The Blood Gospel Read Online Free PDF

limp in his grasp, refusing to let gravity take them as death had. When his strength gave out, he knelt next to their bodies and waited for his own last breath.
    But as minutes passed, that last breath refused to come.
    He wiped an arm across his tearstained face and stumbled to his feet, refusing to look at his parents’ crumpled bodies, their blistered eyes, the blood on their faces. If he didn’t look, maybe they weren’t really dead. Maybe it was a dream.
    He turned in a slow circle facing away from them. The foul smoke had blown away. Bodies littered the ground. As far as he could see, everything was dead still.
    It was no dream.
    Why am I the only one still alive? I was supposed to die. Not Mom and Dad.
    He looked down again at their bodies. His grief was deeper than weeping. Deeper than all the times he’d mourned his own death.
    It was wrong. He was the sick one, the defective one. He had known for a long time that his death was coming. But his parents were supposed to carry on memories of him, frozen at the age of fourteen in a thousand snapshots. The grief was supposed to be theirs.
    He fell to his knees with a sob, thrusting his hands toward the sun, his palms upraised, both beseeching and cursing God.
    But God wasn’t done with him yet.
    As his arms stretched to the sky, one sleeve fell back, baring his wrist, pale and clear.
    He lowered his limbs, staring at his skin in disbelief.
    His melanoma had vanished.

3
    October 26, 2:15 P.M ., IST
    Caesarea, Israel
    Kneeling in the trench, Erin surveyed the earthquake’s damage and sighed in frustration. According to initial reports, the epicenter was miles away, but the quaking rocked the entire Israeli coastline, including here.
    Sand poured through the broken boards that shored up the sides of her excavation, slowly reburying her discovery, as if it were never supposed to have been unearthed.
    But that wasn’t the worst of the earthquake’s wrath. Sand could be dug out again, but a cracked plank sat atop the child’s skull, the one she had been struggling to gently release from the earth’s grip. She didn’t permit herself to speculate about what lay under that chunk of wood.
    Just please let it be intact …
    Her three students fidgeted near the trench, keeping to the edge.
    Holding her breath, Erin eased up the splintered plank, got it free, and blindly passed it to Nate. She then lifted the tarp that she’d covered the tiny skeleton with earlier.
    Shattered fragments marked where the baby’s once-intact skull had been. The body had lain undisturbed for two thousand years—until she exposed it to destruction.
    Her throat tightened.
    She sat in the trench and brushed her fingertips lightly over the bone fragments, counting them. Too many. She bowed her head. Clues to the baby’s death had been lost on her watch. She should have finished this excavation before following Nate to the tent to study the new GPR readings.
    “Dr. Granger?” Heinrich spoke from the edge of the trench.
    She leaned back quickly so he would not think she was praying. The German archaeology student was too bound up with religion. She didn’t want him to think that she was, too. “Let’s get a plaster cast over the rest of this, Heinrich.”
    She needed to protect the rest of the skeleton from aftershocks.
    Too little, too late, for the tiny skull.
    “Right away.” Heinrich combed his fingers through his shaggy blond hair before heading toward the equipment tent, which had ridden out the earthquake undamaged. The only modern casualty was Amy’s Diet Coke.
    Heinrich’s sylphlike girlfriend, Julia, trailed behind him. She wasn’t supposed to be on the dig site at all, but she was passing through for the weekend, so Erin had allowed it.
    “I’ll check out the equipment.” Amy’s anxious voice reminded Erin of how young they all really were. Even at their age, she had not been so young. Had she?
    Erin gestured around the hippodrome. It had been in ruins long before their