The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  Venice suffered from a devastating outbreak of the plague between 1575 and 1577, which killed more than one-third of the population. The Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, or Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, was erected as an offering to the divine and a plea for liberation from the deadly disease.

  On the third weekend in July, Venetians celebrate the Redentore Festival to commemorate the disappearance of the plague. A temporary bridge is erected on floating pontoons, leading from the main part of Venice to the Island of Giudecca, where the Redentore Church is located.

  Every year, as Julian Ascher explained, Luciana chose to kill a victim at this festival.

  Why she did that, Julian had not explained.

  There must be a reason.

  Brandon leafed through her file, looking for an answer. But if there was an answer, it didn’t lie within the folder he had received.

  He himself had faced difficult choices in life. However, at every turn, he had consistently made decisions driven by the desire to benefit humankind. Motivated by altruism. Geared toward forgiveness. Anything else lay beyond his realm of comprehension.

  “At their core, demons are just like us,” Arielle had insisted, back when she had been his supervisor. “They’re just passionate beings who have made a big mistake. They don’t recognize that their true nature is divine. It is our job to teach them that. To bring them back into the light.”

  Not all of them wanted to come into the light. Not all of them were ready. Looking at Luciana’s pictures, he was pretty sure this demoness was comfortable exactly as she was. Firmly ensconced in the dark, taking full advantage of all its powers and privileges.

  With the file in his lap, he shut his eyes for a brief moment.

  And he stepped into the too-familiar landscape of his usual nightmare.

  The same full moon illuminating the sky. The same cool evening breeze.

  The same smell of urine and rotting garbage, the same dark alley.

  And, yet, when he turned the corner to enter the alleyway, it wasn’t the place of his death that he entered. Instead, he walked into an empty space, devoid of anything, like an empty theater stage used in a minimalist production. No props, only a bare black wooden floor.

  Into this blank space, the demoness emerged out of the darkness.

  A wraith forming out of mist, she then solidified into a more concrete figure that seemed to Brandon utterly hypnotic. Out of thin air, her tall, slender body materialized with its impossibly lush curves. Skin so pale and so perfect he itched to reach his hand out and test the velvet texture of it beneath his fingertips, to hold the flawless curve of her cheek in his hand.

  From the grainy photos, she stepped into living flesh, incarnated so vividly that he had no doubt that she was real. In an instant, he forgot completely that he had ever felt disgust for her. Looking at her, the sole emotion rushing into his brain, flooding into every part of his body, was desire.

  God in heaven.

  “You’re not real,” he said, reaching for her. His fingers, roughened from his weekend mechanic tinkering, accustomed to the unforgiving motor parts of metal and rubber, caught on the silk of her dress. He reached out toward the fine porcelain of her skin to touch her face. Yet, he could not reach her. “You can’t be real.”

  So exotic. So beautiful. And, as she was in the photos, so incredibly unhappy.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing,” she said in a siren’s voice, honey-soft and lilting with a Mediterranean rhythm. The rich and heavy vowels called to him despite the clear disdain of her message. “If you know what’s best for you, you’ll turn back now.”

  She vanished.

  Left in the emptiness by himself, Brandon had no sense of space, no idea where to go. Intuitively, he knew that if he stepped forward, he would walk back into the unavoidable dreamspace of his human death. But he had no choice. There was nowhere else to go. So he walked forward, felt his body shift into another place, enclosed by brick walls, suffused with the too-familiar scent of urine and garbage. He turned the corner. Into the same alley.

  The first bullet exploded in the back of his spine.

  The second, into the back of his head.

  He awoke, as he always did. In a cold sweat, feeling incredibly sad that he had died.

  But there was something unusually disturbing about this dream.

  Even more distressing than his usual nightmare was the fact that the dream had changed.

  He had never seen that bare black space. Had never seen a woman in his dream.

  “Heated hand towel, sir?” The flight attendant’s normal, human voice jarred him fully into the waking world. He took the towel, wiped the sheen of sweat from his face.

  Reminded himself again where he was.

  Not in a filthy alleyway in Detroit.

  On a plane, flying over the Atlantic, toward Italy.

  To catch a demoness.

  To find a woman he had not even met, who had already begun to invade his dreams.

  * * *

  Luciana looked up from her worktable, jolted out of her reverie. Her mind reached for the memory of the man she had envisioned, but his image faded too quickly to grasp.

  A rumble, a disturbance blurred the air unlike anything she had ever felt before. She shivered.

  On the edge of the table, just beside her hand, lay a feather.

  She picked it up, examining it.

  Dark gray at the tip, fading to dirty white at the bottom of the shaft. An ordinary feather, the kind pigeons left all over the city. Due to the city’s recent measures to cull the population of winged rats, the flying nuisances infested Venice in fewer numbers than before. However, plenty of them remained.

  Where this particular feather had come from was a mystery to her.

  The window was closed, and the workroom remained sealed.

  How very curious, she thought. But no matter.

  Taking the feather between her thumb and forefinger, she tossed it in the garbage. Along with the vague feeling that it might be connected with the man in her dream.

  Who cares, she thought. How many thousands of men’s dreams had she invaded in the past? She did not even know. She was a virtuoso at this type of manipulation. An expert at navigating their desires. One more man would be as easy to discard as the rest of them.

  She went downstairs to find her head Gatekeeper.

  “Prepare the boat,” she told him. “It is time to begin the hunt.”

  As the boat cleaved its way up the Grand Canal and out into St. Mark’s Basin, the salt-tinged breeze off the Adriatic whipped through Luciana’s hair. She closed her eyes, and the image of that single feather floated in her mind’s eye again.

  “Just there,” she said to Massimo, pointing to a mooring post near the church.

  She stepped up to the fondamenta beside the canal, tilting her head to look up at the imposing marble facade of the church, at the monumental classical Roman pillars combined with the round lines of a Christian cathedral. People filed through the large open doors. Inside, hundreds of humans were gathering for the opening ceremony of the festival.

  Eyeing the crowd funneling into the church, she wished she could cull the whole lot of them. Just get rid of them, like the city had done with the pigeons. Instead, she would have to choose just one, a single victim. It should not be a problem. These witless humans never seemed to suspect what was coming for them.

  “Wait here for me,” she instructed Massimo. “This shouldn’t take long.”

  Chapter Three

  Brandon felt his lost humanity weighing on him as he entered the place he knew he would find her. Looking up at the marble facade of the Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, he scanned the huge white building, looked at the figures decorating it.

  Why here, of all the sacred places in Venice?

  Why not St. Mark’s, the massive basilica across the canal?

  Why not Carnival, the most famous of Venice’s festivals?

  The questions flickered in his mind as
he walked through the open doors and into the church. Inside, he slipped quietly into the back, blending into the congregation of humans come to pay homage to their God. Humans who brought their hopes, their fears, their dreams to this place of worship. His heart ached for them, for the suffering that humankind underwent.

  No, he himself was no longer human.

  The faint scent of incense drifted from the priest’s censer, chants in Latin drifting with it: et ideo cum Angelis et omnibus Sanctis gloriam tuam praedicamus… The vague meaning of the phrase echoed in his mind despite the foreignness of the words…. Something about saints and angels, and the glory of the divine.

  As he stood there in the church, images from his most recent dream drifted into his head. Images of her face, her body, her voice. And his body reacted, sensing her nearness. But he knew that he must fight against the failings, the desires, the weaknesses of the physical body.

  She is here.

  He heard the commotion when it began, the shouts of “Demonessa!” He saw the man drag his elderly mother out of the church. In the resulting scuffle, Brandon sneaked up the side of the congregation, moving toward the source of the conflict.

  And he became all too conscious of his human desires.

  He was still close enough to his lost humanity that he could not control the twitch of his cock in the moment he first saw her.

  Dark hair tumbled down her back in a loose fall of curls. Green eyes the color of pale emeralds, of new grass, of springtime. Skin so fair it was almost translucent, glowing in the fading daylight that spilled into the chapel. She smiled, shrugging a little in innocence, appeasing those around her.

  Brandon stood watching, transfixed.

  When the ceremony ended, the church emptied, the congregation filing down the long nave and out the massive doors.

  Luciana remained. She knelt in one of the side chapels, pretending to be praying, her head bowed in a graceful imitation of reverence, the last rays of sunlight swathing her lush body. If she was truly absorbed in prayer, she was issuing a request for help from the other side.

  Murderer. Poisoner. Thief. Whore.

  Too beautiful. Too evil. And entirely too easy to find.

  Beauty can be evil. He knew that much. But not beauty like this…

  Once this evening, she had already been named for what she was. By an old woman near the threshold between life and death, who everyone assumed was completely insane. That was the only other person in the building who saw the truth about Luciana. Who knew that she was not merely an innocent woman, not a pious beauty who had come to pay homage to the divine.

  He neared, ready to approach her. He reminded himself why he was here. What he had been sent here to do. To find her. To capture her. To take her back with him. Back to America. Back to the Company of Angels.

  Then he looked into those absinthe eyes of hers.

  And felt himself falling.

  The sensation reminded him of dying—not the painful part of passing over, but the feeling of elation. The bliss of rising up into a curtain of pure light, spiraling into a feeling of absolute peace. He had never experienced it while embodied in a physical form before. But here he was, in the midst of this church, with the crowd of festive Venetians and tourists still dispersing. He felt as though he might have been alone with her. He felt tremendous compassion for her, almost as if his heart were about to burst open. As if he could absorb all of her sorrows from that one glance.

  For she was full of suffering, although she bore it behind a veil of pride and a noble bearing. Yet, there it was, an unfathomable sadness that made him yearn to fold her in his arms and wrap her in pure joy.

  More sorrowful than the Pietà.

  Full of grace, more than a demon should ever be.

  And then she saw him, and her entire countenance changed.

  He had never known that the color of fury was green, but looking into those eyes, at that moment, he was sure of it.

  The hottest fires of hell must be green.

  It chilled him for a moment, the depth of what he saw in those eyes. The lightning-fast change of emotions flashing in those verdant depths, a chameleon change so quick that it seemed he was looking at a different woman entirely.

  Not an innocent and pious beauty.

  But a dangerous and malevolent killer.

  Which, in fact, she was.

  Around them, in the silence, rose an unspoken challenge, a whisper so loud it seemed to ricochet off the walls of the church, louder than the wings of the birds that circled overhead.

  Nothing is sacred. If you want me, come and get me.

  She stood, pivoted her tall, slender body in a graceful turn. The rose-colored silk of her dress fluttered behind her. He knew he had no choice but to follow. It was a compulsion that was partly born from his duty to the Company. Partly born from the importance of the mission on which he had been sent. And partly to do with raw desire.

  His silent words of prayer ascended to the dome of the church, to meet the last burst of sunlight pouring down through the apertures above.

  Give me the strength to accomplish what I need to do.

  * * *

  In the same instant, the thought that ran through Luciana’s mind mirrored Brandon’s prayer exactly.

  The demoness’s prayer, however, was headed in the opposite direction.

  Beneath the noise of the pigeons, angel and demoness circled each other, their steps striking on the marble floor. Pivoting in sync as if partners in a choreographed dance, the energy of their bodies was as palpable as a magnetic force. Opposite poles ruled by an invisible current, as highly charged as electricity.

  The message, one to the other, was a challenge issued as plainly as a slap in the face: game on.

  Physically, there was no question who would win.

  He was well over six feet tall and all hard, lean muscle. In the set of his body, she read the movements of a warrior.

  Yet size was not the primary concern when it came to her hunting skills. She had taken down bigger prey before. Brigadiers, marshals, generals, admirals. Career soldiers often had the most vulnerable spots, if you knew where to push. Oh, there was so much more at play than mere physical strength.

  Luciana was an expert at seduction. She had other weapons at her disposal, but temptation was her weapon of choice. Centuries ago, she had mastered the one rule that all great seductresses, from Mata Hari to Madame de Pompadour, from Marlene Dietrich to Madonna, all knew. To truly seduce a man, you can’t just grab him by the cazzo…the cock… You’ve got to get inside his head.

  The demoness scanned her opponent, assessing. The energy radiating from him was raw and full of exuberance, but it was young energy that pulsed in the space between them. But there was more than that.

  Power.

  That was what made her pause.

  Power emanated from him, like the subtle presence of pheromones, intangible but sure, rising almost as visibly as the early morning mists that hung above the lagoon. It was there, innate in his stride. Built into his stance. It had nothing to do with wealth or materiality, and everything to do with attitude. A man could be as poor as a dirt farmer, yet still have power if he was his own man.

  Yes, power.

  Wherever he came from, whoever had sent him, this man had it. But his power lay beyond mere physical strength. There was a keen intellect behind his tough facade, those gray eyes sharp with latent intelligence. But not with experience.

  In human years, he might have been in his late twenties.

  In the ways that counted, he was a mere infant.

  “Barely a decade past your human expiration date, I’d guess,” she said.

  She took a step sideways. Across from her, he mirrored the movement.

  Are you alone, or are there others? she wondered.

  She goaded him a little, prompting, “You’re what they sent after me? Disappointing. Where’s the rest of your Company of Assholes?”

  He didn’t react, pacing toward her. Didn’t n
eed to say anything—his face said it all. Do you really think I’d need help?

  “Are you mute on top of it?” She laughed. “How sad.”

  “I came to collect you, that’s all,” he said, a low growl, the intense focus of his gray eyes as cool and flat as the surface of a rainwater pool.

  “American!” she said, barely bothering to feign surprise. “You must be one of Arielle’s.”

  “I am American. But I don’t answer to Arielle,” he said.

  Ah, there it is, she thought. The edge to his equanimity, the tiny flint of an angry spark in the flatness of his rain-gray eyes. The trick was to feed that spark, to fan it into something that would burn.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of asylum?” she said, keeping her own voice as even as she could, although she could hear the tremor in it, a snag in its usual velvet. “You can’t arrest me in the house of God.”

  His answer was immediate and unflinching. “The doctrine of asylum arose in England, and it was never widely used in Italy. It certainly hasn’t applied to major crimes for centuries. Quit stalling. You can’t talk yourself out of this.”

  He took a step toward her, clearly expecting her to back away.

  Instead, she drew up and took a step toward him, holding herself straight, looking him straight in the eyes.

  “Perhaps I’ve come here to repent my sins,” she taunted. She licked her lips, looking him up and down. “If only I could find someone who would hear my prayer.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “How can you be so sure?” she whispered.

  She was so close she could see clouds gathering in his eyes. She imagined that she smelled rain in the middle of a summer so flawless that not a drop of precipitation had fallen in forty consecutive days. She felt the sensation of a coming storm so tangibly that she shivered.

  In the distance, thunder rumbled.

  He reached for her.

  What grazed her wrist wasn’t his fingers, but steel.

  The rounded edge of a handcuff.

  She snatched her hand away with a millisecond between herself and captivity.