Innocent Blood(63)

“Stop!” Rhun yelled, his voice booming in the small space.

Elizabeth held her ground. She pictured the sarcophagus from which she was birthed into this new world. She remembered the bricked-up cell in her castle tower where she had slowly starved. She could not stand to be confined again, to be trapped.

“The last time you put me in a coffin,” she spat at Rhun, “I lost four hundred years.”

“It’s just for this trip,” Rhun promised her. “The plane will be traveling above the clouds. There will be no escaping the sun where we fly.”

Still, she panicked at the thought of being shut away again, unable to control herself. She thrashed against the silver that bound her to him. “I’d rather die.”

Nadia stepped closer. “If you prefer.”

With a quick flick of her short sword, the woman slashed Elizabeth’s throat. Silver burned her skin, and blood poured from the wound, trying to purge the holiness from her body. Elizabeth stopped fighting, the blade falling from her fingertips. Rhun was there, clamping his hand over her throat, holding in the blood.

“What have you done?” he hissed at Nadia.

“She’ll live,” Nadia said. “I cut shallow. It will make it easier to get her into the box without more needless fighting.”

Nadia lifted the hinged lid.

Elizabeth moaned, but crippled by silver, she had the strength to do nothing more.

Rhun lifted her and carried her to the coffin.

“I promise that I will fetch you from here,” he said. “Within hours.”

He lowered her into the coffin gently. A click and the manacle left her wrist.

She willed herself to sit up, to fight, but she could not summon the strength.

The lid came down on the box, smothering her again into darkness.





24





December 19, 5:39 P.M. CET

Castel Gandolfo, Italy



With the sun down for the past hour, Leopold haunted the edges of the papal summer residence. The grounds themselves were larger even than the entirety of Vatican City, offering plenty of places to skulk, hide, and watch. At the moment, he was up in one of the giant holm oaks that dotted the property, using its branches and thick trunk to keep hidden in the dark. The tree stood only a stone’s throw from the main castle.

Earlier, as the sun went down, he had crawled out of his hay bale. Using the darkness, it was easy to slip through the police barricade around the ruins of the train. His ears easily picked out the heartbeats of the salvage investigators, allowing him to avoid them and leave unseen. From the hay bale, he had heard the cardinal mention that he would be coming to Castel Gandolfo, where he would mourn and pray for the souls who had lost their lives this day.

So Leopold followed after sunset, rushing with the speed only a Sanguinist could muster, to cross the handful of miles to reach the small village with its looming papal castle.

For the past half hour, he had watched the residence from a distance, slowly circling it completely. He dared get no closer lest the Sanguinists inside sense his presence.

But with his keen ears, he heard much from inside, bits and pieces of conversation, the flow of gossip among the staff. He slowly learned what they knew of the tragic events. It seemed only Cardinal Bernard had escaped alive. The police had found the bodies of the train engineers. Leopold remembered hearing a helicopter come and go before the rescuers arrived on scene. The cardinal must have collected his dead. Bernard would not let the bodies of Sanguinists fall into the hands of the Italian police. Leopold even heard a maid mention a body, seen briefly by her, before Bernard whisked it out of sight into the bowels of the castle.

Leopold shifted on his branch and prayed for their murdered souls. He knew the deaths were necessary, to serve a greater purpose, but he mourned Erin and Jordan, and his fellow Sanguinists—Rhun, Nadia, and Christian. Even the irascible Father Ambrose had not deserved such a fate.

Now, he listened to the sounds of a funeral Mass, the cardinal’s rich Italian tones unmistakable even from such a distance. Leopold’s lips moved in prayer to match, attending that Mass himself from his perch in the tree. All the while, he listened for the voices of Erin and Jordan, in case the staff were wrong. He tried to pick their heartbeats out of the tapestry of the pope’s human retainers.

Nothing.

He heard only the cardinal’s prayers.

As the funeral Mass finished, he climbed down the tree and retreated out of the grounds and across to the neighboring town. He searched and found a discreet telephone booth beside a gas station. He dialed a number he had memorized.

The connection was answered immediately. “You survived?” the Damnatus said, sounding more angry than relieved. “Did anyone else?”