we’ve waited a long time for this. We can wait a few more hours.”
Verlaine heard footsteps as Godwin walked closer to the wall.
“In the meantime, I’ll tell you how the procedure will work. It’s a bit of a departure.”
Verlaine heard Eno grunt her approval, and Godwin’s voice grew still louder. He had walked
closer to the wall.
“This machine,” Godwin said, “will extract the angel’s blood and filter it. We are interested in the
blue cells, as you know, and this machine over here will separate the blue from the red and white
blood cells. Evangeline is interesting to us, just as her father was interesting to the Romanovs one
hundred years ago, because of the rare quality of her blood. Hers is red blood, not blue blood, but it
contains an abundance of blue blood cells, which, if one were to get technical, contain stem cells of
an extremely adaptable and creative variety, far superior in their generative power to human stem
cells. The precision of this equipment gives us great advantage over blood used in the past. Rasputin,
for example, used blood that had been withdrawn from an angel, but he could not filter it. It was an
inseparable conglomeration of white, red, and blue cells. He must have fed it to the tsarevitch whole,
which would have made the child desperately sick before he began to improve. Not us. We will use
just the cells we need. And with these cells, we will continue the project I began with your masters.
Soon we will see the results of our labors.”
“This should be ten times more fun than what you did for my masters,” Eno said. “If you can pull it
off.”
“No creator since God has been as successful in fashioning a living being as I have been,” Godwin
said.
“That may be true,” Eno said. “But can you do it again or are you going to disappoint my masters?”
“The panopticon cannot possibly disappoint,” Godwin said.
“Don’t be so sure,” Eno said. “The Grigori capacity for disappointment is very high. They have me
here to make sure you don’t fuck this up.”
Suddenly the door flew open, and he stood face-to-face with a man with a deathly white face
topped by a shock of carrot-orange hair. Verlaine stepped back in surprise and grabbed for his gun,
but Godwin took hold of his jacket and pulled him violently into the room. Eno glared at him, her eyes
narrowed, her whole manner that of a predator. Verlaine couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid.
Godwin had sensed that he was behind the door, waited until the optimal moment, and jumped him.
Before he could fight back, Godwin pushed him into a restraining cage and slammed the door closed.
In his ten years as an angel hunter, Verlaine had been exposed to almost everything he could
imagine. He had seen every variety of creature, he understood the physical conditions in which the
angels lived, and he accepted the level of violence necessary to bring the Nephilim in. But in all his
time in the service of angelology, he had never witnessed anything quite like the scene before him. It
took him a few seconds to fully process what he was seeing.
At the center of the room, strapped to two examining tables near Godwin and Eno, were the
Grigori twins. Verlaine couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead: They’d been stripped and laid out
like corpses. Their golden wings were wrapped around their bodies, covering them from chest to
ankle in scintillating plumage. Their skin was bluish gray, the color of ash. Surely they must be dead,
Verlaine thought, but then he saw one of them blink his eyes, and he knew that they were somehow
part of Eno and Godwin’s experiment.
Verlaine heard a voice behind him.
“I knew you’d come,” Evangeline said.
Verlaine turned and found her sitting cross-legged in the far corner of the cage, her wings folded
over her and her body subsumed by shadow.
“I felt you standing outside the door. I wanted to warn you, but Godwin got to you first.”
“I can’t believe it’s you,” Verlaine said at last, lacking the words to describe his relief and joy at
finding her.
“Hard to believe, I know,” she said, smiling slightly.
As Evangeline spoke to him, Verlaine felt as if the order of the universe were changing shape.
Somehow when he was near her, he understood everything perfectly. He knew why he had thought of
her so often; he understood why he’d followed her halfway around the world. Verlaine’s heart was
beating too hard, sweat falling from his forehead and dripping down his neck. This woman had
changed everything. He couldn’t go forward without her.
“We have to get out of here,” he whispered, sliding his hand over her hand and squeezing it. He