Angelopolis Read online

  “And Xenia?”

  “If I hadn’t intervened, Xenia would be dead.”

  “Was that her body at the Eiffel Tower?”

  “No.” Evangeline shook her head, her expression serious. “That was just some random Nephil who looked a bit like me. I planted my ID on her and led the Emim to believe she was me.”

  Verlaine considered this, realizing how far Evangeline had gone in her efforts to survive. “So they think you’re dead,” he said at last.

  Evangeline sighed, a look of relief on her face. “I hope so,” she said. “It will give me enough time to hide.”

  As Verlaine considered Evangeline, his eyes drifted to her neck, where a chain of bright gold glittered against her skin. She still wore her pendant, the very one she had worn the day they’d met. Legend had it that the infamous angelologist Dr. Raphael Valko had fashioned three amulets from a rare and precious metal called Valkine. One pendant he had worn himself, one he had given to his daughter, Angela, and the third was worn by his wife, Gabriella. Evangeline inherited Angela’s pendant upon her mother’s death; Verlaine wore Gabriella’s pendant, which he had taken when Gabriella died. Verlaine brought his fingers to his neck and pulled out the pendant, showing it to Evangeline.

  Evangeline paused, looked for a moment at the pendant. “I was right, then,” she said, reaching for the egg in his hand. The brush of her finger against his palm gave him such a shock that he nearly dropped it. “You’re meant to have this. Gabriella would have wanted it that way. Keep it safe.” She closed her hand around his, as if locking his fingers around the egg.

  “They want this thing,” Verlaine said, glancing down at the egg. “But what in the hell is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Evangeline said, meeting his eye. “That is why I need you.”

  “Me?” Verlaine said, unable to imagine how he could be of any use.

  “You’re an angelologist now, aren’t you?” Evangeline asked, her voice challenging him. “If anyone can help me understand this, it’s you.”

  “Why not go to the others?” Verlaine asked.

  Evangeline stepped away and the air around her seemed to fold, as if heat emanated from her clothes. The smooth surface of the air buckled with electricity. Her human appearance dissolved in a fluctuation of warped space, flesh wavering and twisting as if she were made of nothing but colored smoke. A wash of light exploded around her as her wings unfolded.

  Verlaine blinked, holding—for a strange and disorienting moment—Evangeline’s dual selves in his vision, the surface illusion of a woman and the underlying reality of the winged creature. The images of human and angel were like holograms that, with a turn of the light, bled into each other. She opened her wings, extending first one and then the other, rotating them until they stretched to the walls of the passage. They were immense and luminous, the layered feathers deep purple shot through with veins of silver—and yet they were transparent, ephemeral, so light he could see the texture of the brick wall behind them. He watched them vibrate with energy. They pulsed with the slow rhythm of her breathing, brushing her shoulders and sending shivers through her hair.

  He leaned against a wall, steadying himself. For years Verlaine had tried to imagine Evangeline’s wings, to reconstruct them. When he had first seen them a decade before, it had been from a distance, and with the untrained eyes of a man who couldn’t tell the difference between the varieties of angels. Now he could decipher all the small distinctions that marked her, subtle as inclusions in quartz. He could see the iridescence of her skin in the shadows, the strange colored glow that appeared around her hair. He walked around her, studying her as if she were a winged statue in the Louvre, and he wondered what it felt like to live outside of time. Evangeline wouldn’t age like human beings, and she wouldn’t die for many hundreds of years. When Verlaine was an old man, Evangeline would be exactly the way he saw her now—as young and lovely as a figure cut from marble. He would die and she would remember his existence as something brief and insignificant. He realized now that she was more special than he could have ever guessed. He could hardly breathe. Evangeline was a thing of wonder, a miracle playing itself out before his eyes.

  “Now do you understand why I cannot go to them?” Evangeline whispered.

  “Come here,” Verlaine said, and to his surprise, Evangeline stepped toward him. He could feel the movement of the air swirling around her wings, smell the sweet fragrance of her skin. Her wrist, when he took it to feel her pulse, was cold as ice and slicked with the plasma characteristic of the Nephilim. He wanted, suddenly, to bring his lips to her skin. Instead, he pressed his finger to her vein. Her pulse was low and shallow, almost nonexistent.

  “Your blood?”

  “Blue.”

  “Eyesight?”

  “Better than perfect.”

  “Temperature?”

  “Thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes lower.”

  “It’s strange,” he said. “You have both human and Nephil characteristics. Your heartbeat is extraordinarily slow—less than two beats per minute, much slower than the average Nephil rate.” He squeezed her arm. “And you’re practically frozen. But your skin is flushed. You look every bit as human as I do.”

  Evangeline took a breath, as if bracing herself. “Have you killed many creatures like me?”

  “I have never in my life encountered a creature like you, Evangeline.”

  “The way you say that,” she said, holding his gaze, “makes it seem like you understand what I’ve become.”

  “Everything I’ve done, all the hunting, has been so that I could understand you.”

  “Then tell me,” Evangeline asked, her voice trembling. “What am I?”

  Verlaine looked at her, aware that his measured caution was giving way to the strength of his feelings. At last he said, “It is clear from your wings—their color and size and strength—that you are one of the elite angels. You are a Grigori, a descendant of the great Semyaza, granddaughter of Percival, great-grandaughter of Sneja. But you are human, too. You are incredible, a kind of miracle.”

  He stepped away and looked at Evangeline’s wings once more, touching the gooseflesh under the feathers. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” he said. “What does it feel like to fly?”

  “I wish I could explain it,” she said. “The sensation of weightlessness, the lightness, the buoyancy, the feeling that I might evaporate in a current of air. When I was human, I could not have imagined what it was like to step into a void, to fall fast and then sweep up, suddenly, into the wind. At times it feels like I belong less on the earth than to the sky, that I must recalibrate all of my movements just to remain earthbound. I used to fly out over the Atlantic, where I wouldn’t be seen, and I would go for miles and miles without tiring. Sometimes the sun would rise and I would see my reflection in the water and think that I should keep going. I would have to force myself to go back.”

  “It’s in your nature to fly,” Verlaine said. “But what about the other characteristics of the Nephilim? Did you experience those as well?”

  Her expression changed, and Verlaine could see at once that she was afraid of her capabilities. “My senses are slightly altered—everything is stronger and sharper; I don’t need food or water in the way I used to—but I have none of the desires attributed to the Nephilim. I am physically different, but my inner life is unaltered. My spirit has not changed. I may have inherited the body of a demon,” Evangeline said softly, “but I would never willingly become one.”

  Verlaine touched the pendant resting against her skin. It was so cold that a sheet of frost covered the metal. His finger melted a watery print on its surface. “You’re freezing.”

  “Did you expect my skin to be like yours?” Evangeline asked.

  “I’ve been in crowds of Nephilim; I’ve spoken to them in close proximity. You can feel the ice running in their veins—they are cold, but it is a different kind of coldness, like the dead walking among us. They have no soul
and so they feed on the souls of human beings. Even a mediocre angelologist can identify them easily. But you’re not like that. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would have believed you to be human. You could pass for one of us.”

  “Do I frighten you?”

  Verlaine shook his head. “I have to trust my instincts.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That you may look like them, but you’re not one of them. That you’re different. That you’re better.”

  Evangeline’s skin shimmered in the half light of the moon. He wanted, suddenly, to pull her close, to warm her in his arms. Perhaps he could help her. He felt as if nothing mattered but this moment with Evangeline. He brushed her cheek with his finger and slipped his arm around her, feeling the dusty surface of feathers brush over his hand as he drew her to him. He wanted, for just a moment, to feel as if the world beyond them was all a distant dream, an unreality. Angelologists and Nephilim, the hunters and the hunted—all of this didn’t matter. In all of existence, there was only the two of them. Verlaine wanted the illusion to last forever.

  But holding her was like trying to embrace a shadow. She slipped away, her attention drawn to something behind him. Verlaine caught a sweep of movement in the corner of his eye. Suddenly a car pulled into the passage, its headlights breaking through the darkness. The door opened and an Emim angel leaped from the car. Before he could move, Evangeline ran through the passage and, with a speed and grace that he recognized as belonging to the most adept creatures, she lifted into the air, landing on the rooftop above. The Emim angel opened her wings—large black wings, immense and powerful—and flew after her.

  1973 Alfa Romeo, rue Bosquet, seventh arrondissement, Paris

  Bruno roved the streets, unsure of where to look for Verlaine. He’d discovered his Ducati abandoned near the Seine, and Bruno knew instantly that his strange evening was only going to get stranger. Something was going on with Verlaine, that much was obvious. He loved his Ducati and was rarely without it. Leaving it thrown on the sidewalk—especially at this time of night, when the restaurants and cafés were closed and the seventh arrondissement was little more than a calcified forest of shuttered windows—was wholly out of character.

  Bruno reached into his pocket, took out a flask filled with Glenfiddich Solera Reserve, and took a long drink. The whole damn neighborhood was full of Nephilim. After his time in New York, he thought he’d seen the worst of it. But the area between the Bon Marché and the Eiffel Tower had proved to be the most concentrated collection of old-world Nephil families in the world.

  Over the course of Bruno’s time as an angel hunter—thirty years of service in Jerusalem, Paris, and New York—he had watched the Nephilim grow more and more reckless. It used to be that the creatures feared exposure, creating elaborate methods to shroud their existence in secrecy. For many hundreds of years, the creatures’ survival depended upon blending into the surrounding population of humans. Now there seemed to be a total disregard for such machinations. Among the new generations of angels there was a tendency toward exhibitionism. Reports, confessions, photographs, and videos were everywhere. Once such testimonies would have been relegated to sensational magazines, their claims printed next to UFO and yeti sightings. Bruno had watched it all with interest and, in recent years, growing alarm. Such exhibitionism was pure arrogance: The creatures believed that they were strong enough to come out in the open. And yet, strange as it might have seemed, Bruno had found that the more the angels exposed of their secret lives, the less shocking they were to the human population. There was no general awareness of them, no fear, no real inquiry into the nature of the Nephilim. Human beings were so saturated with the supernatural that they’d become desensitized. Bruno had to admit that there was a certain brilliance in it all: The creatures had chosen the perfect moment in history to step out of their shadow existence. After thousands of years of living in seclusion, they’d embraced the present era of exhibitionism.

  Of all his agents, he believed Verlaine best equipped to handle the change in the creatures’ behavior. Bruno had studied Verlaine at the crime scene as attentively as he’d studied the corpse and, as always, he’d liked what he saw: a young man with the potential to become a great leader. Sure, Verlaine was still struggling to find his place in their organization, but he was talented. He was also unusual, without the typical family history, without the normal education, and with a scary talent for locating and capturing angels. Acting on gut feeling alone, Bruno had plucked Verlaine out of his ordinary life as an academic in New York, brought him to Paris, and trained him with a rigor he saved for only the strongest and brightest recruits. He’d seen something unique in him, a rare balance of intelligence and intuition. And, sure enough, once he had entered training, Verlaine exemplified all the elements of an angel hunter—a sixth sense for the creatures mixed with the physical stamina to capture them. And, on top of everything, Verlaine had the remarkable ability to see the angels plainly, without assistance.

  Within the various departments of the society, angel hunters were the most covert, well funded, and selective. As director of their Paris bureau, Bruno handpicked his team, training each member personally. It was a painstaking process, as delicate and refined as the education of a samurai warrior. Verlaine had bypassed the academic track—a difficult and lengthy course of study rooted in the traditional practices of textual and archival study—and began his apprenticeship as a hunter straightaway.

  Now he was one of Bruno’s best. The young American scholar who’d once been in limbo about his future could now decipher the presence of angels with extraordinary precision. He understood the physiology of the Nephilim and demonstrated a clear ability to differentiate between human and angelic anatomy. He could detect the small distinguishing physical markings of the Nephilim—the sharp, opalescent fingernails, the wide forehead, the slightly irregular skeletal structure, the large eyes. He understood that the Nephil body was designed for flight, with thin, hollow bones that rendered their skeletons as light and agile as birds’. He noticed the scintillating quality of the skin, the way it shimmered as if dusted with tiny crystals. The structure of the wings themselves—the efficient retraction, the airy composition of the feathers, the struts and trusses that fortified the muscles—had fascinated Verlaine from the start. He had mastered every method of identifying angels, capturing them, binding them, and interrogating them, skills known by only the elite of the society. Bruno believed Verlaine could already be considered a great hunter, but he suspected that his protégé could become more: a mythic angel hunter, the kind of hunter to emerge once in a generation.

  And still there was something holding Verlaine back, a weakness that Bruno could feel lingering below the surface but could not readily identify. He’d made it his personal responsibility to help Verlaine overcome this Achilles’ heel and succeed.

  Something in the distance caught his eye. It seemed to him that there was a commotion at the far end of the street. Bruno pulled over, cut the engine, and got out of the car, trying to see more clearly. There was an Emim angel, its black wings stretched, the light of the moon casting a gray brilliance over the feathers, giving them a smoky fluidity. Although Bruno couldn’t see beyond the creature, he was sure—from the belligerent stance and the extended wings—that it was preparing to attack. He was certain that an Emim attack had just occurred at the Eiffel Tower. Given the proximity of the passage, there was a good chance that he’d found the killer.

  He pulled out his smartphone, snapped a series of photographs of the angel, and, after logging onto the society’s encrypted network, sent the images for identification. A series of Emim profiles popped onto the screen, but there was only one that interested him.

  Name: Eno

  Species: Emim

  Height: 200 cm

  Hair color: Black

  Eye color: Black

  Domain: Unknown. Three unconfirmed sightings in St. Petersburg, Russia (see call reports).

  Distinguishing features: Classic
Emim angel features; black wings measuring twelve feet wide by four feet high; normally works exclusively with members of Nephilim species.

  Surveillance history: First documented angelological encounter occurred in 1889, during the Paris World’s Fair, and resulted in the death of an agent. Subsequent encounters have included extended surveillance during the Second World War (see agent notes in dossier), DNA sample retrieved from strands of hair, and a series of photographs taken by agents at various Paris locations (see photographs below). Eno is characterized by outbursts of extreme violence, especially sexual violence enacted upon human males she has seduced (see autopsy reports).

  Although the surveillance report on Eno suggested she was in St. Petersburg, Bruno was certain that she was the angel at the end of the street, and that she was responsible for the murder at the Eiffel Tower. Bruno recognized Eno’s signature in the brutality of the slaughter, the great skill and strength of the killer, the peculiar way the body had been mutilated. He took a deep breath and tucked his phone into his pocket. Nothing had changed. Eno was as sadistic as ever.

  In his twenties, he had come under Eno’s spell during a hunt. She was unbelievably deft at evading their best agents, a vicious Emim who had been wanted for over a hundred years, and Bruno was determined to capture her. He’d known she was deadly. One of the murdered agents cited in Eno’s profile had suffered third-degree burns over his chest, indicative of electro-induction shock, and his body had been found with rope burns to the neck, wrists, and ankles, signifying that he’d been tied up and tortured. Lacerations to the face, torso, buttocks, and back confirmed this. He had been castrated and dumped in the Seine.