Angelopolis A Novel

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.

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 formed 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.

Vera, however, hadn’t forgotten a thing: She suddenly turned to Verlaine, giving him a hard look, one that conveyed curiosity and complicity at once, and then glanced from Verlaine to Bruno. Registering that she and Verlaine weren’t alone, she assumed the expression of a disinterested colleague.

“Thanks for agreeing to meet us on such short notice,” Bruno said.

“It was quite a surprise to get your call.” Vera shook Bruno’s hand and gestured for them to sit at one of the tables. “Please, tell me what I can do to help you.”

“I’m not entirely sure if you can help,” Bruno said.

“Actually,” Verlaine said, cutting in, “we’re hoping you can give us some information.”

“With pleasure.” Vera moved her eyes over Verlaine until he felt his stomach turn. Details of their night together were beginning to come back to him.

Without trying to explain, he removed the jeweled egg from his pocket and turned it in his fingers as if it were a Rubik’s cube. With each twist of his wrist, he struggled to forget that this egg had been in Evangeline’s hands only hours before, and that the Nephilim had likely abducted her in hopes of obtaining it.

Vera took the egg from Verlaine, lifting it as if it might explode in her hand. “My God. Where did you get this?”

“You recognize it?” Bruno asked, clearly surprised by the intensity of her reaction.

“Yes.” Her expression softened as she grew thoughtful. “It’s Fabergé’s Cherub with Chariot Egg, made in 1888 for Empress Maria Feodorovna.” Vera ran her fingers over the enamel and, with expert movements, opened the egg, moving the hinges apart so that the golden mechanism creaked. As she removed the chariot and cherub figurine, Verlaine stepped behind her and examined it over her shoulder. The workmanship was exceptional: The sapphire eyes, the golden hair—every detail of the cherub had been perfectly rendered.

“What does it say on the sash?” Bruno asked.

“Grigoriev,” Vera said, reading the letters painted in Cyrillic. She paused, considering the word. “The patronymic of Grigori, meaning son of Grigori.”

Verlaine couldn’t help but think of Evangeline’s connection to the Grigoris: As the granddaughter of Percival Grigori, she was a descendant of one of the most vicious Nephilim families on record. “Is it possible that the egg could belong to the Grigori family?”

Vera gave him a weary look. “Grigori is an extremely common name in Russia.”

Bruno rolled his eyes. “It’s just a piece of tsarist bling, a nicely made bauble. Nothing deeper than that.”

“I don’t agree with your aesthetic sensibility,” Vera said. “Fabergé’s eggs are exquisite objects, almost perfect in their lack of practicality, whose sole purpose was to delight and surprise the recipient. Their seemingly impermeable exterior cracks to reveal another egg and then, at the center of this egg, a precious object, the surprise. The eggs are the most pure expression of art for art’s sake: beauty that reveals only itself.”

Verlaine liked the way Vera stood when she spoke, her posture that of a ballet dancer midstep, one arm moving with her voice, as if her ideas had been choreographed to match the rhythm of her body. Perhaps sensing the intensity of Verlaine’s gaze, she changed her stance.

“Go on,” Bruno said.

“The first Imperial Easter egg was constructed by Peter Carl Fabergé for the Russian tsar in 1885, and delighted Empress Maria Feodorovna, who had seen similar creations in her childhood at the Danish court. Fabergé was commissioned to create a new and original egg each year. The jeweler was given the artistic license to design the eggs according to his imagination, and, as you can probably guess, they grew more elaborate—and more expensive—with time. The only requirement of Fabergé was that there must be a new egg each Easter and that each must contain a surprise.”

Vera took the chariot and the cherub and placed it on one of the oak reading tables. It seemed to Verlaine like a precious windup toy that might, with the twist of a key, twitch into motion.

“Some of the surprises were miniatures, like this one,” Vera continued. “Others were jeweled brooches or portraits of the tsar and his family painted onto ivory. After Tsar Alexander III died in 1894, his son Nikolai II took up the tradition, commissioning two eggs each year, one for his mother and the other for his wife, Empress Alexandra. There were fifty-four eggs designed for the Romanovs in total. After the 1917 revolution, many were confiscated. Those that were not were dispersed—smuggled out of Russia and sold to collectors or passed on to the living relations of the Romanovs. Since then, they have become museum pieces and treasures for the rich. There are a number of them here at the Hermitage, and Buckingham Palace houses dozens as well. The Forbes family collected them for years, and Grace Kelly was given one—the Blue Serpent Clock Egg—for her wedding to Prince Rainier. The eggs are extremely valuable, rare, and, as a result, have become coveted displays of wealth and taste, especially after the Forbes auction. Of the fifty-four original imperial eggs, the location of eight is unknown. Collectors believe they were lost, destroyed by revolutionaries, stolen, or kept hidden in private vaults. This egg—and its cherub and chariot surprise—is one of the missing eight.”

Bruno gave the egg a dismissive look. “It’s not really missing if we have it,” he noted.

“To the world at large—and to collectors especially—it has disappeared,” Vera said. She plucked the golden chariot from the table and turned it over. Squinting, she examined the chassis, pushing it with her fingernail. Suddenly, a gold plate slid out. “Ah,” Vera said, smiling triumphantly, as she showed Verlaine a series of Cyrillic letters stamped across the plate.

Verlaine couldn’t begin to decipher it. “What does it say?”

“Hermitage,” Vera said. She held up the plate for Verlaine to get a better look. He saw a string of numbers etched over the length of the plate, the numbers so faint that he had to squint to see them. “After the revolution there was a committee formed to catalog the Romanov treasures. They added numbers to many of the items—sometimes even painting them onto the canvases of Rembrandts—to identify their place in the archival storage area. Often the numbers rubbed off, or the identification tags were lost, leaving a holy mess of miscataloged and forgotten objects in the archive.”

Verlaine tucked the egg into his pocket and said, “You seem to know a lot about this.”

“Unfortunately, my first years here were spent doing such drudge work. I would find the strangest things shoved into the archival vaults.” Vera sighed and returned her gaze to the egg. “The interesting thing about this, however, is that while most of the Romanov treasures were cataloged, the Fabergé eggs were not.”

“But the plate you found?” Bruno said.

“Clearly the number was inserted into the egg by someone else,” Vera said.

“But why?” Verlaine asked.

Vera smiled softly, and Verlaine realized that there was truly more to what Vera was saying than he had imagined. “Come with me. There’s only one way to know for sure.”

• • •

They left the reading room and turned into a corridor off the main entrance of the research center, passing door after door, each one identical to the one before, until Vera stopped abruptly at an electronic keypad. Vera pressed her thumb against it and an adjacent entryway clicked open.

Her high heels clicked on the polished marble as she led them into an immense gilded Rococo space. The ceilings glittered with chandeliers, and glass cases lined the walls, holding objects donated by past angelologists: a treatise on the seraphim by Duns Scotus; a scrying stone that had belonged to John Dee; a gold model of the lyre of Orpheus; a clipping of hair taken from the dead angel in the Devil’s Throat. The upper walls were lined with thousands of Russian, Byzantine, and Eastern Orthodox manuscripts collected over the course of generations, most of them relocated to the Hermitage during the cold war. Were it not for Evangeline and the urgency he felt to find her, he could imagine spending a lifetime exploring this room.

A short man in a brown wool suit greeted them. “Vera Petrovna Varvara,” the man said, his reedy voice filled with weariness. After the night shift in the archives, he was clearly glad to have human contact.

Handing him the tiny golden plate, Vera said, “From the permanent collection, please.”

“You have clearance for this?” the man said, examining first the gold plate and then Vera.

Vera lifted the sleeve of her dress and presented the man with her forearm. He took a pen from his pocket, switched it on, and, in one quick gesture, scanned the chip implanted in her arm. A beep confirmed Vera’s identity.

“Very well, then,” the man said and, turning on his heel, he disappeared behind the desk and into a darkened room. It took nearly ten minutes for him to return, leading Verlaine to imagine that he had become lost in the folds of shelving, each one connected into the other like the bellows of an accordion. He was growing impatient. Maybe the whole idea of coming to the Hermitage had been a mistake to begin with. Evangeline could be food for vultures before the archivist got back to them. Finally the man arrived with a large manila envelope in his hands.

“This was deposited here in 1984,” the man said tersely as he handed Vera the envelope.

Vera slid her finger under the seal and opened it. A reel of 8mm film slid onto the table.

“I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid,” Verlaine said, “And even then, 8mm was retro.”

“Eighty-four,” Bruno said, picking up the envelope and looking for something that might explain it. His voice was hollow, and Verlaine knew that something about the year loomed in his memory, immense and solid as a stone monument to a massacre. “That was the year Evangeline’s mother was murdered.”

Biowaste storage facility, Grigori Laboratoies, Ekaterinburg, Russia

Evangeline arched her back until the thick straps of leather tightened over her chest. She tried to move her legs, but they, too, were strapped down. She couldn’t even turn her head more than an inch. A dull pounding behind her temples caused her vision to blur. She closed her eyes and opened them again, trying to regain focus, willing herself to understand where she was and how she had gotten there, pinned like a butterfly to a board. Her memory held shapes she couldn’t decipher—forms of sensation that she felt but could not identify well enough to name: the whine of a jet engine; the prick of a needle; the cinching of buckles against her skin. Making out the sterile wash of white paint on concrete, she guessed that she was in a hospital or, perhaps, in a prison. The strange pulsing sound took on the pitch and tempo of a voice before dissolving into a rain of static. Whoever was speaking could have been nearby, but she heard the voice as if it were at the far end of a tunnel, distant and echoing.

The noise suddenly ceased and, as if a door had opened in her mind, memories rushed into her consciousness. She remembered the rooftop, the black-winged angel, the duel. She remembered the fleeting freedom, that brief but exhilarating buoyancy she’d felt before her surrender. She remembered Verlaine, standing nearby, helpless. She remembered what it had felt like to be touched by him. She remembered the heat of his skin against hers as he ran his finger along her cheek, and the shiver that went through her as he touched the delicate skin that joined her wings to her back.

And then her thoughts were driven even further back to the only time in her life that she had felt as frightened as she did now. It was 1999, New Year’s Eve in New York City. While the rest of the world celebrated the coming of the new millennium, Evangeline was caught in her own private apocalypse. She found a park bench and sat in Central Park, too stunned to move, watching the crowds passing by. The angelic creatures had blended into the population with such skill that—despite the eerie colored light that surrounded them—they appeared to be entirely human. Some of the Nephilim paused, noticing her, recognizing her as one of their own, and Evangeline felt her whole being recoil. It was impossible that she was one of them. Yet she was no longer human. She noted the changes in her body as if they belonged to someone else. Her heartbeat was slow and shallow, the beat barely registering against her finger. Her breathing had sunk to such a depressed level that she took one or two breaths a minute. When she inhaled, the sensation was intense and pleasurable, as if the air itself gave her nourishment. She knew that Nephilim survived for five hundred years, a little more than six times the average life span of a human being, and she tried to imagine the years before her, the days and nights of unrelenting imprisonment in a body that needed little sleep. She was a monster, the very creature her parents had worked to destroy.

Evangeline strained against the leather straps once more, but they held fast. Her wings were open and pressed flat against the table. She could feel them against her skin, soft as sheets of silk. She knew that if she could move her wings, the straps would loosen, giving just enough for her to slip free. But as she twisted, a biting pain stopped her cold: She had been pinned to the table. The nails ripped into the skin of her wings.

A figure stepped into her peripheral vision. Evangeline could turn her head just enough to see a woman in a white lab coat.

“She’s a very unusual creature,” the woman said.

“I thought that was what Dr. Godwin was looking for,” a second voice responded.

Evangeline’s skin grew hot; her hands trembled against the metal cuffs. She recognized the name Godwin. She knew it from her childhood. If Godwin was behind this, she knew she was in terrible danger. It would be better to tear off her own wings than to be subject to his will.

She pressed her forehead against the leather strap, seeking the coolness of it, but the throb of the electrodes sent a current of heat into every part of her body. The pain caused her eyes to fill with tears. She blinked them away and they slid down her temples. A bright light burst on overhead, blinding her. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a syringe poised in a hand. As the nurse inserted the needle into her vein, she took a deep breath and struggled to stay conscious. She wanted nothing more than to drift to sleep. But she couldn’t let herself go. If she did, she might never wake up.

Angelology Research Center, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

As they walked down the narrow iron staircase and into the underworld of the Hermitage, Verlaine was subsumed by the smell of thick deoxygenated air shot through with the slightest hint of gunpowder.

“Stay close and be careful not to trip,” Vera said. She moved ahead, flipped a switch, and a naked bulb illuminated the space. They had descended into a long hallway made of old limestone. Vera grabbed a flashlight from a shelf, turned it on, and walked through a narrow, dark passageway. “This passage leads to chambers where the tsars once hoarded ordnance to stave off political agitators.” They turned a corner. Verlaine found the passage so tight that the walls brushed the sleeves of his jacket, leaving a film of powder behind. “You smell the gunpowder, yes?” Vera continued. “Whenever I smell it I remember the thousands of people gathered outside the palace and the crimes committed against Russians by their own army.”

Vera opened a door and led them into a room.

“Now these rooms belong to the society, and for decades they’ve been employed as a staging area for more than three million pieces of undocumented art. The first months of my time here were spent cataloging objects for my supervisor.” Stopping before a wooden door sunk into the stone, she took a set of keys from her pocket and unlocked it. “This is his private space. If he knew I was bringing you here, I would be out on the street.”

In a single motion, Vera opened the door and led them into the space. Verlaine walked inside, feeling awed by the chaos of objects.

“After Angela Valko’s death, her father, Dr. Raphael Valko, donated her research papers to the research academy.”

“I haven’t heard news of Raphael for years,” Bruno said. “He left the academy abruptly in the eighties to pursue his own research. He was ancient when I met him. I imagine he must have passed away by now.”

“Raphael Valko is very much alive,” Vera said. Reaching beneath a shelf, she hauled out a suitcase trimmed in leather. As she opened it, clouds of dust rose into the air, spinning in the weak gleam of the flashlight. Shining the beam across its contents, she picked up a picture frame, the glass coated in a thick film of dust, and gave it to Verlaine. Wiping away the grime, he found an image of Evangeline. She stood between her parents, one hand in her mother’s hand, the other in her father’s. She could not have been much older than five or six years old. Her hair was long and braided; a missing front tooth created a gap in her smile. Evangeline had been a normal kid once. He wished, suddenly, that he had tried harder to protect her. He couldn’t help but feel that he’d gone about everything in the wrong way—they should have captured Evangeline and Eno when they had had the chance. Looking up, he found Bruno holding a folder.

Bruno opened the folder. There was a collection of loose pages inside. A passage had been scribbled on the top page. Bruno read: “To you this tale refers who seek to lead your mind into the upper day, for he who overcomes should turn back his gaze toward the Tartarean cave. Whatever excellence he takes with him he loses when he looks below.”

“Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy,” Verlaine said. The passage was from what had become a veritable mantra of the angelologists, a text that referred to to a geological formation called the Devil’s Throat Cavern, the mountainous cave where the Watchers were imprisoned, and where, angelologists believed, they waited still for their release. He stepped closer, to get a better look at the inscription, and saw that someone had written the words Dad’s translation next to the passage.

“Any ideas?” Verlaine asked Vera.

“This is an early draft of Dr. Raphael Valko’s translation of the Venerable Clematis’s notebook, which was written during the First Angelic Expedition. The most obvious reference of the passage is to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—Orpheus rescued his beloved, but at the point of leaving Hades, or Tartarus, he turned back and lost her forever. But Angela Valko thought that this passage referred not just to the myth of Orpheus—and his lyre, which was recovered in the Devil’s Throat Cavern, as you very well know—but to a spiritual journey, the emergence of the individual mind from the darkness of self to find a higher purpose.”

“You make Angela sound like some kind of Sufi mystic,” Bruno said.

“True, she was a bit unusual,” Vera said. “Although a die-hard scientist, she interpreted much of her work as part of a spiritual journey, believing that the material world was the expression of the unconscious, and that this collective unconsciousness was God. The word of God brought forth the universe, and each human being has access to this original language through the unconscious. You might call her a Jungian, I suppose, but there was a history of such mysticism long before Carl Jung. In any case, Angela was interested in this passage for its verticality—the upward trajectory from the pit to the sky, from darkness to light, from hell to heaven. Each step up brought the seeker out of chaos and into a place of beauty and order.”

“Like Jacob’s Ladder,” Verlaine said.

“Or,” Vera said, turning the flashlight into a room, “a passionate collector.”

Verlaine could hardly believe his eyes. There, displayed in glass cases, was an incredible collection of eggs—thousands of varieties of bird eggs: plain bird eggs glazed with paint; dodo eggs cut apart and labeled; robin’s eggs preserved in formaldehyde, with the chick still curled against the shell, delicate as a bean in a pod. There were crystal eggs, jeweled eggs, eggs from the courts of Denmark and France. The assortment was singular and obsessive, qualities that piqued Verlaine’s curiosity.

“The egg you showed me in the research center would fit very nicely here, don’t you think?” Vera asked.

“Perfectly,” Bruno said under his breath. “Where did they come from?”

“I haven’t uttered a word about this to anyone,” Vera said, “but I don’t come down here to simply admire the eggs. I believe the fact that Angela Valko had one of Fabergé’s eggs in her possession—and found a way to catalog the egg in our archives—is more than just a coincidence.”

“You can’t seriously think there is a connection between one of our best scientists and this collection,” Bruno said.

“Quite,” Vera responded crisply. “I won’t bore you with my research any more than necessary, but one of my pet projects at the moment has to do with Nephilim reproduction. It just so happens that once upon a time egg births were common among the purest breeds, their offspring superior in strength, beauty, agility, and intelligence.”

Verlaine’s eyes fell upon an illustration from Albrecht Dürer’s famous Manual of Measurement propped up among the eggs. He had heard of Dürer’s theory of the egg line, and his obsession with the egg, with its perfect euclidean shape, as the vessel through which pure angels were born. Verlaine had dismissed the idea. It seemed to him that when angelologists couldn’t prove their work with hard facts, they fell to creating airy theories. He wasn’t sure whether Vera’s support of such an idea granted it credence or if it proved that she was out of her mind.

Vera continued. “Many of the royal families in Europe longed for an egg-born heir, and they mated with this in mind, arranging marriages with other royal families based on their reproductive prospects. Nevertheless, as time went on, Nephilim eggs became more and more rare.”

“Enter Carl Fabergé,” Verlaine said.

“Indeed,” Vera replied. “Clearly, the Romanovs were not immune to the ostentatious fuss over the eggs. Fabergé played on this obsession. His eggs were precious and intricate objects that, when cracked open, revealed a surprise that spoke of the secret desires of kings—the most precious surprise of all would be an heir hatched from an egg. The tradition of giving enameled eggs at Easter stemmed from the imperial family’s longing for another such birth. Indeed, all the Nephilim of Russia wanted an egg-hatched heir. Such an event would be prestigious, and would guarantee instant advancement.”

“If this were the case, why aren’t we seeing eggs now?” Bruno asked.

“There’s no concrete answer to this question, but it seems that the Nephilim lost their ability to create the eggs. There were no egg births after the seventeenth century, as far as I know, but that did not kill hope. At the court of Louis XIV, there was such a fuss about the production of an egg that the court confectioner created elaborate chocolate eggs and presented them to the king and queen at Easter. The surprise at the center of the egg was something of an inside joke, one that the royal families understood all too well. Suddenly eggs were everywhere. The fashion for eggs spread to the masses. Ordinary human families began to color chicken eggs, and factories molded chocolate eggs by the millions, some of which contained small toys inside, a direct reference to the surprise of the jeweled eggs, which, of course, referred to the coveted angelic child. Human beings have copied Nephilim habits without realizing that they were celebrating the hatching of their oppressors. It is a great irony that chocolate eggs are now so common at Easter. When you eat a Cadbury egg you don’t realize that you are following this tradition without understanding its origin, or the joke.”

“For Christians, the eggs symbolize the resurrection of Christ,” Bruno said. “There is nothing Nephilistic about that.”

“On the surface this appears to be compatible with the Christian celebration of Easter,” Vera said. “But if you look deeper you will see that the egg symbol has little to do with the church. The decoration of eggs, the Orthodox practice of breaking eggs on Easter morning, the egg hunt—these are all popular practices whose real origin is obscure. Of course, there is the pagan Germanic goddess Eostre, whose feast day was celebrated in the spring, but ask the man on the street why he’s coloring eggs at Easter, and he has no idea.”

“Wouldn’t there be Christmas eggs rather than Easter eggs?” Verlaine asked.

“Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’s human birth,” Vera said. “Easter, his second, spiritual, immortal birth. One birth within the next. An egg within an egg.” Vera placed the flashlight on a table. “Which brings us back to our purpose in this room. Someone—Angela Valko most likely—added the metal card to the surprise at the heart of Fabergé’s Cherub with Chariot Egg. She intended for whoever would discover the egg to watch the film stored in the archives.”

Vera walked to a gray plastic box at the far side of the room and carried it to the table. She flipped a series of metal clasps and revealed an old film projector. Unwinding a cord, she plugged it into a makeshift socket hanging from the wall, its wires dangerously exposed. An electric buzz hummed through the projector, and, with a flip of a switch, a searing white light blazed onto the wall, cutting a perfect square of light.

“Voilà,” she said. “Give me the reel of film.”

As Verlaine placed the film in Vera’s hand, he felt another tremor of anxiety. Perhaps it was filled with nothing more than images of lab equipment, or, worse, it had been damaged and would spit out a series of distorted and indecipherable images.

Vera locked the reel into place and fiddled with the levers until they were in the correct positions. After feeding the film into the catch and turning the wheel so that it spooled, she pressed a button, and the reels began to move. A flickering of sepia frames flashed over the limestone wall, and then, as if by some feat of magic much stronger than any charm taught at the Academy of Angelology, Angela Valko appeared before them.

Verlaine’s muscles stiffened at the sight of Evangeline’s mother, as if the electricity that powered the projector had funneled itself through his spine. Angela’s face was serious, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail, her large blue eyes staring into the camera, and into the eyes of the people who had gathered together to try to understand the message she left behind.

Verlaine felt the irrational urge to speak to the woman on the wall, to reach out and touch the insubstantial light that flickered in the dusty air, to draw close to the illusion. She was beautiful and—Verlaine could only make the comparison now, after having seen Percival Grigori in person—a near replica of her Nephilistic father. She wore a white lab jacket unbuttoned to reveal a black turtleneck. The laboratory was sterile, orderly, with large glass windows and a polished concrete floor. Droppers, tongs, tubes, and other equipment he couldn’t readily identify were arrayed on a shelf behind her. A series of beakers had been placed at hand, some filled with liquid, others with powders. Something flashed at her throat. Verlaine looked more closely until he made out a necklace—the lyre pendant he’d touched only hours before—at her throat.

Suddenly Evangeline’s father stepped into the frame. Striking in his T-shirt and jeans, Luca looked nothing like the man Verlaine had imagined him to be. In the film he was young and vibrant, filled with energy and determination. He had long black hair that fell over his brow, tanned skin, dark eyes. There was an aura of care in his movements—he stepped deeper into the frame and paused to be certain everything was in place—but he had a buoyancy about him that seemed at odds with the accounts Verlaine had heard. The founder of the angel hunter unit was, as legend had it, a darkly laconic man, a warrior whose strategic mind allowed him to trap and kill angels with an ease most angelologists found unnerving.

The couple exchanged a look of complicity—as if they had planned every last detail of the film—and Luca leaned over and kissed Angela’s cheek, a quick gesture, one that he might have performed without thought many times each day, but in the kiss it was clear how profoundly he had loved her.

A strange, guttural noise—half moan, half growl—caused Angela to turn. The camera, following her gaze, panned over the lab and settled on a creature. The Nephil was suspended from a metal hook, its feet dangling above the floor. Although the creature was male, the long, white-blond hair, narrow shoulders, and elegant, tapering waist gave it a delicate beauty. Bright copper wings fell around its body like the feathers of a dead bird. The creature had been stripped, perhaps beaten, most likely sedated, as it seemed to be in a state of confusion.

As a captive of the flickering image, Verlaine was horrified and fascinated at once. It was beautiful and grotesque, like a fairy caught in a spider’s web, its luminous skin creating the softest glow through the glass. He recognized the honeylike liquid that oozed over its skin, sliding slowly over the creature’s chest and legs, dripping from its suspended feet and pooling on the glass floor—it was the same excretion that coated Evangeline’s skin when he’d touched her earlier. For an unsettling moment he imagined how Evangeline would react to such bondage. Would she struggle if the ropes burned her wrists? Would she fold her wings against her body like a shield as they interrogated her? Luca must have beaten the creature—there was no other explanation for its condition—and it remained to be seen whether he would resort to even more violent methods. A wave of nausea came over Verlaine, and he wanted, suddenly, to walk out of the room and breathe the fresh cold air aboveground.

Angela Valko began to speak. “To those who object to our methods of obtaining information, I say this: We can no longer submit to the moral code created two thousand years ago by our founding fathers that requires us to fight with approved methods. We have acted with dignity, showing restraint and judgment in our fight. As a result, our enemies have become more vicious than ever. They evolve in their methods to harm us. We must, in turn, evolve in our methods of defense. Angelologists who have worked with me, either in the academy or here at my laboratory, know that I am no reactionary. My work has been a steady accumulation of facts gleaned through observation and experimentation. I am a scientist, and I would prefer to be left in peace, to continue my work. My belief that the Nephilim can be routed only by hard work over multiple human lifetimes hasn’t changed. But it is clear that the reach of the creatures has grown and that we must respond. The angelic life-forms around the globe multiply exponentially each year. The victory of the creatures over humanity is at hand, and it seems that we must stand by and watch their ascendancy. We have fought too long and too hard to lose our war against the Nephilim. I will not allow that to happen. It is to that end that I record this communication. It is not an apology for what Luca and I intend to do but an attempt to demonstrate our motives and, in the case of our deaths, which both Luca and I realize to be a very strong possibility, to help other angelologists to understand the secret structures the Nephilim are building.”

Another man stepped into the frame, and Verlaine was startled to see a young Vladimir Ivanov. Verlaine calculated that he had encountered Vladimir in New York nearly twenty years after this film was made. In 1999 Vladimir’s whole manner had been that of a man exhausted by life; in the 1984 film he was a man fully energized by his work. Next to Vladimir was a woman Verlaine did not recognize. She wore a white lab coat over a brown dress. She was so still, so statuesque in her manner, that Verlaine hardly registered her presence.

“That is Nadia,” Bruno whispered. “Vladimir’s wife, a lab tech who assisted Angela in her work. After Angela’s murder, she quit her work at the academy. When Vladimir left for New York, she didn’t go with him.”

Verlaine turned back to the film just as Vladimir was putting his arms around the angel’s chest and lifting it from the hook. The creature was unwieldy—at least two feet taller than the men in the room with it. Struggling, it hissed, its body contracting and writhing as Vladimir bound it to the chair, the ropes cinching tighter as it moved. The creature’s wings hung outside of the stays, falling limp as bat wings until suddenly, in desperation, the angel thrust them open, striking Angela in the face and slamming her against the wall. Verlaine’s urge to protect Angela, to pull her away from the creature, felt even stronger than before, a feeling mirrored by Luca: The camera jolted and wavered, then stabilized as Luca set it onto the table and rushed into the frame. He grabbed the creature, wrenched the wings closed, and, holding the angel steady, assisted Vladimir in binding the wings.

“Let’s get on with this,” Angela said, her voice hardened. The left side of her face had been scratched. She pulled a chair close to the bound angel, balanced a notebook on her lap, and tapped a pen against the paper. The metallic click of the spring pounded an even rhythm as Angela spoke.

“Interrogation of Nephil male, 1984, Montparnasse, Paris.”

Angela glanced at Luca, as if to check that he was filming the exchange, and then turned her attention back to the angel. “The creature was captured on the rue de Rivoli at approximately 1:30 A.M., and injected with ketamine en route to our facilites in Montparnasse. Preliminary observations suggest the creature to be between two hundred and three hundred years old, with the characteristics of all Nephilim. Initial attempts to interview the subject were fruitless. He remains unresponsive.”

Angela looked at the angel, and Luca followed with the camera. The creature stared at his interrogator through narrowed eyes. His face was flushed with anger, and his breathing—whether from the cinch of the ropes or the strain of fury—came in labored bursts. Veins snaked over his skin, as if they might explode with the pressure of his blood.

Angela looked at him with a cold, clinical eye and said, “Are you ready to begin?”

The creature’s nostrils flared. He displayed a level of belligerence consistent with Nephilim of his rank and heritage. Verlaine recognized the insouciant, indignant anger of the fallen angel. Although he had not read Milton for years, he couldn’t help but think of Lucifer—the brightest star of heaven—falling to the depths of the earth, undone by beauty and pride.

“Speak, beast,” Vladimir said, stepping behind the angel and tightening the ropes.

The creature closed his eyes and said, “If words were shields, my voice would rally to my defense.” His words seemed to float upon his light, buoyant voice, its tone taken from the pure registers of the angels.

“Riddles will get you nowhere,” Vladimir said.

“Then I will remain stationary for the time being,” the creature said.

Vladimir assessed the angel and, with a swift movement, slapped him across the face. A stream of blue blood slid over his lips and chin and dripped onto his chest. He smiled a vicious, devilish smile, one filled with arrogance. “Do you really believe pain is an effective method? I have lived through things you cannot begin to imagine.”

Angela stood, placed the notebook and pen on the chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and said to Luca, “Perhaps he’ll be more cooperative if I speak to him by myself.”

The camera moved abruptly, and Luca—setting the device onto a table, leaving Angela and the angel in view—stepped into the frame. “There is no way I’m leaving you alone with this thing,” he said.

Angela placed her hand on his arm, as if to assuage his worries. “He can’t do much under the circumstances. I know he has information we can use, if we can get him to talk. If you hear anything alarming, come back in.” Angela glanced at the creature, who had closed his eyes, as if waiting for the ordeal to end. A look of determination passed over her features, and Verlaine knew that she was testing herself against the creature, marking her strength and intelligence against it, placing her bets on her ability to defeat it. He recognized the feeling. It was exactly this that kept him hunting.

“Go on, Luca,” Angela said, opening the door. “I’ll alert you if there’s a problem.”

The film went black and then, in a sputter of light and movement, resumed. The bright, industrial overhead bulb had been dimmed, and a single desk light glowed in a corner, casting a blue shadow over the creature. Angela Valko sat in a metal chair across from the angel. They were alone.

“Identify yourself, please,” Angela said.

“Percival Grigori III,” the creature said. “Son of Sneja and Percival Grigori II.”

Verlaine looked more closely at the creature, trying to understand how this could be the person he had met in New York. The Percival Grigori he had known was twisted and ill, his skin transparent, his eyes a watery, weak blue. The angel in the film was beautiful, his skin glowing with health, his golden hair glossy, his expression one of superiority and defiance. In fact, there was a staggering resemblance between the angelologist and the angel. It was obvious to anyone who saw them together that they were related by blood. And yet, Angela never knew the true identity of her father. Neither one of them could guess what time would bring. Frozen in 1984, they were forever suspended in their innocence.

“Percival,” Angela said, her manner softer, as if she were playing a new role, that of a woman charming a quarrelsome companion. “Can I get you a drink?”

“How kind,” Percival said. “Vodka. Straight.”

Angela stood and walked offscreen. Verlaine heard the clinking of glass. Soon she returned with a cut-crystal tumbler.

Percival looked from the glass to his hands, which were bound by rope. “If you please.”

As Angela hesitated and then untied the ropes, Verlaine wanted to jump into the film and to stop her, to warn her against Percival, to pull her away. He felt his heart sink at what lay ahead. Angela Valko was falling into a trap.

When the ropes fell from Percival’s wrists, Angela gave him the tumbler of vodka and returned to her seat. “Now it’s time to answer my questions.”

Percival took a sip, swallowed, and said, “Perhaps. But first I have a question of my own: Why does such a lovely young woman spend so much time in this dungeon of a laboratory? I can’t imagine it offers much pleasure.”

“My work has its own rewards,” Angela said. “One of which is capturing and studying creatures like you. You would make a fine specimen for my students.”

Percival smiled, his expression cruel. “It is very fortunate that I am not as brutal as my grandfather. He would have killed you within the first five minutes of meeting you. He would tear you apart and leave you here to bleed. I wouldn’t dream of killing you in such a messy fashion.”

“That’s reassuring,” Angela said, a hand disappearing in the folds of her white lab coat. She removed a pistol and aimed it at Percival’s chest. “Because I have no such scruples.”

Percival drank the vodka, turned the glass in his hand as if pondering what to do, and then, with an explosive movement, threw the tumbler at Angela. It smashed against a wall, the crystal shattering offscreen, creating chords of dissonance. “Untie me,” he said.

Angela leaned back in her chair, a smile on her face. “Come now, I can’t let you go. I’ve only just got you talking.” She raised the gun, slowly, as if considering its weight in her hand, and shot. The bullet missed, yet Percival cried out in surprise and anger. “I have a reason for bringing you here. I don’t expect to let you leave until I have answers.”

“About what?”

“Merlin Godwin.”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“I have proof that he’s been in communication with you,” Angela said. “What you need to do now is to give me the details.”

“You are mistaken if you think that you pose a threat to us. Indeed, your work has helped us enormously.”

“What has Godwin given you?” Angela said, her voice carefully calibrated. “I want to know everything: the experiments, the subjects, the purpose. I am especially interested to know how Merlin Godwin has gained access to my work.”

Percival took a deep breath, as if considering his options. “The project is but in its beginning phases.”

Although Angela maintained a clinician’s equilibrium, Verlaine could see that Percival had taken her by surprise, that she had not expected his capitulation at all. He was going to cooperate. Getting what she wanted had thrown her off balance.

“Technically, we are advancing with great rapidity.” Percival’s complexion changed as he spoke, his white skin turning even paler, as if he’d drifted away from Angela and fallen into an argument he’d long been fighting inside his mind.

“Merlin Godwin has made trips across the Iron Curtain in recent months,” Angela said. “Is this related in some way to your project?”

“It wasn’t my first choice to build in the old world, but, of course, we mustn’t forget the Watchers.”

“Are you mining Valkine?”

“‘Mining’ is not how I would describe it,” Percival said. “It is more like extracting dust from a hurricane. The quantities are minuscule and the conditions are wretched. And yet we need the material. It is the only way.”

“The way to what?”

“Perfection,” Percival said, flatly. His blue eyes seemed to sharpen as he spoke.

“Perfection is a concept,” Angela said. “It is not something one can construct.”

“Purity is perhaps the better word. We are recovering the purity we lost four thousand years ago. We will take back what was destroyed in the Deluge, the purity of our race that was compromised by generations of breeding with humanity, and re-create the original breed of Nephilim.”

“You want to re-create paradise,” Angela said, astonished.

Percival smiled and shook his head. “The Garden of Eden was created for human beings,” he said. “The Angelopolis is for angels, pure creatures, the likes of which haven’t been seen on earth since Creation.”

“But that is impossible,” Angela said. “The Nephilim were never pure. You were born of angels and women. You were mixed at your origin.”

Percival said, “Look at me closely—at my transparent skin, my wings—and tell me what is and what is not possible. My family is the last of the exceptionally pure Nephilim. If my existence is possible, anything is possible. But what we can make in the future, now that is even more incredible.”

Angela stood and paced the room, her shadow falling over the angel. “You are engineering an alternate world for yourselves, one that will be wholly constructed for Nephilim.”

“It would be more correct to say that we have made a petri dish, and from this small biological culture we will grow a new world, one that will replace what you call human civilization.”

As Angela Valko considered this, Verlaine imagined the obvious questions forming in her mind: Why would the Nephilim do this now, after thousands of years of coexistence with human beings? What is their motivation? How could they achieve something so drastic? And what would they do with human beings?

“This isn’t a new endeavor,” Percival said, reading Angela’s thoughts. “We’ve been looking for a way forward for many, many years. The twentieth century has provided many pieces to the puzzle: War allowed us to test our formulas on human subjects; science has allowed us to look inside the mechanisms of our creation; technology has allowed us to collect and compare data.” Percival folded his hands in his lap. “And we’ve found an ally.”

“Dr. Merlin Godwin,” Angela said. “You’ve found an angelologist to spy and steal for you.”

“We’ve found a man who appreciates the dilemma of our race,” Percival said.

“Nephilistic diminishment,” Angela said. “Nephilim fertility has dwindled, immunity to human diseases has weakened, and wingspan has shortened, as has life expectancy. Of course I’m fully aware of this phenomenon. I have been studying the possible causes for the past few years.”

Percival said, “Your theory on the genetics of angelic creatures has been extraordinarily helpful. In fact, Dr. Valko, it is because of your work that we will be able to rebuild our race.”

“My work has nothing to do with genetic engineering.”

Percival smiled again, and the frightening hunch that Verlaine had sensed earlier—that the creature could manipulate Angela as he wished—returned. “I know your theories very well, Dr. Valko. You have spent your career deciphering Nephilistic DNA. You’ve speculated about the role of Valkine in the production of angelic proteins. You’ve explored the mysteries of angelic and human hybrids. You’ve even found and captured me, no small feat. Your work has uncovered the codes, the secrets of production, all the answers to the questions you have. And still you don’t see.”

A tremor in Angela’s lip was all that revealed her growing irritation. “I think you may be surprised by our capabilities,” Angela said, the faintest hint of insecurity passing over her features. She stood, went to a cabinet, and removed an oblong object. “This, I believe, might be familiar to you.”

Verlaine recognized it instantly: It was an elaborately jeweled enamel egg. Although similar to the one in his pocket, its design was distinctly different. The exterior was sprinkled with brilliant blue sapphires.

“That,” Vera said, her eyes trained upon the egg, “is another of the missing eggs.”

As Verlaine followed Angela’s movements, he realized that his entire body had gone rigid.

Angela sat down, turning the egg in her hands, the gems glittering. To Verlaine’s great surprise, even Percival watched with fascination.

“I thought you might recognize it,” Angela said. She opened the egg. Inside there was a golden hen with eyes of rose-cut diamonds. Angela pushed the beak and the bird split apart, revealing a series of glass vials.

While Percival Grigori’s expression transformed from surprise to bafflement, and then to rage, his voice remained calm. “How?”

Angela smiled, triumphant. “Just as you have watched us, we have been watching you. We know that Godwin has been collecting samples of blood.” Angela lifted one after the other and read the labels. “ALEXEI, LUCIEN, EVANGELINE.”

Were it not for the undertone of anguish in Angela’s voice when she spoke her daughter’s name, Verlaine would have doubted what he’d heard. If Evangeline had been marked by the Nephilim from childhood, what would they do with her now that they had her in their possession?

Angela returned the vials to the egg and closed it. “What I want to understand is why, exactly, you have these samples.”

“If you want to understand,” Percival said, “you will join us. There is a place for your work at the Angelopolis.”

“I don’t think that will be possible,” she said, removing a small syringe from her pocket. “I have some ideas of my own about purification.”

Percival narrowed his eyes as he examined the needle in her hand. “What is it?”

“A suspension that holds a virus. It affects creatures with wings—birds and Nephilim are particularly vulnerable. I created it in my laboratory by employing mutations of known viral strains. It is a simple virus, something like the flu. It would give human beings a headache and a fever, but nothing more serious than that. If it is released into the Nephilim population, however, it will cause mass extinction unlike anything you’ve seen since the Flood.” Angela lifted the syringe to the light, revealing a green liquid. She shook it slightly, as if swirling wine in a glass. “A biological weapon, some might call it. But I think of it as a way to level the field.”

A hint of cruelty shone in Angela’s eyes, and Verlaine understood that she had succeeded in turning the interview around. Percival Grigori was once again in her power.

Angela hesitated for a moment, and then, taking the syringe in hand, moved toward him. Verlaine sensed with growing alarm that he should not be there, should not be witnessing Angela Valko’s final interaction with her father. In the decades since the film had been made, the virus in her syringe had infected 60 percent of the Nephilim, killing and disabling the creatures with a vicious efficiency. The disease had been such a powerful force that many in the society had joked that it was a pestilence sent from heaven to help along their work.

But Verlaine knew a terrible truth that Angela did not: The personal wager she was making would fail. The angel would tell her his secrets, but there would be consequences. Soon, within days after the film was shot, Angela Valko would lose her life.