The Blood Gospel (40 page)

No matter the outcome, if Piers had come here of his own free will, they might never be able to sanctify him enough for him to return to the Sanguinist fold.

Piers cocked his head to the left as they reached the crossroad of corridors. “
Sortie
.”

French for “exit.”

Erin must have understood. He was attempting to direct them to a way out.

She knelt and drew the Odal rune in the dust with her finger. She pointed to it. “Can you show me where the exit is, Piers?”

Jordan held Piers so that he could see the rune. The old man stretched one bone-thin finger to the
left
leg of the rune. Their team had entered through the
right
.

“There’s a second exit,” Erin said, looking up hopefully. “In the other leg of the rune. It must be how his bats came and went.”

Piers closed his paper-white eyelids, and his head fell back on Jordan’s shoulder.

“If we hurry,” Rhun said, “perhaps we
can
get him to the Harmsfeld chapel before sunrise.”

But, even so, a fear nagged at Rhun.

Was it already too late to save Father Piers’s soul?

October 27, 6:45
A.M
., CET

Harmsfeld Mountains, Germany

Bathory gathered her sable-fur coat around her slender form and waited in the dark woods. To the east, the skies had already begun to pale. From the uneasy glances of her restless troops in that direction, it was clear they knew they had only a quarter hour left before sunrise.

The air had turned bitterly cold, as if night sought to concentrate its chill against the coming day. Bathory’s hot breath steamed from her lips—same as the panting wolf, blowing white into the dark forest. The same could not be said of the rest of her forces. They remained as cold and still as the forest as they waited, but not all were equally quiet.

“We must go. Now.” Tarek loomed next to her, his mouth curled in a snarl.

His brother, Rafik, kept tight to his older brother’s legs, his lips still blistered from the intimate moment Bathory had shared with him.

Bathory shook her head. So far, no word had been radioed from the lookout she had left by the motorcycles. The Sanguinists had not returned that way—and she didn’t expect them to. She was certain this was the place where the rabbits would leave the warren.

In her gut, she knew it.

“Never follow an animal into its burrow,” she warned.

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.

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 balcony, 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 …”