He promised himself in that moment that he would exact swift vengeance on whoever had sent her blazing into the sunlight.
But until then . . .
He fell atop her, letting fire and desire burn away all thought.
19
December 19, 1:36 P.M. CET
South of Rome, Italy
Burrowed deep in the giant hay bale, Leopold strove for a comfortable position. Straw pierced his robe and gouged his tender burns. Still, he dared not leave this shelter.
As the train had exploded, he had jumped clear, riding the blast wave across an expanse of stubbly fields. Only by the hand of God had he been standing in the lee of the boiler when it blew. The metal tank bore the brunt of the explosion, saving him from being incinerated on the spot.
Instead, he had been blown free of the car. He had tumbled through the air, burnt and bleeding, and skidded into the cold mud of the winter fields. Dazed and deafened, he had crawled into a hay bale to hide, to think, to plan.
He did not know then if he was the only survivor.
While he waited, he had stanched the blood flowing from his many wounds. Finally, as the ringing in his ears faded, he heard the rhythmic sound—thump, thump, thump—of a helicopter landing, muffled by the straw surrounding him.
He did not know if the aircraft had been summoned by the cardinal or if it marked the arrival of rescue workers. Either way, he kept hidden. Though he had not set the bomb himself, he knew he bore the blame for the attack. As soon as he had texted the Damnatus, informing him that everyone was on board, along with sharing their theory concerning the identity of the First Angel, the train had exploded—catching Leopold entirely by surprise.
Perhaps he should have expected as much.
Whenever the Damnatus spotted what he wanted, he moved in for the kill.
Never any hesitation.
After the helicopter lifted off and headed away, he heard Cardinal Bernard calling his name, the grief plain in his voice. Leopold longed to go to him, to assuage his sorrow, to beg for forgiveness, and to truly rejoin the Sanguinists.
But, of course, he did not.
Though brutal, the Damnatus’s goal was right and pure.
Over the next hour, more helicopters arrived, followed by rescue vehicles with sirens and shouting men and tromping feet. He curled smaller in the straw. The commotion should mask any sounds he made when he did his penance.
Finally, he could drink the holy wine and heal.
With some difficulty, he freed his leather wine flask and brought it to his lips. Using his teeth, he unscrewed the top and spit it out, and drank deeply, allowing the fire to take him away.
Far beneath the city of Dresden, Leopold knelt in a dank crypt lit by a single candle. Since the air-raid siren had sounded, no one dared show a light, fearful of drawing the wrath of the British bombers down upon them.
As he listened, a bomb detonated far overhead, the boom shaking loose pebbles from the ceiling. The church above had been struck weeks ago. Only this crypt was spared, the entrance dug out from the inside by the Sanguinists who lived there.
Leopold knelt between two other men. Like him, they were both strigoi, preparing to take their final vows as Sanguinists on this dark and violent night. Before him stood a Sanguinist priest, dressed in fine robes and cupping a golden chalice in his clean white palms.
The strigoi next to him trembled. Was he afraid that his faith was not strong enough, that the first sip of Christ’s blood would be his last?
When it came to his turn, Leopold bowed his head and listed his sins. He had many. In his mortal life, he had been a German doctor. Early in the war, he had ignored the Nazis, resisted them. But eventually the government drafted him and sent him into battlefields to care for young men ripped apart by guns and bombs or brought low by disease, starvation, and cold.
One winter night, a rogue pack of strigoi set upon his small unit in the Bavarian Alps. The half-frozen soldiers fought with rifles and bayonets, but the battle lasted no more than a handful of minutes. In the first sweep by the beasts, Leopold had been wounded, his back broken, unable to fight or move. He could only watch the slaughter, knowing his turn would come.
Then a strigoi the size of a child dragged him into the empty cold forest by his boots. He died there, his blood steaming holes into dirty white snow. All the while, the child sang in a high clear voice, a German folk song. That should have been the end of Leopold’s miserable life, but the boy had chosen to turn him into a monster.
He fought against the blood being poured into his mouth—until revulsion became hunger and bliss. As Leopold drank, the child continued to sing.
In the end, wartime was a strigoi’s paradise.
To Leopold’s great shame, he feasted.
Then one day he met a man he could not bite. His senses told him that a drop of that man’s blood would kill him. The stranger intrigued him. As a doctor, he wanted to understand this one’s secrets. So he sought him out night after night, watching him for weeks before daring to speak. When he finally did confront the stranger, the man listened to Leopold’s words, understood his disgust over what he had become.