Blood Infernal: The Order of the Sanguines Series Read Free Page B

Ecsed

FIRST
    For Jesus said unto him, “Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit!”
    And he asked him, “What is thy name?” And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion: for we are many.”
    —Mark 5:8–9

March 17, 4:07 P.M. CET
    Vatican City
    Don’t get caught .
    That warning kept every muscle tense as Dr. Erin Granger crouched behind a card catalog in the center of the Vatican Apostolic Library’s reading room. Elaborate frescoes decorated the white surface of the arched ceiling that hung far above her head. Shelves of the rarest books in the world stretched on either side of her. The library contained over seventy-five thousand manuscripts and over a million books. Ordinarily, as an archaeologist, this was exactly the kind of place she would have loved to while away hours and days, but it had recently become more of a prison than a place of discovery.
    Today I must escape it .
    She was not alone in this plot. Her accomplice was Father Christian. He stood on one side of her, in plain sight, silently urging her to hurry with furtive waves of his hand. He appeared to be a young priest, tall with dark brown hair and the sharpest of green eyes, his cheekbones defined, his skin flawless. He could be easily mistaken for a youth in his late twenties, but he was decades older than that. He was once a monster, a former strigoi , a creature who had survived on human blood. But long ago he had joined the Catholic Order of the Sanguines and taken a vow to live eternally on the blood of Christ. He was a Sanguinist now, and one of the few that Erin trusted implicitly.
    So she took him at his word concerning this stranger beside her.
    The young nun, Sister Margaret, hid next to Erin behind the counter. She breathed heavily, struggling to wiggle out of her dark habit, her wimple already on the floor between them. From the perspiration on the woman’s brow, she was human. Erin swore she could hear the nun’s frantic heartbeat. It was likely a match to her own.
    “Here,” Margaret said, shaking loose her long blond hair, catching Erin’s gaze with dark amber eyes. Sister Margaret was about Erin’s size and coloring, and that made her essential to their plan.
    Erin pulled Margaret’s habit over her head. Black serge scraped against her cheeks. The cloth smelled freshly laundered. She shrugged the garment across her body and smoothed it over her hips as best she could while still crouched. Margaret helped position her abandoned white wimple over Erin’s head, adjusting it around her cheeks to cover her blond hair, tucking away a few errant strands.
    Once finished, the nun sat back on her heels, appraising Erin’s disguise with critical eyes.
    “What do you think?” Christian asked from a corner of his mouth, leaning an arm on the card catalog to further hide their actions.
    Margaret nodded, satisfied. Erin now looked like an ordinary nun, practically anonymous in Vatican City, where only tourists and priests outnumbered the sisters in their habits.
    To finish the subterfuge, Margaret slipped a black cord that held a large silver cross over Erin’s head and handed her a silver ring. Erin slipped the warm circle onto her ring finger, realizing that she’d never worn a band there before.
    Thirty-two years old and never married .
    She knew how her father, long dead, would have been horrified at such a prospect for his daughter. He had preached ardently that it was a woman’s highest duty to create babies that served God. Of course, he would have been equally mortified to know that she’d attended a secular school, gotten a PhD in archaeology, and had spent the past ten years proving that much of the history recorded in the Bible was entirely without miraculous origins. If he hadn’t already shunned her for fleeing the religious compound as a teenager, he would have damned her now. But she had made peace with that.
    A few months ago, she had been offered a glimpse into the secret history of the world, a world not