The Blood Gospel (58 page)

“I don’t believe in that damn prophecy,” Erin said, and meant it. So far, the trio seemed to have bungled more things than they got right. It didn’t feel like they had divine prophecy on their side.

“Ah, but others do.” Bathory stroked the grimwolf’s head. “Help us.”

“No.” She would die before she assisted the Belial in opening the book.

Bathory snapped her fingers. The grimwolf leaped and pinned Nate to the floor with his front paws, knocking his hand loose from Erin’s. The wolf bent his muzzle low over Nate’s throat.

The message was clear, but Bathory drove it home anyway. “I don’t need your cowboy.”

Bathory trained her flashlight on Nate. Erin tried not to look at him. She stared instead at the rough stone walls, the newly installed barred steel gate, and the black ceiling of the cell that seemed to extend upward forever.

But her gaze returned to Nate. He had closed his eyes, quaking, but looking so brave she wanted to hug him. Clearly terrified, he still didn’t ask for help. He just waited.

“What do you need?” Erin asked Bathory.

“Your thoughts about opening the lead casing that holds the book.” Bathory put both hands on her hips. “To start.”

“I don’t know.”

The dog lowered its head toward Nate’s exposed throat and snarled.

“But maybe
we
can talk it through, you and I.” Erin spoke as fast as she could. “But first, call off the grimwolf.”

As if obeying a silent command from its mistress, the wolf raised its head.

Nate shuddered with relief.

Erin had to give the woman something. “The lead box had a design on it. A skeleton and a man bound together by loops of rope.”

“Yes, we know. Along with the symbols for the Alpha and the Omega.”

Bathory turned to the taller of the two brothers, his flesh punctured and tattooed, his eyes hungry upon her. He shrugged off a satchel, pulled free the heavy artifact, and held it out to Erin.

“What else do you see?” Bathory asked.

Erin took the cold metal object, careful not to touch the fingers of the tattooed man. She wished she had something significant to add. What did she know about the book? She stroked the two figures carved into the front: the human skeleton and the naked man, crossed and locked in an embrace, bound together by a braided cord.

Drawing by Trish Cramblett

“The book is about miracles,” Erin started. “Christ’s miracles. How He harnessed His divinity.”

The wolf shifted its weight from paw to paw.

“We know that,” Bathory snapped. “How do we
open
it?”

Erin ignored her and tried to think. “Miracles. Like changing water to wine. Bringing the living back from the dead …”

She stopped, surprised.

Bathory understood at the same time. “All the major miracles are about
transformations
.”

“Exactly!” Erin was surprised at how quickly Bathory had made the connection. “Like transubstantiation, changing wine to the blood of Jesus.”

“So, perhaps this block of lead
is
the actual book.” Bathory crossed over and crouched next to her, like two colleagues conferring. She touched the lead, too. “Alchemists were always trying to find a way of turning lead to gold.”

Erin nodded, understanding the woman’s hypothesis. “Maybe that quest has its roots in this legend. Some old hint about the Gospel traveled up through the ages. Turning lead to gold.”

Bathory’s silver eyes locked on hers. “Maybe the Gospel needs to be transformed in the same way. From dull, worthless lead to the golden glory of the book?”

Erin suddenly remembered Piers’s words in the bunker.

The book is not yet a book. Not yet
.

Had the old priest figured out the puzzle as he hung for decades on the cross with nothing else to ponder as he suffered?

Erin nodded. “I think you’re right.”

“It’s an interesting idea. But what are the alchemical ingredients needed to cause this transformation?” Bathory tapped the figure of the skeleton inscribed on the lead jacket. “I suspect the answer may lay in our bony friend here?”

“But what does the Alpha symbol above his head mean? It has to be a clue.” Erin stared at the skeleton under the Alpha symbol, then glanced at the naked man and the symbol above his head. “And what’s the meaning of the Omega symbol?”

“Alpha skeleton, Omega man.” Bathory slipped her finger into two small divots at the top of the block.

Erin hadn’t seen those before. They looked like tiny receptacles, meant to hold something, maybe something like those alchemical ingredients Bathory mentioned. She tried to get a better look at them.

Before she could, Bathory sprang to her feet, understanding flashing across her face. She ripped the lead block from Erin’s hands.

“What?” Erin asked. “What did you see?”

Bathory snapped her fingers, and the wolf abandoned Nate.

The young man sat up shakily, rubbing his throat.

The eerie silver eyes smiled at Erin. “Thank you for your help.”

With that, she and the
strigoi
brothers left the cell. The lock clicked closed, and light retreated down the tunnel. Erin leaned forward to watch it disappear. Bathory had figured out something, something important.

Nate drew in a shaky breath. “She’ll be back.”

Erin agreed, adding, “But we won’t be here.”

3:35
P.M
.

Rhun pulled his dark hood lower over his eyes, hiding from both the tourists and the late-afternoon sunlight that inundated St. Peter’s Square.

Here he waited with Jordan.

Across the travertine square rose St. Peter’s Basilica, its dome the highest point in all of Rome. To either side, Bernini’s double colonnade swept out in two wide arcs, framing the keyhole-shaped plaza between. According to Bernini, the colonnade was supposed to represent the arms of Saint Peter reaching out to embrace the faithful into the fold. Atop these arms, a hundred and forty stone saints perched and stared down upon the spectacle below.

Rhun hoped they didn’t see him. He had chosen this place for a rendezvous, out in the open, under the sun, to hide in plain sight, so that if Bathory had reached Rome, her
strigoi
wouldn’t be able to overhear any words he spoke. Possibly he was being too paranoid, but after the events in Russia, he dared take no chances.

Jordan rolled up his sleeves. The edge of a
strigoi
bite showed just above his elbow. The man had an incredible constitution. He’d been battered and bitten, but his obvious worry for Erin kept him going.
A fine Warrior of Man
, Rhun thought, and tried to be grateful that she had such a champion.

Humans swirled around him. A mother bounced a fat infant on her hip. Next to her, a young man watched her breasts, his heart rate giving away his response. A group of schoolgirls in navy-blue uniforms chattered under the watchful eye of a middle-aged teacher wearing brilliant red-framed eyeglasses.

A woman in long jeans, a tight-fitting black shirt, a floppy straw hat, and sunglasses meandered around the crowded square. She snapped a few pictures, then stuck a tiny camera into the backpack that dangled by one strap on her shoulder. She looked like a tourist, but she wasn’t.

Nadia
.

At last
.

Rhun waited, not daring to cross the square until she signaled it was safe. He hated skulking around Vatican City. Rome had been his home for centuries. It had been the one place in the world where he had always walked freely—until now. Before this quest had started, he had considered retreating from the world, ensconcing himself in the meditative world that existed deep below the Basilica. Would such peace ever be afforded him again?

He strolled along the curved colonnade toward the ancient three-tiered fountain. Like many things in Rome, it was older than he was. A young girl played hide-and-seek among the Doric columns, chased by an energetic mother. They probably sought to get in one more game before heading home for their dinners.

Rhun’s sharp eyes picked out the red porphyry stone set among the sea of gray cobblestones. The red stone had been placed there to mark the spot of Pope John Paul II’s shooting thirty years before. The bloodred stone reminded him of the cobblestones enshrined in the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, a thought that seemed to call the specter of Rasputin into this holy place.

Rhun stopped next to the tall stone obelisk. This very pillar had witnessed the crucifixion of countless Christians in Nero’s Circus, even Saint Peter himself. But since the late 1500s, it had watched over the center of the Christian world. He calculated the time by the long shadow it threw across the square. They had less than two hours before sunset. If the Belial had
strigoi
stationed in Rome, they must act before then.

Nadia paused next to him.

“Where is the woman?” She angled her head back as if studying the cross that topped the obelisk.

“Erin,” Jordan said. “Her name is Erin.”

“She was taken, along with the book.” Rhun filled her in on the events in Russia, ending by handing her Jiang’s rosary and flask. She could bring them to the sanctuary beneath the necropolis of St. Peter’s Basilica, where the Order of the Sanguines made their home.

Nadia’s hands lingered on the flask before she slipped it into her backpack. She had often worked with Jiang. “The Cardinal has returned to Rome from Jerusalem. He’s been with the Cloistered Ones since he received word of your alleged death. Praying.”

Guilt wormed its way into Rhun’s gut. He hated having lied to Bernard. He had known that after Nadia told him of his death, Bernard would grieve. He would be furious and hurt when he found out how Rhun and Nadia had deceived him. But there had been no other way to conceal their actions from the Belial spy in their midst. Still, it would not get any easier to face Bernard. Rhun glanced toward the imposing stone Apostolic Palace rising above the colonnade. A few windows had been left open to let in the light and air.

“Can you take us to Bernard? We have no time for secrecy now that the Belial have the book.”

“And Erin,” Jordan put in. “They have Erin, too.”

October 28, 3:40
P.M
., CET

Circus of Nero, Rome, Italy

“What do you mean we’re getting out of here?” Nate asked.

Erin stumbled over to him in the oily darkness and caught his hand to reassure him. “We’re going to
climb
out.”

“What? How?”

She told him.

Earlier, when Bathory had waved her flashlight around the cell, Erin had spotted a possible way out. They certainly could never breach the stone walls, and the new steel bars looked strong, and the floor had been carved from solid rock. They wouldn’t be leaving by any of those ways.

But the ceiling!

Under the glow of Bathory’s flashlight, she had noted that the cell had no roof. It was just a sheer-walled black shaft that headed straight up.

Erin knew what that meant. In ancient times, Roman slaves used long poles to push caged animals down the stone tunnel that Bathory had sauntered along before. They were animals meant for the arena, but first their cages had to be pushed into the very cell that she and Nate now occupied.

Back then, a wooden platform would have covered the cell’s stone floor. Over the centuries, the platform had disintegrated into the slivers Erin had felt when she first woke up in the cell. Originally, planks had been nailed together in the shape of this room. Chains would have been attached to both sides of the platform and run up to pulleys at the top. Those chains would have traveled up slots on either side of the black rectangle above her.

Slaves rolled the caged animals on top of the platform. Later, on cue from above, other slaves used an elaborate rope-and-pulley elevator system to lift the platform and the cage from deep under the earth to the ground-level arena.

Erin and Nate had to hope that this shaft led to someplace safer than the prison they were stuck in now.

“Come over here,” she urged Nate, taking him by hand. “We can climb the steel gate to reach the shaft above.”