Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,47
met their colleagues in Russia, but he’d heard about them often, mostly in jokes about their use of heavy gear. They wore black gloves with steel knuckles embedded in the leather and black steel helmets with angel wings painted in silver on the sides. He counted nine Russian angel hunters, giving them a total of eleven angelologists. Under normal circumstances the numbers would have been more than sufficient. But it was clear after his encounter with Eno that this wasn’t an average hunt, and Eno and the twins weren’t average targets.
Just when Verlaine was beginning to feel confident that they could handle the situation, a new creature jumped from the twins’ sedan. It was one of the Raiphim, an angelic order indigenous to Russia. From the lexicon of angels Verlaine owned, he knew that the Raiphim were phoenixlike monsters who rose again and again from the dead. They were known as “the dead ones” for their pale pink eyes and their ability to return to their bodies after death. He had never seen one up close. He found them ghoulish, their pallor that of bloodless flesh.
Verlaine blinked as the passenger side door opened and a second Raiphim emerged. One of the Russian hunters ran at the first creature, aimed, and kicked, trying for the chest. A second hunter stunned it from behind. The beast collapsed onto the pavement, gasping for breath, as a third angel hunter leaped onto the felled creature and slapped a collar around its neck.
“Easy does it,” Bruno called. “They come back stronger and meaner if you kill them.”
Verlaine saw, from the corner of his eye, that the Russians had cornered the second Raiphim. A hunter lunged forward and grabbed one of its stalky wings. The creature struggled and fell backward, its wings whipping through the air. In the frenzy, it sliced a gash across the exposed skin below the hunter’s motorcycle helmet. He gasped and fell to the pavement, holding a gloved hand to the wound. The creature moved in, sensing weakness, and—just as he was about to come down on the wounded man—Verlaine stepped between them, trying to hold him off. The monster struck Verlaine and his mouth filled with fresh blood. He spit, trying to clear the taste. The creature was coming at him a second time when one of the Russian hunters slapped a collar around its neck. As if a switch had been flipped, the angel fell to the ground, its wings folding under it.
The twins stood at the center of the road, watching the fight with cool detachment. They were exact replicas of Percival Grigori—not the decrepit Percival Verlaine had known in New York City ten years before but the young and healthy Percival from Angela Valko’s film. He studied them, perplexed, wondering who they were and how it had happened that there was no record of them anywhere. According to Bruno—and to the rest of the hunters who relied on profiling—if a creature didn’t exist in their database, it didn’t exist at all.
Whoever these Nephilim were, Eno was serving them. She stepped forward, protecting them, her wings outstretched. The twins allowed her to shield them, standing at a remove, watching the angel hunters with growing alarm.
“They’re looking for something,” Bruno said, scanning the crowd.
Verlaine glanced over the plaza, hoping to find a backup team of angelologists ready to fight. They were at the very heart of St. Petersburg, across from the Hermitage, a location that complicated matters. There would be police there any minute, and Verlaine couldn’t be sure that they would be friendly. The sky began to glow pink with twilight in the background, smoky and dim. Lights around the square were coming on, throwing a pale, eerie glow over the Winter Palace, its stone creamy as white chocolate.
Bruno was right: Eno was looking for something. Wiping blood from his eyes, Verlaine tried to anticipate what she would do next. If she were waiting for other Emim, it would be next to impossible to fight them. If they hoped to find Evangeline, they would need to take Eno down carefully, without killing her. They approached in tandem, one man on each side, Verlaine centering his attention on Eno.
“If you manage to get the egg,” Bruno whispered, “get on the motorcycle and get the hell out of here. Don’t stay to help and don’t look back.”
Motioning for the hunters to follow him, Verlaine closed in. When Eno didn’t back away, Verlaine made a grab for the egg, hazarding a guess