Angelopolis (16 page)

“Easy does it,” Bruno called. “They come back stronger and meaner if you kill them.”

Verlaine saw, from the corner of his eye, that the Russians had cornered the second Raiphim. A hunter lunged forward and grabbed one of its stalky wings. The creature struggled and fell backward, its wings whipping through the air. In the frenzy, it sliced a gash across the exposed skin below the hunter’s motorcycle helmet. He gasped and fell to the pavement, holding a gloved hand to the wound. The creature moved in, sensing weakness, and—just as he was about to come down on the wounded man—Verlaine stepped between them, trying to hold him off. The monster struck Verlaine and his mouth filled with fresh blood. He spit, trying to clear the taste. The creature was coming at him a second time when one of the Russian hunters slapped a collar around its neck. As if a switch had been flipped, the angel fell to the ground, its wings folding under it.

The twins stood at the center of the road, watching the fight with cool detachment. They were exact replicas of Percival Grigori—not the decrepit Percival Verlaine had known in New York City ten years before but the young and healthy Percival from Angela Valko’s film. He studied them, perplexed, wondering who they were and how it had happened that there was no record of them anywhere. According to Bruno—and to the rest of the hunters who relied on profiling—if a creature didn’t exist in their database, it didn’t exist at all.

Whoever these Nephilim were, Eno was serving them. She stepped forward, protecting them, her wings outstretched. The twins allowed her to shield them, standing at a remove, watching the angel hunters with growing alarm.

“They’re looking for something,” Bruno said, scanning the crowd.

Verlaine glanced over the plaza, hoping to find a backup team of angelologists ready to fight. They were at the very heart of St. Petersburg, across from the Hermitage, a location that complicated matters. There would be police there any minute, and Verlaine couldn’t be sure that they would be friendly. The sky began to glow pink with twilight in the background, smoky and dim. Lights around the square were coming on, throwing a pale, eerie glow over the Winter Palace, its stone creamy as white chocolate.

Bruno was right: Eno was looking for something. Wiping blood from his eyes, Verlaine tried to anticipate what she would do next. If she were waiting for other Emim, it would be next to impossible to fight them. If they hoped to find Evangeline, they would need to take Eno down carefully, without killing her. They approached in tandem, one man on each side, Verlaine centering his attention on Eno.

“If you manage to get the egg,” Bruno whispered, “get on the motorcycle and get the hell out of here. Don’t stay to help and don’t look back.”

Motioning for the hunters to follow him, Verlaine closed in. When Eno didn’t back away, Verlaine made a grab for the egg, hazarding a guess that it was in a pocket of her cape, and hit the jackpot. He scooped it up, feeling its cold weight in his hand, and made his way toward his motorcycle. As he threw his leg over the bike, he felt a cold shadow fall over him, an icy sensation that penetrated his clothes and chilled him to the bone. Suddenly, quick as a viper striking its prey, Eno pulled him to the ground. He pulled his gun from his belt, aiming it at her chest and—although she was moving and he couldn’t be certain of his shot—pulling the trigger. A burst of electricity knocked the gun from his hands, eliminating all hope for a second shot, but he could tell from the strength of the surge that he wouldn’t need one.

He had stunned her. She clasped her arms over her chest, moaning in pain. A female angel hunter—Verlaine guessed her to be one of their elite by the skillful way she reacted—threw him a collar. Verlaine opened it and went for Eno’s neck. He had been trained to act quickly, to disarm while the creature was stunned, to lock the collar in one strong gesture. Once it was in place, the angel would sink into a state of drowsy submission, allowing the angelologist to take it into custody with ease. Verlaine followed this procedure perfectly. Yet, as he moved to secure the collar, Eno struck back. He fell, knocking the wind from his lungs. The collar slid from his hands, skittering across the pavement. Verlaine couldn’t breathe. He was paralyzed.

In a violent strike, Eno pinned Verlaine to the ground, pressing the stiletto of her boot into the curve of his neck, as if to puncture his throat. She knelt over him, placing her hands over his chest, her wrists meeting above his heart. A shock of electricity moved through him, and a low, grating sound filled Verlaine’s hearing. It wasn’t a sound he recognized, and it was impossible to tell if the noise was something generated in his own mind—the mental clatter of terror ringing in his ears—or if Eno was causing this bizarre music to move through him. Although he had studied the Nephilim’s use of vibration to stun human victims—it was one of their many tactics to derange the senses before a kill—Verlaine had never heard of an Emim angel having the power to do so.

Verlaine struggled, pushing against her, feeling her wings take hold of him as she pressed her hands harder onto his chest. He could feel a sharp, vibrating pulse pounding over the beating of his heart. He had seen the victims of angelic electroattacks. Their bodies were charred to black cinders. A wave of fear and panic struck him. Eno was going to kill him.

Heat slithered over his skin, as if he had fallen into a pit of boiling oil. He might have screamed—he heard his voice in his ears, but had no sensation of using it. Somewhere in the distance there were footfalls, gunshots, the echo of Bruno’s voice. A brilliance subsumed him, and in a burst of heat, the strength of which overwhelmed his body and mind, Verlaine lost consciousness.

The Fourth Circle

GREED

Burgas, Black Sea Coast, Bulgaria

V
era watched the sky as the plane descended. The flight from St. Petersburg to Burgas had been four hours of relentless turbulence, the Cessna twisting in sharp currents of air. Nevertheless, she had fallen asleep the moment the plane took off. The dips and jags of the plane blended into the liquidity of her dreams. She couldn’t remember what she dreamed but felt a weightlessness at the back of her mind, distant yet vivid.

The airport was a small, regional outpost with a single jet parked on the tarmac. She took in the concrete building, the swaths of muddy lots around the airfield, the barbed wire spiraling at the top of the chain-link fence. She had never been to Azov’s Black Sea outpost before and had seized this opportunity to see for herself what the great expeditions to Bulgaria—the first taken in the twelfth century and the second during the Second World War—might have been like. She found that the airport looked tired, run-down, as if it were recovering from a long, abusive winter. The sky, however, was filled with a lingering spring light. Vera slid on her sunglasses and followed the other passengers.

She was greeted at the end of the runway by a pair of security guards and ushered through a mesh gate, where a black Mercedes jeep waited, ostentatious and anonymous at once. She hadn’t been asked for her passport: Her presence in Bulgaria would not be registered. Officially, she had never entered the country.

A woman with black hair and deeply tanned skin greeted her from the driver’s seat. She introduced herself as Sveti and told her that Bruno had called hours before about Vera’s arrival and her requirements while in Bulgaria. She said, “If you’re hungry, help yourself.”

Vera opened a wicker basket filled with cucumber and tomato sandwiches, an egg and feta cheese pastry Sveti called
banitza
, stuffed grape leaves, bottles of Kamenitza beer and Gorna Banya mineral water. She couldn’t imagine eating much after her morning with Nadia but nonetheless spread a cloth napkin on her lap and took a sandwich.

“We are currently outside of Burgas,” Sveti said, pulling away from the airport, the tires kicking gravel as she turned onto a paved road. “About twenty-five minutes from Sozopol. Once we arrive I will take you to the Angelological Society of Bulgaria Dive Center, where we will meet with Dr. Azov. Our outpost has been here for years, but somehow we’ve managed to stay off the radar. He’s been doing work nobody could dream existed. And yet the rest of the world has never come calling before. You are the first foreign angelologist in ages to visit us.”

Vera stared out the window as they drove through the city of Burgas, gas stations and a McDonald’s marking the way. They passed dour concrete apartment buildings, a Lukoil station, and any number of makeshift fruit-and-vegetable stands. Traffic was sparse, and Sveti took full advantage of the open road, driving faster and faster. As they made their way south, the two-lane highway swung out to the water’s edge, skirting the jagged coastline. They passed a shipping yard filled with industrial barges and clusters of houses that seemed ready to tip into the water. The Black Sea glinted in the sunlight, an enormous pool of green-blue, still and calm as a sheet of glass. The peculiarity of the color, Sveti informed her, was due to a certain variety of algae that bloomed in the spring. Normally the water was a steely gray, a shade more in keeping with its dark name.

“We’re nearly there,” Sveti said, turning off the highway and onto a winding road that overlooked the water. A village rose before them, perched high on a promontory.

“Sozopol was once called Apollonia,” Sveti said. “The Greeks traded from the port, and it became an important outpost on the Black Sea. Obviously much has changed since then: the Romans came, and then the Ottomans, and then the Russians. I’ve been visiting this place since I was as a child, when Sozopol was a small fishing village where families vacationed every summer.” Sveti slowed on the winding road. “Then the village itself was contained on an arm of land that reaches into the Black Sea. Since that time there has been massive development. Hotels and clubs have sprung up on every vacant piece of land. A modern section of the town has taken over the opposite side of the bay. It used to be a kind of paradise. Now, well, now it is like everything else: all about business. At least it is still quiet in the spring.”

They drove along a harbor, past sailboats and fishing vessels, reams of net hanging from the sides. Sveti stopped the jeep, cut the engine, and jumped out, gesturing for Vera to follow. She stretched, feeling the sunlight on her skin. Suddenly the cold drafts of the wind from the Neva seemed a world away.

Vera glanced up at the village. It rose behind the harbor, displaying a warren of narrow streets. She studied a house poised upon the hill. The construction appeared to be ancient—the first floors were built entirely of stone, windowless, as if to resist the onslaught of water, with a wooden second floor that overhung the stone base. There was a small terrace laden with strings of drying peppers, bundles of herbs, and wet laundry. An old woman stared down at them, a pipe hanging from her lips, her hands crossed over her chest, incurious as to what was happening below.

Within minutes of their arrival a motorboat arrived at the water’s edge. Vera and Sveti climbed aboard, took seats, and held tight to a metal railing on the boat’s edge. The driver turned the wheel and the boat angled away from Sozopol as they headed into the calm waters of the Black Sea.

“The research center is on St. Ivan Island,” Sveti said, pointing to a landmass in the middle of the bay, where a lighthouse sat at the highest point.

“The island was inhabited by Thracians between the fourth and seventh centuries
B.C.
, but the lighthouse—or an early version of it—wasn’t constructed until the Romans arrived in the first century
B.C.
The island was considered holy, and has always been revered as a place of mystical discovery. The Romans would have found temples and monastic chambers built by the Thracians. To their credit, they preserved the nature of the island: A temple of Apollo was built and St. Ivan has remained a place of contemplation, ritual, worship, and secrets.” Sveti said, “We’ll dock in a few minutes, which leaves me just enough time to give you an update. As I understand it, you are well acquainted with Dr. Azov, but perhaps it is best if we start from the beginning.”

“No need,” Vera said. “I know that Azov has occupied the center on St. Ivan Island for over three decades—since before I was born. His outpost was created in the early eighties, when a body of research pointed to the presence of well-preserved artifacts under the Black Sea. Before this, angelologists stationed in Bulgaria worked near the Devil’s Throat in the Rhodope mountain chain, where they monitored the buildup of Nephilim and, of course, acted as a barrier should the Watchers escape. But as information came to light about the significance of the Black Sea—of Noah and the sons of Noah, in particular—Azov petitioned for an outpost here as well.”

“Clearly you’ve followed his work,” Sveti said. “Yet I wonder if you or your colleagues are aware that we are, at this very moment, working on the most exciting recovery project of the decade.”

“I assume that almost anything with Dr. Azov behind it would be of that nature,” she said.