Angelopolis: A Novel (ANGELOLOGY SERIES)

by Danielle Trussoni

  If Eno had detected Verlaine, she didn’t alter her behavior in the least. She stepped off Nevsky Prospect, toward the Neva, her pace quickening. Verlaine increased his speed, his determination to catch her growing stronger each second. Her stiletto heels made her seem enormous among the human beings around her. He walked faster and faster, until finally he broke into a run, the cool wind blowing through his hair. It was not a question of whether he could catch her—he was determined to apprehend her no matter what it took. Rather it was a question of how far she would go to evade him. If he knew anything at all about the Emim, he knew that Eno would keep going.

  Even as he followed her, something in him pulled back. He saw himself at a remove, as if he were outside of the scene, looking on his movements from high above the city: a man in a bloodstained yellow sport coat pushing his way along the crowded bridge over the river, dodging traffic as he crossed the street at the Hermitage.

  Verlaine glanced at the great block of the Winter Palace rising before him once again. The buildings seemed even more massive in the afternoon sunlight than they had when he’d arrived before dawn. It seemed like a lifetime ago when he’d held out the egg, unaware that it was more than an ornate bauble.

  When Eno turned down a tree-lined side street, Verlaine saw his opening. Although the labyrinthine ancient quarter behind the Winter Palace wasn’t as sheltered as he would have liked—not a dark alley or an enclosed courtyard or a deserted tunnel in a subway station—it would have to do. He didn’t have much time to make his move. If he was going to get her, it had to be now.

  As if sensing his intention, Eno increased her pace. He matched her gait, gaining on her from behind, his entire body tingling with anticipation. After all of the years of tracking angels, he still found the hunt exhilarating and terrifying. Eno’s effect upon him—the mixture of fear and disbelief that left him jittery and anxious—was similar to what he’d felt the first time he had chased a creature, years before. He moved closer and closer, until he was dangerously, recklessly near her, so close that he could smell her thick scent—a musky smell that marked her kind. He’d first heard the scent described as ambroisal—it is in some of the earliest recorded descriptions of the creatures—but to Verlaine it was a rotten odor, like a decaying animal, an odor that distinguished the lesser breeds from the more refined scent of the Nephilim. He felt the air chill between them and he grew tense, overwhelmed by the proximity. Her pale skin glowed; her features were sharp, aquiline. When she looked over her shoulder, he saw that her eyes were amber, more golden than anything in the natural world. The very traits that painters had used to represent angels from the Renaissance onward were imprinted upon her face: She had wide symmetric eyes, a broad forehead, and high cheekbones, the characteristics that had come to be the hallmark of angelic beauty. It was no mystery why angel hunters kept chasing her. Eno was ravishing.

  As they rounded a corner, Eno stopped and faced Verlaine. Her golden eyes rested on his, challenging him to come closer. A delicate white membrane had fallen over her eyes, creating a milky sheath, like the eyes of a reptile. She blinked and the film retracted. For a terrifying moment he felt that she would kiss him. A shiver of electricity passed through him, a kind of recognition that Verlaine didn’t want to admit feeling, but the truth of it hit him squarely in the chest: Eno was one of the most frightening, most seductive creatures he’d ever seen.

  He needed to hit her just hard enough to stun her, so he could get a cuff around her neck. He touched his back pocket, making sure the device was where he always kept it—it was so thin and flexible that it rolled up to the size of a coin—and then grabbed her by the arm, pulling her back hard and kicking her feet out from under her. She landed on the sidewalk, hitting the pavement, her bag falling at her side. Verlaine grabbed it, threw it from her reach, and dug his knee into her chest, pinning her to the concrete. He’d knocked the breath out of her—he could hear her gasp as she struggled to breathe. Verlaine held her wrists together with one hand and grabbed the collar from his back pocket with the other. But as he pressed the metal to her neck, she pushed him away with such ease, twisted from under him and jumped to her feet, a smile changing her icy features to the radiant beauty of a Botticelli. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  Verlaine lunged, landing a blow to her stomach. She countered by dragging her fingernails across his face, then swept his legs out from under him. In a blur of movement, he hit the sidewalk. He heard the sharp sound of Eno’s boots tapping against the cobblestones as she fled.

  He jumped up and started after her. She was fast, but Verlaine kept pace with her until she opened her wings. They glistened, vibrating with energy. She lifted off the ground and flew through the streets, gaining speed with each passing second.

  Verlaine looked around for something that might help him catch her. There was a rusty Zid motorcycle parked nearby, its wires hanging loose. The engine was vastly different from his Ducati, but in a matter of seconds, he’d hot-wired the bike, thrown his leg over the leather seat, and was speeding after Eno. He held tight to the bars as he swerved through streets and turned back onto the wide boulevard. He tried to get his bearings. He was driving west, toward the Neva. A minaret rose against the purple sky.

  A dull, throbbing pain seeped through his skull. The cut had scabbed over and, when he turned his head, he felt it break open. Warm, fresh blood seeped across his skin.

  Suddenly, Verlaine saw Bruno up ahead in the backseat of a taxi. He was follwing the twins, trailing their sedan, gaining momentum by the second. Verlaine could see that he was close enough to assist Bruno and, with the right balance of velocity and control, could cut the twins off. Glancing up, he saw Eno, her black wings stretched against the sky. She was guarding the twins from above. If Verlaine went after the taxi, it would draw her down so that he could fight her.

  A rumbling caught Verlaine’s attention. He turned and found a pack of black MV Agusta motorcycles behind him, moving in formation. Bruno leaned out of the the taxi’s window, gave a quick wave of his hand, and the Agustas swarmed the twins’ sedan, their motors buzzing as they swerved in and out of its path.

  The sedan spun around, screeching to a halt, and Bruno’s taxi followed. Verlaine pulled over and dropped the motorcycle.

  “Nice timing,” Bruno said, looking Verlaine over and giving a low whistle. Verlaine must have looked as bad as he felt. He’d be black and blue, no doubt, with his head stitched together like a football. As he stepped toward Bruno, he realized that the bump to his head was making him unsure on his feet.

  The pack of Russian angelologists dismounted their motorcycles and flanked Bruno and Verlaine. He’d never met their colleagues in Russia, but he’d heard about them often, mostly in jokes about their use of heavy gear. They wore black gloves with steel knuckles embedded in the leather and black steel helmets with angel wings painted in silver on the sides. He counted nine Russian angel hunters, giving them a total of eleven angelologists. Under normal circumstances the numbers would have been more than sufficient. But it was clear after his encounter with Eno that this wasn’t an average hunt, and Eno and the twins weren’t average targets.

  Just when Verlaine was beginning to feel confident that they could handle the situation, a new creature jumped from the twins’ sedan. It was one of the Raiphim, an angelic order indigenous to Russia. From the lexicon of angels Verlaine owned, he knew that the Raiphim were phoenixlike monsters who rose again and again from the dead. They were known as “the dead ones” for their pale pink eyes and their ability to return to their bodies after death. He had never seen one up close. He found them ghoulish, their pallor that of bloodless flesh.

  Verlaine blinked as the passenger side door opened and a second Raiphim emerged. One of the Russian hunters ran at the first creature, aimed, and kicked, trying for the chest. A second hunter stunned it from behind. The beast collapsed onto the pavement, gasping for breath, as a third angel hunter leaped onto the felled creature and slapped a collar arou
nd its neck.

  “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

  Vera 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.”