Angelopolis Read online

  Bruno understood the kind of creature he was dealing with, but when he was near Eno, it was as if he had stepped into a field of electricity, one that made all rational thought impossible. Of course, the original attraction between the Watchers and humans was purely physical, a dark and persistent sexual allure, a phenomenon of sheer lust, something that didn’t disappear over time. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he’d fallen into a dangerous, obsessive pattern of hunting her. That he could lose his place in the society, that he could be disgraced or even killed—all of this had faded in the pursuit of Eno. She was beautiful, but that wasn’t what interested Bruno. There was something hypnotic about her very existence, something dangerous and exciting about the knowledge of what she would try to do to him if he succeeded in capturing her. She made him feel alive even as she planned to kill him.

  Passage de la Vierge, seventh arrondissement, Paris

  Verlaine climbed onto the ledge of a window, grasped the iron bars of the balcony, and, swinging his legs to gain momentum, pulled himself up toward the rooftop, the soles of his wing tips slipping as he climbed. He took a breath and continued. There were four more balconies above him, each one just out of reach, each one a step closer to Evangeline. He could see her there, above, perched on the roof tiles like a gargoyle.

  By the time he’d hoisted himself over the balustrade of the final balcony, his muscles burned. The resistance felt good. His body was lean, his muscles tight and long, his endurance high. He would be forty-three years old in less than a week and he was in the best condition of his life, able to run for miles without breaking a sweat. Verlaine threw one leg over the ironwork balustrade and pushed himself onto the slate-roof tiles.

  The Emim angel swooped past him, the wings brushing against his back as she flew into the sky. He felt the shiver of air against his skin, felt the strength of the creature’s body as it slid past. If he were to grab her wings, she would take him with her into the air. He watched her twist upward, the lights and rooftops of Paris stretching beyond. As the Emim angel lowered herself to the rooftop, Evangeline rose. Soon the two creatures stood at the center of the rooftop, one facing the other, their wings moving in time.

  There was no doubt in Verlaine’s mind that the Emim was an exceptionally powerful angel. There was a rarefied, ghostly transparency to her skin and a certain distinction to her carriage that marked her as the higher order of warriors. As he examined the creature’s bone structure and facial features he saw that everything—her large, alien eyes and her sinuous body—coalesced to form a strange and inhuman beauty. One rarely came across such a striking Emim. He took a deep breath and wondered what kind of god would fashion such a seductive and evil being.

  Verlaine heard something behind him and turned to see Bruno emerge from a balcony just below. He knew that he should have called for assistance right away, that following Evangeline without backup went against all that he’d been trained to do, but Verlaine hadn’t even thought to alert Bruno.

  “I see you have a death wish,” Bruno said.

  “I thought that was one of the criteria for this job.”

  “Going solo against a creature like Eno is suicide,” Bruno said, gasping for breath as he pulled himself over the ledge. “Believe me, I’ve been there.”

  Verlaine noted the hesitation in Bruno’s movements and the self-conscious way he spoke, and strained to imagine what sort of connection to Eno could provoke this reaction in his boss. Veraline turned to the two angels facing off at the center of the rooftop. “I think there’s something else happening here.”

  Verlaine stared at Evangeline and Eno for a moment, as if considering their actions with the eye of an anthropologist. The Emim angel traced a circle around Evangeline, marking her territory, and slowly opened her enormous black wings. They were magnificent, falling in sweeping tiers, the small feathers graduating into large opaque bursts of plumage. While the powdery feathers appeared heavy and substantial, he knew that if he were to touch them, his hand would pass through, as if skimming through a projection of light. Most Emim were repulsive, but this one was alluring, with all of the defects of the breed altered to create a disturbing and dark beauty. Verlaine was captivated. He wanted to remember each minute detail of what he was seeing, to store it in his mind so that he could examine the creature again in the future.

  As if to demonstrate the power and agility of her wings, Eno curled them around her body and, with a pulse of strength, puffed them outward, so that they flared like the hood of a cobra. Although the subject of years of intensive investigation, Verlaine was never quite prepared for the mystery, the sheer inexplicable magic, of angels’ wings. Strength, breeding, and classification in the heavenly sphere—all of this became instantly evident with a flash of a wing.

  When Evangeline looked down at her opponent preparing to attack, she opened her wings in response, so that a layer of purple light wrapped around her body in a shimmering cloud. Silver streaks shot through the feathers, quick and electric, as if charged with a current. She swiveled and turned, moonlight sliding over her. The display was meant to terrify and impress.

  “Pay close attention,” Bruno whispered, his manner agitated. “You might never see an identification ritual like this again.” He leaned closer to Verlaine, lowering his voice further. “First, they will display their wings to establish hierarchy. When there is a great disparity in strength, the weaker angel will submit straightaway. But clearly this match isn’t going to be like that. There are two females creatures, both with extraordinary wings, one with a pedigree that should put her among the elite angels, the other with the strength of a mercenary. The dominant creature isn’t obvious. If they can’t establish a pecking order, they’ll fight a duel.”

  Verlaine watched, fear growing in his stomach. The duel was an ancient angelic ritual, one that was considered outdated by modernized Nephilim. For centuries the custom had remained embedded in Russia, however, where the presence of the most powerful Nephilim, those descending from ancient angelic families, reside. Human beings once copied the practice, challenging one another in the name of honor, marking off paces and shooting at close range. In time, human beings had left the practice behind. Now only the most traditional Nephilim fought duels.

  In the abstract, Verlaine found the ritual to be beautiful, a kind of call-and-response between creatures of strong but quite distinct species. Verlaine had watched archival footage of duels between Nephilim many times, but Eno’s aggressive posturing, and Evangeline’s defensive reaction, was unlike anything he had seen in the case studies he’d encountered. A duel between angels was theoretically a confrontation to the death. Only one of the angels would make it out alive. And although Evangeline was of a higher species of angel, he couldn’t help but sense that Eno would win.

  Evangeline fixed the angel in her gaze. Verlaine could see that she was struggling with her thoughts, that the confrontation was unexpected, that she didn’t want to fight. He remembered what she had said about choosing not to become like the Nephilim, about being born with the characteristics of the beasts but refusing to accept her fate. Every impulse told her to kill Eno, and yet he knew she would not allow herself to do it.

  Suddenly, Eno leaped into the air, her wings pushing her high above the rooftop once more. Evangeline stretched her wings and swooped into the sky. Eno hovered, waiting for Evangeline, watching her, preparing to attack. In a swirl of motion, the fight began. From a distance they looked like dragonflies twisting and circling in the moonlight.

  As Verlaine studied their movements, he saw that Evangeline was far more adept than he had initially thought. Eno dove and struck, harrying Evangeline, darting at her, circling her, teasing her. Evangeline responded, slamming into Eno full force. Eno fell back, tumbling through the air. Recovering herself, she held her knees to her body, pushed herself forward, and turning in a somersault, spun once, twice, three times, gaining momentum with each rotation until she was a ball of fire. She launched herself at Evangeline,
striking her with a force that threw her to the roof in a clatter of slate tiles. She lay still, stunned from the force of her fall.

  With an elegant flick of her wings, Eno descended and walked to Evangeline. She was trembling from the effort, her long black hair falling over her shoulders, her breathing heavy. She stood over Evangeline and drew her wings back, preparing to deliver a final blow, when Evangeline pushed Eno with an inhuman strength, landing a hit to the solar plexus.

  “Very nice,” Bruno said under his breath, and Verlaine had to agree: The solar plexus was the weakest point of all angelic creatures. A solid strike there could end the duel in a second.

  “The Emim angel isn’t wearing a shield,” Verlaine noted, surprised. Mercenary angels often protected thier chest.

  “She likes the challenge,” Bruno said. “And if she gets hit, she likes the pain.”

  Eno buckled, raising her hands to defend herself. Evangeline kicked again, striking her with enormous force, her movements precise, perfectly delivered, vicious. In a matter of seconds she gained dominance over her opponent, pinning her to the floor, pressing her boot into the curve of her elegant neck, as if to crush her throat. Evangeline was the stronger angel. She had the power and the skill to kill Eno if she chose, kill her without effort, kill her as easily as if she were pressing the body of an insect under her boot. Despite himself, Verlaine was proud of her. He watched, waiting for her to deliver the death blow.

  Instead, Evangeline bent on one knee and folded her wings over her shoulders in submission. Verlaine stared, shocked, as Eno recovered her bearing and, losing no time, began to bind Evangeline’s hands behind her back. Evangeline met his eye, and he knew, with one look, that this act of surrender was a message for him. Evangeline had the powers of the Nephilim, but she chose not to be one of them. It was clear now that all his dreams, and every angel he had tracked, had led him back to Evangeline. Now he was about to lose her again.

  Bruno must have been thinking the same thing, because he was ready to go after Evangeline. He stepped forward, his gun in his hand. Verlaine knew the standard procedure: Shoot the creature with an electric stunning device, sending a stream of electricity at the angel until the wings were immobilized. The stunned creature would lose control and fall to the ground, where the angel hunter would bind it. Verlaine felt a rush of panic at the thought of harming Evangeline. Although the method was meant to simply stun the furcula, the force of the electricity could cause enormous pain.

  “Don’t shoot,” Verlaine whispered, panic making him feel unsteady as he moved across the slate tiles toward Bruno.

  “It’s not Evangeline I’m after,” Bruno said under his breath.

  Eno yanked Evangeline to her feet, wrapped an arm around her waist, and, with a push of her wings, flew into the night. Bruno and Verlaine stood in silence, watching Eno ascend. It seemed to Verlaine that a part of himself was in Eno’s hands, that as she moved farther and farther into the sky, he, too, was beginning to fade away. When Bruno put his hand on Verlaine’s shoulder, Verlaine wanted to believe that his mentor understood his burning anger, his rage, his need for revenge. “We’re going after them,” Verlaine said.

  “It’s useless to try to track Eno in Paris,” Bruno said, as he walked to the edge of the roof and began to climb down to the balcony. “If we want to capture her, we’ll have to hunt her on her own territory.”

  The Second Circle

  LUST

  Winter Palace, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

  If Vera Varvara were permitted to do as she wished, she would leave her office, with its chipping white plaster and disorderly papers, and walk through the vast Baroque hallways of the Winter Palace. She would make her way through the ancient corridors, with their gilded mirrors and cut crystal chandeliers, free as a child in a palace built of rock candy. She would cross the immense Palace Square, walk under the arches of the southern façade, and wander to the museum, where a flash of her ID card would open every door. Among paintings and tapestries and porcelains and statues—all the beautiful things amassed by the Romanovs during their three-hundred-year rule of Russia—she would feel as unfettered as a princess.

  Instead she twisted her long blond hair into a chignon, went to the window, and pushed the pane open. There were angelic creatures below; she could feel them lingering, their presence like a high frequency vibrating her ear. She ignored them and let the chill night wind sweep over her. A lifetime in the swampy climate of St. Petersburg had given her a strong constitution, one that resisted every kind of illness and allowed her to get through harsh winters without much discomfort. Vera was neither tall nor short, thin nor fat, beautiful nor plain. In fact, she considered herself to be a perfect example of physical mediocrity, and this knowledge empowered her to live entirely in her mind, to push herself intellectually, to forget the frivolous lives led by so many women she knew—lives filled with shopping and husbands and children—and to excel in her work. In this regard, she had a difficult time coming down to the level of the people she met on the street; she simply didn’t want to hear about their everyday successes and failures. An old boyfriend had once complained that her mind was like a metal trap—it hung open, inviting one to engage, and then clamped down hard on whoever dared come inside. She had never had a relationship with a man for more than a month or two, and even that duration of time she found to be cloying.

  Leaning forward, Vera craned her neck outside, taking in the green-and-white marble of the Winter Palace, the onion dome rising in the distance. The river Neva, floes of ice floating and sinking, rushed by. All that she found ugly about St. Petersburg—the Communist apartment blocs, the gaudy trappings of the nouveaux riches abutting the glaring poverty, the lack of political freedom of Putin’s government—seemed far away when she was ensconced in her tiny corner of the Winter Palace. Vera’s position as a junior researcher revolved around the study of Russian Nephilim, their infiltration into the royal family and the aristocracy, their artifacts, their genealogies, and their fates during the revolution of 1917. She’d grown up in post-Soviet Petersburg, surrounded by the lush Italianate buildings of the Romanovs, and this—along with her training in angelology—had influenced her taste profoundly. She did not yearn, like so many young Russians, to experience the opulence of the past, to feel the luxuries and excesses of another era, and yet she didn’t perceive such decadence as a kind of sickness either, as the Communists had. She was able to accept the layers of historical accretion as one accepts the layers of an archaeological dig: The effects of the Nephilim on the earth could be found underneath the social, economic, and political structures humans experienced each day. She knew that the creatures had infected the essence of her country once and, with the angelic population rising, would do so again.

  With only two years of work outside of her training period, Vera was at the lowest position on the totem pole and, as such, was charged with sorting and cataloging artifacts. Just a fraction of the Hermitage collections were on permanent display. The rest of the three million treasures were kept in massive storage rooms below the palace, hidden from public view. Among these she’d found uncountable remnants of Romanov treasures: ancient books that had been ripped apart; Rembrandts with red numbers painted on the canvases to mark their place in the Soviet inventory; furniture destroyed by water and fire. Many of the objects had been part of Catherine the Great’s private collection but had been significantly augmented by Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna before her fall from power in 1917. Picking up the pieces strewn about by history, and putting them back together—rebinding books, matching chipped enamels, removing the mar of red paint—was work she loved. Such opportunities were rare, and ones that allowed access to a collection like that of the Hermitage were almost nonexistent. Past curators had left the artifacts locked away for nearly a hundred years, uncertain of what to do with such strange treasures. Whenever she entered the storage rooms she felt as though she had walked into a time capsule, one as eerie as an Egyptian tomb, filled with
secrets too strange to be shared with the world. She found segments of the collection to be a highly unnerving, almost frightening, accumulation of bizarre curiosities. For example, there was an entire storage room filled with canvases depicting angels and swans and young women, presumably virgins. It made her wonder at the motives for collecting such objects. Had the Romanovs actively singled them out or had the pieces been procured for them at random? For some reason, the taste of the collector mattered to her.

  One day earlier that year, while Vera was searching through this bizarre collection of swans and virgins, she come across a sheaf of etchings. She’d found many odd things, but these were magnetic, perhaps because they were so unusual. Each print contained a portrait of an angel unlike any she had seen before. The creatures seemed utterly unique, with details that set them apart, and it was clear that they were very pure beings, perhaps archangels. Checking the signature, she realized that the prints were the work of Albrecht Dürer, a fifteenth-century artist, mathematician, and angelologist whom Vera deeply admired. His Apocalypse series was taught extensively in angelological courses as a vision of what would happen if the Watchers were ever released from their subterranean prison.

  But these etchings seemed like a departure for Dürer. Oddly, they reminded her of the photographs taken by Seraphina Valko during the Second Angelic Expedition, in 1943. The renowned Dr. Valko and her team had located a dead angel’s body, measured it, photographed it, and positively identified it as belonging to one of the Watchers who had been banished from Heaven for falling in love with human women.