The Blood Gospel (49 page)

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.”

October 27, 5:57
P.M
., MST

St. Petersburg, Russia

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.

6:04
P.M
.

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.”

October 27, 6:08
P.M
., MST

St. Petersburg, Russia

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.