The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  Julian Ascher will pay, she thought. The Company of Angels will pay.

  Luciana would have vengeance on them all. Inside of her, a dark alchemy had transformed this longing into a substance so hard and so sharp, it might have cut diamond. Once she finished with her annual hunt, she would turn her mind to completing her revenge.

  At the thought of it, she smiled.

  The boat cruised out from under the bridge, back into the sunshine.

  Luciana tilted her face upward in the humid air, gazing at the palazzos lining the waterway in their elegant decay. The day was still new. The possibilities, endless. The winding streets of Venice teemed with people, already beginning their preparations for tonight’s festivities.

  “You’re looking better already, baronessa,” Massimo said, smiling back at her.

  “Thank you, Massimo. The city is a balm to my soul,” she said. “And the Redentore Festival always brings me such joy.”

  The fireworks display and homage to the Virgin Mary marked the height of every summer. Boats decked with garlands would crowd St. Mark’s Basin for the pyrotechnic spectacle. Restaurants and bars would overflow with drunken patrons. The canals would stream with locals and tourists alike, come to watch and to party.

  Venetians were masters of celebration. They had been honing the art of revelry for centuries. Looking up from their preparations, a boatful of shirtless men whistled as they watched her boat speed past.

  “Che bellissima!” one of them shouted. “Ciao, bella!”

  Ah, sì. The catcall. That was another thing Venetian men had mastered.

  Normally, she simply ignored such men. Had been doing so since adolescence, when her womanhood had begun to flower. This time, she gave them an enigmatic little smile and called back, “Te lo puoi sognare!”

  In your dreams…

  * * *

  Across an ocean, the full moon shone brightly on a night that was just beginning.

  Brandon Clarkson was deep undercover in the seediest area of downtown Detroit. A greasy sheen covered his body from not having showered in days, a stale feeling of exhaustion hung in his lungs. His ripped jeans and leather jacket, unwashed and overripe.

  To look at him, you would never guess he was what he was.

  A cop.

  Not one of the drug dealers he had been tracking for months.

  He slid into the dark alley, following the criminals he was on the verge of catching. He was close, so close. Knew they were here. Sensed their heartbeats nearby, could feel their breath mingling with the cool night breeze. The scent of them hanging in the air, alongside the smell of urine and garbage rotting in the darkness. The skitter of unseen vermin, animal and human, hidden in the shadows, surrounded him.

  Something in the pit of his gut called to him, a little voice whispering urgently that something wasn’t right here.

  There’s trouble…

  His brain overrode it, with a message that was loud and clear.

  You’ve been hunting these criminals for the past six months. This may be the only chance you’ll ever get.

  It was time to put these scumbags away. He knew their habits. Knew the sheer volume of their trade. Had seen a warehouse’s worth of heroin and cocaine pass through their hands, enough to keep the entire city of Detroit high for a week.

  He stepped forward, moving farther into the alley, holding his handgun at eye level, ready to shoot.

  Tonight’s the night, he told himself. This ends right here.

  He heard a noise behind him. A few quick footsteps striking on the pavement. A pop so loud he thought his eardrum might have erupted. And then his spine exploded. He felt a burst of pain that seared and radiated, like magma surging in his vertebrae, more intense than any pain he had felt in his life. A burst that could only be a bullet.

  He fell, the structure of his body ruptured, the sturdy architecture of flesh and bones shattered in a single instant.

  Heard the footsteps nearing.

  A pause.

  He was dying. He knew it. Sprawled on his side, he could almost feel the life seeping out of him through the hole blown in his back. He shoved his hand in his pocket. Pulled out the old silver pocket watch he had carried every day of his job, ran his fingers over the raised engraving of Saint Michael on the back.

  To the patron saint of cops and warriors, Brandon whispered a request for help.

  “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil…”

  He held the old watch against his heart, felt the wetness soaking his shirt. Realized it was because the bullet had blown clean through his body. He was bleeding out, left to die here on the filthy pavement of this alley.

  Heard the scrape of a shoe near his ear, so close now.

  A second explosion as another shot slammed into the back of Brandon’s skull.

  Death came instantly. But the last sliver of his human existence, less than a fraction of a breath, stretched into an eternity that seemed to encompass his entire life span.

  The last thing he saw through his human eyes was his watch, its second hand clicking its last tick.

  All of time seemed to hover in a single instant, packed into the space between those two black lines that demarcated one second from another.

  And in that second, the summary of his human experience poured forth in his mind.

  Every image he had ever experienced, all flooding into his memory in a simultaneous rush. Emerging out of his mother’s body, into the cold light of a hospital room…his infancy and childhood in a run-down suburb of Detroit…roughhousing with his brothers…front yards full of rusted-out cars and tall weeds…his high school sweetheart, Tammy…the police academy…his wedding…their first home…lovemaking in the afternoons…

  All rushing through him and past him, as if he were being sucked backward through a tunnel.

  And now, this.

  The moments of his death were literally the worst moments of his life. In them, he felt loss, sorrow, regret, fear. Swirling together like a black hole in the cosmos. Nothing that words could ever describe, the feeling was so much more intense than language, which failed utterly to scratch the surface of that experience.

  The experience of intense suffering.

  Enough for a lifetime, compacted into the last fleeting scrap of consciousness.

  What a shitty way to die, he thought.

  Those were the last words that ran through his human mind.

  He spiraled upward, flying out of his human body.

  Looking down, he saw his mortal form sprawled on the ground, bleeding out onto the dirty pavement in the dark of night. Over his now-lifeless body, the killer leaned.

  Brandon could only see the killer’s back as the man bent down to remove the object enclosed in the curled hand of the corpse. The final impression of Brandon’s human experience was one of absolute injustice. Not only had the killer taken Brandon’s life, but he had also stolen Brandon’s goddamned watch.

  Fortunately, Brandon no longer cared. Detached from his human body, he spun upward.

  Into light, he had been born. And now in death, he returned to light again. But not the light of the human world. Not a cold light this time, but reaching toward the warmest and most joyful light he had ever known.

  Reaching, reaching, upward, upward…

  To hang in the cosmos for a single, shining, glorious instant. An instant as long as eternity and shorter than the blink of an eye. But he knew he could not stay there forever.

  Not yet. There were things to be done.

  And then falling, plunging downward at a dizzying velocity, traveling faster than matter.

  Because he, Brandon, was constructed of pure light.

  He landed with a jolt, the light of his soul crashing back into his physical body.

  Lying in bed. Howling a keening cry of mourning for the life he had just lost.

  Just as he did every time he woke from this nightmare.

  Every sin
gle fucking night for the past ten years, he awoke shivering in terror.

  Thanking God that it was only a dream.

  Because the first time it happened, it hadn’t been a dream.

  That time, it had been real.

  Three o’clock in the morning.

  That’s what time his bedroom clock read.

  The clock that existed in real time. Not dream time.

  He shut his eyes against the memory of his death. Brought himself back to the here and now. Dragged in one long breath, and then another. Beneath him, he felt the damp of the sheets. Soaked through with sweat. The throb of adrenaline still coursing through his body.

  In the darkness of his room he lay, recounting the facts to himself.

  He, Brandon Clarkson, was no longer human.

  But he had been, once.

  It had been ten years since his human death. Why he revisited the scene of his own death every night, he wasn’t entirely sure. He would have taken it for a curse if he had not been reborn as something other.

  Angel.

  Immortal, but sent back in a human body. With all the same problems bound up with physical incarnation. Fatigue. Stress. Insomnia.

  Nightmares.

  Reaching for the lamp beside his bed, he switched on the light. Blinking a few times, he squinted in the brightness. He got up and wandered around his apartment. The sleek modern loft in a historic Art Nouveau building was a world away from the alley where he’d died. He stood at the window, looking down at the river thirty stories below, shimmering gold in the hot July night, downtown city lights aglow on the surface of the water.

  Not the Detroit River, but the Chicago River.

  Not Detroit, he reminded himself.

  Not Detroit, where he had been born. Where he had lived. Where he had died.

  I’m in Chicago. Where he now worked as a Guardian in the Company of Angels. Where he had been promoted to supervisor, overseeing his own unit, after his preliminary training in the Los Angeles unit.

  Chicago was a world away from his human existence. A lifetime away.

  In the kitchen, he stood in front of the fridge, reading the words of the decade-old newspaper clipping he kept hanging there. His human life, boiled down to three paragraphs, black ink on yellowing paper.

  Slain Officer Killed in Gang-Related Shooting

  28-year-old police officer Brandon Clarkson was fatally shot in Detroit’s downtown core on Saturday evening while investigating gang-related activities. Police say he died immediately from his wounds.

  A memorial ceremony was held at Campus Martius Park, during which Clarkson was posthumously promoted to detective. His partner, Officer Jude Everett, was also promoted for his “extraordinary bravery” after capturing the man accused of gunning down Clarkson.

  Clarkson had served seven years with the Detroit police force. He is survived by his parents, three brothers and his widow, Tammy.

  As he read the words for the three-thousandth time, the old darkness rose in him, bitter and familiar. Somewhere deep inside him, the feeling that he wasn’t entirely good. Not like most of the other members of the Company, whose pure-hearted goodness was beyond doubt.

  Death had made him angry in a way that he had never been in his human life.

  Brandon Clarkson had been born with an eerie sense of how he wanted to live. He had come into this world knowing exactly what he wanted to do.

  Serve and protect.

  He had lived fast. He had loved intensely. But if he had come into the world on a mission, he had left the world in service to that mission. He had been sent back as a Guardian, essentially to do the same thing he had always done. To chase down the most dangerous criminals on earth. To catch the most corrupt beings in existence, humans and demons alike. To protect those who could not protect themselves.

  Now, here he was a decade later.

  With one tiny problem.

  The nightmare.

  Of an endlessly recurring human death that made him feel like some character in a Greek myth. Like Sisyphus pushing the same rock up a hill, over and over. Or Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle every day. Destined to relive the same hellish fate time after time.

  “Let it go,” his superiors, the Archangels, had told him dozens of times.

  Somehow, he could not.

  Not everyone dies young, he thought, pacing around the apartment.

  He did what he always did when he caught himself trapped in his own self-pity. Struck a match and lit one of the candles on his coffee table. Arielle, his former supervisor, had told him, “Light a candle when you need help letting go of the resentment at having to leave your human life.”

  Three thousand eight hundred and ninety-four candles later, Brandon was still waiting for the night his pain and resentment tapered out into wisps of smoke. Burned away like those many cylinders of wax.

  On his dining-room table, his cell phone vibrated, jarring his attention away from the yellow flame. It was a message from Michael, the patron saint of cops and warriors himself. From the Archangel who was now his direct boss. The words he read on the phone’s screen made him frown.

  You have a new assignment. Return to your unit headquarters immediately. Assemble your unit and contact Arielle.

  Brandon pinched out the flame of the candle with his bare fingers. Then he headed out the door.

  Heaven had called.

  Chapter Two

  If humans knew the extent of the unseen elements at work in the world, it would probably drive most people bat-shit crazy.

  Behind the wheel of his self-modified Dodge Challenger, Brandon sped through the empty streets of downtown Chicago, blaring the stereo so loud he could feel the guitar riffs buzzing in his bone marrow. He made the fifteen-minute drive to his destination in ten.

  Punching his code into the electronic security system, he entered the mirrored-glass office tower. Took the elevator up to the forty-seventh floor. The office might have been just another upscale business—a law office or a consulting firm.

  Instead, it housed the city’s unit of the Company of Angels.

  He unlocked the massive glass front doors, slid them open, flipped on the lights. One by one, the other Guardians began to trickle in. Every seat around the circular boardroom table was filled, all thirty angels assembled. Brandon clicked on the plasma video screen to start the three-way conference call with Michael and Arielle, along with the thirty angels in the L.A. unit.

  “Guardians, a very serious situation has developed,” Michael said.

  The Archangel’s image appeared on one-third of the screen, his luminous wings spread behind him, iridescent and beautiful. But the wrinkles in his face were deep set with worry. The words he spoke brought a hush over the two units of Guardians present. All pairs of jeweled eyes watched, riveted to the screens as Michael continued.

  “Luciana Rossetti has escaped.”

  The name meant nothing to Brandon. One-third of the screen showed the L.A. unit, and on it, Arielle’s face registered the smallest twinge. A tiny flicker of annoyance passed over her habitually neutral expression. In the ramshackle legal-aid clinic that served as the L.A. unit headquarters, she sat at the head of her boardroom table, her posture ramrod straight, her blond hair as perfectly coiffed as ever.

  But she had definitely cringed. Brandon had seen it.

  “Luciana is a Rogue demon,” Michael said quietly. “As you all know, Rogue demons are not ordinarily at the top of the Company’s priorities. They rank in the middle of the demon hierarchy. However, Luciana Rossetti is in possession of an extremely dangerous poison. A poison that could cause serious harm to every one of us.”

  There was a long, horrified pause before the angels began murmuring to each other.

  Arielle spoke over them, her smile unnervingly calm. “With all due respect, I don’t understand why the Chicago unit needs to be involved in this assignment.”

  Behind her, the thirty angels of the L.A. unit nodded, settling back into quiet.
>
  Michael said, “Every city in the world has a unique unit of Guardians dedicated to protecting it. We all know that. But Brandon’s approach is different. We Archangels contacted Brandon because we thought the assignment could benefit from his particular approach.”

  No hand-holding. No babysitting. No New Age bullshit.

  The total opposite of Arielle and her crew.

  “The L.A. unit is totally capable of handling this assignment. Luciana Rossetti escaped on my watch,” Arielle said in that infuriatingly neutral tone of hers, which he had endured for three years under her supervision. “The L.A. unit has this covered.”

  “What’s your plan?” Brandon said tersely. “Are you going to hold a yoga class and hope the target shows up? Break out the acoustic guitar, start singing a round of ‘Kumbaya’ and pass a communal joint?”

  Behind Brandon, some of the angels in the Chicago unit snickered.

  “Stop,” ordered Michael. “I didn’t call you in to start an argument.”

  “Does Brandon even know who Luciana Rossetti is?” Arielle said to Michael. “He doesn’t even know who we’re talking about.”

  “Then we’ll show him,” said Michael.

  On the video screen, a full-color image of the demoness appeared, a grainy image, captured from afar. Whoever had snapped the picture had caught the target in a bad moment. Or perhaps she only had bad moments.

  Yet, she was undeniably beautiful. In the photo, she was suspended in midturn, tendrils of dark hair whipping in the wind around a face whose full lips and haughty, defined cheekbones could have graced the cover of Vogue Italia. But what caught Brandon, what made him literally stop and stare, was her glittering green eyes, so vibrant and snapping with life that they seemed to leap off the screen.

  A shiver ran through him.

  In both boardrooms, there was a pause and a hush as the angels looked at her picture. Behind Brandon, one of the male Guardians let out a low whistle.

  “Enough,” Brandon said, cutting off the inappropriate behavior by holding up his hand.