The Blood Gospel (21 page)

“Then what happened?” Jordan asked.

Rhun hurried his words, clearly wanting to be done. “I became
strigoi
, but instead of turning to their ways, I was offered another path. I was recruited that very night—before I ever tasted human blood—and ordained into the Order of the Sanguines. There I chose to follow Christ. I have followed Him ever since.”

“Followed Him how?” Jordan asked, matching her skepticism. “How does something like you serve the Church?”

“The blessing of Christ’s blood allows the Sanguinists many boons. Like walking under the sun. It also allows us to partake of all that is holy and sacred. Though, like the sun, such holiness still burns our flesh.”

He peeled off one glove. A red blistering marked his palm in the shape of a cross. Erin remembered him clutching his pectoral crucifix a moment before, and imagined it searing into his skin.

Rhun must have read her distress. “The pain reminds us of Christ’s suffering on the cross and serves as a constant remembrance of the oath we took. It is a small price to pay to live under His grace.”

She watched him gently tuck his cross back under the shreds of his cassock. Did the crucifix burn over his heart? Is that why Catholic priests had taken to wearing such prominent crosses, another symbol of a hidden secret? Like the hooded cassock, did such accoutrements allow the Sanguinists to hide in plain sight among their human brothers of the cloth?

She had a thousand other questions.

Jordan had only one. “Then, as a warrior of the Church, who do you fight?”

Again Rhun looked to the desert. “We are called up to battle our feral brothers, the
strigoi
. We hunt them down and offer them a chance to join the fold of Christ. If they do not, we kill them.”

“And where do we humans fall on your hit list?” Jordan asked.

Rhun’s eyes returned to them. “I have sworn
never
to take a human life, unless it is to save another.”

Erin found her voice again. “You say your mission is to kill
strigoi
. Yet it sounds like these creatures did not
choose
to become what they are, any more than you did, any more than a dog chooses to become rabid when bitten.”

“The
strigoi
are lower than animals,” Rhun argued. “They have no souls. They exist only to do evil.”

“So your job is to send them back to Hell,” Jordan said.

Rhun’s gaze wavered. “In truth, soulless as they are, we do not know where they go.”

Jordan shifted next to her, lowering his weapon, but he did not relax his stance.

“If
strigoi
are feral,” Erin asked, “why do they care about this Gospel of Christ?”

Rhun looked ready to explain, but then froze—which immediately set her heart to pounding. He jerked his head to the side, his gaze on the skies.

“A helicopter comes,” he stated bluntly.

Jordan searched around—but only in darting glances, never taking his eyes fully off of Rhun. “I don’t see anything.”

“I hear it.” Rhun cocked his head. “It is one of ours.”

Erin spotted a light in the sky heading toward them fast. “There.”

“What do you mean by ‘one of ours’?” Jordan asked.

“It is from the Church,” Rhun explained. “Those who come will not harm you.”

As she watched the helicopter’s swift approach, Erin felt a nagging worry.

Over the centuries, how many men have died after hearing similar promises?

October 26, 8:28
P.M
., IST

Caesarea, Israel

Bathory moved silently through the ruins of the hippodrome, shadowed by Magor, who padded quietly behind her. She shared his senses, becoming as much a hunter as the grimwolf. She tasted the salt of the neighboring Mediterranean, a black mirror to her right. She smelled the dust of centuries from the rubble of the ancient stone seats. She caught a distant whiff of horse manure and sweat.

She gave the stables a wide berth, careful to stay downwind so as not to spook the horses. She had left Tarek and the others with the helicopter, glad to put some distance between herself and them. It felt good to be alone, Magor by her side, dark sky above, and her quarry close.

Slowly she and the wolf crossed the sands toward the cluster of tents, aiming for the only one that still glowed with light. She did not need Magor’s sharp senses to hear the voices from inside, reaching her across the quiet of the night. She spotted two silhouettes moving, two people. From the timbre of their voices, they were a man and a woman, both young.

The archaeologist’s students.

Under the cover of their conversation, she reached the rear of the tent, where a small mesh window had been tied open to the night’s breezes. She stood there, spying upon the two, a silent sentinel in the night, with Magor at her hip.

A young man in cowboy boots and jeans paced the length of the tent while a young woman sat before a laptop and sipped a Diet Coke. On the computer’s screen, a silent CNN report of the earthquake played. The woman did not take her eyes from the screen; the palm of her hand held an earbud in place, listening.

She spoke without turning away. “Try the embassy again, Nate.”

The young man paced up to the small mesh window, staring out but not really seeing. Bathory remained standing, knowing she was still concealed by the shadows. She loved these moments of the hunt, when the quarry was so close, yet still blind to the blood and horror poised to leap at its throat.

Next to her, Magor stayed as still as the night sky. Once again, she was thankful that Tarek and the others were not here. They did not appreciate the beauty of the hunt—only the slaughter that followed.

Nate turned away, stepped over to the table, and dumped his cell phone beside the laptop. “What’s the use? I tried calling them over and over. Still busy. Even tried the local police. Can’t get any word on where Dr. Granger was taken.”

Amy pointed to the ongoing report on the screen. “What if she was flown to Masada? Reports are saying aftershocks brought the whole mountain down.”

“Quit thinking the worst. Dr. Granger could be anywhere. You’d think if the professor had time to send us those weird pics, she could’ve at least texted us, told us where she was.”

“Maybe she wasn’t allowed to. That Israeli soldier had her on a short leash. But from that photo of the open sarcophagus, it definitely looked like she was exploring some ransacked tomb.”

In the darkness, Bathory smiled, picturing the archaeologist desperately waving her cell phone. So she
had
been transmitting photos, something she had considered important, possibly some clue to the whereabouts of the book.

In the dark, Bathory stroked the bandage on her arm, reminding herself that Hunor had died in pursuit of the secret that those pictures might reveal. Cold anger sharpened her senses, focused her mind, drove back the deep ache in her blood.

“I’m going back to my tent,” Nate said. “Going to try to take a nap for a couple hours, then I’ll see if I can reach anyone after all this quake hubbub dies down. You should, too. Something tells me it’s going to be a long night.”

“I don’t want to be alone.” Amy looked up from her computer at him. “First Heinrich, now no word from the professor … I’ll never sleep.”

Bathory heard the invitation behind her words, but Nate seemed oblivious to it. A pity. It would have made it much easier to steal the laptops and their phones if they were both gone. Such a loss would not be uncommon at this remote camp, dismissed as simple theft.

Instead, she sized the pair up. Nate was tall, well built, handsome enough. She could see why Amy liked having him near.

She herself understood the comfort of a warm male beside you, sharing your bed, picturing poor Farid. Her fingers slipped to her belt and pulled out the Arab’s dagger, stolen after she killed him. Even in this small way, Farid was still useful to her.

She stepped back, considering the best way to flush the pair out—or at least separate them. She glanced around the campsite, heard the distant nickering of horses, and smiled.

A quick whisper in Magor’s ear, and the wolf loped silently toward the stables.

8:34
P.M
.

Racked by guilt, Nate paced the tent.

I shouldn’t have let Dr. Granger go off alone.

He owed the professor. She had given him a chance when no one else had. Two years ago, he had been a hard sell as a grad student. At Texas A&M, he’d been raising a younger sister while holding down two jobs. The workload had trashed his GPA, but Dr. Granger took a chance on him. The professor had even helped get his kid sister a full scholarship to Rice, freeing him to travel.

And what did he do to repay her?

He let her step into a helicopter full of armed men all by herself.

As he reached the open flap of the tent, a chorus of frightened whinnies erupted from the stables, echoing eerily across the dark ruins.

He stepped out into the night. Moonlight shone on ancient stone seats and the rectangular trench where his friend Heinrich had received the blow that had killed him.

A cold wind blew sand into his eyes.

Nate blinked away tears. “What’s wrong with the horses?”

“I don’t care,” Amy said, still seated at the laptop. “I hope it’s something awful. Especially for that white one.”

“The stallion was just frightened. It was an accident.” Still he couldn’t blame her for being mad at the horse. Heinrich was dead, just like that. Wrong place, wrong time. It could just as easily have been him.

The neighing grew more shrill.

“I’m going to see,” he said. “Could be a jackal.”

Panic tinged Amy’s voice. “Don’t leave me here by myself.”

He crammed his cowboy hat on his head and rummaged through a wooden crate near the door for Dr. Granger’s pistol. She used it for shooting snakes.

“Let the stable people take care of the horses,” Amy pressed. “You shouldn’t go out there in the dark.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “And you’re perfectly safe here.”

Glad to be doing something besides stewing, he headed out of the tent and across the sand. But the night felt different now. Gooseflesh rose up on his arms that had nothing to do with cold.

Just spooked by Amy
, he told himself.

Still, he tightened his grip on the pistol and strode faster—until a shadow rushed by on his right.

He stopped and whirled.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of something large sweeping past. He didn’t get a good look at it, couldn’t tell what it was, only that it was bigger than any jackal he’d ever seen, the size of a yearling calf, but moving fast and smooth like a predator. It vanished so quickly he wasn’t sure he saw anything.

He looked back at the well-lit tent. It seemed far away now, a single lamp in the darkness.

Behind him, a horse screamed.

8:36
P.M
.

Under the cover of the stallion’s cry, Bathory poked the tip of Farid’s dagger through the tent’s fabric and dragged the blade down. Its finely honed edge sliced through the taut material with barely a whisper.

All the while she kept an eye on Amy, who remained seated at the laptop, her focus fully on the tent’s door, her back to the new door opening up behind her.

Bathory pushed sideways through the sliced fabric, slipping silently into the tent. Once inside, she stood behind the frightened young woman, who remained oblivious to her presence. One earbud was still seated in Amy’s ear, the other dangled loosely. Bathory heard the tiny buzz of the CNN report playing on the laptop’s screen.

She was struck by how unconsciously most people moved through their lives, unmindful of the true nature of the world around them, safely ensconced in their cocoon of modernity, where news came 24/7, filtered and diluted, where jolts of caffeine were needed to nudge them blearily through their ordinary lives.

But that was not living.

Deep in her heart, Magor’s hunt stirred inside her, a distant haze of blood, adrenaline, and predatory glee.

That was the
true
face of the world.

That was living.

Bathory stepped forward, and with a single savage slash under the woman’s chin, she snuffed out that feeble flicker of the young woman’s wasted life. She tipped the body off the camp stool before the spray of blood doused the laptop.

Amy twitched on the floor, too stunned to know she was dead. She managed to squirm a few feet toward the tent’s door before finally slumping in defeat, crimson pooling under her.

Bathory worked quickly. She closed the laptop, slipped it into her backpack, along with the pair of cell phones on the table.

To the side, the tent flap twitched.

She turned to see Nate stepping inside. He took in the scene with a glance, his pistol jerking up to point at her. “What the hell … ?”

Bathory straightened, smiling warmly.

But she was not greeting the young man.