Innocent Blood (9 page)

11

December 19, 7:34
A.M.
CET

Vatican City

“
Help us!
” a voice called at his door.

Hearing the fear, the urgency, Cardinal Bernard rose from his desk chair and crossed his chamber in a heartbeat, not bothering to hide his otherness from Father Ambrose. Although his assistant knew of the cardinal’s hidden nature, he still stumbled back, looking shocked.

Bernard ignored him and ripped open the door, coming close to tearing it off the hinges.

At the threshold, he found the young form of the German monk, Brother Leopold, newly arrived from Ettal Abbey. On his other side, a diminutive novice named Mario. They carried a slack form of a priest between them, the victim’s head hanging down.

“I found him stumbling out of the lower tunnels,” Mario said.

The vinegary scent of old wine poured from the body, filling the room, as Leopold and Mario entered with their burden. Waxen wrists stuck out from the damp robe, the skin stretched tight over bones.

This priest had starved long, suffered much.

Bernard lifted the man’s chin. He beheld a face as familiar as his own—the high Slavic cheekbones, the deeply cleft chin, and the tall, smooth forehead.

“Rhun?”

Past his shock, waves of emotions battered within him at the sight of his friend’s ravaged form:
fury
at whoever had inflicted this upon him;
fear
that it might be too late to save him; and a great measure of
relief
. Both for Rhun’s return and the plain evidence that he could not have murdered and drained all those girls in Rome, not in this state.

All was not yet lost.

Tortured dark eyes opened and rolled back.

“Rhun?” Bernard begged. “Who did this to you?”

Rhun forced words through cracked lips. “She comes. She nears the Holy City.”

“Who comes?”

“She leads them to us,” he whispered. “Many
strigoi
. Coming here.”

With his message delivered, Rhun collapsed.

Leopold slipped an arm under Rhun’s knees and picked him up as if he were a child. His body hung there, spent. Bernard would get nothing more from him in this state. He would need more than wine to recover Rhun from this devastation.

“Take him to the couch,” Bernard ordered. “Leave him with me.”

The young scholar obeyed, placing Rhun on the chamber’s small sofa.

Bernard turned to Mario, who gaped at him with wide blue eyes. New to the cross, he had seen nothing akin to this. “Go with Brother Leopold and Father Ambrose. Sound the alarm, and make for the entrance of the city.”

As soon as the others were out of the room, he opened the small refrigerator under his desk. It was stocked with drinks for his human guests, but that was not what he needed now. He reached behind those bottles to a simple glass jar stoppered with a cork. Every day, he refilled it. Having such a temptation near him was forbidden, but Bernard believed in the old ways, when necessity tempered sin.

He carried the bottle to Rhun and uncorked it. The intoxicating scent wafted out, causing even Rhun to stir.

Good.

Bernard tilted Rhun’s head back, opened his mouth, and poured the blood down his throat.

Rhun shuddered with the bliss, lost in the crimson flow through his black veins. He wanted to rebel, recognizing the sin on his tongue. But memories blurred: his lips upon a velvety throat, the give of flesh under his sharp teeth. Blood and dreams carried away his pain. He moaned with pleasure of it, riding waves of ecstasy that pulsed through every fiber of his being.

Denied this pleasure so long, his body would not let it go.

But the rapture eventually ebbed, leaving an emptiness behind, a well of dark craving. Rhun struggled for breath to speak, but before he could, darkness overwhelmed him. As it consumed him, he prayed that his sin-filled body could withstand the penance to come.

Rhun passed through the monastery’s herb garden, heading to midmorning prayers. He lingered and let the summer sun warm his face. He ran his hand along the purple stalks of lavender that bordered the gravel path, the delicate scent swelling in his wake. He brought his dusted fingers to his face to savor the fragrance.

He smiled, reminded of home.

Back at his family’s cottage, his sister would often scold him for dawdling in the kitchen garden and laugh when he tried to apologize. How his sister had loved to vex him, but she always made him smile. Perhaps he would see her this Sunday, her round belly rising in front of her, full with her first child.

A fat yellow bee wandered along a dusky purple bloom, another bee landing on the same stalk. The stalk bent under their weight and swayed in the breeze, but the bees paid that no mind. They worked so diligently, sure of their place in God’s plan.

The first bee lifted off the blossom and swooped across the lavender.

He knew where it was headed.

Following its meandering path, Rhun reached the lichen-covered wall at the back of the garden. The bee disappeared through a round hole in one of the golden-yellow conical hives—called skeps—that lined the top of the stone wall.

Rhun had constructed this very skep himself late the previous summer. He had loved the simple task of braiding straw into ropes, twisting those ropes into spirals, and forming them into these conical hives. He found peace in such simple tasks and was good at them.

Brother Thomas had observed the same. “Your nimble fingers are meant for this kind of work.”

He closed his eyes and breathed in the rich smell of honey. The sonorous buzzing of bees enveloped him. He had other work that he could be doing, but he stood a long moment, content.

When he came back to himself, Rhun smiled. He had forgotten that moment. It was a simple slice of another life, centuries old, from before he was turned into a
strigoi
and lost his soul.

He smelled again the sweet rich scent of the honey, the light undertone of lavender. He remembered the warmth of sun on his skin, when sunlight was not yet mixed with pain. But mostly he thought of his laughing sister.

He ached for that simple life—only to recognize it could never be.

And with that hard realization came another.

His eyes snapped open, tasting blood on his tongue, and confronted Bernard. “What you did . . . it is a sin.”

The cardinal patted his hand. “It is
my
sin, not yours. I’ll willingly accept that burden to have you at my side for the upcoming battle.”

Rhun lay still, wrestling with Bernard’s words, wanting to believe them, but knowing the act was wrong. He sat up, finding renewed strength in muscle and bone. Most of his wounds had also closed. He drew in a breath to steady his riotous mind.

Bernard held out his hand, revealing a familiar curve of tarnished silver.

It was Rhun’s
karambit
.

“If you are recovered enough,” Bernard said, “you may join us in the battle ahead. To exact vengeance upon those who treated you so brutally. You mentioned a woman.”

Rhun took the weapon, shying away from the cardinal’s penetrating gaze, too ashamed even now to speak her name. He fingered the blade’s sharp edge.

Elisabeta had stolen it from him.

How had Bernard found it again?

The strident clang of a warning bell shattered the moment.

Questions would have to wait.

Bernard crossed the chamber in a flash of scarlet robes and lifted down his ancient sword from the wall. Rhun stood, surprised by how light his body felt after drinking blood, as if he could fly. He firmed his grip on his own weapon.

Rhun nodded to Bernard, acknowledging that he was fit enough to fight, and they took off at a run. They sailed down the gleaming wooden halls of the papal apartments, through its front bronze doors, and out onto the square.

To avoid the eyes of the handful of people milling about the open plaza, Rhun followed Bernard into the shadowy refuge of Bernini’s colonnade that bordered the piazza’s edges. The massive Tuscan columns, four deep, should keep their preternaturally swift passage hidden. Bernard joined a contingent of other Sanguinists who waited in the shadows for the cardinal. As a group, they rushed along the sweep of the colonnade toward the entrance to the Holy City.

Once they reached the waist-high fence that divided the Vatican city-state from Rome proper, Rhun’s eyes scanned the nearest rooftops. He remembered the shared vision he had with Elisabeta, of her leaping from rooftop to rooftop.

The furious honk of a car horn drew his eyes below, to the cobblestone street that led here.

Fifty yards away, the small shape of a woman fled down the center of Via della Conciliazione, limping on one leg. Though her hair was shorter, he had no trouble recognizing Elisabeta. A white car swerved to miss her.

She paid it no mind, intent on reaching St. Peter’s Square.

Trailing behind her, a dozen
strigoi
loped and sprinted.

He longed to burst from the colonnade and run to her, but Bernard put a steadying hand on his arm.

“Stay,” the cardinal warned, as if reading his thoughts. “Humans are on that street and in those houses. They will see the battle, and they will know. We have millennia of secrecy to protect. Let the fight come to us.”

As Rhun watched, he recognized the pain in Elisabeta’s thinned lips, her fearful glances behind. He remembered the same panic when looking through her eyes.

She is not
leading
this pack—she’s
fleeing
them.

Despite all she had done to him, to the innocents of the city, a reflexive surge to protect her fired inside him. Bernard’s fingers tightened on his shoulder, perhaps feeling him lean forward, ready to dash to her defense.

Elisabeta finally reached the end of the street. The other
strigoi
were almost upon her. Not slowing, she hurdled the low fence that marked the boundary of Vatican City and landed in a half crouch, facing the snarling pack.

She sneered, exposing her fangs, and taunted them. “Cross to me if you dare.”

The pack pulled hard to a stop beyond the fencerow. A few took a cautious step closer, then away again, sensing the debilitating holiness of the hallowed ground on this side. They wanted her, but would they dare enter Vatican City to get her?

Holy ground was not all they had to fear here.

The Sanguinist force waited to either side of Rhun and Bernard, as still as statues among the columns. If the
strigoi
came into the city, the beasts would be pulled into this shadowy forest of stone and slaughtered.

Elisabeta retreated from the fencerow—but she put too much weight on her hurt leg, and her ankle finally gave out fully, dropping her to the pavement.

The sign of weakness was too much for the
strigoi
to resist. Like lions descending upon a wounded gazelle, the pack surged forward.

Rhun ripped out of Bernard’s grip and burst into the open. He flew toward Elisabeta, as much a creature of instinct as the
strigoi
. He reached her at the same time that the pack leader, a huge figure with ropy muscles and blue-black tattoos, bounded the fence and landed on the countess’s far side, baring his teeth.

More
strigoi
followed his example, flowing over the fence.

Rhun grabbed her by the arm and retreated toward the colonnade, dragging her, hoping to lure the pack into the stone forest.

The leader barked an order and an overzealous beast rushed forward.

Heaving with one arm, Rhun threw Elisabeta like a rag doll into the colonnade and slashed out with his
karambit
. The silver blade cut through the air—then through flesh. The feral youngster fell back, clutching his throat as blood and breath bubbled out of his severed neck.

Other
strigoi
surged forward as Rhun retreated—only to be met at the edge of the colonnade by Bernard and the other Sanguinists.

A brief battle raged among the columns. But with the pack caught by surprise and weakened by holy ground, it was a slaughter. A few broke away, leaping the fence and scattering like vermin into the streets, fleeing both the fight and the sun.

Rhun found himself confronting the hulking leader. Upon his bared chest, a Hieronymus Bosch painting had been tattooed, a hellish landscape of death and punishment. It came to life as his muscles rippled, lifting his heavy blade.

Rhun’s blade looked contemptibly small compared to that length of steel.

As if knowing this, spite polished the other’s dark eyes to a wicked gleam. He sprang at Rhun, hacking that sword downward at his head, ready to cleave him in two.

But holiness slowed the
strigoi
’s attack, allowing time for Rhun to duck inside the other’s guard. He turned the hook of his
karambit
up and sliced into the other’s belly. Ripping high, he tore that grotesque canvas in half and kicked the body away.

The gutted bulk toppled to the edge of the columns, one arm flinging out into the light—into
sunlight
. The limb burst into flame. Another Sanguinist helped Rhun yank the body back into the shadows and stanched the flames before the fire drew unwanted attention.

A few faces turned toward the shadows, but most remained oblivious of the swift and deadly battle within the colonnade. As Rhun stared at the sunlight brightening the plaza, fear rang through him.

Elisabeta . . .

He turned to find Bernard looming over her huddled form, her face to the ground. She surely felt the blaze of the new day, sensed its burn. For now, her only safety lay within the shadowy shelter of the colonnade. To step beyond it would be her death.

Bernard grabbed her by the shoulder, looking ready to cast her out into the square, to face the judgment of a new day. Sanguinists crowded around him, reeking of wine and incense. None would stop the cardinal if he chose to slay her. She had led
strigoi
to the holiest city in Europe.