Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,5
had passed. He was a different man. If he caught Evangeline, he would have to capture her. He had to remember what she was and what she was capable of doing to him. If he caught her, he would take her into custody. If she attacked him, he would fight. He needed to move fast, to put his feelings aside. He needed to convince himself that she was just another angel and this was just another routine hunt.
In the distance the lights of the Eiffel Tower glimmered against the night sky, bright as a constellation fallen to earth. Verlaine ran, his hand trembling as he reached for his gun. Drawing it from his belt, he switched it on. With its two hundred volts of electricity, the gun was powerful without being lethal. If placed over the furcula of an angel, and the shot directed into the solar plexus, the creature would be stunned for hours. He didn’t want to use force, but he wasn’t going to let Evangeline slip away again.
Limousine, Pont de l’Alma, above the Seine, Paris
Axicore Grigori peered through the smoky glass of the limousine window. It was a clear spring night, with the streets filled with people, which made it very unlikely that he would leave the dark enclosure of the car. He detested Homo sapiens, and the thought of getting out into the soup of humanity made his skin crawl. When he had to venture out among people, he kept his distance. He didn’t walk among them, he didn’t eat in their restaurants, he traveled in a private jet. He never so much as touched the hand of a human being without feeling deeply, essentially violated. The very idea that his ancestors had been attracted to such vile beings filled him with wonder. What on earth, he wondered, looking at the people walking by, had the Watchers been thinking? How his twin brother, Armigus, had managed to remain in Russia while Axicore found himself on a filthy Paris bridge like some common Gibborim was beyond him.
His great-aunt Sneja Grigori believed that one of these repulsive creatures, a young woman named Evangeline, was the granddaughter of her deceased son, Percival. It all seemed so far-fetched to Axicore—even more so after his most trusted mercenary angel had observed the subject in question for weeks. Eno had reported everything back to Axicore. He learned that Evangeline was short, thin, dark haired, and utterly human in appearance. She lived simply, did not exhibit her wings, had no Nephilistic contacts, and spent the majority of her time moving among normal human beings. She bore none of the typical characteristics of the Nephilim, nor any of the various identifying markings that ran through purebreds, much less the Grigori family traits.
The contrast between them could be drawn by a simple comparison with his own bearing, a perfect exemplar of the Grigori. He was a head taller than human beings, his skin fine and pale, and his eyes white blue. He dressed impeccably, as did Armigus—they often wore matching attire and never the same suit twice. That morning’s shipment had come from their grandfather Arthur’s favorite Savile Row tailor, the brushed velvet smooth and black as the coat of a jaguar. With their elegant clothing and thick blond hair that fell over their shoulders in a chaos of curls, the twins were stunning, classically handsome, startling enough to make the most beautiful women stop and stare, especially on the exceedingly rare occasions that the twins went out into the human world together. In this they resembled all the Grigori men, and the late Percival Grigori in particular. The twins were princes among peasants their mother used to say, regal creatures forced to walk the earth, drawn into the material plane when they should be among the ethereal beings in the heavenly spheres.
Of course, with the dilution of their race over the past millennia, such physical traits were only superficial. The true markings of the Nephilim were more subtle and complicated than that of complexion, eye color, and body type. If Evangeline was, in fact, Sneja’s flesh and blood, Axicore concluded, she was the ugliest Grigori ever born.
Tapping a long, white finger on the window glass, Axicore tried to put aside his repulsion and concentrate upon the task at hand. He had retrieved Eno from an establishment on the Champs-Élysées, and although she sat next to him in the limousine, she was so silent, so ghostly, that he barely registered her presence. He admired her