Angelopolis Page 5

  Vera had seen the photos firsthand, during a conference in Paris the year before. Although they were black-and-white, taken in conditions that were far from ideal, the body of the dead angel was clearly visible. The long limbs, the hairless chest, the ringlets of hair falling over its shoulders, the full lips—the creature seemed vital and healthy, as if it had only closed its eyes for a moment. Only a broken wing fanning from the torso, its feathers folded at an unnatural angle, revealed the truth: The angel had been dead for thousands of years. The creature was male, with all the recognizable organs of human anatomy, a truth the pictures demonstrated with graphic accuracy. Seraphina Valko’s photographs proved that the Watchers were physical beings, more like humanity than traditionally believed. Angels were not sexless beings but physical creatures whose bodies were but a more perfect expression of the human body. And most important of all, the photos had proven that angels were capable of fathering children. All of Vera’s ideas about the Watchers, and all the work she had done to support her theories, depended upon this conclusion.

  Vera drew away from the window and leaned against her desk, a Brezhnev-era affair with rusting metal legs. She slid open a drawer and removed the envelope she’d hidden under a stack of magazines. The portfolio was too bulky to keep on her desk, where anyone stopping by to chat could see it. With such limited access hours to the Hermitage, and the strict ban on bringing objects up from the storage rooms, she had had little choice but to smuggle the prints out of their tomb. It was her only hope for making progress on her own research. If there was one thing she knew about her field, it was this: Nobody was going to help her to advance but herself.

  Gently unwinding the string of the clasp, she spread the sketches over the desk, marveling at the intricacy of the figures, the leaden hue of the line, the sheer genius of Dürer’s composition. Originally, it was her fascination with Dürer’s artistry that drew her to covet the etchings. But now, in the privacy of her office, the drawings seemed to become animated with movement and energy. Only an artist as masterful as Dürer could make a viewer viscerally understand how a Watcher could, like Zeus, seduce a virgin. Gazing at the prints, Vera imagined the encounter: In a swirl of wind, an angel appears before a young woman. He opens his wings, blinding her with his brilliance. She blinks, tries to understand who or what has come to her, but is too afraid to speak. The angel tries to comfort her, wrapping the terrified woman in his wings. There is a moment of terror and empathy and attraction. Vera wanted to feel it: the tangle of feathers and flesh, the heat of the embrace, the conflating of pain and pleasure and fear and desire.

  Aeroflot Ilyushin IL-96 300, economy class, 35,000 feet above Europe

  The lights in the cabin had been switched off. Most of the passengers were twisted in their seats, trying to sleep. Bruno pulled down the plastic table and set out his dinner, bought at Roissy before boarding: a baguette sandwich with ham and a bottle of red wine from Burgundy. If there was one thing he understood about the present situation, it was that he couldn’t think on an empty stomach.

  Bruno found two plastic cups and poured the wine. Verlaine accepted one, took a pillbox from his pocket, and swallowed two pills, washing them down with the wine. He was obviously too jittery to eat anything. Verlaine tried to hide his state of mind, but Bruno could see it clearly: Finding Evangeline had opened a door to another lifetime, one Verlaine had nearly forgotten. Bruno knew, at that moment, that his suspicions about Verlaine were correct: His Achilles’ heel, that secret weakness he’d detected, was now clear.

  No one knew it, he hoped, but Bruno was also wrestling with his own demons: He couldn’t forget Eno—the way she moved, her strength, her beauty. Calling up the profile he’d downloaded onto his phone, he scrolled through the supplementary documents, glancing at the DNA report before stopping to examine—admire, if he were honest with himself—the photographs of her exquisitely cold features. It was no use pretending to himself that her penetrating black eyes hadn’t burned into his heart.

  “What are you looking at?” Verlaine asked, squinting through his glasses.

  Bruno passed the phone to Verlaine. “Eno,” he said, opting to tell him the truth. “This creature inspires pure obsession among our agents,” he said. “There is something about her, something that makes the challenge of capturing her almost irresistible. Our official stance has been to discourage our agents from becoming too tied up in hunting a particular creature. Often they don’t heed this advice.”

  As Verlaine looked at Eno’s profile on the phone, a look of horror spread over his face: “The victim suffered burns to the neck, wrists, and ankles; lacerations to the face, torso, buttocks, and back. The body was marred by what appears to be—from autopsies documenting previous victims—ritualistic castration. Organs are never left at the scene and assumed to be kept as a trophy.”

  “She’s not someone you want to take home for a quiet romantic evening,” Bruno continued. “No matter how much one likes to think himself the hunter, Eno is the one doing the hunting. She’s young, by the standards of the Emim angels, and hungry.”

  “But what does she want with Evangeline?” Verlaine asked.

  It was an interesting question for Bruno. The last time he had seen Evangeline, she’d been at the center of an operation that ended in unqualified disaster: They had lost their outpost in Milton, New York, not to mention a number of agents, and an artifact of untold value to their cause. Evangeline’s own grandmother Gabriella, a close friend of Bruno’s, had been found dead on a subway platform. Evangeline had disappeared completely. For the past ten years Bruno had considered her AWOL at best; at worst she was a traitor, guilty of crimes against their society.

  Not that he was perfectly in line with society regulations himself. Bruno took a long sip of his wine, trying to think through the consequences of his decision to go after Eno and Evangeline. Flying to Russia on the spur of the moment was totally unsanctioned. Of course, Bruno had leeway to go after dangerous creatures, and he didn’t ask for permission for every hunt, but this was not the usual situation. He’d bought the tickets himself, to keep the flight off the record, and he knew that he would have to work without the usual backup. It was an act of insubordination worthy of Evangeline, but even more so of Evangeline’s mother, Angela Valko, one of the most daring angelologists in recent memory.

  When Bruno arrived at the academy in Paris, Angela Valko was already legendary. Even then she was considered to be their most brilliant scientist. Her reputation was varnished by her husband, an infamous angel hunter named Luca Cacciatore. Angela’s pedigree was the envy of every student in the school. As the daughter of Gabriella and Dr. Raphael Valko, she was personally tutored by her parents and was thus their heir in spirit as well as in name. As it turned out, she was the rare case of a well-connected child exceeding the glories of the past: Angela’s work was so advanced that it didn’t matter who her parents were or what they had done to help her. Her work changed the direction of the battle against angels—angelologists began to focus on the possibility of destroying the Nephilim en masse.

  As with the chatter about any celebrity couple, much of what Bruno heard was gossip, but there must have been at least a little truth in the stories. Whenever an antiquated tradition or the red tape of the society held her back, Angela had simply changed the rules. If she couldn’t change the system, she created a new one, beginning with her marriage to Luca, whom she met when he was a guest from the academy in Rome. When the council members—old and conservative angelologists who liked to keep the school staffed with their own kind—rejected Luca’s application for a position in Paris, Angela helped him to create the angel hunter unit. Together they recruited the first fleet of angel hunters and the rest was history.

  In the end their work had gone terribly wrong. Angela was murdered, Luca died alone and forgotten in America, their daughter was raised by nuns at St. Rose Convent—strangers, really—who hadn’t been able to protect her in the end. The reality of Evangeline as a fully form
ed angelic creature was the final blow to the once inviolable Valko legacy. For Bruno, the truth about Evangeline was a total shock to the system. Seeing her perched on the rooftop, her wings tucked behind her, had produced a chemical reaction, pure and simple. He’d repressed an instinctual desire to destroy her.

  “To discover what Eno wants with Evangeline might take some digging,” Bruno said, finally answering Verlaine’s question. “Eno’s motives are never clear. She confounds the best of us.”

  “I’m more interested in finding Evangeline than in theorizing about her abductor,” Verlaine said.

  Suddenly Bruno wondered if his obsession with Eno tinted everything he did and said. “She works exclusively for the Grigoris. If she wants Evangeline, there’s something important going on.”

  “This might have something to do with it,” Verlaine said, reaching into his backpack.

  Bruno watched him unwrap a gaudy, gem-encrusted egg. It was clearly valuable but, in Bruno’s mind, a piece of kitsch that he wouldn’t have looked at twice under normal circumstances. “How’d you make it through security with that thing?”

  Verlaine held the egg before Bruno’s eyes and said, “Watch this.” He pressed a tiny button and the egg split in two, springing open on an invisible hinge and revealing, tucked inside its center, another egg. This egg, in turn, split apart, revealing two small miniatures: an intricately constructed gold chariot and a cherub, its body enameled and jeweled and gleaming, as if rendered in oil paint and varnish. What was once compact as a stone had expanded, as if by some magic mechanism, into an intriguing diorama.

  “Evangeline slipped it to me,” Verlaine said. “I was hoping you might know why.”

  Bruno looked it over, unsure of what to make of it, and closed the contraption, feeling the cold metal click into place as each mechanism retracted. “I can’t tell you. But if there’s a connection, we’re going to the right place to find out.”

  Bruno felt his stomach lift as the plane descended. Pushing up the window shade, he looked out through the warped lens of thick acrylic plastic. In the distance, beyond a haze of darkness, the lights of St. Petersburg sparkled. He strained to see the twist of the Neva and the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, but could make out only a faint gradation of gray hovering at the edges of the lights, like smudges on an abstract painting. As the wheels hit the tarmac, and the plane bounced with the weight of the impact, Bruno could almost feel the density of the angelic population, as if their presence created another layer in the atmosphere. Eno was there, among these creatures. Turning to Verlaine he saw that his best hunter understood what they were up against. He would risk his life—he would risk everything—to find Evangeline.

  Grigori mansion, Millionnaya Street, St. Petersburg

  Against his better judgment, Armigus left the human creature to scream. He knew it would be much less trouble to end its life quickly and be done with it. He had a dagger—a piece of sharpened bone that had been passed down for generations by the Grigori men—ready, he had the human’s hands tied and the plastic sheets ready to catch the blood, but the doorbell was ringing on the first floor, the sound echoing through the vast plaster and marble interior. As Armigus left the room the human looked at him, pleading, desperate. He wanted to die quickly, Armigus could see it, but there was no choice but to put a pause to this little amusement. It could be his brother back from Paris, after all. And if Axicore had to wait, he would be furious.

  Armigus walked the long stretch of hallway from one side of the house to the other, passing an array of modern glass-and-steel furniture, a shelf filled with Tibetan copper bowls, and a collection of Shivas cast in bronze. The apartment had been occupied by a lesser branch of the imperial family before the revolution, a period the twins disliked, and so, in defiance of the stuffy nineteenth-century moldings and the elaborate marble floors, Axicore and Armigus filled the space with modern furniture, tatami mats, Japanese manga, folding silk screens—anything to dispel the musty air of the past.

  They had the same tastes in everything. In conversation one twin would finish the other’s sentences. As children they would switch identities, so as to confuse their teachers and friends. When they were older they would take each other’s women to bed, sharing lovers without disclosing the truth to their partners. Indeed, Axicore and Armigus Grigori were identical in every way except one: Axicore’s right eye was green and his left eye blue, while Armigus’s left eye was green and his right eye was blue. When the twins faced each other, they appeared to be mirror images. When they were standing side by side, the colors of the eyes made it possible to distinguish them. Armigus had often wondered about this anomaly, something that marked no Grigori before or since. Perhaps they were different, more unique, somehow better than the others.

  Sighing with annoyance, Armigus reached the door. Under normal circumstances his Anakim angel would take care of this for him, but he always dismissed the Anakim from the house when he held human beings there. The screaming and crying always spooked the Anakim, who were truly lower in the hierarchy of angelic beings in every sense of the word. They simply could not tolerate the preferences and habits of the Nephilim.

  He felt the hot, sensual energy of an Emim angel before he actually saw Eno in the doorway. She slid her sunglasses into her hair and said, “Your brother asked me to come for you.”

  Armigus stepped aside, letting Eno push past. She was as tall as Armigus, strong and dangerous. “He’d like me to help capture Sneja’s Nephil?”

  “I have caught her already,” Eno said, giving him a haughty look, one that perfectly represented her feelings about Armigus. She preferred Axicore, thought him a true Nephil, and always reported to him. Armigus was just a secondary master, the one with a weakness for human beings. “Axicore is moving her to Russia now, but he needs your help. He wants you to speak with Sneja—to tell her that he’s got Evangeline—and to meet him in Siberia to finish the job.”

  “What about Godwin?”

  Eno blinked, clearly surprised that he would speak to her about the subject. The Grigori dealings with Godwin were confidential, not the kind of topic to be discussing with a mercenary angel, but Armigus wanted to win Eno’s confidence. He wanted her to like him. But she only thought he was weak. He could see it in her eyes.

  “You will have to speak with your brother about that,” Eno said, her voice cold.

  Walking to the center of the room, she paused under a glass sculpture suspended from the ceiling, its crystals catching light and scattering it over her dark skin, her black hair, the eerie yellow glow that surrounded her eyes. A cry rang through the room.

  “You aren’t alone?” Eno asked, raising an eyebrow. Her long black tongue appeared at the side of her mouth, thick and wet as an eel.

  “I’m in the middle of something,” Armigus said.

  Eno met his eye and smiled, a sadistic look suffusing her face. “Armigus—do you have a human here?”

  Armigus looked away, refusing to answer. Axicore didn’t approve of his appetite for human men, but Eno understood his preferences all too well.

  “You know, Armigus, your brother needs you now. You haven’t the time for playing games. I would be happy to take care of the creature for you,” she said, stepping toward him. “More than happy.”

  Armigus took the key to his bedroom from his pocket and placed it in Eno’s hand. She was doing him a favor—he hated finishing them off, hated the stink of the blood and human flesh—and yet he couldn’t help but feel as though he had been cheated. “Don’t leave a mess behind,” he whispered.

  “You know me better than that,” Eno said, smiling.

  Bracing himself, Armigus grabbed his jacket and hurried out the door, closing it before he could hear the sounds of Eno’s work.

  Angelology Research Center, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

  At that hour, with the sun rising at the edge of the city and the sky oozing a diaphanous mist, the oak tables were completely empty of scholars. Verlaine always found
such places comforting, a reminder of who he had once been when he spent his days in quiet research, preparing classes and organizing notes for his next lecture. Indeed, the moment he and Bruno had set foot in the research center, and he heard the sound of their shoes on the polished floors, he felt his entire being relax, as if, after wandering in inhospitable territory, he had at last come to a place of safety.

  A commotion in the hallway drew his attention as Vera Varvara walked briskly into the room, an air of crisp efficiency about her. He leaned down and kissed her twice, Parisian style, noting that her blue eyes didn’t settle on his but stared through him, as if they had never met before. He felt his cheeks go warm, and he wondered if it had been a good idea to have called her at all.

  While she was the perfect agent to consult—her extensive knowledge of St. Petersburg and access to the angelological collection at the Hermitage was invaluable—he wasn’t sure how she felt about seeing him again. They’d met the year before at a conference in Paris, and spent the night together after having drinks at a bar in the fourteenth arrondissement, near the academy. The next morning they agreed that it had been a mistake, that they would simply pretend that the night hadn’t happened. They hadn’t spoken much since then. While he’d suspected that one day her professional savvy would be useful, he’d never imagined that he would be coming to Vera about Evangeline.

  Verlaine stared at Vera, watching her move. She was as beautiful and brutally elegant as he remembered, but to his surprise he could not recall what it had been like to be with her in bed, what her body had felt like next to his. He could only summon forth the sensation of holding Evangeline, her presence like a vortex of white-blue snow, swirling and dancing around him as he tried to catch it.