The Blood Gospel (50 page)

“So long ago?”

Rhun inclined his head. “Where might they have taken the book?”

“If they knew what they possessed, they would have taken it to Stalin.” Rasputin rested his elbows on the table. “But they did not.”

“Are you certain?”

“Of course. If they had taken it anywhere of significance, I would have known. I know everything.”

Rhun rubbed his index finger where his
karambit
rested when he fought. “You have changed little in the last hundred years, Grigori.”

“I assume you refer to my sin of pride, which always made you worry so for my soul.” Rasputin shook his head. “Yet it is
your
pride which needs looking after.”

Rhun inclined his head. “I am aware of my sins.”

“Yet, every day, you suffer the foolishness of penance.”

“And should we not repent our sins?” Rhun’s fingers found his pectoral cross.

Rasputin leaned forward. “Perhaps. But are we forever defined by our sins? How is a moment or two of weakness so large a crime when weighed against centuries of service?”

Though inclined to agree with him, Jordan suspected Rasputin might have had more than a couple of weak moments in his time.

Rhun tightened his lips. “I am not here to discuss sin and repentance with you.”

“A pity.” Rasputin looked at Erin. “We’ve had many enlightening discussions about that over the years, your Rhun and I.”

“We are here for the Gospel,” Erin reminded him. “Not enlightenment.”

“I have not forgotten.” Rasputin smiled at her. “Tell me from where was it taken and when?”

Rhun hesitated, then spoke the truth. “We found evidence that the book may have been at a bunker in southern Germany, near Ettal Abbey.”

“Evidence?” Rasputin fixed his intense eyes on Jordan, as if he were more likely to answer than Rhun.

Jordan tensed. His instinct was to hide everything from Rasputin that he could. “I’m just the muscle.”

“Russia is a big land.” Rasputin looked to Erin. “If you do not help me, I cannot help you.”

Erin glanced at Rhun. She tugged at the cuff of her sweater.

“Piers told us,” Rhun answered. “Before he died.”

Rasputin’s face drooped. “Then he turned to the Nazis after all?”

When Rhun did not answer, Rasputin continued: “He came to me early in the war. I was not as comfortable as I am now.” He paused and gazed around at the church, smiling at the silent followers lined up against resplendent walls. “But even then I had my resources.”

Surprise flickered across Rhun’s face. “Why would he go to you?”

“We were close once, Rhun. Piers as first, you as second, and I as third. Do you honestly not remember?” Hurt was plain in his voice, with an undercurrent of anger. “Where else could he go? The Cardinal threatened to excommunicate him if he continued searching for the book. So after visiting me, Piers went next to the Nazis, seeking help that I could not provide. He refused to give up the hunt. Obsessions are hard to forsake, as you can attest with Lady Elisabeta.”

Rhun turned away. “Cardinal Bernard would have done no such thing to Piers.”

But Jordan heard the lack of conviction in Rhun’s words. Even with the little experience Jordan had with the Cardinal, he knew how much importance the man placed upon the prophecy of the three. To the Cardinal, Father Piers had no role to play.

How wrong he was …

Grigori continued: “Rhun, you do not know your precious Cardinal so well as you think. Remember, he excommunicated
me
. For committing a sin no greater than your own. And I did not take the life of the one I sought to save.”

“What are you talking about?” Jordan asked, feeling like he’d walked into the theater in the middle of a movie.

Erin sat straighter, guessing the truth. “You’re referring to Czar Nicholas’s young son, aren’t you? The boy named Alexei.”

Rasputin favored her with a sad smile. “The poor child suffered. Finally, he lay near death. What was I to do?”

Jordan now remembered the history. The czar’s son was once Rasputin’s young charge. Like many of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, he had suffered from what was known as “the Royal Disease” of hemophilia. According to history, only Rasputin could bring him relief during his episodes of painful internal bleeding.

“You should have let him die a natural death,” Rhun said, “within the grace of God. But you could not. And afterward, you would not repent for your sin.”

Jordan pictured Rasputin turning the boy into a monster rather than letting him die.

“That is why you could not be forgiven,” Rhun said.

“What makes you think I wanted the Cardinal’s forgiveness? That I needed it?”

“I think we have gotten off topic here,” Jordan cut in. Rhun and Rasputin’s old arguments did not advance their cause. “Will you help us find the book?”

“First tell me, how did Piers die?” Rasputin took Erin’s hand. She looked like she wanted to take it back, but she didn’t. She should have. “Please.”

She told him of the cross in the bunker, of the moment in the boat when Piers passed on.

Rasputin dabbed at his eyes with a large linen handkerchief. “How can you explain that, Rhun?”

“God’s grace.” Rhun’s words were simple and fervent.

“Explain what?” Erin asked, looking between them.

“Tainted as Piers was for breaking his vow, for creating and feeding upon
blasphemare
creatures, he should have been burned to ashes by the sunlight.” Rasputin folded the handkerchief and secreted it away in his robes. “That is what happens to
strigoi
who do not drink the blood of Christ. Has Rhun told you nothing?”

He hadn’t told them much. Just that sunlight killed them, not that they burned up. Jordan remembered how Nadia had carefully lifted the coat from Piers’s face, and her fear as she held him against her side so that he might see the sun one last time. His death had seemed peaceful, not violent, more of a letting go. Had God somehow forgiven his sins at the end or was there enough of Christ’s blessing still within Piers’s veins to keep him from burning? He suspected they would never know the true answer, and at the moment they had a more important concern.

“The book,” Jordan said. “Let’s get back to the book.”

Rasputin straightened, visibly drawing back to the matter at hand. “The German bunker was far south. Do you know
when
Russian troops might have reached it? If I had a time line …”

Jordan tried to remember his history, expecting Erin to interrupt with the answer. “The last major German unit in the south surrendered on April twenty-fourth, but the Russians were probably still mopping up until the formal surrender of Germany on May eighth.”

He counted off dates in his head. “By mid-May, though, the Russians were formalizing the division of Germany and the whole of the Iron Curtain. I would guess the Russian smash-and-grab teams peaked around May twentieth, although there were probably Russians clearing out bunkers before and after.”

Rasputin eyed him with what might be respect. “You indeed know your history.”

Jordan shrugged, but he kept talking, eager to find the book and get the three of them out of Russia alive. “I’ve studied a lot about the World War Two era, heard a lot more from my grandfather who fought during it. Anyway,
that
bunker was far south and isolated. Calculating travel time back then, plus a buffer to get out before American troops began their patrols, I would guess the most likely time for the Russians to have hit the bunker would have been between May twenty-eighth and June second. With a wide margin of error, of course.”

Erin gave him a surprised look, as if she hadn’t expected him to know anything useful. Which was getting old.

“Impressive, Sergeant.” Rasputin leaned back. “That information is valuable. Although it will still take time to find the book.”

How did Rasputin know that Jordan was a sergeant? That was worrisome.

“Why is it valuable?” Erin asked. “Why do the dates matter?”

“First, tell me what you are hiding in your coat, my good doctor.”

So he knew Erin had a Ph.D., too, Jordan realized, and that she had the pieces of concrete that had surrounded the book in her pockets. What didn’t he know?

“I can smell it,” Rasputin said.

Erin looked to Rhun. He nodded, and she drew out a piece of the book’s encasement. “We believe this might have been covering the book.”

Rasputin held out his hand, and Erin slowly dropped the gray fragment into his palm. His thumb followed the thin lines of soot that showed where the stone had been blasted apart.

Jordan snapped upright. He should have thought of this before. “If you get me an explosives sensor, I can use that piece as a control and find anything else with the same chemical signature. If this was wrapped around the Gospel, the book would have the same chemical breakdown products on its cover. Assuming it wasn’t destroyed in the blast.”

Rhun touched his cross again, looking shocked. Apparently the priest hadn’t considered the possibility that the book might have been destroyed, that they might be risking their lives to search for something that had been blasted to fragments and ashes.

Rasputin nodded to Sergei, who stepped forward. “Go with my personal assistant. He will help you procure the item that you need.”

Jordan stayed seated. “We move as a team.”

6:17
P.M
.

Rasputin frowned, then laughed. Erin hadn’t thought that she could hate that laugh more than she had the first time she heard it, but she did.

“Very well,” Rasputin said. “Write down the details for Sergei.”

Sergei produced a spiral-bound notebook and pencil stub from his back pocket.

Erin took the concrete piece off the table and slipped it back into her pocket, worrying that Rasputin might steal it. He was clearly an opportunist and not one to underestimate. He already knew too much: that she was a doctor, that she and Rhun and Jordan searched for the book, and that they were possibly the trio of prophecy. And from the greedy glint in his eyes when Jordan had listed the likely dates the bunker had been breached, she also suspected that he already had a good idea about the book’s location.

Clearly, Rasputin enjoyed making them dance like trained monkeys, but was it more than malicious pleasure?

Their host rose and gestured toward a black tabernacle at the rear of the church. “Shall we view the very cobblestones where the czar fell? The namesake for this church.”

She pushed back her chair. Jordan and Rhun stood, too. They walked behind Rasputin’s slope-shouldered form like a Sanguinist trio, Rhun in front, Jordan flanking the right, and Erin the left.

Rasputin stopped in front of the tabernacle. Four polished black columns supported an ornate marble canopy carved in Russian folk-art style, with jet-black stone flowers and flourishes. Behind a small gate lay a simple section of gray cobblestones. Its utilitarian nature clashed with the church’s elaborate grandeur, reminding Erin why this giant building had been constructed—to memorialize the murder of the czar. She contrasted the soaring ceilings and rich gold tiles with the simple mounds of earth in Piskariovskoye Cemetery.

Some deaths were marked better than others.

A handful of Rasputin’s followers came and stood in a semicircle behind them, as if bound to their leader by invisible cords.

“I came here often during the siege of Leningrad,” Rasputin said, resting his hands on the wooden edge of the tabernacle. His sleeves rode up, displaying thick black hair on his wrists and lower arms. “The church was deconsecrated. The holiness stolen back by Rome. But the building was good enough for the dead. They used this nave as a morgue in winter. Piled bodies against the walls.”

Erin shivered, imagining frozen corpses stacked like carcasses in a slaughterhouse, awaiting a spring burial.

“As the siege stretched and the hunger grew worse, the bodies were brought here by wooden carts pulled by living men. The horses had been eaten by then. The dead came as they were born: naked. Every scrap of cloth had to be saved to warm the living.” Rasputin’s voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “I lived in the crypt. No one thought to check the dead. There were too many. Nights I came up, and I counted. Do you know how many children died in the siege? Not just from the cold, although it was bitter and claimed its share. Not just from the hunger, although it drove many to their death. Not even from the Nazis and the death they rained from the sky and the land all around. No, not even them.”

Erin’s throat closed. “
Strigoi?
”

“They came like a plague of locusts, devouring the weak and starving souls huddled here. I escaped to Rome and begged for help.” Rasputin turned to Rhun, who lowered his eyes. “The Church was neutral in the war, but never had Sanguinists forsaken their war against
strigoi
. Until then.”

Erin hugged her chest.
Strigoi
would have found easy prey in the besieged city.

“So I came back alone from Rome. I fought through troops until I was back inside the charnel house that the city I loved had become. And when I came upon dying children, I saved them, brought them into my fold. With my own blood, I built an army to protect my people from the curse.”