her mother’s body, bruised and broken, her beautiful face marred. Wiping her eyes with the back of
her hand, Evangeline understood at last why her father had taken her so far away from the country of
her birth.
Upon the third reading of the cards, Evangeline stopped to examine a line relating to her mother’s
killers. There are many who would see our work eliminatedand who will kill indiscriminately to
reach that end. Your mother died at the hands of the Grigori family, whoseeffortshave kept the
battle between Nephilim and angelologists alive. She had heard the name, but she could not say
where until she remembered that Verlaine was working for a man called Percival Grigori. At once
she understood that Verlaine—whose intentions were obviously pure—was working for her greatest
enemy.
The horror of this realization left Evangeline at a loss. How could she assist Verlaine when he
didn’t even realize the danger he was in? Indeed, he might report his findings to Percival Grigori.
What she had believed to be the best plan—to send Verlaine back to New York and to carry on at St.
Rose as if nothing significant had happened—had put them both in grave danger.
She began to pack the cards when, skimming the lines, she noticed one that struck her as odd: By
thetime you read this, you will be a woman of twenty-five. Evangeline recalled that Celestine had
been asked to give her the cards when she turned twenty-five years old. Therefore the missive must
have been conceived and written out entirely more than ten years before, when Evangeline was
twelve, as each letter had been sent in an orderly progression each year. Evangeline was twenty-three
years old. That meant that there must be two more cards, and two more pieces of the puzzle her
grandmother had fashioned, waiting to be found.
Taking the envelopes once again, Evangeline put them in chronological order and checked the
cancellation dates inked across the stamps. The last card had been postmarked before the previous
Christmas, on December 21, 1998. In fact, all of the cards had a similar cancellation date—they had
been mailed just days before Christmas. If the card for the present year had been posted in the same
fashion, it could have already arrived, perhaps in the previous afternoon’s mailbag. Evangeline
wrapped the cards together, put them in the pocket of her skirt, and hurried from her cell.
Columbia University, Morningside Heights, New York City
It had been a long and chilly walk from the I25th Street—Harlem station to his office, but Verlaine
had buttoned his coat and was determined to face the freezing winds. Once he arrived on the
Columbia University campus, he found everything utterly quiet, more still and dark than he’d seen it
before. The holiday had sent everyone—even the most dedicated students—home until after the New
Year. In the distance, cars drove along Broadway, their lights opening over the buildings. Riverside
Church, its imposing tower stretching above even the highest of the campus buildings, sat in the
distance, its stained-glass windows illuminated from within.
The cut on Verlaine’s hand had somehow reopened on the walk, and a fine trickle of blood
blossomed through the silk of his fleur-de-lis tie. After some searching he found his office keys and
let himself into Schermerhorn Hall, the location of the art history and archaeology department, an
imposing brick building in proximity to St. Paul’s Chapel that had once housed the natural sciences
departments. Indeed, Verlaine had heard that it had been the site of early work on the Manhattan
Project, a bit of trivia he found fascinating. Although he knew he was alone, he felt too ill at ease to
take the elevator and risk being trapped inside. Instead, Verlaine ran up the stairs to the graduate-
student offices.
Once in his office, he locked the door behind him and removed the folder containing Innocenta’s
letters from his desk, taking care not to let his bloodied hand come into contact with the desiccated,
fragile paper. Sitting in his chair, he flicked on his desk lamp, and in the pale ring of light he
examined the letters. He had read them numerous times before, noting every possible distinguishing
innuendo and every potentially allusive turn of phrase, and yet even now, after hours of rereading
them in the spooky solitude of his locked office, he felt that the letters seemed strangely, even
bizarrely banal. Though the events of the past day prodded him to read the slightest detail with a new
eye, he could find very little that pointed to a hidden agenda between these two women. Indeed,
beneath the puddle of light from his desk lamp, Innocenta’s letters appeared to be not much more than
sedate tea-table discursions on the quotidian rituals of the convent and on Mrs. Rockefeller’s unerring