Rhun felt himself relaxing in their camaraderie. Admittedly, they were a team that had survived much together, but they were more than that.
They were friends.
As they reached the doors, the guards parted. From under his hood, one spoke, sounding none too happy at their intrusion, nor to whom they had come to see.
“The cardinal has been expecting you,” the guard said, his contempt for the prisoner plain.
The other guard removed a large key from under his cloak and unlocked the door. He did not bother to open it.
Rhun shifted forward, but his balance betrayed him. Erin caught his arm.
Jordan moved to the door and shoved it open, speaking to the guards. “You both need to work on your hospitality skills. Trust me, my Yelp review about this place will sting.”
Jordan held the door for Erin and Rhun.
They passed into a sumptuous entry hall, decorated with plump furniture and heavy silk drapery. Beyond that space, a short passage led to bedrooms, a small parlor, and a powder room. The place was kept dark, except for candlelight glowing through a door at the end. Rhun heard a faint voice rising from there. The words were too inaudible to understand, but the accent was unmistakable.
Bernard.
Was someone with him? Patrick had told him on the way up that Bernard’s assistant, Father Gregory, had been coming and going at all hours of the day and night, likely running errands for the cardinal as the man fought to keep his position, to control the gears that his sin had set in motion.
Jordan heard the cardinal, too, and strode briskly down the hall. He took in the surroundings as he went. “Talk about a pretty bird cage,” he mumbled sourly.
Rhun followed.
Erin hovered at his side, clearly worried about his stability, but he waved her forward.
Jordan reached the half-closed door first and rapped a knuckle on it. When his knock went unchallenged, Jordan pushed inside. Erin kept close at his heels, plainly full of questions for Bernard.
Rhun hurried after them. He had much to ask Bernard himself about his lies and half-truths, especially concerning the cardinal’s old friend, the crusader Hugh de Payens.
As Rhun slipped into the room, he saw the disheveled state of Bernard’s temporary desk, the pools of melted candle wax on top, the heavy silk drapes that had been tied closed over the windows.
Something’s not—
The door slammed shut behind him.
He turned too slowly to block the shoulder that rammed into him, knocking him to the floor. Agony lanced through him as he landed on his left side, jarring his stump and closing his vision to a knot.
A dark shape sped past him and struck Jordan a blow to the skull with the bust of a statue. As Jordan collapsed, Erin was grabbed and tossed over the desk, where she hit a draped window and crashed to the floor.
Before Rhun could even sit up, a hand grasped his neck with iron-strong fingers and yanked him high, until only his toes brushed the carpet.
A ghastly chuckle cut through his pain.
Cardinal Bernard leered at him. His scarlet robes hung in tatters on his nearly naked form. Madness crazed his brown eyes.
“Welcome, Knight of Christ . . . welcome to your ruin.”
March 19, 8:02 A.M. CET
Castel Gandolfo, Italy
Dazed by the sudden attack, Erin grabbed the edge of the desk and pulled herself up, ignoring the ache in her side. Her flung body had knocked over the lone candle. The room was now dark, lit only by filtered light coming from the shuttered windows.
Her first thought was: strigoi.
She stumbled to the window behind her and yanked on the drapes. A sash had been knotted over them, keeping them from opening completely, but she managed to part the heavy silk enough to bring sunlight into the room.
Twisting back around, she saw an impossible sight. Cardinal Bernard had Rhun clutched by the throat, pinned against a bookcase. Rags of scarlet draped the man’s nearly naked body, revealing scores of scratches on the white skin beneath, as if he had torn his own robes from his shoulders in a rage.
On the rug behind them, a figure lay unmoving on the floor, blood seeping from his scalp.
Jordan . . .
Rhun seemed to recover from his surprise. A silver blade appeared in his right hand and bit deep into the cardinal’s arm. Fingers released his throat. As Rhun slumped down the bookcase, he lashed at the cardinal—but only swiped through empty air.
Bernard was already across the room, ripping a sword from the wall. The unearthly speed with which he moved told her that the cardinal no longer obeyed the vows of a Sanguinist. Like the strigoi, his power sprang from a darker source.
What had happened?
Jordan stirred, his eyes fluttering open. In the darkness, they shone with a faint golden gleam.
Before Jordan could gather his wits, Bernard rushed Rhun.
Rhun leaped to the side, crashing clumsily into a giant Chinese vase. His natural grace was plainly thrown off balance by his missing arm.
She drew a dagger from an inner sheath in her jacket, ready to defend the others. But she wasn’t a fighter. Her best weapon was her mind. Bernard went after Rhun again, but Jordan broadsided the cardinal, knocking him over a large standing globe.
As the cardinal sprang back up with a snarl—his body framed in a sliver of sunlight—Erin searched his exposed nakedness, looking for a telltale black handprint.
Nothing.
She wasn’t surprised.
How could Legion have possessed the cardinal? Especially while the man was imprisoned here? But if Legion wasn’t the source of this corruption, what was?
Must think . . .
Jordan joined Rhun, both facing down the raving beast that was the cardinal.
Erin studied the room, searching for whatever held the cardinal in thrall. Her gaze swept across the chaos atop his desk. She saw nothing unusual: papers, books, a leather-bound journal. She looked around the base of the desk. As she did so, her toe nudged a black pouch on the floor. Something rolled out the open end.
A piece of black glass.
It seemed to exude darkness. She had seen such a poisonous artifact before: in the Egyptian desert. Rhun had recently led a team to rid the sands of such evil. She dropped to a knee, knowing what rested on the carpet.
A drop of Lucifer’s blood.
She used a piece of paper to scoop the stone up, while grabbing the ties of the bag. Straightening, she rolled that black tear into the pool of sunlight atop the desk and emptied the pouch’s contents beside it. The pile of dark drops seemed to suck in the light, creating little voids in the fabric of the universe. She didn’t need to touch them to sense their malignancy, their wrongness.
But how could she vanquish it?
Sunlight clearly had no effect.
And why should it?
Millennia ago, these drops of Lucifer’s blood had fused with the Egyptian sand, creating a black glass that sealed in their malevolence, protected the darkness within from the light of the sun. If two thousand years of desert heat hadn’t harmed them, then simple Italian sunlight wouldn’t have any effect.
But what if—
Her eyes fell on a toppled stone paperweight on the corner of Bernard’s desk. It was in the shape of an angel—but more important, it was heavy.
She grabbed it, lifted it high, and smashed it down on a dull black drop, shattering it to dust.
Across the room, Bernard howled and hissed.
So you feel that, do you?
She lifted the paperweight again and again, crushing drop after drop. With each strike, a tendril of black smoke rose up from the crystalline powder. It swirled in a circle, snaking away from the exposure of the sun, then over the edge of the desk, where it plunged through the floor.
She remembered Elizabeth’s recounting how the essence of a strigoi would do the same upon the beast’s death, returning to its source.
Lucifer.
As she shattered the last obsidia
n piece, Cardinal Bernard gave out a final gasp, toppling over, his body thudding to the floor.
8:12 A.M.
Rhun knelt over Bernard’s body, his knife at the cardinal’s throat, ready to kill his old friend. Jordan had collected the abandoned sword and stood guard by his shoulder. By now, the two cloaked guards had rushed into the room, sweeping in with weapons bared, drawn by the clatter of the brief fight.
Fearing what other evil might be about, Rhun shouted. “Guard the doors! Let no one in without my word!”
They gave him curt nods and returned to their posts.
As Rhun watched, madness faded from the cardinal’s eyes. It was replaced with something that Rhun had never seen there before.
Doubt.
Rhun leaned back, lifting his blade away, but keeping it ready.
Bernard sat up, gathering the shreds of his robes around himself, as if trying to do the same with his dignity. He ended with his hands trembling in his lap.
Erin came over, still holding a small angelic sculpture. The bottom was cracked, coated with black dust. “It was those drops of Lucifer’s blood.”
Rhun nodded, understanding. “I left them after I returned from Egypt. Locked up in the cardinal’s safe. It’s my fault.”
“No . . .” Bernard shook his head. “It was my hubris, believing I could dabble with such darkness and remain untouched.”
“But why mess with them in the first place?” Jordan asked.
“I hoped to learn something from them, something about Lucifer.” Bernard stared at Rhun. “Last night, when Father Gregory brought word that you were headed back from Prague, that you were coming with questions about stones associated with Lucifer, I remembered what you had brought back from Egypt.”
“The glass stones,” Rhun said.
“I was going to wait until you were all here before examining them, but after Father Gregory fetched them for me from my safe in my old offices, they called to me. I could not resist.”
Rhun nodded, turning to the others. “I saw the same affliction strike members of the team who had traveled with me to Egypt.”
Bernard stared around, a hand rising to touch his forehead in confusion. “I don’t know how long I was under its power. It took me, but it gave nothing in return.”
“But you’re free now,” Erin said. “And we have questions.”
“About Hugh de Payens,” Bernard said with a sad nod. “Father Gregory informed me of this, too. You want the truth about my friend.”
Erin brought a gentler tone to her voice, possibly responding to the pain and sorrow in the cardinal’s voice when he mentioned this figure from his past. “So Hugh didn’t die, as you claimed, during the Second Crusades?”
Bernard’s voice was barely above a whisper. “He did not.”
Erin held an arm toward the cardinal, helping him up. “Jordan, fetch him a blanket.”
Rhun guided Bernard to a set of chairs by the fireplace, careful of the broken pieces of vase on the floor. Jordan returned from a neighboring bedroom with a woolen throw and handed it to Bernard, who wrapped his nakedness, sighing his gratitude, slowly regaining some of his dignity. He looked, again, like the man Rhun had known so long.
Erin sat in a chair across from Bernard, leaning forward. “Tell us what really happened.”
Bernard looked at the cold fireplace, his gaze still lost, slipping into the past. “Hugh took me in when I was a savage beast. He prayed for me when I was lost.”
Rhun had not heard this story. “Are you saying he was the one who converted you, brought you into the Sanguinist fold?”
A small nod confirmed this.
Rhun knew such a monumental act’s significance, how it could deeply bond a pair. It was, in fact, Bernard who had brought Rhun to this holy path, becoming his mentor and friend, and despite the cardinal’s recent actions, he would always owe Bernard a debt of gratitude. The bonds between Bernard and Hugh de Payens must have been equally strong.
“I was a lost savage until he saved me,” Bernard continued. “Together we brought many into the order. Many. We founded the Knights Templar. We did much good.”
“Nine men, bound by blood,” Erin said quietly. “A Sanguinist order of warrior monks.”
“What were these Sanguinist Templars exactly?” Jordan asked.
Bernard glanced to the big man, a touch of pride stiffening his bowed back. “We were a knighthood within a knighthood, capable of fighting a double battle against both the adversaries born of flesh and those spirits risen out of evil. Our armor was our faith, as much as it was our chain mail. We feared neither men nor demons.”
“So you truly are Bernard of Clairvaux?” Erin asked.
“I am. And together, Hugh and I performed great acts, uniting the scattered Templars under a single banner, giving them unity and strength of purpose.” Bernard stared around at them. “You must understand, Hugh was a great leader. Charismatic, sympathetic, empathetic. Men and Sanguinist fell in line behind him, willing to give their lives upon his word. But over time, it became too much.”
“I knew men like that,” Jordan said. “The characteristics that make a man a good leader—like empathy—sometimes make them more susceptible to battle fatigue, to PTSD.”
“What happened to Hugh?” Erin asked.
Bernard sighed heavily. “He abandoned the Templars. After the Second Crusades.” He stared at Rhun. “In truth, he left our order entirely.”
“He left the Sanguinists?” Rhun could not hide his shock.
Sanguinists didn’t leave. They were either killed in service to the Church, or they forsook from their vows, returning to their unholy natures so that they had to be hunted down and slain. The only Sanguinist who had escaped such a fate was Rasputin, who had built his own twisted version of the order within the Russian Orthodox Church, safely entrenched in the city of St. Petersburg, beyond the reach of the Sanguinists.
But apparently there had been one other.
“Where did he go?” Rhun asked.
Bernard looked to his hands. “He sojourned far and wide at first, alone, both hermit and nomad. Eventually he settled in the remote mountains of France, to a hermitage of his own making. There, he found some measure of peace, discovering grace in the wild places of the world.”
“So what are you saying?” Rhun asked. “That he reverted to a strigoi?”
Bernard shook his head.
Rhun struggled to understand. “Then how did he come to live beyond the protection of the Church?”
“He simply did,” Bernard answered evasively, not meeting Rhun’s eye.
It was Erin who clarified some of this story. “That’s why you spread the lie of his death, wasn’t it? Hugh de Payens abandoned the order, but he didn’t return to his savage ways. He found his own path to grace, independent of the Church.”
Rhun stared at her, unable to accept her words. There could be no other path to grace than humble service to the Church. He and all the Sanguinists had been taught this simple truth since the days of Lazarus.
“I could let no one know,” Bernard explained. “What if more Sanguinists were to leave the order? So I made up a story of a noble death, of a life given in service to the Church. But that was only half the reason for the lie”
“What’s the other half?” Erin asked.
“When Hugh spoke of leaving the order, I knew that they would kill him for it. To save him, I made up that story.” Bernard looked to Rhun, as if searching for absolution. “I lied to the order. I lied to the Church. But they would have hunted him down like an animal, and he was no animal. He was my friend.”
Rhun settled heavily to another chair, weakened both by his injuries and by the revelations.
This Sanguinist had found grace outside the Church.
Rhun’s mind whirled. He had joined the Sanguinists because he had thought that it was the only way to live with his curse. The choice offered to him had been a simple one: die as a strigoi or live as a man of the cloth, helping to protect othe
rs. At the time, centuries ago, Rhun had already been on the road to the priesthood, studying in a seminary, so his decision had been an easy one: he would serve. He had thought it the only way.
When Rasputin had left the Church nearly a century ago and built up an army of followers strong enough to protect him from the Church’s justice, Rhun’s faith had not faltered. Rasputin’s life was one of wickedness and deceit, and Rhun would not follow his example. But to hear that there might be another path frightened him and made him angry.
He stared toward the sunlight flowing through the windows.
Has my entire existence been a lie?
8:25 A.M.
Erin noted how Rhun sagged in his chair, reading the forlorn look etched on his face. She knew he had been through too much. He had nearly died and lost his arm, but she suspected this news was a deeper wound, one that would take some time to heal, if it ever did. She could almost see Rhun’s foundation and faith in the Church crumbling beneath him.
But for now, they had more pressing matters to discuss.
She confronted Bernard. “Does Hugh still live?”
“He does.”
Rhun looked sharply at Bernard, but the cardinal would not meet his eye.
“He still maintains his remote hermitage in those mountains,” Bernard admitted.
“Do you know anything about the stones?” Erin nodded to Jordan, who pulled out the pieces of green diamond. “Hugh gave this one to John Dee, and maybe two more like it.”
“I know nothing. It was why I thought to dabble with those cursed drops.”
Jordan pocketed the diamond. “So it sounds like we’re going to have to go to the horse’s mouth. Pay this old guy a visit, if we want any answers.”
Exactly.
“Tell us how we can find him,” Erin urged.
Bernard lifted a hand, but he let it drop to his knee in a gesture of defeat. “One does not simply request an audience with Hugh de Payens. He has no interest in worldly concerns, and his hermitage is well guarded.”
“Guarded?” Jordan frowned. “How?”
“What you must understand, what made Payens such a great leader, was his ability to read another’s heart, to know them often better than they know themselves. And it wasn’t just the hearts of men. He had a keen affinity for all God’s creatures and became a great admirer of St. Francis of Assisi.”
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