Authors: Danielle Trussoni
“We’re on our way to Siberia,” Bruno said. “By train.”
“What happened to you?” Verlaine asked, trying to pull himself up in bed and feeling a spike of pain.
“Run-in with the Russian Raiphim,” Bruno said.
“Sounds like a good name for your memoirs,” the blond woman said.
“This is Yana,” Bruno said. “She’s a Russian hunter who has, coincidentally, been tracking Eno for nearly as long as I have. She has also agreed to relinquish one of her transport cars for your recovery.”
Yana wore tight jeans and a tatty pink turtleneck sweater—a markedly different aesthetic from the leather and steel of her hunting uniform. There was a wary, tired air about her as she stepped away from the bed. She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms, as if she were anxious to get back to work. Her English was heavily accented as she said, “Feeling okay?”
“Fantastic.” Verlaine’s head felt like it might explode. “Just perfect.”
“Frankly, you’re lucky to feel anything at all,” Yana said, looking him over with an air of professional interest, as if comparing his injuries with those she’d seen in the past.
Verlaine tried to sit up and the pain localized to a sharp, searing burn on his chest. “What the hell happened?”
“You don’t remember?” Bruno asked.
“Up to a certain point, I remember everything,” Verlaine said. “I must have lost consciousness.”
“You must have lost your mind to go after Eno like that,” Yana said. “Another minute and you would have been completely scorched.”
Verlaine remembered the sensation of electricity moving through him and shivered. “She tried to kill me,” he said.
“And she very nearly succeeded,” Bruno said.
“Lucky for you we were able to stop her before that happened,” Yana added. “You were burned, but it’s localized.”
“Are you sure about that?” Verlaine felt as if his entire body had been slow roasted over a bonfire.
“If you recall the bodies at St. Rose Convent, I think you’ll count yourself as one of the lucky,” Bruno said.
The attack on St. Rose had left a deep impression in Verlaine’s imagination. Dozens of women had been charred to death, their bodies so badly disfigured that they were unrecognizable. He knew exactly what the creatures were capable of doing to a person.
“The electrical current threw your heart into a seizure for a good three minutes,” Bruno said. “Yana performed CPR. She was able to keep you alive until her colleagues brought her a portable defibrillator.”
“You came back from the dead,” Yana said. “Literally.”
“I guess I have one thing in common with the Raiphim,” Verlaine said.
“Although that doesn’t explain why you survived the attack,” Yana said. “Forgive the expression, but you should have been burned to a crisp.”
“Lovely image,” Verlaine said, pulling himself up in bed. The skin over his chest prickled with pain, but he tried to ignore it and go forward, one small movement at a time. He remembered Eno’s strength, the heat of her touch.
“This might have had something to do with it,” Bruno said, pulling a necklace from his pocket and holding it above Verlaine.
He took the pendant and looked it over. It hadn’t been altered by Eno’s attack in the least. The metal still shone as if alloyed with sunlight. He knew that Bruno was connecting the dots and probably already understood how Verlaine had come to have the pendant. Gabriella had been Bruno’s close friend, and although his mentor wasn’t about to talk about the pendant in front of Yana, it was clear that Bruno was not happy that Verlaine had hid it from him all these years.
Verlaine leaned up to fasten the necklace around his neck, and winced. Yana—more out of impatience than anything resembling compassion—lifted it from his fingers and secured the clasp. “There,” she said, giving him a pat on the chest and sending a fresh jolt of pain through his body. “You’re safe from the bogeyman.”
The door opened and a doctor arrived, a short, hefty woman with thick glasses and perfectly styled hair. She leaned over the bed, yanked the sheets down to Verlaine’s waist. A thick, white, gauze bandage had been taped over his chest. She worked her fingernails under the edges, lifting the tape and pulling it gently away.
“Here,” Yana said, taking a small mirror from her bag and giving it to Verlaine.
He looked in the mirror and saw the reflection of a battered man, a line of fresh stitches over his eye, a series of bruises staining his skin. The image was so unfamiliar, so startling, that Verlaine straightened his spine and threw back his shoulders. His burned skin chafed, and he wanted nothing more than to fall back asleep, but he refused to be the person in the reflection. He held the mirror level with his chest and saw that it was blackened, with raw patches of red and pink oozing a clear liquid. An impression of Eno’s hands was branded into his skin.
“You now carry the telltale mark of an Emim’s attack,” Bruno said.
Yana examined the outline of the fingers seared upon Verlaine’s chest. “The shape of the burn is very particular. It is something I have long been interested in. A creature must position its hands a certain way to draw down the electric charge—the thumbs touching and the palms angled outward. Do you recognize the shape?”
“Of course,” Verlaine said, feeling sickened by the sight. “They’re wings.”
He was used to injuries—he’d been hurt innumerable times over the course of the past ten years—but an assault like this wasn’t one he would forget. The creature had marked him forever.
The doctor stepped away and returned with a tray stacked with ointment, scissors, bandages, and cotton swabs. Verlaine breathed hard, bringing the air into his lungs slowly as the doctor used cotton to clean his chest.
“The nerves are dead where the flesh is black. The pain you feel is from the less severe burns around the edges of the wound.” The doctor paused, studying the shape of the burn. “I haven’t seen one of these in a while,” she said, brushing an ointment over his skin and pressing on a new bandage. “This application will help enormously with the pain. In the old days it would have taken weeks, perhaps months, to fully recover from this.”
Verlaine felt a coolness suffuse his skin. The effect was immediate and intense. “Amazing,” he said. “The pain is fading.”
“Your skin is rapidly healing itself,” the doctor said, leaning close to Verlaine. “The ointment is a nanoemulsion that stops bacteria from setting in while creating the conditions for rapid skin cell production. A layer of new skin forms immediately over the burn, helping to keep out air and reduce pain. It’s a rare commodity: We have only a few doses. It was developed by angelologists for angelologists. It is unbelievably effective.” She ran her hand over the surface of the wound, as if to prove her point.
“Effective or not, we need this angelologist,” Yana said, unable to conceal her impatience. “How long does he need to rest?”
The doctor held Verlaine’s wrist and took his pulse. “Your heartbeat is normal,” she said. “How do you feel?”
Verlaine wiggled his toes and then moved his ankles. The ringing in his ears and the searing pain across his chest were gone. “Tip-top,” he said.
As she took the tray and headed for the door, she said, “Then he should be able to leave the train at your scheduled stop. Tyumen is about thirty-five hours from here. I would suggest taking it easy until then.” Glancing at Verlaine, she said, “That means: no more dates with the devil. Although I doubt you’ll take that advice. Agents like you never do.”
Verlaine threw his legs over the side of the bed. He steadied himself and stood. He was with Yana on this: There was no way he was going to stay in some godforsaken hospital cot.
After the doctor left the room, Bruno said, “There’s some good news in all of this. We managed get the egg back. And, most important, to capture Eno.”
“Where is she?” Verlaine asked.
“In a safe place,” Yana said, her gaze boring into him as if daring him to ask more.
Bruno winked at Verlaine and said, “Yana insisted that we take her to a specialized prison in Siberia.”
Verlaine said, “Leave it to the Russians to have an angel gulag.”
“We are taking her for observation,” Yana said. “You’re lucky I agreed to allow you to accompany me.”
“And you think that you’re capable of getting information out of Eno?” Verlaine asked.
“There’s no other way,” Yana said. “Once Eno is taken into custody in Siberia, she’ll be forced to talk.”
“Have you witnessed such questioning before?” Verlaine asked Yana.
“The specialists at the prison have very particular methods of extracting information from their prisoners,” Yana replied, her voice quiet.
Verlaine moved through a mental list of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours, trying to shake the feeling that he’d landed in an alternate universe, a kind of strange, lifelike game that was both real and unreal at the same time. He was on a train moving through the vast and frozen Siberian tundra in pursuit of a half-human, half-angel creature that he now knew—after ten years of doubt—he loved. After all that he’d seen he had thought he couldn’t be surprised anymore. He’d been wrong. Things just kept getting stranger and stranger.
St. Ivan Island, Black Sea, Bulgaria
A
zov’s chopper embodied just the sort of mixture of cultural references that inspired scholars like Vera to go to work every day. According to Sveti, the Vietnam-era machine had been lost by the Americans—abandoned by a crew after it crash-landed in Cambodia—and ended up in Azov’s possession by dint of various trades and handshakes over the past three decades. It had been confiscated by Communists, repaired in the USSR, and sent on to their Bulgarian allies during the seventies. By the time Azov got his hands on it, the cold war had ended and Bulgaria had joined NATO. Now, watching Sveti grip the cyclic control between her knees, Vera wondered what kind of realigned world children born today would grow up to live in.
Azov gave a nod and Sveti flipped switches, checking the monitors on the dash before taking them into the air. They lifted away from the earth, shouldering the wind. Vera watched the land recede as they climbed higher, the contours of the lighthouse losing verticality, the sea growing uniform until the water below seemed little more than an adamantine sheet against the muted shoreline. The sun was setting, casting the world in a darkening purple light. She strained to see the fishing villages nestled into the cove, the squat gray shacks like rocks basking in the rarefied light. The beaches were deserted—no umbrellas blooming from the sand, not a boat floating in the bay, only endless stretches of rocky coastline. Vera tried to imagine the settlements buried under cubic tons of dark water, the remnants of ancient civilizations frozen in the suffocating chill of a lightless underworld.
The helicopter tipped as Sveti flew them over a stretch of shoreline and then cut inland, the blades overhead banging their slow and steady rhythm. They swooped over baked clay rooftops, narrow highways, and empty fields, leaving the Black Sea behind.
Suddenly, from the corner of her eye, Vera saw something else flying in the distance. For a moment it seemed little more than the silhouette of a hang glider hovering in the air, a slash of red against the purple horizon. Then a second figure appeared, then a third, until a swarm surrounded the helicopter, their red wings beating in the air, their eyes fixed as they circled inward.
“You didn’t mention that St. Ivan Island is being guarded by Gibborim,” Vera said, glancing at Azov.
“It isn’t—they must have followed our jeep from Sozopol,” Sveti said, steering the helicopter inland as one of the creatures swung against the windscreen, its red wing brushing the plastic and leaving a streak of oil behind.
“We can’t fight them up here,” Azov said under his breath. “We’ll have to outrun them. We’ll have help on the ground if we can just make it to the airport.”
“Hold on,” Sveti said, as she manipulated the stick, swerving the helicopter.
It swayed and jerked, dipping like a ship on choppy water, but the creatures stayed with them. Suddenly the craft faltered and tipped, throwing Vera forward against her shoulder straps. She looked out the window and saw that two Gibborim had attached themselves to the runners. With their wings open, they were dragging the helicopter down toward the rocky shore.
Sveti bit her lip and bore onto the controls. It wasn’t until they approached the electrical wires and Sveti was angling the runners toward a bank of transmission towers that Vera realized their pilot intended to force the creatures off by scraping the bottom. Sveti feinted right, then left, and then lowered the chopper down. The Gibborim hit the wires, their wings tangling as the helicopter ascended once more, sweeping back out over the bay.
Within minutes the shipping yard at Burgas came into view. Massive pyramids of salt grew along the shore, white and rocky. Sveti steered inland again toward the airport, stationed just miles from the water. The runway stretched into the distance, and the Cessna piper sat abandoned on the tracks like a metallic insect anticipating flight.
As Sveti moved down lightly onto the tarmac, they were approached by a group of uniformed men who seemed almost bored as they escorted the trio out of the craft, around passport control, through the exit of the airport. Stepping out once again into the cool night, Vera found the sky had gone inky blue: The runway beyond the chain-link fence was shrouded in shadow. She scanned the landing field, looking for Gibborim.
A man in jeans and a black T-shirt strolled by, and Vera felt something cold and metallic thrust into her hand—a set of keys strung onto a leather strap. The agent—she knew that the man could only have been sent by Bruno—gestured to a Range Rover and, without a word, kept walking.
Azov gave Vera a look of surprise. He was clearly not used to having equipment and personnel show up without a word. Vera hadn’t experienced such assistance either—she had never been out in the field before—but she knew that Bruno would take care of them. She gripped the keys, deciding that she was going to make the most of everything they gave her, use every resource and every bit of her talent to get to Dr. Valko.