The Blood Gospel

1

Dr. Erin Granger stroked her softest brush across the ancient skull. As the dust cleared, she studied it with the eyes of a scientist, noting the tiny seams of bone, the open fontanel. Her gaze evaluated the amount of callusing, judging the skull to be that of a newborn, and from the angle of the pelvic bone, a boy.

Only days old when he died.

As she continued to draw the child out of the dirt and stone, she looked on also as a woman, picturing the infant boy lying on his side, knees drawn up against his chest, tiny hands still curled into fists. Had his parents counted his heartbeats, kissed his impossibly tender skin, watched as that tiny heartbeat stopped?

As she had once done with her baby sister.

She closed her eyes, brush poised.

Stop it.

Opening her eyes, she combed back an errant strand of blond hair that had escaped its efficient ponytail before turning her attention back to the bones. She would find out what happened here all those hundreds of years ago. Because, as with her sister, this child’s death had been deliberate. Only this boy had succumbed to violence, not negligence.

She continued to work, seeing the tender position of the limbs. Someone had labored to restore the body to its proper order before burying it, but the efforts could not disguise the cracked and missing bones, hinting at a past atrocity. Even two thousand years could not erase the crime.

She put down the wooden brush and took yet another photo. Time had colored the bones the same bleached sepia as the unforgiving ground, but her careful excavation had revealed their shape. Still, it would take hours to work the rest of the bones free.

She shifted from one aching knee to the other. At thirty-two, she was hardly old, but right now she felt that way. She had been in the trench for barely an hour, and already her knees complained. As a child, she had knelt in prayer for much longer, poised on the hard dirt floor of the compound’s church. Back then, she could kneel for half a day without complaint, if her father demanded — but after so many years trying to forget her past, perhaps she misremembered it.

Wincing, she stood and stretched, lifting her head clear of the waist-high trench. A cooling sea breeze caressed her hot face, chasing away her memories. To the left, wind ruffled the flaps of the camp’s tents and scattered sand across the excavation site.

Flying grit blinded her until she could blink it away. Sand invaded everything here. Each day her hair changed from blond to the grayish red of the Israeli desert. Her socks ground inside her Converse sneakers like sandpaper, her fingernails filled up with grit, even her mouth tasted of sand.

Still, when she looked across the plastic yellow tape that cordoned off her archaeological dig, she allowed a ghost of a smile to shine, happy to have her sneakers planted in ancient history. Her excavation occupied the center of an ancient hippodrome, a chariot course. It faced the ageless Mediterranean Sea. The water shone indigo, beaten by the sun into a surreal, metallic hue. Behind her, a long stretch of ancient stone seats, sectioned into tiers, stood as a two-thousand-year-old testament to a long-dead king, the architect of the city of Caesarea: the infamous King Herod, that monstrous slayer of innocents.

A horse’s whinny floated across the track, echoing not from the past, but from a makeshift stable that had been thrown together on the far end of the hippodrome. A local group was preparing an invitational race. Soon this hippodrome would be resurrected, coming to life once again, if only for a few days.

She could hardly wait.

But she and her students had a lot of work to finish before then.

With her hands on her hips, she stared down at the skull of the murdered baby. Perhaps later today she could jacket the tiny skeleton with plaster and begin the laborious process of excavating it from the ground. She longed to get it back to a lab, where it could be analyzed. The bones had more to tell her than she would ever discover in the field.

She dropped to her knees next to the infant. Something bothered her about the femur. It had unusual scallop-shaped dents along its length. As she bent close to see, a chill chased back the heat.

Were those teeth marks?

“Professor?” Nate Highsmith’s Texas twang broke the air and her concentration.

She jumped, cracking her elbow against the wooden slats bracing the walls from the relentless sand.

“Sorry.” Her graduate student ducked his head.

She had given strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed this morning, and here he was bothering her already. To keep from snapping at him, she picked up her battered canteen and took a long sip of tepid water. It tasted like stainless steel.

“No harm done,” she said stiffly.

She shielded her eyes with her free hand and squinted up at him. Standing on the edge of the trench, he was silhouetted against the scathing sun. He wore a straw Stetson pulled low, a pair of battered jeans, and a faded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose well-muscled arms. She suspected that he had rolled them up just to impress her. It wouldn’t work, of course. For the past several years, fully focused on her work, she acknowledged that the only guys she found fascinating had been dead for several centuries.

She glanced meaningfully over to an unremarkable patch of sand and rock. The team’s ground-penetrating radar unit sat abandoned, looking more like a sandblasted lawn mower than a high-tech tool for peering under dirt and rock.

“Why aren’t you over there mapping that quadrant?”

“I was, Doc.” His drawl got thicker, as it always did when he got excited. He hiked an eyebrow, too.

He’s found something.

“What?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Nate bounced on the balls of his feet, ready to dash off and show her.

She smiled, because he was right. Whatever it was, she wouldn’t believe it until she saw it herself. That was the mantra she hammered into her students: It’s not real until you can dig it out of the ground and hold it in your hands.

To protect her work site and out of respect for the child’s bones, she gently pulled a tarp over the skeleton. Once she was done, Nate reached down and helped her out of the deep trench. As expected, his hand lingered on hers a second too long.

Trying not to scowl, she retrieved her hand and dusted off the knees of her jeans. Nate took a step back, glancing away, perhaps knowing he had overstepped a line. She didn’t scold him. What would be the use? She wasn’t oblivious to the advances of men, but she rarely encouraged them, and never out in the field. Here she wore dirt like other women wore makeup and avoided romantic involvement. Though of average height, she’d been told that she carried herself as if she were a foot taller. She had to in this profession, especially as a young woman.

Back home, she’d had her share of relationships, but none of them seemed to stick. In the end, most men found her intimidating — which was off-putting to many, but oddly attractive to others.

Like Nate.

Still, he was a good field man with great potential as a geophysicist. He would grow out of his interest in her, and things would uncomplicate themselves on their own.

“Show me.” She turned toward the khaki-colored equipment tent. If nothing else, it would be good to get out of the baking sun.

“Amy’s got the information up on the laptop.” He headed across the site. “It’s a jackpot, Professor. We hit a bona fide bone jackpot.”

She suppressed a grin at his enthusiasm and hurried to keep pace with his long-legged stride. She admired his passion, but, like life, archaeology didn’t hand out jackpots after a single morning’s work. Sometimes not even after decades.

She ducked past the tent flap and held it open for Nate, who took off his hat as he stepped inside. Out of the sun’s glare, the tent’s interior felt several degrees cooler than the site outside.

A humming electric generator serviced a laptop and a dilapidated metal fan. The fan blew straight at Amy, a twenty-three-year-old grad student from Columbia. The dark-haired young woman spent more time inside the tent than out. Drops of water had condensed on a can of Diet Coke on her desk. Slightly overweight and out of shape, Amy hadn’t had the years under the harsh sun to harden her to the rigors of archaeological fieldwork, but she still had a keen technological nose. Amy typed on the keyboard with one hand and waved Erin over with the other.

“Professor Granger, you’re not going to believe this.”

“That’s what I keep hearing.”

Her third student was also in the tent. Apparently everyone had decided to stop working to study Nate’s findings. Heinrich hovered over Amy’s shoulder. A stolid twenty-four-year-old student from the Freie Universität in Berlin, he was normally hard to distract. For him to have stepped away from his own work meant that the find was big.

Amy’s brown eyes did not leave the screen. “The software is still working at enhancing the image, but I thought you’d want to see this right away.”

Erin unsnapped the rag clipped to her belt and wiped grit and sweat off her face. “Amy, before I forget, that child’s skeleton I’ve been excavating … I saw some unusual marks that I’d like you to photograph.”

Amy nodded, but Erin suspected she hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

Nate fidgeted with his Stetson.

What had they found?

Erin walked over and stood next to Heinrich. Amy leaned back in her metal folding chair so that Erin had a clear view of the screen.

The laptop displayed time-sliced images of the ground Nate had scanned that morning. Each showed a different layer of quadrant eight, sorted by depth. The pictures resembled square gray mud puddles marred by black lines that formed parabolas, like ripples in the puddle. The black lines represented solid material.

Erin’s heart pounded in her throat. She leaned closer in disbelief.

This mud puddle had far too many waves. In ten years of fieldwork she’d never seen anything like it. No one had.

This can’t be right.

She traced a curve on the smooth screen, ignoring the way Amy tightened her lips. Amy hated it when someone smudged her laptop screen, but Erin had to prove that it was real — to touch it herself.

She spoke through the strain, through the hope. “Nate, how big an area did you scan?”

No hesitation. “Ten square meters.”

She glanced sidelong at his serious face. “Only ten meters? You’re sure?”

“You trained me on the GPR, remember?” He cocked his head to the side. “Painstakingly.”

Amy laughed.

Erin kept going. “And you added gain to these results?”

“Yes, Professor,” he sighed. “It’s fully gained.”

She sensed that she’d bruised his ego by questioning his skills, but she had to be certain. She trusted equipment, but not always the people running it.

“I did everything.” Nate leaned forward. “And, before you ask, the signature is exactly the same as the skeleton you were just excavating.”

Exactly the same? That made this stratum two thousand years old. She looked back at the tantalizing images. If the data were correct, and she would have to check again, but if they were, each parabola marked a human skull.

“I did a rough count.” Nate interrupted her thoughts. “More than five hundred. None larger than four inches in diameter.”

Four inches …

Not just skulls — skulls of babies.

Hundreds of babies.

She silently recited the relevant Bible passage: Matthew 2:16. Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.

The Massacre of the Innocents. Allegedly, Herod ordered it done to be certain, absolutely certain, that he had killed the child whom he feared would one day supplant him as the King of the Jews. But he had failed anyway. That baby had escaped to Egypt and grown into the man known as Jesus Christ.

Had her team just discovered tragic proof of Herod’s deed?

2

Sweat stung Tommy’s eyes. Eyebrows would come in handy about now.

Thanks again, chemo.

He slumped against another camel-colored boulder. All the rocks on the steep trail looked the same, and every one was too hot to sit on. He shifted his windbreaker under his legs to put another layer of protection between his pants and the scorching surface. As usual, he was holding the group up. Also, as usual, he was too weak to go on without a break.

He struggled to catch his breath. The burning air tasted thin and dry. Did it even have enough oxygen? The other climbers seemed to be fine breathing it. They practically sprinted up the switchbacks like he was the grandpa and they were the fourteen-year-olds. He couldn’t even hear their voices anymore.

The rocky trail — named the Snake Path — twisted up the sheer cliffs of the infamous mountain of Masada. Its summit was only a handful of yards overhead, sheltering the ruins of the ancient Jewish fortress. From his current perch on the trail, Tommy searched out over the baked tan earth of the Jordan Valley below.

He wiped sweat from his eyes. Being from Orange County, Tommy thought he’d known heat. But this was like crawling into an oven.

His head drooped forward. He wanted to sleep again. He wanted to feel cool hotel sheets against his cheek and take a long nap in air-conditioning. After that, if he felt better, he would play video games.

He jerked awake. This was no time to daydream. But he was so tired, and the desert so quiet. Unlike humans, animals and bugs were smart enough to take cover during the day. A vast empty silence swallowed him. Would death be like this?

“Are you okay, honey?” his mother asked.

He startled. Why hadn’t he heard her approach? Did he fall asleep again? He wheezed out, “Fine.”

She bit her lip. They all knew he wasn’t fine. He yanked his cuff over the new coffee-brown blotch of melanoma that disfigured his left wrist.

“We can wait as long as you need to.” She plunked down next to him. “I wonder why they call it the Snake’s Path. I haven’t seen a single snake.”

She spoke to his chin. His parents rarely made eye contact with him anymore. When they did, they cried. It had been like that throughout the last two years of surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation — and now through his relapse.

Maybe they’d finally look him in the face when he lay in his coffin.

“Too hot for snakes.” He hated how out of breath he sounded.

“They’d be snake steaks.” She took a long drink from her water bottle. “Sun-broiled and ready to eat. Just like us.”

His father trotted up. “Everything all right?”

“I’m just taking a break,” his mother lied, covering for him. She wet her handkerchief and handed it to Tommy. “I got tired.”

Tommy wanted to correct her, to tell the truth, but he was too exhausted. He wiped the cloth across his face.

His father started talking, like he always did when he was nervous. “We’re close now. Just a few more yards, and we’ll see the fortress. The actual fortress of Masada. Try to picture it.”

Obediently, Tommy closed his eyes. He pictured a swimming pool. Blue and cool and smelling like chlorine.

“Ten thousand Roman soldiers are camped out all around here in tents. Soldiers with swords and shields wait in the sun. They close off any escape route, try to starve out the nine hundred men, women, and children up there on the plateau.” His father talked faster, excited. “But the rebels stand firm until the end. Even after. They never give up.”

Tommy tugged his hat down on his bald head and squinted up at him. “They offed themselves in the end, Dad.”

“No.” His father spoke passionately. “The Jews here decided to die as free men, rather than fall to the mercy of the Romans. They didn’t kill themselves in surrender. They chose their own fate. Choices like that determine the kind of man you are.”

Tommy picked up a hot stone and tossed it down the trail. It bounced, then vanished over the edge. What would his father do if he really chose his own fate? If he offed himself instead of being a slave to the cancer. He didn’t think his father would sound so proud of that.

He studied his father’s face. People had often said they looked alike: same thick black hair, same easy smile. After chemo stole his hair, no one said that anymore. He wondered if he would have grown up to look like him.

“Ready to go again?” His father hitched his pack higher on his shoulder.

His mother gave his father the evil eye. “We can wait.”

“I didn’t say we had to go,” his father said. “I was just asking—”

“You bet.” Tommy stood up to keep his parents from arguing.

Eyes on the trail, he dragged forward. One tan hiking boot in front of the other. Soon he’d be up top, and his parents would get their moment with him at the fort. That was why he had agreed to this trip, to this long climb — because it would give them something to remember. Even if they weren’t ready to admit it, they wouldn’t have many more memories of him. He wanted to make them good ones.

He counted his steps. That was how you got through tough things. You counted. Once you said “one,” then you knew “two” was coming, and “three” right after that. He got to twenty-eight before the path leveled out.

He had reached the summit. Sure, his lungs felt like two flaming paper bags, but he was glad he’d done it.

At the top stood a wooden pavilion — though pavilion was a pretentious word for four skinny tree trunks topped by more skinny tree trunks laid sideways to cast patchy shade. But it beat standing in the sun.

Beyond the cliff’s edge, desert stretched around him. In its dried-out and desolate way, it was beautiful. Bleached brown dunes rolled as far as he could see. Sand slapped against rocks. Millennia of wind erosion had eaten those rocks away, grain by grain.

No people, no animals. Did the defenders see this view before the Romans arrived?

A killing wasteland.

He turned and scanned the plateau up top, where all that bloodshed had happened two thousand years ago. It was a long flat area, about five football fields long, maybe three times as wide, with a half dozen or so crumbling stone buildings.

This is what I climbed up here for?

His mother looked equally unimpressed. She pushed curly brown hair out of her eyes, her face pink from sunburn or exertion. “It looks more like a prison than a fortress.”

“It was a prison,” his father said. “A death row prison. Nobody got out alive.”

“Nobody ever gets out alive.” Tommy regretted his words as soon as they left his mouth, especially when his mother turned away and slid a finger under her sunglasses, clearly wiping a tear. Still, a part of him was glad that she let herself feel something real instead of lying about it all the time.

Their guide bounced up to them, rescuing them from the moment. She was all bare legs, tight khaki shorts, and long black hair, barely winded by the long climb. “Glad you guys made it!” She even had a sexy Israeli accent.

He smiled at her, grateful to have something else to think about. “Thanks.”

“Like I told everybody else a minute ago, the name Masada comes from the word metzuda, meaning ‘fortress,’ and you can see why.” She waved a long tan arm to encompass the entire plateau. “The casemate walls protecting the fortress are actually two walls, one inside the other. Between them were the main living quarters for Masada’s residents. Ahead of us is the Western Palace, the biggest structure on Masada.”

Tommy tore his eyes away from her lips to look where she pointed. The massive building didn’t look anything like a palace. It was a wreck. The old stone walls were missing large sections and clad with modern scaffolding. It looked like someone was halfway through building a movie set for the next Indiana Jones installment.

There must be a deep history under all that scaffolding, but he didn’t feel it. He wanted to. History mattered to his father, and it should to him, too, but since the cancer, he felt outside of time, outside of history. He didn’t have room in his head for other people’s tragedies, especially not people who had been dead for thousands of years.

“This next building we believe was a private bathhouse,” the guide said, indicating a building on the left. “They found three skeletons inside, skulls separated from the bodies.”

He perked up. Finally something interesting.

“Decapitated?” he asked, moving closer. “So they committed suicide by cutting off their own heads?”

The guide’s lips curved in a smile. “Actually, the soldiers drew lots to see who would be responsible for killing the others. Only the last man had to commit suicide.”

Tommy scowled at the ruins. So they killed their own children when the going got tough. He felt a surprising flicker of envy. Better to die quickly at the hands of someone who loved you than by the slow and pitiless rot of cancer. Ashamed of this thought, he looked at his parents. His mother smiled at him as she fanned herself with the guidebook, and his father took his picture.

No, he could never ask that of them.

Resigned, he turned his attention back to the bathhouse. “Those skeletons … are they still in there?” He stepped forward, ready to peek inside through the metal gate.

The guide blocked him with her ample chest. “Sorry, young man. No one is allowed inside.”

He struggled not to stare at her breasts but failed miserably.

Before he could move, his mother spoke. “How’re you doing, Tommy?”

Had she seen him checking out the guide? He blushed. “I’m fine.”

“Are you thirsty? Do you want some water?” She held out her plastic water bottle.

“No, Mom.”

“Let me put some more sunscreen on your face.” His mother reached into her purse. Normally, he would have suffered the indignity, but the guide smiled at him, a stunning smile, and he suddenly didn’t want to be babied.

“I’m fine, Mom!” he spat out, more harshly than he’d intended.

His mother flinched. The guide walked away.

“Sorry,” he said to his mother. “I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be over there with your father. Take your time here.”

Feeling terrible, he watched her walk away.

He crossed over to the bathhouse, angry at himself. He leaned on the metal gate to see inside — the gate creaked open under his weight. He almost fell through. He stepped back quickly, but before he did so, something in the corner of the room caught his eye.

A soft fluttering, white, like a crumpled piece of paper.

Curiosity piqued inside him. He searched around. No one was looking. Besides, what was the penalty for trespassing? What was the worst that could happen? The cute guide might drag him back out?

He wouldn’t mind that at all.

He poked his head inside, staring at the source of the fluttering.

A small white dove limped across the mosaic floor, its left wing dragging across the tiles, scrawling some mysterious message in the dust with the tip of its feathers.

Poor thing …

He had to get it out of there. It would die from dehydration or get eaten by something. The guide probably knew a bird rescue place they could bring it to. His mother had volunteered at a place like that back home in California, before his cancer ate up everyone’s life.

He slipped through the gap in the gate. Inside, the room was smaller than his father’s toolshed, with four plain stone walls and a floor covered by a faded mosaic made of maddeningly tiny tiles. The mosaic showed eight dusty red hearts arranged in a circle like a flower, a row of dark blue and white tiles that looked like waves, and a border of terra-cotta and white triangles that reminded him of teeth. He tried to imagine long-ago craftsmen putting it together like a jigsaw puzzle, but the thought made him tired.

He stepped across the shadowy threshold, grateful to be out of the unforgiving sun. How many people had died in here? A chill raced up his spine as he imagined the scene. He pictured people kneeling — he was certain they would be kneeling. A man in a dirty linen tunic stood above them with his sword raised high. He’d started with the youngest one, and by the time he was done, he barely had the strength to lift his arms, but he did. Finally, he, too, fell to his knees and waited for a quick death from his friend’s blade. And then, it was over. Their blood ran over the tiny tiles, stained the grout, and pooled on the floor.

Tommy shook his head to clear the vision and looked around.

No skeletons.

They were probably taken to a museum or maybe buried someplace.

The bird raised its head, halting its journey across the tiles to stare up at Tommy, first with one eye, then the other, sizing him up. Its eyes were a brilliant shade of green, like malachite. He’d never seen a bird with green eyes before.

He knelt down and whispered, his words barely a breath. “Come here, little one. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

It stared with each eye again — then took a hop toward him.

Encouraged, he reached out and gently scooped up the wounded creature. As he rose with its warm body cradled between his palms, the ground shifted under him. He struggled to keep his balance. Was he dizzy because of the long climb? Between his toes, a tiny black line skittered across the mosaic, like a living thing.

Snake was his first thought.

Fear beat in his heart.

But the dark line widened, revealing it to be something worse. Not a snake, but a crack. A finger of dark orange smoke curled up from one end of the crack, no bigger than if someone had dropped a lit cigarette.

The bird suddenly burst from his palms, spread its wings, and sailed through the smoke as it fled out the door. Apparently it hadn’t been that injured. The smoke wafted Tommy’s way, beat by the passing wings. It smelled surprisingly sweet with a hint of darker spices, almost like incense.

Tommy crinkled his brow and leaned forward. He held his palm over the smoke. It rose up between his fingertips, cold instead of warm, as if it came from some cool place deep within the earth.

He bent to look at it more closely — when the mosaic cracked under his boots like glass. He jumped back. Tiles slipped into the gap. Blues, tans, and reds. The gap devoured the pattern as it grew wider.

He backpedaled toward the door. Gouts of smoke, now a reddish orange, boiled up through the splintering mosaic.

A grinding groan rose from the mountain’s core, and the entire room shook.

Earthquake.

He leaped out the bathhouse door and landed hard on his backside. In front of him, the building gave a final, violent jerk, as if slapped by an angry god — then toppled into the chasm opening beneath it.

The edges crumbled wider, only feet away. He scooted backward. The chasm chased him. He gained his feet to run, but the mountaintop jolted and knocked him back to the ground.

He crawled away on his hands and knees. Stones shredded his palms. Around him, buildings and columns smashed to the ground.

God, please help me!

Dust and smoke hid everything more than a few yards away. As he crawled, he saw a man vanish under a falling section of wall. Two screaming women dropped away as the ground split beneath them.

“TOMMY!”

He crawled toward his mother’s voice, finally clearing the pall of smoke.

“Here!” he coughed.

His father rushed forward and yanked him to his feet. His mother grabbed his elbow. They dragged him toward the Snake Path, away from the destruction.

He looked back. The fissure gaped wider, cleaving the summit. Chunks of mountain fell away and rumbled down to the desert. Dark smoke churned into the achingly blue sky, as if to take its horrors to the burning sun.

Together, he and his parents stumbled to the cliff’s edge.

But as quickly as it began, the earthquake ceased.

His parents froze, as if afraid any movement might restart the quakes. His father wrapped his arms around them both. Across the summit, pained cries cut the air.

“Tommy?” His mother’s voice shook. “You’re bleeding.”

“I scraped my hands,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”

His father let them go. He’d lost his hat and cut his cheek. His normally deep voice came out too high. “Terrorists, do you think?”

“I didn’t hear a bomb,” his mother said, stroking Tommy’s hair like he was a little boy.

For once, he didn’t mind.

The cloud of blackish-red smoke charged toward them, as if to drive them off the cliff.

His father took the suggestion and pointed toward the steep trail. “Let’s go. That stuff could be toxic.”

“I breathed it,” Tommy assured them, standing. “It’s okay.”

A woman ran out of the smoke clutching her throat. She ran blind, eyelids blistered and bleeding. Just a few steps, then she pitched forward and didn’t move.

“Go!” his father yelled, and pushed Tommy ahead of him. “Now!”

Together, they ran, but they could not outpace the smoke.

It overtook them. His mother coughed — a wet, tearing, unnatural sound. Tommy reached for her, not knowing what to do.

His parents stopped running, driven to their knees.

It was over.

“Tommy …” his father gasped. “Go …”

Disobedient, he sank down beside them.

If I’m going to die anyway, let it be on my own terms.

With my family.

A sense of finality calmed him. “It’s okay, Dad.” He squeezed his mom’s hand, then his dad’s. Tears flowed when he thought he had none left. “I love you, so much.”

Both of his parents looked at him — square in the eye. Despite the terrible moment at hand, Tommy felt so warm right then.

He hugged them both tightly and still held them as they went limp in his grasp, refusing to let gravity take them as death had. When his strength gave out, he knelt next to their bodies and waited for his own last breath.

But as minutes passed, that last breath refused to come.

He wiped an arm across his tearstained face and stumbled to his feet, refusing to look at his parents’ crumpled bodies, their blistered eyes, the blood on their faces. If he didn’t look, maybe they weren’t really dead. Maybe it was a dream.

He turned in a slow circle facing away from them. The foul smoke had blown away. Bodies littered the ground. As far as he could see, everything was dead still.

It was no dream.

Why am I the only one still alive? I was supposed to die. Not Mom and Dad.

He looked down again at their bodies. His grief was deeper than weeping. Deeper than all the times he’d mourned his own death.

It was wrong. He was the sick one, the defective one. He had known for a long time that his death was coming. But his parents were supposed to carry on memories of him, frozen at the age of fourteen in a thousand snapshots. The grief was supposed to be theirs.

He fell to his knees with a sob, thrusting his hands toward the sun, his palms upraised, both beseeching and cursing God.

But God wasn’t done with him yet.

As his arms stretched to the sky, one sleeve fell back, baring his wrist, pale and clear.

He lowered his limbs, staring at his skin in disbelief.

His melanoma had vanished.

3

Kneeling in the trench, Erin surveyed the earthquake’s damage and sighed in frustration. According to initial reports, the epicenter was miles away, but the quaking rocked the entire Israeli coastline, including here.

Sand poured through the broken boards that shored up the sides of her excavation, slowly reburying her discovery, as if it were never supposed to have been unearthed.

But that wasn’t the worst of the earthquake’s wrath. Sand could be dug out again, but a cracked plank sat atop the child’s skull, the one she had been struggling to gently release from the earth’s grip. She didn’t permit herself to speculate about what lay under that chunk of wood.

Just please let it be intact …

Her three students fidgeted near the trench, keeping to the edge.

Holding her breath, Erin eased up the splintered plank, got it free, and blindly passed it to Nate. She then lifted the tarp that she’d covered the tiny skeleton with earlier.

Shattered fragments marked where the baby’s once-intact skull had been. The body had lain undisturbed for two thousand years — until she exposed it to destruction.

Her throat tightened.

She sat in the trench and brushed her fingertips lightly over the bone fragments, counting them. Too many. She bowed her head. Clues to the baby’s death had been lost on her watch. She should have finished this excavation before following Nate to the tent to study the new GPR readings.

“Dr. Granger?” Heinrich spoke from the edge of the trench.

She leaned back quickly so he would not think she was praying. The German archaeology student was too bound up with religion. She didn’t want him to think that she was, too. “Let’s get a plaster cast over the rest of this, Heinrich.”

She needed to protect the rest of the skeleton from aftershocks.

Too little, too late, for the tiny skull.

“Right away.” Heinrich combed his fingers through his shaggy blond hair before heading toward the equipment tent, which had ridden out the earthquake undamaged. The only modern casualty was Amy’s Diet Coke.

Heinrich’s sylphlike girlfriend, Julia, trailed behind him. She wasn’t supposed to be on the dig site at all, but she was passing through for the weekend, so Erin had allowed it.

“I’ll check out the equipment.” Amy’s anxious voice reminded Erin of how young they all really were. Even at their age, she had not been so young. Had she?

Erin gestured around the hippodrome. It had been in ruins long before their arrival. “The site’s been through worse.” She injected false cheer into her voice. “Let’s get to work putting it to rights.”

“We can rebuild it. We have the technology. Better than it was before.” Nate hummed the theme music from the Six Million Dollar Man.

Amy gave him a flirtatious smile before heading off to the tent.

“Can you fetch me a new board?” Erin asked Nate.

“Sure thing, Doc.”

As he left, his tune drifted through her mind. What if they could actually rebuild it? Not just the excavation, but the entire site.

Her gaze traveled across the ruins, picturing what this place must have once looked like. In her mind’s eye, she filled in the half that had long since crumbled away. She imagined cheering crowds, the rattle of chariots, the pounding of hooves. But then she remembered what came before the hippodrome was constructed: the Massacre of the Innocents. She imagined the raw panic when soldiers snatched infants from their helpless mothers. Mothers forced to see swords cut short the wailing of their babies.

So many lives lost.

If she was right about her discovery, she began to suspect the real reason why Herod had built this hippodrome at this spot. Had it given him some dark amusement to know the trampling of hooves and the spill of the blood further desecrated the graves of those he had slaughtered?

Shrill neighing startled her out of her thoughts. She stood and looked toward the stables, where a groom walked a skittish white stallion. She knew horses. She had spent many happy childhood hours at the compound’s stable and knew firsthand how they hated earthquakes. The great, sensitive beasts were restless before a quake struck and unsettled after. She hoped these were being properly taken care of.

Heinrich and Nate returned. Nate had an intact board, while Heinrich carried a box of plaster, a water jug, and a bucket. An art minor, he had careful hands, just what she needed to help put the broken pieces in place.

Nate handed her the board. It brought with it the forest scent of pine, out of place here in this desert. Taking care to avoid the remains of the skeleton, he climbed in next to her. Together she and Nate shouldered the board between its braces and back against the edge of the trench. She hoped it wouldn’t fail her like the last one.

While Nate left to check on his equipment, she and Heinrich dug out sand. The board had damaged the skull and the left arm. She remembered the tiny fontanel, the angle of the neck. There had been clues there, she felt certain. Now lost forever.

Intending to preserve what was left, she raised her camera and focused first on the shattered skull. She took several shots from multiple angles. Next, she photographed the broken arm, shattered mid-radius. As she clicked away, her forearm gave a twinge of sympathy. Her own arm had hurt off and on since she was four years old.

Placing her camera down, still staring at that broken limb, she stroked her fingers down her left arm and slipped into a painful past.

Her mother had pushed her toward her father, urging her to show the crayon picture of the angel that she had drawn. Proudly, with the hope of praise, she held it toward his callused hand. He was so tall that she barely reached past his knee. He took the picture, but only glanced at it.

Instead, he sat and pulled her into his lap. She began to tremble. Only four, she knew already that her father’s lap was the most dangerous place in the world.

“Which hand did you use to draw the angel?” His booming voice washed over her ears like a flood across the land.

Not knowing enough to lie, she held up her left.

“Deceit and damnation arise from the left,” he said. “You are not to use it to write or draw with ever again. Do you understand?”

Terrified, she nodded.

“I will not let evil work through a child of mine.” He looked at her again, as if expecting something.

She did not know what he wanted. “Yes, sir.”

Then he lifted his knee and snapped her left arm across it like a piece of wood.

Erin gripped the site of the fracture, still feeling that pain. She pressed hard enough to know the bone had healed offset. Her father had not allowed her to visit a doctor. If prayer could not heal a wound, or save a baby’s life, then it was not God’s will, and they must submit always to God’s will.

When she fled her father’s tyranny, she spent a year teaching herself to write with her left hand instead of her right, anger and determination cut into every stroke of the pen. She would not let her father shape who she became. And so far, evil did not seem to have invaded her, although her arm ached when it rained.

“So the Bible was correct.” Heinrich drew her out of her reverie. He lifted a handful of sand off the baby’s legs and deposited it on the ground outside the trench. “The slaughter happened. And it happened here.”

“No.” She studied scattered bone fragments, trying to decide where to start. “You’re overreaching. We have potential evidence that a slaughter occurred here, but I doubt it has anything to do with the birth of Christ. Historical fact and religious stories often get tangled together. Remember, for archaeological purposes, we must always treat the Bible as a …” She struggled to find a noninflammatory word, gave up. “A spiritual interpretation of events, written by someone bent on twisting the facts to suit their ideology. Someone with a religious agenda.”

“Instead of an academic one?” Heinrich’s German accent grew stronger, a sign that he was upset.

“Instead of an objective agenda. Our ultimate goal — as scientists — is to find tangible evidence of past events instead of relying on ancient stories. To question everything.”

Heinrich carefully brushed sand off the little femur. “You don’t believe in God, then? Or Christ?”

She scrutinized the bone’s rough surface. No new damage. “I believe Christ was a man. That he inspired millions. Do I believe that he turned water into wine? I’d need proof.”

She thought back to her First Communion, when she had believed in miracles, believed that she truly drank the blood of Christ. It seemed centuries ago.

“But you are here.” Heinrich swept his pale arm around the site. “Investigating a Bible fable.”

“I’m investigating a historical event,” she corrected. “And I’m here in Caesarea, not in Bethlehem like the Bible says, because I found evidence that drew me to this site. I am here because of facts. Not faith.”

By now, Heinrich had cleared the bottom of the skeleton. They both worked faster than usual, wary that an aftershock might strike at any time.

“A story written on a pot from the first century led us here,” she said. “Not the Bible.”

After months of sifting through potsherds at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, she had uncovered a misidentified broken jug that alluded to a mass grave of children in Caesarea. It had been enough to receive the grant that had brought them all here.

“So you are trying to … debunk the Bible?” He sounded disappointed.

“I am trying to find out what happened here. Which probably had nothing to do with what the Bible said.”

“So you don’t believe that the Bible is holy?” Heinrich stopped working and stared at her.

“If there is divinity, it’s not in the Bible. It’s in each man, woman, and child. Not in a church or coming out of the mouth of a priest.”

“But—”

“I need to get brushes.” She hauled out of the trench, fighting back her anger, not wanting her student to see it.

When she was halfway to the equipment tent, the sound of a helicopter turned her head. She shaded her eyes and scanned the sky.

The chopper came in fast and low, a massive craft, khaki, with the designation S-92 stenciled on the tail. What was it doing here? She glared at it. The rotors would blow sand right back onto the skeleton.

She spun around to tell Heinrich to cover the bones.

Before she could speak, a lone Arabian stallion, riderless and ghostly white, bolted across the field from the stables. It would not see the trench. She rushed toward Heinrich, knowing she would be too late to beat the horse to him.

Heinrich must have felt the hoofbeats. He stood just as the horse reached the trench, spooking the rushing animal further. It reared and struck his forehead with a hoof. Heinrich disappeared into the trench.

Behind her, the helicopter powered down.

The stallion edged away from the noise, toward the trench.

Erin circled around the horse. “Easy, boy.” She kept her voice low and relaxed. “No one’s going to hurt you here.”

A large brown eye rolled to stare at her. The horse’s chest heaved, his quivering flanks coated in sweat, froth spattering his lips. She had to calm him and keep him from falling into the trench where Heinrich lay motionless.

She stepped between the trench and the horse, talking all the while. When she reached up to stroke his curved neck, the stallion shuddered, but he did not bolt. The familiar smell of horse surrounded her. She drew in a deep breath and exhaled. The animal did the same.

Hoping the horse would follow, she stepped to the side, away from Heinrich. She had to move him someplace safer in case he spooked again.

The stallion moved a step on trembling legs.

Nate came running, followed by Amy and Julia.

Erin held up a hand to stop them.

“Nate,” she said in a singsong voice. “Keep everyone back until I get the horse away from Heinrich.”

Nate skidded to a stop. The others followed suit.

The horse blew out heavily, and his sweat-stained withers twitched.

She threaded her fingers into his gray mane and led him a few steps away from the trench. Then she nodded to Nate.

A cry drew her attention over her shoulder, to a small robed figure flying across the sand. The man, plainly the horse’s handler, came rushing forward.

He dropped a lead over the animal’s head, jabbering and gesturing to where the helicopter had landed. Erin got it. The animal didn’t like helicopters. She didn’t much either. She patted the horse on his withers to say good-bye. The handler led him away.

Amy and Julia had already climbed down next to Heinrich. Julia held one hand to his forehead. Blood coated the side of his face. Julia murmured to Heinrich in German. He didn’t answer. Erin held her breath. At least he was still breathing.

Erin joined them. Kneeling down, she gently moved Julia’s hand aside and felt his head. Plenty of blood, but the skull seemed intact. She stripped off her bandanna and held it against the wound. Far from sterile, but it was all she had. Warm blood wet her palm.

Heinrich opened his gray eyes, groaning. “It takes a sacrifice. In crushed skulls. This site.”

She gave him a tight smile. Two skulls crushed on her watch.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

He muttered something in German through bloodless lips. His eyes lost focus, rolling backward. She had to get him to a doctor.

“Dr. Granger?” A voice with an Israeli accent spoke from behind her. “Please stand at once.”

She put Julia’s trembling hand over the makeshift bandage and stood, hands in the air. In her experience, people used that tone only when they were armed. She turned very slowly, Heinrich’s blood already drying on her palms.

Soldiers. A lot of soldiers.

They stood in a semicircle in front of the trench, dressed in desert sand fatigues, sidearms on their belts, automatic weapons strapped around their shoulders. Eight in all, each standing at attention. They wore gray berets, except for the man in front. His was olive green; obviously their leader. The guns weren’t pointed at her.

Yet.

She lowered her hands.

“Dr. Erin Granger.” It was a statement, not a question. He didn’t sound like he ever asked questions.

“Why are you here?” In spite of her fear, she kept her voice even. “Our permits are in order.”

He studied her with eyes like two oiled brown marbles. “You must come with us, Dr. Granger.”

She had to take care of Heinrich first. “I’m busy. My student is injured and—”

“I’m Lieutenant Perlman. With Aman. I’ve been ordered to fetch you.”

As if to underline his point, the soldiers raised their weapons a fraction of an inch.

Aman was Israeli military intelligence. That couldn’t be good. Anger rose in her chest. They had come to fetch her, and their machine had spooked the horse that hurt Heinrich. Erin kept her voice steady, but it still came out cold. “Fetch me to where?”

“I’m not authorized to say.”

The lieutenant did not look like he would be backing down anytime soon, but she could make use of him. “Your helicopter frightened a horse, and it wounded my student.” She balled her hands into fists at her sides. “Badly.”

He looked down at Heinrich, then inclined his head to one of the soldiers. The man pulled a trauma kit from a pack and climbed into the trench. A medic. That was something. She unclenched her hands and wiped her bloody palms on her jeans.

“I want him airlifted to a hospital,” she said. “Then, perhaps, we can talk about other things.”

The lieutenant looked down at the medic. The man nodded, looking worried.

That couldn’t be good.

“Very well,” Perlman said.

He gestured, and his men responded quickly. Two soldiers helped lift Heinrich out of the trench; another two hauled over a stretcher. Once loaded, he was carried toward the helicopter. Julia followed them, sticking close to his side.

Erin drew in a deep breath. A helicopter ride to the hospital was the best chance Heinrich had.

She took Lieutenant Perlman’s proffered hand, noticing his strength as he pulled her out of the trench.

Without a word, he turned and headed back toward the helicopter. The remaining soldiers stepped in behind her, indicating that she should follow. She stomped after Perlman. She was being kidnapped from her site at gunpoint.

She wouldn’t win this fight, but she would get what information she could from them. “Does this have to do with the earthquake?” she called to Perlman.

The lieutenant glanced back, didn’t answer, but she read his face. Her mind filled in the blanks. Earthquakes broke things. But they also uncovered them.

All of which raised another question.

There were plenty of other archaeologists in Israel. What reason could they have to drag her out of her own dig? No ancient treasure warranted this kind of urgency. Archaeologists didn’t get shuttled around in military helicopters.

Something was very wrong.

“Why me?” she pressed.

Perlman finally responded. “I can only say that it is a delicate situation, and your expertise has been requested.”

“By whom?”

“I could not say.”

“If I refuse?”

Perlman’s gaze bored into her. “You’re a guest of our country. If you refuse to come with us, you’ll no longer be a guest of our country. And your friend will not be taken to the hospital in our helicopter.”

“I think the embassy would not condone this treatment,” she bluffed.

His lips twisted into an unconvincing smile. “It was a member of the delegation at the U.S. embassy who recommended you.”

She fought to conceal her surprise. So far as she knew, no one in the embassy cared anything about her. Either Perlman was lying, or he knew way more than she did. Regardless, the time for talking was past. She had to get Heinrich to a hospital.

So she continued walking toward the helicopter. The soldiers had dropped into formation around her as if she might bolt like the stallion.

Nate and Amy hurried along behind. Nate looked belligerent, Amy worried.

Erin turned and walked backward, calling out instructions. “Nate, you’re in charge until I return. You know what needs to be done.”

Nate talked over a soldier’s shoulder. “But, Professor—”

“Stabilize the skeleton. And have Amy study the left femur before you jacket it.”

Nate pointed toward the helicopter. “Are you sure it’s safe to go with them?”

She shook her head. “Contact the embassy the second I’m gone. Confirm that they recommended me. If they didn’t, call in the cavalry.”

The soldiers didn’t miss a step, impassive faces staring straight ahead. Either they didn’t speak English, or they weren’t worried about her threat. Which could be a good thing or a very bad one.

“Don’t go,” Nate said.

“I don’t think I have a choice,” she said. “And neither does Heinrich.”

She saw him swallow that truth, then nod.

Lieutenant Perlman beckoned from the open cabin door. “Here, Dr. Granger.”

The helicopter’s whirling blades began to roar louder as she ducked under them.

She climbed inside the chopper and strapped into the only empty seat. Heinrich lay on a stretcher on the other side of the craft with Julia in a seat next to him. Julia flashed her a shaky smile, and Erin gave her a thumbs-up. Did they even do that in Germany?

As the chopper lifted off, Erin turned to the soldier next to her and pulled back in surprise. He was no soldier. He was a priest. He wore black pants, overhung by an ankle-length hooded cassock, along with black leather gloves, dark sunglasses, and the familiar white collar of the Roman Catholic clergy.

She recoiled. The priest leaned away from her as well, one hand reaching to adjust his hood.

She’d had more than enough squabbles with Catholic priests over the years concerning her archaeological work. But at least his presence lent some credibility to her hope that it really was an archaeological site she was being called to, something religious, something Christian. The downside was that this priest would probably claim the artifacts before she could see them. If so, she would have been pulled from her site and blood spilled for nothing.

That’s not going to happen.

The woman seated beside him smelled of lavender, horse, and blood. Scents as out of place in this modern era as Father Rhun Korza himself.

She offered her hand. He had not intentionally touched a woman in a very long time. Even though dried blood streaked her palm, he had no choice but to take it, grateful that he wore gloves. He steeled himself and shook. Her warm hand felt strong and capable, but it trembled in his. So, he frightened her.

Good.

He dropped her hand and shifted away, seeking to put space between them. He had no wish to touch her again. In fact, he wished she would climb back out of the craft and return to her safe study of the past.

For her own sake as much as his own.

Before receiving his summons, he had been dwelling in deep meditation, in seclusion, ready to forsake the greater world for the beauty and isolation of the Cloister, as was his right. But Cardinal Bernard had not let him stay there. He had pulled Rhun from his meditative cell and sent him on this journey into the world to fetch an archaeologist and search for an artifact. Rhun had expected the archaeologist to be a man, but Bernard had chosen a woman, and a beautiful one at that.

Rhun suspected what that meant.

He gripped the silver cross at his throat. Metal warmed through his glove.

Above his head rotor blades throbbed like a massive mechanical heart, beating fast enough to burst.

His gaze fell on the second woman. She was German, from her whispered words to the man on the stretcher. Blood streaked her white cotton dress. She gripped the hand of the wounded man, never taking her eyes off his face. The iron smell of his blood blanketed the airborne vehicle.

Rhun closed his eyes, fingered the rosary on his belt, and began a silent Our Father. Vibrations shuddered through his prayer.

He would much rather travel on a mule with a naturally beating heart.

But the blades drowned out more dangerous sounds — the heavy drip of blood from the split scalp to the floor, the quick breathing of the woman next to him, and the faraway neighing of a frightened stallion.

As the vehicle banked, the stench of jet fuel rolled in. Its foreignness stung his nostrils, but he preferred it to the scent of blood. It gave him the strength to let himself look at the injured man, at the blood running in threads along the metal floor, then dropping out toward the harsh stone landscape below.

This late in the fall, the sun set early, in less than two hours. He could ill afford a delay to aid a wounded man. Much rested on his shoulders.

Out of the corner of his eye, he studied the woman next to him. She wore threadbare denim jeans and a dusty white shirt. Her intelligent brown eyes traveled once around the cabin, seeming to assess each man. Those eyes skittered past him as if he were not there. Did she fear him as a man, as a priest, or as something else?

He tightened his gloved hands on his knees and meditated. He must purge thoughts of her from his mind. He would need all his holy strength for the task ahead. Perhaps, after it was complete, he could return to the Sanctuary, to the Cloister, and rest undisturbed.

Suddenly the woman brushed him with her elbow. He tensed, but did not jump. His meditation had steadied him. She leaned forward to check on her colleague, her fine eyebrows drawn down in worry. The man would not recover, but Rhun could not tell her so. She would never believe him. What did a simple priest know of wounds and blood?

Far more than she could ever imagine.

Erin’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She drew it out and held it next to her leg to conceal it from Lieutenant Perlman. She doubted he would want her texting from the helicopter.

Amy wrote her:

“Hey, Prof. Can u talk?”

The lieutenant seemed to be looking the other way.

Erin typed.

“Go.”

Amy’s answer came back so quickly she must have been typing while Erin was thinking.

“Took a look at that skeleton’s femur.”

“And?”

“It had gnaw marks.”

That confirmed Erin’s earlier assessment. She had noted what looked like teeth marks on the bone. She struggled to type as the helicopter jolted.

“Not uncommon … Lots of desert predators out here.”

Amy’s response was slow, her answer long to type out:

“But the bite marks match what I saw on that dig in New Guinea. Same dentition. Same pattern of gnawing.”

Erin’s heart sped up, knowing the subject of Amy’s last dig: the headhunters of New Guinea. That could mean only one thing …

But cannibalism? Here?

If true, the story behind this mass grave of children might be even worse than the tale of Herod’s massacre. But it still seemed unlikely. The newborn’s skeleton had been fairly large, with no obvious signs of malnutrition that might indicate a famine, which might warrant such depraved hunger.

“Evidence?”

she typed back.

“4 incisors. Continuous arch. It was HUMANS who gnawed that baby’s bones.”

Erin lifted her thumb, momentarily too shocked to type — then Lieutenant Perlman suddenly snatched the phone out of her grip, making her jump. He switched it off.

“No outside contact,” he yelled.

She swallowed her anger and crossed her arms, submitting. No point getting further on his bad side.

Yet.

The lieutenant dropped the phone into his shirt pocket. She missed it already.

She was relieved when the helicopter touched down at the pad at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center. Perlman had kept his word. White-suited hospital personnel sprinted toward them. She’d heard that they had a good trauma team, and she was grateful to see such a rapid response. She reached to unbuckle her harness, but Perlman covered her hand.

“No time,” he warned.

His men had already climbed out and unfastened the stretcher. Julia stood next to it on the ground, still holding Heinrich’s fingers. She lifted her free hand to wave to Erin. Heinrich’s chest rose and fell as they wheeled him off. Still breathing. She hoped that would be true the next time she saw him.

As soon as the soldiers were back on board, the chopper lifted fast and hard.

She turned her gaze from the hospital to stare at the spread of desert beyond Caesarea as her thoughts moved from her anxiety about Heinrich to another gnawing worry.

Where are they taking me?

4

Bathory Darabont stood poised in the shadows, hidden on a second-story landing above the hotel. She stared down to the tiled fountain that dominated the hotel lobby, water splashing from the wall into a half-round basin of monstrous green marble. She guessed the water was two or three feet deep. She stroked the ornate brass railing as she calculated the drop from where she stood.

Twenty-five feet. Probably survivable. Definitely intriguing.

The man next to her rattled on. With his masses of curly dark hair, huge brown eyes, and straight nose, he looked like he had just stepped out of a fresco depicting Alexander the Great. Of course, he knew that he was beautiful and rich, some distant prince of a distant land — and that made him accustomed to getting his own way.

This bored her.

He strove to talk her right out of her designer silk dress and into his bed, and she wasn’t necessarily averse to that, but she was more interested in action than in preliminaries.

She pushed back her waist-length red hair with one languid white hand, watching his eyes linger on the black palm tattooed across her throat. An unusual mark, and more dangerous than it looked.

“How about a bet, Farid?”

His brown eyes returned to her silver ones. He really did have the most amazing long dark lashes. “A bet?”

“Let’s see who can jump into that fountain.” She pointed one long finger down into the atrium. “Winner takes all.”

“The stakes?” He flashed her a perfect smile. He looked like he might like games.

She did, too, and held out one slender wrist. “If you win, I give you my bracelet.”

The diamond bracelet cost fifty thousand dollars, but she had no intention of losing it. She never lost.

He laughed. “I don’t need a bracelet.”

“And I give it to you in your hotel room.”

Farid looked over the railing and fell silent. She liked him better silent.

“If I win …” She stepped so close to him that her silk dress brushed his warm leg. “I get your watch — and you give it to me in my room.”

A Rolex; she suspected it cost about the same as her bracelet. She had no need of it either. But the jump would cut short the flirting and might lead to more inspired and passionate lovemaking than Farid was probably capable of.

“How can I lose?” he said.

She gave him a long and languorous kiss. He responded well. She slipped her phone into his pocket, fingers tracing a metal knife that she found there. Farid was not so defenseless as he appeared. She remembered her mother’s words.

Even a white lily casts a black shadow.

When she drew back, Farid slid both hands down her silk-covered back. “How about we skip the jump?”

She laughed. “Not on your life.”

Grasping the cold railing with both hands, she vaulted over the side.

She opened into a swan dive, falling, arms out straight and back arched. Her dress fluttered against her thighs. For a moment she thought that she had misjudged the depth and the fall would kill her, and in that moment she felt more relief than fear. She hit the water flat, distributing her weight.

The violent slap stole her breath.

For a second, she floated facedown in the cool blue, breasts and belly stinging, her unsettled blood finally quiet. Then she rolled over, pushing her now transparent bodice out of the water while dipping her head to slick back her hair, laughing brightly.

When she stood up, the entire lobby stared. A few onlookers applauded, as if she were part of a show.

Far above, Farid gaped.

She climbed out of the fountain. Water streamed from her body and spread across the expensive woolen carpet. She bowed to Farid, who returned the gesture with a slight nod, followed by the dramatic unbuckling of his Rolex and the lift of an eyebrow, conceding she had won the bet.

Minutes later, they stood outside her door. She shivered slightly in her damp clothes in the air-conditioned hallway. Farid’s bare palm, as soft as silk but as hot as a coal, ran up her back under her thin dress, raising an entirely different shiver. She sighed and glanced darkly toward him, craving the heat of his flesh far more than any companionship he could offer.

She retrieved her key card, the newly won Rolex dangling from her wrist.

As she unlocked the door and pushed it open, her phone buzzed, but it came from Farid’s pants. She turned, slipped her hand into his pocket, and tugged it free.

“How did that get there?” he asked, surprised.

“I put it there when I kissed you.” She smiled at him. “So it wouldn’t get wet. I knew you’d never jump.”

A wrinkle of hurt pride blemished his perfect forehead.

Standing in the doorway, she checked her phone. It was a text message, an important one from the name of the sender. She went cold all over, beyond anything a shiver could warm through or a heated touch could soothe.

No more time for play.

“Who is Argentum?” Farid asked, reading over her shoulder.

Oh, Farid … a woman likes to keep her secrets.

It was why she traveled under so many false names, like the one she used to book this room.

“It appears I have some pressing business to attend,” she said, stepping through the doorway and turning. “I must bid you good-bye here.”

A dark disappointment showed in his face, a flicker of anger.

He abruptly shoved her deeper into the room, following close. He grabbed her roughly and shoved her against the wall, kicking the door shut.

“I’ll say when we’re finished,” he said huskily.

She lifted an eyebrow. So there was some hidden fire in Farid after all.

Smiling up at him, she tossed her phone to the bed, pulled him even closer, their lips almost touching. She swung him around so he was now the one with his back to the wall. She reached to his pants, which widened his dark smile. But he mistook what she searched for — she removed his hidden knife instead.

She opened it one-handed, and with a quick thrust, she buried it in his eye socket, punching it up and back. She kept hold of his body, pressed against the wall, feeling his body’s heat through her thin clothes, knowing that warmth would quickly expire, snuffed out with his life. She savored that waning heat, held him tightly as the death tremors shook through him.

As they ended, she finally let go.

His body sagged to the ground, his life spent.

She left him there, stepped to the bed, and sat down, crossing a long leg. She retrieved her phone and opened the attached image file that had been sent to her.

On the screen, a single photo appeared, of a piece of paper covered with a strange script. The handwriting stemmed from another time, better suited to being scratched on parchment with a sliver of bone. More code than language, it was written in an archaic form of Hebrew.

As part of her training, she had studied ancient languages at Oxford and now read ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as easily as her native Hungarian. She deciphered the message carefully, ensuring she made no mistake. Her breath quickened as she worked.

She brought a hand to her white throat, fingertips brushing the mark that blackened her skin, thinking of the night she received it and became forever tainted. Her blood burned still.

She read on.

She stared at the phrase in Herodian Aramaic. The Belial had waited long for this message.

Her lips shaped impossible words, not daring to speak them aloud.

A surge of unfamiliar fear pulsed through her fingertips.

He whom she served had long suspected the Jewish mountain stronghold might hide the precious book. Along with a handful of other sites. It was one of the reasons she had been sequestered here, deep within the Holy Land. A few hours’ distance from dozens of possible ancient landmarks.

But was he correct? Did Masada mark the true resting place for the Book of Blood? Once she and her team revealed their presence, they could not be hidden again. Was this enough of a sign to warrant that risk?

She knew the answer to only the last question.

Yes.

If the book were truly unearthed, it offered a singular opportunity — a chance to end the world and forge a new one in His name. Although she had been trained from a young age, she had never truly expected this day to arrive.

Preparations must be made.

She pressed the second number on her speed dial and pictured the large muscular man who would answer on the first ring.

Her second in command, Tarek.

“Your wish?” His deep voice still bore traces of a Tunisian accent, although he had not spoken with a countryman for a lifetime.

“Wake the others,” she ordered. “At long last, the hunt begins.”

5

Erin longed to be on the ground, away from the heat and noise and dust, and from the priest. She was too hot herself, and the priest must have it worse in his long cassock and hood. She tried to remember when Catholic priests stopped wearing hoods. Before she was born. Between his hood and his sunglasses, she saw only his chin, square with a cleft in the middle.

A movie-star chin, but he made her uneasy. As far as she could tell, he had not moved in more than half an hour. The helicopter dropped a few feet, but her stomach stayed up in the air. She swallowed. She wished that she had thought to bring water. The soldiers didn’t seem to have any, but they didn’t seem to care. The priest didn’t either.

Monotonous arid landscape slipped by below. Since the helicopter left the hospital, it had been flying east and north, toward the Sea of Galilee. Every minute of flight changed their possible destination, but Erin had lost interest in trying to guess where she might land.

They closed in on a familiar flat-topped mountain that climbed steeply out of the desert. She made out the white finger of the ramp that the Romans had built to finally breach its walls.

Masada.

It hadn’t even been on her list of possible sites. Masada had been thoroughly excavated in the sixties. Nothing new had come out of the site in decades. Tourists had been tramping all over it.

Perhaps the earthquake had uncovered something nearby. A Roman camp? Or the remains of the nine hundred Jewish rebels? Only thirty or so bodies had ever been recovered. They had been reburied with full military honors in 1969.

She craned her neck to get a better view. Unbroken sand stretched in all directions. No sign of activity around the base, but she spotted a large helicopter on the summit. That must be where she was headed. She sat straighter, eager to discover what required her immediate attention.

The priest moved almost imperceptibly, a slight shift of his handsome chin. So he still lived. She had forgotten to take him into account while guessing their destination. Though primarily a Jewish landmark, Masada was also home to the ruins of a Byzantine church, circa AD 500. The earthquake might have exposed Christian relics. But, if the Israelis planned to turn the relics over to the priest, why bring her in the first place? Something didn’t add up.

The helicopter descended toward the summit, kicking sand through the open doorway. She squinted against the hot grit and cupped her hands around her eyes. She should have brought protective goggles. And water. And dinner. And a backup phone.

She wished Perlman hadn’t taken her cell phone. Surely her students had reported in by now to let her know Heinrich’s condition. Otherwise … well, she didn’t want to think about otherwise. He had been at the site as her grad student. Whatever happened to him was her responsibility.

Erin brought her pinkie finger and thumb to her ear to pantomime the word phone.

Perlman fished it out of his pocket. He yelled over the noise. “Keep it off.”

“Yes, sir.” At this decibel level, he wouldn’t hear the sarcasm.

He handed the phone to her, and she stuck it into her back pocket. The second he turned his back, she intended to turn it on and check her messages.

The summit came into view.

She leaned out, searching below, stunned. It took her a thundering moment to understand what she was seeing.

Masada was … gone.

The walls, the buildings, the cisterns were piles of rocks. The casemate wall that had surrounded the fortress for thousands of years had been completely destroyed. Rubble stood in place of the columbarium and synagogue. The mountain had practically been cleaved in two. She had never seen such devastation up close.

The pilot slowed the engines, and they whined out in a lowering pitch as the skids scraped the top of the mountain and the helicopter settled to a stop.

She strained to see through the cloud of dust surrounding them. Black rectangles had been lined up near the edge of the plateau. They were too regularly shaped to be natural. Two people dropped a new one next to the others.

Body bags. Full ones.

Masada was one of the most popular tourist sites in Israel. It had probably been teeming with tourists when the quake struck. How many more lives had the cursed mountain claimed? Her stomach lurched again, but this time not from the helicopter.

A cool hand fell on her shoulder, and she jumped. The priest. He, too, must have noted the dead. Maybe she had been wrong all along. Maybe he was here to perform Last Rites or look after the dead at the behest of the Church.

She felt sick at the thought of how excited she had been a few minutes before. This was no archaeological site. It was a disaster scene. She wished that she were back in Caesarea.

Lieutenant Perlman jumped out and barked orders in Hebrew. Men spilled from both sides of the chopper and headed toward the body bags. They must have been summoned to collect the bodies. No wonder the officer had been so tight-lipped about it. She didn’t envy him his task.

The priest sprang out of the helicopter, graceful as a desert cat. His long cassock swirled in the rotor wash. He pulled his hood closer to his face and turned his head from side to side as if searching.

She fumbled with sweat-slick hands to unclip her safety harness. The floor seemed to lurch when she stood. She steadied herself against the seat back and took a few deep breaths. The Israelis had had a reason to bring her here, and she’d best calm down and find out what it was.

The priest turned and offered her help, gloved palm upturned in an old-fashioned, almost courtly gesture. It was certainly nothing like the way Lieutenant Perlman had hauled her out of the trench before she started this journey.

Grateful for the support, she took his hand. He released it the instant her sneakers touched the limestone.

The wind blew back his hood, revealing a pale face with high cheekbones and thick dark hair. A handsome man, for a priest.

“Tot ago attero …,” he murmured as he pulled his black hood back over his head, masking his face again. She translated his Latin words. So many lost.

The priest bowed before striding off purposefully, as if he, at least, knew why he was here.

She shielded her eyes and looked at the sun, already low in the sky. The sun set in about an hour. If they did not get the bodies removed by then, jackals would arrive. In spite of the heat, she shivered.

She forced her eyes to look at the ruined site, beyond the body bags, to figures dragging corpses from the rubble. Figures wearing sky-blue biohazard suits.

Biohazard suits for an earthquake?

Before she could ask why such a precaution was necessary, a tall soldier strode forward. He wasn’t wearing a biohazard suit. Comforting.

He headed straight for her. Even without the flag sewn on the shoulder patch of his khaki jacket, she would have known that he was American. Everything about him said apple pie: from his wheat-blond hair, shorn into an army standard crew cut, to his square-jawed face and broad shoulders. Clear blue eyes fixed on her, taking her measure in a single tired breath. She liked him. He seemed competent, and not inured to the tragedy he was dealing with. But what was the American military doing on an Israeli mountaintop?

“Dr. Erin Granger?”

So, he did expect her. Should she be relieved or even more worried? “Yes, I’m Dr. Granger.”

The soldier looked past her shoulder toward the priest, who headed away through the rubble. One eyebrow rose. “I wasn’t apprised of a priest coming here,” he said to Lieutenant Perlman.

The Israeli waved to two of his men and pointed to the priest before answering, “The Vatican requested Father Korza’s presence. A Catholic tourist party was here during the quake. It included a cardinal’s nephew.”

That explained the priest, Erin thought. One tragic mystery solved. The soldier seemed to agree with her assessment and faced her again.

“Thank you for coming, Dr. Granger. We need to hurry.” He headed away from the helicopter, aiming toward the worst of the destruction.

She jogged to keep up with his long legs, trying to focus on him and on her footing, not on the body bags. This morning these people had been as alive as she. She talked to keep from thinking. “I was pulled from a dig without a word of explanation. What’s going on here?”

“That sounds familiar.” His lips slipped into a tired grin. “I was in Afghanistan yesterday, Jerusalem a few hours ago.” He halted, wiped his palm on his sand-colored T-shirt, and stuck out his hand. “Let’s start over. Sergeant Jordan Stone, Ninth Ranger Battalion. We’ve been called in by the Israelis to help out here.”

His grip was warm and firm without being aggressive, and she immediately noticed a white line on his left hand, where a wedding band should go. Embarrassed that she had focused on that detail, she quickly dropped his hand. “Dr. Erin Granger,” she repeated.

He started walking. “Don’t mean to be rude, Doc, but if you want any archaeology left to study, we need to hurry. We’ve been having aftershocks.”

She kept pace. “Why the biohazard suits? Was this a chemical or biological attack?”

“Not exactly.”

Before she could ask what that meant, the sergeant stopped at the edge of a tumble of limestone that blocked the view forward. He turned fully to her.

“Doc, I need you to brace yourself.”

Jordan doubted that Dr. Granger had ever seen anything like this. The path led through a maze of rubble and crushed bodies: some covered, others staring blindly at the unforgiving sun, adults and children. But, short of putting blinders on her like a horse, he saw no way to protect her. She’d have to walk through it to get to the temporary base camp set up at the edge of the chasm that the quake had opened.

He sidestepped a body covered with a blue tarp. He didn’t allow himself to be distracted by the dead; he had seen enough corpses in Afghanistan. Later tonight, privately, he might drink too much Jack Daniel’s to keep him from thinking too much. Until then, he had to remain in control of both his team and his feelings.

The archaeologist was a bit of a surprise. Not that she was a woman. He had no issues working with women. Some were competent, some weren’t; no different from any man. But why had an archaeologist been sent to the site to begin with?

He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his wrist. Dusk closed in, but the temperature still crested ninety degrees. He took a deep breath, tasting hot desert air mixed with the copper tang of blood. Then he noticed Dr. Granger was no longer behind him.

He waited for her to struggle over, saw glints of sympathy and compassion in her eyes as she searched the rubble, studying bodies, mourning deaths. She wouldn’t soon forget today.

He walked back. “You okay?”

“As long as I keep moving. Stop too long, and you’ll be carrying me the rest of the way.” She offered him a hollow smile — it seemed to take a gargantuan effort.

He walked, more slowly than before, trying to pick a path that kept them away from the scattered bodies. “Most victims died instantly. Chances are they didn’t feel a thing.”

It was a lie. And she only had to look at the bodies to know it.

She raised a skeptical eyebrow, but she didn’t call him on it, which he appreciated.

She stared at a young woman’s body. Blisters covered her face and dried blood crusted around her mouth and eyes. Not your typical earthquake victim. “Not all these bodies were crushed. What happened to the others, Sergeant?”

“Call me Jordan.” He hesitated. He bet she’d call him on it if he lied this time. Better to tell her as little as possible than to have her guessing. “We’re still testing, but from the initial gas chromatograph readouts, we suspect they were exposed to a derivative of sarin.”

She tripped over a stone brick, kept going. He admired her grit. “Nerve gas? Is that why the American military is involved?”

“The Israelis asked for our help because we’re experts in this field. So far, we haven’t confirmed the nature of the gas. It most closely resembles sarin. Rapid effects, quick dispersion. By the time the first responders arrived on Masada, the gas was already inert.”

A bit of luck there, Jordan thought, or the casualty count would have been much higher. The Israelis had thought the earthquake was their biggest problem. The first responders hadn’t donned suits until they found the first bodies.

“Who would do that?” Her voice carried the shocked tone of one unused to confronting everyday evil firsthand. He envied her.

“I wish I had an answer for you.”

Even the gas was a mystery. It had none of the markers of a modern, weaponized agent. In breaking down the gas’s essential components, his team had found bizarre anomalies. Like cinnamon. Who the hell puts a spice into a nerve agent? His team was still trying to track down several other equally odd and elusive ingredients.

It unsettled him not to know the gas’s true origin. That was his job, and he was usually damn good at it. He hated to think he’d found a previously unidentified nerve gas with this kind of killing power, especially in the Middle East. Neither his superiors nor the Israelis would be happy to hear that.

He had to step over a body bag. He reached for Dr. Granger’s hand, both to steady her and as a gesture of reassurance. Her grip was more muscular than he expected. She must be lifting more than pencils.

“Was this a terrorist attack?” Her voice remained firm, but he felt the fine tremor in her arm. Best to keep her talking.

“That’s what the Israelis initially thought.” He released her hand. “But the toxic exposure coincided exactly with the earthquake. We suspect old toxic canisters might be buried underground here, and the tremor cracked them open.”

Her brow furrowed. “Masada is a sacred archaeological site. I can’t see the Israelis dumping anything like that here.”

He shrugged. “That’s what my team and I are here to find out.”

He had his orders: find the source and safely remove or detonate any remaining canisters.

He and the doctor walked a few steps in silence. He heard a thump as someone dropped a body bag into a helicopter. They’d better work faster. Night would fall soon, and he didn’t want to waste a man on jackal patrol.

He noted that the doctor’s eyes had grown glassy and wide, her breathing harder. He needed to keep her talking. “Almost to camp.”

“Were there any survivors?”

“One. A boy.” He gestured toward the mobile P3 containment lab, the billowing plastic tent where the teenager was being held.

“Was he here alone?” she asked.

“With his parents.”

The boy allegedly inhaled several large gulps of the chemical agent and survived. He had described the gas as a burnt reddish orange with a sweet, spicy smell to it. No modern nerve gas fit that description.

Jordan glanced back to her. “His parents didn’t make it.”

“I see,” Erin said quietly.

He stared across the rubble to the containment tent. Through the clear plastic walls, Jordan watched the priest kneel next to the boy. He was glad to see someone with the kid. But what priestly words could the man come up with to comfort him?

Suddenly his own job didn’t seem so hard.

“Is that your camp?” She pointed in front of him to a makeshift canvas lean-to pitched at the edge of the fissure.

Camp was a generous description. “Be it ever so humble.”

He spared the fissure another glance. It cut through the ground like a giant scar, five yards wide, perhaps a hundred long. Even though a simple earthquake created it, it felt unnatural.

“Is that a mass spectrometer?” the archaeologist asked as they reached the site.

He couldn’t help but grin at the surprise on her face. “Didn’t think they’d let us grunts work with such ivory-tower toys?”

“No … it’s just … well …”

He liked watching her stutter. Everybody assumed that if you wore a uniform you had checked your brain at the recruiter’s office. “We just bang on it with rocks, Doc, but it seems to work.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. And please call me Erin. ‘Doc’ makes me feel like a pediatrician.”

“Good enough.” He aimed for the tent. “Almost there, Erin.”

Two of his men huddled under the meager shelter.

One stood near the computer, sucking hard on a canteen. The other sat in front of the monitor, fiddling with joysticks that guided the team’s remote-operated vehicle. The little robot had been lowered by its tether into the crevasse an hour ago.

As he led her into camp, both men turned. Each gave him a brief nod but took a far longer look at the attractive blond doctor.

Jordan introduced her, emphasizing her title.

The freckled young man returned his attention to his joysticks.

Jordan gestured at him. “Dr. Granger, that’s our computer jockey, Corporal Sanderson, and the man over there drinking all our water is Specialist Cooper.”

The husky black man snapped on a pair of latex gloves. A dozen bloodstained pairs filled the nearby garbage can.

“I’d stay and chat, but I gotta get back to cleanup duty.” Cooper looked to Jordan. “Where you hiding the extra batteries? McKay’s camera is almost dead, and we have to get everyone photographed before we bag ’em.”

Erin winced. She went pale again. Being in-country for so long, Jordan realized how easy it was to forget the sheer horror of what surrounded him every day.

Not much he could do for her right now. Or the bodies outside. “Blue pack, right pocket.”

Cooper dug a lithium ion battery from the zipper compartment.

“Damn it!” Sanderson swore, drawing their attention.

“What’s wrong?” Jordan asked.

“The rover is stuck again.”

Cooper rolled his eyes and left the tent.

The corporal frowned at the image on the color monitor like it was a video game he was about to lose.

Erin leaned over his shoulder and stared at the four monitors, each displaying footage from one of the ROV’s cameras. “Is that from inside the crevasse?”

“Yeah, but the robot’s jammed up tight.”

The screen displayed the reason for Sanderson’s frustration. The rover had wedged into a crack. Fallen grit and pebbles obscured two cameras. Sanderson pressed the sticks and the tank treads spun ineffectively, kicking up more debris. “Army piece of crap!”

The equipment wasn’t the problem. The ROV was state-of-the-art, packed with enough sensing and radar instruments to detect a mouse farting in a warehouse. The problem was that Sanderson hadn’t yet mastered the art of manipulating the dual joysticks. Jordan couldn’t run them either.

Erin glanced at him, eyes curious. “Is that an ST-20? I’ve logged hundreds of hours on one. Could I give it a shot?”

Might as well give her something to do. Sanderson didn’t look like he’d get the robot out. Plus Jordan respected anyone who was willing to jump in and help. “Sure.”

Sanderson lifted his hands in obvious disgust and rolled his chair out of the way. “Be my guest. The only thing I haven’t tried doing is crawling down that hole and kicking it.”

Erin stood where Sanderson’s chair had just been and took both joysticks like she knew what she was doing. She alternated between the front and rear controls, inching the ROV forward and backward much like she was trying to parallel-park.

“I tried that,” Sanderson said. “It’s not going to—”

The ROV abruptly pulled out of the crack. Jordan saw Erin smother a quick smile of victory, and respected her all the more for trying to spare Sanderson’s feelings.

Sanderson stood and put his hands on his hips. “Dude! You’re making me look bad in front of my CO.”

Then he smiled and pushed his chair behind her like it was a throne. Once she got settled, she looked up at Jordan. “What are we looking for?”

“Our team’s been commissioned to find the source of the gas.”

“Let me guess,” she said with a true smile. “I’m here to assure the Israeli government that you don’t destroy any millennia-old artifacts in the process?”

Jordan matched her smile. “Something along those lines.”

He didn’t take it any further than that, but her presence here was at the request of Israeli intelligence, not the antiquities department. He wasn’t sure why yet. And he hated unsolved mysteries.

All eyes were on the monitors as she steered the ROV over a pile of rocks.

“What are you doing in Israel anyway?” Sanderson asked her.

“I have a team digging in Caesarea,” she said. “Routine stuff.”

Jordan suspected by the tone of her voice that it wasn’t routine. Interesting.

The rover slid down a rocky outcropping, then entered what appeared to be a straight passageway.

“Look at the walls.” She rotated the rover’s cameras. “Sharp-edged chipping.”

“So?” Jordan prompted.

“This tunnel is man-made. Dug out by hand and chisel.”

“Way down there? At the heart of the mountain?” He stepped closer to her. “Who do you think dug it out? The Jewish rebels who died here?”

“Maybe.” She leaned away from him. Personal space issues. He moved back a fraction. “Or the Byzantine monks who lived on the mountain centuries later. Without more evidence, it’s impossible to say. I’m guessing this little guy might be the first one down this passage in a very long time.”

The ROV climbed over a pile of rubble, halogen headlamps painting the pitch-black crevasse sickly white.

“Damn,” Erin said.

“What is it?” Jordan asked.

She turned the rover fully to the right to show a pile of broken stones.

“And?” To Jordan, it didn’t look that different from any other pile of rocks.

“Look at the top.” She traced the image on the monitor with her finger. “That was a tunnel, but it’s collapsed.”

“So has a lot of stuff,” Sanderson put in. “Why is that a big deal?”

“Look at the sides,” she said. “Those are fairly modern drill marks.”

Jordan leaned forward excitedly. “Which means?”

“It means that someone cut their way into this tunnel sometime in the last hundred years or so.” Erin sighed. “And probably stole anything of value.”

“Maybe they left the gas.” Jordan wasn’t sure why he felt relieved that it might be a modern nerve gas and not an ancient one, but he did.

She turned the rover forward again, and it rolled down the path, eventually reaching an open area.

“Stop there,” Jordan said. “What’s this place?”

“Looks like an underground storage chamber.” Erin turned the rover around to get a look at the empty room. No broken canisters yet.

Focusing on his corporal, Jordan asked, “How are the readings?”

Sanderson hunched over a neighboring monitor. He might have trouble piloting the ROV, but the kid knew his instrumentation. “Plenty of secondary breakdown products. No active agent. Still, these are by far the hottest spikes I’ve seen here. I’d say that chamber is the source of the gas.”

A camera angled up to display an arched ceiling.

“That looks like a church,” Sanderson said.

Erin shook her head. “More likely a subterranean temple or tomb. The building style is ancient.” She touched the screen, as if that would help her feel the stone.

“What is that box?” Jordan asked.

“I think it’s a sarcophagus, but I can’t be certain until I get closer. The light doesn’t go that far.”

She sent the ROV forward, but it stopped. She pushed on both joysticks, then let go with an impatient sigh.

“Stuck again?” Jordan asked. They were so close.

“End of the line,” she said. “Literally. That’s as far as the ROV’s tether can reach.”

She left the camera pointed at the sarcophagus. “Definitely appears to be a burial container. If so, somebody important must be interred there.”

“Important enough to booby-trap the chamber?” That might explain it.

“It’s possible, but Egyptians — not Jews — were notorious for engineering elaborate traps.” She rubbed her lower lip. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Nothing does here.” Sanderson snorted. “Like cinnamon-scented nerve gas.”

She swiveled her chair around. “What?”

Jordan scowled at Sanderson, then admitted what they’d found. “One of the anomalies about this gas. We’ve detected traces of cinnamon in it.”

“Well, that makes some sense with the tomb.”

“How so?” It didn’t make any sense to Jordan.

“Cinnamon was a rare spice during ancient times,” she lectured. “For the rich, it was burned in funeral rites as a scent favored by God. It’s mentioned multiple times in the Bible. Moses was commanded to use it when preparing an anointing oil.”

“So the cinnamon is probably a contaminant?” Jordan was grateful for the information. All he knew about cinnamon was that he liked it on French toast.

“The concentration is too high in the gas residue to be just a contaminant,” Sanderson piped up.

“What else can you tell me about the ancient uses for cinnamon?” Jordan asked.

“If I’d known there would be a quiz, I’d have studied.” Erin offered a soft smile; its warmth caught him off guard. “Let’s see, they used it as a digestive aid. Stopping colds. As a mosquito repellent.”

“Research it,” Jordan ordered. He strode to stand behind Sanderson, as jazzed as if he’d downed a triple espresso.

Sanderson’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “On it.”

“What?” she asked. “What did I do?”

“Maybe solved part of my problem,” Jordan said. “Most mosquito repellents are around two chemical bonds away from nerve gas. The first nerve gas—”

The ground gave a violent shake. Erin’s chair rolled backward, threatening to topple. Jordan held it steady as the canvas lean-to swayed, and the metal of the scaffolding creaked in protest.

She tensed as if to jump out of her seat, but he pressed her back in place. “Safer if you ride the aftershock out here,” Jordan said.

He didn’t add that there was no safe place on the damaged plateau. It wouldn’t take much shaking to split the entire mesa in half. The shock died away. “All right, the time for window shopping is over.” He turned to Sanderson. “Are you sure there’s no active gas in that chamber?”

Sanderson bent over his console, and after a moment straightened. “None, sir. Not a single molecule.”

“Good. Fetch Cooper and McKay and alert Perlman. We gear up and head down in five.”

The doctor rose as if she expected to go, too. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to stay topside until we secure the chamber.”

She scowled. “You pulled me away from my site to come here. I’m not going to—”

“I’m responsible for the four soldiers in my unit. That responsibility isn’t one I take lightly, Dr. Granger. There is a probable source of deadly nerve gas down there. I will not have a civilian casualty on my conscience as well.”

“Back to ‘Dr. Granger,’ are we?” Her enunciation was suddenly precise. She reminded him of his mother. “What exactly were your standing orders regarding me, Sergeant Stone?”

“As I told you before, to ensure the integrity of the site.” He kept his tone even and polite. He didn’t have time to deal with an angry academic who wanted to hurl herself into danger.

“How can I ensure that integrity from up here?”

“You already said the only thing in there was a sarcophagus—”

“I said that’s all I could see from up here. But what about what’s inside the sarcophagus, Sergeant Stone?”

Her tone was a couple degrees frostier than a minute before. He rallied. “I don’t much care what’s inside it, Doctor. I—”

“You should care. Because it’s open.”

He stepped back in surprise. “What?”

She tapped the screen with her fingernail, showing a spot on the picture relayed by the ROV. “Right there. That’s the lid. On its side next to the sarcophagus. Someone must have broken the seal and lifted it off.”

He wished she hadn’t seen that. It made his life a lot more complicated.

She lowered her voice. “We have no idea what might be in there. The body of a Jewish king. An intact copy of the Torah. Masada is a treasured historical site to the Jewish people. If anything gets damaged …”

He opened his mouth to protest. Instead he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was right. The Israelis would have his head if his team made the slightest mistake. Damn it. “There might be intact canisters of gas down there. If so, they could get broken open by an aftershock at any time. And we end up like the people you saw outside.”

She blanched, then straightened her back. “I understand the consequences, Sergeant.”

He doubted that she did. “Have you rappelled before?”

“Of course,” she said. “More times than I can count.”

He held her gaze. “I’m assuming you can count higher than one?”

She grinned. “I can count higher than that. Maybe even to a hundred.”

He relaxed. At least getting her down there wouldn’t be a problem. “As of now, you are under my command. When I say ‘jump’—”

She put on a serious face. “I ask how high. I got it.”

He touched his earpiece. “Sanderson, get Dr. Granger suited up in a harness. She’s going in with us.”

6

Bathory twitched the blackout curtains back into place, concealing the barren desert beyond the airport hangar, wondering if that would be the last she ever saw of the sun.

She took a moment to close her eyes, to center herself. She took a deep breath and pushed back the pain that continually ran through her blood, that dull ache, always there, never forgotten, a reminder of an oath she had taken when she was much younger. The pain marked her as steadfastly as the strangling black palm print tattooed upon her white throat; both had been born at the same time, binding a promise made in blood and sacrifice to serve Him.

Her fingers rose to her throat, to touch the source of pain and promise. It also served one other purpose: for protection. It marked her as one of His chosen, elevating her. None could touch her, and all obeyed her.

She forced her arm back down, knowing she must never show a shred of weakness, especially in front of the others.

She turned to face the cavernous dark hangar, lit dimly by pools of light from overhead fixtures in the steel rafters. Her team had already boarded the helicopter, waiting on her.

One of the flight crew clanged shut the rear cargo hatch. Something bumped hard against that closing door, knocking the man back a step, leaving him visibly shaken before he got the latch closed.

She allowed a small smile, reassured. The black mark on her throat was not her only protection.

Hush, she sent forth to that rear hold, you’ll be free soon enough.

The message was not words, but a casting out of warmth and comfort.

She felt an echo back: satisfaction, hunger, and a deep well of love.

Basking in that glow, she adjusted the Kevlar and leather that hugged her form, secured the holstered Sig Sauer in its shoulder harness, and headed across the wide hangar to join her team aboard the helicopter. The chopper’s engines were already whining up for liftoff, the noise deafening in the enclosed space.

Ducking under the whirling blades, she climbed into the cabin of the specially designed Eurocopter Panther and slammed the door closed behind her. Inside, it was dark and cool, insulated and whisper-quiet. The medium-size craft would carry ten passengers, along with the additional six hundred pounds of payload secured in the rear hold.

But it was no ordinary chopper. Stealth modifications made it run nearly invisibly, and sound-dampened engines made it run quietly. It had also been painted with Israeli colors, camouflaged to fit the region. Except for the cabin windows — which had been painted black, blinding them to the outside.

As she moved to her lone open seat, eyes tracked her. The nine were all seasoned hunters, well-blooded. She read the raw hunger in their eyes, recognizing the ferocity hidden behind their blank stares.

Ignoring them, she sat next to her second in command, Tarek. In the dim cabin, he was merely a darker shadow, and just as cold. She remembered Farid’s heat, the touch of his hot hand on her back. It seemed a distant memory now.

She fitted her headphones in place and radioed the pilot. In the blackened craft, he would be navigating by instruments alone, aided by flight-simulator software.

“What’s our status?” she asked.

His answer came back tersely. “I’ve already radioed the proper Israeli security code for access to the summit. They’re expecting a cargo helicopter. We’ll be skids down there in twenty-two minutes.”

She calculated in her head. Seven minutes after sundown.

Perfect.

The engines sped up with a muffled roar from outside. She pictured the hangar doors sweeping open overhead, blazing with sunlight. She felt the craft lurch up toward the sun and pictured their craft racing across the hot sands, a dark mote against a fiery sea.

“How many?” Tarek growled.

She knew what he was asking: what force could they expect to meet them at Masada? But she also heard the underlying lust in those two words. It cast a flash of excitement across the cabin, like a match dropped into a pool of gasoline.

She answered him, addressing both what was spoken and unspoken.

“Seventeen.”

Tarek’s face remained in shadows, but she sensed his hard smile, raising the small hairs on the back of her neck, an instinctive response to the presence of a hidden predator.

According to her intelligence, only a small force of soldiers still guarded the summit of the mountain. With the nine at her side and the advantage of surprise, she estimated it would take no more than a couple of minutes to secure the area.

After that, the book must be found.

Her hand tried to drift to her throat again, but she clutched her fingers in her lap.

She could not fail Him.

But there remained one unknown element as she remembered the warning that came with His note:

A Knight has been dispatched to retrieve it.

Let nothing stop you.

She told Tarek that, too.

“Be prepared. A Knight of Christ may also be present.”

Tarek stiffened, his shadow becoming a sculpture of black ice. His voice was a quiet hiss, using the ancient name for such a one like a curse.

“Sanguinist.”

7

Erin looked furtively around the empty tent. Jordan had told her to wait inside until he came back. That gave her a few minutes alone. She drew out her cell and checked her messages.

A text from Nate.

“Can’t reach the embassy. They’re swamped because of the quake. U ok?”

Worried that Perlman might walk by, she texted back quickly.

“I’m fine. It’s legit. News on Heinrich?”

The screen stayed dark so long that she feared he was away from his phone.

“Nate?”

“Can you call me?”

The text message blurred, and she blinked. She couldn’t call him. Someone would hear. She had no doubt Perlman would destroy her phone if he caught her using it again.

“No,”

she texted back.

“Tell me. Now.”

Another pause, then,

“Heinrich didn’t make it.”

Erin collapsed into Sanderson’s chair. Heinrich, gone. He had died in a hospital thousands of miles from home because of her. She’d left him alone in the trench to fetch brushes she didn’t need just to spare herself an argument. What would she tell his parents? The smell of blood drifted over from the garbage can full of used gloves. She fought down an urge to retch.

“Doc?” Jordan stuck his blond head around the corner. “We’re ready for you if—”

He stepped into the tent. “Erin, are you okay?”

She raised her head to look at him. His voice sounded like it came from far away.

“Erin? Did something happen?” He crossed the tent in two quick steps.

She shook her head. If she told him about Heinrich’s death, she would break down right here in a tiny canvas tent in the middle of a field of bodies.

He gave her a concerned look.

Not able to match his gaze, she turned to her phone and texted back a response to Nate. She doubted Jordan would care.

“Understood. I will call when I can.”

Once done, she pocketed the phone. “It’s just my dig,” she said, preparing to believe her lie. “It’s been years of planning, and there was earthquake damage.”

“We’ll get you back soon.”

“I know.” He’d probably think she was crazy for being upset about some old bones buried in dirt. Still, she felt calmer being able to release even a tiny bit of the anguish about Heinrich. Either that or Jordan had a calming effect on her. How else would she have been able to walk through the death she had seen outside the tent? She took one last deep breath.

“I’m ready,” she said, standing up.

“Then step this way. We’ll get that harness on you.”

She followed him to the edge of the fissure, where he handed her a complicated mess of knots and straps. Military issue, it was nothing like what she was used to. She stared at it blankly.

He turned it around. “Step one leg in here. The other there.”

He stood behind her and helped her into the harness. His sure hands moved around her body, straightening straps and fastening clips. The harness was on, and her body temperature had risen by what felt like ten degrees. She quickly fastened the clips across her chest.

A helicopter lifted off. She glanced around the plateau. The teenager had gone, along with most of the crew and the body bags. It looked like only a dozen people worked in the lengthening shadows.

Jordan came around to her front. He reached down and tightened straps around her upper thighs in a way both by-the-book formal and incredibly personal. The webbing cinched against her, pulling her toward him. She looked up into his blue eyes, which were darkening as the sun set.

“If there’s anything I need to know before we go down there,” he said, “now is the time to tell me.”

“Nothing.” She wanted to stay up here alone among all the bodies even less than she wanted to go down into the hole. “Bad day.”

“Sanderson’s got a chair warmed up for you.” He studied her face. “With the ROV in place, you could monitor our progress from up here.”

Summoning up courage she thought she’d lost, she forced a smile. “And let you have all the fun?”

He gave her one more worried look before returning to his men.

On either side, men tossed ropes over the edge. Blue blankets laid along the fissure’s lip cushioned the ropes and lessened friction between the rope lines and sharp, broken stone. They seemed to know what they were doing. She double-checked the ropes anyway.

Sanderson stepped up behind her. He wasn’t going down, only helping the others gear up. He passed her something the length and width of a pen.

“Sarge told me to give you an atropine dart,” he said. “Best to stick it in your sock.”

“What does it do?”

“If you’re exposed to the mystery gas, pop the cap and jab yourself in the thigh.”

Fear fluttered in her chest at the idea of that. “I thought there was no active gas down there.”

“It’s just a precaution, but be careful. Stuff’s strong. Don’t use it unless you know you’re exposed. Atropine jacks your heart rate through the roof. Strong enough to blow up your ticker if you’re not poisoned. Quick, too.”

“Shouldn’t we be wearing biocontainment suits?”

“Too bulky to rappel in. And the straps would tear the fabric. Don’t worry, at the first sign of symptoms — nausea, bleeding — just use the needle. You should live long enough for us to pull you out.”

She scrutinized his freckled face to see if he was joking, trying to scare her.

He squeezed her shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

She didn’t feel fine. Breathing a bit faster, she lifted her pant leg and wedged the dart deep into her sock.

Lieutenant Perlman, along with two other soldiers — a young Israeli and an older American — walked up to the fissure. The American had bushy brown hair and carried a satchel over one shoulder. She read the name stenciled on his fatigues: McKay.

On his bag were three prominent letters: EOD.

He caught her looking. “Explosive Ordnance Disposal. I blow stuff up.”

They must be planning on detonating any intact canisters they found down there. She should be more worried, but the shock of Heinrich’s death had left her too numb to panic.

McKay held out a hand. She shook it. He was a large man, a few cheeseburgers away from having a gut, and a decade older than the others. She guessed he was in his early forties. He smiled broadly while shaking her hand.

“Best-looking climbing partner I’ve had in ages.” He winked, and she tried to smile back.

He moved to the edge of the fissure as if stepping up to a curb. She stepped next to him and looked down. Shadows obscured the bottom. The fissure was broad enough to rappel down without worry, but she still shivered. The jagged, ugly thing didn’t belong on this mountain.

McKay and Cooper secured their rappelling gear to a pair of ropes.

She stepped to a free line and did the same, pulling it tight twice to check.

Another of Jordan’s team — a woman named Tyson — knelt beside the crevasse. She had fed a long hose down into the hole. Next to her camouflaged knee rested a gas chromatograph.

“What’s the reading, Tyson?” Jordan called.

“Spikes of nitrogen, oxygen, argon.” She kept her eyes on her screen. “A trace of everything you’d expect. No bad gases, Sarge.”

“Keep monitoring, Corporal.” Jordan faced them. “And everyone keep your atropine at the ready.”

“What’re we waiting for, Sergeant?” Cooper hung over the abyss. His line looked too thin to support his bulk, but his eyes danced with adrenaline. A born climber.

Jordan circled his arm in the air. “Rangers lead the way!”

With a whoop from Cooper and a tired sigh from McKay, the pair walked backward down the cliff face, as easily as if they were on horizontal ground.

The Israelis clipped on next and dropped over the edge.

Tyson fiddled with her monitoring equipment. She wasn’t harnessed up, so she must be staying up here, too.

That left Erin and Jordan. He came forward with a large weapon slung over his back, then secured himself on the rope next to her. Once set, he leaned over and tugged on her line. “Good tie-on.”

“You bet.”

Jordan flashed a quick grin, leaned back, and took a big step down. He stared up, face serious, words firm. “Anytime now. I’ll be right next to you.”

She leaned out, felt her hands open and close, letting rope slide through her gloved fingers as she backed up — and next thing she knew she was standing next to Jordan on the cliff face.

When his boots hit the ground, Jordan did an automatic inventory of his weapons. He patted the holstered sidearm on his hip, a Colt 1911, then checked the KA-BAR dagger strapped to his ankle. But his primary weapon — a Heckler & Koch MP7—hung on a strap over his right shoulder. The machine pistol fired hardened steel rounds to the beat of 950 per minute, capable of turning Kevlar armor into Swiss cheese.

He quickly checked the weapon’s safety, clip, and optics, ensuring he didn’t bump it against anything on the way down. He caught Erin staring.

“You need that much firepower down here?” Erin folded her gloves in half and crammed them in her back pocket.

He shrugged. “It’s standard carry for my team.”

Before he could explain more, Sanderson’s voice crackled over the radio in his earpiece. “Sarge, we’ve got an Israeli cargo chopper coming in. I’m guessing they’ve come for the rest of the bodies.”

The evacuation chopper was early, but just as well. Jordan wanted everyone off this bloody mountain as soon as possible. He touched his earpiece. “Got it.”

He and Erin joined the rest of the team gathered at a thin seam in the cliff face. The ROV cable trailed down it and vanished into the darkness.

He glanced over at Erin. What the hell had happened to her in the lean-to? At first he’d thought maybe she was scared of heights and worried about the rappel, but she’d handled that without blinking an eye. He suspected she did have more than a hundred climbs behind her. So she must have seen or heard something during the few minutes she was alone that knocked her down. He didn’t think she’d told him the whole truth about it. She seemed better now, but he hoped whatever it was wouldn’t affect the mission.

Cooper pulled his head out of the two-foot-wide crack the ROV had run through and tossed a glowstick, lighting the way ahead. “That man-made tunnel opens just past this seam.”

Hands on his hips, McKay eyed the small opening.

Jordan clapped him on the shoulder. “Tight fit, but you should make it.”

McKay shook his head. “Spoken by a skinny guy who can barely bench-press his weight.”

Jordan wasn’t skinny, and he could certainly bench much more than his weight. But he’d fit through. For McKay in full gear, it would be a tight squeeze.

Cooper smiled an overly broad grin. “You can always strip to your skivvies and rub yourself in grease.”

“And give you a free show? Not likely.”

Lieutenant Perlman stood with his arms crossed, frowning. The other Israeli soldier shifted from foot to foot.

Jordan saw no reason to delay. The sun was setting, and he wanted to get done here soon. He adjusted his shoulder lamp.

“Let’s move.”

Kneeling, Erin watched the others file into the crack. She drew in a cautious breath. She expected a chemical odor, even though Tyson and Sanderson had given the air a thumbs-up. Instead, it smelled musty, mingled with a staleness that came from places unoccupied for a long time. The familiar and oddly comforting scent of an old tomb.

She patted the dart in her sock and stood to follow Jordan into the narrow opening. Rough stone walls pressed against both shoulders, and she turned sideways, hoping that McKay would make it through without losing too much skin.

The air felt much cooler than on the mountaintop. Underfoot, her sneakers sank in the sand. The glowstick cast an eerie yellow pall along the tunnel. When she reached the stick, she resisted the urge to pick it up and shove it in her pocket. They were littering an archaeological site. She made a note to get it on the way back. She kept one hand running along the top of the crack, making sure that her head wouldn’t bump into the fissure’s roof as she forged on, anxious to get to the tomb and start exploring.

Ahead McKay let loose with a string of curses as he cleared the seam, mostly involving the tightness of the squeeze. Cooper laughed gleefully.

Erin found herself smiling. She frequently worked with soldiers, often at sites located in areas of conflict. In the past, she had regarded the military as a necessary evil, but she already felt an odd bond with this group, forged by horror and bloodshed above and by tension below.

At last, she and Jordan reached the end of the narrow seam. He stepped out into a man-made tunnel, then helped her to climb free. Out in the passageway, he held up a hand, indicating she should stand pat.

“We wait for the all clear from the team.”

He was in charge down here, for now. She stopped and touched the tunnel wall, feeling sharp-edged gouges, picturing chisels and hammers and sweating men. She dropped to a knee and touched the path, pinching up dirt and letting it run through her fingers.

Someone had dug this out thousands of years ago. Who had walked through here? And why?

A few feet away, chunks of rocks closed up the modern tunnel she’d seen on the rover’s cameras. The tunnel must have collapsed. She touched the drill marks on the edges. Twentieth century. But when?

She spotted what looked like the elastic straps and the plastic faceplate of a modern-era gas mask crushed under a boulder. She walked toward it, drawing Jordan with her. If this had been an official expedition, she would have known about it. If it was unofficial, how had they concealed that large of an undertaking at such a famous site? There would have to have been a lot going on at the time.

Like a war.

Before they could examine anything further, Jordan’s radio buzzed. It was loud enough that she heard Cooper’s tinny voice say, “Chamber is secure, Sarge. You might want to get your asses in here. Some fucked-up shit went down.”

“Heading over.” Jordan waved for her to continue with him. “Stick to my side, Doc.”

She followed, making a mental checklist of things to do: use a metal detector to search for tools, scrape soot from the ceiling to judge the type of torches employed by the workers, apply a plaster cast to the wall to discern what tools were used to dig here.

The kinds of things Heinrich had been good at. She stumbled a step, and Jordan caught her arm, his hand warm and reassuring, his eyes concerned. “Doc?”

She shook her head and waved him on.

After another ten yards, they arrived at the entrance to the underground chamber she had just seen through the ROV’s cameras. An ancient and well-made doorway.

The doorway was too narrow for two people to enter at once. She hung back and let Jordan duck through first. She estimated the entryway at a hair over six feet tall and reached one hand up to lightly touch the arch, then stepped over the threshold behind him.

Goose bumps rose on her arms. The air was even cooler here. The muted light of three yellow glowsticks that had been tossed randomly inside revealed a well-made limestone floor, tall, soot-streaked ceilings, close-fitted stone blocks on the walls. She would have loved to be able to take pictures of the dust on the floor, maybe see the footprints of the grave robbers who had opened the sarcophagus. But Jordan and his men had already tramped through and overlaid ancient footprints with their own.

The others gathered across the room, huddled on the far side of the sarcophagus, facing the wall. There must be something very interesting there. As soon as she got a better sense of the overall site, she’d let herself join them.

“Please touch nothing,” she called, fully expecting them to ignore her.

She entered, stepping past the ROV, and crossed to the stone sarcophagus. As she expected, it was carved from a single stone, the sides finely wrought, each corner perfectly angled, each side perfectly flat. She marveled anew at the workmanship of those ancient craftsmen. Their tools might be considered primitive, but the results certainly weren’t. She glanced at the polished top where it lay in one piece on the floor beside the grave it had covered for so long. Odd to see it intact, as grave robbers usually broke the lids of sarcophagi when they pulled them off.

She searched for the pulleys or rope that must have been used, but the plunderers had taken their tools back out with them. Also unusual.

She stepped forward — but a hand stopped her.

“What did I say about sticking close to me?” Jordan asked.

Together, she and Jordan neared the sarcophagus. When she was finally close enough to take some pictures, she dug out the only tool still in her possession: her cell phone. She took multiple shots of the sarcophagus’s side and the piles of ashes at the corners, wishing she had her Nikon, but it was back in Caesarea.

She risked a peek inside the coffin. Nothing. Just bare stone, stained deep burgundy. What would make a stain like that? Blood dried brown. Most resins ended up black.

She also took a few pictures of the empty clay jugs around the sarcophagus. They must have carried liquid down here. Usually they were used for wine, but why fill a sarcophagus with wine?

As she straightened, Jordan turned from the far wall. Even in the dim light, she could tell he was upset. “Doc, you want to explain this one?”

She looked over as the men parted to either side.

A macabre sculpture hung on the wall, like a blasphemous crucifixion. She moved past the corner of the sarcophagus. With each step, a growing horror rose in her.

It wasn’t a sculpture.

On the wall hung the desiccated corpse of a small girl, maybe eight years old, dressed in a tattered, stained robe. A handful of blackened arrows pinned her in place, a good yard off the floor. They pierced her chest, neck, shoulder, and thigh.

“Crossbow bolts,” Jordan said. “Looks like they’re made of silver.”

Silver?

She stood before the child, struck by one anachronism after another. The girl’s burgundy robes looked ancient, both in style and in the degree of decay. The ornamentation and pattern of weave dated from the same period as the fall of Masada. Probably made in Samaria, maybe Judea, but at least two thousand years old.

Long dark hair framed the sunken face. Her eyes closed peacefully, her chin hung to her thin chest, lips parted ever so slightly as if she had died in mid-sigh. Even her tiny eyelashes were intact. Judging by the amount of soft tissue still clinging to her bones, the girl had been dead only a few decades.

Decades. How could that be?

An object lay crumpled under the girl’s toes. Erin dropped to a knee next to it.

A doll …

Her heart ached. The tiny dried toy was crafted from hardened lumps of leather stitched with scraps of cloth and stained the same burgundy as the robes. The child’s slack arm seemed to be reaching for her plaything, forever unable to claim it.

The abandoned doll struck Erin deeply as she remembered another like it, handmade, too. She had buried it with her baby sister. She swallowed hard, fighting back tears, feeling foolish for it. Heinrich’s death continued to throw her off balance, and right now she had to pull herself together in front of the soldiers.

Still on her knees, she glanced up to the child’s other hand, half hidden behind her body, and saw a glint from between the curled fingers.

Odd.

She leaned one palm against the wall, feeling hard mortar extruding between the bricks. Though the body was the result of a recent murder, not an ancient one, she still treated the remains with respect. This child was once someone’s little girl.

She reached for that hand. The girl’s arm trembled, then jerked. The entire mummified body shook against the wall as if the child still lived.

Erin fell back with a gasp.

A hand gripped her shoulder, steadying her.

“Another aftershock,” Jordan said.

Fine dust sifted from the stone roof. Behind Erin, a brick thudded to the floor. She held her breath until the quake ceased.

“They’re getting worse,” Jordan said. “Nothing here for us. Time to go.”

She resisted the pull of his arm. This was her site now, and there were still things here for her to explore. She shifted closer to the wall and reached again for the girl’s hand.

Jordan noted her attention and dropped beside her. “What is it?”

“Looks like the child grabbed something before she died.”

Archaeological protocol dictated that nothing be touched before it had been photographed, but this girl had not been murdered that long ago, so Erin would forgo protocol just this once.

Reaching out, she nudged the girl’s fingers open. She had expected them to be brittle but found them eerily pliable. Surprised at the state of the body, she missed catching the object as it fell free. It dropped in the dust.

She didn’t need a doctorate in archaeology to recognize this artifact.

Jordan swore under his breath.

She stared dumbfounded at the medal, at the iron cross, at the swastika.

German.

From World War II.

Here was the identity of the grave robbers, the ones who had drilled down here with modern tools. But why was this medal clutched in the mummified fingers of a girl inside an ancient Jewish tomb?

Jordan clenched a fist. “The Nazis must have got here first. Raided and emptied this place out.”

His words clarified little. Hitler was obsessed with the occult, but what had he hoped to find in Masada?

She scrutinized the girl’s clothes. Why would the Nazis take so much care to dress a child in replicas of the first millennium, only to crossbolt her to the wall?

She pictured the girl ripping the medal off her tormentor’s uniform, hiding it, stealing proof of who killed her. Again an upwelling of sympathy for this child — and for the courage of this final act — swept through her. Tears again rose in her eyes.

“Are you okay?” Jordan’s face was close enough for her to see a fine scar on his chin.

To hide her tears, she lifted her phone and took several pictures of the medal. The girl had gone to great lengths to secure a clue to the identity of her murderer. Erin would record her proof.

Once she lowered her phone, Jordan reached to the dust, picked up the medal, and flipped it over. “Maybe we can find out who did this. SS officers often carved their names on the reverse side of their medals. Whoever this bastard was, I want his name. And if he’s somehow still alive …”

At that moment she liked Jordan more than ever. Shoulder to shoulder, they studied the small metal disk. No name covered the reverse side, only a strange symbol.

She took a snapshot of it in Jordan’s palm, then read aloud the words along its border. “Deutsches Ahnenerbe.”

“That makes sense,” Jordan said sourly.

She shot him a quizzical glance. Recent German history was not her specialty. “How so?”

He tilted the medal from side to side. “My grandfather fought in World War Two. Told me stories. It’s one of the reasons I joined up. And I’m a bit of a history buff. The Deutsches Ahnenerbe were a secret sect of Nazi scientists with an interest in the occult who went around the world seeking lost treasures and proof of an ancient Aryan race. Himmler’s band of grave robbers.”

And they got here first. She felt a sinking sense of defeat. She was used to studying graves that had already been robbed, but those thefts usually happened in antiquity. It rankled her that this tomb had been despoiled mere decades ago.

He touched the center of the symbol. “That’s not their usual symbol. Normally, the Ahnenerbe are represented by a sword wrapped in a ribbon. This is something new.”

Curious, she touched the central symbol. “Looks like a Norse rune. From Elder Futhark. Maybe an Odal rune.”

She drew it in the dust on the floor with a finger.

“The rune represents the letter O.” She turned to Jordan. “Could that be the medal owner’s initial?”

Before she could contemplate it further, McKay barked, “Freeze! Hands in the air!”

Startled, she spun around.

Jordan shouldered his Heckler & Koch machine pistol and twisted toward the tomb’s entrance. Again the ground shook, rock dust shivered — and from out of the shadows, a dark shape stepped into the room.

8

“Hold your fire!” Jordan yelled, lifting up his left arm. “It’s the padre.”

He lowered the muzzle of his submachine gun and strode over to the clergyman. It was strange enough that the priest had come down here, but he noticed something even more disturbing.

He’s not wearing any rappelling gear.

Jordan stepped in front of him as the aftershock faded. “What are you doing down here, Father?”

From under the cowl of his hood, the priest regarded him. Jordan did the same, sizing the other up. Father Korza stood two inches taller than Jordan, but under his long open jacket, he was leaner, muscular, a whip of a man. The hard planes of his face were clearly Slavic, softened only by full lips. He wore his black hair down to his collar — a bit too long for a holy man.

But it was those eyes, studious and dark—very dark — that set Jordan’s heart to pounding. His fingers involuntarily tightened on his weapon.

He’s only a priest, he reminded himself.

Father Korza stared a moment longer at Jordan, then his gaze flicked away, sweeping the room in a single glance.

“Did you hear me, padre? I asked you a question.”

The priest’s words were whispered, breathless, oddly formal. “The Church has prior claim to what lies within this crypt.”

Father Korza started to step past him. Jordan grabbed his arm — but only caught air. Somehow the priest smoothly shrugged out of his way and stalked toward the open sarcophagus.

Jordan followed, noting the priest’s eyes fix to the child staked to the wall, his face unreadable. Reaching the tomb, the man glanced inside the empty sarcophagus and visibly tensed, going statue-still.

Erin approached him from the far wall. She held aloft her cell phone, plainly searching for a signal, hoping to get her photographs uploaded somewhere safe, always thinking like a researcher.

As she reached the sarcophagus, Jordan kept between her and Father Korza. For some reason, he didn’t want her near the strange priest.

“This is a restricted area,” Jordan warned.

Perlman backed him up, resting a palm on his sidearm. “You should not be here, Father Korza. The Israeli government set strict guidelines on your visit here.”

The clergyman ignored them both. He focused on Erin. “Have you found a book? Or a block of stone of such size?” He held out his arms.

Erin shook her head. “We found nothing like that, just the girl. It looks like the Germans cleared this tomb during the war.”

His only reaction was a slight narrowing of his eyes.

Who is this guy?

Jordan placed his hand on the butt of his machine pistol, waiting to see what the holy man would do next. Brusque and taciturn, the priest had obvious issues with authority, but so far he’d shown no outward signs of threat.

Peripherally, Jordan watched McKay slip a hand to his own dagger.

“Easy, Corporal,” he ordered. “Stand down.”

The priest ignored McKay, but he suddenly tensed, freezing in midturn, his ear cocked to the side. He made eye contact with Jordan, but his words were for all of them.

“You must all leave. Now.”

The last word bristled with warning.

What is he talking about?

The answer came from Jordan’s earpiece: a scream burst forth, full of blood and pain, sharp enough to stab deep into his head.

Sanderson.

From up top.

The scream cut off into a burst of static.

He touched the throat mike. “Sanderson! Respond!”

No reply.

“Corporal, come in!”

The priest moved swiftly to the entrance. Cooper and the young Israeli soldier blocked him from leaving. Weapons were raised all around.

At the threshold to the tomb, the priest lifted his face toward the roof, his whole body going rigid, like a big cat before an attack. His next words were chilling for their calmness.

“Back against the walls.” He turned and locked eyes with Jordan. “Do as I say or you will all die.”

Jordan raised his weapon. “Are you threatening us, padre?”

“Not I. The ones who come.”

Erin struggled to comprehend what was happening. The priest’s gaze met hers. For a moment a flicker of fear broke through the pale contours of the priest’s face, long enough to drive her heart into her throat. She sensed that he worried for their safety, not his own. A terrible sadness haunted his eyes as he looked away, as if he already mourned them.

She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.

But Jordan was clearly not giving up so easily. “What’s going on? I’ve got men topside. As does Lieutenant Perlman.”

Again that mournful look. “By now, they are dead. As you shall be if you do not—”

A gasp rose from Cooper, who stood by the door. Everyone turned. He opened his mouth, but only blood flowed out. He collapsed to his knees, then his face. The black hilt of a dagger jutted from the base of his skull.

Erin cried his name. The soldiers raised their guns as one. She stepped behind them, out of the line of fire.

Beyond Cooper’s body crouched a dark shape, a figure sculpted from shadows. Jordan fired multiple volleys, blasts deafening in the closed space. The shadow shivered back into darkness—

— but not before snagging the young Israeli soldier who was still hovering near the threshold. Erin caught a glint of steel, then he was gone, yanked off his feet and into the black tunnel.

Jordan stopped firing, plainly fearing he’d hit the soldier.

A scream, full of terror and blood, echoed — then silence.

Lieutenant Perlman lurched forward, weapon up. “Margolis!”

The priest’s black-clad arm shoved the Israeli back.

Hard.

“Stay here,” Father Korza warned, then defied his own words.

With a turn of his wrist, a blade appeared in his fingers as if out of thin air. He bared the edge: a sickle of silver, a hooked dagger, like some prehistoric claw.

With a sweep of his jacket, he dove across the threshold and vanished.

Immediately a savage wailing keened out of the darkness.

The sound sang to fears buried in her bones and bound her in place.

Even the hardened soldiers seemed to sense it. Jordan drew her farther from the entrance. McKay and Perlman flanked them, weapons pointed at the door. Retreating, regrouping, they took cover behind the sarcophagus.

A single piercing scream ripped from the tunnel.

Jordan lifted Erin as effortlessly as if her bones were hollow, her flesh immaterial. She felt that way already, as if she could float away.

He rolled her into the open sarcophagus. “Stay down, stay hidden.”

The steel in his voice and iron in his eyes grounded her back in her own skin — not that she wanted to be there. He pressed her lower. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.” She wanted to duck away, cover her head, shut out the horror, but when she did, sightlessness scared her more. Her fingers clung to the lip of the box. Like everyone else, she watched the pitch-dark mouth of the tunnel.

To the left, a sharp strike and flash drew her eye. McKay held a flaming flare.

“Toss it!” Jordan pointed to the dark exit.

McKay swung his arm and tossed the flare through the doorway. It tumbled end over end, leaving a trail of fire, and plunged into the well of darkness. Brightness forced back shadows, along with darker shapes. Erin lost count at four.

That left a lone figure in the center, standing in a shredded cassock, lit from the back. He held an arm over his eyes, blinded by the sudden flare. His other hand held up a curved dagger, blade dripping black blood, shimmering with reflected fire.

“Father!” Jordan yelled, raising his weapon. “Get down!”

The warning came too late.

Like rabid dogs, shadowed shapes leaped at the priest. They slammed him down. He landed hard atop the flare, quenching it with his body. Erin winced. Darkness again swallowed the scene — but not before a figure bounded over the priest and leaped headlong into the chamber.

It flew far, hit the stone floor, then shot straight at them, moving impossibly fast. A wolf? No. A man in wrinkled brown leather, arms wide, a butcher’s hook held aloft by one muscular arm.

Jordan dropped to one knee and fired up, striking the man square in the chest. The hail of rounds knocked him into the bricked roof. He dropped to the stone floor, hitting hard and going dead-still.

At the door, a mass of shadows rolled into the room. The priest wrestled with two black-suited figures. A third leaped past.

The attacker sped low and fast into Lieutenant Perlman. They hit the wall beside the crucified girl and dropped out of view. The Israeli’s rifle barked, blasting upward, rounds sparking off rock. Erin flattened herself in the stone box.

A shadow materialized above her. She caught a flash of teeth—too many teeth—and wished that she had a gun or a knife. She crossed both arms in front of her face and waited to feel the teeth in her skin.

Instead, bullets ripped through the torso above, and the bulk dropped atop her. She struggled out from under the body, her jeans wet with blood. Gritting her teeth, she searched the body for a weapon. No gun, but he carried an Egyptian khopesh with a long curved blade. She had seen similar swords in hieroglyphs and paintings, but such weapons hadn’t been used in battle for seven hundred years.

McKay peered over the edge of the sarcophagus. “You okay?”

Before she could answer, he vanished, hit broadside. She rose up on her knees, clutching the sword.

McKay sailed across the room and slammed into the wall, cracking his head. He fell to the floor, leaving a streak of blood on the wall behind him.

A dark figure leaped atop McKay and lunged at his throat.

Jordan was pinned under an attacker who was stronger than anyone he had ever fought. He’d already lost his gun. The guy was also ridiculously fast.

Jordan twisted and grabbed for his ankle — and the KA-BAR dagger sheathed there. He freed it as bony hands lashed down. One clamped to his throat, the other held his arm pinned against the stone.

Nails dug deep, tearing flesh.

Wrenching his free arm around, he drove the KA-BAR blade deep into the assailant’s throat, to the hilt, until he hit bone, then ripped outward.

Blood washed down his arm.

The man went limp. Jordan threw off the deadweight and rolled to a crouch. His attention fixed on Erin, standing in the sarcophagus with a short, curved sword in one hand. She looked ready to climb out to help McKay, who lay on the other side of the room, but McKay was beyond anyone’s help now. Like Perlman, who was on the floor nearby, his throat had been torn away.

Jordan shot McKay’s attacker full in the chest, knocking him off his teammate’s body. Movement turned his head back to Erin.

A shadow loomed behind her.

He leaped toward her, but a hand shoved him aside. It felt like being clipped by a speeding truck. He lost his footing and crashed into the wall.

Dazed, he watched the priest barrel past him, knock Erin down, and tackle her attacker. He struck the bloody man with his shoulder and drove him backward, slamming him into the mummified girl on the wall. Dried bone exploded under their weight.

Korza rebounded back a step.

His opponent remained in place, hanging off the ground, impaled and writhing. The butt end of the crossbow bolts that penetrated his flesh held him aloft. One bolt poked out the man’s throat. Fingers scrabbled at it. Blood bubbled out of the wound, as if it were boiling.

Then Korza lashed out, severing the man’s throat with an explosive stroke.

Jordan regained his own shaky feet, crouched, searching all around. The priest stood before the wall, shoulders hunched under shredded garments. Dark blood dripped from his blade, from his fingertips. Jordan didn’t know how much of it came from the priest’s own wounds.

He kept his gun up as he stumbled to Erin. He saw no reason to check on his other teammates. He knew death when he faced it. As far as he could tell, the only ones still alive in this room were the priest, Erin, and him.

He kept a cautious eye on the priest, leery of his allegiances.

With a flare of his long jacket, Korza dropped to a knee, head bowed as if in prayer — but that was not his intent. He snatched something from the floor. It vanished into his black robes as he stood again.

The child’s small doll was gone.

Instead of checking on Erin, he’d gone to pick up a doll? Jordan gave up trying to figure the man out.

“Erin?” he said as he reached her side.

She whirled toward him, her sword held high.

“Just me,” he said, and shifted his gun to the side, both hands up, palms out.

Her wide eyes came into focus, and she lowered the blade. He pried it out of her fingers and dropped it. Her face white, her eyes lost, she slumped in the corner of the sarcophagus. He lifted her out and sat with his back against the cold stone with her in his lap. He ran his hands over her, searching for wounds. She seemed unharmed.

The priest joined them. Jordan’s hand inched toward his pistol, a protective arm encircling Erin. What were his intentions?

“There are no more,” Korza whispered as if in prayer. “But we are still not safe.”

Jordan glanced over at the battered man.

“They will seal us in,” he said with such certainty that Jordan believed him.

“How do you know …?”

“Because it is what I would do.” He strode toward the door.

Jordan noted where he headed. The ROV sat on the floor, one camera aimed at them, a green light shining above it. The priest stamped on the lens. Metal and glass shattered under his heel and skittered across stone.

Jordan understood, remembering Sanderson’s scream.

They’ve been watching us.

9

As the last screams echoed across the summit, Bathory crouched before the now-dark monitor, frozen in shock, trapped between the past and the present.

She had witnessed the battle in the tomb, followed by the slaughter of the forces she had sent below. The fighting had been swift, dimly lit, much of it occurring out of camera view.

But she had also spied the few moments before the chaotic fighting.

She had watched a helmeted soldier confront a black-garbed figure, his back to the camera. But she had caught the flash of a white Roman collar as he cast a single glance to encompass the room.

Her pained blood went cold at this fleeting glimpse of the enemy.

Here was that Knight of Christ mentioned in the texted message.

A Sanguinist.

The two men faced off like rams during rutting season. Maybe the soldier would solve her problem for her, but the knight stepped past the soldier and stopped, staring at the far wall — what did he see?

She wished the camera’s range extended to the back of the room.

Out of those shadows, a woman in civilian clothes appeared, another surprise. She came waving her phone in the familiar pantomime of someone searching for a signal.

The knight turned to the woman and held out his hands to indicate an object the size and shape of a book.

Bathory’s breathing had quickened.

The woman shook her head.

The knight performed a slow circuit of the room. The tomb seemed empty, except for the sarcophagus. No likely hiding places. When the knight’s shoulders slumped, she let out her breath.

So they had not found the book.

Either it had never been there, or it had been plundered.

Then the knight grew wise to the presence of Bathory’s team, requiring a swift response. He should have been defeated, but she had underestimated his skill, also the support by the soldiers. He had taken out half of her forces in seconds.

From his performance, she knew the knight below was not new to the cloth, but someone much older, as well blooded as her own forces.

Then, as that knight crossed to crush the ROV camera, she got a full look at his face: his cleft chin, his broad Slavic cheekbones, his intense dark eyes. The shock of recognition immobilized her and left her hollowed out.

But life was not a vacuum.

Into that void, a molten, fiery hatred flowed, filling her anew, forging her into something else, a weapon of fury and vengeance.

She finally moved, clenching her hand into a fist and gouging her ancient ruby ring down the darkened monitor. Like so much that she possessed, the precious ring had been connected to her family for a long time.

As had the knight.

Rhun Korza.

That name had scarred her as surely as the black palm on her neck — and caused her as much pain. All her life, she had been raised on tales of how Korza’s failure had cast her once-proud family into generations of poverty and disgrace. She fingered the edge of her tattoo, a source of constant agony, another debt of blood that she owed that knight.

She flashed to that long-ago ceremony, kneeling before Him to whom she had pledged herself, His hand around her throat, burning in that mark in the shape of His palm and fingers, binding her to Him in servitude.

All because of that knight.

She had seen him in a thousand dreams and had always hoped she might someday find him alive, to make him pay for the deeds that had doomed generations of women in her family to sacrifice, to years of living with torment — enslaved by blood, fated to train, to serve, to wait.

This knowledge came with another truth, a pained realization.

She again felt His strangled hold on her throat, burning away her old life.

Her master must have known that Rhun Korza was the knight sent to Masada to retrieve the book. Yet that secret had been kept from her. He had sent her to face Korza without warning her first.

Why?

Was this to satisfy His own cruel amusements — or was there some greater purpose in all of this?

If she had known that Korza lurked in that tomb, she would never have sent anyone down. She would have waited for the knight to come up with the book, or empty-handed in failure, and shot him off the fissure like a fly off a wall.

The slaughter below told her that Korza was too dangerous to confront in close combat, even if she sent her remaining forces down after him.

But there was another way, a more fitting way.

The anger inside her hardened to a newer purpose.

Before the image went dark, she had spotted the body of one of her team near the tomb’s door, carrying a satchel over one shoulder. An identical pack waited near the top of the fissure.

She turned to the two hunters still in attendance.

Tarek had shaved his head like many of the others and riddled his skin with black tattoos, in his case Bible verses written in Latin. Leather, stitched with human sinew, clad his muscular six-foot frame. Steel piercings cut through lips and nostrils. His black eyes had narrowed to slits, furious at the casualties inflicted by those in the tomb. He wanted revenge. Dealt by his own hands.

“The knight is too dangerous,” she warned. “Especially when backed into a corner. We are down too many to risk sending more.”

Tarek could not argue. They had both witnessed the slaughter on the screen. But there was another option. Not as satisfying, but the end would be the same.

“Blow the fissure.” She motioned to the pack on top and pictured the satchel below. “Kill them all.”

She intended to entomb the knight and his companions, to rebury the secrets here under tons of rock. And if Korza survived the blast, then a slow death trapped beneath all of that stone would be his fate.

For a moment it seemed that Tarek would disobey her order. Fury ruled him, stoked by all the blood. Then his gaze flicked to her neck. To the tattoo. He knew its significance better than any.

To defy her was to defy Him.

Tarek bowed his head once, like bending iron — then turned and folded into the night.

She closed her eyes, centering herself, but a low moan caught her attention, reminding her that she still had work to do.

The freckle-faced corporal named Sanderson knelt in the dust, the lone survivor of the massacre on the summit. He’d been stripped to the waist, his head yanked back by nails dug deep into his scalp by the remaining hunter at her side. This one — Rafik, brother to Tarek — was lean, all bone and malice, a useful tool in trying times.

She shifted closer, the soldier’s eyes tracking her.

“I have questions,” she said gently.

He only stared, trembling and sweating, doe-eyed with terror, looking so very young. She once had a brother very much like this one, how he had loved roses and chilled wine, but she had been forbidden from any contact with him after taking His mark. She had to cut away all earthly attachments to her past, binding herself only to Him.

Another loss she placed upon Korza’s shoulders.

She ran the back of her hand down the corporal’s velvety cheek. He was not yet old enough to grow a proper beard. Yet, despite his terror, she read an ember of defiance in his eyes.

She sighed.

As if he had any hope of resisting.

She leaned back and lifted an arm, casting out her desire.

Come.

The pair — she named them Hunor and Magor, after two Hungarian mythic heroes — were never far from her side, forever bonded to her. Without looking, she felt them push out of the darkness behind her, where they had been feeding, and pad forward. She held out a palm and was met by a warm tongue, a furry muzzle, and a low rumble like thunder beyond the horizon.

She dropped her hand, now damp and weeping with blood.

“They’re still hungry,” she commented, knowing it to be true, feeling an echo of that desire inside her.

The soldier’s eyes widened, straining against the unimaginable. Horror at what stood behind her quashed any further defiance.

She leaned very close. She felt his hot breath, almost tasting his anguish. She moved to his ear and whispered.

“Tell me,” she said, starting with a simple question, “who was that woman down there?”

Before he could answer, the night exploded behind her. Light, sound, and heat erupted from Masada’s summit, shaking the ground, turning darkness to day. Flames blasted out of the chasm, swirling into a cataclysm of smoke and dirt — closing what God had opened only hours ago. She intended to bring this entire mountain down to cover her tracks.

With the detonation, peace again settled over her.

She stared down at the corporal.

She still needed answers.

10

Heat scorched Rhun’s back, as hot as the breath of any dragon. He pictured the wall of flames rolling over the top of the sealed dark sarcophagus. But it was the sound that hurt the worst. He feared the concussive blast might crack his skull, fountain blood from his ears, and defile this once-sacred space.

Beyond their tomb, stone rained down near the entrance. Unlike the first explosion that had sealed the fissure above, this second one sought to destroy this very chamber.

Thus trapping them.

As fire and fury died down to a rumbling groan, he braced hard against the limestone sides of the tomb. It was fitting that he die in a sarcophagus — trapped as surely as he’d once sealed another behind stone. Indeed, he almost welcomed it. But the woman and soldier had not earned this fate.

He had hurled them both inside the coffin after the first explosion. Knowing this ancient crypt offered the only shelter, he had drawn the stone lid over them, using all of his strength, assisted only slightly by the soldier. If they survived, he did not know how he would explain such strength of limb. The code he lived by demanded that he let them die rather than allow those questions to be asked.

But he could not let them die.

So they crowded together in pitch darkness. He tried to pray, but his senses continued to overwhelm him. He smelled the wine that had once filled this box, the metallic odor of blood that saturated the remains of his clothing, and the burnt paper-and-chalk smell of spent explosives.

None of it masked the simple lavender scent of her hair.

Her heartbeat, swift as a woodlark’s, raced against his chest. The warmth of her trembling body spread along his stomach and legs. He had not been this close to a woman since Elisabeta. It was a small mercy that Erin was turned away from him, her face buried in the soldier’s chest.

He counted her heartbeats, and in that rhythm, he found the peace to pray — until at last silence finally returned to his mind and to the world beyond their small tomb.

She stirred under him, but he touched her shoulder to tell her to be still. He wanted them to wait longer, to be certain that the room had stopped collapsing before he attempted to shift the tomb’s lid. Only then would he know if they were entombed by more rock than even he could lift.

Her breathing slowed, her heart stilled. The soldier, too, calmed.

Finally, Rhun braced his knees against the bottom of the stone box and pushed up with his shoulders. The lid scraped against the sides. He heaved again. The massive weight moved a handsbreadth, then two.

Finally, it tilted and smashed to the floor. They were free, although he feared that they had only traded the small cell for a larger one. But at least the temple held. The men who had dug out this secret chamber had reinforced its walls to hold the tempestuous mountain at bay.

He stood and helped Erin and Jordan out of the sarcophagus. One glowstick had survived the blast and cast a dim glow into the room. He squinted through scorching dust to the tomb’s entrance.

It was an entrance no more.

Earth and rock sealed it from floor to ceiling.

The other two coughed, holding cloths to their faces, filtering the fouled air. They would not last long.

The soldier clicked on a flashlight and shone it toward the doorway. He met Rhun’s eyes and stepped back from him, his face dark with suspicion and wariness.

The woman cast the beam of a second flashlight around the ruined chamber. A layer of dust covered everything, transforming the dead bodies to powdered statues, blunting the horror of the slaughter.

But nothing hid the broken pieces of the sarcophagus’s heavy stone lid. Her light lingered there. Motes of dust drifting through the beam did not obscure the truth of his impossible act in lifting and pushing that stone free.

The soldier did not seem to notice. He faced the blasted doorway as if it were an unsolvable mystery.

Closer at hand, the woman’s light settled on Rhun, as did her soft brown eyes. “Thank you, Father.”

He heard an awkward catch in her voice when she said the word father. He found it discomfiting, sensing that she had no faith.

“My name is Rhun,” he whispered. “Rhun Korza.”

He had not shared the intimacy of his full name with another in a long time, but if they were to die here together, he wanted them to know it.

“I’m Erin, and this is Jordan. How—”

The soldier cut her off; cold fury underlay his tone. “Who were they?”

That single question hid another. He recognized it in the man’s voice, read it in his face.

What were they?

He considered the hidden question. The Church forbade revealing the truth, its most guarded secret. Much could be lost.

But the man was a warrior, like himself. He had stood his ground, faced darkness, and he had paid in blood for a proper answer.

Rhun would honor that sacrifice. He stared the other full in the eye and offered the truth, naming their attackers. “They are strigoi.”

His words hung in the air, like the swirling dust, obscuring more than they revealed. Clearly confused, the man cocked his head to the side. The woman, too, studied him, more in curiosity than in anger. Unlike the soldier, she did not seem to blame him for the deaths here.

“What does that mean?” The soldier would not be pacified until he understood, and doubtless not afterward either.

Rhun lifted a stone off one of the dead men and brushed sand from his face. The woman kept her light on his hands as he angled the dusty head toward them. With one gloved hand, he peeled back cold lips, exposing an ancient secret.

Long white fangs glinted in the beam of light.

The soldier’s hand moved to the butt of his gun. The woman drew in a sharp breath. Her hand rose to her throat. An animal’s instinct to protect itself. But instead of remaining frozen in horror, she lowered her hand and came to kneel beside Rhun. The man stayed put, alert and ready to do battle.

Rhun expected that, but the woman surprised him, when so little else did. Her fingers — trembling at first, then steadying — reached to touch the long, sharp tooth, like Saint Thomas placing his hand in Christ’s wound, needing proof. She plainly feared the truth, but she would not shun it.

She faced Rhun, skeptical as only a modern-day scientist could be. And waited.

He said nothing. She had asked for the truth. He had given it to her. But he could not give her the will to believe it.

She waved a hand over the corpse. “These may be caps, put on to lengthen his teeth …”

Even now, she refused to believe, sought comforting rationalizations, like so many others before her. But unlike them, she leaned closer, not waiting for confirmation or consolation. She lifted the upper lip higher.

As she probed, he expected her eyes to widen with horror. Instead, her brows knit together in studious interest.

Surprised yet again, he eyed her with equal fascination.

Kneeling by the body, Erin sought to make sense of what lay before her. She needed to understand, to put meaning to all the blood and death.

She desperately ran through a mental list of cultures where people sharpened their teeth. In the Sudan desert, young men whittled their incisors to razor points in a rite of passage. Amid the ancient Maya, filed teeth had been a sign of nobility. In Bali, tooth filing was still a coming-of-age ritual that marked the transition from animal to human. Every continent had similar practices. Every single one.

But this was different.

As much as she wanted it to be true, no tools had sharpened these teeth.

“Doc, talk to me.” Jordan hovered over her shoulder, his tense voice loud in the small space. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

She fought to keep her tone clinical, both for her sake and for his. If she lost her composure, she might never get it back. “These canine teeth are firmly rooted in the maxilla. Feel how the bony sockets at the base of the fangs are thickened.”

Jordan stepped over a pile of rubble to stand between her and the priest. He rested one hand on his gun. “I’ll take your word for it.”

She flashed him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. It didn’t seem to work, because his face stayed stern when he asked, “What does it mean?”

She leaned back on her haunches, eager to put space between herself and the tooth she had just touched. “Such root density is a common trait in predators.”

Father Korza stepped away. Jordan’s barrel twitched toward him.

“Jordan?” She stood next to him.

“Keep talking.” He eyed the priest, as if he expected him to interrupt, but the man stood still. “It’s interesting stuff, isn’t it, padre?”

She scrutinized the dusty brown face in the rubble. It looked as human as she did. “A lion’s jaw exerts six hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. To support such power, the tooth sockets harden and thicken around the fangs, as these have done.”

“So what you are saying,” Jordan said, clearing his throat, “is that these fangs aren’t just a weird fashion statement. That they’re natural?”

She sighed. “I can’t come up with another explanation that fits.”

In the dim light of her flashlight, she read the shock on Jordan’s face and the fear in his eyes. She felt it, too, and she would not let her feelings overwhelm her. Instead, she turned to the silent priest for answers. “You called them strigoi?”

His face had closed into an unreadable mask of shadows and secrets. “Their curse bears many names. Vrykolakas. Asema. Dhakhanavar. They are a scourge once known in all corners of the world. Today you call them vampires.”

Erin sat back. Did a memory of this horror lie at the root of ritualistic tooth filing, a macabre mimicry of a real terror forgotten in the modern age? Forgotten, but not gone. An icy finger traced up her back.

“And you fight them?” Jordan’s skepticism filled the tomb.

“I do.” The priest’s soft voice sounded calm.

“So what does that make you, padre?” Jordan stepped into a wider stance, as if expecting a fight. “Some kind of Vatican commando?”

“I would not use such words.” Father Korza folded gloved hands in front of him. “I am but a priest, a humble servant of God. But to serve the Holy See, I and certain other brethren of the cloth have been trained to fight this plague, yes.”

Erin had a thousand questions she wanted to ask, but she had a most pressing one, one that had troubled her since the priest stepped into the tomb and said his first words.

The Church has prior claim to what lies within this crypt.

Suddenly glad to have a soldier between them, Erin watched the bloody figure over Jordan’s shoulder. “Earlier, you asked about a book that might be hidden here. Is that why we were attacked? Why we’re trapped down here?”

The priest’s face closed. He craned his neck toward the brick roof as if seeking guidance from above. “The mountain is still moving.”

“What—” A great groaning of stone, accompanied by explosive booms of crushed rock, interrupted Jordan’s question. The ground shook — at first mildly, then more violently.

Erin stumbled into Jordan’s back before finding her footing. “Another aftershock?”

“Or the concussive charges weakened the mountain’s infrastructure.” Jordan looked at the ceiling. “Either way, it’s coming down. And soon.”

“We must first find the way out,” Father Korza said. “Before we discuss other matters.”

Jordan moved toward the collapsed entrance.

“We will gain no passage that way.” Father Korza slowly turned in a full circle. “But it is said that those who came to hide the book during the fall of Masada used a path known only to a few. A path they sealed behind them as they left.”

Jordan scanned the solid walls. “Where?”

The priest’s eyes were vacant. “That secret was lost.”

“You’re not holding out on us, are you?” Jordan asked.

Father Korza fingered rosary beads on his belt. “The path is beyond the knowledge of the Church. No one knows it.”

“Not true.” Erin ran both hands along the wall closest to her, digging a nail into the mortar between two stones.

All eyes turned to her.

She smiled. “I know the way out.”

Jordan hoped that Erin knew what she was talking about. “Show me.”

She hurried to the rear of the chamber, dancing her fingertips along rough stone as if reading a book written in Braille.

He followed, patting the stone with one hand, the other still on his submachine gun. He didn’t trust Korza. If the priest had warned them from the start, Jordan’s men might still be alive. Jordan wasn’t going to turn his back on him anytime soon.

“Feel how clean the masonry is along this wall?” Erin asked. “The blocks fit so perfectly that little mortar was even needed. I suspect they only cemented it as an extra measure to secure the vault against quakes.”

“So it’s probably the only reason we’re still alive,” he said. “Let’s hear it for overbuilding.”

A distracted smile played across her lips. He hoped to see that smile again out in the sunlight, somewhere safe.

At the back wall, she dropped to a knee beside the impaled bodies. Her shoulders tensed, and her eyes fixed on the wall, averted from the dead. But she kept going. He admired that. She placed a palm against the ancient bricks and stroked it downward.

“I noticed this earlier.” The ground jolted, and her next words rushed out. “Before the attack. When we were examining the girl.” She took his hand and placed it beside hers on the stones. “Feel the ridges of mortar pushing out between the bricks.”

He touched the cold unyielding stone.

“This section is unlike the other walls,” she rattled on eagerly. “Skilled masons, such as those who built this vault, would skim the excess mortar away, to create a clean look and to protect the mortar from being knocked out if anyone brushed against the wall.”

“Are you saying that they got sloppy here?”

“Far from it. Whoever built this section of wall was working from the other side. That’s why the mortar is bulging out toward us here.”

“A sealed doorway.” He whistled. “Nice going, Doc.”

He studied it. The mortared section formed a rough archway. She might be right. He pounded the wall with the flat of his fist. It didn’t give. “Feels damned solid to me.”

To dig this out would take hours, maybe days. And he suspected they had only minutes. Erin had done a good job, but it wouldn’t be enough to save them.

A section of roof near the entrance broke away and fell with a deafening crash. Erin flinched, and he moved toward her protectively. They’d end up buried down here with the corpses of monsters and men.

His men, with Cooper and McKay.

“McKay,” he said aloud.

The holy man frowned, but Erin glanced at McKay’s twisted body. Her eyes brightened with hope and understanding.

“Do you have enough time?” she asked.

“When I’m this motivated? Damned straight.”

He headed across the rubble and knelt beside McKay’s body.

I’m sorry, buddy.

He gently rolled his lifeless body to the side. He kept his eyes off the ruin of his friend’s throat, resting a hand on his shoulder. He held back memories of his friend’s barking laugh, his habit of peeling labels off of beer bottles, his hangdog look when confronted by a beautiful woman.

All gone.

But never forgotten, my friend.

He freed the backpack and returned to the wall where Erin waited. He didn’t want her to be alone with the priest. He didn’t know what the man might do. The holy man was full of secrets, secrets that had cost his men their lives. What would Korza do to keep those secrets if they escaped this prison?

No matter what was planned, the mountain would probably crush them first. Jordan hurriedly unzipped the backpack. As the team’s demolitions expert, McKay carried explosives, originally brought along to blow up canisters and neutralize any residual threat. Back when they thought they were dealing with something simple, like terrorists.

He worked fast, fingers inserting blasting caps into blocks of C-4. McKay could have done this faster, but Jordan shied away from that well of pain, unable to face the loss. That would come later. If there was a later.

He shaped and wired charges, doing fast calculations in his head while keeping an eye on Erin as she talked to the priest.

“The girl,” she said, waving an arm toward the child on the wall. “You’re telling me that she was two thousand years old when she died?”

Korza’s voice was so low that Jordan had to strain to hear his answer. “She was strigoi. Sealed in here to protect the book. A mission she performed until those silver bolts ended her life.”

As he worked, Jordan pictured those grisly events unfolding: the Nazis opened the sarcophagus, found the little girl still alive in the damn coffin, then staked her to the wall with a hail of silver crossbow bolts. He remembered the crushed gas mask spotted near the tomb’s entrance. The Nazis must have known what they would find here. They had come expecting both the girl and that toxic gas.

Erin pressed, clearly seeking some way to understand all of this, to insert it into a scientific equation that made sense. “So the Church used this poor girl. Forced her to be its guard dog for two thousand years?”

“She was no girl, and she was asleep, preserved in the holy wine that bathed her.” Korza’s words fell to a pained whisper. “Still, you are correct. Not all agreed with such a cruel decision. Nor even the choice of this accursed place. It is said the apostle Peter picked this mountain, that tragic time, to bind the blood sacrifice of the Jewish martyrs to this tomb, to use that black pall to protect the treasure.”

“Wait,” Erin scoffed. “The apostle Peter … Saint Peter? Are you saying he ordered someone to bring the book here during the siege of Masada?”

“No. Peter carried the book here himself.” The priest’s hands fiddled with his rosary. “Accompanied only by those he trusted best.”

Jordan suspected he wasn’t supposed to be telling them any of this.

“That can’t be,” Erin argued. “They crucified Peter during the reign of Nero. Roughly three years before Masada fell.”

Korza turned away, his voice quiet. “History is not always recorded with precision.”

On that cryptic note, Jordan finished his preparations. He stood and lifted the wireless detonator. Erin looked a question at him.

He wished he had more comforting words.

“Either this will work … or I’m going to kill us all.”

11

Sitting in his hospital bed, Tommy fingered the IV port sticking out of his chest. He did this numbly, not out of curiosity. He knew why the nurse had inserted it there. He’d had one before. After so many blood draws, they were afraid of collapsing a vein.

His doctor — a thin woman with sharp cheekbones, olive-green scrubs, and a grim expression — had not bothered to tell him her name, which was weird. Usually doctors kept introducing themselves and expected you to remember them. This one acted as if she wanted to be forgotten.

He hiked up the thin flannel blanket and looked around. It seemed like any other hospital room: motorized bed, intravenous lines pumping who knew what into his blood, a table with an olive-green plastic pitcher and cup.

He did miss that there was no television stuck up on the wall, not that he would have understood anything on the Israeli channels. But after his months in the hospital before, he knew there was comfort in the familiar movement on the flickering screen.

With nothing else to do, he got out of bed and pulled his IV pole along with him toward the window, the linoleum tiles cold against his bare feet. The view outside was only moonlit desert, an endless expanse of rocks and shrubs. Beyond the parking lot, not a man-made light could be seen. The Israelis had dragged him out to the middle of nowhere.

Why?

Hospitals were in cities, places with people, lights, and cars. But he had seen none of those things when the helicopter landed in that parking lot, just a cluster of mostly dark buildings.

In the chopper, he had been strapped in the middle seat, between two Israeli commandos. Both had leaned as far away from him as they could, as if they were scared to touch him. He could guess why. Earlier, he had overheard one of the American soldiers mention that he had chemical breakdown elements of that toxic gas still on his clothes and hair. No one dared touch him until he was decontaminated.

Back at Masada, he had been stripped naked inside the contamination tent, his clothes taken. And once he got here, they forced him into a series of chemical showers, seeming to scrub every dead cell off of his skin. Even that dirty water had been collected into sealed tubs.

He bet that was why he was here in the middle of nowhere: to be a guinea pig so they could figure out why he had survived that gas when everyone else died.

After all of that, he was glad he never mentioned anything about the melanoma lesion vanishing from his wrist. One finger absently rubbed that spot, still trying to fathom what that meant. His secret was an easy one to keep. Hardly anyone spoke to him — they spoke around him, about him, but seldom to him.

Only one person looked him in the eye.

Father Korza.

He remembered that dark gaze framed in a gentle face. His words had been kind, asking as much about his mother and father as about the horrors of the day. Tommy wasn’t Catholic, but he still appreciated the Father’s kindness.

As he thought again of his parents, tears threatened — but he put them in the box. He’d invented the box to deal with his cancer treatments. When things hurt too much, he boxed them up for later. With his declining health and terminal diagnosis, he’d never imagined he would live long enough to ever have to open it.

He stared down at his bare wrist.

Now, it seemed, he would.

12

Erin crouched behind the sarcophagus, her hands clamped over her ears. She flinched as Jordan triggered the C-4 planted against the wall. The blast hit her gut like a blow. Rock dust rolled across the chamber. Sand sifted down from the roof, brushing her exposed skin like the whispery crawl of a thousand spiders.

Then Jordan yanked her up, hard. “Move it!”

She didn’t understand his urgency — until the echo of the blast in her ears continued to grow louder. She stared up as the ground jostled under her.

Another aftershock.

The priest took her other arm and pulled her toward the smoking wall. A small hole had been knocked out of it. But it was too small.

“Help me!” Jordan called out.

Working together, the three of them yanked out loosened bricks along the edges. Beyond the hole loomed a dark passageway, chiseled out of the rock. Long ago, men had dug it to take them somewhere — and right now anywhere was better than here.

The quaking grew worse. The treacherous ground shifted under her and slammed her into the wall.

“No more time!” Jordan hollered and yanked out one last brick, creating a tight squeeze. “Everybody out!”

Before they could act, a resounding boom threw them all to the floor.

Overhead, a crack split the arched roof.

Jordan jumped up, grabbed Erin, and shoved her into the stone opening. Skin ripped off her elbows as she scrambled through. She regained her feet in the passageway and shone her light back at Jordan.

“You next, padre,” Jordan called. “You’re smaller than me.”

With a nod, the priest dove headlong through the narrow hole and rolled into a ready crouch beside Erin. He took a quick look around the passageway. What did he expect to see?

Erin turned back to Jordan. He gave her a quick grin. Behind his back, the entire roof dropped in one large piece, crushing the sarcophagus.

Jordan leaped at the opening. He got one shoulder through the hole, then stuck fast. His face reddened with effort. The tomb continued to collapse behind him, imploding under the mountain’s weight. His blue eyes met hers. She read his expression. He wouldn’t make it. He motioned his head toward the dark passageway, indicating that she should leave him.

Then Father Korza was there. Impossibly strong fingers snagged Jordan’s free arm and yanked with such force that bricks broke away as his body popped free. Jordan fell atop the priest, gasping, his face contorted between agony and relief.

Father Korza lifted and helped him up.

“Thanks, padre.” Jordan cradled his arm. “Good thing I don’t need that shoulder.”

The priest gestured down the dark passageway. It dropped steeply, carved with crude stairs. As the entire mountain shook, it was clear they were not yet out of danger.

“Go!” he said.

Erin wasn’t about to argue.

She fled down the tunnel, leaping steps, her tiny flashlight all she had to lead the way. The path zigzagged. The mountain shifted. She lost track of right and left. Up and down. Only forward mattered.

A misstep twisted her right ankle. Before she could fall, the priest scooped her up and hauled her in a fireman’s carry. The arm locked around her was iron; his muscular movement as he ran reminded her of the flow of molten rock.

After a precarious flight down a steep section of the passageway, he abruptly stopped and set her down.

She caught her breath and tried her ankle. Sore but not bad. She swept her tiny beam ahead. Light splashed against a wall of limestone that blocked their way.

Jordan groaned as he joined them. “Dead end.”

Rhun ran his hands across the flat wall of rock that blocked their way, examining its surface for any clues. A flicker of warmth spread to his hand. Though night had fallen, the stone still held some of the sun’s heat.

He closed his eyes, picturing a massive stone, pushed into place to seal the outer entrance to the tunnel. He’d already felt the gaps along the bottom corner.

Next, he laid his ear against the rough surface, listening, concentrating on the world beyond the stone. As he strained, he heard life outside: the soft pad of paws on sand, the faint heartbeat of a jackal—

“Do we go back, padre?” Jordan asked, his voice boomingly loud. “Look for another passage?”

But the American knew there was no other passage.

“We are nearly free,” Rhun declared, straightening and turning. “This is the last obstacle.”

But time was running short, flowing like sand through an hourglass.

In this case, literally.

Overhead, the mountain continued to shake. Sand now poured down the passageway’s steep steps, sifting through fissures and cracks far above and accumulating in this lowest section of the tunnel. It would not take long to completely fill the tiny space.

Jordan joined Rhun and placed a palm on the rock. “So then we push?”

There was no other choice.

Erin joined them, tucking soft blond hair behind her ears.

Rhun threw his weight against the stone next to theirs. He recognized the futility after the first attempt, but he labored with them until their heartbeats betrayed their exhaustion, and he smelled blood on their palms where rock had torn their skin. The shared efforts had not been nearly enough.

All the while Masada shook.

Sand had climbed midway to his calves.

Side by side, the other two rested their backs against the immovable rock.

“How about that grenade on your belt?” The woman pointed. “Could it blow through the stone?”

The soldier sagged. “It’s not enough to destroy it. And the blast would deflect right back at us. Even if I hadn’t used up the C-4 in McKay’s demolition pack, I doubt we could blow that rock without turning us into hamburger.”

A strong jolt rocked the mountain. The woman’s face whitened. The soldier stared at the rock as if he were vowing to move it by sheer force of will. Desperation etched his features, the raw desire to live another hour, another day.

The soldier slipped an arm around the woman and pulled her close. She softened against him, burying her face in his shoulder. The man gently kissed the top of her head, possibly so softly she never felt it. How effortlessly they had moved into an embrace. The priest stared at the simple comfort of contact, of touch, the solace found only in companionship.

An ache cut into him, a longing to be like them.

But that was not his role. He turned and faced the boulder, determined to serve them.

Sand rained on his brow and lashes. With his face still upturned, he closed his eyes in prayer.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.

Bits of scripture flowed through his head, both a search for answers and a focus for his mind. He opened himself to God’s will, letting go.

As sand slowly climbed his legs, he waited — but no answer came.

So be it.

He would find his end here.

As he touched his cross, a line of scripture suddenly glowed gold before his mind’s eye: And Joseph bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulcher which was hewn out of a rock …

Of course.

His eyes flew open, and he studied the immutable stone. He touched its flat surface, picturing an equally flat surface on the other side. He remembered the gaps along the bottom, how he had found that the stone’s edges had been curved. He imagined that curve extending fully around the stone, forming a circle.

In his mind, he saw it.

A flat disk of rock.

His lips moved in a silent prayer of thanks, then he crossed to the others.

The woman stood up to meet him. “What is it?”

She must have noticed something in his face. That alone illustrated Rhun’s own desperation, that another could read him so easily. Hope flared in her eyes.

As the soldier joined them, Rhun unclipped the grenade from his belt.

“That won’t work,” the man said. “I was just explaining—”

“Trust me.” Rhun waded through the pool of sand back to the boulder and dug down near the corner, where the rock met the wall. He dug swiftly, but the sand fought him, filling as fast as he could scoop it out.

He couldn’t do this alone.

“Help me.”

The others flanked him.

“Dig to the floor,” he ordered.

They worked together until the sand was clear along the bottom edge, exposing a small curved gap between the stone disk and tunnel floor. Rhun reached down and jammed the grenade deep into that crack, wedging it under the disk’s edge.

He then placed a finger in the pin’s ring and spoke over his shoulder. “Get back as far up the tunnel as you can reach.”

“What about you?” the soldier asked.

With no one digging, sand poured back into the hole, burying his wrist, then his forearm. “I will follow you.”

The soldier hesitated, but he finally nodded and pulled the woman with him.

Erin called to him, “How do you know it will work?”

Rhun didn’t. He had to trust in God — and in a certain line from the Bible, one concerning boulders sealing tombs.

Mark 15:46.

He whispered it now, both as answer and as prayer.

“And Joseph bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulcher which was hewn out of a rock — and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulcher.”

With those words, he yanked the pin on the grenade, pulled his arm free, and fought against the cataract of flowing sand.

He made it in just three steps.

The grenade coughed behind him, a giant, barking wheeze that blew a dusty fireball across his back. His head clipped the edge of a wall as he fell to the floor.

Dazed, vision swimming, he flopped over to his back.

Feet pounded down the steps toward him.

He lay flat, unmoving.

The air tasted of sand and smoke — then a breeze suffused the passageway. A sweet, clean waft of desert air.

“I’ve got him.” The soldier hooked Rhun under the armpits and dragged him across the sand-strewn floor.

The woman ran ahead. “Look! The force of the grenade blast rolled the stone two feet to the side. Why didn’t I think of that? They’d sealed this place just like Christ’s tomb.”

“… rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulcher,” he mumbled, fading in and out.

Of course she recognized what he’d done.

He felt himself dragged past the blackened stone and out into the open air. He looked up. The stars were bright, razor-sharp, eternal. Those stars had watched Masada being built, and now they bore witness to its destruction.

A great crescendo of grating stone and booming rock sounded as the mountain collapsed, utterly.

Then at long last, silence.

Still, Erin and Jordan continued to haul the priest far out into the desert, not taking any chances. But finally they stopped.

A warm hand squeezed Rhun’s shoulder. He caught a glimpse of amber eyes. “Thank you, Father, for saving our lives.”

Such simple words. Words he rarely heard. As a soldier of God, he often went for days without speaking to another soul. That earlier ache — as he watched the pair embrace on the stairs — returned, only slicing deeper now, almost too painful to bear. He stared into those eyes.

Would I feel this way if she weren’t so lovely?

As darkness drowned him, she leaned closer. “Father Korza, what book were you looking for here?”

She and the soldier had fought, killed, and had friends die because of the book. Had they not earned an answer? For that reason alone, he told her.

“It is the Gospel. Written in the blood of its maker.”

Behind her, stars framed her face. “What do you mean? Are you talking about some lost apocryphal text?”

He heard the hunger in her voice, the desire for knowledge, but she did not seem to understand. He turned his heavy head to meet her eyes directly. She had to see his sincerity.

“It is the Gospel,” he repeated as darkness took away the world. “Written by Christ’s own hand. In his own blood.”