Should that not be enough?
She smoothed her hands down the front of her dress. “You are wise, Father. An aristocrat who lowers his mask does not survive long in these times.”
He stood. “What is it that troubles you so?”
“Perhaps I am simply weary of the intrigues.” Her eyes followed the hawk as it fell. “Surely the Church struggles amidst the same cauldron of ambitions, both great and small?”
He touched his pectoral cross with one fingertip. “Bernard shields me from the worst, I think.”
“Never trust those who would be your shield. They feed on your ignorance and darkness. It is best to look at things directly and be unafraid.”
He offered her some consolation. “Perhaps it is best to trust those who would shield you. If they do it out of love, to protect you.”
“Spoken like a man. And a priest. But I have learned to trust very few.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Except I trust you, Father Korza.”
“I am a priest, so you must trust me.” He offered her a shy smile.
“I trust no other priests. Including your precious Bernard. But you are different.” She placed her hand on his arm, and he savored the touch. “You are simply a friend. A friend where I have so very few.”
“I am honored, my lady.” He stepped back and bowed, an exaggerated gesture to lighten the mood.
She smiled indulgently. “As you should be, Father.”
They both laughed at her tone.
“Here comes Anna, returned again. Tell me once more about the time you had a footrace with your brother and how you both ended up in the stream with fish in your boots.”
He told her the story, embellishing it with more details than he had in the last telling to make her laugh.
They had happy times, with much laughter.
Until, one day, she had stopped laughing.
The day that he betrayed her.
The day he betrayed God.
Back in his body, where cold sand pressed against his knees, dry wind chased tears from his cheeks. His silver cross had burned through his glove and left a scarlet welt on his palms. His shoulders bowed under the weight of his sins, his failures. He tightened his grip on the searing metal.
“Rhun?” A woman’s voice spoke his name.
He raised his head, half expecting to see Elisabeta. The soldier watched him with suspicion, but the woman’s eyes held only pity.
He fixed his eyes on the soldier. He found the man’s hard gaze easier to bear.
“Time to start explaining,” the soldier said, training his weapon on Rhun’s heart—as if that had not been destroyed long ago.
8:08 P.M.
“Jordan, look at his teeth … they’re normal again.”
Amazed, Erin stepped forward, wanting to examine the miraculous transformation, to understand what her mind still refused to believe.
Jordan blocked her with a muscled arm.
She didn’t resist.
Despite her curiosity as a scientist, Rhun still scared her.
The priest’s voice came out shaky, his Slavic accent thicker, as if he’d returned from a long distance, from a place where his native tongue was still spoken. “Thank you … for your patience.”
“Don’t expect that patience to last,” Jordan said, not unfriendly, just certain.
Erin pushed Jordan’s arm down, willing to listen, but she didn’t step forward. “You said that you were ‘Sanguinist,’ not strigoi. What does that mean?”
Rhun looked out to the dark desert for that answer. “Strigoi are wild, feral creatures. Born of murder and bloodshed, they serve no one but themselves.”
“And the Sanguinists?”
“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—”