Immanuel's Veins

by Ted Dekker

  The Blood Book I’d left in my leather bag.

  She held the book out. “Is this true?”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Stefan eased away from Lucine. The others shifted as well. Something had altered the norm.

  My heart bolted with both anticipation and fear at seeing Lucine. She’d found the book, and something in her reading of it had drawn her mind back from the darkness. But what price would she pay for her choice to question her master?

  He still had me by the neck, but he’d twisted around and was staring silently at that vision of beauty that filled the doorway, backlit by an orange glow from within the castle.

  Drenched, the beast’s shirt clung to sinewy cords of muscle wrapped around his shoulders and down his back. I had no doubt that he could break my neck with a single squeeze of his fingers. My vision was already fading.

  I reached up with both hands and grasped his wrist in an attempt to loosen his grip but only succeeded for a moment before his fingers wound tighter, cutting off my air.

  “Is it true that you are a devil?” she asked.

  “How dare you leave my tower!”

  She looked up at me. “Let him go. Please, his only crime is to love me.”

  He released me and I collapsed in a heap then fell to one side. My head hit the stone surface with a sickening thud. The stake was on the other side, too far to reach. I struggled to remain conscious.

  “I found Natasha,” Lucine said. “She’s dead. You killed my sister.” It was said simply, but the emotion behind her words betrayed a dreadful sorrow.

  Valerik’s reaction was immediate. One moment he stood on the platform, glaring down at her, the next he was in front of her. He slammed his fist into her gut and raked his claw up her face when she doubled over. The book flew from her hand. He’d knocked the wind from her so she couldn’t breathe, much less scream.

  “You haven’t imagined the kind of pain I am capable of.” He grabbed her hair and jerked her head up so that she faced me. “Is this the ugly wench you love?” he mocked.

  I pried my head off the stone and got one arm under my chest, afraid that if I said anything he would only hurt her more. But he didn’t need the motivation.

  Holding her up with one hand, Valerik hit her face with the other. Then again. “Is this the woman?” He ripped her dress and slashed at her breasts, bloodying her badly. Then he shoved her forward with a fist full of hair.

  “Is this the bride you love? Tell me!”

  I pushed myself up to my knees, sobbing now, terrified to say anything.

  “Toma?” She gasped, choked with desperation.

  The beast snarled and cut her a fourth time, this time silencing her with an open hand across her neck, laying her flesh open as if she were a fish. Blood spilled and I knew that she could not survive long.

  “Luci . . .” My damaged throat could rasp her name. I tried again but this time only a whisper. “Lucine!”

  He dropped her and she fell to her face without the strength to break her fall. And there she lay, perfectly still, bleeding in the rain.

  Valerik moved like a storm, plucking me from my knees and pinning me against the cross to finish his killing. With two quick flicks of his hand he sliced my wrists.

  “Now I will bleed your veins,” he breathed. And he held me tight against the cross as my blood flowed from the wounds, over my hands, and into the water.

  So both Lucine and I would die.

  But a thought crawled into my mind. Something I’d read in the Blood Book. Words about a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins.

  Be her Immanuel, Toma.

  I did not understand it fully. I didn’t even know if this single thought was only the mad fantasy of a dying man. But I let it consume me and I groaned my approval.

  “Take my blood . . .” I forced the words past those cords around my neck.

  “Bleed for me,” he growled.

  “Take my blood!” I rasped. Then, with my last reserves of breath, “Find your life in my blood!”

  I could see only the sky because his hand was wrapped under my chin. But he shook me like a rag and shifted that grip, allowing me air and a clearer vantage. And I saw.

  I saw the blood flowing from my veins.

  I saw the pool, turning red now with that blood.

  I saw Lucine struggling to her knees.

  My eyes darted to Valerik’s face. The dark rage there made me cringe, but I only wanted more fury from him, so that he would find his complete distraction with me.

  “Without the shedding of blood,” I said, then had to take a breath before I finished, “there is no remission.”

  His face twitched. Something registered in his eyes—a stray thought or dawning realization.

  “She is my bride,” I said. “She will always be my bride.”

  He jerked around.

  Lucine was already on her feet, falling forward. She toppled face-first into the fountain filled with blood drawn from my veins.

  “No!” Valerik released his grip and I crumpled to my hands and knees. He leaped to the side of the pool. “No, no, no!” But she was past his grasp.

  In a flash, Valerik was back on the platform, leaning over toward her body. He grasped her by the back of her dress and tried to jerk her out, but the cloth tore free and she sank.

  “No!” He shoved his arm into the water and cried out with pain. When he yanked his hand out, it was blistered, seared by the blessed water.

  Lucine was below the surface still, baptized in that shallow bath of blood. I could fall in after her and try to shove her to the surface. Or I could get my hands around the stake and try to end the life of this beast.

  Valerik first. If I pulled her out it would only be for him to savage her.

  I got to my feet, staggered to my right, and fell upon the lone stake. When I swung back, Valerik had his hand under the surface again, ignoring the pain of his seared flesh, grasping for her body.

  I stumbled forward and threw my full weight into my fall, stake extended. Down upon the back of Vlad van Valerik.

  The sharp wood entered his back and slammed right through to the stone beneath him. His body arched and he screamed, a terrifying demonic sound that would disturb the sleep of the most jaded fool.

  His body shook violently, bowed back like a praying mantis. I knew I had hit his heart by the full-fledged panic in his eyes.

  I knew I had ended his existence on this earth. He was surely dead.

  But then I was falling, over the edge, into that bloody grave that was more than my own making.

  Lucine wasn’t sure if she was alive or if she was dead.

  Dead, she thought. She’d learned from the book that she was dead already.

  But now hot fingers snaked through her body, tingling and burning along her wounds, and then deeper, through her veins to her extremities like molten lava finding its way through cracks and down narrow channels. It burned her fingers and her toes and it made her face hot.

  Toma . . . The thought of him made her jerk. Her eyes snapped open. She was lost in a sea of red.

  Toma . . . Sorrow welled up in her throat. Toma, dear Toma! He’d been right. All the signs were there. From the beginning she’d seen the affection in his eyes. And now she hated herself for not being swept away by those eyes.

  Was she alive?

  Her knee bumped into the hard surface beneath her. She was in the pool, below the surface, lungs burning. Suddenly alarmed, she flailed and jerked upright.

  Her head cleared the water and she gasped for breath. Water streamed off her face and splashed into the pool. She wiped her face with her palm to clear her vision and was struck immediately with the changes.

  At the door, Stefan turned and looked into her eyes. Vlad’s limp body hung over his shoulder. From the look of disdain on Stefan’s face, she thought Vlad might be dead. How? The lieutenant turned without a word and walked into the castle.

  The pain on her face was gone. A glance down at her
body showed only smooth flesh, no wounds. Her neck . . . She touched her neck with light fingers, then eagerly, grasping, feeling. But there was no torn skin. She was healed?

  She spun around, rising to her feet. The coven was gone. They were all gone. Stefan had been the last. Rain poured, water flowed, but there wasn’t another soul in the room. The cross upon which Vlad had pummeled Toma rose to the sky, mere stone.

  “Toma?”

  She looked around again.

  “Toma!”

  But only blood remained to show that anything had happened here at all. A fountain of blood and she, standing lost in the pool.

  Something struck her ankle and she jumped back. A hand floated on the surface. Wearing the gold ring that bore the empress’s insignia.

  “Toma?”

  She plunged both hands down and clawed at him, finding his hair and his arm. “Toma!”

  Lucine hauled him up, got his head and upper body out of the water, but in the dark she couldn’t tell if he was still breathing, dead or alive.

  “No, no, please, no!” She dragged him to the side, then over the edge where he flopped onto the stone floor. “Wake up, Toma! Wake, wake!”

  She still couldn’t tell if he was alive and she had no idea how to help him. She beat on his chest.

  “Wake up, Toma. Please don’t leave me now. I need you! I am your bride, you can’t leave me.” Then, when he still didn’t respond, she screamed at him. “Toma! Wake, Toma!”

  His eyes fluttered open. Lucine gasped. They closed again.

  He was too weak, drained of blood!

  But his eyes opened again, and this time he stared at her for an extended moment then sat up. The cuts on his wrists were still bleeding—she had to stop the flow of blood!

  Her dress was tattered and drenched, but she had nothing else. Frantic, she tore off her sleeves. “We have to stop the bleeding!”

  He was staring at her with wide eyes as she quickly wrapped his wounds.

  “You’re alive?” he asked.

  I sat there in shock, seeing Lucine working madly over my wounds without bearing a single mark on her own body. I’d seen what the beast had done to her, and despite all that I had seen, the vision of her unblemished body was staggering to me.

  It was more than the fact that she didn’t bear a single mark. Her skin had changed, become smooth and flesh-toned rather than translucent and white. And her eyes. They were once again a light brown.

  The Russians were gone. Vlad van Valerik’s body was gone.

  But Lucine was not. She was there and she was whole, unless this was her ghost.

  “You’re alive?” I asked, and in my shock it sounded like a reasonable question.

  She worked to secure the cloth around my wrists without responding.

  “But you are,” I said. “You’re alive!”

  She suddenly sat back on her haunches, dropped her head into her hands, and gave up a sob.

  “Lucine . . .”

  She sat up. “Shh, shh, no.” She pressed a finger against my lips to silence me. Then, with tears streaming down her face, she began to kiss my hands, like the tender drops of rain that now fell lightly around us. Unwilling to restrain herself any longer, she took my face in her hands and kissed my cheeks, my nose, my forehead, every part of my head.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, thank you.”

  She kissed my lips. “Thank you, Toma. I’m so sorry. Thank you.” And she kissed me again, a longer, lingering kiss that was far more than necessary for any show of gratitude.

  She pulled back and stared into my eyes, searching through her tears. “I love you, Toma.”

  It was all I wanted to hear. I was so eager to hear those words that I suffered a momentary fear she might take them back or soften their impact with an explanation.

  So I threw my arms around her and pulled her tight against my breast. I began to cry unabashedly, undone by such gratefulness that she would love me, praying she would not take it back.

  “I love you, Toma,” she said again, this time into my ear. And by the sound of her voice and her desperate embrace, I knew that what she said was true.

  I could say nothing that I had not already said, and I didn’t want to breathe a word that might upset the moment. We clung to each other for a long time, and although I was weak, she seemed to have the strength for both of us.

  “Are they gone?” she asked, looking at the door. “I mean, gone?”

  “Vlad van Valerik is dead,” I said.

  She twisted back. “He is?”

  “I put a stake through his heart before I fell into the pool.”

  “Are . . . are you sure?” Her eyes darted about the room. “You saw him die?”

  “I believe I did, yes. And now they are all gone. They must have taken his body.”

  She stood and peered out the door. Then disappeared through it.

  “Lucine? Hold on!” I pushed myself to my feet, reached out to the fountain to steady myself, then walked rather unsteadily to the door.

  She stood in the great room two doors away, looking around, lost.

  “Lucine?”

  “They’re gone,” she said.

  “Are you well?”

  Lucine turned and hurried back, and with each step she took, her face brightened. She walked right up to me and slipped her arms around my neck.

  “I am far more than well now.”

  She stood to her tiptoes and she kissed me until I was sure that I was melting there in her arms. Her tears came again, now surely drawn by love more than remorse. Her lips slipped away from mine and she buried her head into my neck, crying. Too much had happened not to cry.

  Lucine and I stood in the Castle Castile now emptied of all its evil, and together we wept. For we had found the truest love. We had found God’s blood.

  We had found each other.

  My dear reader— So you see, I am dead. Not in the flesh, but that hardly matters, does it? I was killed by Vlad van Valerik, and through my death Lucine, who was surely as dead, found life.

  I can’t rightly tell you if my death was physical, if I truly died in that fountain, but again, that hardly matters. Either way I am now dead to this world, having seen too much of the other. Having been infused with a new life, God’s blood, which now surely passes through my veins.

  I am not a saint named by orthodoxy, for that church has rejected my story and brands me as a heretic. There are times when I think back on those weeks and I wonder if it all really happened or whether perhaps I did lose my mind. But I have only to look at Lucine, my wife, sitting across the table, to know that every memory is true.

  It wasn’t a conventional happening, to be sure, but then neither are most of the accounts in that book called the Holy Scripture. If you have any lingering doubts, you may visit our home and we could talk about the matter over a fine roast and red wine. Naturally, you would have to travel to Russia because Lucine and I moved to Moscow after we were wed, two months following that day.

  As for Natasha and Alek, we mourn their deaths to no end. If there was a way to bring them back, I would do it. I would enter another castle and slay another beast. But they are gone. Kesia sold the Moldavian estate and has taken up residence with her husband, Mikhail Ivanov, in the country near Moscow. We visit her often.

  The Castle Castile is still vacant to my knowledge. No sign of the coven was found. The only bodies recovered belonged to our dear friends, Natasha and Alek. Although the antiquities remained there for a day, when I took the army up the following afternoon, even those were gone. The entire castle had been cleaned out then gutted by fire.

  I am sure you want to know what happened to those creatures, those poor souls infected by Nephilim. Truthfully, I can’t be sure. Lucine still carries the blood in her veins, this much we know. But she is different from the rest, for she has been recovered.

  The rest may have vanished forever when their half-breed maker died. Dear God, I pray not, because Lucine and I still talk of Sofia
and would relish a meeting with her, a chance to win her over to a new life.

  We aren’t certain which of them might be saved or turned, but we are convinced that a true half-breed would no longer be considered human, the greater half being made from that fallen angel himself.

  So then, if you read this book and if you encounter any person who might strike you as lost to the darkness, I would only implore you to love them and pray they be delivered into the light by a blood that works to purge evil.

  The Blood Book is lost, gone with the rest of the castle relics. But I attest to its message, and it is a message of love and romance. I have neither seen nor heard of that old messenger from God who called himself Saint Thomas. But to honor him I have taken his name.

  As for me, I am freed from my duties to the army. And upon learning that Vlad van Valerik (who had indeed been chosen as Lucine’s suitor) murdered Natasha, Catherine forgave me my indiscretion for falling in love with Lucine.

  I now spend much of my time writing poems, songs, messages to my Lucine, which delight her. Books, such as this one you have read.

  The very day Lucine and I rode down those Carpathian slopes, I penned a poem about Immanuel’s veins. I have recently learned that it fell into the hands of a great writer of hymns in England named William Cowper. He did write a hymn using a fragment or two of my poem, I believe. For my words are true and I leave you with them now.

  There is a fountain filled with blood,

  Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;

  And any plunged beneath that flood

  Will be purged of all that is bane.

  The End

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