Angelopolis

by Danielle Trussoni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And they believed you?”

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

  “Charming,” Bruno said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Verlaine gave Bruno a questioning look.

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

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

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

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

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

  “What went wrong?” Sveti asked.

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

  Vera thought of the film she’d watched in the storage rooms of the Hermitage the previous morning—the vials of blood labeled with various names. She understood now why Alexei’s and Lucien’s blood had been stored away. “Angela extracted her own daughter’s blood?”r />
  “She oversaw its extraction and testing, yes,” Valko said.

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

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

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

  “You mean the virus,” Vera said.

  “Yes,” Valko said.

  “It was an incredible accomplishment,” Vera said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “But what?” Sveti said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You can’t be serious,” Sveti said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “A true Manichaean,” Sveti said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “That was an unexpected consequence.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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