“Stop worrying about her,” Luciana snapped. “She’s a ghost, not a lost puppy. We have much more pressing things to worry about.”
“Where were you tonight?” he asked.
“I had a run-in with the angels.”
“Angels, as in plural?” Massimo’s green eyes widened.
She briefly recounted her encounter with the Archangel and fleeing from Brandon.
The Gatekeepers would never dare speak it, but a question hung in the air, poised among all of them.
Why didn’t you kill him tonight?
“You must find a way to end him quickly,” Massimo said quietly. “Without hesitation.”
“Yes,” she said, pressing her eyes closed, swallowing down the feeling of her own failure. “I know that.”
“You’ve said many times that demons cannot love.”
“Love has nothing to do with any of this,” she said, her temper flaring. “Don’t presume to think that it does.”
“Of course, baronessa,” he said.
With a bow, he departed, and she heard him go downstairs to his own quarters, close his door with a small sound. The other Gatekeepers, not knowing what to do without his guidance, dispersed to their own rooms, too, muttering to one another as they went.
Immediately, she regretted snapping at him.
Downstairs, Violetta began to sing, a soaring aria that spiraled up through the old stone. Eerie, but in its oddness, more beautiful than any human voice Luciana had ever heard. So she made it back after all. A strange sense of relief washed over the demoness, although why she should care about the girl, she didn’t know.
Massimo is right, she knew. My resolve is slipping.
For almost two and a half centuries, she had navigated this city with finesse. Gliding through its streets and taking what she needed, relishing in her feats under the cover of night. She had climbed her way out of hell and rebuilt her household. She had maintained that household with all the dignity of the noble name to which she had been born.
Never wavering, never hesitating, never regretting.
Now, with the arrival of this interloper angel, everything had changed.
Luciana abhorred change. The angel would have to be fixed.
And quickly, because she was running out of time.
“You’ve got to sleep sometime,” she murmured, peering out the window into the darkness, knowing that he was out there. “And when you do, I’ll be waiting.”
* * *
Across the canal, Brandon returned to the crumbling building, back to the windowsill with the boards stripped away. There was no point in hiding from her now—she knew exactly where he was. He would have to find a way to attack the demoness on another front.
Weaken her defenses without giving her the opportunity to weaken his.
And as he returned to his observation point, he saw exactly what he needed.
An opportunity. An opening.
Her Gatekeepers.
From what he had seen, there were six Gatekeepers in all, burly young men in jeans and black T-shirts. Because they looked similar and dressed identically, it was hard to tell how many there actually were. Now, through the palazzo’s massive windows, he could see Luciana and her Gatekeepers pacing back and forth, immersed in a conversation that appeared to leave them all dejected. Then they dispersed, each going into different rooms.
She’s probably told them about her little run-in with me, he realized.
None of them looked too happy about the discussion that had taken place.
It was exactly the kind of opening he needed.
Right now, her security system was on the brink of collapse.
He slipped out of his hiding place. Not far away, he found a rickety wooden boat tied to a mooring post and decided to borrow it. He rowed quietly across the canal, leaving his borrowed vessel tied loosely to her neighbor’s landing.
The courtyard beside her palazzo was beautifully kept, spilling with roses, the scent of them overwhelming in the summer heat.
Such a beautiful garden must be maintained by someone, he thought.
There was a small shed in the corner of the courtyard. He went to it, easily picking the ornamental lock. Perused the gardening tools inside. And picked up a hedge trimmer.
Tucking it into the back of his belt, he circled the house quietly in the dark. Halfway up the side wall, he spotted a box near the roof that looked like it might contain some important electrical wiring.
He climbed up the ornate decoration, hanging on the edge of a balcony just below the box. Reaching for the hedge trimmer, he used the tool to pry open the box. Inside, the multicolored electrical wires curled in a thick coil.
He hacked through the cords.
Inside the house, the lights went off. The reflection disappeared from the surface of the canal, moonlight the only thing spilling across the dark water.
And Brandon waited. Silence.
Shouts from within the house began.
The demoness’s distinctive honey-toned voice rang out. “Massimo! Giancarlo!”
The deep voices of the Gatekeepers, calling to each other in a rapid stream of Italian.
The side door opened.
Two of the Gatekeepers came outside to investigate, one carrying a toolbox.
The Gatekeepers might be slow, but Brandon could tell they sensed him out there as they stood outside the door, listening in the stillness, peering out into the dark.
It was the goblins under the house who gave him away. The evil little creatures screeched in high-pitched squeals, like alley cats in a fight. The Gatekeepers turned toward the noise. The one with the toolbox flung it open. He drew back his arm and chucked a wrench at Brandon’s head like an anvil. The other one charged, head down like a bull.
Brandon caught the wrench in midair, pivoted like a matador to avoid the charging demon and brought the heavy tool down on the back of his assailant’s neck. The demon fell like a rock.
In a split second, he was after the other one, throwing the wrench back and knocking the Gatekeeper’s knees out from under him. The man groaned and Brandon held him in a headlock until he passed out.
One at a time, he hauled each unconscious body to the little wooden boat and tossed them both in the bottom, securing their hands with his cuffs. Once he had rowed the short distance across to his own crumbling temporary abode, he still wasn’t done.
He hefted them inside. It was only when he had them both arranged securely in a windowless little room in the back of the building that he checked to see what the demoness was doing across the street. She was standing in a window, holding a candle and peering out into the night.
Come out and play, he almost shouted across the canal.
Then he went to interview his new acquaintances.
* * *
In her workroom, bent over her extractions, Luciana continued working on her formula by candlelight.
Massimo pounded on the door. He called through it with a strained note in his voice that she had never heard before. “Baronessa, we have an emergency.”
She opened the door, pulling off her gloves to rub her tired eyes.
“I can see that,” she said, blinking in the darkness. “Have the Gatekeepers made any headway restoring the electricity?”
“No, baronessa. As you can see, we are still without power. But more importantly—” Massimo’s face was drawn “—two of the Gatekeepers have disappeared.”
“Which ones?” she said.
“Giancarlo and Antonio. They went outside to try to fix the outage.”
Neither of them said anything. Giancarlo and Antonio were both strong young men. Certainly capable of holding their own.
She swallowed. “We don’t know what happened to them, but it doesn’t make sense to assume the worst. If the Company of Angels got a hold of them, they’ll likely just find a woman to fuck them into submission. That seems to be their main mode of operation.”
Massimo managed a shaky smile. “True enough.”
/>
“We can’t worry about them now. We have other things to focus on,” she said. “Time is running out. We have a handful of days left to deliver our sacrifice. And if we don’t…”
She pressed her lips together and swallowed. There was no use thinking about the consequences. They both knew what would happen.
“Do not fear, Massimo. See if you can repair the power outage. I must keep working.”
She bent over the worktable, furious as she worked by the flickering light of a taper.
* * *
Brandon tried every interrogation technique he knew, short of torture.
After several hours of interrogating the Gatekeepers in separate small, windowless rooms, he was getting nowhere. He loomed over one of them, who matched him in size, chained carefully—with his hands separated from each other—to the foot of a rusted-out bed frame. The man glared up at him. His ferocious loyalty to his mistress was clear in his dark brown eyes.
“Why are you so loyal to her?” Brandon asked, crouching once more to stare eye to eye with the man. “She wouldn’t do the same for you.”
“You have no idea what the baronessa is like, deep down,” the Gatekeeper growled, the first words he had spoken. “You totally misunderstand her.”
“Then tell me.”
“Your kind is always too busy judging to hear the truth.”
“Try me,” Brandon said, folding his arms across his chest.
Silence.
Brandon paced around the room, looking down at him, knowing that to hit him would be to lose the game. He wouldn’t stoop to violence—not in this situation. He had already gone as far as he cared to go in that direction. So instead, he started talking. Talking absolute bullshit, saying the worst things he could think of about Luciana Rossetti.
“She’s a whore. She’s weak. She’s mentally deranged. She’d sell her own grandmother to the devil, and probably did. She’d sell you Gatekeepers out if anyone ever offered her the chance.” He continued, circling the room and ranting out every insult that came to mind.
“Enough!” The Gatekeeper lunged forward finally, yanking violently against his bonds. The entire bed frame clattered. “The baronessa is none of those things.”
“We’re not going anywhere, so you might as well talk. There’s no harm in telling me why you remain loyal to her, is there?”
The Gatekeeper bunched his hands into fists and gave a growl of frustration. He considered it for a moment. Then he said, “We were orphans, all of us Gatekeepers. Lost souls living on the streets. We were no better off than the vermin you see crawling in the gutters, no better than the goblins living beneath the houses here. The baronessa gave us a roof over our heads, food to eat. She gave us a purpose.”
“Killing people,” Brandon said flatly.
“It is a small price to pay for our freedom. At least her victims have a chance of redemption. What happens to them is temporary—they can’t be held in eternal damnation. Not unless they’re truly evil to begin with.”
“You tell yourself that, to alleviate your conscience,” said Brandon.
“You don’t think the devil can hold the souls of the truly innocent forever, do you? If you believe that, then you’re more screwed than I am,” the demon growled.
“So you have a conscience, after all. I can help you. Just tell me how much poison Luciana has,” Brandon said. “You know which one I’m talking about.”
“I know no such thing,” the Gatekeeper said.
“Don’t play stupid. She has a poison that can kill immortals. She killed a demon in Vegas, a low-ranking bellboy. How much does she have?”
The Gatekeeper stared back, hate snapping in his brown eyes. “That, you’ll never get out of me. What I will say is that the baronessa has the power to avenge herself on you, and all of your kind. And when she does, you’ll regret you ever came here.”
Brandon paced a little circle around the room.
“I’ve seen your kind come through this city before,” the Gatekeeper spat. “In the sixteenth century, we called it the Inquisition. You think you can justify torture just because you tell yourself that you’re on the ‘right’ side. You have no idea whether your side is really justifiable. Look at yourself. What makes you any different from me?”
“The fact that I haven’t pummeled you into a bloody mess, like you would have done to me if the circumstances were reversed,” Brandon said.
“You’d better pray that never happens,” the Gatekeeper growled.
Brandon gagged the man quickly. And then he exited the room immediately, without saying another word. Because he was an inch away from doing real physical damage to the demon.
Maybe the Gatekeeper was right.
Maybe there was a fine line between angel and demon, between just how far a person was willing to go in the name of the “right” cause.
Maybe.
Outside in the hallway, just for a second, Brandon leaned against the wall, sliding down it to sit on the floor. He shook his head, trying to clear the exhaustion out of it, and for a mere instant, let his eyelids drift shut.
Just to rest my eyes. Just for a second.
And when he opened them, he checked his pocket, touched the watch.
I’m dreaming.
He stood by the edge of a swimming pool. The moon’s reflection splayed across the surface of the water, and as Brandon looked into its crystalline blue depths, the pool looked so unbelievably alluring that the promise of diving into it was almost more seductive than the demoness herself.
Almost.
When he saw her, he realized how ridiculous that thought was. She wore her long, dark hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail. Her lush body in a tiny silver bikini seemed to Brandon like evidence of the divine if he’d ever seen it. The miniscule garment she wore seemed to have been designed to catch the moonlight, as though it had some power to draw light into it. And where light was drawn, so was the eye.
“Buona sera. It has been so hot in the city these past few days, don’t you think? Why don’t you take a little break with me?” she said, the coy slide of her green eyes a calculation in seduction, the angle of her face so shockingly lovely, the movement so simple and yet so arresting.
Everything Luciana did was measured. Every gesture, perfectly choreographed, every glance, perfectly timed. It only seemed simple, he told himself, because she had perfected it, had practiced it for hundreds of years on hundreds of men. Perhaps thousands.
Beauty can be evil, he reminded himself for the hundredth time in the past several days. And for the hundredth time, his body answered back, But not beauty like this.
She strode toward him, her skin luminescent in the moonlight.
Look away, said his gut.
That would be an utter waste, said the rest of him.
In any case, he found that he could not tear his eyes away, even if he had wanted to. Why he had thought he had any chance of resisting her, caught up in this world of dreaming with her, he had no idea. He was a fool, full of bravado and good intentions.
Intentions he now realized were mere paving stones along the road to hell.
As if he had a choice.
“Enjoying the show?” she asked, tilting her head slightly as she walked toward the pool. “In case you were wondering, they’re real.”
He flushed red, because he had wondered…
She ran a finger along the edge of one taut silver triangle. Then she went to sit on the edge of the pool, dipped her toe into the water. “Così buono, ‘that feels so good.’”
He rolled his eyes toward the darkened sky.
Somewhere up there, Michael and the rest of the Archangels must be looking down and having a good laugh at his expense.
“Well, are you just going to stand around and watch? Why don’t you join me for a swim? I know you must be hot. It would be such a relief just to take a little dip, wouldn’t it?” She beckoned, holding out her open hand toward him. “Come on. You know you want to. We could even swim senza vestit
i.”
“What does that mean?” he said, feeling like a complete moron when the answer was so glaringly obvious. Still, he could not control himself. It was as if someone else was speaking for him, controlling his tongue here in his dreamworld.
Luciana, he thought wildly, is gaining more and more of a hold over me.
She smiled as though she understood everything perfectly.
“I could tell you. But why don’t I demonstrate instead?” she said, reaching behind her neck. Two quick pulls of a silver string, and the top of her bikini fell away. He felt himself harden at the sight of her large, dark nipples. “See? Isn’t learning Italian fun?”
His mouth was completely dry; he didn’t even try to speak.
“Come,” she beckoned.
He found it impossible to resist.
He went to her, shedding his clothes along the way, dropping them onto the pool deck behind him. He came to sit beside her, lowering his own legs into the pool. After days of sweating in that abandoned building, he was ready to plunge right into the depths of the water.
Reaching up, she brushed the side of his cheek with her fingertips. He reached down to cup one of those glorious breasts, brushing his fingers over the nipple, feeling it tighten beneath his touch.
She kissed him. The sweetness of it was impossible. He pulled her into the water so they stood waist-deep, lifted her leg so it rode his thigh. He was just on the verge of entering her, of plunging into the sweet depths of her.
When a voice came whispering through, shattering the moment of intense pleasure.
Chapter Nine
“Brandon, wake up.” The whisper of a woman’s voice, the teasing brush of her hair on his face lured him from sleep.
“Luciana?”
A delicate perfume filled his nostrils. A scent he knew well. Roses and a hint of vanilla.
Not a scent he associated with the demoness.
In the early morning sunlight, he blinked, dazed for a moment.
The eyes peering down at him were clear blue. Not green. The crease between them was one of profound concern. A flood of sunlight illuminated a halo of bright gold hair. The woman who hovered over him was so near that he almost flinched at her presence.
The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels) Page 14