Blood Infernal: The Order of the Sanguines Series (5 page)

Erin shuddered at the memory, the dark tunnels somehow making it more real. Her back twinged even now, as if remembering the old pain and the lesson learned.

The price of knowledge was blood and pain
.

Even before her back had healed, she had returned to her father’s office and read the rest of the almanac in secret. One section contained a weather forecast. For a year she’d tracked it to see if the authors knew what the weather would do, and they were often wrong. And she realized that things in books could be
wrong
.

Even the Bible.

Back then, the fear of punishment hadn’t stopped her.

And it won’t stop me now
.

Her feet pounded the stone, carrying her along until at last she reached the door to the Sanctuary. It was not the main entrance into their territory, but a rarely used back door, one that opened not far from their library. This gateway looked like a blank wall with a small alcove that held a stone basin, not unlike a small bowl or cup.

She knew what she must do.

The secret gate could only be opened by the blood of a Sanguinist.

She reached to her pocket and retrieved Christian’s glass vial. She studied the black blood roiling inside. Sanguinist blood was thicker and darker than any human’s. It could move with a will of its own, flowing through veins without the need of a beating heart. That was about all she knew about the essence that sustained both the Sanguinists and the
strigoi
, but she suddenly wanted to know more, to tease out the secrets of that blood.

But not now.

She emptied the vial’s dark contents into the stone basin, while speaking words in Latin. “For this is the Chalice of My Blood, of the new and everlasting Testament.”

The blood swirled within the cup, stirring on its own, proving its unnatural state.

She held her breath.
Would the gate reject Christian’s blood?

The answer came as the dark pool seeped into the stone, vanishing away, leaving no trace.

She let out a sigh, whispering the final words, “
Mysterium fidei
.”

She took a step back from the sealed wall, her heart pounding in her throat. Surely any Sanguinists nearby would hear that telltale beat and know she was standing at their threshold.

Stone ground heavily on stone, slowly opening a passage before her.

She took a step toward that waiting darkness, remembering her father’s painful lesson.
The price of knowledge was blood and pain
.

So be it.

March 17, 4:45
P.M. CET

Cumae, Italy

Why am I always stuck underground?

Sergeant Jordan Stone dragged himself forward with his elbows through the cramped tunnel. Rock pressed tightly on him from all sides, and the only way to move forward was to wriggle like a worm. As he struggled, dirt sifted into his hair and fell into his eyes.

At least I’m still moving.

He pushed forward another few inches.

A heavily accented voice called from the tunnel ahead, encouraging him. “You’re almost through!”

That would be Baako. He pictured the tall Sanguinist who hailed from somewhere in Africa. Last week, when Jordan had inquired about his exact country of origin, Baako had been vague, saying only,
Like many nations in Africa, the one I come from has borne many names, and likely will bear many more
.

It was a typical Sanguinist answer: dramatic and basically useless.

Jordan stared ahead. He could vaguely make out a dull glow, a promise that this damned tunnel did indeed reach an inner cavern. He fought toward that light.

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.