James Rollins - Blood Infernal

No ill effects?

His skin blazed under her fingertips. He would barely meet her eyes. She remembered another time when he had burned so hotly. It was when he was healed by Tommy’s angelic blood. Was this evidence of the prophecy concerning the Warrior of Man? The words echoed in her head: The Warrior of Man is likewise bound to the angels to whom he owes his mortal life .

Jordan tugged his shirt back down, glancing at Erin. “I didn’t want you to worry. I was going to tell you when we were alone.”

Were you?

She hated that she doubted him, but she did.

“I figured we had a more important detail to address first,” Jordan continued.

He pulled something out of his camouflage pants and held it up for all to see. Its sharp edges flashed in the candlelight. It looked like two pieces of a broken green egg.

“We found this near the altar down in the sibyl’s temple,” Jordan explained.

He crossed the room and put the pieces down on the cardinal’s desk. They gathered around it. Its facets cast rainbows across their faces, brighter than she’d ever seen — yellows like sunshine, greens like the sun on the grass, blues like a summer sky. The pieces certainly weren’t made of ordinary glass.

“What kind of stone is it?” she asked.

“Diamond, I think,” said Christian, as he leaned closer. “A green diamond, more precisely. Exceedingly rare.”

Transfixed by its beauty, Erin gazed at the stone. The crystal cast dappled reflections around the desktop. Those glowing emerald teardrops reminded her of tiny leaves, dancing in a summer wind.

Jordan nudged the two pieces together. “We found it already broken into these two halves, but at one time, it must have been a single gemstone. And look at this…”

He rolled the stone over to reveal a symbol etched into the crystal.

Erin leaned closer, traced it with her index finger. It looked as if the design had been melted into the stone.

“Strange, isn’t it?” Jordan said, noting her attention. “It’s like the symbol was always part of the diamond, not carved in afterward.”

Erin frowned. “I’ve heard of flaws and inclusions in gems, but it’s hard to believe that such a precise emblem formed naturally.”

Christian nodded. “I agree.”

She straightened. “Besides, I’ve seen this symbol before.”

A small part of her enjoyed their shocked expressions.

“Where?” Bernard asked.

She pointed to the cardinal’s bookshelf. “Right here.”

Proving it, she stepped over and took down a small leather-bound tome. She herself had delivered this depraved book to the cardinal, picking it up from the snow in Stockholm after Elizabeth Bathory had dropped it. It was the Blood Countess’s personal diary, a record of her atrocities and macabre experiments.

Erin stepped back to the desk and opened the book’s brittle cover. It was centuries old. Still, she swore she could smell the scent of blood wafting forth from its pages. She flipped past drawings of medicinal plants until she reached Bathory’s later experiments, those that held detailed drawings of human and strigoi anatomy. Her eyes were drawn to the neatly written notes of horrific tests performed on living women and strigoi , grisly acts that must have caused terrible suffering and death.

She hurried past them.

At the end of the book, Erin found what she sought. Scrawled as if in great haste on the last page was a symbol.

It matched the one on the stone exactly.

“What does it mean?” Bernard asked.

“We’ll have to ask the woman who wrote it,” Erin said.

Jordan groaned. “Something tells me she’s not going to be that cooperative, especially after what Rhun did to her. She’s not exactly the forgiving type.”

“Still,” Erin said, “Rhun might be the only one who could convince her.”

Jordan sighed. “In other words, it’s time to put the band back together again.”

He didn’t look happy, but Erin felt a flicker of relief at the thought of them all together again, the trio of prophecy reunited.

She pictured Rhun’s ashen face, his haunted dark eyes, and turned to Bernard.

“So where exactly is our missing Knight of Christ?”

One last duty, and I’ll be free to return to Rome .

Though in truth, Rhun was not in any particular hurry. After returning from Egypt, he had stopped first at the pope’s summer residence in the rural countryside of Castel Gandolfo. With the pontiff rarely visiting, the residence was run like a country estate. The pace was slow and deliberate, changing only with the seasons.

Rhun stood at a window and stared across the spring fields and down to the moonlit waters of Lake Albano. He did not realize how much he had missed the sight of water after his months in the desert. He drew in a deep breath filled with the scent of water, green things, and fish.

Then a sharp pain flared in his heel, drawing his attention back to the stone floor and the mischievous lion cub chewing on the back of his shoe. The snowy-white cub was lying flat on the floor, his paws stretched in front of him like the sphinx. Except a sphinx normally didn’t have its head tilted to the side, its teeth embedded in leather.

“Enough of that, my friend.” Rhun shook the determined cub off his foot.

The young lion had tolerated the journey from Egypt. Before the flight to Italy, the cub had devoured a huge breakfast of milk and meat, then slept curled up for hours in the crate.

Apparently you’re hungry again… for shoe leather .

A knock on the door caused them both to look in that direction. Rhun hurried over, hoping it was the person he had privately asked to meet him in this remote corner of the papal residence. He opened the door to discover a chubby priest, with gray hair shaved into a friar’s tonsure. His head barely reached Rhun’s shoulder.

“Friar Patrick, thank you for coming.”

The fellow Sanguinist ignored Rhun’s formal manner and pushed into the room. He clasped both of Rhun’s hands in his cold ones. “When they said you had come to see me, I did not believe it. It has been so many years.”

Rhun smiled at his enthusiasm. “Friar Patrick, you shame me. Has it been so long?”

The man scrunched his face in thought. “I believe the last time we spoke, man had just set foot on the moon. I know you were here recently, but you came and went so quickly.” He scolded him with the wag of a finger. “You should have stopped by.”

Rhun nodded. He had been busy at the time, dealing with the threat of a traitor in the order, but he didn’t bother trying to explain. Luckily, Friar Patrick’s attention was quickly diverted to the castle’s other guest.

“Oh my!” Patrick dropped to a knee and reached for the cub, his fingers fondling those soft ears. “This certainly makes up for your long absence. It’s been ages since I’ve seen such a magnificent beast.”

The friar had long cared for the pope’s menagerie, from the days when it had consisted of horses, cattle, pigeons, and falcons. In spite of his small stature and well-padded frame, he could harness a team of horses faster than anyone. Over a century ago, Rhun had worked alongside him in the stables. No one had a better kinship with God’s creatures than Patrick.