She brushed his palm with her soft fingertips as she handed him stalks of lavender. A thrill surged through his body. A priest should not feel such a thing, but he did not move away. He stepped closer, admiring the sunlight on her jet-black hair, the sweep of her long white neck down to her creamy shoulders, and the curves of her soft silk gown.
Elisabeta’s maidservant held up the basket for the lavender. The wisp of a girl turned her head to the side to hide the raspberry-colored birthmark that covered half her face.
“Anna, take the basket back to the kitchen and empty it,” Elisabeta instructed, dropping in one more sprig of thyme.
Anna retreated across the field, struggling under the heavy load. Rhun would have helped the small girl carry such a burden, but Elisabeta would never allow it, considering it not his place.
Elisabeta watched her maid leave. Once they were alone, she turned to Rhun, her face now even brighter—if that were possible.
“A moment’s peace!” she exclaimed gladly. “It is so lonely with my servants constantly around me.”
Rhun, who often chose to spend days alone in dark prayer, understood all too well the loneliness of false company.
She smiled at him. “But not you, Father Korza. I never feel lonely in your company.”
He could not hold her gaze. Turning away, he knelt and cut a stalk of lavender.
“Don’t you ever tire of it, Father Korza? Always wearing a mask?” She adjusted her wide-brimmed hat. She always took great pains to keep sunlight from her fair skin. Women of her station must not look as if they needed to work in the sun.
“I wear a mask?” He kept his face impassive. If she knew all that he hid, she would run away screaming.
“Of course. You wear the mask of priest. But I must wear many masks, too many for one face to bear easily. Lady, mother, and wife. And others still.” She turned a heavy gold ring around and around on her finger, a gift from her husband, Ferenc. “But what is under all of those masks, I wonder.”
“Everything else, I suppose.”
“But how much truth … how much of our true nature can we conceal, Father?” Her low voice sent a shiver down his spine. “And from whom?”
He studied the shadow she cast on the field next to him and mumbled as if in prayer, “We conceal what we must.”
Her shadow retreated a pace, perhaps because she was unhappy with his answer—a thought that crushed him as surely as if she ground him under that well-turned heel.
The dark shape of a hawk floated across the field. He listened to its quick heartbeat above and the faint heartbeats of mice below. His service to the Church, the verdant field, the bright sun, the blooming flowers … all were bounteous gifts, given freely by God to one as lowly as himself.
Should that not be enough?
She smoothed her hands down the front of her dress. “You are wise, Father. An aristocrat who lowers his mask does not survive long in these times.”
He stood. “What is it that troubles you so?”
“Perhaps I am simply weary of the intrigues.” Her eyes followed the hawk as it fell. “Surely the Church struggles amidst the same cauldron of ambitions, both great and small?”
He touched his pectoral cross with one fingertip. “Bernard shields me from the worst, I think.”
“Never trust those who would be your shield. They feed on your ignorance and darkness. It is best to look at things directly and be unafraid.”
He offered her some consolation. “Perhaps it is best to trust those who would shield you. If they do it out of love, to protect you.”
“Spoken like a man. And a priest. But I have learned to trust very few.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Except I trust you, Father Korza.”
“I am a priest, so you must trust me.” He offered her a shy smile.
“I trust no other priests. Including your precious Bernard. But you are different.” She placed her hand on his arm, and he savored the touch. “You are simply a friend. A friend where I have so very few.”
“I am honored, my lady.” He stepped back and bowed, an exaggerated gesture to lighten the mood.
She smiled indulgently. “As you should be, Father.”
They both laughed at her tone.
“Here comes Anna, returned again. Tell me once more about the time you had a footrace with your brother and how you both ended up in the stream with fish in your boots.”
He told her the story, embellishing it with more details than he had in the last telling to make her laugh.
They had happy times, with much laughter.
Until, one day, she had stopped laughing.
The day that he betrayed her.
The day he betrayed God.
Back in his body, where cold sand pressed against his knees, dry wind chased tears from his cheeks. His silver cross had burned through his glove and left a scarlet welt on his palms. His shoulders bowed under the weight of his sins, his failures. He tightened his grip on the searing metal.
“Rhun?” A woman’s voice spoke his name.
He raised his head, half expecting to see Elisabeta. The soldier watched him with suspicion, but the woman’s eyes held only pity.
He fixed his eyes on the soldier. He found the man’s hard gaze easier to bear.
“Time to start explaining,” the soldier said, training his weapon on Rhun’s heart—as if that had not been destroyed long ago.
8:08 P.M.
“Jordan, look at his teeth … they’re normal again.”
Amazed, Erin stepped forward, wanting to examine the miraculous transformation, to understand what her mind still refused to believe.
Jordan blocked her with a muscled arm.
She didn’t resist.
Despite her curiosity as a scientist, Rhun still scared her.
The priest’s voice came out shaky, his Slavic accent thicker, as if he’d returned from a long distance, from a place where his native tongue was still spoken. “Thank you … for your patience.”
“Don’t expect that patience to last,” Jordan said, not unfriendly, just certain.
Erin pushed Jordan’s arm down, willing to listen, but she didn’t step forward. “You said that you were ‘Sanguinist,’ not strigoi. What does that mean?”
Rhun looked out to the dark desert for that answer. “Strigoi are wild, feral creatures. Born of murder and bloodshed, they serve no one but themselves.”
“And the Sanguinists?”
“All members of the Order of the Sanguines were once strigoi,” Rhun admitted, looking her square in the eye. “But now those in my order serve Christ. It is His blessing that allows us to walk under the light of God’s brightness, to serve as His warriors.”
“So you can walk in daylight?” Jordan asked.
“Yes, but the sun is still painful,” the priest admitted, and touched the hood of his cassock.
She remembered her first sight of Rhun, buried in his cassock, most of his skin covered, wearing dark sunglasses. She wondered if the tradition of Catholic monks wearing hooded robes might not trace back to this Order of the Sanguines, an outward reflection of a deeper secret.
“But without the protection of Christ’s blessing,” Rhun continued, “the touch of the sun will kill a strigoi.”
“And what exactly are these blessings of Christ?” Erin asked, surprised at the mocking edge to her tone, but unable to stop it.
Rhun stared at her for a long moment, as if he were struggling to find the right words to explain a miracle. When he finally spoke, his words were solemn, weighted by a certainty that had been missing from most of her life.
“I follow Christ’s path and have sworn an oath to forsake the drinking of human blood. Such an act is forbidden to us.”
Jordan remained ever practical. “Then what do you feed on, padre?”
Rhun straightened. Pride radiated from him, beating across the desert air toward her. “I am sworn to partake only of His blood.”
His blood …
She heard the
emphasis in those last words and knew what that meant.
“You’re talking about the blood of Christ,” she said, surprised now by the absence of mockery in her tone. Raised in a devout sect of Roman Catholicism, she even understood the source of that blood. She flashed to her childhood, kneeling on the dirt floor by the altar, the bitter wine poured on her tongue.
She stared at the water skin in Rhun’s grasp.
But it did not hold water.
Nor did it hold wine—despite what she herself had sipped only moments ago.
She knew what filled Rhun’s flask. “That’s consecrated wine,” she said, pointing to what he held.
He reverentially stroked the wineskin. “More than consecrated.”
She understood that, too. “You mean it’s been transubstantiated.”
She had been taught that word during her earliest catechism and believed it once herself. Transubstantiation was one of the central tenets of Catholicism. That wine consecrated during a Mass became the literal blood of Christ, imbued with His very essence.
Rhun bowed his head in agreement. “True, my blessed vessel holds wine converted into the blood of Christ.”
“Impossible,” she muttered, but the word lacked conviction.
Jordan also wasn’t buying it. “I drank from your flask, padre. It looks like wine, smells like wine, tastes like wine—”
“But it is not,” Rhun broke in. “It is the Blood of Christ.”
The mocking edge returned to Erin’s tone, and it helped to steady her. “So you’re claiming transubstantiation results in a real change, not a metaphorical one?”
Rhun held out his arms. “Am I myself not proof? It is His blood that sustains my order. The act of transubstantiation was both a pact and a promise between Christ and mankind, but even more so for the strigoi whom He sought to save. For a chance to regain our souls, we have sworn off feeding on humans and survive only upon His blessed blood, becoming Knights of Christ, bound by an oath of fealty to serve the Church to the end of our days, when we will be welcomed again to His side. That is our pact with Christ and the Church.”
Erin couldn’t bring herself to believe any of this. Her father would turn over in his grave at the mere thought of Christ’s blood being used in such a way.
Rhun must have read the doubt on her face. “Why do you think the early Christians referred to Communion wine as the ‘medicine of immortality’? Because they knew what has long since been forgotten—but the Church has a much longer memory.”
He turned his wineskin over so that they could see the Vatican seal inscribed on the back: two crossed keys bound with a cord under the triple crown of the triregnum.
His gaze fell upon Erin. “I ask you to believe nothing but what you see with your own eyes and feel with your own heart.”
She sat heavily on a boulder and dropped her head into her hands. She had tasted the wine in his flask. As a scientist, she refused to believe it was anything but wine. Still, she had watched the strigoi feed on blood, watched him drink his wine.
Both had been strengthened.
She struggled to fit the miraculous into a scientific equation.
It was impossible to turn wine into blood, so it must be belief that allowed Rhun to drink wine as if it were blood. It must be some sort of placebo effect.
“You okay, Doc?” Jordan asked.
“Transubstantiation is just a legend.” She tried to explain it to him. “A myth.”
“Like the strigoi?” Rhun interjected. “Those who walk in the night and drink the blood of humans? You could accept them, but you cannot accept that blessed wine is the blood of Christ. Have you no faith at all?”
He sounded more upset by that last detail than by all of her arguments.
“Faith did not serve me well.” She clenched her hands in front of her. “I saw the Church used as a tool of the powerful against the weak, religion used as an obstacle to the truth.”
“Christ is more than the actions of misguided men.” Rhun spoke urgently, as if trying to convert her, as priests so often had. “He lives in our hearts. His miracles sustain us all.”
Jordan cleared his throat. “That’s all well and good, padre. But back to you. How did you become one of these Sanguinists?”
“There is little to tell. Centuries ago, I was bitten by a strigoi, then forced to drink quantities of its blood.” Rhun shuddered. “I was corrupted into one of them, a creature of base desires, a devourer of men.”
“Then what happened?” Jordan asked.
Rhun hurried his words, clearly wanting to be done. “I became strigoi, but instead of turning to their ways, I was offered another path. I was recruited that very night—before I ever tasted human blood—and ordained into the Order of the Sanguines. There I chose to follow Christ. I have followed Him ever since.”
“Followed Him how?” Jordan asked, matching her skepticism. “How does something like you serve the Church?”
“The blessing of Christ’s blood allows the Sanguinists many boons. Like walking under the sun. It also allows us to partake of all that is holy and sacred. Though, like the sun, such holiness still burns our flesh.”
He peeled off one glove. A red blistering marked his palm in the shape of a cross. Erin remembered him clutching his pectoral crucifix a moment before, and imagined it searing into his skin.
Rhun must have read her distress. “The pain reminds us of Christ’s suffering on the cross and serves as a constant remembrance of the oath we took. It is a small price to pay to live under His grace.”
She watched him gently tuck his cross back under the shreds of his cassock. Did the crucifix burn over his heart? Is that why Catholic priests had taken to wearing such prominent crosses, another symbol of a hidden secret? Like the hooded cassock, did such accoutrements allow the Sanguinists to hide in plain sight among their human brothers of the cloth?
She had a thousand other questions.
Jordan had only one. “Then, as a warrior of the Church, who do you fight?”
Again Rhun looked to the desert. “We are called up to battle our feral brothers, the strigoi. We hunt them down and offer them a chance to join the fold of Christ. If they do not, we kill them.”
“And where do we humans fall on your hit list?” Jordan asked.
Rhun’s eyes returned to them. “I have sworn never to take a human life, unless it is to save another.”
Erin found her voice again. “You say your mission is to kill strigoi. Yet it sounds like these creatures did not choose to become what they are, any more than you did, any more than a dog chooses to become rabid when bitten.”
“The strigoi are lower than animals,” Rhun argued. “They have no souls. They exist only to do evil.”
“So your job is to send them back to Hell,” Jordan said.
Rhun’s gaze wavered. “In truth, soulless as they are, we do not know where they go.”
Jordan shifted next to her, lowering his weapon, but he did not relax his stance.
“If strigoi are feral,” Erin asked, “why do they care about this Gospel of Christ?”
Rhun looked ready to explain, but then froze—which immediately set her heart to pounding. He jerked his head to the side, his gaze on the skies.
“A helicopter comes,” he stated bluntly.
Jordan searched around—but only in darting glances, never taking his eyes fully off of Rhun. “I don’t see anything.”
“I hear it.” Rhun cocked his head. “It is one of ours.”
Erin spotted a light in the sky heading toward them fast. “There.”
“What do you mean by ‘one of ours’?” Jordan asked.
“It is from the Church,” Rhun explained. “Those who come will not harm you.”
As she watched the helicopter’s swift approach, Erin felt a nagging worry.
Over the centuries, how many men have died after hearing similar promises?
18
October 26, 8:28 P.M., IST
Caesarea, Israel
Bathory moved silently through the ruins of the hippodrome, shadowed by Magor, who padded quietly behind her. She shared his senses, becoming as much a hunter as the grimwolf. She tasted the salt of the neighboring Mediterranean, a black mirror to her right. She smelled the dust of centuries from the rubble of the ancient stone seats. She caught a distant whiff of horse manure and sweat.
She gave the stables a wide berth, careful to stay downwind so as not to spook the horses. She had left Tarek and the others with the helicopter, glad to put some distance between herself and them. It felt good to be alone, Magor by her side, dark sky above, and her quarry close.
Slowly she and the wolf crossed the sands toward the cluster of tents, aiming for the only one that still glowed with light. She did not need Magor’s sharp senses to hear the voices from inside, reaching her across the quiet of the night. She spotted two silhouettes moving, two people. From the timbre of their voices, they were a man and a woman, both young.
The archaeologist’s students.
Under the cover of their conversation, she reached the rear of the tent, where a small mesh window had been tied open to the night’s breezes. She stood there, spying upon the two, a silent sentinel in the night, with Magor at her hip.
A young man in cowboy boots and jeans paced the length of the tent while a young woman sat before a laptop and sipped a Diet Coke. On the computer’s screen, a silent CNN report of the earthquake played. The woman did not take her eyes from the screen; the palm of her hand held an earbud in place, listening.
She spoke without turning away. “Try the embassy again, Nate.”
The young man paced up to the small mesh window, staring out but not really seeing. Bathory remained standing, knowing she was still concealed by the shadows. She loved these moments of the hunt, when the quarry was so close, yet still blind to the blood and horror poised to leap at its throat.
Next to her, Magor stayed as still as the night sky. Once again, she was thankful that Tarek and the others were not here. They did not appreciate the beauty of the hunt—only the slaughter that followed.
The Blood Gospel Page 14