The Blood Gospel

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.