Field of Blood by Wilson, Eric (pdf e book reader .TXT) 📕

The search was still on, as it had been for ages.

Collectors down through the centuries had entrenched themselves in countries and cultures. Sniffing. Stalking. Ferreting out hosts and sources for blood. Many clusters dabbled in their own delights and pastimes, caught up in the snares they meant to set for others. Others, in territorial disputes, tore at each other’s throats.

But always, there were those committed to the cause.

Those Who Hunted.

Their ultimate prey: the Nistarim, the thirty-six who carried the world’s sorrows upon their backs. Three dozen men commissioned to protect the faithful, to hold up the weary, the widows, and the fatherless. Yet who was the leader of this ragtag crew? The Nazarene, as some claimed?

Bah. Ariston of Apamea had been there, in Jerusalem, as a man. Encoded in his memory, before the infiltration of any Collector, he’d heard the eyewitness accounts of the Nazarene’s death upon a tree—thus cursed by Mosaic Law, a victim of Roman torture. The Nazarene had died.

Ariston had also heard the rumors of an empty tomb.

In the Negev, Mendel had confirmed those rumors, and the Collector within had grudgingly accepted this reality, overriding Ariston’s limited recollections with his own knowledge of the Nazarene’s defiant act. Where others had given way to the grave, the Nazarene had bridged the Separation. He had risen up from his resting place.

The entire thing gave Ariston a headache.

Or was it the Collector who was now subjected to splitting pain?

Always this struggle . . . Two wills battling for dominance while relying on one another in twisted symbiosis.

At the moment, it was immaterial. The young girl was the issue. Brushed across her skin, the letter Tav had convinced Ariston she had some connection to the Nistarim.

And, by the sails of Sicily, he was not going down without a fight.

He whirled into action, delegating cleanup and guard duties to his own family and commanding the House of Eros to gather information from the locals. Barabbas was left to repair the front door.

“What about you, Ariston?” Megiste purred. “Come join the fun.”

“I’ve got my own task. When I return, I may need your help, so see to it that things are made right.”

He peered into the sky, where feathered silhouettes were blurred by the encroaching dusk. Though nonhuman hosts were at his disposal, he knew utilizing one was a tenuous affair. Not only would he be dependent on animal instincts and proclivities, he would face serious depletion upon return. Collectors who dared to partner a human host with animalistic tendencies—in the guise of a werewolf, for example—often faced the added threat of the creature’s capture or death. A time-consuming setback.

One the Akeldama Cluster knew well.

Eons ago, hadn’t they drowned in the sea while at the mercy of a herd of pigs? The Nazarene himself had overseen that little fiasco.

Yeshua . . . There it was again. That name.

Ariston rubbed his temples, miffed by this convergence of human memory and much broader undead experience. He thought of the Nazarene’s authority, as displayed there at the Sea of Kinneret and also in his abandoned grave. Perhaps Those Who Resist hoped to gain similar benefits through the intake of his blood: power and regeneration, as well as protection against the forces that sought to destroy them.

Nazarene Blood.

Ariston thought of Salome, his daughter. She had suffered the consequences of attacking such a person—a dry husk, a withering corpse, and sent back as dust to the Restless Desert.

Bah. None of it was original, not one bit. Collectors knew all about such vicarious survival, tapping the life, the talents, and the memories. If anything, these thoughts only galvanized his zeal to destroy the Nistarim and the fools who aligned themselves with the one called the Nazarene.

Ariston pulled back his shoulders, stared into the firmament, and honed in on a raptor, a black kite with a forked, brown-tipped tail. Through visual coupling, he called the bird to himself and found it receptive, even eager. The kite circled lower on outstretched wings, its sharp whistle changing to staccato chirps.

By the time those talons reached him, the Collector had emerged as a shimmying haze. He rose. Took possession of his temporary vessel.

Looking down through avian eyes, he saw the plump human frame of Ariston, wilted and lifeless, propped against the back wall of the house. Even now, vacant from his host, he felt the tug of Ariston’s hereditary memories and inclinations. The longer a Collector maintained possession of a host, the weightier such things became.

It was not uncommon for a Collector to seek relief by switching to a temporary host, sometimes even for days or weeks at a time. To do so, however, was a risk. The temporary host might dilute and confuse the Collector’s mind-set. If, for example, he spent time in a stray dog, he might come back to his human host with a tendency to scratch himself in public or to lounge for hours of mindless inactivity. More troublesome, he might find that the original host had become resistant to his return.

I must do what’s necessary. I have to find the girl and her mother.

The black kite lifted on powerful pinions. Effortless in flight, it rode the breezes above Cuvin’s patchwork fields while the Collector began his search.

North of Cluj-Napoca, Romania

The driver downshifted. “You haven’t told her yet, have you, Nikki?”

“I will,” Nicoleta said. “When the time’s right.”

Into the night, Gina had been fighting off sleep. The rattling engine made eavesdropping difficult, but the conversation up front was becoming more agitated.

“You know that whole ‘ignorance is bliss’ thing?” the Provocateur said. “It’s a crock. If you keep her in the dark, that’s right where those things’ll find her. Your superstitions won’t be worth squat. They’ll track her down, and I’ve already seen what they can do. They’ll suck her dry.”

“Not where we’re going,” Nicoleta said.

Where? Gina touched the fresh scar on her neck. What things?

“I don’t even wanna know where,” the man said. “Safer that way. I’ll drop you in the forest near