The Blood Gospel

Elizabeth Bathory, also known as the Blood Countess, was often referred to as the most prolific and cruel serial killer of all time. In the 1600s, over the course of decades, the wealthy and powerful Hungarian countess had tortured and killed many young girls. Estimates of the number of her victims ranged well into the hundreds. It was said that she bathed in the blood of her victims, seeking eternal youth.

Such stories smacked of vampirism.

Did Rhun create that monster? Did he have those young girls’ blood on his hands? Was that what haunted him every time he drank his transubstantiated wine?

A tragic sigh drew Erin’s attention to the altar, back to the present. “You mentioned a gift on the car ride over here,” Rasputin said, pointing to the leather tube over Rhun’s shoulder. “Let me see it, and we shall see what it buys you.”

Rhun pulled the tube from his back.

Rasputin motioned to Erin and Jordan like an excited schoolboy. “Come, let us all see.”

As Erin left the pew with Jordan, Rasputin’s acolytes cleared the altar, stripping it down to bare marble. Once finished, they were waved away to make room for Rhun, Erin, and Jordan.

She climbed the altar, the air richer in incense and the scent of burning candles.

Once they were all gathered around the altar, Rasputin rested his fists on his hips and looked avidly at the long brown leather tube. “Show me,” he ordered.

Rhun ran a sharp nail through the papal seal and lifted the top off. He stared inside, his brows pinching together, then shook the contents onto the marble surface. A rolled-up piece of old canvas slid out and landed on the altar, unfurling slightly.

Rasputin leaned closer, and with gentle care, respecting the age of the canvas, he rolled it wide for all to see.

Erin gasped at the painting revealed under the candlelight. She recognized the work immediately. Painted by the deft hand of the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn.

It was an original.

It depicted Christ performing his most powerful miracle.

Raising Lazarus from the dead.

6:04 P.M.

Grigori dropped to his knees in supplication before the altar, before the oil painting, and one by one, his dark congregation followed suit.

Rhun remained standing, staring down at the image of Lazarus in his stone tomb.

It was a stunning rendition of that moment, a secret known to Rembrandt and recorded in his painting. The work was one of three known to exist.

In beautiful, evocative strokes, Rembrandt revealed Lazarus, clad in his death shroud, rising from his granite sarcophagus. To the side, family members started back in horror. These spectators to the scene held up their hands as if to protect themselves from the man they had once loved. To them, this was not a joyous moment of resurrection. For they knew what had killed Lazarus.

“The first Sanguinist.” Erin’s whisper carried across the now-silent church.

Yes, those beside the tomb had witnessed the birth of the Order of the Sanguines. Lazarus had been attacked and turned to a strigoi, but his family had found him and sealed him into a crypt before he was able to feed on a human victim. There they doomed him to a slow death by starvation. But Christ arrived and set him free. For on that day Christ offered Lazarus a choice that no strigoi before could ever have been offered. Lazarus could not change his nature, but he could use Christ’s love and blood to struggle against it. He could choose to serve Christ, and perhaps someday see the resurrection of his own soul.

This pact of duty, of service as a Knight of Christ, was represented in the painting by weaponry—the sheathed sword and sheaf of arrows—hanging above Lazarus’s crypt, ready to be taken up in service of the new Church.

From that moment onward, Lazarus had accepted his burden and formed the Sanguinist side of the Church. Fresh from his crypt, he had never tasted human blood. He had always found sustenance simply in the blood of Christ. Only one other Sanguinist, since the dawn of time, had started his next existence ready to follow in Lazarus’s footsteps; only one other had been turned before his first kill.

Pure. Untainted.

Long ago, Rhun had been that Sanguinist. He had thought himself worthy of prophecy. Had believed in his goodness. Had taken solace in his pride. Until the day he tasted Elisabeta’s blood. The day he created a monster.

In that moment he had fallen. Only the One had ever kept himself undefiled.

Lazarus.

Their true father.

Even Grigori recognized that role. He traced the holy form of Lazarus on the painting, his finger slowing as it crossed a thin line of red dripping from the corner of Lazarus’s mouth.