The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  Go back to Chicago. Stay in L.A. It hardly mattered. All the things he had counseled Luciana to do—forgive—he would have to figure that process out for himself.

  How he was going to do that, he had no idea.

  But he was going to have to start somewhere.

  He turned on the ignition again, and headed back toward the Center.

  Arielle came out to look at the car, her mouth pressed into a thin line when he pulled into the driveway. The early morning sunlight glinted off her perfect hair as she eyed the large dent in the rear bumper, shaking her head with disapproval.

  “When I let you borrow that car, I trusted you would drive it responsibly,” she said.

  “Now is not the time,” he growled.

  “Come into my new office and we’ll discuss this like rational beings,” she said, crossing her arms. “If you’re dealing with something, perhaps I can help you.”

  I seriously doubt that, he thought. But he went anyway, too tired to resist.

  “I’m afraid you’re becoming exhausted, Brandon. I think it would be best if you went back to Chicago. As much as I appreciate having you here, I’m sure your own unit needs you more.”

  He stopped listening as she enumerated a number of other concerns she had about him. His head began to ache.

  “I need to clear my head before I make any decisions,” was all he said.

  He stood up to go. Arielle bent over her desk, attending to her endless pile of paperwork.

  But as he was about to leave her office, he spotted something in Arielle’s garbage can.

  A little glass vial.

  Plain, innocuous.

  Empty.

  Exactly like the ones Luciana used.

  Is she okay? he wondered frantically.

  If she is, I’ve got to get out now and take her with me, he told himself. But how?

  Without saying a word to Arielle, he slipped out of the hallway and walked briskly to the surveillance room. Where the video monitors showed Luciana in her room, lying on the bed. She lay there, still and bleeding.

  Is she dead?

  The tips of her fingers began to curl, and she reached to wipe a little blood off her mouth.

  Still alive. She survived whatever Arielle did to her while I was gone.

  The Guardian on watch duty turned around. “May I help you?”

  Brandon just smiled, his eyes flickering away from the monitors. “Just checking things out,” he said, hoping he sounded as banal as he intended. “Pretty impressive setup.”

  Julian was the first person he ran into as he stepped out of the surveillance room. Brandon tried to blow by him, fully focused on getting to Luciana. But Julian caught him by the arm.

  “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  Brandon dragged him into a corner and told him in a hushed voice, “I have no time to explain. I think Arielle has gone crazy. I saw something in her office. I can’t tell you everything now. But man-to-man, Luciana’s in danger.”

  Julian did not seem surprised. But he said, “Arielle is my supervisor. Technically, she’s also my Guardian.”

  “You ignored her for over two hundred years. What’s another half hour? I swear, that’s all it will take. Help me. For Luciana’s sake. She needs our help,” said Brandon. “Now.

  Julian paused, frowning. “All right. But Arielle will crucify me if she ever finds out.”

  “No, she won’t. Because you’re footing the bill for this place. Now think. How can I get Luciana out of here?”

  “As you saw yourself, Arielle has this place surrounded by an energy field, like a giant fence. If you try to break Luciana out of that wall, her head will all but explode.”

  “So is there any way out?”

  “You can’t break her out by going through the fence. But theoretically you can go over it. Way over it. My helicopter is parked on the launchpad outside. Take Luciana. I’ll distract Arielle for as long as I possibly can.”

  “I’ve never flown a helicopter,” Brandon said.

  “You don’t have to fly it for long. Just get over the fence and far enough so that you have enough time to get away. Then ditch the helicopter and find a car.”

  He rattled off a list of instructions, and Brandon tried to commit the details to memory.

  “Press the red starter button on the left-hand side, master avionics switch on, fuel valve master on, roll on the throttle to power the engine…”

  Brandon blinked, trying to absorb it all.

  “Just remember, too much throttle and the helicopter will get too much liftoff.”

  “What would happen?” Brandon asked.

  Julian grinned, giving him a hearty pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. That’s the beauty of being immortal.”

  Whatever, thought Brandon. I just hope this works.

  * * *

  Luciana was still lying on the bed, feeling nauseous when the series of electronic beeps sounded again. She thought, God, who is it this time?

  Brandon rushed in, yanked her up by the arm. “Come on. I’m getting you out of here.”

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked, not moving.

  “Now is not the time to ask questions,” he barked. “We don’t have time. It’s your choice. You can either come with me, or you can stay here with Arielle. But you’ve got to trust me.”

  In her gut, something flickered, a tiny flame of hope. She leaped off the bed.

  He twisted her arms behind her back, secured her wrists together with a plastic tie.

  The little flame of hope flickered, dimming inside her. She resisted, trying to twist away. “Not this again!”

  “I told you,” he said. “You’ve got to trust me.”

  He led her out into the hallway, where a few Guardians strolled, going about their assigned tasks. He marched straight ahead, head up, not bothering to hide from any of them. One of the angels stopped him at the end of the hall, just before a set of locked doors.

  “Where are you taking the detainee? Do you have clearance to move her?”

  “Arielle asked to see her,” he said. “In the main office.”

  The angel nodded and buzzed them through the door.

  “You’re crazy,” she muttered. “She’s going to flay us alive if she catches us.”

  “Be quiet. Keep walking.”

  He marched her down the staircase, out the back exit.

  To a helicopter that was parked on the round slab of concrete. He opened the door and shoved her in, strapping her into the passenger seat. When he took the pilot’s seat, he started muttering to himself, flipping a number of different switches. In an alarmingly random fashion.

  “Have you ever flown one of these before?” she asked, her heart faltering a beat.

  “No, but what’s the worst that can happen?” he grinned.

  He eased a lever forward, powered the helicopter on.

  The rotor blades began to rotate, the noise drowning out any possibility for debate.

  Arielle came running out of the main building, waving her arms at them. Brandon saw her, but did not stop. He pulled up on the control stick. The helicopter jerked off the ground, lifting off in a crazy circle like a broken midway ride. Arielle ducked, running back toward the building for cover.

  For a moment, Luciana felt certain they were going to crash.

  Better to go down fighting, she thought, holding her mouth shut.

  Sweat dripped down Brandon’s face as he gripped the control stick, struggling to get the helicopter stabilized. His gray eyes pored over the instruments with intense concentration, flicking switches as he tried to figure out the complex machine. The look on his face was one of sheer determination. Why and how he had deemed her worthy of such an effort and such an immense risk, Luciana didn’t quite know.

  Finally, they swung up and over the wide lawn, pulling smoothly into the air and away.

  On the ground below them, Arielle looked up, shielding her eyes from the bright morning sun with her hand, her meti
culously styled blond hair blown terribly out of place, whipped by the draft of the helicopter as they flew away.

  * * *

  “Let them run,” Arielle said calmly to the Guardians who gathered around her, watching the helicopter make its wobbly escape. “There’s no point in tracking them. I already know exactly where they’ll both end up.”

  * * *

  “Zuccolo,” Luciana muttered, clenching her jaw as she sat immobile in her seat. “You are completely crazy.”

  He landed in a field with a bump, breaking one of the landing skids on the bottom of the helicopter so that they ended up lopsided.

  But still intact.

  In the stillness, he began laughing. Out of shock, she thought.

  Her hands were still bound behind her back. “Let me out. Now.”

  He obliged, muttering about needing a car. She jumped out of the broken helicopter and collapsed on the ground, inhaling deeply. After a few moments of recovery, she got up. And headed toward the highway.

  “Stay here,” she told him. “I’ll take care of the car.”

  “Wait, Luciana. We can’t steal—”

  He was shouting something, but she ignored him.

  A moment later, she returned in a little black BMW Roadster.

  “Get in. Don’t ask how I got it. Nobody was hurt. I don’t want any more discussion, not after you almost crashed us back into the afterlife. And this time, I’m driving.”

  Without a word, he folded his big body into the passenger seat and she took off, heading north. Away from L.A., where Arielle would have the city crawling with her own people, every Guardian within her control likely on high alert.

  “If Arielle catches us, it will be worse than death, just so you know,” she said, gripping the steering wheel. “She’s probably planning to waterboard me in her new meditation pond. And she’ll scrape off your hide and fly it on the flagpole in front of her center as a warning to the others.”

  “Then we’d better not let her catch us,” he said.

  He turned around and checked out the rear window, looking back every thirty seconds.

  “Quit it,” she told him. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “I’ve never run from anything in my life,” he said. “Plus, I’m used to being in the driver’s seat. Distract me. Tell me the rest of the story of how you became a demon.”

  “We’re not on a road trip where we share bagged snacks and our most intimate secrets,” she said irritably. “Why do you want to know? That’s all in the past.”

  “It’s part of you. It defines you.”

  She sighed, checking the rearview mirror herself. There was no one following them. No one above them. And the road ahead was straight and clear.

  “Fine,” she relented. “Where did I leave off?”

  “Julian and Harcourt killed each other in a duel. What happened after that? I want to know how you died. How you came to be what you are.”

  She heard him shift, searching for a comfortable position in his seat.

  “Oh, that,” she said, exhaling deeply. “Let’s see…

  “I buried my husband in his birthplace in England. And then I went back to Venice. I expected to find my parents and Carlotta. But I returned to Venice too late.

  “When I arrived at Ca’ Rossetti, it was a stranger who opened the door. My parents were no longer living there. They had sold the palazzo when they ran out of money. I finally tracked them down in the poor quarter of the Campo San Barnaba, where they were living in destitution in a single room above a tavern.

  “They told me that Carlotta had died in childbirth, not long before my arrival. Her last baby did not survive, either, my parents told me. They also said that the old pedophile remained as wealthy as always, and had refused to help them when they had asked for his aid.

  “Soon after my return to Venice, the old pedophile died, too. But not of natural causes.

  “He became my first victim. In Carlotta’s name, I learned the art of poison. I began to study on my own, through books and experiments. But on the island of Sant’ Ariano, I found a woman who taught me far more than I had ever imagined. Her methods were ghastly. But after ten years of being beaten by my husband, after knowing my sister suffer so miserably, after she and I had spent so many years as chattel, shuttled from one miserable fate to another…well.

  “I had never dreamed that a mere woman could feel such a power.

  “After my revenge on the old pervert, a kind of satisfaction settled over me. But it was not enough, I knew. I felt a sense of elation then. Of knowing that there was justice in the world. And that it had nothing to do with God. Over the next year, I honed my skills, searching for other victims, seeking out ways in which I could increase my power.

  “In the end, who came for me was not God, but Harcourt.

  “Harcourt, like so many other men I have known, blamed me for his death. He strangled me, dragging me down into the bowels of hell with him. I did what I had to do to survive. I took my revenge on my husband yet again, making a deal with the minions of hell to ensure that he was permanently left in the lowest reaches of hell. In order to do so, I used every resource I could to barter and trade. Eventually, I clawed my way out of hell and became a Rogue demon.

  “The brothel above the glass gallery was the first place I was sent. To my shock, when I arrived there, Carlotta was already working there.

  “During her life, she had taken her own revenge on the prostitutes her husband had hired. She blamed the women for infecting her with the disease that killed her unborn children. My sister was too much of a coward to take care of the real culprit, her husband. As her punishment, she was sent back to earth into an existence of prostitution herself. It was a ghastly situation.

  “I knew I had to get myself out somehow. And that’s when I made the bargain with the devil.

  “One single human soul per year, delivered during the Festival of the Redeemer. The devil was so pissed off that the Venetians had found a way to cheat him of his beloved plague that he wanted to find a way to desecrate the church they had built in honor of the Redeemer. To me, one sacrifice per year did not seem like a large price to pay in exchange for my freedom.

  “While I was struggling my way up through the ranks of the damned, Julian Ascher had already gained a position of prominence in the demon world. From time to time, we crossed paths, but it wasn’t until recent years that I began to think in earnest about destroying my former lover. I traveled to Las Vegas and took up with Corbin Ranulfson, specifically to find a way to take Julian down. I failed, quite miserably. That was when I ran into the Company and met your friends. And the rest,” she said, “is history.”

  Brandon was silent, twisted in the passenger seat of the small car to look at her, to listen.

  “There is more, of course,” she said. “Behind every story is another story. There are infinite layers of stories, as many stories as there are stars in the sky. But for tonight, that’s enough, mio caro.”

  “I have one question,” he said finally. “Do you think you could ever be good?”

  It was her turn to fall silent.

  At last, she said honestly, “I want to be good.”

  Whether she was capable of being good was another question entirely.

  She drove until dark. All the way up the coast of California, until they crossed the state line into Oregon. Sometime in the middle of the night, she finally ceded the driver’s seat to him, and hours later they crossed the border into Washington State. They drove into the next day, until neither of them could keep their eyes open. When the sun began to dawn on the horizon, they had almost reached Canada.

  “We have to stop and rest,” she said. “We can’t just keep driving forever.”

  They found a cheap motel, paid cash that Luciana managed to pickpocket off an unsuspecting motorist at a gas station. Parked the stolen car behind some bushes around the corner. Went inside and shut the curtains.

  “I suppose this is as good a place as any to h
ideout for a while. Until Arielle cools down,” he said.

  * * *

  Lying on the hard motel-room bed beside her in the darkness, Brandon tried to sleep.

  All he could think about was the story she had told him in the car.

  How difficult her human life had been.

  And how things could have been different for her.

  I want to be good, she had said. He believed she could.

  If only…

  She turned her head to look at him.

  “I must be dreaming,” she murmured, lifting one hand to trace the side of his face. “To be here with you now, seems unreal. I want every minute to count. I want to be here with you.”

  By moonlight, he worshipped her, in awe before the grace of her.

  A cathedral of flesh and bone, her clavicles like buttresses, the architecture of her as fine and as strong as old stone. He found the altar of her spine, traced the path of it with his fingers, a pilgrimage of her body. Bent her backward into his hands. Kissed the tips of her nipples, her breasts, those fragile domes. Her body was his sanctuary. He entered, reverently, so quietly he might have been a penitent come to lay offerings at a shrine.

  A prayer dropped from his lips. Her name.

  Whispered as devoutly as if it were the name of God.

  By the time they were finished, he knew without a doubt that she was a part of the sacred, as much as he was, as much as any of them were, and that she would always be.

  “I want to slay dragons for you,” he said as they lay in the darkness, their sated bodies pressed against each other. His breath burned in his lungs, but whether it was from exertion or from anguish, he did not know. “I want to scale mountains and swim oceans.”

  She shifted uncomfortably, pushing out of his embrace. “You don’t need to do that. I’m right here. And I can fight my own battles. I’m strong enough to do that on my own.”

  “Yes, but are you strong enough to walk away from the fight? You could turn your life around if you were willing to let go.”

  “Stop preaching, angelo mio. Don’t you think I’ve heard centuries of it? Do you think I’m going to change now?”