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would hear that telltale beat and know she was standing at their threshold.
    Stone ground heavily on stone, slowly opening a passage before her.
    She took a step toward that waiting darkness, remembering her father’s painful lesson. The price of knowledge was blood and pain .
    So be it.

March 17, 4:45 P.M. CET
    Cumae, Italy
    Why am I always stuck underground?
    Sergeant Jordan Stone dragged himself forward with his elbows through the cramped tunnel. Rock pressed tightly on him from all sides, and the only way to move forward was to wriggle like a worm. As he struggled, dirt sifted into his hair and fell into his eyes.
    At least I’m still moving.
    He pushed forward another few inches.
    A heavily accented voice called from the tunnel ahead, encouraging him. “You’re almost through!”
    That would be Baako. He pictured the tall Sanguinist who hailed from somewhere in Africa. Last week, when Jordan had inquired about his exact country of origin, Baako had been vague, saying only, Like many nations in Africa, the one I come from has borne many names, and likely will bear many more .
    It was a typical Sanguinist answer: dramatic and basically useless.
    Jordan stared ahead. He could vaguely make out a dull glow, a promise that this damned tunnel did indeed reach an inner cavern. He fought toward that light.
    Earlier today, Baako had climbed down this recently discovered tunnel, returning with the news that the shaft led straight to the sibyl’s temple. A horrific battle had been fought in that cavern a few months back, when an innocent boy had been used as a sacrificial lamb in an attempt to open a gate to Hell. The effort had failed, and afterward a giant earthquake had sealed the place up.
    As he crawled, another voice in a lilting Indian accent urged him from behind, poking fun at him. “Maybe you shouldn’t have had such a big breakfast.”
    He glanced back toward Sophia, making out her lithe shadowy form. Unlike the dour Baako, this particular Sanguinist always seemed on the verge of laughter, a perpetual shadow of a smile on her lips, her dark eyes shining with amusement. He usually appreciated her good humor.
    Not now.
    He rubbed dust from his stinging eyes.
    “At least, I still eat breakfast,” he called back to her.
    Jordan gritted his teeth and continued onward, wanting to see for himself what remained of that temple in the aftermath of the battle. Following the quake, the Vatican had cordoned off this entire volcanic mountain. The church could not let anyone find the bodies below, especially those of the strigoi and their dead Sanguinist brothers and sisters.
    A typical cover-your-ass operation.
    And as the Vatican was his new employer after the army reassigned him here, he found himself a part of that cleanup detail. But he wasn’t complaining. It meant more time with Erin.
    Still, while that should have thrilled him, something nagged at the corners of his mind, a dark shadow that dampened his emotions. It wasn’t that he didn’t still love her. He did. She was as brilliant and sexy and funny as ever, but those qualities seemed to matter less to him every day.
    Everything seemed to matter less.
    She clearly sensed it, too. He found her staring quizzically at him, often with a pained expression. Whenever she brought it up, he brushed her concerns away, dismissing them with some joke or a smile that never reached his heart.
    What the hell is wrong with me?
    He didn’t know, so he did what he always did best: he put one foot in front of the other. He kept working, keeping himself distracted. Everything would get sorted out in the end.
    Or at least, I hope it will .
    And if nothing else, working here offered him some space from Erin, allowing him to try to find that center that he seemed to have lost. Not that he had found himself with much free time. Over the past week, they had been moving bodies from the mountain’s outermost tunnels, letting the strigoi remains burn away under the Italian sun, and