Chapter 25: Dead Woman Walking

The old woman rubbed cedar paste behind my ears and along both wrists, and the whole elevator smelled like a closet.

"Wolves can't read you through it," she said. "Not for an hour."

"Then I have an hour."

"You have until Marla wipes it off. Don't make her wait."

I pulled the black veil down over my face.

Calvin stood beside me in a funeral suit, with the Reese council's crest on his lapel and his hands shaking.

"You can still go back down," I said.

"No."

"Bram Crane's people are already in the northern box," I said. "Eamon's text said so."

"And he still wants it today."

"He wants Bram sitting where he can watch it fall."

The doors opened onto the top floor of the Mackay Tower.

The cathedral was bigger than I remembered.

Two thousand people sat under a ceiling of blue glass, and in the middle of the glass was a silver moon.

Every one of them was in black.

At the front, on a stand of white flowers, sat a sealed alloy pod with a plate on the lid that said HAZEL.

There was nothing inside it but sandbags and my lab coat, and I did not look at it long.

Calvin's guest pass got us past the guards.

We stood at the back, against the last pillar, among the standing mourners.

Lydia was on the dais in a long white dress, with a pale sash across her chest.

She did not look like a woman who had poisoned anyone.

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