Angelopolis A Novel

The First Circle

LIMBO

Allée des Refuzniks, Eiffel Tower, seventh arrondissement, Paris, 2010

V. A. Verlaine pushed through the barrier of gendarmes, making his way toward the body. It was nearly midnight, the neighborhood deserted, and yet the entire perimeter of the Champ de Mars—from the quai Branly to the avenue Gustave Eiffel—had been blocked by police cars, the red and blue lights pulsing through the darkness. A floodlight had been set up in a corner of the scene, the harsh illumination revealing a mutilated body resting in a pool of electric blue blood. The features of the victim were unreadable, the body broken and bloodied, her arms and legs angling at unnatural positions like branches cracked from a tree. The phrase “ripped to shreds” passed through Verlaine’s mind.

He had studied the creature as it died, watching the wings unfold over its body. He’d watched it shiver with pain, listening to its sharp, animal grunts as they dulled to a weak whine. The wounds were severe—a deep cut to the head and another to the chest—and yet it seemed that the creature would never stop struggling, that its determination to survive was endless, that it would fight on and on, even as blood seeped over the ground in a thick dark syrup. Finally, a milky film had fallen over the creature’s eyes, giving it the vacant stare of a lizard, and Verlaine knew the angel had died at last.

As he looked over his shoulder, his jaw grew tense. Beyond the ring of police stood every variety of creature—a living encyclopedia of beings who would kill him if they knew he could see them for what they were. He paused, assuming the cold, appraising position of a scholar as he cataloged the creatures in his mind: There were congregations of Mara angels, the beautiful and doomed prostitutes whose gifts were such a temptation to humans; Gusian angels, who could divine the past and the future; the Rahab angels, broken beings who were considered the untouchables of the angelic world. He could detect the distinguishing features of Anakim angels—the sharp fingernails, the wide forehead, the slightly irregular skeletal structure. He saw it all with a relentless clarity that lingered in his mind even as he turned back to the frenzy surrounding the murder. The victim’s blood had begun to seep past the contours of the floodlight, oozing into the shadows. He tried to focus upon the ironwork of the Eiffel Tower, to steady himself, but the creatures consumed his attention. He could not take his eyes off their wings fluttering against the inky darkness of the night.

Verlaine had discovered his ability to see the creatures ten years before. The skill was a gift—very few people could actually see angel wings without extensive training. As it turned out, Verlaine’s flawed vision—he had worn glasses since the fifth grade and could hardly see a foot in front of himself without them—allowed light into the eye in exactly the right proportion for him to see the full spectrum of angel wings. He’d been born to be an angel hunter.

Now Verlaine could not block out the colored light rising around the angelic creatures, the fields of energy that separated these beings from the flat, colorless spaces occupied by humans. He found himself tracking them as they moved around the Champ de Mars, noting their movements even while wishing to shut out their hallucinatory pull. Sometimes he was sure that he was going crazy, that the creatures were his personal demons, that he lived in a custom-made circle of hell in which an endless variety of devils were paraded before him, as if amassed for the purpose of taunting and torturing him.

But these were the kinds of thoughts that could land him in a sanitarium. He had to be careful to keep his balance, to remember that he saw things at a higher frequency than normal people, that his gift was something he must cultivate and protect even as it hurt him. Bruno, his friend and mentor, the man who had brought him from New York and trained him as an angel hunter, had given him pills to calm his nerves, and although Verlaine tried to take as few as possible, he found himself reaching for an enamel box in his jacket pocket and tapping out two white pills.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned. Bruno stood behind him, his expression severe. “The cuts are indicative of an Emim attack,” he said under his breath.

“The charred skin confirms that,” Verlaine said. He unbuttoned his jacket—a vintage yellow 1970s polyester sport coat of questionable taste—and stepped close to the body. “Does it have any kind of identification?”

His mentor removed a wallet, its pale suede stained with blood, and began to sort through it. Suddenly Bruno’s expression changed. He held up a plastic card.

Verlaine took the card. It was a New York driver’s license with a photo of a woman with black hair and green eyes. His heart beat hard in his chest as he realized that it belonged to Evangeline Cacciatore. He took a deep breath before turning back to Bruno.

“Do you think this could really be her?” Verlaine said, watching his boss’s expression carefully. He knew that everything—his relationship with Bruno, his connection to the Angelogical Society, the course of his life from that point forward—would depend upon how he handled himself in the next ten minutes.

“Evangeline is a human woman; this is a blue-blooded Nephil female,” Bruno replied, nodding toward the bloody corpse between them. “But be my guest.”

Verlaine slid his fingers between the buttons of the victim’s trench coat, his hands trembling so hard he had to steady himself to make out the shape of her shoulders. The features of the woman were utterly unrecognizable.

He remembered the first time he had seen Evangeline. She had been both beautiful and somber at once, looking at him with her large green eyes as if he were a thief come to steal their sacred texts. She had been suspicious of his motives and fierce in her determination to keep him out. Then he made her laugh and her tough exterior had crumbled. That moment between them had been burned into him, and no matter how he tried, he had never been able to forget Evangeline. It had been over a decade since they had stood together in the library at St. Rose Convent, books open before them, both of them unaware of the true nature of the world. “There were Giants on the Earth in those days, and after.” These words, and the woman who showed them to him, had changed his life.

He hadn’t told anyone the truth about Evangeline. Indeed, no one knew that she was one of the creatures. For Verlaine, keeping Evangeline’s secret had been an unspoken vow: He knew the truth, but he would never tell a soul. It was, he realized now, the only way to remain faithful to the woman he loved.

Verlaine tucked the driver’s license into his pocket and walked away.

McDonald’s, avenue des Champs-Élysées, first arrondissement, Paris

Paris was full of angelologists and, as such, one of the most dangerous places in the universe for an Emim angel like Eno, who had a tendency toward recklessness. Like the rest of her kind, she was tall and willowy, with high cheekbones, full lips, and gray skin. She wore heavy black eye makeup, red lipstick, and black leather, and often wore her black wings openly, unafraid, daring angelologists to see them. The gesture was considered an act of provocation, but Eno didn’t have any intention of hiding. This would be their world soon. The Grigoris had promised her this.

Even so, there were angelologists lurking everywhere in Paris—scholars who looked like they hadn’t left the Academy of Angelology’s archive in fifty years, overzealous initiates taking photographs of whatever creature they could find, angelological biologists looking for samples of angelic blood, and, worst of all as far as Eno was concerned, the teams of angel hunters out to arrest all angelic creatures. These idiots often mistook Golobiums for Emim and Emim for the more pure creatures like the Grigoris. Hunters seemed to be on every corner lately, watching, waiting, ready to take their prey into custody. For those who could detect the hunters, life in Paris was merely inconvenient. For those who could not, each movement through the city was a deadly game.

Of course Eno had strict rules of engagement, and her first and most important rule was to leave the risk of being captured to others. After she had killed Evangeline, she’d removed herself from the scene quickly and walked on the Champs-Élysées, where nobody would think to look for her. She understood that sometimes it was best to hide in plain sight.

Eno folded her hands around the Styrofoam cup, taking in the ceaseless motion of the Champs-Élysées. She would be going back to her masters as soon as possible now that her work in Paris was finished. She’d been assigned to find and kill a young female Nephil. She’d tracked the creature for weeks, watching her, learning her patterns of behavior. She’d become curious about her target. Evangeline was unlike any other Nephil she had seen before. According to her masters, Evangeline was a child of the Grigori, but she had none of the distinguishing characteristics of an angel of her lineage. She had been raised among regular people, had been abandoned by the Nephilim, and—from everything that Eno had observed—was dangerously sympathetic to the ways of humanity. The Grigoris wanted Evangeline dead. Eno never let her masters down.

And they, she was certain, would not let her down either. The Grigoris would take her home to Russia, where she would blend into the masses of Emim angels. In Paris, she was too conspicuous. Now that her work was done, she wanted to leave this dangerous and loathsome city.

• • •

She’d learned the dangers of Parisian angelologists the hard way. Many years ago, when she was young and naïve to the ways of humans, she had nearly been killed by an angelologist. It had been the summer of 1889, during the Paris World’s Fair, and people had flooded into the city to see the newly erected Eiffel Tower. She strolled through the fair and then ventured into the throngs in the fields nearby. Unlike many Emim, she adored walking among the lowly beings that populated Paris, loved to have coffee in their cafés and walk in their gardens. She liked to be drawn into the rush of human society, the exuberant energy of their futile existence.

In the course of her stroll, she noticed a handsome Englishman staring at her from across the Champ de Mars. They’d spoken for some minutes about the fair, then he took her by the arm and led her past the crowds of foot soldiers, the prostitutes and scavengers, past the carriages and horses. From his soft voice and gentlemanly manner, she assumed him to be more elevated than most human beings. He held her hand gently, as if she were too delicate to touch, all the while examining her with the care of a jeweler appraising a diamond. Human desire was something she found fascinating—its intensity, the way love controlled and shaped their lives. This man desired her. Eno found this amusing. She could still recall his hair, his dark eyes, the dashing figure he cut in his suit and hat.

She tried to gauge whether the man recognized her for what she was. He led her away from the crowds, and when they were alone behind a hedge, he looked into her eyes. A change came over him—he’d been gentle and amorous, and now a wash of violence infused his manner. She marveled at his transformation, the changeable nature of human desire, the way he could love and hate her at once. Suddenly the man withdrew his dagger and lunged at her. “Beast,” he hissed, as he thrust the blade at Eno, his voice filled with hatred. Eno reacted quickly, jumping aside, and the knife missed its mark: Instead of her heart, the soldier sliced a gash across her shoulder, cutting through her dress and into her body, leaving the flesh to fold away from her bone like a piece of lace. Eno had turned on him with force, crushing the bones of his throat between her fingers until his eyes hardened to pale stones. She pulled him behind the trees and destroyed all traces of what she had found beautiful in him: His lovely eyes, his skin, the delicate fleshy curl of his ear, the fingers that had—only minutes before—given her pleasure. She took the man’s peacoat and draped it over her shoulders to hide her injury. What she couldn’t hide was her humiliation.

The cut had healed, but she was left with a scar the shape of a crescent moon. Every so often she would stand before a mirror examining the faint line, to remind herself of the treachery that humans were capable of performing. She realized, after reading an account in the newspaper, that the man was an angelologist, one of the many English agents in France in the nineteenth century. She had been led into a trap. Eno had been tricked.

This man was long dead, but she could still hear his voice in her ear, the heat of his breath as he called her a beast. The word beast was embedded in her mind, a seed that grew in her, freeing her from every restraint. From that moment on her work as a mercenary began to please her more and more with each new victim. She studied the angelologists’ behavior, their habits, their techniques of hunting and killing angelic beings until she knew her work in and out. She could smell a hunter, feel him, sense his desire to capture and slaughter her. Sometimes she even let them bring her into custody. Sometimes she even let them act out their fantasies with her. She let them take her to their beds, tie her up, play with her, hurt her. When the fun was over, she killed them. It was a dangerous game, but one she controlled.

• • •

Eno slid on a pair of oversize sunglasses, the lenses black and bulbous. She rarely went outside without them. They disguised her large yellow eyes and her unnaturally high cheekbones—the most distinct Emim traits—so that she looked like a human female. Leaning back in her chair, she stretched her long legs and closed her eyes, remembering the terror in Evangeline’s face, the resistance of the flesh as she slid her nails under the rib cage and ripped it open, the frisson of surprise Eno had felt upon seeing the first rush of blue blood spill onto the pavement. She had never killed a superior creature before, and the experience went against everything she had been trained to do. She had expected a fight worthy of a Nephil. But Evangeline had died with the pathetic ease of a human woman.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and as she reached for it, she checked the crowds walking by, her gaze flicking from humans to angels. There was only one person who used that number, and Eno needed to be certain that she could speak privately. Emim were bound by their heritage to serve Nephilim, and for years, she had simply done her duty, working for the Grigoris out of gratitude and fear. She was of a warrior caste and she accepted this fate. She wanted to do little else but to experience the slow diminishing of a life, the final gasping for breath of her victims.

Fingers trembling, she took the call. She heard her master’s raspy, whispery voice, a seductive voice she associated with power, with pain, with death. He said only a few words, but she knew at once—from the way he spoke, his voice laced with poison—that something had gone wrong.

Quai Branly, seventh arrondissement, Paris

Before he’d found Evangeline dead beneath the Eiffel Tower, Verlaine had had a presentiment of her death. She had appeared to him in a dream, an eerie creature woven of light. She spoke, her voice resounding through the corridors of his mind, her words inaudible at first but then, as he strained to hear them, becoming clearer and clearer. Come to me, she said as she hovered over him, a beautiful and horrible creature, her skin glowing with luminosity, her wings gathered about her shoulders like a gauzy ethereal shawl. He understood that he was dreaming, that she was a figment of his imagination, something he’d conjured up from his subconscious, a kind of demon meant to haunt him. And yet he was terrified when she leaned close and touched him. Placing her cold fingers upon his chest, she seemed to be feeling his heartbeat. Heat passed from her hands and into his body, the current moving from her fingers into his chest, burning through him. He knew with terrifying clarity that Evangeline was going to kill him.

It was always at this moment in the dream that he would wake, unable to breathe, overcome by fear, love, desire, hopelessness, and humiliation at once. He would emerge into consciousness knowing that an angel of darkness had been with him. If not for Bruno’s intervention, Verlaine might still be caught in an endless loop of terror and desire.

Still reeling, Verlaine headed toward the street, trying to reconcile the woman in his dream with the dismembered corpse. His Ducati 250 was parked on the rue de Monttessuy. The very sight of it—the chrome fenders polished, the leather seat buffed—helped bring him back to the present moment. He’d bought the Ducati his first month in Paris and restored it, sanding away the rust and repainting it red. It remained one of his favorite possessions, giving him the feeling of freedom whenever he rode it. As he pulled it off its kickstand, he noticed a jagged scratch gouged into the paint. He swore under his breath and rubbed it to see how deep it went, though, in truth, the scratch was just one of the many abuses the Ducati had endured in recent years. Ironically he associated each dent and scratch with his own experiences over the past decade. He had been injured more times than he could count and—unlike the restored Ducati—he was beginning to show his age. Catching his reflection in a passing storefront window, he noted that the motorcycle was better preserved than he was.

As he reached the quai, something else caught his attention. Later, when Verlaine examined the moment he saw Evangeline, he would tell himself that he’d felt her presence before seeing her, that a change in the atmospheric pressure had taken place, the kind of imbalance created when a gust of cold air sweeps through a warm room. But at the time, he didn’t think. He simply turned and there she was, standing near the Seine. Verlaine recognized the sharpness of her shoulders and the glossy blackness of her hair. He recognized her high cheekbones, the same green eyes that had just stared back at him from the driver’s license. He simply wanted to stare at her, to make certain that it was really her, a flesh and blood being and not a figment of his mind. Verlaine held her eye for a second, and in that moment, he felt a slow turning in his perception, as if some rusty lock had clicked open. He caught his breath. A cold sensation grasped his spine and moved through his body. The mutilated woman below the Eiffel Tower was a stranger. He propped the Ducati on its kickstand and made his way to his Evangeline.

She crossed the street as he grew near and, without giving it a second thought, he fell into step behind her, following her as he would any other target. He wondered if she could sense him behind, feel his eyes upon her. She must have known he was there and purposely led him onward, because she never moved too far ahead, but never allowed him to get too close either. Soon he was close enough to see her reflection appear and disappear in the glass of a parked van, her image silvery, wavering, fluid as a mirage. As the image stabilized he saw that her hair had been cropped in a messy pageboy and she seemed to be wearing dark makeup. She could be any one of the thousands of young women walking through Paris, but her disguise didn’t fool Verlaine. He knew the real Evangeline.

As she increased her pace, he struggled to keep up. The streets were packed with people; Evangeline could disappear easily, in an instant, washing away in the swirl of the crowd. In all the hunts in which he’d participated, he had done his job impeccably. He followed, captured, and then imprisoned the creatures without question. But everything about this chase was different. He wanted to catch her, but he couldn’t follow the usual protocol if he did. Most troubling of all, he only wanted to talk to her, to understand what had happened in New York. He wanted an explanation. He felt he deserved that much.

Verlaine felt the soles of his favorite shoes—a pair of brown leather wing tips he’d worn for years—slipping with each step. A shiver of fear moved through him, gathering into a solid ball in his stomach at the thought of losing her again. He knew that, if she chose, she could easily outrun him. Indeed, she could open her wings and fly away. He had watched her do it before. The last time he had seen her she’d lifted herself away from him, moving high into the vault of the sky, her wings bright under the moon, a beautiful monster among the stars.

He hadn’t told anyone about this—not the angelologists who had been part of the New York mission and not the men and women who certified him as he passed through his courses at the academy. Evangeline’s true identity had remained his secret, and his silence had made him complicit in her deception. His silence was the only gift he could give her, but that gift had left him feeling like a traitor. He’d lied to everyone. Earlier, as he stood at the crime scene, he couldn’t look Bruno in the eyes.

Verlaine hated the feeling. He’d spent too many years hunting the creatures, worked too long and too hard to capture them, to be so shaken. No matter what had happened between them, years had passed. He was a different man. If he caught Evangeline, he would have to capture her. He had to remember what she was and what she was capable of doing to him. If he caught her, he would take her into custody. If she attacked him, he would fight. He needed to move fast, to put his feelings aside. He needed to convince himself that she was just another angel and this was just another routine hunt.

In the distance the lights of the Eiffel Tower glimmered against the night sky, bright as a constellation fallen to earth. Verlaine ran, his hand trembling as he reached for his gun. Drawing it from his belt, he switched it on. With its two hundred volts of electricity, the gun was powerful without being lethal. If placed over the furcula of an angel, and the shot directed into the solar plexus, the creature would be stunned for hours. He didn’t want to use force, but he wasn’t going to let Evangeline slip away again.

Limousine, Pont de l’Alma, above the Seine, Paris

Axicore Grigori peered through the smoky glass of the limousine window. It was a clear spring night, with the streets filled with people, which made it very unlikely that he would leave the dark enclosure of the car. He detested Homo sapiens, and the thought of getting out into the soup of humanity made his skin crawl. When he had to venture out among people, he kept his distance. He didn’t walk among them, he didn’t eat in their restaurants, he traveled in a private jet. He never so much as touched the hand of a human being without feeling deeply, essentially violated. The very idea that his ancestors had been attracted to such vile beings filled him with wonder. What on earth, he wondered, looking at the people walking by, had the Watchers been thinking? How his twin brother, Armigus, had managed to remain in Russia while Axicore found himself on a filthy Paris bridge like some common Gibborim was beyond him.

His great-aunt Sneja Grigori believed that one of these repulsive creatures, a young woman named Evangeline, was the granddaughter of her deceased son, Percival. It all seemed so far-fetched to Axicore—even more so after his most trusted mercenary angel had observed the subject in question for weeks. Eno had reported everything back to Axicore. He learned that Evangeline was short, thin, dark haired, and utterly human in appearance. She lived simply, did not exhibit her wings, had no Nephilistic contacts, and spent the majority of her time moving among normal human beings. She bore none of the typical characteristics of the Nephilim, nor any of the various identifying markings that ran through purebreds, much less the Grigori family traits.

The contrast between them could be drawn by a simple comparison with his own bearing, a perfect exemplar of the Grigori. He was a head taller than human beings, his skin fine and pale, and his eyes white blue. He dressed impeccably, as did Armigus—they often wore matching attire and never the same suit twice. That morning’s shipment had come from their grandfather Arthur’s favorite Savile Row tailor, the brushed velvet smooth and black as the coat of a jaguar. With their elegant clothing and thick blond hair that fell over their shoulders in a chaos of curls, the twins were stunning, classically handsome, startling enough to make the most beautiful women stop and stare, especially on the exceedingly rare occasions that the twins went out into the human world together. In this they resembled all the Grigori men, and the late Percival Grigori in particular. The twins were princes among peasants their mother used to say, regal creatures forced to walk the earth, drawn into the material plane when they should be among the ethereal beings in the heavenly spheres.

Of course, with the dilution of their race over the past millennia, such physical traits were only superficial. The true markings of the Nephilim were more subtle and complicated than that of complexion, eye color, and body type. If Evangeline was, in fact, Sneja’s flesh and blood, Axicore concluded, she was the ugliest Grigori ever born.

Tapping a long, white finger on the window glass, Axicore tried to put aside his repulsion and concentrate upon the task at hand. He had retrieved Eno from an establishment on the Champs-Élysées, and although she sat next to him in the limousine, she was so silent, so ghostly, that he barely registered her presence. He admired her enormously, thought her one of the most fierce Emim he had ever seen, and—although he would never openly admit this—found her much more attractive than most lower angelic creatures. Indeed, Eno was a beautiful killing machine, one he admired and secretly feared, but not the most clever angel in the heavenly spheres. Her outbursts of rage could be violent. He had to handle her with care. And so it was with some delicacy that Axicore resumed the explanation he had begun on the phone. Eno had made a grave error. Evangeline was alive.

“You’re certain?” Eno said, the yellow fire of her eyes piercing the lenses of her dark sunglasses. “Because I never make mistakes.”

She was angry, and Axicore wanted to use her ferocity to his advantage. “Absolutely certain,” he said. “And I’m not the only one—an angelologist is hunting her at this very moment. An angel hunter.”

Eno took off her sunglasses, the light from her eyes breaking through the darkness. “Have you identified him?”

“One of the typical crew,” Axicore said, feeling uneasy at the thought of what she would do to this angel hunter if she caught him. Axicore had seen Eno’s victims. Such gruesome violence almost evoked his sympathy.

“We’ll take care of this now,” Eno said, sliding her sunglasses back over her eyes. “And then we will go home. I want to get out of this horrid city.”

Axicore sat back in his seat, remembering his childhood in Russia. They would leave their city apartments and spend months in the Crimea, where their family estate stood at the edge of the water. The Grigori clan would gather for tea, and he and his brother would unfurl their wings—great golden wings that shimmered like sheets of pounded foil—and lift themselves into the air, performing tricks for their adoring relations. They would do twists and turns and acrobatics that elicited the approval of the older generation, four-hundred-year-old Nephilim who had given up on such athletic maneuverings long before. Their parents were there, dressed entirely in white, gazing up with pride. They were the golden children of an ancient family. They were young, beautiful, with all of creation at their feet. There seemed to be nothing at all that could bring them down to earth.

Passage de la Vierge, seventh arrondissement, Paris

Verlaine felt a cold presence deep in the shadows of the passage and knew that Evangeline was there, standing in the darkness, so close he could feel the icy chill of her breath against his neck.

He took a step back, trying to see her more clearly, but she seemed little more than an extension of the shadows. There were so many things he wanted to say to her, so many questions he’d rehearsed, but he couldn’t begin to formulate them. The contradictions he felt about Evangeline—the affection he’d felt for her, the anger—left him enraged and confused. His training hadn’t prepared him for this. He wanted to take her by the arm and force her to speak to him. He needed to know that he wasn’t imagining everything that happened between them.

Finally, he reached into his pocket and removed the driver’s license. Holding it out to her, he said, “I think you lost something.”

She met his eye and slowly took the card in her hand. “You believed it was me back there.”

“All evidence pointed in that direction,” Verlaine said, feeling his stomach turn at the thought of the bloody mess at the Eiffel Tower.

“There was no other way.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “They were going to kill me.”

“Who was going to kill you?”

“But they made a mistake,” she said, her eyes wide. “I led them in the wrong direction. I let them kill someone else.”

Verlaine felt a strange, double-edged sensation of wanting to protect Evangeline from whoever had tried to kill her and wanting to take her into custody himself. His first instinct was to call Bruno and bring her to their prison in La Forestière. “You’re going to have to give me more than this.”

Evangeline slipped her hand into the pocket of her jacket and removed something large and round, and dropped it into Verlaine’s hand. It was some kind of egg. He examined the hard brilliance of the enamel, the jewels that encrusted the surface like chunks of rock salt. He removed his glasses, cleaned them on his shirt, and slid them on again: The intricacy of the egg clicked into focus. He turned it in his fingers, letting the jewels glint in the weak light.

“Why would they want to hurt you?” he asked, meeting Evangeline’s eyes. Even the green of her irises struck him as hazardous and hypnotic. With this thought came a sharp pang of longing for the person he had once been—trusting, optimistic, young, his future wide open before him. “You’re one of them.”

Evangeline drew close to him, bringing her lips to his ear as she whispered, “You must believe me when I say that I was never one of them. I’ve wandered from place to place trying to understand what I had become. It’s been ten years and still I don’t understand. But I know one thing for certain: I am not like the Grigori.”

Verlaine pulled away, feeling as if he were being broken apart inside. He wanted to believe her, and yet he knew what the Nephilim were capable of doing. She could be lying to him.

“So tell me,” Verlaine said. “What brings you back now?” Verlaine tossed the jeweled egg in the air and caught it in his hand. “The Easter Bunny?”

“Xenia Ivanova.”

“Vladimir’s daughter?” Verlaine asked, turning serious. The death of Vladimir Ivanov had been just one of many fatalities of their failed mission in New York. It had been Verlaine’s first brush with the murderous treachery of their enemies.

“Vladimir was one of the only people I had known outside the convent,” Evangeline said. “He’d been close to my father. His daughter, Xenia, took over the café after he died, and she was kind enough to let me work and live in a small apartment in the back of the shop, deducting the rent from my salary. Years went by this way. I became close to Xenia, although I was never certain if she fully understood the kind of work her father had done, or my family’s connection to him.”

“I’m sure you didn’t go to great lengths to fill her in, either,” Verlaine said.

Evangeline looked at him for a moment, decided to ignore his comment, and continued. “And so I was surprised when, one day last month, Xenia told me that she had something to discuss with me. She took me upstairs to her father’s apartment, a room still cluttered with his possessions, as if he’d only just left. She showed me the egg you have in your hands. She told me she was surprised to have found it among Vladimir’s effects after his death.”

“It’s not really Vladimir’s style,” he said. Vladimir was remembered for his ascetic ruthlessness. His café in Little Italy was a cover for a life of extreme austerity.

“I think he was merely holding this egg for someone else,” Evangeline said. “It was the only object of this kind among his possessions. Xenia found it wrapped in a cloth at the back of one of his suitcases. She believed he’d brought it to New York from Paris in the eighties. Xenia didn’t know what to do with it, so she simply held on to it. But then, a few months ago, she took it to an auction house to have it appraised and, not long after this, strange things started happening. Nephilim began to follow her. They searched her apartment and the café. By the time she told me about the egg, she was terrified. One night two Gibborim broke into her apartment and tried to steal the egg. I killed one and the other escaped. After this I knew that I needed to tell her the truth. I explained everything to her—our fathers’ work, the Nephilim, even my own situation—and, to my surprise, she knew more about Vladimir’s work than I had initially believed. Eventually Xenia agreed to close the shop and disappear. I took the egg. It’s why I came here. I had to find someone who could help me explain what it means.”

“And Xenia?”

“If I hadn’t intervened, Xenia would be dead.”

“Was that her body at the Eiffel Tower?”

“No.” Evangeline shook her head, her expression serious. “That was just some random Nephil who looked a bit like me. I planted my ID on her and led the Emim to believe she was me.”

Verlaine considered this, realizing how far Evangeline had gone in her efforts to survive. “So they think you’re dead,” he said at last.

Evangeline sighed, a look of relief on her face. “I hope so,” she said. “It will give me enough time to hide.”

As Verlaine considered Evangeline, his eyes drifted to her neck, where a chain of bright gold glittered against her skin. She still wore her pendant, the very one she had worn the day they’d met. Legend had it that the infamous angelologist Dr. Raphael Valko had fashioned three amulets from a rare and precious metal called Valkine. One pendant he had worn himself, one he had given to his daughter, Angela, and the third was worn by his wife, Gabriella. Evangeline inherited Angela’s pendant upon her mother’s death; Verlaine wore Gabriella’s pendant, which he had taken when Gabriella died. Verlaine brought his fingers to his neck and pulled out the pendant, showing it to Evangeline.

Evangeline paused, looked for a moment at the pendant. “I was right, then,” she said, reaching for the egg in his hand. The brush of her finger against his palm gave him such a shock that he nearly dropped it. “You’re meant to have this. Gabriella would have wanted it that way. Keep it safe.” She closed her hand around his, as if locking his fingers around the egg.

“They want this thing,” Verlaine said, glancing down at the egg. “But what in the hell is it?”

“I don’t know,” Evangeline said, meeting his eye. “That is why I need you.”

“Me?” Verlaine said, unable to imagine how he could be of any use.

“You’re an angelologist now, aren’t you?” Evangeline asked, her voice challenging him. “If anyone can help me understand this, it’s you.”

“Why not go to the others?” Verlaine asked.

Evangeline stepped away and the air around her seemed to fold, as if heat emanated from her clothes. The smooth surface of the air buckled with electricity. Her human appearance dissolved in a fluctuation of warped space, flesh wavering and twisting as if she were made of nothing but colored smoke. A wash of light exploded around her as her wings unfolded.

Verlaine blinked, holding—for a strange and disorienting moment—Evangeline’s dual selves in his vision, the surface illusion of a woman and the underlying reality of the winged creature. The images of human and angel were like holograms that, with a turn of the light, bled into each other. She opened her wings, extending first one and then the other, rotating them until they stretched to the walls of the passage. They were immense and luminous, the layered feathers deep purple shot through with veins of silver—and yet they were transparent, ephemeral, so light he could see the texture of the brick wall behind them. He watched them vibrate with energy. They pulsed with the slow rhythm of her breathing, brushing her shoulders and sending shivers through her hair.

He leaned against a wall, steadying himself. For years Verlaine had tried to imagine Evangeline’s wings, to reconstruct them. When he had first seen them a decade before, it had been from a distance, and with the untrained eyes of a man who couldn’t tell the difference between the varieties of angels. Now he could decipher all the small distinctions that marked her, subtle as inclusions in quartz. He could see the iridescence of her skin in the shadows, the strange colored glow that appeared around her hair. He walked around her, studying her as if she were a winged statue in the Louvre, and he wondered what it felt like to live outside of time. Evangeline wouldn’t age like human beings, and she wouldn’t die for many hundreds of years. When Verlaine was an old man, Evangeline would be exactly the way he saw her now—as young and lovely as a figure cut from marble. He would die and she would remember his existence as something brief and insignificant. He realized now that she was more special than he could have ever guessed. He could hardly breathe. Evangeline was a thing of wonder, a miracle playing itself out before his eyes.

“Now do you understand why I cannot go to them?” Evangeline whispered.

“Come here,” Verlaine said, and to his surprise, Evangeline stepped toward him. He could feel the movement of the air swirling around her wings, smell the sweet fragrance of her skin. Her wrist, when he took it to feel her pulse, was cold as ice and slicked with the plasma characteristic of the Nephilim. He wanted, suddenly, to bring his lips to her skin. Instead, he pressed his finger to her vein. Her pulse was low and shallow, almost nonexistent.

“Your blood?”

“Blue.”

“Eyesight?”

“Better than perfect.”

“Temperature?”

“Thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes lower.”

“It’s strange,” he said. “You have both human and Nephil characteristics. Your heartbeat is extraordinarily slow—less than two beats per minute, much slower than the average Nephil rate.” He squeezed her arm. “And you’re practically frozen. But your skin is flushed. You look every bit as human as I do.”

Evangeline took a breath, as if bracing herself. “Have you killed many creatures like me?”

“I have never in my life encountered a creature like you, Evangeline.”

“The way you say that,” she said, holding his gaze, “makes it seem like you understand what I’ve become.”

“Everything I’ve done, all the hunting, has been so that I could understand you.”

“Then tell me,” Evangeline asked, her voice trembling. “What am I?”

Verlaine looked at her, aware that his measured caution was giving way to the strength of his feelings. At last he said, “It is clear from your wings—their color and size and strength—that you are one of the elite angels. You are a Grigori, a descendant of the great Semyaza, granddaughter of Percival, great-grandaughter of Sneja. But you are human, too. You are incredible, a kind of miracle.”

He stepped away and looked at Evangeline’s wings once more, touching the gooseflesh under the feathers. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” he said. “What does it feel like to fly?”

“I wish I could explain it,” she said. “The sensation of weightlessness, the lightness, the buoyancy, the feeling that I might evaporate in a current of air. When I was human, I could not have imagined what it was like to step into a void, to fall fast and then sweep up, suddenly, into the wind. At times it feels like I belong less on the earth than to the sky, that I must recalibrate all of my movements just to remain earthbound. I used to fly out over the Atlantic, where I wouldn’t be seen, and I would go for miles and miles without tiring. Sometimes the sun would rise and I would see my reflection in the water and think that I should keep going. I would have to force myself to go back.”

“It’s in your nature to fly,” Verlaine said. “But what about the other characteristics of the Nephilim? Did you experience those as well?”

Her expression changed, and Verlaine could see at once that she was afraid of her capabilities. “My senses are slightly altered—everything is stronger and sharper; I don’t need food or water in the way I used to—but I have none of the desires attributed to the Nephilim. I am physically different, but my inner life is unaltered. My spirit has not changed. I may have inherited the body of a demon,” Evangeline said softly, “but I would never willingly become one.”

Verlaine touched the pendant resting against her skin. It was so cold that a sheet of frost covered the metal. His finger melted a watery print on its surface. “You’re freezing.”

“Did you expect my skin to be like yours?” Evangeline asked.

“I’ve been in crowds of Nephilim; I’ve spoken to them in close proximity. You can feel the ice running in their veins—they are cold, but it is a different kind of coldness, like the dead walking among us. They have no soul and so they feed on the souls of human beings. Even a mediocre angelologist can identify them easily. But you’re not like that. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would have believed you to be human. You could pass for one of us.”

“Do I frighten you?”

Verlaine shook his head. “I have to trust my instincts.”

“Meaning?”

“That you may look like them, but you’re not one of them. That you’re different. That you’re better.”

Evangeline’s skin shimmered in the half light of the moon. He wanted, suddenly, to pull her close, to warm her in his arms. Perhaps he could help her. He felt as if nothing mattered but this moment with Evangeline. He brushed her cheek with his finger and slipped his arm around her, feeling the dusty surface of feathers brush over his hand as he drew her to him. He wanted, for just a moment, to feel as if the world beyond them was all a distant dream, an unreality. Angelologists and Nephilim, the hunters and the hunted—all of this didn’t matter. In all of existence, there was only the two of them. Verlaine wanted the illusion to last forever.

But holding her was like trying to embrace a shadow. She slipped away, her attention drawn to something behind him. Verlaine caught a sweep of movement in the corner of his eye. Suddenly a car pulled into the passage, its headlights breaking through the darkness. The door opened and an Emim angel leaped from the car. Before he could move, Evangeline ran through the passage and, with a speed and grace that he recognized as belonging to the most adept creatures, she lifted into the air, landing on the rooftop above. The Emim angel opened her wings—large black wings, immense and powerful—and flew after her.

1973 Alfa Romeo, rue Bosquet, seventh arrondissement, Paris

Bruno roved the streets, unsure of where to look for Verlaine. He’d discovered his Ducati abandoned near the Seine, and Bruno knew instantly that his strange evening was only going to get stranger. Something was going on with Verlaine, that much was obvious. He loved his Ducati and was rarely without it. Leaving it thrown on the sidewalk—especially at this time of night, when the restaurants and cafés were closed and the seventh arrondissement was little more than a calcified forest of shuttered windows—was wholly out of character.

Bruno reached into his pocket, took out a flask filled with Glenfiddich Solera Reserve, and took a long drink. The whole damn neighborhood was full of Nephilim. After his time in New York, he thought he’d seen the worst of it. But the area between the Bon Marché and the Eiffel Tower had proved to be the most concentrated collection of old-world Nephil families in the world.

Over the course of Bruno’s time as an angel hunter—thirty years of service in Jerusalem, Paris, and New York—he had watched the Nephilim grow more and more reckless. It used to be that the creatures feared exposure, creating elaborate methods to shroud their existence in secrecy. For many hundreds of years, the creatures’ survival depended upon blending into the surrounding population of humans. Now there seemed to be a total disregard for such machinations. Among the new generations of angels there was a tendency toward exhibitionism. Reports, confessions, photographs, and videos were everywhere. Once such testimonies would have been relegated to sensational magazines, their claims printed next to UFO and yeti sightings. Bruno had watched it all with interest and, in recent years, growing alarm. Such exhibitionism was pure arrogance: The creatures believed that they were strong enough to come out in the open. And yet, strange as it might have seemed, Bruno had found that the more the angels exposed of their secret lives, the less shocking they were to the human population. There was no general awareness of them, no fear, no real inquiry into the nature of the Nephilim. Human beings were so saturated with the supernatural that they’d become desensitized. Bruno had to admit that there was a certain brilliance in it all: The creatures had chosen the perfect moment in history to step out of their shadow existence. After thousands of years of living in seclusion, they’d embraced the present era of exhibitionism.

Of all his agents, he believed Verlaine best equipped to handle the change in the creatures’ behavior. Bruno had studied Verlaine at the crime scene as attentively as he’d studied the corpse and, as always, he’d liked what he saw: a young man with the potential to become a great leader. Sure, Verlaine was still struggling to find his place in their organization, but he was talented. He was also unusual, without the typical family history, without the normal education, and with a scary talent for locating and capturing angels. Acting on gut feeling alone, Bruno had plucked Verlaine out of his ordinary life as an academic in New York, brought him to Paris, and trained him with a rigor he saved for only the strongest and brightest recruits. He’d seen something unique in him, a rare balance of intelligence and intuition. And, sure enough, once he had entered training, Verlaine exemplified all the elements of an angel hunter—a sixth sense for the creatures mixed with the physical stamina to capture them. And, on top of everything, Verlaine had the remarkable ability to see the angels plainly, without assistance.

Within the various departments of the society, angel hunters were the most covert, well funded, and selective. As director of their Paris bureau, Bruno handpicked his team, training each member personally. It was a painstaking process, as delicate and refined as the education of a samurai warrior. Verlaine had bypassed the academic track—a difficult and lengthy course of study rooted in the traditional practices of textual and archival study—and began his apprenticeship as a hunter straightaway.

Now he was one of Bruno’s best. The young American scholar who’d once been in limbo about his future could now decipher the presence of angels with extraordinary precision. He understood the physiology of the Nephilim and demonstrated a clear ability to differentiate between human and angelic anatomy. He could detect the small distinguishing physical markings of the Nephilim—the sharp, opalescent fingernails, the wide forehead, the slightly irregular skeletal structure, the large eyes. He understood that the Nephil body was designed for flight, with thin, hollow bones that rendered their skeletons as light and agile as birds’. He noticed the scintillating quality of the skin, the way it shimmered as if dusted with tiny crystals. The structure of the wings themselves—the efficient retraction, the airy composition of the feathers, the struts and trusses that fortified the muscles—had fascinated Verlaine from the start. He had mastered every method of identifying angels, capturing them, binding them, and interrogating them, skills known by only the elite of the society. Bruno believed Verlaine could already be considered a great hunter, but he suspected that his protégé could become more: a mythic angel hunter, the kind of hunter to emerge once in a generation.

And still there was something holding Verlaine back, a weakness that Bruno could feel lingering below the surface but could not readily identify. He’d made it his personal responsibility to help Verlaine overcome this Achilles’ heel and succeed.

Something in the distance caught his eye. It seemed to him that there was a commotion at the far end of the street. Bruno pulled over, cut the engine, and got out of the car, trying to see more clearly. There was an Emim angel, its black wings stretched, the light of the moon casting a gray brilliance over the feathers, giving them a smoky fluidity. Although Bruno couldn’t see beyond the creature, he was sure—from the belligerent stance and the extended wings—that it was preparing to attack. He was certain that an Emim attack had just occurred at the Eiffel Tower. Given the proximity of the passage, there was a good chance that he’d found the killer.

He pulled out his smartphone, snapped a series of photographs of the angel, and, after logging onto the society’s encrypted network, sent the images for identification. A series of Emim profiles popped onto the screen, but there was only one that interested him.

Name: Eno

Species: Emim

Height: 200 cm

Hair color: Black

Eye color: Black

Domain: Unknown. Three unconfirmed sightings in St. Petersburg, Russia (see call reports).

Distinguishing features: Classic Emim angel features; black wings measuring twelve feet wide by four feet high; normally works exclusively with members of Nephilim species.

Surveillance history: First documented angelological encounter occurred in 1889, during the Paris World’s Fair, and resulted in the death of an agent. Subsequent encounters have included extended surveillance during the Second World War (see agent notes in dossier), DNA sample retrieved from strands of hair, and a series of photographs taken by agents at various Paris locations (see photographs below). Eno is characterized by outbursts of extreme violence, especially sexual violence enacted upon human males she has seduced (see autopsy reports).

Although the surveillance report on Eno suggested she was in St. Petersburg, Bruno was certain that she was the angel at the end of the street, and that she was responsible for the murder at the Eiffel Tower. Bruno recognized Eno’s signature in the brutality of the slaughter, the great skill and strength of the killer, the peculiar way the body had been mutilated. He took a deep breath and tucked his phone into his pocket. Nothing had changed. Eno was as sadistic as ever.

In his twenties, he had come under Eno’s spell during a hunt. She was unbelievably deft at evading their best agents, a vicious Emim who had been wanted for over a hundred years, and Bruno was determined to capture her. He’d known she was deadly. One of the murdered agents cited in Eno’s profile had suffered third-degree burns over his chest, indicative of electro-induction shock, and his body had been found with rope burns to the neck, wrists, and ankles, signifying that he’d been tied up and tortured. Lacerations to the face, torso, buttocks, and back confirmed this. He had been castrated and dumped in the Seine.

Bruno understood the kind of creature he was dealing with, but when he was near Eno, it was as if he had stepped into a field of electricity, one that made all rational thought impossible. Of course, the original attraction between the Watchers and humans was purely physical, a dark and persistent sexual allure, a phenomenon of sheer lust, something that didn’t disappear over time. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he’d fallen into a dangerous, obsessive pattern of hunting her. That he could lose his place in the society, that he could be disgraced or even killed—all of this had faded in the pursuit of Eno. She was beautiful, but that wasn’t what interested Bruno. There was something hypnotic about her very existence, something dangerous and exciting about the knowledge of what she would try to do to him if he succeeded in capturing her. She made him feel alive even as she planned to kill him.

Passage de la Vierge, seventh arrondissement, Paris

Verlaine climbed onto the ledge of a window, grasped the iron bars of the balcony, and, swinging his legs to gain momentum, pulled himself up toward the rooftop, the soles of his wing tips slipping as he climbed. He took a breath and continued. There were four more balconies above him, each one just out of reach, each one a step closer to Evangeline. He could see her there, above, perched on the roof tiles like a gargoyle.

By the time he’d hoisted himself over the balustrade of the final balcony, his muscles burned. The resistance felt good. His body was lean, his muscles tight and long, his endurance high. He would be forty-three years old in less than a week and he was in the best condition of his life, able to run for miles without breaking a sweat. Verlaine threw one leg over the ironwork balustrade and pushed himself onto the slate-roof tiles.

The Emim angel swooped past him, the wings brushing against his back as she flew into the sky. He felt the shiver of air against his skin, felt the strength of the creature’s body as it slid past. If he were to grab her wings, she would take him with her into the air. He watched her twist upward, the lights and rooftops of Paris stretching beyond. As the Emim angel lowered herself to the rooftop, Evangeline rose. Soon the two creatures stood at the center of the rooftop, one facing the other, their wings moving in time.

There was no doubt in Verlaine’s mind that the Emim was an exceptionally powerful angel. There was a rarefied, ghostly transparency to her skin and a certain distinction to her carriage that marked her as the higher order of warriors. As he examined the creature’s bone structure and facial features he saw that everything—her large, alien eyes and her sinuous body—coalesced to form a strange and inhuman beauty. One rarely came across such a striking Emim. He took a deep breath and wondered what kind of god would fashion such a seductive and evil being.

Verlaine heard something behind him and turned to see Bruno emerge from a balcony just below. He knew that he should have called for assistance right away, that following Evangeline without backup went against all that he’d been trained to do, but Verlaine hadn’t even thought to alert Bruno.

“I see you have a death wish,” Bruno said.

“I thought that was one of the criteria for this job.”

“Going solo against a creature like Eno is suicide,” Bruno said, gasping for breath as he pulled himself over the ledge. “Believe me, I’ve been there.”

Verlaine noted the hesitation in Bruno’s movements and the self-conscious way he spoke, and strained to imagine what sort of connection to Eno could provoke this reaction in his boss. Veraline turned to the two angels facing off at the center of the rooftop. “I think there’s something else happening here.”

Verlaine stared at Evangeline and Eno for a moment, as if considering their actions with the eye of an anthropologist. The Emim angel traced a circle around Evangeline, marking her territory, and slowly opened her enormous black wings. They were magnificent, falling in sweeping tiers, the small feathers graduating into large opaque bursts of plumage. While the powdery feathers appeared heavy and substantial, he knew that if he were to touch them, his hand would pass through, as if skimming through a projection of light. Most Emim were repulsive, but this one was alluring, with all of the defects of the breed altered to create a disturbing and dark beauty. Verlaine was captivated. He wanted to remember each minute detail of what he was seeing, to store it in his mind so that he could examine the creature again in the future.

As if to demonstrate the power and agility of her wings, Eno curled them around her body and, with a pulse of strength, puffed them outward, so that they flared like the hood of a cobra. Although the subject of years of intensive investigation, Verlaine was never quite prepared for the mystery, the sheer inexplicable magic, of angels’ wings. Strength, breeding, and classification in the heavenly sphere—all of this became instantly evident with a flash of a wing.

When Evangeline looked down at her opponent preparing to attack, she opened her wings in response, so that a layer of purple light wrapped around her body in a shimmering cloud. Silver streaks shot through the feathers, quick and electric, as if charged with a current. She swiveled and turned, moonlight sliding over her. The display was meant to terrify and impress.

“Pay close attention,” Bruno whispered, his manner agitated. “You might never see an identification ritual like this again.” He leaned closer to Verlaine, lowering his voice further. “First, they will display their wings to establish hierarchy. When there is a great disparity in strength, the weaker angel will submit straightaway. But clearly this match isn’t going to be like that. There are two females creatures, both with extraordinary wings, one with a pedigree that should put her among the elite angels, the other with the strength of a mercenary. The dominant creature isn’t obvious. If they can’t establish a pecking order, they’ll fight a duel.”

Verlaine watched, fear growing in his stomach. The duel was an ancient angelic ritual, one that was considered outdated by modernized Nephilim. For centuries the custom had remained embedded in Russia, however, where the presence of the most powerful Nephilim, those descending from ancient angelic families, reside. Human beings once copied the practice, challenging one another in the name of honor, marking off paces and shooting at close range. In time, human beings had left the practice behind. Now only the most traditional Nephilim fought duels.

In the abstract, Verlaine found the ritual to be beautiful, a kind of call-and-response between creatures of strong but quite distinct species. Verlaine had watched archival footage of duels between Nephilim many times, but Eno’s aggressive posturing, and Evangeline’s defensive reaction, was unlike anything he had seen in the case studies he’d encountered. A duel between angels was theoretically a confrontation to the death. Only one of the angels would make it out alive. And although Evangeline was of a higher species of angel, he couldn’t help but sense that Eno would win.

Evangeline fixed the angel in her gaze. Verlaine could see that she was struggling with her thoughts, that the confrontation was unexpected, that she didn’t want to fight. He remembered what she had said about choosing not to become like the Nephilim, about being born with the characteristics of the beasts but refusing to accept her fate. Every impulse told her to kill Eno, and yet he knew she would not allow herself to do it.

Suddenly, Eno leaped into the air, her wings pushing her high above the rooftop once more. Evangeline stretched her wings and swooped into the sky. Eno hovered, waiting for Evangeline, watching her, preparing to attack. In a swirl of motion, the fight began. From a distance they looked like dragonflies twisting and circling in the moonlight.

As Verlaine studied their movements, he saw that Evangeline was far more adept than he had initially thought. Eno dove and struck, harrying Evangeline, darting at her, circling her, teasing her. Evangeline responded, slamming into Eno full force. Eno fell back, tumbling through the air. Recovering herself, she held her knees to her body, pushed herself forward, and turning in a somersault, spun once, twice, three times, gaining momentum with each rotation until she was a ball of fire. She launched herself at Evangeline, striking her with a force that threw her to the roof in a clatter of slate tiles. She lay still, stunned from the force of her fall.

With an elegant flick of her wings, Eno descended and walked to Evangeline. She was trembling from the effort, her long black hair falling over her shoulders, her breathing heavy. She stood over Evangeline and drew her wings back, preparing to deliver a final blow, when Evangeline pushed Eno with an inhuman strength, landing a hit to the solar plexus.

“Very nice,” Bruno said under his breath, and Verlaine had to agree: The solar plexus was the weakest point of all angelic creatures. A solid strike there could end the duel in a second.

“The Emim angel isn’t wearing a shield,” Verlaine noted, surprised. Mercenary angels often protected thier chest.

“She likes the challenge,” Bruno said. “And if she gets hit, she likes the pain.”

Eno buckled, raising her hands to defend herself. Evangeline kicked again, striking her with enormous force, her movements precise, perfectly delivered, vicious. In a matter of seconds she gained dominance over her opponent, pinning her to the floor, pressing her boot into the curve of her elegant neck, as if to crush her throat. Evangeline was the stronger angel. She had the power and the skill to kill Eno if she chose, kill her without effort, kill her as easily as if she were pressing the body of an insect under her boot. Despite himself, Verlaine was proud of her. He watched, waiting for her to deliver the death blow.

Instead, Evangeline bent on one knee and folded her wings over her shoulders in submission. Verlaine stared, shocked, as Eno recovered her bearing and, losing no time, began to bind Evangeline’s hands behind her back. Evangeline met his eye, and he knew, with one look, that this act of surrender was a message for him. Evangeline had the powers of the Nephilim, but she chose not to be one of them. It was clear now that all his dreams, and every angel he had tracked, had led him back to Evangeline. Now he was about to lose her again.

Bruno must have been thinking the same thing, because he was ready to go after Evangeline. He stepped forward, his gun in his hand. Verlaine knew the standard procedure: Shoot the creature with an electric stunning device, sending a stream of electricity at the angel until the wings were immobilized. The stunned creature would lose control and fall to the ground, where the angel hunter would bind it. Verlaine felt a rush of panic at the thought of harming Evangeline. Although the method was meant to simply stun the furcula, the force of the electricity could cause enormous pain.

“Don’t shoot,” Verlaine whispered, panic making him feel unsteady as he moved across the slate tiles toward Bruno.

“It’s not Evangeline I’m after,” Bruno said under his breath.

Eno yanked Evangeline to her feet, wrapped an arm around her waist, and, with a push of her wings, flew into the night. Bruno and Verlaine stood in silence, watching Eno ascend. It seemed to Verlaine that a part of himself was in Eno’s hands, that as she moved farther and farther into the sky, he, too, was beginning to fade away. When Bruno put his hand on Verlaine’s shoulder, Verlaine wanted to believe that his mentor understood his burning anger, his rage, his need for revenge. “We’re going after them,” Verlaine said.

“It’s useless to try to track Eno in Paris,” Bruno said, as he walked to the edge of the roof and began to climb down to the balcony. “If we want to capture her, we’ll have to hunt her on her own territory.”