The Blood Gospel (43 page)

“None of which we have.” Nadia’s hand stroked her wounded leg. She suddenly looked frail. “We’ll never get Rhun back to the abbey alive if we have to walk.”

“What about the Harmsfeld church?” Erin pointed to the steeple poking above the forest. “You thought it could offer Piers sanctuary. What about Rhun?”

Nadia leaned back. She stroked a hand along the coat covering Rhun.

“We must pray it has what we need.”

7:14
A.M
.

From the shoreline, Jordan watched the fog disperse in tatters in the early morning sunlight. Once it was gone, they’d be exposed beside the lake: three adults with a stolen dory and a badly wounded man.

Not easy to explain that one.

Nadia stepped over to the beached boat and began to haul the unconscious Rhun up in her arms. It was a short hike to the picturesque hamlet of Harmsfeld.

Jordan stepped in to intervene. “Please give him to me.”

“Why? Do you think me too weak for such a task?” Her dark eyes narrowed.

“I think that if anyone sees a woman as small as you carrying a full-grown man as easily as if he were a puppy, it’ll raise questions.”

Reluctantly, she allowed Jordan to hoist Rhun on his shoulder. The priest was deadweight in his arms. If he were a human, he’d be simply dead: cold, no heartbeat, and no breath. Was he even still alive?

Jordan had to trust that Nadia would know.

The woman led them through the surrounding forest at a punishing pace. Jordan soon wished he’d let her carry Rhun until they got within sight of the village.

But in less than ten minutes, they were traipsing across the frost-coated paving stones of the main street. Nadia led them in a seemingly haphazard fashion, stopping occasionally to listen with her head cocked. She probably heard people long before Jordan and Erin could and sought to avoid running into any.

He glanced over at Erin. Like him, she was soaked to the skin. But unlike him, she wasn’t working up heat from carrying a heavy weight. Her blue lips trembled. He had to get her inside and warmed up.

Finally, they reached the village church in the square. The sturdy structure had been constructed out of locally quarried stone centuries ago, its builders forming bricked archways and framing stained-glass windows along both flanks. The single bell spire pointed toward Heaven with what seemed like an unquestioning resolve.

Nadia sprang up the steps and tried the double front doors. Locked.

Jordan eased Rhun to the ground. Maybe he could pick the lock.

Nadia drew back a step, lifted her leg, then kicked the thick wooden doors. They slammed open with a
crack
. Not the quietest way in, but an effective one.

She rushed inside. Jordan picked up Rhun and followed, with Erin close behind. He wanted everyone out of sight before someone noticed that they had broken into a church while carrying a dead man.

Erin tugged the doors closed behind them, likely fearing the same.

Nadia was already at the altar, rooting around. “No consecrated wine,” she said, and in her frustration, she elbowed an empty chalice and sent it crashing to the stone floor.

“Maybe a little quieter?” Jordan hated to upset her.

She uttered something that sounded blasphemous, then stormed toward a wooden crucifix behind the altar. The resemblance of the carved oak figure to Piers was so uncanny that Jordan stepped back a pace.

What was Nadia planning on doing?

October 27, 7:31
A.M
., CET

Harmsfeld Mountains, Germany

Bathory stood before the dead Sanguinist’s body. It was still spiked by crossbow bolts to the trunk of an ancient pine, like some druidic sacrifice.

She gripped one of the bolts by its feathered end and yanked it out of the dead arm, freeing the limb to hang limp and broken. She studied her handiwork with a sigh.

Bright sunlight suffused the glade, melting frost from the yellow linden leaves. There was little evidence of the battle that had been fought here: some torn earth, more than a few rounds of ammunition that peppered tree trunks, and dark splotches of blood soaking into the ground. A good rain, a couple weeks of new growth, and no one would have any clue as to what transpired here.

Except for this damned body bolted to the tree.

She yanked out another bolt, wishing that she could have assigned this job to Tarek, but she couldn’t, not during the day. Even Magor had suffered too much in the sunlight, his body smoking, until she had forced him to retreat into the bunker with the others.

She continued yanking out spikes, slowly freeing the body.

Too bad it wasn’t Korza impaled here. But she had seen him fall after putting six silver slugs into him. He wouldn’t last long in that state. She savored the look of surprise on his face when she shot him. He had thought her Elisabeta—Bathory’s long-dead ancestor, somehow come back to forgive him.

As if that would be enough to atone for his sins.

She pulled the Sanguinist free from the last spike. If the man had been a
strigoi
, the sunlight would have burned him to ash and saved her the trouble.

Resigned, she hurried with this last bit of bloody business as a plan took shape in her mind.

The book was still lost—but she knew where to go to find it.

And more important,
who
could help her.

October 27, 7:35
A.M
., CET

Harmsfeld, Germany

Erin accompanied Jordan as he placed Rhun down in front of the altar. The limp priest lay on the stone floor as if dead.

“Is he still alive?” she asked.

“Barely.” Kneeling, Nadia dribbled wine from her flask into his mouth.

He did not swallow.

That couldn’t be good.

“How can we help?” Jordan asked.

“Stay out of my way.” Nadia cradled Rhun’s head in her lap. “And stay quiet.”

Nadia sorted through the items she had gathered from behind the altar, settling first on the sealed bottle of wine. She pushed in the cork with one long finger.

“I need to consecrate this wine,” she explained.

“You can do that?” Jordan looked at the door, plainly worried about someone coming into the church and interrupting whatever was about to happen.

“Of course she can’t,” Erin said, shocked. “Only a priest can consecrate wine.”

Nadia sniffed derisively. “Dr. Granger, you are enough of an historian to know better, are you not?” She wiped blood off Rhun’s chest with the altar cloth. “Didn’t women perform Mass and consecrate wine in the early days of the Church?”

Erin felt chastened. She
did
know better. In a knee-jerk reaction, she had leaned upon Church dogma, when history plainly contradicted it. She wondered how much she was still her father’s daughter at heart.

That thought stung.

“I’m sorry,” Erin said. “You’re right.”

“The human side of the Church took that power away from women. The Sanguinist side did not,” Nadia said.

“So you can consecrate wine,” Jordan said.

“I did not say that. I said that
women
in the Sanguinist Church can be priests. But I have not yet taken Holy Orders, so I am not yet a priest myself,” Nadia said.

Jordan stared back at the door. Again. “Why don’t we just take this bottle of vino and do whatever you’re planning somewhere else, away from where someone might come barging in at any time? You don’t need to do this in a church, do you?”

“Wine has its greatest healing powers if consecrated and consumed in a church. Holy ground lends it additional power.” Nadia put a hand on Rhun’s chest. “Rhun needs as many advantages as we can give him.”

She poured the last drops of wine from her flask into one of Rhun’s bullet wounds, raising a moan from him.

Erin’s heart leaped with hope. Maybe he wasn’t as bad off as she thought.

Nadia unfastened Rhun’s silver flask from his leg. She trickled more wine down his throat. This time he swallowed.

He drew in a single breath. “Elisabeta?”

Nadia closed her eyes. “No, Rhun. It’s Nadia.”

Rhun looked around, his eyes unfocused.

“You must consecrate this wine.” She wrapped his fingers around the bottle’s green neck. “Or you will die.”

His eyelids drifted closed.

Erin studied the unconscious priest. She didn’t see what could rouse him. “Are you sure that you need to consecrate the wine? Maybe you can just tell him it’s blessed.”

Nadia gave her a venomous look.

“I’ve been wondering, since our time in the desert, if the wine needs to be truly consecrated or if Rhun just needs to
think
it is. Maybe it’s about faith, instead of miracles.” Erin couldn’t believe that these words were coming out of her mouth.

She had seen firsthand what happened when medical care was left to faith and miracles, first with her arm, and then with her baby sister. She shut her eyes, as if doing this would shut out the memory. But the memory came, like it always did.

Her mother had been having a hard birth. Erin and the other women in the compound had watched her labor for days. Summer had come early, and the bedroom was hot and close. It smelled of sweat and blood.

She held her mother’s hand, bathed her brow, and prayed. It was all she could do.

Eventually her sister, Emma, came into the world.

But Emma was feverish from the first. Too weak to cry or suckle, she lay wrapped in her baby quilt, held against her mother’s breast, wide dark eyes open and glassy.

Erin begged her father to take the baby to a real doctor, but he backhanded her, bloodying her nose.

Instead, the women of the compound gathered around her mother’s bed to pray. Her father led the prayers, his deep voice confident that God would hear, and God would save the child. If not, God knew that she wasn’t worth saving.

Erin stayed by her mother’s side, watching Emma’s heartbeat in her soft fontanel, quick as a bird’s. She ached to pick her up, load her on a horse, and take her into town. But her father, seeming to sense her defiance, never left her alone with the baby. All Erin could do was pray, hope, and watch the heartbeat slow and stop.

Emma Granger lived for two days.

Faith did not save Emma.

Erin touched the fabric in her pocket. She had cut it from Emma’s baby quilt before she was wrapped in it for burial. She’d carried it with her every day since, to remind herself to honor the warnings in her heart, to ask the impossible questions, and then, always, to act.

“Nadia,” Erin said. “Try drinking the unconsecrated wine. What have you got to lose?”

Nadia lifted the bottle to her own mouth and took a deep gulp. Red liquid erupted from her throat and sprayed across the floor.

Jordan grimaced. “Guess it doesn’t work that way.”

Nadia wiped her mouth. “It’s about miracles.”

Or maybe it was simply that Nadia didn’t
believe
the wine was Christ’s blood.

But Erin remained silent.

7:44
A.M
.

Rhun longed for death, wishing they’d never woken him.

Pain from his wounds paled in comparison to what he had felt when he saw Elisabeta again in the forest. But it had not truly been her. He knew that. The woman in the forest had red hair, not black. And Elisabeta had been gone for four hundred years.

Who was the woman who had shot him? Some distant descendant? Did it matter?

Darkness folded back over him like a soft cape. He relaxed into it. Silver did not burn him in the warm blackness. He floated there.

Then liquid scalded his lips, and he tried to turn his head away.

“Rhun,” ordered a familiar voice. “You
will
come back to me.”

It wasn’t Elisabeta. This voice sounded angry. Also frightened.

Nadia?

But nothing frightened Nadia.

He forced his heavy eyelids open, heard heartbeats. Erin’s quick one, the soldier’s steady rhythm. So they had both made it out alive.

Good.

Content, he tried to drift away again.

But cold fingers grabbed his chin, pulling him to Nadia’s dark eyes. “You will do this for me, Rhun. I have given you all of your wine—and
mine
. Without it, I, too, will die. That is, unless I break my oath.”

He strove to keep his eyelids open, but they slid closed again. He pushed them open.

“You force this upon me, Rhun.”

Nadia released his head and stood, a quick flash of darkness. She wrapped an arm around Erin’s waist and yanked her head to the side. Erin’s heartbeats sped until each muscular squeeze flowed into the next in one continuous thrumming.

Jordan brought up his submachine gun.

“If you shoot me, soldier, know that I can kill her before the second bullet strikes,” Nadia hissed. “So, Rhun, can you do this?”