The Blood Gospel

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The Blood Gospel Page 30

by Rebecca Cantrell James Rollins


  But in less than ten minutes, they were traipsing across the frost-coated paving stones of the main street. Nadia led them in a seemingly haphazard fashion, stopping occasionally to listen with her head cocked. She probably heard people long before Jordan and Erin could and sought to avoid running into any.

  He glanced over at Erin. Like him, she was soaked to the skin. But unlike him, she wasn’t working up heat from carrying a heavy weight. Her blue lips trembled. He had to get her inside and warmed up.

  Finally, they reached the village church in the square. The sturdy structure had been constructed out of locally quarried stone centuries ago, its builders forming bricked archways and framing stained-glass windows along both flanks. The single bell spire pointed toward Heaven with what seemed like an unquestioning resolve.

  Nadia sprang up the steps and tried the double front doors. Locked.

  Jordan eased Rhun to the ground. Maybe he could pick the lock.

  Nadia drew back a step, lifted her leg, then kicked the thick wooden doors. They slammed open with a crack. Not the quietest way in, but an effective one.

  She rushed inside. Jordan picked up Rhun and followed, with Erin close behind. He wanted everyone out of sight before someone noticed that they had broken into a church while carrying a dead man.

  Erin tugged the doors closed behind them, likely fearing the same.

  Nadia was already at the altar, rooting around. “No consecrated wine,” she said, and in her frustration, she elbowed an empty chalice and sent it crashing to the stone floor.

  “Maybe a little quieter?” Jordan hated to upset her.

  She uttered something that sounded blasphemous, then stormed toward a wooden crucifix behind the altar. The resemblance of the carved oak figure to Piers was so uncanny that Jordan stepped back a pace.

  What was Nadia planning on doing?

  42

  October 27, 7:31 A.M., CET

  Harmsfeld Mountains, Germany

  Bathory stood before the dead Sanguinist’s body. It was still spiked by crossbow bolts to the trunk of an ancient pine, like some druidic sacrifice.

  She gripped one of the bolts by its feathered end and yanked it out of the dead arm, freeing the limb to hang limp and broken. She studied her handiwork with a sigh.

  Bright sunlight suffused the glade, melting frost from the yellow linden leaves. There was little evidence of the battle that had been fought here: some torn earth, more than a few rounds of ammunition that peppered tree trunks, and dark splotches of blood soaking into the ground. A good rain, a couple weeks of new growth, and no one would have any clue as to what transpired here.

  Except for this damned body bolted to the tree.

  She yanked out another bolt, wishing that she could have assigned this job to Tarek, but she couldn’t, not during the day. Even Magor had suffered too much in the sunlight, his body smoking, until she had forced him to retreat into the bunker with the others.

  She continued yanking out spikes, slowly freeing the body.

  Too bad it wasn’t Korza impaled here. But she had seen him fall after putting six silver slugs into him. He wouldn’t last long in that state. She savored the look of surprise on his face when she shot him. He had thought her Elisabeta—Bathory’s long-dead ancestor, somehow come back to forgive him.

  As if that would be enough to atone for his sins.

  She pulled the Sanguinist free from the last spike. If the man had been a strigoi, the sunlight would have burned him to ash and saved her the trouble.

  Resigned, she hurried with this last bit of bloody business as a plan took shape in her mind.

  The book was still lost—but she knew where to go to find it.

  And more important, who could help her.

  43

  October 27, 7:35 A.M., CET

  Harmsfeld, Germany

  Erin accompanied Jordan as he placed Rhun down in front of the altar. The limp priest lay on the stone floor as if dead.

  “Is he still alive?” she asked.

  “Barely.” Kneeling, Nadia dribbled wine from her flask into his mouth.

  He did not swallow.

  That couldn’t be good.

  “How can we help?” Jordan asked.

  “Stay out of my way.” Nadia cradled Rhun’s head in her lap. “And stay quiet.”

  Nadia sorted through the items she had gathered from behind the altar, settling first on the sealed bottle of wine. She pushed in the cork with one long finger.

  “I need to consecrate this wine,” she explained.

  “You can do that?” Jordan looked at the door, plainly worried about someone coming into the church and interrupting whatever was about to happen.

  “Of course she can’t,” Erin said, shocked. “Only a priest can consecrate wine.”

  Nadia sniffed derisively. “Dr. Granger, you are enough of an historian to know better, are you not?” She wiped blood off Rhun’s chest with the altar cloth. “Didn’t women perform Mass and consecrate wine in the early days of the Church?”

  Erin felt chastened. She did know better. In a knee-jerk reaction, she had leaned upon Church dogma, when history plainly contradicted it. She wondered how much she was still her father’s daughter at heart.

  That thought stung.

  “I’m sorry,” Erin said. “You’re right.”

  “The human side of the Church took that power away from women. The Sanguinist side did not,” Nadia said.

  “So you can consecrate wine,” Jordan said.

  “I did not say that. I said that women in the Sanguinist Church can be priests. But I have not yet taken Holy Orders, so I am not yet a priest myself,” Nadia said.

  Jordan stared back at the door. Again. “Why don’t we just take this bottle of vino and do whatever you’re planning somewhere else, away from where someone might come barging in at any time? You don’t need to do this in a church, do you?”

  “Wine has its greatest healing powers if consecrated and consumed in a church. Holy ground lends it additional power.” Nadia put a hand on Rhun’s chest. “Rhun needs as many advantages as we can give him.”

  She poured the last drops of wine from her flask into one of Rhun’s bullet wounds, raising a moan from him.

  Erin’s heart leaped with hope. Maybe he wasn’t as bad off as she thought.

  Nadia unfastened Rhun’s silver flask from his leg. She trickled more wine down his throat. This time he swallowed.

  He drew in a single breath. “Elisabeta?”

  Nadia closed her eyes. “No, Rhun. It’s Nadia.”

  Rhun looked around, his eyes unfocused.

  “You must consecrate this wine.” She wrapped his fingers around the bottle’s green neck. “Or you will die.”

  His eyelids drifted closed.

  Erin studied the unconscious priest. She didn’t see what could rouse him. “Are you sure that you need to consecrate the wine? Maybe you can just tell him it’s blessed.”

  Nadia gave her a venomous look.

  “I’ve been wondering, since our time in the desert, if the wine needs to be truly consecrated or if Rhun just needs to think it is. Maybe it’s about faith, instead of miracles.” Erin couldn’t believe that these words were coming out of her mouth.

  She had seen firsthand what happened when medical care was left to faith and miracles, first with her arm, and then with her baby sister. She shut her eyes, as if doing this would shut out the memory. But the memory came, like it always did.

  Her mother had been having a hard birth. Erin and the other women in the compound had watched her labor for days. Summer had come early, and the bedroom was hot and close. It smelled of sweat and blood.

  She held her mother’s hand, bathed her brow, and prayed. It was all she could do.

  Eventually her sister, Emma, came into the world.

  But Emma was feverish from the first. Too weak to cry or suckle, she lay wrapped in her baby quilt, held against her mother’s breast, wide dark eyes open and glassy.

  Erin begg
ed her father to take the baby to a real doctor, but he backhanded her, bloodying her nose.

  Instead, the women of the compound gathered around her mother’s bed to pray. Her father led the prayers, his deep voice confident that God would hear, and God would save the child. If not, God knew that she wasn’t worth saving.

  Erin stayed by her mother’s side, watching Emma’s heartbeat in her soft fontanel, quick as a bird’s. She ached to pick her up, load her on a horse, and take her into town. But her father, seeming to sense her defiance, never left her alone with the baby. All Erin could do was pray, hope, and watch the heartbeat slow and stop.

  Emma Granger lived for two days.

  Faith did not save Emma.

  Erin touched the fabric in her pocket. She had cut it from Emma’s baby quilt before she was wrapped in it for burial. She’d carried it with her every day since, to remind herself to honor the warnings in her heart, to ask the impossible questions, and then, always, to act.

  “Nadia,” Erin said. “Try drinking the unconsecrated wine. What have you got to lose?”

  Nadia lifted the bottle to her own mouth and took a deep gulp. Red liquid erupted from her throat and sprayed across the floor.

  Jordan grimaced. “Guess it doesn’t work that way.”

  Nadia wiped her mouth. “It’s about miracles.”

  Or maybe it was simply that Nadia didn’t believe the wine was Christ’s blood.

  But Erin remained silent.

  7:44 A.M.

  Rhun longed for death, wishing they’d never woken him.

  Pain from his wounds paled in comparison to what he had felt when he saw Elisabeta again in the forest. But it had not truly been her. He knew that. The woman in the forest had red hair, not black. And Elisabeta had been gone for four hundred years.

  Who was the woman who had shot him? Some distant descendant? Did it matter?

  Darkness folded back over him like a soft cape. He relaxed into it. Silver did not burn him in the warm blackness. He floated there.

  Then liquid scalded his lips, and he tried to turn his head away.

  “Rhun,” ordered a familiar voice. “You will come back to me.”

  It wasn’t Elisabeta. This voice sounded angry. Also frightened.

  Nadia?

  But nothing frightened Nadia.

  He forced his heavy eyelids open, heard heartbeats. Erin’s quick one, the soldier’s steady rhythm. So they had both made it out alive.

  Good.

  Content, he tried to drift away again.

  But cold fingers grabbed his chin, pulling him to Nadia’s dark eyes. “You will do this for me, Rhun. I have given you all of your wine—and mine. Without it, I, too, will die. That is, unless I break my oath.”

  He strove to keep his eyelids open, but they slid closed again. He pushed them open.

  “You force this upon me, Rhun.”

  Nadia released his head and stood, a quick flash of darkness. She wrapped an arm around Erin’s waist and yanked her head to the side. Erin’s heartbeats sped until each muscular squeeze flowed into the next in one continuous thrumming.

  Jordan brought up his submachine gun.

  “If you shoot me, soldier, know that I can kill her before the second bullet strikes,” Nadia hissed. “So, Rhun, can you do this?”

  Erin’s amber eyes stared into his, pleading for her life, and for his.

  To answer that look more than Nadia’s question, Rhun found the strength. He roused himself to grasp the wine, to pull the bottle to his heart, to recite the necessary words.

  The ceremony stretched into a sacrament—all the while Nadia held Erin, her teeth at her throat.

  Finally, Rhun ended with “We offer to Thee this reasonable and unbloody sacrifice; and we beg Thee, we ask Thee, we pray Thee that Thou send down Thy Holy Spirit on us and on these present gifts.”

  Nadia answered, “Amen. Bless this Holy Chalice.”

  “‘And that which is in this chalice, the Precious Blood of Thy Christ.’ ”

  He dropped his hands to his lap, the ritual complete, his strength fleeing his limbs, his only desire a wish for unconsciousness.

  But Nadia refused to let him rest. She poured Christ’s blood into his wounds, into his mouth. His body took in that fire, and it burned him completely this time. He knew where it would take him, and he quailed at the prospect.

  “No … ,” he begged—but this prayer wasn’t answered.

  “Turn away.” Nadia’s ragged command to the humans faded as his sins carried him away into penance.

  Bernard had sensed the blackness in Rhun’s heart and sent him to Čachtice Castle to cut ties with Elisabeta. Rhun told himself that he could do it, that he felt nothing more for her than the duty to serve her as a priest.

  Still he prayed as he lingered on the long winter road to her door. Snow hid fields and gardens where they had once walked together. Among long dried stalks of lavender, a raven pecked at a gray mouse, the tiny scarlet stain of its lifeblood visible even from so far away. He tarried until the raven finished its repast and flew away.

  He reached the castle at twilight, hours later than he had planned. Yet he stood long in front of the door before he could bring himself to knock. Snow dusted the shoulders of his cassock. He did not feel cold anymore, but he brushed the snow away as a man would do. He would not show his otherness in this house.

  Her maid, Anna, answered, her hands reddened with cold. “Good evening, Father Korza.”

  “Hello, my child,” he said. “Is the Widow Nádasy at home?”

  He prayed that she was far away. Perhaps he should request that she meet him at the village church. His resolve was strongest there. Yes, the church would be better.

  Anna curtsied. “Since the death of the good Count Nádasy, she walks late in the evenings, but she will return before dark. You may wait?”

  He followed her thin figure into the great room, where a fire crackled in the immense hearth. Chamomile sprinkled atop the floor rushes lent the room the familiar smell of summer. He remembered gathering leaves of it with her on a sunlit afternoon before Ferenc’s death.

  Rhun refused Anna’s offer of refreshment and stood as close to the fire as he dared, drawing its heat into his unnatural body. He prayed and thought of Ferenc, the Black Knight of Hungary, and the man to whom Elisabeta had been bound. If Ferenc were still alive, all would be different. But Ferenc was dead. Rhun pushed away thoughts of his last visit, when he had told her of Ferenc’s passing.

  Elisabeta entered wearing a deep burgundy cloak, snow melted to darkness on the shoulders. Rhun straightened his spine. His faith was strong. He would endure this.

  She shook water from her cloak. Dark droplets spattered the floor. A servant girl took the heavy woolen garment from her outstretched hand and walked backward from the room.

  “It is good to see that you are well, Father Korza.” Black skirts swished against rushes as she walked to join him at the fire. “I trust you have been offered wine and refreshment?”

  Her tone was light, but her racing heart betrayed her.

  “I have.”

  In the firelight, she looked thinner than he remembered, her features harder, as if grief had tempered the softness from her. Even so, she was achingly beautiful.

  Fear flashed through Rhun’s blood.

  He longed to flee, but he had promised Bernard, and he had promised himself. He was strong enough to do this. He must be.

  “I imagine that you are here collecting for the Church?” Her bitter tone told him that she knew how he had failed her when he left her to grieve for Ferenc alone, that she did not forgive him for deserting her in her hour of deepest need.

  His mind screamed at him to run, but his body would not obey.

  He stayed.

  “Father Korza?” She leaned closer, her dark head tilted in concern, her heart slowing in sympathy instead of speeding up in anger. “Are you ill? Perhaps you should sit?”

  She guided him to a straight-backed wooden chair, th
en sat across from him, their knees a mere handsbreadth apart. The fire’s heat cooled in comparison to the warmth of her body.

  “Have you been well, Father Korza?”

  He roused from the song of her strong red heart. “I have. How have you fared, Widow Nádasy?”

  She shifted at the word widow. “I have been bearing up—” She leaned forward. “Nonsense. We have known each other too long and too well to be untruthful now. Ferenc’s death has been both a great burden and a freedom to me.”

  A freedom?

  He dared not ask. He raised his head.

  “You look as if you have been ill,” she said. “So tell me the truth. How have the past months served you?”

  He fell into her silver eyes, reflecting orange from the firelight. How could he be apart from her? She alone of all he knew he had trusted with memories of his mortal life, only keeping secret his unnatural state of being.

  A ghost of a smile played on her soft lips. Her hand brushed water from her bare shoulder, then fell coyly to her soft throat. He stared at her fingers, and what they covered.

  She stood and took his hand between hers. “Always so cold.”

  The heat of her hand exploded under his skin. He must move away, but instead he stood and put his other hand over hers, drawing more of her warmth into his chilled body. Just that. A simple moment of connection. He asked for nothing more.

  Her heartbeat traveled from her hands through his arms and up to where his heart had once beat. Now his blood moved to the rhythm of hers. Scarlet stained the edges of his vision.

  Her eyelids fell closed, and she tipped her face up toward his.

  He took her flushed cheeks in his marble-white hands. He had never touched a woman before, not like this. He caressed her face, her smooth white throat.

  Her heart sped under his palms. Fear? Or did something else drive it?

  Tears coursed down her cheeks.

  “Rhun,” she whispered, “I’ve waited so long for you.”

  He traced the impossibly soft redness of her lips with one fingertip. She shivered under his touch.

  He longed to press his lips against hers, to feel the warmth of her mouth. To taste her. But it was forbidden. He was a priest. Chaste. He must stop this at once. He drew his hands a finger’s width away from her and toward the silver cross that lay over his cassock.

 

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