Angelopolis (24 page)

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

V
era 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.”