Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,3

her work as a mercenary began to please her more and more with each new victim. She studied the angelologists’ behavior, their habits, their techniques of hunting and killing angelic beings until she knew her work in and out. She could smell a hunter, feel him, sense his desire to capture and slaughter her. Sometimes she even let them bring her into custody. Sometimes she even let them act out their fantasies with her. She let them take her to their beds, tie her up, play with her, hurt her. When the fun was over, she killed them. It was a dangerous game, but one she controlled.

• • •

Eno slid on a pair of oversize sunglasses, the lenses black and bulbous. She rarely went outside without them. They disguised her large yellow eyes and her unnaturally high cheekbones—the most distinct Emim traits—so that she looked like a human female. Leaning back in her chair, she stretched her long legs and closed her eyes, remembering the terror in Evangeline’s face, the resistance of the flesh as she slid her nails under the rib cage and ripped it open, the frisson of surprise Eno had felt upon seeing the first rush of blue blood spill onto the pavement. She had never killed a superior creature before, and the experience went against everything she had been trained to do. She had expected a fight worthy of a Nephil. But Evangeline had died with the pathetic ease of a human woman.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and as she reached for it, she checked the crowds walking by, her gaze flicking from humans to angels. There was only one person who used that number, and Eno needed to be certain that she could speak privately. Emim were bound by their heritage to serve Nephilim, and for years, she had simply done her duty, working for the Grigoris out of gratitude and fear. She was of a warrior caste and she accepted this fate. She wanted to do little else but to experience the slow diminishing of a life, the final gasping for breath of her victims.

Fingers trembling, she took the call. She heard her master’s raspy, whispery voice, a seductive voice she associated with power, with pain, with death. He said only a few words, but she knew at once—from the way he spoke, his voice laced with poison—that something had gone wrong.

Quai Branly, seventh arrondissement, Paris

Before he’d found Evangeline dead beneath the Eiffel Tower, Verlaine had had a presentiment of her death. She had appeared to him in a dream, an eerie creature woven of light. She spoke, her voice resounding through the corridors of his mind, her words inaudible at first but then, as he strained to hear them, becoming clearer and clearer. Come to me, she said as she hovered over him, a beautiful and horrible creature, her skin glowing with luminosity, her wings gathered about her shoulders like a gauzy ethereal shawl. He understood that he was dreaming, that she was a figment of his imagination, something he’d conjured up from his subconscious, a kind of demon meant to haunt him. And yet he was terrified when she leaned close and touched him. Placing her cold fingers upon his chest, she seemed to be feeling his heartbeat. Heat passed from her hands and into his body, the current moving from her fingers into his chest, burning through him. He knew with terrifying clarity that Evangeline was going to kill him.

It was always at this moment in the dream that he would wake, unable to breathe, overcome by fear, love, desire, hopelessness, and humiliation at once. He would emerge into consciousness knowing that an angel of darkness had been with him. If not for Bruno’s intervention, Verlaine might still be caught in an endless loop of terror and desire.

Still reeling, Verlaine headed toward the street, trying to reconcile the woman in his dream with the dismembered corpse. His Ducati 250 was parked on the rue de Monttessuy. The very sight of it—the chrome fenders polished, the leather seat buffed—helped bring him back to the present moment. He’d bought the Ducati his first month in Paris and restored it, sanding away the rust and repainting it red. It remained one of his favorite possessions, giving him the feeling of freedom whenever he rode it. As he pulled it off its kickstand, he noticed a jagged scratch gouged into the paint. He swore under his breath and rubbed it to see how deep