Blood Infernal, Page 2

  But I will bring their light to earth and share it with all of mankind.

  He moved to the fireplace and lit a long taper. He carried it around the circle, igniting five candles placed at the corners of the pentagram. The yellow flames looked weak and insubstantial in the sunlight, guttering in the draft from the window.

  At last, he closed the curtains, and darkness cloaked the room.

  He hurried back and knelt at the edge of the circle.

  From the gemstone, inky smoke flowed from the tiny opening, moving tentatively, perhaps sensing the larger world still glowed with the new day. Then it seemed to grow bolder, rushing toward John, as if to claim him, to make him pay for its long imprisonment. But the circle of salt held it at bay.

  Ignoring the threat, John’s voice hissed against the crackling fire as he recited words in the Enochian language, a language long thought lost to mankind. “I command thee, Master of Darkness, to show me the light that is the opposite of your shadows.”

  Within the circle, the black cloud quivered once, twice, expanding and contracting like a living heart. With each beat, it grew larger than before.

  John clasped his hands in front of him. “Protect me, oh Lord, as I look upon the glory thou hast wrought.”

  The darkness coalesced into an oval large enough for a man to step through.

  Whispered words brushed John’s ear.

  “COME TO ME . . .”

  The voice rose from out of the portal.

  “SERVE ME . . .”

  John picked up an unlit candle from beside his knee and lit it from one on the corner of the pentagram. He held the flame aloft, calling again upon the protection of God.

  A new noise reached him as if something shifted on the far side of the portal, accompanied by a heavy chinking sound, the clang of metal on metal.

  Words returned, worming into his mind. “OF ALL MORTALS, I HAVE FOUND THOU ALONE WORTHY.”

  John rose and took a step toward the circle, but his foot brushed Vaclav’s outstretched hand. He stopped, suddenly sensing how unworthy he was to look upon such glory.

  I have killed an innocent.

  His silent confession was heard.

  “GREATNESS HAS ITS PRICE,” he was assured. “FEW ARE PREPARED TO PAY IT. THOU ART UNLIKE THE OTHERS, JOHN DEE.”

  He trembled at these new words, especially the last two.

  My name is known, spoken by an angel.

  He teetered between pride and fear, the room spinning drunkenly. The candle fell from his fingers. Still lit, it rolled into the circle, then through the portal to cast its light on what lay hidden on the other side.

  He gaped at a figure of incredible majesty seated atop a shining ebony throne. Candlelight glinted off eyes of black oil in a face of stern beauty, each plane seemingly sculpted from onyx. Atop that beautiful countenance rested a broken crown of silver, its surface tarnished black, jagged edges looking like horns. From beyond wide shoulders rose mighty wings, whose feathers were as dark and glossy as a raven’s. They curved high, sheltering the naked form within their embrace.

  The figure shifted forward, disturbing the tarnished silver chains that encased his flawless form, securing him to his throne.

  John knew upon whom he stared.

  “Thou art no angel,” he whispered.

  “I AM . . . AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN.” Though that smooth voice filled his head, the figure’s lips did not move. “THY WORDS HAVE SUMMONED ME. WHAT ELSE COULD I BE?”

  Doubt fluttered in John’s chest, accompanied by a growing pain. He had been wrong. Darkness had not summoned light—it had called to darkness instead.

  As he stared in horror, a link of the chain shattered from the figure’s form. Fresh silver shone brightly from the fractured edge. The creature was breaking free.

  The sight cut through John’s trance. He fell away from the circle and stumbled toward the window. He must not let this creature of darkness enter this world.

  “HALT . . .”

  That single syllable of command stabbed a fiery lance of pain through his head. He could not think, he could barely move, but he forced himself onward. With hands like claws, he grabbed the thick curtain and pulled with all his feeble strength.

  The velvet tore.

  Sunlight flooded the room, shining onto the bell, the desk, the circle, and, finally, the portal of darkness. A piercing scream rose behind him, filling his skull to bursting.

  It was too much.

  But it was enough.

  As John Dee slumped to the ground, his last sight was darkness again fleeing the sunlight, retreating to its place of refuge in the gem. He offered one final prayer to the world as he left it.

  May no one ever find that cursed stone . . .

  At noon, soldiers shattered the laboratory door with a battering ram. The men fell to their knees in the hall as the emperor himself swept past them.

  “Lift not your faces from the ground,” he ordered.

  The soldiers obeyed without question.

  Emperor Rudolf II walked past their prostrate forms and into the room, taking in the pentagram, the puddles of wax, and the two dead bodies upon the floor—the alchemist and his young apprentice.

  Rudolf knew what their deaths meant.

  John Dee had failed him.

  Not sparing the corpses a second glance, Rudolf stepped into the mystical circle and retrieved his precious diamond from the center. A black mass quivered hatefully inside its leaf-green heart. Cold fury emanated from the stone and clawed at Rudolf’s mind, but it could do no worse. Whatever else he had done, Dee had contained the evil.

  Keeping the bright stone in the sunlight, Rudolf stoppered the opening with the sliver of bone that lay abandoned on the corner of the desk, translucent as a snowflake but still so very powerful. He lit a candle and sealed the bone to the diamond using drips of tallow that burned his fingers.

  Once done, he sat in the battered chair. With careful movements, he covered the luminous green stone and the darkness that it held with fresh oilcloth. Afterward, he tied the wrapping and lowered the bundle into a cauldron of warm tallow that Dee kept always near the fireplace. Rudolf submerged the bundle to make certain that wax sealed each bit.

  He glanced at the men in the hall. They lay as ordered, their faces pressed into the floor. Satisfied that he was unwatched, he opened the secret compartment in the fireplace mantel and tucked the foul object inside. Using the Enochian language, he whispered a quick prayer of protection before closing the secret door.

  For now, the evil was hidden.

  Weariness dragged at his limbs. It had been long since he had enjoyed a real rest, and he would find none this day either. With a sigh, he fell again into the wooden chair beside Dee’s desk and picked up a scrap of parchment from an untidy pile. He dipped a quill into a silver inkwell and began to write in the Enochian alphabet. Few had been taught the language’s secrets.

  When finished, the emperor folded the paper twice, sealed it with black wax, and pressed the seal on his ring into the hot liquid. A trusted man would ride out within the hour to deliver it.

  The emperor sought help.

  He needed the counsel of the only one who had delved as deeply as Dee into the world of light and dark angels. He stared at the bodies on the floor, praying she could undo the damage wrought here.

  He lifted his hastily written note. Sunlight shone against the black letters of her famous name.

  Countess Elisabeta Bathory de Ecsed

  FIRST

  For Jesus said unto him, “Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit!”

  And he asked him, “What is thy name?” And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion: for we are many.”

  —Mark 5:8–9

  March 17, 4:07 P.M. CET

  Vatican City

  Don’t get caught.

  That warning kept every muscle tense as Dr. Erin Granger crouched behind a card catalog in the center of the Vatican Apostolic Library’s reading room. Elaborate frescoes decorated
the white surface of the arched ceiling that hung far above her head. Shelves of the rarest books in the world stretched on either side of her. The library contained over seventy-five thousand manuscripts and over a million books. Ordinarily, as an archaeologist, this was exactly the kind of place she would have loved to while away hours and days, but it had recently become more of a prison than a place of discovery.

  Today I must escape it.

  She was not alone in this plot. Her accomplice was Father Christian. He stood on one side of her, in plain sight, silently urging her to hurry with furtive waves of his hand. He appeared to be a young priest, tall with dark brown hair and the sharpest of green eyes, his cheekbones defined, his skin flawless. He could be easily mistaken for a youth in his late twenties, but he was decades older than that. He was once a monster, a former strigoi, a creature who had survived on human blood. But long ago he had joined the Catholic Order of the Sanguines and taken a vow to live eternally on the blood of Christ. He was a Sanguinist now, and one of the few that Erin trusted implicitly.

  So she took him at his word concerning this stranger beside her.

  The young nun, Sister Margaret, hid next to Erin behind the counter. She breathed heavily, struggling to wiggle out of her dark habit, her wimple already on the floor between them. From the perspiration on the woman’s brow, she was human. Erin swore she could hear the nun’s frantic heartbeat. It was likely a match to her own.

  “Here,” Margaret said, shaking loose her long blond hair, catching Erin’s gaze with dark amber eyes. Sister Margaret was about Erin’s size and coloring, and that made her essential to their plan.

  Erin pulled Margaret’s habit over her head. Black serge scraped against her cheeks. The cloth smelled freshly laundered. She shrugged the garment across her body and smoothed it over her hips as best she could while still crouched. Margaret helped position her abandoned white wimple over Erin’s head, adjusting it around her cheeks to cover her blond hair, tucking away a few errant strands.

  Once finished, the nun sat back on her heels, appraising Erin’s disguise with critical eyes.

  “What do you think?” Christian asked from a corner of his mouth, leaning an arm on the card catalog to further hide their actions.

  Margaret nodded, satisfied. Erin now looked like an ordinary nun, practically anonymous in Vatican City, where only tourists and priests outnumbered the sisters in their habits.

  To finish the subterfuge, Margaret slipped a black cord that held a large silver cross over Erin’s head and handed her a silver ring. Erin slipped the warm circle onto her ring finger, realizing that she’d never worn a band there before.

  Thirty-two years old and never married.

  She knew how her father, long dead, would have been horrified at such a prospect for his daughter. He had preached ardently that it was a woman’s highest duty to create babies that served God. Of course, he would have been equally mortified to know that she’d attended a secular school, gotten a PhD in archaeology, and had spent the past ten years proving that much of the history recorded in the Bible was entirely without miraculous origins. If he hadn’t already shunned her for fleeing the religious compound as a teenager, he would have damned her now. But she had made peace with that.

  A few months ago, she had been offered a glimpse into the secret history of the world, a world not explained by the books she had studied in school or the science that was the bedrock of her own personal faith. She had met her first Sanguinist—living proof that monsters existed and that devotion in the church could tame them.

  Still, a large part of her remained the same skeptic, still questioning everything. While she might have accepted the existence of strigoi, it was only after she had met one, saw its ferocity, and examined its sharp teeth. She trusted only what she could verify herself, which was why she had insisted on this plan to begin with.

  Margaret pulled her own blond hair back into a ponytail like Erin usually wore. Beneath her habit, the nun had already been wearing an old pair of Erin’s jeans and one of her white cotton shirts. From a distance, she could pass for Erin.

  Or at least I hope so.

  They both turned to Christian for his final approval. He gave a thumbs-up, then leaned down to whisper in Erin’s ear.

  “Erin, the danger ahead is real. Where you are about to trespass is forbidden. If you are caught . . .”

  “I know,” she said.

  He handed her a folded map and a key. She attempted to take them, but Christian held firm.

  “I’m willing to go with you,” he said, his eyes bright with concern. “Just say the word.”

  “But you can’t,” she countered. “You know that.”

  Erin glanced over to Margaret. For this subterfuge to work, Christian had to stay in the library. He had been assigned as Erin’s bodyguard. And rightfully so. Of late, the number of strigoi attacks across the breadth of Rome was escalating. Something had stirred the monsters up. And not just here. Reports from around the globe indicated a shift in that balance between the light and the dark.

  But what was causing it?

  She had her suspicions but she wanted confirmation before sharing them, and this trespass today might gain her the answers she needed.

  “Be careful,” Christian finally said, releasing the map and key. He then took Margaret’s hand and helped her stand. It was hoped that everyone would assume that the blonde beside Christian was Erin, keeping her absence undetected.

  “Your blood,” Erin whispered. She would need that final item as much as she would the key.

  Christian gave a small nod and slipped her a stoppered glass vial containing a few milliliters of his own black blood. She added the cold vial to her other pocket next to a small flashlight.

  Christian touched his pectoral cross and whispered, “Go get ’em, tiger.”

  Then he ushered Sister Margaret out from behind the card catalog toward the table where Erin had left her backpack and notebook. She stared at the backpack, hating to leave it behind. Inside, sealed in a special case, was a tome more precious than all the multitudes of ancient volumes secured in the Vatican’s secret archives.

  It held the Blood Gospel.

  The book of prophecies had been written by Christ, inscribed in His holy blood. Only a few pages of that book had revealed themselves. She pictured those fiery lines scribing to life across those ancient blank pages. They were stanzas of cryptic prophecies. Some had already been deciphered; others still remained a mystery yet to be solved. But even more intriguing were the hundreds of blank pages that had still not revealed their hidden contents. It was rumored that those lost secrets might contain all the knowledge of the universe, of God, of the meaning of existence, and what lay beyond.

  Erin found her mouth going dry even now at the thought of leaving behind such a font of knowledge. Pride also prickled through her, knowing such knowledge was meant for her. Back in the deserts of Egypt, the book had been bound to her. Its words could only be read if she held the book in her hands. So, up until this moment, she had carried it everywhere, never letting it out of her sight.

  But now she must.

  Nuns didn’t carry backpacks, so for her disguise to work, she would have to leave the precious tome in Christian’s capable care.

  And the sooner I get this done, the sooner I can be back.

  That knowledge drove her to her feet. She had a lot of ground to cover, and if she didn’t return by evening when the library closed, they would all be caught. Pushing that thought out of her head, she kept her back bowed so that no one could see her face. She took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the catalog into the quiet murmur of the library.

  No one seemed to pay her any special notice as she walked slowly toward the front door. She willed herself to remain calm. Sanguinists had senses so acute that they could hear a human heartbeat. They might wonder why a nun walking through the tranquil library had a galloping heartbeat.

  She passed rows of shelves and scholars seated at polish
ed wooden tables next to stacks of books. Many of these scholars had waited years to come to this place. They were bent reverently over their tasks, as devout as any priest. She had once been no different from them—until she’d discovered an alternate, deeper vein of history. Well-known texts and familiar paths no longer contented her.

  That was just as well. Such ordinary scholarly ways were no longer open to her. She had recently been dismissed from her post at Stanford University following the death of a student on a dig in Israel. She knew that she should be preparing for her future, worrying about her long-term career, but none of that mattered. If she and the others didn’t succeed, no one would have a future to worry about.

  She pushed open the heavy library door and stepped out into a bright Italian afternoon. The spring sunshine felt good against her face, but she didn’t have time to linger and enjoy it. She quickened her pace, hurrying through the Holy City toward St. Peter’s Basilica. Tourists were all around, consulting maps and pointing.

  They slowed her down, but eventually she reached the grand and imposing basilica. The building symbolized papal power, and no one looking upon it could fail to recognize its strength and grandeur. Even knowing its stern purpose, the beauty of its façade and its massive domes always filled her with awe.

  She made straight for the giant doors and passed unchallenged between marble columns so tall that they spanned two floors. As she strode through the atrium and into the nave of the massive basilica itself, she cast a glance at Michelangelo’s Pietà on her right, a sorrowful sculpture of Mary cradling her son’s dead body. It served as a reminder and quickened Erin’s steps.

  Many more mothers will be mourning their lost children if I fail.

  Still, she had no idea what she was doing. For the past two months she had scoured the Vatican Library, searching for the truth behind the Blood Gospel’s last prophecy: Together, the trio must face their final quest. The shackles of Lucifer have been loosened, and his Chalice remains lost. It will take the light of all three to forge the Chalice anew and banish him again to his eternal darkness.