James Rollins - Blood Infernal

Not now.

He rubbed dust from his stinging eyes.

“At least, I still eat breakfast,” he called back to her.

Jordan gritted his teeth and continued onward, wanting to see for himself what remained of that temple in the aftermath of the battle. Following the quake, the Vatican had cordoned off this entire volcanic mountain. The church could not let anyone find the bodies below, especially those of the strigoi and their dead Sanguinist brothers and sisters.

A typical cover-your-ass operation.

And as the Vatican was his new employer after the army reassigned him here, he found himself a part of that cleanup detail. But he wasn’t complaining. It meant more time with Erin.

Still, while that should have thrilled him, something nagged at the corners of his mind, a dark shadow that dampened his emotions. It wasn’t that he didn’t still love her. He did. She was as brilliant and sexy and funny as ever, but those qualities seemed to matter less to him every day.

Everything seemed to matter less.

She clearly sensed it, too. He found her staring quizzically at him, often with a pained expression. Whenever she brought it up, he brushed her concerns away, dismissing them with some joke or a smile that never reached his heart.

What the hell is wrong with me?

He didn’t know, so he did what he always did best: he put one foot in front of the other. He kept working, keeping himself distracted. Everything would get sorted out in the end.

Or at least, I hope it will .

And if nothing else, working here offered him some space from Erin, allowing him to try to find that center that he seemed to have lost. Not that he had found himself with much free time. Over the past week, they had been moving bodies from the mountain’s outermost tunnels, letting the strigoi remains burn away under the Italian sun, and securing the bodies of the Sanguinists for proper burial. Jordan’s background with the Army had been in forensic investigations. It was a skill set much suited to the task at hand.

Especially when this tunnel was discovered.

Nobody remembered seeing this mystery passageway before, and from the freshly excavated appearance of the surrounding walls, it looked to have been dug recently.

A fact that presented an interesting dilemma: was the tunnel formed by someone digging down into that inner temple cavern or someone clawing their way out from below?

Neither prospect was a good one, but Jordan had come down to investigate.

As last, he spilled painfully out of the tunnel and sprawled onto a rough stone floor. Baako helped him up, pulling him to his feet as effortlessly as if lifting a small child instead of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall soldier.

A small lamp on the cavern floor offered some illumination, but Jordan flicked on his helmet light as Sophia climbed out of the tunnel, rolling gracefully to her feet, looking barely disheveled.

“Show-off,” he scolded, brushing dust from his clothes.

That perpetual ghost of a smile grew wider. She combed her short-cropped black hair from her wide brown cheeks as she searched. With her sharp unnatural gaze, she didn’t need the lamp or his helmet light to take in the room.

Jordan envied such night-vision. Stretching a kink out of his neck, he began his own search. As he drew in a deep breath, the smell of sulfur filled his nostrils, but it wasn’t as intense as when he was last down here, during the battle, when a wide crack in the floor had been fuming with smoke and fiery brimstone.

Still, a new odor underlay the sulfur.

The familiar reek of the dead.

Jordan noted the corpses of several strigoi scattered to his right, their bodies broken and burned, their flesh cracked and split. A part of him wanted to turn and run, a natural instinct when faced with such a slaughterhouse of horror, but he had a duty here. Leaning hard on his background to settle himself, he took out a video camera and filmed the room. He took his time, making sure that he captured each body, more out of force of habit than anything else. He had worked as a crime scene investigator as part of the Army’s Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facility in Afghanistan, and he had learned to be thorough.

He moved deeper into the cavern, filming the stone altar, trying not to remember the young boy, Tommy, who had been chained there, his lifeblood dripping to the floor. The boy’s angelic blood was the catalyst to open a gateway to the underworld, and in the end, it was the same boy’s bravery that was instrumental in closing it.

Tommy had left his mark on Jordan, too, healing him with a touch of his palm. Jordan could still feel that imprint, and it seemed to burn brighter with every passing day.

“Well,” Baako said, drawing him back to the present, “what do you think?”

Jordan lowered his camera. “It… it’s definitely changed since we were last here.”

“How so?” Sophia asked, joining them.

Jordan pointed to a pile of dead rats in the far corner. “They’re new.”

Baako crossed over, picked up one of the tiny bodies, and sniffed at it. The action made Jordan cringe.

“Interesting,” Baako said.

“How’s that interesting ?” Jordan asked.

“It’s been drained of blood.”

Sophia took the rat, examined it herself, and confirmed the same. “Baako is right.”

The small Indian woman offered the dead body to Jordan.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “But if you’re right, that means something was down here, feeding on those rats.”

Which could only mean one thing…

Jordan dropped his hand to the machine pistol holstered at his side. It was a Heckler & Koch MP7. The gun was compact and powerful, capable of firing 950 rounds a minute. It had always been his go-to weapon, only now the magazine was loaded with silver rounds. He also checked the silver-plated KA-BAR dagger strapped to his ankle.

“One of the strigoi must have survived the attack,” Sophia said.

Baako glanced to the tunnel. “It must have fed on the rats until it was strong enough to dig its way out.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a strigoi ,” Jordan said, his heart thudding in his throat as a sudden realization rose. “Help me search the bodies.”

Sophia cast him a quizzical look, but the two Sanguinists obeyed. One by one, they examined the faces of the dead.

“He’s not here,” Jordan said.

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.”