Innocent Blood (16 page)

20

December 19, 1:44
P.M.
CET

Rome, Italy

Atop the Tiber River, Judas drew back on the sculls, and his slim wooden boat shot a gratifying distance across the water. Sunlight reflected off the silvery river and dazzled his eyes. This late in the year he savored both its light and its fading warmth.

A flock of crows circled overhead, disappearing into the bare branches of a riverside park before rising up against the bright winter sky.

Below, he kept his body working in rhythm, moving down the Tiber, stroking harder as he battled the wake of a passing boat. Larger crafts plowed through the river around him. His fragile wooden hull could easily be smashed to matchsticks in an instant. This time of year, he was the only rower who braved the frigid winter temperatures and the risk of being run down by speedboats, ferries, and cargo ships.

His phone buzzed with another text message from his receptionist.

Sighing, he knew what it said without reading it. He had watched it on the news before he climbed into his boat. The papal train had been destroyed. The cardinal alone had survived. Everyone else aboard had died.

He stroked the sculls through the water again.

With the prophesied trio gone, nothing stood in his way.

Brother Leopold’s last text message had mentioned the First Angel, the one who was destined to use the book as a weapon in the coming War of the Heavens. With the prophecy broken, this angel likely posed no further threat, but Judas did not like loose ends.

A ferry captain tooted his horn, and Judas raised a hand in greeting. The man straightened his black cap and waved back. They had greeted each other almost every day for twenty years. Judas had watched him grow from a thin young buck, uncertain on the controls, to a portly old man. Still, he had never learned his name.

He had grown to understand solitude as he watched his family and friends die. He had learned to keep his distance from others after generations of friendships had ended in death.

But what of this immortal boy Leopold had spoken of?

Thomas Bolar.

Judas wanted him. He would bargain with Rasputin, pay whatever the monk desired, and fetch this immortal child to his home. His heart quickened at the thought of meeting another like himself, but also from knowing the role that the boy was destined to play.

To help bring about the end of the world.

It was a shame he hadn’t met this boy earlier in his long life, to have someone to share his endless span of years, another who was as ageless and as unfettered by time.

Still, Judas had been offered such a chance centuries before, and he had wasted it.

Perhaps this is my penance.

As he pulled on the oars, he pictured Arella’s dark skin and gold eyes. He remembered the first ride that he had taken with her, the night they were reunited at the Venetian masquerade. Then, too, he had manned a wooden boat, driven the craft where he wanted it to go, never sensing how little control he had.

Their gondola glided over the calm water of a dark canal, the stars shining above, a full moon beckoning. As he poled the craft through a light mist, passing alongside a grand Venetian house, the reek of excrement and waste washed over their craft, intruding on their pleasant night like some sulfurous shade.

He scowled at the sewage pipe leaking tepidly into the canal.

Noticing his attention and expression, Arella laughed. “Is this city not refined enough for your tastes?”

He gestured at the rooms above full of laughter and decadence, then to the sludge fouling the water below. “There are better ways of ridding such waste.”

“And when it is time, they will find them.”

“They have found them and lost them.” Judas’s voice held the bitterness he had acquired from watching the fate of men.

She trailed long dark fingers along the hull’s black lacquer. “You speak of the former wonders of Rome, when the city was at its splendorous best.”

He poled the boat away from the lighted houses and back toward his inn. “Much was lost when that city fell.”

She shrugged. “It shall be regained. In time.”

“In times past, the healers of Rome knew how to cure diseases from which the men of this era still suffer and die.”

He sighed at how much had been lost to the darkness of this age. He wished that he had studied medicine, that he could have preserved such knowledge after the libraries burned and the men of learning were put to the sword.

“This age will pass,” Arella assured him. “And the knowledge will be found again.”

Silvery moonlight shone on her hair and her bare shoulders, leaving him wondering about this beautiful mystery before him. After discovering each other again, they had danced most of the night away, sweeping across wooden floors, until finding themselves here as dawn neared.

He finally broached the subject that he had been reluctant to raise all evening, fearful of the answer.

“Arella . . .” He slowed the pace of the boat and let it drift through the mists on its own, as undirected as a leaf. “By my name alone, you know my sin, my crime, and the curse laid upon me by Christ, to march these endless years. But how are you able . . . what are you . . . ?”

He could not even form the question fully on his lips.

Still, she understood and smiled. “What does
my
name tell you?”

“Arella,” he repeated, letting it roll off his tongue. “A beautiful name. Ancient. In old Hebrew, it means
a messenger from God
.”

“And it is a fitting name,” she said. “I have often carried messages from God. In that way also, we two are alike. Both servants to the heavens, bound to our duty.”

Judas snorted softly. “Unlike you, I have received no special messages from above.”

And how he wished he would have. After the bitterness of his curse waned, he had often wondered why this punishment had been exacted upon his flesh, leaving it undying. Was it merely penance for his sin or was it for some purpose, a goal he had not yet come to understand?

“You are fortunate,” she said. “I would gladly accept such silence.”

“Why?” he pressed.

She sighed and touched the silver shard hanging from around her neck. “It can be a curse to see dimly into the future, knowing of a tragedy to come but not knowing how to avert it.”

“So then you are a prophetess?”

“I was once,” she said, her dark eyes flicking up to the moon and back. “Or should I say
,
many times. In the past, I once bore the title of the Oracle of Greece, another time the Sibyl of Erythraea, but throughout the ages, I was called countless other names.”

Shocked, he sank to the seat before him. He kept a grip on the pole in the water, while he took her hand in his. Despite the cool night, he felt the heat coming off her skin, far warmer than the touch of most men and women, beyond that of any human.

Her lips curved into the already familiar half smile. “Do you doubt me? You who have lived to see the world change and change again?”

The most remarkable thing was that he did not.

As the gondola drifted silently in the moonlight, a half smile played across her lips, as if she knew his thoughts, guessing what he had begun to suspect.

She waited.

“I do not pretend to know such things,” he started, picturing her in his arms, dancing with her. “But . . .”

She shifted in her seat. “What do you not pretend to know?”

He squeezed the fierce heat of her palm and fingers.

“The nature of one such as you. One given messages from God. One who endures across the ages. One of such perfection.”

He blushed as he said these last words.

She laughed. “Am I then so different from you?”

He knew deep in his bones that she was—both by nature and by character. She was an embodiment of
good,
whereas he had done terrible things. He gazed at the wonder before him, knowing another name for
a messenger of God,
another name for the word
Arella
.

He forced himself to state it out loud. “You are an angel.”

She folded her hands in front of her, as if in prayer. Slowly, a soft golden light emanated from her body. It bathed the gondola, the water, his face. The warmth of its touch suffused him with joy and holiness.

Here was another eternal being—but she was not like him.

Where he was evil, she was good.

Where he was dark, she was light.

He closed his eyes and drank in her radiance.

“Why have you come to me? Why are you here?” He opened his eyes and looked at the water, the houses, the sewage in the canal, then back to her—back to a beauty beyond measure. “Why are you on Earth and not in Heaven?”

Her light dimmed, and she resembled an ordinary woman again. “Angels may descend and visit Earth.” She looked up at him. “Or they may
fall
.”

She stressed that last word.

“You fell?”

“Long ago
,
” she added, reading the shock and surprise in his face. “Alongside the Morning Star.”

That was another name for Lucifer.

Judas refused to believe she had been cast out of Heaven. “But I sense only goodness in you.”

She gazed at him, her eyes patient.

“Why did you fall?” he pressed, as if this were a simple question on a simple night. “You could not have done evil.”

She looked down at her hands. “I kept my knowledge of Lucifer’s pride hidden in my heart. I foresaw his coming rebellion, yet stayed silent.”

Judas tried to fathom such an event. She had kept a prophecy concerning the War of the Heavens from God, and for that she was cast down.

Arella raised her head and spoke again. “It was a just punishment. But unlike the Morning Star, I did not wish ill of mankind. I chose to use my exile to watch over God’s flock here, to continue to serve Heaven as I could.”

“How do you serve Heaven?”

“However I can.” She brushed a speck from her skirt. “My greatest act was during your age, when I protected the Christ child from harm, watching over him while he was but a babe, defenseless in this hard world.”

Judas bowed his head in shame, reminded how he had failed to do the same when Jesus was older. Judas had betrayed not only the Son of God—but also his dearest friend. He felt again the weight of the leather bag of silver coins that the priests had given him, the warmth of Christ’s cheek under his lips when he kissed him to mark him to his executioner.

Unable to keep the envy from his voice, he asked, “But how did you protect Christ? I do not understand.”

“I came before Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, shortly after Christ was born. I told them what I foresaw, of the coming slaughter of innocents by King Herod.”

Judas gulped, knowing this story, recognizing anew who shared his boat.

“You were the angel who told them to flee to Egypt.”

“I also led them there, taking them to where their son could grow up sheltered from harm.”

Judas now understood how very different she was from him.

She had saved Jesus.

Judas had killed him.

His breathing grew heavier. He had to stand again, to move. He returned to slowly poling the gondola down the canal, trying to picture her life here on Earth, a stretch of time far longer than his brief span.

He finally asked another question, one just as important to him. “How do you stand the time?”

“I pass through it, just as you do.” Again, she touched the shard on her neck. “For time beyond measure
,
I have served mankind as a seer, a prophetess, an oracle.”

He imagined her in this role, wearing the simple robes of a Delphic priestess, sharing words of prophecy. “Yet you do this no more?”

She stared out across the dark waters. “I still see occasional glimpses of what is to come, of time rolling ahead of me as surely as it trails behind me. I cannot stand against these visions.” A line of sorrow appeared between her brows. “But I no longer share them. To know my prophecies has brought more suffering to mankind than pleasure, and so I keep such futures a secret.”

The inn appeared through the mists. He steered his gondola toward the stone dock. Once he drew abreast of it, two men in livery hurried to secure the boat. One held out a gloved hand to the beautiful lady. Judas steadied her with a palm held against the small of her back.

Then shadows fell out of the darkness above and landed on the dock, forming the shapes of men—but they were not men. He saw the sharp teeth, the pale, feral faces.

Many times he had fought such creatures, and many times he had lost. Still, with his immortality, he always healed, and his tainted blood always destroyed them.

He pulled Arella behind him in the boat, letting the beasts take the men from the hotel. He could not save them, but perhaps he might save her.

He swung his pole like a club, while her beautiful hands fumbled with the ropes that secured them to the dock. Once free, he pushed the gondola away. It heeled to one side, then righted itself.

But they were not fast enough.