The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  “Wait. I think you’ll find this interesting.”

  He saw a man drive up.

  Get out of the car and kiss her.

  Something bittersweet twisted inside Brandon as he watched them.

  “Who is that?” Luciana asked.

  “My wife, Tammy,” he said.

  “The man, I meant,” she said flatly.

  “My best friend and partner, Jude,” he ground out.

  “Did you know?” Luciana asked. “That they were together?”

  “I had no idea. I was told to leave it alone. And so I did.”

  Her eyes sparkled in the light, and what he saw in them was pure, green evil. “There you go. Learn your own lesson in forgiveness. I dare you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Brandon awoke, sweating and sick with the knowledge that more than a wall separated him and Luciana. Not just wood and drywall, after all. But the fundamental core of what they were.

  Angel and demon.

  She’s pure evil. I would never have done such a thing to her. Would I?

  His heart pounded as he lay in the bed.

  What did she really do, except reveal the truth? he argued with himself.

  He shot out of bed, threw on his clothes and tore into the hallway.

  The noise of it woke Arielle, who was sleeping in a room across the hall.

  She opened her door and stood there in her nightgown, white and ethereal.

  “What’s wrong, Brandon?”

  He needed to drive, to get far away from this insane asylum full of immortals. His palms tingled for a steering wheel. His foot yearned for the press of a gas pedal. He needed speed to rid him of the desire to crawl out of his own skin. Before that desire drove him crazy.

  And Arielle knew it.

  “Just a minute,” she said, going into her room. When she returned, she handed him a car key and said, “Outside. In the driveway.”

  Veering along the Pacific Coast Highway, he drove until he reached Zuma Beach, Malibu. Where he stood on the sand, looking out over the still-dark ocean. Listened to the sound of the waves. Asked for guidance. And what—who—he found there was Michael. High on a cliff above the beach, the Archangel waited, his massive wings extended out behind him.

  He launched off the cliff and circled down, toward Brandon, landing on the sand.

  “I take it the current situation has exceeded your capacity to text,” said Michael.

  “Seriously, I need help. But not from you.”

  “You’re stuck with me,” said Michael. “So talk.”

  “What am I doing here?” Brandon asked. He did not whine. He never whined. But the frustration had become so intense, it threatened to explode out of him if he did not give it voice.

  “What do you mean?” Michael asked quietly.

  “I should not be involved in this assignment anymore.”

  “You can leave. You have that choice.”

  “I don’t trust Arielle. But that’s not the whole problem. I had a dream last night. Not the same dream. And I saw something I had never seen before.”

  “What was it?”

  “It had to do with Tammy. And her husband.”

  Michael let out a sigh, compassion on his face. “There are circumstances beyond your comprehension. There are reasons for things that even we Archangels do not understand. But I warn you, Brandon. You must forget about this entirely. Leave it to divine justice to handle. Don’t throw away everything you’ve worked toward for your entire existence. This, like everything else, is merely a test. You have a choice. The best option is to leave it alone.”

  “I’m worried about Tammy,” he gritted out.

  “Are you worried about Tammy, or are you angry with her? Brandon, let it go,” Michael warned. “You have your instructions. You have been a good Guardian all these years.”

  “So I think I deserve to know. How long have Tammy and Jude been together? Since my death?”

  Michael answered, “Yes.”

  “Since before my death?”

  The question hovered between them.

  Brandon was certain Archangels were physically incapable of dishonesty. Michael’s mouth contracted, but he didn’t deny it. All he said was, “We can’t control the actions of anyone but ourselves.”

  Fury burned inside him. Hurt. Sadness.

  His mind flipped back through all the events of his past. Jude, his partner and best friend. Older and wiser. Giving advice. Hugging Tammy. Hugging her a little too tightly, Brandon realized now.

  “Let it go,” said Michael again. “You are not to pry into the lives of your loved ones.”

  Let it go. Brandon had said essentially the same words to Luciana. But now he realized how difficult, how agonizing that suggestion was.

  “How?”

  “You’ll find a way,” said Michael.

  “And this demoness?” he asked. “What am I to do about her?”

  “Slay the dragon.”

  “Wait. What the hell does that mean, anyway?”

  “That’s for you to find out.”

  * * *

  When Luciana awoke in the early hours before dawn, Arielle was standing over her.

  “Where’s Brandon?” the demoness asked.

  “He went for a little trip. It will give you and I an opportunity to talk,” Arielle smiled. “To get to know one another.”

  Luciana almost snorted. “My kind do not get to know your kind. Serpents do not get to know the rats they devour. Even when the rats gang up and gnaw the snake to death.”

  “I’m going to ignore that comment because I know you’re under a lot of stress. Look, I’ve brought you some breakfast,” said Arielle.

  There was an assortment of breakfast foods laid out on a tray.

  Cereal, scrambled eggs and bacon. A cup of coffee.

  “American food,” said Luciana with a flick of her hand, looking over the food. “This is clearly part of my torture, no? A choice between cardboard and a heart attack? No, thank you.”

  “Cut the crap, Luciana. This isn’t la dolce vita.”

  “Really? I think you’d be a lot happier if you learned the art of la dolce far niente. ‘The sweet art of doing nothing.’ Either that, or maybe you could get laid once in a while,” she said, smiling her sweetest, sunniest smile. “And maybe then you wouldn’t need to pimp out members of your Company.”

  Impervious to the insults, Arielle merely picked up the cup of coffee, set it in front of her. “I trust you slept well.”

  “Grazie, I slept tolerably enough,” Luciana said, taking a sip of the coffee and grimacing. “But not as well as I slept after I made love to Brandon.”

  Arielle still didn’t move a muscle. “I understand that you’re frustrated and I imagine it’s not very pleasant for you to be kept against your will. But if you cooperate, then we can all accomplish our goals. We know you created a very special kind of poison.”

  “Perhaps,” Luciana drawled.

  “You will tell us where it is. You will tell us how you made it.”

  In her blandest tone, the demoness said, “No wonder it took you two hundred years to reform Julian. If this is your idea of how to negotiate, I can’t blame him. It’s too bad that the best you can offer demonkind is a good screw from your underlings.”

  “Where’s Corbin?” the supervisor asked, switching subjects abruptly.

  “I have no idea where Corbin is,” said Luciana, studying her fingernails.

  “You must know. You were lovers. You spent three months living with him in Las Vegas.”

  “Truthfully, I really don’t know where Corbin is. I don’t care. He’s no longer my lover, and he’s certainly not my friend.”

  “Play these games,” Arielle said coolly. “Laugh at me all you want. But in the end, I’ll have the last laugh. I have the power to keep you apart from the only thing that matters to you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. My home was destroyed in a fire two nights ago. There’s nothing more t
hat I want.”

  “Well, now, that’s not true at all, is it?”

  It was not an angelic halo that radiated out from this woman, but an aura of smugness.

  “This is a totally different approach than you took with Julian,” Luciana said instead, broaching a subject that genuinely piqued her curiosity. “You went to such lengths to reform him.”

  “Of course,” Arielle said. “Because Julian was my very first Assignee. When I was ordained as an angel, two and a half centuries ago, the first person I was sent to guard was Julian. But you know how things went with him. He got extremely out of hand, especially when you entered the picture. Why, all those years ago in Venice when you were seventeen, I told him to leave you. If you had just stayed out of the picture, everything would have been fine.”

  Arielle smiled as the morning sunlight broke into the room.

  And Luciana understood everything.

  Julian had been a priority for Arielle because he had been a personal mission.

  The one who got away.

  And Arielle had been responsible for guiding Julian’s decision to leave Venice two and a half centuries ago. That decision had ultimately ruined Luciana’s human life.

  “You’re not interested in reforming me, are you?” Luciana said finally.

  “Not you. The idea of you joining the Company is intolerable. You will never become an angel,” said Arielle evenly.

  “I have to hand it to you, Arielle. There’s more to you than I thought.”

  “Grazie. I take that as a compliment,” said Arielle.

  “There is no more poison. It burned to the ground with Ca’ Rossetti,” the demoness said truthfully.

  “Good,” Arielle said. “That’s all I really wanted to know.”

  “Yes, that’s the truth,” Luciana said. And for once, it was.

  “No, actually it’s not.”

  “I swear it all burned. I tried to save some of it, but your colleague stopped me.”

  “Well, no. There’s still some of that poison left. Do you want to know how I know?” Arielle smiled, infuriatingly neutral.

  It’s eerie the way she sometimes reminds me of Corbin, Luciana thought.

  “I found this in your home before I burned Ca’ Rossetti to the ground.”

  She held up one of the little glass vials, which held the poison Luciana had concocted in her workroom in the days before she had left Venice.

  It was empty.

  Luciana looked down at her coffee cup. “American coffee really is poison, isn’t it?”

  Is this how it feels? Luciana thought. I had forgotten.

  The pain of dying was unbearable.

  The poison Arielle had fed her burned through her veins, killing parts of her physical body as it went.

  “How strange to be poisoned yourself, isn’t it? Imagine, after you’ve done the same to so many others,” said the angel.

  Luciana tried to answer back. The word bitch formed on her lips even as she convulsed, caught in a spasm as the cyanide burned through her veins. Arielle looked down at her, that infuriating coolness of hers unchanging as she surveyed the results of her work.

  “Who do you think ordered the burning of Ca’ Rossetti? You may have thought it was Corbin, but I doubt he would ever be so destructive. No,” Arielle said, “I was the one who did it. The reason should be perfectly clear to you. I did so in order to save human lives.”

  Luciana looked up at her from the floor.

  “I think you did it for your own satisfaction,” she managed to gasp. “For revenge.”

  Arielle shrugged. “The reason hardly matters now. What’s more important are the consequences. By burning down your house, I was also able to ensure that you wouldn’t be able to manufacture any more poison. From what I hear, you had quite the little laboratory set up there.”

  The demoness stumbled away, about to vomit.

  “We’re working toward the same thing here in the Company of Angels. Only we call it by a different name.” Arielle smiled. “Disposal.”

  The thought that ran through Luciana’s mind was, I wish it had been different.

  A thousand thoughts and a thousand images rushed into her mind, flooding through her like a wave that washed over her, took her breath away, swept her into unconsciousness. Her parents’ faces…her sister…Julian…the fallen republic of Venice and all the citizens plunged into poverty and humiliation…every face of every human victim she had ever killed…the Gatekeepers she had raised like children…

  And Brandon…

  As the tide of darkness rolled over her, she smiled, suddenly grateful that she had gotten the chance to know him at all.

  A single word rushed into her mind.

  Peace.

  How much time passed as Luciana lay on the floor of that horrible little room, fading in and out of consciousness, carried on the tide of the poison, she had no idea.

  She only knew that when she opened her eyes, Arielle was standing over her, looking down, her blond hair lit by a blaze of fluorescent light from the ceiling above.

  “Get up,” said the angel.

  “You killed me,” Luciana accused, coughing out a little blood.

  “No. I shot you full of cyanide, just like you did to Brandon. You should have figured that out by the time you didn’t go to hell. And you should have figured out that I’m not a murderer. Not like you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Oh, there’s a lot I want from you. I know you have a lot of knowledge, and I hope we can channel that knowledge, together, for the greater good of humankind. Perhaps once we’ve gone through this poisoning process a few more times, you’ll begin to work with me.”

  Torture, Luciana thought wildly. She plans to torture me.

  “Brandon will never let you get away with this,” she managed to choke out.

  “Brandon is going home to Chicago,” said Arielle. “You’re going to tell him you want him to leave. He is far better off without you, in any case.”

  That’s the one thing you’ve got right, the demoness realized.

  Arielle held up a fistful of Luciana’s vials.

  “I’ve got half a dozen more like this, stashed away,” said the blonde angel. “You know exactly what is in them. If you dare disobey me, I will hunt down everything that is dear to you and obliterate it from the face of the earth forever. Those Gatekeepers of yours, especially that big one. What is his name? Massimo?”

  Luciana closed her eyes and swallowed back a cry, refusing to give the angel the satisfaction of an answer.

  “And just think. If you ever did escape, wouldn’t it be terrible to worry that perhaps Brandon was at risk, too?” asked Arielle.

  “They say the line between angels and demons is a fine one,” said Luciana, finally turning her head to stare up at her tormentor. “You’re starting to sound exactly like Corbin.”

  “Now, now. There’s no need for name-calling. Since you’re going to be spending a long time with us here, you’ll have to learn to be more civil. Mezza stronza, mezza strega,” said Arielle as she loomed over the gasping demoness. She kicked her once, in the center of the gut, so hard that blood spilled out of Luciana’s mouth. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Brandon bore down on the gas pedal, veering along the curves of PCH as he raced back toward the retreat center. He cranked the stereo up. The entire car rattled with the pounding beat, the screaming guitar riffs from a heavy-metal radio station threatening to blast out the windows and his eardrums.

  No music was loud enough to drown out his memories.

  A babble of conversations with Jude flooded into Brandon’s mind.

  Now, he could not help but dwell. Not just dwell.

  Seethe.

  In the hours before Brandon had entered that alleyway, he had fought with Jude.

  “We need to go down there tonight,” Brandon had insisted.

  “Buddy, we’re off duty.”

  “We have a job to do,�
�� Brandon insisted. “I have a hunch about this.”

  “Suit yourself,” Jude said angrily. “I thought you were going over to play poker with the guys. I had other plans for tonight. But if you really want to go, then so be it.”

  Of course, they had gone. And Brandon had never gotten a chance to set things right with Jude. Had never gotten to tell him how much he had appreciated his friendship over the years. How much he missed the guy. Loved him, even.

  He had always regretted not telling him that.

  Jude Everett, the hero.

  Who had captured and arrested his shooter.

  Am I still supposed to feel grateful? What were your plans that night, Jude? Were you planning on banging her? Are you still a hero if you were sleeping with your dead partner’s wife all along?

  Jude’s grinning face floated in his mind’s eye.

  Brandon floored the gas pedal. The car shot forward.

  The rush of speed accelerated his anger. Fed his frustration. The next turn came a little too fast, a little too sharp. The car swerved out of control. He slammed on the brakes. The wheels spun out under him, sending the car rotating 360 degrees…720 degrees…how many revolutions it spun, he lost count…the palm trees and scrubby landscape and ocean blurred together into a dizzy splotch. The front bumper—or was it the rear?—bashed against the guardrail, sending the car flying across the road diagonally.

  And then it stopped.

  The radio was still playing something loud and thrashing.

  He shut it off, sat in silence.

  Mercifully, he had not crashed through the guardrail and ended up in the ocean.

  Thankfully, there were no other cars on the highway.

  No one else he could injure while he worked out his own horrific issues.

  He looked at the tattoos covering his arms, the multitude of designs and images interwoven as if they all fit together somehow. Right now, he didn’t want to think about any of it. Not about any of his past Assignees, not about any of the angels, not about the inked wingspan sprawling across his back. He wished he could crawl out of his own skin right now. And leave it all behind.

  Pull your shit together, he told himself. Because if you don’t, the rest of the Company is going to do it for you. And Arielle will be the first in line.