It was so hard not to yell back, to try and shout him down and make him understand that nobody’s God orders something like this. I wanted to make my case; I wanted to knock some sense into him. But—really, what would be the point? How could I ever make someone like him budge from an entrenched stance that was hundreds of years in the making and backed by a papal order? This wasn’t one of those debates where I could slide around to try to see things from his perspective. As the saying goes, that way lies madness.

The rage was hard to keep in its box, though. It burned in my mouth and in muscles, and it tingled like electricity in the dangerous tips of my fingers. When I trusted myself to speak normally, I asked, “Who told you I would be coming here?”

“I—I don’t know,” he said. “We got a call. My team was ordered to come here to do God’s work and—”

“Who made the call?”

“I don’t know.”

I searched his face for the lie but I think he was too scared to pull any new stunts on me, and unfortunately that meant that he was probably no more than a grunt. A foot soldier in a war that was out of step with reality and with my real mission. The nukes.

“How many more of you are there?”

His mouth tightened with either pride or defiance. “Enough.”

“Don’t get cute with me.”

“We are the Army of God,” he declared. “We will never stop hunting. We will never cease in our war.”

He said all that in awkward, broken English, but I got the point. I wasn’t impressed.

“All of this is because you want to rid the world of vampires?”

“No—not that. That is not our mission. We want to save the world from the Upierczi.”

“Upierczi? That’s another word for vampire, right? So, with all that’s going on in the world—wars, poverty, religious intolerance, disease—you ‘priests’ spend your time and resources hunting vamps?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I demanded. “’Cause right now I’m thinking you psychopaths have done a lot more harm to the world. What makes you better than them?”

His face took on a contemptuous cast and with an imperious tone, he said, “We fight to save the world. They want to destroy it.”

“And how do they plan to do that?”

“They want to blow it up.”

I sat back on my heels and stared at him. Again he read my expression and he nodded.

“The Upierczi have hidden for centuries,” he said. “Now they are in the light. Now they attack openly. They have great weapons. Why else do you think they would reveal themselves to the world?”

“What do you mean by ‘great weapons’?”

“Great,” he repeated, letting me take the obvious definition from that.

Oh shit.