Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,96

again as Lucien landed. Lucien looked her over and, lifting her slowly, held her in his arms and flew over the river. She held on to his neck, nestling into the downy warmth of his wings as they made their way back to the rope ladder. The ladder twisted up into the darkness, disappearing into a fold in the rock.

“Hold on to me tightly,” Lucien said, positioning Vera’s hands around his shoulders and wrapping her arm about his waist. “I’ll bring you up.”

“No,” Vera said. “Bring Azov here first.”

Lucien considered this a moment before setting Vera down and flying back for Azov.

Vera collapsed against the wall of the cavern, her ears ringing with the sharp, rapid-fire noise of the waterfall. Without the light from Lucien’s body, the cave fell into a fathomless darkness. She strained to discern the space. She tried to stand, but her legs gave out from under her. She fell to the ground, feeling as if she might lose consciousness. She closed her eyes for what seemed less than a moment. When she opened them, a faint glow emanated from the distance. Lucien was coming back; she needed to prepare herself for the searing pain of movement. Easing herself up, she watched the light come closer. She saw a glow of white wings, the shimmer of a silver robe, and she knew that it wasn’t Lucien at all but one of the Watchers. It stood before her, looking her over with curiosity.

“You are human?” the angel asked at last.

Vera nodded, all the while staring at the angel. There was something soft in his features, something divine, and for the first time she truly understood how unfair it had been that such beautiful beings had been punished so severely. Vera wanted to understand how an act of love—because the Watchers had, after all, disobeyed God out of love—had brought so much treachery to the world. The angel had spent thousands of years in this underworld of stone and water. He had lost paradise and now he had lost his companions.

The angel introduced himself as Semyaza and placed his hand on Vera’s shoulder. A gentle burst of warmth moved through her muscles, easing the pain, as if she’d been given a shot of morphine. The relief was so profound that Vera felt as if she had the strength to stand.

“The others are up there,” Vera said, pointing up the rope ladder to the ledge high above. “Don’t you want to join your brothers?”

“I’ve decided to remain here,” Semyaza said.

“But why?” Vera didn’t understand. They were offering the angel its freedom, and it had chosen to stay in the cave in solitude and darkness.

“In the presence of other beings like yourself, one can endure great suffering. For thousands of years I’ve been a creature of hell. I don’t know if I can adjust to the light.” Semyaza smiled. “Besides, the earth belongs to humanity. There is no place for me there. I am a prisoner not of this cave but to eternal life as a fallen angel. I would like, for just one minute, to understand what it is like to be human. My memories of falling in love are so vibrant. There is nothing in my experience like it. To feel warm blood in my veins, to hold another body close, to eat, to fear death. For that, I would return to earth.”

The Eighth Circle

FRAUD

I

Dr. Merlin Godwin pressed his thumb against the screen, and the thick, iron doors opened. He made his way into a dark concrete tube, neon bulbs lighting his path. Each morning he entered the tunnel via the south entrance, walking the thirteen hundred feet leading from the exterior to the interior chamber, his briefcase in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. It was a dark and solitary commute. And while it lasted less than ten minutes, walking through the corridor gave him a few moments of total peace and isolation, allowing him to leave the normal world, where people lived without the slightest knowledge of the truth, and enter a place that seemed to him, even after twenty-five years, a place of nightmares.

In truth, he was only traveling one hundred thirty feet below the ground to a space carved into the soft rock below the Siberian permafrost. It was something of a miracle that the facility even existed. Although the society had a long and well-documented history of observing and studying live specimens—their first contact with an angel had been in