As Rhun slipped into the room, he saw the disheveled state of Bernard’s temporary desk, the pools of melted candle wax on top, the heavy silk drapes that had been tied closed over the windows.
Something’s not—
The door slammed shut behind him.
He turned too slowly to block the shoulder that rammed into him, knocking him to the floor. Agony lanced through him as he landed on his left side, jarring his stump and closing his vision to a knot.
A dark shape sped past him and struck Jordan a blow to the skull with the bust of a statue. As Jordan collapsed, Erin was grabbed and tossed over the desk, where she hit a draped window and crashed to the floor.
Before Rhun could even sit up, a hand grasped his neck with iron-strong fingers and yanked him high, until only his toes brushed the carpet.
A ghastly chuckle cut through his pain.
Cardinal Bernard leered at him. His scarlet robes hung in tatters on his nearly naked form. Madness crazed his brown eyes.
“Welcome, Knight of Christ… welcome to your ruin.”
26
Dazed by the sudden attack, Erin grabbed the edge of the desk and pulled herself up, ignoring the ache in her side. Her flung body had knocked over the lone candle. The room was now dark, lit only by filtered light coming from the shuttered windows.
Her first thought was: strigoi.
She stumbled to the window behind her and yanked on the drapes. A sash had been knotted over them, keeping them from opening completely, but she managed to part the heavy silk enough to bring sunlight into the room.
Twisting back around, she saw an impossible sight. Cardinal Bernard had Rhun clutched by the throat, pinned against a bookcase. Rags of scarlet draped the man’s nearly naked body, revealing scores of scratches on the white skin beneath, as if he had torn his own robes from his shoulders in a rage.
On the rug behind them, a figure lay unmoving on the floor, blood seeping from his scalp.
Jordan…
Rhun seemed to recover from his surprise. A silver blade appeared in his right hand and bit deep into the cardinal’s arm. Fingers released his throat. As Rhun slumped down the bookcase, he lashed at the cardinal — but only swiped through empty air.
Bernard was already across the room, ripping a sword from the wall. The unearthly speed with which he moved told her that the cardinal no longer obeyed the vows of a Sanguinist. Like the strigoi, his power sprang from a darker source.
What had happened?
Jordan stirred, his eyes fluttering open. In the darkness, they shone with a faint golden gleam.
Before Jordan could gather his wits, Bernard rushed Rhun.
Rhun leaped to the side, crashing clumsily into a giant Chinese vase. His natural grace was plainly thrown off balance by his missing arm.
She drew a dagger from an inner sheath in her jacket, ready to defend the others. But she wasn’t a fighter. Her best weapon was her mind. Bernard went after Rhun again, but Jordan broadsided the cardinal, knocking him over a large standing globe.
As the cardinal sprang back up with a snarl — his body framed in a sliver of sunlight — Erin searched his exposed nakedness, looking for a telltale black handprint.
Nothing.
She wasn’t surprised.
How could Legion have possessed the cardinal? Especially while the man was imprisoned here? But if Legion wasn’t the source of this corruption, what was?
Must think…
Jordan joined Rhun, both facing down the raving beast that was the cardinal.
Erin studied the room, searching for whatever held the cardinal in thrall. Her gaze swept across the chaos atop his desk. She saw nothing unusuaclass="underline" papers, books, a leather-bound journal. She looked around the base of the desk. As she did so, her toe nudged a black pouch on the floor. Something rolled out the open end.
A piece of black glass.
It seemed to exude darkness. She had seen such a poisonous artifact before: in the Egyptian desert. Rhun had recently led a team to rid the sands of such evil. She dropped to a knee, knowing what rested on the carpet.
A drop of Lucifer’s blood.
She used a piece of paper to scoop the stone up, while grabbing the ties of the bag. Straightening, she rolled that black tear into the pool of sunlight atop the desk and emptied the pouch’s contents beside it. The pile of dark drops seemed to suck in the light, creating little voids in the fabric of the universe. She didn’t need to touch them to sense their malignancy, their wrongness.
But how could she vanquish it?
Sunlight clearly had no effect.
And why should it?
Millennia ago, these drops of Lucifer’s blood had fused with the Egyptian sand, creating a black glass that sealed in their malevolence, protected the darkness within from the light of the sun. If two thousand years of desert heat hadn’t harmed them, then simple Italian sunlight wouldn’t have any effect.
But what if—
Her eyes fell on a toppled stone paperweight on the corner of Bernard’s desk. It was in the shape of an angel — but more important, it was heavy.
She grabbed it, lifted it high, and smashed it down on a dull black drop, shattering it to dust.
Across the room, Bernard howled and hissed.
So you feel that, do you?
She lifted the paperweight again and again, crushing drop after drop. With each strike, a tendril of black smoke rose up from the crystalline powder. It swirled in a circle, snaking away from the exposure of the sun, then over the edge of the desk, where it plunged through the floor.
She remembered Elizabeth’s recounting how the essence of a strigoi would do the same upon the beast’s death, returning to its source.
Lucifer.
As she shattered the last obsidian piece, Cardinal Bernard gave out a final gasp, toppling over, his body thudding to the floor.
Rhun knelt over Bernard’s body, his knife at the cardinal’s throat, ready to kill his old friend. Jordan had collected the abandoned sword and stood guard by his shoulder. By now, the two cloaked guards had rushed into the room, sweeping in with weapons bared, drawn by the clatter of the brief fight.
Fearing what other evil might be about, Rhun shouted. “Guard the doors! Let no one in without my word!”
They gave him curt nods and returned to their posts.
As Rhun watched, madness faded from the cardinal’s eyes. It was replaced with something that Rhun had never seen there before.
Doubt.
Rhun leaned back, lifting his blade away, but keeping it ready.
Bernard sat up, gathering the shreds of his robes around himself, as if trying to do the same with his dignity. He ended with his hands trembling in his lap.
Erin came over, still holding a small angelic sculpture. The bottom was cracked, coated with black dust. “It was those drops of Lucifer’s blood.”
Rhun nodded, understanding. “I left them after I returned from Egypt. Locked up in the cardinal’s safe. It’s my fault.”
“No…” Bernard shook his head. “It was my hubris, believing I could dabble with such darkness and remain untouched.”
“But why mess with them in the first place?” Jordan asked.
“I hoped to learn something from them, something about Lucifer.” Bernard stared at Rhun. “Last night, when Father Gregory brought word that you were headed back from Prague, that you were coming with questions about stones associated with Lucifer, I remembered what you had brought back from Egypt.”