Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,8

the day they’d met. Legend had it that the infamous angelologist Dr. Raphael Valko had fashioned three amulets from a rare and precious metal called Valkine. One pendant he had worn himself, one he had given to his daughter, Angela, and the third was worn by his wife, Gabriella. Evangeline inherited Angela’s pendant upon her mother’s death; Verlaine wore Gabriella’s pendant, which he had taken when Gabriella died. Verlaine brought his fingers to his neck and pulled out the pendant, showing it to Evangeline.

Evangeline paused, looked for a moment at the pendant. “I was right, then,” she said, reaching for the egg in his hand. The brush of her finger against his palm gave him such a shock that he nearly dropped it. “You’re meant to have this. Gabriella would have wanted it that way. Keep it safe.” She closed her hand around his, as if locking his fingers around the egg.

“They want this thing,” Verlaine said, glancing down at the egg. “But what in the hell is it?”

“I don’t know,” Evangeline said, meeting his eye. “That is why I need you.”

“Me?” Verlaine said, unable to imagine how he could be of any use.

“You’re an angelologist now, aren’t you?” Evangeline asked, her voice challenging him. “If anyone can help me understand this, it’s you.”

“Why not go to the others?” Verlaine asked.

Evangeline stepped away and the air around her seemed to fold, as if heat emanated from her clothes. The smooth surface of the air buckled with electricity. Her human appearance dissolved in a fluctuation of warped space, flesh wavering and twisting as if she were made of nothing but colored smoke. A wash of light exploded around her as her wings unfolded.

Verlaine blinked, holding—for a strange and disorienting moment—Evangeline’s dual selves in his vision, the surface illusion of a woman and the underlying reality of the winged creature. The images of human and angel were like holograms that, with a turn of the light, bled into each other. She opened her wings, extending first one and then the other, rotating them until they stretched to the walls of the passage. They were immense and luminous, the layered feathers deep purple shot through with veins of silver—and yet they were transparent, ephemeral, so light he could see the texture of the brick wall behind them. He watched them vibrate with energy. They pulsed with the slow rhythm of her breathing, brushing her shoulders and sending shivers through her hair.

He leaned against a wall, steadying himself. For years Verlaine had tried to imagine Evangeline’s wings, to reconstruct them. When he had first seen them a decade before, it had been from a distance, and with the untrained eyes of a man who couldn’t tell the difference between the varieties of angels. Now he could decipher all the small distinctions that marked her, subtle as inclusions in quartz. He could see the iridescence of her skin in the shadows, the strange colored glow that appeared around her hair. He walked around her, studying her as if she were a winged statue in the Louvre, and he wondered what it felt like to live outside of time. Evangeline wouldn’t age like human beings, and she wouldn’t die for many hundreds of years. When Verlaine was an old man, Evangeline would be exactly the way he saw her now—as young and lovely as a figure cut from marble. He would die and she would remember his existence as something brief and insignificant. He realized now that she was more special than he could have ever guessed. He could hardly breathe. Evangeline was a thing of wonder, a miracle playing itself out before his eyes.

“Now do you understand why I cannot go to them?” Evangeline whispered.

“Come here,” Verlaine said, and to his surprise, Evangeline stepped toward him. He could feel the movement of the air swirling around her wings, smell the sweet fragrance of her skin. Her wrist, when he took it to feel her pulse, was cold as ice and slicked with the plasma characteristic of the Nephilim. He wanted, suddenly, to bring his lips to her skin. Instead, he pressed his finger to her vein. Her pulse was low and shallow, almost nonexistent.

“Your blood?”

“Blue.”

“Eyesight?”

“Better than perfect.”

“Temperature?”

“Thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes lower.”

“It’s strange,” he said. “You have both human and Nephil characteristics. Your heartbeat is extraordinarily slow—less than two beats per minute, much slower than the average Nephil rate.” He squeezed her arm. “And you’re practically frozen. But your skin is flushed. You look every bit