The Blood Gospel

Dark blood splattered rough stone walls.

Ahead, the Cardinal grappled hand to hand with three strigoi, proving his spryness.

But at this rate, they’d never reach that tunnel.

Then a voice spoke at his ear, seemingly arriving out of thin air.

“I bring reinforcements.”

He turned to discover the cherubic, bespectacled Brother Leopold at his shoulder. Beyond his small frame, a cadre of Sanguinist monks—twenty strong—fell like rain from the baldachin and landed in a circle around Jordan’s group, already fighting before their feet hit the floor.

Leopold joined Jordan, pushing his eyeglasses higher on his nose, looking more like a kid brother than an undying warrior of Christ.

As if zeroing in on a weaker target, a strigoi lunged out of the darkness behind the short scholar; the flash of sword was the only warning.

Jordan reacted on pure muscle memory. He jerked his machine pistol up and caught the blade, deflecting it from Leopold’s neck. The edge still grazed a bloody line across the young Sanguinist’s shoulders.

The scholar’s eyes grew round.

Angered, the strigoi turned toward Jordan. He was a hulking figure with dark skin and pale tattoos, studs puncturing his nose and ears. Jordan remembered seeing the guy in Germany, at Bathory’s side. He figured him to be some sort of lieutenant for the Belial—which meant he must have helped orchestrate the attack on Jordan’s men in Masada.

The beast smiled, showing teeth.

“Get back, Leopold,” Jordan warned, ready to square off with this bastard, who only kept smiling.

The young monk’s eyes became huge as he stared at Jordan—or rather behind Jordan.

Caught in the reflection of Leopold’s eyeglasses, Jordan spotted movement.

He twirled, his American Bowie knife appearing in his fingers.

A gaunt, skeletal version of the larger lieutenant lunged at him, impossibly wide jaws going for his throat.

Jordan continued his spin and drove the silver-plated blade between those snapping jaws, punching it hilt- deep.

Chew on that.

The creature screamed, jerking straight up into the air like a jack-in-the-box, ripping the knife’s haft from Jordan’s fingers. As it flew high, smoke and boiling blood erupted from its mouth, from the back of its skull.

The body fell and struck the stone, already dead.

A scream of rage erupted behind him. “Rafik!”

Feral, grief-filled eyes fixed on Jordan.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Jordan growled. “Losing someone you love.”

The strigoi launched himself at Jordan, flying through the air, his cloak billowing wide, like a man-size icarops.

Jordan dropped to a knee, tilted his submachine gun up, and unloaded at full auto, shredding the monster in the chest with pure silver. “That’s for my men.”

The strigoi lieutenant clattered to the stone, his body steaming. But he was still alive, in agony, dragging himself toward the impaled Rafik.

Leopold scooped up the monster’s abandoned sword, the very weapon that had come close to killing him. He strode to the struggling strigoi.

The creature had almost reached his goal, extending a bloody arm, his fingers scrabbling to reach the one called Rafik, to touch him one last time.

Mercilessly, Leopold swung the sword in a blurring flash.

The strigoi’s head flew off his body, and the stretching arm fell limply to the floor.

The fingers dropped short, never reaching the other, the two remaining forever separated.

Leopold turned and stared around the cavern, his brow pinched in confusion. “Where did everyone else go?”

Jordan spun, searching the spot where Erin had been a half minute ago.

She was gone.

And Rhun with her.

60

October 28, 5:34 P.M., CET

Necropolis below St. Peter’s Basilica, Italy

Erin twisted to the side as a strigoi’s blade thrust toward her.

Then Rhun was there. He yanked her nearly off her feet and hauled her behind him. With one quick step forward, he slashed his blade across the strigoi’s throat, felling him like a sapling.

She stared around, realizing they were momentarily alone in the tunnel down which Bathory had fled. She glanced back. Out in the main necropolis, Sanguinists were flowing down the columns to join the subterranean battle.

“Return to Jordan when it’s safe,” Rhun said fiercely, brooking no argument as he nodded back to the fighting. “I shall overtake Bathory.”

With a swirl of his cassock, he disappeared down the dark tunnel.

With no choice, Erin faced the battlefield, heard the screams, smelled the blood. She searched the carnage until she spotted Jordan. He stood with his back to one of the metal plinths, firing at another tunnel that disgorged a flow of strigoi.

It was chaos, a hellish Bosch painting come to life.

She would never make it through that gauntlet. If the strigoi didn’t get her, friendly fire might. She turned back toward the empty tunnel that Rhun had taken. It seemed the safest choice.

She kept her light low and to the left, running her right hand along the side of the tunnel, feeling for a side tunnel. If she came to a crossroads and she didn’t know which direction Rhun had taken, she’d have to turn back.

Shots echoed ahead of her, coming from a place where a gray light flowed from around a bend in the tunnel.

She hurried forward—then a fierce, guttural growling flowed back to her, slowing her feet to a more cautious pace.

She brought up Jordan’s Colt, loaded with silver ammunition. She moved more warily as she reached the turn in the tunnel. Step-by-step, she edged around the bend.

The crack of a pistol made her jump.

A short way down the tunnel, she watched Rhun leap with unnatural speed past the bulk of the grimwolf, his gun smoking. Landing beyond it, he lunged down the tunnel, away from the wolf, ready to continue his pursuit of Bathory, who was nowhere in sight—but then he skidded to a stop, turning as he did so with incredible grace.

Over the bulk of the wolf, his eyes found her. No doubt he had heard her heartbeat or noted the shift in shadows as she arrived with her flashlight.

He wasn’t the only one.

The grimwolf jerked around, facing her, its teeth bared, its muscles bunched to spring.

“Erin, run!”

The beast’s ears twitched toward Rhun, but it didn’t turn from Erin.

Rhun came sprinting back, his pistol up, firing at the monster’s hind end.

That got its attention.