Baako frowned. “Who’s not here?”
Jordan pictured the boyish face of his former friend, someone whom he had trusted wholeheartedly, only to have that confidence betrayed in this cavern.
“Brother Leopold,” Jordan mumbled to the darkness. He stepped to a spot on the floor, where blood still stained the rock. “Rhun stabbed Leopold right here. This is where he fell.”
His body was gone.
Baako swung an arm to encompass the room. “I already checked the space. The earthquake collapsed all the other passages.”
Jordan shone his light toward the narrow tunnel. “So he made his own.”
Jordan closed his eyes, again seeing Rhun giving Leopold his last rites, Leopold’s blood spilling into a huge pool under his body. With such a mortal wound, how had Leopold managed to survive, let alone find the strength to dig himself out? There couldn’t have been enough sustenance in that pile of rats.
The same question must have been on Sophia’s mind. “The tunnel is at least a hundred feet long,” she said. “I’m not sure even a healthy Sanguinist could claw through that much dirt and stone.”
Baako knelt beside the bloodstain on the stone floor, taking in its expanse. “Much blood was spilled. This brother should be dead.”
Jordan nodded, coming to the same assessment. “Which means there’s something we’ve missed.”
He returned to the tunnel, studied the cavern, then began to slowly walk in a grid pattern across the room, looking for anything that could explain what had happened. They moved bodies, checking beneath them. Jordan even dropped to his hands and knees and examined the old crack in the floor by the altar, discovering a thin gold line where it had sealed.
Sophia squatted next to him and passed her brown hand over the entire length of the crack. “It looks closed.”
“That’s good news, at least.” Jordan straightened, cracking his head on the bottom edge of the altar, and knocking his helmet askew.
“Careful there, soldier,” Sophia said, hiding a small smile.
Jordan reseated his helmet. As he did so, his headlamp glinted off two pieces of what looked like glass, green as a broken bottle of beer, resting in the shadow of the altar.
Hmm…
He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and picked up one of the two pieces. “Looks like some sort of crystal.”
He held it higher. In the lamplight, rainbows of light reflected from the broken surfaces. He examined the shattered edge, then returned the piece next to the other one. The two pieces looked as if they’d once been a single stone, about the size of a goose egg, now broken in two. He fitted the halves together, noting that the stone appeared to be hollowed out inside, like an egg.
Baako stared over his shoulder. “Have you seen it before? Maybe during the battle?”
“Not that I recall, but a lot was going on.” Jordan rolled the object to examine it from every angle. “But look at this.”
His gloved fingertip hovered over lines imbedded in the crystalline surface. They formed a symbol.
He glanced to Sophia. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“Not me.”
Baako merely shrugged. “Looks somewhat like a cup.”
Jordan realized he was right, but maybe it didn’t just represent a cup. “Maybe it’s a chalice.”
Sophia cocked a skeptical eyebrow toward him. “As in Lucifer’s Chalice.”
This time he shrugged. “It’s at least worth investigating.”
And I know a certain gal who would be very intrigued by it.
With his phone, Jordan snapped several pictures of the stone and symbol, planning on emailing them to Erin as soon as he had a signal.
“I should crawl back outside and send this to—”
A scraping sound drew all their attentions back to the tunnel. A dark figure snaked out of the darkness and into the light. Jordan barely registered the fangs — before it launched straight at him.
3
A pang of regret flared through Rhun’s silent heart. He sat on his heels at the base of a tall dune and listened to the soft hiss of grains sliding down the Egyptian slopes. It filled him with a sense of profound peace to be here, alone, doing God’s work.
But even that purity was marred by a darkness at the edges of his senses. He turned slowly toward it, drawn by a compass submerged deep in his immortal blood. As he bent over, searching for the source, sunlight glinted off the silver cross hanging from his neck. His black robe brushed the sand as his palm skated across the hot surface of the desert, skimming over the fine grains. His questing fingertips sensed a seed of malevolence below the surface.
Like a crow hunting a buried worm, Rhun cocked his head, narrowing his focus to one point in the sand. Once he was sure, he pulled a small spade from his pack and began to dig.
Weeks ago, he had arrived with a team of Sanguinists tasked with accomplishing this very duty. But the pieces of evil unearthed here had threatened to master the others, to consume them fully. In the end, he had forced them to abandon the dig site and head back to Rome.
It seemed Rhun alone was capable of withstanding the evil buried here.
But what does that say of my own soul?
He poured each shovelful of burning sand through a sieve, like a child at the beach. But this was not work for children. The sieve caught neither shells nor rocks.
Instead, it captured teardrop-shaped bits of stone, black as obsidian.
The blood of Lucifer.
Over two millennia ago, a battle had been fought in these sands between Lucifer and the archangel Michael over the young Christ child. Lucifer had been wounded, and his blood fell to the sand. Each drop had burned with an unholy fire, melting through the tiny grains to form these corrupted bits of glass. Time had long since buried them, and now it was Rhun’s duty to bring them back to the light again.
A single black drop appeared, resting in the bottom of the sieve.
He picked the drop up and held it a moment in his cupped palm. It burned against his bare skin, but it did not seek to corrupt him, as it did the other Sanguinists. Unlike them, he saw no scenes of bloodshed and terror, or lust and temptation. Prayers filled his mind instead.
Opening a leather pouch at his side, he dropped the black pebble inside. It tapped against two others, all that he had found this day. The drops were smaller now, and harder to find. His task was almost complete.
He sighed, staring across the empty sand.
I could stay… make this desert my home.
A cask of sanctified wine waited for him back at his camp. He needed nothing else. Bernard had sent word that he was to increase his efforts, that he was needed back in Rome. So, reluctantly, he had, although he did not wish for this assignment to end.
For the first time in centuries, he felt at peace. A few months ago, he had redeemed his greatest sin when he had restored his former lover’s lost soul, changing her from strigoi back to a human woman. Of course, Elisabeta — or Elizabeth, as she preferred to be called now — had not thanked him for it, cursing him instead for returning her mortality, but he did not need her gratitude. He sought only redemption, and he had found it centuries after he had given up any hope.
As he straightened, forgoing his search, a distant mewling reached his ear. He tried to ignore it as he carefully tied the leather pouch and packed away his tools. But the sound persisted, plaintive and full of pain.
Just some desert creature…