"All members of the Order of the Sanguines were once strigoi," Rhun admitted, looking her square in the eye. "But now those in my order serve Christ. It is His blessing that allows us to walk under the light of God's brightness, to serve as His warriors."

"So you can walk in daylight?" Jordan asked.

"Yes, but the sun is still painful," the priest admitted, and touched the hood of his cassock.

She remembered her first sight of Rhun, buried in his cassock, most of his skin covered, wearing dark sunglasses. She wondered if the tradition of Catholic monks wearing hooded robes might not trace back to this Order of the Sanguines, an outward reflection of a deeper secret.

"But without the protection of Christ's blessing," Rhun continued, "the touch of the sun will kill a strigoi."

"And what exactly are these blessings of Christ?" Erin asked, surprised at the mocking edge to her tone, but unable to stop it.

Rhun stared at her for a long moment, as if he were struggling to find the right words to explain a miracle. When he finally spoke, his words were solemn, weighted by a certainty that had been missing from most of her life.

"I follow Christ's path and have sworn an oath to forsake the drinking of human blood. Such an act is forbidden to us."

Jordan remained ever practical. "Then what do you feed on, padre?"

Rhun straightened. Pride radiated from him, beating across the desert air toward her. "I am sworn to partake only of His blood."

His blood ...

She heard the emphasis in those last words and knew what that meant.

"You're talking about the blood of Christ," she said, surprised now by the absence of mockery in her tone. Raised in a devout sect of Roman Catholicism, she even understood the source of that blood. She flashed to her childhood, kneeling on the dirt floor by the altar, the bitter wine poured on her tongue.

She stared at the water skin in Rhun's grasp.

But it did not hold water.

Nor did it hold wine-despite what she herself had sipped only moments ago.

She knew what filled Rhun's flask. "That's consecrated wine," she said, pointing to what he held.

He reverentially stroked the wineskin. "More than consecrated."

She understood that, too. "You mean it's been transubstantiated."

She had been taught that word during her earliest catechism and believed it once herself. Transubstantiation was one of the central tenets of Catholicism. That wine consecrated during a Mass became the literal blood of Christ, imbued with His very essence.

Rhun bowed his head in agreement. "True, my blessed vessel holds wine converted into the blood of Christ."

"Impossible," she muttered, but the word lacked conviction.

Jordan also wasn't buying it. "I drank from your flask, padre. It looks like wine, smells like wine, tastes like wine-"

"But it is not," Rhun broke in. "It is the Blood of Christ."

The mocking edge returned to Erin's tone, and it helped to steady her. "So you're claiming transubstantiation results in a real change, not a metaphorical one?"

Rhun held out his arms. "Am I myself not proof? It is His blood that sustains my order. The act of transubstantiation was both a pact and a promise between Christ and mankind, but even more so for the strigoi whom He sought to save. For a chance to regain our souls, we have sworn off feeding on humans and survive only upon His blessed blood, becoming Knights of Christ, bound by an oath of fealty to serve the Church to the end of our days, when we will be welcomed again to His side. That is our pact with Christ and the Church."

Erin couldn't bring herself to believe any of this. Her father would turn over in his grave at the mere thought of Christ's blood being used in such a way.

Rhun must have read the doubt on her face. "Why do you think the early Christians referred to Communion wine as the 'medicine of immortality'? Because they knew what has long since been forgotten-but the Church has a much longer memory."

He turned his wineskin over so that they could see the Vatican seal inscribed on the back: two crossed keys bound with a cord under the triple crown of the triregnum.

His gaze fell upon Erin. "I ask you to believe nothing but what you see with your own eyes and feel with your own heart."

She sat heavily on a boulder and dropped her head into her hands. She had tasted the wine in his flask. As a scientist, she refused to believe it was anything but wine. Still, she had watched the strigoi feed on blood, watched him drink his wine.

Both had been strengthened.

She struggled to fit the miraculous into a scientific equation.

It was impossible to turn wine into blood, so it must be belief that allowed Rhun to drink wine as if it were blood. It must be some sort of placebo effect.

"You okay, Doc?" Jordan asked.

"Transubstantiation is just a legend." She tried to explain it to him. "A myth."

"Like the strigoi?" Rhun interjected. "Those who walk in the night and drink the blood of humans? You could accept them, but you cannot accept that blessed wine is the blood of Christ. Have you no faith at all?"

He sounded more upset by that last detail than by all of her arguments.

"Faith did not serve me well." She clenched her hands in front of her. "I saw the Church used as a tool of the powerful against the weak, religion used as an obstacle to the truth."

"Christ is more than the actions of misguided men." Rhun spoke urgently, as if trying to convert her, as priests so often had. "He lives in our hearts. His miracles sustain us all."

Jordan cleared his throat. "That's all well and good, padre. But back to you. How did you become one of these Sanguinists?"

"There is little to tell. Centuries ago, I was bitten by a strigoi, then forced to drink quantities of its blood." Rhun shuddered. "I was corrupted into one of them, a creature of base desires, a devourer of men."

"Then what happened?" Jordan asked.

Rhun hurried his words, clearly wanting to be done. "I became strigoi, but instead of turning to their ways, I was offered another path. I was recruited that very night-before I ever tasted human blood-and ordained into the Order of the Sanguines. There I chose to follow Christ. I have followed Him ever since."

"Followed Him how?" Jordan asked, matching her skepticism. "How does something like you serve the Church?"

"The blessing of Christ's blood allows the Sanguinists many boons. Like walking under the sun. It also allows us to partake of all that is holy and sacred. Though, like the sun, such holiness still burns our flesh."

He peeled off one glove. A red blistering marked his palm in the shape of a cross. Erin remembered him clutching his pectoral crucifix a moment before, and imagined it searing into his skin.

Rhun must have read her distress. "The pain reminds us of Christ's suffering on the cross and serves as a constant remembrance of the oath we took. It is a small price to pay to live under His grace."

She watched him gently tuck his cross back under the shreds of his cassock. Did the crucifix burn over his heart? Is that why Catholic priests had taken to wearing such prominent crosses, another symbol of a hidden secret? Like the hooded cassock, did such accoutrements allow the Sanguinists to hide in plain sight among their human brothers of the cloth?

She had a thousand other questions.

Jordan had only one. "Then, as a warrior of the Church, who do you fight?"

Again Rhun looked to the desert. "We are called up to battle our feral brothers, the strigoi. We hunt them down and offer them a chance to join the fold of Christ. If they do not, we kill them."

"And where do we humans fall on your hit list?" Jordan asked.

Rhun's eyes returned to them. "I have sworn never to take a human life, unless it is to save another."

Erin found her voice again. "You say your mission is to kill strigoi. Yet it sounds like these creatures did not choose to become what they are, any more than you did, any more than a dog chooses to become rabid when bitten."

"The strigoi are lower than animals," Rhun argued. "They have no souls. They exist only to do evil."

"So your job is to send them back to Hell," Jordan said.

Rhun's gaze wavered. "In truth, soulless as they are, we do not know where they go."

Jordan shifted next to her, lowering his weapon, but he did not relax his stance.

"If strigoi are feral," Erin asked, "why do they care about this Gospel of Christ?"

Rhun looked ready to explain, but then froze-which immediately set her heart to pounding. He jerked his head to the side, his gaze on the skies.

"A helicopter comes," he stated bluntly.

Jordan searched around-but only in darting glances, never taking his eyes fully off of Rhun. "I don't see anything."

"I hear it." Rhun cocked his head. "It is one of ours."

Erin spotted a light in the sky heading toward them fast. "There."

"What do you mean by 'one of ours'?" Jordan asked.

"It is from the Church," Rhun explained. "Those who come will not harm you."

As she watched the helicopter's swift approach, Erin felt a nagging worry.

Over the centuries, how many men have died after hearing similar promises?

18.

October 26, 8:28 P.M., IST Caesarea, Israel Bathory moved silently through the ruins of the hippodrome, shadowed by Magor, who padded quietly behind her. She shared his senses, becoming as much a hunter as the grimwolf. She tasted the salt of the neighboring Mediterranean, a black mirror to her right. She smelled the dust of centuries from the rubble of the ancient stone seats. She caught a distant whiff of horse manure and sweat.

She gave the stables a wide berth, careful to stay downwind so as not to spook the horses. She had left Tarek and the others with the helicopter, glad to put some distance between herself and them. It felt good to be alone, Magor by her side, dark sky above, and her quarry close.

Slowly she and the wolf crossed the sands toward the cluster of tents, aiming for the only one that still glowed with light. She did not need Magor's sharp senses to hear the voices from inside, reaching her across the quiet of the night. She spotted two silhouettes moving, two people. From the timbre of their voices, they were a man and a woman, both young.

The archaeologist's students.

Under the cover of their conversation, she reached the rear of the tent, where a small mesh window had been tied open to the night's breezes. She stood there, spying upon the two, a silent sentinel in the night, with Magor at her hip.

A young man in cowboy boots and jeans paced the length of the tent while a young woman sat before a laptop and sipped a Diet Coke. On the computer's screen, a silent CNN report of the earthquake played. The woman did not take her eyes from the screen; the palm of her hand held an earbud in place, listening.

She spoke without turning away. "Try the embassy again, Nate."

The young man paced up to the small mesh window, staring out but not really seeing. Bathory remained standing, knowing she was still concealed by the shadows. She loved these moments of the hunt, when the quarry was so close, yet still blind to the blood and horror poised to leap at its throat.

Next to her, Magor stayed as still as the night sky. Once again, she was thankful that Tarek and the others were not here. They did not appreciate the beauty of the hunt-only the slaughter that followed.

Nate turned away, stepped over to the table, and dumped his cell phone beside the laptop. "What's the use? I tried calling them over and over. Still busy. Even tried the local police. Can't get any word on where Dr. Granger was taken."

Amy pointed to the ongoing report on the screen. "What if she was flown to Masada? Reports are saying aftershocks brought the whole mountain down."

"Quit thinking the worst. Dr. Granger could be anywhere. You'd think if the professor had time to send us those weird pics, she could've at least texted us, told us where she was."

"Maybe she wasn't allowed to. That Israeli soldier had her on a short leash. But from that photo of the open sarcophagus, it definitely looked like she was exploring some ransacked tomb."

In the darkness, Bathory smiled, picturing the archaeologist desperately waving her cell phone. So she had been transmitting photos, something she had considered important, possibly some clue to the whereabouts of the book.

In the dark, Bathory stroked the bandage on her arm, reminding herself that Hunor had died in pursuit of the secret that those pictures might reveal. Cold anger sharpened her senses, focused her mind, drove back the deep ache in her blood.

"I'm going back to my tent," Nate said. "Going to try to take a nap for a couple hours, then I'll see if I can reach anyone after all this quake hubbub dies down. You should, too. Something tells me it's going to be a long night."

"I don't want to be alone." Amy looked up from her computer at him. "First Heinrich, now no word from the professor ... I'll never sleep."

Bathory heard the invitation behind her words, but Nate seemed oblivious to it. A pity. It would have made it much easier to steal the laptops and their phones if they were both gone. Such a loss would not be uncommon at this remote camp, dismissed as simple theft.

Instead, she sized the pair up. Nate was tall, well built, handsome enough. She could see why Amy liked having him near.

She herself understood the comfort of a warm male beside you, sharing your bed, picturing poor Farid. Her fingers slipped to her belt and pulled out the Arab's dagger, stolen after she killed him. Even in this small way, Farid was still useful to her.

She stepped back, considering the best way to flush the pair out-or at least separate them. She glanced around the campsite, heard the distant nickering of horses, and smiled.

A quick whisper in Magor's ear, and the wolf loped silently toward the stables.

8:34 P.M.

Racked by guilt, Nate paced the tent.

I shouldn't have let Dr. Granger go off alone.

He owed the professor. She had given him a chance when no one else had. Two years ago, he had been a hard sell as a grad student. At Texas A&M, he'd been raising a younger sister while holding down two jobs. The workload had trashed his GPA, but Dr. Granger took a chance on him. The professor had even helped get his kid sister a full scholarship to Rice, freeing him to travel.