Angelopolis A Novel

The Fifth Circle

FURY

Trans-Siberian Railway

Verlaine’s ears rang with a steady, grating buzz. He opened his eyes and saw an indistinct space, foggy and insubstantial, its gray walls bleeding into a gray ceiling, giving him the impression that he’d awoken in a cave. His whole body was consumed in heat, so much so that even the crisp cotton sheets under his shoulders burned his skin. He couldn’t figure out where he was, how he had ended up on such a hard mattress, why his whole body throbbed with pain. Then it all came back: St. Petersburg, the black-winged angel, the electricity moving through his body.

The outline of a woman appeared at his side, a shadowy presence that seemed both comforting and menacing at once. He blinked, trying to make out her features. For a second he was in his recurring dream with Evangeline. He felt the icy coolness of her kiss, the electric attraction as he touched her, the strength of her wings as they wrapped around his body. He was disoriented by her presence, confused about whether he had seen her at all, afraid that—when he awoke completely—she would be lost to him again. But his eyes were open and she was at his side. The beautiful creature he had been longing for had come back to him.

Verlaine blinked again, trying to focus on his surroundings. “You might want these,” a voice said, and Verlaine felt the metal of his wire-rimmed glasses against his skin. Instantly the world contracted into focus, and he caught sight of the Russian angel hunter he’d seen just before he lost consciousness. Without her helmet she looked softer than he remembered—less the professional killing machine and more a regular person. The woman had long blond hair and an expression of concern on her face. Bruno stood nearby, looking almost as bad as Verlaine felt. His hair was matted and his cheek had been scraped raw. Seeing Bruno’s injuries brought Verlaine back to his own. Every breath hurt. He remembered the chase through St. Petersburg, he remembered Eno and the wretched Nephilim twins. He swallowed hard, the pain going down with it. He wanted to say something but couldn’t find his voice.

“Welcome back,” Bruno said, moving close to squeeze Verlaine’s shoulder.

While Verlaine had discerned that he was in some kind of medical facility, he had no idea if he was in Russia or France. “Where am I?”

“Somewhere between Moscow and Yaroslavl, I’d guess,” Bruno said, checking his watch.

Bruno’s face was encrusted with dried blood, his clothes streaked with dirt. Verlaine gave Bruno a questioning look, trying to understand what was happening.

“We’re on our way to Siberia,” Bruno said. “By train.”

“What happened to you?” Verlaine asked, trying to pull himself up in bed and feeling a spike of pain.

“Run-in with the Russian Raiphim,” Bruno said.

“Sounds like a good name for your memoirs,” the blond woman said.

“This is Yana,” Bruno said. “She’s a Russian hunter who has, coincidentally, been tracking Eno for nearly as long as I have. She has also agreed to relinquish one of her transport cars for your recovery.”

Yana wore tight jeans and a tatty pink turtleneck sweater—a markedly different aesthetic from the leather and steel of her hunting uniform. There was a wary, tired air about her as she stepped away from the bed. She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms, as if she were anxious to get back to work. Her English was heavily accented as she said, “Feeling okay?”

“Fantastic.” Verlaine’s head felt like it might explode. “Just perfect.”

“Frankly, you’re lucky to feel anything at all,” Yana said, looking him over with an air of professional interest, as if comparing his injuries with those she’d seen in the past.

Verlaine tried to sit up and the pain localized to a sharp, searing burn on his chest. “What the hell happened?”

“You don’t remember?” Bruno asked.

“Up to a certain point, I remember everything,” Verlaine said. “I must have lost consciousness.”

“You must have lost your mind to go after Eno like that,” Yana said. “Another minute and you would have been completely scorched.”

Verlaine remembered the sensation of electricity moving through him and shivered. “She tried to kill me,” he said.

“And she very nearly succeeded,” Bruno said.

“Lucky for you we were able to stop her before that happened,” Yana added. “You were burned, but it’s localized.”

“Are you sure about that?” Verlaine felt as if his entire body had been slow roasted over a bonfire.

“If you recall the bodies at St. Rose Convent, I think you’ll count yourself as one of the lucky,” Bruno said.

The attack on St. Rose had left a deep impression in Verlaine’s imagination. Dozens of women had been charred to death, their bodies so badly disfigured that they were unrecognizable. He knew exactly what the creatures were capable of doing to a person.

“The electrical current threw your heart into a seizure for a good three minutes,” Bruno said. “Yana performed CPR. She was able to keep you alive until her colleagues brought her a portable defibrillator.”

“You came back from the dead,” Yana said. “Literally.”

“I guess I have one thing in common with the Raiphim,” Verlaine said.

“Although that doesn’t explain why you survived the attack,” Yana said. “Forgive the expression, but you should have been burned to a crisp.”

“Lovely image,” Verlaine said, pulling himself up in bed. The skin over his chest prickled with pain, but he tried to ignore it and go forward, one small movement at a time. He remembered Eno’s strength, the heat of her touch.

“This might have had something to do with it,” Bruno said, pulling a necklace from his pocket and holding it above Verlaine.

He took the pendant and looked it over. It hadn’t been altered by Eno’s attack in the least. The metal still shone as if alloyed with sunlight. He knew that Bruno was connecting the dots and probably already understood how Verlaine had come to have the pendant. Gabriella had been Bruno’s close friend, and although his mentor wasn’t about to talk about the pendant in front of Yana, it was clear that Bruno was not happy that Verlaine had hid it from him all these years.

Verlaine leaned up to fasten the necklace around his neck, and winced. Yana—more out of impatience than anything resembling compassion—lifted it from his fingers and secured the clasp. “There,” she said, giving him a pat on the chest and sending a fresh jolt of pain through his body. “You’re safe from the bogeyman.”

The door opened and a doctor arrived, a short, hefty woman with thick glasses and perfectly styled hair. She leaned over the bed, yanked the sheets down to Verlaine’s waist. A thick, white, gauze bandage had been taped over his chest. She worked her fingernails under the edges, lifting the tape and pulling it gently away.

“Here,” Yana said, taking a small mirror from her bag and giving it to Verlaine.

He looked in the mirror and saw the reflection of a battered man, a line of fresh stitches over his eye, a series of bruises staining his skin. The image was so unfamiliar, so startling, that Verlaine straightened his spine and threw back his shoulders. His burned skin chafed, and he wanted nothing more than to fall back asleep, but he refused to be the person in the reflection. He held the mirror level with his chest and saw that it was blackened, with raw patches of red and pink oozing a clear liquid. An impression of Eno’s hands was branded into his skin.

“You now carry the telltale mark of an Emim’s attack,” Bruno said.

Yana examined the outline of the fingers seared upon Verlaine’s chest. “The shape of the burn is very particular. It is something I have long been interested in. A creature must position its hands a certain way to draw down the electric charge—the thumbs touching and the palms angled outward. Do you recognize the shape?”

“Of course,” Verlaine said, feeling sickened by the sight. “They’re wings.”

He was used to injuries—he’d been hurt innumerable times over the course of the past ten years—but an assault like this wasn’t one he would forget. The creature had marked him forever.

The doctor stepped away and returned with a tray stacked with ointment, scissors, bandages, and cotton swabs. Verlaine breathed hard, bringing the air into his lungs slowly as the doctor used cotton to clean his chest.

“The nerves are dead where the flesh is black. The pain you feel is from the less severe burns around the edges of the wound.” The doctor paused, studying the shape of the burn. “I haven’t seen one of these in a while,” she said, brushing an ointment over his skin and pressing on a new bandage. “This application will help enormously with the pain. In the old days it would have taken weeks, perhaps months, to fully recover from this.”

Verlaine felt a coolness suffuse his skin. The effect was immediate and intense. “Amazing,” he said. “The pain is fading.”

“Your skin is rapidly healing itself,” the doctor said, leaning close to Verlaine. “The ointment is a nanoemulsion that stops bacteria from setting in while creating the conditions for rapid skin cell production. A layer of new skin forms immediately over the burn, helping to keep out air and reduce pain. It’s a rare commodity: We have only a few doses. It was developed by angelologists for angelologists. It is unbelievably effective.” She ran her hand over the surface of the wound, as if to prove her point.

“Effective or not, we need this angelologist,” Yana said, unable to conceal her impatience. “How long does he need to rest?”

The doctor held Verlaine’s wrist and took his pulse. “Your heartbeat is normal,” she said. “How do you feel?”

Verlaine wiggled his toes and then moved his ankles. The ringing in his ears and the searing pain across his chest were gone. “Tip-top,” he said.

As she took the tray and headed for the door, she said, “Then he should be able to leave the train at your scheduled stop. Tyumen is about thirty-five hours from here. I would suggest taking it easy until then.” Glancing at Verlaine, she said, “That means: no more dates with the devil. Although I doubt you’ll take that advice. Agents like you never do.”

Verlaine threw his legs over the side of the bed. He steadied himself and stood. He was with Yana on this: There was no way he was going to stay in some godforsaken hospital cot.

After the doctor left the room, Bruno said, “There’s some good news in all of this. We managed get the egg back. And, most important, to capture Eno.”

“Where is she?” Verlaine asked.

“In a safe place,” Yana said, her gaze boring into him as if daring him to ask more.

Bruno winked at Verlaine and said, “Yana insisted that we take her to a specialized prison in Siberia.”

Verlaine said, “Leave it to the Russians to have an angel gulag.”

“We are taking her for observation,” Yana said. “You’re lucky I agreed to allow you to accompany me.”

“And you think that you’re capable of getting information out of Eno?” Verlaine asked.

“There’s no other way,” Yana said. “Once Eno is taken into custody in Siberia, she’ll be forced to talk.”

“Have you witnessed such questioning before?” Verlaine asked Yana.

“The specialists at the prison have very particular methods of extracting information from their prisoners,” Yana replied, her voice quiet.

Verlaine moved through a mental list of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours, trying to shake the feeling that he’d landed in an alternate universe, a kind of strange, lifelike game that was both real and unreal at the same time. He was on a train moving through the vast and frozen Siberian tundra in pursuit of a half-human, half-angel creature that he now knew—after ten years of doubt—he loved. After all that he’d seen he had thought he couldn’t be surprised anymore. He’d been wrong. Things just kept getting stranger and stranger.


St. Ivan Island, Black Sea, Bulgaria

Azov’s chopper embodied just the sort of mixture of cultural references that inspired scholars like Vera to go to work every day. According to Sveti, the Vietnam-era machine had been lost by the Americans—abandoned by a crew after it crash-landed in Cambodia—and ended up in Azov’s possession by dint of various trades and handshakes over the past three decades. It had been confiscated by Communists, repaired in the USSR, and sent on to their Bulgarian allies during the seventies. By the time Azov got his hands on it, the cold war had ended and Bulgaria had joined NATO. Now, watching Sveti grip the cyclic control between her knees, Vera wondered what kind of realigned world children born today would grow up to live in.

Azov gave a nod and Sveti flipped switches, checking the monitors on the dash before taking them into the air. They lifted away from the earth, shouldering the wind. Vera watched the land recede as they climbed higher, the contours of the lighthouse losing verticality, the sea growing uniform until the water below seemed little more than an adamantine sheet against the muted shoreline. The sun was setting, casting the world in a darkening purple light. She strained to see the fishing villages nestled into the cove, the squat gray shacks like rocks basking in the rarefied light. The beaches were deserted—no umbrellas blooming from the sand, not a boat floating in the bay, only endless stretches of rocky coastline. Vera tried to imagine the settlements buried under cubic tons of dark water, the remnants of ancient civilizations frozen in the suffocating chill of a lightless underworld.

The helicopter tipped as Sveti flew them over a stretch of shoreline and then cut inland, the blades overhead banging their slow and steady rhythm. They swooped over baked clay rooftops, narrow highways, and empty fields, leaving the Black Sea behind.

Suddenly, from the corner of her eye, Vera saw something else flying in the distance. For a moment it seemed little more than the silhouette of a hang glider hovering in the air, a slash of red against the purple horizon. Then a second figure appeared, then a third, until a swarm surrounded the helicopter, their red wings beating in the air, their eyes fixed as they circled inward.

“You didn’t mention that St. Ivan Island is being guarded by Gibborim,” Vera said, glancing at Azov.

“It isn’t—they must have followed our jeep from Sozopol,” Sveti said, steering the helicopter inland as one of the creatures swung against the windscreen, its red wing brushing the plastic and leaving a streak of oil behind.

“We can’t fight them up here,” Azov said under his breath. “We’ll have to outrun them. We’ll have help on the ground if we can just make it to the airport.”

“Hold on,” Sveti said, as she manipulated the stick, swerving the helicopter.

It swayed and jerked, dipping like a ship on choppy water, but the creatures stayed with them. Suddenly the craft faltered and tipped, throwing Vera forward against her shoulder straps. She looked out the window and saw that two Gibborim had attached themselves to the runners. With their wings open, they were dragging the helicopter down toward the rocky shore.

Sveti bit her lip and bore onto the controls. It wasn’t until they approached the electrical wires and Sveti was angling the runners toward a bank of transmission towers that Vera realized their pilot intended to force the creatures off by scraping the bottom. Sveti feinted right, then left, and then lowered the chopper down. The Gibborim hit the wires, their wings tangling as the helicopter ascended once more, sweeping back out over the bay.

Within minutes the shipping yard at Burgas came into view. Massive pyramids of salt grew along the shore, white and rocky. Sveti steered inland again toward the airport, stationed just miles from the water. The runway stretched into the distance, and the Cessna piper sat abandoned on the tracks like a metallic insect anticipating flight.

As Sveti moved down lightly onto the tarmac, they were approached by a group of uniformed men who seemed almost bored as they escorted the trio out of the craft, around passport control, through the exit of the airport. Stepping out once again into the cool night, Vera found the sky had gone inky blue: The runway beyond the chain-link fence was shrouded in shadow. She scanned the landing field, looking for Gibborim.

A man in jeans and a black T-shirt strolled by, and Vera felt something cold and metallic thrust into her hand—a set of keys strung onto a leather strap. The agent—she knew that the man could only have been sent by Bruno—gestured to a Range Rover and, without a word, kept walking.

Azov gave Vera a look of surprise. He was clearly not used to having equipment and personnel show up without a word. Vera hadn’t experienced such assistance either—she had never been out in the field before—but she knew that Bruno would take care of them. She gripped the keys, deciding that she was going to make the most of everything they gave her, use every resource and every bit of her talent to get to Dr. Valko.

She climbed into the driver’s seat without a word. Azov climbed in beside her, leaving Sveti to take the backseat. The jeep was a new stick shift, with four-wheel drive and less than a thousand kilometers recorded on the dial. The leather steering wheel was cold from the night air. A manila envelope sat on the dash. Vera tossed it to Azov, threw the car into gear, and sped away from the airport.

Azov unzipped his backpack and pulled out a stack of plastic cups and a bottle of liquor. “Rakia,” Azov said, as he raised the bottle, offering it to Vera.

She accepted and took a long drink. It wasn’t as potent as vodka and not nearly as smooth, but she relished the feeling it produced in her body, a slow declenching of her muscles, a gradual loosening of her mind as she handed the bottle back to Sveti.

Azov dug in his backpack again and pulled out a map outlining the route from the Black Sea to the mountains, now obscured by nightfall. “Dr. Valko lives in Smolyan, which is roughly a five-hour drive from here, near the village of Trigrad. These roads are far from ideal, but at least we’re not going to meet Gibborim on the way.”

Azov was right about the Gibborim—they attacked only while in flight, fixing their victims midair—but Vera also knew that if Bulgaria was infested with those kinds of creatures, there would surely be others.

As she turned onto the highway, following Azov’s directions, she tried to calculate when they would get to Dr. Valko. According to the clock on the dashboard, it was just after 9:00 P.M. If they made it to Smolyan within the next five hours, they would be showing up at the home of an old man in the middle of the night. “Even if you’re still on good terms with him, he isn’t going to be thrilled to see us in the middle of the night.”

Azov said, “It’s true that we’ll need to approach Raphael with care. He is enormously protective of his privacy and his work. Essentially, he cut off all contact with the outside world after Angela died. We’ll have to convince him to speak to us. But it’s worth the effort.”

“Actually, we have little choice but to try,” Sveti said, taking a swallow of the rakia.

As Vera drove up into the mountains, she was aware that her attitude toward Dr. Raphael Valko was like any other young angelologist—she was starstruck by the very mention of him. Dr. Valko was a legend. She had never dreamed that she might meet him in person.

Perhaps sensing that she wanted to know more, Azov said, “Valko lives within spitting distance of the Devil’s Throat Cavern for a reason.”

“He’s mining Valkine?” Vera asked.

“That would certainly be useful for our purposes,” Sveti said.

“Everyone has their own ideas about what he’s doing up there,” Azov said. “He’s up there with only the most essential modern conveniences. No telephone line, no electricity. He heats his house with wood and carries water from a well. He’s nearly impossible to get to. I’m in the same country as the man, and I’ve been to his fortress—it is the only way to describe what he’s built in Smolyan—only a handful of times, always to exchange and discuss seeds. By reputation he is an explorer and a man of science, but in person he’s more like a Bulgarian goat herder—difficult to rile and terrifying in his vengeance toward those he believes would cross him. He’s tough as nails, even at one hundred years old.”

Vera looked at Azov, astonished. “He’s one hundred years old?”

“Yes,” Azov said. “The first time I met him, in 1985, he looked every bit like the seventy-six-year-old man he was. Later, after we began sharing the antediluvian seeds, he had the appearance of a man no older than fifty. Now he lives with a woman who is forty-five. She became pregnant with his child ten years ago.”

“He is ninety years older than his daughter?” Sveti said. “It’s completely impossible.”

“Not if he’s been using the seeds for his own purposes,” Azov said.

Vera said, “There were rumors in the nineties that Valko was supplying his second wife Gabriella with vials of a liquid distillation from the plants in his garden. Well into her eighties she was actively fighting the Nephilim, going out on missions, enduring the hardships that agents half her age struggled to endure. She died during a mission. Nobody understood how she had the strength to even participate. She seemed to defy her body. The seeds you gave Raphael Valko are the only explanation. He must be growing his own antediluvian garden up there.”

“Whether he is mixing their oils or growing the seeds into plants, it is impossible to say. You should remember that the seeds Valko has cultivated are the very same ones that Noah grew before the Flood, and Noah—as you know—lived to be nearly one thousand years old. It is impossible to know what nutritional substances the plants contained or what their effects would be, but it is obvious that Valko has used them to his advantage.”

“Have you considered that he may have already found the formula for Noah’s medicine?” Vera asked.

Azov sighed, as if he had considered the question many times before. “The truth is that any number of things could be happening in Raphael Valko’s workshops. He is the man who discovered the location of the Watchers’ prison in 1939. He is also the man who organized and sustained the society’s resistance during the Second World War. Dr. Raphael Valko is not a man who leaves anything to chance. I’m certain that whatever he’s doing up there in the Rhodopes, he’s approaching it with the same single-minded drive that has always allowed him to succeed where many others have failed.”

“Aren’t you afraid that one of these days you will go up there and find him dead?” Vera asked.

“Not in the least,” Azov said. “But I’m very much concerned that he’ll turn us away when we get there. There’s no guarantee that he’ll help us with this concoction at all. Although he’s connected to the society through various unofficial channels—myself included—he left angelology decades ago. There’s every chance that he won’t want to provide the missing element—the Valkine—even for something as alluring as the elusive medicine of Noah.”

Vera drove onward, moving into the foothills of the Rhodope Mountains. While her inclination was to get to the village of Smolyan as fast as possible, the terrain worked against her. As they climbed higher and higher, the roads cut through increasingly steep passes, forging a sloped conduit overhung by rock on one side and a steep drop into an abyss on the other. She forced herself to glance at the ravine, the precipice opening over a tumbling darkness that, with one wrong turn, would take them over the edge. Even in daylight, when she could anticipate the tight hairpin turns, the drive would have been daunting. She kept the gear low and powered up the Range Rover, keeping a slow, steady speed.

Cresting the peak of a ridge, the jeep was suddenly awash in the light of a full moon, which illuminated a forest of birch and oak and pines sloping off beyond them. The road plunged down into canyons cut by streaks of moonlight and up to the mountaintop villages and then down again through more narrow passes, so that it seemed to Vera that they were making their way through an elaborate topiary maze, one that might lead nowhere. After hours of driving, they reached the summit of what must have been the highest peak in the region. Vera saw nothing above them but a vast canopy of stars. The village of Smolyan crouched in a scoop of land, hidden in darkness.

Azov directed Vera to turn onto a darkened gravel road that twisted and turned downward until a small Orthodox church appeared. A tower hovered nearby, its ironwork clock looming over the village. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. At Azov’s instruction, Vera continued down the road, passing the ancient ramparts and arriving at a square lined with evergreen trees. She cut the engine. Nobody spoke, but a new sense of hope had been born. It was as if they all felt that a solution was possible, that once they made it to Valko they would overcome the seemingly impossible odds.

“We’re here,” Azov said. “Let’s just hope Raphael will see us.”


Trans-Siberian Railway, between Kirov and Perm

Bruno leaned into the soft cushion of his seat and stared out the window at the starlight playing over the snow. The clattering of the train’s wheels punctuated his thoughts with a sharp, staccato rhythm. He tried to imagine the thousands and thousands of miles of open space stretching to the Pacific, the permafrost and ancient forests, the bogs of peat, the stark, immaculate mountains. The train traveled over five thousand miles between Moscow and Beijing. The landscape seemed so alien, so far removed from the modern Russia they had just left, that he could almost imagine the distant era of the Romanovs, with its palace balls and sledges and hunting parties and regiments of elegant soldiers on horseback. Secrets could be buried forever in such a vast and inhospitable landscape. Perhaps Rasputin had entombed some himself.

Turning, he stole a glance at Verlaine. His skin was pale, his hair a knot of dark curls, and his shoulders slightly hunched. Even if the doctor’s salve had helped ease the physical pain of the attack, the psychological effects of Eno’s electric shock had had a terrible and indelible effect on him. Bruno couldn’t help but worry. Bruno’s feelings had changed in the past several hours from anger at his own bravado—he should have known better than to encourage Verlaine to go after Eno alone—to relief that his most promising hunter was alive. He was so thankful that he couldn’t be angry about the pendant.

A trolley moved through the compartment with coffee and tea. Bruno attempted to hold his china teacup steady in his hand as the server poured, but the saucer shook, spilling hot liquid over his jeans. Once this cup had been filled, Bruno smelled the rich scent of the black tea and tried to ease his mind by sorting through everything that Nadia had said before the creatures had attacked. It seemed to Bruno, as he turned over the details in his mind, that there was no clear method for how to act. Nadia had never fully explored the information in Rasputin’s journal. Indeed, she had seemed content to let the pages remain a curiosity from the past. It was up to them to learn what Rasputin had intended by his book of flowers.

Bruno felt Yana’s hand on his shoulder. “Come on,” she said.

They walked through a seemingly endless caravan of train cars, Yana sauntering ahead, leading the way. Bruno noticed her gun, tucked discreetly into a brace under her jacket. With a pang of admiration, he remembered her savvy in taking down Eno in St. Petersburg, handling the Emim with unbelievable skill in a studied, almost clinical manner. Bruno wondered what hindered his own ability to fight Eno. Maybe he unconsciously subverted his own efforts. Maybe something inside him wanted her to be free. Maybe women hunters didn’t have these problems.

Yana paused before a steel door at the rear of the final passenger car, and, after fumbling through a ring of keys, inserted one into the lock. Turning to Bruno, she said, “The last ten cars are our storage and transport cabins, reserved for prisoners on their way to Siberia. In addition to the infirmary, there are cars equipped to hold the various species of angelic creatures, each one designed to counter the creature’s particular strength. Nephilim are kept in a car filled with a high-frequency electric current that renders them comatose. Eno is in a freezer car, a space reserved for the most violent angels—warrior angels such as Gibborim and Raiphim, as well as Emim like herself. As you’re well aware, the lower temperatures slow the heart, diminish the power of the wings, and bring the level of violence to a minimum.” Yana smiled and pushed the door open. “Eno is in bad shape. You may not even recognize her.”

They stepped into a narrow, lightless passage that opened to the holding cars. As they walked, Bruno stopped at each car to examine the creatures. There were three angels bound together in one cell—a Leogan, a Nestig, and a small red Mendax, three creatures whose words could never be trusted. They didn’t notice Bruno, so busy were they muttering among themselves. At the end of the train, at the front of the last car, there was a plate-glass door covered in ice.

“This is my week’s transport,” she said, pride in her voice.

“Impressive,” Bruno said, careful to not reveal the extent of his admiration.

“Eno is an extraordinary catch, one that I’ve been hoping to make for years. I don’t think I could have managed her alone, and so I have you to thank.” Yana stopped before the frozen door. “Come and look at our angel.”

Yana unlocked the door and Bruno stepped into the compartment, his skin prickling from the cold, his breath rising and fogging in the air, his shoes slipping on the frost-covered floor. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He saw Eno’s bare leg, its blue-gray skin a curl of fog; he saw her face, drawn in sleep, her eyes closed, her violet lips. Her head had been shaved, and thick veins snaked over her skull, pulsing and blue, living. Now that her beauty was stripped away, Bruno could perceive, with visceral poignancy, how inhuman she was. As he knelt beside her, he heard her breath sticking in her chest, as if the freezing air had lodged itself into her lungs. He ran a finger over her cheek, feeling the old electric attraction to her. The train jerked and Eno opened her eyes. Their reptilian sheaths retracted. As she trained her gaze on him, he saw that she knew him, that she wanted to speak to him, but all her strength was gone.

She opened her mouth and her long, black tongue fell from her lips, its end forked like a snake’s. Bruno felt an irrational urge to draw her close, to feel her breathing on his neck, to feel her struggle under him. From the way she looked at him, he could feel her rage. Their game was over. Bruno had won.

Yana said at last, “Do you have any clue how difficult this Emim is?”

Bruno let his gaze linger a moment longer. Half of his life had been spent hunting Eno. Yana had no idea how well he understood how difficult and dangerous she could be. “Unfortunately, I do,” he said, following Yana back into the corridor of the train.

“You think she’ll talk?”

“Maybe,” Bruno said. “Now that she’s isolated from the Grigoris, we have a better chance.”

Yana took a cigarette from a pack and offered it to Bruno. He didn’t smoke under normal circumstances, but the past days were not at all normal. He took a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled, feeling his mind clear.

“I have to admit, this is the first time a foreign angel hunter has assisted me with a hunt,” she said, blowing the smoke from her cigarette away from Bruno.

“Your team isn’t very large, is it?” Bruno asked.

“It’s become more active in the past five years, but that is only because the oil companies have brought a lot of action back to this part of the world. Old Nephilim families—families that left Russia after the revolution—are building mansions and setting up corporations here. The new oligarchs have worked in tandem with the Grigori family to create massive wealth. Before this rush of new blood, it was just me, the occasional lost Anakim angel, and Siberia’s godforsaken winters.” Yana threw her cigarette onto the metal floor of the train car, its embers melting a nebula into the frost. “All this is to say that if you’re looking for Nephilim in western Siberia, I know how to find them. I have files on every creature that has passed through here in the last fifty years.”

“You have an enormous field to cover,” Bruno said, marveling at her ability to manage such a large operation.

“I’ve heard about the methods you have in Paris. They are nothing like the way we do things here. Eno was special. I can’t afford to expend that kind of effort on all the creatures. Most of the time my concern is getting them to the prison. Once they’re there, I’m out of the picture. I can’t imagine spending time in the panopticon itself.”

“Panopticon?”

“The prison is modeled on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon,” Yana said. “It has the classic circular structure of the original, which allows the guards to monitor each angelic creature. That said, the prison has, out of necessity, been adapted to meet our particular needs.”

Bruno tried to imagine such a place, its purpose and size. He felt a sense of professional jealousy rising at the thought of the number of angels that were kept there. “Can you get me inside?”

“We certainly can’t just show up,” Yana said. “This prison is the biggest, and most strongly guarded, angelological holding area ever built. It is also located in Chelyabinsk, a nuclear waste area that has the distinction of being the most polluted patch of land on the planet. Russian angelologists and the military are on every inch of the grounds. Although I’m on the payroll, and have limited access to the prison, my clearance has been invalid since the beginning of perestroika. To access the interior circles of the prison, you’d have to get help from someone else.”

Bruno studied her, trying to gauge whether her ignorance was genuine. “Merlin Godwin is at this prison?” he asked. It was a long shot, he knew, but since Godwin was the one person from Angela’s film who remained unaccounted for, he needed to give it a try.

“Of course,” Yana said. “He’s been the director of the Siberia Project for more than twenty years.”

Bruno considered his options: He could keep everything that he’d seen in Angela Valko’s film and everything he’d learned in the Hermitage a secret. Or he could trust Yana and ask for her help. “Have you heard of something called the Angelopolis?”

Yana’s face froze and drained of color. “Where did you hear that word?”

“It’s something more than just a legend, I see,” Bruno said, his curiosity rising.

“Quite a bit more than that,” she said, taking a deep breath to steady herself before speaking. “The Angelopolis is a mystery for all of us who haven’t been given security clearance to the interior realms of the prison. It is the subject of much gossip—that the prison is the site of a massive experiment, that it is a sort of sci-fi genetics laboratory, that Godwin is cloning lower angelic life-forms to be used as servants for the Nephilim. There is no way to know for certain what is going on inside. As I said, security around the perimeter is intense, and that’s putting it lightly. I’ve been working here for two decades, and I’ve never even made it past the first checkpoint.” Yana lit another cigarette as she considered her thoughts. “What do you know about it?”

“Not much,” Bruno admitted. “I know that Dr. Merlin Godwin was working with the Grigoris at some point, and may still be, but that’s about as far as it goes.”

“Have you looked up his profile?” Yana asked

“No, unfortunately, I haven’t,” Bruno replied.

Yana rolled her eyes, as if to say that there was no point in going any further without doing what every angel hunter knew to be the first step.

“Honestly,” Bruno said, feeling his skin burn. “I haven’t had the chance.”

Yana pulled a laptop from her backpack and opened it on the floor in the corridor.

“Our network isn’t as high-tech as the one you have, I’m sure, but I have access to it. If there’s anything here about Godwin, we’ll know.”

Bruno watched as Yana logged into the Russian society’s network and began searching through an angelological database that seemed to spit out everything from enemy profiles to security events to society personnel.

Yana played around for a few minutes. Then, after a flurry of typing, a profile for Merlin Branwell Godwin appeared on the screen, as clear and concise as Eno’s profile had been on his smartphone. “Here we go.”

“Found something?”

“Read it for yourself,” she said, holding out the laptop for him. “You can choose to read it in French, English, or Russian, take your pick.”

Bruno clicked on the profile and read the report in English. Born in Newcastle in 1950, Godwin had taken a degree in chemistry from Cambridge University and, in 1982, come to the academy where he worked closely on a number of classified projects. He’d received prestigious awards and distinctions. But the strings of biographical information didn’t catch Bruno’s attention nearly so much as the picture that appeared alongside the text. Godwin was a thin man with bright red hair, a long sharp nose, and piercing black eyes.

“It isn’t much,” Bruno said at last.

“There’s never anything meaty in the general files,” Yana said, giving him a sly look. “Almost anyone can access this kind of information.”

She resumed her typing until various windows began flashing by in such rapid succession that Bruno could hardly keep up with them as they appeared and disappeared on the screen. Suddenly she stopped. “It’s weird. Another piece on Merlin Godwin does exist, a classified dossier created in 1984, but it has been deleted.”

“How is that possible?”

“Someone with clearance went in and erased it,” Yana said.

“Erasing a classified file isn’t exactly easy to do.”

“Clearly someone went through a lot of trouble.”

“Could there be another way to access it?”

“Nothing is ever completely lost on this network,” Yana said. “This document was probably stored inside the classified archive, and it was most likely encrypted, which would mean that there’s a trace somewhere.” Yana turned back to the laptop. “Let’s see what I can do.”

With a click, the streams of Cyrillic gave way to legions of binary numbers falling across the screen. A report appeared; he made out the name Angela Valko written at the top. As he watched Yana begin to read, he knew that she had found something of interest. He could only hope that it would be extraordinary.


Smolyan, Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria

It seemed to Azov that they had risen high above the inhabited world to a remote and hidden place where, with one step, he would disappear into a mountain pass, never to be seen again. Everywhere they turned, they found silence. He looked over his shoulder, watching the street with wary attention. He’d monitored the road and was certain that they had been alone the entire drive, and yet he couldn’t help but feel that someone was watching them, that they were surrounded by danger at every moment.

The moon shone against the stark stone walkways. Shuttered shops and cafés sat in pools of darkness, their awnings drawn. Ancient buildings rose from rough jags of hewn stone. As he led Vera and Sveti away from the square, it seemed to Azov as though the entire foundation of the village had been carved directly from the rock, each building retaining the swirls of mineral in the marble. Looking over the village, he saw gorges and valleys falling away in tiers, each new depth like a sheet of linen absorbing the inky night.

They moved through a warren of streets, each one twisting as it rose. At a dead end, Azov stopped, looked behind, and turned back. He had been to the house before, but in daylight; the labyrinthine structure of dark narrow streets had temporarily confused him. Within steps, however, he found his bearings. “Here it is,” he said, stopping abruptly before a tall and narrow black door framed by a crumbling stucco façade. The house was one of a row of village houses, three stories high, with pale blue shutters closed to the street. Azov picked up a brass knocker and brought it down upon a sheet of metal.

“Identify yourself.”

The voice, familiar as it was, startled him from his thoughts. He looked up to find a man with glasses and long white hair wearing what seemed, from the shadowy street, to be a military greatcoat. He held a gun in his hand.

“Tell me exactly what in the hell you’re doing outside my door at three thirty in the morning,” the man said.

“Dr. Valko,” Azov said, his voice calm. “It is Hristo Azov, from the angelological outpost on St. Ivan Island. Forgive me for coming to you like this without warning, but we need to speak with you. It’s urgent.”

Raphael Valko squinted, as if trying to make out the faces of each member of the group. He paused as he saw Azov, his expression softening as he recognized his colleague. “Azov,” he said. “My friend, what are you doing here?”

“I think we’d better speak inside,” Azov said, looking over his shoulder as a cat ran from the shadows.

“I’ve been hoping you would return,” Valko said. “But I expected some warning—a letter, perhaps, or a messenger. It isn’t wise to come here so openly. You’re risking your life, but also mine.” He lowered the gun and said, “Come with me. It’s best to get out of the street. Anyone, or anything, could be watching.”

They followed Valko into a pinched cobblestone passageway. He stopped, unlatched an iron door, and led them into an immense, flowering courtyard. The dimensions of the courtyard were the exact inverse of the narrow alley: It was an enormous square filled with lanterns and lined with high stone walls, creating a veil of privacy. If Azov had not visited Valko’s home before, he would never have been able to guess that such a marvelous private courtyard existed inside. Every inch of the garden was filled with greenery. Fruit trees grew along the wall, their branches heavy; flowers of every variety and color bloomed in earthenware pots; vines slithered along trellises, tendrils curling in the pale moonlight. The fragrance of gardenias and roses and lavender filled the air. A stone fountain gurgled at the center of the courtyard and, as they stepped deeper and deeper into the paradise of colors and scents, Azov felt utterly at ease. Here, in this secret garden, in the midst of an unnatural fecundity, he was among friends.

Even from a distance Azov could make out plants in what appeared to be a greenhouse at the far end of the courtyard. An ironwork frame held sheets of glass that rose, as they gained height and volume, into an elaborate Victorian cupola. The structure cut upward in lapidary panels, sharp and crystalline against the night sky. To Azov’s surprise, a bank of solar panels had been installed beyond the greenhouse, angling toward the south. The interior lights were hazy, as if a mist of water swirled through the warm air. As they walked closer he saw leaves pressed against the glass, and his mind turned to the thousands of seeds he had collected and preserved. St. Ivan Island, and the work he did there, seemed a million miles away.

Valko unlocked the door to the greenhouse and they stepped inside. The cool mountain air transformed into a blanket of humidity filled with the scent of flowers. UV lights burned from bulbs overhead. A dull hum radiated from a solar-powered generator.

The tables were filled with every variety of plant. A forest of fruit trees grew in fat ceramic pots. Azov paused to examine a tree and saw a fruit that had the shape of a pear but the deep purplish red of a cluster of grapes. He leaned close and inhaled, smelling the fruit as if it were the trumpet of a lily. The scent was spicy and full, more like the aroma of a tea composed of cinnamon and cardamom than a piece of fruit. “Smell this,” he said, calling Vera over. As she took in the aroma, her gaze fell upon a strange-looking tree. “What is this?” she asked.

Valko smiled, clearly pleased to have captured their attention. “Everything you see in this greenhouse is a plant that has not existed for thousands of years. The flowers blooming on that table, the vegetables growing at the far end of the greenhouse, the fruit you have just smelled—none of these things have blossomed since the time of the Flood. In my original plans, the greenhouse alone was to be vast, with over two thousand varieties of antediluvian seeds.”

As Azov looked more closely, he saw that the plants were both familiar and strange, retaining the basic qualities of the flora one saw every day, and yet—as he touched the leaves—he knew that he hadn’t seen these particular varieties before. The leaves were glossier, the fruit more fragrant. Apples hung from the branches, each one perfectly round, with skin that shone brilliant pink. Valko plucked an apple from the tree and gave it to Azov. “Taste it,” he said.

Azov turned the apple in his hand. Up close the skin was solid pink, flawless and shiny as a rubber ball. The stem was an iridescent blue.

“Don’t worry,” said Valko, “it’s too late to get thrown out of Eden.”

Azov took a bite. The taste was startling and strange. He had expected a burst of sweetness, something approximating the many varieties of apple he had eaten in the past. Instead his mouth was filled with a strange and unpleasant taste, a medicinal, herbal astringency that reminded him of spiced liquor. He almost dropped the apple but caught sight of the flesh: It was the same glowing blue as the stem, phosphorescent, as if lit from within.

Valko took the apple from Azov’s hands and placed it on the table. Removing a Swiss army knife from his pocket, he cut the apple in half, the juice streaking the blade. He carved the apple into slices and handed Vera and Sveti a crescent. Azov watched as the others tasted it, detecting the same reaction as he’d had seconds before—unequivocal repulsion.

“This very well may have been the fruit that caused the exile of Adam and Eve. But then again,” Valko said, stepping past the apple tree and stopping before a beautiful citrus tree, its leaves lush and glossy. Between the leaves grew clusters of tiny, bright yellow fruit that looked like miniature lemons. “If I were to trade paradise to taste a fruit, it would have to be this one.” He plucked one of the clusters and offered it to his guests. Vera pinched a lemon free and held it under a neon light. It was no bigger than the nail of her thumb, the peel supple and pliable to the touch. “No need to peel it,” Valko said. Vera put one in her mouth.

Azov followed her example. As he bit into the fruit, sweetness filled his tongue, a rich taste that seemed to be distantly related to citrus but had been overlaid with strawberry and cherry, and with darker, more subtle tastes, such as fig and plum. He looked at the tree, wanting to pick a cluster of the lemons.

“How were you able to get so many of the seeds to grow?” Sveti asked.

“I developed a solution of fertilizer and plant hormones in which I soaked the seeds until they began to sprout. In the protection of the greenhouse, most of them thrived. I have kept a record of every blossom on every tree and every fruit that has ripened.” Valko’s delight was apparent as he gestured to his work. “When I close the door to this greenhouse, shutting myself inside with these ancient forms of life, I can almost imagine what the world looked like before the Flood.”

Azov looked carefully at Raphael. His skin was pale and carved with wrinkles, his white hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, and a fine white beard curled to his stomach. What Azov had believed to be a greatcoat revealed itself, under the lights, to be a midnight blue gown that swept to the ankles and made the old scientist look like a magician.

Azov wanted to simply move through the garden, examining the plants. “These new varieties are even more strange and wonderful than I had imagined,” he said at last. “Have you lost any of the seeds?”

“A few,” Valko said. “But not as many as I had initially anticipated. Now that I have the solar energy panels, I have been very successful in growing nearly all of them, and have made enormous progress with my various medicines.”

“Medicines for whom?” Vera asked, her voice trembling. Azov found her excitement charming—he’d delighted in her intelligence and curiosity since she was a child.

“For my own consumption, mainly,” Valko replied.

“Is that wise?” Azov asked. Although he hadn’t mentioned it to Vera and Sveti, he had been tempted to dabble in the medicinal arts but had ultimately resisted. The potential dangers of mixing such medicines outweighed the possible benefits.

“Most are tinctures of ingredients that are perfectly safe when ingested in small quantities,” Valko explained. “I have had only one case of serious toxicity, and that was because I ground the seeds of a cluster of prehistoric grapes into a tea. I should have simply eaten the fruit, I suppose, but I wanted to know if the seeds contained properties associated with longevity, concentrated amounts of undiluted polyphenols that are found in diluted quantities in the seeds of modern fruits. It turned out that the seeds were more powerful than I could have imagined. And, in fact, despite the fact that I got sick a time or two, there were extreme benefits as well. I am an old man, and yet this garden has given me a second youth. I feel and look younger and younger each year.”

Azov studied Raphael closely. At one hundred years old, his vitality was nothing short of astonishing.

“Once I felt the effects of the seeds, I mixed them with the extract from the hemlock plant. It is an extremely powerful concoction.”

“It’s a lethal concoction, Raphael,” Azov said.

“Not quiet lethal,” Valko replied. “With the right dosage, it is a classic example of the pharmakon.”

“That’s Greek,” Sveti said, glancing at Vera to make sure she followed. “It refers to a substance that is both a remedy and a poison at once.”

“Well put, my dear,” Valko said. “The seeds have the power to kill me, but the seeds also have the power to prolong my life. This is the basis of homeopathy: At one dosage a substance may do great good. At a different dosage, it kills you. Certainly most medicines and vaccines work on this principle. It has been the North Star of my work. But enough about me and my fountains of youth. Come inside now and tell me what brings you here.”