Angelopolis Read online

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and as she reached for it, she checked the crowds walking by, her gaze flicking from humans to angels. There was only one person who used that number, and Eno needed to be certain that she could speak privately. Emim were bound by their heritage to serve Nephilim, and for years, she had simply done her duty, working for the Grigoris out of gratitude and fear. She was of a warrior caste and she accepted this fate. She wanted to do little else but to experience the slow diminishing of a life, the final gasping for breath of her victims.

  Fingers trembling, she took the call. She heard her master’s raspy, whispery voice, a seductive voice she associated with power, with pain, with death. He said only a few words, but she knew at once—from the way he spoke, his voice laced with poison—that something had gone wrong.

  Quai Branly, seventh arrondissement, Paris

  Before he’d found Evangeline dead beneath the Eiffel Tower, Verlaine had had a presentiment of her death. She had appeared to him in a dream, an eerie creature woven of light. She spoke, her voice resounding through the corridors of his mind, her words inaudible at first but then, as he strained to hear them, becoming clearer and clearer. Come to me, she said as she hovered over him, a beautiful and horrible creature, her skin glowing with luminosity, her wings gathered about her shoulders like a gauzy ethereal shawl. He understood that he was dreaming, that she was a figment of his imagination, something he’d conjured up from his subconscious, a kind of demon meant to haunt him. And yet he was terrified when she leaned close and touched him. Placing her cold fingers upon his chest, she seemed to be feeling his heartbeat. Heat passed from her hands and into his body, the current moving from her fingers into his chest, burning through him. He knew with terrifying clarity that Evangeline was going to kill him.

  It was always at this moment in the dream that he would wake, unable to breathe, overcome by fear, love, desire, hopelessness, and humiliation at once. He would emerge into consciousness knowing that an angel of darkness had been with him. If not for Bruno’s intervention, Verlaine might still be caught in an endless loop of terror and desire.

  Still reeling, Verlaine headed toward the street, trying to reconcile the woman in his dream with the dismembered corpse. His Ducati 250 was parked on the rue de Monttessuy. The very sight of it—the chrome fenders polished, the leather seat buffed—helped bring him back to the present moment. He’d bought the Ducati his first month in Paris and restored it, sanding away the rust and repainting it red. It remained one of his favorite possessions, giving him the feeling of freedom whenever he rode it. As he pulled it off its kickstand, he noticed a jagged scratch gouged into the paint. He swore under his breath and rubbed it to see how deep it went, though, in truth, the scratch was just one of the many abuses the Ducati had endured in recent years. Ironically he associated each dent and scratch with his own experiences over the past decade. He had been injured more times than he could count and—unlike the restored Ducati—he was beginning to show his age. Catching his reflection in a passing storefront window, he noted that the motorcycle was better preserved than he was.

  As he reached the quai, something else caught his attention. Later, when Verlaine examined the moment he saw Evangeline, he would tell himself that he’d felt her presence before seeing her, that a change in the atmospheric pressure had taken place, the kind of imbalance created when a gust of cold air sweeps through a warm room. But at the time, he didn’t think. He simply turned and there she was, standing near the Seine. Verlaine recognized the sharpness of her shoulders and the glossy blackness of her hair. He recognized her high cheekbones, the same green eyes that had just stared back at him from the driver’s license. He simply wanted to stare at her, to make certain that it was really her, a flesh and blood being and not a figment of his mind. Verlaine held her eye for a second, and in that moment, he felt a slow turning in his perception, as if some rusty lock had clicked open. He caught his breath. A cold sensation grasped his spine and moved through his body. The mutilated woman below the Eiffel Tower was a stranger. He propped the Ducati on its kickstand and made his way to his Evangeline.

  She crossed the street as he grew near and, without giving it a second thought, he fell into step behind her, following her as he would any other target. He wondered if she could sense him behind, feel his eyes upon her. She must have known he was there and purposely led him onward, because she never moved too far ahead, but never allowed him to get too close either. Soon he was close enough to see her reflection appear and disappear in the glass of a parked van, her image silvery, wavering, fluid as a mirage. As the image stabilized he saw that her hair had been cropped in a messy pageboy and she seemed to be wearing dark makeup. She could be any one of the thousands of young women walking through Paris, but her disguise didn’t fool Verlaine. He knew the real Evangeline.

  As she increased her pace, he struggled to keep up. The streets were packed with people; Evangeline could disappear easily, in an instant, washing away in the swirl of the crowd. In all the hunts in which he’d participated, he had done his job impeccably. He followed, captured, and then imprisoned the creatures without question. But everything about this chase was different. He wanted to catch her, but he couldn’t follow the usual protocol if he did. Most troubling of all, he only wanted to talk to her, to understand what had happened in New York. He wanted an explanation. He felt he deserved that much.

  Verlaine felt the soles of his favorite shoes—a pair of brown leather wing tips he’d worn for years—slipping with each step. A shiver of fear moved through him, gathering into a solid ball in his stomach at the thought of losing her again. He knew that, if she chose, she could easily outrun him. Indeed, she could open her wings and fly away. He had watched her do it before. The last time he had seen her she’d lifted herself away from him, moving high into the vault of the sky, her wings bright under the moon, a beautiful monster among the stars.

  He hadn’t told anyone about this—not the angelologists who had been part of the New York mission and not the men and women who certified him as he passed through his courses at the academy. Evangeline’s true identity had remained his secret, and his silence had made him complicit in her deception. His silence was the only gift he could give her, but that gift had left him feeling like a traitor. He’d lied to everyone. Earlier, as he stood at the crime scene, he couldn’t look Bruno in the eyes.

  Verlaine hated the feeling. He’d spent too many years hunting the creatures, worked too long and too hard to capture them, to be so shaken. No matter what had happened between them, years had passed. He was a different man. If he caught Evangeline, he would have to capture her. He had to remember what she was and what she was capable of doing to him. If he caught her, he would take her into custody. If she attacked him, he would fight. He needed to move fast, to put his feelings aside. He needed to convince himself that she was just another angel and this was just another routine hunt.

  In the distance the lights of the Eiffel Tower glimmered against the night sky, bright as a constellation fallen to earth. Verlaine ran, his hand trembling as he reached for his gun. Drawing it from his belt, he switched it on. With its two hundred volts of electricity, the gun was powerful without being lethal. If placed over the furcula of an angel, and the shot directed into the solar plexus, the creature would be stunned for hours. He didn’t want to use force, but he wasn’t going to let Evangeline slip away again.

  Limousine, Pont de l’Alma, above the Seine, Paris

  Axicore Grigori peered through the smoky glass of the limousine window. It was a clear spring night, with the streets filled with people, which made it very unlikely that he would leave the dark enclosure of the car. He detested Homo sapiens, and the thought of getting out into the soup of humanity made his skin crawl. When he had to venture out among people, he kept his distance. He didn’t walk among them, he didn’t eat in their restaurants, he traveled in a private jet. He never so much as touched the hand of a human being without feeling deeply, essentially vi
olated. The very idea that his ancestors had been attracted to such vile beings filled him with wonder. What on earth, he wondered, looking at the people walking by, had the Watchers been thinking? How his twin brother, Armigus, had managed to remain in Russia while Axicore found himself on a filthy Paris bridge like some common Gibborim was beyond him.

  His great-aunt Sneja Grigori believed that one of these repulsive creatures, a young woman named Evangeline, was the granddaughter of her deceased son, Percival. It all seemed so far-fetched to Axicore—even more so after his most trusted mercenary angel had observed the subject in question for weeks. Eno had reported everything back to Axicore. He learned that Evangeline was short, thin, dark haired, and utterly human in appearance. She lived simply, did not exhibit her wings, had no Nephilistic contacts, and spent the majority of her time moving among normal human beings. She bore none of the typical characteristics of the Nephilim, nor any of the various identifying markings that ran through purebreds, much less the Grigori family traits.

  The contrast between them could be drawn by a simple comparison with his own bearing, a perfect exemplar of the Grigori. He was a head taller than human beings, his skin fine and pale, and his eyes white blue. He dressed impeccably, as did Armigus—they often wore matching attire and never the same suit twice. That morning’s shipment had come from their grandfather Arthur’s favorite Savile Row tailor, the brushed velvet smooth and black as the coat of a jaguar. With their elegant clothing and thick blond hair that fell over their shoulders in a chaos of curls, the twins were stunning, classically handsome, startling enough to make the most beautiful women stop and stare, especially on the exceedingly rare occasions that the twins went out into the human world together. In this they resembled all the Grigori men, and the late Percival Grigori in particular. The twins were princes among peasants their mother used to say, regal creatures forced to walk the earth, drawn into the material plane when they should be among the ethereal beings in the heavenly spheres.

  Of course, with the dilution of their race over the past millennia, such physical traits were only superficial. The true markings of the Nephilim were more subtle and complicated than that of complexion, eye color, and body type. If Evangeline was, in fact, Sneja’s flesh and blood, Axicore concluded, she was the ugliest Grigori ever born.

  Tapping a long, white finger on the window glass, Axicore tried to put aside his repulsion and concentrate upon the task at hand. He had retrieved Eno from an establishment on the Champs-Élysées, and although she sat next to him in the limousine, she was so silent, so ghostly, that he barely registered her presence. He admired her enormously, thought her one of the most fierce Emim he had ever seen, and—although he would never openly admit this—found her much more attractive than most lower angelic creatures. Indeed, Eno was a beautiful killing machine, one he admired and secretly feared, but not the most clever angel in the heavenly spheres. Her outbursts of rage could be violent. He had to handle her with care. And so it was with some delicacy that Axicore resumed the explanation he had begun on the phone. Eno had made a grave error. Evangeline was alive.

  “You’re certain?” Eno said, the yellow fire of her eyes piercing the lenses of her dark sunglasses. “Because I never make mistakes.”

  She was angry, and Axicore wanted to use her ferocity to his advantage. “Absolutely certain,” he said. “And I’m not the only one—an angelologist is hunting her at this very moment. An angel hunter.”

  Eno took off her sunglasses, the light from her eyes breaking through the darkness. “Have you identified him?”

  “One of the typical crew,” Axicore said, feeling uneasy at the thought of what she would do to this angel hunter if she caught him. Axicore had seen Eno’s victims. Such gruesome violence almost evoked his sympathy.

  “We’ll take care of this now,” Eno said, sliding her sunglasses back over her eyes. “And then we will go home. I want to get out of this horrid city.”

  Axicore sat back in his seat, remembering his childhood in Russia. They would leave their city apartments and spend months in the Crimea, where their family estate stood at the edge of the water. The Grigori clan would gather for tea, and he and his brother would unfurl their wings—great golden wings that shimmered like sheets of pounded foil—and lift themselves into the air, performing tricks for their adoring relations. They would do twists and turns and acrobatics that elicited the approval of the older generation, four-hundred-year-old Nephilim who had given up on such athletic maneuverings long before. Their parents were there, dressed entirely in white, gazing up with pride. They were the golden children of an ancient family. They were young, beautiful, with all of creation at their feet. There seemed to be nothing at all that could bring them down to earth.

  Passage de la Vierge, seventh arrondissement, Paris

  Verlaine felt a cold presence deep in the shadows of the passage and knew that Evangeline was there, standing in the darkness, so close he could feel the icy chill of her breath against his neck.

  He took a step back, trying to see her more clearly, but she seemed little more than an extension of the shadows. There were so many things he wanted to say to her, so many questions he’d rehearsed, but he couldn’t begin to formulate them. The contradictions he felt about Evangeline—the affection he’d felt for her, the anger—left him enraged and confused. His training hadn’t prepared him for this. He wanted to take her by the arm and force her to speak to him. He needed to know that he wasn’t imagining everything that happened between them.

  Finally, he reached into his pocket and removed the driver’s license. Holding it out to her, he said, “I think you lost something.”

  She met his eye and slowly took the card in her hand. “You believed it was me back there.”

  “All evidence pointed in that direction,” Verlaine said, feeling his stomach turn at the thought of the bloody mess at the Eiffel Tower.

  “There was no other way.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “They were going to kill me.”

  “Who was going to kill you?”

  “But they made a mistake,” she said, her eyes wide. “I led them in the wrong direction. I let them kill someone else.”

  Verlaine felt a strange, double-edged sensation of wanting to protect Evangeline from whoever had tried to kill her and wanting to take her into custody himself. His first instinct was to call Bruno and bring her to their prison in La Forestière. “You’re going to have to give me more than this.”

  Evangeline slipped her hand into the pocket of her jacket and removed something large and round, and dropped it into Verlaine’s hand. It was some kind of egg. He examined the hard brilliance of the enamel, the jewels that encrusted the surface like chunks of rock salt. He removed his glasses, cleaned them on his shirt, and slid them on again: The intricacy of the egg clicked into focus. He turned it in his fingers, letting the jewels glint in the weak light.

  “Why would they want to hurt you?” he asked, meeting Evangeline’s eyes. Even the green of her irises struck him as hazardous and hypnotic. With this thought came a sharp pang of longing for the person he had once been—trusting, optimistic, young, his future wide open before him. “You’re one of them.”

  Evangeline drew close to him, bringing her lips to his ear as she whispered, “You must believe me when I say that I was never one of them. I’ve wandered from place to place trying to understand what I had become. It’s been ten years and still I don’t understand. But I know one thing for certain: I am not like the Grigori.”

  Verlaine pulled away, feeling as if he were being broken apart inside. He wanted to believe her, and yet he knew what the Nephilim were capable of doing. She could be lying to him.

  “So tell me,” Verlaine said. “What brings you back now?” Verlaine tossed the jeweled egg in the air and caught it in his hand. “The Easter Bunny?”

  “Xenia Ivanova.”

  “Vladimir’s daughter?” Verlaine asked, turning serious. The death of Vladimir Ivanov had been just one of many fat
alities of their failed mission in New York. It had been Verlaine’s first brush with the murderous treachery of their enemies.

  “Vladimir was one of the only people I had known outside the convent,” Evangeline said. “He’d been close to my father. His daughter, Xenia, took over the café after he died, and she was kind enough to let me work and live in a small apartment in the back of the shop, deducting the rent from my salary. Years went by this way. I became close to Xenia, although I was never certain if she fully understood the kind of work her father had done, or my family’s connection to him.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t go to great lengths to fill her in, either,” Verlaine said.

  Evangeline looked at him for a moment, decided to ignore his comment, and continued. “And so I was surprised when, one day last month, Xenia told me that she had something to discuss with me. She took me upstairs to her father’s apartment, a room still cluttered with his possessions, as if he’d only just left. She showed me the egg you have in your hands. She told me she was surprised to have found it among Vladimir’s effects after his death.”

  “It’s not really Vladimir’s style,” he said. Vladimir was remembered for his ascetic ruthlessness. His café in Little Italy was a cover for a life of extreme austerity.

  “I think he was merely holding this egg for someone else,” Evangeline said. “It was the only object of this kind among his possessions. Xenia found it wrapped in a cloth at the back of one of his suitcases. She believed he’d brought it to New York from Paris in the eighties. Xenia didn’t know what to do with it, so she simply held on to it. But then, a few months ago, she took it to an auction house to have it appraised and, not long after this, strange things started happening. Nephilim began to follow her. They searched her apartment and the café. By the time she told me about the egg, she was terrified. One night two Gibborim broke into her apartment and tried to steal the egg. I killed one and the other escaped. After this I knew that I needed to tell her the truth. I explained everything to her—our fathers’ work, the Nephilim, even my own situation—and, to my surprise, she knew more about Vladimir’s work than I had initially believed. Eventually Xenia agreed to close the shop and disappear. I took the egg. It’s why I came here. I had to find someone who could help me explain what it means.”