The Blood Gospel (51 page)

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.

October 27, 6:22
P.M
., MST

St. Petersburg, Russia

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
?”

6:38
P.M
.

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.

6:46
P.M
.

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.