The Blood Gospel

46

Erin had trudged through Russian customs half asleep, but she woke up fully when she and the two men reached the freezing sidewalk in front of the St. Petersburg airport. Rhun hustled them into a taxi with a broken heater and a driver who obviously had no fear of death. She was too scared to be cold as the driver careened through the thickening snowstorm, talking all the while in Russian.

Eventually the cab slid to a stop in front of what looked like a city park, a large space that was probably green in summer, with tall trees lining both sides. Right now the trees had naked limbs, and the frozen grass would soon be buried under thick white snow.

She could not believe how far she had come from the searing heat of Masada. Yesterday morning, her biggest weather worry had been sunburn; today it was hypothermia. As she climbed from the taxi, the St. Petersburg wind cut through her grimwolf leather coat and sucked warmth from the marrow of her bones. Instead of sand, gritty snowflakes stung her cheeks.

Overhead, the sun had changed into a pearly disk struggling to cast a white glow through banks of cloud, providing little light and less warmth.

Jordan walked close at her side as they crossed under a stone arch and into the park. She suspected that he wanted to take her hand, but she punched her fists deep in her pockets and kept walking. He looked hurt, and she couldn’t blame him, but she didn’t know what to do with him. She had been very close to making love to him back in Germany and was terrified by what would have happened if she had. She liked Jordan far too much already.

With each step, her sneakers slipped on the ice-glazed stone tiles of the path. To either side, the earth had been raised into knee-high grassy mounds. She eyed them, wondering what they were for.

Jordan had turned up his collar, his nose and cheeks already red. She remembered the feel of his jaw under her lips, the heat of his lips against her skin, and quickly looked away.

A few steps ahead, Rhun hadn’t bothered with a coat and strode in a billowing black cassock, white hands at his sides, looking as comfortable as he had in hundred-degree heat atop Masada. In one hand, he carried the long leather cylinder that Nadia had left for them in Germany. Erin had no idea what it contained and suspected that Rhun didn’t either. Before Nadia had given it to him, she had sealed the cylinder with golden wax and imprinted it with the papal seal — two crossed keys tied with a band and topped by the triple crown of the pope.

“Okay, Rhun.” Jordan stepped up on the priest’s right side. “Why are we here? Why did we come to this freezing park?”

Erin moved to Rhun’s other side to hear the answer. He had told them only that their destination was St. Petersburg, that Russian forces might have brought the book to the city after the war. Erin had already surmised as much, picturing the dead Russian soldier in the bunker, remembering Nadia reading the Cyrillic orders. The soldier had been dispatched from this city.

Erin also knew the man had a wife and a child, a daughter who might still be alive, living in St. Petersburg, unaware that some strangers knew more about her father’s death than she did.

Erin was glad that she had given Nadia the letters from the bunker to pass along to Brother Leopold. Maybe their efforts would bring the woman a small measure of peace.

“Rhun?” Erin pressed him, wanting to know more, deserving to know more.

The priest stopped and looked across the snow-covered mounds toward a copse of skeletal trees. Wind rattled stubborn and ragged leaves. “We have come here to ask permission to seek the book on Russian soil.”

“Why?” Jordan said. “I thought Sanguinists didn’t ask for permission.”

Rhun’s poker face concealed his emotions, but Erin sensed fear from him. She hated to imagine something terrible enough to frighten Rhun.

“St. Petersburg is not in our domain,” he answered cryptically.

“Then whose is it?” Jordan asked. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Catholic Church has a renewed presence here.”

Erin stuffed her hands deeper into cold pockets and stared at the path’s end, where she saw a large bronze statue of a woman in a broad skirt holding an object up into the air. Erin squinted, but couldn’t quite make out what it was. She searched around the space. She had thought this was a city park, but an air of sadness permeated the air. She could not imagine children ever playing here.

“The Vitandus rules this land,” Rhun answered Jordan. The priest touched the leather cylinder slung over his shoulder as if to reassure himself that he had not lost it. “And he has no love for the Church. When he comes, tell him nothing about our mission or yourselves.”

“What’s a Vitandus?” Jordan asked.

Erin knew that answer. “It is a title given as a punishment. There is no worse religious condemnation from the Church. It’s worse than excommunication. More like a permanent banishment and shunning.”

“Great. Can’t wait to meet the guy. Must be a real charmer.”

“He is,” Rhun added. “So beware.”

Jordan made an involuntary move for his holster, but they had been forced to leave their weapons in Germany. They flew here by commercial airlines, using false papers prepared by Nadia. But there was no way to smuggle in their weapons.

“What did this Vitandus do?” Erin asked, stamping her cold feet against the stone as if that would warm them. “Who is he?”

Rhun kept his gaze on the bare trees, watchful, wary, with a frightened cast to his eyes. He responded matter-of-factly — though the answer stunned her.

“You know the man better as Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.”

Moving slowly down the tiled path, Rhun fingered his icy rosary and offered a prayer that Grigori would not order them immediately slaughtered, as he had murdered every Sanguinist sent to Russia since 1945. Perhaps the tube that Nadia had handed him offered some hope. She had instructed him to give it to Grigori unopened.

But what was it?

Did he bear a gift or a weapon?

Erin broke into his worries. “Rasputin?” Disbelief rang in her voice, shone in her narrowed eyes. “The Mad Monk of Russia? Confidant to the Romanovs?”

“The same,” he answered.

Such details were what most historians noted about Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. He had been a mystic monk rumored to have healing powers, his fate tied to Czar Nicholas II and his family. In the early 1900s, he had used those powers to ingratiate himself with the czar and his family, seemingly the only one capable of helping their son through his painful illness of hemophilia. For such tender care, they had overlooked his sexual eccentricities and political machinations, until eventually a British secret-service agent and a group of nobles had assassinated him.

Or so it was thought.

Rhun, of course, knew far more.

He drew in a deep breath of cold air. He smelled the fresh tang of snow, the underlying carpet of frostbitten leaves, and the faint tinge of old death.

Here was Russia.

He had not breathed its scent in a hundred years.

Jordan, meanwhile, surveyed the park, ever vigilant as he strode at Rhun’s side.

Rhun followed his gaze. The soldier’s eyes lingered on the dark tree trunks, the low stone wall, the plinth supporting a statue, all places where enemies might hide. He appreciated Jordan’s wariness and suspicion, two valuable traits while standing on Russian soil. But their adversary had not yet arrived. For perhaps another few moments they were still safe.

They stopped at the grim dark statue of a woman staring into the distance, proffering a wreath to the lost citizens of St. Petersburg: the symbol of a mourning motherland.

Jordan blew into his hands to warm them, a gesture that spoke to his humanness and the fire burning inside him. He faced Rhun. “I thought Rasputin died during World War One?”

Erin answered him. “He was assassinated. Poisoned with cyanide, shot four times, beaten with a club, wrapped in a rug, and thrown in the Neva River, where he supposedly drowned.”

“And this guy survived all that?” Jordan said with thick sarcasm. “Sounds like a strigoi to me.”

Erin shook her head. “There are plenty of pictures of him in daylight.”

Rhun tried to focus past their endless chatter. He heard a creature rustle among the trees a few yards off. But it was only a field mouse searching for grain before winter buried everything in snow. He hoped that the creature might find some.

“Then what is he?” Jordan asked.

Rhun sighed, knowing only answers would silence them. “Grigori was once a Sanguinist. He and Piers and I served as a triad for many years, before he was defrocked.”

Jordan frowned. “So your order defrocked this guy, then punished him with eternal banishment?”

“An order of Vitandus,” Erin reminded him.

The soldier nodded. “No wonder this guy doesn’t like the Church. Maybe you need to work on your PR.”

Rhun turned his back on them. “That is not the entire reason for his hatred of the Church.”

He touched his pectoral cross. Grigori had many reasons — hundreds of thousands of reasons — to hate the Church, reasons that Rhun understood far too well.

“So why was Rasputin excommunicated?” Erin asked.

He could still hear the doubt in her voice as she spoke Grigori’s name. She would not believe the truth until she could touch it. In this case, she might regret needing such reassurances.

Jordan pressed Rhun with more questions. “And what happens to an excommunicated Sanguinist? Can he still perform holy rites?”

“A priest is said to have an indelible mark on his soul,” Erin said. “So I’m guessing he can still consecrate wine?”

Rhun rubbed his eyes — with such short lives, their impatience was understandable, their need for answers insatiable. He wished for silence, but it was not to be.

“Grigori can consecrate wine,” Rhun answered tiredly. “But unlike wine blessed by a priest from the true Church, it does not have the same sustaining power of Christ’s blood. Because of that, he is forever trapped in a state between cursed strigoi and blessed Sanguinist.”

Erin brushed her hair out of her face. “What does that mean for his soul?”

“At the moment,” Jordan said, “I’m more concerned about what it means for his body. Like can he come out during the day?”

“He can and does and will.”

And soon.

“So why do we need his permission to be here?” Jordan asked.

“We need his permission because he has not let a Sanguinist leave Russian soil alive for many decades. He knows we are here. He will have us brought to him when it is time.”

Jordan turned on him, his heart spiking with anger. “And you couldn’t have told us this sooner? How much danger are we in?”

Rhun faced his fury. “I believe that we stand a good chance of leaving Russia alive. Unlike the others who have come here, the Vitandus and I have a more nuanced relationship because of our shared past.”

Jordan’s hand strayed to the side where his weapon usually hung. “So the men in the black rattletrap who have been following us since the airport … they belong to a Russian strigoi mobster with a shoot-on-sight order for all Sanguinists?”

Erin jerked her head toward the distant street. “We’re being followed?”

Jordan simply glared. “I had hoped they were Rhun’s people.”

“I have no people,” Rhun said. “The Church does not know we are here. After the attack at Masada and then the events in Germany, I suspect the Belial have a traitor in the Sanguinist fold. So I had Nadia declare us all dead.”

A muscle twitched in the soldier’s jaw. “Oh, this just gets better and better.”

A new voice interrupted, scolding in tone but amused nonetheless. “Such vehemence is unbecoming here.”

They all turned as a man in the long dark robe of a Russian Orthodox priest circled around the bronze statue and approached on stocky legs. The edges of his robe swept the tiles. Around his neck he wore a pectoral cross, a triple-barred crucifix of the same Church.

He smiled as he closed upon them. His once-long hair had been cut an inch above his shoulders and was combed back to reveal a broad face and cunning blue eyes. His sable-brown beard was neatly trimmed, which it had not been during the years Rhun had spent with him.

Erin smothered a gasp.

Grigori, Rhun realized, must still look enough like his century-old photographs to put an end to her lingering doubt. He prayed that she and Jordan would remember his admonition to tell Rasputin nothing.

Rhun greeted him with the slightest bow of his head. “Grigori.”

“My dear Rhun.” Grigori inclined his square head toward Erin and Jordan. “You have new companions.”

Rhun did not introduce them. “I do.”

“As usual, you have chosen a wise meeting place.” Grigori gestured toward the mounds to either side of the path with one powerful hand. “I might have killed you elsewhere, but not here. Not among the bones of half a million of my countrymen.”

Jordan swiveled his head around, as if looking for those bones.

“He did not tell you where you are, perhaps?” Grigori clucked his tongue. “Ever the poor host, Father Korza. You are at Piskariovskoye Cemetery. It commemorates the lives of those lost during the siege of Leningrad. These mounds you see are mass graves. Precisely one hundred and eighty-six of them.”

Erin stared aghast at the spread of grassy hummocks.

“They contain the bones of half a million Russians. Four hundred and twenty thousand civilians. They died during the years that the Nazis surrounded our city. When we fought and prayed for help. But help did not come, did it, Rhun?”

Rhun said nothing. If he said anything, it would fan to life the flame of Grigori’s smoldering temper.

“Four years of unending slaughter. And yet do any of these graves weigh on your Cardinal’s conscience?”

“I am sorry,” Erin said. “For your losses.”

“Even the child can apologize, Rhun. Do you see?” Grigori pointed back toward a car idling near the entrance to the cemetery. “Shall we move your poor companions out of the cold? I can see that they suffer under its bite.”

Rhun spared Erin and Jordan a quick glance. They did, indeed, look very cold. He had so little to do with humans that he often forgot their fragility.

“Will you guarantee our safety?”

“No more than you will guarantee mine.” Wind whipped Grigori’s dark hair across his white face. “You must know that the time of your death is at my choosing now.”

Jordan wrapped an arm around Erin’s shoulder. She didn’t lean into it, but she didn’t move away from it either. He faced Rhun and Rasputin, sensing between them the tension of old hostilities mixed with a measure of respect, maybe even dark friendship.

He kept his tone light. “How about we all talk about our imminent demise someplace warm?”

Rasputin’s eyebrows rose high at his words, then he threw back his head and laughed. It sounded deep and merry and completely out of place in a snowy graveyard, especially after the threat to kill them. Jordan could see why they called him the Mad Monk.

“I like this one.” Rasputin clapped a broad hand on Jordan’s back, almost knocking him off his feet. He smiled at Erin. “But not quite as much as the beauty here.”

Jordan didn’t like the sound of that.

Rhun stepped between them. “Perhaps my companion is right. We could find a more amenable location for our conversation.”

Rasputin shrugged heavily and led them back down the path to the waiting car. Once there, he indicated that Jordan and Erin should take the front seat. He and Rhun took the back.

Jordan opened the door to a wave of warmth. It smelled like vodka and cigarettes. He climbed in before Erin, to sit between her and Rasputin’s driver.

The driver held out his hand. He looked around fourteen, and his snow-white hand felt colder than Jordan’s.

“Name’s Sergei.”

“Are you old enough to drive?” It slipped out before Jordan could stop it.

“I am older than you.” The boy spoke with a slight Russian accent. “Perhaps older than your mother.”

Jordan suddenly missed his submachine gun, his dagger, and the days when all his enemies were human.

47

As the large sedan wound away from the cemetery, Erin held her outstretched fingers over the car’s heater vent. Jordan had one arm across the back of the seat behind her. He was the only one in the car whom she trusted — and in truth, she barely knew him.

But at least he was human.

Right now that meant one hell of a lot.

Rhun and Rasputin spoke in measured tones in the backseat. As civil as they sounded, she could tell that they were arguing, even if she didn’t understand a word of Russian.

The car screeched through the late-afternoon streets, bright Russian facades peeking like fairy-tale houses through plumes of swirling snow. They had at best another hour of daylight. If the Belial had followed them to Russia, would they attack again after nightfall? Was Rasputin at war with them, as he seemed to be with the Sanguinists?

Any answers would have to wait until she could get Rhun away from Rasputin.

After another ten minutes, the car slowed to a stop in front of a magnificent Russian-style church. Erin pushed her face closer to the window to see.

Onion-shaped domes topped with golden crosses soared into the sky, each dome more fantastical than the last — two gilt, one with bright swirls of color, others blue and encrusted with designs of gold and white and green. The facade sported columns, raised squares, arches, and an enormous mosaic of Jesus bathed in a golden light. Such fanciful opulence stole her breath away.

“Wondrous, yes?” the driver said with reverence.

“Stunning,” she answered honestly.

“You see here the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood,” Rasputin said, leaning forward from the backseat. “Erected over the spot of Czar Alexander the Second’s assassination in 1881. But he would not be the last Romanov to fall to the wrath of the people. Inside that church, you will see cobblestones once stained with Alexander’s blood.”

Despite the church’s rich history, it lost some of its splendor in Erin’s eyes as she listened to Rasputin’s words. She had seen enough stones stained with blood, enough to last a lifetime. Still, she pushed open the car door and stepped into cold wind, more frigid than even the cemetery. She stared at dirty gray snowdrifts pushed up along the wall of the church by the stiff wind coming off the nearby river.

Jordan moved close enough to her to block the wind. He stared up at the elaborate construction. “Looks like someone had a gingerbread kit and a lot of spare time.”

Rhun scolded in a low voice, “He is proud. Do not insult him.”

Rasputin’s answer carried through the wind and across the car. “They could do no more to insult me than you and those whom you love have done already, Rhun. But they would be wise not to anger me themselves. For now, I am feeling generous enough to grant them immunity because they are not Sanguinists.”

“Guess it’s good to be human,” Jordan muttered with a crooked, wry smile.

Proving this, he reached down and threaded warm fingers through Erin’s cold ones.

Together, they followed the two black-clad priests toward the twin arches of the church’s entrance.

Once they passed the entrance vestibule, Rhun stepped into the main nave. He knew what to expect, but what he saw still struck his senses deeply — as Grigori knew it would.

His gaze was immediately drawn to the mosaics covering every surface inside the space. Bright blues and golds and crimsons swam in Rhun’s vision. Tiles depicting biblical stories shouted from every wall and ceiling: Jesus and the apostles, the stylized brown eyes of saints, the brilliant wings of angels. Millions of minuscule tiles formed and re-formed into biblical scenes. He closed his eyes, but they burned anew when he opened them.

His stomach roiled from the smells here, too: warm humans in the nave, incense, wine, old death seeping from the floor and cracks, and, somewhere, fresh human blood. He struggled against an urge to flee.

Rhun turned back toward the entrance, his eyes falling upon a vast mosaic over the doorway. Hundreds of thousands of small tiles depicted the greatest moment of Sanguinist history. He knew that Grigori himself had commissioned this very work, showing the rising of Lazarus from his tomb, the first of the Sanguinist Order to greet Our Lord, making his pact to serve Christ, to partake only of His blood.

Except for Rhun, Lazarus was the only member of the Order who had been converted before ever tasting human blood, before ever taking a single life.

How far I have fallen …

Rhun cast his eyes down. The majesty of the story of Lazarus helped him find his center amid the din and clamor of the vibrant church.

“Wondrous, is it not?” Grigori beamed at the monstrous home he had created.

“The mosaics are masterful,” Erin agreed, striding past him, her head tilted up, studying all.

“Yes, they are.”

Grigori clapped his hands, and shadowy figures appeared from doorways and alcoves, whirling into activity.

Rhun returned his attention to the room, noting that those who did Grigori’s bidding had no heartbeats; most looked like their driver, so very young in face but so very old in years. These were strigoi who had made a pact with Grigori as their pope, creating a dark version of the Sanguinist order on Russian soil.

Upon Grigori’s orders, the tourists in the church were hustled out the doors, which thudded closed and locked. Within minutes, only two human hearts still beat in the church.

Besides Rhun and his companions, the church held only Grigori’s followers, fifty in all: men, women, and children whom he had turned into his own dark congregation, forever trapping them between salvation and damnation. They were not as feral as most strigoi, yet neither were they striving toward holiness like the Sanguinists.

A new shade of darkness had been brought into the world by Grigori.

Wooden pews were carried into the nave and lined up facing the altar. Electric lights were switched off, and long yellow beeswax candles flamed to life. The summer scent of honey fought the tainted odors of the dark congregation.

Erin and Jordan stayed close to Rhun near the back of the church. Jordan shifted warily from side to side, as if he expected an attack at any moment. Erin turned her focus to one fantastical mosaic after another. Even here, they each amply demonstrated their roles as Warrior of Man and Woman of Learning.

Rhun kept between them and Grigori’s congregation, filling his own role.

Knight of Christ.

But his head whirled at the deep sense of wrongness here, as sacred images looked down upon Grigori’s profaned flock.

Accompanied by young acolytes, Grigori climbed the black marble stairs to the altar with a stately tread. Ornate bloodred columns, lit by tall candles, flanked him. Behind his shoulder, the last light of day, a feeble orange glow, shone through high windows onto a mosaic of Christ feeding the apostles with the host and the wine, while angels beamed from above.

In this space, Grigori intoned his dark Mass.

The choir chanted ancient Russian prayers, clear voices soaring to faraway ceilings in rhythms and tones that humans could never attain, would never hear.

At last, hands led Rhun and the others to a pew. He followed, still unable to adjust to the bone-deep wrongness of this spectacle.

Then a warm hand touched his bare wrist.

“Rhun?” whispered a voice.

He turned and looked into Erin’s questioning eyes. Their naturalness, their humanity, helped to ground him.

“Are you all right?” She tilted her head as they took seats in the pew.

He put his hand atop hers, closed his eyelids, and concentrated on the quick, sure beat of her heart, letting it blot out the profane music. One true human heartbeat was enough to keep it all at bay.

The singing stopped.

For a heartbeat, silence swallowed the church.

Then Grigori called everyone forward to accept the Eucharist, holding high a golden chalice. Disciples filed forward to receive their wine, their boots soft on the dark marble floor. Rhun remained seated with Jordan and Erin.

When the consecrated liquid touched their lips, smoke rose from their mouths as if they had just breathed fire. With bodies too impure to accept Christ’s love, even the pale version of it that Grigori could offer, they moaned in agony.

Erin’s heart squeezed to a faster beat, in sympathy with their pain, especially that of those who seemed no more than children.

Rhun stared at a young girl, who in life had been no more than ten or eleven, step away, her lips blistering, each breath a steaming gasp of agony and ecstasy. She crossed back to her pew and knelt with her head bowed in supplication.

Here was Grigori’s greatest evil, his willingness to convert the young. Such an act stole their souls and cut them off from receiving Christ’s love for all eternity.

Grigori’s voice cut through Rhun’s musings. “And now, Rhun. You, too, must accept my Communion.”

He remained seated, refusing to take such darkness into his body. “I will not.”

Grigori snapped his fingers, and Rhun’s party was suddenly surrounded by a group of Rasputin’s disciples, fouling his nostrils with the odors of wine and burnt flesh.

“That is my price, Rhun.” Grigori’s words boomed through the church. “Accept my hospitality. Drink of the sacred wine. Only then will I listen.”

“If I refuse?”

“My children will not go hungry.”

The disciples moved closer.

Erin’s heart raced. Jordan’s hands formed fists.

Grigori smiled paternally. “But your companions will fight, won’t they? It will be no easy death. The man is a soldier, is he not? Dare I say, he is a warrior?”

Rhun flinched.

“And the woman,” Grigori continued. “A true beauty, but with hands callused from work in the field, and also, I suspect, from holding a pen. I believe that she is most learned.”

Rhun glared across the dark congregation toward Grigori at the altar.

“Yes, my friend.” Grigori laughed his familiar mad laugh. “I know that you are here seeking the Gospel. Only prophecy would send you to my doorstep. And perhaps I will even help you — but not without a price.”

Grigori cupped the tainted chalice in his palms and raised it.

“Come, Rhun, drink. Drink to save your companions’ souls.”

With no choice, Rhun stood. On stiff legs, he walked between the pews, mounted the hard stone stairs, and opened his mouth.

He braced himself against the pain.

Grigori came forward, lifted his chalice high, poured from that height.

Bloodred wine struck and filled Rhun’s mouth, his throat.

To his surprise, this black sacrament did not burn. Instead, a welcoming warmth coursed through his body. Strength and healing surged within him, quickening even his still heart to beat — something it had not done in many centuries. With that quiver of muscle in his chest, he knew what was mixed in that wine, but still he did not turn his face away from the flowing chalice.

It filled him, quieting that endless hunger inside him. He felt the wounds that had been opened in the bunker pull closed. But best of all, he was enveloped in a deep contentment.

He moaned at the rapture of it.

Grigori stepped back, taking his chalice with him.

Rhun struggled to form words as the world around him wavered. “You did not—”

“I am not so holy as you,” Grigori explained, looming over him as Rhun slumped to the marble floor. “Not since my excommunication from your beloved Church. So, yes, any wine that I give my followers must be fortified. With human blood.”

Rhun’s eyes rolled back, taking away the world and leaving only his eternal penance.

At Elisabeta’s throat, Rhun swallowed blood. In all his long years as a young Sanguinist, he had never tasted its rich iron against his tongue, save that first night when he became cursed, feeding on tainted strigoi blood.

Panic at the blasphemy gave him strength to swim against that bloodred tide, to pull his vision clear. The beating of his own heart, quickened by her surge of blood through him, slowed … slowed … and stopped.

Elisabeta lay under him, her soft body golden in the firelight. Dark hair spilled over her creamy shoulders, across the stone floor.

Silence now filled the room. But that could not be.

Always he heard the steady beat of her heart.

He whispered her name, but this time she did not answer.

Her head fell to the side, exposing the bloody wound on her throat. Rhun’s hand rose to his mouth. For the first time in many years, he touched fangs.

He had done this. He had taken her life. In his blind lust, he had lost himself, believing himself strong enough—special enough, as Bernard always claimed — to break the edict placed upon those of his order, to maintain chastity lest they free the beast inside them all.

In the end, he had proven to be as weak as any.

He stared down at Elisabeta’s still form.

Pride had killed her as surely as his teeth.

He gathered her cooling body into his lap. Her skin was paler than it had been in life, long lashes soot black against white cheeks. Her once-red lips had faded to pink, like a baby’s hand.

Rhun rocked and wept for her. He had broken every commandment. He had loosed the creature buried within him, and it had devoured his beloved. He thought of her vibrant smile, the mischief in her eyes, her skill as a healer. The lives she would have saved now withering as surely as hers had.

And the sad future of her motherless children.

He had done this.

Under the fire’s hissing a faint thump sounded. A long breath later, another.

She lived! … But not for long.

Perhaps only long enough to save her. He had failed her so many times and in so many ways, but he must try.

The act was forbidden. It defiled his most basic oaths. Already he had defiled his priestly vows, at a terrible cost. The cost would be even greater if he also broke the vows of a Sanguinist.

The penalty for him would be death.

The cost for her would be her soul.

The first law: Sanguinists may not create strigoi. But she would not be strigoi. She would join him. She would serve the Church as he did, at his side. As Sanguinists, they would share eternity. He would not fall again.

Fainter, her heart throbbed.

He had little time. Almost none. He slashed his wrist with his silver knife. The hissing and burning were stronger, now that he was no longer holy. His blood, now mixed with hers, welled out. He held his wrist over her mouth. Drops splattered onto bloodless lips. Gently he parted those lips with his own.

Please, my love, he begged.

Drink.

Join me.

Rhun woke to hunger on the cold marble, the points of his fangs sharp on his tongue.

Grigori’s cursed wine had been spiked with human blood. Rhun fought against that treachery. But his body, even now, demanded more, insisted upon release.

His ears picked out the twin heartbeats at the back of the church.

He staggered to his feet, shaking with desire, turning inexorably toward the thrum of life, like the face of a flower turning to the sun.

“Do not deny your true nature, my friend,” Grigori whispered seductively behind him. “Such measures of control must always snap. Release the beast within you. You must sin greatly in order to repent as deeply as God demands. Only then will you be closer to the Almighty. Do not struggle to withstand it.”

“I shall withstand it,” Rhun gasped out hoarsely.

His ears rang, his vision dimmed, and the hand at his cross trembled.

“You didn’t always,” Grigori reminded him. “What did you see when you drank my wine? Perhaps the defilement of your Elisabeta?”

Rhun turned and lunged for him, but Grigori’s troops fell upon him, ready for such an assault. Two boys held each of his arms, two encircled each leg, another two pulled at his shoulders.

Still, he fought, dragging them all across the marble floor.

Paces away, Grigori laughed.

“Rhun!” Erin called to him. “Don’t!”

He heard the fear in her voice, in her heart — for them all.

Grigori heard it, too. Nothing escaped him.

“Look, Rhun, how she knows to fear you. Perhaps it will save her, as it did not save your Lady Elisabeta Bathory.”

Rhun heard the gasp behind him, one of recognition, coming from Erin.

Shame finally drew him to a stop, down to his knees.

Grigori smiled over him. “So even your friend knows that name. The woman whom history would curse as the Blood Countess of Hungary. A monster born out of your very love.”

48

Cold hands clutched and held Erin to the rear pew. Frigid bodies pressed from all sides. She forced herself to stay still, not to yield to fear, and most of all, not to provoke an attack. Jordan leaned against her, his body as tense as hers.

The next moment would determine everything.

Rhun turned from his pursuit of Grigori. He met her gaze. She read the raw hunger there, his eyes almost aglow with it. In the pain of his grimace, the points of his fangs punctured his own lips. He clearly fought a battle against his bloodlust.

From Rhun’s reaction, she assumed that Rasputin had tainted the wine with human blood.

Resist it, she sent silently to him, keeping her eyes locked upon his, refusing to look away, to face the beast inside him and his shame.

At last, Rhun’s shoulders sagged and he sank to his knees. He raised his folded hands before his nose. Past his fingers, he still locked gazes with her. His mouth moved in a silent Latin prayer. She read those bloody lips, knew that prayer of atonement from her days spent kneeling in the dirt as punishment.

She shook off those who held her and sank to her knees at her pew.

In unison with Rhun, she recited that Latin plea for forgiveness.

All the while she stared into Rhun’s eyes.

At the end, his head finally bowed — when he raised it again, his fangs were gone.

He whispered to the church: “You have failed, Grigori.”

“And you have triumphed, my friend. God’s will be done.” Rasputin did not sound disappointed. If anything, he sounded awed and reverential.

Grumbling, the congregants retreated from the pew, from behind Erin and Jordan.

Sergei patted Jordan’s shoulder before stepping away. “Perhaps later.”

Once Jordan was alone with Erin, he turned to face her as she rose from her knees and returned to her seat. His breath whispered warm against her cheek. “Are you all right?”

Not trusting herself to speak, she simply nodded.

She watched Rhun slowly regain his feet, still wobbly.

If she understood what Rasputin implied, it sounded like Rhun had defiled Elizabeth Bathory. Erin knew that name, one that echoed from the bloody legends of the dark forests of Hungary and Romania.

Elizabeth Bathory, also known as the Blood Countess, was often referred to as the most prolific and cruel serial killer of all time. In the 1600s, over the course of decades, the wealthy and powerful Hungarian countess had tortured and killed many young girls. Estimates of the number of her victims ranged well into the hundreds. It was said that she bathed in the blood of her victims, seeking eternal youth.

Such stories smacked of vampirism.

Did Rhun create that monster? Did he have those young girls’ blood on his hands? Was that what haunted him every time he drank his transubstantiated wine?

A tragic sigh drew Erin’s attention to the altar, back to the present. “You mentioned a gift on the car ride over here,” Rasputin said, pointing to the leather tube over Rhun’s shoulder. “Let me see it, and we shall see what it buys you.”

Rhun pulled the tube from his back.

Rasputin motioned to Erin and Jordan like an excited schoolboy. “Come, let us all see.”

As Erin left the pew with Jordan, Rasputin’s acolytes cleared the altar, stripping it down to bare marble. Once finished, they were waved away to make room for Rhun, Erin, and Jordan.

She climbed the altar, the air richer in incense and the scent of burning candles.

Once they were all gathered around the altar, Rasputin rested his fists on his hips and looked avidly at the long brown leather tube. “Show me,” he ordered.

Rhun ran a sharp nail through the papal seal and lifted the top off. He stared inside, his brows pinching together, then shook the contents onto the marble surface. A rolled-up piece of old canvas slid out and landed on the altar, unfurling slightly.

Rasputin leaned closer, and with gentle care, respecting the age of the canvas, he rolled it wide for all to see.

Erin gasped at the painting revealed under the candlelight. She recognized the work immediately. Painted by the deft hand of the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn.

It was an original.

It depicted Christ performing his most powerful miracle.

Raising Lazarus from the dead.

Grigori dropped to his knees in supplication before the altar, before the oil painting, and one by one, his dark congregation followed suit.

Rhun remained standing, staring down at the image of Lazarus in his stone tomb.

It was a stunning rendition of that moment, a secret known to Rembrandt and recorded in his painting. The work was one of three known to exist.

In beautiful, evocative strokes, Rembrandt revealed Lazarus, clad in his death shroud, rising from his granite sarcophagus. To the side, family members started back in horror. These spectators to the scene held up their hands as if to protect themselves from the man they had once loved. To them, this was not a joyous moment of resurrection. For they knew what had killed Lazarus.

“The first Sanguinist.” Erin’s whisper carried across the now-silent church.

Yes, those beside the tomb had witnessed the birth of the Order of the Sanguines. Lazarus had been attacked and turned to a strigoi, but his family had found him and sealed him into a crypt before he was able to feed on a human victim. There they doomed him to a slow death by starvation. But Christ arrived and set him free. For on that day Christ offered Lazarus a choice that no strigoi before could ever have been offered. Lazarus could not change his nature, but he could use Christ’s love and blood to struggle against it. He could choose to serve Christ, and perhaps someday see the resurrection of his own soul.

This pact of duty, of service as a Knight of Christ, was represented in the painting by weaponry — the sheathed sword and sheaf of arrows — hanging above Lazarus’s crypt, ready to be taken up in service of the new Church.

From that moment onward, Lazarus had accepted his burden and formed the Sanguinist side of the Church. Fresh from his crypt, he had never tasted human blood. He had always found sustenance simply in the blood of Christ. Only one other Sanguinist, since the dawn of time, had started his next existence ready to follow in Lazarus’s footsteps; only one other had been turned before his first kill.

Pure. Untainted.

Long ago, Rhun had been that Sanguinist. He had thought himself worthy of prophecy. Had believed in his goodness. Had taken solace in his pride. Until the day he tasted Elisabeta’s blood. The day he created a monster.

In that moment he had fallen. Only the One had ever kept himself undefiled.

Lazarus.

Their true father.

Even Grigori recognized that role. He traced the holy form of Lazarus on the painting, his finger slowing as it crossed a thin line of red dripping from the corner of Lazarus’s mouth.

How could anyone look upon this painting and not recognize the truth revealed by Rembrandt? The scared spectators, the blood on the lips, the weapons on the wall. Rembrandt had been privy to the Sanguinists’ secrets, one of the few ever allowed such knowledge outside the inner circle of the Church. To honor that trust, he produced this masterwork of light and shadow, to hide a secret in plain sight as a memorial and testament to their order.

Grigori regained his feet, his eyes lifting from the painting to a mosaic in his own church, sprawled above the entrance. It depicted Lazarus in his shroud, standing alive at the door to his tomb, his hood up to protect his face from the sunlight. Christ stood before the risen man, his hand outstretched toward his new disciple as his followers looked on in wonder, much as Grigori’s followers looked to him.

Tears shone in Grigori’s eyes as he faced Rhun.

“I will help you search for your book, my friend, and, unless God wills otherwise, no grievous harm shall come to you while you are within the borders of my land.”

49

Jordan stood a few steps from the altar, watching the others.

He didn’t trust any of them. Not Rasputin with his crazy laugh and his games, not the waiflike congregants who had finally retreated into the shadows, not even Rhun. He pictured that glowing bloodlust in his eyes, the way he stared at Erin, locked on her like a lion on a fatted calf.

Worst of all, Jordan could have done nothing if she had been attacked. Grigori’s minions had him trapped, weighing down his every limb, his strength useless against them.

Voices drew his attention away from the altar. Rasputin’s children spoke in hushed tones as they carried a wooden table and four clunky chairs into the nave. Although the dark chairs had to be heavy, the boys lifted them as if they were made of balsa wood.

Unlike Rasputin, his acolytes wore regular street clothes instead of priestly garb. Jeans or black pants and sweaters. If he hadn’t known what they were, he’d have assumed them to be pasty Russian schoolchildren and their parents.

But he did know.

“Come.” Rasputin strode from the altar to the table, leading the others and collecting Jordan in the wake of their passage. The Mad Monk sat quickly, straightening his robes like a fussy old lady. “Join me.”

Erin found a seat, and Jordan took the one next to her, leaving the last for Rhun.

Sergei set a giant silver samovar in the middle of the table. Another of Rasputin’s minions brought in tea glasses that fit into silver holders with handles.

“Tea?” Rasputin asked.

“No, thanks,” Jordan mumbled.

After seeing what happened to Rhun, Jordan had no intention of eating or drinking anything Rasputin had touched. He’d rather not even breathe the air.

Erin declined, too, but from the way she pulled the ends of her sweater down over her hands, she was probably cold enough to want something hot to drink.

“Your companions don’t trust me, Rhun.” Rasputin bared square white teeth. His fangs were retracted, but Jordan didn’t find him any less dangerous for it.

None of them responded. Apparently the subject of Rasputin’s trustworthiness would never take up a lot of conversation.

Rasputin turned to Rhun. “Pleasantries aside, then. What makes you think the Gospel might be here in my city?”

“We believe it may have been brought back by Russian troops at the end of the Second World War.” Rhun kept his palms flat on the table, as if he wanted to be ready to push back and stand, either to fight — or possibly to flee.

“So long ago?”

Rhun inclined his head. “Where might they have taken the book?”

“If they knew what they possessed, they would have taken it to Stalin.” Rasputin rested his elbows on the table. “But they did not.”

“Are you certain?”

“Of course. If they had taken it anywhere of significance, I would have known. I know everything.”

Rhun rubbed his index finger where his karambit rested when he fought. “You have changed little in the last hundred years, Grigori.”

“I assume you refer to my sin of pride, which always made you worry so for my soul.” Rasputin shook his head. “Yet it is your pride which needs looking after.”

Rhun inclined his head. “I am aware of my sins.”

“Yet, every day, you suffer the foolishness of penance.”

“And should we not repent our sins?” Rhun’s fingers found his pectoral cross.

Rasputin leaned forward. “Perhaps. But are we forever defined by our sins? How is a moment or two of weakness so large a crime when weighed against centuries of service?”

Though inclined to agree with him, Jordan suspected Rasputin might have had more than a couple of weak moments in his time.

Rhun tightened his lips. “I am not here to discuss sin and repentance with you.”

“A pity.” Rasputin looked at Erin. “We’ve had many enlightening discussions about that over the years, your Rhun and I.”

“We are here for the Gospel,” Erin reminded him. “Not enlightenment.”

“I have not forgotten.” Rasputin smiled at her. “Tell me from where was it taken and when?”

Rhun hesitated, then spoke the truth. “We found evidence that the book may have been at a bunker in southern Germany, near Ettal Abbey.”

“Evidence?” Rasputin fixed his intense eyes on Jordan, as if he were more likely to answer than Rhun.

Jordan tensed. His instinct was to hide everything from Rasputin that he could. “I’m just the muscle.”

“Russia is a big land.” Rasputin looked to Erin. “If you do not help me, I cannot help you.”

Erin glanced at Rhun. She tugged at the cuff of her sweater.

“Piers told us,” Rhun answered. “Before he died.”

Rasputin’s face drooped. “Then he turned to the Nazis after all?”

When Rhun did not answer, Rasputin continued: “He came to me early in the war. I was not as comfortable as I am now.” He paused and gazed around at the church, smiling at the silent followers lined up against resplendent walls. “But even then I had my resources.”

Surprise flickered across Rhun’s face. “Why would he go to you?”

“We were close once, Rhun. Piers as first, you as second, and I as third. Do you honestly not remember?” Hurt was plain in his voice, with an undercurrent of anger. “Where else could he go? The Cardinal threatened to excommunicate him if he continued searching for the book. So after visiting me, Piers went next to the Nazis, seeking help that I could not provide. He refused to give up the hunt. Obsessions are hard to forsake, as you can attest with Lady Elisabeta.”

Rhun turned away. “Cardinal Bernard would have done no such thing to Piers.”

But Jordan heard the lack of conviction in Rhun’s words. Even with the little experience Jordan had with the Cardinal, he knew how much importance the man placed upon the prophecy of the three. To the Cardinal, Father Piers had no role to play.

How wrong he was …

Grigori continued: “Rhun, you do not know your precious Cardinal so well as you think. Remember, he excommunicated me. For committing a sin no greater than your own. And I did not take the life of the one I sought to save.”

“What are you talking about?” Jordan asked, feeling like he’d walked into the theater in the middle of a movie.

Erin sat straighter, guessing the truth. “You’re referring to Czar Nicholas’s young son, aren’t you? The boy named Alexei.”

Rasputin favored her with a sad smile. “The poor child suffered. Finally, he lay near death. What was I to do?”

Jordan now remembered the history. The czar’s son was once Rasputin’s young charge. Like many of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, he had suffered from what was known as “the Royal Disease” of hemophilia. According to history, only Rasputin could bring him relief during his episodes of painful internal bleeding.

“You should have let him die a natural death,” Rhun said, “within the grace of God. But you could not. And afterward, you would not repent for your sin.”

Jordan pictured Rasputin turning the boy into a monster rather than letting him die.

“That is why you could not be forgiven,” Rhun said.

“What makes you think I wanted the Cardinal’s forgiveness? That I needed it?”

“I think we have gotten off topic here,” Jordan cut in. Rhun and Rasputin’s old arguments did not advance their cause. “Will you help us find the book?”

“First tell me, how did Piers die?” Rasputin took Erin’s hand. She looked like she wanted to take it back, but she didn’t. She should have. “Please.”

She told him of the cross in the bunker, of the moment in the boat when Piers passed on.

Rasputin dabbed at his eyes with a large linen handkerchief. “How can you explain that, Rhun?”

“God’s grace.” Rhun’s words were simple and fervent.

“Explain what?” Erin asked, looking between them.

“Tainted as Piers was for breaking his vow, for creating and feeding upon blasphemare creatures, he should have been burned to ashes by the sunlight.” Rasputin folded the handkerchief and secreted it away in his robes. “That is what happens to strigoi who do not drink the blood of Christ. Has Rhun told you nothing?”

He hadn’t told them much. Just that sunlight killed them, not that they burned up. Jordan remembered how Nadia had carefully lifted the coat from Piers’s face, and her fear as she held him against her side so that he might see the sun one last time. His death had seemed peaceful, not violent, more of a letting go. Had God somehow forgiven his sins at the end or was there enough of Christ’s blessing still within Piers’s veins to keep him from burning? He suspected they would never know the true answer, and at the moment they had a more important concern.

“The book,” Jordan said. “Let’s get back to the book.”

Rasputin straightened, visibly drawing back to the matter at hand. “The German bunker was far south. Do you know when Russian troops might have reached it? If I had a time line …”

Jordan tried to remember his history, expecting Erin to interrupt with the answer. “The last major German unit in the south surrendered on April twenty-fourth, but the Russians were probably still mopping up until the formal surrender of Germany on May eighth.”

He counted off dates in his head. “By mid-May, though, the Russians were formalizing the division of Germany and the whole of the Iron Curtain. I would guess the Russian smash-and-grab teams peaked around May twentieth, although there were probably Russians clearing out bunkers before and after.”

Rasputin eyed him with what might be respect. “You indeed know your history.”

Jordan shrugged, but he kept talking, eager to find the book and get the three of them out of Russia alive. “I’ve studied a lot about the World War Two era, heard a lot more from my grandfather who fought during it. Anyway, that bunker was far south and isolated. Calculating travel time back then, plus a buffer to get out before American troops began their patrols, I would guess the most likely time for the Russians to have hit the bunker would have been between May twenty-eighth and June second. With a wide margin of error, of course.”

Erin gave him a surprised look, as if she hadn’t expected him to know anything useful. Which was getting old.

“Impressive, Sergeant.” Rasputin leaned back. “That information is valuable. Although it will still take time to find the book.”

How did Rasputin know that Jordan was a sergeant? That was worrisome.

“Why is it valuable?” Erin asked. “Why do the dates matter?”

“First, tell me what you are hiding in your coat, my good doctor.”

So he knew Erin had a Ph.D., too, Jordan realized, and that she had the pieces of concrete that had surrounded the book in her pockets. What didn’t he know?

“I can smell it,” Rasputin said.

Erin looked to Rhun. He nodded, and she drew out a piece of the book’s encasement. “We believe this might have been covering the book.”

Rasputin held out his hand, and Erin slowly dropped the gray fragment into his palm. His thumb followed the thin lines of soot that showed where the stone had been blasted apart.

Jordan snapped upright. He should have thought of this before. “If you get me an explosives sensor, I can use that piece as a control and find anything else with the same chemical signature. If this was wrapped around the Gospel, the book would have the same chemical breakdown products on its cover. Assuming it wasn’t destroyed in the blast.”

Rhun touched his cross again, looking shocked. Apparently the priest hadn’t considered the possibility that the book might have been destroyed, that they might be risking their lives to search for something that had been blasted to fragments and ashes.

Rasputin nodded to Sergei, who stepped forward. “Go with my personal assistant. He will help you procure the item that you need.”

Jordan stayed seated. “We move as a team.”

Rasputin frowned, then laughed. Erin hadn’t thought that she could hate that laugh more than she had the first time she heard it, but she did.

“Very well,” Rasputin said. “Write down the details for Sergei.”

Sergei produced a spiral-bound notebook and pencil stub from his back pocket.

Erin took the concrete piece off the table and slipped it back into her pocket, worrying that Rasputin might steal it. He was clearly an opportunist and not one to underestimate. He already knew too much: that she was a doctor, that she and Rhun and Jordan searched for the book, and that they were possibly the trio of prophecy. And from the greedy glint in his eyes when Jordan had listed the likely dates the bunker had been breached, she also suspected that he already had a good idea about the book’s location.

Clearly, Rasputin enjoyed making them dance like trained monkeys, but was it more than malicious pleasure?

Their host rose and gestured toward a black tabernacle at the rear of the church. “Shall we view the very cobblestones where the czar fell? The namesake for this church.”

She pushed back her chair. Jordan and Rhun stood, too. They walked behind Rasputin’s slope-shouldered form like a Sanguinist trio, Rhun in front, Jordan flanking the right, and Erin the left.

Rasputin stopped in front of the tabernacle. Four polished black columns supported an ornate marble canopy carved in Russian folk-art style, with jet-black stone flowers and flourishes. Behind a small gate lay a simple section of gray cobblestones. Its utilitarian nature clashed with the church’s elaborate grandeur, reminding Erin why this giant building had been constructed — to memorialize the murder of the czar. She contrasted the soaring ceilings and rich gold tiles with the simple mounds of earth in Piskariovskoye Cemetery.

Some deaths were marked better than others.

A handful of Rasputin’s followers came and stood in a semicircle behind them, as if bound to their leader by invisible cords.

“I came here often during the siege of Leningrad,” Rasputin said, resting his hands on the wooden edge of the tabernacle. His sleeves rode up, displaying thick black hair on his wrists and lower arms. “The church was deconsecrated. The holiness stolen back by Rome. But the building was good enough for the dead. They used this nave as a morgue in winter. Piled bodies against the walls.”

Erin shivered, imagining frozen corpses stacked like carcasses in a slaughterhouse, awaiting a spring burial.

“As the siege stretched and the hunger grew worse, the bodies were brought here by wooden carts pulled by living men. The horses had been eaten by then. The dead came as they were born: naked. Every scrap of cloth had to be saved to warm the living.” Rasputin’s voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “I lived in the crypt. No one thought to check the dead. There were too many. Nights I came up, and I counted. Do you know how many children died in the siege? Not just from the cold, although it was bitter and claimed its share. Not just from the hunger, although it drove many to their death. Not even from the Nazis and the death they rained from the sky and the land all around. No, not even them.”

Erin’s throat closed. “Strigoi?”

“They came like a plague of locusts, devouring the weak and starving souls huddled here. I escaped to Rome and begged for help.” Rasputin turned to Rhun, who lowered his eyes. “The Church was neutral in the war, but never had Sanguinists forsaken their war against strigoi. Until then.”

Erin hugged her chest. Strigoi would have found easy prey in the besieged city.

“So I came back alone from Rome. I fought through troops until I was back inside the charnel house that the city I loved had become. And when I came upon dying children, I saved them, brought them into my fold. With my own blood, I built an army to protect my people from the curse.”

Rasputin gestured to those acolytes nearby with one black-clad arm. “You see before you only a few of the lost children of Leningrad. Angels who did not die in filth.”

They shifted their feet, pale eyes fixed on him, in worship.

“Do you know how many people died here, Doctor?”

Erin shook her head.

“Two million. Two million souls in a city that once housed three and a half million people.”

Erin had never confronted someone who had seen the suffering, counted the Russian dead. “I’m sorry.”

“I could not stand aside.” Rasputin clenched his powerful hands into fists. “For that, I was shunned. A fate harsher than excommunication. For saving children. Tell me, Doctor, what would you have done in my stead?”

“You did not save them,” Rhun said. “You turned them into monsters. Better to let them go to God.”

Rasputin ignored him, deep-set blue eyes focused on Erin’s. “Can you look into the eyes of a dying child and listen to a heartbeat fade and do nothing? Why did God give me these powers, if not to use them saving the innocent?”

Erin remembered watching her sister’s heartbeat slow and stop. How she had begged her father to let them go to a hospital, how she had prayed for God to save her. But her father and God chose to let an innocent baby die instead. Her own failure to save her sister had haunted her entire life.

She slipped her hand into her pocket and touched the scrap of quilt. What if she’d had Rasputin’s courage? What if she had used her anger to defy her father, renounced his interpretation of God’s will? Her sister might still be alive. Could she fault Rasputin for doing something she wished she had done herself?

“You corrupted them.” Rhun touched her sleeve, as if he sensed her sorrow. Rasputin’s eyes dropped to follow his hand. “You did not save those children. You kept them from finding eternal peace at God’s side.”

“Are you so sure of this, my friend?” Rasputin asked. He turned from the tabernacle to face Rhun. “Have you found any peace in your service to the Church? When you stand before God, who will have a cleaner soul? He who saved children or he who created a monster out of the woman he loved?”

Rasputin’s eyes fell upon Erin at that moment.

She shivered at the warning in that dark gaze.

50

Before Rhun could respond to Grigori’s contempt, they were interrupted. All eyes — except for Erin’s and Jordan’s — swung toward the entrance to the ornate church. Again Rhun’s senses were assaulted by the reflection of flickering candlelight off millions of tiles, patterned marble, and gilt surfaces.

Past it all, he heard a heartbeat approach the outer door. The rhythm sounded familiar—why? — but between Erin’s and Jordan’s own throbbing life and the head-swimming sensory overload, he could not discern what set his teeth on edge.

Then a knock.

Now Erin and Jordan turned, too, hearing the strong, demanding strike of knuckle on wood.

Grigori raised his hand. “Ah, it seems I have more visitors to attend to. If you’ll excuse me.”

His dark congregants surrounded Rhun and his companions, driving them toward the apse.

Rhun continued to stare toward the door, casting out his senses toward the mysterious visitor, but by now the smell of blood and burnt flesh wafting from Grigori’s acolytes had engulfed him, too. Frustrated, he took a deep breath and offered up a prayer for patience in adversity. It did nothing to calm him.

Grigori slipped away with an insolent wave and vanished into the vestibule and out the door into the cold night.

“I’m getting tired of being herded around,” Jordan said as he was elbowed closer to Erin.

“Like cows,” Rhun agreed.

“Not a cow,” the soldier said. “Like a bull. Let me keep my dignity.

Such as it is.”

As they waited, Erin crossed her arms. She seemed the calmest of the three. Did she trust that Grigori would keep his word, that they would come to no harm? Surely she was not so foolish. Rhun tried to shut out the sound of her heartbeat and listen, straining at the door, but Grigori and his late visitor had moved too far away.

“Do you think he knows where the book is?” she asked, making it plain how little she actually did trust Grigori.

“I don’t know. But if it is in Russia, we will never find it without his cooperation.”

“And after that?” Jordan asked. “What then? What will he do — to you, to us? I imagine that won’t be fun either.”

Rhun relaxed fractionally, relieved that Jordan had seen through the monk. “Indeed.”

Erin’s voice remained resolute. “I think Rasputin will keep his word. But that may be as worrisome as if he didn’t. He strikes me as someone who plays many levels of a chess game while always wearing a smiling face.”

Rhun nodded. “Grigori is a man of his word — but you must listen carefully to each utterance from his lips. He does not speak casually. And his loyalty is … complicated.”

Jordan glanced at the silent congregation, who kept their guard as they all waited. “Things would be easier here if the Church had kept its word. They should have helped during the siege, especially if strigoi came here to feed. Maybe then we wouldn’t have Rasputin as our enemy.”

Rhun fingered the worn beads of his rosary. “I pressed his case with Cardinal Bernard myself, told him that Christ had not saved us to show neutrality in the face of evil, that He made us to fight it always and in all of its forms.”

Rhun did not tell them that he had considered following Grigori back to St. Petersburg during the war. He believed his inability to convince Bernard to help the besieged city was one of his greatest failures as a Sanguinist, possibly rivaling what he had inflicted upon Elisabeta.

One of the congregants stepped closer. It was Sergei, his eyes hard as glass. “So you admit that he was right?”

“Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Jordan folded his arms. “And right doesn’t always mean good.”

There, the argument stalled.

Erin seemed to spend the next hour studying the jewel-like mosaics, stopping to feel them where she could, as if she made sense of them through touch. Rhun could not stand to look at them. It was an affront to God to have such beautiful works of religious art in such a profane den.

Like a good soldier, Jordan returned to the table, sat down, and rested his head on the top, catching sleep when he could do nothing else. Rhun admired his practicality, but he could not settle to such calmness. He stretched his senses outside the church, listening to the rhythms of a city moving into night, the rumble of cars quieting, the muffled footfalls, the voices passing away, and underneath it all, the soft whisper of falling snow.

Then Rhun heard feet and a frantic heartbeat approaching the church’s outer entrance. Heads turned, but Grigori’s acolytes seemed to have already recognized the visitor, because they did not bother to herd Rhun and the others into hiding again.

Sergei disappeared into the vestibule and returned with a small greasy-haired man with a pointed nose. The stranger brought with him the icy smell of snow.

“It wasn’t easy to get, what you asked.” The man handed Sergei a sealed plastic case about the size of a shoe box.

Sergei gave him a roll of bills, which he counted with one nicotine-stained finger. He pocketed the roll, nodded once to Sergei, and on quick, furtive feet, disappeared back out into the night.

Sergei turned to them, to Jordan. “Now it is our turn to give gifts, da?”

Jordan accepted the case, undid the small latch, and lifted the lid. He whistled appreciatively at what he found. Christmas had come early.

“What is it?” Erin brushed his elbow. The fresh laundry scent of the German hotel’s shampoo drifted up, and he remembered that first kiss. “Jordan?”

It took him an extra second to collect himself.

“It’s what I asked for earlier.” He tilted the box to reveal a blue electronic device packed into gray foam cushioning, along with battery packs, carrying straps, manuals, and sampling tools. “It’s a handheld explosives detector.”

“It looks like an oversize remote control.” She touched the blue casing with one bare finger. “One without enough buttons.”

“This has enough buttons,” Jordan said. “If it works properly, it can detect trace levels of explosive materials in the parts-per-quadrillion range. Anything from C-4 to black powder to ammonium and urea nitrates. Actually pretty much anything it can sample, it can search for.”

“How does it work?” Erin looked like she wanted to take it right out of his hand to see.

“It uses amplifying fluorescent polymers.” He pulled the detector out of the foam, earning a twinge from his bat-gnawed thumb. “The detector shoots a ray of ultraviolet light out and sees what happens in the fluorescent range after the particles are excited.”

“Is it dangerous?” Rhun asked, eyeing it with suspicion.

“Nope.” Jordan inserted the battery and turned on the device while they were talking. “May I have that piece of the book’s concrete jacket?”

Erin fished it out of her pocket and put it in his hand, her cold fingers stroking across his palm. He didn’t know if she did this on purpose, but she could keep doing it all day long.

Rhun cleared his throat. “Will it suffice for our needs?”

“It should help.”

Jordan examined the scorch marks along one side of the crumbling lime-ash concrete. Once satisfied that it should offer a decent test sample, he set everything down on the table and got to work.

“I should be able to calibrate the device to match whatever explosive was used to shatter the cement jacket. It’ll turn this little unit into our own personal electronic bloodhound.”

He had only just finished his calibrations when Rasputin returned, beaming. Jordan tensed, glancing up at him. Anything that made Rasputin that happy could not be good for them.

Erin turned to Rasputin as Rhun hovered nearby.

Jordan returned to doing some final adjustments on the explosives detector.

“Good evening!” Rasputin strode across to them. He seemed energized and overly enthusiastic, even for him. “I trust that the equipment we obtained is satisfactory?”

“It is,” Jordan admitted grudgingly. “And it’s ready to go.”

“As am I.” Rasputin rubbed his hands together and smiled. He looked greedy and happy, like a child about to go to an ice-cream store.

“You have a lead on the book?” Erin asked.

“Possibly. I know where it might have been taken if it was brought back to St. Petersburg on the dates specified by the sergeant.”

Rasputin stepped closer, touched the small of Erin’s back, and guided her toward the center of the church. She reached behind her and tried to pull his hand away. He left it there for a second, as solid as if it were made of stone. Then, with a tiny smile, he let her shift his arm aside. The message was clear: he was stronger than she was, and he would do with her as it suited him.

Seeing this, Jordan collected the detector, stood, and moved to her side, sticking close, either jealous or worried. She found that this thought didn’t bother her as much as it had in Jerusalem. Body heat radiated across the small space between them.

Jordan’s eyes darkened as it warmed him, too.

Rasputin drew them to a halt in the center of the church. He knelt on a stone mosaic and pulled out a single tile from the center of a flower. Sergei handed him a metal rod with a hook on the end like a crowbar. Rasputin wedged it in the hole and lifted out a circular section of the floor one-handed, revealing a dark shaft leading down.

With a gentlemanly flourish, he gestured to a metal ladder bolted in place on one side.

Erin leaned over and couldn’t see the bottom, but it smelled rank.

She bit back a sigh.

They were going underground.

Again.

Rhun slipped around Jordan and mounted the ladder first, climbing down swiftly.

Jordan dropped his detector into his pocket and waited for Erin to go second. He plainly intended to act as a buffer between her and Rasputin.

And she was happy to let him.

After first slipping her hand into her pocket to reassure herself that her flashlight was still there, she followed. Cold from the metal seeped into her fingers and palms as she grasped the rungs and began the longest ladder climb of her life.

Jordan followed, clambering down one-handed. Was he showing off or favoring his bitten hand? The wound ran deep, but he hadn’t complained.

Above him, Rasputin and his congregants flowed down after them.

She turned her attention to the long journey down, counting the rungs. She had reached more than sixty when her toe stretched down and touched the icy floor.

Rhun helped her off the ladder. She didn’t refuse. By now, her fingers had gone numb. She stepped aside to get out of Jordan’s way, jamming her hands in her pockets.

Jordan gave her a quick grin as he hopped off the ladder. “When this is over, let’s spend a week at a sunny beach. Aboveground. And margaritas are on me.”

She smiled back at him and fought down the urge to pinch her nose against the stench down here. It reeked of human waste.

Russian voices from above directed their attention back to Rasputin, his figure outlined in the circle of light as he climbed down. Behind the monk’s shoulder, ten of his congregants followed him. Then someone replaced the metal cover over the hole and plunged them into darkness.

A half second later, Jordan’s flashlight flared brightly, and Erin followed suit with her own.

Their twin beams showed them enclosed by a dingy gray concrete tube, with a ceiling so low that Jordan’s head almost touched it. Green-and-brown frozen slime covered the floor and climbed the walls.

Erin fought against gagging. The reek of waste filled her mouth and crawled down her throat. She told herself she could stand it. It must be much worse during the summer.

Rasputin smiled grimly. “Not so pleasant as an ancient tomb, is it?”

Erin shook her head.

“This warren continues to serve as a tomb, I’m afraid,” he said. “Each winter, the homeless children of St. Petersburg flee to the sewers. Tens of thousands of them. We bring them hot food and keep the sewers free of strigoi, but it is not enough. Innocents still die here in the dark, and still your precious Church does not care, Rhun.”

Rhun tightened his lips but did not speak.

Rasputin lifted the hem of his robes with one hand, like a lady with a ball gown, and led them forward. Five of his acolytes trailed at his heels and another five brought up the rear behind Rhun, Erin, and Jordan.

Erin concentrated on watching where she stepped and on not slipping. She shuddered to think of any part of her touching the floor. It was comforting to have Rhun on one side and Jordan on the other, although the three of them could not hold their own against the ten who accompanied them — eleven if she counted Rasputin.

Rhun stumbled and caught himself against the wall.

Jordan shone his light toward him. “Are you all right?”

The acolytes pushed them forward, keeping them moving.

Rhun sniffed the air, as if to double-check something. He called up to Rasputin: “Is that an ursus I scent? Down here?”

Erin sniffed, but didn’t smell anything.

“Not just any ursus.” Rasputin’s answer boomed down the tunnel. “The Ursa herself. Since we’re down here, I think we should pay her a visit, for old time’s sake.”

The monk turned abruptly into a side tunnel, forcing them to follow.

Erin caught Rhun rubbing his right leg. She read worry there, along with fear.

Jordan must have seen it, too, because he took her hand again.

After trudging a few minutes more, she then smelled it, too. She had grown up in the California woods, and she recognized the familiar musky odor.

Bear.

Jordan’s grip tightened on her fingers.

Ahead, Rasputin stopped at the crossing of two tunnels.

Like in the bunker, X marked the spot.

The tunnels came together in a chamber about fifty feet square. Wrought-iron gates blocked each of the four ways into the intersection, forming a massive cage. The metal had been worked into fanciful trees with connecting branches and leaves, like a forest. The pattern continued on the concrete walls with glass mosaics of trees and birds. The deep jewel tones and artistic renderings reminded Erin of the mosaics in the church far above.

In spite of the beauty, she fought down bile. A fouler stench underlay the musk of bear — the stench of rotting meat and old blood.

Jordan played his flashlight’s beam into the cage and picked out a black mound of fur curled atop a nest of gray bones and spruce boughs.

Rasputin smacked both palms against the gate blocking them. “My dear Ursa! Awake!”

The blackness shifted into life — cracking branches and bones underneath it — as it rolled lugubriously to its stomach.

A scarred muzzle rose and sniffed the air. Then the creature lifted itself onto four unsteady legs and lurched upright.

Erin gasped at its sheer size. Its shoulders scraped the arched roof inside. She put the creature’s height at around seven feet at the shoulder, probably fifteen feet when upright, if it could stand.

It shook itself once and came fully awake, turning the black wells of its eyes toward them, revealing a deep crimson glowing out of the bottomless depth. The shine spoke to its corruption and raised all the hairs over Erin’s body.

Then in one lightning-fast leap, it charged at them.

Rhun swept in front of Erin, his arms raised, ready to protect her. She appreciated the gesture, but it would be futile if the bear broke through that gate.

“Darling Ursa,” Rasputin crooned as the bear skidded to a halt before him. “One more meal before your winter’s sleep?”

Erin’s heart raced. Did he intend for them to be that meal? A quick look at Jordan and Rhun told her that they were thinking the same thing. Even the acolytes hung back, maintaining a healthy distance.

Reaching the gate, the bear rubbed its massive head against the iron, revealing gray fur interspersed with black. It was old.

Rasputin reached through the bars and fondled its ears. The bear huffed at him warmly, then swiveled its head toward Rhun, fixing him with those unnatural red eyes — and growled.

“Ah, see, she remembers you!” Rasputin chucked the bear under the chin. “After all these years. Imagine!”

Rhun ran his hand again down his leg. “I remember her, too.”

Based on his expression, it was no happy memory.

“Your leg seems to have healed well,” Rasputin said. “And you should not have been so careless.”

“Why is she here, Grigori?” Anger hardened Rhun’s voice.

“There was no safe place for her to overwinter in the wilderness,” he said. “Humans might find her den. At her age, she is slow to wake. She deserves a quiet place to spend the cold months.”

Rasputin rolled up his long black sleeve, drew a short dagger from his robes, and slit his own wrist. Dark blood welled out. He slipped his muscular forearm through the gate. The creature huffed again, sniffed, and licked his wrist. A long pink tongue wrapped around the monk’s arm with each stroke.

All the while Rasputin murmured to the bear in Russian.

Erin covered her mouth in disgust, and Jordan swallowed hard.

As the bear nuzzled Rasputin’s arm, its huge front foot kicked a round object through a gap in the gate’s ornamentation. The sphere rolled to a stop in front of Erin’s sneakers. She shone her light on it.

A human skull.

Judging by the tiny strips of flesh still clinging to it, it had come from a recent kill.

She danced back in horror.

Rhun spoke, his voice thick with command. “Enough, Grigori.”

Rasputin withdrew his white arm from the fawning bear and tugged his sleeve down. He glanced back at the others. “Does the time press at you so, Rhun?”

“We are here to find the Gospel and leave.” Rhun’s dark eyes never left the bear. “As you promised.”

“So I did.” Rasputin drew a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his palms. “Follow me.”

He headed back down the tunnel, slipping past the others, smelling of blood and bear.

They resumed their journey. Erin needed no urging to put distance between herself and the bear.

“Rhun?” she asked, keeping next to him. “What was that about you and the bear?”

He sighed impatiently. “The Ursa was once known as the Bear of Saint Corbinian. Do you know the story?”

Erin nodded. During her youth, she’d been forced to memorize all the saints and their stories. “Saint Corbinian, on his way back to Rome, encountered a bear who ate his mule. Afterward, Corbinian forced the bear through the will of God to accept a saddle, and it carried him home. But surely the monster here can’t be that bear. That story goes back to the eighth century.”

“The beast is a blasphemare, and they can live very long lives. Corbinian encountered the monster on the road and got it to serve him, a very rare event for a blasphemare creature to bow to the will of a Sanguinist.”

Erin thought about Piers and the bats but remained silent.

Jordan glanced back over his shoulder. “That bear definitely looked big enough to ride.”

“How did you encounter it?” she pressed.

“Eighty years ago there was word of a huge bear, one that was devouring peasants in Russia. Piers, Grigori, and I were sent to dispatch it.”

“Looks like you didn’t,” Jordan said.

Rasputin dropped back and joined in the conversation, clapping a hand on Rhun’s shoulder. “Not for want of trying. Rhun tracked her to her winter den. Piers was displeased by the mission and refused to help. But the Father proved most helpful after she nearly took off Rhun’s leg.”

Rhun touched his leg again. “That took over a decade to heal.”

“The Ursa was merely frightened,” Rasputin said. “She is a gentle soul.”

Erin thought about the pile of human bones in her cage.

“She didn’t look too gentle to me,” Jordan added.

“After Piers and I removed Rhun from the Ursa’s playful embrace, she escaped into the forest.” Rasputin shook his head. “We never found her. Eventually we were recalled to Rome.”

“But you found her now,” Rhun said. “How?”

“She called to me,” Rasputin said. “Once I left the Sanguinists and embraced my true nature, blasphemare began to seek me out.”

“Abominations seeking kinship.” Rhun sounded bitter.

“We are what we are, Rhun. Accepting your fate instead of fighting it grants you more power than you can imagine.”

“I do not seek power. I seek grace.”

Rasputin chuckled. “And, in all these centuries of striving, have you found it yet? Perhaps the grace you seek is within your heart, not within the walls of a church.”

Rhun clamped his jaw closed tightly.

No one spoke for several minutes. They hurried along. The only sounds were the crunch of shoes against foul ice.

They passed several other tunnels leading off in both directions, also ladders leading up and down to other levels. Erin usually had a good sense of direction underground, but she would never be able to find the church again. Jordan seemed to be counting, so she hoped he had a better sense of where they were.

Finally, Rasputin stopped and mounted a metal ladder. Erin shone her light up, but couldn’t see the end.

“Up we go,” Jordan said, craning his neck. “Is it too much to hope that this takes us to a Starbucks?”

In short order, they all mounted the rungs and climbed.

The ladder emptied out into a clean concrete room. Erin was glad to leave the stench far below. She took a deep breath of the fresher air, clearing her lungs. The only feature in the small space was a gray metal box on one wall connected to cables running into the ceiling.

Rasputin ignored it and crossed to a gunmetal-gray door. He used a huge old-fashioned key to unlock it and led them into another room. Another door blocked the way from here, this time guarded by a modern keypad on the wall. His fingers darted across the keys, entering digits so quickly that Erin could not keep track.

The thick steel door, like a bank vault, trundled open.

Rasputin crossed gingerly over the threshold and waved them all into a darkened corridor with ocher walls. Other hallways branched off in many directions. It felt like stepping into a giant labyrinth.

Rasputin’s pace hurried from there. Soon even Jordan gave up counting as they delved deeper into the maze.

After another ten minutes of traversing halls, climbing short staircases, and crossing dusty rooms, Rasputin stopped before an unremarkable wooden door with a black glass doorknob. It looked no different from a hundred others that they had passed.

Rasputin pulled free a massive key ring out of the folds of his robes. He fumbled through what must have been fifty keys before finally selecting one.

As he inserted the key, Rhun stationed himself between Erin and Rasputin. Jordan stood on her other side. The congregants from the Russian church stood in a semicircle behind them.

Rasputin twisted the key with a tired creak and pushed open the door. “Come!”

They followed him into a shadowy room that smelled of rust and mildew. Erin’s throat itched, drawing a cough out of her. She wondered how long it had been since the room had been aired out. The scientist in her wanted to ask for a dust mask.

A few steps away, Rasputin pulled a string attached to a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Dim flickering light fell on piles of junk stacked against the walls. It looked like a hoarder’s living room.

“Here we are!” Rasputin turned to his followers. “Wait outside. I think we are already too many for this space.”

“Where are we?” Jordan asked as the lightbulb buzzed overhead.

“We are beneath the Hermitage,” Rasputin said. “One of the largest and oldest art museums in the world.”

Jordan glanced around the crowded room. “It doesn’t look like much.”

“These are the museum’s storage areas,” Rasputin said with a glare. “Above, the actual museum is quite lovely.”

Erin felt a twinge of professional irritation. Like most academics, she had heard of the sorry state of the Hermitage’s long-buried and decaying collection, but never had she imagined it would be this neglected. As she stepped forward, mice erupted from a pile of mildewed quilts.

She stumbled back, aghast. “This is where and how the museum stores its extra collections?”

Rasputin merely shrugged, as if to say, What is history to someone who has lived centuries?

She wiped her hands on her jeans and looked around in dismay. A framed picture leaning against the wall behind the quilts looked like an original Dürer woodcut of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The priceless woodcut had been tossed in haphazardly with broken tools and old rotting tapestries. Overhead, a black bloom of mold stained the roof, marking an old leak.

“This can’t be the right place,” she insisted.

Rasputin chuckled and nudged Rhun good-naturedly. “She is endearing, isn’t she? This Woman of Learning of yours.”

Rhun simply turned to Jordan. “You should try the detector in here.”

As Jordan set about booting up the explosives sniffer, Erin refused to let it go. “Why has none of this been cataloged?”

Rasputin pulled what looked like a dirty dishcloth off a sculpture, like someone rummaging through a garage sale.

“Careful!” Erin touched the top of the exposed sculpture’s downturned head, ran a finger along an extended leg. “This is a Rodin. A dancer. It’s priceless.”

“Likely,” Rasputin agreed. The monk moved to a stack of leather-bound books, picking through them. Scraps of paper fluttered out of his hands to the ground.

Erin closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch, and she hated to think of the damage that had been done to the artifacts in the museum and to the historical record.

Rhun sifted through a crate. “Why do you believe this is the right room, Grigori?”

“The date.” Rasputin fingered a yellowed card affixed to the wall by a rusty nail. “This is one of the rooms where Russian forces, those returning in late May, warehoused the treasures plundered from Europe.”

“How many other rooms are there?” Jordan had finally booted up his detector and swept it from side to side.

“Several,” Rasputin said.

A piece of plaster fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing Erin’s head.

“Are they all this disorganized?” Her head throbbed in time to the flickering bulb.

“Many are worse.”

Sighing in defeat, she joined Rhun in his search.

It took them an hour to go through the first nest of rooms. Rasputin’s minions did not help. They stood out in the corridor and smoked. Smoking wasn’t doing the artifacts any favors either, but Erin supposed it was just another grain of sand in the hourglass marking the inevitable decay of these treasures.

Rasputin remained as gratingly cheerful as ever.

“One down, but more to come!” he announced, and led them down a damp corridor.

The next room, like the first, was crammed to the ceiling with a mishmash of useless and priceless objects, but here there was at least a theme — a martial or military one. Erin stared across the panoply of old Russian flags, piles of helmets, bayonets stacked up like cordwood, and what looked like a giant propeller stretching across the room.

The space was cavernous. They could search a lifetime in just this one room and never find something as small as a book.

Then Jordan’s machine beeped.

51

Jordan whooped with delight.

Now we can get down to business — and soon, hopefully, get the hell out of here.

“Is the book here?” Erin hurried to his side, looking over his shoulder. Her breath brushed the back of his neck.

He had to step away. “Maybe. I don’t know. But at least it’s a positive reading. Something with a chemical signature equivalent to Nobel 808 is close. That’s what I picked up on that chunk of rock in your pocket.”

He swung the detector from side to side, almost bumping her. The sniffer led him to a tattered tapestry. He lifted it and it disintegrated under his finger, tearing apart with a quiet sigh.

This time Erin didn’t scold him. She stuck close to his side.

Jordan stepped past the tapestry, following each beep of the detector deeper into the room. It led him toward the giant propeller that rested atop a wooden crate in the center of the room.

“I think that’s from a MiG-3,” he said, stroking a hand along the smooth metal. “Only a few thousand were ever made, but they kicked butt in dogfights on the eastern front.”

“Is that what’s setting off your detector?” she asked.

“Noooo …” He slowly knelt, pointing the tip of the device forward. “Whatever is triggering the detector is underneath the propeller. Probably in that crate.”

“We will move the propeller,” Rhun said, nodding to Rasputin.

Jordan glanced over his shoulder at the other men. It would normally take six or seven guys to lift this steel monstrosity. But then again, there was nothing normal about the pair.

The two men crossed to either side of the giant propeller, each shouldering himself under one of the steel blades. At a silent signal, they both straightened, lifting the massive hunk of aeronautics with a groan of metal. From the strain on their faces, the weight was taxing even their strength.

Jordan wiggled under the blades, trusting them not to drop it on his head. He reached the exposed crate and stared into its straw-filled depths. His heart thudded into his throat.

Oh, God …

“Anything?” Erin called.

To either side of him, Rhun and Rasputin struggled with the sheer mass of steel. Overhead, the propeller began to shake in their weakening grips.

“Freeze!” Jordan yelled. “Nobody move!”

Hearing the panic in the soldier’s heart as much as in his words, Rhun went dead still, as did Grigori. A fleeting fear passed through him with razored wings, cutting through his resolve: had the propeller crushed the book?

“What is it?” Erin asked. “Should I help you?”

“No!” The salty scent of fear wafted from him. “Stay where you are. And I mean everybody. Or we’ll all die.”

The soldier crawled backward away from the wall, his heart skittering.

Rhun waited, the propeller growing heavier in his hands.

Grigori gave him a mischievous grin. “Here we are, working side by side, one step from death, my droog. Just as in the olden days.”

Jordan slowly rose to his feet. “You can’t put the propeller back down. There’s an unexploded ordnance stored in that crate. The detector did what it was designed for. Unfortunately, it found a bomb, not a book.”

“Are you sure it’s a bomb?” Erin asked.

“It’s a Soviet antitank missile. And yes, I’m sure.”

As always, Erin kept arguing. “Maybe the book is under the missile—”

“If it is, I’m not getting it out.” Jordan pointed to the hall. “Sorry, guys, but I think you’re going to have to take that to the far side of the room. If so much as a pound of weight presses on that missile, we’re all dead.”

“Did you hear that, Rhun? We must be cautious.” Grigori gave a carefree laugh.

The sound took Rhun back decades. Grigori had been the most foolhardy member of the trio, unconcerned about the prospect of death — not for himself, not for others. His blithe bravery had saved Rhun’s life many times, but it had also endangered it.

“Should the two of you evacuate before we attempt to move it?” Rhun asked.

“It wouldn’t help,” Jordan said. “If that missile goes off, it’ll take out the building and half a city block around it.”

Erin’s heart sped up.

“I suggest everyone make their peace with God, then.” Grigori’s lips curved into a familiar half smile. “On three, Rhun?”

Together they lifted the propeller higher and inched toward the back of the room. Jordan and Erin ducked under the blades and helped clear the path for the others’ burdened legs.

Once he was far enough away, Jordan waved them to lower the propeller to a mound of crates near the back of the space.

“What if there are bombs in these crates, too?” Rhun asked, his voice strained by the sheer weight of the engine blades.

Jordan swore, and Erin’s face paled.

“Life is always a risk.” Grigori began lowering his end. “I see no point in perishing while holding this.”

With no choice, doubting he could carry the weight another foot anyway, Rhun followed Grigori’s example. Together, they safely sat the propeller on the pile of boxes.

They all waited, as if expecting the worst.

But the crates held.

Satisfied, Grigori called to one of his acolytes, telling him to seek out the museum curator in the morning and explain what they had found. Rhun was grateful that Grigori had assumed the responsibility to ensure that the missile would be removed.

Over the next long, tense hour, they continued to search this room and others, hitting a series of false alarms, including a rusted truck muffler that Jordan’s detector sniffed out, which must have been exposed to a bomb long ago.

At some point, Erin’s hair had come loose from its fastening and dusty grime now streaked her cheeks. Rhun could see that the chaos around them weighed on her. She seemed to be more upset that so many precious objects were hidden away than that they had made no progress toward finding the book.

Grigori searched with his usual dogged patience, a counterpoint to his reckless daring. The Mad Monk was more careful and cunning than most believed.

Jordan’s detector beeped again.

Erin walked to his side. “Another car part?”

“Let’s hope it’s not another missile.” Jordan moved closer to the room’s corner.

Rhun followed.

The device led them to a crumbling wicker basket holding linens that might have once been white. Thick dust had settled on the top, and black mold ate at the basket’s sides.

Rhun pulled off the top sheet. A tablecloth. He set it atop a Louis XIV — era writing desk and reached for the next one.

“The readings are getting stronger,” Jordan said. “Be careful.”

Rhun lifted off another tablecloth, a pile of napkins, and a red Nazi flag.

Grigori tensed when the flag was unfurled to reveal the black Nazi swastika. How many of his countrymen had died under the waving of that flag? Rhun crumpled the cloth and tossed it aside.

Erin lifted out a linen pillowcase stuffed with oddly shaped objects. She set it on the floor and searched through it, item by item. She pulled out a book, but it was only a German code book.

Rhun closed his eyes. Was it the Gospel’s destiny to remain hidden? Perhaps things were better so. Perhaps the best outcome would be if they never found the book. He opened his eyes. No. They must find it, if only to keep it from the hands of the Belial.

Erin pulled blackened sardine tins out of the pillow sack — then she tensed.

“Jordan! Rhun! Look!” She lifted out a gray concrete fragment identical to the ones that had encased the book.

Jordan ran the sensor across the top. It chirped.

Excited, she removed more fragments until the pillowcase was empty. She shook her head. No book.

Rhun clutched his cross, attempted to hold back the tide of despair that accompanied the pain of burning silver.

Had they come this far only to be disappointed again?

Jordan poked through to the remainder of the basket with his device.

The sensor began to beep again, steady as a heartbeat.

Erin pulled the last threadbare sheet from the basket. She lifted it like a burial shroud, holding her breath, fearful of what she might discover, yet just as excited. But what she found both disappointed and confounded her.

What is it?

Resting at the bottom of the basket was a featureless block of dull gray metal about a foot in width and a little more in length. She lifted it carefully. It felt heavy, like lead.

Jordan ran the explosives detector over it, sagging a bit. “This is definitely what set off my sensors. See the scorch marks? It must have been caught in the same sort of blast.”

Rhun turned away, bowed over his cross in frustration.

Erin refused to succumb to defeat. If nothing else, the oddity of the artifact intrigued her. Could this still be what they were searching for — not a book written by Christ, but a symbolic relic, a piece of ancient sculpture?

She recalled the words of Father Piers, spoken first in German, then translated by Jordan.

Es ist noch kein Buch.

It is not a book.

Is this what Piers meant? Or was this artifact just a piece of lead that had been contaminated by the fragments when it was tossed into the pillowcase with them?

Something about the fragments also nagged at her, something she’d never really had a chance to investigate. But now that she had more pieces of the puzzle …

She turned and handed the lead block to Jordan. “Hold this. I want to try something.”

She then gathered the broken bits of rubble into one of the ancient sheets and took them out into the hall, where she had more room. With the fragments still in her pockets, she might have enough pieces to reassemble the casing more fully. Maybe then she could read the Aramaic lettering impressed on one side of the fragments. At the moment it seemed like a better idea than poking through more piles of rotting junk.

She gestured for Rasputin’s forces to move aside, then spread the sheet across the floor. Grigori’s acolytes gathered around, watching her. She ignored their presence and lifted out the fragments. As she set about arranging the pieces into their original form, concentrating fully on her task, the sounds of Jordan and the priests rummaging next door receded.

Her world became the puzzle.

Sometime later, a hand touched her shoulder, making her jump.

“We found nothing else in there,” Jordan said. “We’re ready to move on to the next room.”

“I need another minute.”

Jordan crouched down beside her. “What do you have there?”

Bare overhead bulbs illuminated the fragments. She had organized them into a square of about one foot by one foot. Fitted together, they revealed a bas-relief of a drawing and impressions of Aramaic letters.

The left side of the bas-relief depicted what looked like a skeleton topped by the Alpha symbol. The right showed the profile of a well-fleshed man with the Omega symbol crowning his head. The two figures were crossed together in an eternal embrace, while a braided rope looped from around the man’s throat to the lower vertebrae of the skeleton, binding them together.

“What does that mean?” Jordan asked.

Erin blew out her breath in frustration. “I have no idea.”

Jordan traced it with his finger, his voice sharpening. “I’ve seen this skeleton.”

“What? Where?” She ran back over the places they had been together: the tomb in Masada, the bunker, and the Russian church.

“This way!” He uncoiled like a spring. He sprinted back into the room he had just vacated, almost bowling over Rasputin in his haste.

Erin rushed after him, drawing both Rasputin and Rhun with her.

“Such a volatile pair.” Rasputin spoke from behind her. “So hot-blooded.”

She hoped that blood would stay right where it belonged.

Jordan crossed back to the basket and lifted that strange block of lead. Black blast marks covered its surface. He rubbed the scorched area with his leather sleeve. “Look!”

Erin leaned at his shoulder, only now seeing a faint pattern underneath the blast marks.

He spat on his fingers and used them to rub away a circle of the soot.

A skull grinned back at them from the lead, its backbone trailing down at an angle.

It matched the picture on the fragments. Erin pictured a slurry of lime and ash being poured over this lead sculpture and drying like clay, hardening to create an impression of the design on the lead box’s top.

Jordan stared up at her, laying a palm atop the lead surface. “Is this another box? First concrete, now lead. Could the Gospel be inside of that?”

Rhun heard Jordan’s words, wanting to disbelieve. It seemed impossible. He reached one tentative hand toward the block, realizing he was acting just like Erin — needing to touch it to make it real.

Did this truly hold the Gospel of Christ?

After so many centuries of searching, he had thought he would never find it, had assumed his sin with Elisabeta had made him unworthy of finding it.

Jordan passed the heavy leaden block to Erin’s outstretched hands. She polished away more of the soot with a grimy tablecloth.

“I don’t see any seams.” She hefted it. “And it feels solid. It looks more like a sculpture than a box.”

Rhun longed to take it from her and test the truth for himself, but he kept still.

“I bet the Germans believed there was something in there.” Jordan tapped the blast marks. “It looks like they tried to blast it again and again. That’s why the sensor readings are so high.”

Grigori jostled against Rhun, wanting to examine the object himself. If the book was still encased within this block of lead, Grigori must not have it. He placed himself between Grigori and Erin.

“Have no fear, Rhun,” Grigori said. “I have no illusion that I am part of the prophecy.”

Only now did Rhun even remember the prophecy. He had never truly believed its words, especially after Elisabeta. Yet now …

“All three of you touch it,” Grigori said. “See if it reveals itself to you.”

“Could it be that simple?” Jordan put a palm on the block.

Erin rested her smaller hand next to his.

Rhun hesitated, loath to attempt such an act in front of Grigori.

As if reading his thoughts, Grigori beckoned with one hand. His dark followers crowded into the room. Their threat made real.

Rhun placed his hand next to Jordan’s and Erin’s.

Erin stood, afraid to move.

The cold of Rhun’s hand chilled one side of her hand; the warmth of Jordan’s bathed the other. She couldn’t believe that she, who had devoted her life to science, was standing with her hand on a block of lead expecting miracles. What had happened to her over the last day and a half? If Jordan and Rhun hadn’t been standing next to her, she would have taken her hand off the block and jammed it into her pocket.

But they were there, so she stayed put, trying to convince herself that she was just humoring them, even though she knew better.

As she waited, icy cold seeped into her palm. It felt dead, like a corpse. The irrational thought would not leave her mind. The book was dead, and it would not come back to life on Russian soil.

She remembered the Cardinal’s words: The book can only be opened in Rome.

“Well, that was disappointing,” Jordan said, taking his hand back, the first to break the circle and admit defeat.

Rhun followed suit, and Erin hefted the block back against her chest. Would something miraculous have happened if she had only had faith?

She shook her head.

Enough of that.

“I figured it wouldn’t be that easy,” Jordan said.

“Indeed.” Rasputin gave his personal assistant, Sergei, a meaningful look and the young acolyte backed out the door.

Erin didn’t like to think where he might be going.

“Let’s gather up the stone pieces,” Rhun said. “And be on our way.”

“Where does your way lead?” Rasputin blocked their exit.

“Do you mean to break your word, Grigori? Steal the book and kill us?”

Rasputin’s feet stayed planted. “If God chose you, there is nothing I could do to stop him.”

“Great!” Jordan stepped close. “Thank you for your help and—”

Five acolytes glided up swiftly and surrounded him.

“Don’t be a fool,” Rhun warned Rasputin, his tone as calm as if they were discussing travel arrangements. “You must know that you do not have the resources here to open the Gospel.”

“I do realize that, my dear Rhun.” Rasputin smiled. A chill ran up Erin’s back that had nothing to do with the Russian weather. “Larger forces are at play than you or I.”

Sergei returned to the room.

A massive beast padded in after him, the dead come back to life.

The grimwolf growled, its ears flattened menacingly, its hackles spiked along his back.

Here was a twin to the one they had killed in the desert.

From behind the wolf, a woman stepped forward, running her fingers possessively along the flank of the monster. She tossed aside a mane of fiery hair to reveal a pale and familiar face — the woman from the forest in Germany.

The one who shot Rhun.

52

As Rhun stared, fire lanced through his chest, igniting with the memory of the silver rounds exploding into him. The woman looked so much like his Elisabeta — the silvery-gray eyes, the high cheekbones, the perfect skin, the same tilt to her chin, even the knowing smile.

But it could not be her. Rhun closed his eyes, listened to her heart. Each beat told him that this woman was not his Elisabeta, could not be her.

Rage replaced remorse. She had used her resemblance to his beloved to trick him, to try to murder him. Her forces had killed Emmanuel, had almost killed them all.

Jordan spoke, but Rhun caught only the end of the sentence. “… the visitor who pulled you away from the church earlier today?”

“I am ever a polite host,” Rasputin said.

Rhun opened his eyes and studied the impostor. The resemblance was uncanny, but false. Like everything in Rasputin’s realm, the fair face hid an evil core.

Rasputin’s followers seemed frightened of her. They crowded against the walls, leaving a circle around her, as if they did not dare to touch her.

“I see that you are quite restored, Father Korza.” The redhead smiled coldly.

Her icy eyes flicked over Erin and lingered on Jordan. Rhun heard his heartbeat quicken under her gaze.

The grimwolf at her heels snarled, its red eyes fixed on Rhun with deep hatred. It looked enough like the one in the desert of Masada to be its littermate. If so, did it know that he had killed its brother?

Masada.

The woman with the wolf must have been there, too, Rhun realized. She had more than Emmanuel’s blood on her fair hands.

As if reading his thoughts, she nodded. “This sudden restoration of health. Was it perhaps the blood of your companions that fortified you so?”

“I drink only the blood of Christ.”

“Not always,” she said. “Long ago, you defiled one of my ancestors.”

“I’ve heard our guest’s story,” Rasputin said, shaking a finger at Rhun. “She has good reason to be angry at you. Since your tragic mistake with Elisabeta, one woman of each generation of the Bathory line is cursed to a lifetime of pain and servitude. Each must bear a mark to prove it.”

The stranger bared her long throat, revealing a black handprint.

Still, Rhun searched for some trickery here. Did this woman truly come from the line of Bathory? Was she a descendant of the first woman believed to be the Woman of Learning?

Reading portents of that time, Cardinal Bernard had thought Elisabeta was the prophesied Woman of Learning. In the end, he was proven wrong, but had someone believed Bernard was on the right path? Had they taken command of the Bathory lineage as a precaution? Or was there some other purpose here?

The redheaded woman shifted her attention to Rasputin, but she never took her eyes off Rhun. “Let me take him as well as the book. I will double your fee.”

Rhun’s eyes narrowed. Whom did this strange woman serve? Who gave her that black mark on her throat? And why?

Rhun could think of only one person powerful enough to receive favors from Rasputin. The mysterious head of the Belial. The very last person who should ever receive the book.

He studied the mark on the woman’s throat. Was he staring at the shadow of the man’s own hand, the true puppet master of the Belial? A shiver traveled through him. He prayed that Cardinal Bernard was right, that the Belial could not open the Gospel. The Nazis had not been able to. Nor had the Russians. Perhaps the book was its own best protector.

But he hated to leave that to chance.

Rhun calculated the odds. Ten strigoi, Rasputin, and the wolf. He could not win here, and if he tried, Erin and Jordan would likely be killed. But an opportunity could present itself later. If he let Bathory take him now, he could remain near the book, try to get it free. Knowing he had no other choice, he inclined his head in agreement.

Rasputin studied his face for several seconds before speaking, his blue eyes calculating. “No, my dear. He is too willing. I promised you the book as a gesture of goodwill toward those whom you serve. But Rhun is mine. You may, however, take one of the humans, if, in return, your master grants me the life of my choosing later.”

“That was not your promise to us, Grigori.” Rhun kept his voice calm, but still his minions tightened their grip on him. “But if someone must be taken, why not me?”

“Yes,” Bathory said. “Why not him?”

Rasputin motioned to his remaining followers, and they reluctantly stepped closer to her. “My counsel is my own. Do not try my patience further.”

“You gave us your word, Grigori,” Rhun said. “We were not to be harmed.”

Bathory ignored him. “My apologies, Father Rasputin.” She studied first Erin, then Jordan. “I will accept your kind offer, but you have left me with a hard choice. Whom will I choose?”

“Take me.” Jordan winked at her. “I’m a lot more fun.”

“I’m sure you are.” Bathory’s lips curved into a wicked-looking smile. Her silver eyes met Rhun’s. A malicious glint flared. “But I believe I will take the woman.”

Rhun dove for Bathory, but a crowd of strigoi bore him to the ground before he could take a single step, pinning him with their sheer weight. Three others immobilized Jordan.

“Now, Rhun.” Rasputin kicked him lightly with the toe of a black boot. “I always keep my word. Every word, in fact.”

Rhun struggled to fight free. Next to him, Jordan tried, too. But it was pointless. Erin’s eyes had grown wide. Strigoi held her by each arm. She could not escape either. Rhun cursed himself for foolishly trusting Grigori. This, too, was his fault.

Rasputin rested his hands on his hips. “Bathory, my dear, I gave my word that the woman would not be harmed while in Russia. And you will adhere to that promise. But that protection dies as soon as she crosses our borders. Once beyond Russian soil, you may do with her as you wish.”

Erin fought the hands that restrained her, but she couldn’t budge an inch. More of Rasputin’s people swarmed into the room, filling it with the smell of death.

Rhun thrashed against the strigoi who were holding him, lashing out with teeth and nails. Blood spattered the nearby wall. More figures piled on top of him.

Jordan struggled with his attackers, too, but suddenly went limp. Erin gasped. Was he dead? Knocked out cold?

She struggled to get close to him, but it was impossible.

Hands snatched the lead block. Others cuffed her hands in front of her.

A cold collar encircled her neck, and Grigori’s minions stepped back a pace. As she hurled herself toward Jordan’s prone form, sharp points dug into her throat. Blood ran down her neck.

Gasping for air, she stopped short. Her neck throbbed. The collar was spiked, like a dog’s collar, although the points must have been sharpened to make it more painful. Someone ran a finger under the collar, pulling the spikes out of her flesh. She clenched her jaw to keep from crying out.

A moan ran through the strigoi who were gathered around her. All eyes fixed on her neck. The one holding her licked his lips.

“Enough!” Rasputin called.

He pushed himself to Erin’s side. In his hands he held a leather leash. He clipped one end to the back of Erin’s collar and handed the other end to Bathory.

“Thank you.” Bathory looped it around her wrist. With the other hand, she yanked the leash tight.

Erin choked, the tightness of the collar keeping her from coughing. She couldn’t breathe. Her cuffed hands rose to her throat, fingers trying to loosen it. Cold hands pulled her limbs down. She would die.

“Just so we understand each other.” Bathory stuck her face right next to Erin’s. “You can come very near to a painful death in Russia without me breaking my word to Rasputin.”

Her knees buckling, Erin looked into those cool silver eyes. Would they be the last things she ever saw?

“I hope that you understand that, too, Father Korza.” Bathory glanced at the pile of forms that were burying Rhun.

Erin’s vision closed in dark.

Buried under a mass of Grigori’s acolytes, Jordan struggled to breathe against the sheer weight of them, squeezing the air from his chest, slowly choking him. Teeth sliced into his arms and legs.

Please, God, don’t let me die like this …

His prayer was answered from the most unlikely source.

Distantly, he heard Rasputin shout. “Enough!”

At that command, the pressure eased; bodies rolled off of him. Hot blood seeped from the bites on his arms and legs. His head swam; his vision whirled, but finally settled.

Impossibly strong hands hauled him to his feet. Grigori’s minions yanked Rhun upright, too. One acolyte still lay on the ground, bleeding profusely.

It seemed Rhun had put up a better fight than Jordan had.

“Wh-where did that woman take Erin?” Jordan swayed with dizziness. How much blood had he lost?

“Away.” Rasputin smiled his crazy smile. “If Bathory doesn’t kill her en route, I have an idea where they will end up.”

Rhun spat blood and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Why did you let the Belial take her — and the Gospel? They are godless. You must know the consequences if they open the book.”

“Would the consequences be any worse for me if Sanguinists had the book?” Rasputin’s face relaxed into planes of sorrow. “Your beloved Church has possessed countless holy tomes, Rhun — filled their precious Secret Archives with them — and they have never used any of them to help me and mine.”

“But the world will suffer, Grigori. The entire world that God created.”

“The world suffers now.” Rasputin ran his hand through his long hair. “And your God does nothing. Your Church does nothing. Your humans do nothing.”

Rhun took a step toward Rasputin, but the Russian’s acolytes surrounded him again, forcing him to halt.

“If it doesn’t matter,” Jordan said, “then let us go.”

Rasputin chuckled. “He is charming, your warrior.”

“What do you plan for us, Grigori?”

“What I have always planned.” Rasputin turned to leave the cramped room. He snapped his fingers, and his dark flock herded Jordan and Rhun along behind him. “I intend to let your God save you, Rhun. Has not that been your eternal prayer, my friend? Salvation at His hand.”

Gasping, her throat on fire, Erin trailed down the dark corridor at Bathory’s heels, dragged like a dog. The woman released the choke chain enough to allow her to breathe — but barely.

Rasputin’s words rang in her ears: Once beyond Russian soil, you may do with her as you wish.

If she didn’t get away before they left Russia, Bathory would kill her.

And what about Jordan? Was he already dead?

She refused to believe it.

Rhun was clearly alive, fighting desperately against overwhelming odds, when she was hauled away, but Jordan had not moved, buried and being bitten on all his limbs.

He cannot be dead … he cannot.

Erin lifted her chin in an effort to ease the pressure of the spikes at her throat. Even that small movement caught her neck in a fiery noose of agony, narrowing her vision. She suspected the spikes were made of silver, the collar likely meant to imprison Sanguinists. She tried not to imagine how much worse it would feel if the silver acted as a poison in her body as it did in those of the Sanguinists.

Bathory threaded through corridors with no hesitation, trusting her grotesque wolf to lead the way. It loped ahead, occasionally dropping its nose to the floor and snuffling along like an ordinary dog. Erin found the naturalness of the gesture unsettling, as if this creature had no right to behave like a normal animal.

“Why do you hate Rhun Korza?” Erin’s voice sounded hoarse and unnatural, echoing in the corridor.

The leash twitched, and her throat closed in fear, but Bathory did not pull.

“That creature ruined my family.”

Erin took a fast step to keep up. “Then it’s true. You are descended from the Elizabeth Bathory? But how exactly did Rhun ruin her?”

“He killed her and turned her. As a strigoi, she abused peasants to satisfy her needs, something which would have gone unremarked during that time, but then she turned to noble girls, and the Hungarian king stripped her of her wealth, her nobility, and sent the Church after her. Since that time …”

Her voice trailed off and she touched the mark on her throat.

Erin took a few more steps before prompting, “Since that time …?”

Bathory’s fingers dropped from her neck. “We were penniless, persecuted. Then a stranger came offering a path to survival, to lost riches, and also to revenge.” She held up her hand, one finger of which bore a large ruby ring. “He even returned some of our family treasures and heirlooms, rescued them in secret before they were lost forever. But such noble generosity came with a stiff price: one woman from every generation had to be bound in servitude to a hard master, chained to His painful will. I am the only woman of my generation. So it fell to me, whether I wished for it or not.”

This last was said with a bitterness that stung.

Aghast, Erin fell silent for several steps. They reached a closed door, and Bathory unlocked it to reveal a dingy stairwell. She took a flashlight from her pocket and shone it up. Steps ascended for several stories. It would be a long climb.

“Come.”

Bathory pulled Erin into the stairwell behind her as the grimwolf bounded ahead. With each step, the collar pinched against Erin’s throat. Fresh blood dripped down her neck. She tried to block the pain out of her mind, struggling to think of some way to escape.

The grimwolf had reached the next flight. The landing ahead had a door. This might be the only chance she would get.

As they reached the next landing, she took a deep breath, then slipped into a quick crouch, sweeping out with her leg, catching Bathory across the knees.

As the woman fell back toward the steep stairs, Erin yanked the leash free from her grip. Bathory went tumbling and crashing below. Erin twisted to the side. The spikes still dug painfully into her neck, but she didn’t care. If she could get through that door and somehow seal it, she might be able to lose her captors in the maze of the Hermitage.

Higher up on the stairs, the wolf yelped, as if feeling his mistress’s pain.

Glowing red eyes turned to stare down at Erin.

She fell back against the door and fumbled at it with her cuffed hands. She struggled to turn the doorknob — and despaired.

Locked.

Forced down the hallway by a squad of Grigori’s acolytes, Jordan smelled the giant, reeking bear. As he marched, he pictured the human skull that had rolled out of its cage, and glanced sidelong at Rhun.

The priest nodded. He knew the truth, too.

Rasputin planned to feed them to the bear.

Jordan had been waiting for a clear moment, but the bastards surrounded him like a wall, less than a step away on all sides. He knew their strength, and his own weakness. He’d lost too much blood to put up much of a fight. Hell, he could barely walk.

Was this how he was going to die, as bear chow? He recalled his desperate plea not to meet his end at the fangs of Grigori’s minions. That prayer had been answered, and he was, oddly, still grateful. He would take the maw of the bear over the fangs of a strigoi any day.

Then he pictured Erin’s face, remembered her lips, her heated hands on his skin. He had to get free. He had to find her. Every second that passed, Bathory dragged her farther from Rasputin’s domain and closer to her death. He’d seen that look in Bathory’s eyes. She intended to kill Erin the minute she could do so without disobeying Rasputin.

All to hurt Rhun.

The tunnel ended a short way ahead, the stench of bear overpowering. Jordan spotted the elaborate gate depicting a woodland forest. He and Rhun were pushed forward until they were pressed against its fancy iron scrollwork.

Inside the cage, the bear slumbered on. Maybe it would be too tired to eat them.

Rasputin banged the flat of his palms against the gate, sounding the dinner bell.

The creature lumbered to its feet.

It was feeding time.

Fueled by raw fury, Bathory tucked into a roll as she tumbled headlong down the stairs, pushed by that damned archaeologist. She felt each sharp step against her back, until she finally hit a landing and sprawled out.

Above her, two thuds sounded. She heard a low growl, knew it was aimed at the cursed archaeologist, and felt a wash of satisfaction emanating from Magor, the pleasure of a predator who had cornered its prey.

“Easy!” Bathory called out, sharing in the wolf’s joy. It helped dull the pain as she climbed to her feet. She would have some nasty bruises, but nothing serious. She had lived so long with pain she barely noticed it.

She climbed with determination to the landing above. Magor had pinned the woman against the battered door, a paw on either side of her shoulders, his teeth bared at her neck. She felt his longing to tear out her throat. His claws scored the concrete wall.

The archaeologist watched him with wide eyes. She looked ready to faint.

In fact, Bathory was surprised she hadn’t.

“Not yet, my pet.” She retrieved the end of the leather leash and drew the collar tight. “When we can, I promise you can play with her as long as you like.”

Cowed and on shaking legs, the archaeologist trudged after her up the next flight of stairs, her shoulders low.

“Such despair and hopelessness,” Bathory taunted. “This isn’t what you expected when you started out on this bold quest in Jerusalem, is it? You thought your life might have value because of the prophecy?”

They reached a side door, and she unlocked it before pulling the woman out onto the empty street. Wind ruffled the sable fur of Bathory’s coat.

“What prophecy are you talking about?” the archaeologist asked, feigning ignorance … badly.

Lying took practice, and her prisoner clearly hadn’t had much of that.

Moving suddenly, Bathory grabbed her shoulder and slammed her against the side of a silver SUV that was parked roadside.

Magor growled.

“Don’t even try to lie to me. I am not a fool. I don’t believe in prophecy. So don’t think your life has value to me because of a thousand-year-old poem.”

The woman struggled to keep her feet on the icy cobblestones. Hauling the leash up, Bathory forced her higher up onto her tiptoes. If the woman should slip, the choke collar might kill her.

Bathory glanced up and down the empty street. No witnesses. But Rasputin would still know. She was not safe from him until she was well off Russian soil.

She loosened the leash, opened the SUV’s door, and shoved the archaeologist into the backseat. Magor jumped in after her, pushing his muzzle close to the prisoner’s throat. A tongue, frothing and thick with drool, licked the blood dribbling from under the spiked collar.

The archaeologist smothered a scream. She was a brave one, Bathory thought, but she had limits, too.

“Easy, Magor. If the Cardinal believes that she has a special destiny, she might have some use for us yet as a pawn in the game to come.”

The woman twisted her face away from the wolf, her voice tight and hard. “I don’t think the Cardinal cares that much about me.”

“Then you don’t know this Cardinal very well.” Bathory smiled. “Either way, remember that the prophecy never specified the condition you must be in when the book opens.”

Bathory read the understanding, the fear, in the archaeologist’s eyes.

Smart.

Maybe she was indeed the Woman of Learning.

“We will probably need you alive,” Bathory cruelly acknowledged. “But unwounded?”

She shook her head and smiled.

No.

53

Standing in the tunnel outside the cage’s gate, Rhun watched the Ursa, and the Ursa watched Rhun. Her red eyes glinted with old malice, her hatred of him undiminished across the past century. Drool slavered from her muzzle, and her impossibly long tongue slid across lips as black as rubber.

He suspected she remembered how he tasted. His leg throbbed and threatened to buckle. His limb remembered her, too.

Grigori wrapped his fingers around the branch of a wrought-iron oak sculpted into the gate. “If God loves you, Rhun, He will help you to escape the bear. Remember the lesson of Daniel and the lions? Perhaps your belief will close her mouth.”

Rhun didn’t think it would be that simple.

He studied the tiles that covered the chamber where the tunnels met, finding no break, no other way out. He shifted his attention to the iron gates.

When unlocked, they parted down the middle into two halves, opening like French doors. Two thick iron rods, one on each side of the gateway, had been drilled into the concrete and attached each side of the gate to the floor and ceiling. Less than an inch of a gap surrounded the gateway, and the elaborate patterns woven through the bars left openings no bigger than a few inches.

Once Rhun went into the room, there would be no escape.

Jordan dropped a warm hand to his shoulder. Rhun met his questioning blue eyes. The soldier glanced surreptitiously to Grigori and the strigoi. It was plain that he was asking if they should make their stand here, go down fighting before Rhun could be thrown in with the bear.

Affection rose in his breast. Jordan was a true Warrior of Man to the end. “Thank you,” Rhun whispered. “But no.”

Jordan stepped back, his eyes scared — but less for his own safety than for Rhun’s.

Unable to face that raw humanity any longer, Rhun turned to the gate. “I am ready, Grigori.”

Acolytes grabbed Jordan’s arms; others held Rhun in place while Grigori unlocked the thick steel lock and wrenched open the door.

Rhun was shoved bodily through the gate and into the cage.

The Ursa’s head swung toward him.

“Yes, my love,” Grigori called. “Sport with him as long as you like.”

Keeping back and staying low, Rhun circled her. The room was large, about fifty feet by fifty. He must use that space wisely. Overhead, the creature’s shoulders brushed the ceiling. Rhun could not jump over her.

A twig cracked under his shoe, releasing the sharp smell of spruce, the only natural scent in the cavern. He drank it in.

Then the Ursa lunged.

Her giant paw drove through the air with unnatural speed.

He had expected it. Long ago, she had always led with her left paw. He dove under her claws and rolled. The movement took him to the center of the room.

Ahead, a glint caught his eye. He ran forward and snatched it from the floor. A holy flask. Another Sanguinist had been sacrificed here. As he searched, he discovered other evidence: a pectoral cross, a silver rosary, a scrap of black cassock.

“May God have mercy on your soul, Grigori,” Rhun called out.

“God forsook my soul long ago.” Grigori rattled his gate. “As He did yours.”

The Ursa spun to face Rhun.

He swept the chamber swiftly with his eyes. If the murdered Sanguinist had been armed, perhaps his or her weapons remained. If he could—

The Ursa charged again.

He stood his ground.

The floor shook under her paws. He listened as her old heart stirred to passion again, beating hard.

When her carrion breath touched his cheek, he dropped flat to his back, letting her momentum carry her across his body. The sea of dark fur passed inches from his face. He lifted his own cross and let it drag across her stomach, setting her fur to smoldering.

She shrieked.

He had inflicted no serious damage, but he had given the bear a reminder that he was no mosquito to be squashed.

Jordan cheered from outside the gates.

Rhun rolled across the floor, his hands seeking the objects he had spotted before the attack. Two wooden staffs lay on the floor, both ends tipped with silver. He knew those unique weapons. His brother of the cloth — Jiang — had died here. Rhun had watched him practice with those staffs for hours, deep below the necropolis of Rome, where the Sanguinists made their home.

Still addled by the burn, the Ursa swept her head from side to side.

Rhun crouched perfectly still and measured the sides of his prison with his eyes.

With the hint of a plan in his mind, he darted to the iron gate that was farthest from Grigori.

The Ursa caught his movement and barreled toward him.

Leaping and twisting at the last moment, he cracked one of the staffs across her muzzle and rolled to the side.

Her enormous bulk plowed straight into the gate, knocking one of the two iron support rods loose from the floor. That corner of the gate bent, creating an opening too small for Rhun to squeeze through, but such an escape was not his intent.

He led her around toward where Grigori and Jordan watched the blood sport.

She came after him. He performed the same maneuver, but this time she skidded and stopped less than an inch from the gate. Her paw swatted through the air and caught him across the back as he leaped away. A glancing blow, but it cut through his leather armor and ripped into the flesh of his back.

A gasp escaped him, equal parts pain and defiance.

The Ursa sank onto her rear haunches and pulled her bloodied paw to her maw. With tiny eyes watching him, she licked each drop of his blood from her claws, huffing with pleasure.

He waited at the far side of the room, next to the damaged gate. The iron smell of his own blood coated his nostrils. He slid one staff down his bleeding back and through his belt, hooking the top through his priestly collar. That left him a staff in one hand, and the other hand free.

He broke the staff across his knee and set both pieces on the ground.

Then he dropped to that same knee, bowed his head, and muttered a prayer, calming his mind. A holy kiss on his pectoral cross burned his lips. His pain drew to a single point, centering him.

He touched his forehead with his index finger. “In nomine Patris …”

He touched his breastbone. “Et Filii …”

He touched first his left shoulder, then his right. “Et Spiritus Sancti.”

Then he crossed his thumb across his index finger and kissed it.

He gathered up the two pieces of the staff.

The bear came.

He whispered, “By the sign of the cross, deliver me from my enemies, O Lord.”

The Ursa thundered toward him, almost upon him.

At the last moment he leaped straight toward the ceiling, flattening his body against the roof as only a Sanguinist could, sliding between the bear’s back and the roof. He found narrow passage, only inches to spare.

Below him, the Ursa hit the gate with a tremendous crack. The second rod holding it to the floor broke away, and the gate was now bent more than a foot. If Rhun had been willing to abandon Jordan, he could have escaped.

Instead, he twisted in midair and fell back down upon the dazed beast. Before the Ursa had time to shake her stunned head, he stabbed one half of his broken staff toward one shaggy paw.

His aim was true.

His weight and momentum thrust the silver-tipped piece of the staff through her paw and deep into the hole that had been drilled into the concrete long ago for the gate’s iron rod.

She bellowed in pain, from the wound and the precious silver.

Before the beast had a chance to move, Rhun leaped onto her back and rolled across to her other side, shifting the second piece of the broken staff into his right hand.

He drove it through her other paw and into the other hole on the floor, imprisoning both limbs.

The Ursa collapsed forward, her muzzle knocking under the broken gate into the tunnel. With her forelegs splayed to each side, her body formed the sign of a cross.

Rhun had crucified the bear.

She howled.

He jumped atop her head and drew the unbroken staff from behind his back. Kissing the silver end first, he jammed it through her eye and deep into her brain. She twitched and heaved, dying. He read her demise in the vast chambers of her ancient heart.

Dominus vobiscum.

He bowed his head and made the sign of the cross over the beast’s massive form. As he finished his prayer, the red glow faded from her remaining eye, leaving it black.

After centuries, she was finally freed of her tainted servitude.

Rhun turned to this nemesis, his face defiant, triumphant in his glory.

Jordan’s arms were let free. He stared around, surprised. He swiped his hand down his jacket, as if dusting off the places where Rasputin’s congregants had touched him. Would that Russian monk keep his word and let Rhun and him go? If not, he intended to go down fighting side by side with Rhun.

Rasputin stepped back from the cage’s gate, his blue eyes wide. “God truly loves you, Rhun. You are indeed His most chosen one.”

Rhun knelt down and gathered a rosary, a silver cross, and a flask. Jordan bet they had belonged to another Sanguinist, someone killed by the bear.

Rasputin unlocked the cage.

Rhun’s hatred for Rasputin burned so palpably that the monk fell back a step. His minions retreated as if blown by a fierce wind.

“Where has Bathory taken Erin?” Rhun asked, biting off each word.

Rasputin’s voice cracked. “To Rome.”

Rhun glared, searching the other’s face for the truth. “Are we done here with your challenges to God, Grigori?”

Rasputin tilted his head. “Why do you scold me so, Rhun? Your dear Bernard sought to force the prophecy. He thrust you next to Elisabeta in the past, his alleged Woman of Learning … and her husband, that mighty Warrior. Look how that meddling turned out.” He lifted his hands in supplication of forgiveness. “I merely sought to test the prophecy here today. If you were truly one of the prophesied, God would spare you from the bear.”

“And here I stand,” Rhun said. “But your test is not over, is it? That is why you sent Erin off. You sundered the trio, to test if the three of us would find one another again and fulfill our duties. In this way, you continue to challenge God, as you once challenged the Church.”

Rasputin shook his head. “Not at all. I challenge only you, my friend. The one whom the Church loves as much as it hates me.”

Turning on a heel, Rasputin swept his minions aside with a wave of his hand, opening up a path to freedom.

Jordan waited for Rhun to reach him. Together, they walked through the gauntlet of Rasputin’s dark flock. With each step, Jordan’s bite wounds throbbed. The hair stood up on the back of his neck. He tensed, waiting for an attack from behind, a final betrayal by Rasputin.

None came.

“Find your woman, Rhun,” Rasputin called after them. “Prove that the Church placed its faith in the correct bloodstained hands.”

Rhun swept down the tunnel toward the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, not seeming to notice that his own blood pattered onto the frozen ground behind him.