Chapter Text
The lamina has thinned between the angel and her prey.
The angel is lately called Villanelle, once hailed as Oksana or Tomila the Interfector, long ago seen in the guise of Invidia and Elos, and invoked, falsely or not, as one of the eleven monsters born of weeping and warring Tiamat. Was this her true origin: the trembling star-flesh of a goddess; black blood upon seafoam, gold scales shed like tears into veiled water rich with oysters; the release of the sharp-toothed creature from the sheath of its mother into the rosy shallows, and the newborn spirit standing on its shaky legs to lift a pearl dagger in the goddess’ name, limping into the sands to enact her vengeance? Was this her beginning? If so, the angel does not remember. She has learned over the eons that all that can be known is just as easily forgotten; angelic attention, so piercing, must be focused on one thing at a time, all else fading beside the flame of that singular devotion, centuries and peripheral objects alike. What does any of it matter anymore? Time lost its meaning to her long before any mortal concocted the concept. Anyway, rather than contemplate the winding of cosmic filaments, the angel lately called Villanelle has a more pressing pilgrimage in mind: she must go to Tesco.
It is a matter of great inconvenience that Villanelle hungers. Previous forms have required little to nothing by way of sustenance: if needed - and really it was never a need so much as the divine version of an itch craving a scratch, an entirely petty endeavor - she would drop like a great meteor into the center of some village in the steppes, her many eyes would gaze all at once on the shrieking humans whose lives she absorbed in a fine red mist. It was only in these last millennia that the true gnawing began. When she was first submitted to her current cycle of punishment, she would leap onto sleeping elk and try to no avail to pierce their hides with her useless teeth. The animals would shake her off and race away, leaving her with only the hares to twist open. Her stomach - a terrible thing, to have organs, to play host to entrails, those needy fucking things - still groaned no matter how many she ate, no matter how much of their blood she drank. Her new flesh smeared red, she would lie flat on her back in the shadow of the Urals and sob in frustration, rendered utterly pathetic, and she would see the clouds gather above the bare peaks, she would be reminded once more that she was under, beneath, in a subterranean condition by virtue of being on this ground at all, and she’d scream at the sky, aware she would not be answered but beginning to fill with the sense of something she would learn the humans called nihilism. Yes, it was all becoming clear, she thought. The universe was virtueless dogshit.
She is no longer choking herself on the bones of small mammals, not since she learned that the craving for such things can be sated by bleeding rare steaks and mustardy tartare and raw fish rolled into art. No, the situation is far worse: Villanelle has a sweet tooth. She longs for the juice of peaches and the jeweled seeds of pomegranates, a pear’s wet white flesh. Palms stained by blackberries, glazed tarts full of lusty plums. Wines and liqueurs. There are flashes of a form before this one, perhaps a trick she was playing, or a guise meant to comfort a mortal, and within that memory the taste of a mealy apple from the plains of Pelagonia, light reflecting off a golden earring, a woman’s hair like a thatch of black curls.
Sweetness, she has found, takes many forms. It does not solely dangle from trees, though it universally tastes best when ripe, and it is always good for biting. Villanelle never denies herself the pleasure, because what, after all, would be the point? She knows she has nothing to gain from repression. It was the humans who invented the concept of temptation; such an invention does not exist to a creature of pure indulgence.
The woman in the dairy section smirks at Villanelle: millennia after millennia, always the same. The humans love their gestures, their twitches of musculature, so consistent and predictable. Gods learned this long ago, that they are easy to imitate and fool.
“Have you had this before?” Villanelle asks; the attention was already dangled, she merely snatched the thread and pulled it to her. Villanelle lifts the cheese in her hand, a Wensleydale with apricot.
“No.” The woman’s teeth graze her upper lip. Do they realize they do this? Do they know that they are contorting their bodies to give away intent so quickly, painted like a signpost? Some of them must be aware of the game, they can’t all be that dense. “I’m sure it’s quite nice, though. Fruit and cheese, that goes lovely together.”
“Lovely,” Villanelle repeats. “You’re right.”
“Your accent is beautiful.”
“Is it? I’ve found it’s an acquired taste.”
“Are you Russian?” the woman asks, taking a step closer, and Villanelle is about to answer, she is sensing the heat of the woman’s body now that they stand mere inches apart, but there is a hand on her arm, someone taking her basket, which for now contains only a bag of oranges. Konstantin, she sees, when she turns and scowls at his placid little smile, more hulking than usual in his puffer.
“You forgot the eggs,” he says.
“I didn’t.”
“And we don’t need cheese. You don’t even like cheese.” He shakes his head, though his smile is always intact. He shrugs at the woman, arms spread, that sharp bark of laughter. “She doesn’t even like cheese.”
The attention has been withdrawn; Villanelle feels the snare retract with a snap, and the woman can only nod now with a murky expression. “Oh,” she says, her smile suddenly awkward.
Villanelle steps on Konstantin’s foot and he sucks in air; yes, he feels pain just fine these days. “My senile father,” she says with exaggerated apology. “Excuse him, please. His mind is like a frittata.”
Konstantin is already laughing again. “Can you not help yourself for one shop? It isn’t her fault.” He gestures at the woman, who looks increasingly uncomfortable as she attempts to slowly exit the aisle while walking backward. “It’s in their fucking bones or something. They detect your celestial aura, they cannot help it. You are not that irresistible.”
Villanelle raises her eyebrows as if to say ‘See? Absolute fruitcake...’ but the woman has already disappeared around the corner into the frozen foods, and Konstantin is sighing in a satisfied way, having achieved his goal.
“The eggs,” he says, steering them in that direction. “That’s the only reason we are here.”
“Do you always have to patronize me?”
His expression indicates that he does, in fact, always have to patronize her. “I am reminding you.”
“I hadn’t forgotten. I was going to get them as soon as I was done.”
“Done with what? We leave tonight. You do not have time for this kind of thing.” He frowns as he takes down the eggs from the shelf, inspecting their contents. “Someone might think you’re desperate, Villanelle.”
“Really.” And for this, she drops a carton onto the floor. Then another, and another, until there are yellow streaks and shells across the dingy tile of the aisle. “I would disagree.”
Konstantin steps over her mess, not at all exasperated but still giving her a look as they leave it untouched behind them. “You know, this behaviour of yours comes down on me first.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Then stop being childish.”
“Don’t use that descriptor if you don’t know what it’s like to be a child.”
“I have never seen an imp but I understand the meaning of the word impish.”
“It’s probably a lesser demon.”
“An imp?”
“Some peasant saw a lesser demon and called it an imp and now a person can be impish.”
“You can be impish.”
“There is a valley in Hungary where that particular sect of Cumans had a saying, something like ‘we all must give the flaming woman her chalice of blood’. All because one day I happened to come through that area when I was peckish.” She drops the carton onto the self-checkout till with a bit too much gusto. “It’s in the Codex Cumanicus. I have a copy for the fun of it.”
“Fun.” He is unperturbed by her assault on his precious eggs, so used to her antics by now that they don’t provoke the slightest irritation; Konstantin, a pillar to match his name. “Do you know what fun is, Villanelle?”
“I know that you don’t.”
“I interrupt your flimsy seductions, I think that is very fun.”
“On that note, if I hear you talk about my celestial aura again, I’ll take your left wing off with a rusty cleaver. I’ll make sure the blade is especially dull.” She pantomimes the act of slowly sawing. “It’ll be more like I’m grating than slicing.”
He stops and stares at her; they are only a few feet outside of the store, and the other shoppers step around them, their flow briefly stemmed. “I don’t know why I let you talk to me like that,” he says, and then he’s laughing that ridiculous canine laugh, unafraid of the Atoning angel Villanelle, known vengeful terror.
In the car, Konstantin cracks each egg and drops it into the bowl of his mouth, swallows it whole with a gusting slurp that makes her teeth grind. Villanelle pulls apart an orange.
“The hunger is worse now,” she says, knowing she will regret this admittance. Knowing that what is called shame is something not reserved for mortals alone. She masks the emotion in a pout. “It was easier before.”
The final egg is cracked in Konstantin’s fist, and he tips his head back, drinks it from the cup of the shell and swallows quickly. “Yes,” he says, and the empty shell remains in his fingers, considered. “I know.”
“Is this how the mortals feel?”
His eyes are on something across the car park: a human woman and her child, wheeling a trolley. “No.”
“Then why do we feel like this?”
He shrugs, cleaning his beard with a napkin. “Because we are Atoning, and Atonement is painful.”
“What a stupid fucking system.” And she shakes her head, smirks, because it is the chaos that is a comfort to her. The meaningless stupor of the world, the ease of weightless lives and their snuffing out. The beautiful artifice of value, something so haphazardly assigned that it is clear as day how unconvinced of it all even the humans are; they can hardly stand their own lies, the stink of them, but they believe them all the same, swallow them down as they mirror each other’s false glee.
When Konstantin laughs, there is no joy or amusement present in the sound. Its hollowness fills the car, and he rolls down the window, drops the eggshells into the cement. When Konstantin’s Atonement began, he awoke on the shores of the Oka, starving and screaming; she knows he ate beasts and wore their skins for warmth when he realized his own skin was useless for everything but keeping out rain. She knows, too, that he snapped the necks of every child that crossed his path, that whole villages voided a generation because Konstantin happened upon them, ate incessantly, slept off each meal as the harsh ache had briefly subsided, then woke again groaning with pain, insatiable, seeking out the next.
And now he eats eggs, which are not the same, but she knows are substitutes for the children. Just as steak tartare substitutes her hares, and fruit makes her stop yearning for the sweet nectar she recalls in her dreams: streams of amber, running down the sides of her open mouth. The pleasure of it seeping through her pointed teeth and onto her waiting tongue. Just as all these women are a replacement for something else, but she can’t remember what. She tries, but it never comes, only the familiar ache that must take the shape of a certain kind of body, that body beneath hers or pressed against something hard, to impale them on her hand as upon a flaming sword.
Konstantin starts the car. He pats the glove compartment, indicating she should take out the paper map already marked with a pen, but she shakes her head.
“No need,” she says.
“I know.” He nods as they pull out onto the road. “I can feel them, too.”
Behind the sparkling white facade of a fine house in Kensington, the woman has noticed her visitor. She’s as well-made as this box that houses her guise; tall and regal and built like a fortress. She finishes applying her lipstick as she eyes Villanelle in the mirror.
“I suppose I should be surprised,” she says. “But it’s all very predictable, isn’t it? I’d wager you’re starting to get sick of it yourself.”
“That’s a nice shade,” Villanelle says. “May I have it when you’re done?”
A shaped eyebrow lifts. “You’re asking me? Such etiquette from a lowly angel.”
“I could just call dibs.”
The woman waves the tube, then caps it again. “Be my guest, darling.” She turns to face her, striking a slight pose. “Well, go on. I’m sure there’s enough of me that you won’t miss.”
“It’s a shame. You’re beautiful.” Villanelle means it; in certain shadows, Villanelle can see the outlines of the woman’s other forms, like a stack of vellum above a constant flame: sharpened wings and rotating shapes like fine tracery, layered beneath her dark skin. A Shining One, Order Virtutum. It’s been a while since Villanelle has come across such a being, and she feels the familiar sourness in her throat. She isn’t going to enjoy this nearly as much as she should.
“Oh, please. Don’t compliment me before you kill me.” The woman only looks peeved for a moment, then returns to her less readable smile. “Then again, I don’t think you’re really killing me, do you? Maybe we shouldn’t use the term. Something for humans to talk about, but you and I know it’s quite useless.” She pauses to gauge Villanelle’s reaction; Villanelle tries to give her none. “How long have you been a servant?”
Villanelle says nothing, taking out her gun. They always call her a servant; she does hate that. She leaves the gun at her side for emphasis.
“What did you do?” The woman smirks. “What did you want so badly that you were willing to cross the Thrones? It was Want, wasn’t it? Coveting. You reek of desire.”
“I don’t know.” Villanelle allows the woman to step past her so she may choose where it is she wants to end. In all the centuries of this work, it is incredibly rare that they ever try to run. The last vestiges of their divinity emerge this way: a calm acceptance, silent or not.
“You’re about to shoot me in the head and you won’t answer my small and unobtrusive question?”
“Is that where you want it? The head?”
“I would request cold efficiency.”
Villanelle laughs, dropping into the nearest chair. As always, she sprawls. She likes to give the impression she owns everywhere she lands. “Then you requested the wrong archangel.”
“Please.” The woman gestures, her tone flat. “Make yourself comfortable.”
She kicks her feet up onto the rococo table. “Oh, thank you.”
“And obviously you were not requested. If I had my way, you’d be here in another century.”
“Another century wouldn’t make a difference.”
“I can do a great deal in a century.” The woman fixes her with a look. “You certainly don’t rely on the element of surprise, do you?”
“Would you have preferred a sniper?” She pretends to put an invisible scope up to her eye. “I do that sometimes, if the target is going to be a pain.”
“And how did you determine I wasn’t a pain?”
“We’ve been tailing you for a few days.” This is true. “It was clear you wouldn’t fight.”
“In what way was it clear, archangel?”
“You have your tells. Obvious ones.” She allows herself to get a little cocky here, showing her canines. A smirking shrug. “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
“Why didn’t I sense you? I can sense ones all the way across the Channel.”
“One might say I’m not on your radar.”
“I see.” The woman is at her side now, taking Villanelle’s free hand in hers. She removes the leather glove. “You are too much like a mortal.” She turns over Villanelle’s palm, running a finger over each line. “A shame the only way I could meet something like you is through this scenario. It is fascinating that you…exist like this.” There is clear wonder in the woman’s eyes, and something else - envy, Villanelle thinks, because she has seen it in creatures like this before - but the flame dies quickly, and is masked by another knowing smile. “You’re not going to ransack the place when you’re done.”
Villanelle cocks her head. “Only your vanity.”
“Then consider this your one debt: tell me what you did.”
“I don’t remember,” Villanelle says, which is the truth.
“Don’t lie to me before you kill me. That’s as bad as complimenting me.”
“I’m not lying. One day, I woke up and I was in a form I could not leave, and I was hungry.”
“Was that how you knew you were being punished? The hunger? I have heard of such things.” The woman grasps Villanelle’s wrist, runs her fingers up her exposed forearm. She traces the veins there. “I drink coffee sometimes. I have no need for it, but there is something about the taste, how acidic it is.” Her voice trails off, and she releases Villanelle, giving her a quick but unconvincing smile. “It must be more intense for you.”
“It’s not hunger for food. It is a very raw desire.” She cocks the gun as she stands, places it at the woman’s smooth temple. Holds back for a moment, thinking. “If you want to know, it hurts.”
“The bullet or your desire?”
“My desire. You’ll feel nothing when I pull the trigger.”
“Pity. I would have liked to feel.” The woman purses her lips, even with the barrel against her skull. “Well, where I’m off to now, neither of us know. Exciting, isn’t it? Being released from all this. If I were you, I’d be envious. Salivating. You didn’t tell me how long you’ve been atoning.”
She will allow the woman this, given the hour. “Centuries. Millennia.”
“And how close are you to being finished?”
“They don’t tell us.”
“How unnecessarily cruel.” And she looks at Villanelle again, makes eye contact. There is something newly wicked in her expression. “Do you want to know why I did it?” she asks.
“I already know,” Villanelle says, and pulls the trigger.
In the car, Konstantin makes her toss her scraps of orange flesh out the window.
“I hate when they’re happy to see me,” she says.
He snorts. “A talker, I bet.”
“They always are when they’re in a good mood about it. She wanted to spend her last moments throwing me a fucking pity party.”
“Did you let her?”
She snorts, chewing with determination. She has never gotten fully used to these dull useless teeth. “Of course not.”
“I would have let her. Who else is throwing you a party? It is not like you have friends. Or a birthday.”
“Fall,” she says, and repeats herself when he doesn’t hear. “It was some time in fall.”
She remembers a stand of birches with golden leaves. A white trunk smeared with her blood: blood, so new to her form that she did not recognize it as her own, yet to realize she was now a container, and thus capable of being emptied out. The shock of rain hitting her bare flesh. Curls of bark were building under her nails as she dug and dug, trying to get to the life within. She was overwhelmed by the noisy pulse of veriditas all around her, unable to pinpoint its source, but instinct told her that she needed it. Starving. Her mouth full of pulp as she sucked and chewed, swallowed needlessly.
It would take years to contemplate anything but the ache. Almost half a century before she began to understand what she was meant to do: her new purpose arrived in the form of visions, heavy and nauseating. And then she had met Konstantin, or Konstantin had found her, had sensed her from across the great range of land and had been told she would be his charge, for better or worse. Konstantin the Scourge, once an archangel of a high order, now a mere Atoning servant who was meant to direct angels to whatever Fallen needed executing, had plucked her from the floor of some hovel not far from Siläbe, caked in mud and blood and the insides of animals. She recalls how he’d looked at her when he’d first opened the door and she’d lifted her head to observe the intruder: Konstantin had smiled that smile that was rarely happy, and spread his arms like a bear. In his regional dialect, which she’d never fully learned, he said something along the lines of: “A little mud-whelp. Aren’t I fucking lucky?”
There were so many Fallen. The humans, if they knew, could scarcely comprehend it. That so many angelic beings had chosen to live among them, to hide from their brethren and pretend at mortality, at sensation, to make trouble, to make love to humans, to return when they felt it was right to return. But it took them a very long time to develop such a feeling, as feelings did not come naturally to any of them, even after so many years, and the Fallen she was meant to assassinate were often centuries-upon-centuries old, having slipped from one identity to the next, their powers still intact and their forms changing with little effort. She recalls one of the Cherubim who had their own harem in some corner of Florence, the Black Death raging outside but their villa a plush and writhing nest of bared humans, moaning over their form, slippery as it was: there came the occasional drift of feathers, clawed feet, the hind leg of a goat disappearing into the mouth of a woman. That had been a messy job. Back when she worked with blades. The being hadn’t run, but they had tried to bargain. “If it’s taken them this long to find me, I can’t be a threat. It’s not as if I’ve made any effort to hide.” She remembers them slapping away a few hands trying to pull them back down into the pile of bodies. “They're so haughty, the Thrones. It is the will of the Creator. Ridiculous. We are no more proof of God than humans are.” They’d held out their wrists, and though that was not how she did it, though there was no part of this process that would involve binding them, she knew the gesture was surrender. “Go on, make haste.” There was a brief glint of hope in their eyes. “Is it at least painful?”
She remembers shaking her head, pulling her sword from its sheath. The warm glow of firelight in its smooth surface. “Not at all.”
They were cross as they walked into her blade. “Then I have nothing to look forward to.” And they’d stuck themself there, looking bitterly angry as what passed for life had left them.
She snorts at the Christmas tree outside St. Pancras International, and then her snort erupts into a full and bitterly cruel laugh. Konstantin glances up and sees the source of her amusement, then steers her with his fist on her shoulder, giving her a look of paternal disappointment.
“Don’t laugh,” he grunts.
“Why not? It’s hilarious.”
She is speaking, of course, of the aesthetically-pleasing angel sitting at the top of the tree: a golden-haired human somewhere between child and woman, pink cheeks balled as though holding too much air, a painted smile that can only be called saccharine and insincere. The wings are encrusted with cheap rhinestones and shaped, predictably, like a pigeon’s.
“They don’t know any better,” Konstantin says, and he is technically correct. “You laugh at this every year. How can it still be entertaining to you?”
“They’ve had millennia to get it right. It’s not like we don’t make ourselves apparent. The best they can do is a wagon wheel with eyeballs and…” She points at the angel. “These little bitches.”
“If we were meant to be apparent, you and I would be out of a job.”
“They’d find some other way for us to be miserable, I’m sure.”
“Some of us do look like that.”
“Only because it’s what they’re expecting. Archangels are such people pleasers.”
She had meant that as a dig, but he does not take the bait. “Not everything can be photorealistic, Villanelle.”
Fine. She will give him that. “In a meaningless world, the truth is at the will of its keeper.”
“A human woman is looking at you.”
Her reverie ends. She glances at Konstantin, and then in the direction his head is tilted: across the arcade, a woman is staring at her, half-hidden behind a rack of hats but evident in her focus, the strength of her gaze. She is looking at Villanelle.
This form Villanelle was given - this young woman’s body, full of organs, bones that are no longer made of beryl, blood that is no longer the same color as a gleaming sword, is much harder to surprise, because in all these centuries she has spent with it, she has experienced every possible sensation, chased the ones that were rare, the hunger the only thing that ever changed. But when she looks at the woman, what she feels is entirely new: all of her flesh pulses, it circles a great chasm in the woman’s shape, it aches to fill this darkness with some kind of raging heat, with terrifying white light, and she senses it, impossible as it is, the knowledge that the woman would allow it. That she seeks it.
The woman turns, tries to disappear into the crowd, but her hair is dark and thick with curls and her walk distinct: as though she wishes to curl into herself like a fern, as though she cannot quite believe she is ready to live.
“What is she?”
Konstantin’s attention has been refocused on the Eurostar information, and he sniffs to demonstrate only half of his attention, shrugging. “Just a human.”
Villanelle is practically panting; she seals her mouth and forces herself to breathe through her nose, controlling the wake the sensation leaves behind. The woman is gone but the ripple remains. “She was like a hole.”
At this, he does snort. “Vulgar.”
She shakes her head, sincere. “Not like that.”
“To you, they are all that. I don’t know how you can fuck something you don’t respect.”
And this, finally, allows her to shake it off, though beneath the surface there is still some soft beating that cannot be extracted - that, and the urge to chase the woman. “I do respect them. As much as I respect anything else.”
“That is a very low bar.”
“I like to watch them feel,” she says, momentarily regretful for admitting it at all, but Konstantin doesn’t react, does not give her one of those looks of judgment that comes from somewhere between a father and a warden.
“As I said, she could feel your celestial—”
For the second time that day, Villanelle digs her heel into the foot of Konstantin the Scourge. “What did I say about my fucking aura?”
“I am trying to keep your ego in check.” He starts in the other direction. “Come on, we board now. You can eat your fruit on the train.”
In these latest decades, she has made her home in Paris. When last she was here, the guillotine rang every hour like a bell, and it was easy to sate her hunger, low but beginning to grow more insistent: at night, she walked down to the squares and dipped her cupped hand into puddles of blood, drank until her stomach settled. Women, too, were plentiful, newly widowed, and even in the decades before revolution, she had spent years making her way to Versailles for the high season, taking advantage of the pleasure on everyone’s minds. It was still not the first time she’d lived in the city: she’d had a house under the rule of Clovis the Frank, and she had watched the Franks pour into the city like so much water, and she had been sad to see the Gauls go: they were more cunning than the Franks and less intrusive, better neighbors for divine beings, and their women were loud and passionate and not too hung up on monogamy. If the Frankish people were ever as wild, they were neutered under the Merovingian kingdom, where they had swiftly become sanctimonious and repressed. A shit trade, really.
The French who currently share the city with her are something else altogether, and she tires of them like every other population that surrounds her for too long. She tries to move every few decades, where Konstantin, again, is true to his name: he has a house in Russia whose location he will never reveal, one he has kept for centuries. When he comes to Paris, it is to sit in the parlor of her apartment and relate news he has already been told: your next target is so-and-so, they live at this-or-that street in this-or-that country. She knows Konstantin speaks directly to the Thrones - she assumes they burn the bushes outside his dacha or some other display of unnecessary holy grandeur, the usual fucking theatrics - and she knows Villanelle is not to speak to anyone. In this way she knows his Atonement is lesser. She is the greater criminal in this arrangement, though the crime itself is a blank spot in her mind.
Villanelle sits in bed and eats a split peach as the sun rises, the doors open to her rusting balcony, the cold air that sometimes stirs her sheets already musty with the smell of the city, of her neighbor’s daily morning cigarette, of human refuse and diesel exhaust and heady cannabis that snakes up to her like the pronged Seine.
She uses her thumb to wipe juice from the corner of her mouth. Sucks it clean. Tastes more than peaches on her fingers.
“Did you sleep?” the woman behind her asks, her voice raspy under the weight of the night she has yet to shake off, and Villanelle turns to look at her and smirks.
“Divinely, actually.”
The woman’s hair was briefly contained in a bun last night, but now it spills everywhere, a dark cloud. Villanelle had met her outside a bar some time before midnight. She had not caught her name, but that didn’t matter. The gnawing when she’d gotten off the train had been worse than ever: it was not the same, no, it had slipped somewhere else, it was as though a stallion lived in her chest. She hadn’t gone home from the station. She’d stalked the streets for an amount of time she could not measure, driven only by this strange nascent want. The woman had stepped out of a door to her left: Villanelle had turned as though her name was called, and she’d seen the hair, something clicking, a brief rotation, and she had stopped. Said just enough to bring the human back to the apartment, and then words were not necessary, and they were insufficient anyway, they were not what Villanelle sought.
She knows that what she considers sensations, the ones this body of hers experiences, are not the same as the humans’. There is the hunger, of course, for something undefinable. Pain itself can only be inflicted upon her by others who are Atoning: the first time Konstantin smacked her in the face - some cellar in Poznań with a Principality cornered and begging in a manner most beneath its true form, pushing both of their patiences - she had been shocked by the rush of heat in her cheek. Only moments later, the Principality, disguised as a youth with the first hint of a beard, would rush her and pound at her with his fists, but she would feel nothing, neither the impact nor the blowback from his efforts. Were a human to do the same, they would have the same lack of effect.
But in the levels of sensation beneath pain - the light tracing of fingertips, the gentle impression of a grip - she does feel, regardless of who touches her, and this has been much stranger than the obviousness of pain: the subtlety of such touches, how intensely they carry.
There are other things: she can cause herself pain. She can bring herself to completion, though she thinks it must be different than what she does to others, because it is too intense to enjoy; they in turn, of course, cannot do the same for her. She cannot kill herself, regardless of how many times she has tried, regardless of what method she attempts. The blood she contains is seemingly endless, it can never be fully drained, its loss does not seem to impede her in the slightest. High falls do not cause the slightest scratch. The impact of a train is only bad for the train. She thinks she has thrown herself in every river west of the Volga, and still it doesn’t matter. She has mapped every inch of pain, found its limitations to be endless, and in that way, entirely meaningless.
She cannot leave this body until she is done with this punishment. And she cannot know when she is done. There may never be an end to this Atonement, she sometimes thinks. It may be that there will always be too many Fallen, and it will always be her job to rove about and end them, and the promise of an end was just a lie. Or perhaps her crime was too great, and her sentence eternal to match it.
Konstantin had texted her an hour ago to tell her that she needed to go to some town in Slovenia this week; she’d lied and said she would leave today. No, she is not leaving today. She is finishing this woman a few more times and then she is going back to London.
The woman laughs when Villanelle falls back beside her. Villanelle’s fingers find the edge of the woman’s jaw, and the laughter grows placid and becomes a warm smile. Villanelle feels the familiar sensation in her chest: oh, this is getting far too soppy for her. The woman is going to be out of here the moment she’s done with her and she will leave with a false name and a fake number, certainly. But that is then, and this is now.
“I liked last night.”
Villanelle makes a face. “I would hope so.”
“I think that was the best fuck I’ve ever had,” the woman says, almost shyly. “You’re very talented.”
“It’s my celestial aura,” Villanelle says.
The woman laughs again. “Oh, that’s funny.”
When the woman comes, her eyes close, her mouth opens, her limbs stiffen in imitation of death, and Villanelle watches, suspending the moment for as long as she can. For all the pretense of her disillusionment with humans, it is always a wonder to watch them feel. It is one of the few beauties she still believes in.
In the carriage house of a Georgian estate on the outskirts of Bath, a room has been painted red. This is a recent development as of one month ago: it is the result of the total contents of blood and pulverized innards belonging to what was once a man named Roger Twillis, who acted as a property overseer when its owner was out of the country. The amount of blood Roger had in his body was slightly above the human average - around 6 litres - which, when distributed over a small room such as this, could cover a great deal of wall. It was helped by the fact that every single living item that had formerly existed within him was somehow liquified at the same time the blood had sprayed out. What was left of Roger was his DNA sample, which allowed him to be identified, and the threads of his clothing, and miniscule shards of glass that had once been his bifocals.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the dark-haired woman says, scanning the photos at a very fast rate. She spreads them across her kitchen table, pushing her untouched dinner - a microwaved container of leftover spaghetti, too dry from being overheated - out of the way to do so. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she repeats, softer this time, and begins examining each photograph closer, running her fingers across certain details. “It’s hard to comprehend. The fact there’s nothing here resembling a human form…it’s disorienting. If you told me you were redoing your bathroom, I would almost believe you.”
“I’d never choose such a garish colour.” The other woman has shorter hair and a more composed bearing, her coat balanced on squared shoulders, her mouth curled into the slightest smirk of appraisal. She seems as interested in the woman’s reaction as she is in the photos themselves. “Everything is approximately the same consistency - brains, bladders, etcetera - but it’s not uniform enough to have gone through a machine.”
“They couldn’t have done this by hand.” She picks up one of the photos again - a close-up of the wall where the bits of bone stand out like white gravel. “How would a person even begin to accomplish this?”
“That, Eve, is the question.” The short-haired woman removes a manila envelope from under her coat, slides this across the table, too. “Here is everything we know about Roger Twillis and every possible motivation someone would have for liquifying him and then splashing the results into his guest room a month ago. The most important point is that his employer, the owner of the estate, is missing. No lead there in the past three weeks. The man vanished into thin air, as far as we can tell. Last seen a few days before Roger’s death, driving up to the estate in his Jag, looking altogether healthy and unbothered.”
“So he’s the main suspect for now.”
“Well, he would be if we had any other motive outside of the fact of his not seeming to exist anymore. Cui bono, as they say, and I can’t say Garth Barham had anything to gain from the death of someone who was by all accounts undercharging him for his services. Why kill off a bargain deal, I would ask. Anyway, we can determine all this should he be found, if he is in any state to be found.”
“Until someone paints a room with him.”
“I’d hope they don’t do the whole house with that colour.” The short-haired woman stands, pulling her coat down and beginning the task of closing the buttons. “I’ve got to go now - don’t envy me, I have never met a cabinet minister who could throw a decent dinner party - but I’ll leave you to it.” The other woman walks her to the door.
“I can start looking into it tonight.”
“Excellent. Oh, and Eve, it’s under the table with this one, as before.”
“Obviously,” the dark-haired woman says, snorting, and adds when she sees the other woman’s expression: “You brought it to my kitchen as opposed to my desk. This is clearly off the record.”
“Right. I suppose that is rather obvious. Back to your very appetizing dinner you go.” And with that, the woman has left, and the dark-haired woman has returned to her kitchen to once again pore over the photographs, her dinner continuing to be ignored, and Villanelle takes this opportunity to knock at the back window, where she has been patiently waiting.
The woman starts before turning, and when she sees it is Villanelle there, her eyes grow wide. She braces herself against the table, and Villanelle knocks again, gesturing to the front of the house to indicate she is going around the other side and using the front door. The woman does not move, only her gaze following Villanelle around the corner and out of sight, and Villanelle pushes past the unloved and seasonally dead flora whose skeletons cling pathetically to the side of the building, steps over a smashed pot that has surely been there for at least a year, and then knocks at Eve’s door.
She is sure the woman will answer.
And so she does.
The door opens, slowly, just a crack, and a sliver of Eve’s face appears: Villanelle is full of that insistent thrumming as soon as she sees this slice of her eye, her lip. It consumes her again, the longing.
“Who are you?”
Villanelle leans forward, her voice dropping to a whisper. She allows herself the indulgence of a smirk. “Do you know who I am, Eve?”
“No,” Eve says. “I don’t.”
“But you were following me.” Villanelle isn’t entirely sure this is the truth; it is possible Eve only noticed her in the station the one time, but there was something about the way she so quickly turned on her heel that had the feeling of being caught, and Villanelle is attempting this strategy to see if she owns up to it. A risk, but a worthy one, she feels.
“I wasn’t following you,” Eve retorts, too fast and harsh to be even remotely close to the truth, and then the door opens slightly more, and the sliver turns to one half. A moon waxing. “I wasn’t,” she repeats, and the repetition is even less convincing than the first.
“You’re not a good liar.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Third time is not the charm in your case, is it? You should probably let me inside soon. You have very nosy neighbors.” She gestures over her shoulder at a curtain that is hurriedly closed as soon as she points in its direction. Eve looks out and then appears to give in, stepping aside. The door swings wider and Villanelle steps in. The angel crosses the threshold. The angel continues walking until she enters the kitchen, and then places her palm flat on the table next to the photographs.
“This isn’t your crime scene.”
“How do you know about my job?” Eve stands in the doorway, arms crossed. She is a curious human, Villanelle will give her that: she holds herself like a closed cabinet, seems to be making herself small, but behind her eyes a thousand filaments turn and screw. A universe of perpetual motion. Villanelle would give anything to cast herself among such gears. To be ground to a dust that way. “Were you listening the whole time?”
“No, I just mean that it’s mine.”
Eve blinks. “What do you mean it’s yours?”
“It’s unfortunate, but it’s always been this way. A weapon in my hands, regardless of the weapon itself, immediately matches my power. So I put a gun to some Order’s head, fine, bullet collides, they evaporate like a puddle. But the same gun is fired at a human…” She taps her finger on the nearest photo. “Turns to this.” She looks over her shoulder at Eve, grinning. “It could be worse, you know. You should have seen what it was like when I used swords. Humans were more likely to try and fuck with me in those days, too, it was a very brutal time. Everyone was so surly. But what was I supposed to do? They’d come at me, and I’d just raise my blade and that was it. Flesh ribbons. Literally, ribbons. You could have knit a blanket with some of these people. And, to be honest, that would have been a good use for them, because winter in Mother Russia was no joke.”
“You’re Russian.”
“A hundred borders have risen and fallen around me. Too many to be useful for an identity.”
“But you must speak Russian. Your accent…”
“I speak many languages.” She cocks her head, thrumming. It is hard to speak to the woman and be this close to her. The same sensation from the station is overwhelming her: her limbs are throbbing, her heart pounding. She wants to throw the woman against the wall and disappear into her cavities. She wants to crawl inside the woman like a grave and pull the dirt down over them both. “You’re not interested in anything I said about evaporating that man in the carriage house. You just want to know if I’m Russian.”
“I’m responding to what’s real. I have nothing to say to a fantasy.”
“Eve,” she says, shrugging. “You believe me. I know you do.”
“I don’t.”
“No, even on the fourth try, you’re still shit at lying.” She sits down at the table, pushing the chair in front of her with her foot until it’s been pulled out. An invitation. Eve doesn’t move, and Villanelle doesn’t care, because she knows she will eventually. “How did you find me?”
“How did you find me?”
“That was so easy it isn’t interesting to explain. Why were you looking for me?”
“My husband will be home soon.”
“Even if that was true, I wouldn’t care.” She holds up her hand, fingers spread. “You’re up to five now. At ten, we’ll have to dole out some sort of punishment.”
“Who’s paying you to kill people?”
This, finally, surprises Villanelle, and her tongue finds its way to her molars and she grins open-mouthed, eyebrows bunched in amusement. “Aren’t you a fascinating creature? I apologize for underestimating you. I will not make that mistake again.”
Eve crosses the kitchen and drops with some haughtiness into the chair Villanelle had shoved out for her, and in that moment Eve is suddenly a queen, her chin high and her expression verging on smugness. She is strikingly beautiful like this, even in her hideous shirt. “I’m connecting the dots. You’re Russian, you’re an assassin…I don’t know where you’re based yet, but somewhere on the continent, I’d guess. France, I think. Paris.”
“Again, I don’t call myself Russian, but you’re coming right along.”
“So tell me who pays you.”
“No one pays me, Eve.”
Eve snorts. “You’re not a serial killer.”
“You’re so sure.”
“You don’t match the profile. Your kills don’t either.”
“My kills.” Villanelle props her head on one hand, playing up her interest. “Do tell me about these kills.”
“I want to know where you hide them. You’re meticulously clean.”
“I don’t hide them.”
“It would be a pain to bury them, or even relocate the body. Especially in some of these places with higher security, or the locations that are surrounded by people. How did you move that one in Marseilles from his apartment? There was no elevator. I had to climb six flights of stairs to get up there, and you couldn’t have dropped him out a window. Do you dissolve them in the bathtub? If so, you must have God's own cleaning routine.”
“God’s own.” Villanelle smirks. “Finally, you’re getting close.” But more interesting to her by far is the fact that Eve was in Marseilles, that she went to the same apartment where Villanelle had executed that fussy Archangel. That was three months ago. Has she been following for this long?
Eve reaches across the table to pick up a photograph; the motion causes Villanelle to unconsciously lean forward and be near her touch. But Eve’s hand snatches away with the photo, her eyes narrowing. “What you were saying before, you mean Garth Barham was yours. The man who owned the estate. You assassinated him.”
“I did, in a manner of speaking.”
She flattens the photo against the table: the room painted crimson. “Then what happened with Roger Twillis?”
“I’ve already told you, Eve.”
“The truth.”
“Eve.” She nods. “You know I’m telling the truth.”
“How did you do it? Meat grinder? That doesn’t seem fine enough.”
She holds up six fingers. “I’m counting that as your sixth lie, Eve.”
“Did you liquify the body there, or did you do it somewhere else and bring it back to throw it into the room?”
Another finger goes up. “Seventh. Taking a risk here, Eve.”
“Why do that at all, though? What was the point? Your modus operandi is erasing the person, which we’ll get back to in a minute. Why go to all this extra trouble to do something that’s nearly impossible when you could have just disappeared?”
“Eight, and it was a mistake.”
Eve looks as though she was about to launch into another question, but she lurches to a halt, mouth half-open. “A mistake.”
“I don’t like to harm humans. I avoid it at all costs. But you see, he was upstairs in the carriage house, and Garth was downstairs. They were fucking, for the record.” She taps on the envelope the short-haired woman had left behind. “That probably isn’t in here, but you should add it to the files. A bit of exclusive intel.”
Eve blinks. “Thank you.”
“Anyway, Garth tried to run. They don’t usually do that. Higher beings tend to have some self-respect, but Garth was an archangel, and they’re a mixed bag. They have egos, you see. They think they’re above someone else’s authority, which is ironic, considering I’m the only thing lower than them in the food chain. So Garth ran upstairs and I shot him there, but Roger, poor thing, ran in front of him, trying to save him, and Roger was only human, so he turned into a cocktail.”
“What did you use? Was it chemical?”
Villanelle sighs. “Nine, Eve. You live dangerously, don’t you?”
“Keep telling your stories, by all means. I’m not going to acknowledge anything but the facts. You’ve figured that out by now, haven’t you?”
Villanelle stands, clicking her tongue. “Oh, Eve. Ten.” She shakes her head. “That was so quick I could swear you were looking for this exact outcome.”
When she reaches for Eve’s wrist, when her fingers close over the fine bones there, Villanelle nearly falls to her knees: it is as though her entire body is sighing, every muscle giving one earth-shattering pulse, her head struck by an iron mallet. And down Eve’s bare arm curls the spiral of a black snake with gleaming eyes, a tongue of gold, and as it slithers around her forearm it runs over Villanelle’s hand, too, holding them together.
“What the fuck is that?” Eve gasps, though her words are more of a croak, and it is obvious from her expression that she can feel it, too, the thing that is not quite pain and not quite pleasure. Something much more.
“I don’t know,” Villanelle manages, which is the truth. The snake’s scales are hot on her flesh, and they carry a memory; she has felt this same warmth before, in a desert far from here. She is sure of it. “What are you?”
“I’m a research assistant specializing in intelligence,” Eve stammers, shaking. The snake is still tied around them, its tongue flickering.
“What are you?” Villanelle repeats, and Eve stills, looks at her with something new in her gaze.
“I don’t know,” she says, and with her hair down like that, Villanelle can see the dance of fire reflecting in her dark curls.
The snake is gone. Villanelle releases Eve, and the two of them breathe heavily, eyeing one another, so careful it could be mistaken for penitence.
“Was that my punishment?” Eve asks, and the question takes Villanelle off guard. She had not been expecting this boldness, even if Eve’s expression is far from coy. She looks deadly serious.
“That wasn’t mine,” Villanelle says. “That had nothing to do with me.”
Eve’s voice is calm. “Then you owe me.”
“I owe you.” Villanelle pauses. “Can you do me a favor?”
Eve nods once. “I think so.”
“Hit me in the face.”
Eve’s expression shifts; she pushes away her chair, gets to her feet. Takes a step away from her. “No.”
“Eve, a snake just manifested down your arm and then sealed itself around us like a fucking eternal pledge. Please humor me.”
“I don’t want to hit you.”
“It doesn’t have to be a punch. Open-handed slap is fine.”
Eve holds up her hand, grimacing. She swings back, and Villanelle breathes in, and before she can exhale, Eve’s palm lands on her cheek.
The impact is palpable. It stings. She hisses before she can stop herself, wincing into the pain and the revelation.
“Fuck,” Villanelle says, and Eve rushes forward then, touches the white-hot place where her hand had previously landed.
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” she starts, but she is silenced when Villanelle leans in to kiss her, and every part of Villanelle surges forward, her very cells scream at the contact. Eve moans into her mouth, instantly pliable, and Villanelle can see it: the angel holding a flaming sword aloft, and a thousand palms burning. The world grows dark around them until they are both on their knees, clinging to each other with their hands, their mouths, and Villanelle doesn’t feel anything anymore but the hunger giving way to white heat, a world above and below this one.