The Blood Gospel

28

With the promise of dawn still hours away, Jordan shifted in the rear passenger seat of the black Mercedes S600 sedan. He stared out the window into a dark Bavarian forest, where night still held sway. Erin sat next to him, while up front, Korza drove with a skill that demonstrated his preternatural reflexes.

Mario Andretti in a Roman collar.

Beyond the asphalt of the winding stretch of road, spruce and fir trees carved blacker lines into the murky gray sky. All around, wisps of fog stretched from the dark loam like ghostly fingers. Jordan rubbed his eyes. He had to stop thinking like a man trapped in a horror movie. Reality was freakish enough without letting his imagination run away with him.

He yawned, still jet-lagged. He had barely climbed into the luxurious private plane supplied by the Vatican before falling asleep in one of its giant seats. It was hard to believe that it was still the same night, and they had left Jerusalem only four hours before, whisking north at the jet’s top speed.

When the plane had landed in Munich, Erin had an endearing, just-woken-up look, so he figured she got a bit of sleep, too.

Now she was facing away from him in the backseat, looking out her own window. She wore simple gray jeans, a white shirt, and the leather jacket the Cardinal had given her. Jordan slid his finger around his own high collar. Except for the tight neck, it was the most comfortable body armor he’d ever worn, and it looked like a regular jacket. Still, considering what they were up against, it might not be enough.

Up front at the wheel, Korza had ditched his torn cassock and wore his own leathers — black, nicer than Erin’s and Jordan’s, and tailored. He seemed unfazed by the long night they had spent.

Had he slept at all on the plane? Did he need sleep?

Jordan hadn’t made a sound since the car started, not wanting to distract Korza from the road. Erin had kept quiet, too, but he doubted it was for the same reason.

He couldn’t figure her out. Ever since he handed the Cardinal his wedding band, Erin seemed to have retreated from him. He caught her watching him occasionally from the corner of her eye, as if she dared not look him fully in the face.

If he’d known that announcing that he was single would make her less interested in him rather than more, he would have passed the ring to Bernard in private. But what did he know about women? He’d spent the year since Karen’s death hiding behind the ring.

Erin stirred beside him. “There’s the village of Ettal.”

He leaned over to see where she pointed.

Ahead, nestled in the piney woods, glowing streetlamps revealed white buildings with brown roofs. Most windows were still dark at this early hour. The place resembled a postcard, a picturesque hamlet with the words Enjoying Bavaria! emblazoned on the front. It was hard to believe the humble village hid a darker secret, that it was a Sanguinist stronghold.

Rhun did not slow and swept past the town.

A few hairpin turns later, a grand Baroque structure appeared, rising high and spreading outward into two towering flanks. In the center, a domed roof thrust into the sky, supporting a massive golden cross that shone in the moonlight. Countless archways decorated the bone-white facade, sheltering statues or hiding ornate windows.

“Ettal Abbey,” Erin said, awed, sitting straighter. “I had hoped to see it someday.”

Jordan liked to hear her talking again.

She continued, excitement returning to her voice. “Ludwig of Bavaria chose this spot for the abbey because his horse bowed three times at this site.”

“How do you get a horse to bow?” Jordan asked.

“Divine intervention apparently,” Erin answered.

He grinned at her before leaning forward to talk to the priest. “Is this the monastery you were talking about, padre? The secret university?”

“It lies behind. And I’d prefer you call me Rhun, not padre.”

The car fishtailed as it rounded the corner, a plume of gravel spewing from the tires. Their headlights caught simpler buildings in the back, white with red tile roofs, more humble and austere. This seemed more like the Sanguinists’ style.

Rhun drew them to a fast stop beside one of the nondescript buildings. The priest was out before the engine had fully died. He remained near the sedan, scanning the surrounding hills, moving only his eyes. His nostrils flared.

Erin reached for her door handle, but Jordan stopped her.

“Let’s wait till he clears us to go. And zip your jacket up, please.”

He wanted her protected as fully as possible.

Outside, Rhun spun in a slow circle, like he expected an attack from any direction.

Rhun cast out his senses, drawing in the heartbeats of the men who were asleep in the neighboring monastery. He smelled pine from the forest and hot metal from the vehicle and heard the soft whoosh of an owl’s wings above the forest, the quick scurry of a vole below his feet.

He found no danger.

He took one breath to relax, to become one with the night. He spent most of his life indoors in prayer or out in the field hunting, too busy with war to enjoy the natural world. When he first took the cloth of his order, the otherness of his senses had frightened him, reminding him always of his nature as one who was damned, but now he treasured these rare moments when he could stop and commune with God’s creation at its fullest, at its most intimate. He never felt nearer to God than in these moments of solitude, far closer than when he was buried on his knees in some subterranean chapel.

He selfishly drew in one more breath.

Then the woman shifted inside the vehicle, recalling him to his duty.

He faced the massive structure of the main building and its two wings. He studied the rear windows, watching for any movement. It appeared no one was spying from inside. A thick door stood closed at the base of one of the smaller towers. He stretched his senses through its stout wood planking, but he heard no heartbeat on the far side — only a whisper meant for his ears alone.

“Rhun, be welcome. All is safe.”

Rhun relaxed at the familiar soft voice, accented in German.

He turned and gave Jordan a quick nod. At least the man had had sense enough to stay inside the car with Erin. The pair clambered out, sounding loud and clumsy to Rhun’s sharp ears.

Once they were safely in his shadow, Rhun strode toward the wood door.

Jordan kept himself between Erin and the dark forest, protecting her from the most likely direction of attack. He had good instincts, Rhun had noticed. Perhaps that would be enough.

The thick door opened before they reached it.

Rhun stepped to the side to let the other two precede him. The sooner they were out of the open, the better.

As Jordan and Erin ducked through the small doorway, he cast one final glance around. He uncovered no menace, but danger still pricked at his senses.

29

Hidden on a forested hilltop overlooking the abbey, Bathory lay on her stomach in a bower of leaf litter, letting the cold damp soothe the fury smoldering inside her at the sight of Rhun Korza.

Bare linden branches creaked above. Through her high-power binoculars, she had watched the knight leave the sedan behind the monastery. She’d placed her post far from the monastery to stay out of range of the Sanguinist’s senses. The knight’s caution as he stood at a rear doorway indicated his suspicion, but he had not discovered her.

Right now her only enemy was the rising fog.

As Korza disappeared inside the abbey, she rested her forehead on her arm in relief.

The risky gamble she had played had paid off handsomely.

She had sent the photos of the Nazi medallion to three historians who were in league with the Belial. As they squabbled over the medallion’s importance, she had set another course, turning to her network of spies throughout the Holy Lands. They came back with news that Korza planned to take a plane to Germany, but they didn’t know where he would land, where he would go.

She did know — or at least, she had her suspicions.

Korza would not let the book’s trail grow cold for long. He would take the only clue from the tomb and consult historians loyal to his order, as she had done with those loyal to hers. She knew about Ettal Monastery, the Pontifical University of Sanguinist scholars devoted to historical research, going back to the end of World War II.

Of course he would come here.

So she had acted, telling no one, knowing that waiting for permission would take too long. She gathered all of the strigoi forces out of the sands of the Holy Lands — a small army — and hunkered them down here in loam and leaf.

It had been a bold move, one supported by Tarek, who she knew secretly hoped she would fail.

Magor shifted next to her, resting his head on her shoulder. She leaned against him. Despite wearing a thick fur-lined coat against the frigid cold of the Bavarian night, she appreciated the furnace of Magor’s body, and even more, the affection flowing from him, bathing her as warmly as his flesh. Likewise, he sought reassurance from her. She felt the undercurrent of unease in his breast.

This was a strange new world for the desert wolf.

Be calm … she sent to him … prey bleeds as easily here as out on the sand …

On her other side, another stirred, one who held her only in contempt. “Shouldn’t I take the others and move closer?” Tarek asked. “I have no heartbeat to give me away. Unlike you.”

She ignored the insult, suspecting he wanted to steal the glory of this moment from her. She reined him in. “We stay. We can’t risk alerting them.”

The musty smell of wet leaves filled her nostrils. Unlike Magor, she drank it in. After years in the dry Judean desert, she welcomed the familiar sounds and smells of a forest. It reminded her of her home in Hungary, and she took strength from those happier memories — the time before she took His mark.

“We have more troops this time,” Tarek pressed. “We could take them, wring the information from them, and retrieve the book ourselves.”

She heard the raw desire behind his words, his need to avenge those who had been lost at Masada, to slake his bloodlust. She gripped her binoculars tighter. Did he not realize she shared the same yearning for revenge, for blood? But she would not be foolish or rash — nor would she let Tarek be. That was the true strength of the Belial union: to temper the ferocity of the strigoi with the calculated cunning of humans.

She didn’t bother to turn her head. “My orders stand. Such strongholds have protections against your kind. Just one of those Sanguinists took down six of you on unfamiliar ground in Masada, and we do not know how many live at the abbey. Anyone who ventures down there will not return.”

Most of her troops looked cowed at the thought.

Tarek did not. He pointed toward the abbey, ready to argue, to test her. She was done with his disrespect of her authority. She needed to break him as surely as the Sanguinist had broken her family.

She grabbed his extended arm and forced his hand to her throat before he could react. “If you think you can lead,” she spat, “then take it!”

As his palm touched her mark, his skin sizzled. Tarek leaped high and away with a snarl, his fingers smoking from the brief contact with Bathory’s tainted blood, even through her skin.

The other men fell back — all but Rafik.

He came to his brother’s defense, landing on top of her.

Magor growled, ready to join the fray.

No, she willed to him.

This was her fight, her lesson to teach.

She rolled Rafik’s thin frame under her, straddling him like a lover. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and dragged his mouth to her throat. Tender flesh smoked as Rafik screamed and writhed under her.

She stared at Tarek all the while. “Should I feed your brother?”

The anger in his eyes blew out, replaced with fear — for his brother’s life, but also fear of her. Satisfied, she let Rafik go and cast him away. He went whimpering on all fours to Tarek’s side, his lips smoking and blistered.

Tarek knelt and comforted his addled brother.

Bathory felt a twinge of guilt, knowing Rafik’s intelligence was little better than that of a small child, but she had to be hard — harder than any of them.

Magor belly-crawled to her side, both nosing her to make sure she was okay and prostrating himself to show he respected her dominant role in the pack.

She scratched behind his ear, accepting his wolfish deference.

She stared over at Tarek, expecting the same from him.

Slowly, his head bowed, his eyes averted.

Good.

She returned to her leafy bower and lifted her binoculars.

Now to break the other one.

30

As soon as Erin stepped through the small rear door of the abbey, the familiar smell of wood smoke took her back to her days of hauling firewood and water at the compound.

The oddity of it struck her. Why would the Sanguinists need a fire? Did they enjoy the warmth, the dance of flame, the crackle of embers? Or were there humans in this part of the abbey?

Past the threshold, she stopped alongside Jordan at the entrance to a long stone hallway, the end hidden in darkness. The way was blocked by a cherubic-looking priest, no more than a boy really.

If he was a boy.

“I am Brother Leopold,” he greeted them, accompanied by a slight bow, his accent strongly Bavarian. He wore a simple monk’s robe and round, wire-rim glasses. “Let me switch the lights on.”

He reached forward, but Rhun caught his hand. “No illumination until we are well away from the door.”

“Forgive my carelessness.” Brother Leopold motioned to the long hall. “We get little excitement here in the provinces. If you’ll follow me.”

He hustled them down the dark hallway to a set of stairs. In the darkness, Erin stumbled and almost took a header down the steps, but Rhun caught her elbow and pulled her upright, his hand as firm as it was cold.

Jordan put a pair of the night-vision goggles in her other hand. “We’ve got the toys. Might as well use them. Like they say, when in Rome …”

She slipped the glasses over her head and strapped them in place. The world brightened into shades of green. She could now easily pick out the stairs. Rather than crude stone steps, she found only worn linoleum, which remined her of the steps at any other university.

The small touch of normalcy reassured her.

Curious, she switched her goggles to infrared mode, picking out the glow of Jordan’s body heat beside her. She instinctively drew a little closer to it.

A glance toward their host revealed that he had vanished — though she could still hear his footsteps on the stairs. He plainly cast no body heat. Despite his cherubic exterior, he was not a young man, not at all. He was a Sanguinist. Disturbed at the thought, she quickly toggled back to low-light mode.

At the bottom of the stairs, a steel door with an electronic keypad blocked their way.

Brother Leopold punched five digits into the keypad and the door swung inward. “Quickly, please.”

Erin looked over her shoulder, suddenly fearful, wondering what danger he had sensed.

“The room is climate-controlled,” Brother Leopold explained with a reassuring smile. “Nothing more, I assure you.”

She hurried through the door, followed by Jordan, who did not relax his vigilant posture.

Brother Leopold reached over and flipped a switch. Light flared, bursting blindingly bright through Erin’s goggles. Both she and Jordan ripped off the equipment.

“Sorry,” Brother Leopold said, realizing what he had done.

Erin blinked away the residual retinal flare to discover an overstuffed office, much like her own back at Stanford. But instead of biblical-era treasures, the room was filled with memorabilia and artifacts from World War II. Framed maps from the 1940s plastered one wall; another was covered with a floor-to-ceiling case crammed with books shelved two deep; the far wall was odd, covered with black glass. The room smelled like old books, ink, and leather.

The scholar in her wanted to move in and never leave.

A dilapidated leather office chair stood at an angle to the large oak desk. The top was obscured by stacks of papers, more books, and a glass display box filled with pins and medals.

Jordan surveyed the room. “Thank God, for once, I don’t see a single thing that looks older than the United States.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Erin scolded.

“And do not be fooled,” Rhun added. “Much evil has been done in modern settings as well as old.”

“No one is going to let me enjoy the moment, are they?”

Jordan moved closer to her as he let Brother Leopold pass. She again felt the welcoming and reassuring heat of his body.

“Forgive me for not tidying up,” the young monk said, adjusting his glasses. “And for not making a proper introduction. You are Sergeant Jordan Stone, yes?”

“That’s right.” Jordan offered his hand.

Brother Leopold grasped it in both of his, pumping it up and down. “Wilkommen. Welcome to Ettal Abbey.”

“Thanks.” Jordan gave the monk a genuine smile.

Brother Leopold returned it, his expression as enthusiastic as his handshake.

After making her own introductions, Erin decided the monk seemed far more human than either Rhun or Bernard. True, his hand felt as cold as theirs when she shook it, but it was still friendlier than the usual stiff and formal gloved handshake of the others.

Maybe he was simply younger than his centuries-old elders.

Brother Leopold turned with a dramatic sweep of his arm over the chaos of his office. “The collection and I are at your disposal, Professor Granger. I understand you have some artifact that you wish to gain some further insight about.”

“That’s right.” She reached under her long duster to her pants pocket and pulled out the Nazi medal. She held it out toward the monk. “What can you tell us about this?”

He held it between his pudgy finger and thumb, eyeballing it with and without his glasses. He flipped the coin over several times, finally drifting toward his desk, where he placed the medal under a fixed magnifying lens.

He read the writing along the edge of the medallion. “Ahnenerbe. No surprise to find one of their calling cards buried in the sands of the Holy Land. That group spent decades scouring tombs, caves, and ruins there.”

He tapped the symbol on the back. “But this is interesting. An Odal rune.” He glanced at Erin. “Where exactly was this found?”

“In the mummified hand of a girl murdered in the Israeli desert. We are looking for something, an artifact, that might have been stolen from her by the Ahnenerbe.”

One of the monk’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. He looked to them for further explanation, but when none came he simply sighed and concluded, “The Nazis’ evil ranged far.”

Erin felt guilty for not being more open with the enthusiastic monk. She knew Brother Leopold had been told nothing about the search for the Blood Gospel, only that they needed help with the medallion found in the desert.

“Do you think you can figure out whom the medal might have once belonged to?” she asked. “If we knew that, we might know where to continue our search.”

“That may be difficult. I see no identifying marks.”

She tried not to look crestfallen, but how could she not?

Jordan must have caught her tone because he squeezed her shoulder and changed the subject. He read a few of the titles off the maps, pronouncing the German names correctly.

“You speak German?” she asked.

“A little,” Jordan said. “And a little Arabic. And a little English.”

Rhun shifted, drawing Erin’s attention to him. She wondered how many languages he spoke.

Jordan faced Brother Leopold. “How did you come upon such a comprehensive collection of maps?”

“Some have been in my possession since they were drawn.” The monk stroked wooden rosary beads hanging from his belt. “I am ashamed to say that I was a member of the National Socialist Party, when I was human.”

Jordan’s eyes widened. “You—”

Equally surprised, Erin tried to picture the round monk with the open face as a Nazi.

Rhun interrupted. “Perhaps we should turn our attention to the Ahnenerbe?”

“Of course.” Brother Leopold sat on his creaky leather chair. “I merely wish your two companions to understand that my knowledge of such matters is not esoteric. Since becoming a Sanguinist, I have learned more about the activities of the Nazis and have dedicated my continuing existence and my studies to the undoing of their evil and to ensure that such malevolence never rises again.”

“To that end,” Rhun asked, “have you seen any medallions like this before?”

“I’ve seen similar.” Brother Leopold rummaged through a desk drawer and pulled out a tiny wooden box with a glass lid. “Here are some badges of the Ahnenerbe. Most of these were collected by Father Piers, a mentor of mine and the priest who converted me to the cloth. He knew far more about the Nazi occult practices than anyone — probably more than the Germans knew themselves.”

Erin remembered Cardinal Bernard mentioning the deceased priest’s name back in Jerusalem. Over the centuries, many famous historians had died, taking their undocumented knowledge with them to the grave. That kind of tragedy was not limited to human scholars.

The monk directed her attention back to the display box. “I think you’ll appreciate the shape of the medal in the center.”

He tapped the glass over a pewter badge in the shape of the Odal rune, with a swastika in the middle and two legs extending out from the bottom like tiny feet.

She read the words that marched around its edges. “Volk. Sippe.”

“‘Folk’ and ‘tribe,’” he translated. “The Ahnenerbe believed that Germans descended from the Aryan race, a people that they believed settled Atlantis before moving north.”

“Atlantis?” Jordan shook his head.

Erin’s eye caught on another pin in the case. The emblem appeared to be a pedestal holding up an open book. “What’s this one?”

“Ah, that one represents the importance of Ahnenerbe in documenting Aryan history and heritage, but there are some who say it represents a great mystery, some occult book of deep power held by them.”

Erin matched glances with Rhun.

Could this be some hint of their possession of the Blood Gospel?

The monk shoved aside a stack of Nazi-era documents to reveal a modern keyboard. He began typing, and the wall of glass beside his desk bloomed to light, revealing it to be a giant computer monitor. Across the large screen, data scrolled at startling speeds. It appeared the Sanguinists had their share of both ancient and modern toys.

“If you’re looking for a lost Ahnenerbe artifact,” Leopold said as his fingers flew over the keyboard, “this is a map of Germany. I’ve been working on it for the better part of sixty years. The red arrows you see represent suspected Nazi bunkers and repositories. Green ones have been cleared.” He sighed. “Sadly there are more red arrows than green.”

Erin felt a sinking in her gut. Barely an inch of the map didn’t contain an arrow.

And yes, most were depressingly red.

“If all these are not cleared,” Erin said, “how come you know they’re even there? What do you mean by suspected Nazi bunkers?”

“We hear stories of them. Local folklore. Sometimes we can guess from half-destroyed Nazi documents.”

Jordan squinted at the screen. “But that’s not the only way you’re pinpointing these places, is it?” He nodded to the crowded screen. “From the sophistication of this survey, I’m guessing you must be using satellite telemetry and ground-penetrating radar to identify hidden, underground structures.”

Brother Leopold smiled. “It almost feels like cheating. But in the end, all that wonderful technology has only succeeded in adding more red arrows to the screen. The only way to know if there’s anything really there — or if those hidden structures contain anything significant — is to search them in person, one by one.”

Rhun’s eyes flicked from side to side as he scanned the map from top to bottom. “What we seek could be in any of those hundreds of locations.”

Brother Leopold pushed back his chair and crossed his legs. “I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.”

Rhun twitched. Erin sensed his impatience. The Belial were on the trail of the book as avidly as she and Jordan and Rhun were. Every minute mattered.

Jordan tapped one of the red arrows. “Then it’s grunt work from here, guys. We go through the sites and assign them high and low probabilities and work through them. Use a grid pattern. It won’t be quick, but it’ll be thorough.”

His idea sounded logical — but it felt wrong.

Jordan watched Erin step to the desk and remove the medallion from under the magnifying lens. He could tell she was frustrated from the pinch of her brows and the stiffness of her back. He didn’t like the idea of searching hundreds of sites either, but what other choice did they have?

As Erin turned in his direction, a light flickered deep in her eyes. That usually meant things were about to change, not always for the better.

He touched her shoulder. “Erin, you got something?”

“I don’t know.” She rubbed the rune on the back of the medal with her thumbs.

Rhun cocked his head, his eyes fixed on Erin with an intensity that somehow rankled Jordan; as if that gaze would consume her.

Jordan shifted to stand between them. “Talk it out,” he said. “Maybe we can help.”

Erin’s brown eyes remained far away. “Symbols were crucial to the Ahnenerbe. Why that symbol on the stolen badge?”

Leopold’s chair creaked. “The Odal rune indicates inheritance. If the Odal rune was written next to a person’s name or an object, it meant ownership.”

“Like writing your name on your sneakers,” Jordan said. He looked over at the badge with the swastika in the center of the rune. “So does that emblem mean the Ahnenerbe owned the Nazis?”

He knew he probably sounded like an idiot to the scholars, but sometimes an idiot’s perspective ended up getting more things done.

“I think it’s more like the Ahnenerbe thought they owned the Third Reich,” Erin clarified. “They believed they were the true protectors of Aryan heritage.”

“But what does that signify?” Rhun pressed her, leaning toward her as if trying to draw the answer from her physically.

Erin leaned back. “I’m not sure, but at the end of the war, Berlin was being bombed. The Third Reich was on the run.” Her words came out slowly, as if she searched for words to a once-familiar story. “And the Ahnenerbe scientists would have known that the war was over long before the formal surrender.”

Leopold nodded. “They would have. But they thought in terms of centuries. To them, the present was a pale thing of little importance. They were interested in the history of the Aryan race going back ten thousand years—and forward the same number of millennia.”

“To the Fourth Reich!” Erin said, her eyes lighting up. “That group would have been planning for the long term. They would have wanted to keep their most important objects hidden until the coming of the Fourth Reich.”

“Which means that they would have hidden them somewhere unknown to the leaders of the Third Reich,” Leopold said, swinging back to his deck. “So we can eliminate any bunkers documented by the Nazi government.”

The monk tapped hurriedly at his keyboard and half the red arrows vanished.

“That helped,” Jordan said.

“There are still too many,” Erin concluded, and began to pace the small office, plainly trying to discharge nervous energy and stay focused.

Rhun did not move, but he tracked her with his eyes.

Erin pointed at the screen but didn’t glance at it. “Where would they hide their more precious artifacts to ensure that some future Aryan scientists could find them?”

“How about Atlantis?” Jordan asked with a roll of his eyes. “With the mermaids?”

She slapped her forehead with her palm. “Of course!”

All three men looked at her as if she were mad.

“Erin,” Rhun warned, his voice gentle. “I must remind you that the Nazis did not know the location of Atlantis.”

She waved such details aside. “Legend has it that the Fourth Reich would rise like Atlantis from the sea, returning the Aryan race to supremacy.” She faced Leopold. “What if the last of the Ahnenerbe tried to hedge that bet, to force the prophecy to be true?”

Rhun stirred next to Jordan, as if something Erin said had disturbed him.

Erin forged on. “To match that legend, they might have hidden their most important and significant artifacts near water. Trapped and surrounded by Allied forces, the last of the Ahnenerbe couldn’t reach the sea at the end of the war — and they would’ve wanted to keep their treasures buried in the soil of the Fatherland anyway. So they might have sought the next best thing.”

Leopold’s voice grew hushed. “A German body of water.”

“A lake,” Erin said.

Leopold typed in a command and all but a dozen red arrows disappeared, marking unexplored lakeside bunkers.

Jordan’s fist tightened with excitement.

Even Rhun came dangerously close to smiling.

“Let me bring up a satellite view of each one,” Leopold said.

In a few minutes, a checkerboard of images filled the large screen, displaying ground-penetrating images of each of the suspected bunkers.

“Mein Gott in Himmel,” Leopold swore, reverting to his native tongue in shock.

They all moved closer to the screen. They all saw it.

In the lower right checkerboard, one of the outlines of the subterranean bunkers was in the exact shape of the Odal rune.

And this particular one wasn’t just next to a lake.

It lay sunken underwater.

Just like Atlantis.

31

In front of the computer screen, Rhun stood near enough to Erin to smell the simple soap Bernard stocked at his Jerusalem apartments. Her long hair left a trace of warmth in the air when she swung it away from her face.

Jordan stepped between them, blocking his view of her again. Rhun knew it was done on purpose. The soldier kept his hands out at his sides, ready for anything, including a fight.

Irritation flashed through Rhun, but he forced it away. Jordan was correct to enforce a space between him and this young woman. Erin Granger, with her sharp mind and compassionate heart, was a very dangerous woman indeed. And Rhun needed all the distance he could muster.

Rhun turned his attention to Brother Leopold and to the task at hand. “Is there a triad in residence?”

“Natürlich.” The monk’s rosary clacked against the desk when he rose. “Nadia, Emmanuel, and Christian are here. Shall I fetch them?”

“Nadia and Emmanuel only,” Rhun said. “I will be the third.”

“What’s a triad?” Jordan asked, eavesdropping on their conversation.

Leopold lifted the receiver of a black telephone and explained. “Sanguinist warriors often work in groups of three. It is a holy number.”

And a perfect fighting unit, Rhun added silently.

Aloud, he said, “I will go with two others to this bunker and search it.”

Erin crossed her arms. “I’m going, too.”

“We’re a package deal,” Jordan added. “Isn’t that what the Cardinal said?”

Rhun drew himself up straight. “Your orders were to aid me in the search, which you have done. If we are successful, we will return here with the artifact.”

Jordan gave an unconvincing smile. “I believe the Cardinal said that we were the trio. Woman, warrior, and knight. I’m all for getting reinforcements, but not replacements.”

Brother Leopold dialed four numbers and spoke into the receiver — but his eyes had locked on to the soldier. He had heard what was spoken, knew what it meant, understood now what they sought.

“Rhun,” Erin said. “If the … artifact is in this bunker, my help led you there, and maybe you’ll need my help once you’re inside, too.”

“I have survived for centuries without your help, Dr. Granger.”

She didn’t back down. “If the Cardinal is correct about the prophecy, this is no time for pride. From any of us.”

Rhun blinked. She had blithely named his greatest fault.

Pride.

Such a fault had once brought him low — he would not let it happen again. She was right. He might very well need their help, and he could not be too proud to accept it.

“We must all do what we were called to do,” Erin said, echoing something the Cardinal had told him.

We must each humbly bow to our own destinies.

Erin added, “The book demands no less.”

Rhun cast his eyes down. If the fulfillment of the prophecy had begun, the three of them together must seek the book. As much as he wanted to, he could not leave Erin behind.

Not even for her own safety.

Or for his.

A new map covered the large computer screen, a modern road map of the mountainous terrain of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The lake and its hidden bunker lay about forty miles into that rough terrain. On the glowing monitor, Erin traced the thin white line that threaded between dark green hills and ended at the small alpine tarn.

“Is that a road?” she asked.

“An old dirt track,” Brother Leopold said. “The vehicle you arrived in cannot navigate it. But—”

The office door clicked open behind them.

Jordan’s hand went to the butt of his submachine gun.

Rhun flowed back into a ready stance.

Erin simply turned. Were the others right to be so on edge, even here, where she had felt safe? At that moment she sensed her inadequacy to deal with the dangers ahead.

Two black-cloaked figures swept into the room like an icy wind: swift, relentless, and cold. Only when they stopped moving did Erin recognize them as Sanguinists.

The first, surprisingly, was a woman, outfitted in tailored leather armor, similar to Rhun’s — except she wore a thin silver belt that looked like it was made of chain. She had braided her shiny black hair and pinned it up in a bun. Her severe face was darker-complected than Rhun’s, but equally implacable. She rested a gloved hand on the hilt of a dagger that was strapped to her thigh.

Her eyes swept the room, then she offered the slightest bow of her head to Erin and Jordan. “I am Nadia.”

The other, a man, stood two steps behind the woman.

“And I am Emmanuel,” he said, his accent Spanish.

He wore a black cassock, unbuttoned down the front, revealing leather armor beneath and a silvery hint of hidden weapons. Blond hair hung loose past his shoulders, far too long for a priest, and a pink scar ran down one chiseled cheekbone.

Rhun spoke hurriedly to the two in Latin. Erin listened, not showing that she understood. Jordan maintained his usual guard, his palm resting on the stock of his shouldered submachine gun. He plainly didn’t trust any of them.

Erin followed his example and feigned interest in the map on the screen as she eavesdropped.

Rhun quickly related everything in terse Latin: about the prophecy, about Erin and Jordan, about the book they sought and the enemy they faced. As he mentioned the word Belial, both Nadia and Emmanuel tensed.

Once finished, Rhun turned to Leopold. “You’ve readied what I asked?”

Leopold nodded. “Three bikes. They’re already gassed and waiting for you.”

Erin glanced back to the map, to a thin white track that wound through the mountains. It seemed they weren’t going to be traversing that torturous route via car or truck.

“If you are ready,” Rhun asked, taking Erin and Jordan in with a single glance.

Erin could only nod — but even that gesture was false. She hated to leave the familiar territory of dusty books, leather chairs, and the cold certainty of the computer screen. But she was committed.

As Leopold led them back up the stairs, Jordan hung back with her, touching her wrist, allowing his hand to linger.

He bent close to her ear, his breath chasing across her cheek. “Anything I need to know about what they just said?”

Of course, her act hadn’t fooled him. He knew she had been eavesdropping. She struggled to answer his question, but her mind was too busy registering his proximity — and how a part of her longed to close the last inch.

She had to repeat the question in her head before she answered. “Nothing important. He just filled the others in.”

“Keep me apprised,” he whispered.

She glanced over at his eyes, then down to his lips, remembering how they’d felt against hers in Jerusalem.

“Dr. Granger?” Rhun called from the top of the stairs. “Sergeant Stone?”

Jordan gestured for her to proceed ahead of him. “Duty calls.”

Rather breathless — and not only from the climb — Erin hurried toward the Sanguinists.

Once outside, she found the night much colder, the fog much thicker. She could barely make out the outline of their Mercedes sedan.

As they rounded past the car, Jordan whistled appreciatively.

Three black motorcycles, accented with red piping, sat parked on the dried grass ahead. They didn’t seem like much to Erin, but Jordan was clearly impressed.

“Ducati Streetfighters,” he commented happily. “With magnesium rims and what looks like carbon silencers on the exhaust. Nice. Apparently it’s good to be pope.”

Erin had a more practical concern, comparing the number of passengers and the number of bikes. “Who is riding with whom?”

Nadia raised the corner of her mouth in a tiny smile, which went a long way toward humanizing her. “For an even weight distribution, I shall take Sergeant Stone.”

Erin hesitated. She still didn’t fully understand the role of a female Sanguinist. If Rhun was a priest, was Nadia some sort of nun, equally sworn to the Church? Whatever the circumstance, the look she gave Jordan was anything but chaste.

Jordan apparently had his own thoughts on the matter, crossing to one of the bikes. “I can drive.” From the edge to his voice, it was clear that he wanted to drive one of these bikes. “And I prefer that Erin and I stick together.”

“You will slow us down,” Nadia said, her dark eyes twinkling with amusement.

Erin bristled, but she knew, after watching Rhun drive the sedan, that her and Jordan’s reflexes were no match for a Sanguinist’s.

Jordan must have recognized it, too, sighing heavily with a curt nod.

Emmanuel crossed and hooked a leg possessively over one of the bikes, not saying a word. Jordan followed Nadia to another.

“You shall ride with me, Dr. Granger,” Rhun said, motioning to the third motorcycle.

“I don’t know if—”

Rhun stepped past her objection and crossed to the bike, mounting with a flourish of his long coat. Twisting in his seat, he patted the leather behind him with one gloved hand. “I believe you stated ‘the book demands our best.’ Those were your words, were they not?”

“They were.” She hated to admit it and climbed behind him. “Shouldn’t we be wearing helmets?”

Nadia laughed, and her bike roared to life.

Rhun tensed when Erin’s arms slipped around his waist. Even through his leather, he felt the heat of her limbs wrapped low over his midsection. For a moment he fought between elbowing her away and pulling her closer.

Instead, he stuck to the practical requirements of the moment. “Have you ridden before?” he asked, keeping his gaze fixed to the fog-shrouded dark forest.

“Once, a long time ago,” she said.

He felt her heart race against his back. She was more frightened than her tone indicated.

“I will keep you safe,” he promised her, hoping it was true.

She nodded behind him, but her heart did not slow.

Jordan gave a thumbs-up from the back of Nadia’s bike as she throttled her engine to a muffled roar. Emmanuel simply gunned his bike and tore away, not waiting.

Nadia followed after him.

As Rhun urged his bike forward more gently, Erin’s arms tightened around him. Her body slid forward until it pressed against his. Her animal warmth flowed into his back, and his body fought against leaning into it.

He must not permit baser instincts to control him. He was a priest, and with God’s help, he would fulfill his mission. He murmured a short prayer and focused on Nadia’s rapidly disappearing red taillight.

He sped faster — and faster still.

Black tree trunks whipped past on both sides. The blue beam of his headlight penetrated the heavy blanket of fog. He kept his eyes on the uneven road. One misjudgment, and they would crash.

Ahead of him, Nadia and Emmanuel poured on more speed. He matched it.

Erin buried her face between his shoulder blades. Her breaths came quick and shallow, and her heartbeat skittered like a rabbit’s.

Not panicked yet, but close.

Despite his prayers and promises, his body quickened in response to her fear.

Jordan leaned hard into the curve. Nearby trees blurred into a long line of black topped by dark green. Wind stung his eyes. His jacket flapped behind him.

Nadia opened up the throttle on the next straightaway, a rare stretch along this twisting dirt course. He flicked a quick glance over her shoulder at the speedometer: 254 kilometers per hour. That came out to a little more than 150 miles per hour.

It felt like flying.

He felt more than heard Nadia’s laugh as she pushed the bike to go faster.

Unable to stop himself, Jordan matched her enthusiasm, laughing along with her, ebullient and feeling free for the first time since Masada.

Nadia leaned the bike over for another curve. His left knee skimmed a fraction of an inch above the gravel, his face not more than a foot from the rocks that tumbled by under them. One wrong move from either of them, and he was dead.

A part of him hated to be at the mercy of her skill.

No more than a spectator to her dexterity.

Still, he smiled into the wind, tucked in tight against her cold, hard form, and simply abandoned himself to the ride.

32

When the motorcycle finally slowed, Erin risked opening her eyes. For most of the journey, she had ridden blind, sheltered behind Rhun’s broad back, but she was still left windburned and rattled.

Ahead, a spatter of lights revealed the reason for Rhun’s slowing pace. They had reached the mountain hamlet of Harmsfeld. He slowed their pace to a crawl as he crept through the center of the sleeping village. The small Bavarian town looked like it had just emerged from a medieval time capsule, complete with dark houses with red tile roofs, stacked stone walls, and painted wooden flower boxes adorning most windows. A single church with a Gothic-style steeple marked a village square, a space that probably converted into a farmers’ market during the day.

She searched past Rhun’s shoulder for the other two bikes, but she saw no sign of them on the cobblestone street, a testament to the more cautious pace Rhun had set with her as his passenger.

Still, she felt like she’d left her stomach in the parking lot of Ettal Abbey.

As they left the village, a silvery expanse of lake appeared. Its still surface held a perfect reflection of the starlit skies above, the surrounding forest hugging its banks, and the craggy peaks that enclosed the valley.

Erin spotted the others, parked beside a beach next to a wooden dock. Its ash-gray pilings were darker than the waters that gently lapped at them.

Rhun roared up next to the other bikes and finally braked to a stop. She forced her hands to unclench from the front of his jacket, unhooking her arms from him and climbing off the bike on shaky legs. She tottered forward like an old lady.

Near the dock, the other three pushed a wooden dory across the mud and into the moonlit water. Jordan’s excited tone echoed off the water to her, expressing how much he had enjoyed his ride. Something he said caused Nadia to laugh, the sound unexpectedly carefree.

Jordan noted Erin’s bowlegged approach and called to her. “How was it?”

She gave him the shakiest thumbs-up of her life, which drew a laugh from him.

Rhun glided past her like a shadow.

Nadia eyed the two of them as they reached the shoreline, as if trying to read some secret message.

Emmanuel simply gave the small rowboat a final heave into the water, set it to floating, and climbed on board. He moved to the front, then sat there as unmoving as the figurehead on a pirate ship.

Nadia leaped as lithely as some jungle cat into the boat.

Jordan stayed on the beach to help Erin into the dory. She took hold of his hand and climbed in, noticing the white paint was peeling off the wide wooden planks of the seats. It didn’t look like the most seaworthy of boats. She freed her flashlight, turned it on, and shone it at the bottom of the boat.

No water inside.

Yet.

“Did you have an enjoyable ride?” Nadia asked, and moved to the side so Erin could join her on the middle seat.

Rhun and Jordan sat on the plank behind them while Emmanuel continued his lone vigil at the bow.

“On the way back, I think I’ll call a cab,” Erin said.

“Or you can ride with me on the way back,” Jordan said, staring longingly back toward where they had hidden the three Ducati bikes. “That is, if we’re not over deadline.”

Rhun dug his paddle into the water so hard that the boat lurched to the side.

Nadia glanced at him and whispered something in a teasing undertone too faint for Erin to discern. Rhun’s back stiffened, which broadened Nadia’s smile.

The female Sanguinist then handed Erin a heavy wooden paddle. “I believe we four must paddle while Emmanuel rests.”

Emmanuel ignored her and settled back against the gunwale.

Soon Erin was stroking her paddle through the water, trying to settle into the rhythm of the others. As they glided across the surface, fog rolled thicker over the lake, swallowing them up and dimming the moonlight. The dory now bobbed through a ghostly world where Erin could see only a few yards ahead.

Jordan touched her back, and she jumped.

“Sorry,” he said. “Look down.”

He angled his small flashlight into the dark water. The beam stretched down through the murk like a probing finger. Far below, the mottled light traced across a human form. Erin held her breath and leaned closer to the surface. Emerald-green algae draped from an uplifted arm, the curve of a cheek. It was a statue of a man on a rearing horse. Underneath it rested the huge bowl of a fountain.

Fascinated, she freed her own flashlight and played it in a wider circle, revealing the uncanny sight of rectangular forms of ruined houses and lonely stone hearths.

Nadia explained, “According to Brother Leopold, the local Nazis — likely of the Ahnenerbe—had this lake enlarged, damming the river on the far side and flooding the town below. Some claim the Nazis sealed anyone who protested in their own homes, along with their families, drowning them as punishment.”

Below, a school of silvery fish ghosted through Erin’s light. She shivered, wondering how many people had died and were entombed down there.

Jordan’s voice took on a somber tone. “They must have done it to hide the entrance to the bunker beneath the lake.”

Erin had seen enough and switched off her light.

“I assume you both can swim?” Nadia asked.

Erin nodded, although she knew she wasn’t the strongest swimmer. She had learned the basics in college, mostly to appease her roommate, who was convinced she would fall off a dock someday and drown. Erin conceded the practicality of the skill, took the class, but still hated the water.

Jordan, predictably, had better credentials. “I was a lifeguard in high school. Done a bit of training since. I think I’ll be okay.”

Erin had never thought to ask how deep the entrance was to the bunker. What if she couldn’t make it all the way down and had to wait in the boat? Or what if the entire place was simply flooded?

Emmanuel spoke his first word since leaving the abbey, a command that startled Erin with its fierceness. “Stop.”

He pointed into black water in front of the boat.

Jordan shifted forward and shone his flashlight into the water to reveal a rounded arch far below, its crest velvet with algae.

Emmanuel lowered the anchor into the water so slowly that it barely made a splash. Once the dory was secure, he slipped off his cassock, balled it up, and secured it under his leather armor. Then, quick as a fish, he dove and followed the anchor line down.

Blond hair streamed behind him as he sank away.

Erin watched his progress, judging the depth of the water. Maybe twenty feet. She could dive that deep, but what then? Would she have to explore the tunnels underwater?

Her throat closed up.

“You both wait here,” Rhun said, and signaled to Nadia.

The pair dove overboard, rocking the boat, carrying lights down with them. Erin put a hand on each gunwale to steady it, glad to be alone in the boat with Jordan.

“Not much of a swimmer, are you?” Jordan asked with a smile.

“How could you tell?”

He threaded the paddles under the seats, then straightened. “Your shoulders inch up to your ears when you get nervous.”

She made a mental note to stop doing that and gestured to the Sanguinists below. “I sure can’t swim like them.”

Through the water, she watched the trio try to shift what appeared to be a large metal hatch.

“They cheat,” Jordan said. “They don’t need to breathe, remember? Just one more weird thing to add to the list.”

“You have a list?”

He ticked items off on his fingers. “No heartbeat, free-flowing blood, allergic to silver. Did I miss anything?”

“How about the way they can sit still as statues or move twice as fast as we do?”

“There’s that. And the fact that they prey on humans.”

“Sanguinists don’t,” she reminded him. “That’s one of their laws.”

“Law or not, I can tell they still want to. That lust is still in them.” He leaned forward. “I’ve seen the way Rhun looks at you, like he’s both fascinated and hungry.”

“Quit it! He does not.”

She had to turn away, hiding her lack of conviction in her words, the memory of what had transpired in the subterranean chapel in Jerusalem still fresh in her mind.

“Just be careful around him,” Jordan added.

Erin glanced back again, hearing a catch in his voice. Was he right, or was he simply jealous? She wasn’t sure which proposition she found more worrisome.

Just then, a sleek black head popped up next to the boat. Nadia. “The door is open. The bunker is sealed with an air lock. We must enter together, close the first door, and open the second.”

She swam a yard off and waved an arm for Erin and Jordan to follow.

Always a soldier, Jordan dove immediately. He surfaced quickly, rolled onto his back, and stared at Erin with a big grin.

“Water’s fine,” he said, the shiver in his voice belying his words.

Nadia could read the true reason for Erin’s hesitation. “If you are frightened, perhaps you had best remain with the boat.”

Screw that.

Erin stood and leaped into the water. The snowmelt cold of the lake shocked her, as if trying to force reason back into her skull, to encourage her to return to the safety of the boat.

Instead, she took a deep breath and dove straight for the open door below.

At the bottom of the lake, Rhun heard their two heartbeats change when Erin and Jordan entered the water. He stuck his head out of the archway door and shone his waterproof flashlight up, offering them a beacon to follow. Silver moonlight from the surface silhouetted their dark forms as they kicked and pawed their way downward.

The soldier swam swiftly and economically. He could have reached the bottom in seconds, but he hung back, keeping watch on Erin.

She, on the other hand, was a terrible swimmer. Her movements were jerky with panic and her heart raced. Still, Rhun respected her for having the courage to try. Without the heavy grimwolf coat weighing her down, he doubted that she would have made it.

Once she got close enough, Rhun reached out, seized her arm, and pulled her through the archway and into the small flooded air lock. Less than a second later, Nadia and Jordan swam in.

Together, the pair tugged the outer hatch closed.

Metal thudded into place. A quick clanking sounded as they spun the door lock. Rhun’s flashlight revealed concrete walls surrounding them — and the frightened face of Erin.

He worried that her heart might explode, its pace barely pausing between beats. He had to get her out of the water before she panicked and drowned. If the bunker beyond the air lock was flooded, he would have to rush her back to the surface himself.

On the far side of the small chamber, Emmanuel worked at the steel dogs that locked down the inner hatch. As he twisted the last one, the door burst open on its own, shoved by the water pressure from inside the air lock. As the water flooded out of the chamber, they were all swept along with the draining torrent — and spilled into the dry Nazi bunker.

33

Erin stood shakily, soaked to the skin, her teeth already beginning to chatter.

Everyone else was on their feet, weapons drawn, sweeping their lights down the dark concrete tunnel ahead. She rested her hand on the cold stock of her own holstered pistol and pulled out her waterproof flashlight from the wet pocket of her long leather coat.

Her heart still thudded in her throat. She glanced back into the air lock. She did not want to ever have to do that again. She hoped there was some hidden landward exit to this bunker.

Clicking on the flashlight, she shone its beam on the floor, where drains were already reclaiming the water that had flooded in with the new arrivals. She swept the beam around the tunnel. Its rounded sides rose from a level floor, climbing fifteen feet, large enough to drive a Sherman tank down without scraping the concrete from the walls.

She imagined the teams of skeletal concentration-camp inmates working on this tunnel in near-total darkness, only to be killed when the structure was complete, their blood shed to keep its secrets.

She sniffed the air: dank and moldy, but not stale. She searched the ceiling. Likely some passive ventilation system was still intact.

She joined the others. Based on the satellite map, they should be standing in the right leg of the Odal rune. But where should they go from here?

“What now?” Jordan asked, mirroring Erin’s concern. “We just wander around looking?”

The triad of Sanguinists formed a silent wedge-shaped shield a few steps away: Emmanuel, at the head, pulled his wet cassock back over his leather armor. Nadia and Rhun flanked him. All three were clearly casting out their senses, gaining their bearings, and judging the threat level.

Erin moved closer to Jordan, into the shelter of their protection.

She knew her role, too — as scholar, the alleged Woman of Learning.

“I think the most symbolically powerful place to store a sacred object here,” she offered, “would be at an intersection, like where this leg intersects with the bottom of the diamond. Or maybe the top of the diamond.”

“Agreed,” Nadia said, and urged Emmanuel forward, to take point.

She and Rhun moved in sync behind him, as if the three were connected by invisible wires.

“You go in front of me, Erin,” Jordan said. “I’ll take the rear.”

Erin didn’t argue, happy to comply with military protocol in this instance.

Together, they all moved down the tunnel — too swiftly for Erin’s taste, but likely too slowly from the triad’s perspective. While the Sanguinists kept to their formation perfectly, she kept following first too close and then too far.

Emmanuel stopped at the first door they came to — a nondescript gray metal hatch on the side of the tunnel. He tried the handle. It was clearly locked, but that didn’t seem to deter the stoic Spaniard. He flexed black-gloved fingers and yanked the handle out of the door. He tossed it aside with a skittering clunk.

Jordan’s eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything.

Emmanuel nudged the door open with one leather boot. A short silver sword appeared in his hand. He and Nadia stepped through together.

Rhun stayed outside next to Erin. She glanced up the hall, pointing her flashlight. Empty as far as her beam would reach.

“Safe,” called Nadia from inside.

Erin and Jordan went in next, Rhun last.

Inside, Erin’s light revealed a dusty-looking desk on which sat an old-fashioned radio assembly. A code book lay open in front of it. Next to the desk, a chair had been pushed out. Beside it sprawled the skeleton of a Nazi soldier. He had probably been transmitting or receiving when he died.

Jordan’s light picked out a pewter Ahnenerbe pin on his lapel. The decoration was in the shape of the Odal rune, an exact match of the one etched on the Nazi medal found in the tomb at Masada.

“Looks like we came to the right place,” he said.

Erin stepped over and examined the dead soldier, keeping a professional attitude.

He’s just like any mummy I’ve encountered on digs.

That was what she kept reminding herself as she studied the dried blood staining the front of his uniform. It had run in great gouts down his chest.

What had happened?

She shifted behind the body, turned, and directed her light back at the doorway. A second body lay off to the side. She shuddered to think that she had practically stepped on it on her way in.

The Sanguinists ignored both corpses and searched the shelves next to the radio.

There wasn’t room to help them, so Erin walked to the remains by the door. A neat round hole in the center of the man’s skull left no question as to how he had died. His uniform differed from the radio operator’s. His was khaki brown and of a rougher fabric.

She panned her light across it.

“Russian,” Jordan said. “See the five-pointed red star? It’s an emblem from the World War Two era, too.”

Russian?

“What was he doing here?” Erin asked. “And how did he get in?”

Jordan crouched next to her and went through the soldier’s pockets, setting items on the thick dust that covered the floor: cigarette pack, matchbox, an official-looking document in Cyrillic, a letter, and a picture.

Jordan held up the faded black-and-white photo of a Slavic woman holding a thin girl with pigtails in front of a haystack.

Probably the dead man’s wife and daughter.

She wondered how long the woman had had to wait to learn of her husband’s fate. Had she mourned him or been relieved that he was gone? The man’s wife surely must be dead by now, but the little girl might well be alive.

Erin turned to Rhun, needing to do something. “Is there any way for Brother Leopold to notify the soldier’s family?”

Rhun spared her a quick glance. “Take the letter. Knowing Leopold, he will try.”

She collected the note and stood up. She pictured the scene from long ago.

The radio operator at his desk, perhaps calling for help. The Russian soldier bursts in. Shots are exchanged. Afterward, someone seals the place without anyone retrieving the bodies.

But why?

Nadia stood over Jordan, holding out her gloved hand. “Show me the other document.”

When he handed her the paper with the Cyrillic writing, she scanned it, folded it, and put it in her pocket.

“What did it say?” he asked.

“Orders. His unit had been ordered to deploy from St. Petersburg to southern Germany near the end of the war. To ‘retrieve items of interest’ from the bunker before the American invasion.”

“From St. Petersburg?” Rhun asked.

He and Nadia exchanged a long glance, both their faces worried.

Then Nadia waved toward the door. “We’ve learned what we can here,” she said. “We move on.”

Erin looked around in dismay. The archaeologist in her hated that she had not photographed the room, mapped things properly, and made an inventory of the contents. “But there might be more clues to—”

“We must search as many rooms as we can before the Belial find us.” Rhun stopped halfway out the door. “Brother Leopold will do a more thorough inventory later, if there is time.”

Jordan stayed close behind Erin as she followed Rhun back into the long tunnel.

The Sanguinists proceeded more quickly now. Something had clearly spooked them. Erin shared an uneasy look with Jordan. Anything that made a trio with powers like theirs nervous had to be terrifying.

Moving down the tunnel, they cleared another room: sleeping quarters filled with bunks. Erin counted four dead German soldiers, two still in their bunks, two halfway to the door. Two dead Russians were slumped against the wall.

Whatever transpired here, it had been hard fought.

Metal chests next to the bunks stored folded clothes, cigarette packs, matches, a few risqué postcards, more letters, and plenty of pictures of women and children, a sad reminder of those who had sat at home awaiting word on their loved ones.

Erin collected as many letters as she could and crammed them into her pockets, hoping that the water wouldn’t cause the faded ink to run.

They also discovered books — a manual on caring for a rifle, a novel in German, an instruction pamphlet on venereal diseases — but nothing that fit the description of the Blood Gospel.

Defeated and heavyhearted from all the slaughter, Erin returned to the corridor. The others filed out with her.

A heavy rustling, like the shaking of curtains, accompanied by a faint and distant squeaking filled the corridor. The hairs on the back of her neck immediately stood on end.

“Jordan?”

“I hear it, too,” he said. “Rats?”

Nadia herded them behind her. “No.”

A pace ahead of them, Emmanuel sniffed the air, shoulders thrown back, neck arched, and head raised, like a dog.

Or a grimwolf.

Erin drew in a deep breath, but she only smelled mildew and wet concrete. What could he smell that she could not?

“What is it?” Jordan asked.

“Blasphemare,” Nadia said. “The tainted ones.”

“Another grimwolf?” Jordan moved his machine pistol into ready position.

“No.” Nadia’s eyes flashed at Erin, wholly inhuman at that moment. “Icarops.”

Jordan looked confused by the foreign word.

Rhun clarified, cold and matter-of-fact. “Icarops are bats whose nature has been twisted by strigoi blood.”

Erin’s heart clenched into a knot.

He was talking about blasphemare bats.

Erin remembered the monstrous wolf in the moonlit desert — its fetid breath, its teeth, its muscled bulk. This time, with wings. She shuddered.

“Just when you think it can’t get any weirder.” Jordan switched on the light attached to the barrel of his Heckler & Koch machine pistol. “How do we proceed?”

“Quickly, I would recommend,” Nadia said. “And quietly.”

They set off down the tunnel — toward the source of the noise.

Jordan kept his weapon fixed in front, readying himself.

“Will guns kill them?” Erin whispered.

Emmanuel snorted.

Not helpful.

“Even silver bullets will only enrage them,” Nadia said. “A knife is a better tool.”

Jordan leaned down and pulled the silver Bowie knife from his boot sheath.

Erin drew her knife, too.

“I don’t like the idea of a corrupted bat getting close enough to kill it with a blade,” Jordan said. “I think I’d rather take them out with an intercontinental ballistic missile.”

“When they come,” Nadia warned, her voice low and her tone matter-of-fact, “lie down on the floor. We’ll keep them off you as best we can.”

“Not happening.” Jordan hefted his knife. “But thanks for the offer.”

Nadia lifted her thin shoulders in a shrug.

Erin agreed with Jordan. She had no intention of lying on her stomach, waiting for a bat to chew through her spinal cord. She’d rather take her chances standing up, with a knife in her hand.

The Sanguinists were now moving so quickly that she and Jordan had to run to keep up with them.

Soon they arrived at the intersection of another cross tunnel.

“We must have reached the base of the diamond,” she said, picturing the Odal rune, running a map of their progress in her head like a schematic.

From the air, this crossing of the two tunnels must look like a giant X—hopefully as in X marks the spot, Erin thought.

“This feels like the most likely place to hide something,” she said.

She cast her light across the floor but found only featureless concrete. She splashed her beam across the walls and ceiling. Nothing indicated a special or sacred hiding place at this intersection.

Jordan understood. “We’ll have to check all three of these next corridors. Search every door.”

Before they could take another step, though, screeches filled the air — coming from all three tunnels ahead.

There was no escape.

The smell reached them first, thrust forward by the muscular beat of hundreds of wings. The stench threatened to knock Jordan to his knees — a foul combination of the fetid bite of urine and the bloated ripeness of corpses left in the sun. He fought his heaving stomach, wondering if this reek was as much a weapon of these beasts as their teeth and claws, meant to incapacitate their prey.

He refused to succumb.

It was more than his life in danger.

With a shaky hand he pushed Erin behind him so that she was shielded both by him and the Sanguinist triad. Her flashlight beam cut across the tunnel to the left, to the right, searching for a door.

No such luck.

Then darkness consumed the light, flowing up the tunnels on all sides. A handful of winged pieces of shadow broke from the pack and rushed forward. They swept high, over the heads of the Sanguinists, as if they had no interest in creatures without heartbeats.

Still, silver flashed through the air, slicing through wing and body.

Black blood rained.

Furred bodies fell, twisting, screeching, tumbling.

One creature made it through the silver gauntlet, diving through its dying brethren. Blinded by the light here, it struck a wall behind them and slid to the floor, flipping immediately around. It might be driven sightless by the shine, but it could still hear.

It hissed at Jordan, who again sheltered Erin behind him.

It was the size of a large cat, with a massive wingspan of two meters. It rushed at him, scrabbling on its hind legs and the hard angle of its wings. The bat’s eyes glowed red, and its needlelike teeth shimmered in the light. A high-pitched screech burst from its slathering jaws as it launched itself at him.

Jordan lashed out with his Bowie knife, slicing across the creature’s throat. Blood burst from the wound, but the bat’s bulk still struck at him, knocking him back a step. He had come close to decapitating the beast in a single blow. Still, leathery wings tried to fold around him. Claws dug at his body, but the thick skin of his duster protected him.

Finally, death claimed the creature, and it fell away.

Jordan turned to find a hellish winged fury sweeping in a dark tide from three directions, breaking upon the triad in front. Each Sanguinist faced a different tunnel.

Erin stood in the center of them, her face a mask of terror.

Jordan ducked to her side, ready to defend her as devoutly as the trio.

Bats now swirled overhead in a shadowy cluster of wings, claws, and glowing eyes. The horde held back for the moment, possibly smelling the blood of their foul brothers, hearing their death cries.

Even now, the shrill squeaks set Jordan’s teeth to aching.

He tried to find a single animal to focus on, but they darted back and forth too quickly.

Erin shone her light above. The bats shied from the beam, swooping away, as if it stung — and maybe the brightness did.

“Vespertilionidae,” she gasped, as if the word were an incantation. “Vesper bats. Never seen them more than a tenth of this size.”

“How do you—”

“I work in caves a lot,” she explained.

Her light jumped back and forth. Each time it struck a bat’s eyes, the animal retreated.

“They’re never aggressive like this.”

Jordan pointed his submachine gun up, the beam from the weapon scattering them, too. “Because you work around normal bats, not friggin’ tainted ones.”

“They’re regrouping faster each time.” Erin spoke like an objective researcher, but her voice was pitched an octave higher than usual. “They’re growing accustomed to the light.”

“Let them come.” Nadia had pulled off her silver chain belt and held it in one gloved hand. She fingered each silvery link like the beads of a rosary. “Waiting is wearing to my nerves.”

“Patience,” Rhun said. “Let’s walk farther ahead, search for a door, somewhere to shelter. Perhaps they won’t attack.”

“If you can,” Erin suggested, “look for a door on the right side of the passageway, something that might lead into the center of the Odal diamond.”

Jordan had to hand it to her. Even shrouded within a black cloak of shrieking death, she never took her eye off the ball. She still sought the treasure that was hidden in the bunker.

Emmanuel took a step forward, one hand upraised. A dagger glinted from his fist.

Nadia moved next to him, weight balanced, graceful as a ballerina.

Together, the five of them made slow progress down the tunnel, all eyes intent on the bats massed above them.

Jordan longed to fire his weapon, but he was worried about ricochets, and concerned, too, about provoking the bats. He remembered Nadia’s earlier warning that bullets would not kill them. Their best chance lay in reaching—

Without a sound, the bats dove.

Again, they ignored the Sanguinists and zeroed in on the pair at the center of the triad.

They came for Erin’s face.

And Jordan’s.

Overhead, Nadia twirled her belt. Jordan now recognized it as a silver chain whip. With her preternatural speed and strength, she wielded the weapon like it was a Cuisinart. Bats who came too close were shredded and torn apart.

Learning its lesson, the horde retreated.

Nadia’s whip caught one last straggler across its gray back, snagging the creature from the air and smashing it against the concrete wall.

Meanwhile, Rhun and Emmanuel kept the path open ahead, continuing to fight through the shadowy forms with silver blades in both hands.

Jordan defended the rear as best he could with his Bowie knife. The high-pitched shrieking stabbed his ears. Despite the protection of his leather duster, his hands and face bore countless scratches.

It now seemed as if for every bat taken down, two took its place.

Erin plunged her knife into the belly of one that slipped past Jordan. Its sharp caninelike fangs snapped closed by her nose before it thudded to the floor.

Jordan grabbed another bat as it tried to fly past, its skin cold and dry, like a dead lizard. He swallowed revulsion and slashed at it with his knife. It pivoted its muscle-bound neck and sank its teeth into the fleshy part of his thumb. Pain shot up his arm.

He slammed his hand against the concrete wall, once, twice, three times, but the bat’s teeth stayed firm. It would not knock loose. He felt teeth scrape bone, threatening to take off his thumb. Blood ran down the inside of his coat to his elbow. Another bat glanced off the side of his head, opening up a stinging wound across his temple.

Erin came to his aid. She grasped the bat attached to his hand by its ears. She thrust her knife under its chin and drew the blade downward. Black blood sprayed the wall, and the teeth finally let go.

“Forward!” Rhun called from a step away — which at the moment felt like an impassible distance. “A door ahead! To the right!”

Emmanuel drove forward, leading the charge. Bats flew at Emmanuel’s face, his neck, his hands. But they seemed reluctant to bite him, not that the tall man didn’t sustain wounds. His entire form dripped blood, his blond hair black with it.

Another of the horde reached past Jordan’s tiring arm. Fangs locked onto his wrist. They didn’t seem to have any problem biting him.

Rhun’s knife flashed through the air, slicing through wings and fur, freeing him.

But the bats never slowed.

Jordan’s arm trembled, weakening — and still the bats came.

34

Bathory knelt beside the fog-shrouded Bavarian lake.

Her finger touched drag marks left in the mud. Something wide and heavy had been hauled along the bank here — and recently. Water had seeped in to fill the lines, but no leaves or pine needles marred the surface; nor animal tracks.

Straightening, she motioned for her troops to stay back while she circled the area where the boat had entered the water. She counted footprints, recognizing American military boots, a set of Converse sneakers, and three others in handmade boots, two large and one small. Judging by the depth of the impressions, she guessed two women and three men.

But Bathory hated to make assumptions.

She followed the tracks to the water’s edge. She peered into the gauzy fog, but could see no farther than a few yards, cursing the mountain mists. Earlier, she’d almost missed Rhun and his companions as they fled under the cloak of fog. Until the roar of the motorcycle engines gave them away.

She turned to her second in command. “Do you hear anything, Tarek?”

He cocked his head to the side as if listening. “Not a heartbeat out there.”

But was he telling the truth, or was he lying to keep her from finding the book?

Magor? she cast out silently.

The wolf pawed the ground and ducked his head. He also heard nothing. She patted his warm flank. Her vehicle had been no match for speeding motorcycles across this harsh terrain. It had taken Magor’s nose to track her quarry this far. While the wolf’s keen senses had served her well, he was no more able to sense across water than she was able to see in fog.

She studied the smooth lake again. It seemed that the Sanguinists had procured a boat and had a good head start.

That presented a new challenge.

“Tarek, bring up a map of the lake.”

He handed her his cell with a satellite picture. The lake had no islands. So either the Sanguinists had used the boat to cross to the other side, or they had searched for something underwater. A problem, as she had no boat, nor any idea of where to steal one. Searching would waste precious time.

Tarek growled deep in his throat, impatient. Strigoi hated to wait. The others caught his insolence and shifted from foot to foot.

She stared him down until he fell silent — then commanded him for good measure: “Disable the motorcycles. But stay within hearing.”

Magor slumped to his haunches next to her, his reddish-golden eyes staring across the water. She rested her free hand atop his head, then returned her gaze to the on-screen image. Perhaps she could learn why the Sanguinists had chosen this place.

She zoomed in on the satellite image and scrolled around to view the terrain surrounding the lake. The picture had been taken in summer. Dark green trees obscured the ground. No clearings seemed significant.

“The bikes won’t run again,” Tarek called.

“Good,” she answered. When they returned, the Sanguinists would have no quick way to escape.

She zoomed in tighter on the map, her eye caught by a long straight line of lighter green. The trees were different in this spot. Did that mean water? Or were the trees younger? She connected that line with another line, then another, almost too faint to see.

She smiled at her own brilliance as she recognized the pattern.

It was a corner of the design depicted on the Nazi medallion. The rest appeared to extend under the lake.

So that’s why they came out here.

In her mind’s eye, she completed the shape of the rune. On the screen, she ran one long fingernail around the diamond shape. She realized something of great interest. The two legs of the rune — one stretched and ended under the lake, but the other ran underground and terminated on the far side of the hill across the lake. The terrain maps showed that area to be heavily wooded. No man-made structures, just trees and boulders, but that didn’t mean something wasn’t still buried there.

She glanced to her small army, a force strong enough to dig for hours without tiring. She had to take the gamble. She stared across the lake to the distant hills.

If she was right, this subterranean vault might have a back door.

35

In the echo chamber of the cavernous concrete tunnels, Rhun’s senses swam and wavered, as if he were fighting underwater. Ultrasonic shrieking tore into his skull. The flurry of beating wings and writhing bodies, splattered with a rain of blood, made it near impossible to focus.

But he fought through the noise by concentrating on one face: scared, bloodied, and fierce.

Erin Granger.

Rhun reached her and swatted a bat away from her chest with all the strength in his arm, cracking hollow bones and crushing the creature’s face. Although Erin’s long jacket continued to protect all but her hands and head, he watched the frantic thrum of her heartbeat in her throat, heard the gasp of her breath. Their group could not last much longer.

Erin twirled before him, struggling with another icarops that clung to her back, clawing its way toward her neck.

Her flashlight jerked as she struggled, illuminating curtains of bats overhead.

Thousands.

He grabbed her, threw her across his back, and shouldered her through the dark doorway, where Emmanuel was fighting with his blade. At his side, Nadia danced amid a shimmer of whirling silver death.

“Get the soldier inside!” Rhun yelled to his sister of the cloth.

He dropped Erin roughly, deliberately, onto her back, crushing the icarops with a sharp squeal and a wash of blood. The soldier skidded across the floor next, protected by his own leathers. He rolled to bash a bat from his shoulder with his flashlight, then finished with a sharp blow of the butt of his gun.

A reverberating crash behind Rhun shook the air, telling him that Nadia had slammed the door. Emmanuel leaned his back against it. The room was square, small, but secure for the moment. An open archway at the rear of the room led into yet another chamber, but Rhun heard no heartbeats, no movement. The air smelled dead and still, tainted by old guano.

They should be safe for a few moments.

Nadia finished clearing the smattering of bats that had made it into the room with them.

The wooden door muffled the squealing of the bats outside, but claws continued to scrabble and teeth to gnaw as the horde fought to reach them.

Rhun understood that desire. Erin’s heartbeat continued fast but strong. Next to her the soldier’s heart still raced. The fragrance of blood wafting from her and the soldier threatened to overpower him.

He took a step back, away from the bleeding pair.

Erin stood and stumbled to Jordan’s side. “Are you hurt?”

He still sat on the ground. “Just my pride,” he said. “Give it a minute.”

“Did the Belial do this?” Erin turned toward Rhun, bringing with her another drift of blood scent.

He swallowed and retreated another step.

Nadia answered, wiping her chain across her thigh before securing it back around her waist like a belt. “It would take years to make that many blasphemare. It was not those who hunted you in Masada who made these creatures.”

Rhun nudged a dead bat with his toe. “She is right. Some of these icarops are decades old.”

“So we are not alone down here.” Emmanuel’s deep voice overrode theirs. “One or more strigoi are using this structure as a nest.”

“More good news,” Jordan said, fingering his scalp. “But these bat bites won’t turn us into strigoi, right?”

Erin aimed her light at him. Fresh blood streamed from his hands and temple. Slashes marked the top of her body, too.

Rhun flinched, having to look away from the gleaming red blood. He spoke to the wall. “No. To become a strigoi, you must be drained by one, then drink his blood. Or her blood. You are safe from that fate.”

Nadia reached a hand down and hauled the sergeant to his feet, seeming to sense that Rhun did not dare get any closer to him. “Are your wounds serious, Sergeant?”

Jordan directed his light at the cut on his hand. “Nothing I can’t fix with a big enough Band-Aid. How about you, Erin? You okay?”

“Mostly.” She wiped the back of her hand on her jeans. “But why didn’t the bats attack you three?”

“An intriguing question.” Emmanuel’s body rocked forward as bats thumped and squealed against the door. “It might be your heartbeats. Or perhaps they have been trained to attack humans.”

Jordan winced. “Trained attack bats?”

“Did you prefer the wolf?” Erin pulled his miniature first-aid kit out of his pocket.

“A little,” he said. “Yes.”

Rhun’s head was swimming with the scent of their blood. He stepped back toward the door.

“Your wine,” Nadia reminded him.

He reached to his thigh, freed his wineskin, and took a quick sip, enough to steady him, but hopefully not enough to trigger a penance. Christ’s blood burned down his throat, the warmth spreading through him — but thankfully no memories came.

“Hold out your hand,” Erin said to Jordan. “Let me see.”

The soldier pointed his flashlight at the wound on his thumb. “I think the teeth missed all the important parts. Stings like the devil, though.”

“They are the devil’s work,” Emmanuel said, still crouched at the door. He fingered his rosary and began to pray.

Nadia flattened her back against the wall, her eyes fixed on the bats on the floor, also doing her best to ignore the small drops of fresh blood striking the concrete, as loud as raindrops on a tin roof.

Here was why humans could not be included in Sanguinist expeditions. Rhun fought down his anger, much of it directed at Bernard for forcing this pair upon them. The Cardinal did not understand life in the field.

“Did you have a recent tetanus shot?” Erin whispered.

“Sure, but not rabies.”

“They’re not rabid,” Nadia said, not looking up.

Erin finished bandaging his thumb. “Luckily, it’s your left hand.”

“The expendable one?” The soldier grinned at her. “What about that gash at my hairline?”

“Put your head down.” She examined it and concluded her assessment. “Bloody, but not deep.”

Rhun tried not to notice how gently she wiped the scalp wound clean or how lightly her hands closed it with butterfly bandages. Every motion made it obvious that she cared for the soldier.

“Now your turn,” the soldier said once she was done. He switched places with her, taking up the first-aid kit. “Let me look at you.”

Jordan’s bandaged hand slid along Erin’s face and scalp, quickening her pulse.

She retreated and lifted her arm between them. “They only bit my hand.”

With a nod, Jordan quickly wrapped her injury.

“If you two are quite finished …,” Emmanuel said, irritated. “Shall we discuss our next move?”

Behind him, claws continued to dig at the door.

The bats were almost through.

As Jordan watched, a fist-size section of the door splintered and gave way. Through the opening, a scabrous head pushed into view, screeching, ears unfolding, teeth gnashing.

Emmanuel slashed out with his short sword, and the bat’s head rolled to the floor.

Jordan helped Erin to her feet and backed away as another bat stuck its head through the hole.

“Bastard chewed through the door,” he said. “That’s dedication.”

Rhun nodded toward the shadowy rear of their space. “There is an open archway back there. Seek shelter in the next room.”

Jordan pointed his light, noting the dark doorway for the first time. The archway led who knew where, but at least bats weren’t coming through it. And if Rhun sensed nothing of menace back there, that was good enough for him.

“Make haste.” Emmanuel spoke through gritted teeth as more of the door began to disintegrate, torn apart by determined teeth and claws.

Nadia and Rhun went to his aid.

Jordan and Erin crossed and stood at the threshold, fearing to enter alone. Jordan played his light across the space, discovering that Rhun’s keen senses proved true. The archway did lead to another room — a large circular space, empty and cavernous — but as he played his beam along the curved wall, an awful truth became evident.

There was no other exit.

It was a dead end.

“There’s no way out of here!” Erin called back to Rhun.

Her eyes watered from the sharp smell of ammonia in the room.

Bat guano.

She took a few steps inside, trailed by Jordan. Her flashlight illuminated a round chamber with a domed roof. She was immediately struck by two details. The chamber was the same shape and size as the tomb in Masada. But here, fine white marble covered every surface: the floor, walls, and ceiling.

She imagined it must have been a beautiful space once, but now dark guano streaked the walls and piled up in corners.

She also noted a second detail, her heart beating faster, again picturing the schematic of the Odal rune in her head.

“What is wrong?” Rhun shouted back.

Erin glanced back. Had he felt the stirring of her excitement?

She answered him, not bothering to shout this time, knowing he would hear her fine at a normal speaking volume: “I believe this chamber lies in the exact center of the diamond part of the Odal rune.”

Their path here glowed in her mind’s eye.

Rhun understood. “Search for the book. Time runs short! If we cannot defend this door, we may have to flee back to the tunnel and seek a more secure shelter.”

Granted his permission and responding to his urgency, she hurried inside, her attention already drawn to the most dramatic object, the tallest item, in the room: a life-size marble crucifix with a shockingly emaciated Christ nailed to it, sculpted of the whitest marble. Every detail on his body was faultlessly rendered, from his perfectly formed muscles to the deep wound on his side. Unlike Christ, though, this figure was naked, hairless as a newborn, giving the image a stylized beauty, a mix of godlike innocence and human agony.

She moved her light to follow the gaze of his lowered head. The sculpture looked down upon a tall stone pedestal with a splayed top. Erin knew that shape, having just seen it hours ago. It matched the Ahnenerbe pin in Leopold’s office, the one depicting a column supporting on open book.

The monk had said the emblem’s pedestal represented an important Ahnenerbe goal: to document Aryan history and heritage. But he also said it could symbolize “a great mystery, some occult book of great power held by them.”

Breathless, Erin knew she was looking at the source of that Ahnenerbe symbol.

From the way the pedestal’s top was tilted toward the statue and away from her, she could not tell if anything rested there.

“We should stay by the door,” Jordan warned. “In case we have to make a run for it.”

She did not slow, did not hesitate. Nothing would stop her from reaching that pedestal and seeing for herself what lay there — possibly a book written in Christ’s own blood.

Jordan swore under his breath and followed her deeper inside.

The cross and column rested upon a dais, a square marble base six feet across. That both objects should have been placed on a stage demonstrated their importance. But why would the Nazis erect a life-size crucifix? Were they guarding something they considered sacred and holy?

Erin had to find out.

She jumped up onto the stage, wincing when her feet ground into pieces of broken rock. Careful not to step on anything else, she circled the pedestal.

As she came around, holding her breath, her light glowed across the upper surface of the marble lectern.

Then her heart sank.

It was empty.

“What did you find?” Jordan called to her from the base of the dais, but his face remained turned toward the vestibule, where the Sanguinists fought to keep the bats at bay.

Erin stepped forward and ran her fingertips across the empty surface of the lectern. She felt the indentation along the top, as if something was meant to rest there, an object roughly of the dimensions described by Rhun.

“The book was here,” she mumbled.

“What?” Jordan asked.

Defeated, she stepped back, her heel crushing another chunk of debris underfoot. She glanced down, shining her light. Fragments of gray rock lay scattered around the pedestal. Focused now, she saw that they were not natural stone, but something man-made. She knelt and carefully picked up one shard.

Most of the others strewn on the floor were less than an inch thick and ashy in hue. She retrieved a larger piece and rolled it around in her palm, judging the material.

Gray. Concrete. If ancient, probably lime and ash.

Could these pieces date to the time of the Blood Gospel? To know for sure, she would have to do a proper analysis somewhere else, but for now she improvised.

She scratched a thumbnail over one corner and sniffed at the abraded edge.

A familiar spicy scent struck her deeply, almost causing her eyes to tear.

Frankincense.

Her heartbeat sped up. There had been traces of frankincense in the tomb in Masada, common enough in ancient burials.

But not in Nazi bunkers.

She fought to keep her composure, kicking herself mentally for jumping on the dais like a lumbering ox, especially after years of scolding her students for the most minor violations of the integrity of a site.

She turned the shard over. The piece was roughly triangular, like the corner of a box. Frozen in place, as if she were crouching in the middle of a minefield, she studied the other pieces on the floor. Three other triangles rested nearby, along with other pieces.

What if the triangles were corners?

If so, maybe they had been part of a box.

A box that might have held a book.

She stared up at the empty lectern. Had the marauding Russians come upon what was hidden here? Smashed open what they found and stole what was inside?

Despairing, she looked to the crucifix for answers. The figure on the cross was as skeletal as a concentration-camp victim, thinner than any representation of Christ she had ever seen. Black nails pinned each bony hand to the cross, and a larger spike had been driven deep through the figure’s overlapping feet. Burgundy paint glistened around his wounds. She moved the light up, drawn to the nearly featureless face, eyes and mouth barely demarcated by slits, the nostrils even thinner — depicted here was a perfect rendition of endless suffering.

She had an irrational urge to cut the statue down, to comfort that figure.

Then a sharp pain burst in her hand. She raised it to the light, realizing she had sliced her thumb on the shard from clenching her fist too hard.

Reminded of her duty, she turned her back on the cross and began gathering the broken pieces from the dais, scooping them up and stuffing them in her pockets. She noted that some had writing on one side, but she would have to decipher them later.

Jordan noted her work and began to climb onto the stage with her.

“Don’t!” she warned, fearful of any further destruction to the clues left here by the Russians.

With enough time, she might—

Rhun’s shout reached them, full of hopelessness. “The bats are through the door.”

36

Rhun fled from the front edge of a furious storm behind him.

Wings battered his body; claws and teeth tore at flesh and clothes.

He burst through the arched doorway, shadowed by Nadia and Emmanuel. The horde of icarops thundered past him, beating by with muscular wings. The mass fled upward and filled the arched dome of the room with fluttering shadows.

Rhun’s sharp eyes took in the chamber with a glance, recognizing a dark mirror of the Masada tomb, a despoiled ruin of that sacred space. Fury stoked inside him, but fear extinguished it.

In the center of the room, he saw Erin crouching atop a stage behind a tall pedestal, her face upturned to the bats. Her guardian, Jordan, leaped atop the dais, ready to shelter her. A futile gesture. The soldier could not hope to defeat the number of icarops gathered here.

None of them could.

As if knowing this, the icarops horde crashed down upon the exposed pair.

“Arrêtez …!”

The single word of command shattered through the hissing screams of the bats and drove back their attack. The black horde shredded apart around Erin and Jordan and wheeled away, flapping to the streaked walls and the ceiling. There, sharp claws scrabbled for pitted roosts. Wings folded over fur, and the icarops hung from every surface. Oily red-black eyes stared down.

With his first indrawn breath, the stench hit Rhun. He drew breath again. Another smell lurked under the tainted blood of the icarops and the sharp smell of their waste.

A familiar one.

Across the chamber, Jordan scanned the room, his shoulders hunched against the fluttering mass above. “Who yelled?”

The answer came from Erin, who pointed toward the crucifix. “Look!”

There on the cross, the marble sculpture moved. A head lifted, revealing a ravaged face, skin shriveled tight around hard-edged bone. Erin’s hand rose to cover her throat, as if she knew what hung there.

Nadia stopped still next to Rhun, and Emmanuel staggered back a pace.

The Sanguinists knew, too.

As if obeying a silent command, Rhun rushed forward, flanked by Emmanuel and Nadia.

On the cross, eyelids opened, rough slits in that leathery visage. And from those cracks, a glimmer of life still shone — the little that remained. The glassy blue stare found Rhun and settled on him with a look of bottomless grief.

Those despairing eyes left no doubt about who it was that hung on that ghastly cross.

Rhun filled out the face, crowned it with silver hair, made the sunken lips smile with the knowledge of untold ages. In his mind, he heard that once-vigorous voice explaining the mysteries of history, the destiny of the Sanguinists. In its time, this body had housed a powerful priest.

Father Piers.

A friend for centuries.

The scholar had disappeared seventy years ago on an expedition to find the Blood Gospel. When he had not returned, the Church had declared him dead. Instead, it seemed that the Nazis had captured him, then abandoned him to suffer here for decades.

Emmanuel fell to his knees in supplication. “Father Piers … how can it be …?”

The old priest’s head sagged again, as if he were unable to hold his heavy skull up any longer. Faded eyes found Emmanuel. “Mein Sohn?” he croaked, throat clearly unaccustomed to forming words.

My son.

Tears ran down Emmanuel’s face, reminding Rhun that Father Piers had found and recruited Emmanuel into the Sanguinist fold. He was as much Emmanuel’s father as his savior.

Emmanuel reached toward the blackened spike hammered through the priest’s bare feet. Another nail impaled each palm. Droplets of dark, dried blood caked around his wounds.

“Careful.” Nadia stood near them. “He’s been secured with silver.”

Emmanuel pulled on the thick spike that bound the priest’s feet, burning his own fingers.

Nadia yanked him back. “Not yet.”

He hissed at her, showing fangs. “Look at him. Has he not suffered enough?”

“The question,” Nadia said evenly, “is why has he suffered? Who nailed him here and why?”

“Libri … verlassen …” It seemed that Piers struggled as much with his tongue as with his mind, tripping through various languages as madness danced behind the glaze of his eyes.

Rhun stared up at the ruins of the Sanguinist scholar. “Take him down.”

Nadia looked ready to object, but Rhun knelt and gently supported the old priest’s feet. Emmanuel pulled the spike from the priest’s feet and tossed it aside, then stood, reaching for the hands.

Piers remained oblivious. His eyes rolled toward the arched roof and its black decorations. “Meine Kinder … they have brought you.” An exultant tone threaded through his feeble words. “To save me …”

Nadia’s face hardened. She looked in the direction of the battered priest’s gaze — to the horde of the icarops. “It was Father Piers who created these unholy creatures.”

“Blasphemare?” Emmanuel’s fingers hesitated over the nail that lanced Piers’s left palm. “But that is forbidden.”

Rhun was less interested in blasphemy than he was in answers. “He had no choice. He must have had to feed to survive all those decades alone on the cross. What else would he have here to feed upon but the bats.”

He pictured the priest drawing what little sustenance he could from the dark denizens of this tomb, eventually bending them to his will as the decades passed, twisting them to serve him, using their companionship to anchor what little sanity he could retain in this dark isolation.

Long ago, Rhun had starved himself almost to death in penance. He remembered the pain, and he could not fault Piers for making the icarops in order to survive. It had been the only way.

“How long has he been up there?” Erin’s face had gone white.

“Since the Nazis left him, I imagine.” Nadia did not move to help.

Rhun pulled the nailed spike out of Piers’s right palm while Emmanuel worked on his left. Dark blood flowed down the old man’s hand. Rhun tried to be gentle. The wounded priest had little blood left to lose.

“What did he do to deserve this fate?” Jordan asked.

“That is the salient question.” Nadia stood in front of Piers and looked up into his gaunt face, her voice rising. “What did you do to come to be nailed here, Father?”

The memory of the tomb at Masada sliced through Rhun: the strigoi girl pinned to the wall by silver spikes, the old gas mask crushed under rock. Had Piers broken under torture? Had he told the Nazis where to find the book, what safeguards to expect, what they needed to do to overcome the millennia-old protections and retrieve it?

Piers whimpered with every movement of the nail. Rhun knew firsthand the pain of silver. Piers had endured the burning agony of silver for almost seventy years. Like Jesus, he had done his penance on a cross.

The last spike came free, and Emmanuel threw it across the chamber. Rhun caught Piers’s slight weight against his shoulder.

Emmanuel tore off his own damp cassock, revealing his leather armor, and wrapped the cassock around the ancient priest. Rhun lowered him to the ground. Emmanuel reached for his wine flask, but Nadia stopped him.

“He’s no longer holy,” she said. “The wine would do more harm than good.”

Emmanuel cradled Piers in his arms. “What have they done to you?”

“Blut und bone,” the old man mumbled. “Libri.”

Beside him, Erin stirred. “Libri? That’s Greek for ‘book.’ Does his crucifixion here have something to do with the Gospel?”

Rhun knew that it did.

Erin held out her hand toward Rhun. In her palm rested a shard of ashy stone. “I found these accretions of lime and ash, an ancient form of concrete, broken into pieces around the pedestal. It might be that the Gospel was encased in a block of such stone and someone broke it free, right here in this room. Could Father Piers have been crucified here as the guardian of it, like the little girl in Masada?”

“Only he knows,” Rhun answered. “And I don’t know what’s left of his mind.”

“Then heal him.”

“Such matters may be beyond me, beyond even the Church.”

Rhun took the shard and examined it. His fingertips as much as his eyes picked out the Aramaic lettering impressed on one side. If his heart still beat, it would have quickened.

The book had been here. Someone had found it and removed its covering. But had they opened it?

That could not be. If it had happened, the thieves of Heaven would have claimed its power. But who had taken it?

He needed the answer — and Erin was right.

Only one person could supply it.

“Father Piers?” he intoned, trying to draw a moment of lucidity from him. “Can you hear me?”

The old man’s eyes slid closed. “Pride … shameful pride.”

What was Piers talking about? Did he mean the hubris of the Nazis, or did he mean something much worse?

“How did the Nazis capture you?” Rhun pressed. “Did you tell them of the book?”

“Es ist noch kein Buch,” Piers whispered through bloodless lips.

“It is not a book,” Jordan translated.

“They must have tortured him, Rhun,” Emmanuel said. “Just as you are doing now. We must heal him before you disturb him with questions.”

“Not yet,” Father Piers said. “Not yet a book.”

Nadia glanced at the marble walls as if they held windows. “Sunrise comes soon. Do you feel it?”

Rhun nodded. His body had begun to weaken. Christ’s grace allowed them to walk under the day’s sun, but because of their taint, they were always strongest at night.

“I like the sound of sunrise,” Jordan said.

“We can’t take Piers out into the new day,” Nadia said. “He’s no longer blessed by Christ’s blood. The sun would destroy him.”

“Then we hunker down here.” Jordan glanced uneasily at the ceiling. “It’s not a five-star hotel, but as long as the bats seem calm, I think we can—”

“He will die before nightfall,” Emmanuel said, and gestured toward the icarops horde rustling on the walls. “Unless he feeds off those cursed creatures.”

“And I will not allow that,” Nadia said. “It is a sin.”

“And I will not leave Piers to die in sin.” Emmanuel drew his knife, threatening her.

Rhun stepped between them and held his hands up. “If we hurry, we can still reach the chapel in Harmsfeld. We can sanctify him there. After that, he can partake of Christ’s blood again.”

“What if he cannot be sanctified?” Nadia practically spat out the words. “What if he was no pawn of the Nazis—”

Rhun held up a hand to silence her, but she would not be silenced.

“What if he sought them out?”

“We shall see,” Rhun said. Nadia had spoken his deepest fears, that Piers’s intellectual pride had led him into forming an alliance with the Nazis. Rhun knew that pride all too well — and where it could lead even a devout Sanguinist.

“Into formation,” he ordered the others. “We must reach the church at Harmsfeld before sunrise.”

Out of long habit, Emmanuel and Nadia stepped into their places, Emmanuel in front, Nadia to his left. Rhun met Jordan’s eyes and jerked his head toward Piers.

They stepped out of the defiled chamber, through the vestibule, and back into the dark concrete tunnel.

Jordan gathered up Piers, still wrapped in Emmanuel’s cassock, and followed with Erin close behind.

“Ich habe Euch betrogen,” Piers whispered. “Stolz. Buch.”

Rhun heard Jordan translate. “I have betrayed you all. Pride. Book.”

Emmanuel stopped and glanced back at Piers. Tears shone in his eyes. Rhun touched his arm. Piers had all but admitted it just then, that he had betrayed their order to the Nazis.

Rhun turned away, trying to understand. Had his friend’s all-consuming desire to be the first to find the book led him into his unholy alliance with the Ahnenerbe? Had the Germans betrayed him in the end? Rhun remembered his addled words. It is not a book. Did those words indicate that the Nazis had failed here somehow? As a punishment, did they crucify Piers?

No matter the outcome, if Piers had come here of his own free will, they might never be able to sanctify him enough for him to return to the Sanguinist fold.

Piers cocked his head to the left as they reached the crossroad of corridors. “Sortie.”

French for “exit.”

Erin must have understood. He was attempting to direct them to a way out.

She knelt and drew the Odal rune in the dust with her finger. She pointed to it. “Can you show me where the exit is, Piers?”

Jordan held Piers so that he could see the rune. The old man stretched one bone-thin finger to the left leg of the rune. Their team had entered through the right.

“There’s a second exit,” Erin said, looking up hopefully. “In the other leg of the rune. It must be how his bats came and went.”

Piers closed his paper-white eyelids, and his head fell back on Jordan’s shoulder.

“If we hurry,” Rhun said, “perhaps we can get him to the Harmsfeld chapel before sunrise.”

But, even so, a fear nagged at Rhun.

Was it already too late to save Father Piers’s soul?

37

Bathory gathered her sable-fur coat around her slender form and waited in the dark woods. To the east, the skies had already begun to pale. From the uneasy glances of her restless troops in that direction, it was clear they knew they had only a quarter hour left before sunrise.

The air had turned bitterly cold, as if night sought to concentrate its chill against the coming day. Bathory’s hot breath steamed from her lips — same as the panting wolf, blowing white into the dark forest. The same could not be said of the rest of her forces. They remained as cold and still as the forest as they waited, but not all were equally quiet.

“We must go. Now.” Tarek loomed next to her, his mouth curled in a snarl.

His brother, Rafik, kept tight to his older brother’s legs, his lips still blistered from the intimate moment Bathory had shared with him.

Bathory shook her head. So far, no word had been radioed from the lookout she had left by the motorcycles. The Sanguinists had not returned that way — and she didn’t expect them to. She was certain this was the place where the rabbits would leave the warren.

In her gut, she knew it.

“Never follow an animal into its burrow,” she warned.

She kept her eyes fixed on the bunker door. Magor had discovered the hole nestled among some boulders. It was little larger than a badger den, but the sharper senses of Tarek’s men revealed the source of the scent that drew her wolf.

Icarops.

She pictured the foul flock squirming out of that hole each night. Something must have created that horde, something that might still be down there.

Her men had set about widening the hole, digging out the earth that the Nazis had used to bury the hidden door. Once it was cleared, they discovered where the bats had clawed through stone around one edge of the hatch to make their nightly sojourn.

With the way unblocked, it would be easy to push open the hatch from the inside, an invitation to her quarry to make their escape this way.

“We’ll kill them as soon as they step out the door,” she said.

“What if they’re waiting for dawn?” Tarek’s eyes swept the eastern sky, already turning steel gray.

“If they are not out by sunrise, we will enter the bunker,” she promised. Her men would fight best if they knew they must take the bunker or die. “But not until the last moment.”

Her six crossbowmen stood rock-still, three to each side of her, silver arrows at the ready. The larger bolts of a crossbow delivered a deadlier dose of silver than a simple bullet, plus the arrows had the tendency to remain impaled in place rather than passing harmlessly through.

She was not taking any chances with Rhun Korza.

Tarek’s head swiveled to the door. All her troops went on alert.

She heard nothing, but she knew they must.

The bunker door moved forward, pushing its way along the path they had carefully cleared for it.

Three Sanguinists stepped into the forest, Rhun Korza among them.

Bathory counted three more figures behind them, still in the bunker, one carried by another, apparently wounded. But that made no sense — and she didn’t like surprises. Only five had left the abbey, and only five tracks were found at the water’s edge.

So who was this sixth?

Had Korza found someone alive in the bunker?

Then she remembered the icarops.

Was this the mysterious denizen of the bunker?

She kept her hand held high, telling her troops to wait until everyone was out of the bunker. But the last three stayed inside, plainly suspicious.

Korza looked at the ground and knelt, clearly noting where Bathory’s men had disturbed the soil. Before any further suspicions could be raised, she slashed her arm down.

Crossbow bolts whistled with a twang of taut strings. The volley struck the Sanguinist in the lead, nailing him to the large bole of an ancient black pine.

He struggled to free himself, smoke already steaming from his wounds into the cold night.

The bowmen shot another volley, all the bolts striking true, piercing chest, throat, and belly.

The Sanguinist writhed in a fog of his own boiling blood.

That took care of one priest.

Now to kill Korza.

38

“Stay inside!” Rhun shouted, diving through a rain of deadly silver.

A crossbow bolt struck his arm, embedded itself into his forearm. Its touch burned deep into his flesh with the poison of silver. He had known the danger as soon as he found the fresh loam turned at the foot of the door — but he had reacted too slowly.

Someone had been waiting in ambush.

Someone who had expected to fight Sanguinists.

He reached the shelter of a thick linden tree and rolled behind it.

Safe behind the broad trunk, he yanked out the crossbow bolt. More blood than he could spare flowed from the wound, trying to purge his body of the silver’s taint.

He sagged against the tree and glanced left.

As he had hoped, Nadia had reached the shelter of a boulder next to the doorway.

But not Emmanuel.

A dozen silver bolts had skewered him to a pine a few yards away. Smoke boiled from his wounds, enfolding him in a ghostly shroud of his own pained essence.

Rhun knew he could not reach him — and even if he could, death had already laid claim to his old friend and brother of the cloth.

Emmanuel knew this, too. He reached an arm back toward the bunker.

Piers’s voice rasped from out of the darkness. “My son.”

“I forgive you,” Emmanuel whispered.

Rhun hoped that Piers had heard the words and cast a silent prayer to his dying friend.

Then Emmanuel slumped, only the cruel bolts holding him upright.

Behind the boulder, Nadia wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. Like Rhun, she had to accept that Emmanuel was dead, but with that grief came a sliver of joy. He had met the most honorable end for any Sanguinist: death in battle.

Emmanuel had freed his soul.

When he was finished with his prayer, Rhun’s attention snapped to the sound of a single human heart beating out in the forest. There was a human among the strigoi attackers, revealing the true nature of those who attacked them.

The Belial.

But how had they come to find Rhun and his party here?

And how many were hidden in the woods?

Behind him, Erin’s and Jordan’s heartbeats echoed out of the bunker, where they remained sheltered with Piers. They were safe, at least for another moment.

Rhun reached to his thigh and pulled out his wineskin. He needed Christ’s blood to replace what he had just lost. Without it, he could not continue to do battle. But with such a drink, he risked being thrust into the past, helpless and exposed.

Still, he had no choice. He lifted the skin and drank.

Heat burned through him, fortifying him, pushing back the burn of silver with the purity of Christ’s fire. Crimson crept into the edges of his vision.

He fought against the looming threat of penance.

Elisabeta in the fields. Elisabeta by the fire. Elisabeta’s rage.

He tightened his hand around his pectoral cross, begging the pain to keep him present. The world became a shadowy mix of past and present. Images flashed:

… a long bare throat.

… a brick plastered in a closing wall.

… a young girl with a raspberry blemish screaming silently.

No.

He fought to focus on the woods, on the pain of the cross in his burning palm, on the sounds of breaking twigs and snapping branches as strigoi burst out of hiding and surged toward the bunker. He risked a glance around the trunk, catching movement too quick for human eyes to track.

Six to ten.

He couldn’t be sure.

Jordan and Erin would have no chance against them. He brought his gun up into firing position with trembling hands.

More images assaulted him, reminding him of his sin, unmanning him when he needed to be at his strongest.

… a spray of blood across white sheets.

… pale breasts in moonlight.

… a smile as bright as sunshine.

Through the spectral glimpses of his past, he aimed and fired, hitting two strigoi on the right, each square in the knee, dropping them, slowing them, if nothing else.

Nadia picked off another two on the left.

Behind him, Jordan’s submachine gun crackled as the soldier fired and strafed from the bunker’s door. He heard the pop-pop-pop of Erin’s pistol.

The first wave of strigoi scattered to the side, trying to flank them. More came behind them. He counted a dozen, four wounded, but not badly. One was older than Rhun; the others youngsters but still dangerous.

Memories continued to wash over him, thicker now, pulling him away, then back again.

… a crackling fire, listening to the soft voice of a woman reading Chaucer, struggling with the Middle English, laughing as much as reading.

… a twirl of a gown in moonlight, a figure dancing by herself under the stars on a balcony, as music echoed from an open window.

… the pale nakedness of flesh, so stark against a crimson pool of blood, the only sound his own panting.

Please, Lord, no … not that …

A crossbow bolt grazed his cheek, snapping him back to the present. The arrow winged off the edge of the tree and buried itself in dirt behind him.

He fell back, knowing none of his party could last out in the open, especially not in the state he was in.

They were too exposed.

“Take them farther inside!” he gasped out, waving to Nadia, who was closer to the bunker door. “I’ll hold them off—”

“Stop!” called a voice so familiar Rhun clutched for his cross again, unsure if he was in the past or present.

He listened, but the forest had gone dead quiet.

Even the strigoi had gone to ground — but with the sun nearly up, they would not wait long. They would rush at any moment, swarming over them.

He strained, wondering if he had imagined the voice, a broken fragment of memory come to life.

Then it came again. “Rhun Korza!”

The accent, the cadence, even the anger in that voice he knew. He struggled to stay in the present, but the calling of his name summoned him into the past.

… Elisabeta climbing from horseback, an arm outstretched for his aid, baring her wrist, exposing her faint pulse through her thin pale skin, her voice amused at his hesitation. “Father Korza …”

… Elisabeta weeping in the garden under bright sunlight, hiding her face from the sun, grief-stricken, but finally seeing him, rising to meet him, her simple joy shining through tears. “Rhun Korza …”

… Elisabeta coming to him, barefoot, across the rushes, her limbs naked, her face raw with desire, her lips moving, speaking the impossible. “Rhun …”

Those arms lifted toward him, inviting him at long last.

He went to them.

A gun blast tore into his chest, the blossom of pain tremendous, shredding away the past and leaving only the present.

He stood still with his arms outstretched toward her.

She stood before him — only transformed. Her dark black hair had turned to fire. He heard her heartbeat, knowing there should be none, not here, not now.

Downslope from him, she kept her distance, sheltered by an alder. But even from here, he recognized the same curve of her cheek, the same dance to her quicksilver eyes, the same long curls tumbling to her shoulders. She even smelled as she always had.

His vision swam, overlaying two women.

Pink lips curved into the smile that had once seduced him. “Your deeds brought us here, Father Korza. Remember that.”

She lifted her smoking Glock and fired, fired, fired.

Bullets tore into his chest.

Silver.

Every one.

The world darkened, and he fell.

Jordan fired a volley over Rhun’s body as the priest dropped. The redhead who had shot him ducked behind a tree.

Why the hell had the fool stepped out into the open like that?

Rhun had looked like he was in a daze as he stumbled out of hiding, his arms stretched out toward the woman, his hands empty, as if surrendering to her.

Jordan kept firing his Heckler & Koch submachine gun, offering Nadia cover so she could reach Rhun. Strigoi crawled forward toward them, clearly not eager to stand up and be shredded apart by silver. He hoped he had enough bullets in the extended magazine to get the pair back inside.

Erin knelt on the other side of the door, her Sig Sauer in hand. She didn’t have the same firepower he did, but she was a surprisingly good shot. She shot for legs, wounding rather than killing, just as Rhun had done. For the moment it was easier to slow them than to kill them.

Nadia hooked a hand under one arm and dragged Rhun back toward the bunker.

She took a crossbow bolt in the back of her thigh, but didn’t even flinch until she had hauled Rhun’s body inside and slammed the bunker door.

“Emmanuel?” Jordan asked.

“Lost.” She clenched her jaw and yanked out the bolt. Blood boiled out and smoked down her thigh. The stench of burnt flesh drifted up.

Erin swallowed hard. Jordan understood how she felt.

“Can you walk?” he asked. “I can give you a shoulder to—”

“I can walk.”

Nadia hurried them away from the door and pulled a wineskin from her belt. She took a small, cautious sip.

A heavy object thudded against the locked door behind them, echoing inside.

Nadia ignored it, but she finally stopped and lowered Rhun to the floor. She quickly freed Rhun’s karambit and used the hooked blade to slice off the leather armor covering his chest.

“We must work swiftly. The Belial will come through that door at any moment.”

Erin knelt next to her. “How do you know they’ll do that?”

“They have to. They’re strigoi. When the sun rises, they’ll all die. They will need to go to ground.”

Nadia dug a slug out of Rhun’s chest with his karambit’s tip. The bullet had deformed into a grotesque five-petal flower.

“Silver hollow point,” Jordan said, immediately understanding.

The attackers had known what to expect.

Nadia dug out the other slugs, none too gently, hurrying. Six total. A human could not live with that much damage. Maybe not even a Sanguinist.

Blood pumped out and ran across the floor.

Erin put her palm on Rhun’s chest, plainly concerned. “I thought he would stop bleeding on his own.”

Jordan remembered Korza’s demonstration back in Jerusalem with his sliced palm.

Nadia pushed Erin’s hand away. “His blood is purging the silver. If it doesn’t, he’ll die.”

“But then won’t he bleed to death?” Erin asked.

Nadia’s face tightened. “He might,” she admitted, and glanced back at the door.

The strigoi had ceased pounding. Jordan didn’t trust the silence and apparently neither did Nadia.

She stood, hauling Rhun over one shoulder.

Erin joined her. “What do we do? Try to use the water exit?”

“It’s our only chance,” Nadia said, and pointed her free arm. “We must reach sunlight.”

They took off at a dead run. Jordan hauled Piers along in a fireman’s carry, but Nadia outpaced him. They reached the intersection of passageways — when a thunderous explosion erupted behind them.

Jordan jolted, ducking from the noise. The enemy had set charges against the door.

Without breaking stride, he turned to check on Erin. She was behind him, too far behind. Snarls echoed down the tunnel from the blasted doorway.

The monsters were inside — and they were pissed.

39

Tommy shifted in his new bed, trying to find a more comfortable position. He had no idea where he was, when he was, but he didn’t think it was another hospital. He studied his new home, which he suspected was what this prison was supposed to be.

He filed that disturbing thought away for now.

But he had to admit that the box in his head was growing more and more crammed.

Something eventually had to give.

He stared around. The walls were painted silver, with no windows, but the room came equipped with three different kinds of video-game consoles and a flat-screen TV, fed by satellite and carrying American channels.

Across from the foot of his bed, a door led to a bathroom stocked with familiar brands of soap and shampoo. Another door led to a corridor, but he’d been unconscious when he was brought in, so he didn’t know where that went.

Some faceless doctor must have set his bones, patched his wounds, and cranked him up on pain relievers. His mouth still felt full of cotton that no amount of water could soothe. But his neck had already healed, and his bones were knitting fast, too. Whatever had happened at Masada, it had sped up his healing, curing him from far more than just cancer.

Since he’d woken up, they brought him food, whatever he asked for: burgers, fries, pizza, ice cream, and Apple Jacks cereal. And he was surprisingly hungry. He could not get enough to eat; likely his body needed the fuel to help heal itself.

Nobody told him where he was or why he was here.

He spent one entire hour crying, but no one seemed to care, and he finally realized the futility of tears and turned to more practical thoughts: thoughts of escape.

So far, he had no good plan. The walls were made of concrete, and he imagined that something in the room was a camera. The guards shoved his food through a slot in the door that led out to the corridor.

Suddenly that door opened.

Tommy sat up. He couldn’t stand very well yet.

A familiar figure strode inside, sending a chill through Tommy. It was the boy who had kidnapped him from the hospital. The strange kid walked in and flung himself into bed, sprawling next to Tommy, as if they were best chums.

This time he wore a gray silk shirt and a pair of expensive-looking gray pants.

He sure didn’t dress like a normal kid.

“Hello.” Tommy twisted to face him and held out his hand, not knowing what else to do. “I’m Tommy.”

“I know who you are.” The boy’s accent was strange and stiff.

Still, he shook Tommy’s hand, pumping it firmly, formally. He had the coldest hands that Tommy had ever felt. Had he been shipped to some country above the Arctic Circle?

The boy let go of his hand. “We are friends now, no? So you can call me Alyosha.”

Friends don’t try to kill friends.

But Tommy kept silent about that and asked a more important question. “Why am I here?”

“Is there somewhere else you would rather be?”

“Anywhere else,” he admitted. “This feels like a prison.”

The boy turned a thick gold ring around on his white finger. “As cages go, it is a gilded one, no?”

Tommy didn’t bother pointing out that he didn’t want to be in any cage — gilded or not — but he didn’t want to offend the kid, nor did he want to chase him off by being rude. To be honest, Tommy didn’t want to be alone again. He’d even take this weird kid’s company at the moment — especially if he could learn anything.

“When I was your age, I lived in one of the most gilded cages in the world.” The boy’s soft gray eyes traveled around the room. “But then I was set free, as you are.”

“I don’t call this free.” Tommy gestured around the room.

“I meant free of the prison of your flesh.” The boy sat up, crossed his legs, and reached for a game controller. “Many aspire to that.”

“Are you free?” Tommy reached over and picked up the other controller, as if this were the most natural thing to do.

The boy shrugged and started an Xbox game on the screen. “After a fashion.”

“What does that mean?”

Alyosha faced him as the game bloomed to life on the screen. “You are immortal, no?”

Tommy lowered his controller. “What?”

Alyosha prompted the game—Gods of War—to start. “You know this now, no? It was what I tried to teach you. Out in the desert. So you would understand.”

Tommy struggled to understand, seeking some frame of reference as the game’s theme music began, full of drumbeats and brass chords. “Are you immortal, Alyosha?”

“There are ways that my life can end. But if I avoid them, yes, I will live forever. So we will be friends for a very long time.”

Tommy heard a hint of the loneliness in that voice.

He spoke softly, despairing. “So I’m like you, then?”

Alyosha shifted as if this part of the conversation bothered him. “No, you are not. In all the long history of time, there has only ever been one other like you. You, my friend, are very special.”

“Is this other one still around?”

“Yes, of course, he is still around. Like you, he cannot die or take his own life.”

“Ever?”

“Until the end of time.”

Tommy took another long look around the room. Would he be a prisoner here forever? He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, but some part of him knew that Alyosha had told him the truth — but maybe not the full enormity of it.

Tommy understood that on his own.

Immortality was not a blessing.

It was a curse.

40

With Piers hauled over his shoulder, Jordan ran several steps sideways, chased down the concrete tunnel by the screams of pursuing strigoi, feral and terrifying.

He yelled back to Erin, who trailed twenty yards behind.

“Hurry!”

“Keep going!” she called back, both irritated and scared.

That was Erin.

To hell with that.

By now, Nadia had reached the far leg and vanished down it, aiming for the air lock with Rhun, limp and poisoned, in her arms. Apparently she felt no obligation to wait for the two, slower humans. And she didn’t seem too fond of Piers either. She probably wasn’t coming back.

Jordan lowered Piers to the concrete and freed his submachine gun. “Sorry, old man.”

Piers opened faded blue eyes. “Meine Kinder.”

My children.

“I’ll come back.” Jordan hoped he’d be able to keep that promise.

Before Jordan could come fully to standing, Piers seized his hand, his grip incredibly strong, still capable of breaking bone. “Icarops. Sie kommen. To help. I send them.”

From the broken doorway of the neighboring vestibule, a black cloud of bats burst forth into the tunnel, churning, squealing, and swooping over their heads.

Thousands poured into the passageway.

Jordan ducked under the wings, overwhelmed by the creatures’ stench, tasting it on the back of his tongue. He crouched with Piers against the wall.

Erin had almost reached him, one arm shielding her face against the winged onslaught.

But this time their fury was not directed at her.

She forged through them, ducking low.

Behind her, the black horde struck the strigoi like a raging torrent. Bats battled monsters in a kaleidoscope of black blood, fur, and pale skin. Amid the chaos, silver flashed like lightning. Some of the icarops fell, but more swooped in to take their places.

Jordan saw one huge bat sweep up and wrap its wings around one strigoi like a monstrous cloak.

Screams rang louder.

Then a jetting flame burst upward in the heart of that dark storm. A whoosh and a crackling filled the air, followed by a terrible screeching. A cloud of foul smoke rushed toward the three onlookers.

Burnt flesh and petroleum.

Flamethrower.

Piers moaned in sympathy for his children as the chorus of screams threatened to burst Jordan’s ears.

But Erin finally reached him.

Jordan grabbed her arm and pushed her around the corner. “Make for the air lock! I’ll be right behind you!”

She nodded, breathing hard.

He collected up Piers and sprinted after her. He prayed that the remaining bats could buy them enough time to get free of this cursed place. After that, the sun ought to protect them.

At least, it was a theory.

They fled toward the open air lock. Out of the darkness ahead, Nadia came rushing toward them, empty-handed. She must have left Rhun at the air lock and come back to help. So she hadn’t abandoned them after all.

“Hurry!” the woman shouted, reaching Erin and grabbing her, almost lifting her off her feet.

A feral scream from behind drew Jordan’s attention. A strigoi—bloody, burned, and missing an eye — came charging around the corner at them, moving too fast, half climbing the walls in its haste to reach them.

The air lock loomed mere yards away.

But he’d never make it.

Erin ground her heels against the inevitable force of Nadia’s pull toward the air lock. She twisted in her grip and lifted her Sig Sauer pistol.

“Jordan! Drop!”

From farther down the tunnel, he obeyed, sprawling headlong, rolling with Piers, keeping the priest protected.

She aimed her pistol at the monster as it leaped toward Jordan.

She took a single steadying breath, not holding it, and squeezed the trigger.

The blast of the pistol cracked like thunder, stinging her ears, setting them to ringing.

The back of the strigoi’s skull burst, smoking from the silver she had sent through its remaining eye. The creature’s momentum carried its bulk past Jordan. The body hit the ground and skidded to Erin’s feet.

She leaped back, but Nadia pronounced its sentence.

“It’s dead.”

Jordan hauled back up, lifting Piers. “Nice shooting.”

There was no condescending grin. He meant it. A surge of satisfaction warmed through her.

Together, they charged into the damp air lock.

Erin hurried over to Rhun, fearful at the sight of his white complexion — whiter than usual. His bared chest still seeped blood. Nadia and Jordan slammed the air lock with a resounding clank and dogged it shut.

The two went to open the outer hatch, hurrying.

Nadia rushed across the tiny room and spun open the handle for the outer door. As it cracked open, cold lake water surged inside before Erin had time to snatch a breath. In seconds the water rose above her head. Jordan switched on his waterproof flashlight, crouching by Piers.

Erin did the same, keeping one fist curled in Rhun’s jacket.

Nadia shouldered the door open as pressure finally equalized, and motioned them all out. She swam over to Erin and Rhun, grabbing her fellow Sanguinist by a wrist.

Freed of responsibility for him, Erin kicked off through the hatch and swam upward. She fought the weight of her leather duster — not to mention the pockets full of concrete fragments. She began to sink, but she refused to give up what had cost her so much to gain. In the distance, she made out the shimmering form of the fountain statue, a man on a rearing horse, draped in algae.

Would she join the others who had drowned in this flooded town?

Then Jordan was by her side. He gathered a fistful of her jacket’s collar and pulled, kicking and dragging both Piers and her toward the silvery promise of dawn above.

What felt like an eternity later her head broke the surface.

She gasped.

Overhead, the sky had lightened to a dove gray. Sunrise was approaching, but it would be too soon for Piers. They would never reach the sanctuary of the Harmsfeld church in time.

Jordan pushed her toward the boat.

Nadia was already aboard with Rhun and helped pull Father Piers’s unconscious body into the stern. Jordan hauled up by himself, coming close to capsizing the dory.

Erin clutched the wooden gunwale near the bow and waited her turn. She took deep shuddering breaths, her body shaking. She had never been so cold in her life, but she was alive.

Balancing, Jordan stripped off his grimwolf leather coat and spread it over someone in the boat. He then reached a warm hand down to Erin and pulled her, one-armed, into the dory, causing her to land in a sprawl.

“Your coat,” Nadia said. “Hurry.”

Jordan helped peel off her sodden duster as if she were on fire.

She was shivering so hard she nearly fell over.

Jordan and Nadia worked quickly, arranging both coats over the wounded Sanguinists so that no sun would touch them. Sunlight would kill Piers, and Erin guessed Rhun must be too weak to withstand it as well. He had lost so much blood at the bunker door.

Once she was done, Nadia knelt and bowed her head. She shuddered and fell to one arm.

“Are you okay?” Jordan asked.

“I’ll be fine,” the woman whispered, sitting back but not sounding fine. She had a hole the size of a quarter in her right thigh, and it went clean through. Yet despite her wound, she had saved everyone.

Jordan raised the anchor and dropped it in the middle of the boat.

Feeling like a weakling, Erin fumbled with her paddle and helped Jordan row toward shore. Her hands shook so that she could barely hold the shaft.

From under one of the cloaks, a weak, muffled voice gasped. “Please. Take it off.”

It was Father Piers.

Nadia stared down at his covered figure, her face a study of agony. “You’ll die.”

“I know,” he said. “Release me.”

Nadia’s hand hovered over the coat, but she did not pick it up. “Please, Piers, don’t.”

“Can you grant me absolution?” His frail voice barely rose above the splashes of their paddle blades.

Nadia sighed. “I have not yet taken Holy Orders.” She lifted the other coat and peered under it. “Rhun cannot grant you absolution either in his state. I’m sorry.”

Beside Erin, Jordan raked his paddle through the water, methodical and fast. She paddled harder, her hands cold claws on the wood.

“Then please, let us pray together, Nadia,” Piers pleaded.

As Erin and Jordan worked slowly toward shore, the two Sanguinists prayed in Latin, but Erin did not translate the words. She stared straight at the water, orange in the rising sun, and she thought of Rhun, dead or dying under Jordan’s coat. Why had she acceded to this quest? The search for the Gospel had already cost so many lives, just as Rhun had warned her. They had gained nothing and lost much.

As they neared the shoreline, Nadia gently lifted the coat off Piers and drew him up, cradling his gaunt form against her. For the first time, she looked frightened.

Piers’s filmy blue eyes searched the landscape of the shore.

Erin followed his gaze to dark pines, to the silver trunks of lindens bared by fall, a lake turned copper, and the golden rays of light breaking through fog.

Piers raised his face to the sun. “Light is truly the most beautiful of His creations.”

Tears streamed down Nadia’s cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away, instead tightening her grip on Piers. “Forgive me,” she said in Latin. “You are blessed.”

Jordan’s face was set like stone. He did not break the rhythm of his paddling.

Piers’s face glowed iridescent in a wash of sunlight.

His back arched. The flush spread to his neck and hands.

He screamed.

Nadia held him close. “Lord our God, You are our refuge from generation to generation. Year and days vary, but You remain eternal.”

Piers grew silent, slumping in her arms and going still.

“Your mercy sustains us in life and in death,” Nadia continued. “Grant us to remember with thanks what You have given us through Piers and Emmanuel. Receive them together into Your kingdom after their long years of service to You.”

Erin finished with her, using a word she hadn’t spoken in years and doubted that she ever truly meant, until now.

“Amen.”

41

Jordan dug deeper with the paddle, working slowly across the lake’s surface. He stared up at the sun, marking a new day after the longest night of his life — but at least, he still had a life.

He pictured the faces of his men … of Piers … of Emmanuel.

When Jordan had spread his coat over Rhun, he could tell that the priest might not be far behind the others. And for what? They’d come out of their long nightmare empty-handed.

At the bow of the boat, Nadia removed the duster from Piers’s body and handed it to Erin. The priest no longer needed its protection, but Erin was shivering in the early morning chill.

Nadia laid Piers out in the boat as best she could and crossed his arms over his thin chest. Her hands lingered above the terrible wounds on his feet and hands, but she refused to touch them. She drew Emmanuel’s cassock over his lifeless form, tucking it lovingly around him, then bowed her head in prayer.

Jordan did the same, owing Piers that much.

Once this was done, Nadia made the sign of the cross.

The woman looked to the sun for a long breath, then scooped up Piers, lifted him over the gunwale, and gently rolled his body into the lake. He sank out of sight in the green water, a trail of bubbles rising from the black cassock.

Erin gasped at the unceremonious end of Father Piers.

“He cannot rest in hallowed ground, nor can his body be found,” Nadia explained, then she sat back down, picking up a paddle. “Let him find his peace and eternal rest in these highlands he loved so much.”

Erin shivered, her blue lips pressed into a thin line, but she kept paddling.

Jordan checked behind his shoulder. The shore loomed out of the fog. He spotted the dock to the right. In the forest ahead, a bird called, greeting the morning, and another answered.

It seemed that life went on.

He did not slow the boat as the bank swept up to its bow. He used their momentum to shove the boat into the mud.

“Wait here,” he warned.

Erin shivered and nodded.

Nadia did not respond.

He drew his Colt and vaulted off the side. Mud sucked at his boots, but it felt good to be on land, outside in the sunlight.

He hurried to the spot where they’d hidden their Ducati bikes. They could be back at the abbey in less than an hour. Maybe Brother Leopold had some kind of medicine to help Rhun heal.

But as Jordan stepped behind the sheltering tree, he stopped, staring down at the wreckage of the trio of bikes. He tensed, searching around. The strigoi were surely hiding from the sun, but he knew that the Belial also employed humans.

At that moment he realized a horrible truth.

They were still not safe — even in the brightness of a new day.

Standing on the muddy shore, Erin pulled her leather duster tightly around her body. She turned her gaze at the trees that had swallowed up Jordan. She saw no movement out there, which burned an ember of worry in her chest.

To the side, Nadia unstrapped the wineskin from her leg and ducked under the coat covering Rhun, still keeping the sunlight off his body as she checked on him.

Erin longed to peek beneath, too, and see how Rhun fared, but she didn’t dare. Nadia knew best how to care for him. She had probably known him longer than Erin had been alive.

Jordan’s familiar form reappeared out of the woods, and Erin let out a deep breath. But she could tell by the slump of his shoulders that he had bad news. Very bad. It took a lot to defeat him, and Jordan looked crestfallen.

Nadia sat back up, one hand resting on Rhun’s covered head.

“Someone destroyed the bikes,” Jordan said, casting her an apologetic look, as if it were his fault.

“All of them?” Nadia asked.

Jordan nodded. “Not fixable without parts and tools and time.”

“None of which we have.” Nadia’s hand stroked her wounded leg. She suddenly looked frail. “We’ll never get Rhun back to the abbey alive if we have to walk.”

“What about the Harmsfeld church?” Erin pointed to the steeple poking above the forest. “You thought it could offer Piers sanctuary. What about Rhun?”

Nadia leaned back. She stroked a hand along the coat covering Rhun.

“We must pray it has what we need.”

From the shoreline, Jordan watched the fog disperse in tatters in the early morning sunlight. Once it was gone, they’d be exposed beside the lake: three adults with a stolen dory and a badly wounded man.

Not easy to explain that one.

Nadia stepped over to the beached boat and began to haul the unconscious Rhun up in her arms. It was a short hike to the picturesque hamlet of Harmsfeld.

Jordan stepped in to intervene. “Please give him to me.”

“Why? Do you think me too weak for such a task?” Her dark eyes narrowed.

“I think that if anyone sees a woman as small as you carrying a full-grown man as easily as if he were a puppy, it’ll raise questions.”

Reluctantly, she allowed Jordan to hoist Rhun on his shoulder. The priest was deadweight in his arms. If he were a human, he’d be simply dead: cold, no heartbeat, and no breath. Was he even still alive?

Jordan had to trust that Nadia would know.

The woman led them through the surrounding forest at a punishing pace. Jordan soon wished he’d let her carry Rhun until they got within sight of the village.

But in less than ten minutes, they were traipsing across the frost-coated paving stones of the main street. Nadia led them in a seemingly haphazard fashion, stopping occasionally to listen with her head cocked. She probably heard people long before Jordan and Erin could and sought to avoid running into any.

He glanced over at Erin. Like him, she was soaked to the skin. But unlike him, she wasn’t working up heat from carrying a heavy weight. Her blue lips trembled. He had to get her inside and warmed up.

Finally, they reached the village church in the square. The sturdy structure had been constructed out of locally quarried stone centuries ago, its builders forming bricked archways and framing stained-glass windows along both flanks. The single bell spire pointed toward Heaven with what seemed like an unquestioning resolve.

Nadia sprang up the steps and tried the double front doors. Locked.

Jordan eased Rhun to the ground. Maybe he could pick the lock.

Nadia drew back a step, lifted her leg, then kicked the thick wooden doors. They slammed open with a crack. Not the quietest way in, but an effective one.

She rushed inside. Jordan picked up Rhun and followed, with Erin close behind. He wanted everyone out of sight before someone noticed that they had broken into a church while carrying a dead man.

Erin tugged the doors closed behind them, likely fearing the same.

Nadia was already at the altar, rooting around. “No consecrated wine,” she said, and in her frustration, she elbowed an empty chalice and sent it crashing to the stone floor.

“Maybe a little quieter?” Jordan hated to upset her.

She uttered something that sounded blasphemous, then stormed toward a wooden crucifix behind the altar. The resemblance of the carved oak figure to Piers was so uncanny that Jordan stepped back a pace.

What was Nadia planning on doing?

42

Bathory stood before the dead Sanguinist’s body. It was still spiked by crossbow bolts to the trunk of an ancient pine, like some druidic sacrifice.

She gripped one of the bolts by its feathered end and yanked it out of the dead arm, freeing the limb to hang limp and broken. She studied her handiwork with a sigh.

Bright sunlight suffused the glade, melting frost from the yellow linden leaves. There was little evidence of the battle that had been fought here: some torn earth, more than a few rounds of ammunition that peppered tree trunks, and dark splotches of blood soaking into the ground. A good rain, a couple weeks of new growth, and no one would have any clue as to what transpired here.

Except for this damned body bolted to the tree.

She yanked out another bolt, wishing that she could have assigned this job to Tarek, but she couldn’t, not during the day. Even Magor had suffered too much in the sunlight, his body smoking, until she had forced him to retreat into the bunker with the others.

She continued yanking out spikes, slowly freeing the body.

Too bad it wasn’t Korza impaled here. But she had seen him fall after putting six silver slugs into him. He wouldn’t last long in that state. She savored the look of surprise on his face when she shot him. He had thought her Elisabeta — Bathory’s long-dead ancestor, somehow come back to forgive him.

As if that would be enough to atone for his sins.

She pulled the Sanguinist free from the last spike. If the man had been a strigoi, the sunlight would have burned him to ash and saved her the trouble.

Resigned, she hurried with this last bit of bloody business as a plan took shape in her mind.

The book was still lost — but she knew where to go to find it.

And more important, who could help her.

43

Erin accompanied Jordan as he placed Rhun down in front of the altar. The limp priest lay on the stone floor as if dead.

“Is he still alive?” she asked.

“Barely.” Kneeling, Nadia dribbled wine from her flask into his mouth.

He did not swallow.

That couldn’t be good.

“How can we help?” Jordan asked.

“Stay out of my way.” Nadia cradled Rhun’s head in her lap. “And stay quiet.”

Nadia sorted through the items she had gathered from behind the altar, settling first on the sealed bottle of wine. She pushed in the cork with one long finger.

“I need to consecrate this wine,” she explained.

“You can do that?” Jordan looked at the door, plainly worried about someone coming into the church and interrupting whatever was about to happen.

“Of course she can’t,” Erin said, shocked. “Only a priest can consecrate wine.”

Nadia sniffed derisively. “Dr. Granger, you are enough of an historian to know better, are you not?” She wiped blood off Rhun’s chest with the altar cloth. “Didn’t women perform Mass and consecrate wine in the early days of the Church?”

Erin felt chastened. She did know better. In a knee-jerk reaction, she had leaned upon Church dogma, when history plainly contradicted it. She wondered how much she was still her father’s daughter at heart.

That thought stung.

“I’m sorry,” Erin said. “You’re right.”

“The human side of the Church took that power away from women. The Sanguinist side did not,” Nadia said.

“So you can consecrate wine,” Jordan said.

“I did not say that. I said that women in the Sanguinist Church can be priests. But I have not yet taken Holy Orders, so I am not yet a priest myself,” Nadia said.

Jordan stared back at the door. Again. “Why don’t we just take this bottle of vino and do whatever you’re planning somewhere else, away from where someone might come barging in at any time? You don’t need to do this in a church, do you?”

“Wine has its greatest healing powers if consecrated and consumed in a church. Holy ground lends it additional power.” Nadia put a hand on Rhun’s chest. “Rhun needs as many advantages as we can give him.”

She poured the last drops of wine from her flask into one of Rhun’s bullet wounds, raising a moan from him.

Erin’s heart leaped with hope. Maybe he wasn’t as bad off as she thought.

Nadia unfastened Rhun’s silver flask from his leg. She trickled more wine down his throat. This time he swallowed.

He drew in a single breath. “Elisabeta?”

Nadia closed her eyes. “No, Rhun. It’s Nadia.”

Rhun looked around, his eyes unfocused.

“You must consecrate this wine.” She wrapped his fingers around the bottle’s green neck. “Or you will die.”

His eyelids drifted closed.

Erin studied the unconscious priest. She didn’t see what could rouse him. “Are you sure that you need to consecrate the wine? Maybe you can just tell him it’s blessed.”

Nadia gave her a venomous look.

“I’ve been wondering, since our time in the desert, if the wine needs to be truly consecrated or if Rhun just needs to think it is. Maybe it’s about faith, instead of miracles.” Erin couldn’t believe that these words were coming out of her mouth.

She had seen firsthand what happened when medical care was left to faith and miracles, first with her arm, and then with her baby sister. She shut her eyes, as if doing this would shut out the memory. But the memory came, like it always did.

Her mother had been having a hard birth. Erin and the other women in the compound had watched her labor for days. Summer had come early, and the bedroom was hot and close. It smelled of sweat and blood.

She held her mother’s hand, bathed her brow, and prayed. It was all she could do.

Eventually her sister, Emma, came into the world.

But Emma was feverish from the first. Too weak to cry or suckle, she lay wrapped in her baby quilt, held against her mother’s breast, wide dark eyes open and glassy.

Erin begged her father to take the baby to a real doctor, but he backhanded her, bloodying her nose.

Instead, the women of the compound gathered around her mother’s bed to pray. Her father led the prayers, his deep voice confident that God would hear, and God would save the child. If not, God knew that she wasn’t worth saving.

Erin stayed by her mother’s side, watching Emma’s heartbeat in her soft fontanel, quick as a bird’s. She ached to pick her up, load her on a horse, and take her into town. But her father, seeming to sense her defiance, never left her alone with the baby. All Erin could do was pray, hope, and watch the heartbeat slow and stop.

Emma Granger lived for two days.

Faith did not save Emma.

Erin touched the fabric in her pocket. She had cut it from Emma’s baby quilt before she was wrapped in it for burial. She’d carried it with her every day since, to remind herself to honor the warnings in her heart, to ask the impossible questions, and then, always, to act.

“Nadia,” Erin said. “Try drinking the unconsecrated wine. What have you got to lose?”

Nadia lifted the bottle to her own mouth and took a deep gulp. Red liquid erupted from her throat and sprayed across the floor.

Jordan grimaced. “Guess it doesn’t work that way.”

Nadia wiped her mouth. “It’s about miracles.”

Or maybe it was simply that Nadia didn’t believe the wine was Christ’s blood.

But Erin remained silent.

Rhun longed for death, wishing they’d never woken him.

Pain from his wounds paled in comparison to what he had felt when he saw Elisabeta again in the forest. But it had not truly been her. He knew that. The woman in the forest had red hair, not black. And Elisabeta had been gone for four hundred years.

Who was the woman who had shot him? Some distant descendant? Did it matter?

Darkness folded back over him like a soft cape. He relaxed into it. Silver did not burn him in the warm blackness. He floated there.

Then liquid scalded his lips, and he tried to turn his head away.

“Rhun,” ordered a familiar voice. “You will come back to me.”

It wasn’t Elisabeta. This voice sounded angry. Also frightened.

Nadia?

But nothing frightened Nadia.

He forced his heavy eyelids open, heard heartbeats. Erin’s quick one, the soldier’s steady rhythm. So they had both made it out alive.

Good.

Content, he tried to drift away again.

But cold fingers grabbed his chin, pulling him to Nadia’s dark eyes. “You will do this for me, Rhun. I have given you all of your wine — and mine. Without it, I, too, will die. That is, unless I break my oath.”

He strove to keep his eyelids open, but they slid closed again. He pushed them open.

“You force this upon me, Rhun.”

Nadia released his head and stood, a quick flash of darkness. She wrapped an arm around Erin’s waist and yanked her head to the side. Erin’s heartbeats sped until each muscular squeeze flowed into the next in one continuous thrumming.

Jordan brought up his submachine gun.

“If you shoot me, soldier, know that I can kill her before the second bullet strikes,” Nadia hissed. “So, Rhun, can you do this?”

Erin’s amber eyes stared into his, pleading for her life, and for his.

To answer that look more than Nadia’s question, Rhun found the strength. He roused himself to grasp the wine, to pull the bottle to his heart, to recite the necessary words.

The ceremony stretched into a sacrament — all the while Nadia held Erin, her teeth at her throat.

Finally, Rhun ended with “We offer to Thee this reasonable and unbloody sacrifice; and we beg Thee, we ask Thee, we pray Thee that Thou send down Thy Holy Spirit on us and on these present gifts.”

Nadia answered, “Amen. Bless this Holy Chalice.”

“‘And that which is in this chalice, the Precious Blood of Thy Christ.’ ”

He dropped his hands to his lap, the ritual complete, his strength fleeing his limbs, his only desire a wish for unconsciousness.

But Nadia refused to let him rest. She poured Christ’s blood into his wounds, into his mouth. His body took in that fire, and it burned him completely this time. He knew where it would take him, and he quailed at the prospect.

“No …,” he begged — but this prayer wasn’t answered.

“Turn away.” Nadia’s ragged command to the humans faded as his sins carried him away into penance.

Bernard had sensed the blackness in Rhun’s heart and sent him to Čachtice Castle to cut ties with Elisabeta. Rhun told himself that he could do it, that he felt nothing more for her than the duty to serve her as a priest.

Still he prayed as he lingered on the long winter road to her door. Snow hid fields and gardens where they had once walked together. Among long dried stalks of lavender, a raven pecked at a gray mouse, the tiny scarlet stain of its lifeblood visible even from so far away. He tarried until the raven finished its repast and flew away.

He reached the castle at twilight, hours later than he had planned. Yet he stood long in front of the door before he could bring himself to knock. Snow dusted the shoulders of his cassock. He did not feel cold anymore, but he brushed the snow away as a man would do. He would not show his otherness in this house.

Her maid, Anna, answered, her hands reddened with cold. “Good evening, Father Korza.”

“Hello, my child,” he said. “Is the Widow Nádasy at home?”

He prayed that she was far away. Perhaps he should request that she meet him at the village church. His resolve was strongest there. Yes, the church would be better.

Anna curtsied. “Since the death of the good Count Nádasy, she walks late in the evenings, but she will return before dark. You may wait?”

He followed her thin figure into the great room, where a fire crackled in the immense hearth. Chamomile sprinkled atop the floor rushes lent the room the familiar smell of summer. He remembered gathering leaves of it with her on a sunlit afternoon before Ferenc’s death.

Rhun refused Anna’s offer of refreshment and stood as close to the fire as he dared, drawing its heat into his unnatural body. He prayed and thought of Ferenc, the Black Knight of Hungary, and the man to whom Elisabeta had been bound. If Ferenc were still alive, all would be different. But Ferenc was dead. Rhun pushed away thoughts of his last visit, when he had told her of Ferenc’s passing.

Elisabeta entered wearing a deep burgundy cloak, snow melted to darkness on the shoulders. Rhun straightened his spine. His faith was strong. He would endure this.

She shook water from her cloak. Dark droplets spattered the floor. A servant girl took the heavy woolen garment from her outstretched hand and walked backward from the room.

“It is good to see that you are well, Father Korza.” Black skirts swished against rushes as she walked to join him at the fire. “I trust you have been offered wine and refreshment?”

Her tone was light, but her racing heart betrayed her.

“I have.”

In the firelight, she looked thinner than he remembered, her features harder, as if grief had tempered the softness from her. Even so, she was achingly beautiful.

Fear flashed through Rhun’s blood.

He longed to flee, but he had promised Bernard, and he had promised himself. He was strong enough to do this. He must be.

“I imagine that you are here collecting for the Church?” Her bitter tone told him that she knew how he had failed her when he left her to grieve for Ferenc alone, that she did not forgive him for deserting her in her hour of deepest need.

His mind screamed at him to run, but his body would not obey.

He stayed.

“Father Korza?” She leaned closer, her dark head tilted in concern, her heart slowing in sympathy instead of speeding up in anger. “Are you ill? Perhaps you should sit?”

She guided him to a straight-backed wooden chair, then sat across from him, their knees a mere handsbreadth apart. The fire’s heat cooled in comparison to the warmth of her body.

“Have you been well, Father Korza?”

He roused from the song of her strong red heart. “I have. How have you fared, Widow Nádasy?”

She shifted at the word widow. “I have been bearing up—” She leaned forward. “Nonsense. We have known each other too long and too well to be untruthful now. Ferenc’s death has been both a great burden and a freedom to me.”

A freedom?

He dared not ask. He raised his head.

“You look as if you have been ill,” she said. “So tell me the truth. How have the past months served you?”

He fell into her silver eyes, reflecting orange from the firelight. How could he be apart from her? She alone of all he knew he had trusted with memories of his mortal life, only keeping secret his unnatural state of being.

A ghost of a smile played on her soft lips. Her hand brushed water from her bare shoulder, then fell coyly to her soft throat. He stared at her fingers, and what they covered.

She stood and took his hand between hers. “Always so cold.”

The heat of her hand exploded under his skin. He must move away, but instead he stood and put his other hand over hers, drawing more of her warmth into his chilled body. Just that. A simple moment of connection. He asked for nothing more.

Her heartbeat traveled from her hands through his arms and up to where his heart had once beat. Now his blood moved to the rhythm of hers. Scarlet stained the edges of his vision.

Her eyelids fell closed, and she tipped her face up toward his.

He took her flushed cheeks in his marble-white hands. He had never touched a woman before, not like this. He caressed her face, her smooth white throat.

Her heart sped under his palms. Fear? Or did something else drive it?

Tears coursed down her cheeks.

“Rhun,” she whispered, “I’ve waited so long for you.”

He traced the impossibly soft redness of her lips with one fingertip. She shivered under his touch.

He longed to press his lips against hers, to feel the warmth of her mouth. To taste her. But it was forbidden. He was a priest. Chaste. He must stop this at once. He drew his hands a finger’s width away from her and toward the silver cross that lay over his cassock.

She cast her eyes on the cross and let out a quiet moan of disappointment.

Rhun froze, fighting the warmth of her skin, the scent of snowmelt in her hair, the pulse of her heart in her lips, the salt smell of her tears. He had never been so terrified in his mortal and immortal life.

She leaned forward and kissed him, her lips light as the touch of a butterfly.

And Rhun was lost.

She tasted of grief and blood and passion. He was no longer a priest or a monster. He was simply a man. A man as he had never been before.

He pulled his head back and stared into her shadowed eyes, dark with passion. She pulled off her cap and black hair tumbled free around her shoulders.

“Yes, Rhun,” she said. “Yes.”

He kissed the inside of her wrist. Her heart pounded strong against his lips. He unfastened her sleeve and kissed the crook of her elbow. His tongue tasted her skin.

She buried her hands in his hair and pulled him closer. He chased her pulse up her bare neck. As she swooned in his embrace, he tightened his arms around her back. Her mouth found his again.

God and vows fled. He needed to feel her skin against his. His hands fumbled with the lacings of her dress. She pushed him away and undid them herself, her mouth never leaving his.

Her dress fell heavy to the stone floor, and she stepped out of it, closer to the fire. Orange flames shone through her linen chemise. He released her long enough to tear the garment in half.

And she stood naked in his arms. Skin soft and warm. Her heart racing under his palms.

Her hands flew across the impossibly long row of buttons on his cassock. Thirty-three, to symbolize the thirty-three years of the earthly life of Christ. The cassock fell to the floor atop her dress. His silver cross burned against his chest, but he no longer cared.

He swept Elisabeta up in his arms, crushing her against him. She gasped when the cross touched her bare breast. He reached up and broke the chain. The cross clattered to the stone next to his robes. He should care, he should gather up its holiness and hold it against his body, hold it between them like a wall.

Instead, he chose her.

Her lips found his again, and her mouth opened under his. Nothing separated them now. They were two bodies craving only union.

She called out his name.

Rhun answered with hers.

He lowered her to the fire-warmed floor. She arched under him, long velvet throat curving toward his mouth.

Rhun lost himself in her scent, her warmth, her heart. No man could experience what he felt; no Sanguinist could withstand it. Never had he felt so content, so strong. This bliss was why men left the priesthood. This bond was deeper than his feelings for God.

He joined with her. He never wanted to be separate again.

Red consumed him. Then it consumed her. He pulsed in a sea of seething red.

When the red cleared, both their souls were destroyed.

44

A few feet away from Erin, Nadia knelt next to Rhun, whispering in Latin while he wept. Whatever happened when they drank consecrated wine, it was more unpleasant than being shot six times in the chest. She ached for Rhun, trapped in such a state for eternity, consigned to an unimaginable Hell for the sin of being attacked by a wild strigoi.

Erin walked back to the broken church doors and stared out at the early morning. Jordan joined her, leaned next to her. How did he stay so warm? She was freezing. First they had both been dunked in that snowmelt lake, and now they stood in an unheated church.

Once Rhun quieted, she heard Nadia gasp as she also consumed a draft of consecrated wine, but she did not weep as Rhun had done.

For a long moment silence filled the church.

“He is awake,” Nadia finally called out, returned again to her calm, even state. “With luck, he will be fit to travel before nightfall. But he will be weakened for the next few days. Christ’s blood does not heal us as quickly as human blood would.”

“Why is the wine not as difficult for you to drink as it is for Rhun?” Erin glanced over at the priest, lying on his side, facing away from them, covered with the altar cloth.

Nadia stared over at him, too. “I did not have so far to fall.”

Jordan looked around the small room of the inn that Nadia had rented for him and Erin in Harmsfeld. The quaint residence stood across the town square from the church.

Nadia shared a room with Rhun, right next door, but Jordan still surveyed the room as if he were preparing for a coming siege. The hotel door was made of stout oak. A check of the window revealed a trellis below their second-story room. A difficult entry point. He did a quick assessment of the bathroom. The window there was too small to admit anyone. The rest of the space was typical of European accommodations: white tiles, a utilitarian shower, sink, toilet, and bidet.

When he returned to the main room, Erin hadn’t moved from her spot on the bed, perched at the edge of a plump duvet. The space contained a double bed, two nightstands with lamps, and an odd metal contraption he thought might be used for cleaning boots.

Erin looked paler than he’d ever seen her. Dark circles shadowed her eyes; dirt smudged her face.

“Do you want the first shower?” he asked.

“‘Shower,’” she said, standing and stretching. “Best word in the English language right now.”

Jordan watched her leave, closing the door. He thought that the best two words in the English language right now might be shower together, but he knew better than to say so. Instead, he sat on the other side of the bed and opened the room-service menu.

He selected three breakfasts with coffee and tea because he had no idea what Erin ate or drank. He picked up the phone and dialed, but before anyone answered, Erin turned on the water for the shower. Jordan pictured her stepping over the tile threshold, her hair loose and falling halfway down her bare back, water tracing its way down the curves of her—

“Darf ich Ihnen behilflich sein?” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

Jordan turned his back to the bathroom door and ordered breakfast in German.

While he waited, he spread their coats to dry over the radiator, trying not to think about Erin in the shower, face upturned to the water and steam rising around her.

He had to find something else to do. He sat on the bed and cleaned his weapons, one at a time, keeping the other always near to hand. After that, he cleaned Erin’s Sig Sauer.

Nadia knocked on the door and thrust a paper bag into his hands without a word. As he closed the door, he opened the bag to find basic toiletries and a change of clothes for both of them.

Warm sweaters, so he guessed he wasn’t flying back to Jerusalem.

Room service arrived, and Jordan started his breakfast before Erin finished her shower.

Moments later, the flow of water shut off with a clunking sound. He kept glancing at the door, trying his best not to picture Erin buffing her naked form.

He failed.

He waited for her to come out. When she finally did, she stepped into the room in a cloud of steam. She wore a white terrycloth robe she must have found in the bathroom and had rebandaged her hand. Her face and neck were flushed from the hot water. He wished he could see how far down her body that flush extended.

As she approached, Jordan adjusted the napkin on his lap.

“I tried to save you some hot water,” she said.

“I … um … tried to save you some breakfast.” Jordan took a big sip of his steaming coffee.

Erin walked over and looked down at the remains of the food. She smelled like soap and clean laundry. “Here’s hoping I did a better job than you.”

He kept his eyes studiously averted from the front of her robe and hurried to the bathroom. He showered and shaved quickly. After he brushed his hair and pulled on a clean pair of khakis and a long-sleeved shirt, he felt ready to take on the world.

Or at least to take a long nap.

Erin was just finishing up breakfast when Jordan came out of the bathroom. He lay down on the bed and sighed. A real bed.

“I could sleep on the floor,” Erin said.

“Neither of us is taking the floor,” Jordan answered. “I promise to stay on my side, if you promise to stay on yours.”

Erin looked at the floor, as if considering the other option.

Jordan rolled back to his feet and retrieved his dry coat from the radiator. “During times of dire need, didn’t maidens once sleep with a sword between them and their knight protector?” He spread the coat across the middle of the bed and held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor, I won’t cross this moat of leather unless you ask me to.”

She eyed him skeptically. “Were you ever a Boy Scout?”

He flopped down on the side of the bed closest to the door. “Eagle Scout.”

After a short time, they both settled to their respective sides of the bed. Jordan thought he’d be awake thinking about Erin lying inches away, but he fell asleep almost immediately, still in his clothes.

He awoke sitting up, one hand on his gun. He took in the sunlit room with a single glance. Nothing out of place. Door closed. Window closed. Bathroom empty. What had woken him up?

Next to him, Erin whimpered.

He turned to check on her. Still in her robe, she lay on her side facing him, her hands clasped under one cheek. She gasped in her sleep. He wanted to reach over the coat and touch her, but he didn’t want to break his promise. One wrong move with Erin, and he would be finished.

“Hush,” he whispered, as if she were his niece Abigail, famous in the family for her nightmares about giant tarantulas.

Erin let out one long breath and seemed to sink deeper into sleep.

She had plenty of food for bad dreams: strigoi, bats, and—

With a scream, Erin sat bolt upright.

“I’m right here,” Jordan said, sitting up with her. “We’re safe.”

She looked over at him, eyes wide.

“It’s Jordan, remember?” he said.

She drew in a ragged breath and scooted back to lean against the headboard. “I remember.”

Careful to stay on his side of the coat, Jordan did the same. “Bad dreams?”

“Bad reality.”

“Should I be insulted?” Maybe that would lighten the mood.

“I didn’t mean you. You’re … well … fine. But the rest of the situation …”

Jordan was insulted at being relegated to merely fine, but decided this wasn’t the time to make a smart-aleck comment about it. “At least we got some sleep and food. I haven’t felt so good since before Masada.”

He stopped talking. Masada. Where his team had died. All of them. He named them in his head, intending to never forget them: Sanderson. McKay. Cooper. Tyson. All of them, except McKay, younger than he. Tyson had a two-year-old daughter who would never see her mother again. McKay had three kids, an ex-wife, and a dog named Chipper. Cooper used his army pay to support his frail elderly mother and a long string of girlfriends. Sanderson hadn’t even had time to start a relationship. He was just a kid. Jordan rested his head against the headboard. “It’s been a very long twenty-four hours.”

“I wonder what comes next,” Erin said.

“Another field trip with our fun tour guides, Rhun and Nadia.”

“Nadia’s not much fun.” Erin pulled the covers up past her waist. “I think she would’ve killed me in that church.”

“I thought she was bluffing.”

Erin put one hand up to her throat. “I don’t think Nadia bluffs.”

Jordan didn’t think so either. “I get the feeling that if she wanted to, she could just crush us like bugs and hire someone to clean up the greasy spots.”

Erin grinned. “That’s supposed to be reassuring?”

He glanced over at her. “At least we have each other.” It sounded so cheesy he wished he could take it back.

“But I barely know you,” she said.

“What do you want to know?” He stuck a pillow behind his head. “I’m human. Thirty-five. Career army. Born in Iowa. Third son. My mom had five kids. My favorite color is green.”

Erin smiled and shook her head.

“Not good enough?” Jordan decided to go for it, just tell the truth. “My wife — Karen — was also in the army. She died about a year ago. Killed in action.” His voice tightened around that knot of grief, but he forged on. “No kids, but I wanted three. Now your turn. Kids? Husband? Siblings?”

“I can’t play this game.” He saw a quick flash of pain in her eyes before she glanced away.

Family was off-limits. Got it. He picked an easier question. “Not even your favorite color? That’s not a state secret, right?”

She turned back with a slight smile, as if she appreciated the effort. “Sepia.”

“Sepia?” He looked over at her. “That’s brown, right?”

“It’s a brown gray. It was originally made from the ink sac of a cuttlefish. Sepia is the Latinized form of ‘cuttlefish.’ ”

Her earnest amber eyes stared over into his. Or were they sepia?

“See. That’s a start.” He shifted on the bed, trying to come up with another question. “Let’s say today was Saturday, and you were home. What would you be doing?”

She looked down at the grimwolf jacket, almost as if she were embarrassed. “I’d be eating Lucky Charms and watching cartoons.”

“I didn’t see that answer coming.” He imagined her sitting in pajamas with a bowl of cereal in her lap and cartoons on TV. Not a bad way to start a weekend.

“My roommate in college, Wendy, got me into it. She said I had a lot of cartoons to catch up on.”

After her freaky childhood, it sounded like Wendy had a point.

“So,” Erin said. “Your turn. What would you be doing on a lazy Saturday morning?”

“Sleeping.” He wished he had a cooler answer.

She looked sheepish. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“I’m not.” He reached over and smoothed a damp strand of hair back from her cheek, ready to back off if she gave any sign that she wanted him to stop.

Instead, she closed her eyes and rested her head against his hand.

He leaned across the grimwolf leather jacket and kissed her. He did it without thinking, as if his lips were meant to be there.

She let out a tiny sigh and slid her arms around his neck.

Rhun awoke to the lemony smell of chemical cleaning fluid. He laid a palm against his aching chest, remembering.

He pushed himself up on an elbow. He was in a bedroom with white curtains drawn against the light. A few steps away a woman was lying on the wooden floor. Nadia. He remembered now. Nadia. Emmanuel. The bunker. He listened for Erin’s and Jordan’s heartbeats, heard them on the other side of a wall. The soft rumble of their voices comforted him.

He used the headboard to lift himself to his feet.

Nadia stirred, stretching like a waking cat. “Better?”

Rhun stood, swaying. “Were you hurt?”

“Only my leg.” She stood, too, more easily than he had. “It will mend.”

Rhun envied her. “Were the others wounded?”

“The soldier has luck,” she said. “The woman is a talented shooter, even with a pistol, and she had the sense to stay low.”

“Piers?” Rhun looked around the darkened room.

“Gone.” Nadia explained all that had happened since Rhun was shot in the forest.

Rhun circled to the most disturbing question. “How did the Belial know where we were, where to ambush us?”

His team’s departure from Jerusalem had been known only by the Cardinal and his innermost circle.

Nadia sighed, concerned. “I think the best course of action is for me to return to the abbey with news of Emmanuel’s death, to claim you and the others died, too. That will give you time to operate outside the range of the Church and any spies, to hide your next steps on the way to the Blood Gospel.”

Rhun nodded. They needed to keep their search secret from the Belial. “What about Piers? What will you say about him?”

“I’ll tell them what I found,” she said. “A shame that I only noticed German soldiers in the bunker. And strigoi, of course.”

“So you will not tell them of the Russian soldiers?”

“If the Church learns that Russian soldiers from St. Petersburg had been in the same bunker as the Blood Gospel, they will send more than a team to Russia. It will be all-out war.”

Rhun nodded. No Sanguinist had ever returned from St. Petersburg alive since the traitorous Vitandus took command there. To retrieve anything from Russia, the Church would have to send an army. And every casualty would weaken their order in the battle they must eventually fight against the Belial.

“We must go alone,” Rhun said. “Both to prevent a war and for any hope of recovering the book.”

“And what about the humans? It will be dangerous to bring them.”

“The Vitandus may hate our order, but he maintains a strange sense of honor. It may be enough to keep them safe.”

From the other side of the wall, Rhun heard Jordan’s and Erin’s hearts beat faster.

“I can plainly see your affection for them, Rhun,” Nadia said. “Do you think that the Russian will not?”

“I can’t leave them here.” He tried to block out the sounds of Erin and Jordan. “If the Belial have agents within the Sanguinist ranks, their lives might be more at risk here than if I took them to Russia.”

“Then the matter is settled.” Nadia stood and put on her chain belt.

“I will need papers for us all,” Rhun added.

“I will get them for you in secret.”

Rhun considered the path on which he was about to embark. For the first time in his long, long life, he was about to be sundered from the Church, even if only for a time. He felt bereft.

Nadia headed toward the door. “And I will bring you something you can trade for safe passage. Something precious to the ruler of St. Petersburg.”

Even Nadia did not dare to speak his name.

He had once been a Sanguinist, but he had broken the Church’s laws so violently that he had been excommunicated — and not an ordinary excommunication, but a banishment that could not be undone, one so severe that all who knew him must shun him forever after.

In the end, his name had become his curse: Vitandus.

Erin smiled when Jordan lifted her over the leather jacket and onto his lap. She now straddled him, staring down at his impish smile. “What happened to staying on your side?”

“You’re the one who came over to my side.” He kissed her lightly on the lips and a shiver ran down her spine.

She couldn’t argue with that. With one foot, she kicked the grimwolf jacket onto the floor.

Jordan grinned up at her. “Problem solved.”

She stroked a hand across his jaw. Smooth from his recent shave. She kissed him again. He smelled like eucalyptus shaving cream, and he tasted like coffee.

She pulled back and gazed into those beautiful blue eyes. “Your eyes are Egyptian blue, like the sun god Ra.”

“I’m taking that as a compliment.”

He slid one warm palm around the small of her back, then pulled her so tightly against his chest that she felt his heartbeat against her breast.

She relaxed against him, feeling safe.

Then he shifted his lips, found her mouth, and kissed her hard. A yearning urgency flowed from his lips to hers. She moaned between them and threaded her fingers through his hair, pulling him even closer.

She wanted to forget everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, blot out every bad memory. The only thing she had room for in her head was the two of them. He stroked his hands along her body.

With one arm around her back, he used the other to ease her around and under him on the bed.

She stretched under his weight, feeling his muscular bulk settle upon her. Her hands stroked down his broad back. She slid them under his shirt, felt the smooth warmth of his skin. He pulled his T-shirt over his head in one quick movement, revealing the blaze of his tattoo down one side, the branching fractal marking the lightning strike, a testament to his brief experience of death.

Her finger traced one of the forking lines, raising a shiver over his flesh.

He was far from dead now: his breath heaved, heat radiated from him, his eyes shone deep into hers.

Never breaking from her gaze, he undid the belt of her robe and smoothed back both sides. Only then did his eyes drift down, devouring her body, leaving heat in their wake without him even touching her.

“Wow,” he silently mouthed.

She drew him down to her, gasping when his bare skin touched hers. His mouth found hers again. Erin lost herself in the kiss. Her heart raced against his, and her breath caught, held, then sped, too.

He raised his lips from hers, just a finger’s breadth, and she lifted up to meet them again. He kissed down her throat. She tilted her neck and arched her head back against the pillow, feeling strands of wet hair fall across her face but not wanting to take her hands from his body for even a second to brush them away. His lips moved lower, grazed along the top of her collarbone, ending on the hollow of her throat.

“Erin?” His question brushed soft against her neck.

She knew what he asked, and she knew what she wanted to answer. But she didn’t speak. “Wait.” The word came out breathless. She pushed him away and pulled the robe closed. “Too fast.”

“Slower,” he said. “Got it.”

She tied the robe. Her heart raced, and she wanted nothing more than to flee back to the warmth of his arms. But she didn’t trust that. She couldn’t.

A fist pounded the door.

A voice called through.

Nadia.

“Time to go.”

45

As the jet lifted off, Bathory settled into the plane’s soft seat with a sigh. In the darkness of the cargo hold, she felt Magor relax.

Sleep, my darling, she told him. We are safe.

For the first time in years, she was flying during the day, and without her strigoi. Where she was going, they had more to fear than just sunlight; their very existence put them at risk. It was a dangerous destination, but she felt safer without them.

She had chartered a plane, one whose pilot did not question her when the ground crew loaded the wolf into the cargo hold. He had stayed silent in his covered crate, as ordered, but they must have smelled him, known that he was a huge beast. For the right price, they had said nothing. She stretched luxuriantly in the wide seat of the jet. She had the plane to herself. The only others on board were the captain and the copilot.

How long since she had been so alone? Far from Him and His tools? Years.

She stroked the leather seat appreciatively and pulled up the window shade. Sunlight flooded into the cabin, falling across her legs, warming them. She held her hand palm up to the light, as if she could grasp hold of it. When she tired of that, she turned her attention to the bright landscape below.

The city of Munich gave way to farms, forests, and tiny, one-family homes that spread ever farther apart as the jet headed east. In each house, a family had just had breakfast. A father had kissed a mother good-bye, a child had gathered up a schoolbag and left. Those houses were empty now, but later they would fill again.

What would it be like to live in one of them?

Her destiny had been fated at birth. No simple life of husbands and children and domesticity. She usually felt only contempt for those living such a simple existence, but today she was drawn to its humble charm.

She shook her head. Even if she were free, she would not settle into another prison as a wife and mother. Instead she and Magor would hunt. They could range as far as they liked, living alone, never having to worry that He would punish her, that Tarek would finally have the revenge he had so long sought, not fighting every day for respect, for the right to live to see another sunrise.

Just thinking about it made her tired.

Magor stirred in the cargo hold, sensing her worries.

Rest, she told him, and he settled back down.

Her fingers stroked the black mark on her neck, the proof that set her apart from others. It would take a miracle for her to erase it, to escape Him.

What if the book could show her just such a miracle?