“Shoot her again,” he commanded, but his voice cracked on the words.“Finish it.”
Elias fumbled with his crossbow, the Gilded Cross forgotten at his feet where he’d set it down for the execution.His hands shook as he tried to load another bolt, the simple action he’d probably performed thousands of times now beyond his rattled capability.
That’s when Matthias arrived.
He burst from the treeline like something hunted, his broken body moving with desperate purpose that overcame its limitations.His dislocated arm swung uselessly at his side, but his good hand clutched something—a rosary, I realized, the wooden beads worn smooth by countless prayers.His fevered eyes found Desiderius first, still writhing against the stake, and something shattered in his expression.
“Father,” he breathed, using the old term, the acknowledgment of their bond that he’d tried so hard to deny in service to the Order.Then louder, a scream that tore from his throat: “Father!”
“Matthias, no,” Desiderius gasped through his agony.“Run.”
But Matthias had already seen the Gilded Cross lying abandoned near Elias’s feet.His gaze fixed on it with the intensity of revelation, of purpose finally understood.He moved faster than his broken body should have allowed, diving for the relic before anyone could react.
“Stop him!”Marcus roared, but too late.
Matthias’s fingers closed around the Cross’s golden surface, and immediately light erupted from the point of contact.He screamed—not in pain but in something like ecstasy, like recognition.
“Redemption!”he cried, struggling to his feet with the Cross clutched against his chest.“You promised redemption, Marcus.You said we could be saved through sacrifice, through submitting to divine judgment.”
“Put it down,” Marcus commanded, but his voice had lost its authority.He could see what we all could—the light from the Cross was spreading through Matthias, illuminating him from within like a paper lantern, showing the bones beneath his flesh, the soul beneath the monster.
“I understand now,” Matthias said, and his voice held a clarity I’d never heard from him before, the fever-bright madness replaced by terrible sanity.“The Cross doesn’t judge the damned—it reveals truth!I must embrace the truth; I must confess my sins!I must rely on His mercy!”
He turned toward Desiderius, took a stumbling step forward.The light grew brighter with each movement, as if his approach to his sire fed the Cross’s power.“Forgive me, Father.For betraying you.For choosing fear over faith.For believing their lies about what we are.”
“Matthias,” Desiderius’s ancient voice broke on the name.“My son.”
That acknowledgment, that moment of connection between sire and progeny, seemed to complete some circuit within the Cross.Matthias raised it higher, and the light exploded outward in a wave that turned night into noon, that revealed every shadow, every hidden thing in the clearing.
But it didn’t touch my companions.
The light washed over Desiderius, Ruth, and Rebecca, still bound to their stakes on the consecrated ground, and...nothing.No burning, no destruction.If anything, their writhing eased slightly, as if the Cross’s light somehow countered the concentrated holiness beneath them.
“Impossible,” Marcus breathed.
The light continued to pour from Matthias, but now I could see the cost.His body was dissolving, not into ash like vampires struck by sunlight, but into something else—particles of light that rose like inverted snow, like a soul finally released from its prison.He was being unmade, but gently, lovingly, transformed rather than destroyed.
“I’m going home!”Matthias cried.His eyes, the last solid thing about him, found mine across the clearing.“You knew, didn’t you?”
I couldn’t speak through the bolts and blood, but I nodded, feeling tears I didn’t know I could still cry running down my cheeks.
The light reached its crescendo, and Matthias simply...wasn’t.Not destroyed but transformed, transcended, gone.The Gilded Cross fell to the scorched but consecrated earth with a dull thud, its light extinguished, looking like nothing more than an old relic, tarnished and forgotten.
Silence descended on the clearing, broken only by my companions’ labored breathing and Father O’Malley’s whispered prayers.Marcus stood at his altar like a broken puppet, his carefully constructed theology in ruins around him.Timothy had dropped his knife entirely, backing away from Father O’Malley as if proximity to the priest might infect him with doubt.Elias knelt beside the fallen Cross, afraid to touch it, afraid to leave it, trapped between reverence and terror.
And I lay in my blood pool, bolts still piercing my flesh, pain still singing through every nerve, but something had changed.The wounds in my hands and feet, the massive wound in my side—they’d begun to glow.Not bright, or piercing, but softer, warmer, like candlelight seen through stained glass.
Marcus’s eyes found mine across the clearing, and in them I saw something I’d never expected—fear.Is that’s what Matthias’s unexpected sacrifice offered?Had it shown Marcus his truth, the guilt, the terror he’d so long refused to face on account of his anger?
But when he looked at me he wept.
I wanted to respond, to tell him it was just beginning, that love would continue to confound his hatred, that every vampire he tried to destroy might be another Matthias, another soul capable of redemption.But the bolts through my body made speech impossible, and perhaps silence was the better testimony anyway.Because the power that confounded his hatred, that illuminated his fears, that confounded his anger, now radiated from my wounds, from Christ’s woundsin me.
Chapter 20
TheparticlesofMatthias’stranscendence still drifted through the clearing like inverted snow, each mote of light carrying something of his final ecstasy—that terrible joy of a soul finally understanding its purpose.They fell upward, these fragments of illuminated flesh, ascending toward stars that seemed suddenly closer, as if heaven itself had bent down to collect its wayward son.Where they touched the charred earth, tiny flowers bloomed—white things that shouldn’t exist in January’s frozen grip.
I lay transfixed by their impossible beauty, the crossbow bolts still piercing my flesh like iron prayers.The pain remained constant, but beneath it something else stirred—a warmth from my heavenly encounter refusing to dissipate, spreading through limbs that should have been growing cold with final death.
