The first symptoms of the disorder had appeared ten years before, when fine tracks of mildew materialized along the inner shafts and vanes of the feathers, a phosphorescent green fungus that grew like patina on copper. He had thought it a mere infection. He’d had his wings cleaned and groomed, specifying that each feather be brushed with oils, and yet the pestilence remained. Within months his wingspan had decreased by half. The dusty golden shimmer of healthy wings faded. Once, he had been able to compress his wings with ease, folding his majestic plumage smoothly against his back. The airy mass of golden feathers had tucked into the arched grooves along his spine, a maneuver that rendered the wings completely undetectable. Although physical in substance, the structure of healthy wings gave them the visual properties of a hologram. Like the bodies of the angels themselves, his wings had been substantial objects utterly unimpaired by the laws of matter. Percival had been able to lift his wings through thick layers of clothing as easily as if he had moved them through air.
Now he found that he could no longer retract them at all, and so they were a perpetual presence, a reminder of his diminishment. Pain overwhelmed him; he lost all capability for flight. Alarmed, his family had brought in specialists, who confirmed what the Grigori family most feared: Percival had contracted a degenerative disorder that had been spreading through their community. Doctors predicted that his wings would die, then his muscles. He would be confined to a wheelchair, and then, when his wings had withered completely and their roots had melted away, Percival would die. Years of treatments had slowed the progression of the disease but had not stopped it.
Percival turned on the faucet and splashed cool water over his face, trying to dissipate the fever that had overtaken him. The harness helped him to keep his spine erect, an increasingly difficult task as his muscles grew weak. In the months since it had become necessary to wear the harness, the pain had only grown more acute. He never quite got used to the bite of leather on his skin, the buckles as sharp as pins against his body, the burning sensation of ripped flesh. Many of their kind chose to live away from the world when they became ill. This was a fate Percival could not begin to accept.
Percival took Verlaine’s envelope in his hands. Feeling its heft with pleasure, he disemboweled the dossier with the delicacy of a cat feasting upon a trapped bird, tearing open the paper with slow deliberation and placing the pages upon the marble surface of the bathroom sink. He read the report, hoping to find something that might be of use to him. Verlaine’s summary was a detailed and thorough document-forty pages of single-spaced lines forming a black, muscular column of type from beginning to end-but from what he could see there was nothing new.
Putting Verlaine’s documents back in the envelope, Percival took a deep breath and slipped the harness over his body. The tight leather caused much less trouble now that his color had returned and his fingers had grown steady. Once dressed, he saw that he’d ruined all hope of being presentable. His clothes were wrinkled and sweat-stained, his hair fell into his face in a messy blond sweep, his eyes were bloodshot. His mother would be mortified to see him so careworn.
Smoothing his hair, Percival left the bathroom and set out to find her. The sounds of crystal glasses clinking, the hum of a string quartet, and the shrill laughter of her friends became louder as he ascended the grand staircase. Percival paused at the edge of the room to catch his breath-the slightest effort drained his strength.
His mother’s rooms were always filled with flowers and servants and gossip, as if she were a countess holding a nightly salon, but Percival found the gathering under way to be even more elaborate than he had expected, with fifty or more guests. A cantilevered ceiling rose above the party, the skylights’ usual brightness dimmed by a cap of snow. The walls of the upper floor were lined with paintings his family had acquired over the course of five hundred years, most of which the Grigoris had chosen from museums and collectors for their private enjoyment. The majority of the paintings were masterworks, and all were original-they had provided expert copies of the paintings to be circulated through the world at large, taking the originals for themselves. Their art required meticulous care, everything from climate control to a team of professional cleaners, but the collection was well worth the trouble. There were a number of Dutch masters, a few from the Renaissance, and a smattering of nineteenth-century engravings. An entire wall at the center of the sitting room held the famous Hieronymus Bosch triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, a wonderfully gruesome depiction of paradise and hell. Percival had grown up studying its grotesqueries, the large central panel depicting life on earth providing him with early instruction on the ways of humanity. He found it particularly fascinating that Bosch’s depiction of hell contained gruesome musical instruments, lutes and drums in various stages of dissection. A perfect copy of the painting hung at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, a reproduction Percival’s father had personally commissioned.
Gripping the ivory head of his cane, Percival made his way through the crowd. He usually put up with such debauchery but felt now-in his current condition-that it would be difficult to make it across the room. He nodded to the father of a former schoolmate-a member of his family’s circle for many centuries-standing at a remove from the crowd, his immaculate white wings on display. Percival smiled slightly at a model he had once taken to dinner, a lovely creature with pellucid blue eyes who came from an established Swiss family. She was far too young for her wings to have emerged, and so there was no way to glean the full extent of her breeding, but Percival knew her family to be old and influential. Before his illness had struck, his mother had tried to convince him to marry the girl. One day she would be a powerful member of their community.
Percival could tolerate their friends from old families-it was to his benefit to do so-but he found their new acquaintances, a collection of nouveau riche money managers, media moguls, and other hangers-on who had insinuated themselves into his mother’s good graces, to be loathsome. They were not like the Grigoris, of course, but most were close enough to be sympathetic to the delicate balance of deference and discretion the Grigori family required. They tended to gather at his mother’s side, inundating her with compliments and flattering her sense of noblesse oblige, ensuring that they would be invited to the Grigori apartment the next afternoon.
If it were up to Percival, their lives would be kept private, but his mother could not endure being alone. He suspected that she surrounded herself with amusement to stave off the terrible truth that their kind had lost their place in the order of things. Their family had formed alliances generations before and depended upon a network of friendships and relations to maintain their position and prosperity. In the Old World, they were deeply, inextricably connected to their family’s history. In New York, they had to re-create it everywhere they went.
Otterley, his younger sister, stood by the window, a dim light falling over her. Otterley was of average height-six feet three inches-thin, and zipped into a low-cut dress, a bit much but in keeping with her taste. She’d pulled her blond hair back into a severe chignon and had painted her lips a bright pink that seemed a little too young for her. Otterley had been stunning once-even more lovely than the Swiss model standing nearby-but had burned through her youth in a hundred-year spree of parties and ill-suited relationships that had left her-and their fortune-significantly diminished. Now she was middle-aged, well into her two-hundredth year, and despite her efforts to conceal it, her skin had the appearance of a plastic mannequin’s. Try as she might, she couldn’t recapture the way she had looked in the nineteenth century.