Earlier today, Baako had climbed down this recently discovered tunnel, returning with the news that the shaft led straight to the sibyl’s temple. A horrific battle had been fought in that cavern a few months back, when an innocent boy had been used as a sacrificial lamb in an attempt to open a gate to Hell. The effort had failed, and afterward a giant earthquake had sealed the place up.
As he crawled, another voice in a lilting Indian accent urged him from behind, poking fun at him. “Maybe you shouldn’t have had such a big breakfast.”
He glanced back toward Sophia, making out her lithe shadowy form. Unlike the dour Baako, this particular Sanguinist always seemed on the verge of laughter, a perpetual shadow of a smile on her lips, her dark eyes shining with amusement. He usually appreciated her good humor.
Not now.
He rubbed dust from his stinging eyes.
“At least, I still eat breakfast,” he called back to her.
Jordan gritted his teeth and continued onward, wanting to see for himself what remained of that temple in the aftermath of the battle. Following the quake, the Vatican had cordoned off this entire volcanic mountain. The church could not let anyone find the bodies below, especially those of the strigoi and their dead Sanguinist brothers and sisters.
A typical cover-your-ass operation.
And as the Vatican was his new employer after the army reassigned him here, he found himself a part of that cleanup detail. But he wasn’t complaining. It meant more time with Erin.
Still, while that should have thrilled him, something nagged at the corners of his mind, a dark shadow that dampened his emotions. It wasn’t that he didn’t still love her. He did. She was as brilliant and sexy and funny as ever, but those qualities seemed to matter less to him every day.
Everything seemed to matter less.
She clearly sensed it, too. He found her staring quizzically at him, often with a pained expression. Whenever she brought it up, he brushed her concerns away, dismissing them with some joke or a smile that never reached his heart.
What the hell is wrong with me?
He didn’t know, so he did what he always did best: he put one foot in front of the other. He kept working, keeping himself distracted. Everything would get sorted out in the end.
Or at least, I hope it will.
And if nothing else, working here offered him some space from Erin, allowing him to try to find that center that he seemed to have lost. Not that he had found himself with much free time. Over the past week, they had been moving bodies from the mountain’s outermost tunnels, letting the strigoi remains burn away under the Italian sun, and securing the bodies of the Sanguinists for proper burial. Jordan’s background with the Army had been in forensic investigations. It was a skill set much suited to the task at hand.
Especially when this tunnel was discovered.
Nobody remembered seeing this mystery passageway before, and from the freshly excavated appearance of the surrounding walls, it looked to have been dug recently.
A fact that presented an interesting dilemma: was the tunnel formed by someone digging down into that inner temple cavern or someone clawing their way out from below?
Neither prospect was a good one, but Jordan had come down to investigate.
As last, he spilled painfully out of the tunnel and sprawled onto a rough stone floor. Baako helped him up, pulling him to his feet as effortlessly as if lifting a small child instead of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall soldier.
A small lamp on the cavern floor offered some illumination, but Jordan flicked on his helmet light as Sophia climbed out of the tunnel, rolling gracefully to her feet, looking barely disheveled.
“Show-off,” he scolded, brushing dust from his clothes.
That perpetual ghost of a smile grew wider. She combed her short-cropped black hair from her wide brown cheeks as she searched. With her sharp unnatural gaze, she didn’t need the lamp or his helmet light to take in the room.
Jordan envied such night-vision. Stretching a kink out of his neck, he began his own search. As he drew in a deep breath, the smell of sulfur filled his nostrils, but it wasn’t as intense as when he was last down here, during the battle, when a wide crack in the floor had been fuming with smoke and fiery brimstone.
Still, a new odor underlay the sulfur.
The familiar reek of the dead.
Jordan noted the corpses of several strigoi scattered to his right, their bodies broken and burned, their flesh cracked and split. A part of him wanted to turn and run, a natural instinct when faced with such a slaughterhouse of horror, but he had a duty here. Leaning hard on his background to settle himself, he took out a video camera and filmed the room. He took his time, making sure that he captured each body, more out of force of habit than anything else. He had worked as a crime scene investigator as part of the Army’s Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facility in Afghanistan, and he had learned to be thorough.
He moved deeper into the cavern, filming the stone altar, trying not to remember the young boy, Tommy, who had been chained there, his lifeblood dripping to the floor. The boy’s angelic blood was the catalyst to open a gateway to the underworld, and in the end, it was the same boy’s bravery that was instrumental in closing it.
Tommy had left his mark on Jordan, too, healing him with a touch of his palm. Jordan could still feel that imprint, and it seemed to burn brighter with every passing day.
“Well,” Baako said, drawing him back to the present, “what do you think?”
Jordan lowered his camera. “It . . . it’s definitely changed since we were last here.”
“How so?” Sophia asked, joining them.
Jordan pointed to a pile of dead rats in the far corner. “They’re new.”
Baako crossed over, picked up one of the tiny bodies, and sniffed at it. The action made Jordan cringe.
“Interesting,” Baako said.
“How’s that interesting?” Jordan asked.
“It’s been drained of blood.”
Sophia took the rat, examined it herself, and confirmed the same. “Baako is right.”
The small Indian woman offered the dead body to Jordan.
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “But if you’re right, that means something was down here, feeding on those rats.”
Which could only mean one thing . . .
Jordan dropped his hand to the machine pistol holstered at his side. It was a Heckler & Koch MP7. The gun was compact and powerful, capable of firing 950 rounds a minute. It had always been his go-to weapon, only now the magazine was loaded with silver rounds. He also checked the silver-plated KA-BAR dagger strapped to his ankle.
“One of the strigoi must have survived the attack,” Sophia said.
Baako glanced to the tunnel. “It must have fed on the rats until it was strong enough to dig its way out.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a strigoi,” Jordan said, his heart thudding in his throat as a sudden realization rose. “Help me search the bodies.”
Sophia cast him a quizzical look, but the two Sanguinists obeyed. One by one, they examined the faces of the dead.
“He’s not here,” Jordan said.
Baako frowned. “Who’s not here?”
Jordan pictured the boyish face of his former friend, someone whom he had trusted wholeheartedly, only to have that confidence betrayed in this cavern.
“Brother Leopold,” Jordan mumbled to the darkness. He stepped to a spot on the floor, where blood still stained the rock. “Rhun stabbed Leopold right here. This is where he fell.”
His body was gone.
Baako swung an arm to encompass the room. “I already checked the space. The earthquake collapsed all the other passages.”
Jordan shone his light toward the narrow tunnel. “So he made his own.”
Jordan closed his eyes, again seeing Rhun giving Leopold his last rites, Leopold’s blood spilling into a huge pool under his body. With such a mortal wound, how had Leopold managed to survive, let alone find the strength to
dig himself out? There couldn’t have been enough sustenance in that pile of rats.
The same question must have been on Sophia’s mind. “The tunnel is at least a hundred feet long,” she said. “I’m not sure even a healthy Sanguinist could claw through that much dirt and stone.”
Baako knelt beside the bloodstain on the stone floor, taking in its expanse. “Much blood was spilled. This brother should be dead.”
Jordan nodded, coming to the same assessment. “Which means there’s something we’ve missed.”
He returned to the tunnel, studied the cavern, then began to slowly walk in a grid pattern across the room, looking for anything that could explain what had happened. They moved bodies, checking beneath them. Jordan even dropped to his hands and knees and examined the old crack in the floor by the altar, discovering a thin gold line where it had sealed.
Sophia squatted next to him and passed her brown hand over the entire length of the crack. “It looks closed.”
“That’s good news, at least.” Jordan straightened, cracking his head on the bottom edge of the altar, and knocking his helmet askew.
“Careful there, soldier,” Sophia said, hiding a small smile.
Jordan reseated his helmet. As he did so, his headlamp glinted off two pieces of what looked like glass, green as a broken bottle of beer, resting in the shadow of the altar.
Hmm . . .
He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and picked up one of the two pieces. “Looks like some sort of crystal.”
He held it higher. In the lamplight, rainbows of light reflected from the broken surfaces. He examined the shattered edge, then returned the piece next to the other one. The two pieces looked as if they’d once been a single stone, about the size of a goose egg, now broken in two. He fitted the halves together, noting that the stone appeared to be hollowed out inside, like an egg.
Baako stared over his shoulder. “Have you seen it before? Maybe during the battle?”
“Not that I recall, but a lot was going on.” Jordan rolled the object to examine it from every angle. “But look at this.”
His gloved fingertip hovered over lines imbedded in the crystalline surface. They formed a symbol.
He glanced to Sophia. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“Not me.”
Baako merely shrugged. “Looks somewhat like a cup.”
Jordan realized he was right, but maybe it didn’t just represent a cup. “Maybe it’s a chalice.”
Sophia cocked a skeptical eyebrow toward him. “As in Lucifer’s Chalice.”
This time he shrugged. “It’s at least worth investigating.”
And I know a certain gal who would be very intrigued by it.
With his phone, Jordan snapped several pictures of the stone and symbol, planning on emailing them to Erin as soon as he had a signal.
“I should crawl back outside and send this to—”
A scraping sound drew all their attentions back to the tunnel. A dark figure snaked out of the darkness and into the light. Jordan barely registered the fangs—before it launched straight at him.
March 17, 11:05 A.M. EET
Siwa, Egypt
A pang of regret flared through Rhun’s silent heart. He sat on his heels at the base of a tall dune and listened to the soft hiss of grains sliding down the Egyptian slopes. It filled him with a sense of profound peace to be here, alone, doing God’s work.
But even that purity was marred by a darkness at the edges of his senses. He turned slowly toward it, drawn by a compass submerged deep in his immortal blood. As he bent over, searching for the source, sunlight glinted off the silver cross hanging from his neck. His black robe brushed the sand as his palm skated across the hot surface of the desert, skimming over the fine grains. His questing fingertips sensed a seed of malevolence below the surface.
Like a crow hunting a buried worm, Rhun cocked his head, narrowing his focus to one point in the sand. Once he was sure, he pulled a small spade from his pack and began to dig.
Weeks ago, he had arrived with a team of Sanguinists tasked with accomplishing this very duty. But the pieces of evil unearthed here had threatened to master the others, to consume them fully. In the end, he had forced them to abandon the dig site and head back to Rome.
It seemed Rhun alone was capable of withstanding the evil buried here.
But what does that say of my own soul?
He poured each shovelful of burning sand through a sieve, like a child at the beach. But this was not work for children. The sieve caught neither shells nor rocks.
Instead, it captured teardrop-shaped bits of stone, black as obsidian.
The blood of Lucifer.
Over two millennia ago, a battle had been fought in these sands between Lucifer and the archangel Michael over the young Christ child. Lucifer had been wounded, and his blood fell to the sand. Each drop had burned with an unholy fire, melting through the tiny grains to form these corrupted bits of glass. Time had long since buried them, and now it was Rhun’s duty to bring them back to the light again.
A single black drop appeared, resting in the bottom of the sieve.
He picked the drop up and held it a moment in his cupped palm. It burned against his bare skin, but it did not seek to corrupt him, as it did the other Sanguinists. Unlike them, he saw no scenes of bloodshed and terror, or lust and temptation. Prayers filled his mind instead.
Opening a leather pouch at his side, he dropped the black pebble inside. It tapped against two others, all that he had found this day. The drops were smaller now, and harder to find. His task was almost complete.
He sighed, staring across the empty sand.
I could stay . . . make this desert my home.
A cask of sanctified wine waited for him back at his camp. He needed nothing else. Bernard had sent word that he was to increase his efforts, that he was needed back in Rome. So, reluctantly, he had, although he did not wish for this assignment to end.
For the first time in centuries, he felt at peace. A few months ago, he had redeemed his greatest sin when he had restored his former lover’s lost soul, changing her from strigoi back to a human woman. Of course, Elisabeta—or Elizabeth, as she preferred to be called now—had not thanked him for it, cursing him instead for returning her mortality, but he did not need her gratitude. He sought only redemption, and he had found it centuries after he had given up any hope.
As he straightened, forgoing his search, a distant mewling reached his ear. He tried to ignore it as he carefully tied the leather pouch and packed away his tools. But the sound persisted, plaintive and full of pain.
Just some desert creature . . .
He climbed toward his camp, but the sound pursued him, scratching at his ears, shredding his sense of solace. It was high-pitched, like the screech of a house cat. Irritation grew inside him—along with a trickle of curiosity.
What was wrong with it?
He reached his small camp and plotted how to break down his tent and clear out his gear to leave no trace of his trespass here.
Still, none of his thoughts lessened the ache of that cry in his ears. It was like hearing the scratching of a dry branch against a bedroom window’s glass. The more one tried to ignore it and return to slumber, the louder it became.
He had at best one more night alone in the desert. If he didn’t do something about that mewling, he would never enjoy his last moments of peace.
He stared in the direction of the crying, took one step, then another toward its source. Before he knew it, he was running across the sun-washed sand, flying over the dunes. As he drew closer, the sound grew louder, drawing him inexplicably onward. A part of him recognized something unnatural about this hunt, how it drew him, but he sped faster anyway.
At last, he spotted the source in the distance. The mewling rose from an acacia bush that cast a faraway shadow. The desert tree must have found an underground water source, its tough roots fighting for survival in this dry land. The thorny trunk listed to one side,
a testament to the relentless winds.
Long before he reached the tree, a noxious smell struck him. Even upwind, the scent was familiar, marking the presence of a beast corrupted by the blood of a strigoi into something monstrous.
A blasphemare.
Was it that corrupted blood that had drawn him so inextricably across the desert? Had its evil impinged upon his already sharpened senses—senses honed from weeks of mining the sands for those malevolent drops? He slowed enough to pull his blades from their wrist sheaths. Sunlight flashed off the silver knives, ancient karambits, each curved like a leopard’s claw. He would need such claws to fight what lay ahead. By now, he could identify the scent of his prey: a blasphemare lion.
He circled the tree from a distance. His eyes searched the shadows until he spotted a mound of tawny fur, mostly hidden beneath the bower. In her natural form, the lioness must have been stunning. Even as a tainted creature, her magnificence was undeniable. The corruption had filled her form with thick muscle, while her fur grew thick as velvet. Even her massive head, resting between her paws, revealed an intelligent face.
Still, sickness throbbed in each weary beat of her heart.
As he drew closer to her, he noted black blood crusted on her shoulder. It appeared a wide swath of fur had been burned away across her flanks.
He could guess the origin of this corrupted lioness—and her injuries. He pictured the hordes of blasphemare that had accompanied Judas’s army during the battle fought here last winter. There had been jackals, hyenas, and a handful of lions. Rhun had believed that such beasts had been driven off or killed, along with the strigoi forces, at the end of that war, when a holy angelic fire had swept across these sands.
Afterward, a Sanguinist team had been sent forth to hunt down any straggling survivors, but clearly this beast must have escaped the fire and the hunters.
Even wounded, she had survived.
She raised her golden muzzle and snarled in his direction. Her eyes glowed crimson out of the shadows, their true color stolen by the strigoi blood that had corrupted her. But even this effort seemed to sap her remaining strength. Her head sank back again to her paws. She had not long to live.
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