fully formed angelic creature was the final blow to the once inviolable Valko legacy. For Bruno, the truth about Evangeline was a total shock to the system. Seeing her perched on the rooftop, her wings tucked behind her, had produced a chemical reaction, pure and simple. He’d repressed an instinctual desire to destroy her.
“To discover what Eno wants with Evangeline might take some digging,” Bruno said, finally answering Verlaine’s question. “Eno’s motives are never clear. She confounds the best of us.”
“I’m more interested in finding Evangeline than in theorizing about her abductor,” Verlaine said.
Suddenly Bruno wondered if his obsession with Eno tinted everything he did and said. “She works exclusively for the Grigoris. If she wants Evangeline, there’s something important going on.”
“This might have something to do with it,” Verlaine said, reaching into his backpack.
Bruno watched him unwrap a gaudy, gem-encrusted egg. It was clearly valuable but, in Bruno’s mind, a piece of kitsch that he wouldn’t have looked at twice under normal circumstances. “How’d you make it through security with that thing?”
Verlaine held the egg before Bruno’s eyes and said, “Watch this.” He pressed a tiny button and the egg split in two, springing open on an invisible hinge and revealing, tucked inside its center, another egg. This egg, in turn, split apart, revealing two small miniatures: an intricately constructed gold chariot and a cherub, its body enameled and jeweled and gleaming, as if rendered in oil paint and varnish. What was once compact as a stone had expanded, as if by some magic mechanism, into an intriguing diorama.
“Evangeline slipped it to me,” Verlaine said. “I was hoping you might know why.”
Bruno looked it over, unsure of what to make of it, and closed the contraption, feeling the cold metal click into place as each mechanism retracted. “I can’t tell you. But if there’s a connection, we’re going to the right place to find out.”
Bruno felt his stomach lift as the plane descended. Pushing up the window shade, he looked out through the warped lens of thick acrylic plastic. In the distance, beyond a haze of darkness, the lights of St. Petersburg sparkled. He strained to see the twist of the Neva and the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, but could make out only a faint gradation of gray hovering at the edges of the lights, like smudges on an abstract painting. As the wheels hit the tarmac, and the plane bounced with the weight of the impact, Bruno could almost feel the density of the angelic population, as if their presence created another layer in the atmosphere. Eno was there, among these creatures. Turning to Verlaine he saw that his best hunter understood what they were up against. He would risk his life—he would risk everything—to find Evangeline.
Grigori mansion, Millionnaya Street, St. Petersburg
Against his better judgment, Armigus left the human creature to scream. He knew it would be much less trouble to end its life quickly and be done with it. He had a dagger—a piece of sharpened bone that had been passed down for generations by the Grigori men—ready, he had the human’s hands tied and the plastic sheets ready to catch the blood, but the doorbell was ringing on the first floor, the sound echoing through the vast plaster and marble interior. As Armigus left the room the human looked at him, pleading, desperate. He wanted to die quickly, Armigus could see it, but there was no choice but to put a pause to this little amusement. It could be his brother back from Paris, after all. And if Axicore had to wait, he would be furious.
Armigus walked the long stretch of hallway from one side of the house to the other, passing an array of modern glass-and-steel furniture, a shelf filled with Tibetan copper bowls, and a collection of Shivas cast in bronze. The apartment had been occupied by a lesser branch of the imperial family before the revolution, a period the twins disliked, and so, in defiance of the stuffy nineteenth-century moldings and the elaborate marble floors, Axicore and Armigus filled the space with modern furniture, tatami mats, Japanese manga, folding silk screens—anything to dispel the musty air of the past.
They had the same tastes in everything. In conversation one twin would finish the other’s sentences. As children they would switch identities, so as to confuse their teachers and friends. When they were older they would take each other’s women to bed, sharing lovers without disclosing the truth to their partners. Indeed, Axicore and