The Blood Gospel

with a thud.

She jumped down. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” He didn’t sound fine.

“This time, you go first.”

Erin found his hand and directed him back to the bars. Nate climbed up again, fell again.

“Leave me,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

“You mean to tell me that a strapping Texas boy like you doesn’t have the guts to outclimb a scrawny old lady like me?”

“It’s not about guts.” His quiet voice sounded defeated.

She hated to poke him again, but she did. “Damn right it is. Stop whining, and get your ass up that shaft. I am not going up there just to tell your kid sister that you were killed here because you were too lazy to climb out of a hole.”

Nate stood back up. “I used to like you.”

“Up you go.”

This time she supported his feet when he pushed himself upward. Once braced across the slot, he didn’t need to use his wounded arms, just his back and his legs.

Dirt and stone chips rained down on her as Nate made slow progress upward. She followed, straightening one leg, lifting it up a few inches, then forcing herself to pry the other foot off the wall. Over and over. Inching upward. She had done chimneying before, but always with a rope belay and a flashlight.

“How’re you doing, Nate?”

“Best time I’ve had in days.” He shifted up another few inches.

She smiled grimly. Probably true.

A few more precious feet, and then he slipped.

She caught his calf, forcing it against the wall. He pushed out and stopped his slide.

Her heart raced. She and Nate had almost fallen all the way back down to the cell. With any luck, they would have died on impact. If not, they’d have had the fun of being torn apart by the grimwolf.

But at least they would have died trying.

Dim gray light shone up the shaft.

Someone was coming.

4:05 P.M.

In a private room in the Apostolic Palace, Jordan gritted his teeth. Naked from the waist up, he was lying on his face on a thick wool rug covering a polished wood floor.

Nadia played nursemaid, swabbing the bite wounds on his arm and back—and none too gently.

“Strange tattoo,” she said, noting the Lichtenberg design from the lightning strike.

“I know,” he said, wincing. “You got to die to get one.”

Nadia had sneaked him and Rhun out of St. Peter’s Square through some secret doorway into the Apostolic Palace, where, apparently, the pope lived. She’d rushed them into this simple room with whitewashed walls. The room held an old-fashioned, long wooden table, six heavy chairs, and a macabre crucifix on the wall. After his meeting with Piers, he could hardly stand to look at crucifixes anymore.

Instead, he kept his eyes on the rug. It smelled like a wet sheep.

Nadia wrung out a brown washcloth into a copper basin, its water stained pale pink from Jordan’s blood.

“Where is Bernard?” Rhun paced the room, stopping only long enough to peer out the window into the courtyard below.

“I’ve sent word.” Nadia poked Jordan again.

Ouch. Now she was just being mean.

She drew a glass jar from her backpack. “This might sting.”

“That’s not what you’re supposed to say,” Jordan groused. “You’re supposed to lie.”

“Lying is a sin.”

“Like telling the Cardinal we died.”

Nadia unscrewed the top of a jar that smelled like pitch mixed with horse manure.

“What’s in that stuff?” he asked, changing the tender subject.

She scooped the goop onto her index and middle fingers. “It’s best you don’t know.”

He opened his mouth to insist—then thought better and shut it again. If something made Nadia squeamish, he didn’t want to know.

She slathered the balm into a bite wound on his back. Fire followed in its wake.

He gasped, immediately breaking out into a sweat. “Feels like napalm.”

“I know.” She worked fast, sealing each wound.

He studied a bite on his arm. It had been oozing blood since they’d left Russia, but the stinking salve had stopped the bleeding. He took deep breaths, hoping that the burning would subside. “What’s the plan for finding Erin?”

Rhun kept pacing, his steps quiet on the old rug. “Once the Cardinal arrives, we will put together a team to search for her and the book. The Sanguinists have a wide net of informants, especially in Rome. We’ll find them.”

Near as Jordan could tell, the Sanguinists’ net of informants had been useless so far, but saying that wouldn’t help. He stayed quiet as Nadia roughly bandaged his wounds. She had no future as a nurse.

Nadia tossed him a clean gray T-shirt, and he sat up to put it on. He now looked like a normal guy with a couple of big Band-Aids, instead of the survivor of a strigoi attack.

Progress.

Someone tapped on the door. Before anyone could reach it, it burst open.

The Cardinal stood in the doorway. Scarlet cassock and all.

He was flanked by men wearing blue pantaloons tucked into high black leather boots, blue long-sleeved shirts with flat white collars, white gloves, and black berets. They looked like they had stepped out of another century.

But the Sig Sauers in their hands were plenty modern.

4:12 P.M.

Erin froze as the light grew brighter below. She didn’t want anyone to hear—then realized how ridiculous that was.

The cell had a single exit, and she and Nate were jammed in it, about ten feet up. The strigoi could hear heartbeats, so hiding was useless. The only chance of escape lay in flight.

Above her, Nate scrambled faster. His labored breathing expressed how much this effort cost him. And, since neither he nor Erin knew the length of the shaft, she had no idea if it made any difference. She kept close behind him, hoping for a miracle.

The grimwolf barked up the shaft.

The sound bounced off the stone, as if a pack of hellhounds were coming to get them.

Nate slipped.

Erin braced herself hard against both sides of the slot.

No use.

The impact of his body knocked her loose. She and Nate hurtled downward. Her head and arms glanced off the sides as she tried to slow them.

Then she dropped through empty air, Nate on top of her.

Her back struck not stone, but a figure that crashed to the floor underneath her.

She tried to push Nate off to roll free, but he was too heavy.

A woman snarled Slavic-sounding curses and with sharp elbows drove Erin to the side. Erin rolled off Bathory with no small amount of grim satisfaction.

A hulking strigoi picked Erin up in his left hand, Nate in his right. He must have been seven feet tall, bald, with beady eyes. He was dark-skinned, for a strigoi, and wore dirty cargo pants with a stained white T-shirt. The shirt hugged the contours of his muscular chest. He definitely didn’t have a weapon on his upper body. She looked lower. A dagger in a leather sheath was strapped to his