The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  “Va bene,” she said.

  She swallowed. Something in those green eyes of hers seemed to waver in her resolve.

  Once again, the scene around them shifted. And as it solidified, Brandon’s heart began to pound so hard it almost broke through the confines of his chest.

  When he looked down, the ground was at least three hundred feet below him.

  And he was dangling in midair.

  Chapter Ten

  The view at the top of the Campanile at midnight never failed to inspire.

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack,” he said, gripping his chest with one hand.

  With the other, he clutched the brick ledge of the bell tower that had finally materialized.

  “Wasn’t that fun?” she said brightly. “Almost like flying.”

  “Where are we?” he asked, still dazed.

  “Back in Venice,” she said into the breeze. And Venice itself is half the seduction.

  Below, the five domes of San Marco’s Basilica glowed white in the moonlight. The curving, brown-roofed labyrinth of streets wound for miles around them. Where the city ended at the lip of the sea, the dark Adriatic stretched into the infinity of night. Overhead, the stars glittered, a brilliant canopy set against the black velvet sky.

  Venice in the aggregate was more impressive than any single church or palace, no matter how architecturally stunning. More beautiful than any one painting, sculpture or jewel. More breathtaking than any individual violin concerto, dance, glass of wine or dish of risotto.

  “We are at the top of the most famous bell tower in the city,” she said. “This is where Galileo first demonstrated his telescope to the Doge, more than four hundred years ago.”

  Brandon did not look impressed. He leaned out over the edge of the tall brick structure, looked down at the rectangle of the empty Piazza San Marco below and asked, “How do we get down?”

  “Right now, we don’t,” she said. “Just enjoy the view. Almost nobody gets to come up here at this hour of night.”

  It was true that tourists were not allowed here after the official hours of operation.

  But some of Luciana’s most prized victims had been treated to this extraordinary late-night view. And every victim she had ever brought here had been impressed by the thrill of the observation platform and the massive iron bells hanging above, at this forbidden time of night. When each of those victims had died, each had departed his or her human life after a unique experience that only Luciana could offer them.

  Brandon did not seem to appreciate the privilege.

  No matter. She would make him appreciate it.

  She launched into the same story she fed every victim she brought here.

  “This is the special place I like to come to by myself, late at night, when I want to escape the world,” she told him, peering up at him with an appealingly shy glance. “When I want to be alone. To clear my head, and to enjoy the beauty of Venice.”

  “So you’ve never been up here with another man?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” she lied, adding a tiny flutter of her eyelashes for effect.

  “Of course you have.” His mouth twisted into a slow smile. “The question is, how many?”

  “Why do you bother asking questions if you already know the answers?” she said, annoyed.

  “At least there are only two of us here right now,” he said, the smile twisting a little farther. “I expected there to be another orgy.”

  “There’s nobody here except the two of us,” she said.

  She kept her mouth shut, and thought about the golden weather vane on top of the Campanile. In the shape of the Archangel Gabriel. She had always loved the irony of conducting her seductions watched by the figures of angels and saints crowding the city. But Brandon didn’t need to know about that. Not now.

  The wind swept through her hair. For a moment, she almost believed her own illusion. Almost fell into her own trap. Into believing that they were a pair of star-crossed lovers, escaping the impossibility of a situation. Not angel and demon. Not sworn enemies, sent to hunt each other down.

  We can’t be both enemies and lovers, she realized. It’s one or the other. We must choose.

  “Think of how beautiful your existence could be. You could live in splendor like this all the time,” she said, trailing her fingertips down his chest. “You could travel the world. Own a pied-à-terre in London or Paris, in Hong Kong or Dubai. A Maserati or a Ferrari. The possibilities are limitless. You’re so much more than just a supervisor at the Company of Amateurs. You could be an Archdemon.”

  Beneath her fingertips, she felt his entire body tense, steel ready to blow.

  “Don’t push me. There’s nothing in this world that I want,” he ground out.

  “Isn’t there?” she said, looking up at him.

  He shook his head, but she could see the lie in those gray eyes of his.

  “Mi arrendo—‘I give up.’ Tell me what you want. Just whisper it in my ear,” she said.

  He leaned in close, paused before whispering a single word in her ear. “Enough.”

  But he did not pull away. Instead, he drew her earlobe into his mouth. The softness of his tongue along her sensitive lobe was astonishing. She leaned toward him, the hard muscle of his chest beneath her palms. His breath warmed her ear.

  Against the side of her neck, he murmured, “No more games.”

  * * *

  Arielle sat outside the door to the room where Brandon slumbered.

  Sleep. The one thing Brandon had refused to do with Arielle when they had been together. While she waited for him to wake, she remembered the day he had first walked through the doors of her unit headquarters in L.A.

  A day so hot, the thermometer outside Arielle’s office window had burst.

  Brandon Clarkson had not been like any other neophyte angel. The moment he walked through the doors of the legal-aid clinic that doubled as unit headquarters, everything seemed to change. The clinic suddenly seemed impossibly small, as though it might burst like the tempered glass tube unable to contain the overheated mercury.

  “Michael sent me,” he said, knocking on the door. “I’m here to join the Company.”

  He was so different from any man she had ever seen. His shaved head, his impressively muscled physique did not intimidate her, but caught her interest immediately. Back then, he had only had one tattoo. On that first day, she had seen only the curl of a feather peeking out the neck of his T-shirt. Had figured that, like many members of the military and police, it was probably an American eagle tattooed on his shoulder.

  “The air-conditioning broke down. I’m the only one here,” she explained, sitting upright to dab the perspiration from her forehead and trying not to drool on her mountain of paperwork. “Everyone else has gone home, or they’re out on assignment. There’s a repairman coming in a few days, so we can get you started later this week.”

  She went back to work, expecting him to leave.

  Minutes later, she felt a breeze cool the back of her neck.

  He had fixed the air-conditioning.

  “I’d like to get started as soon as possible,” he said, leaning in her office doorway. “If there’s anything you need a hand with, I’d like to stick around and start learning.”

  And so she had set him to work.

  Brandon would do anything asked of him, she found, and didn’t need to be told twice.

  One week later, he had already completed his first official assignment as a Guardian, in a record amount of time for a fledgling angel.

  He came into her office and shut the door.

  “Do you mind if I show you something?” he asked, pulling down the window shade. “It’s kind of personal.”

  “Of course,” she said, trying to keep a straight face as he removed his shirt.

  And showed her the little star tattooed on his chest. A symbol of his first Assignee, a little boy with terminal cancer, whom Brandon had helped pass into the afterlife.

  �
�Does this happen after every assignment?” he asked her. “I got it last night. I just woke up and it was there.”

  Then he turned around to show her the massive angel, wings outstretched across the broad muscles of his back.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of another Guardian with tattoos like that.”

  A gift. From the divine. She knew that when she saw them.

  She had already begun to fall for him… And yet, it was not the tattoos that had struck her, and not even the impressive physique. It was the man underneath it all.

  Two angels falling in love. The makings of a fairy tale…

  What had gone wrong, Arielle had never quite figured out.

  Sitting in the heat of the ruined palazzo, she felt the moment he jarred awake.

  Felt it, and she herself jolted out of her reverie.

  When she opened the door, he lay sprawled on the cot, bare from the waist up, his ripped torso and arms adorned with those magnificent tattoos. He turned his head in the direction of the light streaming in through the open door. His sharp gaze fixed on her, as vast and inescapable as the sky before rain.

  Oh, but he’s beautiful.

  He blinked, still half seeing whatever—whomever—he had been dreaming about. She read the naked desire in his eyes. Saw it wash away, like a stain washing off a sidewalk in a rainstorm. Watched him avert his gaze, cheeks flushed with color.

  What was he dreaming about? she wondered. And as she watched him, she knew, Whatever it was, it was not about me.

  He stretched his big body, sat up on the edge of the cot. Behind her, a few members of the Venetian unit hurried in to bring him a glass of water, a clean washcloth, satisfied that he had finally managed to get a full night’s sleep after such a long stretch of wakefulness. Arielle tried not to stare at his sharply defined abs, or at the sprawl of tattoos, so many of them new since the last time she’d seen him.

  She had lost the right to look. But perhaps she would win it back.

  Somehow, maybe, she thought as he pulled a shirt over his head.

  She turned and went back out into the large room where the Venetians sat quietly talking amongst themselves. When Brandon came out, she told him, “We were talking while you slept. The Company has come to a decision. What we have decided is in everyone’s best interests.”

  “What is that?” Brandon said.

  “Our plan is to dispose of Luciana,” Infusino answered without hesitation. “Venice will be rid of that demoness at last.”

  “Disposal? You’re convinced that’s the right course of action?” Brandon said quietly.

  The Venetian supervisor nodded. “Two hundred years we have battled with this woman. You have been called into this fight just a handful of days ago. I tell you, it is impossible. Luciana must be returned to the source of all life. She will rest in peace at last.”

  Brandon’s gaze shot to Arielle. “I thought you believed that everyone deserves a chance at redemption. Don’t they?”

  She could feel her face flushing red. She did not reply.

  “Perhaps you have become too personally involved with the situation,” Infusino suggested. “It is difficult to see clearly when we are in the thick of things. We all understand that.”

  “No, you don’t understand. You know perfectly well that you need the approval of the Archangels before you start talking about disposal. They will never agree without the unanimous support of the Company. And I will never allow it.”

  “We’ll see,” was all Infusino said.

  The others went on about their business, although quietly and with their heads bowed.

  Brandon sauntered over to Arielle, leaned in close. “I know exactly who is behind this. Make no mistake, you and I will never be together. No matter who you schedule for disposal.”

  “But, Brandon, I…”

  “Don’t you get it? It’s never going to work out between us,” Brandon snapped. “Even if Luciana had never been born, there is no way I would be with you.”

  Then he stormed toward the door.

  “Wait,” she called after him. “Listen to reason. These Guardians have been dealing with the demoness for far longer than you or I. She is truly dangerous, Brandon. You need to know that disposal is in everyone’s best interests. In the best interests of humankind. Luciana cannot be allowed to continue her evil.”

  He didn’t say a word. Just stood there and looked at her with those eyes, cold as stone.

  “You don’t see how she’s beginning to affect you,” Arielle said.

  Then he slammed out of the building.

  Arielle knew the moment she lost it. The moment everything slipped, and the world went sideways. The moment she went into the room where the Gatekeepers were kept, and unleashed her wrath on them.

  “Take them away,” she said to the Venetian angels, who stood silently, regarding her with their luminous eyes. “We’ll petition for their disposal, too.”

  She shivered, recognizing the seed of something that had been growing in her for a long time.

  Vengeance.

  That which she had hated so much in Luciana was beginning to grow in herself.

  Arielle saw it, but she had no idea how to stop it.

  * * *

  Brandon half hoped that the rickety old building would fall down and crush the lot of them.

  He hadn’t gotten far when a wordless scream came out of the building he’d just exited. Not a human scream, but something animal.

  The scream of something—someone—being tortured.

  He rushed back into the building, up the stairs, bounding toward the room where the Gatekeepers were held. Arielle was just exiting it, wiping blood from her hands onto a cloth.

  “The big one’s not talking anymore,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  Arielle said nothing, that inscrutable expression on her face. Brandon went into the room. There was blood all over the floor, running down the Gatekeeper’s chin. He went over to the demon, opened his mouth.

  The Gatekeeper no longer had a tongue.

  Brandon bolted down the stairs. Arielle looked at him calmly, perched on the ledge of a windowsill, looking out at the early morning light bouncing off the canal.

  “I may have been a little overzealous. Sometimes these things are necessary,” she said.

  “Necessary,” was all he could say.

  “It’s not like he’s human,” she said, turning to look at Brandon. “If you begin to sympathize with these demons, you’ll never get the job done.”

  * * *

  Across the canal, everyone in Ca’ Rossetti heard the scream.

  “That was Giancarlo,” Luciana said to Massimo, looking up from her worktable. “I know it.”

  “Giancarlo and Antonio are old souls in strong, young bodies,” Massimo assured her. His face, however, had gone as white as the arsenic he was measuring. “They can fend for themselves. The likelihood that something has happened to them…”

  “Screw likelihood, Massimo. I know what I heard.”

  Fury welled up in her. She set down the flask she had been holding.

  They stood looking at each other, not speaking. A staff of Gatekeepers that had taken her centuries to collect, decades to train. Ruined. By that damned angel.

  Massimo’s frown deepened. Finally, he said, “Perhaps now would be the time to…”

  “Go. Take the others and go to Tuscany, or go to Naples. Go somewhere and don’t tell me where.”

  Massimo fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “I’m not leaving you. You need protection, more than any of us. We swore an oath.”

  “You’re just getting in the way here, and presenting more targets for those damned angels,” she said irritably. “We cannot remain cooped up in this house. I would leave, too, if I could. But I have responsibilities here in Venice. I must stay. Go, Massimo.”

  “No, baronessa. Not unless you can convince me that it is absolutely necessary.”

  There was a terrible silence between
them. Something of which they never spoke.

  “I cannot tell you that, Massimo. Not right now.”

  “Then I’m staying.”

  Death was not the end. They both knew that. The soul was never destroyed.

  They had both died before, as humans.

  But torture at the hands of the Company of Angels…neither of them knew exactly what that meant. Except for the scream they had both heard carry across the water, a wordless sound that could mean no good.

  Chapter Eleven

  Brandon stormed away from Arielle, slamming out the back door of the dilapidated building for the second time.

  Moments later, he scaled the side wall of Luciana’s palazzo, climbing easily up the ornamental columns and cornices. What impelled him to do so this time, he wasn’t quite sure. Nor did he care. He only knew that he was past thinking.

  What drove him now was pure gut feeling.

  Luciana’s home was like the rest of her, Brandon thought as he popped the lock on her bedroom window and stole inside. Opulent. Luxurious. Sensual.

  Nudes adorned the frescoed walls, satyrs and nymphs in risqué positions, their partially clothed flesh portrayed in sensual colors that looked almost touchable. Swathes of silk and velvet curtained the windows and draped the large, gilt bed that stood in the center of the room.

  But where is the demoness? he wondered.

  The presence of her remaining Gatekeepers and the possibility of capture, he had totally pushed out of his mind.

  She came into the bedroom after a bath, dressed in a black silk robe, drying her hair with a thick white towel. When she saw him, she dropped her towel, stumbled a few steps toward the door.

  “Wait,” he said, blocking her way. “Don’t call for your Gatekeepers.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “How do I know that you’re not planning on torturing us all?”

  Any explanation, any words he wanted to speak were stuck on his tongue.

  The message he had come to deliver hung in his mind, unspoken.

  The Company is planning on obliterating you.