The Blood Gospel

“Transubstantiation is just a legend.” She tried to explain it to him. “A myth.”

“Like the strigoi?” Rhun interjected. “Those who walk in the night and drink the blood of humans? You could accept them, but you cannot accept that blessed wine is the blood of Christ. Have you no faith at all?”

He sounded more upset by that last detail than by all of her arguments.

“Faith did not serve me well.” She clenched her hands in front of her. “I saw the Church used as a tool of the powerful against the weak, religion used as an obstacle to the truth.”

“Christ is more than the actions of misguided men.” Rhun spoke urgently, as if trying to convert her, as priests so often had. “He lives in our hearts. His miracles sustain us all.”

Jordan cleared his throat. “That’s all well and good, padre. But back to you. How did you become one of these Sanguinists?”

“There is little to tell. Centuries ago, I was bitten by a strigoi, then forced to drink quantities of its blood.” Rhun shuddered. “I was corrupted into one of them, a creature of base desires, a devourer of men.”

“Then what happened?” Jordan asked.

Rhun hurried his words, clearly wanting to be done. “I became strigoi, but instead of turning to their ways, I was offered another path. I was recruited that very night—before I ever tasted human blood—and ordained into the Order of the Sanguines. There I chose to follow Christ. I have followed Him ever since.”

“Followed Him how?” Jordan asked, matching her skepticism. “How does something like you serve the Church?”

“The blessing of Christ’s blood allows the Sanguinists many boons. Like walking under the sun. It also allows us to partake of all that is holy and sacred. Though, like the sun, such holiness still burns our flesh.”

He peeled off one glove. A red blistering marked his palm in the shape of a cross. Erin remembered him clutching his pectoral crucifix a moment before, and imagined it searing into his skin.

Rhun must have read her distress. “The pain reminds us of Christ’s suffering on the cross and serves as a constant remembrance of the oath we took. It is a small price to pay to live under His grace.”

She watched him gently tuck his cross back under the shreds of his cassock. Did the crucifix burn over his heart? Is that why Catholic priests had taken to wearing such prominent crosses, another symbol of a hidden secret? Like the hooded cassock, did such accoutrements allow the Sanguinists to hide in plain sight among their human brothers of the cloth?

She had a thousand other questions.

Jordan had only one. “Then, as a warrior of the Church, who do you fight?”

Again Rhun looked to the desert. “We are called up to battle our feral brothers, the strigoi. We hunt them down and offer them a chance to join the fold of Christ. If they do not, we kill them.”

“And where do we humans fall on your hit list?” Jordan asked.

Rhun’s eyes returned to them. “I have sworn never to take a human life, unless it is to save another.”

Erin found her voice again. “You say your mission is to kill strigoi. Yet it sounds like these creatures did not choose to become what they are, any more than you did, any more than a dog chooses to become rabid when bitten.”

“The strigoi are lower than animals,” Rhun argued. “They have no souls. They exist only to do evil.”

“So your job is to send them back to Hell,” Jordan said.

Rhun’s gaze wavered. “In truth, soulless as they are, we do not know where they go.”

Jordan shifted next to her, lowering his weapon, but he did not relax his stance.

“If strigoi are feral,” Erin asked, “why do they care about this Gospel of Christ?”

Rhun looked ready to explain, but then froze—which immediately set her heart to pounding. He jerked his head to the side, his gaze on the skies.

“A helicopter comes,” he stated bluntly.

Jordan searched around—but only in darting glances, never taking his eyes fully off of Rhun. “I don’t see anything.”

“I hear it.” Rhun cocked his head. “It is one of ours.”

Erin spotted a light in the sky heading toward them fast. “There.”

“What do you mean by ‘one of ours’?” Jordan asked.

“It is from the Church,” Rhun explained. “Those who come will not harm you.”

As she watched the helicopter’s swift approach, Erin felt a nagging worry.

Over the centuries, how many men have died after hearing similar promises?

18

October 26, 8:28 P.M., IST

Caesarea, Israel

Bathory moved silently through the ruins of the hippodrome, shadowed by Magor, who padded quietly behind her. She shared his senses, becoming as much a hunter as the grimwolf. She tasted the salt of the neighboring Mediterranean, a black mirror to her right. She smelled the dust of centuries from the rubble of the ancient stone seats. She caught a distant whiff of horse manure and sweat.