Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,26
a cord, she plugged it into a makeshift socket hanging from the wall, its wires dangerously exposed. An electric buzz hummed through the projector, and, with a flip of a switch, a searing white light blazed onto the wall, cutting a perfect square of light.
“Voilà,” she said. “Give me the reel of film.”
As Verlaine placed the film in Vera’s hand, he felt another tremor of anxiety. Perhaps it was filled with nothing more than images of lab equipment, or, worse, it had been damaged and would spit out a series of distorted and indecipherable images.
Vera locked the reel into place and fiddled with the levers until they were in the correct positions. After feeding the film into the catch and turning the wheel so that it spooled, she pressed a button, and the reels began to move. A flickering of sepia frames flashed over the limestone wall, and then, as if by some feat of magic much stronger than any charm taught at the Academy of Angelology, Angela Valko appeared before them.
Verlaine’s muscles stiffened at the sight of Evangeline’s mother, as if the electricity that powered the projector had funneled itself through his spine. Angela’s face was serious, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail, her large blue eyes staring into the camera, and into the eyes of the people who had gathered together to try to understand the message she left behind.
Verlaine felt the irrational urge to speak to the woman on the wall, to reach out and touch the insubstantial light that flickered in the dusty air, to draw close to the illusion. She was beautiful and—Verlaine could only make the comparison now, after having seen Percival Grigori in person—a near replica of her Nephilistic father. She wore a white lab jacket unbuttoned to reveal a black turtleneck. The laboratory was sterile, orderly, with large glass windows and a polished concrete floor. Droppers, tongs, tubes, and other equipment he couldn’t readily identify were arrayed on a shelf behind her. A series of beakers had been placed at hand, some filled with liquid, others with powders. Something flashed at her throat. Verlaine looked more closely until he made out a necklace—the lyre pendant he’d touched only hours before—at her throat.
Suddenly Evangeline’s father stepped into the frame. Striking in his T-shirt and jeans, Luca looked nothing like the man Verlaine had imagined him to be. In the film he was young and vibrant, filled with energy and determination. He had long black hair that fell over his brow, tanned skin, dark eyes. There was an aura of care in his movements—he stepped deeper into the frame and paused to be certain everything was in place—but he had a buoyancy about him that seemed at odds with the accounts Verlaine had heard. The founder of the angel hunter unit was, as legend had it, a darkly laconic man, a warrior whose strategic mind allowed him to trap and kill angels with an ease most angelologists found unnerving.
The couple exchanged a look of complicity—as if they had planned every last detail of the film—and Luca leaned over and kissed Angela’s cheek, a quick gesture, one that he might have performed without thought many times each day, but in the kiss it was clear how profoundly he had loved her.
A strange, guttural noise—half moan, half growl—caused Angela to turn. The camera, following her gaze, panned over the lab and settled on a creature. The Nephil was suspended from a metal hook, its feet dangling above the floor. Although the creature was male, the long, white-blond hair, narrow shoulders, and elegant, tapering waist gave it a delicate beauty. Bright copper wings fell around its body like the feathers of a dead bird. The creature had been stripped, perhaps beaten, most likely sedated, as it seemed to be in a state of confusion.
As a captive of the flickering image, Verlaine was horrified and fascinated at once. It was beautiful and grotesque, like a fairy caught in a spider’s web, its luminous skin creating the softest glow through the glass. He recognized the honeylike liquid that oozed over its skin, sliding slowly over the creature’s chest and legs, dripping from its suspended feet and pooling on the glass floor—it was the same excretion that coated Evangeline’s skin when he’d touched her earlier. For an unsettling moment he imagined how Evangeline would react to such bondage. Would she struggle if the ropes burned her wrists? Would she fold her wings against her body like a shield