Abbie loved the sound of the rain. It reminded her of long afternoons spent alone in her room as a child, playing with her dollhouse. For some reason, rain made the world go quiet and still. There were no fearful sobs, no banging doors or barking dogs. The chaos of her daily life – a volatile, alcoholic father and a mother who had retreated into the solace of madness – melted away for a precious hour or two. The pattering on the roof, the gurgling in the gutters and the tap-tap-tap against the window were the sounds of pure happiness.

Now, as Abbie sat in her kitchen, chugging a rapidly cooling latte, the sound of the rain was a reminder once more of everything she had lost.

Since Katrina was rescued from Abraham's clutches, Abbie's life had undergone a complete sea-change. There were times when she had begrudged Crane's presence in her life, his constant need for explanation and reassurance, her instinct to mother him. What she tended to forget was how much she had come to cherish his eccentricities, to look forward to his apoplectic outbursts about modern life.

Now a door had slammed in her face and she was that little girl again, alone in the rain.

Crane and Katrina's reunion had become a second honeymoon. For a solid week, they had barely left the cabin. Neither she nor Jenny had fully recovered from the injuries sustained in their respective accidents, yet Crane's absence had forced them to shoulder the burden of fighting the war against Moloch by themselves.

It was a bitter pill to swallow.

Things had been quiet on the demon front, but in terms of planning a strategy to prevent the Apocalypse, they were well and truly stuck. Abbie hated to admit it, but Crane's unique brain would really come in really useful right about now.

They were working on a cipher that Jenny had uncovered, buried inside the diary of an 18th century rector at the Old Dutch Church. His writings were elliptical, but Jenny was sure that the code held a clue to defeating Moloch. Without Crane's bottomless knowledge of cryptography and obscure languages, they were practically banging their heads against the wall in frustration.

In the silence that surrounded her, Abbie began to feel like she as spiralling out of control. It was as if small pieces of her identity were shearing off and flying away, like a leaf in a wind tunnel. She was disappearing. As much as she had been Crane's anchor to the twenty-first century, he had been hers. In the aftermath of Corbin's death, when the forces of hell threatened to drag her under, he had tethered her to life. Now that he had found Katrina again, what did she have to cling to?

In that moment, with the rain whipping against her windows, she could have sworn she heard a light tapping at her door. Just when she had dismissed it as a tree branch caught in the wind, she heard it again, louder this time, and then a voice.

'Miss Mills? It's Katrina Crane – may I speak to you for a moment?'

Abbie pulled back the chain and opened the door to find Katrina standing in front of her, bedraggled and soaked to the skin.

'Come in,' Abbie said quickly, holding the door wider for the other woman.

Katrina stood in the living room, seeming a little lost.

'Let me get you a towel. You'll catch pneumonia,' Abbie suggested, more as a means of breaking the awkward silence than out of genuine concern.

'There is no need,' Katrina replied, her precise tones carrying an authority that belied their softness. 'The cold does not affect me.'

Abbie gestured towards the couch, positioning herself on a chair, the balls of her feet touching the floor in readiness. 'How can I help you?'

'From what I have heard, you and my husband formed a close bond during the time you spent together.'

Damn, Abbie thought. The woman certainly doesn't beat around the bush.

'Didn't really have much of a choice in the matter,' she said lightly. 'Crane had nowhere to go. He needed me.'

The words slipped out before she knew it. Sure enough, she saw a flash of pain in Katrina's eyes. As quick as a wink, though, she recovered her composure.

'Be that as it may, I am Ichabod's wife.'

Despite the bluntness of her words, Abbie could detect no hint of accusation in the other woman's voice. What she heard was something close to desperation.

'What's the matter, Katrina?'

Katrina looked down at her hands, seemingly at a loss for what to say. 'You can imagine how I felt when I discovered that my son was alive, Miss Mills. I went from elation to despair in a matter of seconds. To know that not only was my son was an instrument of evil, but that he had betrayed me to the Horseman of Death, it was… almost unbearable.'

She paused, her voice choked with emotion.

'Miss Mills, until you have a child of your own you cannot understand, but being a mother is a blessing and a burden at the same time. Despite everything that has happened, I cannot forget the love I bore for Jeremy. However, I can ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.'

Katrina stood up and regarded Abbie with a look of fierce determination. It was so unexpected as to be almost frightening.

'There are medicines and devices which can prevent a woman from getting with child, are there not?'

Abbie reacted with surprise. 'Yes,' she answered slowly, trying to make sense of what Katrina was saying.

'I need you to procure one of these items for me.' She laughed nervously. 'I wouldn't know how to go about it.'

'Sure, I guess.' Abbie was anything but sure. 'You have talked to Crane about this, right?'

Katrina turned her back on her. 'I don't want Ichabod to know about this – it would break his heart. If you knew how dearly he longs for children...'

Abbie was genuinely shocked. Surely Katrina was not serious about keeping something so huge from her own husband? 'You can still have a child, Katrina. He's not going to turn into Jeremy.'

'You don't know that for sure!'

Katrina rounded on her again, eyes flashing. In that moment, Abbie got a distinct impression of just how powerful the witch could be.

'It was an error, the most profound folly, to give in to my feelings with so much at stake. For a witch to marry a Witness was a terrible risk – Jeremy's powers are a testament to that. I dare not take that chance again.'

Abbie approached Katrina, challenging her. 'If you don't want to get pregnant again, why don't you use your witchy powers?'

'I wish I could, but it is against the rules of my order to interfere with nature's course. I have seen witches cast into exile for inducing a miscarriage. I have already suffered so much at the hands of the Sisterhood of the Radiant Heart – ' she almost spat the name – 'if any of them still survive, I still fear their retribution.'

She seemed so vulnerable that Abbie was tempted to reach out and touch her hand, but she held back. There was still something about Katrina that she didn't trust. As much as Abbie sympathised, her primary allegiance was to Crane.

'Look, Katrina, I'll help you get what you need, but I won't go behind Crane's back. You need to talk to him. That's the deal.'

Two days later, Crane walked into the archives with a spring in his step. All it took was one glance for Abbie to know that Katrina had not fulfilled her promise to talk to him. She sighed deeply.

He cheerfully greeted Abbie and Jenny in turn, without noticing the shell-shocked expression on both their faces.

'Crane.' Abbie approached him, concern creasing her brow. 'Jenny's found something. You need to hear this.'

Jenny warily regarded him from her seat at the table, manuscripts and books splayed in front of her like dissected laboratory animals. 'Since you've been incommunicado for the past few days, we've had to do some digging of our own.'

She showed Crane the pastor's journal with its mysterious cipher.

'I've been trying to translate this for days. I finally figured it out last night – the cipher is based on Native American pictograms. The translation isn't perfect – of course we could've used your help…'

'Jenny.' Abbie's voice was a warning.

'Here, check out the entry for 15 February 1774.'

Crane took the journal from her hands, along with a fair copy of the translation she had made. His heart was hammering in his chest as he began to read aloud.

"God be praised – His Holy Word and Writ be done. I have been blessed with visions and have spoken with many tongues. Holy, holy be his name. One of His Witnesses walks the earth – I have seen him with mine own eyes. He is 1st Lieutenant Ichabod Crane of the Queen's Royal Regiment. I must pray and have faith and the path before me will become clear. In the dark times to come, the Witnesses may be our only hope."

Crane was shocked. Someone in his own time had known his destiny as a Witness. He felt a thrill of excitement and fear, as of an unknown truth revealing itself.

Jenny ran her finger down the page. 'Read the 22th of March.' Her voice was small, lacking her usual barely-concealed air of truculence.

"I have had congress with the Sisterhood of the Radiant Heart. Though witches, they are not as foul as their reputation suggests. The coven has pledged itself to battling the evil forces that threaten us in the dark times ahead."

Crane's eyes widened with shock and horror. It was with great difficulty that he managed to keep reading.

"One of them has vowed to play her part in bringing Ichabod Crane to our side in this holy war. She will seduce him and beguile him with sweet words, and if the task proves difficult, use her magic to persuade him of the righteousness of our cause. She shows great courage and fortitude, though she knows that cleaving herself to this man will degrade her in body and spirit. Her name is Katrina Van Tassel."

Crane's mind reeled. Everything he had clung to in this world had been ripped from him in a matter of seconds. For a moment he entertained the notion that Jenny had incorrectly interpreted the cipher, or worse, deliberately deceived him. Though comforting, he quickly discarded these delusions. He knew that Jenny and Abbie would never mislead him.

As painful as the truth was, he had to face it. Their meeting was not a beautiful accident as he had once believed, but a contrived event. Katrina, on behalf of her coven, had cajoled and manipulated him for her own purposes. Worse still, she had married him and borne his child, all the while knowing that their love was based upon a falsehood.

What he most desperately wanted to know was, what else was not true? Did Katrina engineer his encounter with Abraham on the battlefield that day? Did she place that spell on him whilst knowing that he would awaken and encounter Abbie?

Katrina's reticence about revealing her pregnancy made a horrible kind of sense to him now.

'Crane?'

He looked up and saw Abbie's eyes alight with compassion.

'Talk to me, Crane. Tell me what you're thinking.'

Though fluent in many languages, it was impossible for him to translate his thoughts into coherent words. He stood up, feeling weak yet at the same time emboldened with a new sense of purpose.

'If you will excuse me, Miss Mills, Miss Jenny, I must leave you.'

He knew what he had to do.