Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,73
answer in this report. I can only record here that the revelations of Gabriella’s report were deeply shocking to me and have repercussions that will seep into every aspect of my life.
As for the second discovery, I am relieved to say, it had a professional importance that almost obscured the pain of the first discovery. On the shelf, prized in the fingers of a silver holder, was an egg.
I recognized it immediately as one of the eggs created by Fabergé for the Romanovs. I spent many childhood afternoons paging through books about the Romanovs—the family was of intense interest to angelologists—and my mother had a large collection of books about the tsar. The egg in Godwin’s laboratory was one of the eight missing eggs. Instantly, picture-book images of these eggs appeared in my mind, crisp and glistening with bright lithographic colors: the Cherub with Chariot Egg; the Empire Nephrite Egg; the Hen Egg; the Emperial Egg; the Nécessaire Egg; the Mauve Egg; the Danish Jubilee Egg; and the Alexander III Egg. Sitting on the shelf was the Hen Egg, its blue enamel surface alive with sapphires. I took it down and, turning it in my hand, found the mechanism and pressed it.
The egg sprang apart. Inside was a hen surprise, and inside this precious miniature, wrapped in a muslin cloth, were three glass vials full of liquid, each labeled in Godwin’s thin scrawl. Holding a loupe to the writing, I was able to make out the names ALEXEI and LUCIEN, but the third word was written in such a messy scrawl that I refused to accept the word my eyes deciphered: EVANGELINE. I removed the tiny stopper of this third vessel and brought it to my nose. The smell was distinctly sanguine, sweet and metallic at once, but still I could not believe that Godwin had kept a vial of my daughter’s blood.
After returning to my own workspace with a number of the most illustrative photographs—as well as Gabriella’s red book and the Hen egg—I phoned Vladimir Ivanov, who aside from working closely with Luca, has aided me in a number of projects relating to Russian Nephilim. I asked him to bring his wife, Nadia, my assistant, who I knew to be an expert on tsarist antiquities, including Fabergé’s eggs. Vladimir and Nadia joined me straightaway. As I began to run tests on the blood, Nadia explained that the egg in Godwin’s possession—with its golden bird hatching from the center—symbolized the hunt for the savior, the new creature that would arrive to liberate our planet. Glancing through the stack of photographs, Vladimir explained that the violence of the images was not at all unusual—the Nephilim reproduced through such extreme practices—but that he had never seen it documented with such attention. I listened as I analyzed the blood, trying to understand how the elements before me fit together.
The vials made an especially fascinating trio. By far the oldest of the three was the Alexei sample—much of the blood had dried out and crusted black against the glass—but it was also the most straightforward: Nephilistic through and through. The contents of the vial marked LUCIEN, on the other hand, defied categorization. The color was a far richer blue than the Nephilistic cerulean—more like the indigo prized by the elite of Rome—and bore none of the typical traces of human physiognomy. Had I not been so anxious about the sample taken from my daughter, I would have begun to run more complex tests on it. But it was the third and final vessel—the vial labeled EVANGELINE—that commanded my full attention.
It was clear that the crimson blood was human, and yet, at the same time, there were abnormalities atypical of Nephilistic contamination: The level of iron was extraordinarily high, and there was no potassium present at all, which would be strange under any circumstance—no human being can live without potassium present in the blood. I myself had authorized Merlin Godwin to run tests on Evangeline’s blood—we had been monitoring her for years—but he had never disclosed such obvious abnormalities to me. In fact, he had always claimed that her blood was human, without the slightest taint of Nephil characteristics. The conclusion I am forced to draw from this revelation is particularly shocking to me: Godwin has been taking samples of my daughter’s blood covertly and using the blood for his own perverse purposes.
Dr. Raphael Valko’s compound, Smolyan, Bulgaria
Vera followed Valko into a squat stone building at the west end of the courtyard, Azov and