When he’d left them, he’d gone into the woods and then circled around on their blind side, standing downwind of them so he could study them. He could have come up behind them and cut their throats, and his hands ached to do just that, but he was caught in a moment of indecision.

Before he had confronted them, Saint John had heard the boy call the girl “Nyx.”

Nyx was the mother of his god.

He rubbed at the cut on his arm and frowned in doubt. His vexation with them had been righteous but hasty. Were they, in fact, heretics who profaned her holy name?

Or . . . was this some kind of test?

He chewed on that. It would not be the first such test laid before him. He remembered that night a few days after the gray plague started when he found a wretched woman being chased through the streets of a burning city by a pack of abusive men. Saint John had seen such horrors a thousand times as the world crumbled and died, but this one instance drew his attention. On some level too profound for him to fully grasp, the events were part of a test of his faith and his resolve. It was a subtle test, and even after all these years he could not understand every aspect of it; but what was important was that he recognized it as a test.

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.