The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  Strychnine, arsenic, cyanide…whatever earthly poison she threw at him, he could handle. He would recover from those things. But none of the angels knew for certain what her special concoction contained.

  It had killed a demon. That much, he knew.

  Brandon felt himself slipping, his mind fighting to keep control.

  He had to trust that in the end, there was a reason for everything. Knew that whatever happened to his physical incarnation, even if this particular body died again, well, he would be recycled.

  He forced himself to let go.

  Brandon was stuck in a haze.

  Am I dreaming? he wondered.

  There was no alleyway. No smell of squalor. No shock of bullets entering his body. Instead, a moment of confusion, caught between two worlds, conscious and unconscious.

  He faded into darkness. Dreamlessness.

  Heard her bend down and whisper, “Hush, now. Just let it take you.”

  Screw that, he thought. I’m not going anywhere.

  The small door behind them burst open.

  One of her Gatekeepers—Massimo, Brandon thought—stumbled through it. Near exhaustion, his face smudged with ash, his clothes singed. He choked out, “Baronessa. Ca’ Rossetti is on fire.”

  Her face, those glittering green eyes trained on Brandon with absolute hatred.

  She was out the door in a flash, not bothering to utter a single word to him.

  The look alone had conveyed everything.

  * * *

  Luciana ran out into the mezzanine, down the marble staircase, the quick series of taps that her high-heeled shoes made on the stairs as she ran down them, delicate and light.

  Inside the opera house, the first act was ending. Amid the shouts and the cheering, she and Massimo crossed the foyer.

  Out into the cool summer night. To the boat tethered not far from the entrance.

  He did not question her, but leaped into the boat behind her.

  Neither of them spoke as she drove, cleaving down the canals, veering around corners and finally, nearing her home.

  She felt the heat of it from fifty yards away as they approached. The roar of it, as if a dragon had come thundering up from the depths of the canal to scorch Ca’ Rossetti with its fury. But her own heart thundered much louder. She felt the weight of that organ dropping into her stomach, through the bottom of the boat, down into the dark waters of the canal.

  Ca’ Rossetti burned.

  * * *

  Violetta stepped into the box, knowing why she had come to La Fenice tonight—and it had nothing to do with the demoness.

  She had stayed on earth to accomplish this single thing before she went into the light.

  To love Massimo, and to be loved by him. Perhaps that had been part of her lesson here on earth, in the very short but very sweet time they had shared. But she knew that the more important reason for her stay, and maybe the whole reason she had died in the first place, had been for this.

  This single moment, so brief but so important.

  I may no longer have a body, but I have a voice.

  Looking at the angel on the floor, she bent down, and shouted into his ear with all the force of her classically trained lungs.

  “Wake up!”

  He didn’t move, so she shouted again. And again.

  Until she watched his eyes flicker open. Until she was sure he was moving back into consciousness, his hands fumbling for something in his pocket that wasn’t there, then pushing against the floor.

  And then she spiraled upward.

  Upward, departing through a rain of applause, the audience inside La Fenice clapping at the end of the opera, shouts of “Bravo!” creating a tunnel of sound around her. Pushing her, propelling her up.

  Into the light. Past the tiers of boxes and their glittering wall sconces. Past the gilt-and-crystal chandelier she had always loved so much. Past the winged angels frescoed on the sky-blue ceiling. She departed the world from the theater that she loved so well, the place that would forever hold a part of her soul.

  * * *

  How long Brandon had been lying there, he didn’t know.

  He awoke to the horrific sound of a ghost screaming in his ear.

  When his head finally began to clear and he sat up, she was gone.

  The demoness was nowhere to be seen.

  But she hadn’t killed him, after all. Hadn’t injected him with the special concoction that could have ended his existence on earth, could have taken away his immortality and wiped out his physical existence.

  What was in that syringe? Cyanide? Strychnine?

  He didn’t know. But where she had gone, he knew instantly.

  He rubbed the side of his neck. Checked his limbs. With an effort that would have rivaled any Herculean act, he climbed to his feet.

  And went to find her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Flames licked the night sky. Playing a dangerous game of tag with the buildings around Ca’ Rossetti, fire streamed out the windows of the palazzo, threatening to catch the walls and roofs of neighboring palaces. Thick smoke and the smell of burning hung in the still air. The sound of crackling sent a cold sweat down Luciana’s exposed back.

  She slipped to her knees, barely conscious of Massimo taking the wheel of the boat as she collapsed, clinging to the side of it. And then she was over the side of the boat, leaping onto the pavement.

  She ran into the house.

  The bottom floor had not yet begun to burn—the fire must have started upstairs. Perhaps there was still some way to stop it, she thought wildly.

  But how?

  Then she felt the heat billowing down the staircase, the flames still out of view but so hot it was like the inside of a wood oven. The palazzo was beyond saving, she knew. The only thing she could do was to take what she could carry and run.

  But what to take?

  Her mother’s jewelry lay broken and scattered on the floor of the bedroom upstairs. The Tiepolos and Tintorettos were huge canvases, too large for her to pry off the wall by herself and carry outside.

  And more precious than any single item of art or jewelry was the palace itself…the frescoes she had painstakingly and lovingly restored, the plasters and the stonework repaired by the teams of artisans she had brought in, the delicate applications of gilt on the front facade…

  There was no way to save it all…no way…

  She charged up the stairs, heedless of the heat. Like an inferno. Like the flames of hell.

  Every which way she turned, she did not know what to save, how to save anything.

  No single item could preserve the memory of her family’s lost legacy.

  Pushing open the door to her workroom, she saw the vials of poison she had so painstakingly created, lined up on the table. She grabbed a fistful of them.

  The flames came barreling their way down the hallway, roaring toward her.

  She no longer wanted to be a part of this world.

  It had beaten her. She sank to her knees, ashamed of herself. Ashamed that the only thing she thought to save when her ancestral home was burning was the most evil thing in it, apart from herself.

  That her first and only impulse was to grab the most important thing to her.

  Poison.

  With all the strength she had left in her, she crawled toward the fire.

  Let it take me.

  And then she was pulled by a force greater than anything earthly. Not the fire. Not the heat.

  But him.

  Through the flames he emerged, big and brash and fearless as ever.

  When she saw him, she knew beyond a doubt why he had been resurrected as a Guardian. The fact that he would risk himself for a woman who had just shot him full of cyanide and left him to suffer…. It made her want to weep, right there in the middle of the fire.

  “There’s only one way out,” he shouted over the roar of flames, his voice, roughened by smoke, ground in her ear. “You’ve got to come with me.”

  She knelt
there, paralyzed. What would happen if she simply gave herself over to him?

  Disaster.

  His fingers pried her hand open, forcing her to release the vials of poison she still clutched. And then arms were clamping around her, and a single word, an order. “Come!”

  He dragged her back toward the stairs, but they were blocked. No way to get down. The only way to go was up. And so they went. Up toward the roof. Dragging her, he pulled her through the house. Outside, to the air. Cool air that burned her lungs.

  On the rooftop, it was like standing on top of a bonfire, on the last log that was yet to be consumed by the flames. Beneath them, the building was going to collapse. He pulled her toward the edge of the roof.

  “Jump!” Brandon shouted over the noise of the fire beneath them.

  The roar was deafening. She thought of what she had seen in hell. The image of Harcourt flickered before her. Of the pile of dead girls. Of Carlotta.

  “Don’t just stand there! Jump!”

  In the end, it wasn’t her who made the decision. It was all him.

  Flinging himself off the roof, he pulled her through the air with him. He leaped from the top of the building just as it exploded into flames, the burning heat shooting up into the night sky behind them.

  They fell in a graceful arc that seemed to last forever. She wished it would, the two of them plummeting downward amid a gray rain. Not feathers this time, but the ashes of her home littering the night sky.

  * * *

  He knew the moment he lost her. Not in body, but in soul.

  It was the moment he jumped off the rooftop, pulling her with him.

  You can’t force someone to take a leap of faith.

  But he did, grabbing her in his arms and flinging them both into the dark space over the canal, half expecting them to land in a dreamscape.

  Instead, they landed in the real world, in the murky water of the Grand Canal.

  * * *

  Down, down they plunged.

  So far down, so cold, so dark that she thought she might as well stay here instead, beneath the water. Waiting for the dragon she might call up from its depths to drag them away, to join the corpses of so many victims she had dumped here over the years. Or to meet the devil’s ferryman, who might arrive in his black funerary gondola to row their bodies away to the underworld.

  Whoever came for them, their final destination would remain the same.

  But Brandon would not relent. There was something so unbreakable about this man. He pulled her up, upward, until the air singed her lungs and once again ignited in her somewhere deep down the will to exist.

  But that existence was not without pain.

  When she screamed, nothing came out of her but a thin wail. So whisper-fragile that it was as if her voice, her very soul, had been sucked into the flames along with her home.

  Vaguely, she heard Brandon’s voice above her, comforting, rationalizing.

  Whatever he said didn’t even register.

  Centuries of history. History for which she had fought. The last remnants of a family legacy she had struggled to preserve. Gone. Burned to ashes.

  She screamed again, wordless rage drowned by the frenzied human activity around the building, the Venetian firemen already rushing to the scene with their hoses, pumping water from the canal onto the burning building.

  And them.

  The goddamned Company of Angels.

  Standing up on the rooftops around Ca’ Rossetti. Watching it burn.

  In the late evening, lit by the flames that consumed her ancestral home, stood a line of half a dozen figures dotting the neighboring rooftops. She recognized most of them, but her attention swung like the scope of a rifle, fixing on two figures in particular, two Company supervisors she had not expected to see here tonight.

  Arielle, the bitch who had thwarted her plans in America, supervisor of the L.A. unit.

  Infusino, her old nemesis, supervisor of the Venetian unit.

  Brandon hauled her out of the water, into a boat that someone had pulled up beside them. Covered her with a blanket, rubbing the canal water out of her despite the fact that her most pressing need at this moment was far from dryness.

  It was revenge.

  * * *

  The flames of hell were green. Brandon was sure of it when he looked into her eyes.

  When they had gotten far enough away from the building that the fire was no longer visible, she turned toward him.

  “Angels,” she hissed, spitting the word out. An accusation, a swear, a profanity. “You fight dirtier than any demons I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m not sure who set your palazzo on fire,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t anything I had planned, nor was I involved.”

  As they navigated down the Grand Canal, they saw another figure, amber eyes glowing in the dark. Corbin Ranulfson smirked down at them from the balcony of one of the grand hotels.

  “This is not our doing,” he said. “You saw yourself. It could very possibly have been Corbin.”

  “Even if it was, he would never have done this if you hadn’t appeared in the goddamned Redentore Church, you wingless sewer rat. If you had never come here, I would have completed my sacrifice for the year. I would be relaxing on my rooftop, enjoying a cocktail and my victory over your wretched kind.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But you might be in a worse situation.”

  “Worse,” she said, her voice flat. He knew what she meant. In her estimation, there was nothing worse than being captured by the Company of Angels. A moment later, she said, “Where are you taking me?”

  “Back to the States,” he answered.

  Back to America.

  * * *

  Luciana turned away, completely wrung out. Not an ounce of strength remained in her to run away. Not an iota of energy to resist capture. As Brandon steered the boat through the flat lagoon in the dark of night, the only thing she could do was glare at him in the darkness.

  If hate was tangible, she could feel it now, pulsing inside her.

  Huddled against the seat, she clung to that hate. Would never let go of it. The possibility of relenting, once so close, seemed completely impossible now. She had almost done so, and it had quite literally backfired.

  At least there was one consolation. In America, there would be plenty of time to get revenge.

  Brandon would pay.

  Julian would pay.

  The entire Company of Angels would pay.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Brandon drove Luciana’s boat through the dark lagoon, toward the airport.

  In the back of the boat, Luciana huddled in the silver-foil emergency blanket he had pulled out of the vessel’s first-aid kit. Beneath the blanket, her ruined silk dress clung to her magnificent body. Her dark hair streamed with water from the canal. She turned her face to stare at the flat sea, making no effort to escape, but refusing to look at him.

  He had finally captured her.

  Yet, he felt no satisfaction. Instead, an odd feeling of loss gnawed inside him.

  He pulled up to the dock at the Marco Polo Airport, removed her from the boat. And when he walked the demoness toward the Company plane that waited on a strip of runway, she made no attempt to resist, clutching the square of foil around her like a child huddling under a security blanket.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, guiding her up the retractable stairs to the small plane.

  She didn’t answer. And her silence was deeply disturbing.

  He expected a curse. A wordless accusation. A glare at the very least. Some form of resistance, not this blank acquiescence. Not this crumpling of her spirit that seemed at once fitting, yet unnerving. Instead, there was nothing. Just a flat expression, more frightening than the shrillest scream or the angriest evil eye. When her gaze passed over him, there was a look of absolute emptiness in her green eyes.

  They boarded the small private plane. Infusino and Arielle were already seated there, along with a few members of the Venetian unit a
s backup. Brandon took her to a seat and buckled her in. Still, she betrayed no sign of reaction, made no effort to resist.

  The plane taxied down the runway, and her gaze fixed on the dark window. Her face was blank, whiter and paler than he had ever seen it.

  Across the plane, Arielle leaned over to whisper something to Infusino, covering her mouth with her hand. Beneath the noise of the plane’s engine, he caught the name of Luciana’s home in that covert whisper.

  “…Ca’ Rossetti…”

  The demoness heard it, too.

  In one smooth motion, Luciana flipped open the buckle of her seat belt, lunged forward and leaped out of her seat. Brandon grabbed for her, and caught her just in time. But she came so close to raking Arielle across the face that her manicured fingernails grazed the edge of Arielle’s meticulous hair, swiping a fraction of an inch away from the angel’s unflinching face.

  Arielle didn’t even blink. She simply said two words as Brandon pinned the demoness back down in her seat. “Restrain her.”

  He wrestled Luciana into compliance, handcuffing each of her wrists to the arms of her seat. Then he left her staring out the window, down at the lights of Venice as they faded into the distance below. Finally, he sank into a seat across from Arielle, buckling his own seat belt.

  “You should have secured her the minute you brought her onto this plane,” Arielle noted.

  “Enough,” he said, closing his eyes and shutting her out.

  Exhaustion took hold of him. His aching body shifted, seeking what comfort it could in the rigid confines of the seat.

  “I don’t mean to criticize. Of course you deserve to relax for the moment,” said Arielle, reaching over to pat his arm. “She’s in good hands now. Once we get her back to Los Angeles, we’ll take her to the new retreat center we’ve just acquired. You’re going to love our new facility.”

  Los Angeles… Retreat center…

  His eyes snapped back open.

  Arielle was smiling contentedly, clearly pleased with herself. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re expanding into a new compound.”