“Ordinary poison can harm an immortal body temporarily. But it is not enough to kill an angel or a demon, as you know. However, the poison I created proved effective on a low-ranking demon,” she said. “A bellboy working for Corbin Ranulfson in Vegas.”
“So what is the problem?” Massimo asked.
“Corbin stole the last dose of my last concoction,” she said. “We must make more. To do that, I’ll need your help.”
She held one of the vipers just behind its jaws, grasping its head in her gloved hand as she held it over a venom-collecting receptacle. It bit into the plastic-covered glass funnel, the venom squirting down into the jar below.
“This must be done with a very delicate touch, Massimo. The utmost care must be taken not to damage or traumatize the animals during this process,” she explained. “A good craftsperson always takes proper care of one’s materials.”
“Why do we even need these ingredients if we have the essence of death collected from the girl?” he asked.
“We need to build a poison that will kill not only the spiritual, but the physical body. We could use any poison as a base, but I like to combine several different ingredients. Snake venom, cyanide and botulinum, for instance, make quite a nice combination. Along with those toxins, we use the essence contained in the human blood.”
She put the viper back into its habitat. She withdrew another snake and handed it to the Gatekeeper. “Now you try it.” As he performed the same movement, she nodded. “That’s it exactly. It’s time you learned these techniques. There must be someone who can carry on these ways.”
Just in case I’m captured, she thought.
“Poison may seem like an antiquated way to end a life,” she explained, “but poison means power. There are demons who are capable of ending a human life just by snapping their fingers. However, we lower demons must find our own ways to amass power. Creating a poison that can end the lives of immortals has given us a distinct advantage. But we need more of it. If we can make large quantities of it, we can create a commodity that will be extremely difficult—perhaps impossible—to trace. There are rules in the interactions between angels and demons.”
“Rules that cannot be broken,” Massimo said wearily. He had heard it a thousand times.
“But they can be bent. Angels and demons are not allowed to kill each other. That is the first and most important rule. Everyone knows that. If that rule is broken, then the balance between heaven and hell will be disrupted, and all-out war will be waged on the earth. Humans will be caught in the middle. But if the angels can’t track who’s responsible for the killings, there’s no accountability, no one certain to blame. Poison may be our way around the rules. We will be able to bargain with the rest of the demon hierarchy. We will have a commodity that could affect every immortal in existence. Every creature in existence.”
“Yes, baronessa,” said Massimo.
“If we can control the demon hierarchy, then the world is ours. We won’t even have to worry about killing the angels ourselves. And no one will ever be able to hurt us again.”
That was the goal. To insulate herself and her Gatekeepers from pain.
The window was shut, and even though it was unbearably hot outside, the modernization of Ca’ Rossetti meant that the air-conditioning inside kept everyone cool.
Luciana looked up from her work, rubbing the back of her hand against her forehead.
Feathers.
Pigeon feathers. Not just a single feather this time, but several of them. They sat on the corner of the workbench. She dropped her arm, and the change in the air blew them off the table’s edge, where they drifted onto the floor.
“You didn’t open the window this morning, Massimo.”
“No, baronessa.”
His eye caught the feathers, and he frowned, puzzled. “Where did those come from?”
The angel was watching them.
From where exactly, she could not say. And how he had found her, she did not know.
But he was close.
She got up and went to the window, peering across the canal. In the darkness, the Grand Canal looked the same as it had every night for the past two centuries. Yes, it had shifted slowly over time. The boats had become equipped with motors and fashion had changed. The old Venetians had slowly died out, and the place had become flooded with tourists. Other than that, the same buildings had stood for centuries, sliding slowly into decay.
Except that in one of them, an angel sat watching her.
The most likely location was slightly to the right.
“Come here, Massimo, and tell me if I’m imagining things,” she said, pointing to the only abandoned building within view. “Is it me, or is there movement in that house?”
For the past fifty years, it had been boarded up, left to rot slowly because of the impoverished state of the family who owned it, who could not afford its upkeep.
Massimo didn’t respond, but Brandon was in there. She could feel him.
In the space of their short time together last night, some strange connection had been forged between them. A connection that she neither welcomed, nor would she tolerate.
She would have to find some way to break it.
“Massimo, take off your gloves and go downstairs at once. Make sure all of the doors are securely locked, and the outside gates, as well. Alert the other Gatekeepers. We are under surveillance.”
“But there’s just one man, isn’t that right, baronessa?”
“Just one angel,” she corrected. “And a very dangerous one.”
Luciana sat looking at the light that spilled over the canal. A lone gondolier rowed in the dark of night, singing of the moon and of lost love.
* * *
On the other side of the canal, Brandon sat at the window, listening to the melancholy sound of the singing boatman.
Die my human death again, or be seduced by Luciana in my dreams.
The choice wasn’t even his. But, God, if he had to pick between them, he didn’t know which was worse. He lay on the hard concrete in the abandoned building, waiting for one of them.
Come, sleep. Come, dreams. Come, darkness.
He closed his eyes.
At the sound of female laughter, his eyes popped open again. The laughter was so low, so velvet that he thought simultaneously of vintage Chianti and very rich chocolate.
He was no longer lying on the hard floor of the abandoned house.
Now he was standing in the entrance to the same dark alleyway.
He saw the flicker of rose-colored silk. He followed.
He dug in his pocket for his watch and felt its familiar smoothness.
I’m dreaming.
Looking up, he saw the black letters stenciled on aging stone: Rio Tera dei Assassini. What he was doing here, he didn’t know. All he knew was that he had to follow.
Through the door of the glass gallery. In the back of the shop, up the stairs.
The vast room sat empty. The chandeliers blazed now, illuminating the night.
A woman with dark hair curling down her back. The pale, perfect skin of that back completely unmarred, not a single scratch or scar on her. No blood, no glass.
Her hand outstretched behind her, motioned for him to follow.
Into a magnificent room with velvet furniture. The sound of the door closing behind him.
When he reached for his gun, it was gone. The shoulder holster where he normally carried it, empty. No matter. She was not the kind of enemy you could kill by shooting.
Luciana turned, resplendent. With a single motion, she shed her dress. It dropped to the ground, pooling at her feet. Beneath it, she wore merely a black lace bra and a garter belt attached to thigh-high stockings. It was not the clothing he noticed, so much as what it barely concealed. Or rather, what it failed to conceal.
Her body. Her impossibly long legs, slender and strong. The appealing, subtle curve of her belly. Her high, full breasts, dark nipples just visible through the fabric of her bra in the d
im lamp-lit room.
Decadent. Sinful. And so, so right.
But it was her face that took his breath away. Those plump lips of hers that seemed to invite him to picture them wrapped around his cock. Her evergreen eyes, her glossy hair tumbling around her in a permanently just-been-laid way that women usually paid ungodly amounts to achieve.
“You went digging into my past,” she said. “And you found your way here.”
“It was the only lead I had,” he said gruffly, feeling like he was apologizing.
“It’s your dream. Your fantasy. You wanted to see me like this, didn’t you?” she taunted, fingering a silk ribbon on her garter belt. “Isn’t this what you went searching for? This is what you wanted to find.”
“I’m not after your body,” he said. “I’m only here for one reason. To collect you on behalf of the Company.”
“So you keep insisting. But that won’t fly. Not here, in your dreams. You’re tempted, aren’t you? And there’s only one way you’re going to scratch that itch. You know what Oscar Wilde said, don’t you? The best way to beat temptation is to succumb to it.” She laughed. Then she cooed, “Besides, it’s just a dream. That’s all it is.”
Was it? His mind reached for the truth, unable to grasp it. He reached for the watch in his pocket and touched it again, just to make sure of what he already knew.
I am dreaming.
“La Lucciola,” he said. “They said that was your nickname.”
She laughed. “I should slap you for calling me that. Do you know what it means? It’s the word for ‘firefly.’ Italians use it to refer to a common whore. Because streetwalkers light up the night, just like those small, bright insects.”
“They told me…” He swallowed. “Carlotta told me—”
“So you met her. You believed what that old prostitute told you?” She laughed. “You angels are a gullible sort. And so horny, all of you. When was the last time you had sex? Real sex, I mean.” She ran her finger down the curve of her breast, drawing his eye there.
He swallowed and saw her watch the movement.
She pulled him toward the bed. “Come with me.”
“Your body is sacred,” he said, shaking his head. “You need to treat it as such. I’m not one of your customers.”
“My body hasn’t been sacred for two hundred and twenty years. It may be a physical body, but it isn’t human.”
“It’s still part of the divine,” he said. He knew there was nothing wrong with sex. On the contrary. But sex without spiritual connection, even a fleeting one…
Even in his dreams, he knew better than to go there.
“It’s just a dream. That’s all it is,” she cooed. “If you want a connection, I can give you that. Let me teach you some words in Italian. To speak my language, you must make your mouth very sweet. Watch me,” she said, as if he could tear his eyes away from the movement of her lips, the suggestive and subtle flick of her tongue as she skimmed the tip of it across her upper lip, taunting. “Ti amo. That means I love you. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Don’t invoke the concept of love. You don’t even know me,” he growled.
But in his pants, his cock stirred, rising to harden.
“Perhaps not. But I know that,” she said, addressing his erection. “And it is just like every other of its kind on the planet, angel or otherwise.”
His mind was scrambled in a thousand different directions, trying to decipher what was allowed and what was not. What he could and could not do.
“What is it you really want? Don’t be afraid of your desires. It’s just a dream.”
Draping herself along a velvet chaise longue in deep burgundy, she reclined, allowing her legs to part. Fingered the edge of the bra, allowing her nipple to peek out its lace edge. She reached for his hand, drawing it to her breast, his fingers and hers coaxing the heavy globe out of the fabric. The nipple hardened beneath his touch. He flicked it with his thumb, teasing.
“That’s right. Give in to your desires. You’ve been pent up for so long. I know you have.”
No one could have told her that, but it was a good guess.
The right guess, he thought.
Unable to resist her, he sank to the floor before her, his knees cushioned by the thick carpet. Between her spread legs he bent, running his hands up her pale thighs. Inhaled the scent of her, musky and dark, calling to him. He kissed the inside of her thigh, brushed his lips against the soft skin there, and heard her moan in response. She touched his head, running her fingertips over the coarse stubble on his face while he explored the smooth skin of her inner thigh.
He felt her fingers skim over his broad, muscled back.
“Il mio angelo,” she whispered. He felt her fingers brush over the tattoo of the angel, tracing over the dark gray lines, the pattern of the wings on his back as he touched her sex through the silk of her panties. Her fingers sprawled over the sinews of his back as she undulated, his arms hooked around her legs, holding her thighs open.
Gently licked with his tongue, opening her to him ever so gently.
There was something so exquisitely tender about this demoness, something he had never experienced with another woman.
He felt her tense.
“Relax. Stop thinking and just feel,” he ordered.
“You were right,” she said, sitting up a fraction. “We can’t do this. We should stop.”
This isn’t part of my fantasy, his brain argued.
He raised his head for an instant, registering the genuine shock in those green eyes of hers.
“Why now, principessa?” he said, drunk on the taste of her.
She pulled her legs closed, swept up her discarded dress from the floor. She stood and looked down at him as he knelt there still, her fiery green eyes blazing. “You must leave.”
Go, his gut screamed. Otherwise, she’s going to kill you.
He stood, bewildered, and turned to leave.
Opening the door, he passed through the doorway.
His body braced for the shock of stepping, for the three-thousandth time, into the familiar scene of his nightmare. For the familiar scent of urine and garbage, the alleyway. For the intense pain of the gunshots fired into his back, his neck.
But none of it came.
Instead, he came slamming back into consciousness, into darkness, with his heart pounding as if it would explode inside his chest. On the hard concrete of a floor that somehow felt more real, the odor of the room and of his own sweat, somehow more intense than the sensations of the dreamworld.
And yet, he had not died in his dream.
Orienting himself, he checked his pocket.
No watch.
Not Detroit. Not Chicago.
Venice.
Not the brothel, but lying on the dirty floor of a condemned palazzo.
In the dark, he stilled, listening to the shift and creak of the old building, to the sound of a slow leak somewhere in the back rooms. Water dripped, drop by single drop. And every drop that fell pulled him further back to the reality of waking. He lay wondering if the weary edifice might possibly succumb to the pressure of its thousand years. Might suddenly collapse on top of him, burying him beneath the rubble of decaying brick and unwritten history.
He lay waiting for a break in the craziest assignment he’d ever been dealt.
Whether he was awake or dreaming, he hardly knew.
Reality and dream had become equally unfathomable.
* * *
Across the canal, the demoness lay in her bed, on her silk sheets.
Staring up at the splay of light shifting across the ceiling, wondering how the hell the angel had brought her so perilously close to the edge of letting go.
I’m supposed to be the one seducing him, she thought. I’m supposed to be the one in control.
And yet there, in his dream, he had made her completely forget herself for a moment.
She got up and paced around the room. Went to the window to peer out into the darkness
, toward where he lay.
Nothing like this had ever happened before. She had never lost control.
But this time, it had seemed so real.
The dream had not been entirely good. There were things she would rather forget, things she had buried centuries ago that she had hoped would never resurface.
Luciana, La Lucciola.
She had not thought about such things for a very long time.
But still, there had been the beauty of him, the nearness of him, the realness of him. She put a finger to her lips, still able to feel the pressure of his mouth against hers, breath to breath.
She returned to her bed and wept tears that slid onto the sheets and stained the silk, marks that convinced her that she was in the physical world.
He was still here, in Venice, a stone’s throw away across the canal.
But he might as well have been living in another century or another universe. Her world, although on earth, would always be partly sunk in hell. She closed her eyes and fell into the dark void of dreamless sleep, hoping that she would find some respite from the painful reality of waking existence.
* * *
In the past few weeks, Corbin Ranulfson had suffered the most intolerable humiliation of his existence.
On earth, he had lost his newest hotel to traitor demon-turned-angel Julian Ascher.
In hell, Corbin had been demoted and stripped of his power to dematerialize.
But he was determined to show the demon world that he would not be forgotten.
He had come to Venice in a massive yacht, which he anchored in the Venetian Lagoon, ignoring the human regulations forbidding it. From there, in the shallow waters of the Adriatic, he could view the comings and goings of the city.
He ordered Carlotta to make an appearance. When the courtesan arrived in his stateroom, she curtsied graciously. And he thought, Luciana ought to take lessons.
“What can I do for you, your lordship?” she stuttered.
Corbin grabbed her by the front of her elegantly tailored suit and said, “Very pretty. But let’s dispense with the formalities, shall we? Now why is a whore like you cooperating with the Company of Angels? Why did you feel you needed to take that angel to Luciana’s?”
The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels) Page 10
