Innocent Blood

by James Rollins

  Erin turned her face to Jordan, her voice dry and breathless with fear. “This is where Judas came upon his purpose. He wasn’t pulling this plan out of thin air. It’s a prophecy.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The leaf. It’s plainly old, preserved to protect it. The ancient seers of the past were often known to write their predictions upon leaves.”

  “So what does that mean? It’s destined to happen? We can’t do anything about it?”

  “No, it’s why the seers wrote them on leaves. A reminder that destiny is not written on stone. But Judas—as guilt-ridden as he was—would surely have latched firmly upon this prophecy as his ultimate destiny.”

  “But we still don’t know what he’s planning,” Jordan reminded her.

  She nodded and slipped the first sheet of paper from the pile.

  Jordan noted the old sheet was also stained with flakes of emeralds, purples, and crimsons, proving it was often handled, likely recently.

  Erin stiffened, unable to speak.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  As answer, she held out the page toward him, revealing what was drawn there.

  42

  December 20, 6:48 A.M. CET

  Cumae, Italy

  Tommy stopped at the dark tunnel in the cliff face, balking at entering. The soft stink of rotten eggs flowed out of the darkness like a foul breath. Behind him stretched the soft sugary sand of the beach. Overhead, the sky was dark, shining with stars and a few pale silver clouds, lit with the promise of morning.

  A cool wind brushed through his hair but failed to hide the stink with the sea’s salt and algae.

  I don’t want to go in there.

  An emerald-winged moth landed on one of the boulders, winking its wings at him. Elizabeth stood at his shoulder, her eyes on other moths that flitted about in the gusts, their delicate flights disguising their danger.

  One of Iscariot’s henchman bent his bulk past Tommy, entered the tunnel, and clicked on a flashlight. Black volcanic walls, streaked with yellow, stretched beyond the reach of the beam.

  The flat of a hand pushed into the center of his back, allowing no other recourse.

  “Follow Henrik,” Iscariot ordered.

  Elizabeth took his hand firmly in hers. “We’ll go together.”

  Tommy took a steadying breath, nodded, and took one step forward, then another. It was how you got through hard times: you had to keep going.

  Behind him, Iscariot spoke to the strigoi who piloted the helicopter. “Ready your brethren. Have them haunt the tunnels behind us. We must not be disturbed.”

  With that final order, Iscariot followed, trailed by his second bodyguard. Tommy realized he had never learned this other’s name, not that it would likely matter. He sensed he would never be seeing the sky again.

  Once a fair distance into the narrow tunnel, Elizabeth shed her veil and gloves and pushed back the hood of her cloak. One of the moths fluttered into her hair, tangling its tiny legs for a moment, then flew away again.

  She did not seem to care.

  Tommy did, recognizing the unspoken threat from their captor.

  To calm and distract himself, he counted the moths, observing subtle differences in them. A few were smaller, one had a long tail, another had flakes of gold mixed with the emerald.

  . . . nine, ten, . . . eleven . . .

  There were probably a dozen, but he couldn’t find the last one to make it that even number.

  Elizabeth ran her fingertips along the wall, her eyes studying the side passages that crisscrossed their path and the blind caves that opened up every now and again. It was a maze down here. Tommy had read the myth of Theseus in school, of his struggle against the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Crete.

  What monsters are down here?

  Elizabeth must have been thinking of another story. She glanced back to Iscariot. “In Virgil’s The Aeneid, the hero Aeneas comes to Cumae, speaks to the sibyl there, and she guides him to the land of the dead. The path we take now is very much how it’s described in that book.”

  Iscariot waved his arm around as if to encompass the entire volcanic hill. “He also states there are a hundred paths to that pit, which considering this pocked mountain and its wormed-out holes, is likely true.”

  She shrugged, changing her tone as if she were quoting a poem. “ ‘Easy is the descent to hell; all night long, all day, the doors of dark Hades stand open; but to retrace the path; to come out again to the sweet air of Heaven—there is the task, there is the burden.’ ”

  Iscariot clapped his hands once. “Truly you are the Woman of Learning.”

  Despite his praise, worry clouded her silver eyes. A bright green-gray moth landed in her black hair again, and Tommy reached up to take it off.

  “No,” she warned. “Leave it be.”

  He drew his hand back.

  As they continued, going ever deeper, the branching of the tunnels slowed until they reached a long steep passageway so foul with sulfur, Tommy had to cover his mouth and breathe through his sleeve. The temperature also grew warmer, the walls damp. Tommy heard the echoing rush of water.

  Finally the passage bottomed out, reaching a wide underground river. It bubbled and steamed, a geothermal hot spring. Tommy’s eyes stung from the sulfur; his cheeks burned from the heat.

  “Looks as if we’ve reached the river Acheron . . . or perhaps Styx . . . or its many countless names in the histories of man,” Elizabeth commented. “But apparently no ferryman is needed here.”

  “Indeed,” Iscariot said.

  An arch of rock spanned the river leading to a dark cavern beyond.

  Tommy looked to Elizabeth, suddenly terrified to cross. The hairs on his arms shivered, his heart pounded in his ears.

  Henrik roughly grabbed his arm at the foot of the bridge, ready to drag him across if necessary.

  Elizabeth slammed the big man back as if he were a gnat. “I will not have the boy mishandled.”

  Henrik’s eyes flashed with fury, but he stayed back, getting a confirming nod from Iscariot to obey her.

  Another moth landed on Elizabeth, this time on her shoulder, its wings brushing under her ear. She refused to acknowledge it, but Tommy understood the message here.

  I cross, or he’ll kill Elizabeth.

  Swallowing back his terror, Tommy headed over the bridge, flanked on one side by Henrik, on the other by Elizabeth. He moved slowly across the steam-slick rock bridge, coughing against the sulfur, squinting from the heat. Black water, looking like oil, bubbled and popped, roiled and churned.

  Elizabeth strode along at his side as if passing through a garden, her back straight, her chin high. He tried to emulate her confidence, her stiff swagger, but he failed. Once he saw the far side of the bridge, he rushed to it, happy to escape the burning river.

  For a moment, he was alone, all the others behind him, even Henrik with his flashlight. Ahead, the pitch-dark room smelled oddly of flowers, the perfume cutting through the stink of the sulfur.

  Curious, he headed deeper, wanting to find the source.

  Henrik and the others finally caught up with him. The large man directed his light high, revealing an arched ceiling of volcanic rock, covered in heavy soot. The walls held many iron sconces, bearing fresh bundles of reeds. Someone had prepared this place.

  “Light the torches,” Iscariot ordered.

  Henrik and his partner set about igniting the tar-soaked bundles, each setting off in opposite directions, slowly revealing more of the large cavern. Other tunnels led out from here.

  Tommy remembered Iscariot’s description of the hundred paths to Hell.

  In the center of the room, a large black stone, slightly slanted but polished flat, sat like a black eye staring back at him. He had difficulty looking at it, sensing a wrongness about it.

  His gaze skittered past it to the far side as the last torches were lit.

  What he found there, bound to an iron ring in the wall, was a woman in a white dress. Her skin
was brown and smooth, her cheekbones high. Long black hair spilled over her round bare shoulders. Torchlight glinted off a splinter of metal hung round her neck.

  Unlike the black stone, Tommy’s eyes couldn’t look away from her. Even from across the chamber, her gaze glowed at him, drawing him closer, capturing him, like a whisper of his name spoken with all the love in the world.

  Iscariot stopped him with a touch on his shoulder. He stepped past Tommy to face the woman across the gulf of the room, but the sadness in his voice made that gap sound infinite and impossible to cross.

  “Arella.”

  6:58 A.M.

  Judas stopped near the altar stone, unable to approach her closer. It had been centuries since he had last seen her in the flesh. For a moment, he considered forsaking everything and rushing to her side and begging her forgiveness.

  She offered him that path now. “My love, there is yet time to stop this.”

  A moth fluttered before his eyes, breaking the well of her dark gaze with emerald wings. He fell back a full step. “No . . .”

  “All the centuries we wasted. When we could have been together. All to serve this dark destiny.”

  “After Christ’s return, we can spend eternity together.”

  She stared at him sadly. “Come what will, that will never be. What you do is wrong.”

  “How can that be? For the centuries that passed following your revelation of my purpose, I collected bits and pieces of other prophecies, to understand what I must do, how I must bring about Armageddon. I sought seers from every age, and each confirmed my destiny. Yet it wasn’t until I learned of the boy, of this immortal so like me yet so different, that I recalled something you drew, my love. One of your earlier predictions before you fled my side. I had forgotten about it, considered it of little worth.”

  He turned to the First Angel. “Then came this wondrous boy.”

  “You see shadows I cast and call them real,” she countered. “They are but one path, a ghost of possibility. No more. It is your dark actions that give them flesh, that imbue them with significance and weight.”

  “It is right that I do so, for even the slimmest chance to bring Christ back.”

  “Yet all of this you’ve built up in your mind’s eye alone, basing so many deeds on these prophecies you stole from me. How could anything good come from such a shattering of trust?”

  “In other words, an act of betrayal.” He smiled, almost swayed by her earlier words, but now delivered. “For you see, I am the Betrayer. My first sin led to the forgiveness of all sins, by Christ dying on the cross. Now I will sin again to bring Him back.”

  She sagged along the wall, baring her restraints, clearly recognizing his resolution. “Then why have you trapped me here? Only to torment me by forcing me to watch?”

  Iscariot found the strength at last to cross fully to her. He breathed in the scent of lotus, of the skin he once kissed and caressed. He reached and touched her bare collarbone, daring such a violation with only one finger.

  She leaned toward him, as if to sway him with her body where her words failed.

  Instead, he slipped that finger into the loop of her gold necklace, tightened his fist around it, stirring the silver shard between her perfect breasts.

  Her eyes darted to his, filling with understanding and horror. She pulled away, smashing her back flat against the wall.

  “No.”

  He yanked hard and broke the chain. He stepped back with his prize, letting the gold slither between his fingers until he held only the silver shard.

  “With this blade, I can slay angels to wake the very heavens.”

  She turned to Tommy, but her words were for Judas. “My love, you know nothing. You move in the dark and call it day.”

  Judas turned his back on her words and strode to the boy, prepared to fulfill his destiny.

  At long last.

  7:04 A.M.

  Elizabeth watched Iscariot grab Tommy by the arm and pull him roughly toward the black stone in the room’s center. She sensed a pall of evil around that black altar, so great that even the rock floor beneath it looked unable to bear its unholy weight, the ground breaking away from it in a scatter of thin cracks.

  Tommy cried out, not wanting to get near it.

  His plea ignited something inside her. She lunged forward, ready to rip him free.

  Before she could take two steps, she heard a whispered order echo from the dark tunnels that branched out from here, hinting at another spider in this black web, someone staying hidden for now. The voice struck her as familiar, but before she could ponder it, four figures—two each from the tunnels to either side—burst before her, baring fangs.

  Strigoi.

  They were hulking beasts, bare chested and tattooed with blasphemies. They bore scars, with self-inflicted bits of steel in their flesh. They formed a wall between her and Tommy.

  Beyond them, Iscariot dragged the boy to the black stone. Its slanted surface was polished smooth by the many bodies sacrificed upon it. A slight hollow had been worn near the bottom, as if a thousand heads had rested there, baring their throats to the roof.

  Fueled by terror, Tommy ripped out of Iscariot’s grasp. He knew what was to be asked of him. The boy was no fool.

  “No. Don’t make me do this.”

  Iscariot stood back and lifted his arms, the silver shard flashing in the torchlight. “I cannot force you. You must make this sacrifice of your own will.”

  “Then I choose not to.”

  Elizabeth smiled at his tenacity.

  “Then let me persuade you,” Iscariot said.

  The remaining moths fell upon Elizabeth, on her cheek, the nape of her neck, several on her arms and shoulders.

  “With a thought, they will kill her,” Iscariot promised. “Her blood will boil. She will die in agony. Is that what you choose?”

  Elizabeth suddenly realized Iscariot had not asked her to play nursemaid to the boy to keep him calm, but to win over his heart so that Iscariot could wield her like a weapon. To her horror, she realized how well she played into that trap.

  Tommy’s eyes met hers.

  “Do not do this for me,” she said coldly. “You are nothing to me, Thomas Bolar. Nothing but an amusement, something to play with before I feed.”

  She showed her fangs.

  Tommy cringed from her words, from her teeth. Still, his eyes never turned from hers. He held her gaze for a full breath, then turned to Iscariot.

  “What do you want?” Tommy asked.

  Damn it, boy.

  She narrowed her eyes on the wall of strigoi before her, calculating their young strength against her own. She weighed how long it would take the stings to kill her. Could she break Tommy free in time? Her sharp ears heard shuffling from beyond the boiling river behind her.

  More strigoi lurked in the tunnels back there.

  Tommy would never make it outside alone.

  “Lie down on this table,” Iscariot said. “That’s all you must do. I will do the rest, and she will live. This I swear to you.”

  As the boy stepped forward, she called again to him. “Tommy, we may not leave this room alive, but that does not mean we must submit to the likes of him.”

  Iscariot laughed, from deep in his belly. “You Bathory women! If I’ve learned nothing, it’s that your allegiances are as fickle as the wind.”

  “Then my blood ran true!”

  Elizabeth spun to one side, her form a blur. She tore out Henrik’s throat before he could glance her way. The other strigoi came at her, the closest grabbing her arm. She ripped his limb from its socket, tossing him aside. Two others leaped high and pounded her to the floor. She heaved against them, succeeding in pushing them back a pace, but more beasts poured from the neighboring tunnels and pinned her arms, her legs.

  She struggled but knew it was futile.

  She had failed—not just in not breaking Tommy free, but in not dying. With her death, Iscariot would have no further emotional hold on Tommy. The boy c
ould yet refuse him.

  Iscariot must have realized her ploy.

  She watched a moth crawl across her cheek, then gently rise on soft wings and drift away.

  He needed her alive.

  7:10 A.M.

  “No more!” Tommy yelled and faced Iscariot. Tears streamed down his face. “Do whatever you’re going to do!”

  “Climb on top,” he was told. “On your back. Your head at the lower end of the slab.”

  Tommy crossed to the black stone, every cell in his body screaming for him to run, but he mounted the rock and twisted around to lie on his back, his neck coming to rest in a hollow at the base of the altar—and he knew it was an altar.

  Below his head, a large black crack steamed with sulfur, more foul than even the river. His lungs crinkled up against it. Hot tears spilled from his cheeks. He turned his head enough to find Elizabeth.

  He knew she did not understand. He had watched his mother and father die in his arms, their blood boiling from their eyes—while he lived, cured of his cancer. He could not let another die in agony in his place again. Not even to save the world.

  She stared back at him, a single tear rolling from her angry eyes.

  She also did not know the goodness inside her. He recognized she was a monster as surely as those that pinned her, but somewhere deep inside, something brighter still existed. Even if she didn’t see it yet.

  Iscariot knelt next to him and dragged a rope net over his body, weighted at the edges with heavy stones. He fastened the four corners to iron rings driven into the floor. Once done, Tommy could no longer move, and only his head remained free.

  Tilted with his legs high, blood rushed down, flushing his face even hotter.

  Iscariot placed a cool palm on his cheek. “Be at peace. It is a good thing you do. Your worthy sacrifice will herald Christ’s return.”

  Tommy tried to shrug. “I’m Jewish. So why do I care? Just get it over with.”