“What’s it mean?” I asked.
Cassius’s eyes seemed to be seeing something I couldn’t. “Brothers,” he said.
Just then Maggie bustled up. Best waitress in Camden. She had an encyclopedic memory for drinks, occasions, bands, faces. She also believed in ice. I’d found ice rare outside the States. She put two glasses of ice water down in front of us. The other rarity tonight was that she was wearing a branded Underworld polo and name badge instead of her usual Judas Priest T-shirt.
“What’s with the getup?” I asked.
“Patty just sold the place. Big money. So”—she tugged at her shirt—“looking the part.” Then she leaned in close. “Did you hear about Angela DuFresne?”
I was about to ask who that was when I remembered she was the girl I’d talked up onstage the previous night at the Horse. “What?”
“Dead. Bobbies say she was attacked by some kind of animal. Thing trashed all her gear, too, except her guitar, apparently.”
“Holy . . .” I felt like the wind had just been sucked out of me. My fingers started trembling on the table. I lowered my hands and stuffed them under my thighs. I could still hear her music.
“When was this?” Cassius asked.
“Earlier tonight, outside the Fighting Cocks. She’d just finished playing a show there.” Maggie dabbed her eyes with a rag and slipped away from us to make her rounds.
Cassius and I sat and listened to the band for about five minutes after that, sipping water that tasted like it was straight from the Thames. No way the attack on Angela was a coincidence; I just couldn’t figure out how it might fit. Then I remembered the stone and pulled it out of my pocket. “Any idea what this is?”
Cassius shook his head.
I rolled it around in my palm. “I need to find the woman who gave me this. She handed it to me outside the Horse, just a couple of hours before Henry and I were shot. I think she might know who did it.”
Cassius gently touched the stone. “I know someone who can help.”
“Yeah, who’s that?”
“How long has it been since you attended church?”
That caught me off guard. I hadn’t been inside a church since my last prayer about Mama at St. Frances Cabrini when I was thirteen. Those prayers had never worked out, and I’d stayed away from any kind of chapel for twenty years.
But people were dying or missing, so if Cassius thought going back to church—just once—might help me figure out why, then maybe I could suck it up.
I took in one last scream from Angra’s singer, stood up from the table, then Cassius and I headed up the stairs out of the Underworld.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thanatists must be discreet in the world above and avoid interfering with the politics, religion, or the daily lives of the veiled—humans who have no knowledge of thanaturgic realities.
—The Enigma Covenant, Precedent Law, Rule Six
Westminster Abbey lookedmajestic in the glow of floodlights under the midnight sky. Its gothic spires and immense vaulted windows pointed heavenward while its great marble stones anchored it stoutly to the earth. If God had a house, this might well be it. Cassius led us to an inconspicuous after-hours entrance on the southwest corner, near the Dean’s Yard, and peered up into a security camera.
Two minutes later, a priest in his early fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and broad shoulders, wearing a simple black shirt, opened the door and waved us inside. The door shut behind us with an echoing boom. Without a word, he motioned us to follow.
It was hard to take that first step, and I froze. The priest circled back. “Been a while?” “Yeah,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
He nodded. “Well, given that Cassius has brought you here, let me suggest that for tonight you just think of Westminster as a place to honor the dead. Nothing more, nothing less.”
I could do that. And after we got moving, an unexpected reverence came over me. We were inside London’s most famed burial ground, of course. But it was more than that. I felt like I belonged in a way I hadn’t before. Maybe because I’d died and come back.
On our left, we passed a cloister lit by starlight; the grass had been newly cut around a softly gurgling fountain. We turned left down a vaulted concourse and left again into the south aisle. The ceilings here rose a hundred fifty feet in the central nave above two rows of white-and-brown marble pillars and a stone patchwork flooring.
We passed Poets’ Corner. Dim lights shone on memorials—reliefs, statues, filigreed stone tiling—to Lewis, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and above them the relief of Handel reposed in thought. Alone in Westminster, our hushed steps brushed up against their monuments like deference.
A neatly swept pile of rubble lay on the ground in front of them. I hummed a melody fromMessiahas I stepped over it toward the broad, intricately tiled floor before the High Altar, behind which gold figures of saints and Salviati’s Last Supper gleamed in the dim light of a few foot lamps. Tall, thick, unlit candles stood all around.
