The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  Then they lay joined together, gasping for breath as the storm passed into stillness.

  In her bed, beneath the canopy of silk where she had lain so many nights, lonely and unfulfilled, she trembled, unable to control the shiver that ran through her, sure in her knowledge that the devil himself would find some way to intervene.

  Finally seducing him ought to have been a great accomplishment. The possibility for finishing her sacrifice to the devil was laid out before her. A mere brush of her fingertips away. Yet, now that she had him here, draped over her, his hand still closed over her naked breast, she found herself completely unwilling to carry out those plans.

  Under the bed, the syringe of cyanide remained untouched.

  * * *

  As he lay in her bed, in the jumble of silk that tangled around them, drowning in the aftermath of their lovemaking, he knew the possibility that love with a demoness might well unleash some uncontrollable dark side of him. Just as Luciana had said.

  He was a millimeter away from falling.

  “Just think. It could be like this forever,” he said.

  “I don’t know how you dreamed you could change me. Just by fucking me?” she whispered, smiling a little in the darkness. “You don’t have that kind of power over me. Not like that insipid little Serena has over Julian. Your heart is so much darker than hers could ever be.”

  And at that moment, he knew she was right.

  He might not be a rookie angel like Serena St. Clair.

  But he had so much more resentment in him. So much more anger.

  He had somehow expected Luciana to soften, and she showed no sign of it.

  “Get out,” said the demoness.

  He felt the prick of a needle at the side of his neck. Saw her thumb hovering on the plunger of a syringe, poised, ready to inject.

  “Whatever you wanted to accomplish tonight is never going to happen. Go, before I shoot you full of poison. While you can still walk out of here on your own two feet.”

  * * *

  After he left, she capped the syringe and placed it back under the bed, still full of cyanide.

  She lay in the darkness, listening to the rapid beating of her own heart. She heard the flutter of wings and the coo of a pigeon departing from the balcony outside her window. And she knew that the sense of peace he had brought had departed with him, drained from her body.

  But it was not replaced by the same centuries-old bitterness as before.

  The desire to kill had also been drained out of her. The desire for revenge was dull and sluggish, her mind grasping for the memory of it. Merely a few days ago, that desire had raged in her bloodstream. Now it was more like a distant trickle.

  All because of Brandon.

  She shivered, the implications of such a change crashing over her.

  I cannot let go of that which keeps me alive, she thought. There is only one place left to go. One person left in Venice who can help me.

  She rose from the bed, dressed herself and went to cut some roses from the courtyard, to take as an offering to the darkness she would now call upon.

  * * *

  Brandon climbed back down the darkened facade of Ca’ Rossetti and slipped into the night.

  Lucky.

  That was all he could think. Why she had kicked him out, he had no idea.

  But it was the only thing that had saved him.

  Returning to the Company’s encampment across the canal was out of the question. He had been cooped up in there for far too long. Tossed out of Luciana’s bedchamber after intercourse with the demoness, it would be impossible for him to face Arielle.

  Not now. When the feeling of the demoness’s body was still hot on his skin. When his body still sung from the nearness of her.

  In the absence of a car to lose himself in the power of driving, he walked. He wandered for a long time, thoughts churning as he crossed bridges and navigated narrow lanes, until he was lost in the tangle of streets and water.

  Someone who has brought me so much joy, if only for a brief moment…she couldn’t be all evil, could she?

  He looked up at the sky, at the multitude of stars above. Nothing had been resolved. If anything, their interlude had complicated things beyond imagining, the dreamed quality of their encounters brought into flesh, brought into reality.

  And the demoness herself. His mind had difficulty pinning her down. The thought of her was elusive, shifting, transitory. Maiden, dragon. Seductress, Madonna. It seemed as though every thought he had ever conceived about womanhood existed inside of Luciana. All of those images and feelings, shifting and changing beneath the surface of her skin.

  Maddening.

  An old iron gate caught his eye. It seemed to pop out of the laneway, the ornately wrought metal appearing to glow a little, the vines curling up it seeming to beckon to him, swaying a little in the breeze. He walked toward it, looked inside but could not see.

  Pushed it open, heard the creak of its disused hinges, and walked into a garden.

  Inside, fireflies clustered over a statue in the center of the garden.

  As he walked toward it, he saw a statue of St. George slaying the dragon.

  What it meant, he had absolutely no idea.

  Because the most maddening part of the whole situation, he realized, was that at this point, he was nearer to being swallowed by the dragon than slaying it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Massimo steered the boat across the dark lagoon, into the marshy waters near the island of Sant’ Ariano. The mysterious little island had been deserted for centuries, since the sixteenth century, when the city of Venice decided to use the island as an ossario, an “ossuary.”

  A dumping ground for the bones of dead Venetians.

  Luciana had first come here as a young human woman, searching for snakes on the island rumored to be infested with them. And snakes were vital in the formulas for poisons she had researched in old apothecaries’ handbooks. But she had found something else here.

  Someone else here. Someone who had helped her master the art of poison far beyond what she could have learned on her own.

  “Wait here for me,” she told Massimo, embarking from the boat and taking the flowers with her. “This is a matter I must resolve on my own.”

  A strange mist drifted on the surface of the lagoon, unusual for high summer in Venice. Luciana’s shoes crunched over the earth. She steeled herself against the knowledge of what was crushed beneath her hard soles. Until about a century ago, bodies had simply been dumped in piles. Then the city officials decided to flatten these piles, leaving bone chips and shards all over the island. A wall had been erected around the island, hiding its contents from public view.

  Walking over the uneven ground now, Luciana sensed the energetic trace of thousands of people who had lived and died, their bodies ground into shards and composting quietly with the earth here. Something less than ghostly, the bare essence of them left behind, a fine sort of memory etched on the air.

  She forged farther, until she found a small, broken-down building. The roof had long been torn off, and overhead, tree branches interwove to form a natural roof, moonlight shining through the gaps. Spiders had taken up residence, the sticky residue of the webbing pasting itself to her fingers, attaching itself to her hair.

  Disgusting, she thought as she pushed her way into the small, enclosed space. What a terrible idea it was to come here.

  “Zitella?” Luciana called.

  Perhaps the old crone was gone. It had literally been ages since she had been there, ages since she had needed the kind of help that this woman could give. Perhaps she was not there.

  But among the rotting walls, she recognized her old mentor.

  The master alchemist, the master poisoner.

  Seated in a chair, exactly the way she had been two hundred years ago. Her white hair piled into a neat bun at the back of her head, her black widow’s weeds unchanged in style, shapeless and covering her frail body. Decrepit. Her bony fingers pointed
up toward Luciana, thin and spindly in the moonlight, beckoning her closer.

  Zitella’s age was impossible to guess. Even two hundred years ago, when Luciana had come here as a young widow, desperate for a way out of a terrible situation, the old crone had already been decrepit.

  Back then, Zitella had spent her day grinding human bones to sell for use in refining sugar. What the old woman did now, Luciana had no idea. What she was now…that was equally a mystery. Whether demon or ghost or something caught in between, Zitella was definitely not alive.

  Zitella stopped humming and looked up. “Luciana Rossetti? Is that you, child?”

  Luciana stepped forward.

  “Come closer, child. How long has it been? Centuries…”

  She laid the offering of flowers in Zitella’s lap.

  The old crone picked up the roses, sniffed them briefly before casting them into the darkness behind her. “Do not try to bribe me with such trifling gifts.”

  “There’s something else, Zitella,” Luciana said hurriedly. “I’ve brought another gift for you.”

  She placed the vial in the old woman’s hand.

  Zitella closed her bony old fingers over it. In the faint light, she held it up, uncapped the cork stopper from its top. Inhaling deeply, she said, “Yes, that’s more like it. The blood of an innocent, the essence of a recent death. Yes, I am pleased. What have you come to trade this for?”

  “Whatever you wish to give to me, ma’am,” Luciana said, knowing better than to ask for what she wanted.

  Carefully, Zitella recapped the vial and tucked it into a fold of her black garments. Then she fished into another unseen depth of her clothing and handed over a small bottle of blown glass, with a dull-looking powder inside. “This is what you seek. Ground bones from the most evil beings that walked the streets of Venice. Murderers’ bones and rapists’ bones, bones from sellers of children and purveyors of lost souls, ground to powder. Prepare a base of venom, hemlock and cyanide. And then add the blood of the innocent. Lastly, mix in this powder. Then, you will achieve what you need in such a formula—the ingredients to kill both the body and the soul.”

  Luciana accepted it, curtsied a little out of habit from the old days. “Thank you, Zitella.”

  “Use the techniques exactly as I taught you, those many years ago. Then you will be able to kill any demon on earth.”

  And if it can kill a demon, surely it will also kill an angel, Luciana thought.

  “I will be eternally grateful to you for all that you have passed on to me, both then and now,” said the demoness. She bowed her head in reverence, then turned to leave.

  The old crone stopped her, reaching forward to grab Luciana’s hand with surprising strength. The grasp felt strange, and the demoness almost recoiled from the feel of the old woman’s skin, hardened into bone itself.

  The old woman pulled her so close that they were looking into each other’s eyes. “Wait,” said Zitella. “I have one more question for you. Who is this man who has come to you? Your lover?”

  “I have no lover, Zitella. No one more than there ever was. You must be imagining things,” Luciana said, trying to pull away.

  “Don’t lie to me, Luciana Rossetti. Someone has entered your life.”

  “Perhaps,” she relented a little, “there is a man. But he is of no consequence. The relationship is doomed. There are vast differences between us.”

  “Don’t fool with the angels. Yes, I know. It is obvious. I can smell him on you. He has seen within you.” The old crone jabbed a bony finger into the left side of the demoness’s chest with such force that it hurt. “He knows your heart. Knows you have one.”

  And she laughed, a cackle so loud it disturbed some of the branches of her makeshift roof, causing a hole to break into the ceiling. Moonlight streamed in, shining on Zitella’s wizened old face.

  “Go now,” said the old woman. “What you intend to do with this substance is beyond my control. But have a care where you use it. And remember. Sometimes it is what we fear most that we need most.”

  Crazy old hag, Luciana thought to herself, stumbling back toward the boat in the darkness. She picked something out of her hair, expecting it to be more of the disgustingly sticky spiderweb from Zitella’s hut, or perhaps a twig that had fallen from the roof.

  It was a feather.

  * * *

  “Bring me one of the goblins,” Luciana instructed Massimo much later that night when the sun was about to rise.

  She finished the last essence she was distilling as Zitella had instructed, had finally gotten the mixture to a point where it seemed stable. Took some of the new poison. With shaking fingers, she drew some of the liquid into a syringe.

  Shot it into the goblin.

  Massimo released it, setting it on the floor to watch it scramble madly around.

  “Maybe nothing will happen,” Luciana murmured. “Zitella is ancient, and clearly quite mad. Maybe she gave me a bottle of dust.”

  The creature on the floor let out a vile cough, and a jet of crimson blood spewed out of its mouth, the spray making a disgusting mess on the floor. The thing fell sideways, a red foam spilling from its mouth.

  “Then again, maybe the old woman is not insane after all,” the demoness murmured.

  “That’s promising, certainly,” said Massimo. “I’ve never seen one of your poisons kill that quickly before. Or that violently.”

  “But does it have the power to kill an angel as powerful as the one who watches us?” Luciana mused. “We can only determine that by trial and error,” she said. “There’s no guarantee. I would like to test it before I try it on the angel.”

  “How can we do that?”

  “Perhaps Carlotta will help us out. She always knows the location of a Gatekeeper who can be gotten cheaply. We shall go see her.”

  “And risk being caught by the Company?”

  “It is worth the risk this time, Massimo. We will arm ourselves.”

  She handed him a syringe full of the poison, capped it. “Be very careful. I trust you with this. You must promise not to misuse it. It is probably the most dangerous thing we have ever handled. This could change everything.”

  * * *

  The party at Carlotta’s was finally coming to an end, after five long days and nights of debauchery.

  Up in Carlotta’s rooms, Corbin and the madam were wrapping up their own private party. Strewn on the floor lay discarded lingerie and high heels from the various women he’d screwed over the past handful of days, as well as empty champagne magnums, a half-eaten platter of caviar and foie gras.

  “I’ve had a hell of a time,” Corbin said. “But now it’s time to say goodbye.”

  “Where’s the money you owe me?” Carlotta said, sitting up with her hand out. “You said you were going to pay for all of this.”

  “Did I really?” he stated, his amber eyes boring into her. “Nobody likes a greedy whore.”

  “And nobody likes a has-been,” she flung out casually.

  “I’ve killed for lesser insults,” he said.

  Inside him, a quiet fury flooded up. He reached into his pocket, where he had kept the little vial of Luciana’s poison since taking it from her. He popped open a new bottle of champagne, poured them each a glass.

  Into hers, he slipped the poison.

  “Cin cin, darling,” he said, raising the glass.

  “I really don’t feel like it,” she said.

  “Humor me. The last drink of a very enjoyable party.”

  She drank.

  Then she set the glass on the table and turned. He watched her closely, saw her hand touch her throat. She whirled back to look at him, her eyes wide, and choked out, “What the hell did you put in there?”

  He did not bother to answer, but sat down in a chair and finished his own champagne.

  She fell onto the thick patterned carpet, limbs thrashing wildly in violent spasms.

  Finally, she was quiet. Corbin stood, surveying the wreckage of the party.
>
  And in the middle of it, Carlotta’s body.

  Poison was such a clean kill. Too clean, he thought.

  And that was when he set to work.

  When he finished dismembering her body, there was a large pool of blood in the middle of the carpet. He opened the door and called down to a couple of his Gatekeepers.

  “What happened to her?” one of them asked as they stared at the remnants in the center of the room.

  Hired to replace the ones who had defected in Vegas, these Gatekeepers still had not learned how to keep their mouths shut. But they would learn. Even if he had to teach them the hard way, Corbin knew.

  “Nothing you need to know about,” the Archdemon said, pouring himself another glass of champagne and sipping.

  He felt like toasting himself. It was his first kill since his spectacular defeat at the hands of Julian Ascher, and he felt a sense of triumph rushing through his body. Even if she had only been a second-rate Rogue demon, killing Carlotta brought him a renewed sense of power.

  “If I feel like killing, I kill,” he said. “I don’t need a reason to do it.”

  He wished the same applied to killing angels.

  But there would be consequences that even he could not risk facing.

  The two Gatekeepers stood looking grimly at Carlotta’s body as Corbin drank the champagne. He could see it on their faces—they were undoubtedly thinking of the brothel keeper’s hospitality. The phrase she did not deserve this probably floated through their minds.

  Corbin didn’t care.

  “Get rid of the corpse,” he said. “In fact, help me get rid of them all.”

  “What, there are others?” one of the Gatekeepers grunted.

  “Not yet,” said Corbin. “But there will be when we’re done here.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chiuso—Closed.

  That was what the glass gallery door sign read when Luciana and Massimo arrived the next morning. At ten o’clock on a weekday.

  “How strange,” Luciana murmured.

  Yet when she twisted the doorknob, it was unlocked and the door swung open easily. The bell above the door tinkled. Inside, the shop stood silent and empty. The colorful rows of blown glass stood on their pristine shelves, sparkling in the morning sun.