Angelopolis A Novel

The Sixth Circle

HERESY

Surveillance Report, June 9, 1984, submitted by Angela Valko

This is the first such report I have filed in the history of my time as an angelologist, and I do so with some degree of discomfort. But the horrific nature of my suspicions, and the extent of Dr. Merlin Godwin’s involvement in activities detrimental to our security, require that I report what I have witnessed. I submit this document with the hope that my observations can be of use to the preservation of our work.

My concerns about Godwin began on the night of April 13, 1984, when I came across Dr. Godwin in the street. My husband, Luca, and I were on our way to dinner in a restaurant on the rue de Rivoli when we recognized Godwin. He was ahead, strolling along alone. He wore a three-piece suit and carried a briefcase. We decided to catch up with him, to say hello and invite him for a glass of wine, but before we reached him he was joined by a tall, female creature with the standard angelic traits.

My husband, who was as intrigued as I by this pairing, and whose instinct as an angel hunter pushed him to discover their destination, decided it best to follow. We did, keeping our distance behind Godwin until he stopped on the rue de Temple, where he and the creature entered a restaurant. They took a table near the back, away from human beings. We didn’t dare follow them inside. Dr. Godwin knows me well—he began his career as my intern—and would recognize me instantly.

Luca called a colleague—Vladimir Ivanov, a man who would not have been recognized by Dr. Godwin—and sent him into the restaurant to observe them up close. Vladimir entered the restaurant and sat at the bar, observing, and, within an hour, Godwin and his companion left the restaurant. Vladimir returned to us a short time later, relaying the following surprising information: Godwin had spent the hour in conversation with the woman, whom Vladimir confirmed to be an Emim angel. In his opinion, Godwin was working with the creature. He had spoken of his work at length and, most surprising of all, at the end of their rendezvous, Godwin gave her the briefcase.

Luca and I discussed this at length, speculating about the contents of the briefcase, and in the end decided that we should continue to watch Godwin before making an official report. Consorting with the enemy is a serious offense, but we reasoned that there might be some explanation for his association with the creature. We decided to simply watch and wait.

This was not difficult to do. Godwin has recently been given a laboratory next to mine, and so I had the opportunity to observe him with ease over the course of many weeks. I found nothing out of the ordinary. He works seven days a week; he is solitary; he keeps a strict routine. When I checked in on his work during our weekly appointments, I could find no fault in Dr. Godwin’s experiments.

In the meantime, Luca began to look through profiles of previously hunted and captured creatures. He identified Godwin’s companion as an Emim named Eno. I will not go into further detail about the significance of this name here, but suffice it to say that her identity impressed Luca and me and made us all the more wary of Godwin’s behavior.

On the night of May 30, at eleven o’clock, I saw him leave his laboratory and hurry down the hallway. Again he was dressed in a suit and again he carried his briefcase. I followed him into the elevator and he held the door. He was deferential, bowing in a gentlemanly fashion. I believe now that Godwin must have known more about me than I suspected. For many years I had assumed his slightly awkward manner toward me grew from an inability to speak to women, and that he was too inexperienced and naïve to assert himself in the presence of an attractive colleague. I believed this trait to be a sign of innocence. I would soon see how very wrong I was in this assessment.

As we stood together in the elevator, I noticed him slipping a copper key card into the pocket of his jacket, so that a corner of the metal was visible. Perhaps it was Luca’s influence, but I found myself calculating how I could take the key, what diversionary maneuver I could make to steal it, and what I would do with it once I had it. If Godwin had any secrets—if he were giving our secrets to the Nephilim, as I suspected—then there might be proof in his laboratory.

We walked together through security and left the building. He hailed a taxi and, his gaze never meeting mine, asked if I’d like to share it. Seizing the opportunity, I climbed into the taxi with Godwin. We spoke of office politics, of new policies being implemented for scientists, and of other innocuous subjects, but all the while I was watching the corner of metal poking out of his pocket.

I told the taxi driver to stop and, as I was getting out of the car, I pretended to trip, falling heavily into Godwin’s arms as he held the door open for me. This feint took him off guard and, in the confusion, I plucked the key from his pocket and slid it up my sleeve. Even as I made my apologies for my clumsiness, Godwin climbed into the taxi and disappeared into the night.

I returned to the labs at once and entered Godwin’s office with ease, using his key. The layout was identical to mine, only instead of equipment for the experimental work he’d been presenting to me during our meetings, I found masses of files stacked up on every flat surface of the lab. I began to look through them, trying to find something that would help me to understand Godwin’s association with Eno.

What I discovered shocked me to the core. The folders were stuffed with photographs of angelic creatures in erotic positions, pornographic shots of female and male Nephilim, sadomasochistic couplings between humans and angels, every kind of sexual perversity imaginable. As I moved through the stacks, the photographs became increasingly violent, and soon there were stills of people being tortured and raped and killed by Nephilim. The pleasure the creatures took in human suffering was evident in these photographs, and even now, with some of these images before me, I cannot believe that they exist. Even more unbelievable, however, was a thick book featuring images of the victims after they had been used for pleasure and discarded—the bodies were bruised, bloodied, dismembered, and photographed like trophies. The graphic nature of these images was like nothing I had seen before, and I understood how sheltered I had been from the everyday behavior of the Nephilim, from what horrors they are capable of performing.

As a fellow scientist, I would like to give Godwin the benefit of believing, if possible, that these images are part of his work. If Godwin were exploring the nature of angelic sexuality, he might bring an academic reserve to his participation in the underworld of angelic sex and violence, a coldness in relation to the events that he has photographed. However, I truly do not believe this to be the case, for reasons that will soon be evident.

I spent many hours in Dr. Godwin’s lab that night. Aside from this trove of horrors, I found a number of items that were of intense interest to me, both personally and professionally. The first was a document written by my mother, Gabriella Lévi-Franche, that appears to be a collection of her field notes from 1939–43, the years she worked as an undercover agent while attending the academy. The volume is bound in red leather, in the official manner, signifying that the account was produced and published with the sanction of the council. Until that evening, this period of Gabriella’s life was a mystery to me—she had never told me the details of her wartime work, had never spoken of it to anyone, so far as I had been aware—and so it was with curiosity and trepidation that I opened the red book and looked inside. How Godwin came to possess this book, and what his interest was in my mother’s experiences, is a question I cannot bring myself to answer in this report. I can only record here that the revelations of Gabriella’s report were deeply shocking to me and have repercussions that will seep into every aspect of my life.

As for the second discovery, I am relieved to say, it had a professional importance that almost obscured the pain of the first discovery. On the shelf, prized in the fingers of a silver holder, was an egg.

I recognized it immediately as one of the eggs created by Fabergé for the Romanovs. I spent many childhood afternoons paging through books about the Romanovs—the family was of intense interest to angelologists—and my mother had a large collection of books about the tsar. The egg in Godwin’s laboratory was one of the eight missing eggs. Instantly, picture-book images of these eggs appeared in my mind, crisp and glistening with bright lithographic colors: the Cherub with Chariot Egg; the Empire Nephrite Egg; the Hen Egg; the Emperial Egg; the Nécessaire Egg; the Mauve Egg; the Danish Jubilee Egg; and the Alexander III Egg. Sitting on the shelf was the Hen Egg, its blue enamel surface alive with sapphires. I took it down and, turning it in my hand, found the mechanism and pressed it.

The egg sprang apart. Inside was a hen surprise, and inside this precious miniature, wrapped in a muslin cloth, were three glass vials full of liquid, each labeled in Godwin’s thin scrawl. Holding a loupe to the writing, I was able to make out the names ALEXEI and LUCIEN, but the third word was written in such a messy scrawl that I refused to accept the word my eyes deciphered: EVANGELINE. I removed the tiny stopper of this third vessel and brought it to my nose. The smell was distinctly sanguine, sweet and metallic at once, but still I could not believe that Godwin had kept a vial of my daughter’s blood.

After returning to my own workspace with a number of the most illustrative photographs—as well as Gabriella’s red book and the Hen egg—I phoned Vladimir Ivanov, who aside from working closely with Luca, has aided me in a number of projects relating to Russian Nephilim. I asked him to bring his wife, Nadia, my assistant, who I knew to be an expert on tsarist antiquities, including Fabergé’s eggs. Vladimir and Nadia joined me straightaway. As I began to run tests on the blood, Nadia explained that the egg in Godwin’s possession—with its golden bird hatching from the center—symbolized the hunt for the savior, the new creature that would arrive to liberate our planet. Glancing through the stack of photographs, Vladimir explained that the violence of the images was not at all unusual—the Nephilim reproduced through such extreme practices—but that he had never seen it documented with such attention. I listened as I analyzed the blood, trying to understand how the elements before me fit together.

The vials made an especially fascinating trio. By far the oldest of the three was the Alexei sample—much of the blood had dried out and crusted black against the glass—but it was also the most straightforward: Nephilistic through and through. The contents of the vial marked LUCIEN, on the other hand, defied categorization. The color was a far richer blue than the Nephilistic cerulean—more like the indigo prized by the elite of Rome—and bore none of the typical traces of human physiognomy. Had I not been so anxious about the sample taken from my daughter, I would have begun to run more complex tests on it. But it was the third and final vessel—the vial labeled EVANGELINE—that commanded my full attention.

It was clear that the crimson blood was human, and yet, at the same time, there were abnormalities atypical of Nephilistic contamination: The level of iron was extraordinarily high, and there was no potassium present at all, which would be strange under any circumstance—no human being can live without potassium present in the blood. I myself had authorized Merlin Godwin to run tests on Evangeline’s blood—we had been monitoring her for years—but he had never disclosed such obvious abnormalities to me. In fact, he had always claimed that her blood was human, without the slightest taint of Nephil characteristics. The conclusion I am forced to draw from this revelation is particularly shocking to me: Godwin has been taking samples of my daughter’s blood covertly and using the blood for his own perverse purposes.


Dr. Raphael Valko’s compound, Smolyan, Bulgaria

Vera followed Valko into a squat stone building at the west end of the courtyard, Azov and Sveti following close behind. Inside, she found a large room illuminated by gas lamps and filled with ropes, boots, and belts with rock hammers. Windbreakers and backpacks had been piled on a couch, and a large map of the Rhodopes hung on the wall, its surface filled with colored pins. From the state of disorder it was clear that visitors were a rare phenomenon. As she looked over the mess, she realized that she was exhausted. The few hours of sleep she’d had on the plane weren’t enough to sustain her. The mission was beginning to wear on her.

“My explorations have taken me to nearly every part of these mountains,” Valko said, seeing Vera’s interest in the map. “I left the Paris academy after Angela’s death because, quite frankly, I couldn’t bear to be reminded of her. But I’ve come to realize that there was another reason I left: I needed to go back to the source of my work, the inspiration for all of my efforts.”

Running his finger over the map, he stopped at the Devil’s Throat Cavern.

“My major discoveries have always occurred when I returned to the original dwelling places of the Nephilim—the Alps, or the Pyrenees, or the Himalayas.”

“Or the Rhodopes,” Azov said.

“Correct. The places most important to the creatures are always located in the remotest regions of the earth, away from human eyes.”

A door opened and a girl walked into the room. She appeared to be between ten and twelve years old and wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a pale yellow sweater that matched her bobbed blond hair. She had blue eyes and the distinct patrician features of Dr. Raphael Valko. Vera guessed her to be the daughter Azov had mentioned. Looking her over more carefully, she detected a scar running along the side of the girl’s face, a wide pale track of healed stitches crawling along the line of her jaw, past her ear and into her hairline. The girl set a cup of tea on her father’s desk and looked at the others, as if curious to see so many visitors.

“Thank you, Pandora,” Valko said.

Vera wondered if this was a tea made from the plants Valko had grown from Azov’s Black Sea seeds. Not that Valko seemed the sort to acknowledge others’ contributions. He had invited them inside to hear their reasons for coming to Smolyan, but not even Azov had managed to get a word in edgewise.

Sensing a gap in Valko’s monologue, Vera cleared her throat and said, “There is something I am hoping you can help me with, Dr. Valko.”

“I gathered as much,” he said, taking the cup and drinking. “You’ve come a long way to speak with me. I hope that I can help.”

“Vera has found documents pertaining to the medicines of Noah,” Azov said.

Valko seemed unnaturally calm, as if he were in a trance. “My daughter would have been very interested to speak with you about this matter, if she were alive.”

“So Angela did have an interest in this concoction?” Vera asked, standing and walking to the door, where she gazed out over the garden. The first light of dawn suffused the sky above the courtyard. She reached into her satchel for the Book of Flowers—which overnight had come to seem more her own than Rasputin’s or the Romanovs’—and stepped back into the room.

“Interest?” Valko said, smiling slightly, his gaze resting on the book. “I should say it was more than that. My daughter’s connection wasn’t theoretical. Her involvement brought her deep into the secrets of the nature of angelic life on this planet. In the end she succeeded in learning things that put her in danger.”

“You think that this information led to her death?” Azov asked.

“Most probably,” Valko said, an air of sadness in his manner. “But in the beginning it was an exhilarating, if highly doubtful, quest. Rasputin’s journal came to Angela almost out of the sky.”

“Nadia mentioned that Vladimir simply presented it to her one day,” Vera said.

“Of course, the ease with which it arrived in her life made her suspicious—it could have been a fake; it could have been created to trick her—but in the end she believed that Rasputin’s work was authentic, that he was one more magus seeking the formula cited so cryptically in the Book of Jubilees—Noah, Nicolas Flamel, Newton, John Dee. The chain of seekers is long.”

“And so she came to believe in the quest,” Sveti said.

“Perhaps more pertinent is the question of why Rasputin would attempt to create a potion so universally believed to be of harm to the Nephilim—to the very family he served,” Azov said.

“Ah, you’ve hit at the very root of Angela’s skepticism,” Valko replied. “But her doubts were quickly assuaged by consulting the Nephil family tree.”

“The Book of Generations,” Vera said. She’d seen the society’s copy of the infamous collection of genealogies just once, during the same conference in Paris that had exposed her to Seraphina Valko’s powerful photographs of the dead Watcher, the very conference where she had met Verlaine. The Nephilim genealogies were considered to be rare and precious resources.

Valko emptied his teacup, placed it on the table, and said, “You see, Alexei Romanov’s hemophilia was passed down from Alexandra’s family. The tsarevitch inherited the blood disorder from Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria was one of the most vital, effective Nephilim rulers in English history, while her husband, Albert, was actually partially Golobian, although this was a family secret that has been very well hidden. The hemophilia was passed through the Nephil line. Thus, it would follow that this disorder was one of the traits the medicine of Noah would cure.”

“Surely it would have killed him,” Azov said, echoing Vera’s thoughts.

“Perhaps it would have,” Valko acknowledged. “But Rasputin had little to lose in the gamble. He had promised not only to ease Alexei’s bleeding episodes but to cure him completely. If Noah’s medicine turned the tsarevitch human, the vow would be fulfilled; if it killed the boy, the hemophilia could always be blamed.”

“Rasputin would have been sentenced to exile—even execution—if Alexei had died on his watch,” Vera said.

“You should remember Rasputin’s power over Alexei’s mother,” Valko said. “He was thought to have cast a spell over Alexandra. He was charged with every kind of evil practice imaginable—of holding black masses at the palace, of invoking demons to harm Alexandra’s enemies, of the sexual practices associated with the Khlysty sect. Maybe there was a kernel of truth to the rumors. But if he hadn’t come up with a cure, he would have lost all power over the imperial family.” Valko looked out the doorway, as if the morning star were pulling him toward some distant memory. “I was a boy of nine years when the tsarevitch was executed with his family. Despite his Nephil lineage, despite all that I knew to be wrong with imperial Russia, I remember feeling a profound horror at the thought of his murder, horror at the pain he must have suffered as he and his family were led into the cold and shot. Horror, in the end, at the cruelty of humankind. I cannot say why, but I felt a strange kinship—something like brotherhood—for this murdered child. When his body disappeared and rumors abounded that he lived, I wondered if he was perhaps hiding somewhere, waiting to return.”

Azov exchanged a look with Vera and said, “Just last month, genetic tests identified the remains of Alexei Romanov. They were found in a communal grave in Ekaterinburg.”

“And so Rasputin’s success or failure meant nothing,” Valko said. “Revolution would have snuffed out any progress Rasputin had made with Alexei.”

“What I don’t understand,” Azov said, “is why Angela became involved in all of this. What did she hope to gain from the formula?”

“Remember, it was Rasputin, not Angela, who actually attempted to produce the medicine of Noah,” Valko said. “My daughter’s efforts may have had the appearance of such an endeavor, but the true nature of her work was something else entirely.”

“Such as?” Vera asked.

“Performing a wedding,” Valko said and, seeing Vera’s surprise, he added, “A chemical wedding. The concept is invoked as a symbol for chemical union: a female element and a male element being brought together in an unbreakable, eternal bond. This marriage of disparate elements brings forth a new element, often called the Alchemical Child.” Valko turned to Vera and placed a hand on Rasputin’s journal, brushing her arm. “May I?” he asked.

Vera felt an instant reaction to Raphael Valko’s touch. Something about him made her profoundly aware of herself—she glanced down at her sweaty, wrinkled clothes, the same clothes she’d worn to work when Verlaine and Bruno showed up at the Hermitage, and wondered how she appeared to a man like Valko.

Valko turned through Rasputin’s journal, finally stopping at a page of hastily written sentences. “I read this page thirty-two years ago with Angela. She understood the value of Noah’s medicine, and she was intent upon re-creating it.” Valko gave Azov a nod. “That is how you came into our acquaintance, Hristo. But it wasn’t only Rasputin’s recipe that caught her attention.” He ran a finger along the page until it rested upon a drawing of an egg painted in a wash of gold and scarlet.

Vera recognized another egg, this one different from the others, the fourth of the missing eggs she had seen in two days.

“This aquarelle, made by one of the grand duchesses, probably the talented Tatiana, was of great interest to Angela. She believed it to have been copied under the guidance of Rasputin’s predecessor, Monsieur Philippe—the spiritual adviser who undertook to give the tsar and tsarina an heir. You see, it is the Nécessaire Egg, one of the most practical of the eggs, holding all the important toiletry utensils an empress might need. Contrary to what historians believe about the egg, it was wildly expensive to make, with rubies and colored diamonds studding the egg itself and the toilet articles fashioned of gold.”

“It looks,” Vera said, leaning close, “as if there is a snake biting its tail drawn below the egg.”

“Well spotted,” Valko said. “It is something that Angela found intriguing about the egg.”

“This symbol is very well-known,” Sveti offered. “The ouroboros, the alpha and omega, is a sign of death and rebirth, regeneration and new life. The passage below it contains the words of Jesus, ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’ Revelation 22:13.”

“Yes, of course,” Valko said. “In this respect, the Nécessaire Egg is an echo of the Blue Serpent Clock Egg given to Grace Kelly on her wedding day, and one of the most elaborate and lovely of Fabergé’s eggs, a masterpiece made with the quatre couleur technique of gold, diamonds, and royal blue and opalescent white enamel. Most interesting is the diamond-encrusted serpent coiled around the base, its head and tail pointing to the hour on the face of the clock—the ouroboros, the symbol of eternal renewal and immortality.”

“But what does that have to do with a chemical wedding?” Vera asked. “Especially considering the fact that Monsieur Philippe’s sole legacy was Alexandra’s phantom pregnancy.”

Valko smiled and said, “Bear with me. The quest of the alchemist, once upon a time, was to find the Philosopher’s Stone, which supposedly had the power to turn base metals into gold. This has been discredited many times over as an impossible dream of the avaricious and mad. But the Philosopher’s Stone also signified another human desire, a longing so universal, so persistent in culture and mythology as to be considered integral to the human psyche: The Philosopher’s Stone was believed to be a panacea with properties that could grant eternal life.”

“The Elixir of Life,” Azov said.

Valko continued. “It has gone by many names throughout history: Aab-Haiwan, Maha Ras, Chasma-i-Kausar, Amrita, Mansorovar, Soma Ras. The earliest written records of such a phenomenon emerge in China and denote a substance that is made of liquid gold. In Europe the substance often took on the properties of water, and many well-known drinks that soothed the body were called Water of Life, in French eau de vie, in Gaelic whiskey. There is a biblical precedent to this as well in John 4:14: ‘But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’”

“Is that what you’re growing up here in your garden, Raphael?” Azov asked. “While the rest of us work to fight the Nephilim, you’re concerned about self-preservation?”

“It is not surprising that I would exploit the resources at my disposal to stay alive,” Valko said, his voice soothing. “But I’m afraid that you’re missing the point, my friend, when you say that this is not engaging in our fight. From the moment Vera removed Rasputin’s book from her satchel, I knew what you had come here to do.”

Valko pressed open the book and Vera saw his long fingers frame the heart symbol that had inspired them to travel to Smolyan in the first place.”


“I can imagine the sequence perfectly,” Valko said. “You correctly deciphered Rasputin’s silphium symbol here. And then you turned a few pages and determined that Valkine was all you needed to re-create the medicine of Noah. Voilà, here you are in my home, waiting for it all to come together. But I would like you to take a step back and consider the language of this volume on the whole—including Tatiana’s illustration of the egg and ouroboros. OUR FRIEND, both Monsieur Philippe and Grigory Rasputin, were heavily immersed in the sexual and mystical properties of the alchemist tradition. Their Book of Flowers is much more than a recipe book for the medicine of Noah. In language, symbol, and aesthetic, it is a paean to the chemical wedding—the apotheosis of alchemy, the height of human spiritual aspiration. To understand Angela’s interest in the Russian artifact, you must consider its symbols and Enochian jargon on a metaphoric plane, a moral plane—even an anagogical plane.”

Something clicked in Vera’s mind. Just twenty-four hours earlier she herself had lectured Verlaine and Bruno on Angela’s Jungian approach to the society’s most revered texts. “This Book of Flowers was her Jacob’s Ladder,” Vera said, reaching for the journal.

“I could not have chosen a more apt analogy myself,” Valko said, releasing the book into her hands and walking to an oak armoire from which he removed a thick collection of folders. “This extraordinary collection of firsthand accounts of Rasputin’s life was smuggled out of the USSR. It was my daughter who first found the files more than twenty years before I bought it, during her search for documentation about Rasputin. She read through it and then buried it in a Soviet paper graveyard when she was done. Angela had hoped to find some mention of the flower book. There was nothing at all, but she did find allusions to Rasputin’s friendship with an herbalist. This man practiced medicine, Tibetan medicine in particular. Badmaieff, as he was called, had the honor of making tinctures for the tsar, mostly teas mixed with cannabis to restore his calm—the tsar was a mess psychologically during the First World War. Angela found this rather commonplace—herbal medicines were popular among Russian peasants, who believed that they were ‘God’s cures.’ Rasputin was, above all else, a peasant from Pokrovskoye, and there could be no importance whatsoever placed on giving the tsar tea. Badmaieff may have been just another quack.”

“Or,” Vera said, feeling a sense of satisfaction at the direction Valko was taking them, “he may have held information Angela needed.”

“Precisely,” Valko said. “It was at this point that my daughter came to me for help. Communicating through her friend and colleague Vladimir’s contacts, I learned that Badmaieff’s daughter, Katya, was alive and living in Leningrad. This was over thirty years ago, when there were still people alive who remembered Rasputin. Katya agreed to speak with me and invited me to her apartment near the Anichkov Palace.”

“Risky business, that would have been,” Vera said under her breath.

“As it turned out, Katya was relieved that I had found her. She had long wanted to tell her father’s story to someone, but she hadn’t known whom to trust. The burden of such a history had taken a great toll on her. She was haggard and twisted, her bones weak from osteoporosis. I listened to her story—which even I, who believed I’d heard everything under the sun, found utterly incredible—and then I made her write everything down and sign it, so that I could deliver her account directly to Angela in Paris.”

“I bet that was one amazing testament,” Sveti said, giving a low whistle.

“Quite,” Valko said, pulling a thin folio bound in red leather from the stack of papers. Vera recognized the society colophon on the spine and knew it must be an angelologist’s field notes.

Vera reached for the folio. “This was written by Angela?”

“Her mother,” Valko said, his voice grim. “Collected in this folio are things that my daughter was never meant to read. Officially, they are the reports of her mother, Gabriella Lévi-Franche, about her resistance work in Paris during the Nazi occupation. But between the lines lies the truth of Angela’s true paternity.”

“Forgive me for saying so, Raphael,” Azov said, a hint of apology in his manner. “But Angela’s connection to Percival Grigori is common knowledge.”

“Common knowledge now, perhaps,” Valko said, “but very closely guarded information during Angela’s lifetime. After her murder, Gabriella and I both were devastated to find this red book among Angela’s belongings. Not only did she die knowing I was not her biological father, she died knowing that her mother and I deliberately deceived her. It must have hurt her deeply to realize that she was descended from our enemy.”

Valko sighed deeply, and Vera felt a stab of guilt that they were forcing him to recall such painful memories.

“Finding Katya’s deposition inside the red book was like being slapped in the face,” Valko continued. “Clearly Angela wanted to send her mother and me a message. She wanted us to know that she had learned the truth.”

Vera looked from the red book to the file, knowing that the hundreds of hours she’d spent among Angela’s effects at the Hermitage had been merely the first step in a greater discovery. The obsession with eggs, the cryptic trail of clues the woman seemed to leave behind her wherever she went—Vera had once believed these to be meaningless. In a matter of hours Valko had changed all of that. Feeling an almost irrepressible urge to grab Katya’s testimony, Vera said, “I imagine there must be quite a few surprises in these pages.”

Valko removed a sheaf of loose pages from the red book and gave them to Vera. “Yes, indeed,” he said quietly. “I suggest that you see for yourself.”


Trans-Siberian Railway

Verlaine stepped into a narrow bathroom, turned on a neon light, and looked at himself in the mirror. A black bruise had formed around the stitches across his forehead and was slowly eating its way under his left eye. After taking a piss, he turned on the tap and splashed cold water over his face, wincing as it hit the wound. He was in bad shape. The burn on his chest still ached, his head was still ringing, he was so tired he could hardly move. He only knew that he had to find the strength to get to Evangeline, wherever she was.

As he dragged himself back through the train to his compartment, he took in the sound of Russian. It was strangely sibilant, without the rough edges of English, and he found its rhythms soothing. He picked up a copy of the Moscow daily and tried to make out the Cyrillic, but the alphabet meant nothing to him. That he could puzzle over the angular symbols all morning and they would signify nothing at all was strangely pleasing to him.

A man brushed by him and he turned, feeling the hair stand up at the back of his neck. He recognized the static in the air, the sense of abeyance as everything froze and then broke apart. Looking more closely, he saw that the man’s skin oozed a slick of plasma, that the structure of the shoulders and back corresponded to Nephil wings, that the distinctive scent of the Nephilim followed him. He recognized the velvet suit and the elegance of his comportment: One of the twins from St. Petersburg was on the train.

Verlaine began following the creature, retracing his steps back toward the bathroom, through the second-class sleeping berths with their tatty lace curtains, a smoking car, the dining car smelling of black tea. They were nearing the back of the train. The creature stopped at a door with a gold plate that read PRIVATE LOUNGE. He pressed a button on an intercom system and a voice responded in Russian. The words were incomprehensible and, suddenly, the pleasurable dislocation Verlaine had felt only moments before became irritating. It was imperative that he understand everything happening around him.

Soon a muscular hulk of a man opened the door, mumbled a few words to the creature—Verlaine recognized the voice from the intercom—and motioned him inside. Verlaine followed the creature. He made sure the bouncer was human, and then slipped him a wad of euros, which the bouncer shoved into his jeans as he let Verlaine pass. The thump of music echoed through a narrow, dilapidated compartment. The scent of alcohol and cigarette smoke suffused the air. There were neon lights, cocktail waitresses in trashy lace corsets and stiletto heels, and leather couches where Nephilim lounged with drinks. The Nephil creature nodded at the bartender, who picked up a phone, and, after speaking with someone, waved him toward the back of the room.

Verlaine remembered what the doctor had said—that he should stay away from danger of any kind—and wondered if it was wise to have put himself in such a situation. Everyone had heard stories of agents brutally slaughtered during failed stints undercover. It was a fairly common occurrence, especially in the provincial outposts. The Nephilim could kill him and nobody in Paris would know what had happened. Yana might send the news back to France, although who could say if she could be considered trustworthy. Instinctively, he and Bruno had accepted her identity at face value, taking her skill as a hunter as proof of her authenticity. As he moved deeper into the lounge, Verlaine began to feel a prickling sensation of fear. If he needed to escape, there was no way out of there.

Although Verlaine had never seen Sneja Grigori before, he knew at once that this was the matriarch of the Grigori family. She lay on a leather couch, her body stretched from one end to the other. Two Anakim angels hovered over her, one feeding her pieces of baklava and the other holding a tray with a flute of champagne. Sneja was so enormous that Verlaine wondered how she had walked onto the train, and how she would, when the train reached its destination, descend. She wore what looked like a silk curtain wrapped around her body, and her hair had been tucked up into a turban. As he came closer to the bed, Sneja lifted her great, toadlike eyes. “Welcome to Siberia,” she said, assessing him with a sharp gaze. Her voice was gravelly, abrasive, smoky. “My nephews predicted that you would be coming, although they did not have the slightest notion that you would be making the trip as my personal guest.”

“Your nephews?” Verlaine said. Glancing behind Sneja, he saw that the first twin had been joined by his brother. They stood side by side, beautiful as cherubs, their blond hair curling around their shoulders, their large eyes fixed upon Verlaine.

“You met them in St. Petersburg,” Sneja said, taking a piece of baklava and placing it delicately on her tongue. “With our favorite mercenary angel, Eno, who I believe will be—with the assistance of my nephews—breaking free any moment.”

Sneja nodded to the twins, who turned and walked toward the exit.

“Now,” Sneja said, clasping her flute of champagne and taking a long sip. “Tell me what you know about my granddaughter.”

Verlaine narrowed his eyes, trying to read Sneja’s expression through the thick smoke. It seemed to him that she was a sea creature emerging from the murk of a dark ocean. “I don’t know who you mean,” he said at last.

“With the thousands of possible ways that I could kill you—the slow and painful death, the quick and bloody death, the playful death—you had better try to understand quickly. Evangeline is the single descendant of a noble and illustrious family, the sole child of my son, Percival.”

“You don’t have her already?”

Sneja growled something in German and threw Verlaine a look of contempt. “Don’t play games with me.”

Verlaine tried to understand what Sneja was talking about. Eno had taken Evangeline in Paris. If she hadn’t given her over to the Grigoris, what had she done with her?

“You can’t be right about her patrimony,” Verlaine said, deciding to feign ignorance. “Evangeline doesn’t even look like Percival.”

Suddenly, Sneja’s mood shifted. “You knew my son?”

“I worked for your son,” Verlaine said. “I saw him dead in New York. He was broken and pathetic, like a bird with clipped wings.”

She placed her champagne glass on the silver platter and, pointing her finger at Verlaine, said, “Remove him.”

Moving with the easy grace of a trained agent, Verlaine pulled his gun from his jacket and trained it on Sneja. Before he could bring his finger to the trigger, angelic creatures appeared from all sides, stepping before Sneja, surrounding him. A wing slithered around him, knocking his gun from his hand.

“Tie him up outside,” Sneja said. “I’d like to kill him here and now, but I cannot tolerate the mess.”

One of the creatures yanked Verlaine’s arms and bound them together, pushing him toward the end of the lounge. It kicked open a door and dragged Verlaine out onto a narrow viewing ledge and roped him to the metal banister. His head was pressed flat against the icy railing so that he saw the flash of the tracks flicking by, strips of brown against the white snow. Verlaine struggled against the rope, his warm breath rising into the frigid air. The freezing wind whipped against him, stinging his skin. Looking up, he saw an immense tableau of faint stars holding their light against the morning sky. Looking beyond, he saw the endless crystalline white of the Siberian plain. The train moved onward, slowly, relentlessly toward the east, where the sun was emerging on the horizon. Verlaine felt ice forming in the crevices of his eyelids and knew, within the hour, he would freeze to death.


Deposition of Katya Badmaiova, St. Petersburg, 1976


I was a girl of ten years old when my father brought Rasputin to our home. I knew who he was—even I had heard the stories about him—but I was startled to find that he wasn’t as handsome as I had imagined. I couldn’t understand how the tsarina would fall under the spell of a man with such an ugly, gnarled, black beard, ruddy skin, and strange eyes. My first impression of him was as an ugly brute in peasants’ clothes. But my impression soon changed. Over the next months, when he visited us frequently, I came to have another opinion of Rasputin. He did not have elegant manners, or even a tendency to flatter, but there was something about his way of being that worked upon me until I was open to his allure. By the third or fourth visit his manner had changed my view of him. I was transformed from judging him the most vile of men to thinking him very subtle, almost charming. I believe this to be the secret of Rasputin’s seductive powers: He was an ugly man who had the ability to make people believe him to be beautiful. I, like so many others, was entranced.

Each time Rasputin visited our home—a small apartment near the Anichkov Palace in St. Petersburg—he and my father went to my father’s study, and I continued with my piano lesson, my French lesson, my lessons in embroidery, or whatever activity I had before me that day. We were not rich, but we had a number of tutors to keep me occupied while my father worked. Most of the time, I had no more direct exposure to Rasputin than seeing him walk from the entrance of the house to my father’s study. After a year or so, he gradually stopped visiting my father, and I began to think of him less and less often. After Rasputin’s murder, and the revolution, there was no reason to think of him ever again.

Or so I believed. My father became ill with cancer in the 1950s. During the final days of his life, when the illness had made him insensible to the world, he told a tale that astonished me. He was delirious when he said these things, and I could not know for certain if they were the incoherent words of a dying man or if there was some truth in his bizarre tale, but my mother was at my side, and she confirmed that I had heard the contents of the story correctly. I write it all down as faithfully as I remember it, reserving judgment for those who read it.

My father confessed that Grigory Rasputin came to him in November 1916, asking for his assistance. My father had won favor with the tsar by making him a tea—a simple mixture of cannabis and wolfsbane—which had the desired effect of relaxing Nikolai. And then one day Rasputin told my father that the tsars—as he sometimes called Nikolai and Alexandra—had another request. They wanted my father to mix a medicine. Rasputin claimed that the mixture would help the tsarevitch, Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, recover from a terrible disorder. My father knew of the child’s illness—the boy had nearly died at Christmastime 1911, and he had heard at that time that the child was a hemophiliac. My father responded that a cure for hemophilia was unknown. Rasputin refused to accept this answer. The medicine, Rasputin claimed, required one thousand petals from one thousand different varieties of flowers. Many of the flowers, my father said, did not grow in Russia and would be impossible to find, especially during the war. It was 1916 and freezing cold; there was only snow and ice and suffering.

Rasputin countered this objection, showing him a book filled with flowers. The empress had been collecting the flowers herself over many years—she and the grand duchesses had gone on hunts together in numerous countries in Europe and had preserved the flowers in a diary they shared. My father would only have to confirm that the flowers were correctly labeled and mix them together in the elixir. Rasputin said that the empress herself promised a large sum of money and an elevated position in the tsar’s university in Moscow to anyone who could make the drug. Rasputin gave my father the album filled with flowers and left.

One month later Rasputin returned to see if my father had finished. My father had gone through the flowers in the album and confirmed that the one thousand flowers in the formula were the one thousand flowers in the book—everything matched up perfectly. My father had been having doubts about the authenticity of Rasputin’s promises, however. He didn’t know if he could trust the peasant to give him the sum promised. And so he gave Rasputin the elixir but kept the diary with the flowers as a guarantee.

When Rasputin returned with the money, he was drunk. I remember the evening well, because I was in the sitting room during the visit. I listened as Rasputin bragged to my father about the empress’s devotion to him, calling her “Mama,” a name he was encouraged to use by the empress herself. Rasputin claimed that he knew all of Mama’s secrets, that she kept nothing from him. As proof of her confidence in him, he told my father to visit Pokrovskoye, his native village. There he would find, in the care of Rasputin’s wife, a treasure unlike anything the world had seen before, one worth more than anyone in Moscow or St. Petersburg could imagine. Rasputin told my father that he would send a telegraph to his wife, who still lived in Pokrovskoye, telling her to allow my father to examine the treasure himself. The story was so ridiculous, and Rasputin so drunk, that my father took his payment, gave him the flower album, and kicked Rasputin out. Some days later Grigory Rasputin was murdered by Feliks Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich at the Moika Palace and his body thrown in the Neva.

My father never went to Pokrovskoye to see the treasure. I believe he forgot all about it—our lives were filled with real concerns during those years. After Rasputin’s death, however, a servant from Tsarskoye Selo arrived with a purse of money for my father, a gift of thanks from the tsarina herself, and a warning that he must never speak of what had transpired between them.

After my father’s death, in the summer of 1951, my mother and I began to wonder of these strange events. After much consideration, we took a train to Rasputin’s native village to see if Rasputin’s widow was still alive. It was a long journey from Petrograd to Tyumenskaya Oblast, and it was somewhat silly to make the trip, but we were exceptionally poor and extremely curious, and so decided that we must confirm Rasputin’s story, to put our minds at ease.

We found the widow without too much trouble. She lived in the same place she had shared with Rasputin decades before. She was a kind woman, and she invited us into their two-story house, sat us down, and served tea. My mother introduced herself and mentioned my father’s name. Mrs. Rasputin ruminated over the name a moment, and then went to a wooden box and removed a telegram: It was Rasputin’s communication from thirty-five years before, instructing her to show my father the tsarina’s treasure. Rasputin’s widow returned with a metal trunk, the Romanov eagle emblazoned on its surface. No doubt the poor woman had no idea what was inside or why she should keep it, only that a man—the doctor named in the telegram—would be coming for it. She seemed eager to be rid of it, telling us that it was just sitting around collecting dust.

We hoped for jewels or gold, something of value we might sell. And from the look of the trunk, with its elaborate buckles and fine leatherwork, it seemed that we would soon be rewarded for our efforts. Instead, we found, after we opened the trunk, another sort of thing altogether. Nestled in a bed of red velvet lay an enormous egg—a gold egg with flecks of scarlet on its shell. I picked it up and felt it in my hands. I must clarify that this was not an object like the famous enameled eggs that one could buy in Fabergé’s shop in the days before the Revolution. This was a living egg, large as an ostrich egg, heavy and warm when I took it in my hands. I had never seen anything like it and instantly wanted to give it back, but Mrs. Rasputin insisted that we take it with us. And so we packed the living egg back into the trunk marked with the Romanov insignia and took it home to Petrograd.


Dr. Raphael Valko’s compound, Smolyan, Bulgaria

Vera turned the paper over, looking for more. “That’s it?”

“The account ends there,” Valko said, taking the pages and sliding them back into the red book. “After Katya told me about this giant egg, I began to do some searching into the imperial family’s past, looking for something that could explain how this egg could have come into existence.” A look of frustration crossed his features, as if he were remembering the difficulties of the search. “But the last Russian monarch born of an egg was Peter the Great. His was also a gold egg dappled with scarlet, like the colors of the Romanov crest, but how such a birth had come to pass was never documented. The Romanovs longed for another golden era in their reign, a monarch with superior powers to unite the people behind the dynasty, and what better way to do it than this? But the golden era never came. And so they waited. Nearly three hundred years later, an egg finally arrived. And Katya had it in her possession.”

“But you must know what happened after Katya left Siberia,” Vera said.

“Katya refused to write down the events that occurred after her encounter with Mrs. Rasputin. It was too dangerous, and she couldn’t risk someone reading what she’d written. But she did tell me that she took the Romanov trunk with her to Leningrad, where she kept it hidden in her apartment. If the Soviets had gotten wind of the trunk, they would surely have sent someone around to investigate.”

Vera tried to imagine the existence of such a strange and wonderful object, something that Katya had risked everything to hide. “And it was never discovered?”

“No,” Valko said. “Katya was careful. But in the spring of 1959, fifty-seven years after it was laid, the egg cracked apart. A child lay in the catastrophe of shells, a golden-skinned boy with eyes that burned red and wings that wrapped around his shoulders. Katya was entranced by the creature, and she kept it, raising it as her own son. She named the angel Lucien.”

Vera felt her jaw drop. She stared at Valko, waiting for him to tell her more. Finally she managed to say, “It lived?”

“Oh yes, it lived. Not only did it survive, the creature thrived. He grew over time, moving through the normal stages of development, like any child. Katya tried to treat him as if he were human. Of course, he was never enrolled in a school and had no human contacts other than Katya, but he was taught to read, to write, to speak, to eat, and to dress like a human being. By the time I arrived in Leningrad he had grown to adulthood. I had never seen such a magnificent creature.”

“It was a Nephil with antediluvian qualities?” Azov asked.

“Even a quick look at Lucien told me that he was no Nephil. He seemed to me to embody the ancient descriptions of the heavenly host, the passages that one finds in biblical literature, with skin like pounded gold, hair of silk, eyes of fire. I telegraphed Angela, and, after much difficulty, she came to join us in Russia. This was in the 1970s, when Westerners were not exactly welcome behind the Iron Curtain.”

“Nor archangels, I imagine,” Sveti said.

“True enough,” Valko responded. “Which is perhaps the reason Lucien had been permitted to leave the apartment only a few times in his life. I was there with Angela the day she met Lucien. He looked from Angela to me, his eyes wide with curiosity. There was such purity in his gaze, such peace, that I felt that I was in the presence of divinity. I understood in a single moment the metaphor of the chemical wedding: that synergy, that renewal of existence that grows out of a perfect meeting.”

“Angela felt this as well?” Vera asked, finding it hard to imagine the savvy Angela Valko falling prey to any mystical mumbo jumbo.

“I believe so,” Valko said. “In any case, she convinced Katya to let her take Lucien outside. The creature was delighted by the air, the coldness of the snow, the blue sky, the open spaces. He had never seen the Neva, never touched ice, never heard music played at the theater. Angela showed him the human world, and, in turn, he began to teach her what it meant to be ethereal. I cannot say if Angela had planned to seduce him from the beginning, but from the moment she saw him, there seemed to be no other course for my daughter. They fell in love before my eyes. Soon they were having an affair. And in 1978, after Angela returned to Paris, she gave birth to Lucien’s child.”

Vera felt almost too stunned to speak. “Luca Cacciatore was Evangeline’s father.”

“Biologically, Luca had nothing to do with Evangeline’s existence. The girl’s biological father was, in fact, Lucien.”

“Did Luca know this?” Azov asked.

Valko sighed. “It would be impossible for me to say. My daughter closed herself to me after Evangeline’s birth.”

“Are there records anywhere about this angel?” Vera forced herself to ask. The existence of such a creature mirrored her work so closely—and would prove her theories with such finality—that she was almost afraid to press ahead. “Photographs? Video? Anything that proves his existence?”

“There is no need for photos or videos,” Valko said, crossing his arms and meeting Vera’s eye. “Lucien is with us.”


Trans-Siberian Railway

Bruno’s thoughts were so filled with Angela Valko’s report, the details of her discovery in Godwin’s lab, and the repercussions of what she had found that he didn’t hear the metal door slide open. By the time he realized what was happening it was too late: The Grigori twins were already inside the carriage, surrounded by an army of Gibborim angels. As Yana pulled her gun, and the explosion of bullets rattled the car, he snapped into action, falling to the floor, groping for his gun, and backing Yana up. She was hitting her targets, but, as they both knew, ordinary ammunition did little to affect or harm the Gibborim. They felt the bullets the way Bruno felt the sting of an insect.

From a purely theoretical point of view, the twins were incredible to watch. Immensely tall, thin, pale as milk, their large eyes staring vacantly into the beyond—these Nephilim were the ideal specimens for study. That they were in duplicate, and that they were of such a rarified pedigree, only made them more desirable. He tried to see them through the masses of Gibborim, but they were so well protected that he wasn’t even sure they were in the carriage any longer. A wave of anger washed through him: They should have captured these bastards in St. Petersburg.

Bruno stood and pushed through a line of Gibborim, calling for Yana to watch his back. The Gibborim surrounded him, their claws ripping into his clothes. He felt his arms and back burn, as if he were running naked through a twist of barbed wire. Fighting them put him in a space of pure movement, a place where he lost all thought and simply felt the rush of his fists, the power of his legs, the breath moving in and out of his lungs. A gush of cold air filled the space: The door to Eno’s storage cell must have been opened. By the time he’d pushed through the Gibborim, the twins had Eno out of her cell and were making their way through the train, Eno between them.

Yana screamed something in the distance—he couldn’t make out her words—and he felt a blow to his head. He hit the ground, closed his eyes, and willed himself to stay conscious. When he opened his eyes, the Gibborim were scattered throughout the room, their bodies black as electrocuted flies. Yana stood over him, her beautiful face filled with concern. “Bruno,” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

Bruno took her hand and sat up. Looking more closely, he saw that Yana had decimated the entire population of Gibborim in one fell swoop. Bruno raised an eyebrow, sure that he looked like a smitten schoolboy. “How’d you do that?”

“Gibborish charm,” Yana said, smiling as she helped Bruno to stand up. “One of the many tricks up my sleeve.”

“Can’t wait to see your next one,” Bruno said, looking through the door at the empty carriages. The Grigori were long gone. “They’ve released all of your prisoners.”

“Come on,” Yana said. “We have to recapture them.”

Bruno followed close behind Yana as they ran through the train. The carriages were uniformly quiet, the passengers unaware that anything out of the ordinary was happening. It was remarkable—with the noise and the movement, he would have thought someone would be asking questions, or at least complaining. But the human desire for normalcy outweighed all else.

After searching the length of the train they came to a door marked PRIVATE LOUNGE. Yana typed an access code into an electronic keypad. The door didn’t open.

“It’s strange,” she said, trying a second time. “I don’t recognize this car. It must have been attached in Moscow.”

Bruno understood Yana’s thinking—if the creatures were anywhere on the train, it was there. “If we can’t get in this way,” he said, gesturing to the door. “We’ll have to go out.”

Yana considered this a moment, and then, turning on her heel, led Bruno back to the sleeping berths. She slid open one of the doors, startling the passengers, a man and a woman sleeping in opposite beds. The man jumped out of bed and began screaming in Russian, gesturing for them to get out and—if Bruno could read the man’s intentions—threatening to call the conductor. Yana put her hand on his shoulder and, speaking in a gentle voice, tried to calm him down. Soon the man’s wife climbed out of her bed and began speaking with great animation. After some time they opened the window to the berth. Yana gestured for Bruno to follow her as she hoisted herself up and climbed out the window. He saw her black leather boots gain footing on the sill. With a push, they were up on the roof of the train.

Bruno nodded to the Russian couple and climbed out into the biting wind. The cold was brutal, unlike anything he’d felt before. He blinked away tears, feeling them stick against his eyelids as they froze and melted. Yana stood at the edge of the train, balancing as if she were on a high wire, the glare of the rising sun setting her hair ablaze.

“What did you tell them?” Bruno asked, as he joined her on the roof. With the metallic grinding of the train and the howling wind, he had to shout to be heard.

“That my uncle got drunk and climbed out of the train,” Yana said. “I told them we had no choice but to find him and bring him back inside.”

“And they believed you?”

“This is Russia,” Yana said, giving him a withering look. “Everybody’s got an uncle who gets drunk and climbs out a train window at least once. Usually the police find these guys frozen in a snowdrift somewhere, bottle of vodka in hand.”

“Charming,” Bruno said.

“There’s a reason why the average life expectancy for Russian men is sixty-three,” she said, her voice rising over the noise. “Now we want to go there, to that car ahead. We have to be careful—too much noise and we’ll have problems with the conductor. Think you can make it?”

Bruno felt his temper flare. Just because he’d had trouble with the Gibborim didn’t mean he couldn’t keep up with Yana. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”

Pushing through the wind, Bruno made his way over the metal rooftop. A layer of snow capped the car, covering his shoes. His feet were burning hot, and then, after a few minutes, numb. He jumped the gap between the cars easily, but at the end of the third car, he landed hard on a patch of ice, lost his balance, and fell. He saw the landscape tip away from him, slowly, as if he were falling off the edge of a high cliff into a bottomless cloud.

He landed hard on the rooftop, his body pressing into the powdery snow. It was in the thrall of this sensation—a dry chill that froze through his brain—that he heard a meek voice from below. Pushing himself to the edge of the roof, he found Verlaine, tied to the metal bars of a railing, his body laid out on a narrow ledge. Bruno waved Yana over, and together they climbed over the edge of the roof and made their way down to the ledge, where Verlaine lay frightfully still.

Despite his efforts to speak, Verliane looked half dead. His skin was gray, his lips blue, his wire-rimmed glasses ringed with ice. Bruno untied the ropes with Yana’s help and, after helping Verlaine stand, slid open a door and pulled him into a train car, where Yana proceeded to rub his hands and arms, trying to bring blood back to his extremities. Bruno ran to the restaurant car, ordered black tea, and carried the pot and cup back to Verlaine. By the time he returned Yana had helped Verlaine to sit against the wall. His shoes were off, and she had his feet between her hands, rubbing the skin. Bruno poured the tea and was relieved to see him drink the entire cup. He filled it a second time and noticed, with a shudder, that Verlaine’s hair was encrusted with chunks of ice.

“You were supposed to stay out of trouble,” Bruno said.

Sipping the hot tea more slowly, Verlaine said, “I can take you to the Grigori twins.”

“Bad idea,” Yana said. “They’ve nearly killed you twice. I wouldn’t tempt fate.”

Bruno looked at Yana. “If the Grigoris are there, Eno is too.”

“Sneja is inside,” Verlaine said, looking to Bruno for support. “She’s running everything.”

“That much was obvious from the way she tried to kill you,” Yana said.

“How’s that?” Bruno asked, restraining himself from arguing with Yana. She’d just saved his life; he owed it to her to give her the benefit of the doubt. Still, they’d been trying to corner Sneja Grigori for decades. And she was there, on the train, waiting for them to take her.

“Sneja likes her victims frozen to the brink of death before she executes them,” Yana said. “The actual slaughter is less messy that way.”

“Nice,” Verlaine said, his face going paler.

“So now that you’ve been scorched and frozen by the Grigoris,” Yana said, “that leaves only drowning and being buried alive, if you’d like to cover all the elements. Believe me, you’ve pushed your luck—and mine—enough. Sometimes these transports go awry, and when that happens, it’s best to cut our losses. Besides, Bruno has his sights set much higher than a bunch of Nephilim.”

Verlaine gave Bruno a questioning look.

“We’re going to find Godwin,” Bruno said. And although Bruno understood the massive risk he was taking; he knew that he would get this one chance to get inside the panopticon. He leaned against the wall, his gaze falling over the frozen landscape. It would be many hours before they passed the Ural Mountains into Asia, descending toward Chelyabinsk and its famous prison of angels.

Dr. Raphael Valko’s compound, Smolyan, Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria


Vera watched Azov closely, measuring his every gesture. She knew him well enough to see that he was struggling to contain his emotions. He was mad, and that wasn’t something Vera saw often.

“You’ve known about this,” Azov said, his voice little more than a whisper. “And you’ve said nothing all of these years.”

“Ah, but that is because nothing has worked as we expected it would,” Valko said.

“What went wrong?” Sveti asked.

“Evangeline was human,” Valko said. “Or so her mother believed her to be. Year after year, Angela’s hope that her daughter’s angelic inheritance would reveal itself diminished. With every extraction of her blood, her mother’s disappointment grew.”

Vera thought of the film she’d watched in the storage rooms of the Hermitage the previous morning—the vials of blood labeled with various names. She understood now why Alexei’s and Lucien’s blood had been stored away. “Angela extracted her own daughter’s blood?”

“She oversaw its extraction and testing, yes,” Valko said.

“She wasn’t afraid of putting Evangeline in danger?” Vera asked.

“It sounds as if there wasn’t anything about Evangeline’s blood to cause alarm,” Sveti said.

“Alas, you’re right about that,” Valko said. “At that time, Evangeline’s blood tested human. And Angela, accepting that her child was ordinary, occupied herself with other projects. One in particular became a kind of obsession for my daughter.”

“You mean the virus,” Vera said.

“Yes,” Valko said.

“It was an incredible accomplishment,” Vera said.

“I’m not sure that she was pleased by the virus in itself,” Valko said. “There was more to her plans than simply the creation of an epidemic. A virus can be cured. Creatures can protect themselves from contamination. Angela understood that the virus she’d engineered wasn’t enough. She wanted to utterly destroy the Nephilim race. To do so she needed a stronger, more certain weapon.”

“This is why the Nephilim killed her,” Azov noted, his voice uncertain, as if it were still a surprise to him that Angela was dead.

“Not exactly,” Valko said. “Recall, if you will, Tatiana’s egg in the Book of Flowers. I asked you to interpret this aquarelle as a gateway to a higher purpose, something more elevated than a mere recipe book for the medicine of Noah.”

“Yes, of course,” Sveti said. “Angela’s Jacob’s Ladder. Although I still don’t understand how this interpretation actually led to anything. It doesn’t seem to have any obvious significance to me.”

Valko said, “Angela acted on a hunch that the drawing was more than just an effort from the grand duchesses’ painting classes. She enlisted my help, and, after poking around, I found that Angela was right: The drawing had a much more pointed meaning than anyone could have guessed.”

“But what?” Sveti said.

“I think I understand it,” Vera said, taking the Book of Flowers from Sveti and turning the pages back to the beginning, where OTMA’s dedication of the book to Our Friend was inscribed on the copper plate. “When Nadia gave me this book yesterday she explained that the first Our Friend, a Monsieur Philippe, had prophesied an heir for the tsar in 1902, after which the tsarina experienced her infamous phantom pregnancy.”

“I looked into this pregnancy during my search for an explanation for Lucien’s birth,” Valko said. “I couldn’t find a thing about the birth except, of course, that it had been an enormous embarrassment for the tsar and tsarina. They fired their entire staff of doctors, nurses, and midwives afterward. Monsieur Philippe was sent back to France. Depressing, to say the least.”

“But what if Alexandra’s pregnancy wasn’t phantom at all?” Vera asked.

“You mean, what if Alexandra brought a baby to term?” Azov asked.

“No,” Vera said, twisting her hair and tying it up in a quick messy ponytail. “What if Alexandra actually gave birth, but there was no child to show for it. What if she delivered the longed-for Romanov egg and then, to keep the truth hidden, dispensed with all possible witnesses?”

Valko considered this a moment and began to smile. “It’s entirely possible, I suppose,” he said. “But it doesn’t explain how or why the egg birth came to happen. Why, after hundreds of years of waiting, did it happen then?”

Vera paused, considering how to best present the theory she had wagered her career on. “I am proposing,” she said, with as much authority as she could muster, “that Monsieur Philippe prophesied that Alexandra would become pregnant with a son because he, like John Dee before him, and Rasputin after him, had learned how to communicate with angels.”

The others stared at her, unsure of what to make of such a theory.

“That would explain,” Sveti said tentatively, “the Enochian language written on every page of the journal. But what does that have to do with Alexandra’s phantom pregnancy—egg or no egg, I don’t see how there’s a connection.”

“If Monsieur Philippe was able to summon the Archangel Gabriel, it has everything to do with it,” Vera said. “Consider this: The Watchers were not the only angels who consorted with human women. I believe that the Annunciation of Gabriel should more accurately be called the Consummation of Gabriel, that Mary’s famous union with Gabriel was neither the first not the last instance of human intercourse with a member of the Heavenly Host.”

“You can’t be serious,” Sveti said.

“She’s serious,” Azov whispered. “Hear her out.”

“For the past years, I have been documenting historical representations of angelology and the virgin birth—and Luke’s narration of the annunciation in particular—to discover if there is any truth to theories that Jesus could have been the result of a sexual encounter between the virgin and the Archangel Gabriel. Mind you, this isn’t an entirely new idea. The controversy surrounding the annunciation was once a debate that occupied theoretical angelologists for centuries. One camp believed the birth of Jesus to be accurately depicted by Luke: Jesus was the product of the Holy Spirit descending upon Mary, God’s son, a scenario that placed Gabriel in the position of messenger, the traditional role of the angels in Scripture. The other camp believed that Mary had been seduced by Gabriel, who had also seduced her cousin Elizabeth before her, and that the children both women conceived—John the Baptist and Jesus—were the first in a lineage of what would have become a race of superior creatures: moral, divine angels whose presence would have been a tonic to the evil of the Nephilim. Of course, neither John the Baptist nor Jesus had children. Their lines died with them.”

“So you’re suggesting that John the Baptist and Jesus Christ and Lucien Romanov share the same father?” Azov asked.

“I’m suggesting that exactly,” Vera said.

“There are people in these parts who would burn us at the stake for making such claims,” Sveti said.

“Then I shudder to imagine what they would do upon hearing the next conclusion we must draw,” Vera said. “With his archangelic father, Gabriel, and his Nephilistic mother, Alexandra, Lucien is descended from the exalted and the damned.”

“A true Manichaean,” Sveti said.

“Throw Percival Grigori—Evangeline’s other grandfather—into the mix, and you have a truly unholy cocktail,” Vera said.

“Enough,” Valko said, his voice steely. “You’re speaking about my daughter’s work, all that she lived and died for. I won’t let you trifle with her legacy.”

“Evangeline was her work?” Vera asked, incredulous to hear Valko speak of Evangeline so coldly, as if she were little more than a thought experiment.

“The conception of Evangeline was the most brilliant and dangerous risk of Angela’s career,” Valko said. “Angela knew what she was doing and did it with purpose.” He folded his arms over his chest and looked at them, his features hardening. “The child was not some foolhardy whim. My daughter put her own body on the line, as well as her safety, to produce Evangeline.”

“But you said before that Angela and Lucien were in love,” Azov said.

“That was an unexpected consequence.”

“What did she expect to happen?” Vera asked, realizing with horror that Angela was more calculating than she could have ever imagined. “Do you mean to say that she was fully aware of what she was doing? What did she expect Evangeline to become?”

“The ultimate weapon,” Valko said. “A weapon that derived from the natural hierarchy of angelic beings. There are the spheres of heavenly creatures—the archangels, seraphim, cherubim—and then there are the spheres of devils, fallen angels, the creatures disowned by heaven, demons. Angela knew these distinctions intimately. She knew the power of an angel must be measured against the power of another angel. She knew that false creation—the genetic modeling of automatons, golems, clones, or any such engineered animate being—would not work, as it went against the divine hierarchy of beings. Angela also knew that in order to defeat a creature of human and angelic origin—a monster of the heavenly order—she must create another, more powerful creature. And so she attempted to engineer a new species of angel, one that was stronger than the Nephilim.”

Azov’s voice strained as he said, “You make it sound like Angela was some kind of Frankenstein constructing a monster.”

“My daughter did something even more bold,” Valko said, and Vera could not tell if he was proud of or ashamed by his daughter’s work.

“Are you really saying,” Azov said, “that Angela created a child to be used a weapon?”

“‘Weapon’ is perhaps not the ideal way to classify the girl,” Valko said. “Examine her name. It contains the seeds of her destiny. She was called Evangeline. Eve Angel. The child was to be the new Eve, an original creature born to reconstruct a new world.”

“Semantics aside, it is difficult to believe that Angela used her own child as a kind of genetic experiment,” Azov said, his voice filled with doubt.

“In the end, it didn’t matter,” Valko said. “The experiment failed.”

“Because Evangeline turned out to be human?” Vera asked.

“A female human with ruddy, opaque skin, crimson blood, a propensity toward illness, a navel, and a startling resemblance to her human grandmother, Gabriella.” Valko looked away and his voice grew quiet as he said, “And so Angela tried again.”

“What?” Vera said and, realizing that she was nearly screaming, changed her tone. “I don’t understand. A lot of time passed before Angela could know that Evangeline wasn’t the creature she wanted to create. How on earth did she try again?”

“Angela went back to St. Petersburg in 1983 and renewed her relationship with the angel who had fathered Evangeline. She never told Lucien of Evangeline’s existence, nor did she reveal her reasons for renewing the affair. I don’t think Angela had any notion that she was being heartless or even irresponsible. She did it all with the belief that her second child would be a boy and that he would be the warrior angel she had been waiting for. With the birth of her son, her work against the Nephilim would be finished.”

“And did she succeed?” Vera asked.

Valko said quietly, “My daughter was pregnant when she was killed. During the autopsy it was discovered that an egg had formed in Angela’s womb. The child was a boy. I saw his corpse. His skin was golden and he had the white wings of an archangel. Angela’s second child would have been a warrior. He would have brought peace and tranquility to our world. But this savior child died with her.”

“What became of the angel?” Vera asked.

“After Angela’s death, I knew that I needed to find Lucien,” Valko said. “And after searching for many months, I found him imprisoned in Siberia.”

“They must have taken him to the panopticon,” Vera said. Rumors about the existence of a great Siberian prison were forever circulating among Russian angelologists. It was just the kind of detention center to be found in the wilderness—old-fashioned, aesthetically complex, flawlessly designed, and impenetrable. But no one had ever verified if the panopticon actually existed.

“The very one,” Valko said. “The same day Angela was murdered, Lucien was taken into captivity by the Russian hunters and transported by train to Siberia.”

“They wanted to study him?” Vera asked.

“Clearly,” Valko said. “With such a magnificent creature there would be much to examine and explore. The biological breakdown of an archangel’s son could occupy researchers for years.”

“But the society was founded to fight the Nephilim,” Sveti said. “How could someone get away with the imprisonment of a creature proven to derive from an altogether different, truly divine angelic form?”

“I’m not sure the guards would have known the difference,” Valko said. “And besides, that prison conducts its business outside of the confines of our conventions.”

As if by a sudden impulse, Valko gestured for them to follow him back outside into the garden, where a table had been set with a breakfast of Valko’s antediluvian fruit—orange strawberries and blue apples and green oranges. Vera shivered, feeling the crisp mountain air on her arms as she made her way to the table.

“Sit a moment,” Valko said, pulling a chair out for Vera. “We’ll have something to eat while we finish our conversation.”

Vera sat alongside the others, watching as they chose fruit from a platter. Vera took a strawberry, picked up her knife and fork, and cut it in half. A thick orange juice seeped from the center. Valko opened a thermos and poured coffee into their mugs.

Valko continued where he had left off. “The panopticon prison is funded beyond anything you and I could dream of. As a result, it is extremely well equipped and secure. The scientists there are using captive angelic creatures as experimental subjects. They are taking blood and DNA samples; they are taking biopsies, bone samples, MRI scans; they are even operating on the creatures. They are very powerful and, as they say about absolute power, well . . .” Valko paused to cut a fruit that seemed a cross between a kiwi and a pear, “the aphorism is a perfect expression of the chief technician there—a British scientist named Merlin Godwin.”

Vera nearly choked on her coffee. Hearing the name Merlin Godwin now, uttered in this Edenic garden, was so jarring that she could hardly swallow. She glanced at her watch. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since she had seen Angela’s interrogation projected on a cellar wall of the Winter Palace. Finally, she found her voice. “Merlin Godwin is a traitor.”

“Godwin has been in the Grigoris’ pocket since the beginning,” Valko conceded.

“Why has he been permitted to continue his work, then?” Azov asked. “Sveti and I are struggling to keep our projects going, and this criminal is set up with unlimited funding and equipment.”

“The academy believes that the work he’s doing is of benefit to them,” Valko said. “Keeping him in Siberia is a form of containment: He is a permanent resident of the panopticon. He has absolutely no contact with the world outside.”

“He’s a prisoner himself,” Vera said.

“As director and chief scientist of the facility, I would hardly call him that,” Valko said. “He has ultimate control of the facility. But his power lies only within the walls of the prison. His work with the Grigoris is something he has managed to maintain, apparently, although I have no idea how.”

“Or why,” Sveti added. “How could they allow him to continue his work? I can’t imagine the Grigoris using their own kind as experimental subjects.”

“I have my own theories about that,” Valko said, winking at Vera. “I suspect that they are attempting to develop a new genetic pool as a way to renew themselves. What they may not realize is that their efforts are hopeless without a creature who can give them the biological blueprint they need.”

“Hence Lucien,” Azov added.

“I took care of Lucien,” Valko said, and Vera could hear the pride of a man who had spent a lifetime outsmarting the creatures. “I got him out of Siberia before they did any real harm to him.”

“He’s here?” Vera asked.

“All in due time, my dear,” Valko said. “You came to me for answers and I will try to provide some.” Valko leaned back in his chair, his coffee steaming in his hand. “As you know, the field of angelic genetics was founded by my daughter. What you may not know is that her work was closely monitored by her enemies. They hoped to use genetic engineering to create angels.”

“But I thought you said Angela didn’t believe cloning could work?” Azov said.

“She didn’t think it would be viable,” Valko said. “And her reasoning came from the most basic aspects of genetic inheritance—the nature of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA.”

“Ah, the pillars of ancestry societies everywhere,” Azov said. “We’ve had a number of religious scholars at St. Ivan asking to exhume the remains of John the Baptist, hoping to run such DNA testing.”

“And of course you tell them why that would not be prudent,” Valko said.

“I tell them that it’s the mitochondrial DNA of the female members of a family that acts as a time capsule: A girl’s mitochondrial DNA is a replica of her mother’s, grandmother’s, great-grandmother’s, and so on. So John the Baptist, being a man—a man who may have descended from the Archangel Gabriel, I would now add—wouldn’t deliver the goods.”

“Angela discovered that the same is true for female Nephilim,” Valko said. “There is an exact replica of the maternal line in every female born, creating an enormous possibility to examine ancient DNA structures of female creatures.”

“But the Nephilim are descended from angels and women,” Vera said. “The mitochondrial DNA would, thus, lead back to humanity, not to angels.”

“Correct,” Valko said. “That was why Godwin ultimately found Lucien unusable. He was descended from an angel, sure enough, and was very, very pure. But with an angelic father and a very pure Nephilistic mother, Lucien’s genes were impossible for Godwin to sequence with the technology available in the 1980s. His mitochondrial DNA was a direct match to Alexandra Romanov’s. His nuclear DNA was a hodgepodge of his parents’ combined genes—human, Nephil, and an unidentifiable strain that Godwin couldn’t pinpoint and therefore deemed worthless to him and his project.”

“And Lucien?” Vera asked again. She couldn’t help but think of how alluring it would be to be able to see the creature, to touch it, to feel the heat of its skin.

“When I finally found Lucien in 1986, Godwin had him in their prison in Siberia. The terrible conditions didn’t seem to affect him—he is a transcendental being, quite literally, and the realities of the material world cannot touch him. Even so, I knew that I needed to get him out of there, and so I convinced Godwin that I had the one thing on earth more precious than Lucien—an ingredient in the elusive medicine of Noah.”

“Silphium,” Azov said.

“There were two seeds in the cache you gave me in 1985,” Valko said. “I gave one of them to Godwin in exchange for Lucien.”

“But why?” Azov said, his voice rising. “How could you do something so irresponsible?”

“First of all, if Lucien had remained in Siberia, he would have eventually been used by Godwin—and by extension the Grigoris—in some fashion or another. This is most certain. Second, and more important, I knew that they didn’t have a clue about the formula. It was recorded in one place and one place only.”

“Rasputin’s Book of Flowers,” Vera said. “Buried in an old lady’s antique shop, right under the Grigoris’ noses.”

“Until now, evidently,” Valko replied, glancing at Vera’s satchel, as if verifying that she was bringing it along. “But really, even if Godwin were lucky enough to get the silphium seed to grow, he couldn’t use it.”

“And so you took Lucien from Russia,” Azov said.

“I came here, to these mountains, with Lucien. I hoped to study him, to listen to him, to understand his nature. It is no small thing, having a seraph’s descendant at one’s disposal—our discipline is the classification of angelic systems. Lucien is derived from the highest order.”

“Is he here, in these mountains?” Vera asked, fixing Valko in her gaze, noting the determination with which he spoke about Lucien, the ambition that burned in his eyes. It had been only days since she had revisited the photographs Seraphina Valko had taken of the Watcher. That she might actually see such a creature in the flesh, might touch it and speak to it, was hard to believe.

Valko nodded, an air of pride in his manner. “I gave him a room here, in my cabin, but he was never able to stay there. He would leave to wander through the Rhodopes, spending days and then weeks in the canyons. I would find him at the summit of a mountain, luminescent as a ray of sunshine, singing praises to the heavens, and then I would find him in the caves, in a trance of introspection. And so I took him down into the Devil’s Throat, where he has stayed for many years. Perhaps it is the proximity of his fellow angels, but he finds comfort there, close to the Watchers. There is something in his soul that finds peace in this circle of hell.”