The Blood Gospel

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.”

“Great. Can’t wait to meet the guy. Must be a real charmer.”

“He is,” Rhun added. “So beware.”

Jordan made an involuntary move for his holster, but they had been forced to leave their weapons in Germany. They flew here by commercial airlines, using false papers prepared by Nadia. But there was no way to smuggle in their weapons.

“What did this Vitandus do?” Erin asked, stamping her cold feet against the stone as if that would warm them. “Who is he?”

Rhun kept his gaze on the bare trees, watchful, wary, with a frightened cast to his eyes. He responded matter-of-factly—though the answer stunned her.

“You know the man better as Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.”

4:52 P.M.

Moving slowly down the tiled path, Rhun fingered his icy rosary and offered a prayer that Grigori would not order them immediately slaughtered, as he had murdered every Sanguinist sent to Russia since 1945. Perhaps the tube that Nadia had handed him offered some hope. She had instructed him to give it to Grigori unopened.

But what was it?

Did he bear a gift or a weapon?

Erin broke into his worries. “Rasputin?” Disbelief rang in her voice, shone in her narrowed eyes. “The Mad Monk of Russia? Confidant to the Romanovs?”

“The same,” he answered.

Such details were what most historians noted about Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. He had been a mystic monk rumored to have healing powers, his fate tied to Czar Nicholas II and his family. In the early 1900s, he had used those powers to ingratiate himself with the czar and his family, seemingly the only one capable of helping their son through his painful illness of hemophilia. For such tender care, they had overlooked his sexual eccentricities and political machinations, until eventually a British secret-service agent and a group of nobles had assassinated him.

Or so it was thought.

Rhun, of course, knew far more.

He drew in a deep breath of cold air. He smelled the fresh tang of snow, the underlying carpet of frostbitten leaves, and the faint tinge of old death.

Here was Russia.

He had not breathed its scent in a hundred years.

Jordan, meanwhile, surveyed the park, ever vigilant as he strode at Rhun’s side.

Rhun followed his gaze. The soldier’s eyes lingered on the dark tree trunks, the low stone wall, the plinth supporting a statue, all places where enemies might hide. He appreciated Jordan’s wariness and suspicion, two valuable traits while standing on Russian soil. But their adversary had not yet arrived. For perhaps another few moments they were still safe.

They stopped at the grim dark statue of a woman staring into the distance, proffering a wreath to the lost citizens of St. Petersburg: the symbol of a mourning motherland.

Jordan blew into his hands to warm them, a gesture that spoke to his humanness and the fire burning inside him. He faced Rhun. “I thought Rasputin died during World War One?”

Erin answered him. “He was assassinated. Poisoned with cyanide, shot four times, beaten with a club, wrapped in a rug, and thrown in the Neva River, where he supposedly drowned.”

“And this guy survived all that?” Jordan said with thick sarcasm. “Sounds like a strigoi to me.”

Erin shook her head. “There are plenty of pictures of him in daylight.”