by Tony Verna

Created on: August 30, 2009   Last Updated: September 21, 2009

"There where the faith was, it will be broken.

The enemies will feed upon the enemies:

The sky to rain fire, it will burn, interrupted.

Enterprise by night. Chiefs will make quarrels."

- Nostradamus 28 June 1558

There was nothing ordinary about Jancy Hall. She was too attractive to be called plain, too plain to be called beautiful. But now, with two days to Christmas, 1862, life was no longer as simple as beauty. First, she'd fallen in love-with a magician-and, as a result of that love, those blue eyes of hers, blue as the bluest sky any poet ever rapturized over, were now supposed to possess special powers. "China Blue" Chester Cronklin called her eyes. Chester was Jancy's best friend. He longed to be more, but settled for friendship.

Having grown up with Jancy in an orphanage just outside Washington, D. C., he knew that she was capable of making unhappy children like him want to be as carefree as she was. He'd fallen in love with her when he was ten. And the only special gift he'd ever seen that she possessed was the ability to change the lives of everyone she met. He never imagined she would grow up to change the lives of so many other people, or that the changes she would bring about would lead to death for some, salvation for many more. But that was later.

Now, two days before Christmas, the war on and 1862 drawing to a close, while most people in Washington were interested in what the New Year would bring, Chester's thought was of the moment. Would the new man who had caught Jancy's eye take her away from him? Cutting deep into the dirt streets of the city, Jancy's four-wheeler raised a storm of dust as she rode through a maze of roads bursting with calls from fish stalls and beggars to the more spacious streets where the frantic shouting gave way to the measured marching of the infantry. Driving on, she rode off to more conventionally commercial streets, where the clanking of sabers and the stomping of galloping hooves signaled the approach of squads of cavalry.

Once her carriage reached Pennsylvania Avenue, Jancy's path led her past a large brick building where she began looking for a signal from Chester. Standing on the front steps of the War Department, Chester Cronklin wore gray tweeds that were easily visible against the army blue of the soldiers who guarded the building. He waved at Jancy as she went by, reaffirming that he was playing his part in whatever Machiavellian schemes she and her magician lover had concocted. Chester knew that Jancy had

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