The Blood Gospel

Rhun looked out to the dark desert for that answer. “Strigoi are wild, feral creatures. Born of murder and bloodshed, they serve no one but themselves.”

“And the Sanguinists?”

“All members of the Order of the Sanguines were once strigoi,” Rhun admitted, looking her square in the eye. “But now those in my order serve Christ. It is His blessing that allows us to walk under the light of God’s brightness, to serve as His warriors.”

“So you can walk in daylight?” Jordan asked.

“Yes, but the sun is still painful,” the priest admitted, and touched the hood of his cassock.

She remembered her first sight of Rhun, buried in his cassock, most of his skin covered, wearing dark sunglasses. She wondered if the tradition of Catholic monks wearing hooded robes might not trace back to this Order of the Sanguines, an outward reflection of a deeper secret.

“But without the protection of Christ’s blessing,” Rhun continued, “the touch of the sun will kill a strigoi.”

“And what exactly are these blessings of Christ?” Erin asked, surprised at the mocking edge to her tone, but unable to stop it.

Rhun stared at her for a long moment, as if he were struggling to find the right words to explain a miracle. When he finally spoke, his words were solemn, weighted by a certainty that had been missing from most of her life.

“I follow Christ’s path and have sworn an oath to forsake the drinking of human blood. Such an act is forbidden to us.”

Jordan remained ever practical. “Then what do you feed on, padre?”

Rhun straightened. Pride radiated from him, beating across the desert air toward her. “I am sworn to partake only of His blood.”

His blood …

She heard the emphasis in those last words and knew what that meant.

“You’re talking about the blood of Christ,” she said, surprised now by the absence of mockery in her tone. Raised in a devout sect of Roman Catholicism, she even understood the source of that blood. She flashed to her childhood, kneeling on the dirt floor by the altar, the bitter wine poured on her tongue.

She stared at the water skin in Rhun’s grasp.

But it did not hold water.

Nor did it hold wine—despite what she herself had sipped only moments ago.

She knew what filled Rhun’s flask. “That’s consecrated wine,” she said, pointing to what he held.

He reverentially stroked the wineskin. “More than consecrated.”

She understood that, too. “You mean it’s been transubstantiated.”

She had been taught that word during her earliest catechism and believed it once herself. Transubstantiation was one of the central tenets of Catholicism. That wine consecrated during a Mass became the literal blood of Christ, imbued with His very essence.

Rhun bowed his head in agreement. “True, my blessed vessel holds wine converted into the blood of Christ.”

“Impossible,” she muttered, but the word lacked conviction.

Jordan also wasn’t buying it. “I drank from your flask, padre. It looks like wine, smells like wine, tastes like wine—”

“But it is not,” Rhun broke in. “It is the Blood of Christ.”

The mocking edge returned to Erin’s tone, and it helped to steady her. “So you’re claiming transubstantiation results in a real change, not a metaphorical one?”

Rhun held out his arms. “Am I myself not proof? It is His blood that sustains my order. The act of transubstantiation was both a pact and a promise between Christ and mankind, but even more so for the strigoi whom He sought to save. For a chance to regain our souls, we have sworn off feeding on humans and survive only upon His blessed blood, becoming Knights of Christ, bound by an oath of fealty to serve the Church to the end of our days, when we will be welcomed again to His side. That is our pact with Christ and the Church.”

Erin couldn’t bring herself to believe any of this. Her father would turn over in his grave at the mere thought of Christ’s blood being used in such a way.

Rhun must have read the doubt on her face. “Why do you think the early Christians referred to Communion wine as the ‘medicine of immortality’? Because they knew what has long since been forgotten—but the Church has a much longer memory.”

He turned his wineskin over so that they could see the Vatican seal inscribed on the back: two crossed keys bound with a cord under the triple crown of the triregnum.

His gaze fell upon Erin. “I ask you to believe nothing but what you see with your own eyes and feel with your own heart.”

She sat heavily on a boulder and dropped her head into her hands. She had tasted the wine in his flask. As a scientist, she refused to believe it was anything but wine. Still, she had watched the strigoi feed on blood, watched him drink his wine.

Both had been strengthened.

She struggled to fit the miraculous into a scientific equation.

It was impossible to turn wine into blood, so it must be belief that allowed Rhun to drink wine as if it were blood. It must be some sort of placebo effect.

“You okay, Doc?” Jordan asked.