The Blood Gospel (63 page)

Great.

Moments later, Jordan’s boots hit the stone floor. He clicked on the flashlight attached to his machine pistol. All around, black shapes converged upon him, boiling out of the dark passageways of the necropolis.

To the right, he spotted Bathory—shadowed by her massive grimwolf. The pair rounded a corner and disappeared into a black tunnel.

“Over there!” Jordan yelled, and pointed.

Rhun and the Cardinal stepped into formation, with Bernard at the head. Jordan took the left side, pushing Erin between him and Rhun. It wasn’t much, but it was the safest place for her. She brought her pistol up and fired once into the darkness.

Jordan turned and opened up with his machine pistol.

Dark blood splattered rough stone walls.

Ahead, the Cardinal grappled hand to hand with three
strigoi
, proving his spryness.

But at this rate, they’d never reach that tunnel.

Then a voice spoke at his ear, seemingly arriving out of thin air.

“I bring reinforcements.”

He turned to discover the cherubic, bespectacled Brother Leopold at his shoulder. Beyond his small frame, a cadre of Sanguinist monks—twenty strong—fell like rain from the baldachin and landed in a circle around Jordan’s group, already fighting before their feet hit the floor.

Leopold joined Jordan, pushing his eyeglasses higher on his nose, looking more like a kid brother than an undying warrior of Christ.

As if zeroing in on a weaker target, a
strigoi
lunged out of the darkness behind the short scholar; the flash of sword was the only warning.

Jordan reacted on pure muscle memory. He jerked his machine pistol up and caught the blade, deflecting it from Leopold’s neck. The edge still grazed a bloody line across the young Sanguinist’s shoulders.

The scholar’s eyes grew round.

Angered, the
strigoi
turned toward Jordan. He was a hulking figure with dark skin and pale tattoos, studs puncturing his nose and ears. Jordan remembered seeing the guy in Germany, at Bathory’s side. He figured him to be some sort of lieutenant for the Belial—which meant he must have helped orchestrate the attack on Jordan’s men in Masada.

The beast smiled, showing teeth.

“Get back, Leopold,” Jordan warned, ready to square off with this bastard, who only kept smiling.

The young monk’s eyes became huge as he stared at Jordan—or rather
behind
Jordan.

Caught in the reflection of Leopold’s eyeglasses, Jordan spotted movement.

He twirled, his American Bowie knife appearing in his fingers.

A gaunt, skeletal version of the larger lieutenant lunged at him, impossibly wide jaws going for his throat.

Jordan continued his spin and drove the silver-plated blade between those snapping jaws, punching it hilt-deep.

Chew on that.

The creature screamed, jerking straight up into the air like a jack-in-the-box, ripping the knife’s haft from Jordan’s fingers. As it flew high, smoke and boiling blood erupted from its mouth, from the back of its skull.

The body fell and struck the stone, already dead.

A scream of rage erupted behind him. “Rafik!”

Feral, grief-filled eyes fixed on Jordan.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Jordan growled. “Losing someone you love.”

The
strigoi
launched himself at Jordan, flying through the air, his cloak billowing wide, like a man-size icarops.

Jordan dropped to a knee, tilted his submachine gun up, and unloaded at full auto, shredding the monster in the chest with pure silver. “That’s for my men.”

The
strigoi
lieutenant clattered to the stone, his body steaming. But he was still alive, in agony, dragging himself toward the impaled Rafik.

Leopold scooped up the monster’s abandoned sword, the very weapon that had come close to killing him. He strode to the struggling
strigoi
.

The creature had almost reached his goal, extending a bloody arm, his fingers scrabbling to reach the one called Rafik, to touch him one last time.

Mercilessly, Leopold swung the sword in a blurring flash.

The
strigoi
’s head flew off his body, and the stretching arm fell limply to the floor.

The fingers dropped short, never reaching the other, the two remaining forever separated.

Leopold turned and stared around the cavern, his brow pinched in confusion. “Where did everyone else go?”

Jordan spun, searching the spot where Erin had been a half minute ago.

She was gone.

And Rhun with her.

October 28, 5:34
P.M
., CET

Necropolis below St. Peter’s Basilica, Italy

Erin twisted to the side as a
strigoi
’s blade thrust toward her.

Then Rhun was there. He yanked her nearly off her feet and hauled her behind him. With one quick step forward, he slashed his blade across the
strigoi
’s throat, felling him like a sapling.

She stared around, realizing they were momentarily alone in the tunnel down which Bathory had fled. She glanced back. Out in the main necropolis, Sanguinists were flowing down the columns to join the subterranean battle.

“Return to Jordan when it’s safe,” Rhun said fiercely, brooking no argument as he nodded back to the fighting. “I shall overtake Bathory.”

With a swirl of his cassock, he disappeared down the dark tunnel.

With no choice, Erin faced the battlefield, heard the screams, smelled the blood. She searched the carnage until she spotted Jordan. He stood with his back to one of the metal plinths, firing at another tunnel that disgorged a flow of
strigoi
.

It was chaos, a hellish Bosch painting come to life.

She would never make it through that gauntlet. If the
strigoi
didn’t get her, friendly fire might. She turned back toward the empty tunnel that Rhun had taken. It seemed the safest choice.

She kept her light low and to the left, running her right hand along the side of the tunnel, feeling for a side tunnel. If she came to a crossroads and she didn’t know which direction Rhun had taken, she’d have to turn back.

Shots echoed ahead of her, coming from a place where a gray light flowed from around a bend in the tunnel.

She hurried forward—then a fierce, guttural growling flowed back to her, slowing her feet to a more cautious pace.

She brought up Jordan’s Colt, loaded with silver ammunition. She moved more warily as she reached the turn in the tunnel. Step-by-step, she edged around the bend.

The
crack
of a pistol made her jump.

A short way down the tunnel, she watched Rhun leap with unnatural speed past the bulk of the grimwolf, his gun smoking. Landing beyond it, he lunged down the tunnel, away from the wolf, ready to continue his pursuit of Bathory, who was nowhere in sight—but then he skidded to a stop, turning as he did so with incredible grace.

Over the bulk of the wolf, his eyes found her. No doubt he had heard her heartbeat or noted the shift in shadows as she arrived with her flashlight.

He wasn’t the only one.

The grimwolf jerked around, facing her, its teeth bared, its muscles bunched to spring.

“Erin, run!”

The beast’s ears twitched toward Rhun, but it didn’t turn from Erin.

Rhun came sprinting back, his pistol up, firing at the monster’s hind end.

That got its attention.

With a deafening howl, it surged around, and with a heave of its back legs, bowled into Rhun. Erin lost sight of him, blocked by the body of the wolf.

More shots were fired.

She pointed her Colt but didn’t fire, fearing she might strike Rhun with its silver bullets.

Then the wolf tossed its thick neck—with Rhun clutched in its jaws. The massive beast shook him like a rag doll. Blood sprayed the walls of the tunnel. Rhun lost his handgun and struggled to free a knife.

Knowing she had to help, Erin fired her pistol at the wolf, striking it in the shoulder. It twitched, but otherwise remained unfazed. She fired over and over, hoping that the cumulative load of silver might affect it. Pieces of fur ripped off its hide, but still it ignored her and slammed Rhun to the floor, its jaws clamped around his neck.

Rhun didn’t move.

Erin began to run forward—when she heard a high-pitched whistle slice down the tunnel.

Bathory.

The grimwolf dropped Rhun, shook blood from its muzzle, and bounded off down the dark tunnel.

Holstering her useless pistol, Erin rushed forward and skidded on her knees to reach him. Blood soaked her jeans—but it was not her own.

She shone her flashlight on Rhun. Blood wept down both sides of his torn throat. It bubbled from his lips as he tried to speak.

She pressed both hands against his wound. Cold blood covered her palms and seeped between her fingers.

He coughed his throat clear enough to issue a command: “Go back.”

“When you stop the bleeding.” The wounds were so deep that she did not see how he could do so, but she remembered how he had controlled his blood back in the Cardinal’s residence in Jerusalem.

He closed his eyes, and the blood from his neck slowed to a trickle.

“Good, Rhun, good.” She fumbled for the wineskin that was tied to his thigh.

“Not enough …”

The flask slipped from her blood-slicked hands and thumped to the floor. She picked it up, wiped one hand on her pants, and twisted the cap. It took three tries before it opened. Should she pour it on his wounds? Have him drink it? She remembered that Nadia had put it on his wounds first.

Following her example, Erin doused the wound.

Rhun groaned and seemed to fade away.

She shook his shoulder to keep him conscious. “Tell me what to do. Rhun!”

He opened his eyelids slowly, but his gaze slid past hers, staring at the ceiling before his eyes rolled back in his head.

Back in Russia, Rasputin had mixed human blood with the wine. That concoction had seemed to heal Rhun better than the holy wine alone.

Erin knew what he needed.

Not wine.

Not now.

Rhun needed human blood.

She swallowed. Her hand ran across the puncture wounds left by the collar Bathory had forced her to wear.

She looked down the tunnel. No sign of Bathory or the wolf. Erin knew she could never catch the woman. The best hope to secure the Gospel was still Rhun. If Bathory escaped Rome with the book, the world would be forever changed.

But was she ready to do this? To risk everything on her faith that her blood would cure Rhun? Every fiber of her scientific mind rebelled at the thought.

After escaping the compound, she had refused to succumb to superstition, finding no value in mere faith. She knew too well what had happened when her father and mother had stopped thinking logically. They had placed the fate of her infant sister, Emma, in the hands of an indifferent God—and Emma had died for those blind beliefs.

But over the past days, Erin had seen
extraordinary
things. She could not discount them; she could not explain them with logic and science. But was she ready to trust her life to a miracle?

She stared down at Rhun.

What choice did she have?

Even if she could fight her way back to Bernard and the other Sanguinists, to warn them, Bathory would be long gone by the time Erin fetched them here.

Bathory must not escape with the book. The stakes for the world were too high for Erin not to try everything—even the power of
faith
.

She leaned over Rhun, baring her neck to his cold mouth.

He did not move.

Reaching up, she raked her fingernails across the soft scabs on her throat, ripping them away. Blood began to flow. Again she pressed her bleeding throat against his open lips.

He snarled and turned his head, refusing to drink.

“You have to.”

His voice was a pained whisper. “Once I start, I might not …”

She finished his sentence:
once started, he might not be able to stop
.

Might
was the important word.

It seemed, in order to do this, that she must put her trust not only in faith, but also in Rhun.

If I do not try, then the Belial will have already won.

She tilted her head, lowered her throat to his mouth.

Her blood pattered onto his lips.

He groaned deep in his throat, but this time he did not turn away.

Erin’s heart raced. She was still animal enough to want to run away—but in the end she wasn’t an animal. She remained steadfast, her mind flashing to Daniel entering the lion’s den.

I can do this.

Shifting her gaze, she forced herself to look at Rhun. His eyes grew alert, as if those few drops of blood had revived him.