He took a step back, trying to see her more clearly, but she seemed little more than an extension of
the shadows. There were so many things he wanted to say to her, so many questions he’d rehearsed,
but he couldn’t begin to formulate them. The contradictions he felt about Evangeline—the affection
he’d felt for her, the anger—left him enraged and confused. His training hadn’t prepared him for this.
He wanted to take her by the arm and force her to speak to him. He needed to know that he wasn’t
imagining everything that happened between them.
Finally, he reached into his pocket and removed the driver’s license. Holding it out to her, he said,
“I think you lost something.”
She met his eye and slowly took the card in her hand. “You believed it was me back there.”
“All evidence pointed in that direction,” Verlaine said, feeling his stomach turn at the thought of the
bloody mess at the Eiffel Tower.
“There was no other way.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “They were going to kill me.”
“Who was going to kill you?”
“But they made a mistake,” she said, her eyes wide. “I led them in the wrong direction. I let them
kill someone else.”
Verlaine felt a strange, double-edged sensation of wanting to protect Evangeline from whoever had
tried to kill her and wanting to take her into custody himself. His first instinct was to call Bruno and
bring her to their prison in La Forestière. “You’re going to have to give me more than this.”
Evangeline slipped her hand into the pocket of her jacket and removed something large and round,
and dropped it into Verlaine’s hand. It was some kind of egg. He examined the hard brilliance of the
enamel, the jewels that encrusted the surface like chunks of rock salt. He removed his glasses,
cleaned them on his shirt, and slid them on again: The intricacy of the egg clicked into focus. He
turned it in his fingers, letting the jewels glint in the weak light.
“Why would they want to hurt you?” he asked, meeting Evangeline’s eyes. Even the green of her
irises struck him as hazardous and hypnotic. With this thought came a sharp pang of longing for the
person he had once been—trusting, optimistic, young, his future wide open before him. “You’re one
of them.”
Evangeline drew close to him, bringing her lips to his ear as she whispered, “You must believe me
when I say that I was never one of them. I’ve wandered from place to place trying to understand what
I had become. It’s been ten years and still I don’t understand. But I know one thing for certain: I am
not like the Grigori.”
Verlaine pulled away, feeling as if he were being broken apart inside. He wanted to believe her,
and yet he knew what the Nephilim were capable of doing. She could be lying to him.
“So tell me,” Verlaine said. “What brings you back now?” Verlaine tossed the jeweled egg in the
air and caught it in his hand. “The Easter Bunny?”
“Xenia Ivanova.”
“Vladimir’s daughter?” Verlaine asked, turning serious. The death of Vladimir Ivanov had been
just one of many fatalities of their failed mission in New York. It had been Verlaine’s first brush with
the murderous treachery of their enemies.
“Vladimir was one of the only people I had known outside the convent,” Evangeline said. “He’d
been close to my father. His daughter, Xenia, took over the café after he died, and she was kind
enough to let me work and live in a small apartment in the back of the shop, deducting the rent from
my salary. Years went by this way. I became close to Xenia, although I was never certain if she fully
understood the kind of work her father had done, or my family’s connection to him.”
“I’m sure you didn’t go to great lengths to fill her in, either,” Verlaine said.
Evangeline looked at him for a moment, decided to ignore his comment, and continued. “And so I
was surprised when, one day last month, Xenia told me that she had something to discuss with me.
She took me upstairs to her father’s apartment, a room still cluttered with his possessions, as if he’d
only just left. She showed me the egg you have in your hands. She told me she was surprised to have
found it among Vladimir’s effects after his death.”
“It’s not really Vladimir’s style,” he said. Vladimir was remembered for his ascetic ruthlessness.
His café in Little Italy was a cover for a life of extreme austerity.
“I think he was merely holding this egg for someone else,” Evangeline said. “It was the only object