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Suddenly a car pulled into the passage, its headlights breaking through the darkness. The door opened and an Emim angel leaped from the car. Before he could move, Evangeline ran through the passage and, with a speed and grace that he recognized as belonging to the most adept creatures, she lifted into the air, landing on the rooftop above. The Emim angel opened her wings—large black wings, immense and powerful—and flew after her.

1973 Alfa Romeo, rue Bosquet, seventh arrondissement, Paris
    B runo roved the streets, unsure of where to look for Verlaine. He’d discovered his Ducati abandoned near the Seine, and Bruno knew instantly that his strange evening was only going to get stranger. Something was going on with Verlaine, that much was obvious. He loved his Ducati and was rarely without it. Leaving it thrown on the sidewalk—especially at this time of night, when the restaurants and cafés were closed and the seventh arrondissement was little more than a calcified forest of shuttered windows—was wholly out of character.
    Bruno reached into his pocket, took out a flask filled with Glenfiddich Solera Reserve, and took a long drink. The whole damn neighborhood was full of Nephilim. After his time in New York, he thought he’d seen the worst of it. But the area between the Bon Marché and the Eiffel Tower had proved to be the most concentrated collection of old-world Nephil families in the world.
    Over the course of Bruno’s time as an angel hunter—thirty years of service in Jerusalem, Paris, and New York—he had watched the Nephilim grow more and more reckless. It used to be that the creatures feared exposure, creating elaborate methods to shroud their existence in secrecy. For many hundreds of years, the creatures’ survival depended upon blending into the surrounding population of humans. Now there seemed to be a total disregard for such machinations. Among the new generations of angels there was a tendency toward exhibitionism. Reports, confessions, photographs, and videos were everywhere. Once such testimonies would have been relegated to sensational magazines, their claims printed next to UFO and yeti sightings. Bruno had watched it all with interest and, in recent years, growing alarm. Such exhibitionism was pure arrogance: The creatures believed that they were strong enough to come out in the open. And yet, strange as it might have seemed, Bruno had found that the more the angels exposed of their secret lives, the less shocking they were to the human population. There was no general awareness of them, no fear, no real inquiry into the nature of the Nephilim. Human beings were so saturated with the supernatural that they’d become desensitized. Bruno had to admit that there was a certain brilliance in it all: The creatures had chosen the perfect moment in history to step out of their shadow existence. After thousands of years of living in seclusion, they’d embraced the present era of exhibitionism.
    Of all his agents, he believed Verlaine best equipped to handle the change in the creatures’ behavior. Bruno had studied Verlaine at the crime scene as attentively as he’d studied the corpse and, as always, he’d liked what he saw: a young man with the potential to become a great leader. Sure, Verlaine was still struggling to find his place in their organization, but he was talented. He was also unusual, without the typical family history, without the normal education, and with a scary talent for locating and capturing angels. Acting on gut feeling alone, Bruno had plucked Verlaine out of his ordinary life as an academic in New York, brought him to Paris, and trained him with a rigor he saved for only the strongest and brightest recruits. He’d seen something unique in him, a rare balance of intelligence and intuition. And, sure enough, once he had entered training, Verlaine exemplified all the elements of an angel hunter—a sixth sense for the creatures mixed with the physical stamina to capture them.