Authors: Danielle Trussoni
She climbed into the driver’s seat without a word. Azov climbed in beside her, leaving Sveti to take the backseat. The jeep was a new stick shift, with four-wheel drive and less than a thousand kilometers recorded on the dial. The leather steering wheel was cold from the night air. A manila envelope sat on the dash. Vera tossed it to Azov, threw the car into gear, and sped away from the airport.
Azov unzipped his backpack and pulled out a stack of plastic cups and a bottle of liquor. “Rakia,” Azov said, as he raised the bottle, offering it to Vera.
She accepted and took a long drink. It wasn’t as potent as vodka and not nearly as smooth, but she relished the feeling it produced in her body, a slow declenching of her muscles, a gradual loosening of her mind as she handed the bottle back to Sveti.
Azov dug in his backpack again and pulled out a map outlining the route from the Black Sea to the mountains, now obscured by nightfall. “Dr. Valko lives in Smolyan, which is roughly a five-hour drive from here, near the village of Trigrad. These roads are far from ideal, but at least we’re not going to meet Gibborim on the way.”
Azov was right about the Gibborim—they attacked only while in flight, fixing their victims midair—but Vera also knew that if Bulgaria was infested with those kinds of creatures, there would surely be others.
As she turned onto the highway, following Azov’s directions, she tried to calculate when they would get to Dr. Valko. According to the clock on the dashboard, it was just after 9:00
P.M.
If they made it to Smolyan within the next five hours, they would be showing up at the home of an old man in the middle of the night. “Even if you’re still on good terms with him, he isn’t going to be thrilled to see us in the middle of the night.”
Azov said, “It’s true that we’ll need to approach Raphael with care. He is enormously protective of his privacy and his work. Essentially, he cut off all contact with the outside world after Angela died. We’ll have to convince him to speak to us. But it’s worth the effort.”
“Actually, we have little choice but to try,” Sveti said, taking a swallow of the rakia.
As Vera drove up into the mountains, she was aware that her attitude toward Dr. Raphael Valko was like any other young angelologist—she was starstruck by the very mention of him. Dr. Valko was a legend. She had never dreamed that she might meet him in person.
Perhaps sensing that she wanted to know more, Azov said, “Valko lives within spitting distance of the Devil’s Throat Cavern for a reason.”
“He’s mining Valkine?” Vera asked.
“That would certainly be useful for our purposes,” Sveti said.
“Everyone has their own ideas about what he’s doing up there,” Azov said. “He’s up there with only the most essential modern conveniences. No telephone line, no electricity. He heats his house with wood and carries water from a well. He’s nearly impossible to get to. I’m in the same country as the man, and I’ve been to his fortress—it is the only way to describe what he’s built in Smolyan—only a handful of times, always to exchange and discuss seeds. By reputation he is an explorer and a man of science, but in person he’s more like a Bulgarian goat herder—difficult to rile and terrifying in his vengeance toward those he believes would cross him. He’s tough as nails, even at one hundred years old.”
Vera looked at Azov, astonished. “He’s one hundred years old?”
“Yes,” Azov said. “The first time I met him, in 1985, he looked every bit like the seventy-six-year-old man he was. Later, after we began sharing the antediluvian seeds, he had the appearance of a man no older than fifty. Now he lives with a woman who is forty-five. She became pregnant with his child ten years ago.”
“He is ninety years older than his daughter?” Sveti said. “It’s completely impossible.”
“Not if he’s been using the seeds for his own purposes,” Azov said.
Vera said, “There were rumors in the nineties that Valko was supplying his second wife Gabriella with vials of a liquid distillation from the plants in his garden. Well into her eighties she was actively fighting the Nephilim, going out on missions, enduring the hardships that agents half her age struggled to endure. She died during a mission. Nobody understood how she had the strength to even participate. She seemed to defy her body. The seeds you gave Raphael Valko are the only explanation. He must be growing his own antediluvian garden up there.”
“Whether he is mixing their oils or growing the seeds into plants, it is impossible to say. You should remember that the seeds Valko has cultivated are the very same ones that Noah grew before the Flood, and Noah—as you know—lived to be nearly one thousand years old. It is impossible to know what nutritional substances the plants contained or what their effects would be, but it is obvious that Valko has used them to his advantage.”
“Have you considered that he may have already found the formula for Noah’s medicine?” Vera asked.
Azov sighed, as if he had considered the question many times before. “The truth is that any number of things could be happening in Raphael Valko’s workshops. He is the man who discovered the location of the Watchers’ prison in 1939. He is also the man who organized and sustained the society’s resistance during the Second World War. Dr. Raphael Valko is not a man who leaves anything to chance. I’m certain that whatever he’s doing up there in the Rhodopes, he’s approaching it with the same single-minded drive that has always allowed him to succeed where many others have failed.”
“Aren’t you afraid that one of these days you will go up there and find him dead?” Vera asked.
“Not in the least,” Azov said. “But I’m very much concerned that he’ll turn us away when we get there. There’s no guarantee that he’ll help us with this concoction at all. Although he’s connected to the society through various unofficial channels—myself included—he left angelology decades ago. There’s every chance that he won’t want to provide the missing element—the Valkine—even for something as alluring as the elusive medicine of Noah.”
Vera drove onward, moving into the foothills of the Rhodope Mountains. While her inclination was to get to the village of Smolyan as fast as possible, the terrain worked against her. As they climbed higher and higher, the roads cut through increasingly steep passes, forging a sloped conduit overhung by rock on one side and a steep drop into an abyss on the other. She forced herself to glance at the ravine, the precipice opening over a tumbling darkness that, with one wrong turn, would take them over the edge. Even in daylight, when she could anticipate the tight hairpin turns, the drive would have been daunting. She kept the gear low and powered up the Range Rover, keeping a slow, steady speed.
Cresting the peak of a ridge, the jeep was suddenly awash in the light of a full moon, which illuminated a forest of birch and oak and pines sloping off beyond them. The road plunged down into canyons cut by streaks of moonlight and up to the mountaintop villages and then down again through more narrow passes, so that it seemed to Vera that they were making their way through an elaborate topiary maze, one that might lead nowhere. After hours of driving, they reached the summit of what must have been the highest peak in the region. Vera saw nothing above them but a vast canopy of stars. The village of Smolyan crouched in a scoop of land, hidden in darkness.
Azov directed Vera to turn onto a darkened gravel road that twisted and turned downward until a small Orthodox church appeared. A tower hovered nearby, its ironwork clock looming over the village. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. At Azov’s instruction, Vera continued down the road, passing the ancient ramparts and arriving at a square lined with evergreen trees. She cut the engine. Nobody spoke, but a new sense of hope had been born. It was as if they all felt that a solution was possible, that once they made it to Valko they would overcome the seemingly impossible odds.
“We’re here,” Azov said. “Let’s just hope Raphael will see us.”
Trans-Siberian Railway, between Kirov and Perm
B
runo leaned into the soft cushion of his seat and stared out the window at the starlight playing over the snow. The clattering of the train’s wheels punctuated his thoughts with a sharp, staccato rhythm. He tried to imagine the thousands and thousands of miles of open space stretching to the Pacific, the permafrost and ancient forests, the bogs of peat, the stark, immaculate mountains. The train traveled over five thousand miles between Moscow and Beijing. The landscape seemed so alien, so far removed from the modern Russia they had just left, that he could almost imagine the distant era of the Romanovs, with its palace balls and sledges and hunting parties and regiments of elegant soldiers on horseback. Secrets could be buried forever in such a vast and inhospitable landscape. Perhaps Rasputin had entombed some himself.
Turning, he stole a glance at Verlaine. His skin was pale, his hair a knot of dark curls, and his shoulders slightly hunched. Even if the doctor’s salve had helped ease the physical pain of the attack, the psychological effects of Eno’s electric shock had had a terrible and indelible effect on him. Bruno couldn’t help but worry. Bruno’s feelings had changed in the past several hours from anger at his own bravado—he should have known better than to encourage Verlaine to go after Eno alone—to relief that his most promising hunter was alive. He was so thankful that he couldn’t be angry about the pendant.
A trolley moved through the compartment with coffee and tea. Bruno attempted to hold his china teacup steady in his hand as the server poured, but the saucer shook, spilling hot liquid over his jeans. Once this cup had been filled, Bruno smelled the rich scent of the black tea and tried to ease his mind by sorting through everything that Nadia had said before the creatures had attacked. It seemed to Bruno, as he turned over the details in his mind, that there was no clear method for how to act. Nadia had never fully explored the information in Rasputin’s journal. Indeed, she had seemed content to let the pages remain a curiosity from the past. It was up to them to learn what Rasputin had intended by his book of flowers.
Bruno felt Yana’s hand on his shoulder. “Come on,” she said.
They walked through a seemingly endless caravan of train cars, Yana sauntering ahead, leading the way. Bruno noticed her gun, tucked discreetly into a brace under her jacket. With a pang of admiration, he remembered her savvy in taking down Eno in St. Petersburg, handling the Emim with unbelievable skill in a studied, almost clinical manner. Bruno wondered what hindered his own ability to fight Eno. Maybe he unconsciously subverted his own efforts. Maybe something inside him wanted her to be free. Maybe women hunters didn’t have these problems.
Yana paused before a steel door at the rear of the final passenger car, and, after fumbling through a ring of keys, inserted one into the lock. Turning to Bruno, she said, “The last ten cars are our storage and transport cabins, reserved for prisoners on their way to Siberia. In addition to the infirmary, there are cars equipped to hold the various species of angelic creatures, each one designed to counter the creature’s particular strength. Nephilim are kept in a car filled with a high-frequency electric current that renders them comatose. Eno is in a freezer car, a space reserved for the most violent angels—warrior angels such as Gibborim and Raiphim, as well as Emim like herself. As you’re well aware, the lower temperatures slow the heart, diminish the power of the wings, and bring the level of violence to a minimum.” Yana smiled and pushed the door open. “Eno is in bad shape. You may not even recognize her.”
They stepped into a narrow, lightless passage that opened to the holding cars. As they walked, Bruno stopped at each car to examine the creatures. There were three angels bound together in one cell—a Leogan, a Nestig, and a small red Mendax, three creatures whose words could never be trusted. They didn’t notice Bruno, so busy were they muttering among themselves. At the end of the train, at the front of the last car, there was a plate-glass door covered in ice.
“This is my week’s transport,” she said, pride in her voice.
“Impressive,” Bruno said, careful to not reveal the extent of his admiration.
“Eno is an extraordinary catch, one that I’ve been hoping to make for years. I don’t think I could have managed her alone, and so I have you to thank.” Yana stopped before the frozen door. “Come and look at our angel.”
Yana unlocked the door and Bruno stepped into the compartment, his skin prickling from the cold, his breath rising and fogging in the air, his shoes slipping on the frost-covered floor. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He saw Eno’s bare leg, its blue-gray skin a curl of fog; he saw her face, drawn in sleep, her eyes closed, her violet lips. Her head had been shaved, and thick veins snaked over her skull, pulsing and blue, living. Now that her beauty was stripped away, Bruno could perceive, with visceral poignancy, how inhuman she was. As he knelt beside her, he heard her breath sticking in her chest, as if the freezing air had lodged itself into her lungs. He ran a finger over her cheek, feeling the old electric attraction to her. The train jerked and Eno opened her eyes. Their reptilian sheaths retracted. As she trained her gaze on him, he saw that she knew him, that she wanted to speak to him, but all her strength was gone.
She opened her mouth and her long, black tongue fell from her lips, its end forked like a snake’s. Bruno felt an irrational urge to draw her close, to feel her breathing on his neck, to feel her struggle under him. From the way she looked at him, he could feel her rage. Their game was over. Bruno had won.
Yana said at last, “Do you have any clue how difficult this Emim is?”
Bruno let his gaze linger a moment longer. Half of his life had been spent hunting Eno. Yana had no idea how well he understood how difficult and dangerous she could be. “Unfortunately, I do,” he said, following Yana back into the corridor of the train.
“You think she’ll talk?”
“Maybe,” Bruno said. “Now that she’s isolated from the Grigoris, we have a better chance.”
Yana took a cigarette from a pack and offered it to Bruno. He didn’t smoke under normal circumstances, but the past days were not at all normal. He took a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled, feeling his mind clear.