Angelopolis (3 page)

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

A
xicore 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 violated. 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

V
erlaine 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 fatalities 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.”

“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.”