Angelopolis(4)

upon seeing the first rush of blue blood spill onto the pavement. She had never killed a superior

creature before, and the experience went against everything she had been trained to do. She had

expected a fight worthy of a Nephil. But Evangeline had died with the pathetic ease of a human

woman.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and as she reached for it, she checked the crowds walking by,

her gaze flicking from humans to angels. There was only one person who used that number, and Eno

needed to be certain that she could speak privately. Emim were bound by their heritage to serve

Nephilim, and for years, she had simply done her duty, working for the Grigoris out of gratitude and

fear. She was of a warrior caste and she accepted this fate. She wanted to do little else but to

experience the slow diminishing of a life, the final gasping for breath of her victims.

Fingers trembling, she took the call. She heard her master’s raspy, whispery voice, a seductive

voice she associated with power, with pain, with death. He said only a few words, but she knew at

once—from the way he spoke, his voice laced with poison—that something had gone wrong.

Quai Branly, seventh arrondissement, Paris

Before he’d found Evangeline dead beneath the Eiffel Tower, Verlaine had had a presentiment of

her death. She had appeared to him in a dream, an eerie creature woven of light. She spoke, her voice

resounding through the corridors of his mind, her words inaudible at first but then, as he strained to

hear them, becoming clearer and clearer. Come to me, she said as she hovered over him, a beautiful

and horrible creature, her skin glowing with luminosity, her wings gathered about her shoulders like a

gauzy ethereal shawl. He understood that he was dreaming, that she was a figment of his imagination,

something he’d conjured up from his subconscious, a kind of demon meant to haunt him. And yet he

was terrified when she leaned close and touched him. Placing her cold fingers upon his chest, she

seemed to be feeling his heartbeat. Heat passed from her hands and into his body, the current moving

from her fingers into his chest, burning through him. He knew with terrifying clarity that Evangeline

was going to kill him.

It was always at this moment in the dream that he would wake, unable to breathe, overcome by

fear, love, desire, hopelessness, and humiliation at once. He would emerge into consciousness

knowing that an angel of darkness had been with him. If not for Bruno’s intervention, Verlaine might

still be caught in an endless loop of terror and desire.

Still reeling, Verlaine headed toward the street, trying to reconcile the woman in his dream with

the dismembered corpse. His Ducati 250 was parked on the rue de Monttessuy. The very sight of it—

the chrome fenders polished, the leather seat buffed—helped bring him back to the present moment.

He’d bought the Ducati his first month in Paris and restored it, sanding away the rust and repainting it

red. It remained one of his favorite possessions, giving him the feeling of freedom whenever he rode

it. As he pulled it off its kickstand, he noticed a jagged scratch gouged into the paint. He swore under

his breath and rubbed it to see how deep it went, though, in truth, the scratch was just one of the many

abuses the Ducati had endured in recent years. Ironically he associated each dent and scratch with his

own experiences over the past decade. He had been injured more times than he could count and—

unlike the restored Ducati—he was beginning to show his age. Catching his reflection in a passing

storefront window, he noted that the motorcycle was better preserved than he was.

As he reached the quai, something else caught his attention. Later, when Verlaine examined the

moment he saw Evangeline, he would tell himself that he’d felt her presence before seeing her, that a

change in the atmospheric pressure had taken place, the kind of imbalance created when a gust of cold

air sweeps through a warm room. But at the time, he didn’t think. He simply turned and there she was,

standing near the Seine. Verlaine recognized the sharpness of her shoulders and the glossy blackness

of her hair. He recognized her high cheekbones, the same green eyes that had just stared back at him

from the driver’s license. He simply wanted to stare at her, to make certain that it was really her, a

flesh and blood being and not a figment of his mind. Verlaine held her eye for a second, and in that

moment, he felt a slow turning in his perception, as if some rusty lock had clicked open. He caught his

breath. A cold sensation grasped his spine and moved through his body. The mutilated woman below

the Eiffel Tower was a stranger. He propped the Ducati on its kickstand and made his way to his

Evangeline.