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Against his habits and better judgment, Saint John had helped that woman. He saved her from the men by opening red mouths in their flesh. Their souls flowed into the darkness.
The woman appeared to flee from him, but soon Saint John found her hiding in a church. Hiding with twenty-seven angels. Twenty-seven celestial beings who had chosen to take human form, pretending to be orphaned children.
They had adopted Saint John, and he had adopted them.
Had he not accepted the challenge of that first test, Saint John would never have met the woman who would become the pope of his Night Church.
Mother Rose.
And the twenty-seven angels?
They were his first reapers.
Saint John raised his arm to his mouth and slowly, sensually licked up each drop of his own blood. It was hot and salty, smelling of copper and tasting like iron. Saint John’s eyelids fluttered closed for a moment. Even his own blood was so delicious. All blood was delicious.
He wondered, not for the first time, if there were really vampires in the world, and if they were not merely men like him whose minds had been opened by God so they could appreciate the perfect taste of blood.
He decided that this was probably the case.
In the distance he heard a scream that rose louder than the roar of the quads on which his reapers went about their sacred work. Was it male or female? It was hard to say, because there is a level of pain so pure that it strips away gender and identity, and that was what he heard now.
Saint John nodded his appreciation. Most of the reapers were ordinary folk—believers, true, but in no other way exceptional. They were blunt.
Whoever sculpted that scream was one of the special ones. One of his angels—of which only nine were left on this side of the darkness—or one of the recruits who had fully embraced the way of the blade and the glory of the red mouth.
He smiled and nodded to himself.
He began to walk through the woods, following the footprints of the girl who called herself Nyx and the boy who served as her knight. He did not hurry. The world’s clock had run down, and haste was irrelevant.
In all it had been a good week’s work. Twenty-five hundred of the heretics had gone into the darkness at Treetops. Only six hundred of them escaped the burning of their town. Of those, four hundred reached the mountains of southern Nevada. Barely two hundred made it to this patch of wild forestland in the arid Mojave.
Saint John doubted that a hundred heretics still remained on this side of the darkness.
Soon red doors would open for each of them. The reapers were doing everything he and Mother Rose had trained them to do, and they did it with the unquenchable diligence of true faith.
A quad motor growled behind him, and Saint John turned to wait as one of his reapers hurried to find him. When the machine came into view and Saint John saw who was riding it, he smiled.
Brother Peter.
Peter had been the first of the twenty-seven angels to embrace the way of the blade, and it had taken no urging at all. Peter was a natural, a prodigy. The number of heretics he had ushered into the darkness was legion, second only to Saint John himself.
The quad pulled up and Brother Peter turned off the engine, allowing a soothing quiet to settle over the woods. He placed a hand over the angel wings on his chest and gave a slight bow of the head.
“Honored One,” he said softly.
Peter was in his early twenties and had grown up tall and powerful, but his face was unmarked because he had never, in all the years Saint John had known him, smiled. Not once. His scalp was tattooed with a tangle of thornbushes through which centipedes crawled.
“How goes the crusade?” asked Saint John.
“Carter split his people into six groups. He probably thought that would make it easier for them to escape, but it made it easier for us to hunt them. We opened the red doors of two of the groups. Brother Alan and Sister Gail are going to take the third in a pincer movement, because that group went into a valley, and Brother Andrew is hunting a fourth near the creek.”
“And the other two?”
“Our people are looking.”
“That is well.” Saint John approved of Andrew, who was a recent convert and a former town guard from Treetops. It was he who had provided Brother Peter with a map to the tree-house city where Carter and his people had lived until a week ago. The knives of the reapers had been bloodied from tip to pommel that night, and every day since.
“I met Brother Simon a few minutes ago,” said Peter. “He asked me to tell you that Mother Rose has called a meeting of the team leaders.”
