The Blood Gospel

The door opened. Alyosha stood there, holding a snow-white fur coat. The strange kid wore only pants and a light shirt, not bothering even with a jacket. Probably why he was always so cold.

Tommy shrugged into the unusual coat. “What’s it made of?”

“Ermine. Very warm.”

Tommy stroked his hand along the front. It was the softest thing he’d ever felt. How many little creatures had been killed and skinned to make it?

Alyosha led the way down a long hall, up a flight of stairs, and through a thick steel door painted black. Paint flaked off into the snow when Alyosha slammed it behind him.

Tommy spun in a slow circle. They were in a city, in a deserted parking lot. Dirty snow had been crossed by many feet. The sky was overcast and dark gray, as if a storm or night threatened.

Seeing his chance to escape, Tommy made a break for it, but Alyosha was suddenly in front of him. Tommy cut to the right, hoping to get around him and run along the side of the building. Alyosha jumped in front of him again. Tommy dodged left.

But Alyosha stopped him yet again.

Tommy pulled out the knife. “Out of my way!”

Alyosha threw back his head and laughed to the uncaring gray clouds.

Tommy tried to turn, to flee, but he slipped on the ice and caught himself before he fell into the dirty snow. Alyosha had just been playing with him. He would never be able to escape. He’d be stuck here forever, eternally bound to this cruel kid.

Alyosha’s gray eyes glittered with malice. He reminded Tommy of a shrike. Shrikes were cute little birds, but they survived by impaling their prey on thorns and waiting for them to bleed to death. Skeletons of smaller birds and mice littered the ground around their nests.

“You won’t let me go, will you?” Tommy asked.

“He cannot let you go,” boomed a voice from behind them.

Tommy spun around so fast he fell. Gray slush stained his coat. Alyosha dragged him up painfully by one arm.

A priest in a black robe crunched across the snow toward them. At first, Tommy thought it was the priest from Masada because he wore the same kind of uniform, but this one was taller and broader, and his eyes were blue instead of brown.

“I have been waiting a very long time for you, Tommy,” the priest said.

“Are you the one who Alyosha says is like me?”

“Alyosha?” The man frowned, then smiled as if at a private joke. “Ah, that is a—how do you Americans call it?—a slang name. His full title is Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, prince of Russia, heir to the true throne of the Russian Empire.”

Tommy frowned, believing the man was joking. “You didn’t answer my question.”

The priest smiled. A cold chill ran down Tommy’s back. “How rude of me. No, I am not like you. I am like Alyosha.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. And we are going to be great friends.”

Above the man’s head, a flock of gray pigeons wheeled—and in their midst, a snow-white bird danced high, finding a beam of light in this gray day. Tommy’s gaze caught upon it, while he remembered the wounded bird back in Masada, the dove with the broken wing. He remembered picking up that injured bird—just before his life fell apart.

Had that act of kindness and mercy doomed him?

He squinted up as the white bird swooped low, passing over the scene. It stared down at Tommy—first with one eye, then the other.

Tommy shuddered and tore his gaze away from the skies.

The bird’s eyes had shone green, like slivers of jeweled malachite.

Same as the dove in Masada.

How could that be? How could any of this be?

Any moment now, I’ll wake in a hospital room with tubes and drugs running into me.

“I want to go back to my old friends,” he said, not caring if he sounded like a petulant child.

“You shall make a great many new friends over the course of your long, long life,” Mr. Rasputin said. “That is your destiny.”

Tommy looked back at the birds. He longed to be up there, flying free with them. Why couldn’t that be his destiny?

To have wings.

65

October 29, 5:54 A.M., CET

The sanctuary below St. Peter’s Basilica, Italy

Rhun touched his cross. They had won the battle. He shuddered to think how close they had come to losing it all. But they had triumphed.

Eleazar paused. He turned the book back to face him and ran his finger under the lines, reading it again, as if he had gotten it wrong the first time. But the words were the same.

“So we won the first battle,” Jordan said.

“But what about this ‘War of the Heavens’ … and the ‘First Angel’?” Erin asked.

“We found the book,” Jordan said with firm conviction. “We can find an angel. I bet the angel is bigger than the book was. How hard can it be, right?”

Erin laughed and leaned against him. “Right.”

The soldier was correct. They had accomplished the impossible once already. Rhun looked to Eleazar. “Where shall we begin?”

Eleazar furrowed his brow. “The prophecy. Return to the prophecy.”

Rhun waited.