Angelopolis (33 page)

As Bruno slid into a bulletproof vest, he couldn’t help but wonder if what they were doing was worth the risk. Gabriella would have wanted him to go after Evangeline at any cost—he knew this in his heart, but he also knew that more was at stake than recovering a half-human half-angel traitor who may or may not turn against them. Yet Evangeline had touched him. He could almost see her as a little girl running through the courtyard outside the academy, a wild and happy child. It was impossible for him to imagine then that, one day, he might not be able to save her.

IV

V
erlaine had waited long enough; he couldn’t listen to any more talking. Bruno had his method—he would gather information, divide the hunt, and move out with a deliberate plan of attack—but Verlaine couldn’t follow him now. Evangeline was here, somewhere, and there was nothing on earth that would keep him from finding her. Tagging along behind Bruno wasn’t going to happen. His time for simply taking orders was over. He was going after Evangeline alone.

He slipped on the security guard’s jacket, left Dmitri’s office, and began walking the pathway alongside the cells, searching for Evangeline. The lower levels were filled to capacity with ragged, emaciated creatures. Never had he been so close to so many varieties of angelic beings. It was as though he had stepped into a museum packed with specimens.

Verlaine stopped and gripped the metal railing as he looked over the vast prison, the observation tower rising at the center. Suddenly the screens shifted and slats of light sliced across the walls of the panopticon. Verlaine saw the enormous sweep of the space, the chambers stretching away in a path of diminishing visibility. He turned once more to the honeycomb of cells, each one filled with an angel, many with unfurled wings. The cells were deep but narrow, leaving no room for full expansion of the wings, and, as a result, the creatures had pressed their wings against the glass until they curled with pressure, so that the details of feathers were imprinted upon the panes. Angelologists sat behind the glass of the observatory tower studying the creatures’ movements, their manner clinical. Suddenly the panels turned opaque, obscuring the observers behind a shield of smoky glass. It gave Verlaine the creeps to think that they were there, behind the glass, watching him. He didn’t want to be part of their experiment.

Heading up a set of metal steps, he climbed to the top level. If they had Evangeline in custody, she would probably be there, among the Nephilim. The lights were dim, enhancing the effect of the neon bulbs in the creatures’ cells. As he walked along the cells, he glanced inside. The prisoners were large, powerful Nephilim who scowled and hissed as he went by, thrashing their wings, spitting, and cursing at him. One of the creatures scratched at the glass, leaving streaks of blue blood behind. The conditions were horrendous and must have ensured that a steady number of the creatures died each year, perhaps making way for new ones. Over the years he’d lost all ability to feel empathy for the Nephilim, and yet, when he looked at the tortured state of the prisoners, he wondered if the Russian angelologists weren’t being too harsh in their methods.

The sound of footsteps broke his thoughts. Looking into the reflective glass of the window, he saw that a security guard was walking in his direction. He glanced over his shoulder and saw another guard, on the opposite side of the panopticon, staring at him. He turned up the collar of his jacket and walked away, realizing that the curve of the complex offered no escape. It was clear that if they caught him, he wasn’t going to be able to fool anyone with his disguise. He didn’t speak Russian, his face didn’t match the security badge pinned to his pocket, and he was wearing street shoes and jeans. He was an angelologist, and could prove his identity, but they would still take him into custody for questioning until someone in Paris came to the rescue. If these guards stopped him, it was all over.

The guard behind Verlaine called something to him in Russian. Verlaine walked faster, scanning the cells, as if the glass doors might magically open and reveal an escape route. The guard began to run—Verlaine heard the heavy clomping of shoes on the cement—and the second guard, taking his cue, came at Verlaine from the other direction. Looking ahead and behind, he saw that there was nowhere to go but over the railing. In a burst of movement, he leaped over the bar, holding tight as he swung onto the second level. He landed hard next to a cell packed with Mara angels.

He ran, pushing himself faster, his heart racing as he passed the cells, each one filled with a creature in various states of unrest. Verlaine increased his pace, the soles of his shoes hitting the concrete in a hard rhythm. Finally he came to a metal door at the far end of Level 2. Hearing the sound of more and more guards shouting behind him, he tried the knob.

The door was locked. Swearing under his breath, he rattled the lock, pushing against it, as if his weight might force the mechanism to spring open. The voices of guards ricocheted through the panopticon. Bruno and the others would be wondering what in the hell had happened.

Verlaine grabbed his gun and shot the lock. The report made a tremendous amount of noise, and the guards would now be able to follow the sound to his location, but there was a chance that he could escape through the door, and that was all he needed. He kicked it in and looked inside, unsure of what to expect. It looked like an empty closet, just big enough to hide in. Whatever it was, he didn’t have any choice but to take cover. He stepped into the space, slammed the door closed behind him, and flicked on a light.

The closet opened into a number of metal airshafts, huge aluminum tubes that distributed air to distant parts of the prison. Hearing the guards in the distance, Verlaine pulled away the grating of the nearest one and crawled inside. Distributing his weight, he inched forward. If he moved too fast, the thin metal would begin to buckle under him. After thirty feet or so, a metal grating opened up below, and he could see that he was traversing the very top of the structure, crawling high above the concrete floor. His stomach lurched. He felt as if he’d found himself on a wire high above the world, looking down into a fathomless canyon. As he glanced down into the depths, he couldn’t help but imagine falling to the concrete below. In his mind, he plummeted into the space, gravity taking hold as he fell past the caged angels.

He swallowed and crawled ahead, listening to the guards shouting below. Metal gratings appeared at regular intervals, and he was able to glimpse what was happening in the panopticon. He saw the gray concrete of the pillars, the metal walls, the central tower, each part of the structure coming to him in fractured pieces that he reassembled in his mind. He saw the chaos of security guards running past the cells; he saw the caged creatures behind the glass. For ten minutes he moved onward, following the curve of the air pipe until the shaft abruptly tipped, and he found himself pulled downward. Catching himself as best he could, he struggled against gravity until, unable to resist, he let go.

•   •   •

Verlaine landed heavily at the bottom of the shaft, breaking through a metal grating and tumbling onto the hard concrete floor. For a moment he lay stunned, struggling to breathe, trying to discern if he’d broken any bones. In the past forty-eight hours he’d been beaten and burned and frozen. His muscles hurt, and he was bruised and broken. It was a miracle that he was still alive and, in reaction to the absurdity of his situation, he began to laugh. He drummed the opening beats to the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” with his fingers on the concrete. He wiggled his toes, feeling his muscles flex, and had the strangest feeling of joy as his body reacted to his will. One of these days his luck would run out. But for now, he’d made it.

He pulled himself up and began examining his new surroundings. It was clear that he’d fallen into an entirely different quadrant from the rest of the prison. At first glance it seemed that he’d landed in some kind of exterior hallway, perhaps an access route around the facility. There were doors on either side of the hallway. He tried one, found it locked, and continued walking until he heard voices coming through a wall. Checking over his shoulder to be certain he was alone, Verlaine pressed his ear close, straining to understand the muffled words.

“I’ve done my part,” a female voice said. “You can’t expect me to wait.”

Verlaine recognized the voice as belonging to the Emim angel he’d chased through St. Petersburg. Verlaine felt his entire being concentrate to a single point of attention. If Eno was there, Evangeline must be close by.

“And you cannot expect that I can work on her in her present condition,” a man replied. Verlaine assumed it to be Godwin. “The blood is still filled with sedatives.” Godwin’s voice softened. “Look, we’ve waited a long time for this. We can wait a few more hours.”

Verlaine heard footsteps as Godwin walked closer to the wall.

“In the meantime, I’ll tell you how the procedure will work. It’s a bit of a departure.”

Verlaine heard Eno grunt her approval, and Godwin’s voice grew still louder. He had walked closer to the wall.

“This machine,” Godwin said, “will extract the angel’s blood and filter it. We are interested in the blue cells, as you know, and this machine over here will separate the blue from the red and white blood cells. Evangeline is interesting to us, just as her father was interesting to the Romanovs one hundred years ago, because of the rare quality of her blood. Hers is red blood, not blue blood, but it contains an abundance of blue blood cells, which, if one were to get technical, contain stem cells of an extremely adaptable and creative variety, far superior in their generative power to human stem cells. The precision of this equipment gives us great advantage over blood used in the past. Rasputin, for example, used blood that had been withdrawn from an angel, but he could not filter it. It was an inseparable conglomeration of white, red, and blue cells. He must have fed it to the tsarevitch whole, which would have made the child desperately sick before he began to improve. Not us. We will use just the cells we need. And with these cells, we will continue the project I began with your masters. Soon we will see the results of our labors.”

“This should be ten times more fun than what you did for my masters,” Eno said. “If you can pull it off.”

“No creator since God has been as successful in fashioning a living being as I have been,” Godwin said.

“That may be true,” Eno said. “But can you do it again or are you going to disappoint my masters?”

“The panopticon cannot possibly disappoint,” Godwin said.

“Don’t be so sure,” Eno said. “The Grigori capacity for disappointment is very high. They have me here to make sure you don’t fuck this up.”

Suddenly the door flew open, and he stood face-to-face with a man with a deathly white face topped by a shock of carrot-orange hair. Verlaine stepped back in surprise and grabbed for his gun, but Godwin took hold of his jacket and pulled him violently into the room. Eno glared at him, her eyes narrowed, her whole manner that of a predator. Verlaine couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. Godwin had sensed that he was behind the door, waited until the optimal moment, and jumped him. Before he could fight back, Godwin pushed him into a restraining cage and slammed the door closed.

In his ten years as an angel hunter, Verlaine had been exposed to almost everything he could imagine. He had seen every variety of creature, he understood the physical conditions in which the angels lived, and he accepted the level of violence necessary to bring the Nephilim in. But in all his time in the service of angelology, he had never witnessed anything quite like the scene before him. It took him a few seconds to fully process what he was seeing.

At the center of the room, strapped to two examining tables near Godwin and Eno, were the Grigori twins. Verlaine couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead: They’d been stripped and laid out like corpses. Their golden wings were wrapped around their bodies, covering them from chest to ankle in scintillating plumage. Their skin was bluish gray, the color of ash.
Surely they must be dead
, Verlaine thought, but then he saw one of them blink his eyes, and he knew that they were somehow part of Eno and Godwin’s experiment.

Verlaine heard a voice behind him.

“I knew you’d come,” Evangeline said.

Verlaine turned and found her sitting cross-legged in the far corner of the cage, her wings folded over her and her body subsumed by shadow.

“I felt you standing outside the door. I wanted to warn you, but Godwin got to you first.”

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Verlaine said at last, lacking the words to describe his relief and joy at finding her.

“Hard to believe, I know,” she said, smiling slightly.

As Evangeline spoke to him, Verlaine felt as if the order of the universe were changing shape. Somehow when he was near her, he understood everything perfectly. He knew why he had thought of her so often; he understood why he’d followed her halfway around the world. Verlaine’s heart was beating too hard, sweat falling from his forehead and dripping down his neck. This woman had changed everything. He couldn’t go forward without her.

“We have to get out of here,” he whispered, sliding his hand over her hand and squeezing it. He looked from one end of the laboratory to the other, trying to find a way out. Their prospects didn’t look good. He pushed against the wall. The Plexiglas was impenetrable. “We’re going to have to perform some serious Houdini to get out of this.”

•   •   •

It was only a matter of minutes before Verlaine heard a commotion at the door—Bruno and Yana had broken into the lab. Verlaine strained to see what was happening, but his view was blocked as Godwin unfurled a white sheet and threw it over the Grigori twins, as if to protect them. Bruno went after Godwin as Yana snatched a set of keys and ran to the cage. As she unlocked it, Verlaine grabbed Evangeline and pulled her free, leaving the others to fight.

They were in the hallway when a great explosion shook the air. Within seconds, smoke and ash billowed from the lab. An alarm began to sound; it rang through the panopticon, echoing and distorting. The toxic smell of burning plastic, mixed with the syrupy sweet scent of scorched flesh, created a noxious and sickening aroma. Verlaine tried to navigate his way through the smoke, desperate to find a way out. As a second series of explosions went off in the distance—the blasts stronger, more pronounced than the first—Verlaine knew that they were in danger.