But Christ had sent it here for him.
“I must fulfill the covenant of Eve,” she muttered with dry, cold lips.
Beyond the edge of the sphere, the lion stared back at her, stirring as if he had heard her, mewling softly. The cub reminded her of her first cat, a giant barn tom named Nebuchadnezzar. He’d been snowy white, too.
“Hey there, Neb,” she whispered, momentarily lost in time.
Rhun bent closer, drawing back her attention. The sorrow in his eyes made her want to reach up and touch him, to comfort him. “What covenant do you speak of?” he pressed her.
She forced her eyes to focus. “The book… the gospel… must go to Lucifer.”
Rhun’s eyes widened with disbelief, even outrage. “How can Christ’s gospel go to an angel cast out of Heaven by God himself?”
She didn’t have the strength to argue, but she exhaled faint words with each fading breath, knowing his sharp Sanguinist ears would hear them. “Christ wrote it to redeem Lucifer. If Eve had given him the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he would have known good. He could have chosen good. The covenant of Eve must be fulfilled. Rhun, you must give him this knowledge.”
Rhun looked up at the blackened sky. “I cannot leave you to die alone.”
“You must… this is what we were chosen for.”
Rhun lifted the gospel from her as she let it go, glad to be free of this burden. Her empty fingers returned to clutching her throat, as useless as that gesture was by now. She concentrated on Rhun. His face told her how much he wanted to stay with her, and what it cost him to leave her. His eyes flicked to the book hanging open in his one hand, then his face looked scared.
What’s wrong?
He answered her silent question. “The writing is gone.” He tipped the book, fluttering through the pages, all blank. “Remember, the gospel is bound only to you, Erin. The words are not revealed to any other.”
She was so cold now. She didn’t know what to do, what to say.
“Perhaps I can carry you and the book to Lucifer,” Rhun suggested. “We can give it to him together.”
No…
He quickly understood, too, sagging over her. “That won’t work. While you live, the light will burn you to ash. Only Sanguinists or strigoi may pass through such barriers unharmed.”
Erin’s vision faded. She used her last breath to whisper the ultimate truth.
“You have to turn me… it’s the only way.”
I must become a strigoi.
Jordan had lost sight of Erin as a heavy black mist rolled across the shattered lake, rising with distant screams and howls, its darkness broken by flares of blacker flames. Giant forms stirred that fog, things he knew whose very sight would strip him of his sanity, what little there remained.
Still, even with the emerald sphere collapsed around him, he remained on his knees. The gate was forever damaged with the gem’s destruction, never to be closed again.
Jordan saw no reason to keep fighting, especially knowing Erin was likely dead.
If not now, soon.
Without Erin, Jordan wasn’t sure if he wanted to live or die.
But he did know one thing with absolute certainty.
He wanted revenge.
Jordan stared up as Legion fell upon him. The demon lifted the monk’s sword high, his face shining with triumph. That blade still steamed with the demon’s own blood.
It was what had given Jordan this idea.
Retreating from that assault, Jordan sprawled backward to the ground, as if prostrating himself before Legion, accepting death. Instead, Jordan threw himself atop the blade he had propped up a moment ago behind him. The blade pierced his back and thrust out of his belly. That black obsidian sword burned through him like a spike of ice. It was Legion’s own sword, abandoned in the snow earlier, the blade now slick with Jordan’s fiery blood.
As the demon came at him, hobbled by the broken knee, Jordan kicked out again. His crampon struck Legion’s good ankle — not enough to break it, but enough to trip the demon, to send him crashing atop Jordan.
Jordan opened his arms in a giant bear hug. Legion crashed into him, impaling his body on the bloody sword, coated with Jordan’s angelic blood. The demon screamed and writhed on that pike, but Jordan wrapped his arms around Legion and rolled to the side, pouring the pool of fiery blood from his belly wound into Legion’s cold black body. Jordan willed all of his angelic essence to follow, to burn this demon from Leopold’s body.
“Go back to Hell, you bastard.”
Legion thrashed and howled, casting out gouts of dark smoke, as if the demon blazed atop the coals of Jordan’s body. Slowly, the black drained from Legion’s face, from his body. Leopold’s watery blue eyes looked at Jordan.
“Mein Freund…” Leopold said, lowering his forehead to Jordan’s cheek. “You have freed me.”
Jordan held him, not to keep the man from escaping, but to let Leopold know he wasn’t alone, that he was forgiven in the end, even loved. Jordan held him, until the body of his friend fell limp in his arms, finding true peace at last.
Rhun watched as Erin’s hands fell slackly from her neck, too weak now to hold them to the ruins of her throat. Rhun lifted his hand to apply that pressure for her, but he knew from each feeble beat of her fading heart that such an effort was useless. Instead, he scooped her into his lap, cradling her body against his, and clutched her blood-slicked fingers. Her head lolled back, her face bathed in the crimson fire of the stone.
How could he turn her, a woman he had grown to love, still loved?
Strigoi were soulless abominations, and it was a sin to create them. He had slipped from that path long ago when he had taken Elizabeth, and only evil had come of that. She had turned from a healer of man into a killer of men, slaughtering hundreds of innocents.
Rhun glanced in Elizabeth’s direction — but by now, those dreadful mists had spread, consuming her position. Still, the azure column of fire continued to blaze into the dark sky. He hoped that meant she still lived. He knew that there was still good in her, even if she could not fully see it yet. He prayed she lived long enough to discover it.
His eyes stared out into the deeper darkness, toward where that fiery emerald column had gone dark. Did Jordan yet live? Either way, with the gateway damaged, what hope did any of them have?
The lion yowled at him from outside the fiery bubble, as if scolding him. Those golden eyes stared deeply into his, reminding him that there was hope, that it lay limply in his arms.
“But it is forbidden,” he told the young creature. “Look at these soulless demons. Would you have her join their ranks?”
The answer rose like a sigh from Erin’s lips, likely her last.
“Please.”
42
Erin hovered at the edge of oblivion. Though her eyes were open, she saw only shadows now. Still, she could make out a silhouette of Rhun’s face against a fiery backdrop. Past his shoulders, the blaze of the fading eclipse pierced those shadows, but even that fire was slowly being wiped away by a rising tide of black mists from the lake, a darkness that if unchecked would grow to consume this world.
She had no arguments left to convince Rhun, no breath to speak them, but her mind ran with them anyway.