Angelology

Sister Evangeline’s cell, St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

December 24, 1999, 12:01 A.M.

Evangeline went to the window, pushed back the heavy curtains, and gazed into the darkness. From the fourth floor, she could see clear across the river. At scheduled times each night, the passenger train cut through the dark, slicing a bright trail against the landscape. The presence of the night train comforted Evangeline-it was as reliable as the workings of St. Rose Convent. The train passed, the sisters walked to prayer, the heat seeped from steam radiators, the wind rattled the windowpanes. The universe moved in regular cycles. The sun would rise in a few hours, and when it did, Evangeline would begin another day, following the rigid schedule she had followed every other day: prayer, breakfast, Mass, library work, lunch, prayer, chores, library work, Mass, dinner. Her life moved in spheres as regular as the beads on a rosary.

Sometimes Evangeline would watch the train and imagine the shadowy outline of a traveler making his precarious way through the aisle. The train and the man would flash by and then, in a clatter of metal and neon light, move off to some unknown destination. Gazing into the darkness, she longed for the train carrying Verlaine to pass while she watched.

Evangeline’s room was the size of a linen closet and, appropriately, smelled of freshly laundered linens. She had recently waxed the pine floor, cleaned the corners of spiderwebs, and dusted the room from floor to ceiling and wainscoting to sill. The stiff white sheets on her bed seemed to call out to her to take her shoes off and lie down to sleep. Instead she poured water from a pitcher into a glass on the bureau and drank. Then she opened the window and took a deep breath. The air was cold and thick in her lungs, soothing as ice on a wound. She was so tired she could hardly think. The clock’s electric digits gave the hour. It was just after midnight. A new day was beginning.

Sitting upon her bed, Evangeline closed her eyes and let all thoughts of the previous day’s encounter settle. She took the pack of letters Sister Celestine had given her and counted. There were eleven envelopes, one sent each year, the return address-a New York City address she did not recognize-the same on each one. Her grandmother had posted letters with remarkable consistency, the cancellation on the stamp dating the twenty-first of December. A card had arrived annually, from 1988 until 1998. Only the present year’s card was not among them.

Careful, so as not to rip the faces of the envelopes, Evangeline removed the cards and examined them, arranging them in chronological order across the surface of the bed, from the first card to arrive to the last. The cards were covered in pen-and-ink sketches, bold blue lines that did not appear to form any specific image. The designs had been executed by hand, although Evangeline could not understand the purpose or meaning of the images. One of the cards contained a sketch of an angel climbing a ladder, an elegant, modern depiction that had none of the excesses of the angelic images in Maria Angelorum.

Although many sisters did not agree with her, Evangeline much preferred artistic depictions of angels to the biblical descriptions, which she found frightening to imagine. Ezekiel’s wheels, for example, were described in the Bible as beryl-plated and circular, with hundreds of eyes lining their outer rims. The cherubim were said to have four faces-a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. This ancient vision of God’s messengers was unnerving, almost grotesque, when compared with the Renaissance painters’ work, which forever changed the visual representation of angels. Angels blowing trumpets, carrying harps, and hiding behind delicate wings-these were the angels Evangeline cherished, no matter how removed from biblical reality they were.

Evangeline examined the cards one by one. On the first card, dated December 1988, there was the image of an angel blowing a golden trumpet, its white robes traced in gold. When she opened it, she found a piece of creamy paper fastened inside. A message, written with crimson ink in her grandmother’s elegant hand, read:

Be forewarned, dear Evangeline: Understanding the significance of Orpheus’s lyre has proved to be a trial. Legend surrounds Orpheus so heavily that we cannot discern the precise outline of his mortal life. We do not know the year of his birth, his true lineage, or the real measure of his talents with the lyre. He was reputed to have been born of the muse Calliope and the river god Oeagrus, but this, of course, is mythology, and it is our work to separate the mythological from the historical, disentangle legend from fact, magic from truth. Did he give humanity poetry? Did he discover the lyre on his legendary journey to the underworld? Was he as influential in his own lifetime as history claims? By the sixth century B.C., he was known through the Greek world as the master of songs and music, but how he came upon the instrument of the angels has been widely debated among historians. Your mother’s work only gave confirmation to long-held theories of the lyre’s importance.

Evangeline turned the paper over in her hand, hoping the red ink would continue. Surely the message was a fragment of a larger communication. But she found nothing.

She glanced about her bedroom-the solid edges of which had gone soft as her exhaustion grew-then turned back to the cards. She opened another card and then another. There were identical creamy pages fastened inside each card, all of which had been filled with lines of writing that began and ended without any discernible logic whatsoever. Of the eleven cards, only the one addressed to her contained a definite starting or ending point. There were no numbers on the pages, and the order could not be discerned from the chronology in which they’d been mailed. In fact, it appeared to Evangeline that the pages had been simply filled up with an endless stream of words. To make matters worse, the words were so small it strained her eyes to read them.

After examining the pages for some time, Evangeline returned each card to its envelope, being sure to keep the envelopes in the order of cancellation date. The effort of trying to understand the tangled pages of her grandmother’s writing made her head throb. She could not think clearly, and the pain in her temples was acute. She should have gone to sleep hours before. Bundling the cards together, she placed them under her pillow, careful not to bend or crease the edges. She could do nothing more until she had some sleep.

Without pausing to put on her pajamas, she stepped out of her shoes and fell into bed. The sheets were wonderfully cool and soft against her skin. Pulling her comforter to her chin and wiggling her nylon-encased toes, she dropped into the bottomless free fall of sleep.

Metro-North Hudson Line train, somewhere between Poughkeepsie and Harlem-125thStreet station, New York

Verlaine had caught the last southbound train of the night. To his right, the Hudson River ran alongside the tracks; to his left, the snow-covered hills rose to meet the night sky. The train was warm, well lit, and empty. The Coronas he had drunk at the bar in Milton and the slow, rocking rhythm of the train had combined to calm him to the point of resignation, if not contentment. Although he hated the thought of leaving his Renault behind, the reality was that he would probably never get his car back in working order. It was a model with a boxy body whose simple design gestured to the early Renaults of the postwar era, cars that-because they had never been imported to the United States and he had never been to France-Verlaine had seen only in photographs. Now it was smashed up and gutted.

Even worse than losing his car, however, was the loss of his entire body of research. In addition to the meticulously organized material he’d used to support his doctoral thesis-a binder of colored plates, notes, and general information regarding Abigail Rockefeller’s work with the Museum of Modern Art-there were hundreds of pages of photocopies and further notes he’d made in the past year of his work for Percival Grigori. While his formulations were not exactly original, they were all he had. Everything had been in the backseat, in the bag Grigori’s men had stolen. He had made copies of much of his work but with Grigori riding him he’d been more disorganized than usual. He could not recall how much of the St. Rose/ Rockefeller material he’d actually duplicated, nor was he completely certain of what he’d thrown in his bag and what he’d left behind. He would need to stop by his office and check his files. For now he had to hold out hope that he’d been assiduous enough to keep a reserve of the most important documents. In spite of all that had happened in the past hours, there was some reassurance: First, the original letters from Innocenta to Abigail Rockefeller were locked in his office, and second, he had kept the architectural drawings of St. Rose Convent with him.

Sliding his injured hand deep into the inside pocket of his overcoat, he removed the bundle of plans. After Grigori’s dismissive attitude toward them in Central Park, he had almost thought them worthless. Why, then, would Grigori send thugs to break into his car if they weren’t valuable?

Verlaine spread the plans out on his lap, his eye falling upon the seal of the lyre. The coincidence of the icon seal matching Evangeline’s pendant was an oddity Verlaine was keen to explain. In fact, everything about the lyre-from its presence on the Thracian coin he’d found to its prominence on St. Rose’s insignia-felt larger than life, almost mythological. It was as though his personal experiences had taken on the properties of symbolism and layered historical meaning that he was used to applying to his art-history research. Perhaps he was imposing his own scholarly training upon a situation, drawing connections where none existed, romanticizing his work and blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Now that he’d settled into his seat on the train and had the peace of mind to think it all through, Verlaine began to wonder if he hadn’t overreacted a bit to the lyre necklace. Indeed, there was the chance that the men who had broken into his Renault had nothing to do with Grigori. Perhaps there was another, completely logical explanation for the bizarre events that had happened that day.

Verlaine took the sheets of blank St. Rose Convent stationery and pressed them over the top of the architectural drawings. The paper was thick cotton bond, pink, with an elaborately woven heading of roses and angels executed in a lush Victorian-era style that, to his surprise, Verlaine quite liked, despite his preference for modernism. He had not said so at the time, but Evangeline had been wrong that their founding mother had designed the stationery two hundred years before: The invention of a chemical method for making paper from wood pulp, a technological revolution that bolstered the postal service and allowed individuals and groups to create individualized stationery, did not occur until the mid-1850s. The St. Rose stationery was most likely created in the late nineteenth century, using their founding mother’s artwork for the heading. The practice had in fact become extraordinarily popular during the Gilded Era. Luminaries like his very own Abigail Rockefeller had put great effort into making dinner-party menus, calling cards, invitations, and personalized envelopes and stationery, each with family symbols and crests pressed into the highest-quality paper available. He’d sold a number of pristine sets of such custom-printed bond at auction over the years.

He had not corrected Evangeline’s error, he realized now, because she’d thrown him off guard. If she had been an old bulldog of a woman, ill-tempered and overprotective of the archives, he would have been perfectly prepared to handle her. In his years of begging access to libraries, he’d learned how to win over librarians, or at least gain their sympathy. But he’d been helpless upon seeing Evangeline. Evangeline was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was strangely comforting, and-as a nun-completely off-limits. Perhaps she liked him, just a little. Even as she was about to kick him out of the convent, he’d felt a strange connection between them. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember exactly how she’d looked sitting in the bar in Milton. She’d looked-aside from that funky black nun outfit-like a normal person having a normal night out. He didn’t think he would be able to forget the way she’d smiled, just slightly, when he touched her hand.

Verlaine let the rocking of the train car lull him into a state of reverie, thoughts of Evangeline playing through his mind, when a crack against the windowpane jarred him awake. An immense white hand, its fingers spread apart like the points of a starfish, had pressed against the window. Startled, Verlaine sat back, trying to examine it from a different angle. Another hand appeared on the glass, slapping against it as if it might push the thick square of plastic inward, popping it from its frame. A swift, fibrous, red feather brushed against the window. Verlaine blinked, trying to decide if he had somehow fallen asleep, if this bizarre show was a dream. But upon looking more closely, he saw something that chilled his blood: Two immense creatures hovered outside the train, their great red eyes staring at him with menace, their large wings carrying them along in tandem with the car. He stared at them in fright, unable to pull his gaze away. Was he going crazy or did these bizarre beings resemble the thugs he had watched trash his car? To his amazement and consternation, he concluded that they did.

Verlaine jumped up, grabbed his jacket, and ran to the train’s restroom, a small, windowless compartment that smelled of chemicals. Breathing deeply, he tried to calm himself down. His clothes were soaked in sweat, and there was a lightness in his chest that made him feel as though he might faint. He had felt this way only once, in high school, when he’d drunk too much at his prom.

As the train hit upon the edges of the city, Verlaine tucked the maps and stationery deep into his pocket. He left the bathroom and walked quickly to the front of the train. There were only a few passengers to get off the midnight train in Harlem. The stark depopulated midnight station gave him the eerie sensation, as he stepped onto the platform, that he’d made some kind of mistake, perhaps missed his stop or, worse, had taken the wrong train entirely. He walked the length of the platform and down a set of iron stairs to the dark, cold, city street below. He felt as if some cataclysm had hit New York in his absence, and, through some trick of destiny, he had returned to a ravaged and empty city.

Upper East Side, New York City

Sneja had ordered Percival to stay indoors, but after pacing the billiard room for hours waiting for Otterley to call with news, he could not tolerate being alone any longer. When his mother’s entourage had left for the night and he was certain that Sneja had gone to sleep, Percival dressed with care-putting on a tuxedo and a black overcoat, as if he’d just been to a gala-and took the elevator down to Fifth Avenue.

It used to be that contact with the outside world left him indifferent. As a young man, when he’d lived in Paris and could not help but be confronted with the stench of humanity, he had learned to ignore people entirely. He had no need for the ceaseless scurrying of human activity-the tireless toil, the festivities, the amusements. It had bored him. Yet his illness had transformed him. He had begun to watch human beings, examining their odd habits with interest. He had begun to sympathize with them.

He knew that this was symptomatic of the larger changes-those he’d been warned would occur, and that he had been prepared to accept as the natural progression of his metamorphosis. He was told that he would begin to feel new and startling sensations, and indeed he found that he recoiled in discomfort at the sight of these pitiful creatures’ suffering. At first these odd sentiments had poisoned him with absurd bouts of emotion. He knew very well that human beings were inferior and that their suffering was in direct proportion to their position in the order of the universe. It was just so with animals, whose wretchedness seemed only slightly more pronounced than that of humans. Yet Percival began to see beauty in their rituals, their love of family, their dedication to worship, their defiance in the face of physical weakness. Despite his contempt for them, he had begun to understand the tragedy of their plight: They lived and died as if their existence mattered. If he were to mention these thoughts to Otterley or Sneja, he would be ridiculed without mercy.

Slowly, painfully, Percival Grigori made his way past the majestic apartment buildings of his neighborhood, his breathing labored, his cane aiding his progress along the icy sidewalks. The cold wind did not hinder him-he felt nothing but the creaking of the harness about his rib cage, the burning in his chest as he breathed, and the crunching of his knees and hips as the bones ground to powder. He wished he could remove his jacket and unbind his body, let the cold air soothe the burns on his skin. The mangled, decaying wings on his back pressed against his clothes, giving him the appearance of a hunchback, a beast, a deformed being shunned by the world. He wished, on late-night walks like this one, that he could trade places with the carefree, healthy people walking past him. He would almost consent to be human if it would free him of pain.

After some time the strain of the walk overwhelmed him. Percival stopped at a wine bar, a sleek space of polished brass and red velvet. Inside, it was crowded and warm. Percival ordered a glass of Macallan scotch and chose a secluded corner table from where he could watch the revelry of the living.

He had just finished his first glass of whiskey when he noticed a woman at the far end of the room. The woman was young, with glossy black hair cut in the style of the 1930s. She sat at a table, a group of friends encircling her. Although she wore trashy modern clothing-tight jeans and a lacy, low-cut blouse-her beauty had the classical purity Percival associated with women of another era. The young woman was the twin of his beloved Gabriella Lévi-Franche.

For an hour Percival did not take his eyes from her. He composed a profile of her gestures and expressions, noting that she was like Gabriella in more than appearance. Perhaps, Percival reasoned, he wanted to see Gabriella’s features too desperately: In the young woman’s silence, Percival detected Gabriella’s analytic intelligence; in the young woman’s impassive stare, he saw Gabriella’s propensity to hoard secrets. The woman was reserved among her friends, just as Gabriella had always been reserved in a crowd. Percival guessed that his prey preferred to listen, letting her friends carry on with whatever amusing nonsense filled their lives, while she privately assessed their habits, cataloging their strengths and faults with clinical ruthlessness. He determined to wait until she was alone so that he might speak to her.

After he had ordered many more glasses of Macallan, the young woman finally gathered her coat and made her way to the door. As she walked by, Percival blocked her path with his cane, the polished ebony brushing her leg. “Forgive me for accosting you in such a forthright fashion,” he said, standing so that he rose above her. “But I insist upon buying you a drink.”

The young woman looked at him, startled. He could not tell what surprised her more-the cane blocking her way or his unusual approach to asking her to stay with him.

“You’re awfully dressed up,” she said, eyeing his tuxedo. Her voice was high-pitched and emotional, the exact opposite of Gabriella’s cold, uninflected manner of expression, an inversion that damaged Percival’s fantasy in an instant. He had wanted to believe he’d discovered Gabriella, but it was clear that this person was not as similar to Gabriella as he’d hoped. Nevertheless, he yearned to speak to her, to look at her, to re-create the past.

He gestured for her to sit across from him. She hesitated just a moment, glanced once again at his expensive clothing, and sat. To his disappointment, her physical resemblance to Gabriella diminished even further when he examined her at close proximity. Her skin was peppered with fine freckles; Gabriella’s had been creamy and unblemished. Her eyes were brown; Gabriella’s had been brilliant green. Yet the curve of her shoulders and the way her blunt-cut black hair rested upon her cheeks was similar enough to hold his fascination. He ordered a bottle of champagne-the most expensive bottle available-and began to regale her with stories of his adventures in Europe, altering the tales to mask his age or, rather, his agelessness. While he had lived in Paris in the thirties, he told her he’d lived there in the eighties. While his business interests had been entirely directed by his father, he claimed to run his own enterprise. Not that she noticed the finer points or details of what he told her. It seemed to matter little what he said-she drank the champagne and listened, utterly unaware that she caused him such utter discomfort. It didn’t matter if she were as mute as a mannequin, so long as he could keep her there before him, silent and wide-eyed, half amused and half adoring, her hand draped carelessly over the table, her fleeting similarities to Gabriella intact. All that mattered was the illusion that time had fallen away.

The fantasy allowed him to recall the blind fury Gabriella’s betrayal had caused him. The two of them had planned the theft of the Rhodope treasure together. Their plan had been precisely calibrated and, to Percival’s mind, brilliant. Their relationship had been one of passion, but also of mutual advantage. Gabriella had brought him information about angelological work-detailed reports on the holdings and whereabouts of angelologists-and Percival gave Gabriella information that allowed her to advance through the hierarchy of the society with ease. Their business interactions-there could be no other word for these worldly exchanges-had only served to make him admire Gabriella. Her hunger to succeed made her all the more precious to him.

With Gabriella’s guidance the Grigori family learned of the Second Angelological Expedition. Their plan had been brilliant. Percival and Gabriella had set up the abduction of Seraphina Valko together, designating the route the caravan would take through Paris, making certain that the leather case remained in Gabriella’s hands. They had wagered that a trade-releasing the angelologists in exchange for the case containing the treasure-would be instantly approved by the Angelological Council. Dr. Seraphina Valko was not only an angelologist of world renown, she was the wife of the council leader, Raphael Valko. There was no possibility that the council would let her die, no matter how precious the object in question. Gabriella had assured him that their plan would work. He had believed her. Yet it soon became clear that something had gone terribly wrong. When he realized that there would be no trade, Percival killed Seraphina Valko himself. She had died in silence, although they’d done all they could to encourage her to divulge information about the object she’d recovered. But worst of all, Gabriella had betrayed him.

The night she had given him the leather case containing the lyre he would have married her. He would have brought her into their circle, even against the objections of his parents, who long suspected that she was a spy working to infiltrate the Grigori family. Percival had defended her. But when his mother had taken the lyre to be examined by a German specialist in the history of musical instruments, a man often called upon to verify Nazi treasures, they found that the lyre was nothing more than a well-rendered replica, an ancient Syrian specimen made of cattle bone. Gabriella had lied to him. He had been humiliated and ridiculed for his faith in Gabriella, whom Sneja had never trusted.

After the betrayal he’d washed his hands of Gabriella, leaving her to the others, a decision he found painful. He learned sometime later that her punishment had been exceptionally severe. It had been his intention that she die-indeed, he had instructed that she be killed rather than tortured-but through some combination of luck and extraordinary planning on the part of her colleagues she had been rescued. She recovered and went on to marry Raphael Valko, a match that assisted her career advancement. Percival would be the first to admit that Gabriella was the best in her field, one of the few angelologists to fully penetrate their world.

In reality he had not spoken to Gabriella for more than fifty years. Like the others, she had been kept under continual surveillance, her professional and personal activities monitored at all times of the day and night. He knew that she was living in New York City and that she continued her work against him and his family. But Percival knew very little about the details of her personal life. After their affair his family had made sure that all information about Gabriella Lévi-Franche Valko be kept from him.

The last he’d heard, Gabriella was still struggling against the inevitable decline of angelology, fighting against the hopelessness of their cause. He imagined that she would be old now, her face still beautiful but fallen. She would look nothing at all like the frivolous, silly young woman now sitting across from him. Percival leaned back in his chair and examined the woman-her ridiculously low-cut blouse and her uncouth jewelry. She had become drunk-in fact, she had more than likely been so even before he’d ordered the champagne. The tawdry woman before him was nothing at all like Gabriella.

“Come with me,” Percival said, throwing a stack of bills on the table. He put on his overcoat, took up his cane, and walked out into the night, his arm about the young woman. She was tall and thin, larger-boned than Gabriella. Percival could feel the pure sexual attraction between them-since the beginning it had been thus, human women falling prey to angelic charm.

This one was no different from the others. She went along with Percival willingly, and for some blocks they walked in silence until, finding a secluded alley, he took her by the hand and led her into the shadows. The unbearable, almost animal desire he felt for her fueled his anger. He kissed her, made love to her, and then, in a rage, he encircled her delicate, warm throat with his long, cold fingers and pressed the bones until they began to snap. The young woman grunted and pushed him away, struggling to free herself from his grip, but it was too late: Percival Grigori was caught up in the kill. The ecstasy of her pain, the sheer bliss of her struggle, sent shudders of desire through him. Imagining that it was Gabriella in his grasp only made the pleasure more acute.

St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

Evangeline woke at three in the morning in a panic. After years of abiding a rigorously strict routine, she had the tendency to become disoriented when she deviated from her schedule. Glancing about her room and feeling the pull of sleep weighing upon her senses, she decided that what she saw was not her chamber at all but a small, orderly room with immaculate windowpanes and dusted shelves that existed in a dream, and she went back to sleep.

The fleeting image of her mother and father appeared before her. They stood together in the apartment in Paris, her childhood home. In the dream her father was young and handsome, happier than Evangeline had seen him after her mother’s death. Her mother-even in the midst of dreaming, Evangeline struggled to see her-stood in the distance, a shadowy figure, her face obscured by a sun hat. Evangeline reached for her, desperate to touch her mother’s hand. From the depths of her dream, she called for her mother to come closer. But as she strained to be near to her, Angela receded, dissolving like a diaphanous, insubstantial fog.

Evangeline woke for a second time, startled by the intensity of the dream. The bright red light of her alarm clock illuminated three numbers-4:55. A shot of electricity sparked through her: She was about to be late for her scheduled hour of adoration. As she blinked and looked about the room, she realized that she had left the drapes open, and her chamber absorbed the night sky. Her white sheets were tinted grayish purple, as if covered in ash. Standing at her bedside, she stepped into her black skirt, buttoned her white blouse, and fitted her veil over her hair.

As she recalled her dream, a wave of longing enveloped her. No matter how much time passed, Evangeline felt her parents’ absence as acutely as she had as a child. Her father had died suddenly three years before, his heart stopping in his sleep. Though she observed the date of his death each year, performing a novena in his honor, it was difficult to reconcile herself to the fact that he would not know how she’d grown and changed since taking vows, how she’d become more like him than either of them would have thought possible. He’d told her many times that in temperament she was like her mother-both were ambitious and single-minded, eyes trained blindly upon the end rather than the means. But in truth, it was the stamp of his personality that had been impressed upon Evangeline.

Evangeline was about to leave when she remembered the cards from her grandmother that had so frustrated her the night before. She reached under her pillow, sorted through them, and, despite the fact that she was late for adoration, decided to try one more time to understand the tangled words her grandmother had sent to her.

She removed the cards from the envelopes and placed them upon the bed. One of the images caught her attention. In her exhaustion, she had overlooked it the previous night. It was a pale sketch of an angel, its hands upon the rungs of a ladder. She was certain she had seen the image before, although she could not recall where she’d come across it or why it seemed so familiar. The hint of recognition compelled her to move another card next to it, and as she did so, something clicked in her mind. Suddenly the images made sense: The sketches of angels on the cards were fragments of a larger picture.

Evangeline rearranged the pieces, moving them into various shapes, matching colors and borders as if constructing a jigsaw puzzle until a whole panorama emerged-swarms of brilliant angels stepping up an elegant spiral staircase and into a burst of heavenly light. Evangeline knew the picture well. It was a reproduction of William Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder, a watercolor her father had taken her to see in the British Museum as a girl. Her mother had loved William Blake-she had collected books of Blake’s poetry and prints, and her father had bought a print of Jacob’s Ladder for Angela as a gift. They had brought it with them to America after Angela’s death. It was one of the only images that had adorned their plain apartment in Brooklyn.

Evangeline opened the top left card and removed the piece of paper from inside. She opened the second card and did the same. Holding the pieces of paper side by side, she saw that her grandmother’s message worked in the same fashion as the images. The message must have been written at one time, cut into squares and sealed into envelopes that Gabriella had sent in yearly intervals. If Evangeline placed the creamy pages side by side, the jumble of words came together to form comprehensible sentences. Her grandmother had found a way to keep her message safe.

Evangeline arranged the papers in the proper order, placing one sheet next to another, until a whole expanse of Gabriella’s elegant writing lay before her. Reading over it, she saw that she had been correct. The fragments fit together perfectly. Evangeline could almost hear Gabriella’s calm authoritative voice as she scanned the lines.

By the time you read this, you will be a woman of twenty-five and-if everything has worked according to the wishes of your father and me-you will be living a safe and contemplative existence under the supervision of our Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at St. Rose Convent. It is 1988 as I write this. You are just twelve years old. Surely you will wonder at how it came to pass that you are receiving this letter now, so long after it was composed. Perhaps I will have perished before you read it. Perhaps your father will be gone as well. One cannot glean the workings of the future. It is the past and the present that must occupy us. To this I ask you to turn your attention.

You may also wonder why I have been so absent from your life in recent years. Perhaps you are angry that I have not contacted you during your time at St. Rose. The time we spent together in New York, in those most important years before you went to the convent, has sustained me through much turmoil. As has the time we spent together in Paris, when you were but a baby. It is possible that you remember me from that time, although I doubt it very much. I used to take you through the Jardin du Luxembourg with your mother. These were happy afternoons, ones that I cherish to this day. You were such a little girl when your mother was murdered. It is a crime that you were robbed of her so young. I often wonder if you know how brilliantly alive she was, how much she loved you. I am certain your father, who adored Angela, has told you much about her.

He must also have told you that he insisted upon leaving Paris immediately after the incident, believing that you would be safer in America. And so you left, never to return. I do not fault him for taking you far away-he had every right to protect you, especially after what happened to your mother.

It may be difficult to understand, but no matter how I wish to see you, it is not possible for me to contact you directly. My presence would bring danger to you, to your father, and, if you have been obedient to your father’s wishes, to the good sisters at St. Rose Convent. After what happened to your mother, I am not at liberty to take such risks. I can only hope that by twenty-five you will be old enough to understand the care that you must take, the responsibility of knowing the truth of your heritage and your destiny, which, in our family, are two branches of a single tree.

It is not in my power to guess how much you know about your parents’ work. If I know your father, he has not told you a thing about angelology and has attempted to shelter you from even the rudiments of our discipline. Luca is a good man, and his motives are sound, but I would have raised you quite differently. You may be utterly unaware that your family has been taking part in one of the great secret battles of heaven and earth, and yet the brightest children see and hear everything. I suspect that you are one of these very children. Perhaps you uncovered your father’s secret by your own devices? Perhaps you even knew that your place at St. Rose was arranged before your First Communion, when Sister Perpetua-in accordance with the requirements of angelological institutions-agreed to shelter you? Perhaps you know that you, daughter of angelologists, granddaughter of angelologists, are our hope for the future. If you are ignorant of these matters, my letter may bring you quite a shock. Please read my words through to the end, dear Evangeline, no matter the distress they cause.

Your mother began her work in angelology as a chemist. She was a brilliant mathematician and an even more brilliant scientist. Indeed, hers was the best kind of mind, one capable of holding both literal and fantastic ideas at once. In her first book, she imagined the extinction of the Nephilim as a Darwinian inevitability, the logical conclusion of their interbreeding with humanity, the angelic qualities diluted to ineffectual recessive traits. Although I did not fully understand her approach-my interests and background resided in the social-mythological arena-I did understand the notion of material entropy and the ancient truth that the spirit will always exhaust the flesh. Angela’s second book about the hybridization of Nephilim with humans-applying the genetic research founded by Watson and Crick-dazzled our council. Angela rose quickly in the society. She was awarded a full professorship by age twenty-five, an unheard-of honor in our institution, and equipped with the latest technological support, the best laboratory, and unlimited research funding.

With fame came danger. Angela soon became a target. There were numerous threats upon her life. Security levels around her laboratory were high-I made sure of this myself. And yet it was in her lab that they abducted her.

It is my guess that your father has not told you the details of her abduction. It is painful to relate, and I myself have never been able to speak of it to anyone. They did not kill your mother immediately. She was taken from her laboratory and held for some weeks by Nephilistic agents in a compound in Switzerland. It is their usual method-kidnapping important angelological figures for the purpose of making a strategic trade. Our policy has always been to refuse to negotiate, but when Angela was taken, I became frantic. Policy or no policy, I would have traded the world for her safe return.

For once your father agreed with me. Many of her research notebooks were in his possession, and we decided to offer these in trade for Angela’s life. Although I did not understand the details of her work in genetics, I understood this much: The Nephilim were getting sick, their numbers were diminishing, and they wanted a cure. I communicated to Angela’s kidnappers that the notebooks contained secret information that would save their race. To my delight, they agreed to make the trade.

Perhaps I was naive to believe they would keep their end of the agreement. When I came to Switzerland and gave them Angela’s notebooks, I was given a wooden casket containing my daughter’s body. She had been dead for many days. Her skin had been badly bruised, her hair matted with blood. I kissed her cold forehead and knew that I had lost all that mattered most to me. I fear that her last days were spent in torment. The specter of her final hours is never far from my mind.

Forgive me for being the bearer of this horrible story. I am tempted to remain silent, keeping the ghastly details from you. But you are a woman now, and with age we must face the reality of things. We must fathom even the darkest realms of human existence. We must grapple with the strength of evil, its persistence in the world, its undying power over humanity, and our willingness to support it. It is little comfort, I’m sure, to know that you are not alone in your despair. For me Angela’s death is the darkest of all dark regions. My nightmares echo with her voice and with the voice of her killer.

Your father could not live in Europe after what happened. His flight to America came swift and final-he cut off contact with all of his relations and friends, including me, so that he might raise you in solitude and peace. He gave you a normal childhood, a luxury not many of us in angelological families have experienced. But there was another reason for his escape.

The Nephilim were not satisfied with the invaluable information I had relinquished so foolishly. Soon after, they ransacked my apartment in Paris, taking objects of great value to me and to our cause, including one of your mother’s logs. You see, of the collection of notebooks I surrendered in Switzerland, there was one that I left behind, believing it safe among my belongings. It was a curious collection of theoretical work your mother had been compiling for her third book. It was in its early stages and therefore incomplete, but upon first examining the notebook I had understood how brilliant, and how dangerous, and how precious it was. In fact, I believe that it was due to these theories that the Nephilim took Angela.

Once this information had fallen into the hands of the Nephilim, I knew that all my attempts at keeping its contents secret had failed. I was mortified by the loss of the notebook, but I had one consolation: I had copied it word for word into a leather journal that should be very familiar to you-it is the same notebook that was given to me by my mentor, Dr. Seraphina Valko, and the very same notebook that I gave to you after your mother’s death. Once this notebook belonged to my teacher. Now it is in your care.

The notebook contained Angela’s theory about the physical effects of music upon molecular structures. She had begun with simple experiments using lower life forms-plants, insects, earthworms-and had worked up to larger organisms, including, if her experiment log can be relied upon, a lock of hair from a Nephilistic child. She had been testing the effects of some celestial instruments-we had a number of them in our possession and Angela had full access-using Nephilistic genetic samples such as shredded wing feathers and vials of blood. Angela discovered that the music of some of these alleged celestial instruments actually had the power to alter the genetic structure of Nephilim tissue. Moreover, certain harmonic successions had the power to diminish Nephilistic power, while others appeared to have the power to increase it.

Angela had discussed the theory at length with your father. He understood her work better than anyone, and although the details are very complicated and I am ignorant of her precise scientific methods, your father helped me to understand that Angela had proof of the most incredible effect of musical vibrations upon cellular structures. Certain combinations of chords and progressions elicited profound physical results in matter. Piano music resulted in pigmentation mutation in orchids-the études of Chopin leaving a dapple of pink upon white petals, Beethoven muddying yellow petals brown. Violin music brought an increase in the number of segments in an earthworm. The incessant dinging of the triangle caused a number of houseflies to be born without wings. And so on.

You might imagine my fascination when, some time ago, many years after Angela’s death, I discovered that a Japanese scientist named Masaru Emoto had created a similar experiment, using water as the medium upon which musical vibrations were tested. Using advanced photographic technology, Dr. Emoto was able to capture the drastic change in the molecular structure of water after it was subjected to certain musical vibrations. He asserted that certain strains of music created new molecular formations in the water. In essence these experiments agreed with your mother’s experiments, corroborating that musical vibration works at the most basic level of organic material to change structural composition.

This seemingly frivolous experimentation becomes particularly interesting when looked at in the light of Angela’s work on angelic biology. Your father was unnaturally reticent about Angela’s experiments, refusing to tell me more than I saw in the notebook. But from that small exposure, I could see that your mother had been testing the effects of some celestial instruments in our possession on Nephilistic genetic samples, primarily feathers taken from the creatures’ wings. She discovered that some of these alleged celestial instruments had the power to alter the very genetic building blocks of Nephilistic tissue. Moreover, certain harmonic successions played by these instruments had the power not only to alter cell structure but to corrupt the integrity of the Nephilim genome. I am certain Angela gave her life for this discovery. The invasion of my quarters convinced your father you were not safe in Paris. It was clear that the Nephilim knew too much.

But the story that occasions this letter revolves around a hypothesis buried deep within Angela’s many proven theories. It is a hypothesis regarding the lyre of Orpheus, which she knew had been hidden in the United States by Abigail Rockefeller in 1943. Angela had proposed a theory connecting her scientific discoveries about the celestial instruments to the lyre of Orpheus, which was believed to be more powerful than all the other instruments combined. Whereas before the Nephilim had acquired the notebooks they had only vague notions of the lyre’s importance, they learned from Angela’s work that it was the primary instrument, the one that could return the Nephilim to a state of angelic purity unseen upon earth since the time of the Watchers. Angela may well have found the very solution to Nephilistic diminishment in the music of the Watchers’ lyre, known in modern times as the lyre of Orpheus.

Be forewarned, dear Evangeline: Understanding the significance of Orpheus’s lyre has proved to be a trial. Legend surrounds Orpheus so heavily that we cannot discern the precise outline of his mortal life. We do not know the year of his birth, his true lineage, or the real measure of his talents with the lyre. He was reputed to have been born of the muse Calliope and the river god Oeagrus, but this, of course, is mythology, and it is our work to separate the mythological from the historical, disentangle legend from fact, magic from truth. Nor is the real measure of his talents with the lyre known. Did he give humanity poetry? Did he discover the lyre on his legendary journey to the underworld? Was he as influential in his own lifetime as history claims? By the sixth century B.C., he was known through the Greek world as the master of songs and music, but how he came upon the instrument of the angels has been widely debated among historians. Your mother’s work only gave confirmation to long-held theories of the lyre’s importance. Her hypothesis, so essential to our progress against the Nephilim, led to her death. This you now know. What you may not know is that her work is not finished. I have spent my life striving to complete it. And you, Evangeline, will one day continue where I have left off.

Your father may or may not have told you of Angela’s advances and contributions to our cause. It is beyond my power to know. He closed himself to me many years ago, and I cannot hope that he will welcome me into his confidence again. You, however, are different. If you demand to know the details of your mother’s work, he will tell you everything. It is your place to continue the tradition of your family. It is your heritage and your destiny. Luca will guide you where I cannot, I’m certain of it. You must only ask him directly. And, my dear, you must persevere. With my heartfelt blessing, I urge you on. But you must be well aware of your role in the future of our sacred discipline and the grave dangers that await you. There are many who would see our work eliminated and who will kill indiscriminately to reach that end. Your mother died at the hands of the Grigori family, whose efforts have kept the battle between Nephilim and angelologists alive. I daresay you must be warned of the dangers you face and beware of those who wish you harm.

Evangeline nearly cried out with frustration at the missive’s abrupt ending. The amputated letter left no further explanation of what she must do. She searched through the cards and reread her grandmother’s words once again, desperate to discover something she had overlooked.

The account of her mother’s murder caused Evangeline such pain that she had to force herself to continue reading Gabriella’s words. The details were gruesome, and there seemed something cruel, almost heartless, in Gabriella’s retelling of the horror of Angela’s death. Evangeline tried to imagine her mother’s body, bruised and broken, her beautiful face marred. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, Evangeline understood at last why her father had taken her so far away from the country of her birth.

Upon the third reading of the cards, Evangeline stopped to examine a line relating to her mother’s killers. There are many who would see our work eliminatedand who will kill indiscriminately to reach that end. Your mother died at the hands of the Grigori family, whoseeffortshave kept the battle between Nephilim and angelologists alive. She had heard the name, but she could not say where until she remembered that Verlaine was working for a man called Percival Grigori. At once she understood that Verlaine-whose intentions were obviously pure-was working for her greatest enemy.

The horror of this realization left Evangeline at a loss. How could she assist Verlaine when he didn’t even realize the danger he was in? Indeed, he might report his findings to Percival Grigori. What she had believed to be the best plan-to send Verlaine back to New York and to carry on at St. Rose as if nothing significant had happened-had put them both in grave danger.

She began to pack the cards when, skimming the lines, she noticed one that struck her as odd: By thetime you read this, you will be a woman of twenty-five. Evangeline recalled that Celestine had been asked to give her the cards when she turned twenty-five years old. Therefore the missive must have been conceived and written out entirely more than ten years before, when Evangeline was twelve, as each letter had been sent in an orderly progression each year. Evangeline was twenty-three years old. That meant that there must be two more cards, and two more pieces of the puzzle her grandmother had fashioned, waiting to be found.

Taking the envelopes once again, Evangeline put them in chronological order and checked the cancellation dates inked across the stamps. The last card had been postmarked before the previous Christmas, on December 21, 1998. In fact, all of the cards had a similar cancellation date-they had been mailed just days before Christmas. If the card for the present year had been posted in the same fashion, it could have already arrived, perhaps in the previous afternoon’s mailbag. Evangeline wrapped the cards together, put them in the pocket of her skirt, and hurried from her cell.

Columbia University, Morningside Heights, New York City

It had been a long and chilly walk from the I25th Street-Harlem station to his office, but Verlaine had buttoned his coat and was determined to face the freezing winds. Once he arrived on the Columbia University campus, he found everything utterly quiet, more still and dark than he’d seen it before. The holiday had sent everyone-even the most dedicated students-home until after the New Year. In the distance, cars drove along Broadway, their lights opening over the buildings. Riverside Church, its imposing tower stretching above even the highest of the campus buildings, sat in the distance, its stained-glass windows illuminated from within.

The cut on Verlaine’s hand had somehow reopened on the walk, and a fine trickle of blood blossomed through the silk of his fleur-de-lis tie. After some searching he found his office keys and let himself into Schermerhorn Hall, the location of the art history and archaeology department, an imposing brick building in proximity to St. Paul’s Chapel that had once housed the natural sciences departments. Indeed, Verlaine had heard that it had been the site of early work on the Manhattan Project, a bit of trivia he found fascinating. Although he knew he was alone, he felt too ill at ease to take the elevator and risk being trapped inside. Instead, Verlaine ran up the stairs to the graduate-student offices.

Once in his office, he locked the door behind him and removed the folder containing Innocenta’s letters from his desk, taking care not to let his bloodied hand come into contact with the desiccated, fragile paper. Sitting in his chair, he flicked on his desk lamp, and in the pale ring of light he examined the letters. He had read them numerous times before, noting every possible distinguishing innuendo and every potentially allusive turn of phrase, and yet even now, after hours of rereading them in the spooky solitude of his locked office, he felt that the letters seemed strangely, even bizarrely banal. Though the events of the past day prodded him to read the slightest detail with a new eye, he could find very little that pointed to a hidden agenda between these two women. Indeed, beneath the puddle of light from his desk lamp, Innocenta’s letters appeared to be not much more than sedate tea-table discursions on the quotidian rituals of the convent and on Mrs. Rockefeller’s unerring good taste.

Verlaine stood, began packing his papers into a messenger bag he kept in the corner of his office, and was about to call it a night when he stopped short. There was something uncanny about the letters. He could detect no obvious pattern-in fact, they were almost purposely jumbled. But there was an unaccountable recurrence of some very odd compliments Innocenta paid Mrs. Rockefeller. At the end of several missives, Innocenta praised the other woman’s good taste. In the past, Verlaine had skimmed these passages, believing them to be a trite way to bring the letters to a close. Taking the letters from his bag, he reread them again, this time noting each of the many passages of artistic praise.

The compliments revolved around the choice of Mrs. Rockefeller’s taste in a picture or design. In one letter Innocenta had written, “Please know that the perfection of your artistic vision, and the execution of your fancy, is well noted and accepted.” At the close of the second letter, Verlaine read, “Our most admired friend, one cannot fail to marvel at your delicate renderings or receive them with humble thanks and grateful understanding.” And yet another read, “As always, your hand never fails to express what the eye most wishes to behold.”

Verlaine puzzled over these references for a moment. What was all this talk about artistic renderings? Had there been pictures or a design included in Abigail Rockefeller’s letters to Innocenta? Evangeline hadn’t mentioned finding anything accompanying the letter in the archives, but Innocenta’s replies seemed to suggest that there was in fact something of that nature attached to her patron’s half of the correspondence. If Abigail Rockefeller had included her own original drawings and he discovered these drawings, his professional life would skyrocket. Verlaine’s excitement was so great he could hardly think.

To fully understand Innocenta’s references, he would need to find the original letters. Evangeline had one in her possession. Surely the others must be somewhere at St. Rose Convent, most likely archived in their vault in the library. Verlaine wondered if it was possible that Evangeline had discovered Abigail Rockefeller’s letter and had overlooked an enclosure, or perhaps had even discovered an envelope with the letter. While Evangeline had promised to look for the other missives, she had no reason to search for anything more. If only he had his car, he would drive back to the convent and assist her in the search. Verlaine fumbled through his desk, looking for the telephone number of St. Rose Convent. If Evangeline couldn’t find the letters in the convent, it was more than likely that they would never be found. It would be a terrible loss for the history of art, not to mention Verlaine’s career. He suddenly felt ashamed that he had been so afraid, and of his reluctance to return to his apartment. He needed to pull himself together immediately and get back upstate to St. Rose by whatever means possible.

Fourthfloor,St. Rose Convent, Milton, NewYork

Before the previous day, Evangeline had believed what she’d been told about her past. She trusted the accounts she’d heard from her father and the sequence of events the sisters had told her. But Gabriella’s letter had shattered her faith in the story line of her life. Now she distrusted everything.

Gathering her strength, she stepped into the immaculate, empty hallway, the envelopes tucked under her arm. She felt weak and dizzy after reading her grandmother’s letters, as if she had just escaped from the confines of a horrible dream. How had it been that she’d never fully understood the importance of her mother’s work and, even more astonishing, her mother’s death? What more had her grandmother meant to tell her? How could she possibly wait for the next two letters to understand it all? Fighting the urge to run, Evangeline walked down the stone steps, making her way to the one place she knew she might find the answer.

The Mission and Recruitment offices were in the southwestern corner of the convent in a modernized series of suites with pale pink carpeting, multiple-line telephones, solid oak desks, and metal filing cabinets containing all of the sisters’ personal files: birth certificates, medical records, educational degrees, legal documents, and-for those who had departed this earth-certificates of death. The Recruitment Center-combined with the Mistress of Novices’ Office due to the decline in membership-occupied the left arm of the suite, while the Mission Office occupied the right. Together they formed two open arms embracing the outside world to the bureaucratic heart of St. Rose Convent.

In recent years traffic to the Mission Office had risen, while recruitment had fallen into a deep decline. Once upon a time, the young had flocked to St. Rose for the equity and education and independence convent life offered to young women loath to enter into marriage. In modern times, St. Rose Convent became more stringent, demanding that women make the choice to profess vows on their own, without family coercion, and only after much soul-searching.

Thus, while recruitment flagged, the Mission Office became the busiest department at St. Rose. On the wall of the office hung a large laminated map of the world with red flags affixed to affiliate countries: Brazil, Zimbabwe, China, India, Mexico, Guatemala. There were photographs of sisters in ponchos and saris holding babies, administering medicine, and singing in choirs with the native populations. In the past decade, they had developed an international community-exchange program with foreign churches, bringing sisters from all over the world to St. Rose to participate in perpetual adoration, study English, and pursue personal spiritual growth. The program was a great success. Over the years they had hosted sisters from twelve countries. These sisters’ photographs hung above the map: twelve smiling women with twelve identical black veils framing their faces.

Arriving at such an early hour, Evangeline had expected to find the Mission Office empty. Instead there was Sister Ludovica, the oldest member of their community, installed in her wheelchair as the early edition of a National Public Radio broadcast played from a plastic radio on her lap. She was frail and pink-skinned, her white hair springing about the bandeau edges of her veil. Ludovica glanced at Evangeline, her dark eyes glistening in a way that confirmed the growing speculation among the sisters that Ludovica was losing her mind, slipping further and further from reality with each passing year. The previous summer a Milton police officer had discovered Ludovica pushing her wheelchair along Highway 9W at midnight.

Lately her attentions had turned to botany. Her conversations with the plants were harmless but signaled further disintegration. As she wheeled through the convent with a red watering can dangling from the side of her chair, one could hear Ludovica’s stentorian voice quoting Paradise Lost as she watered and trimmed: “‘Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night / To mortal men, he with his horrid crew / Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe / Confounded though immortal!’”

It was plain to Evangeline that the Mission Office’s spider plants had taken to Ludovica’s affection: They had grown to enormous proportions, sending shoots dripping over the filing cabinets. The plant had become so profound in its fecundity that the sisters had started snipping the baby plants and placing them in water until they sprung roots. Once transplanted, the new spider plants grew equally enormous and were stationed throughout the convent, filling each of the four floors with tangles of green spawn.

“Good morning, Sister,” Evangeline said, hoping that Ludovica would recognize her.

“Oh, my!” Ludovica replied, startled. “You surprised me!”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was unable to pick up the mail yesterday afternoon. Is the mailbag in the Mission Office?”

“Mailbag?” Ludovica asked, furrowing her brow. “I believe that all mail goes to Sister Evangeline.”

“Yes, Ludovica,” Evangeline said. “I’m Evangeline. But I wasn’t able to pick up our mail yesterday. It would have been delivered here. Have you seen it?”

“Most certainly!” Ludovica said, wheeling the chair to the closet behind her desk, where the mailbag hung from a hook. It was, as always, filled to the top. “Please deliver it directly to Sister Evangeline!”

Evangeline carried the bag to the far end of the Mission Office, to a darkened cove where she might find more privacy. Spilling the contents over the desk, she saw that it was filled with its usual mixture of personal requests, advertisements, catalogs, and invoices. Evangeline had sorted through such muddles of post so often and knew the sizes of each variety of letters so well that it took her only seconds to locate the card from Gabriella. It was a perfectly square green envelope addressed to Celestine Clochette. The return address was the same as the others, a New York City location that Evangeline did not recognize.

Pulling it from the pile, Evangeline put the card with the others in her pocket. Then she walked to the metal filing cabinet. One of Ludovica’s spider plants had all but buried the tower in leaves, and so Evangeline found herself brushing aside green shoots to open the drawer containing her records.

Although she knew that her personal file existed, Evangeline had never thought to look at it before. The only time she’d needed vital records or proof of her identity had been to get a driver’s license and to enroll at Bard College, and even then she’d used identification drawn up by the diocese. It struck her again as she flipped through the files that she had lived her entire life accepting the stories of others-her father, the sisters at St. Rose, and now her grandmother-without bothering to verify them.

To her consternation, the file was nearly an inch thick, much bulkier than she would have thought. Inside, she had expected to find her French birth certificate, her American naturalization papers, and a diploma-she was not old enough to have accumulated more records than this-but upon opening the folder she found a large pack of papers banded together. Sliding the rubber band from the pages, she began to read. There were sheets of what appeared to her uneducated eye to be lab results, perhaps blood tests. There were pages of handwritten analysis, maybe notes from a visit to the doctor’s office, although Evangeline had always been healthy and could not recall ever having been to a doctor. In fact, her father had always resisted bringing her to the doctor’s office, taking great care that she would not get sick or hurt. To her dismay, there were opalescent black plastic sheets that upon closer inspection Evangeline saw to be X-ray films. At the top of each film she read her name: Evangeline Angelina Cacciatore.

It wasn’t forbidden for the sisters to look at their personal files, and yet Evangeline felt as if she were breaking a strict code of etiquette. Momentarily restraining her curiosity about the medical documents in her file, she turned to the papers relating to her novitiate, a series of run-of-the-mill admission forms that her father had completed upon bringing her to St. Rose. The sight of her father’s handwriting sent a wave of pain through her. It had been years since she’d seen him. She traced a finger over his handwriting, remembering the sound of his laughter, the smell of his office, his habit of reading himself to sleep each night. How odd, she thought, pulling the forms from the folder, that the marks he’d left behind had the power to bring him back to life, if only for a moment.

Reading the forms, she found a series of facts about her life. There was the address where they had lived in Brooklyn, their old telephone number, her place of birth, and her mother’s maiden name. Then, toward the bottom, written in as Evangeline’s designated emergency contact, she found what she was searching for: Gabriella Levi-Franche Valko’s New York City address and telephone number. The address matched the return address on the Christmas cards.

Before Evangeline had a chance to think over the repercussions of her actions, she lifted the phone and dialed Gabriella’s number, her anticipation clouding all other feelings. If anyone would know what to do, it would be her grandmother. The line rang once, twice, and then Evangeline heard it, the brusque and commanding voice of her grandmother. “Allo?”

Verlaine’s apartment, Greenwich Village, New York City

The twenty-four hours since he’d left his apartment felt to Verlaine like a lifetime ago. Only yesterday he’d collected his dossier, put on his favorite socks, and run down the five flights of stairs, his wing tips slipping on the wet rubber treads. Only yesterday he’d been preoccupied with avoiding Christmas parties and putting together his New Year’s plans. He couldn’t understand how the information he’d collected could have led to the sorry state he found himself in now.

He’d packed the original copies of Innocenta’s letters and the bulk of his notebooks into a bag, locked his office, and headed downtown. The morning sunlight had ascended over the city, the soft diffusion of yellow and orange breaking the stark winter sky in an elegant sweep. He walked for blocks and blocks through the cold. Somewhere in the mid-Eighties, he gave up and took the subway the rest of the way. By the time he unlocked the front door of his building, he had almost convinced himself that the previous night’s events were an illusion. Perhaps, he told himself, he had imagined it all.

Verlaine unlocked the door to his apartment, knocked it closed with the heel of his shoe, and dropped his messenger bag on the couch. He took off his ruined wing tips, pulled away his wet socks, and walked barefoot into his humble abode. He half expected to find the place in ruins, but everything appeared to be exactly as he’d left it the day before. A web of shadows fell over the exposed-brick walls, the I950s Formica-topped table stacked with books, the turquoise leather benches, the kidney-shaped resin coffee table-all of his Midcentury Modern pieces, shabby and mismatched, were waiting for him.

Verlaine’s art books filled an entire wall. There were oversize coffee-table Phaidon Press editions, squat paperbacks of art criticism, and glossy folios containing prints of his favorite modernists-Kandinsky, Sonia Delaunay, Picasso, Braque. He owned more books than actually fit into such a small apartment, and yet he refused to sell them. He’d come to the conclusion years ago that a studio apartment was not ideal for someone with a hoarding instinct.

Standing at his fifth-floor window, he removed the silk Hermès tie he’d been using as a bandage, slowly working the fabric away from the scabbing flesh. His tie was ruined. Folding it, he placed it on the sill. Outside, a slice of morning sky hovered in the distance, lifting above rows of buildings as if propped on stilts. The snow hung upon tree branches, slouched down the slopes of drainage pipes, and tapered into daggers of ice. Water towers on rooftops dotted the tableau. Although he didn’t own an inch of property, he felt that this view belonged to him. Looking intently at his corner of the city could absorb his entire attention. This morning, however, he simply wanted to clear his head and think about what he would do next.

Coffee, he realized, would be a good start. Walking to the galley kitchen, he turned on his espresso machine, packed fine-ground beans into the portafilter, and-after steaming some milk-made himself a cappuccino in an antique Fiestaware mug, one of the few he hadn’t broken. As Verlaine took a sip of coffee, the flash of his answering machine caught his eye-there were messages. He pressed a button and listened. People had been calling all night and hanging up. Verlaine counted ten instances of someone simply listening on the line, as if waiting for him to answer. Finally a message played in which the caller spoke. It was Evangeline’s voice. He recognized it in an instant.

“If you took the midnight train, you should have been back by now. I cannot help but wonder where you are and whether you are safe. Call me as soon as you can.”

Verlaine went to the closet, where he dug out an old leather duffel bag. He unzipped it and threw in a clean pair of Hugo Boss jeans, a pair of Calvin Klein boxers, a Brown University sweatshirt-his alma mater-and two pairs of socks. He dug a pair of Converse All-Stars from the bottom of the closet, put on a pair of clean socks, and put them on. There was no time for him to think about what else he might need. He would rent a car and drive back to Milton immediately, taking the same route he’d followed yesterday afternoon, driving over the Tappan Zee Bridge and navigating the small roads along the river. If he hurried, he could be there before lunch.

Suddenly the telephone rang, a noise so sharp and startling that he lost his grip on the coffee cup. It fell against the window ledge with a solid crack, a splatter of coffee and milk spilling over the floor. Eager to speak with Evangeline, he left the cup where it landed and grabbed the phone.

“Evangeline?” he said.

“Mr. Verlaine.” The voice was soft, feminine, and it addressed Verlaine with an unusual intimacy. The woman’s accent-Italian or French, he couldn’t tell exactly which-combined with a slight hoarseness, gave him the impression that she was middle-aged, perhaps older, although this was pure speculation.

“Yes, speaking,” he replied, disappointed. He glanced at the broken cup, aware that he had diminished his collection yet again. “What can I do for you?”

“Many things, I hope,” the woman said.

For a fraction of a second, Verlaine thought the caller might be a tele-marketer. But his number was unlisted, and he didn’t usually get unwanted calls. Besides, it was clear that this voice was not the kind to be selling magazine subscriptions.

“That’s a rather tall order,” Verlaine said, taking the caller’s strange phone manner in stride. “Why don’t you start by telling me who you are?”

“May I ask you a question first?” the woman said.

“You might as well.” Verlaine was beginning to get irritated with the calm, insistent, almost hypnotic sound of the woman’s voice, a voice quite different from Evangeline’s.

“Do you believe in angels?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you believe that angels exist among us?”

“Listen, if this is some kind of evangelical group,” Verlaine said, bending before the window and stacking the fragments of his cup one on top of the other. The white, granular powder from the unglazed center of the cup crumbled over his fingers. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m an overeducated, left-of-left, soy-latte-drinking, borderline-metrosexual liberal agnostic. I believe in angels as much as I believe in the Easter Bunny.”

“That is extraordinary,” the woman said. “I was under the impression that these fictitious creatures were a threat to your life.”

Verlaine stopped stacking the shards of the cup. “Who is this?” he asked finally.

“My name is Gabriella Lévi-Franche Valko,” the woman said. “I have worked for a very long time to find the letters in your possession.”

Growing more confused, he asked, “How do you know my number?”

“There are many things I know. For example, I know that the creatures you escaped last night are outside your apartment.” Gabriella paused, as if to let this sink in, then said, “If you don’t believe me, Mr. Verlaine, look out your window.”

Verlaine bent before the windowpane, a strand of curly black hair falling in his eyes. Everything looked just as it had minutes before.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Look left,” Gabriella said. “You will see a familiar black SUV”

Verlaine followed the woman’s instructions. Indeed, at the left, on the corner of Hudson Street, the black Mercedes SUV idled on the street. A tall, dark-clothed man-the same one he’d seen breaking into his car the day before and, if he hadn’t been hallucinating, seen outside his train window-stepped out of the SUV and paced under the streetlight.

“Now, if you look to the right,” Gabriella said, “you will see a white van. I am inside. I’ve been waiting for you since early this morning. At my granddaughter’s request, I have come to help you.”

“And who is your granddaughter?”

“Evangeline, of course,” Gabriella said. “Who else?”

Verlaine craned his neck and spotted a white van tucked into a narrow service alley across the street. The alley was far away, and he could hardly see a thing. As if the caller understood his confusion, a window descended and a petite, leather-gloved hand emerged and gave a peremptory wave.

“What exactly is going on?” Verlaine said, abashed. He walked to the door, turned the bolt, and secured the chain. “Do you mind telling me why you’re watching my apartment?”

“My granddaughter believed you were in danger. She was right. Now I want you to gather Innocenta’s letters and come down immediately,” Gabriella said calmly. “But I advise you to avoid exiting the building through the front door.”

“There’s no other way out,” Verlaine said, uneasy.

“A fire escape, perhaps?”

“The fire escape is visible from the front entrance. They’ll see me as soon as I start down it,” Verlaine said, eyeing the metal skeleton that darkened the corner of the window and worked its way over the front of the building. “Could you please tell me why-”

“My dear,” Gabriella said, interrupting Verlaine, her voice warm, almost maternal. “You will simply have to use your imagination. I advise you to get yourself out of there. Immediately. They will be coming for you at any moment. Actually, they don’t give a damn about you. They will want the letters,” she said quietly. “As you perhaps know, they will not extract them gently.”

As if taking their cue from Gabriella, the second man-as tall and pale-skinned as the first-stepped out of the black SUV, joining the other. Together they crossed the street, walking toward Verlaine’s building.

“You’re right. They’re coming,” Verlaine said. He turned from the window and grabbed the duffel bag, stuffing his wallet, keys, and laptop under the clothes. He took the folder of Innocenta’s original letters from his messenger bag, placed them inside a book of Rothko prints, slid them gently into his duffel bag, and pulled the zipper shut with swift finality. Finally, he said, “What should I do?”

“Wait a moment. I can see them very clearly,” Gabriella said. “Just follow my instructions, and everything will be fine.”

“Maybe I should call the police?”

“Do nothing yet. They are still standing at the entrance. They will see you if you leave now,” Gabriella said, her voice eerily calm, a strange counterpoint to the rush of blood screeching in Verlaine’s ears. “Listen to me, Mr. Verlaine. It is extremely important that you do not move until I tell you.”

Verlaine unlocked the window and heaved it open. A gust of freezing air swept his face. Leaning out the window, he could see the men below. They spoke in low voices and then, inserting something into the lock, pushed the door open, and entered the building with astonishing ease. The heavy door slammed hard behind them.

“Do you have the letters?” Gabriella asked.

“Yes,” Verlaine said.

“Then go. Now. Down the fire escape. I will be waiting.”

Verlaine hung up the phone, threw the duffel bag over his shoulder, and crawled out the window into the icy wind. The metal froze against the warm skin of his palm as he grasped the rusty ladder. With all his effort, he pulled: The ladder clattered to the sidewalk. Pain shot through his hand as the skin stretched, reopening the wound from the barbed-wire fence. Verlaine ignored the pain and climbed down the rungs, his sneakers sliding on the ice-glazed metal. He was nearly to the sidewalk when he heard an explosive crack of wood above. The men had broken down the door of his apartment.

Verlaine dropped to the sidewalk, making sure to protect the duffel bag in the crook of his arm. As he stepped onto the street, the white van pulled to the curb. The door slid open, and an elfin woman with bright red lipstick and a severe black pageboy haircut beckoned for Verlaine to jump into the backseat. “Get in,” Gabriella said, making room. “Hurry.”

Verlaine climbed into the van beside Gabriella as the driver threw the vehicle into gear, rounded the corner, and sped uptown.

“What in the hell is going on?” Verlaine asked, looking over his shoulder, half expecting to find the SUV behind.

Gabriella put her thin, leather-sheathed hand over his cold, trembling one. “I’ve come to help you.”

“Help me with what?”

“My dear, you have no idea of the trouble you’ve brought upon all of us.”

The Grigori penthouse, Upper East Side, New York City

Percival demanded that the curtains be drawn, so as to protect his eyes from the light. He had walked home at sunrise, and the pale morning sky had been enough to cause his head to ache. When the room was sufficiently dark, he discarded his clothes, throwing the tuxedo jacket, the fouled white shirt, and his trousers on the floor, and stretched out upon a leather couch. Without a word the Anakim unbuckled his harness, a laborious procedure that he endured with patience. Then she poured oil onto his legs and massaged him from ankle to thigh, working her fingers into the muscles until they burned. The creature was very pretty and very silent, a combination that suited Anakim, especially the females, whom he found remarkably stupid. Percival stared at her as she moved her short, fat fingers up and down his legs. The burning headache matched the heat in his legs. Deliriously tired, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

The exact origin of his disorder was still unknown to even the most experienced of his family’s doctors. Percival had hired the very best medical team, flying them to New York from Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, and Japan, and all they could tell him was what everyone already knew: A virulent viral infection had traveled through a generation of European Nephilim, attacking the nervous and pulmonary systems. They recommended treatments and therapies to promote healing in his wings and to loosen his muscles, so that he might breathe and walk with more ease. Daily massages were one of the more pleasant elements of the treatments. Percival called the Anakim to his room to massage his legs numerous times each day, and along with his deliveries of scotch and sedatives, he had come to depend upon her hourly presence.

Under normal circumstances he would not have allowed a wretched servant woman into his private chambers at all-he had not done so in the many hundreds of years before his illness-but the pain had become unbearable in the last year, the muscles so cramped that his legs had begun to twist into an unnatural position. The Anakim stretched each leg until the tendons loosened and massaged the muscles, pausing when he flinched. He watched her hands press into his pale skin. She soothed him, and for this he was grateful. His mother had abandoned him, treating him like an invalid, and Otterley was out doing the work Percival should be doing. There was no one left but an Anakim to help him.

As he relaxed, he drifted into a light sleep. For a brief, buoyant moment, he recalled the pleasure of his late-night stroll. When the woman was dead, he had closed her eyes and stared at her, running his fingers against her cheek. In death her skin had taken on an alabaster hue. To his delight, he saw Gabriella Lévi-Franche clearly-her black hair and her powdery skin. For a moment he had possessed her once again.

As he drifted into the delicate space between waking and sleeping, Gabriella appeared to him like a luminous messenger. In his fantasy she told him to come back to her, that all was forgiven, that they would continue where they had ended. She told him that she loved him, words that no one-human or Nephilim-had said before. It was an inordinately painful dream, and Percival must have spoken in his sleep-he startled awake and found the Anakim servant staring intently at him, her large yellow eyes glimmering with tears, as if she had come to understand something about him. She softened her touch and said a few words of comfort. She pitied him, he realized, and the presumption of such intimacy angered Percival-he ordered the beast to leave at once. She nodded submissively, put the cap on the bottle of oil, collected his soiled clothing, and left in an instant, shutting him in a cocoon of darkness and despair. He lay awake, feeling the sting of the maid’s touch on his skin.

Soon the Anakim returned, delivering a glass of scotch on a lacquered tray. “Your sister is here, sir,” she said. “I will tell her that you are sleeping if you wish.”

“No need to lie for him. I can see that he is awake,” Otterley said, brushing past the Anakim and sitting at Percival’s side. With a flip of her wrist, she dismissed the servant. Taking the massage oil, Otterley uncapped it and poured some in the palm of her hand. “Turn over,” she said.

Percival obeyed his sister’s orders, turning on his stomach. As Otterley massaged his back, he wondered what would become of her-and of their family-after the disease had taken him. Percival had been their great hope, his majestic, masculine golden wings promising that one day he would ascend to a position of power, superseding even his father’s avaricious ancestors and his mother’s noble blood. Now he was a wingless, feeble disappointment to his family. He had envisioned himself to be a great patriarch, the father of an expansive number of Nephilistic children. His sons would grow to be endowed with the colorful wings of Sneja’s family, gorgeous plumage that would bring honor to the Grigoris. His daughters would have the qualities of the angels-they would be psychic and brilliant and trained in the celestial arts. Now, in his decline, he had nothing. He understood how foolish it had been to waste hundreds of years in the pursuit of pleasure.

That Otterley was equally disappointing made his failure even harder to face. Otterley had neglected to bring the Grigori family an heir, just as Percival had failed to grow into the angelic being his mother had so longed for him to be.

“Tell me you’ve come with good news,” Percival said, flinching as Otterley rubbed the delicate raw flesh near the wing nubs. “Tell me that you’ve recovered the map and killed Verlaine and there is nothing more to worry about.”

“My dear brother,” Otterley said, leaning close as she massaged his shoulders. “You have really made a mess of things. First, you hired an angelologist.”

“I did no such thing. He is nothing other than a simple art historian,” Percival said.

“Next, you let him take the map.”

“Architectural drawings,” Percival corrected.

“Then you creep out in the middle of the night and put yourself in this terrible state.” Otterley stroked the rotted stubs of his wings, a sensation Percival found delicious even as he wished to push his sister’s hand away.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mother knows you left, and she has asked me to watch you very closely. What would happen if you were to collapse on the street? How would we explain your condition to the doctors at Lenox Hill?”

“Tell Sneja there is no need to worry,” Percival said.

“But we do have reason to worry,” Otterley said, wiping her hands on a towel. “Verlaine is still alive.”

“I thought you sent the Gibborim to his apartment?”

“I did,” Otterley said. “But things have taken a rather unexpected turn. Whereas yesterday we were simply worried that Verlaine would make off with information, now we know he is much more dangerous.”

Percival sat up and faced his sister. “How could he possibly be dangerous? Our Anakim poses more of a threat than a man like Verlaine.”

“He is working with Gabriella Lévi-Franche Valko,” Otterley said, pronouncing each word with zeal. “Clearly he is one of them. Everything we’ve done to protect ourselves from the angelologists has been for nothing. Get up,” she said, throwing the harness at Percival. “Get dressed. You are coming with me.”

Adoration Chapel, Maria Angelorum Church, Milton, New York

Evangeline dipped a finger into the fount of holy water, blessing herself before she ran down the wide central aisle of Maria Angelorum. By the time she entered the quiet, contemplative space of the Adoration Chapel, her breathing had grown heavy. She had never missed adoration before-it was an unthinkable transgression, one she could not have imagined committing. She could hardly believe the person she was becoming. Only yesterday she had lied to Sister Philomena. Now she had missed her assigned hour of adoration. Sister Philomena must have been astonished by her absence. She slid into a pew near Sisters Mercedes and Magdalena, daily prayer partners from seven to eight each morning, hoping her presence would not disturb them. Even as she closed her eyes in prayer, Evangeline’s face burned with shame.

She should have been able to pray, but instead she opened her eyes and glanced about the chapel, looking at the monstrance, the altar, the beads of the rosary in Sister Magdalena’s fingers. Yet the moment she began, the presence of the heavenly spheres windows struck her as if they were new additions to the chapel-the size, the intricacy, the sumptuously vibrant colors of the angels crowding together in the glass. If she examined them closely, she could see that the windows were illuminated by tiny halogen lights positioned around them, trained upon the glass as if in worship. Evangeline strained to make out the population of the angels. Harps, flutes, trumpets-their instruments scattered like golden coins through the blue and red panes. The seal that Verlaine had shown her on the architectural drawings had been placed at this very spot. She thought of Gabriella’s cards and the beautiful renderings of angels on each cover. How had it happened that Evangeline had looked upon these windows so often and had never really seen their significance?

Below one of the windows, etched into the stone, a passage read:

If there is an angel as mediator for him,

One out of a thousand,

To remind a man what is right for him,

Then let him be gracious to him, and say,

“Deliver him from going down to the pit,

I have found a ransom.”

– Job 33:23-24

Evangeline had read the passage every day of her many years at St. Rose Convent, and each day the words had seemed an unsolvable puzzle. The sentence had slithered through her thoughts, slick and ungraspable, moving through her mind without catching. Now the words “mediator” and “pit” and “ransom” began to fit into place. Sister Celestine had been right: Once she began looking, she would find angelology living and breathing everywhere.

It dismayed her that the sisters had kept so much from her. Recalling Gabriella’s voice on the telephone, Evangeline wondered if perhaps she should pack her things and go to New York. Perhaps her grandmother could help her understand everything more clearly. The hold the convent had had on her only the day before had diminished by all that she’d learned.

A hand on her shoulder disturbed her from her thoughts. Sister Philomena motioned for Evangeline to follow her. Obeying, Evangeline left the Adoration Chapel, feeling a mixture of embarrassment and anger. The sisters had not trusted her with the truth. How could Evangeline possibly trust them?

“Come, Sister,” Philomena said once they were in the hallway. Whatever anger Philomena must have felt at Evangeline’s truancy had disappeared. Now her manner was inexplicably gentle and resigned. And yet something about Sister Philomena’s demeanor seemed disingenuous. Evangeline didn’t entirely believe her to be genuine, although she couldn’t pinpoint why. Together they headed through the central hallway of the convent, past the photographs of distinguished mothers and sisters and the painting of St. Rose of Viterbo, stopping before a familiar set of wooden doors. It was only natural that Philomena would lead her to the library, where they could speak with some measure of privacy. Philomena unlocked the doors, and Evangeline stepped into the shadowy room.

“Sit, child, sit,” Philomena said. Evangeline arranged herself on the green velvet sofa, across from the fireplace. The room was cold, the result of the perennially ill-fitting flue. Sister Philomena went to a table near her office and plugged in the electric kettle. When the water boiled, she poured it into a porcelain pot. Setting two cups on a tray, she waddled back to the sofa, placing the tray on a low table. Taking the wooden chair opposite Evangeline, she opened a metal cookie box and offered Evangeline an assortment of FSPA Christmas Cookies-butter cookies that had been baked, frosted, packaged, and sold by the sisters for their annual Christmas fund-raiser.

The fragrance of the tea-black with a hint of dried apricot-made Evangeline’s stomach turn. “I’m not feeling very well,” she said by way of apology.

“You were missed at dinner last night and, of course, at adoration this morning,” Philomena said, choosing a Christmas-tree cookie with green frosting. She lifted the pot and poured some tea into the cups. “But I am not much surprised. This has been a great ordeal with Celestine, hasn’t it?” Philomena’s posture became very erect, her hand holding the teacup rigid over her saucer, and Evangeline knew that Philomena was about to cut to the heart of the matter.

“Yes,” Evangeline replied, expecting the impatient and stern Philomena to return any moment.

Philomena clucked her tongue and said, “I knew that it was inevitable you would learn the truth of your origins someday. I was not sure how, mind you, but I had a vivid sense that the past would be impossible to bury completely, even in such a closed community as ours. In my humble opinion,” Philomena continued, finishing off her cookie and taking another, “it has been quite a burden for Celestine to remain silent. It has been a burden for all of us to remain so passive in the face of the threat that surrounds us.”

“You knew of Celestine’s involvement in this…” Evangeline fumbled, trying to formulate the correct words to describe angelology. She had the unwelcome thought that perhaps she was the only Franciscan Sister of Adoration who had been kept ignorant. “This… discipline?”

“Oh, my, yes,” Philomena said. “All of the older sisters know. The sisters of my generation were steeped in angelic study-Genesis 28:I2-I7, Ezekiel 1:1-14, Luke I:26-38. Bless me, it was angels morning, noon, and night!”

Philomena adjusted her weight on her chair, making the wood groan, and continued, “One day I was deep into the core curriculum prescribed by European angelologists-our longtime mentors-and the next our convent was nearly destroyed. All of our scholarship, all of our efforts toward ridding the world of the pestilence of the Nephilim, seemed to be to have been for naught. Suddenly we were simple nuns whose lives were devoted to prayer and prayer alone. Believe me, I have fought hard to bring us back to the fight, to declare ourselves combatants. Those in our number who believe that it’s too dangerous are fools and cowards.”

“Dangerous?” Evangeline said.

“The fire of ’44 was not an accident,” Philomena said, narrowing her eyes. “It was a direct attack. It could be said that we were careless, that we underestimated the bloodthirsty nature of the Nephilim here in America. They were aware of many-if not all-of the enclaves of angelologists in Europe. We made the mistake of thinking that America was still as safe as it had once been. I’m sorry to say that Sister Celestine’s presence exposed St. Rose Convent to great danger. After Celestine came, so did the attacks. Not just on our convent, mind you. There were nearly one hundred attacks on American convents that year-a concerted effort by the Nephilim to discover which of us had what they wanted.”

“But why?”

“Because of Celestine, of course,” Philomena said. “She was well known by the enemy. When she arrived, I myself saw how sickly, how battered, how scarred she was. Clearly she had gone through a harrowing escape. And, perhaps most significant, she carried a parcel for Mother Innocenta, something meant to be secured here, with us. Celestine had something that they wanted. They knew she had taken refuge in the United States, only they did not know where.”

“And Mother Innocenta knew everything of this?” Evangeline asked.

“Of course,” Philomena said, raising her eyebrows in wonder, whether at Mother Innocenta or the question, Evangeline was not sure. “Mother Innocenta was the premier scholar of her era in America. She had been trained by Mother Antonia, who was the student of Mother Clara, our most beloved abbess, who had, in turn, been instructed by Mother Francesca herself, who-to the benefit of our great nation-came to Milton, New York, directly from the European Angelological Society to build the American branch. St. Rose Convent was the beating heart of the American Angelological Project, a grand undertaking, far more ambitious than whatever Celestine Clochette had been doing in Europe before she tagged along on the Second Expedition.” Philomena, who had been speaking very rapidly, paused to take a deep breath. “Indeed,” she said, slowly, “Mother Innocenta would never, never have given up the fight so easily had she not been murdered at the hands of the Nephilim.”

Evangeline said, “I thought she died in the fire.”

“That is what we told the outer world, but it is not the truth.” Philomena’s skin flushed red and then blanched to a very pale color, as if the act of discussing the fire brought her skin in contact with a phantom heat.

“I happened to be in the balcony of Maria Angelorum when the fire broke out. I was cleaning the pipes of the Casavant organ, a terribly difficult chore. With fourteen hundred and twenty-two pipes, twenty stops, and thirty ranks, it was hard enough to dust the organ, but Mother Innocenta had assigned me the twice-yearly task of polishing the brass! Imagine it! I believe that Mother Innocenta was punishing me for something, although it completely slips my mind what I could have done to displease her.”

Evangeline knew full well that Philomena could work herself into a state of inconsolable grievance about the events of the fire. Instead of interrupting her, as she wished, she folded her hands in her lap and endeavored to listen as penance for missing adoration that morning. “I am certain you did nothing to displease anyone,” Evangeline said.

“I heard an unusual commotion,” Philomena continued, as she would have with or without Evangeline’s encouragement, “and went to the great rose window at the back of the choir loft. If you have cleaned the organ, or participated in our choir, you will know that the rose window looks over the central courtyard. That morning the courtyard was filled with hundreds of sisters. Soon enough I noticed the smoke and flames that had consumed the fourth floor, although, sequestered as I was in the church balcony, with a clear view of the upper regions, I had no idea of what was happening on the other floors of the convent. I later learned, however, that the damage was extensive. We lost everything.”

“How awful,” Evangeline said, repressing the urge to ask how this could be construed as a Nephilistic attack.

“Terrible indeed,” Philomena said. “But I have not told you everything. I have been silenced by Mother Perpetua on the subject, but I will remain silent no longer. Sister Innocenta, I tell you, was murdered. Murdered.”

“What do you mean?” Evangeline asked, trying to understand the seriousness of Philomena’s accusation. Only hours before, she had learned that her mother had been murdered at the hands of these creatures, and now Innocenta. Suddenly, St. Rose felt like the most dangerous place her father could have placed her.

“From the choir loft, I heard a wooden door slam closed. In a matter of seconds, Mother Innocenta appeared below. I watched her hurry through the central aisle of the church, a group of sisters-two novices and two fully professed-following close behind her. They seemed to be on their way to the Adoration Chapel, perhaps to pray. That was Innocenta’s way: Prayer was not simply a devotion or a ritual but a solution to all that is imperfect in the world. She believed so strongly in the power of prayer that I quite expect she believed she could stop the fire with it.”

Philomena sighed, took her glasses and rubbed them with a crisp white handkerchief. Sliding her clean glasses onto her nose, she looked at Evangeline sharply, as if gauging her suitability for the tale, and continued.

“Suddenly two enormous figures stepped from the side aisles. They were extraordinarily tall and bony, with white hands and faces that seemed lit by fire. Their hair and skin appeared, even from a distance, to glow with a soft white radiance. They had large blue eyes, high cheekbones, and full pink lips. Their hair fell in curls around their faces. Yet their shoulders were broad, and they wore trousers and rain jackets-the attire of gentlemen-as if they were no different from a banker or a lawyer. While these secular clothes dispelled the thought that they might be Holy Cross brothers, who at that time wore full brown robes and tonsured heads, I could not make out who or what the creatures were.

“I now know that these creatures are called Gibborim, the warrior class of Nephilim. They are brutal, bloodthirsty, unfeeling beings whose ancestry-on the angelic side, that is-goes back to the great warrior Michael. It is too noble a lineage for such horrid creatures and explains their strange beauty. Looking back, with full knowledge of what they were, I understand that their beauty was a terrible manifestation of evil, a cold and diabolic allure that could lead one all the more easily to harm. They were physically perfect, but it was a perfection severed from God-an empty, soulless beauty. I imagine that Eve found a similar beauty in the serpent. Their presence in the church caused the most unnatural state to fall over me. I must confess: I was caught completely off guard by them.”

Once again Philomena took her crisp white cotton handkerchief from her pocket, unfolded it in her hands, and pressed it to her forehead, wiping the sweat away.

“From the choir loft, I could see everything very clearly. The creatures stepped from the shadows into the brilliant light of the nave. The stained-glass windows were sparkling with sunlight, as they usually are at midday, and patches of color scattered across the marble floor, creating a diaphanous glow on their pale skin as they walked. Mother Innocenta took a sharp breath upon seeing them. She reached for the shoulder of a pew to support her weight and asked them what they wanted. Something in the tone of her voice convinced me that she recognized them. Perhaps she had even expected them.”

“She could not have possibly expected them,” Evangeline said, baffled by Philomena’s description of this horrible catastrophe as if it were a providential event. “She would have warned the others.”

“I cannot know,” Philomena said, wiping her forehead once again and crumpling the soiled cotton square in her hand. “Before I knew what happened, the creatures attacked my dear sisters. The evil beings turned their eyes upon them, and it seemed to me that a spell had been cast. The six women gaped at the creatures as if hypnotized. One creature placed his hands upon Mother Innocenta, and it was as though an electric charge entered her body. She convulsed and that very instant fell to the floor, the very spirit sucked from her. The beast found pleasure in the act of killing, as any monster might. The kill appeared to make it stronger, more vibrant, while Mother Innocenta’s body was utterly unrecognizable.”

“But how is that possible?” Evangeline asked, wondering if her mother had met the same wretched fate.

“I do not know. I covered my eyes in terror,” Philomena replied. “When at last I peered over the balustrade again, I saw them upon the floor of the church, all six sisters, dead. In the time it took me to run from the loft to the church, a matter of fifteen seconds or so, the creatures had fled, leaving the bodies of our sisters utterly defiled. They had been desiccated to the bone, as if drained not only of vital fluids but of their very essence. Their bodies were shriveled, their hair burned, their skin pruned. This, my child, was a Nephilistic attack on St. Rose Convent. And we responded by renouncing our work against them. I have never comprehended this. Mother Innocenta, may God rest her soul, would never let the murder of our people go unavenged.”

“Why, then, did we stop?” Evangeline asked.

“We wanted them to believe we were merely an abbey of nuns,” Philomena said. “If they thought we were weak and posed no threat to their power, they would cease their search for the object that they believed we possessed.”

“But we do not possess it. Abigail Rockefeller never disclosed its location before her death.”

“Do you truly believe this, my dear Evangeline? After all that has been kept from you? After all that has been kept from me? Celestine Clochette swayed Mother Perpetua to the pacifist stance. It is not in Celestine’s interest for the lyre of Orpheus to be unearthed. But I would wager my very life, my very soul, that she possesses information of its whereabouts. If you will help me find it, together we can rid the world of these monstrous beasts once and for all.”

Light from the sun streamed through the windows of the library, bathing Evangeline’s legs and pooling at the fireplace. Evangeline closed her eyes, contemplating this story in view of all she had taken in over the past day. “I have just learned that these monstrous beasts murdered my mother,” Evangeline whispered. She pulled Gabriella’s letters from her frock, but Philomena snatched them from her before she could give them over.

Philomena tore through the cards, reading them hungrily. Finally, upon coming to the last card, she declared, “This letter is incomplete. Where is the rest?”

Evangeline pulled out the final Christmas card she had collected from the morning mailbag. She turned it over and began to read her grandmother’s words aloud:

“‘I have told you much about the terrors of the past and something of the dangers that you face in the present, but there has been little in my communication about your future role in our work. I cannot say when this information will be of use to you-it may be that you will live your days in peaceful, quiet contemplation, faithfully carrying out your work at St. Rose. But it may be that you will be needed for a larger purpose. There is a reason your father chose St. Rose Convent as your home and a reason you have been trained in the angelological tradition that has nurtured our work for more than a millennium.’

“‘Mother Francesca, the founding abbess of the convent in which you have lived and grown these past thirteen years, built St. Rose Convent through the sheer force of faith and hard work, designing every chamber and stairwell to suit the needs of our angelologists in America. The Adoration Chapel was a feat of Francesca’s imagination, a sparkling tribute to the angels we study. Each piece of gold was inlaid to honor, each panel of glass hung in praise. What you may not know is that at the center of this chapel there is a small but priceless object of great spiritual and historical value.”’

“That is all,” Evangeline said, folding the letter and slipping it into the envelope. “The fragment ends there.”

“I knew it! The lyre is here with us. Come, child, we must share this wondrous news with Sister Perpetua.”

“But the lyre was hidden by Abigail Rockefeller in 1944,” Evangeline said, confused at Philomena’s train of thought. “This letter tells us nothing.”

“Nobody knows for certain what Abigail Rockefeller did with the lyre,” Philomena said, standing and heading toward the door. “Quickly, we must speak with Mother Perpetua at once. Something lies at the heart of the Adoration Chapel. Something of use to us.”

“Wait,” Evangeline said, her voice cracking from the strain of what she must say. “There is something else I must tell you, Sister.”

“Tell me, child,” Philomena said, halting at the doorway.

“Despite your warning I allowed someone to enter our library yesterday afternoon. The man who inquired about Mother Innocenta came to the convent yesterday. Instead of turning him away, as you instructed, I allowed him to read the letter I discovered from Abigail Rockefeller.”

“A letter from Abigail Rockefeller? I have been searching for fifty years for such a letter. Do you have it with you?”

Evangeline presented it to Sister Philomena, who snatched it from her fingers, reading it rapidly. As she read, her disappointment became clear. Returning the letter to Evangeline’s, she said, “There is not one piece of useful information in this letter.”

“The man who came to the archives did not seem to think so,” Evangeline said, wondering if her interest in Verlaine could be detected by Philomena.

“And how did this gentleman react?” Philomena inquired.

“With great interest and agitation,” Evangeline said. “He believes that the letter points to a larger mystery, one his employer has charged him to uncover.”

Philomena’s eyes widened. “Did you determine the motivation for his interest?”

“I believe that his motives are innocent, but-and this is what I must tell you-I have just learned that his employer is one of those who mean us harm.” Evangeline bit her lip, unsure if she could say his name. “Verlaine is working for Percival Grigori.”

Philomena stood up, knocking her teacup onto the floor. “My word!” she said, terrified. “Why haven’t you warned us?”

“Please forgive me,” Evangeline said. “I didn’t know.”

“Do you realize the danger we are in?” Philomena said. “We must alert Mother Perpetua immediately. It is apparent to me now that we have made a terrible mistake. The enemy has grown stronger. It is one thing to wish for peace; it is quite another to pretend the war itself does not exist.”

With this, Philomena folded the letters and cards in her hands and scuttled out of the library, leaving Evangeline alone with the empty tin of cookies. Clearly Philomena had a morbid and unhealthy obsession with avenging the events of 1944. Indeed, her reaction had been fanatical, as if she had been waiting many years for such information. Evangeline realized that she should never have shown Philomena her grandmother’s confidential letter or discussed such dangerous information with a woman she had always felt to be a bit unstable. In despair, Evangeline tried to understand what she would do next. Suddenly she recalled Celestine’s command about the letters: When you have read them, come to me again. Evangeline stood and hurried from the library to Celestine’s cell.

Times Square, New York City

The driver rolled through rush-hour traffic, stopping at the corner of Forty-second and Broadway. Traffic had all but halted at the NYPD headquarters, where police were making preparations for the Millennial New Year’s Eve ball drop. Through the crowds of office workers on their way to work, Verlaine could see the police welding manhole covers closed and setting up checkpoints. If the Christmas season filled the city with tourists, Verlaine realized, New Year’s Eve would be a veritable nightmare, especially this one.

Gabriella ordered Verlaine out of the van. Stepping into the masses of people clustered on the streets, they fell into a chaos of movement, blinking billboards, and relentless foot traffic. Verlaine hoisted the duffel bag over his shoulder, afraid that he might somehow lose its precious contents. After what had happened at his apartment, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched, that every person nearby was suspect, that Percival Grigori’s men were waiting for them at every turn. He looked over his shoulder and saw an endless sea of people.

Gabriella walked quickly ahead, weaving through the crowd at a pace Verlaine struggled to match. As people surged around them, he noted that Gabriella cut quite a figure. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, extraordinarily thin, with sharp features. She wore a fitted black overcoat that appeared to be Edwardian in cut-a tight, tailored, and stylish silk jacket fastened with a line of tiny obsidian buttons. The jacket was so tight that it appeared to have been designed to be worn over a corset. In contrast to her dark clothing, Gabriella’s face was powdery white, with fine wrinkles-the skin of an old woman. Although she must have been in her seventies, there was something unnaturally youthful about her. She carried herself with the poise of a much younger woman. Her sculpted, glossy black hair was perfectly coiffed, her spine erect, her gait even. She walked fast, as if challenging Verlaine to keep up.

“You must be wondering why I’ve brought you here, into all of this madness,” Gabriella said, gesturing to the crowd. Her voice resonated with the same calm equanimity she’d had on the telephone, a tone he found both eerie and deeply comforting. “Times Square at Christmas is not the most peaceful place for a stroll.”

“I usually avoid this place,” Verlaine said, looking around at the neoninfused storefront windows and incessantly flashing news ticker, a zipper of electricity dripping information faster than he could read it. “I haven’t been around here in nearly a year.”

“In the midst of danger, it is best to take cover in the crowd,” Gabriella observed. “One does not want to call attention, and one can never be too careful.”

After a few blocks, Gabriella slowed her pace, leading Verlaine past Bryant Park, where the space swarmed with Christmas decorations. With the fresh-fallen snow and the brightness of the morning light, the scene struck Verlaine as the image of a perfect New York Christmas, the very kind of Norman Rockwell scene that irritated him. As they approached the massive structure of the New York Public Library, Gabriella paused once again, looked over her shoulder, and crossed the street. “Come,” she whispered, walking to a black town car parked illegally before one of the stone lion statues at the library’s entrance. The New York license plate read ANGEL27. Upon seeing them approach, a driver turned on the engine. “This is our ride,” Gabriella said.

They turned right on Thirty-ninth and drove up Sixth Avenue. As they paused at a stoplight, Verlaine looked over his shoulder, wondering if he would find the black SUV behind them. They weren’t being followed. In fact, it unnerved him to realize that he felt almost at ease with Gabriella. He had known her all of forty-five minutes. She sat next to him, peering out the window as if being chased through Manhattan at nine o’clock in the morning were a perfectly normal part of her life.

At Columbus Circle the driver pulled over, and Gabriella and Verlaine stepped into the freezing gusts of wind blowing through Central Park. She walked swiftly ahead, searching traffic and looking beyond the rotary, nearly losing her impenetrable calm. “Where are they?” she muttered, turning along the edge of the park, walking past a magazine kiosk stacked high with daily papers, and into the shadows of Central Park West. She kept pace for a number of blocks, turned onto a side street, and paused, looking about her. “They are late,” she said under her breath. Just then an antique Porsche rounded a corner, stopping with a sharp squeal of tires, its eggshell white paint shining in the morning light. The license plate, to Verlaine’s amusement, read ANGELI.

A young woman bounded out of the driver’s seat of the Porsche. “My apologies, Dr. Gabriella,” she said, placing a set of keys in Gabriella’s hand before walking quickly away.

“Get in,” Gabriella said, dropping into the driver’s seat.

Verlaine followed orders, squeezing into the tiny car and slamming the door. The dash was glossy burled maple, the steering wheel leather. He arranged himself in the cramped passenger seat and shifted the duffel bag so he could reach the seat belt, but found that there wasn’t one to fasten. “Nice car,” he said.

Gabriella gave him a cutting look and started the engine. “It is the 356, the first Porsche made. Mrs. Rockefeller bought a number of them for the society. It’s amazing-all these years later we’re still surviving off her crumbs.”

“Pretty luxurious crumbs,” Verlaine said, running his hand over the caramel-brown leather seat. “I wouldn’t have suspected Abigail to like sports cars.”

“There are many things about her one wouldn’t have suspected,” Gabriella said, and pulled into traffic, spun around in a U-turn, then headed north alongside Central Park.

Gabriella parked on a quiet, tree-lined street in the mid-Eighties. Sandwiched between two similar buildings, the brownstone to which she led him appeared to have been squeezed vertical by sheer force. Gabriella unlocked the front door and waved Verlaine through the entrance, her movements so sure that he hadn’t a moment to get his bearings before Gabriella slammed the door and turned the lock. It took him a moment to register that they’d made it out of the cold.

Gabriella leaned against the door, closed her eyes, and sighed deeply. In the granular darkness of the foyer, he could see her exhaustion. Her hands shook as she brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and placed a hand upon her heart. “Really,” she said softly, “I am getting too old for this.”

“Forgive me for asking,” Verlaine said, his curiosity getting the better of him, “but how old would that be?”

“Old enough to raise suspicion,” she said.

“Suspicion?”

“About my humanity,” Gabriella said, narrowing her eyes-startling sea-green eyes lined heavily in gray shadow. “Some people in the organization believe that I am one of ‘them.’ Really, I should retire. I’ve dealt with such suspicions all my life.”

Verlaine looked her up and down, from black boots to red lips. He wanted to ask her to explain herself, to explain what had happened the previous evening, to tell him why she’d been sent to his apartment to watch him.

“Come, we haven’t time for my complaints,” Gabriella said, turning on her heel and walking up a set of narrow wooden steps. “We’ll go upstairs.”

Verlaine followed as Gabriella climbed a creaky stairway. At the top of the steps, she opened a door and led Verlaine into a darkened room. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a long, narrow room filled with overstuffed armchairs, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, Tiffany lamps perched upon end tables like precarious, brightly plumed birds. A series of oil paintings in heavy gilded frames-it was too dark to make out their subjects-hung upon one wall. An unevenly canted roof peaked at the center of the room, its plaster stained yellow with water damage.

Gabriella gestured for Verlaine to sit as she drew back the curtains of a series of tall narrow windows, filling the room with light. He walked to a set of straight-backed Neo-Gothic chairs near the window, set the duffel bag lightly at his side, and sank into the rock-hard seat. The chair’s legs creaked under his weight.

“Let me be clear, Mr. Verlaine,” Gabriella said, taking a seat in the matching chair at his side. “You are lucky to be alive.”

“Who were they?” Verlaine said. “What did they want?”

“Equally fortuitous,” Gabriella continued, nonplussed by Verlaine’s questions and growing agitation, “is the fact that you eluded them completely unharmed.” Glancing at his raw wound, the scab of which had begun to congeal, she said, “Or nearly unharmed. You are lucky. You have escaped with something that they want.”

“You must have been there for hours. How else would you have known they were watching me? How did you know they would break in?”

“I am no psychic,” Gabriella said. “Wait long enough and soon the devils come.”

“Evangeline called you?” Verlaine asked, but Gabriella said nothing. Clearly she was not about to divulge any of her secrets to the likes of him. “I suppose you know what they were planning to do once they found me,” Verlaine said.

“They would have taken the letters, of course,” Gabriella answered calmly. “Once they had them in their possession, they would have killed you.”

Verlaine turned this over in his mind for a moment. He couldn’t understand how the letters could possibly be so important. Finally, Verlaine said, “Do you have a theory as to why they would do this?”

“I have a theory about everything, Mr. Verlaine.” Gabriella smiled for the first time in their brief acquaintance. “First, they believe, as I do, that the letters in your possession contain valuable information. Second, they want the information very badly.”

“Enough to kill for it?”

“Certainly,” Gabriella replied. “They have killed many times for information of much less importance.”

“I don’t understand,” Verlaine said, pulling the duffel bag onto his lap-a protective movement that, he could see from the flicker in her gaze, did not escape Gabriella’s notice. “They have not read Innocenta’s letters.”

This information gave Gabriella pause. “Are you certain?”

“I didn’t give them to Grigori,” Verlaine said. “I wasn’t sure what they were when I found them, and I wanted to be certain of their authenticity before alerting him. In my line of work, it is essential to verify everything beforehand.”

Gabriella opened the drawer of a small escritoire, took a cigarette from a case, fitted it into a lacquered holder, and lit it with a small gold lighter. The scent of spiced tobacco filled the room. When she held the case to Verlaine, offering him a cigarette, he accepted. He considered asking for a strong drink to accompany it.

“Truthfully,” he said at last, “I don’t have a clue how I got involved in this. I don’t know why those men, or whatever they are, were at my place. I admit I’ve picked up some odd information about Grigori while working for him, but everyone knows that man is an eccentric. Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder if I might simply be going insane. Can you tell me why I’m here?”

Gabriella assessed him, as if contemplating the appropriate response. At last she said, “I have brought you here, Mr. Verlaine, because we need you.”

“‘We’?” Verlaine replied.

“We ask that you help us recover something very precious.”

“The discovery made in the Rhodope Mountains?”

Gabriella’s face turned pale at Verlaine’s words. He felt a brief flicker of triumph-for once he had surprised her.

“You know about the journey to the Rhodopes?” she said, recovering her composure.

“It is mentioned in a letter from Abigail Rockefeller that Evangeline showed me yesterday. I gathered that they were discussing the recovery of some sort of antiquity, perhaps Greek pottery or Thracian art. Although now I see that the discovery was more valuable than a few clay jars.”

“Quite a bit more valuable,” Gabriella said, finishing the cigarette and putting it out in an ashtray. “But its worth is assessed differently than you might think. It isn’t a value that can be quantified with money, although over the past two thousand years there has been much, much gold spent trying to obtain it. Let me put it this way: It has an ancient value.”

“It is a historical artifact?” Verlaine asked.

“You might say so,” Gabriella said, crossing her arms against her chest. “It is very old, but this is no museum piece. It is as relevant today as it was in the past. It could affect the lives of millions of people, and, even more important, it could change the course of the future.”

“Sounds like a riddle,” Verlaine said, extinguishing the cigarette.

“I’m not going to play games with you. We haven’t the time. The situation is much more complicated than you realize. What happened to you this morning began many ages ago. I don’t know how you became enmeshed in this affair, but the letters in your possession place you firmly at the center.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will have to trust me,” Gabriella said. “I’ll tell you everything, but it must be a trade. For this knowledge you will give up your freedom. After tonight either you will become one of us or you will go into hiding. In any case you will spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. Once you know the history of our mission and how Mrs. Rockefeller became involved-which is only a very minor component to a large and complex tale-you will be part of a terrible drama, one that there is no way of exiting completely. It may sound extreme, but once you know the truth, your life will change irrevocably. There is no going back.”

Verlaine looked at his hands, contemplating what Gabriella had said. Although it felt as if he had been asked to step over the edge of a cliff-commanded to jump over, in fact-he could not stop himself from continuing onward willingly. At last he said, “You believe that the letters reveal what they discovered during the expedition.”

“Not what was discovered but what was hidden,” Gabriella said. “They went to the Rhodope Mountains to bring back a lyre. A kithara, to be exact. Once, briefly, we had it in our possession. Now it has been hidden again. Our enemies-an extremely wealthy and influential group-want to find it as badly as we do.”

“That’s who was at my place?”

“The men at your apartment were hired by this group, yes.”

“Is Percival Grigori part of this group?”

“Yes,” Gabriella said. “He is very much a part of it.”

“So in working for him,” Verlaine said, “I have been working against you.”

“As I told you before, you really mean nothing to them. It is detrimental and extremely risky for him to be in public, and so he has always hired disposables-that is his word, not mine-to do his research for him. He uses them to dig up information and then kills them. It is an extremely efficient security measure.” Gabriella lit another cigarette, the smoke forming a haze in the air.

“Did Abigail Rockefeller work for them?”

“No,” Gabriella said. “Quite the opposite. Mrs. Rockefeller was working with Mother Innocenta to find an appropriate hiding place for a case containing the lyre. For reasons we don’t understand, Abigail Rockefeller ceased all communication with us after the war. It caused quite a lot of trauma in our network. We had no idea where she put the contents of the case. Some believe it was hidden in New York City. Others believe she sent it back to Europe. We have been trying desperately to locate where she hid it, if she hid it at all.”

“I’ve read Innocenta’s letters,” Verlaine said, doubtful. “I don’t think they will tell you what you’re hoping to find. It makes more sense to go to Grigori.”

Gabriella took a deep, weary breath. “There is something I would like to show you,” she said. “It may help you understand the kind of creatures we are dealing with.”

Standing, she slid out of her jacket. Then she began to remove her black silk shirt, her veined hands working over the buttons until each one had been unfastened. “This,” she said quietly, pulling first her left arm, then her right free of the black sleeves, “is what happens when you are caught by the other side.”

Verlaine watched Gabriella turn under the light of a nearby window. Her torso was covered with thick, ribboning scars that crossed her back, her chest, her stomach, and her shoulders. It was as though she had been carved with an exceedingly sharp butcher’s knife. From the width of the damaged tissue and the haphazard ridges of the scars, Verlaine guessed that the wounds had not been properly sutured. In the weak light, the skin was pink and raw. The pattern suggested that Gabriella had been whipped or, worse, sliced with a razor blade.

“My God,” Verlaine said, overwhelmed by the mangled flesh, the horrible yet strangely delicate oyster-shell pink of the scars. “How did it happen?”

“Once I believed I could outsmart them,” Gabriella said. “I believed that I was wiser, stronger, more adept than they were. I was the best angelologist in all of Paris during the war. Despite my age I rose through the hierarchy faster than anyone. This was a fact. Believe me-I am and always have been very, very good at my work.”

“This happened in the war?” Verlaine asked, trying to make sense of such brutality.

“In my youth I worked as a double agent. I became the lover of the heir of the most powerful enemy family. My work was monitored, and I was quite successful in the beginning, but ultimately I was found out. If anyone could have pulled off such an infiltration, I could have. Take a long look at what happened to me, Mr. Verlaine, and imagine what they will do to you. Your naïve American belief that good always overcomes evil would not save you. I guarantee: You will be doomed.”

Verlaine could not bear to look at Gabriella, yet he could not turn away. His gaze traced the scars’ sinuous pink path from her clavicle to her hip, the pallor of her skin registering through his body. He felt that he might be sick. “How can you hope to defeat them?”

“That,” Gabriella said, sliding back into her blouse and fastening the buttons, “is something I will explain after you have given me the letters.”

Verlaine set the laptop computer on the surface of Gabriella’s desk and turned it on. The hard drive clicked, and the monitor flickered to life. Soon all his files-including the research documents and scanned letters-appeared as icons on the glowing surface of the screen, bright-colored electronic balloons floating in an electronic blue sky. Verlaine clicked the Rockefeller/ Innocenta folder and stepped away from the computer, giving Gabriella ample room to read. At the dust-streaked window, he observed the quiet, cold park. He knew that beyond there were frozen ponds, an empty skating rink, snow-covered sidewalks, the winterized carousel. A phalanx of taxis sped north on Central Park West, carrying people uptown. The city carried on in its usual manic fashion.

Verlaine glanced over his shoulder at Gabriella. She read the letters breathlessly, utterly absorbed in the computer screen, as if the incandescent words might disappear at any moment. The monitor cast a green-white pallor over her skin, accentuating the wrinkles about her mouth and eyes and turning her black hair a shade closer to purple. She removed a sheet of paper from the desk drawer and jotted notes on it, scribbling as she read, not once glancing up at Verlaine or down at the stream of sentences emerging from her pen. Gabriella’s attention was so intently focused on the screen-the looping, pinched curves of Mother Innocenta’s handwriting, the creases of the paper reproduced to an exact digital likeness-that it was not until Verlaine stood at her side, looking over her shoulder at the computer, that she noticed him.

“There is a chair in the corner,” she said without taking her eyes from the screen. “You will find it more comfortable than bending over my shoulder.”

Verlaine carried an antique piano bench from the corner, placed it lightly next to Gabriella, and sat.

She lifted a hand, as if expecting it to be kissed, and said, “A cigarette, s’il vous plaît.”

Verlaine removed one from the porcelain box, fitted it into the lacquer holder, and placed it between Gabriella’s fingers. Still without looking up, she brought the cigarette to her lips. “Merci,” she said, inhaling as Verlaine ignited the lighter.

Finally he opened his duffel bag, took a folder from inside, and, venturing to disturb her from her reading, said, “I should have given these to you before.”

Gabriella turned from the computer and took the letters from Verlaine. Sifting through them, she said, “The originals?”

“One hundred percent original stolen material from the Rockefeller Family Archive,” Verlaine said.

“Thank you,” Gabriella said, opening the folder and paging through the letters. “Of course, I wondered what happened to them, and I suspected that they might be with you. Tell me-what other copies of these letters are there?”

“That’s it,” Verlaine said. “Those are the originals in your hands.” He gestured to the scans open on the computer screen. “And the scans.”

“Very good,” Gabriella said quietly.

Verlaine suspected that she wished to say more. Instead she stood, removed a canister of coffee grounds from a drawer, and brewed a pot of coffee on a hot plate. When the coffee bubbled into the pot, Gabriella carried it to the computer and, without a hint of warning, poured the contents of the pot over the laptop, the scalding liquid soaking the keyboard. The screen went white and then black. A horrid clicking noise wrenched through the computer. Then it fell quiet.

Verlaine hovered over the coffee-saturated keyboard, trying not to lose his temper-and failing. “What have you done?”

“We cannot allow more copies than absolutely necessary,” Gabriella said, calmly wiping her hands free of coffee grounds.

“Yes, but you’ve destroyed my computer.” Verlaine pressed the “start” button, hoping that it would somehow come to life again.

“Technological gadgetry is easily replaced,” Gabriella said, not a hint of apology in her voice. Walking to the window, she leaned against the glass, her arms crossed over her chest, her expression serene. “We cannot allow anyone to read these letters. They are too important.”

Sorting through them, she placed the letters alongside one another on a low table until it was filled with yellowed sheets. There were five letters, each composed of numerous pages. Verlaine came to Gabriella’s side. The pages were written in florid cursive. Lifting a soft, wrinkled sheet, he attempted to read the script-elegant, looping, exceptionally illegible penmanship that washed across the unlined paper in faded blue waves. It was nearly impossible to decipher in the dim light.

“You can read it?” Gabriella asked, leaning over the table and rotating a page, as if approaching it from a new angle might clarify the tangle of letters. “I find it difficult to make out her writing at all.”

“It takes a bit of getting used to,” Verlaine said. “But yes, I can manage it.”

“Then you can help me,” Gabriella said. “We need to determine if this correspondence is going to be of any real assistance.”

“I’ll give it a try,” Verlaine said. “But first I would like you to tell me what I’m looking for.”

“Particular locations mentioned in the correspondence,” Gabriella said. “Locations where Abigail Rockefeller had full access. Perhaps an institution where she had the authority to come and go as she wished. Seemingly innocuous references to addresses, streets, hotels. Secure locations, of course, but not too secure.”

“That could be half of New York,” Verlaine said. “If I’m going to find anything at all in these letters, I need to know exactly what you’re seeking.”

Gabriella stared out the window. Finally she said, “Long ago a band of rogue angels called the Watchers were condemned to be held in a cave in the remotest regions of Europe. Entrusted to deliver the prisoners, the archangels bound the Watchers and thrust them into a deep cavern. As the Watchers fell, the archangels heard their cries of anguish. It was an agony so great that in a moment of pity the Archangel Gabriel threw the wretched creatures a golden lyre-a lyre of angelic perfection, a lyre whose music was so miraculous that the prisoners would spend hundreds of years in contentment, pacified by its melodies. Gabriel’s mistake had grave repercussions. The lyre proved to be a solace and strength to the Watchers. They not only entertained themselves in the depths of the earth, they became stronger and more ambitious in their desires. They learned that the lyre’s music gave them extraordinary power.”

“What kind of power?” Verlaine inquired.

“The power to play at being God,” Gabriella said. She lit another cigarette and resumed. “It is a phenomenon taught exclusively in our ethereal musicology seminars to the advanced students at angelological academies. As the universe was created by the vibration of God’s voice-by the music of His Word-so the universe can be altered, enhanced, or entirely undone by the music of His messengers, the angels. The lyre-and other celestial instruments fashioned by the angels, many of which we have had in our possession throughout the centuries-has the power to effect such changes, or so we speculate. The degree of power these instruments contains varies. Our ethereal musicologists believe that at the correct frequency any number of cosmic changes could occur. Perhaps the sky will be red, the sea purple, and the grass orange. Perhaps the sun will chill the air rather than heat it. Perhaps devils will populate the continents. It is believed that one of the powers of the lyre is to restore the sick to health.”

Verlaine stared at her, flabbergasted at what this otherwise rational woman had just said.

“It makes little sense to you now,” she said, taking the original letters and giving them to Verlaine. “But read the letters to me. I would like to hear them. It will help me think.”

Verlaine scanned the sheets, found the beginning date of the correspondence-June 5, 1943-and began to read. Although Mother Innocenta’s style posed a challenge-every sentence was grandiose in tone, each thought pounded into writing as if with an iron hammer-he soon fell into the cadences of her prose.

The first contained little more than a polite exchange of formalities and was composed with a tentative, halting tone, as if Innocenta were feeling her way toward Mrs. Rockefeller through a darkened hallway. Nonetheless, the odd reference to Mrs. Rockefeller’s artistry was contained even in this letter-“Please know that the perfection of your artistic vision, and the execution of your fancy, is well noted and accepted”-a reference that brought all of Verlaine’s ambition back the instant he read it. The second letter was a longer and slightly more intimate missive in which Innocenta explained her gratitude to Mrs. Rockefeller for the important role she held in the future of their mission, and-Verlaine noted with particular triumph-discussed the drawing that Mrs. Rockefeller must have included in the letter: “Our most admired friend, one cannot fail to marvel at your delicate renderings or receive them with humble thanks and grateful understanding.” The tone of the letter hinted that an arrangement had developed between the two women, although there was nothing concrete to be found, and certainly nothing to suggest that a plan had been arrived at. The fourth letter contained another of the references to something artistic: “As always, your hand never fails to express what the eye most wishes to behold.”

Verlaine began to explain his theory of Mrs. Rockefeller’s artwork, but Gabriella urged him to read on, clearly annoyed that he would stop. “Read the final letter,” she said. “The one dated December fifteenth, I943.”

Verlaine sifted through the pages until he found the letter.

December 15, 1943

Dearest Mrs. Rockefeller,

Your latest letter arrived at an opportune moment, as we have been laboring at our annual Christmas celebrations and are now fully prepared to commemorate our Lord’s birth. The sisters’ annual fund-raiser has been a greater success than expected, and I daresay that we will continue to draw many donations. Your assistance is also a source of great joy to us. We give thanks to the Lord for your generosity and remember you in our hourly prayers. Your name will long remain upon the lips of the sisters at St. Rose.

The charity benefit described in your letter of November has been met with great approval by all at St. Rose Convent, and I hope it will make quite a difference to our efforts to bring in new membership. After the travails and hardships of our recent battles, the great privations and declines of the past years, we nonetheless see a greater brightness emerging.

While a discerning eye is like the music of the angels-precise and measured and mysterious beyond reason-its power rests in the cast of light. Dearest benefactress, we know you chose your renderings wisely. We eagerly await further illumination and ask that you write in due haste, so that news of your work will lift our spirits.

Your fellow seeker,

Innocenta Maria Magdalena Fiori, ASA

As he read the fifth letter, a particular phrase caught Gabriella’s attention. She asked Verlaine to stop and repeat it. He backtracked and read, “‘… a discerning eye is like the music of the angels-precise and measured and mysterious beyond reason-its power rests in the cast of light.’”

He placed the stack of yellowed papers upon his lap. “Did you hear anything of interest?” he asked, anxious to test his theory about the passages.

Gabriella appeared lost in thought, gazing past him, staring out the window, her chin resting on her hand. “It is half there,” she said at last.

“Half?” Verlaine said. “Half of what?”

“Half of our mystery,” Gabriella said. “Mother Innocenta’s letters confirm something I have long suspected-namely, that the women were working together. I will need to read the other half of this correspondence to be certain,” she went on. “But I believe that Innocenta and Mrs. Rockefeller were choosing locations. Even months before Celestine brought the instrument from Pans-even months before it was retrieved from the Rhodopes-they were planning the best way to keep it safe. It is a blessing that Innocenta and Abigail Rockefeller had the intelligence and foresight to find a secure location. Now we need only to understand their methods. We need to find the location of the lyre.”

Verlaine raised an eyebrow. “Is that possible?”

“I will not be certain until I read Abigail Rockefeller’s letters to Innocenta. Clearly Innocenta was a brilliant angelologist, much smarter than she’s given credit for. All along she was urging Abigail Rockefeller to secure the future of angelology. The instruments were placed into Mrs. Rockefeller’s care only after great forethought.” Gabriella walked the length of the room, as if movement ordered her thoughts. Then she stopped short. “It must be here in New York City.”

“You are certain?” Verlaine asked.

“There is no way to know for sure, but I believe it is here. Abigail Rockefeller would have wanted to keep an eye on it.”

“You must see something in the letters that I can’t,” Verlaine said. “To me they’re just a collection of friendly exchanges between two old women. The only potentially interesting element about the letters is referred to time and time again but isn’t actually there.”

“What do you mean?” Gabriella asked.

“Did you notice how Innocenta returns over and over to the discussion of visual images? It seems that there were drawings or sketches or other artwork Abigail Rockefeller included in her letters,” Verlaine said. “These visual images must be in the other half of the correspondence. Or they have been lost.”

“You are quite right,” Gabriella said. “There is a pattern of some kind in the letters, and I am certain that this will be confirmed once we read the other half of the correspondence. Surely the ideas proposed by Innocenta were refined. Perhaps new suggestions were sent. Only when we can lay out the correspondence side by side will we have the whole picture.”

She took the letters from Verlaine and paged through them once more, reading them over as if to memorize the lines. Then she tucked them into her pocket. “We must be extremely careful,” she said. “It is paramount that we keep these letters-and the secrets they point to-away from the Nephilim. You are certain that Percival has not seen them?”

“You and Evangeline are the only people who have read them, but I did show him something else that I wish he’d never seen.” Verlaine said, removing the architectural drawings from his bag.

Gabriella took the drawings and examined them with care, her expression turning grave. “This is very unfortunate,” she said at last. “These give everything away. When he looked at these papers, did he understand their significance?”

“He didn’t seem to think they were important.”

“Ah, good,” Gabriella said, smiling slightly. “Percival was wrong. We must go at once, before he begins to understand what you have found.”

“And exactly what is it that I’ve found?” Verlaine asked, feeling that he might at last learn the significance of the drawings and the golden seal at their center.

Gabriella placed the drawings on the table and pressed them flat with her hands. “These are a set of instructions,” she said. “The seal at the center marks a location. If you notice, it is at the center of the Adoration Chapel.”

“But why?” Verlaine asked, studying the seal for the hundredth time and wondering at its meaning.

Gabriella slipped into her black silk jacket and headed to the door. “Come with me to St. Rose Convent, and I will explain everything.”

Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, New York City

Percival waited in the lobby of his apartment building, his sunglasses shielding his eyes from the unbearably bright morning. His mind was wholly absorbed in the situation at hand, one that had suddenly become even more mystifying with Gabriella Lévi-Franche Valko’s involvement. Her presence at Verlaine’s apartment was enough to signal that they had in fact hit upon something significant. They would need to move immediately, before they lost track of Verlaine.

A black Mercedes SUV stopped before the building. Percival recognized the Gibborim that Otterley had dispatched to kill Verlaine early that morning. They sat hunched in the front seat, crude, unquestioning, without the intelligence or curiosity to wonder at Percival and Otterley’s superiority. He recoiled at the thought of riding in the same vehicle with such beings-surely Otterley didn’t expect that he would agree to such an arrangement. In his workings with lower life-forms, there were certain lines he would not cross.

Otterley didn’t have such qualms. She emerged from the backseat composed as ever, her long blond hair tied into a smooth knot, her fur-trimmed ski jacket zipped to her chin, and her cheeks stained pink from the cold. To Percival’s great relief, she said a few words to the Gibborim and the SUV sped away. Only then did Percival step outside to greet his sister for the second time that morning, happily in a less compromised position than before.

“We will need to take my car,” Otterley said. “Gabriella Lévi-Franche Valko saw that vehicle outside Verlaine’s apartment.”

The very articulation of Gabriella’s name withered his resolve. “Did you see her?”

“She has probably given every angelologist in New York the plate numbers,” Otterley said. “We’d better use the Jag. I don’t want to take chances.”

“And what about the beasts?”

Otterley smiled-she, too, disliked working with Gibborim but would never deign to show it. “I’ve sent them ahead. They have a specific area to cover. If they find Gabriella, they have been instructed to seize her.”

“I very much doubt they will have the skill to catch her,” Percival said.

Otterley tossed her car keys to the doorman, who walked off to retrieve the car from a garage around the corner. Standing at the curb, with Fifth Avenue stretching beyond, Percival struggled to breathe. The more desperate he became for air, the more painful it was to inhale, and so he was relieved when the white Jaguar idled before them, exhaust rising from the tail. Otterley slid into the driver’s seat and waited as Percival, whose body ached with the slightest irregular movement, eased delicately into the leather passenger seat, wheezing and gasping for breath. His frayed, rotting wings pressed against his back as the harness shifted. He suppressed an urge to cry out in pain as Otterley put the car in gear and sped into traffic.

While she steered toward the West Side Highway, Percival turned the heat on high, hoping that the warm air would allow him to breathe with more ease. At a traffic light, his sister turned to examine him, her eyes narrowed. She did not speak, but it was clear that she didn’t know what to do with the weak, struggling being who had once been the future of the Grigori family.

Percival removed a handgun from the glove compartment, made sure it was loaded, and tucked it into the inside pocket of his overcoat. The gun was heavy and cold. Running his fingers over it, he wondered what it would feel like to point it at Gabriella’s head, to press it upon the soft spot at her temple, to frighten her. No matter what had happened in the past, no matter how many times he had dreamed of Gabriella, he was not going to allow her to interfere. This time he would kill her himself.

Tappan Zee Bridge, 1-87 North, New York

With its antiquated engine and low chassis, the Porsche proved to be a bumpy, loud ride. Yet despite the noise, Verlaine found the journey to be deeply calming. He looked at Gabriella sitting in the driver’s seat, her arm resting against the door. She had the air of someone planning a bank heist-her manner was concentrated, serious, and careful. He had come to think of her as an extraordinarily private person, a woman who said nothing more than she needed to. Although Verlaine had pressed her for information, it took some time before she would open her thoughts to him.

At his insistence they had spent the drive in a discussion about her work-its history and purpose, how Abigail Rockefeller had become involved, and how Gabriella had spent her life entrenched in angelology, until Verlaine understood the depth of the danger he’d fallen into. Their familiarity with each other grew as the minutes passed, and by the time they drove over the bridge, an uncommon understanding had developed between them.

From their vantage above the wide expanse of the Hudson, Verlaine could see ice chunks clinging to the snowy riverbanks. Looking down upon the landscape, he felt as if the earth had split open in a great geomorphic gash. The sun burnished the Hudson so that it scintillated with heat and color, fluid and brilliant as a sheet of fire.

The lanes of the highway were empty compared to the clogged streets of Manhattan. Once across the bridge, Gabriella drove faster and faster over the open road. The Porsche sounded as tired as he felt: Its motor rattled as if it might explode. Verlaine’s stomach ached with hunger; his eyes burned from exhaustion. Glancing into the rearview mirror, he saw, to his surprise, that he looked as if he’d been in a brawl. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair tangled. Gabriella had helped him to dress the wound properly, winding gauze around his hand so that it resembled a boxing glove. It seemed appropriate: In the past twenty-four hours he had become a battered, beaten, and bruised man.

And yet in the presence of such immense beauty-the river, the azure sky, the eggshell glint of the Porsche-Verlaine reveled in the sudden expansion of his perception. He could see how confined his life had become in the past years. He’d spent whole days moving along a tiny track between his apartment, his office, and a few cafés and restaurants. Rarely if ever did he step outside this pattern. He could not remember the last time he had really noted his surroundings or truly looked at the people around him. He had been lost in a maze. That he would never return to that life again was both terrifying and exhilarating.

Gabriella turned off the highway and drove onto a small country road. She stretched, arching her back like a cat. “We need to get gas,” she said, scanning the road for a place to stop. Rounding a bend, Verlaine spotted a twenty-four-hour gas station. Gabriella pulled off the road and parked alongside a pump. She didn’t object when he offered to fill the car, telling him to be sure to use premium.

As Verlaine had paid for the gas, he stood gazing over the neat rows of merchandise inside the station-the bottles of soda, the packaged food, the orderly array of magazines-remarking how simple life could be. Only yesterday he would not have thought much of the creature comforts of a gasstation convenience store. He would have been too annoyed by the long line and neon lights to actually look around. Now he felt a perverse admiration for anything that offered such safe familiarity. He added a pack of cigarettes to the tally and returned to the car.

Outside, Gabriella waited in the driver’s seat. Verlaine took the passenger side and gave Gabriella the pack of cigarettes. She accepted them with a terse smile, but he could see that the gesture pleased her. Then, without waiting another moment, she threw the car into gear and drove onto the small country highway.

Verlaine unwrapped the pack of cigarettes, extracted one, and lit it for Gabriella. She rolled the window down a crack, the cigarette smoke dispersing in a stream of fresh air. “You don’t seem to be afraid, but I know that what I told you must have some effect upon you.”

“I’m still working on getting my mind around it all,” Verlaine replied, thinking, even as he spoke, that this was a huge understatement. In truth, he was baffled by what he’d learned. He couldn’t understand how she managed to stay so calm. Finally, he said, “How do you do it?”

“Do what?” she asked, keeping her eye on the road.

“Live like this,” he replied. “As if nothing abnormal is happening. As if you’ve accepted it.”

Keeping her eyes on the road, Gabriella said, “I became part of this battle so long ago that I am hardened to it. It is impossible for me to remember what it is like to live without knowing. Discovering their existence is like being told the earth is round-it goes against everything one senses to be true. Yet it is reality. I cannot imagine what it is like to live without them haunting my thoughts, to wake in the morning and believe that we live in a just, free, equal world. I suppose I have adjusted my vision of the world to suit this reality. I see everything in white and black, good and evil. We are good, they are evil. If we are to live, they must die. There are those of us who believe in appeasement-that we can work out a way to live side by side-but many also believe we cannot rest until they have been exterminated.”

“I would think,” Verlaine said, surprised by the adamancy of Gabriella’s voice, “it would be more complicated than that”

“Of course, it is more complicated. There are reasons for my strong feelings. While I have been an angelologist all of my adult life, I have not always hated the Nephilim as I do today,” Gabriella said, her voice quiet, almost vulnerable. “I will tell you a story, one that very few have heard before. Perhaps it will help you to understand my extremism. Perhaps you will see why it is so important to me that every last one of them is killed.”

Gabriella tossed the cigarette out the window, lit another, her eyes trained upon the winding highway.

“In the second year of my schooling at the Angelological Society in Paris, I met the love of my life. This is not something I would have admitted at the time, nor would I have made this claim in middle age. But I am an old woman now-older than I look, as a matter of fact-and I can say with great certainty that I will never love again as I did in the summer of 1939. I was fifteen then, too young to fall in love, perhaps. Or maybe it is only then, with the dew of childhood still in my eyes, that I was capable of such love. I will never know, of course.”

Gabriella paused, as if weighing her words, and continued.

“I was a peculiar girl, to put it mildly. I was obsessed with my studies in the way that some become obsessed with riches or love or fame. I came from a family of wealthy angelologists-many of my relatives had trained in the academy. I was also inordinately competitive. Socializing with my peers was out of the question, and I thought nothing of working night and day in order to succeed. I wanted to be at the top of my class in every respect, and routinely I was at the top. By the second term of my first year, it was clear that there were only two students to have distinguished themselves-myself and a young woman named Celestine, a brilliant girl who later became a dear friend.”

Verlaine nearly choked. “Celestine?” he said. “Celestine Clochette who came to St. Rose Convent in 1943?”

“It was 1944,” Gabriella corrected. “But that is another story. This story begins one afternoon in April 1939, a chill, rainy afternoon, as April afternoons tend to be in Paris. The cobblestones veritably flooded over each spring with rain, filling the sewers and the gardens and the Seine. I remember the afternoon exactly. It was one o’clock, April seventh, a Friday. I had finished my morning classes and, as usual, ventured out to find something for lunch. What was unusual about this day was that I had forgotten my umbrella. As I was fastidious to a fault, it was a rare spring day when I found myself unprotected in a downpour. Yet this was the case. Upon walking out of the Athenaeum, I realized that I would be soaked to the bone, and the papers and books I carried under my arm would certainly have been ruined. And so I stood under the great portico of our school’s main entrance, watching the water fall.

“From out of the swirling deluge of rain, a man emerged with an enormous violet-colored umbrella, an unusual choice for a gentleman, I thought. I watched him saunter across the courtyard of the school, elegant, erect, and exceedingly good-looking. Perhaps it was the longing I felt for the hollow, dry sanctuary of the umbrella, but I stared at the stranger, hoping that he would come to me, as if I had the power to cast a spell upon him.

“Those were very different times. If it was unseemly for a woman to stare at a handsome gentleman, it was equally unseemly for him to ignore her. Only the most ill-mannered rake would leave a lady in the rain. He paused halfway through the courtyard, discovered that I was staring at him, turned sharply upon the heel of his leather boot, and came to my aid.

“He tipped his hat so that his great blue eyes met mine. He said, ‘May I take you safely through this torrent?’ His voice was filled with a buoyant, seductive, almost cruel confidence. This one look, this single phrase, was all that it took to win me.

“‘You may take me wherever you wish,’ I replied. Instantly aware of my indiscretion, I added, ‘Anything to get out of this terrible rain.’

“He asked me my name, and when I told him, I saw at once that the name pleased him. ‘Named after an angel?’

“‘The messenger of good news,’ I answered.

“He met my eyes and smiled, pleased with my quick response. His eyes were the coolest, most pellucid blue I had ever seen. The smile was a sweet, delicious smile, as if he knew the power he had over me. A few years later, when it was revealed that my uncle, Victor Lévi-Franche, had disgraced our family by working as a spy for this man, I wondered if his delight at my name was tied to my uncle’s position and not, as he suggested, its angelic provenance.

“He offered his hand and said, ‘Come, my messenger of good news, let us go.’ I gave him my hand. In that moment, with the first touch of his skin, the life I had been leading fell away and a new one began.

“He later introduced himself as Percival Grigori III.” Gabriella glanced at Verlaine, to catch his reaction.

“Not the same-” Verlaine said in disbelief.

“Yes,” Gabriella said. “One and the same. At the time I had no notion of who he was or what his family name meant. If only I had been older and had been exposed to more at the academy, I would have turned from him and run away. In my ignorance I was charmed.

“Under the great violet umbrella, we walked. He took my arm and led me through the narrow, flooding streets to a motorcar, a shiny Mercedes 500K Roadster, an amazing silver car that shone even in the rain. I don’t know if you admire automobiles, but this was a gorgeous machine, with all the luxuries available at the time-electric wipers and locks, opulent coach-work. My family owned a car-which was quite a luxury in itself-but I had never seen anything like Percival’s Mercedes. They were exceedingly rare. As a matter of fact, a prewar 500K was auctioned off a few years ago in London. I went to the event so that I could see the car again. It sold for seven hundred thousand pounds sterling.

“Percival opened the door with a grand gesture, as if placing me into a royal carriage. I sank into the soft seat, my wet skin sticking to the leather, and took a deep breath: The car smelled of cologne mixed with the slightest hint of cigarette smoke. A tortoiseshell dashboard gleamed with buttons and knobs, each one waiting to be pressed and turned, while a pair of leather driving gloves lay folded upon the dash, waiting for his hands to fill them. It was the most beautiful car I had seen in my life. Nestling deep into the seat, I was consumed by happiness.

“I remember quite vividly the feeling I had as he drove the Mercedes along the boulevard Saint-Michel and across the Île de la Cite, the rain falling with increased violence, as if it had been waiting for us to take shelter before releasing itself upon the spring flowers and green, receptive earth. The feeling, I believe, was fear, although at the time I told myself it was love. The danger Percival posed was not known to me. For all I could tell, he was just a young man who drove recklessly. I believe now that I feared him instinctively. Still, he had captured my heart without effort. I watched him, glancing at his lovely pale skin and his long, delicate fingers upon the gearshift. I couldn’t speak. Over the bridge he sped, and then onto the rue de Rivoli, the wipers swishing across the windshield, cutting a porthole through the water.

“‘Naturally I am taking you to lunch,’ he said, glancing at me as he slowed before a grand hotel off the place de la Concorde. ‘I see that you’re hungry.’

“‘And how can you see such a thing as hunger?’ I replied, challenging him, although he was correct: I had not eaten breakfast and was ravenous.

“‘I have a special talent,’ he said, taking the car out of gear, pulling the brake shaft, and peeling his leather driving gloves from his hands one by one. ‘I know exactly what you desire before you know yourself.’

“‘Then tell me,’ I demanded, hoping that he would find me bold and sophisticated, the very things I knew I was not. ‘What do I want most of all?’

“He studied me for a moment. I saw, as I had in the first seconds of our meeting, the fleeting, sensual cruelty behind his blue eyes. ‘A beautiful death,’ he said, so quietly I was not sure that I’d heard him correctly. With that he opened the door and slid out of the car.

“Before I had time to question this bizarre statement, he opened the passenger door, helped me from my seat, and we were walking arm in arm into the restaurant. Pausing at a gilded mirror, he shed his hat and coat, glancing about as if the fleet of waiters rushing to assist him were too slow for his taste. I watched the glass as his reflection moved, examining his profile, the beautifully cut suit of light gray gabardine that in the harsh clarity of the mirror appeared almost blue, an off rhyme of his eyes. His skin was deathly pale, nearly transparent, and yet this quality had the strange effect of making him more attractive, as if he were a precious object that had been kept from the sun.”

As he listened to Gabriella’s tale, Verlaine tried to reconcile her description with the Percival Grigori he had seen yesterday afternoon, but he could not. Clearly Gabriella did not speak of the sickly, decrepit man Verlaine knew, but rather of the man Percival Grigori had once been. Instead of questioning her, as he wished, Verlaine sat back and listened.

“Within seconds a waiter had taken our coats and was leading us into the dining room, a converted ballroom that opened upon a courtyard garden. All the while I could feel him glancing at me with intense interest, as if searching for my reaction.

“There was no question of menus or of ordering our dishes. Wineglasses were filled and plates arrived, as if everything had been arranged ahead of time. Of course Percival achieved his desired effect. My astonishment at it all was immense, although I tried to disguise it. While I had been sent to fine schools and had been raised in the bourgeois fashion of the city, I was quite aware that this man was beyond anything I had experienced. Looking over my clothes, I realized to my horror that I was wearing my school attire, a detail I had overlooked in the excitement of the drive. In addition to my drab clothing, my shoes were scuffed and I had forgotten my favorite perfume at my apartment.

“‘You’re blushing,’ he said. ‘Why?’

“I merely looked down at my pleated wool skirt and crisp white blouse, and he understood my dilemma.

“‘You are the loveliest creature here,’ he said, without a hint of irony. ‘You look like an angel.’

“‘I look exactly like what I am,’ I said, pride overruling all other emotions. ‘A schoolgirl dining with a wealthy older man.’

“‘I am not so much older than you,’ he said playfully.

“‘How much is not so much?’ I demanded. Although he appeared to be in his early twenties-an age that was not, as he rightly said, much older than mine-his manners and the confidence with which he carried himself seemed to belong to a man of great experience.

“‘I am more interested in you,’ he said, brushing away the question. ‘Tell me, do you enjoy your studies? I believe you must. I own apartments near your school, and I have seen you before. You always have the appearance of someone who has been in the library too long.’

“While it should have sent a warning that he had been aware of my existence before that day, it instead sent a ripple of pleasure through me. ‘You noticed me?’ I said, too eager for his attention.

“‘Of course,’ he said, sipping his wine. ‘I could not make it through the courtyard without wishing to see you. It has become rather annoying lately, especially when you are not there. Surely you are aware of your beauty.’

“I paused to eat a sliver of roasted duck, afraid to speak. Finally I said, ‘You are right-I enjoy my studies immensely.’

“‘If they are entertaining,’ he said, ‘you must tell me everything about them.’

“And so the afternoon continued, the hours filled with course after course of delicious food, glasses of wine, and ceaseless conversation. Over the years I have had few confidants-you are perhaps the third-with whom I have spoken openly about myself. I am not the kind of woman who enjoys idle chatter. Yet not a moment of silence intruded between Percival and me. It was as though both of us had been hoarding stories to tell each other. As we talked and ate, I felt myself being drawn closer and closer to him, the brilliance of his conversation holding me in a trance. Eventually I fell in love with his body with equal abandon, but it was his intelligence that I adored first.

“Over the weeks I was drawn closer and closer to him, so close that I could not endure even one day passing without seeing him. Despite the passion I felt for my studies and the dedication I pledged to the profession of angelology, there was nothing at all I could do to keep myself from him. We met in the apartments he owned near the Angelological Society, where we lingered through the hot summer afternoons of 1939. My classes became secondary to our leisurely hours in his bedroom, the windows open to the stifling summer air. I began to resent my roommate for asking questions; I began to hate teachers for keeping me from him.

“After our first meeting, I began to suspect that there was something unusual about Percival, but I ignored my instincts, choosing to see him against my better judgment. Again, after our first night together, I knew that I had fallen into a kind of trap, although I could not articulate the nature of the danger I felt, nor did I know the damage it would cause me. It was only some weeks later that I fully understood he was Nephilistic. He had, until then, kept his wings retracted-a deception that I should have seen through but did not. One afternoon as we made love he simply opened them, encompassing me in an embrace of golden brilliance. I should have left then, but it was too late-I was completely, irrevocably under his spell. It was thus, they say, between the disobedient angels and the women of ancient time-theirs was a great passion that turned heaven and earth upside down. But I was just a girl. I would have traded my soul for his love.

“And in many ways, I did just that. As our affair grew more intense, I began to help him acquire secrets from the Angelological Society. In return he gave me the tools to advance quickly, to gain prestige and power. He asked for small bits of information at first-the location of our offices in Paris and the dates of society meetings. I gave them willingly. When his demands grew, I accommodated them. By the time I understood how dangerous he was and that I must escape his influence, it was too late: He threatened to tell my teachers of our relationship. I was terrified of being found out. It would have meant a life of exile from the only community I had ever known.

“My affair was not easy to keep secret, however. When it became clear that I would be discovered, I confessed everything to my teacher, Dr. Raphael Valko, who decided that I was in a position to be useful to angelology. I became a spy. While Percival believed that I was working with him, I was actually doing my best to undermine his family. The affair continued, growing more and more treacherous as the war continued. Despite my misery, I did my part. I fed the Nephilim misinformation about angelological missions; I brought the secrets I learned about the closed world of Nephilistic power to Dr. Raphael, who in turn educated our scholars; and I organized what was meant to be the biggest victory of our lives, a plan to give the Nephilim a replica of the lyre while we kept the authentic lyre in our care.

“The plan was simple. Dr. Seraphina and Dr. Raphael Valko knew that the Nephilim were aware of our expedition to the gorge and that they would fight us until they had the lyre in their possession. The Valkos suggested that we orchestrate a plan that would throw the Nephilim off our trail. They arranged the manufacture of a lyre with all the properties of those of ancient Thrace-the curved arms, the heavy base, the crossbars. The instrument was created by our most brilliant musicologist, Dr. Josephat Michael, who labored over each detail, finding silk strings woven with the hair of a white horse’s tail. After we had unearthed the true lyre, we saw that it was much more sophisticated than the false version-its body was made of a metallic material that is closest to platinum, an element that has never been classified and cannot be considered an earthly element. Dr. Michael named the substance Valkine, after the Valkos, who had done so much to discover the lyre. The strings were made of glossy golden strands twisted into a tight cord, which Dr. Michael concluded had been made from strands of the Archangel Gabriel’s hair.

“Despite the obvious differences, the Valkos believed we had no choice but to act. We put the false lyre in a structured leather case identical to the case of the true lyre. I gave Percival a tip that our caravan would be driving through Paris at midnight, and he arranged the ambush. If all had gone according to plan, Percival would have captured Dr. Seraphina Valko and demanded that the angelological council give the lyre in exchange for her life. We would have traded the false lyre, Dr. Seraphina would have gone free, and the Nephilim would have believed that they had won the ultimate prize. But something went terribly wrong.

“Dr. Raphael and I had agreed to vote for making the trade. We assumed that the council members would follow Dr. Raphael’s lead and vote to trade the lyre for Dr. Seraphina. But for reasons we could not understand, the council members voted against making the trade, throwing our plan into chaos. There was a tie, which we asked one of the expedition members-Celestine Clochette-to break. She had no way of knowing about our plans and so she voted according to protocol, which fit with her careful, meticulous character. In the end we did not make the trade. I tried to remedy the mistake by taking the false lyre to Percival myself, telling him that I had stolen the lyre for him. But it was too late. Percival had killed Dr. Seraphina Valko.

“I have lived with regret over what happened to Seraphina. But my sorrows were not to end on that terrible night. You see, despite everything, I loved Percival Grigori, or at least was terribly addicted to how I felt in his presence. It seems amazing to me now, but even after he had ordered my capture and had allowed me to be brutally tortured, I could not give him up. I went to him one last time in 1944, as the Americans were liberating France. I knew that he would flee before he could be captured and I needed to see him again, to say good-bye. We spent the night together, and some months later I learned, to my horror, that I had become pregnant with his child. In my desperation to hide my condition, I turned to the only person who knew the extent of my involvement with Percival. My former teacher, Dr. Raphael Valko, understood how much I had suffered from my involvement with the Grigori family and that my child must be kept away from them at all costs. Raphael married me, letting the world believe that he was the father of my child. Our marriage caused a scandal among angelologists loyal to Seraphina’s memory, but it allowed me to keep my secret safe. My daughter, Angela, was born in 1945. Many years later Angela had a daughter, Evangeline.”

Hearing Evangeline’s name startled Verlaine. “Percival Grigori is her grandfather?” he said, unable to mask his incredulity.

“Yes,” Gabriella said. “It was Percival Grigori’s granddaughter who, just this morning, saved your life.”

Rose Room, St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

Evangeline maneuvered Celestine’s wheelchair into the Rose Room and parked it at the edge of a long wooden conference table. Nine stooped and wrinkled Elder Sisters, tufts of white hair curling from under their veils and backs crooked from age, were seated around the table. Mother Perpetua sat among them, a severe, portly woman wearing the same modern attire as Evangeline. The Elder Sisters watched Evangeline and Celestine with great interest, a sure sign that Sister Philomena had alerted them all to the events of the past days. Indeed, as Evangeline took her place at the table, Philomena before them, speaking with great passion about that very subject. Evangeline’s apprehension only grew when she saw that Philomena had spread Gabriella’s letter on the table in front of the sisters.

“The information before me,” Philomena said, raising her arms as if inviting the sisters to join her in observing the letter, “will bring about the victory we have long been hoping for. If the lyre is hidden among us, we must find it quickly. Then we will have all that we need to move forward.”

“Pray, tell me, Sister Philomena,” Mother Perpetua said, examining Philomena doubtfully, “move forward in what direction?”

Philomena said, “I do not believe that Abigail Rockefeller died without leaving concrete information about the lyre’s whereabouts. It is time to know the truth. In fact, we must know everything. What have you been hiding from us, Celestine?”

Evangeline looked at Celestine. She was concerned for her health. Celestine had declined dramatically in the past twenty-four hours. Her face was waxen, her hands knit together at the fingers, and she hunched so deeply in her chair that there appeared a danger she might fall out of it. Evangeline had hesitated to bring Celestine to the meeting at all, but once she’d learned the truth of everything that had happened-of Verlaine’s visit and Gabriella’s letters-Celestine had insisted.

Celestine’s voice was feeble as she said, “My knowledge of the lyre is as incomplete as your own, Philomena. These many years I have, like you, puzzled over its location. Although unlike you I have learned to temper my desire for revenge.”

Philomena said, “There is more to my desire to find the lyre than simple revenge. Come. Now is the moment. The Nephilim will recover it if we don’t.”

“They have not found it yet,” Mother Perpetua said. “I believe we can trust that they will be lost for some time longer.”

“Come, now. You are fifty years old, Perpetua, too young to understand why I object to doing nothing,” Philomena said. “You have not seen the destruction the creatures bring. You have not watched your beloved home burn. You have not lost sisters. You have not feared every day that they might return.”

Celestine and Perpetua eyed each other with a mixture of worry and weariness, as if they had heard Philomena discoursing upon the subject before. Mother Perpetua said, “We understand that what you saw in the attack of 1944 fuels your desire to fight. Indeed, you saw the worst casualties of the Nephilim’s merciless destruction. It is difficult to countenance inaction in the face of such horror. But long ago we voted to maintain peace. Pacifism. Neutrality. Secrecy. These are the tenets of our existence at St. Rose.”

Celestine said, “As long as the whereabouts of the lyre are unknown, the Nephilim will find nothing.”

“But we will,” Philomena said. “We are so very close to finding it.”

Sister Celestine lifted a hand and turned to the sisters gathered around the table, her voice so quiet that Sister Boniface, sitting across the room, adjusted her hearing aid. Celestine clutched at the knobs of the wheelchair’s armrests, her knuckles white with the effort, as if holding herself against a steep fall. “It is true: A time of conflict is upon us. But I cannot agree with Philomena. I hold our position of peaceful resistance sacred. We should not fear this turn of events. It is the way of the universe for the Nephilim to rise and to fall. It is our duty to resist, and we must be ready to face it. But, most important, we must not become as base and treacherous as our enemies. We must preserve our heritage of civilized and dignified pacifism. Sisters, let us not forget the ideals of our founders. If we stay true to our traditions, in time we will win.”

“Time is something we do not have!” Philomena said fiercely, her fervor distorting her features. “Soon they will be upon us, just as they were so many years ago. Do you not recall the destruction we endured? The foul, murderous bloodlust of the creatures? Do you not remember the horrid fate of Mother Innocenta? We will be destroyed if we do not act.”

“Our mission is too precious for rash actions,” Celestine said. Her face had flushed as she spoke, and for a fleeting moment Evangeline could imagine the intense young woman who had arrived at St. Rose Convent seventy years before. The physical effort of Celestine’s speech overwhelmed her. Lifting a trembling hand to her mouth, she began to cough. She appeared to consider her physical frailty with dispassionate attention, as if noting how the mind burned as brightly as ever even as the body made its way to dust.

“Your health has altered your ability to think clearly,” Philomena said, the drapery of her black veil brushing her shoulders. “You are in no state to make such crucial decisions.”

Mother Perpetua said, “Innocenta felt very much the same way. Many of us remember her dedication to peaceful resistance.”

“And look where her peaceful resistance got her,” Philomena said. “They killed her mercilessly.” Turning to Celestine, she said, “You do not have the right to keep the location of the lyre secret, Celestine. I know that the means of finding it are here.”

“You do not know the first thing about the lyre or the dangers that accompany it,” Celestine said, her voice so frail that Evangeline could hardly hear her words. Celestine turned to Evangeline, placed her hand upon her arm, and whispered, “Come, there is no use arguing any longer. I have something to show you.”

Evangeline pushed Celestine’s wheelchair from the Rose Room, through the hallway, and to a rickety elevator at the far end of the convent. Squeezing the chair inside, Evangeline positioned the wheels. The doors slid shut with a soft metallic kiss. As she reached for the button marking the fourth floor, Celestine stopped her. She lifted her quivering hand and pushed an unmarked button. Jerkily, the elevator began to descend. It stopped at the basement, and the doors retracted with a screech.

Evangeline gripped the handles of Celestine’s wheelchair and pushed her into an expanse of darkness. Celestine flicked a switch, and a series of dim lights illuminated the space. When Evangeline’s eyes adjusted, she saw that they were in the convent’s cellar. She could hear the rumbling of industrial dishwashers above and the draining water sluicing through the pipes and knew that they must be directly below the cafeteria. At Celestine’s direction, Evangeline steered the wheelchair through the cellar, navigating them to the farthest edge of the basement. There Sister Celestine looked over her shoulder, to be sure that they were alone, and pointed to a plain wooden door. It was nondescript, so unremarkable that Evangeline would have guessed it to be a broom closet.

Celestine took a key from her pocket and gave it to Evangeline, who jiggled it in the lock. Only after several attempts did it finally turn.

Evangeline pulled a cord dangling before the doorway, and a lightbulb illuminated a narrow brickwork passageway angling at a sharp descending slope. Pulling back on Celestine’s wheelchair to keep it from barreling downward, Evangeline measured her steps. The light grew fainter and fainter until at last the passageway opened to a musty room. Evangeline pulled a second cord, which she would have missed entirely had it not brushed against her cheek, soft as the filament of a spiderweb. Light emanated from an old-fashioned bulb, sizzling as if it might pop at any moment. Mold grew over the walls, and a number of discarded pews littered the floor. Along the wall rested cracked pieces of stained glass and a few milky slabs of marble of the same color and variety as the church altar-remnants of the original construction of Maria Angelorum. In the very center of the room sat a rusted boiler, cobwebs and dust and many years of desuetude settling upon it, heavy as an old skin. The room, Evangeline decided, had not been cleaned in many decades, if ever.

Beyond the boiler she spied another door as plain as the first. She pushed Celestine’s wheelchair directly to it, took her own keys from her pocket, and tried the master. Miraculously, the door opened. Once inside, she made out the contours of a large, furniture-filled room. With the flick of a wall switch near the door, her intuition was confirmed. Long and narrow, the chamber was nearly the size of the church nave, with a low ceiling supported by rows of dark wooden girders. Oriental carpets of various colors-crimson and emerald and royal blue-covered the floor, while tapestries of angels hung upon the walls, numerous golden-threaded weavings that Evangeline took to be quite old, perhaps medieval. A great table sat at the center of the room, its surface laden with manuscripts.

“A hidden library,” Evangeline whispered before she could stop herself.

“Yes,” Celestine said. “It is an angelological reading room. In the nineteenth century, visiting scholars and dignitaries took shelter with us and spent much time here. Innocenta used it for general meetings. It has been abandoned for many years. It is also,” she added, “the most secure spot at St. Rose Convent”

“Does anyone even know of its existence?”

Celestine said, “Not many. When the fire of 1944 began to spread, most of the sisters ran to the courtyard. Mother Innocenta, however, went to the church to lure the Nephilim from the convent. Before this she had instructed me to come here and deposit her papers in our safe. I did not know the convent well, and Innocenta did not have the leisure to give me detailed instructions-but eventually I found this room. I secured what she had given me inside and hurried to the courtyard. To my great sorrow, everything was in flames when I returned. The Nephilim had come and gone. Innocenta was dead.”

Celestine touched Evangeline’s hand. “Come,” she said. “I have something else for you.”

She indicated a magnificent tapestry of the Annunciation in which Gabriel, his wings tucked behind him and his head bowed, gave the Virgin the news of the coming of Christ. “The messenger of good news indeed,” Celestine said. “Of course, the holiness of the news depends upon the recipient. You, my dear, are worthy. Go, roll back the cloth from the wall.”

Evangeline followed Celestine’s instructions, lifting the tapestry to reveal a square copper safe sunk flush with the concrete.

“Three-three-three-nine,” Celestine said, pointing to a combination dial. “The perfect numbers of the celestial spheres followed by the total species of angels in the Heavenly Choir.”

Evangeline squinted at the numbers of a combination dial and-as Celestine told her the combination-twisted the dial right, then left, then right, listening for the soft sweep of metal disks. Finally the safe clicked and, with a swift tug of the handle, popped open. There was a leather case in the belly of the safe. Fingers trembling, Evangeline carried it to the table and wheeled Celestine to it.

“I brought this case with me to America from Paris,” Celestine said, sighing as if all her efforts had led to this singular moment. “It has been here, safe and sound, since 1944.”

Evangeline ran her hands over the cool, polished leather. The brass clasps were shiny as new pennies.

Sister Celestine closed her eyes and clutched at the armrests of her wheelchair.

Evangeline remembered the extent of Celestine’s illness. The journey to the depths of the convent must have taxed her enormously. “You are exhausted,” Evangeline said. “I am terribly thoughtless to have allowed you to bring me here. I think it is time for you to return to your room.”

“Hush, child,” Celestine said, lifting a hand to stop her from protesting further. “There is one more item I must give you.”

Celestine slid her hand into the pocket of her habit, removed a piece of paper, and placed it in Evangeline’s palm. She said, “Memorize this address. It is where your grandmother, as head of the Angelological Society, resides. She will welcome you and continue where I have left off.”

“This is the address I saw in my file in the Mission Office this morning,” Evangeline said. “The same address as that on Gabriella’s letters.”

“The very one,” Celestine said. “It is your time. Soon you will understand your purpose, but for now you must remove this case from our domain. Percival Grigori is not the only one who covets Abigail Rockefeller’s letters.”

“Mrs. Rockefeller’s letters?” Evangeline whispered. “This case doesn’t contain the lyre?”

“The letters will lead you to the lyre,” Celestine said. “Our dear Philomena has been searching for them for more than half a century. They are no longer safe here. You must take them away at once.”

“If I leave, will I be allowed to return?”

“If you do, you will compromise the safety of the others. Angelology is forever. Once you begin, you cannot leave it. And you, Evangeline, have already begun.”

“But you left angelology behind,” Evangeline said.

“And look at the trouble that ensued,” Celestine said, fingering the rosary around her neck. “One might say my withdrawal into the sanctuary of St. Rose is in part responsible for the danger your young visitor is in now.”

Celestine paused, as if to let her words sink in.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said, gripping Evangeline’s hand. “Everything has its proper time. You are giving up this life, but you are gaining another. You will be part of a long and honorable tradition: Christine de Pizan, Clare of Assisi, Sir Isaac Newton, even St. Thomas Aquinas did not shy from our work. Angelology is a noble calling, perhaps the highest calling. It is not an easy thing to be chosen. One must be courageous.”

In the course of their exchange, something about Celestine had changed-her illness seemed in retreat, and her pale hazel eyes burned with pride. When she spoke, her voice was strong and confident.

“Gabriella will be very proud of you,” Celestine said. “But I will be even more so. From the minute you arrived, I knew you would make an exceptional angelologist. When your grandmother and I were students in Paris, we could pick out exactly which of our peers would succeed and which would not. It is like a sixth sense, the ability to discover new talent”

“I hope, then, that I won’t disappoint you, Sister.”

“It is unsettling how much you remind me of her. Your eyes, your mouth, the way you carry yourself as you walk. It is odd. You could be her twin. I pray that angelology will suit you as it has Gabriella.”

Evangeline wanted desperately to ask what had happened between Celestine and Gabriella, but before she could articulate her thoughts, Celestine spoke instead, her voice cracking with emotion. “Tell me one last thing. Who is your grandfather? Are you the grandchild of Dr. Raphael Valko?”

“I don’t know,” Evangeline said. “My father refused to speak about the subject.”

A dark expression clouded Celestine’s features, but just as quickly it dispersed, replaced by anxious concern. “It is time for you to go,” she said. “It will take some skill to get out of here.” Evangeline tried to resume her position behind the wheelchair, but, to her surprise, Celestine drew her close and hugged her.

Whispering into her ear, she said, “Tell your grandmother I forgive her. Tell her I understand that there were no easy choices then. We did what we needed to do to survive. Tell her that it wasn’t her fault, what happened to Dr. Seraphina, and please tell her that everything is forgiven.”

Evangeline returned Celestine’s embrace, feeling how thin and frail the old woman was under her capacious habit.

Gripping the case, feeling its weight, Evangeline slipped the leather strap over her shoulder and pushed Celestine back through the long passageways toward the elevator. Once they reached the fourth floor, her movements would need to be swift and discreet. Already she could feel St. Rose edging away from her, retreating into an unreachable place. Never again would she wake at four forty-five in the morning and rush through the shadowy corridors to prayer. Evangeline could not imagine loving another place as much as she loved the convent, and yet suddenly it seemed inevitable that she leave it.

St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

Otterley backed the Jaguar into a cove outside the convent grounds, hiding the car deep in the foliage of evergreens. She cut the engine and stepped out into the snow, leaving the keys in the ignition. They had agreed that it would be best for Percival-who could not be of much use in any physical ordeal-to stay at a distance. Without a word to him, Otterley closed the car door and walked quickly along the icy path to the convent.

Percival knew enough about Gabriella to understand that capturing her would take a coordinated effort. At his insistence Otterley had put in a call to the Gibborim to check on their progress and had learned that they were prowling a few miles south, on the country roads north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. He doubted that they would make much headway with Gabriella, and he was prepared to step in himself if the Gibborim failed. It was imperative to stop Gabriella before she made it to the convent.

Percival stretched his legs, cramped from the narrow space of the car, and peered through the dust-flecked windshield. The convent loomed ahead, a great brick-and-stone edifice barely visible through the forest. If their timing was right, the Gibborim that Sneja had sent-she had promised at least one hundred-should be stationed in the area already, awaiting Otterley’s signal to attack. Taking his phone from his pocket, Percival dialed his mother, but the line rang and rang. He’d tried to call her every hour all morning without luck. He’d left messages with the Anakim, when she bothered to answer, but she had clearly forgotten to relay them to Sneja.

Percival opened the car door and stepped into the freezing morning air, frustrated with the impotence of his position. He should have organized the entire operation himself. It should be him leading the Gibborim into the convent. Instead his younger sister was in charge and he was left to try to get through to their aloof mother, who was at that moment likely to be soaking in her Jacuzzi without a thought in her head of his condition.

He walked to the edge of the highway, looking for signs of Gabriella, before dialing his mother’s line again. To his surprise, someone picked up on the first ring.

“Yes,” said a hoarse, domineering voice that he recognized at once.

“We’re here, Mother,” Percival said. He could hear music and voices in the background and knew at once that she was in the middle of one of her parties.

“And the Gibborim?” Sneja asked. “They are ready?”

“Otterley has gone to prepare them.”

“Alone?” Sneja said, reproach in her voice. “However will your sister manage it alone? There are nearly one hundred creatures to command.”

Percival felt as if his mother had slapped him. Surely she knew that his sickness prevented him from fighting. Relinquishing control to Otterley was humiliating and required a level of restraint he’d thought Sneja would admire.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said, keeping his anger in check. “Otterley is more than capable. I am watching the entrance to the convent, to be sure there isn’t interference.”

“Well,” Sneja said, “whether she is capable or not is rather beside the point.”

Percival considered the tone of his mother’s voice, trying to understand the message it was meant to imply. “Has she proven otherwise?”

“Darling, she doesn’t have anything to prove herself with,” Sneja said. “For all her bluster, our Otterley is in a terrible predicament.”

“I really have no idea what you mean,” Percival said. In the distance the faintest stream of smoke began to rise from the convent, signaling that the attack had begun. His sister seemed to be managing quite fine without him.

“When was the last time you saw your sister’s wings?” Sneja asked.

“I don’t know,” Percival said. “It’s been ages.”

“I will tell you the last time you saw them,” Sneja said. “It was 1848, at her coming-out ball in Paris.”

Percival recalled the event clearly. Otterley’s wings were new, and, like all young Nephilim, she had displayed them with great pride. They had been multicolored, like Sneja’s wings, but very small. It was expected that they would grow full with time.

Sneja continued, “If you have wondered why it has been so long since Otterley has shown her wings properly, it is because they did not develop. They are tiny and useless, the wings of a child. She cannot fly, and she certainly cannot display them. Can you imagine how ridiculous Otterley would look if she were to open such appendages?”

“I had no idea,” Percival said, incredulous. Despite the resentment he felt for his sister, he was deeply protective of Otterley.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Sneja said. “You don’t seem to notice much but your own pleasure and your own suffering. Your sister has tried to hide her predicament from all of us for more than a century. But the truth of the matter is, she is not like you or me. Your wings were glorious, once upon a time. And my wings are incomparable. Otterley is a lower breed.”

“You think she is incapable of directing the Gibborim,” Percival said, understanding at last why their mother had told him Otterley’s secret. “You think she will lose control of the attack.”

“If only you could assume your rightful role, my son,” Sneja said, her voice filling with disappointment, as if she had already resigned herself to Percival’s failure. “If only it were you taking up our cause. Perhaps we-”

Unable to listen to another word, Percival disconnected the call. Examining the highway, he saw the blacktop stretch away from him, twisting through the trees and disappearing around a bend. There was nothing he could do to assist Otterley. He was helpless to restore the glory of his family.

Route 9W, Milton, New York

By the time they had made it to the small highway outside Milton, Gabriella and Verlaine had smoked half the pack of cigarettes, filling the Porsche with the heavy, acrid scent of smoke. Verlaine cracked the window, allowing a stream of chilled air into the car. He wished Gabriella would continue with her story, but he didn’t want to press her. She appeared frail and tired, as if the very act of recounting her past had exhausted her-dark circles appeared below her eyes, and her shoulders drooped slightly. The abundance of smoke swirling through the car stung Verlaine’s eyes but appeared to have little effect upon Gabriella. She stepped on the gas, intent to reach the convent.

Verlaine looked out the window as the snowy forest flashed by. Trees expanded from the highway, row upon row of winter-barren birch, sugar maple, and oak stretching far as Verlaine could see. He watched the roadside, looking for clues that they had arrived-a wooden sign marking the entrance to the convent or the church spire rising above the trees. He had mapped the course from New York City to St. Rose at his apartment, noting the bridges and highways. If his estimate was correct, the convent would be just miles north of Milton. They should be upon it at any moment.

“Look in the mirror,” Gabriella said, her voice unnaturally calm.

Verlaine followed her instructions. A black SUV followed at a distance. “They’ve been there for the past few miles,” Gabriella said. “It seems that they are not giving up on you.”

“Are you sure it’s them?” Verlaine asked, looking over his shoulder. “What will we do?”

“If I try to run,” she said, “they will follow us. If I continue onward, we will arrive at St. Rose at the same moment and have to confront them there.”

“And then what?”

“They will not let us go,” Gabriella said. “Not this time.”

Gabriella hit the brakes and jerked the wheel, turning precipitously onto a gravel road. The Porsche spun on its tires, delineated a half circle over the snowy road, tipping slightly from the momentum. For a moment the car felt free of gravity, thrown into a state of weightless free fall on the ice, nothing more than a box of metal fishtailing right and left as the tires sought traction. Gabriella slowed and held the wheel, trying to gain control. As it steadied, she hit the gas again until the car sped ever faster, climbing the incline of a long, slow-rising hill, the noise of the engine deafening. Gravel crackled on the windshield in a barrage of sharp explosions.

Verlaine looked over his shoulder. The black SUV had turned onto the road, following at a distance behind.

“Here they come,” he said, and Gabriella gunned the engine, taking them higher and higher along the hill. As the road crested, the thickets of trees gave way to a white sweep of valley, beyond which a dilapidated barn stood red as a splotch of blood against the snow.

“As much as I love this car, it doesn’t have the capacity for speed,” Gabriella said. “It’s going to be impossible to outrun them. We need to find a way to lose them. Or hide.”

Verlaine scanned the valley. From the highway to the barn, there was nothing but exposed frozen fields. Beyond the barn the road twisted up another hill, snaking its way into a copse of evergreens. “Can we make it to the top?” Verlaine asked.

“It doesn’t look like we have much choice.”

Gabriella drove past the barn, where the road tracked a slow, steady ascent. By the time they reached the evergreens, the black SUV had gained so much ground that Verlaine could make out the features of the men in the front seat.

The one in the passenger seat leaned out the window, aimed a gun, and shot, missing them.

“I can’t go faster than this,” Gabriella said, growing frustrated. Keeping one hand on the wheel, she tossed a leather purse to Verlaine. “Find my gun. It’s inside.”

Verlaine unzipped the bag, digging through a tangle of objects until his fingers brushed cold metal. He lifted a small silver handgun from the bottom of the bag.

“Have you shot a gun before?”

“Never.”

“I’ll walk you through it,” she said. “Switch off the safety. Now roll down your window. Hold steady. Good, now level your arm.”

As Verlaine positioned the gun, the man in the SUV took aim.

“Just a moment,” Gabriella said. She swerved into the opposite lane and slowed, giving Verlaine a clear shot at the windshield.

“Shoot,” Gabriella said. “Now.”

Verlaine aimed the gun level with the SUV and squeezed the trigger. The bigger car’s windshield cracked into a web of filaments. Gabriella slammed on the brakes as the Mercedes hit a guardrail and flipped over the edge of the valley road, metal crunching as it rolled. Verlaine watched the upended vehicle, its tires spinning.

“Brilliant shot,” Gabriella said, pulling to the side of the road and cutting the engine. She gave him a look of pride, clearly pleasantly surprised by his aim. “Give me the gun. I need to make sure they’re dead.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

“Of course,” she snapped, taking the gun and climbing out of the car and over the guardrail. “Come, you might learn something.”

Verlaine followed Gabriella down the icy hillside, walking in her tracks through the snow. Looking above, he saw that a mass of dark clouds had collected. They hung abnormally low, as if they might descend upon the valley at any moment. Once the two of them reached the car, Gabriella instructed Verlaine to kick out the windshield. He bashed chunks of glass with the heel of his sneaker as she crouched down and peered inside.

“You hit the driver,” she said, drawing Verlaine’s gaze to the dead man.

“Beginner’s luck.”

“I should say so.” She gestured to the second man, whose body lay twenty feet away, facedown in the snow. “Two birds with one stone. The second was thrown when the car flipped.”

Verlaine could hardly believe what lay before him. The man’s body had transformed into the creature he’d seen through his train window the night before. A pair of scarlet wings splayed open over its back, the feathers brushing the snow. As an icy wind blew over Verlaine, it was impossible to tell if his body tingled from the cold or from the shock at what lay before him.

Meanwhile, Gabriella had managed to open the door and was searching the SUV, emerging with a gym bag, the very bag he’d left in his Renault the previous afternoon.

“That’s mine,” Verlaine said. “They took it when they broke into my car yesterday.”

Gabriella unzipped the bag, withdrew a folder, and sorted through its contents.

“What are you looking for?”

“Something that might explain how much Percival knows,” Gabriella said, examining the papers. “Has he seen these?”

Verlaine peered over her shoulder. “I didn’t give these files to him, but those guys might have.”

Gabriella turned away from the wreckage and made her way back up the snowy hill to the car. “We had better hurry,” she said. “The good sisters of St. Rose are in more immediate danger than I had feared.”

Verlaine took the driver’s seat, deciding that he would drive the remaining miles to the convent. He turned the Porsche around and headed back to the highway. Everything before him lay still and calm. The rolling hills appeared sedate under blankets of snow. The barn slouched in abandonment, the cloud-heavy sky vaulted above. Aside from a few scratches and a guttering in the engine, the old Porsche carried on with admirable resilience. In fact, it appeared that nothing had changed significantly in the past ten minutes but Verlaine. The leather steering wheel grew slick under his hands, and he found that his heart beat hard in his chest. Images of the dead men appeared in his mind.

Intuiting Verlaine’s thoughts, Gabriella said, “You did the right thing.”

“I’ve never even held a gun before today.”

“They were brutal killers,” she said, her voice businesslike, as if the dispatching of men were something she performed on a regular basis. “In a world of good and evil, one cannot shy from making distinctions.”

“It isn’t a distinction I’ve thought much about.”

“That,” Gabriella said softly, “will change if you remain with us.”

Verlaine slowed the car, pausing at a stop sign before turning back onto the highway. The convent was only miles ahead.

“Is Evangeline one of you?” he asked.

“Evangeline knows very little about angelology. We told her nothing about it when she was a child. She is young and obedient-traits that might have been her undoing if she weren’t extremely bright. Placing her in the hands of the sisters of St. Rose Convent was her father’s idea-he was Catholic, quite attached to the romantic notion that young ladies are best sheltered from danger by hiding them in a cloister. He could not help it. He was Italian. Such notions ran in his blood.”

“And she listened to him?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your granddaughter gave up everything worth living for simply because her father told her to?”

“There is perhaps some room for debate about what is and what is not worth living for,” Gabriella said. “But you are right: Evangeline did exactly as she was instructed. Luca brought her to the United States after Evangeline’s mother-my daughter, Angela-was murdered. I imagine that her upbringing was rigorously religious. I imagine he must have prepared her from an early age for her eventual induction into St. Rose Convent. How else in this day and age would a young girl of her gifts go so willingly?”

Verlaine said, “It seems rather medieval.”

“But you did not know Luca,” Gabriella said. “And you do not know Evangeline. Their affection for each other was something to behold. They were inseparable. I believe that Evangeline would have done anything, absolutely anything, her father told her-including giving her life to the church.”

They drove along the highway in silence, the Porsche’s engine rattling, the forest rising on both sides. Only an hour before, it had seemed a strangely restful journey. But every cluster of trees, every bend in the road, every narrow lane funneling into their path presented the opportunity for ambush. Verlaine pressed his foot on the gas, pushing the Porsche faster and faster. He checked the mirror every few seconds, as if the SUV might appear at any moment, the assassins rising from the dead.

St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

Evangeline and Celestine rode the elevator to the fourth floor, the strap of the leather case already weighing upon Evangeline’s shoulder. When the doors opened, the old nun stopped her. “Go, my dear,” she said. “I will distract the others so that you may exit unnoticed.” Evangeline kissed Celestine’s cheek and left her in the elevator. The moment Evangeline walked away, Celestine pushed a button and the doors swept closed. Evangeline was alone.

Upon reaching her bedroom cell, Evangeline tore open the drawers and collected the objects of value to her-a rosary and a small amount of cash she had saved over the years-which she put in her pocket. Her heart ached as she glanced around her room. Not long before, she’d believed she would never leave it. She’d imagined that life stretched before her in an endless progression of ritual, routine, and prayer. She would wake each morning to pray, and she would go to sleep each evening in a room looking out upon the dark presence of the river. Overnight these certainties had melted, dissolving like ice in the Hudson’s current.

Evangeline’s thoughts were interrupted by a great cacophony of rumbling from the courtyard. She ran from her room, threw open a window, and looked over the grounds as a procession of black utility vans pulled into the horseshoe driveway curling before Maria Angelorum. The van doors slid open, and a group of strange creatures climbed out onto the convent lawn. Squinting, Evangeline tried to see them more clearly. They wore uniform black overcoats that brushed the snow as they walked, black leather gloves, and military-style combat boots. As they moved across the courtyard, coming closer to the convent, she observed that their number quickly multiplied-more and more arrived, as if they had the ability to appear from the chill air. As she examined the periphery of the convent grounds, she saw the creatures step from the darkened forest, climb the stone wall, and walk through the great iron gate at the drive. They might have been waiting, hidden, for hours. St. Rose Convent was completely surrounded by Gibborim.

Clutching the leather case close, Evangeline turned from the window in fright and ran through the hallway, knocking on doors, rousing the sisters from study and prayers. She turned the lights to full brightness, a harsh illumination that ripped away the air of coziness of the fourth floor and exposed the tattered carpeting, the peeling paint, the dreary uniformity of their enclosed lives. If there was one thing to be learned from the previous attack, it was that the sisters must leave the convent immediately.

Evangeline’s efforts brought the Elder Sisters from their rooms. They stood throughout the corridor, looking about in utter confusion, their unveiled hair in disarray. Evangeline heard Philomena calling from somewhere in the distance, preparing the sisters to fight.

“Go,” Evangeline said. “Take the back stairwell to the first floor and follow Mother Perpetua’s orders. Trust me. You will soon understand.”

Resisting the urge to lead them down herself, Evangeline pushed through the clusters of women, and, making her way to the wooden door at the end of the hall, she opened it and ran up the winding steps. The room at the top of the turret was freezing cold and shadowy. She knelt before the brick wall and pried the stone from her hiding place. In the recess in the wall, she found the metal box containing the angelological journal, the photograph tucked safely inside. She turned to the last quarter of the notebook. Her mother’s scientific notes were there, copied out in Gabriella’s clean, precise script. Her mother had died for these strings of numbers. Evangeline could not lose them.

The turret windows had frozen over, creating blue-white fractals upon the glass. Evangeline attempted to clear a circle in the ice with her breath, rubbing the pane with the palm of her hand, but the glass remained foggy. In a panic to see the grounds, she removed her shoe and shattered the window with the heel, swiping the barbs of glass from the frame with quick sweeps, opening a small vantage over the courtyard.

Bitterly cold air gushed into the turret. She could see the river and the forest below, framing the courtyard on three sides. The creatures had collected at the center of the grounds, a mass of dark-cloaked figures. Even at a distance, their height foreshortened, they sent a chill through Evangeline. There were fifty, perhaps a hundred of the creatures below her window, quickly composing themselves into rows.

Suddenly, as if responding to a command, they shed their great cloaks in unison. The creatures’ limbs were bare, their skin throwing halos of radiance over the snow. When they stood upright, their immense height gave them the appearance of Grecian statues stationed on a desolate mall. Great, sharp-edged red wings opened on their backs, striated feathers glistening in the dull morning sunlight. In an instant she recognized the creatures, for she was gazing on beasts similar to those angelic beings she had observed in the warehouse in New York City with her father. Only in the years since she’d last set eyes on such a creature, she had grown from a girl to a woman, a change that rendered her sensitive to a seduction she hadn’t experienced before. Their bodies were exceedingly lovely, so sensuous that a shock of longing passed through her. Yet even through the haze of her desire, Evangeline found that everything about them-from the way they stood to the immense span of their wings-struck her as monstrous.

Taking a deep breath to calm her thoughts she noticed a peculiar scent. Loamy and carbon-rich, it was the distinct scent of smoke. Searching the grounds she observed a group of the creatures huddled together beside the convent, fanning flames with their wings. The flickering fire rose higher and higher. The devils were attacking.

Evangeline tucked the angelology journal into the leather case and ran down the turret steps, taking the direct passage to the Adoration Chapel. The smell of fire grew more distinct as she descended, and thick drafts of smoke swirled up through the stairwell. There was no sure way to know how far the fire had blazed and, realizing she might be trapped, she quickened her pace, the leather case clutched tight beneath her arm. The air thickened as she ran down the successive flights of stairs, confirming her belief that the fire was-at least for the moment-contained in the lower regions of the convent. Even so, it seemed impossible that the flames had risen so quickly and with such force. She recalled the creatures standing before the fire, their powerful wings beating, encouraging the flames to mount. She shuddered. The Gibborim would not stop until the entire convent lay in ashes.

St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

Verlaine could hardly make out the words ST. ROSE fashioned into the ornate wrought-iron gate, so dense was the smoke coming from the convent. Alongside the thick limestone wall sat his bludgeoned Renault, its windows smashed. It had most likely filled with snow and ice overnight, but it remained parked where he had left it. The gate to the convent was open, and as they parked the car, Verlaine saw a line of black utility vans lined up one behind the other before the church.

“Do you see that car?” Gabriella asked, pointing to a white Jaguar hidden in foliage at the end of the convent driveway. “It belongs to Otterley Grigori.”

“Related to Percival?”

“His sister,” Gabriella said. “I had the great pleasure of knowing her in France.” Gabriella took the gun in her hand and stepped out of the Porsche. “If she is here, we can presume that Percival is here as well and that the two of them are behind this blaze.”

Verlaine looked beyond Gabriella to the convent a short distance away. Smoke obscured the upper regions of the structure and, although he saw movement on the ground, he was too far away to make out what was happening. He stepped out of the car, following Gabriella toward the convent.

“What are you doing?” she asked, eyeing him skeptically.

“I’m going with you.”

“I need to know you’re here waiting with the car. When I find Evangeline, we will need to leave very quickly. I’m depending upon you to make sure that will happen. Promise me you’ll stay here.” Without waiting for a response, Gabriella started off toward the convent, tucking the gun into a pocket of her long black jacket.

Verlaine leaned against one of the vans, watching Gabriella disappear around the side of the convent. He was tempted to follow her despite her instructions. Instead he walked through the rows of utility vans to the white Jaguar. Cupping his hands over his eyes, he peered through the window.

On the beige leather seat sat a folder of his research, the photocopied picture of the Thracian coin on top. He tried to open the door and, finding it locked, looked around for something to break it with. Just then he saw Percival Grigori at the side of the road, making his way toward the car.

Quickly, Verlaine ducked behind the stone wall that surrounded the convent grounds. Moving ever closer to the convent, his sneakers crunching in the ice-crusted snow, he stopped at a gap in the structure that gave onto the main lawn. He was astonished by the scene before him. Thick, dark smoke hovered above a raging fire; sheets of flames fell over the convent. Much to his amazement, an army of creatures-identical to the ones he had killed with Gabriella-swarmed over the convent grounds, perhaps a hundred winged, reptilian monsters gathered together in attack.

He strained to see the scene more clearly. The beings were a hybrid of bird and beast, part human, part monster in equal measure. Wings were mounted upon their backs, lush and red. They were shrouded in a light so intense it covered them in a gauze of illumination. Although Gabriella had explained the Gibborim to him in great detail and he had recognized them as the same beings as had seen on the train the night before, he now realized that he had not, until this very moment, believed that so many of them existed.

Through the flames and smoke, Verlaine spied more and more clusters of Gibborim. One by one they swooped upon the convent, their great wings beating hard and furious. They lifted high and buoyant in the wind, airy as kites drifting down on the building. They appeared impossibly light, as if their bodies were insubstantial. Their movements were so coordinated, so powerful that Verlaine understood at once they would be impossible to defeat. The creatures flew in an elaborate ballet of attack, rising from the ground in an elegant orchestration of violence, one creature weaving past the other as the flames soared upward. Verlaine watched the destruction in awe.

One creature stood at a remove from the others, at the edge of the forest. Determined to examine it, Verlaine ducked into the thick foliage beyond the stone wall, moving closer to the being until he was less than ten feet away from it, hidden in bushes. He saw the elegance of its features-aquiline nose, golden curls, the terrifying red eyes. He breathed deeply, taking in the sweet aroma of its body-Gabriella had told him that the scent was called ambrosial by those who had the fortune (or misfortune) to encounter it. He was aware at once of the dangerous allure the creature held. Verlaine had imagined them to be hideous, the misbegotten children of a grand historical error, malformed hybrids of the sacred and the profane. He had not considered that he would find them beautiful.

Suddenly the creature turned. In a sweeping motion he glanced toward the forest, as if perceiving Verlaine’s presence among the evergreens. The Gibborim’s quick movement revealed a flash of skin at the neck, a long, thin arm, the outline of its body. As the giant moved toward the stone wall, its red wings shivering about him, Verlaine lost all sense of why he had come, what he wanted, and what he would do next. He knew he should be afraid, but as the Gibborim stepped closer, his skin casting a glow on the ground, Verlaine felt an eerie calm come over him. The harsh, scintillating light of the fire raged, throwing a glow upon the creature, mixing with its native luminescence. Verlaine stood hypnotized. Rather than run, as he knew he should, he wanted to draw closer to the creature, to touch the stark, pale body. He stepped from the safety of the forest and stood before the Gibborim, as if to give himself over. He gazed into its glassy eyes, as if searching for an answer to a dark and violent riddle.

What Verlaine found there startled him beyond reckoning. Instead of malevolence, the creature’s gaze contained a frightening animal vapidity, a vacuity that was neither vicious nor benign. It was as if the creature lacked the ability to comprehend what lay before it. Its eyes were lenses into a pure emptiness. The being did not register Verlaine’s presence. Rather it looked beyond, as if he were nothing more than an element of the forest, a tree stump or a clump of leaves. Verlaine understood that he was in the presence of a creature with no soul.

In a swift movement, it opened its red wings. Rotating one wing and then the other so that the fire’s harsh glare slid over them, the monster gathered its strength and leaped from the ground, light and airy as a butterfly, joining the others in the attack.

Adoration Chapel, St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

Evangeline found the Adoration Chapel awash in smoke. She tried to breathe but was overwhelmed by hot and poisonous air. It singed her skin and stung her eyes so that within seconds her vision had blurred with tears. Through the haze she could make out the silhouettes of the sisters, arrayed through the chapel. It appeared to Evangeline that the habits blended together, forming a single patch of inviolate black. Soft, smoky light suffused the church, falling softly over the altar. Why the sisters remained in the midst of the fire was incomprehensible to her. If they didn’t get out, they would die from the smoke.

Confused, she turned to escape through Maria Angelorum Church when something caught her feet and she fell heavily upon the marble floor, banging her chin. The leather case was jarred from her grip, flying off into the haze beyond. To her horror, the face of Sister Ludovica stared up from the smoke, an expression of fear frozen upon her face. Evangeline had tripped on the body of the old woman, whose upended wheelchair lay tipped at her side, one wheel spinning. Bending over Ludovica, Evangeline placed her hands upon the warm cheeks and whispered a prayer, a final farewell to the eldest of the Elder Sisters. Gently, she pressed the lids of Ludovica’s eyes closed.

Rising to her hands and knees, she inspected the scene as best she could through the smoke. The floor of the Adoration Chapel was littered with bodies. She counted four women lying at intervals along the aisles of pews, asphyxiated. Evangeline felt a surge of despair. The Gibborim had smashed great holes in the angelic-spheres windows, bombarding the bodies with debris. Pieces of colored glass were scattered from one end of the chapel to the other, lying like pieces of hard candy on the marble floors. The pews had been broken, the delicate golden pendulum clock crushed, and the marble angels tipped. The gaping hole in the window opened the convent’s lawn to view. The creatures swarmed over the snowy grounds. Smoke rose into the sky, reminding her that the fire still burned. Gales of freezing wind blew through the desolate interior, sweeping across the ruin. Worst of all, the kneelers before the host were empty. Their chain of perpetual prayer had been obliterated. The sight was so terrible that Evangeline caught her breath at the sight of it.

The air along the floor was slightly cooler, the smoke less dense, and so Evangeline fell to her stomach once again and crawled over the floor in search of the leather case. Smoke burned her eyes; her arms ached with the effort. The smoke had transformed the once-familiar chapel into a place of danger-an amorphous, hazy minefield filled with unseen traps. If the smoke pressed low upon her, she risked losing consciousness like the others. If she crawled directly to Maria Angelorum to make it outside, she might lose the precious case.

Finally Evangeline caught a glint of metal-the copper clasps of the leather case sparked in the firelight. She reached out and grasped the handle, noticing, as she pulled the case closer, that the leather had been singed. Lifting herself off the ground, she covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve, trying to block out the smoke. She recalled the questions Verlaine had asked her in the library, the intense curiosity he’d shown about the location of the seal on Mother Francesca’s drawings. Her grandmother’s last card had confirmed his theory: The architectural drawings had been made for the purpose of marking a hidden object, something secreted by Mother Francesca and guarded for nearly two hundred years. The precision with which the maps of the chapel had been drawn could leave little doubt. Mother Francesca had placed something in the tabernacle.

Evangeline climbed the altar steps, making her way through the smoke to the elaborately decorated tabernacle. It sat atop a marble pillar, its doors crusted with golden symbols of alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. It was the size of a small cupboard, large enough to conceal something of value. Evangeline tucked the leather case under her arm and pulled at the doors. They were locked.

Suddenly a clamoring of movement alerted her to a new presence in the chapel. She turned just as two creatures broke through one of the stained-glass windows, shattering the luminous plate of the First Angelic Sphere so that shards of gold and red and blue glass scattered over the nuns. Ducking behind the altar, she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise as she examined the Gibborim. They were even bigger than they’d seemed from the turret, tall and lanky, with huge red eyes and sweeping crimson wings that draped over their shoulders like cloaks.

One of the Gibborim tore at the kneelers, throwing them to the floor and stamping upon them, while another decapitated the marble figure of an angel, separating head from body with one vicious swipe. At the far end of the chapel, another creature clutched a golden candle holder by the base and threw it with extraordinary strength at a stained-glass window, a lovely rendition of the Archangel Michael. The glass splintered in an instant, a symphonic crackling filling the air as if a thousand cicadas sang at once.

Behind the altar Evangeline held the leather case close to her chest. She knew she must measure each movement with care. The slightest noise would alert the creatures to her presence. She was scanning the chapel to find the best route for escape when she discovered Philomena, crouched in a corner. Philomena lifted her hand slowly, gesturing to her to remain still, to watch and wait. From her hiding place near the tabernacle, Evangeline watched Philomena creep along the floor of the altar.

Then, in a movement startling in its speed and precision, Philomena grasped the monstrance poised high above the altar. The monstrance was solid gold, the size of a candelabra, and must have been extraordinarily heavy. Nonetheless, Philomena raised it over her head and smashed it upon the marble floor. The monstrance itself took no damage at the blow. The small eye of crystal at its center, the orb encasing the host, however, shattered. Evangeline heard the distinct crack of breaking glass from her hiding place.

Philomena’s actions were such a gesture of sacrilege, so awful in their violation of the sisters’ prayers and their beliefs, that Evangeline stood frozen in astonishment. In the midst of the destruction and the horror of the death of their sisters, there seemed no reason for any further vandalism. Yet Philomena continued to work at the monstrance, tearing at the glass. Evangeline stepped away from her hiding place, wondering what madness had overtaken Philomena.

Philomena’s actions drew the creatures’ attention. They moved toward her, their vermilion wings pulsing in time with their breath. Suddenly one of them lunged at Philomena. Possessed with the zealotry of her beliefs and a power that Evangeline would never have imagined her capable of displaying, Philomena stepped free of the monstrous grasp and in an elegant sweep took the creature by its wings and twisted away from it. The great red wings ripped from the creature’s body. The Gibborim fell to the floor, writhing in a growing pool of thick blue fluid that poured from the wound as it screeched in horrid, gurgling agony. Evangeline felt that she had descended into a version of hell. Their most sacred chapel, the temple of their daily prayers, had been defiled.

Philomena turned back to the monstrance, pried away the cracked crystal encasement and then, in a moment of triumph, held something above her head. Evangeline tried to make out the object in Philomena’s hands-it was a small key. Philomena had cut herself on the glass, and ribbons of blood dripped over her wrists and arms. While the sight of such mayhem repulsed Evangeline-she could hardly bring herself to look at the mangled body of the dismembered creature-Philomena did not seem disturbed in the least. Yet even in her fright, Evangeline marveled at Philomena’s discovery.

Philomena called to her to come closer, but there was nothing she could do: The surviving creatures suddenly fell upon Philomena, tearing at her clothing like hawks feasting on a rodent. The black fabric of her habit was swallowed up in a crush of oily red wings. But then Evangeline spied Philomena pushing free from the imbroglio. As if gathering her last bit of strength, Philomena threw the key to Evangeline. Evangeline picked it off the floor and stepped back behind the marble pillar.

When Evangeline looked again, a cold light fell over the desiccated, charred body of Sister Philomena. The murderous Gibborim had moved to the center of the chapel, their great wings drawn, as if they might take to the air at any moment.

At the doorway, a crowd of sisters gathered. Evangeline wanted to call out in warning, but before she could speak, the great uniformity of habited women parted and Sister Celestine emerged from the periphery, her wheelchair pushed by attendants. She wore no veil, and her pure white hair intensified the lines of sadness etched into her face. The attendants pushed Celestine’s wheelchair to the base of the altar, her pathway swallowed in a sea of black habits and white scapulars.

The Gibborim, too, watched Celestine as her attendants brought the wheelchair to the altar. They lit candles and, using pieces of charred wood from the fire, drew symbols on the floor around Celestine-arcane sigils that Evangeline recognized from the angelological journal her grandmother had given her. She had looked upon those symbols many times but had never learned their meaning.

Suddenly Evangeline felt a hand on her arm and, turning, found herself in Gabriella’s embrace. For a brief moment, the terror she felt subsided, and she was simply a young woman in the arms of her beloved grandmother. Gabriella kissed Evangeline and then quickly turned to watch Celestine, examining her actions with a knowing eye. Evangeline stared at her grandmother, her heart in her throat. Although she looked older, and seemed thinner than Evangeline remembered, Evangeline felt a safe familiarity in Gabriella’s presence. She wished that she could speak to her grandmother in private. She had questions she needed to ask.

“What is happening?” Evangeline asked. She examined the creatures, which had become strangely still.

“Celestine has ordered the construction of a magical square within a holy circle. It is preparation for a summoning ceremony.” The attendants brought a wreath of lilies to Celestine and placed it upon her white hair. Gabriella said, “Now they are placing a crown of flowers upon Celestine’s head, which signifies the virginal purity of the summoner. I know the ritual intimately, although I have never seen it performed. Summoning an angel can bring powerful assistance, clearing away our enemies in an instant. In a situation like the one at hand-the convent besieged and the population of St. Rose outnumbered-it could be a most useful measure, perhaps the only measure to bring victory. Yet it is unbelievably dangerous, and certainly for a woman of Celestine’s age. The dangers usually far outweigh the benefits, especially in the case of calling forth an angel for the purpose of battle.”

Evangeline turned to her grandmother. A golden pendant, an exact replica of the one she had given to Evangeline, shone upon Gabriella’s neck.

“And battle,” Gabriella said, “is exactly what Celestine intends.”

“But the Gibborim are suddenly so placid,” Evangeline said.

“Celestine has hypnotized them,” Gabriella said. “It is called a Gibborish charm. We learned it as girls. Do you see her hands?”

Evangeline strained to see Celestine in her chair. Her hands were woven together over her chest, and both pointer fingers bent toward her heart.

“It causes the Gibborim to become momentarily stunned,” Gabriella said. “It will wear off in a moment, however, and then Celestine will need to work very quickly.”

Celestine lifted her arms into the air in a swift movement, releasing the Gibborim from the spell. Before they could resume their attack, she began to speak. Her voice echoed through the vaulted chapel.

“Angele Dei, qui custos es mei, me tibi commissum pietate superna, illumina, custodi, rege, et guberna.”

The Latin was familiar to Evangeline. She recognized it as an incantation, and to her amazement the spell began to take hold. The manifestation began as a gentle breeze, the faintest bluster of wind, and grew in a matter of seconds to a gale that rocked through the nave. In a burst of blinding light, a brilliantly illuminated figure appeared at the center of the twisting wind, hovering above Celestine. Evangeline forgot the danger posed by the summoning, the danger of the creatures surrounding them on all sides, and simply stared at the angel. It was immense, with golden wings spanning the length of the high central dome and arms held outstretched in a gesture that seemed to invite all to come closer. It glowed with intense light, its robes burning brighter than fire. Light gushed upon the nuns, falling over the floors of the church, glinting and fluid as lava. The angel’s body appeared both physical and ethereal at once-it hovered above and yet Evangeline was sure that she could see through it. Perhaps strangest of all, the angel began to assume Celestine’s features, re-creating the physical appearance of what she must have looked like in her youth. As the angel transformed into an exact replica of the summoner, becoming Celestine’s golden-hued twin, Evangeline was able to see the girl Celestine had once been.

The angel floated in midair, glittering and serene. When it spoke, its voice rang sweet and lilting through the church, vibrating with unnatural beauty. It said, “Do you call me in goodness?”

Celestine rose from her wheelchair with astonishing ease and knelt in the middle of the circle of candles, the white robe cascading about her. “I call you as a servant of the Lord to do the Lord’s work.”

“In His holy name,” the angel said, “I ask if your intentions are pure.”

“As pure as His holy Word,” Celestine said, her voice becoming stronger, more vibrant, as if the angel’s presence had strengthened her.

“Fear not, for I am a messenger of the Lord,” the angel said, its voice pure music. “I sing the Lord’s praise.”

In a cataclysm of wind, the church filled with music. A celestial chorus had begun to play.

“Guardian,” Celestine said, “our sanctuary has been desecrated by the dragon. Our structures burned, our sisters killed. As the Archangel Michael crushed the serpent’s head, so I ask you to crush these foul invaders.”

“Instruct me,” the angel said, its wings beating, its lithe body twisting in the air. “Where do these devils hide?”

“They are here upon us, ravaging His holy sanctuary.”

In an instant, so quickly that Evangeline had no time to react, the angel transformed into a sheet of fire, splitting into hundreds of tongues of flame, each flame morphing into a fully formed angel. Evangeline held Gabriella’s arm, bolstering herself against the wind. Her eyes burned, but she could not so much as blink as, swords raised, the warrior angels descended upon the chapel. The nuns fled in terror, running in all directions, a panic that jarred Evangeline from the trance the summoning had cast upon her. The angels struck the Gibborim dead, their bodies collapsing upon the altar and falling from the air midflight.

Gabriella ran to Celestine, Evangeline following close behind. The old nun lay upon the marble floor, her white robes spread around her, the wreath of lilies skewed. Placing her hand upon Celestine’s cheek, Evangeline found her skin hot, as if the summoning had scalded her. Examining her closely, Evangeline tried to understand how a frail, soft-spoken woman like Celestine had the power to defeat such beasts.

Somehow the candles had remained lit throughout the hurricane of the summoning, as if the angel’s violent presence had not translated into the physical world. They flickered brightly, casting the false glow of life upon Celestine’s skin. Evangeline arranged Celestine’s robes, gently folding the white fabric. Celestine’s hand, which had been hot only seconds before, had gone completely cold. In the course of a single day, Sister Celestine had become her true guardian, leading her through the confusion and putting her upon the correct path. Evangeline could not be certain, but it appeared to her that tears had formed in Gabriella’s eyes. “That was a brilliant summoning, my friend,” she whispered as she bent and kissed Celestine’s forehead. “Simply brilliant.”

Remembering Philomena, Evangeline opened her hand and gave her grandmother the key.

“Where did you get this?” Gabriella asked.

“The monstrance,” Evangeline said, gesturing to the shards of crystal on the floor. “It was inside.”

“So that is where they kept it,” Gabriella said, turning the key in her hand. Walking to the tabernacle, she fitted the key into the lock and opened the door. A small leather pouch was inside. “There is nothing more to do here,” Gabriella said. Gesturing for Evangeline to follow, she said, “Come, we must leave at once. We’re not out of danger yet.”

St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York

Verlaine walked across the lawn of the convent, his feet sinking into the snow. Only seconds before, the compound had nearly buckled under the weight of attack. The walls of the convent had been engulfed in flames, the courtyard filled with vile, belligerent creatures. Then, to his utter bewilderment, the battle had ceased. In an instant the fire had disappeared in the air, leaving behind only charred brick, sizzling metal, and the pungent smell of carbon. The creatures’ beating wings stilled midflight. They fell to the ground as if stricken by an electrical current, leaving heaps of broken bodies upon the snow. Verlaine observed the silent courtyard, the last remnants of smoke dispersing in the afternoon sky.

Walking to one of the bodies, he crouched before it. There was something odd about the appearance of the creature-not only had the radiance disappeared, but the entire physicality had changed. In death the skin had become mottled with imperfections-freckles, moles, scars, patches of dark hair. The clarified white of the fingernails had darkened, and when Verlaine pushed the body onto its stomach, he found that the wings had disappeared entirely, leaving behind a red powder. In life the creatures were half man, half angel. In death they appeared completely human.

Verlaine was distracted from the body by voices at the far side of the church. The population of St. Rose Convent filed into the courtyard and began to drag the bodies of Gibborim to the riverbank. Verlaine searched for Gabriella among them but could find her nowhere in their number. There were dozens of nuns, all dressed in heavy overcoats and boots. The women showed great determination in the face of the unpleasant work, organizing themselves into small groups and getting down to the business at hand without hesitation. As the bodies were large and unwieldy, the effort of four sisters was required to transport one creature. They dragged the corpses slowly over the courtyard to the banks of the Hudson, forming a groove of packed snow that slicked to ice. After stacking the creatures one upon another under the bower of a birch tree, they rolled them into the river. The bodies sank below the glassy surface as if weighted with lead.

As the nuns worked, Gabriella emerged from the church with a young woman, both of their faces blackened with smoke. He recognized Gabriella’s features in the young woman-the shape of the nose, the point of the chin, the high cheekbones. It was Evangeline.

“Come,” Gabriella said to Verlaine, clutching a brown leather case under her arm. “We haven’t time to waste.”

“But the Porsche has only two seats,” Verlaine said, realizing the problem even as he articulated it.

Gabriella stopped short, as if her inability to foresee the dilemma at hand annoyed her more than she wished to let on.

“Is there a problem?” Evangeline asked, and Verlaine felt himself drawn to the musical quality of her voice, the serenity of her manner, the ghostly shade of Gabriella in her features.

“Our car is rather small,” Verlaine said, wondering what Evangeline might be thinking.

Evangeline looked at him a moment too long, as if verifying that he was the same man she’d met the day before. When she smiled, he knew that he had not been mistaken. Something between them had taken hold.

“Follow me,” Evangeline said, turning on her heel and walking swiftly away. She traversed the courtyard quickly, with purpose, her small black shoes breaking through the snow. Verlaine knew that he would have followed her anywhere she cared to go.

Ducking between two of the utility vans, Evangeline led them along an icy sidewalk and through the side door of a brick garage. Inside, the air was stagnant and free of the dense smell of the fire. She lifted a set of keys from a hook and shook them.

“Get in,” she said, gesturing to the brown four-door sedan. “I’ll drive.”