Free The Gates of Paradise by Melissa de La Cruz Page A

clench at the thought—but it was too painful and too terrible, so she forcefully pushed it down. Jack—to even think of him brought such a sudden sharp feeling of pain that it made it hard to breathe. She saw his face for a moment—the sheen of his blond hair, his green eyes framed by golden lashes—how peaceful he looked when he was asleep. Would they ever be together again? Or was their last good-bye forever?
    “Mimi? I don’t know…but—” Before Oliver could finish his sentence, the phone rang.
    The butler appeared. “A Margaret St. James for Miss Van Alen.”
    “Margaret? Oh, Tilly. Okay.” Schuyler took the call.
    Afterward, she went back to the dining room, where Oliver was tucking into a second plate of eggs and toast.
    “What did she want? Another fashion show?”
    “You wish. No—she said she remembered something that might be useful. There’s one more person from the old triumvirate who’s still in London. She rang him, and he says he’ll meet with us. He knows what happened in Rome, might be able to help us unlock the gate.”
    “Huh.”
    “And we thought she was just an airhead who designed clothes,” Schuyler said with a wink.

F OURTEEN
Mimi
    he tour guide was speaking in hushed tones to a small gathering of tourists, her quiet words punctuated by the snaps and flashes of eager photographers. One man was filming with his handheld video camera, walking in circles around the apse. Behind him, a young couple clearly on their honeymoon posed against the wrought-iron fence, the groom holding his phone at arms’ length to take the shot.
    Mimi kept her distance from the group. The guide didn’t seem to mind that she’d lingered near the entrance, unlike the usual tourist herders, who were strict about keeping everyone together.
    She’d arrived in Midlothian earlier that week and had visited the Rosslyn Chapel every day, under a different guise each time, lest the nuns who guarded the place recognize her. So far, she had found nothing, and while she was glad of that, there had been no sign of Kingsley either. Perhaps he had not understood the message. If so, then she was a bit disappointed in him. She wondered how long she could pretend to be “looking” for the grail, and she knew she would not be allowed to return to the underworld empty-handed unless she had a reasonable explanation.
    Inside the chapel, every available surface was elaborately decorated in twisted stone carvings. One section depicted the underworld and its inhabitants—an upside-down hanging devil, the mythic “green man” marching a row of skeletons into Hell. The sculptures wound their way around columns and along the arches, across the ceiling and on the floor. There was a term for this, she knew: horror vacui —the fear of empty spaces. Every inch of the place was bursting with decoration, as if the chapel’s creators had feared blank walls like a literal plague.
    What a mess, Mimi sniffed.
    “This is called the apprentice column,” the tour guide said, coming around to stand next to a nearby pillar. “An apprentice boasted to the master mason that he could carve the design without consulting the original on which it was based. When the master saw that the apprentice had done the work perfectly, he became so enraged with jealousy that he struck the apprentice on the head and killed him. When the master was hauled off to justice, the remaining masons carved an exact replica of his face on the column across from this one,” she said, motioning to the other post, which held the visage of a scowling man. “So that forever, the master would be forced to gaze at the perfect work of the apprentice that had caused him so much pain.”
    Creepy, Mimi thought. But justifiable. She remembered the hot fire of jealousy that she’d once felt over Jack’s attraction to Schuyler. If she had never met Kingsley, she probably would have suffered the same doom—forced to endure the reality of the two of them together till the