The Blood Gospel (Page 72)

Nadia looked ready to object, but Rhun knelt and gently supported the old priest’s feet. Emmanuel pulled the spike from the priest’s feet and tossed it aside, then stood, reaching for the hands.

Piers remained oblivious. His eyes rolled toward the arched roof and its black decorations. “Meine Kinder … they have brought you.” An exultant tone threaded through his feeble words. “To save me …”

Nadia’s face hardened. She looked in the direction of the battered priest’s gaze—to the horde of the icarops. “It was Father Piers who created these unholy creatures.”

“Blasphemare?” Emmanuel’s fingers hesitated over the nail that lanced Piers’s left palm. “But that is forbidden.”

Rhun was less interested in blasphemy than he was in answers. “He had no choice. He must have had to feed to survive all those decades alone on the cross. What else would he have here to feed upon but the bats.”

He pictured the priest drawing what little sustenance he could from the dark denizens of this tomb, eventually bending them to his will as the decades passed, twisting them to serve him, using their companionship to anchor what little sanity he could retain in this dark isolation.

Long ago, Rhun had starved himself almost to death in penance. He remembered the pain, and he could not fault Piers for making the icarops in order to survive. It had been the only way.

“How long has he been up there?” Erin’s face had gone white.

“Since the Nazis left him, I imagine.” Nadia did not move to help.

Rhun pulled the nailed spike out of Piers’s right palm while Emmanuel worked on his left. Dark blood flowed down the old man’s hand. Rhun tried to be gentle. The wounded priest had little blood left to lose.

“What did he do to deserve this fate?” Jordan asked.

“That is the salient question.” Nadia stood in front of Piers and looked up into his gaunt face, her voice rising. “What did you do to come to be nailed here, Father?”

The memory of the tomb at Masada sliced through Rhun: the strigoi girl pinned to the wall by silver spikes, the old gas mask crushed under rock. Had Piers broken under torture? Had he told the Nazis where to find the book, what safeguards to expect, what they needed to do to overcome the millennia-old protections and retrieve it?

Piers whimpered with every movement of the nail. Rhun knew firsthand the pain of silver. Piers had endured the burning agony of silver for almost seventy years. Like Jesus, he had done his penance on a cross.

The last spike came free, and Emmanuel threw it across the chamber. Rhun caught Piers’s slight weight against his shoulder.

Emmanuel tore off his own damp cassock, revealing his leather armor, and wrapped the cassock around the ancient priest. Rhun lowered him to the ground. Emmanuel reached for his wine flask, but Nadia stopped him.

“He’s no longer holy,” she said. “The wine would do more harm than good.”

Emmanuel cradled Piers in his arms. “What have they done to you?”

“Blut und bone,” the old man mumbled. “Libri.”

Beside him, Erin stirred. “Libri? That’s Greek for ‘book.’ Does his crucifixion here have something to do with the Gospel?”

Rhun knew that it did.

Erin held out her hand toward Rhun. In her palm rested a shard of ashy stone. “I found these accretions of lime and ash, an ancient form of concrete, broken into pieces around the pedestal. It might be that the Gospel was encased in a block of such stone and someone broke it free, right here in this room. Could Father Piers have been crucified here as the guardian of it, like the little girl in Masada?”

“Only he knows,” Rhun answered. “And I don’t know what’s left of his mind.”

“Then heal him.”

“Such matters may be beyond me, beyond even the Church.”

Rhun took the shard and examined it. His fingertips as much as his eyes picked out the Aramaic lettering impressed on one side. If his heart still beat, it would have quickened.

The book had been here. Someone had found it and removed its covering. But had they opened it?

That could not be. If it had happened, the thieves of Heaven would have claimed its power. But who had taken it?

He needed the answer—and Erin was right.

Only one person could supply it.

“Father Piers?” he intoned, trying to draw a moment of lucidity from him. “Can you hear me?”

The old man’s eyes slid closed. “Pride … shameful pride.”

What was Piers talking about? Did he mean the hubris of the Nazis, or did he mean something much worse?

“How did the Nazis capture you?” Rhun pressed. “Did you tell them of the book?”

“Es ist noch kein Buch,” Piers whispered through bloodless lips.

“It is not a book,” Jordan translated.

“They must have tortured him, Rhun,” Emmanuel said. “Just as you are doing now. We must heal him before you disturb him with questions.”

“Not yet,” Father Piers said. “Not yet a book.”

Nadia glanced at the marble walls as if they held windows. “Sunrise comes soon. Do you feel it?”

Rhun nodded. His body had begun to weaken. Christ’s grace allowed them to walk under the day’s sun, but because of their taint, they were always strongest at night.

“I like the sound of sunrise,” Jordan said.

“We can’t take Piers out into the new day,” Nadia said. “He’s no longer blessed by Christ’s blood. The sun would destroy him.”

“Then we hunker down here.” Jordan glanced uneasily at the ceiling. “It’s not a five-star hotel, but as long as the bats seem calm, I think we can—”

“He will die before nightfall,” Emmanuel said, and gestured toward the icarops horde rustling on the walls. “Unless he feeds off those cursed creatures.”

“And I will not allow that,” Nadia said. “It is a sin.”

“And I will not leave Piers to die in sin.” Emmanuel drew his knife, threatening her.

Rhun stepped between them and held his hands up. “If we hurry, we can still reach the chapel in Harmsfeld. We can sanctify him there. After that, he can partake of Christ’s blood again.”

“What if he cannot be sanctified?” Nadia practically spat out the words. “What if he was no pawn of the Nazis—”

Rhun held up a hand to silence her, but she would not be silenced.

“What if he sought them out?”