Angelopolis A Novel

The Ninth Circle

TREACHERY

Chelyabinsk, Russia

As Verlaine opened his eyes, he understood that he was lying in a snowy field. He couldn’t say how long he had slept. The snow around him was stained with blood; he realized that it was his own. His leg was injured; the wound to his head had opened yet again. As he examined the cut to his leg, he remembered crawling out of the panopticon, fire rising around him, the noise of explosions ringing in his ears. Looking back toward the prison, he saw that the only landmark remaining was a plume of smoke rising in the far distance. The whole compound had collapsed.

A sound grew in his ears, a buzzing as grating and persistent as an insect. It was a truck approaching through the snow. As it got closer, Verlaine could make out Dmitri at the wheel of a Lada Niva. Yana jumped out of the backseat, leaving Bruno—whom Verlaine could see was badly injured—hunched against the door. A man Verlaine didn’t recognize followed behind Yana and Dmitri. He greeted Verlaine and offered his hand, introducing himself as Azov and explaining that he’d come at Vera’s request.

“What happened in there?” Verlaine asked Dmitri, brushing the snow from his clothes.

“Exactly what Godwin hoped would happen,” Dmitri said. His face was streaked black, his clothes singed.

“Is he inside?” Verlaine asked.

“There’s no way to know for sure,” Dmitri said.

Verlaine felt his heart sink. Godwin could be inside, or he could have escaped. He could be anywhere.

“What about the nuclear plant?” Verlaine asked.

“It’s supposed to be able to resist this kind of rupture,” Dmitri said, glancing over his shoulder at the rising smoke. “But I don’t think we should stay and take our chances. We have to get as far from here as we can. Now.”

“We can’t leave,” Verlaine said. “Not yet.”

“If we stay,” Dmitri said, pointing to the far side of the field, “we face that.”

The escaped prisoners—every variety of angel—filled the landscape. Verlaine scanned the chaos of movement, searching for Evangeline, spotting her everywhere and nowhere at once until, in the center of it all, he found her. She walked hand in hand with Lucien at the edge of the panopticon. Verlaine saw, as they walked closer, the image of the father in his child. The delicate shape of her face, the large eyes, the luminosity that surrounded her—it was obvious that Evangeline and Lucien were made of the same ethereal substance.

“Evangeline has to come with us,” Verlaine said, feeling more helpless by the second.

“I don’t know if Lucien will allow that,” Azov said, looking circumspect. “We traveled together for thousands of miles. I know his strength, but also, more important, I know that he is a gentle and kind creature, one whose motives are good. Evangeline, if I can believe what I’ve heard about her, would never fight against him, or allow you to harm him. If you want to bring Evangeline with you, there is only one certain way.”

Azov removed a vessel from his pocket and showed it to Verlaine. He remembered Vera’s confidence that Azov could help her understand Rasputin’s journal. Somehow they had succeeded in making the formula.

Verlaine reached for the vessel, but Azov stopped him. Instead he started toward the angels himself, calling their names, his voice filled with a desperate hope that Verlaine understood: He felt the same violent need to call Evangeline back, to convince her to leave Lucien behind. To Verlaine’s surprise, Azov caught Evangeline’s attention—she walked across the snowy field, approaching them, Lucien at her side.

“Who are you?” she asked. “And what do you want with us?”

Lucien glanced at the vessel in Azov’s hand. Whatever Azov was doing, Lucien understood it immediately. “Don’t go closer,” he said, opening his wings and wrapping them in a protective gesture around Evangeline’s shoulders.

Azov took a plastic vessel from his pocket and held it out to her. “This is for you,” he said. “It will bring you—and the other creatures like you—back.”

“Back to what?” Evangeline asked.

“You have a choice,” Azov replied.

“You don’t have to be one of them anymore,” Verlaine said, stepping closer to Evangeline.

“If I’m not one of them,” she said, her gaze falling upon Verlaine, “what will I be?”

“Human,” Verlaine said. “You’ll be like us.”

Without taking her eyes from Verlaine, she said, “I’m not sure I know how to be like you anymore.”

“I can teach you,” Verlaine said. “I’ll help you return to what you were. If you let me.”

Evangeline extricated herself from Lucien’s wings and, her feet crunching in the snow, walked to Azov and took the medicine of Noah. Verlaine could almost see her thoughts as they crossed her mind—her expression changed from consternation to curiosity to determination. She brushed the cork of the vessel with her fingernail and tilted the vessel back and forth, sending the liquid from one end of the tube to the other. Then, with a quick, decisive gesture, Evangeline slid the potion into her pocket. Turning away, she ran to join Lucien.

Verlaine started after her, but Dmitri and Azov wrestled him back, pulling him across the field, toward the Neva.

“Come on,” Yana yelled from the driver’s seat. “We have to go now.”

As he struggled, using all his strength to reach Evangeline, he could see that the dense black smoke rising from the reactor had grown thicker. A noise filled the air. It began as a vibration, a clattering as sharp as the hum of a cicada. The daylight faded to a thin light, pale and pink, as a series of flashes rocked the earth. Within seconds, the air filled with ash. Then the exodus began. From the depths of the smoke, a swarm of wings swirled up from the crater, rising, creating a mass of creatures so thick that the sky fell dark. In the shadow of the escaped angels, the reactor burned.


M5 Highway, Siberian Steppes, Russia

Bruno clung to the door. Yana drove fast and erratic, the tires sliding as she sped through the tundra. Each bump was torture. Glancing out the window, Bruno could see that the world had begun to change. The sky turned ashy, and then bloodred. They drove past villagers staring up at the heavens; they passed herds of goats struck dead, the bodies lying in the snow; they passed streams of water flowing with blood; they passed the decimated, charred trunks of burned trees. Increasing her speed, Yana careened along the road, sliding ever more dangerously close to the sheer icy edge. A flock of Watchers broke from the crust of the earth, lifting into the sky like crazed birds. Lightning coursed above, crackling through the ionized atmosphere, alighting upon the craggy mountain peak ahead of them. The earth appeared to tip upon its axis and a nexus of stars fell overhead, glowing with a strange, bright fervor. The moon grew large and purple. Rain fell, hissing upon them, staining the snow black. The fallen angels were rebelling. The battle had begun.

Yana pulled over. At the roadside Verlaine packed snow into his hands and returned to Bruno. The snow formed hard, wet packs. Bruno felt the delicious cold against his singed body as Verlaine held the melting ice to his skin, pressing it lightly against his cheek. The cold gave him some relief. Bruno realized that he was shivering, whether because of the cold or the pain or the terrible fear that was growing inside of him, he could not tell.

Somewhere in that sizzling hole in Chelyabinsk lay the man who had started all of this. Bruno closed his eyes, trying to forget what he’d seen. Of all the horrors of that day—the Nephilim breaking free of their cages, the Watchers bearing down upon them from above, the explosions thundering through the underground prison—nothing compared with the terrible end Merlin Godwin had met at the hands of Eno. Bruno had watched it all from a distance—the way Eno rose up like a cobra behind Godwin, curling her black wings around his body until Bruno saw nothing but a stream of blood falling over the floor. When she’d finished she left Godwin’s mangled remains among the ruins of the laboratory. What disturbed Bruno most of all was the fact that the surveillance reports had been wrong—Eno didn’t keep the trophies of her kills. When she’d finished with Godwin, she turned to Bruno, her lips red with blood, and he understood the true horror of what she did to her male victims. Bruno knew that Godwin’s fate could have been his own.

As they drove onward, Bruno tried to make a division between the pain he felt burning through his body and the clear, direct movement of his thoughts. Despite the agony, he must remain sharp; he must keep his mind directed on the future. The real battle would be coming. If they made it out of Siberia alive—and, with Yana at the wheel, their chances were strong—the fight would be at its beginning. The greatest difficulties lay ahead. Soon there would be nowhere to hide.

“You’re going to get us back to St. Petersburg in one piece?” Bruno said to Yana, his voice little more than a whisper.

Yana kept her eyes fixed on the road. “Even if I do,” she said, “What are we going to do then?”

Bruno felt the ice melting against his cheek. The cool liquid fell along the curve of his hand and along his neck. Before Bruno could respond, Verlaine spoke. “We’ll fight them,” he said. “We’ll fight them together, and we’ll win.”


Academy of Angelology, fourteenth arrondissement, Paris

Easter Sunday

Verlaine sat at the long oak table, listening to the church bells in the distance. The council would arrive any minute, and Verlaine wanted to be ready. For two days he had practiced the speech. He knew that, despite their tendency to make conservative decisions, it wouldn’t be difficult to convince them. The damage alone was enough to warrant full and immediate deployment of all their agents. The meltdown had poisoned a third of the planet. The Watchers were free. Human beings were terrified and had begun forming armies. Angelologists had no choice but to fight.

A door opened and, with a great shuffling of feet, the council members entered the athenaeaum. Verlaine, Yana, Dmitri, Azov, and Bruno stood, waiting as the council sat around the table. Bruno met his eyes and smiled, his expression weary. Even if they got everything they wanted, there would be nothing to celebrate. They all knew that they were bound to fight until the last creature had been killed.

A council member, a woman with gray hair and large eyeglasses, nodded to Verlaine and his companions. “My fellow angelologists, we have called you here to ask for your assistance.”

The council member cleared her throat and met Verlaine’s eyes. He felt a shiver of admiration. There was something in her manner that inspired a sense of fearlessness.

“Our council has spoken at great length about the current situation. We are fully aware of the danger of our position. We are also aware that we are fighting for the very existence of our world.” She took a deep breath and continued. “And so, we have decided, after much consideration, to disband the council. It is clear that we are entering a new era, one of great destruction, one of terrible danger and sadness. At the same time, we are aware of the prophesies that have been made, the apocalypse that is at hand, and the possibility that this time of pain has arrived so that we might rise into a new and better world. To do this we need a leader, one who knows the enemy, one who has the strength to see this battle through. We expect this leader to be chosen from our elite angel hunters.”

Verlaine felt the eyes of the council members burning into him as he realized, suddenly, that they expected him to volunteer. Bruno nudged him softly, as if pushing him forward. In that moment, with the council members gazing at him, with Bruno at his side and his body seething with fear and anger, Verlaine knew what he must do. He would stand and lead the battle. He would kill the Nephilim, destroy the Watchers, and bring human beings to victory. Above all, he would find Evangeline. And when he did, he would look into her pale green eyes and he would kill her.