The Blood Gospel

by Rebecca Cantrell James Rollins

She kept her eyes fixed on the bunker door. Magor had discovered the hole nestled among some boulders. It was little larger than a badger den, but the sharper senses of Tarek’s men revealed the source of the scent that drew her wolf.

  Icarops.

  She pictured the foul flock squirming out of that hole each night. Something must have created that horde, something that might still be down there.

  Her men had set about widening the hole, digging out the earth that the Nazis had used to bury the hidden door. Once it was cleared, they discovered where the bats had clawed through stone around one edge of the hatch to make their nightly sojourn.

  With the way unblocked, it would be easy to push open the hatch from the inside, an invitation to her quarry to make their escape this way.

  “We’ll kill them as soon as they step out the door,” she said.

  “What if they’re waiting for dawn?” Tarek’s eyes swept the eastern sky, already turning steel gray.

  “If they are not out by sunrise, we will enter the bunker,” she promised. Her men would fight best if they knew they must take the bunker or die. “But not until the last moment.”

  Her six crossbowmen stood rock-still, three to each side of her, silver arrows at the ready. The larger bolts of a crossbow delivered a deadlier dose of silver than a simple bullet, plus the arrows had the tendency to remain impaled in place rather than passing harmlessly through.

  She was not taking any chances with Rhun Korza.

  Tarek’s head swiveled to the door. All her troops went on alert.

  She heard nothing, but she knew they must.

  The bunker door moved forward, pushing its way along the path they had carefully cleared for it.

  Three Sanguinists stepped into the forest, Rhun Korza among them.

  Bathory counted three more figures behind them, still in the bunker, one carried by another, apparently wounded. But that made no sense—and she didn’t like surprises. Only five had left the abbey, and only five tracks were found at the water’s edge.

  So who was this sixth?

  Had Korza found someone alive in the bunker?

  Then she remembered the icarops.

  Was this the mysterious denizen of the bunker?

  She kept her hand held high, telling her troops to wait until everyone was out of the bunker. But the last three stayed inside, plainly suspicious.

  Korza looked at the ground and knelt, clearly noting where Bathory’s men had disturbed the soil. Before any further suspicions could be raised, she slashed her arm down.

  Crossbow bolts whistled with a twang of taut strings. The volley struck the Sanguinist in the lead, nailing him to the large bole of an ancient black pine.

  He struggled to free himself, smoke already steaming from his wounds into the cold night.

  The bowmen shot another volley, all the bolts striking true, piercing chest, throat, and belly.

  The Sanguinist writhed in a fog of his own boiling blood.

  That took care of one priest.

  Now to kill Korza.

  38

  October 27, 6:47 A.M., CET

  Harmsfeld Mountains, Germany

  “Stay inside!” Rhun shouted, diving through a rain of deadly silver.

  A crossbow bolt struck his arm, embedded itself into his forearm. Its touch burned deep into his flesh with the poison of silver. He had known the danger as soon as he found the fresh loam turned at the foot of the door—but he had reacted too slowly.

  Someone had been waiting in ambush.

  Someone who had expected to fight Sanguinists.

  He reached the shelter of a thick linden tree and rolled behind it.

  Safe behind the broad trunk, he yanked out the crossbow bolt. More blood than he could spare flowed from the wound, trying to purge his body of the silver’s taint.

  He sagged against the tree and glanced left.

  As he had hoped, Nadia had reached the shelter of a boulder next to the doorway.

  But not Emmanuel.

  A dozen silver bolts had skewered him to a pine a few yards away. Smoke boiled from his wounds, enfolding him in a ghostly shroud of his own pained essence.

  Rhun knew he could not reach him—and even if he could, death had already laid claim to his old friend and brother of the cloth.

  Emmanuel knew this, too. He reached an arm back toward the bunker.

  Piers’s voice rasped from out of the darkness. “My son.”

  “I forgive you,” Emmanuel whispered.

  Rhun hoped that Piers had heard the words and cast a silent prayer to his dying friend.

  Then Emmanuel slumped, only the cruel bolts holding him upright.

  Behind the boulder, Nadia wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. Like Rhun, she had to accept that Emmanuel was dead, but with that grief came a sliver of joy. He had met the most honorable end for any Sanguinist: death in battle.

  Emmanuel had freed his soul.

  When he was finished with his prayer, Rhun’s attention snapped to the sound of a single human heart beating out in the forest. There was a human among the strigoi attackers, revealing the true nature of those who attacked them.

  The Belial.

  But how had they come to find Rhun and his party here?

  And how many were hidden in the woods?

  Behind him, Erin’s and Jordan’s heartbeats echoed out of the bunker, where they remained sheltered with Piers. They were safe, at least for another moment.

  Rhun reached to his thigh and pulled out his wineskin. He needed Christ’s blood to replace what he had just lost. Without it, he could not continue to do battle. But with such a drink, he risked being thrust into the past, helpless and exposed.

  Still, he had no choice. He lifted the skin and drank.

  Heat burned through him, fortifying him, pushing back the burn of silver with the purity of Christ’s fire. Crimson crept into the edges of his vision.

  He fought against the looming threat of penance.

  Elisabeta in the fields. Elisabeta by the fire. Elisabeta’s rage.

  He tightened his hand around his pectoral cross, begging the pain to keep him present. The world became a shadowy mix of past and present. Images flashed:

  … a long bare throat.

  … a brick plastered in a closing wall.

  … a young girl with a raspberry blemish screaming silently.

  No.

  He fought to focus on the woods, on the pain of the cross in his burning palm, on the sounds of breaking twigs and snapping branches as strigoi burst out of hiding and surged toward the bunker. He risked a glance around the trunk, catching movement too quick for human eyes to track.

  Six to ten.

  He couldn’t be sure.

  Jordan and Erin would have no chance against them. He brought his gun up into firing position with trembling hands.

  More images assaulted him, reminding him of his sin, unmanning him when he needed to be at his strongest.

  … a spray of blood across white sheets.

  … pale breasts in moonlight.

  … a smile as bright as sunshine.

  Through the spectral glimpses of his past, he aimed and fired, hitting two strigoi on the right, each square in the knee, dropping them, slowing them, if nothing else.

  Nadia picked off another two on the left.

  Behind him, Jordan’s submachine gun crackled as the soldier fired and strafed from the bunker’s door. He heard the pop-pop-pop of Erin’s pistol.

  The first wave of strigoi scattered to the side, trying to flank them. More came behind them. He counted a dozen, four wounded, but not badly. One was older than Rhun; the others youngsters but still dangerous.

  Memories continued to wash over him, thicker now, pulling him away, then back again.

  … a crackling fire, listening to the soft voice of a woman reading Chaucer, struggling with the Middle English, laughing as much as reading.

  … a twirl of a gown in moonlight, a figure dancing by herself under the stars on a balc
ony, as music echoed from an open window.

  … the pale nakedness of flesh, so stark against a crimson pool of blood, the only sound his own panting.

  Please, Lord, no … not that …

  A crossbow bolt grazed his cheek, snapping him back to the present. The arrow winged off the edge of the tree and buried itself in dirt behind him.

  He fell back, knowing none of his party could last out in the open, especially not in the state he was in.

  They were too exposed.

  “Take them farther inside!” he gasped out, waving to Nadia, who was closer to the bunker door. “I’ll hold them off—”

  “Stop!” called a voice so familiar Rhun clutched for his cross again, unsure if he was in the past or present.

  He listened, but the forest had gone dead quiet.

  Even the strigoi had gone to ground—but with the sun nearly up, they would not wait long. They would rush at any moment, swarming over them.

  He strained, wondering if he had imagined the voice, a broken fragment of memory come to life.

  Then it came again. “Rhun Korza!”

  The accent, the cadence, even the anger in that voice he knew. He struggled to stay in the present, but the calling of his name summoned him into the past.

  … Elisabeta climbing from horseback, an arm outstretched for his aid, baring her wrist, exposing her faint pulse through her thin pale skin, her voice amused at his hesitation. “Father Korza …”

  … Elisabeta weeping in the garden under bright sunlight, hiding her face from the sun, grief-stricken, but finally seeing him, rising to meet him, her simple joy shining through tears. “Rhun Korza …”

  … Elisabeta coming to him, barefoot, across the rushes, her limbs naked, her face raw with desire, her lips moving, speaking the impossible. “Rhun …”

  Those arms lifted toward him, inviting him at long last.

  He went to them.

  A gun blast tore into his chest, the blossom of pain tremendous, shredding away the past and leaving only the present.

  He stood still with his arms outstretched toward her.

  She stood before him—only transformed. Her dark black hair had turned to fire. He heard her heartbeat, knowing there should be none, not here, not now.

  Downslope from him, she kept her distance, sheltered by an alder. But even from here, he recognized the same curve of her cheek, the same dance to her quicksilver eyes, the same long curls tumbling to her shoulders. She even smelled as she always had.

  His vision swam, overlaying two women.

  Pink lips curved into the smile that had once seduced him. “Your deeds brought us here, Father Korza. Remember that.”

  She lifted her smoking Glock and fired, fired, fired.

  Bullets tore into his chest.

  Silver.

  Every one.

  The world darkened, and he fell.

  6:50 A.M.

  Jordan fired a volley over Rhun’s body as the priest dropped. The redhead who had shot him ducked behind a tree.

  Why the hell had the fool stepped out into the open like that?

  Rhun had looked like he was in a daze as he stumbled out of hiding, his arms stretched out toward the woman, his hands empty, as if surrendering to her.

  Jordan kept firing his Heckler & Koch submachine gun, offering Nadia cover so she could reach Rhun. Strigoi crawled forward toward them, clearly not eager to stand up and be shredded apart by silver. He hoped he had enough bullets in the extended magazine to get the pair back inside.

  Erin knelt on the other side of the door, her Sig Sauer in hand. She didn’t have the same firepower he did, but she was a surprisingly good shot. She shot for legs, wounding rather than killing, just as Rhun had done. For the moment it was easier to slow them than to kill them.

  Nadia hooked a hand under one arm and dragged Rhun back toward the bunker.

  She took a crossbow bolt in the back of her thigh, but didn’t even flinch until she had hauled Rhun’s body inside and slammed the bunker door.

  “Emmanuel?” Jordan asked.

  “Lost.” She clenched her jaw and yanked out the bolt. Blood boiled out and smoked down her thigh. The stench of burnt flesh drifted up.

  Erin swallowed hard. Jordan understood how she felt.

  “Can you walk?” he asked. “I can give you a shoulder to—”

  “I can walk.”

  Nadia hurried them away from the door and pulled a wineskin from her belt. She took a small, cautious sip.

  A heavy object thudded against the locked door behind them, echoing inside.

  Nadia ignored it, but she finally stopped and lowered Rhun to the floor. She quickly freed Rhun’s karambit and used the hooked blade to slice off the leather armor covering his chest.

  “We must work swiftly. The Belial will come through that door at any moment.”

  Erin knelt next to her. “How do you know they’ll do that?”

  “They have to. They’re strigoi. When the sun rises, they’ll all die. They will need to go to ground.”

  Nadia dug a slug out of Rhun’s chest with his karambit’s tip. The bullet had deformed into a grotesque five-petal flower.

  “Silver hollow point,” Jordan said, immediately understanding.

  The attackers had known what to expect.

  Nadia dug out the other slugs, none too gently, hurrying. Six total. A human could not live with that much damage. Maybe not even a Sanguinist.

  Blood pumped out and ran across the floor.

  Erin put her palm on Rhun’s chest, plainly concerned. “I thought he would stop bleeding on his own.”

  Jordan remembered Korza’s demonstration back in Jerusalem with his sliced palm.

  Nadia pushed Erin’s hand away. “His blood is purging the silver. If it doesn’t, he’ll die.”

  “But then won’t he bleed to death?” Erin asked.

  Nadia’s face tightened. “He might,” she admitted, and glanced back at the door.

  The strigoi had ceased pounding. Jordan didn’t trust the silence and apparently neither did Nadia.

  She stood, hauling Rhun over one shoulder.

  Erin joined her. “What do we do? Try to use the water exit?”

  “It’s our only chance,” Nadia said, and pointed her free arm. “We must reach sunlight.”

  They took off at a dead run. Jordan hauled Piers along in a fireman’s carry, but Nadia outpaced him. They reached the intersection of passageways—when a thunderous explosion erupted behind them.

  Jordan jolted, ducking from the noise. The enemy had set charges against the door.

  Without breaking stride, he turned to check on Erin. She was behind him, too far behind. Snarls echoed down the tunnel from the blasted doorway.

  The monsters were inside—and they were pissed.

  39

  October 27, time unknown

  Undisclosed location

  Tommy shifted in his new bed, trying to find a more comfortable position. He had no idea where he was, when he was, but he didn’t think it was another hospital. He studied his new home, which he suspected was what this prison was supposed to be.

  He filed that disturbing thought away for now.

  But he had to admit that the box in his head was growing more and more crammed.

  Something eventually had to give.

  He stared around. The walls were painted silver, with no windows, but the room came equipped with three different kinds of video-game consoles and a flat-screen TV, fed by satellite and carrying American channels.

  Across from the foot of his bed, a door led to a bathroom stocked with familiar brands of soap and shampoo. Another door led to a corridor, but he’d been unconscious when he was brought in, so he didn’t know where that went.

  Some faceless doctor must have set his bones, patched his wounds, and cranked him up on pain relievers. His mouth still felt full of cotton that no amount of water could soothe. But his neck had already healed, and his bones were knitting fast, too. Whatever had happened a
t Masada, it had sped up his healing, curing him from far more than just cancer.

  Since he’d woken up, they brought him food, whatever he asked for: burgers, fries, pizza, ice cream, and Apple Jacks cereal. And he was surprisingly hungry. He could not get enough to eat; likely his body needed the fuel to help heal itself.

  Nobody told him where he was or why he was here.

  He spent one entire hour crying, but no one seemed to care, and he finally realized the futility of tears and turned to more practical thoughts: thoughts of escape.

  So far, he had no good plan. The walls were made of concrete, and he imagined that something in the room was a camera. The guards shoved his food through a slot in the door that led out to the corridor.

  Suddenly that door opened.

  Tommy sat up. He couldn’t stand very well yet.

  A familiar figure strode inside, sending a chill through Tommy. It was the boy who had kidnapped him from the hospital. The strange kid walked in and flung himself into bed, sprawling next to Tommy, as if they were best chums.

  This time he wore a gray silk shirt and a pair of expensive-looking gray pants.

  He sure didn’t dress like a normal kid.

  “Hello.” Tommy twisted to face him and held out his hand, not knowing what else to do. “I’m Tommy.”

  “I know who you are.” The boy’s accent was strange and stiff.

  Still, he shook Tommy’s hand, pumping it firmly, formally. He had the coldest hands that Tommy had ever felt. Had he been shipped to some country above the Arctic Circle?

  The boy let go of his hand. “We are friends now, no? So you can call me Alyosha.”

  Friends don’t try to kill friends.

  But Tommy kept silent about that and asked a more important question. “Why am I here?”

  “Is there somewhere else you would rather be?”

  “Anywhere else,” he admitted. “This feels like a prison.”

  The boy turned a thick gold ring around on his white finger. “As cages go, it is a gilded one, no?”

  Tommy didn’t bother pointing out that he didn’t want to be in any cage—gilded or not—but he didn’t want to offend the kid, nor did he want to chase him off by being rude. To be honest, Tommy didn’t want to be alone again. He’d even take this weird kid’s company at the moment—especially if he could learn anything.