The Blood Gospel (14 page)

She wished the camera’s range extended to the back of the room.

Out of those shadows, a woman in civilian clothes appeared, another surprise. She came waving her phone in the familiar pantomime of someone searching for a signal.

The knight turned to the woman and held out his hands to indicate an object the size and shape of a book.

Bathory’s breathing had quickened.

The woman shook her head.

The knight performed a slow circuit of the room. The tomb seemed empty, except for the sarcophagus. No likely hiding places. When the knight’s shoulders slumped, she let out her breath.

So they had
not
found the book.

Either it had never been there, or it had been plundered.

Then the knight grew wise to the presence of Bathory’s team, requiring a swift response. He should have been defeated, but she had underestimated his skill, also the support by the soldiers. He had taken out half of her forces in seconds.

From his performance, she knew the knight below was not new to the cloth, but someone much older, as well blooded as her own forces.

Then, as that knight crossed to crush the ROV camera, she got a full look at his face: his cleft chin, his broad Slavic cheekbones, his intense dark eyes. The shock of recognition immobilized her and left her hollowed out.

But life was not a vacuum.

Into that void, a molten, fiery hatred flowed, filling her anew, forging her into something else, a weapon of fury and vengeance.

She finally moved, clenching her hand into a fist and gouging her ancient ruby ring down the darkened monitor. Like so much that she possessed, the precious ring had been connected to her family for a long time.

As had the knight.

Rhun Korza.

That name had scarred her as surely as the black palm on her neck—and caused her as much pain. All her life, she had been raised on tales of how Korza’s failure had cast her once-proud family into generations of poverty and disgrace. She fingered the edge of her tattoo, a source of constant agony, another debt of blood that she owed that knight.

She flashed to that long-ago ceremony, kneeling before Him to whom she had pledged herself, His hand around her throat, burning in that mark in the shape of His palm and fingers, binding her to Him in servitude.

All because of that knight.

She had seen him in a thousand dreams and had always hoped she might someday find him alive, to make him pay for the deeds that had doomed generations of women in her family to sacrifice, to years of living with torment—enslaved by blood, fated to train, to serve, to wait.

This knowledge came with another truth, a pained realization.

She again felt His strangled hold on her throat, burning away her old life.

Her master must have known that Rhun Korza was the knight sent to Masada to retrieve the book. Yet that secret had been kept from her. He had sent her to face Korza without warning her first.

Why?

Was this to satisfy His own cruel amusements—or was there some greater purpose in all of this?

If she had known that Korza lurked in that tomb, she would never have sent anyone down. She would have waited for the knight to come up with the book, or empty-handed in failure, and shot him off the fissure like a fly off a wall.

The slaughter below told her that Korza was too dangerous to confront in close combat, even if she sent her remaining forces down after him.

But there was another way, a more fitting way.

The anger inside her hardened to a newer purpose.

Before the image went dark, she had spotted the body of one of her team near the tomb’s door, carrying a satchel over one shoulder. An identical pack waited near the top of the fissure.

She turned to the two hunters still in attendance.

Tarek had shaved his head like many of the others and riddled his skin with black tattoos, in his case Bible verses written in Latin. Leather, stitched with human sinew, clad his muscular six-foot frame. Steel piercings cut through lips and nostrils. His black eyes had narrowed to slits, furious at the casualties inflicted by those in the tomb. He wanted revenge. Dealt by his own hands.

“The knight is too dangerous,” she warned. “Especially when backed into a corner. We are down too many to risk sending more.”

Tarek could not argue. They had both witnessed the slaughter on the screen. But there was another option. Not as satisfying, but the end would be the same.

“Blow the fissure.” She motioned to the pack on top and pictured the satchel below. “Kill them all.”

She intended to entomb the knight and his companions, to rebury the secrets here under tons of rock. And if Korza survived the blast, then a slow death trapped beneath all of that stone would be his fate.

For a moment it seemed that Tarek would disobey her order. Fury ruled him, stoked by all the blood. Then his gaze flicked to her neck. To the tattoo. He knew its significance better than any.

To defy her was to defy
Him
.

Tarek bowed his head once, like bending iron—then turned and folded into the night.

She closed her eyes, centering herself, but a low moan caught her attention, reminding her that she still had work to do.

The freckle-faced corporal named Sanderson knelt in the dust, the lone survivor of the massacre on the summit. He’d been stripped to the waist, his head yanked back by nails dug deep into his scalp by the remaining hunter at her side. This one—Rafik, brother to Tarek—was lean, all bone and malice, a useful tool in trying times.

She shifted closer, the soldier’s eyes tracking her.

“I have questions,” she said gently.

He only stared, trembling and sweating, doe-eyed with terror, looking so very young. She once had a brother very much like this one, how he had loved roses and chilled wine, but she had been forbidden from any contact with him after taking His mark. She had to cut away all earthly attachments to her past, binding herself only to Him.

Another loss she placed upon Korza’s shoulders.

She ran the back of her hand down the corporal’s velvety cheek. He was not yet old enough to grow a proper beard. Yet, despite his terror, she read an ember of defiance in his eyes.

She sighed.

As if he had any hope of resisting.

She leaned back and lifted an arm, casting out her desire.

Come
.

The pair—she named them Hunor and Magor, after two Hungarian mythic heroes—were never far from her side, forever bonded to her. Without looking, she felt them push out of the darkness behind her, where they had been feeding, and pad forward. She held out a palm and was met by a warm tongue, a furry muzzle, and a low rumble like thunder beyond the horizon.

She dropped her hand, now damp and weeping with blood.

“They’re still hungry,” she commented, knowing it to be true, feeling an echo of that desire inside her.

The soldier’s eyes widened, straining against the unimaginable. Horror at what stood behind her quashed any further defiance.

She leaned very close. She felt his hot breath, almost tasting his anguish. She moved to his ear and whispered.

“Tell me,” she said, starting with a simple question, “who was that woman down there?”

Before he could answer, the night exploded behind her. Light, sound, and heat erupted from Masada’s summit, shaking the ground, turning darkness to day. Flames blasted out of the chasm, swirling into a cataclysm of smoke and dirt—closing what God had opened only hours ago. She intended to bring this entire mountain down to cover her tracks.

With the detonation, peace again settled over her.

She stared down at the corporal.

She still needed answers.

October 26, 5:14
P.M
., IST

Masada, Israel

Heat scorched Rhun’s back, as hot as the breath of any dragon. He pictured the wall of flames rolling over the top of the sealed dark sarcophagus. But it was the
sound
that hurt the worst. He feared the concussive blast might crack his skull, fountain blood from his ears, and defile this once-sacred space.

Beyond their tomb, stone rained down near the entrance. Unlike the first explosion that had sealed the fissure above, this second one sought to destroy this very chamber.

Thus trapping them.

As fire and fury died down to a rumbling groan, he braced hard against the limestone sides of the tomb. It was fitting that he die in a sarcophagus—trapped as surely as he’d once sealed another behind stone. Indeed, he almost welcomed it. But the woman and soldier had not earned this fate.

He had hurled them both inside the coffin after the first explosion. Knowing this ancient crypt offered the only shelter, he had drawn the stone lid over them, using all of his strength, assisted only slightly by the soldier. If they survived, he did not know how he would explain such strength of limb. The code he lived by demanded that he let them die rather than allow those questions to be asked.

But he could not let them die.

So they crowded together in pitch darkness. He tried to pray, but his senses continued to overwhelm him. He smelled the wine that had once filled this box, the metallic odor of blood that saturated the remains of his clothing, and the burnt paper-and-chalk smell of spent explosives.

None of it masked the simple lavender scent of her hair.

Her heartbeat, swift as a woodlark’s, raced against his chest. The warmth of her trembling body spread along his stomach and legs. He had not been this close to a woman since Elisabeta. It was a small mercy that Erin was turned away from him, her face buried in the soldier’s chest.

He counted her heartbeats, and in that rhythm, he found the peace to pray—until at last silence finally returned to his mind and to the world beyond their small tomb.

She stirred under him, but he touched her shoulder to tell her to be still. He wanted them to wait longer, to be certain that the room had stopped collapsing before he attempted to shift the tomb’s lid. Only then would he know if they were entombed by more rock than even he could lift.

Her breathing slowed, her heart stilled. The soldier, too, calmed.

Finally, Rhun braced his knees against the bottom of the stone box and pushed up with his shoulders. The lid scraped against the sides. He heaved again. The massive weight moved a handsbreadth, then two.

Finally, it tilted and smashed to the floor. They were free, although he feared that they had only traded the small cell for a larger one. But at least the temple held. The men who had dug out this secret chamber had reinforced its walls to hold the tempestuous mountain at bay.

He stood and helped Erin and Jordan out of the sarcophagus. One glowstick had survived the blast and cast a dim glow into the room. He squinted through scorching dust to the tomb’s entrance.

It was an entrance no more.

Earth and rock sealed it from floor to ceiling.

The other two coughed, holding cloths to their faces, filtering the fouled air. They would not last long.

The soldier clicked on a flashlight and shone it toward the doorway. He met Rhun’s eyes and stepped back from him, his face dark with suspicion and wariness.

The woman cast the beam of a second flashlight around the ruined chamber. A layer of dust covered everything, transforming the dead bodies to powdered statues, blunting the horror of the slaughter.

But nothing hid the broken pieces of the sarcophagus’s heavy stone lid. Her light lingered there. Motes of dust drifting through the beam did not obscure the truth of his impossible act in lifting and pushing that stone free.

The soldier did not seem to notice. He faced the blasted doorway as if it were an unsolvable mystery.

Closer at hand, the woman’s light settled on Rhun, as did her soft brown eyes. “Thank you, Father.”

He heard an awkward catch in her voice when she said the word
father
. He found it discomfiting, sensing that she had no faith.

“My name is Rhun,” he whispered. “Rhun Korza.”

He had not shared the intimacy of his full name with another in a long time, but if they were to die here together, he wanted them to know it.

“I’m Erin, and this is Jordan. How—”

The soldier cut her off; cold fury underlay his tone. “Who were they?”

That single question hid another. He recognized it in the man’s voice, read it in his face.

What
were they?

He considered the hidden question. The Church forbade revealing the truth, its most guarded secret. Much could be lost.

But the man was a warrior, like himself. He had stood his ground, faced darkness, and he had paid in blood for a proper answer.

Rhun would honor that sacrifice. He stared the other full in the eye and offered the truth, naming their attackers. “They are
strigoi
.”

His words hung in the air, like the swirling dust, obscuring more than they revealed. Clearly confused, the man cocked his head to the side. The woman, too, studied him, more in curiosity than in anger. Unlike the soldier, she did not seem to blame him for the deaths here.