“Seriously”—I give Gaius a pleading look—“what happens during the Rite?”
A dark and gloomy music vibrates through the room, silencing Gaius’s reply. Scanning for the source of the sound, I spot one of the hooded figures sitting at the organ keyboard, playing up a storm. After a couple of extremely familiar melancholy chords, I recognize the piece as Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. My music professor at Columbia would’ve peed herself in pride at my recollection.
The smell of incense wafts through the room, and gray-robed figures walk around, waving pendulum-like censers similar to the ones you’d see at Mass, but with sinister symbols written on them. The symbols remind me of the marks Beatrice made on the corpses.
I get up so I can yell into Gaius’s ear, but one of the robed figures
