Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,104
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