“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.