“If you follow,” Rhun warned, “stay behind me.”
Without waiting for a response, the priest clambered down one side of the canopy.
Jordan gripped Erin’s shoulder before she moved, catching her eye. “As soon as you’re over the edge, get to the inside of the columns. Use that bronze bulk to shield you as much as possible if there is any shooting.”
She leaned forward and kissed him quick on the lips—then freed her grip on the angel, slid down the tilted bronze surface, and vanished over the edge.
With his heart in his throat, Jordan stood still for a moment, shocked, then hustled after her. No matter what, he had to keep her safe.
Reaching the edge, he flipped to his belly, lowered his legs, and discovered plenty of footholds and handholds. In moments, he was leaving the light above for the blackness below. Once this was over, he vowed to climb the tallest building he could find, sit up on its roof, and spend an entire day staring at the sun and enjoying a clean breeze on his face. But for now, he kept climbing down, again, following the blond crown of Erin’s head. She heeded his advice and got to the inside of the column.
He fitted his fingers into the shallow golden swirls decorating the column, moving fast, hoping to get as far down as he could in case he his lost his grip and fell.
Then a dark shadow, tinged with red, stormed past him.
The Cardinal.
“Be warned!” Bernard yelled as he passed. “The enemy is on all sides!”
Great.
Moments later, Jordan’s boots hit the stone floor. He clicked on the flashlight attached to his machine pistol. All around, black shapes converged upon him, boiling out of the dark passageways of the necropolis.
To the right, he spotted Bathory—shadowed by her massive grimwolf. The pair rounded a corner and disappeared into a black tunnel.
“Over there!” Jordan yelled, and pointed.
Rhun and the Cardinal stepped into formation, with Bernard at the head. Jordan took the left side, pushing Erin between him and Rhun. It wasn’t much, but it was the safest place for her. She brought her pistol up and fired once into the darkness.
Jordan turned and opened up with his machine pistol.
Dark blood splattered rough stone walls.
Ahead, the Cardinal grappled hand to hand with three strigoi, proving his spryness.
But at this rate, they’d never reach that tunnel.
Then a voice spoke at his ear, seemingly arriving out of thin air.
“I bring reinforcements.”
He turned to discover the cherubic, bespectacled Brother Leopold at his shoulder. Beyond his small frame, a cadre of Sanguinist monks—twenty strong—fell like rain from the baldachin and landed in a circle around Jordan’s group, already fighting before their feet hit the floor.
Leopold joined Jordan, pushing his eyeglasses higher on his nose, looking more like a kid brother than an undying warrior of Christ.
As if zeroing in on a weaker target, a strigoi lunged out of the darkness behind the short scholar; the flash of sword was the only warning.
Jordan reacted on pure muscle memory. He jerked his machine pistol up and caught the blade, deflecting it from Leopold’s neck. The edge still grazed a bloody line across the young Sanguinist’s shoulders.
The scholar’s eyes grew round.
Angered, the strigoi turned toward Jordan. He was a hulking figure with dark skin and pale tattoos, studs puncturing his nose and ears. Jordan remembered seeing the guy in Germany, at Bathory’s side. He figured him to be some sort of lieutenant for the Belial—which meant he must have helped orchestrate the attack on Jordan’s men in Masada.
The beast smiled, showing teeth.
“Get back, Leopold,” Jordan warned, ready to square off with this bastard, who only kept smiling.
The young monk’s eyes became huge as he stared at Jordan—or rather behind Jordan.
Caught in the reflection of Leopold’s eyeglasses, Jordan spotted movement.
He twirled, his American Bowie knife appearing in his fingers.
A gaunt, skeletal version of the larger lieutenant lunged at him, impossibly wide jaws going for his throat.
Jordan continued his spin and drove the silver-plated blade between those snapping jaws, punching it hilt-deep.
Chew on that.
The creature screamed, jerking straight up into the air like a jack-in-the-box, ripping the knife’s haft from Jordan’s fingers. As it flew high, smoke and boiling blood erupted from its mouth, from the back of its skull.
The body fell and struck the stone, already dead.
A scream of rage erupted behind him. “Rafik!”
Feral, grief-filled eyes fixed on Jordan.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Jordan growled. “Losing someone you love.”
The strigoi launched himself at Jordan, flying through the air, his cloak billowing wide, like a man-size icarops.
Jordan dropped to a knee, tilted his submachine gun up, and unloaded at full auto, shredding the monster in the chest with pure silver. “That’s for my men.”
The strigoi lieutenant clattered to the stone, his body steaming. But he was still alive, in agony, dragging himself toward the impaled Rafik.
Leopold scooped up the monster’s abandoned sword, the very weapon that had come close to killing him. He strode to the struggling strigoi.
The creature had almost reached his goal, extending a bloody arm, his fingers scrabbling to reach the one called Rafik, to touch him one last time.
Mercilessly, Leopold swung the sword in a blurring flash.
The strigoi’s head flew off his body, and the stretching arm fell limply to the floor.
The fingers dropped short, never reaching the other, the two remaining forever separated.
Leopold turned and stared around the cavern, his brow pinched in confusion. “Where did everyone else go?”
Jordan spun, searching the spot where Erin had been a half minute ago.
She was gone.
And Rhun with her.
60
October 28, 5:34 P.M., CET
Necropolis below St. Peter’s Basilica, Italy
Erin twisted to the side as a strigoi’s blade thrust toward her.
Then Rhun was there. He yanked her nearly off her feet and hauled her behind him. With one quick step forward, he slashed his blade across the strigoi’s throat, felling him like a sapling.
She stared around, realizing they were momentarily alone in the tunnel down which Bathory had fled. She glanced back. Out in the main necropolis, Sanguinists were flowing down the columns to join the subterranean battle.
“Return to Jordan when it’s safe,” Rhun said fiercely, brooking no argument as he nodded back to the fighting. “I shall overtake Bathory.”