She focused on her goal ahead.
A few streets separated her from the walls of Vatican City.
The Sanguinists would never let such a pack of strigoi enter their holy city. They would cut them down like weeds. She ran toward that same death with one hope in her silent heart.
She bore the secret of where Rhun lay hidden.
But would that be enough to turn their swords from her neck?
She did not know.
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.