The Blood Gospel (46 page)

She couldn’t argue with that. With one foot, she kicked the grimwolf jacket onto the floor.

Jordan grinned up at her. “Problem solved.”

She stroked a hand across his jaw. Smooth from his recent shave. She kissed him again. He smelled like eucalyptus shaving cream, and he tasted like coffee.

She pulled back and gazed into those beautiful blue eyes. “Your eyes are Egyptian blue, like the sun god Ra.”

“I’m taking that as a compliment.”

He slid one warm palm around the small of her back, then pulled her so tightly against his chest that she felt his heartbeat against her breast.

She relaxed against him, feeling safe.

Then he shifted his lips, found her mouth, and kissed her hard. A yearning urgency flowed from his lips to hers. She moaned between them and threaded her fingers through his hair, pulling him even closer.

She wanted to forget everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, blot out every bad memory. The only thing she had room for in her head was the two of them. He stroked his hands along her body.

With one arm around her back, he used the other to ease her around and under him on the bed.

She stretched under his weight, feeling his muscular bulk settle upon her. Her hands stroked down his broad back. She slid them under his shirt, felt the smooth warmth of his skin. He pulled his T-shirt over his head in one quick movement, revealing the blaze of his tattoo down one side, the branching fractal marking the lightning strike, a testament to his brief experience of death.

Her finger traced one of the forking lines, raising a shiver over his flesh.

He was far from dead now: his breath heaved, heat radiated from him, his eyes shone deep into hers.

Never breaking from her gaze, he undid the belt of her robe and smoothed back both sides. Only then did his eyes drift down, devouring her body, leaving heat in their wake without him even touching her.

“Wow,” he silently mouthed.

She drew him down to her, gasping when his bare skin touched hers. His mouth found hers again. Erin lost herself in the kiss. Her heart raced against his, and her breath caught, held, then sped, too.

He raised his lips from hers, just a finger’s breadth, and she lifted up to meet them again. He kissed down her throat. She tilted her neck and arched her head back against the pillow, feeling strands of wet hair fall across her face but not wanting to take her hands from his body for even a second to brush them away. His lips moved lower, grazed along the top of her collarbone, ending on the hollow of her throat.

“Erin?” His question brushed soft against her neck.

She knew what he asked, and she knew what she wanted to answer. But she didn’t speak. “Wait.” The word came out breathless. She pushed him away and pulled the robe closed. “Too fast.”

“Slower,” he said. “Got it.”

She tied the robe. Her heart raced, and she wanted nothing more than to flee back to the warmth of his arms. But she didn’t trust that. She couldn’t.

A fist pounded the door.

A voice called through.

Nadia.

“Time to go.”

October 27, 10:10
A.M
., CET

Munich, Germany

As the jet lifted off, Bathory settled into the plane’s soft seat with a sigh. In the darkness of the cargo hold, she felt Magor relax.

Sleep, my darling
, she told him.
We are safe.

For the first time in years, she was flying during the day, and without her
strigoi
. Where she was going, they had more to fear than just sunlight; their very existence put them at risk. It was a dangerous destination, but she felt safer without them.

She had chartered a plane, one whose pilot did not question her when the ground crew loaded the wolf into the cargo hold. He had stayed silent in his covered crate, as ordered, but they must have smelled him, known that he was a huge beast. For the right price, they had said nothing. She stretched luxuriantly in the wide seat of the jet. She had the plane to herself. The only others on board were the captain and the copilot.

How long since she had been so alone? Far from Him and His tools? Years.

She stroked the leather seat appreciatively and pulled up the window shade. Sunlight flooded into the cabin, falling across her legs, warming them. She held her hand palm up to the light, as if she could grasp hold of it. When she tired of that, she turned her attention to the bright landscape below.

The city of Munich gave way to farms, forests, and tiny, one-family homes that spread ever farther apart as the jet headed east. In each house, a family had just had breakfast. A father had kissed a mother good-bye, a child had gathered up a schoolbag and left. Those houses were empty now, but later they would fill again.

What would it be like to live in one of them?

Her destiny had been fated at birth. No simple life of husbands and children and domesticity. She usually felt only contempt for those living such a simple existence, but today she was drawn to its humble charm.

She shook her head. Even if she were free, she would not settle into another prison as a wife and mother. Instead she and Magor would hunt. They could range as far as they liked, living alone, never having to worry that He would punish her, that Tarek would finally have the revenge he had so long sought, not fighting every day for respect, for the right to live to see another sunrise.

Just thinking about it made her tired.

Magor stirred in the cargo hold, sensing her worries.

Rest
, she told him, and he settled back down.

Her fingers stroked the black mark on her neck, the proof that set her apart from others. It would take a miracle for her to erase it, to escape Him.

What if the book could show her just such a miracle?

Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.

Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.

Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land …

Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in
,

And cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

—Deuteronomy 26:16–19

October 27, 4:45
P.M
., Moscow Standard Time

St. Petersburg, Russia

Erin had trudged through Russian customs half asleep, but she woke up fully when she and the two men reached the freezing sidewalk in front of the St. Petersburg airport. Rhun hustled them into a taxi with a broken heater and a driver who obviously had no fear of death. She was too scared to be cold as the driver careened through the thickening snowstorm, talking all the while in Russian.

Eventually the cab slid to a stop in front of what looked like a city park, a large space that was probably green in summer, with tall trees lining both sides. Right now the trees had naked limbs, and the frozen grass would soon be buried under thick white snow.

She could not believe how far she had come from the searing heat of Masada. Yesterday morning, her biggest weather worry had been sunburn; today it was hypothermia. As she climbed from the taxi, the St. Petersburg wind cut through her grimwolf leather coat and sucked warmth from the marrow of her bones. Instead of sand, gritty snowflakes stung her cheeks.

Overhead, the sun had changed into a pearly disk struggling to cast a white glow through banks of cloud, providing little light and less warmth.

Jordan walked close at her side as they crossed under a stone arch and into the park. She suspected that he wanted to take her hand, but she punched her fists deep in her pockets and kept walking. He looked hurt, and she couldn’t blame him, but she didn’t know what to do with him. She had been very close to making love to him back in Germany and was terrified by what would have happened if she had. She liked Jordan far too much already.

With each step, her sneakers slipped on the ice-glazed stone tiles of the path. To either side, the earth had been raised into knee-high grassy mounds. She eyed them, wondering what they were for.

Jordan had turned up his collar, his nose and cheeks already red. She remembered the feel of his jaw under her lips, the heat of his lips against her skin, and quickly looked away.

A few steps ahead, Rhun hadn’t bothered with a coat and strode in a billowing black cassock, white hands at his sides, looking as comfortable as he had in hundred-degree heat atop Masada. In one hand, he carried the long leather cylinder that Nadia had left for them in Germany. Erin had no idea what it contained and suspected that Rhun didn’t either. Before Nadia had given it to him, she had sealed the cylinder with golden wax and imprinted it with the papal seal—two crossed keys tied with a band and topped by the triple crown of the pope.

“Okay, Rhun.” Jordan stepped up on the priest’s right side. “Why are we here? Why did we come to this freezing park?”

Erin moved to Rhun’s other side to hear the answer. He had told them only that their destination was St. Petersburg, that Russian forces might have brought the book to the city after the war. Erin had already surmised as much, picturing the dead Russian soldier in the bunker, remembering Nadia reading the Cyrillic orders. The soldier had been dispatched from this city.

Erin also knew the man had a wife and a child, a daughter who might still be alive, living in St. Petersburg, unaware that some strangers knew more about her father’s death than she did.

Erin was glad that she had given Nadia the letters from the bunker to pass along to Brother Leopold. Maybe their efforts would bring the woman a small measure of peace.

“Rhun?” Erin pressed him, wanting to know more, deserving to know more.

The priest stopped and looked across the snow-covered mounds toward a copse of skeletal trees. Wind rattled stubborn and ragged leaves. “We have come here to ask permission to seek the book on Russian soil.”

“Why?” Jordan said. “I thought Sanguinists didn’t ask for permission.”

Rhun’s poker face concealed his emotions, but Erin sensed fear from him. She hated to imagine something terrible enough to frighten Rhun.

“St. Petersburg is not in our domain,” he answered cryptically.

“Then whose is it?” Jordan asked. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Catholic Church has a renewed presence here.”

Erin stuffed her hands deeper into cold pockets and stared at the path’s end, where she saw a large bronze statue of a woman in a broad skirt holding an object up into the air. Erin squinted, but couldn’t quite make out what it was. She searched around the space. She had thought this was a city park, but an air of sadness permeated the air. She could not imagine children ever playing here.

“The Vitandus rules this land,” Rhun answered Jordan. The priest touched the leather cylinder slung over his shoulder as if to reassure himself that he had not lost it. “And he has no love for the Church. When he comes, tell him nothing about our mission or yourselves.”

“What’s a Vitandus?” Jordan asked.

Erin knew that answer. “It is a title given as a punishment. There is no worse religious condemnation from the Church. It’s worse than excommunication. More like a permanent banishment and shunning.”