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way you say that,” she said, holding his gaze, “makes it seem like you understand what I’ve become.”
    “Everything I’ve done, all the hunting, has been so that I could understand you.”
    “Then tell me,” Evangeline asked, her voice trembling. “What am I?”
    Verlaine looked at her, aware that his measured caution was giving way to the strength of his feelings. At last he said, “It is clear from your wings—their color and size and strength—that you are one of the elite angels. You are a Grigori, a descendant of the great Semyaza, granddaughter of Percival, great-grandaughter of Sneja. But you are human, too. You are incredible, a kind of miracle.”
    He stepped away and looked at Evangeline’s wings once more, touching the gooseflesh under the feathers. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” he said. “What does it feel like to fly?”
    “I wish I could explain it,” she said. “The sensation of weightlessness, the lightness, the buoyancy, the feeling that I might evaporate in a current of air. When I was human, I could not have imagined what it was like to step into a void, to fall fast and then sweep up, suddenly, into the wind. At times it feels like I belong less on the earth than to the sky, that I must recalibrate all of my movements just to remain earthbound. I used to fly out over the Atlantic, where I wouldn’t be seen, and I would go for miles and miles without tiring. Sometimes the sun would rise and I would see my reflection in the water and think that I should keep going. I would have to force myself to go back.”
    “It’s in your nature to fly,” Verlaine said. “But what about the other characteristics of the Nephilim? Did you experience those as well?”
    Her expression changed, and Verlaine could see at once that she was afraid of her capabilities. “My senses are slightly altered—everything is stronger and sharper; I don’t need food or water in the way I used to—but I have none of the desires attributed to the Nephilim. I am physically different, but my inner life is unaltered. My spirit has not changed. I may have inherited the body of a demon,” Evangeline said softly, “but I would never willingly become one.”
    Verlaine touched the pendant resting against her skin. It was so cold that a sheet of frost covered the metal. His finger melted a watery print on its surface. “You’re freezing.”
    “Did you expect my skin to be like yours?” Evangeline asked.
    “I’ve been in crowds of Nephilim; I’ve spoken to them in close proximity. You can feel the ice running in their veins—they are cold, but it is a different kind of coldness, like the dead walking among us. They have no soul and so they feed on the souls of human beings. Even a mediocre angelologist can identify them easily. But you’re not like that. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would have believed you to be human. You could pass for one of us.”
    “Do I frighten you?”
    Verlaine shook his head. “I have to trust my instincts.”
    “Meaning?”
    “That you may look like them, but you’re not one of them. That you’re different. That you’re better.”
    Evangeline’s skin shimmered in the half light of the moon. He wanted, suddenly, to pull her close, to warm her in his arms. Perhaps he could help her. He felt as if nothing mattered but this moment with Evangeline. He brushed her cheek with his finger and slipped his arm around her, feeling the dusty surface of feathers brush over his hand as he drew her to him. He wanted, for just a moment, to feel as if the world beyond them was all a distant dream, an unreality. Angelologists and Nephilim, the hunters and the hunted—all of this didn’t matter. In all of existence, there was only the two of them. Verlaine wanted the illusion to last forever.
    But holding her was like trying to embrace a shadow. She slipped away, her attention drawn to something behind him. Verlaine caught a sweep of movement in the corner of his eye.