that their efforts are hopeless without a creature who can give them the biological blueprint they
need.”
“Hence Lucien,” Azov added.
“I took care of Lucien,” Valko said, and Vera could hear the pride of a man who had spent a
lifetime outsmarting the creatures. “I got him out of Siberia before they did any real harm to him.”
“He’s here?” Vera asked.
“All in due time, my dear,” Valko said. “You came to me for answers and I will try to provide
some.” Valko leaned back in his chair, his coffee steaming in his hand. “As you know, the field of
angelic genetics was founded by my daughter. What you may not know is that her work was closely
monitored by her enemies. They hoped to use genetic engineering to create angels.”
“But I thought you said Angela didn’t believe cloning could work?” Azov said.
“She didn’t think it would be viable,” Valko said. “And her reasoning came from the most basic
aspects of genetic inheritance—the nature of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA.”
“Ah, the pillars of ancestry societies everywhere,” Azov said. “We’ve had a number of religious
scholars at St. Ivan asking to exhume the remains of John the Baptist, hoping to run such DNA
testing.”
“And of course you tell them why that would not be prudent,” Valko said.
“I tell them that it’s the mitochondrial DNA of the female members of a family that acts as a time
capsule: A girl’s mitochondrial DNA is a replica of her mother’s, grandmother’s, great-
grandmother’s, and so on. So John the Baptist, being a man—a man who may have descended from
the Archangel Gabriel, I would now add—wouldn’t deliver the goods.”
“Angela discovered that the same is true for female Nephilim,” Valko said. “There is an exact
replica of the maternal line in every female born, creating an enormous possibility to examine ancient
DNA structures of female creatures.”
“But the Nephilim are descended from angels and women,” Vera said. “The mitochondrial DNA
would, thus, lead back to humanity, not to angels.”
“Correct,” Valko said. “That was why Godwin ultimately found Lucien unusable. He was
descended from an angel, sure enough, and was very, very pure. But with an angelic father and a very
pure Nephilistic mother, Lucien’s genes were impossible for Godwin to sequence with the technology
available in the 1980s. His mitochondrial DNA was a direct match to Alexandra Romanov’s. His
nuclear DNA was a hodgepodge of his parents’ combined genes—human, Nephil, and an
unidentifiable strain that Godwin couldn’t pinpoint and therefore deemed worthless to him and his
project.”
“And Lucien?” Vera asked again. She couldn’t help but think of how alluring it would be to be able
to see the creature, to touch it, to feel the heat of its skin.
“When I finally found Lucien in 1986, Godwin had him in their prison in Siberia. The terrible
conditions didn’t seem to affect him—he is a transcendental being, quite literally, and the realities of
the material world cannot touch him. Even so, I knew that I needed to get him out of there, and so I
convinced Godwin that I had the one thing on earth more precious than Lucien—an ingredient in the
elusive medicine of Noah.”
“Silphium,” Azov said.
“There were two seeds in the cache you gave me in 1985,” Valko said. “I gave one of them to
Godwin in exchange for Lucien.”
“But why?” Azov said, his voice rising. “How could you do something so irresponsible?”
“First of all, if Lucien had remained in Siberia, he would have eventually been used by Godwin—
and by extension the Grigoris—in some fashion or another. This is most certain. Second, and more
important, I knew that they didn’t have a clue about the formula. It was recorded in one place and one
place only.”
“Rasputin’s Book of Flowers,” Vera said. “Buried in an old lady’s antique shop, right under the
Grigoris’ noses.”
“Until now, evidently,” Valko replied, glancing at Vera’s satchel, as if verifying that she was
bringing it along. “But really, even if Godwin were lucky enough to get the silphium seed to grow, he
couldn’t use it.”
“And so you took Lucien from Russia,” Azov said.
“I came here, to these mountains, with Lucien. I hoped to study him, to listen to him, to understand
his nature. It is no small thing, having a seraph’s descendant at one’s disposal—our discipline is the