had blue eyes and the distinct patrician features of Dr. Raphael Valko. Vera guessed her to be the
daughter Azov had mentioned. Looking her over more carefully, she detected a scar running along the
side of the girl’s face, a wide pale track of healed stitches crawling along the line of her jaw, past her
ear and into her hairline. The girl set a cup of tea on her father’s desk and looked at the others, as if
curious to see so many visitors.
“Thank you, Pandora,” Valko said.
Vera wondered if this was a tea made from the plants Valko had grown from Azov’s Black Sea
seeds. Not that Valko seemed the sort to acknowledge others’ contributions. He had invited them
inside to hear their reasons for coming to Smolyan, but not even Azov had managed to get a word in
edgewise.
Sensing a gap in Valko’s monologue, Vera cleared her throat and said, “There is something I am
hoping you can help me with, Dr. Valko.”
“I gathered as much,” he said, taking the cup and drinking. “You’ve come a long way to speak with
me. I hope that I can help.”
“Vera has found documents pertaining to the medicines of Noah,” Azov said.
Valko seemed unnaturally calm, as if he were in a trance. “My daughter would have been very
interested to speak with you about this matter, if she were alive.”
“So Angela did have an interest in this concoction?” Vera asked, standing and walking to the door,
where she gazed out over the garden. The first light of dawn suffused the sky above the courtyard. She
reached into her satchel for the Book of Flowers—which overnight had come to seem more her own
than Rasputin’s or the Romanovs’—and stepped back into the room.
“Interest?” Valko said, smiling slightly, his gaze resting on the book. “I should say it was more than
that. My daughter’s connection wasn’t theoretical. Her involvement brought her deep into the secrets
of the nature of angelic life on this planet. In the end she succeeded in learning things that put her in
danger.”
“You think that this information led to her death?” Azov asked.
“Most probably,” Valko said, an air of sadness in his manner. “But in the beginning it was an
exhilarating, if highly doubtful, quest. Rasputin’s journal came to Angela almost out of the sky.”
“Nadia mentioned that Vladimir simply presented it to her one day,” Vera said.
“Of course, the ease with which it arrived in her life made her suspicious—it could have been a
fake; it could have been created to trick her—but in the end she believed that Rasputin’s work was
authentic, that he was one more magus seeking the formula cited so cryptically in the Book of Jubilees
—Noah, Nicolas Flamel, Newton, John Dee. The chain of seekers is long.”
“And so she came to believe in the quest,” Sveti said.
“Perhaps more pertinent is the question of why Rasputin would attempt to create a potion so
universally believed to be of harm to the Nephilim—to the very family he served,” Azov said.
“Ah, you’ve hit at the very root of Angela’s skepticism,” Valko replied. “But her doubts were
quickly assuaged by consulting the Nephil family tree.”
“The Book of Generations,” Vera said. She’d seen the society’s copy of the infamous collection of
genealogies just once, during the same conference in Paris that had exposed her to Seraphina Valko’s
powerful photographs of the dead Watcher, the very conference where she had met Verlaine. The
Nephilim genealogies were considered to be rare and precious resources.
Valko emptied his teacup, placed it on the table, and said, “You see, Alexei Romanov’s
hemophilia was passed down from Alexandra’s family. The tsarevitch inherited the blood disorder
from Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria was one of the most vital, effective Nephilim rulers in English
history, while her husband, Albert, was actually partially Golobian, although this was a family secret
that has been very well hidden. The hemophilia was passed through the Nephil line. Thus, it would
follow that this disorder was one of the traits the medicine of Noah would cure.”
“Surely it would have killed him,” Azov said, echoing Vera’s thoughts.
“Perhaps it would have,” Valko acknowledged. “But Rasputin had little to lose in the gamble. He
had promised not only to ease Alexei’s bleeding episodes but to cure him completely. If Noah’s
medicine turned the tsarevitch human, the vow would be fulfilled; if it killed the boy, the hemophilia
could always be blamed.”
“Rasputin would have been sentenced to exile—even execution—if Alexei had died on his watch,”