Innocent Blood Read online

  “I do not know how.”

  “Nor do I.”

  With the slightest provocation, the moth would stab the monk with its sharp proboscis, releasing a single drop of blood, killing him instantly.

  “Yet she survived,” Judas said. “And she is now reunited with the Warrior, but not yet the Knight. Do you know why they are not reunited with Father Rhun Korza?”

  “No.” The monk dropped his eyes to his rosary. If he died now, in sin instead of in holy battle, his soul would be damned for all eternity. He must be thinking about that.

  Judas gave him an extra moment to dwell on it, then explained. “Because Rhun Korza is missing.”

  “Missing?” For the first time, the monk looked surprised.

  “A few days after Korza fed on her, he disappeared from the view of the Church. And all others.” The moth’s wings shivered in the air currents. “Now bodies litter the streets of Rome, as a monster dares to prey along the edge of the Holy City itself. It is not a strigoi under my control or under theirs. They fear it might be their precious Rhun Korza, returned to a feral state.”

  Brother Leopold met his eyes. “What would you have me do? Kill him?”

  “As if you could. No, my dear brother, that task goes to another. Your task is to watch and report. And never again keep any detail to yourself.” He lifted his hand, and the moth took flight from the monk’s shoulder and returned to its creator’s outstretched palm. “If you fail me, you fail Christ.”

  Brother Leopold stared upon him, his eyes looking both relieved and exultant. “I will not falter again.”

  8

  December 18, 7:45 P.M. PST

  San Francisco, California

  At least the restaurant is empty.

  Erin heaved a sigh of relief as she sat down with Christian and Jordan at a small battle-scarred booth in the Haight-Ashbury district. They had dumped Nate off at his campus apartment at Stanford, then whisked away into the anonymity of San Francisco, taking a circuitous path to the small diner.

  She picked up the menu—not that she was hungry, just needing something to do with her hands. The weight of her Glock was again in her ankle holster. She carried Jordan’s Colt in the deep pocket of her winter jacket. Their combined weight helped ground her.

  She studied the ramshackle eatery, with its black-and-white paintings of skulls and flowers. The only nods to Christmas were ragged plastic poinsettias gracing each table.

  Jordan took her right hand in his left. Even in the harsh, unflattering light, he looked good. A smudge of dust ran across one cheek. She reached out with her napkin and wiped it away, her fingers lingering there.

  His eyes darkened, and he gave her a suggestive smile.

  Across the booth, Christian cleared his throat.

  Jordan straightened but kept hold of her hand. “Nice place you picked out,” he said, craning to look around at the tie-dyed rainbows that decorated the back wall. “So were you a Deadhead in a past life or just stuck in the sixties?”

  Hiding a smile behind her menu, Erin saw the fare was all vegan.

  Jordan’s going to love that.

  “This place is far nicer now than it was in the sixties,” Christian said, revealing a hint of his own past, of a prior life in the city. “Back then, you could barely breathe from the fog of pot smoke and patchouli in here. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the establishment’s contempt for authority. I’m willing to bet my life that there aren’t any surveillance cameras in this building or electronic monitoring devices. The fewer prying eyes, the better.”

  Erin appreciated the Sanguinist’s level of paranoia, especially after the attack.

  “Are you truly that worried about a mole in your order?” Jordan asked.

  “Someone knew Erin would be alone at that ranch. For now, it’s best we fly under the radar. At least until we reach Rome.”

  “That sounds fine to me,” Erin said. “What did you mean when you said I’m the only one who can find Rhun?”

  During the ride to the restaurant, Christian had refused to talk. Even now, he glanced once around the room, then leaned forward. “I have heard from Sergeant Stone that Rhun fed on you during the battle below St. Peter’s. Is that true?”

  She let go of Jordan’s hand, studying the napkin in her lap so that he couldn’t see her expression when she thought of the intimacy that she had shared with Rhun. She flashed to those sharp teeth sinking into her flesh, balancing between pain and bliss as his lips burned her skin, his tongue probing the wounds wider to drink more deeply.

  “He did,” she mumbled. “But he had to. There was no other way to catch the grimwolf and Bathory Darabont. Without our actions, the Blood Gospel would have been lost.”

  Jordan slipped his arm around her shoulders, and she shrugged it off. Surprise flashed across his eyes. She didn’t want to hurt him, but she didn’t want anyone touching her right now.

  “I am not here to judge Rhun,” Christian said. “The situation was extraordinary. You don’t need to explain it to me. I’m more interested in what’s happened to you after that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you had visions? Feelings that you cannot explain?”

  She closed her eyes. Relief flooded through her. So there might be an explanation for her blackouts.

  I’m not going crazy after all.

  Christian must have noticed her reaction. “You have had visions. Thank God.”

  “Someone want to explain this to me?” Jordan asked.

  In retrospect, she should have told him about the blackouts. But she hadn’t wanted to think about them, let alone share them.

  Christian explained to both of them. “When a strigoi feeds on someone and the victim lives—which is a rare occurrence—the blood forms a bond between them. It lasts until the strigoi feeds again and erases that bond with a wash of new blood.”

  Jordan looked sick.

  A young server came by at that moment, his hair in blond dreadlocks, with a pad in hand, a pencil behind his ear. He was waved off after a round of black coffee was ordered.

  Erin waited until the kid was out of earshot, then pressed on. “But what I’ve been experiencing makes no sense. It’s dark. Totally black. I have an intense claustrophobic feeling of being trapped. It’s as if I’m encased in a sarcophagus or coffin.”

  “Like back in Masada?” Jordan asked.

  She took his hand again, appreciating the heat of his palm, partially apologizing for snubbing him a moment ago. “That’s what I thought. I thought it was a panic attack. I dismissed the episodes as flashbacks to that moment when we were stuck in that ancient crypt. But certain details of those visions had struck me as odd. The box was cold, but it felt like I was lying in acid. It soaked through my clothes and burned my skin. And even stranger, everything smelled like wine.”

  “Wine?” Christian asked, sitting straighter.

  She nodded.

  “If you were channeling Rhun during those visions, a bath of consecrated wine would burn.” Christian fixed her with his sharp green eyes. “Do you have any idea where this box might be? Could you hear anything?”

  She slowly shook her head, trying to think of more details, but failing. “I’m sorry.”

  All she remembered was that pain, sensing that what she had felt was only the tiniest fraction of what Rhun must be experiencing. How long had he been trapped there? Christian had said Rhun had gone missing shortly after the battle. That was two months ago. She couldn’t abandon him to that.

  Another insight chilled her. “Christian, with each of these visions I feel weaker, more leaden. In the last, I could barely lift my arms.”

  Christian’s expression confirmed her worst fear.

  It likely meant Rhun was dying.

  Christian reached and touched her arm, trying to reassure her. “The best plan is to get to Rome. Cardinal Bernard has more knowledge of this kind of bond than I do. It was more common in the early days of the Church.”

  They were s
cheduled to leave by chartered plane in another two hours.

  “And if we do find Rhun,” Erin asked, “what do we do after that?”

  She feared she would be tossed aside again, summarily dismissed, like before.

  “Then we all go in search of the First Angel,” Christian said.

  The First Angel.

  She knew all too well the prophecy concerning that mythic figure. She pictured the words inscribed on the first page of the Blood Gospel, words written by Christ, a prediction of a coming war—and a way to avert it.

  A great War of the Heavens looms. For the forces of goodness to prevail, a Weapon must be forged of this Gospel written in my own blood. The trio of prophecy must bring the book to the First Angel for his blessing. Only thus may they secure salvation for the world.

  “The time for waiting is past,” Christian pressed. “Especially after someone moved against you, Erin. They clearly know now how valuable you are.”

  “Valuable?” She couldn’t keep a scoffing, bitter tone from that word.

  “The prophecy says the trio must carry the book to the First Angel. The Knight of Christ, the Warrior of Man, and the Woman of Learning. Jordan and you are the last two. Rhun the first.”

  “But I thought it was clear that I am not the Woman of Learning.” She kept her voice steady and forced out the next sentence. “I’m pretty sure I killed her.”

  Jordan squeezed her hand. She had shot Bathory Darabont in the tunnels under Rome. Not only had she taken the woman’s life, but the Bathory family was long thought to be the true line from which the Woman of Learning would emerge. Erin’s bullet had ended that line, murdering the last living descendant.

  “Darabont is indeed dead and with her that cursed line.” Christian sighed, leaning back with a shrug. “So it looks like you’re the best we’ve got, Dr. Erin Granger. What’s the point in second-guessing?”

  The coffee finally arrived, allowing them to collect their thoughts.

  Once the server was gone, Jordan took a sip, winced at the blistering heat, and nodded to Christian. “I agree with him. Let’s go find this angel dude.”

  As if it could be so easy.

  No one had the faintest idea who the First Angel was.

  9

  December 19, 6:32 A.M.

  The Arctic Ocean

  Tommy Bolar’s teeth ached from the cold. He hadn’t known that was possible. Standing at the ship’s rail in the darkness of the early Arctic morning, a rigid wind burned his exposed cheeks. White ice stretched to the horizon ahead. Behind the ship, a crushed wake of blue ice and black water marked the passage of the icebreaker through the frozen landscape.

  He stared out, despairing. He had no idea where he was.

  Or for that matter, what he was.

  All he knew was that he was no longer the same fourteen-year-old boy who had watched his parents die in his arms atop the ruins of Masada, victims of a poison gas that killed them and healed him. He glanced at the bit of bare skin showing between his deerskin gloves and the sleeves of his high-tech down parka. Once, a brown patch of melanoma had stuck out on his pale wrist, showing his terminal condition—now it was gone, along with the rest of his cancer. Even his hair, lost to chemo, had begun to grow back.

  He had been cured.

  Or cursed. Depending on how you looked at it.

  He wished he had died on that mountaintop with his parents. Instead, he had been kidnapped from an Israeli military hospital, stolen from the faceless doctors who had been trying to understand his miraculous survival. His latest jailers claimed he had more than survived the tragedy at Masada, insisted he had been more than cured of his cancer.

  They said he could never die.

  And worst of all, he had begun to believe them.

  A tear rolled from his cheek, leaving a hot trail across his frozen skin.

  He wiped it away with the back of his glove, growing angry, frustrated, wanting to scream at the endless expanse—not for help, but for release, to see his mother and father again.

  Two months ago, someone had drugged him, and he woke up here, on this giant icebreaker in the middle of a frozen ocean. The ship was newly painted, mostly black, the cabins stacked on top like red LEGO bricks. So far he had counted roughly a hundred crewmembers aboard, memorizing faces, learning the ship’s routine.

  For now, escape was impossible—but knowledge was power.

  It was one of the reasons he spent so much time in the ship’s library, sifting through the few books in English, trying to learn as much as he could.

  Any other inquiries fell on deaf ears. The crew spoke Russian, and none of them would talk to him. Only two people aboard the icebreaker ever spoke to him—and they terrified him, though he did his best to hide it.

  As if summoned by his thoughts, Alyosha joined him at the rail. He carried two rapiers and passed one over. The Russian boy looked the same age as Tommy, but that face was a lie. Alyosha was lots older, decades older. Proving his inhumanity, Alyosha wore a pair of gray flannel pants and a perfectly pressed white shirt, open at the collar, exposing his pale throat to the frigid wind that raked across this empty corner of the icy deck. A real person would freeze to death in that outfit.

  Tommy accepted the rapier, knowing that if he touched Alyosha’s bare hand, he would find it as cold as the ice crusting the ship’s rail.

  Alyosha was an undying creature called a strigoi.

  Immortal, like Tommy, but also very different from himself.

  Shortly after Tommy’s kidnapping, Alyosha had pressed Tommy’s hand to his cold chest, revealing the creature’s lack of a heartbeat. He had shown Tommy his fangs, how his canine teeth could push into and out of his gums at will. But the biggest difference between them was that Alyosha fed on human blood.

  Tommy was nothing like him.

  He still ate regular food, still had a heartbeat, still had his same teeth.

  So what am I?

  It seemed even his captor—Alyosha’s master—didn’t know. Or at least, never shared this knowledge.

  Alyosha clouted him on the head with the hilt of his rapier to gain his attention. “You must attend to what I am saying. We must practice.”

  Tommy followed him out onto the makeshift fencing strip on the ship’s deck and took his position.

  “No!” his competitor scolded. “Widen your stance! And keep the rapier up to cover yourself.”

  Alyosha, apparently bored on the giant ship, was teaching him the manners of a Russian nobleman. Besides these fencing lessons, the boy taught him a lot of terms for horses, horse tack, and cavalry formations.

  Tommy understood the other’s obsession. He had been told Alyosha’s real name: Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov. In the library, he had found a text on Russian history, discovered more about this “boy.” A hundred years ago he had been the son of Czar Nicholas II, a royal prince of the Russian Empire. As a kid, Alyosha had suffered from hemophilia, and according to the book, only one person could relieve him of his painful bouts of internal bleeding, the same man who would eventually become his master, turning the prince into a monster.

  He pictured Alyosha’s master, with his thick beard and dark face, hidden elsewhere aboard the ship, like a black spider in a web. He was known in the early 1900s as the Mad Monk of Russia, but his real name was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. The history texts detailed how the monk had made friends with the Romanovs, becoming an invaluable counselor to the czar. But other sections hinted at Rasputin’s sexual weirdness and political intrigues, which eventually led to an assassination attempt by a group of nobles.

  The monk had been poisoned, shot in the head, beaten with a club, and dumped in a frozen river—only to come back up sputtering, still alive. The books said he eventually drowned in that river, but Tommy knew the truth.

  It wasn’t so easy to kill a monster.

  Like the boy-prince, Rasputin was a strigoi.

  Quick as a cobra strike, Alyosha lunged across the fencing strip, feinting right, then moving
left, almost too fast to see. The tip of his rapier landed in the center of Tommy’s chest, the point poking through his parka and piercing his skin. These were not practice swords with blunted ends. Tommy knew Alyosha could have skewered his heart if he had wanted to.

  Not that it would have killed Tommy.

  It would have hurt, likely left him bedridden and weak for a day or two, but he would have healed, cursed as he was atop Masada with an immortal life.

  Alyosha smiled and stepped back, sweeping his rapier with a triumphant wave. He was close to Tommy’s height, with wiry arms and legs. But he was far stronger and faster.

  Tommy’s curse offered him no such advantages of strength and speed.

  Still, he did his best to parry the next few attacks. They danced back and forth along the fencing strip. Tommy quickly grew exhausted, sapped by the cold.

  As they paused for a breath, a loud crack drew Tommy’s attention past the starboard rail. The deck canted underfoot. The bow of the ship rose slightly, then crashed down onto thick plates of ice. Its giant engines ground the ship forward, continuing its slow passage through the Arctic sea.

  He watched great sheets of ice shear away and scrape along the hull and wondered what would happen if he jumped.

  Would I die?

  Fear kept him from testing it. While he might not be able to die, he could suffer. He’d wait for a better chance.

  Alyosha burst forward and slapped him across the cheek with his sword.

  The sting reminded him that life was pain.

  “Enough!” Alyosha demanded. “Keep alert, my friend!”

  Friend . . .

  Tommy wanted to scoff at such a label, but he kept silent. He knew in some ways this young prince was lonely, enjoying the companionship, even if forced, of another kid.

  Still, Tommy wasn’t fooled.

  Alyosha was no boy.

  So he returned to a defensive stance at his end of the strip. That was his only option for now. He would bide his time, learn what he could, and keep himself fit.