Angelopolis(17)

to examine—admire, if he were honest with himself—the photographs of her exquisitely cold

features. It was no use pretending to himself that her penetrating black eyes hadn’t burned into his

heart.

“What are you looking at?” Verlaine asked, squinting through his glasses.

Bruno passed the phone to Verlaine. “Eno,” he said, opting to tell him the truth. “This creature

inspires pure obsession among our agents,” he said. “There is something about her, something that

makes the challenge of capturing her almost irresistible. Our official stance has been to discourage

our agents from becoming too tied up in hunting a particular creature. Often they don’t heed this

advice.”

As Verlaine looked at Eno’s profile on the phone, a look of horror spread over his face: “The

victim suffered burns to the neck, wrists, and ankles; lacerations to the face, torso, buttocks, and

back. The body was marred by what appears to be—from autopsies documenting previous victims

—ritualistic castration. Organs are never left at the scene and assumed to be kept as a trophy. ”

“She’s not someone you want to take home for a quiet romantic evening,” Bruno continued. “No

matter how much one likes to think himself the hunter, Eno is the one doing the hunting. She’s young,

by the standards of the Emim angels, and hungry.”

“But what does she want with Evangeline?” Verlaine asked.

It was an interesting question for Bruno. The last time he had seen Evangeline, she’d been at the

center of an operation that ended in unqualified disaster: They had lost their outpost in Milton, New

York, not to mention a number of agents, and an artifact of untold value to their cause. Evangeline’s

own grandmother Gabriella, a close friend of Bruno’s, had been found dead on a subway platform.

Evangeline had disappeared completely. For the past ten years Bruno had considered her AWOL at

best; at worst she was a traitor, guilty of crimes against their society.

Not that he was perfectly in line with society regulations himself. Bruno took a long sip of his

wine, trying to think through the consequences of his decision to go after Eno and Evangeline. Flying

to Russia on the spur of the moment was totally unsanctioned. Of course, Bruno had leeway to go after

dangerous creatures, and he didn’t ask for permission for every hunt, but this was not the usual

situation. He’d bought the tickets himself, to keep the flight off the record, and he knew that he would

have to work without the usual backup. It was an act of insubordination worthy of Evangeline, but

even more so of Evangeline’s mother, Angela Valko, one of the most daring angelologists in recent

memory.

When Bruno arrived at the academy in Paris, Angela Valko was already legendary. Even then she

was considered to be their most brilliant scientist. Her reputation was varnished by her husband, an

infamous angel hunter named Luca Cacciatore. Angela’s pedigree was the envy of every student in the

school. As the daughter of Gabriella and Dr. Raphael Valko, she was personally tutored by her

parents and was thus their heir in spirit as well as in name. As it turned out, she was the rare case of a

well-connected child exceeding the glories of the past: Angela’s work was so advanced that it didn’t

matter who her parents were or what they had done to help her. Her work changed the direction of the

battle against angels—angelologists began to focus on the possibility of destroying the Nephilim en

masse.

As with the chatter about any celebrity couple, much of what Bruno heard was gossip, but there

must have been at least a little truth in the stories. Whenever an antiquated tradition or the red tape of

the society held her back, Angela had simply changed the rules. If she couldn’t change the system, she

created a new one, beginning with her marriage to Luca, whom she met when he was a guest from the

academy in Rome. When the council members—old and conservative angelologists who liked to keep

the school staffed with their own kind—rejected Luca’s application for a position in Paris, Angela

helped him to create the angel hunter unit. Together they recruited the first fleet of angel hunters and

the rest was history.

In the end their work had gone terribly wrong. Angela was murdered, Luca died alone and

forgotten in America, their daughter was raised by nuns at St. Rose Convent—strangers, really—who

hadn’t been able to protect her in the end. The reality of Evangeline as a fully formed angelic creature

was the final blow to the once inviolable Valko legacy. For Bruno, the truth about Evangeline was a

total shock to the system. Seeing her perched on the rooftop, her wings tucked behind her, had