And more important, who could help her.

43.

October 27, 7:35 A.M., CET Harmsfeld, Germany Erin accompanied Jordan as he placed Rhun down in front of the altar. The limp priest lay on the stone floor as if dead.

"Is he still alive?" she asked.

"Barely." Kneeling, Nadia dribbled wine from her flask into his mouth.

He did not swallow.

That couldn't be good.

"How can we help?" Jordan asked.

"Stay out of my way." Nadia cradled Rhun's head in her lap. "And stay quiet."

Nadia sorted through the items she had gathered from behind the altar, settling first on the sealed bottle of wine. She pushed in the cork with one long finger.

"I need to consecrate this wine," she explained.

"You can do that?" Jordan looked at the door, plainly worried about someone coming into the church and interrupting whatever was about to happen.

"Of course she can't," Erin said, shocked. "Only a priest can consecrate wine."

Nadia sniffed derisively. "Dr. Granger, you are enough of an historian to know better, are you not?" She wiped blood off Rhun's chest with the altar cloth. "Didn't women perform Mass and consecrate wine in the early days of the Church?"

Erin felt chastened. She did know better. In a knee-jerk reaction, she had leaned upon Church dogma, when history plainly contradicted it. She wondered how much she was still her father's daughter at heart.

That thought stung.

"I'm sorry," Erin said. "You're right."

"The human side of the Church took that power away from women. The Sanguinist side did not," Nadia said.

"So you can consecrate wine," Jordan said.

"I did not say that. I said that women in the Sanguinist Church can be priests. But I have not yet taken Holy Orders, so I am not yet a priest myself," Nadia said.

Jordan stared back at the door. Again. "Why don't we just take this bottle of vino and do whatever you're planning somewhere else, away from where someone might come barging in at any time? You don't need to do this in a church, do you?"

"Wine has its greatest healing powers if consecrated and consumed in a church. Holy ground lends it additional power." Nadia put a hand on Rhun's chest. "Rhun needs as many advantages as we can give him."

She poured the last drops of wine from her flask into one of Rhun's bullet wounds, raising a moan from him.

Erin's heart leaped with hope. Maybe he wasn't as bad off as she thought.

Nadia unfastened Rhun's silver flask from his leg. She trickled more wine down his throat. This time he swallowed.

He drew in a single breath. "Elisabeta?"

Nadia closed her eyes. "No, Rhun. It's Nadia."

Rhun looked around, his eyes unfocused.

"You must consecrate this wine." She wrapped his fingers around the bottle's green neck. "Or you will die."

His eyelids drifted closed.

Erin studied the unconscious priest. She didn't see what could rouse him. "Are you sure that you need to consecrate the wine? Maybe you can just tell him it's blessed."

Nadia gave her a venomous look.

"I've been wondering, since our time in the desert, if the wine needs to be truly consecrated or if Rhun just needs to think it is. Maybe it's about faith, instead of miracles." Erin couldn't believe that these words were coming out of her mouth.

She had seen firsthand what happened when medical care was left to faith and miracles, first with her arm, and then with her baby sister. She shut her eyes, as if doing this would shut out the memory. But the memory came, like it always did.

Her mother had been having a hard birth. Erin and the other women in the compound had watched her labor for days. Summer had come early, and the bedroom was hot and close. It smelled of sweat and blood.

She held her mother's hand, bathed her brow, and prayed. It was all she could do.

Eventually her sister, Emma, came into the world.

But Emma was feverish from the first. Too weak to cry or suckle, she lay wrapped in her baby quilt, held against her mother's breast, wide dark eyes open and glassy.

Erin begged her father to take the baby to a real doctor, but he backhanded her, bloodying her nose.

Instead, the women of the compound gathered around her mother's bed to pray. Her father led the prayers, his deep voice confident that God would hear, and God would save the child. If not, God knew that she wasn't worth saving.

Erin stayed by her mother's side, watching Emma's heartbeat in her soft fontanel, quick as a bird's. She ached to pick her up, load her on a horse, and take her into town. But her father, seeming to sense her defiance, never left her alone with the baby. All Erin could do was pray, hope, and watch the heartbeat slow and stop.

Emma Granger lived for two days.

Faith did not save Emma.

Erin touched the fabric in her pocket. She had cut it from Emma's baby quilt before she was wrapped in it for burial. She'd carried it with her every day since, to remind herself to honor the warnings in her heart, to ask the impossible questions, and then, always, to act.

"Nadia," Erin said. "Try drinking the unconsecrated wine. What have you got to lose?"

Nadia lifted the bottle to her own mouth and took a deep gulp. Red liquid erupted from her throat and sprayed across the floor.

Jordan grimaced. "Guess it doesn't work that way."

Nadia wiped her mouth. "It's about miracles."

Or maybe it was simply that Nadia didn't believe the wine was Christ's blood.

But Erin remained silent.

7:44 A.M.

Rhun longed for death, wishing they'd never woken him.

Pain from his wounds paled in comparison to what he had felt when he saw Elisabeta again in the forest. But it had not truly been her. He knew that. The woman in the forest had red hair, not black. And Elisabeta had been gone for four hundred years.

Who was the woman who had shot him? Some distant descendant? Did it matter?

Darkness folded back over him like a soft cape. He relaxed into it. Silver did not burn him in the warm blackness. He floated there.

Then liquid scalded his lips, and he tried to turn his head away.

"Rhun," ordered a familiar voice. "You will come back to me."

It wasn't Elisabeta. This voice sounded angry. Also frightened.

Nadia?

But nothing frightened Nadia.

He forced his heavy eyelids open, heard heartbeats. Erin's quick one, the soldier's steady rhythm. So they had both made it out alive.

Good.

Content, he tried to drift away again.

But cold fingers grabbed his chin, pulling him to Nadia's dark eyes. "You will do this for me, Rhun. I have given you all of your wine-and mine. Without it, I, too, will die. That is, unless I break my oath."

He strove to keep his eyelids open, but they slid closed again. He pushed them open.

"You force this upon me, Rhun."

Nadia released his head and stood, a quick flash of darkness. She wrapped an arm around Erin's waist and yanked her head to the side. Erin's heartbeats sped until each muscular squeeze flowed into the next in one continuous thrumming.

Jordan brought up his submachine gun.

"If you shoot me, soldier, know that I can kill her before the second bullet strikes," Nadia hissed. "So, Rhun, can you do this?"

Erin's amber eyes stared into his, pleading for her life, and for his.

To answer that look more than Nadia's question, Rhun found the strength. He roused himself to grasp the wine, to pull the bottle to his heart, to recite the necessary words.

The ceremony stretched into a sacrament-all the while Nadia held Erin, her teeth at her throat.

Finally, Rhun ended with "We offer to Thee this reasonable and unbloody sacrifice; and we beg Thee, we ask Thee, we pray Thee that Thou send down Thy Holy Spirit on us and on these present gifts."

Nadia answered, "Amen. Bless this Holy Chalice."

"'And that which is in this chalice, the Precious Blood of Thy Christ.' "

He dropped his hands to his lap, the ritual complete, his strength fleeing his limbs, his only desire a wish for unconsciousness.

But Nadia refused to let him rest. She poured Christ's blood into his wounds, into his mouth. His body took in that fire, and it burned him completely this time. He knew where it would take him, and he quailed at the prospect.

"No ... ," he begged-but this prayer wasn't answered.

"Turn away." Nadia's ragged command to the humans faded as his sins carried him away into penance.

Bernard had sensed the blackness in Rhun's heart and sent him to achtice Castle to cut ties with Elisabeta. Rhun told himself that he could do it, that he felt nothing more for her than the duty to serve her as a priest.

Still he prayed as he lingered on the long winter road to her door. Snow hid fields and gardens where they had once walked together. Among long dried stalks of lavender, a raven pecked at a gray mouse, the tiny scarlet stain of its lifeblood visible even from so far away. He tarried until the raven finished its repast and flew away.

He reached the castle at twilight, hours later than he had planned. Yet he stood long in front of the door before he could bring himself to knock. Snow dusted the shoulders of his cassock. He did not feel cold anymore, but he brushed the snow away as a man would do. He would not show his otherness in this house.

Her maid, Anna, answered, her hands reddened with cold. "Good evening, Father Korza."

"Hello, my child," he said. "Is the Widow Nadasy at home?"

He prayed that she was far away. Perhaps he should request that she meet him at the village church. His resolve was strongest there. Yes, the church would be better.

Anna curtsied. "Since the death of the good Count Nadasy, she walks late in the evenings, but she will return before dark. You may wait?"

He followed her thin figure into the great room, where a fire crackled in the immense hearth. Chamomile sprinkled atop the floor rushes lent the room the familiar smell of summer. He remembered gathering leaves of it with her on a sunlit afternoon before Ferenc's death.

Rhun refused Anna's offer of refreshment and stood as close to the fire as he dared, drawing its heat into his unnatural body. He prayed and thought of Ferenc, the Black Knight of Hungary, and the man to whom Elisabeta had been bound. If Ferenc were still alive, all would be different. But Ferenc was dead. Rhun pushed away thoughts of his last visit, when he had told her of Ferenc's passing.

Elisabeta entered wearing a deep burgundy cloak, snow melted to darkness on the shoulders. Rhun straightened his spine. His faith was strong. He would endure this.

She shook water from her cloak. Dark droplets spattered the floor. A servant girl took the heavy woolen garment from her outstretched hand and walked backward from the room.

"It is good to see that you are well, Father Korza." Black skirts swished against rushes as she walked to join him at the fire. "I trust you have been offered wine and refreshment?"

Her tone was light, but her racing heart betrayed her.

"I have."

In the firelight, she looked thinner than he remembered, her features harder, as if grief had tempered the softness from her. Even so, she was achingly beautiful.

Fear flashed through Rhun's blood.

He longed to flee, but he had promised Bernard, and he had promised himself. He was strong enough to do this. He must be.