The Blood Gospel

by Rebecca Cantrell James Rollins

  “What are you talking about?” Jordan asked, feeling like he’d walked into the theater in the middle of a movie.

  Erin sat straighter, guessing the truth. “You’re referring to Czar Nicholas’s young son, aren’t you? The boy named Alexei.”

  Rasputin favored her with a sad smile. “The poor child suffered. Finally, he lay near death. What was I to do?”

  Jordan now remembered the history. The czar’s son was once Rasputin’s young charge. Like many of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, he had suffered from what was known as “the Royal Disease” of hemophilia. According to history, only Rasputin could bring him relief during his episodes of painful internal bleeding.

  “You should have let him die a natural death,” Rhun said, “within the grace of God. But you could not. And afterward, you would not repent for your sin.”

  Jordan pictured Rasputin turning the boy into a monster rather than letting him die.

  “That is why you could not be forgiven,” Rhun said.

  “What makes you think I wanted the Cardinal’s forgiveness? That I needed it?”

  “I think we have gotten off topic here,” Jordan cut in. Rhun and Rasputin’s old arguments did not advance their cause. “Will you help us find the book?”

  “First tell me, how did Piers die?” Rasputin took Erin’s hand. She looked like she wanted to take it back, but she didn’t. She should have. “Please.”

  She told him of the cross in the bunker, of the moment in the boat when Piers passed on.

  Rasputin dabbed at his eyes with a large linen handkerchief. “How can you explain that, Rhun?”

  “God’s grace.” Rhun’s words were simple and fervent.

  “Explain what?” Erin asked, looking between them.

  “Tainted as Piers was for breaking his vow, for creating and feeding upon blasphemare creatures, he should have been burned to ashes by the sunlight.” Rasputin folded the handkerchief and secreted it away in his robes. “That is what happens to strigoi who do not drink the blood of Christ. Has Rhun told you nothing?”

  He hadn’t told them much. Just that sunlight killed them, not that they burned up. Jordan remembered how Nadia had carefully lifted the coat from Piers’s face, and her fear as she held him against her side so that he might see the sun one last time. His death had seemed peaceful, not violent, more of a letting go. Had God somehow forgiven his sins at the end or was there enough of Christ’s blessing still within Piers’s veins to keep him from burning? He suspected they would never know the true answer, and at the moment they had a more important concern.

  “The book,” Jordan said. “Let’s get back to the book.”

  Rasputin straightened, visibly drawing back to the matter at hand. “The German bunker was far south. Do you know when Russian troops might have reached it? If I had a time line …”

  Jordan tried to remember his history, expecting Erin to interrupt with the answer. “The last major German unit in the south surrendered on April twenty-fourth, but the Russians were probably still mopping up until the formal surrender of Germany on May eighth.”

  He counted off dates in his head. “By mid-May, though, the Russians were formalizing the division of Germany and the whole of the Iron Curtain. I would guess the Russian smash-and-grab teams peaked around May twentieth, although there were probably Russians clearing out bunkers before and after.”

  Rasputin eyed him with what might be respect. “You indeed know your history.”

  Jordan shrugged, but he kept talking, eager to find the book and get the three of them out of Russia alive. “I’ve studied a lot about the World War Two era, heard a lot more from my grandfather who fought during it. Anyway, that bunker was far south and isolated. Calculating travel time back then, plus a buffer to get out before American troops began their patrols, I would guess the most likely time for the Russians to have hit the bunker would have been between May twenty-eighth and June second. With a wide margin of error, of course.”

  Erin gave him a surprised look, as if she hadn’t expected him to know anything useful. Which was getting old.

  “Impressive, Sergeant.” Rasputin leaned back. “That information is valuable. Although it will still take time to find the book.”

  How did Rasputin know that Jordan was a sergeant? That was worrisome.

  “Why is it valuable?” Erin asked. “Why do the dates matter?”

  “First, tell me what you are hiding in your coat, my good doctor.”

  So he knew Erin had a Ph.D., too, Jordan realized, and that she had the pieces of concrete that had surrounded the book in her pockets. What didn’t he know?

  “I can smell it,” Rasputin said.

  Erin looked to Rhun. He nodded, and she drew out a piece of the book’s encasement. “We believe this might have been covering the book.”

  Rasputin held out his hand, and Erin slowly dropped the gray fragment into his palm. His thumb followed the thin lines of soot that showed where the stone had been blasted apart.

  Jordan snapped upright. He should have thought of this before. “If you get me an explosives sensor, I can use that piece as a control and find anything else with the same chemical signature. If this was wrapped around the Gospel, the book would have the same chemical breakdown products on its cover. Assuming it wasn’t destroyed in the blast.”

  Rhun touched his cross again, looking shocked. Apparently the priest hadn’t considered the possibility that the book might have been destroyed, that they might be risking their lives to search for something that had been blasted to fragments and ashes.

  Rasputin nodded to Sergei, who stepped forward. “Go with my personal assistant. He will help you procure the item that you need.”

  Jordan stayed seated. “We move as a team.”

  6:17 P.M.

  Rasputin frowned, then laughed. Erin hadn’t thought that she could hate that laugh more than she had the first time she heard it, but she did.

  “Very well,” Rasputin said. “Write down the details for Sergei.”

  Sergei produced a spiral-bound notebook and pencil stub from his back pocket.

  Erin took the concrete piece off the table and slipped it back into her pocket, worrying that Rasputin might steal it. He was clearly an opportunist and not one to underestimate. He already knew too much: that she was a doctor, that she and Rhun and Jordan searched for the book, and that they were possibly the trio of prophecy. And from the greedy glint in his eyes when Jordan had listed the likely dates the bunker had been breached, she also suspected that he already had a good idea about the book’s location.

  Clearly, Rasputin enjoyed making them dance like trained monkeys, but was it more than malicious pleasure?

  Their host rose and gestured toward a black tabernacle at the rear of the church. “Shall we view the very cobblestones where the czar fell? The namesake for this church.”

  She pushed back her chair. Jordan and Rhun stood, too. They walked behind Rasputin’s slope-shouldered form like a Sanguinist trio, Rhun in front, Jordan flanking the right, and Erin the left.

  Rasputin stopped in front of the tabernacle. Four polished black columns supported an ornate marble canopy carved in Russian folk-art style, with jet-black stone flowers and flourishes. Behind a small gate lay a simple section of gray cobblestones. Its utilitarian nature clashed with the church’s elaborate grandeur, reminding Erin why this giant building had been constructed—to memorialize the murder of the czar. She contrasted the soaring ceilings and rich gold tiles with the simple mounds of earth in Piskariovskoye Cemetery.

  Some deaths were marked better than others.

  A handful of Rasputin’s followers came and stood in a semicircle behind them, as if bound to their leader by invisible cords.

  “I came here often during the siege of Leningrad,” Rasputin said, resting his hands on the wooden edge of the tabernacle. His sleeves rode up, displaying thick black hair on his wrists and lower arms. “The church was deconsecrated. The holiness stolen back by Rome. But the build
ing was good enough for the dead. They used this nave as a morgue in winter. Piled bodies against the walls.”

  Erin shivered, imagining frozen corpses stacked like carcasses in a slaughterhouse, awaiting a spring burial.

  “As the siege stretched and the hunger grew worse, the bodies were brought here by wooden carts pulled by living men. The horses had been eaten by then. The dead came as they were born: naked. Every scrap of cloth had to be saved to warm the living.” Rasputin’s voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “I lived in the crypt. No one thought to check the dead. There were too many. Nights I came up, and I counted. Do you know how many children died in the siege? Not just from the cold, although it was bitter and claimed its share. Not just from the hunger, although it drove many to their death. Not even from the Nazis and the death they rained from the sky and the land all around. No, not even them.”

  Erin’s throat closed. “Strigoi?”

  “They came like a plague of locusts, devouring the weak and starving souls huddled here. I escaped to Rome and begged for help.” Rasputin turned to Rhun, who lowered his eyes. “The Church was neutral in the war, but never had Sanguinists forsaken their war against strigoi. Until then.”

  Erin hugged her chest. Strigoi would have found easy prey in the besieged city.

  “So I came back alone from Rome. I fought through troops until I was back inside the charnel house that the city I loved had become. And when I came upon dying children, I saved them, brought them into my fold. With my own blood, I built an army to protect my people from the curse.”

  Rasputin gestured to those acolytes nearby with one black-clad arm. “You see before you only a few of the lost children of Leningrad. Angels who did not die in filth.”

  They shifted their feet, pale eyes fixed on him, in worship.

  “Do you know how many people died here, Doctor?”

  Erin shook her head.

  “Two million. Two million souls in a city that once housed three and a half million people.”

  Erin had never confronted someone who had seen the suffering, counted the Russian dead. “I’m sorry.”

  “I could not stand aside.” Rasputin clenched his powerful hands into fists. “For that, I was shunned. A fate harsher than excommunication. For saving children. Tell me, Doctor, what would you have done in my stead?”

  “You did not save them,” Rhun said. “You turned them into monsters. Better to let them go to God.”

  Rasputin ignored him, deep-set blue eyes focused on Erin’s. “Can you look into the eyes of a dying child and listen to a heartbeat fade and do nothing? Why did God give me these powers, if not to use them saving the innocent?”

  Erin remembered watching her sister’s heartbeat slow and stop. How she had begged her father to let them go to a hospital, how she had prayed for God to save her. But her father and God chose to let an innocent baby die instead. Her own failure to save her sister had haunted her entire life.

  She slipped her hand into her pocket and touched the scrap of quilt. What if she’d had Rasputin’s courage? What if she had used her anger to defy her father, renounced his interpretation of God’s will? Her sister might still be alive. Could she fault Rasputin for doing something she wished she had done herself?

  “You corrupted them.” Rhun touched her sleeve, as if he sensed her sorrow. Rasputin’s eyes dropped to follow his hand. “You did not save those children. You kept them from finding eternal peace at God’s side.”

  “Are you so sure of this, my friend?” Rasputin asked. He turned from the tabernacle to face Rhun. “Have you found any peace in your service to the Church? When you stand before God, who will have a cleaner soul? He who saved children or he who created a monster out of the woman he loved?”

  Rasputin’s eyes fell upon Erin at that moment.

  She shivered at the warning in that dark gaze.

  50

  October 27, 6:22 P.M., MST

  St. Petersburg, Russia

  Before Rhun could respond to Grigori’s contempt, they were interrupted. All eyes—except for Erin’s and Jordan’s—swung toward the entrance to the ornate church. Again Rhun’s senses were assaulted by the reflection of flickering candlelight off millions of tiles, patterned marble, and gilt surfaces.

  Past it all, he heard a heartbeat approach the outer door. The rhythm sounded familiar—why?—but between Erin’s and Jordan’s own throbbing life and the head-swimming sensory overload, he could not discern what set his teeth on edge.

  Then a knock.

  Now Erin and Jordan turned, too, hearing the strong, demanding strike of knuckle on wood.

  Grigori raised his hand. “Ah, it seems I have more visitors to attend to. If you’ll excuse me.”

  His dark congregants surrounded Rhun and his companions, driving them toward the apse.

  Rhun continued to stare toward the door, casting out his senses toward the mysterious visitor, but by now the smell of blood and burnt flesh wafting from Grigori’s acolytes had engulfed him, too. Frustrated, he took a deep breath and offered up a prayer for patience in adversity. It did nothing to calm him.

  Grigori slipped away with an insolent wave and vanished into the vestibule and out the door into the cold night.

  “I’m getting tired of being herded around,” Jordan said as he was elbowed closer to Erin.

  “Like cows,” Rhun agreed.

  “Not a cow,” the soldier said. “Like a bull. Let me keep my dignity.

  Such as it is.”

  As they waited, Erin crossed her arms. She seemed the calmest of the three. Did she trust that Grigori would keep his word, that they would come to no harm? Surely she was not so foolish. Rhun tried to shut out the sound of her heartbeat and listen, straining at the door, but Grigori and his late visitor had moved too far away.

  “Do you think he knows where the book is?” she asked, making it plain how little she actually did trust Grigori.

  “I don’t know. But if it is in Russia, we will never find it without his cooperation.”

  “And after that?” Jordan asked. “What then? What will he do—to you, to us? I imagine that won’t be fun either.”

  Rhun relaxed fractionally, relieved that Jordan had seen through the monk. “Indeed.”

  Erin’s voice remained resolute. “I think Rasputin will keep his word. But that may be as worrisome as if he didn’t. He strikes me as someone who plays many levels of a chess game while always wearing a smiling face.”

  Rhun nodded. “Grigori is a man of his word—but you must listen carefully to each utterance from his lips. He does not speak casually. And his loyalty is … complicated.”

  Jordan glanced at the silent congregation, who kept their guard as they all waited. “Things would be easier here if the Church had kept its word. They should have helped during the siege, especially if strigoi came here to feed. Maybe then we wouldn’t have Rasputin as our enemy.”

  Rhun fingered the worn beads of his rosary. “I pressed his case with Cardinal Bernard myself, told him that Christ had not saved us to show neutrality in the face of evil, that He made us to fight it always and in all of its forms.”

  Rhun did not tell them that he had considered following Grigori back to St. Petersburg during the war. He believed his inability to convince Bernard to help the besieged city was one of his greatest failures as a Sanguinist, possibly rivaling what he had inflicted upon Elisabeta.

  One of the congregants stepped closer. It was Sergei, his eyes hard as glass. “So you admit that he was right?”

  “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Jordan folded his arms. “And right doesn’t always mean good.”

  There, the argument stalled.

  Erin seemed to spend the next hour studying the jewel-like mosaics, stopping to feel them where she could, as if she made sense of them through touch. Rhun could not stand to look at them. It was an affront to God to have such beautiful works of religious art in such a profane den.

  Like a good soldier, Jordan returned to the table,
sat down, and rested his head on the top, catching sleep when he could do nothing else. Rhun admired his practicality, but he could not settle to such calmness. He stretched his senses outside the church, listening to the rhythms of a city moving into night, the rumble of cars quieting, the muffled footfalls, the voices passing away, and underneath it all, the soft whisper of falling snow.

  Then Rhun heard feet and a frantic heartbeat approaching the church’s outer entrance. Heads turned, but Grigori’s acolytes seemed to have already recognized the visitor, because they did not bother to herd Rhun and the others into hiding again.

  Sergei disappeared into the vestibule and returned with a small greasy-haired man with a pointed nose. The stranger brought with him the icy smell of snow.

  “It wasn’t easy to get, what you asked.” The man handed Sergei a sealed plastic case about the size of a shoe box.

  Sergei gave him a roll of bills, which he counted with one nicotine-stained finger. He pocketed the roll, nodded once to Sergei, and on quick, furtive feet, disappeared back out into the night.

  Sergei turned to them, to Jordan. “Now it is our turn to give gifts, da?”

  6:38 P.M.

  Jordan accepted the case, undid the small latch, and lifted the lid. He whistled appreciatively at what he found. Christmas had come early.

  “What is it?” Erin brushed his elbow. The fresh laundry scent of the German hotel’s shampoo drifted up, and he remembered that first kiss. “Jordan?”

  It took him an extra second to collect himself.

  “It’s what I asked for earlier.” He tilted the box to reveal a blue electronic device packed into gray foam cushioning, along with battery packs, carrying straps, manuals, and sampling tools. “It’s a handheld explosives detector.”

  “It looks like an oversize remote control.” She touched the blue casing with one bare finger. “One without enough buttons.”

  “This has enough buttons,” Jordan said. “If it works properly, it can detect trace levels of explosive materials in the parts-per-quadrillion range. Anything from C-4 to black powder to ammonium and urea nitrates. Actually pretty much anything it can sample, it can search for.”