The Blood Gospel (18 page)

Jordan stripped off his camouflage jacket and spread it over the priest’s limp body. “He seemed pretty coherent a minute ago when you two were talking. Still, we need to get him some real medical care soon.”

Erin stared down at Father Korza.

Rhun
, she reminded herself.

His first name suited him better. It was softer, and hinted at darker mysteries. Atop the shreds of his shirt he wore a Roman clerical collar of white linen, not the plastic worn by most modern priests.

Now that he was unconscious, his face had relaxed from its stern planes. His lips were fuller than she’d first thought, his chiseled features more pronounced. Dark umber hair hung in wavy locks over his brow, down to his round collar. She smoothed them off his face.

Worry burned brighter at the icy feel of his skin.

Would he wake up? Or die like Heinrich?

Jordan coughed. She drew her hand back. Rhun was a priest, and she should not be playing with his hair.

“What about your radio?” she said, rubbing her palms together. She had lost her cell phone. It was now entombed somewhere inside that mountain. Jordan had been fiddling with his handset earlier. “Any luck reaching someone?”

“No.” Jordan’s face tightened with concern. “Its case got cracked. With time, I might get it working.”

Goose bumps ran down Jordan’s bare arms from the cold. Still, he tucked his coat more securely around Rhun.

“What’s the plan, then?” she asked.

He flashed a quick grin. “I thought you made the plans.”

“I thought I was supposed to ask how high and then jump. Weren’t those your orders?”

He looked back at the collapsed mountain, and a shadow passed across his face. “Those under my orders didn’t fare so well.”

She kept her voice low. “I don’t see what you could have done differently.”

“Maybe if this one,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the unconscious priest, “had told us what we were dealing with, we might have stood a better chance.”

“He came down to warn us.”

Jordan grimaced. “He came down to find that book. He had plenty of time to warn us before we went down, or to warn the men topside that those monsters were coming. But he didn’t.”

She found herself defending the priest, since the man couldn’t do it himself. “Still, he did fight to get us out of there. And he got us into that sarcophagus during the explosion.”

“Maybe he just needed our help to get the hell out of there.”

“Maybe.” She gestured across the wide expanse of sand. “But what do we do next?”

His face was stony. “For now, I think it’s best if he’s not moved. It’s about all we can do for him: keep him warm and quiet. After that explosion, rescue teams must be coming here from all directions. We should stay put. They’ll find us soon enough.”

He moved aside the coat and felt across Rhun’s body.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for identification. I want to know who this guy really is. He’s certainly no ordinary priest.”

Erin felt bad at mugging the priest while he was unconscious, but she had to admit that she was just as curious.

Jordan didn’t discover any driver’s license or passport, but he did draw Rhun’s knife from a wrist sheath. He also discovered a leather water flask buttoned in a thigh pocket.

He unscrewed the cap and took a swig.

Thirsty, too, Erin held out her hand, wanting a drink.

Jordan twisted up his face and sniffed at the opening of the flask. “That’s not water.”

She frowned.

“It’s wine.”

Wine?

She took the flask and sipped. He was right.

“This guy gets stranger and stranger,” Jordan said. “I mean look at this.”

He lifted Rhun’s knife, the curved blade shaped like a crescent. It shone silver in the moonlight.

And maybe it was silver, like the bolts that had nailed the girl to the wall.

“The weapon’s called a
karambit
,” Jordan said.

He hooked a finger in a ring at the base of the hilt and demonstrated with fast flicks of his wrist how the weapon could be deployed in several different positions.

She looked away, flashing back to the battle, blood flying from that blade.

“Strange weapon for a priest,” he said.

To her, it was the
least
strange part of the night.

But Jordan wasn’t done. “Not only because most holy men don’t normally carry knives, but because of its origin. The weapon is from Indonesia. The style goes back more than eight hundred years. The ancient Sudanese copied the blade’s shape from the claws of a tiger.”

She looked at Rhun, remembering his skill.

Like his name, the weapon fit him.

“But here’s the oddest detail.” He held the knife where she could see it. “From the patina, I’d say this blade is at least a hundred years old.”

They both stared at the priest.

“Maybe far older.” Jordan’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “What if he’s one of them?”

“One of whom?”

He raised one blond eyebrow.

She understood what he was implying. “A
strigoi
?”

“You saw how he lifted that crypt’s lid?” His voice held a challenge.

She accepted it. “He could’ve been riding a surge of adrenaline. Like women lifting cars off babies. I don’t know, but I rode from Caesarea with him. In broad daylight. You met him on Masada’s summit while the sun was still up.”

“Maybe these
strigoi
can go out in sunlight. Hell, we don’t know anything about them.” Fury and loss marked his face. “All I know for sure is that I don’t trust him. If Korza had warned us in time, more than
three
of us would be standing here.”

She put a hand on Jordan’s warm forearm, but he shrugged it off and stood.

She stared down at the man in her lap, remembering his last revelation.

It is the
G
ospel. Written by Christ’s own hand. In his own blood.

If this was true, what did it imply?

Questions burned through her: What revelations could be hidden within the pages of this lost Gospel? Why did the
strigoi
want it so badly? And more important, why did the Church hide it here?

Jordan must have read her train of thought.

“And that book,” he said. “The one that got so many good men killed. I’m pretty sure there are only
four
Gospels in the Bible. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

Erin shook her head, happy to return to a subject she knew something about. “Actually, there are many more Gospels. The Dead Sea Scrolls alone contain bits of a
dozen
different ones. From various sources. From Mary, Thomas, Peter, even Judas. Only four made it into the Bible. But none of those hint at Christ writing His own book.”

“Then maybe the Church purged them. Wiped away any references.” He set his chin. “We now know how good the Church is at keeping secrets.”

It made a certain sense.

With no references, no hints of its existence, no one would search for it
.

She glanced up at Jordan, surprised again at his sharpness, even when he was overwhelmed by emotion.

“Which makes me wonder,” he continued. “If I was the Church and I had an ancient document written by Jesus Christ, I’d be waving that thing around for all to see. So why did Saint Peter bury it here? What was he hiding?”

Besides the existence of
strigoi? She didn’t bother voicing that question. It was only one among so many.

Jordan turned to the priest. He held the blade threateningly. “There’s one person who has the answers.”

Rhun jerked, sitting straight up. His eyes took in them both.

Had he overheard them?

The priest turned, staring hard into the darkness. His nostrils flared, as if he were testing the air.

He spoke again with that dreadful calmness. “Something is near. Something terrible.”

Her heart jolted into her throat, choking her silent.

Jordan voiced her terror. “More
strigoi
?”

“There are worse things than
strigoi
.”

October 26, 7:43
P.M
., IST

Desert beyond Masada, Israel

Rhun held out his hand toward the soldier. “My knife.”

Without hesitating, Jordan slapped it into his open palm. Rhun collected the remains of his tattered cassock around himself, knowing he’d need every bit of protection.

“What’s coming?” The soldier drew his pistol. Rhun respected that he’d had foresight to scavenge extra ammunition clips from his dead team members back in the tomb.

It would help, but little.

An acrid odor cut through the scents of cooling sand and desert flowers, and Rhun shook his head to clear it. He whispered a quick prayer.

“Rhun?” The woman’s brow knit.

“It is a
blasphemare
,” he said.

The soldier checked his weapon. “What the hell is that?”

Rhun wiped his blade along his dirty pants. “A corrupted beast. A creature whose strength and senses are heightened by tainted
strigoi
blood.”

The soldier kept his gun up. “What sort of corrupted beast, exactly?”

The howling answer pierced the darkness, echoing all around, followed by the crashing sounds of animals fleeing. Nothing wanted to be near the creature that made that sound.

Rhun gave it a name. “A grimwolf.” He pointed his blade to a nest of boulders and offered them one thin chance to survive. “Hide.”

The man snapped around, a skilled enough soldier to know when to obey. He grasped the woman’s hand and sprinted with her toward the scant cover of the rocks.

Rhun searched the darkness, drawing in his awareness. The howl told him the beast knew it had been discovered. It sought to unnerve them.

And he could not say it had failed.

His fingers tightened on his cold blade, trying to block out the overpowering thump of the wolf’s heartbeat. It was too loud for him to nail it down to one specific spot, so he strove to keep it from overwhelming him, to block it out in order to be open for other sounds.

He sensed the creature, a shift of shadows, circling them.

But where …?

A muted thud on the sand behind him.

He could not turn in time.

The beast shed the night, as if throwing off a cloak, its black fur dark as oil. It charged. Rhun dropped, twisting away from its path.

Powerful jaws snapped shut, catching only cloth. The wolf snagged the edge of his ripped cassock and barreled on. Rhun was yanked off his feet, but the cloth ripped, setting him free.

He rolled, sharp desert stones and thorns slicing his bare back. He used the momentum to push into a crouch, finally facing his adversary.

The grimwolf spun, froth flying. Lips rippled back from yellow fangs. It was massive, the size of bears that roamed the Romanian mountains of his boyhood. The beast’s red-gold eyes shone with a malignancy that had no place under the sun.

Tall ears flattened to its skull, and a low growl rumbled from its chest. Hooked nails, long enough to puncture a man’s heart, scraped the sand. Haunch muscles bunched into iron-hard cords.

Rhun waited. Long ago, when he was fresh to the cross, such a beast nearly ended his life—and then he hadn’t been alone. He’d had two others at his side. Grimwolves were nearly impossible to kill, lithe of mind and muscle, with hides as tough as chain mail and a speed that made them more shadow than flesh.

Few blades could harm them. And Rhun had lost his.

He clenched empty fingers. From the corner of his eye, he caught the glint of silver in the sand, where he’d dropped his blade when he was torn off his feet. He could not recover it in time.

As if the wolf knew this, its lips pulled farther back into a savage snarl.

Then it thundered toward him.

He feinted to the right, but the scarlet eyes tracked him. The wolf would not be fooled again. It leaped straight at him.

A harsh shout exploded out of the desert—followed by a shattering blast. In midleap, the wolf’s hindquarters buckled. The beast’s massive shoulder smashed the sand. Its bulk slid toward him.

Rhun twisted away and scrambled toward his knife.

Beyond the wolf’s hackles, he spotted the soldier running toward him, away from the nest of boulders. Muzzle flashes sparked in the darkness as he emptied his clip.

Stupid, brave, impossible man.

Rhun snatched up his knife.

Already the beast had regained its feet, standing between Rhun and the soldier. The wolf’s head swiveled, taking them both in. Its blood blackened the sand.

But not nearly enough.

The soldier dropped a smoking clip and slapped in another. Even such a weapon could not deter a grimwolf. Its heart thundering in battle, a grimwolf ignored pain and all but the most grievous wounds.