Prologue
The Hand of St. Catherine
God only granted SisterMary Agnes glimpses of the sublime on Thursday nights when the moon rose high enough to peek through the tallest windows of the monastery. Despite praying with the other sisters five times a day and spending hours in solitary prayer and study, she only received visions in secret. Stealing across the courtyard to the chapel, Sister Mary Agnes paused to gaze up at the darkened windows of their sleeping quarters to make certain she hadn’t awoken the other sisters. So far, she had been lucky in that no one had noticed her leaving in the night. Perhaps they thought it merely insomnia cured by meditative prayer. The Mother Superior might tolerate that, but would she put a stop to it if she knew that one of the sisters had lied by omission about having visions for years?
As she pushed open the chapel’s oaken doors, a beam of moonlight broke through the stained glass windows floating high above the altar, casting the faces of Christ and the Virgin in stark relief. Motes danced before the crucifix as Sister Mary Agnes fell to her knees, relishing the way the cold stone burned through the layers of her habit. She reached deep into her pocket until her fingers found the rosary her mother’s family had carried all the way from Bohemia. This wasn’t the plain rosary she used in daily prayers or when she prayed beside the sick. It was beautiful and far too fine for her. Its lush mahogany and gold medallions smacked of the decadence she had forsworn at her vows. She couldn’t flaunt the piece in public for obvious reasons, but she also couldn’t trust that it wouldn’t suddenly reveal her secret during the day. The timing of the holy visions had been consistent, but she wasn’t ready to tell the world yet. At the tug of the spirit within her, she pressed her forehead to the ground.
She should know better. If God wanted her to lose control, it was his divine will, and she had to trust him. She let the wooden beads slip between her fingers in time with the movement of her lips. With each prayer, her mind cleared until she brushed against the center pendant representing the First Mystery. Her heart slowed, then hastened as every muscle in her body seemed to tighten and go slack all at once. Sister Mary Agnes should have been afraid, and she had been when her mother presented her with the rosary of some long forgotten cloistered great-aunt and the visions began. At thirteen, she knew she was destined for sainthood. For who saw visions of the Almighty and the Holy Mother but saints?
Sister Mary Agnes’s lips parted and her eyes rolled back in her head at the wave of toe-curling ecstasy overloading every synapse in her body until she could sense nothing but her soul pulling through time to meet the soft brown eyes of the Blessed Mother. Today, she wore the guise of a weary woman about her mother’s age, her face lined with age, silver threads weaving through her ebony hair. For one tender moment, she held Sister Mary Agnes’s face in her gnarled, olive hands. Light flooded the nun’s vision. Love purer than any human could know bore down upon her, terrible and beautiful as the woman holding her. Blood dripped from the corner of the Virgin’s eye, and Sister Mary Agnes knew. She knew, and she wasn’t afraid. She would be returning to the Lord.
Her sisters would find her papers, and they would know. The friend she had been writing to for years about her visions would help publish her writings. He would see things through. She could die in the Blessed Mother’s arms knowing her last vision would go unrecorded as long as the others would live on. With a sear of light, Sister Mary Agnes left this world.
***
Sister Mary Agnes’sbody slumped forward, limbs akimbo before the altar. The shadow in the nave waited, watching the nun’s still back to confirm she was truly dead. He would end up in hell, of that, he was sure. If all the other things he had done hadn’t put him firmly there already, this sealed it. Standing over her body, he knelt and carefully rolled her onto her back. Her eyes were half-closed and her lips lax, but even in her habit, he recognized her face. It was the same face he seen and loved throughout his boyhood when she was still called Maggie. They had both gotten out of the tenement and made something of themselves but only one could survive. As he closed her eyes with the lightest brush of his fingertips, he winced at the blooming pinpricks of blood left behind by what he had done. He wasn’t sure he regretted it, but he was sorry it had come to this.
Sitting back on his heels, he checked her empty palms and invaded her pockets only to find paper and a medal. He couldn’t risk lighting a candle and drawing the attention of anyone who could see the chapel windows, but he had to find it. If the sisters got their hands on it, he would never see it again and killing her would have been for nothing. Prostrating himself before the altar, a flash of gold glinted from beneath the nearest pew. The moon still hung high in the night, so he wrapped his handkerchief around his hand and carefully pulled the rosary out by the chain. In the faint light, he could scarcely make out the miniatures engraved in the softness of the gold medallions, but even without seeing it, he could sense the relic humming within the crucifix.
Peeling the fabric back, he stared down into the face of Christ, barely more than an impression of features. Unlike most crucifixes, this Christ’s arms were not attached to his body, but that wasn’t obvious unless you knew that once upon a time, the thin form of Christ had been the bone from a saint’s palm. Saint Catherine’s visionary magic and the belief of her followers had permeated her very bones. While most of her body resided in Siena in pieces under glass, someone had the forethought to keep a fragment of her hidden away in the most unassuming reliquary. There were few things he appreciated about those who came before him, but the people of the Middle Ages knew how to sense magic and grab onto it with both hands. For centuries, there had been rumors that someone had the hand of St. Catherine somewhere in Europe, but it had been lost for over two hundred years. It wasn’t until his friend had doodled on the margin of a letter that he realized what she had. She never knew. Maybe that was his one regret, but perhaps, it was better she died thinking the visions had been a blessing and not a fluke of fate.
Wrapping the rosary up tightly, he stowed it in his pocket and turned his attention to Sister Mary Agnes. He could leave her to be discovered in the chapel, her body looked whole enough, but the nuns would surely sense something was amiss. Pleasure and pain warred in her ecstatic expression, beatific as St. Teresa. The eyes would give him away. Lifting her into his arms, he backed out the way he came through the darkened halls to the kitchen and the snowy trees beyond the cloister. Sister Mary Agnes’s head lolled against his chest, but he pretended she had fallen asleep and he was carrying her home. This was why he had volunteered to do this himself. It wasn’t cruelty; it was mercy. None of the others would have been as gentle in the face of such awesome power.
Graves of past sisters and the local faithful broke through the ground like gentle hands reaching for her. Beside them stood a life-size statue of the Virgin on a pedestal of rough stone. This was where he would leave her, safe among the people she had longed to be with. The others had said to burn her or bury her or drop her in the nearest river. He couldn’t. He would just have to leave her here and trust the sisters would think she had frozen outside. Laying her before the statue of Mary, he carefully arranged her body to look as if she had fallen asleep on her side.
“Good night, Mags,” he whispered, pressing his lips to her temple. As he walked toward the tree line, he stopped at the sensation of eyes boring into his back, but when he turned, all he found was the Blessed Mother’s all-knowing gaze.
Chapter One
Foolish Choices
Dead people had beenat the center of Oliver Barlow’s world for as long as he could remember, but that didn’t mean he liked them. On one hand, they were the optimal patient. They were quiet, they could be put away when he was tired of dealing with them, they didn’t hide things they would have in life, and they truly couldn’t help any weird noises or smells they made. Unfortunately for Oliver, they rarely stayed so innocuous in his care. Taking one last long swig of coffee, Oliver steeled himself for what he was about to do.
Mr. Hezekiah Henderson had come all the way from the Pennsylvania countryside sealed in a lead-lined casket laden with preservation spells. That should have kept him, but as Oliver well knew, it didn’t always work. He had read the man’s file three times to better understand what may have happened to him before his death and to put off his least favorite activity. Mr. Henderson had been found disemboweled in the woods outside his home. Oliver sighed. Preservation spells could only do so much. With a final breath of uncontaminated air, he cautiously freed the latch and opened the casket.
Inside, Mr. Henderson rested with his sightless eyes staring ponderously at the morgue’s ceiling and his mouth agape. The man inside still looked like a wealthy businessman with his well-groomed, albeit now askew, mustache, uncalloused hands, and what remained of an expensive pinstripe suit. A suit that had now soaked up a considerable amount of blood and offal, but that was unavoidable as his chest and neck had been flayed opened by what looked like claws and teeth. According to their report, the investigators thought it could be a werewolf attack or something far more esoteric from beyond the veil. Craning his neck and pushing up with his knee on the table, Oliver measured his hand against the claw marks. They were large, but werewolf attacks tended to be far less messy than this. Wrinkling his nose at the familiar metallic, meaty tang of innards, he carefully tidied Mr. Henderson’s remaining entrails into his abdomen and buttoned his jacket over it. At least Mr. Henderson wasn’t too far gone yet.
