The taste of the crimson fire spread through his body, as swiftly as a match set to dry grass. She threaded blood-wet fingers through his hair, enfolding him in a cloud of hunger and desire.
Her mouth parted under his kiss, and he lost himself in her scent, her blood, her softness. He had no time for gentleness, and she asked for none. He had waited so long to join with her again, and she with him.
He promised himself in that moment that he would exact swift vengeance on whoever had sent her blazing into the sunlight.
But until then . . .
He fell atop her, letting fire and desire burn away all thought.
19
December 19, 1:36 P.M. CET
South of Rome, Italy
Burrowed deep in the giant hay bale, Leopold strove for a comfortable position. Straw pierced his robe and gouged his tender burns. Still, he dared not leave this shelter.
As the train had exploded, he had jumped clear, riding the blast wave across an expanse of stubbly fields. Only by the hand of God had he been standing in the lee of the boiler when it blew. The metal tank bore the brunt of the explosion, saving him from being incinerated on the spot.
Instead, he had been blown free of the car. He had tumbled through the air, burnt and bleeding, and skidded into the cold mud of the winter fields. Dazed and deafened, he had crawled into a hay bale to hide, to think, to plan.
He did not know then if he was the only survivor.
While he waited, he had stanched the blood flowing from his many wounds. Finally, as the ringing in his ears faded, he heard the rhythmic sound—thump, thump, thump—of a helicopter landing, muffled by the straw surrounding him.
He did not know if the aircraft had been summoned by the cardinal or if it marked the arrival of rescue workers. Either way, he kept hidden. Though he had not set the bomb himself, he knew he bore the blame for the attack. As soon as he had texted the Damnatus, informing him that everyone was on board, along with sharing their theory concerning the identity of the First Angel, the train had exploded—catching Leopold entirely by surprise.
Perhaps he should have expected as much.
Whenever the Damnatus spotted what he wanted, he moved in for the kill.
Never any hesitation.
After the helicopter lifted off and headed away, he heard Cardinal Bernard calling his name, the grief plain in his voice. Leopold longed to go to him, to assuage his sorrow, to beg for forgiveness, and to truly rejoin the Sanguinists.
But, of course, he did not.
Though brutal, the Damnatus’s goal was right and pure.
Over the next hour, more helicopters arrived, followed by rescue vehicles with sirens and shouting men and tromping feet. He curled smaller in the straw. The commotion should mask any sounds he made when he did his penance.
Finally, he could drink the holy wine and heal.
With some difficulty, he freed his leather wine flask and brought it to his lips. Using his teeth, he unscrewed the top and spit it out, and drank deeply, allowing the fire to take him away.
Far beneath the city of Dresden, Leopold knelt in a dank crypt lit by a single candle. Since the air-raid siren had sounded, no one dared show a light, fearful of drawing the wrath of the British bombers down upon them.
As he listened, a bomb detonated far overhead, the boom shaking loose pebbles from the ceiling. The church above had been struck weeks ago. Only this crypt was spared, the entrance dug out from the inside by the Sanguinists who lived there.
Leopold knelt between two other men. Like him, they were both strigoi, preparing to take their final vows as Sanguinists on this dark and violent night. Before him stood a Sanguinist priest, dressed in fine robes and cupping a golden chalice in his clean white palms.
The strigoi next to him trembled. Was he afraid that his faith was not strong enough, that the first sip of Christ’s blood would be his last?
When it came to his turn, Leopold bowed his head and listed his sins. He had many. In his mortal life, he had been a German doctor. Early in the war, he had ignored the Nazis, resisted them. But eventually the government drafted him and sent him into battlefields to care for young men ripped apart by guns and bombs or brought low by disease, starvation, and cold.
One winter night, a rogue pack of strigoi set upon his small unit in the Bavarian Alps. The half-frozen soldiers fought with rifles and bayonets, but the battle lasted no more than a handful of minutes. In the first sweep by the beasts, Leopold had been wounded, his back broken, unable to fight or move. He could only watch the slaughter, knowing his turn would come.
Then a strigoi the size of a child dragged him into the empty cold forest by his boots. He died there, his blood steaming holes into dirty white snow. All the while, the child sang in a high clear voice, a German folk song. That should have been the end of Leopold’s miserable life, but the boy had chosen to turn him into a monster.
He fought against the blood being poured into his mouth—until revulsion became hunger and bliss. As Leopold drank, the child continued to sing.
In the end, wartime was a strigoi’s paradise.
To Leopold’s great shame, he feasted.
Then one day he met a man he could not bite. His senses told him that a drop of that man’s blood would kill him. The stranger intrigued him. As a doctor, he wanted to understand this one’s secrets. So he sought him out night after night, watching him for weeks before daring to speak. When he finally did confront the stranger, the man listened to Leopold’s words, understood his disgust over what he had become.
In turn, the stranger offered him his true name, one so cursed by Christ that Leopold still dared only to think of him as the Damnatus. At that moment, Leopold was offered a path to salvation, a way to serve Christ in secret.
That was what brought him to this crypt beneath Dresden.
On his knees, listing his sins, alongside these others.
Leopold had been instructed to seek out the Sanguinists, to enfold himself among them, but to remain the Damnatus’s eyes and ears within the order.
He swore his allegiance back then—as he must do again this night.
Another bomb fell above, shaking dirt from the crypt’s roof. The penitent on his left yelped. Leopold remained silent. He did not fear death. He had been called for a greater purpose. He would fulfill a destiny that had spanned millennia.
The penitent pulled himself back under control, crossed himself, and finished his litany of sins. Eventually, his words stopped. He had given his sins up to God. He could be purified now.
“Do you repent of your sins out of the truest love to God and not out of fear of damnation?” the Sanguinist priest intoned to Leopold’s neighbor.
“I do,” the man answered.
“Then rise and be judged.” The priest’s face was invisible under his cowl.
The penitent rose, trembling, and opened his mouth. The priest lifted the golden chalice and poured claret-red wine onto his tongue.
Immediately the man began screaming, smoke roiling from his mouth. Either the creature had not fully repented or he had lied outright. No matter the reason, his soul was judged stained, and his body could not accept the holiness of Christ’s blood.
It was a risk they all took to join the order.
The creature fell to the stone floor and writhed, his shrieks echoing off the bare walls. Leopold bent to touch him, to still him, but before his hand reached him, the body crumbled to ash.
Leopold said a prayer for the strigoi who had sought to change his ways, even if his heart was impure. He knelt then, and once more folded his hands.
He finished his own long confession and waited for the wine. If his path was righteous, he would not burn to ash before this holy Sanguinist. If he and the one he served were wrong, a single drop of wine would reveal it.
He opened his mouth, allowing Christ to be poured into his body.
And lived.
Leopold came back into his trembling body, pressed on all sides by the sharp hay. He had never considered his
conversion from strigoi to Sanguinist as a sin, something that needed penance.
Why had God sent this vision to him?
Why now?
For a sickening moment, he worried that it was because God knew that his conversion was done under false pretenses, knew Leopold was destined to betray the order, like the Damnatus had with Christ.
He lay there for a long time, thinking upon this, then swallowed back his fears.
No.
He had seen the vision precisely because his mission was true.
God had spared his life back then to serve the Damnatus, and He spared it again today. Once the sun sank and the rescue workers left for the night, he would leave the hay bale under the cover of dark and continue his purpose, no matter the cost.
Because God told him so.
20
December 19, 1:44 P.M. CET
Rome, Italy
Atop the Tiber River, Judas drew back on the sculls, and his slim wooden boat shot a gratifying distance across the water. Sunlight reflected off the silvery river and dazzled his eyes. This late in the year he savored both its light and its fading warmth.
A flock of crows circled overhead, disappearing into the bare branches of a riverside park before rising up against the bright winter sky.
Below, he kept his body working in rhythm, moving down the Tiber, stroking harder as he battled the wake of a passing boat. Larger crafts plowed through the river around him. His fragile wooden hull could easily be smashed to matchsticks in an instant. This time of year, he was the only rower who braved the frigid winter temperatures and the risk of being run down by speedboats, ferries, and cargo ships.
His phone buzzed with another text message from his receptionist.
Sighing, he knew what it said without reading it. He had watched it on the news before he climbed into his boat. The papal train had been destroyed. The cardinal alone had survived. Everyone else aboard had died.
He stroked the sculls through the water again.
With the prophesied trio gone, nothing stood in his way.
Brother Leopold’s last text message had mentioned the First Angel, the one who was destined to use the book as a weapon in the coming War of the Heavens. With the prophecy broken, this angel likely posed no further threat, but Judas did not like loose ends.
A ferry captain tooted his horn, and Judas raised a hand in greeting. The man straightened his black cap and waved back. They had greeted each other almost every day for twenty years. Judas had watched him grow from a thin young buck, uncertain on the controls, to a portly old man. Still, he had never learned his name.
He had grown to understand solitude as he watched his family and friends die. He had learned to keep his distance from others after generations of friendships had ended in death.
But what of this immortal boy Leopold had spoken of?
Thomas Bolar.
Judas wanted him. He would bargain with Rasputin, pay whatever the monk desired, and fetch this immortal child to his home. His heart quickened at the thought of meeting another like himself, but also from knowing the role that the boy was destined to play.
To help bring about the end of the world.
It was a shame he hadn’t met this boy earlier in his long life, to have someone to share his endless span of years, another who was as ageless and as unfettered by time.
Still, Judas had been offered such a chance centuries before, and he had wasted it.
Perhaps this is my penance.
As he pulled on the oars, he pictured Arella’s dark skin and gold eyes. He remembered the first ride that he had taken with her, the night they were reunited at the Venetian masquerade. Then, too, he had manned a wooden boat, driven the craft where he wanted it to go, never sensing how little control he had.
Their gondola glided over the calm water of a dark canal, the stars shining above, a full moon beckoning. As he poled the craft through a light mist, passing alongside a grand Venetian house, the reek of excrement and waste washed over their craft, intruding on their pleasant night like some sulfurous shade.
He scowled at the sewage pipe leaking tepidly into the canal.
Noticing his attention and expression, Arella laughed. “Is this city not refined enough for your tastes?”
He gestured at the rooms above full of laughter and decadence, then to the sludge fouling the water below. “There are better ways of ridding such waste.”
“And when it is time, they will find them.”
“They have found them and lost them.” Judas’s voice held the bitterness he had acquired from watching the fate of men.
She trailed long dark fingers along the hull’s black lacquer. “You speak of the former wonders of Rome, when the city was at its splendorous best.”
He poled the boat away from the lighted houses and back toward his inn. “Much was lost when that city fell.”
She shrugged. “It shall be regained. In time.”
“In times past, the healers of Rome knew how to cure diseases from which the men of this era still suffer and die.”
He sighed at how much had been lost to the darkness of this age. He wished that he had studied medicine, that he could have preserved such knowledge after the libraries burned and the men of learning were put to the sword.
“This age will pass,” Arella assured him. “And the knowledge will be found again.”
Silvery moonlight shone on her hair and her bare shoulders, leaving him wondering about this beautiful mystery before him. After discovering each other again, they had danced most of the night away, sweeping across wooden floors, until finding themselves here as dawn neared.
He finally broached the subject that he had been reluctant to raise all evening, fearful of the answer.
“Arella . . .” He slowed the pace of the boat and let it drift through the mists on its own, as undirected as a leaf. “By my name alone, you know my sin, my crime, and the curse laid upon me by Christ, to march these endless years. But how are you able . . . what are you . . . ?”
He could not even form the question fully on his lips.
Still, she understood and smiled. “What does my name tell you?”
“Arella,” he repeated, letting it roll off his tongue. “A beautiful name. Ancient. In old Hebrew, it means a messenger from God.”
“And it is a fitting name,” she said. “I have often carried messages from God. In that way also, we two are alike. Both servants to the heavens, bound to our duty.”
Judas snorted softly. “Unlike you, I have received no special messages from above.”
And how he wished he would have. After the bitterness of his curse waned, he had often wondered why this punishment had been exacted upon his flesh, leaving it undying. Was it merely penance for his sin or was it for some purpose, a goal he had not yet come to understand?
“You are fortunate,” she said. “I would gladly accept such silence.”
“Why?” he pressed.
She sighed and touched the silver shard hanging from around her neck. “It can be a curse to see dimly into the future, knowing of a tragedy to come but not knowing how to avert it.”
“So then you are a prophetess?”
“I was once,” she said, her dark eyes flicking up to the moon and back. “Or should I say, many times. In the past, I once bore the title of the Oracle of Greece, another time the Sibyl of Erythraea, but throughout the ages, I was called countless other names.”
Shocked, he sank to the seat before him. He kept a grip on the pole in the water, while he took her hand in his. Despite the cool night, he felt the heat coming off her skin, far warmer than the touch of most men and women, beyond that of any human.
Her lips curved into the already familiar half smile. “Do you doubt me? You who have lived to see the world change and change again?”
The most remarkable thing was that he did not.
As the gondola drifted silently in the moonlight, a half smile played across her lips, as if she knew his thoughts, guessing what
he had begun to suspect.
She waited.
“I do not pretend to know such things,” he started, picturing her in his arms, dancing with her. “But . . .”
She shifted in her seat. “What do you not pretend to know?”
He squeezed the fierce heat of her palm and fingers.
“The nature of one such as you. One given messages from God. One who endures across the ages. One of such perfection.”
He blushed as he said these last words.
She laughed. “Am I then so different from you?”
He knew deep in his bones that she was—both by nature and by character. She was an embodiment of good, whereas he had done terrible things. He gazed at the wonder before him, knowing another name for a messenger of God, another name for the word Arella.
He forced himself to state it out loud. “You are an angel.”
She folded her hands in front of her, as if in prayer. Slowly, a soft golden light emanated from her body. It bathed the gondola, the water, his face. The warmth of its touch suffused him with joy and holiness.
Here was another eternal being—but she was not like him.
Where he was evil, she was good.
Where he was dark, she was light.
He closed his eyes and drank in her radiance.
“Why have you come to me? Why are you here?” He opened his eyes and looked at the water, the houses, the sewage in the canal, then back to her—back to a beauty beyond measure. “Why are you on Earth and not in Heaven?”
Her light dimmed, and she resembled an ordinary woman again. “Angels may descend and visit Earth.” She looked up at him. “Or they may fall.”
She stressed that last word.
“You fell?”
“Long ago,” she added, reading the shock and surprise in his face. “Alongside the Morning Star.”
That was another name for Lucifer.
Judas refused to believe she had been cast out of Heaven. “But I sense only goodness in you.”
She gazed at him, her eyes patient.
“Why did you fall?” he pressed, as if this were a simple question on a simple night. “You could not have done evil.”
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