James Rollins: Blood Infernal

For now, the evil was hidden.

Weariness dragged at his limbs. It had been long since he had enjoyed a real rest, and he would find none this day either. With a sigh, he fell again into the wooden chair beside Dee’s desk and picked up a scrap of parchment from an untidy pile. He dipped a quill into a silver inkwell and began to write in the Enochian alphabet. Few had been taught the language’s secrets.

When finished, the emperor folded the paper twice, sealed it with black wax, and pressed the seal on his ring into the hot liquid. A trusted man would ride out within the hour to deliver it.

The emperor sought help.

He needed the counsel of the only one who had delved as deeply as Dee into the world of light and dark angels. He stared at the bodies on the floor, praying she could undo the damage wrought here.

He lifted his hastily written note. Sunlight shone against the black letters of her famous name.

Countess Elisabeta Bathory de Ecsed

Don’t get caught .

That warning kept every muscle tense as Dr. Erin Granger crouched behind a card catalog in the center of the Vatican Apostolic Library’s reading room. Elaborate frescoes decorated the white surface of the arched ceiling that hung far above her head. Shelves of the rarest books in the world stretched on either side of her. The library contained over seventy-five thousand manuscripts and over a million books. Ordinarily, as an archaeologist, this was exactly the kind of place she would have loved to while away hours and days, but it had recently become more of a prison than a place of discovery.

Today I must escape it .

She was not alone in this plot. Her accomplice was Father Christian. He stood on one side of her, in plain sight, silently urging her to hurry with furtive waves of his hand. He appeared to be a young priest, tall with dark brown hair and the sharpest of green eyes, his cheekbones defined, his skin flawless. He could be easily mistaken for a youth in his late twenties, but he was decades older than that. He was once a monster, a former strigoi , a creature who had survived on human blood. But long ago he had joined the Catholic Order of the Sanguines and taken a vow to live eternally on the blood of Christ. He was a Sanguinist now, and one of the few that Erin trusted implicitly.

So she took him at his word concerning this stranger beside her.

The young nun, Sister Margaret, hid next to Erin behind the counter. She breathed heavily, struggling to wiggle out of her dark habit, her wimple already on the floor between them. From the perspiration on the woman’s brow, she was human. Erin swore she could hear the nun’s frantic heartbeat. It was likely a match to her own.

“Here,” Margaret said, shaking loose her long blond hair, catching Erin’s gaze with dark amber eyes. Sister Margaret was about Erin’s size and coloring, and that made her essential to their plan.

Erin pulled Margaret’s habit over her head. Black serge scraped against her cheeks. The cloth smelled freshly laundered. She shrugged the garment across her body and smoothed it over her hips as best she could while still crouched. Margaret helped position her abandoned white wimple over Erin’s head, adjusting it around her cheeks to cover her blond hair, tucking away a few errant strands.

Once finished, the nun sat back on her heels, appraising Erin’s disguise with critical eyes.

“What do you think?” Christian asked from a corner of his mouth, leaning an arm on the card catalog to further hide their actions.

Margaret nodded, satisfied. Erin now looked like an ordinary nun, practically anonymous in Vatican City, where only tourists and priests outnumbered the sisters in their habits.

To finish the subterfuge, Margaret slipped a black cord that held a large silver cross over Erin’s head and handed her a silver ring. Erin slipped the warm circle onto her ring finger, realizing that she’d never worn a band there before.

Thirty-two years old and never married .

She knew how her father, long dead, would have been horrified at such a prospect for his daughter. He had preached ardently that it was a woman’s highest duty to create babies that served God. Of course, he would have been equally mortified to know that she’d attended a secular school, gotten a PhD in archaeology, and had spent the past ten years proving that much of the history recorded in the Bible was entirely without miraculous origins. If he hadn’t already shunned her for fleeing the religious compound as a teenager, he would have damned her now. But she had made peace with that.

A few months ago, she had been offered a glimpse into the secret history of the world, a world not explained by the books she had studied in school or the science that was the bedrock of her own personal faith. She had met her first Sanguinist — living proof that monsters existed and that devotion in the church could tame them.

Still, a large part of her remained the same skeptic, still questioning everything. While she might have accepted the existence of strigoi , it was only after she had met one, saw its ferocity, and examined its sharp teeth. She trusted only what she could verify herself, which was why she had insisted on this plan to begin with.

Margaret pulled her own blond hair back into a ponytail like Erin usually wore. Beneath her habit, the nun had already been wearing an old pair of Erin’s jeans and one of her white cotton shirts. From a distance, she could pass for Erin.

Or at least I hope so .

They both turned to Christian for his final approval. He gave a thumbs-up, then leaned down to whisper in Erin’s ear.

“Erin, the danger ahead is real. Where you are about to trespass is forbidden. If you are caught…”

“I know,” she said.

He handed her a folded map and a key. She attempted to take them, but Christian held firm.

“I’m willing to go with you,” he said, his eyes bright with concern. “Just say the word.”

“But you can’t,” she countered. “You know that.”

Erin glanced over to Margaret. For this subterfuge to work, Christian had to stay in the library. He had been assigned as Erin’s bodyguard. And rightfully so. Of late, the number of strigoi attacks across the breadth of Rome was escalating. Something had stirred the monsters up. And not just here. Reports from around the globe indicated a shift in that balance between the light and the dark.

But what was causing it?

She had her suspicions but she wanted confirmation before sharing them, and this trespass today might gain her the answers she needed.

“Be careful,” Christian finally said, releasing the map and key. He then took Margaret’s hand and helped her stand. It was hoped that everyone would assume that the blonde beside Christian was Erin, keeping her absence undetected.

“Your blood,” Erin whispered. She would need that final item as much as she would the key.

Christian gave a small nod and slipped her a stoppered glass vial containing a few milliliters of his own black blood. She added the cold vial to her other pocket next to a small flashlight.

Christian touched his pectoral cross and whispered, “Go get ’em, tiger.”

Then he ushered Sister Margaret out from behind the card catalog toward the table where Erin had left her backpack and notebook. She stared at the backpack, hating to leave it behind. Inside, sealed in a special case, was a tome more precious than all the multitudes of ancient volumes secured in the Vatican’s secret archives.