The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  Luciana almost collapsed on the fondamenta.

  The stone walkway was solid beneath her feet, although it did not feel real.

  And yet, there was one more thing to take care of.

  Brandon set the miserable human down. Jude stumbled away, zigzagging a few steps. Where he was going, Luciana didn’t care. She only knew that she wanted to stop him. She picked up a piece of pipe lying nearby and went after him. He fell, looking up at her with terrorized eyes as she held the pipe at his throat.

  “Let him go. I have forgiven him,” Brandon said, catching her arm.

  “Why do you still care what happens to him?” she said, still gripping the pipe so hard her hand hurt. She ached to plunge it into the human’s throat, to put an end to the injustice and suffering Brandon had endured. “He killed you. Don’t you get it?”

  “He’s human,” said the angel. “It’s my job to protect them.”

  “Why do you defend them?” she said fiercely. “Humans are vile. Not even two hundred years ago, people were torturing each other in the streets. Public executions were a form of entertainment. Severed heads hung outside city gates, on bridges, in marketplaces. Don’t think for an instant that this human would hesitate to parade your severed head as a trophy if he thought he could get away with it.”

  “You and I were both human once.”

  “We’re not human anymore,” she said quietly. “This man does not deserve to live.”

  “There’s no justice here on earth that can judge what he’s done. We were not sent here to judge. We can’t presume to know the full reasons behind what occurs on this earth. Come with me now. Come. Walk away with me. And let him go.”

  Brandon held out his hand.

  The pipe trembled in her fingers, poised at Jude’s throat.

  “Leave him,” the angel coaxed. “He’s not worth it. Not when he is all that stands between you and I. Come away with me now. We can be together.”

  An eternity seemed to pass outside the still-flooding factory as they stood amid the chaos of fleeing demons and panicking, newly woken humans running in all directions.

  Almost imperceptibly, she nodded.

  But she did not believe what he said.

  We can never be together, she knew.

  “Leave him,” Brandon said. “It’s not up to us to decide what happens to him.”

  “If that’s what you want,” she said finally.

  She let the pipe fall, heard its clatter as it dropped to the ground and rolled into stillness.

  He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her away, leaving Jude to stumble through the dark streets of Murano, relinquishing him to fate.

  In the boat she had taken from the airport, Luciana and Brandon drove back to Venice. Hand in hand they walked among streets still quiet and dark as the humans lay sleeping safe inside their homes.

  She wanted to collapse from relief, from the shock that Corbin was finally gone.

  The reality of it had not yet sunk in, but she knew it would soon.

  Along with the reality of leaving Brandon.

  “I want to take you home, my love,” he said. “To Chicago. To start fresh.”

  She smiled. There was no home for her but Ca’ Rossetti, and that no longer existed. No life but the one she had known for hundreds of years. He did not seem to understand that now, but he would come to accept it sooner or later.

  He would have an eternity to accept it.

  How strange, she thought, that although we cannot be together, I feel oddly at peace.

  He paused at an archway with an ornate, old gate curling with vines.

  “I came here the night we first made love,” he said, pausing for a moment to peer into the dark garden that lay within.

  In the moment of his pause, Luciana slipped inside, slamming the gate shut behind her. The old latch fell shut with a snick that sounded eerily final. A fraction of a second later, Brandon reached through the wrought iron and grabbed her wrist.

  With his free hand, he grasped the handle. Tried to open it. It would not budge.

  “This is Venice, where things are very old,” she said. “It seems to be locked shut.”

  Around her wrist, his fingers curled, holding her. “Even if it won’t open, I’m not letting you go. We’ll have to wait until it unlocks.”

  “We could stand here forever,” she said. “Caught in another stalemate until we’re both exhausted. Or we could do things the easy way and you could just let me go.”

  His fingers tightened. “I will never give up on you. On us.”

  “Get this through that head of yours—I am never going to change. There’s no place for the two of us together, not in this world. Maybe in the distant future. But not now. You have to let me go. You know that. I won’t let you give up everything that you have and everything that you are. Not for me,” she told him. “Close your eyes.”

  “Forget it,” he growled.

  “Just close them. I promise I won’t do anything stupid.”

  The image she sent into his head was of the two of them.

  Enclosed in each other’s arms beneath a canopy of stars. The first man and the first woman. The last man and the last woman. Both. One. Always.

  “Let me go,” she said. “I will come back to you. I promise.”

  He opened his eyes. Looked deep into her mist-green gaze.

  Just for an instant, he relaxed his fingers.

  And in that instant, she was gone.

  * * *

  It took only a moment for Brandon to scale the gate, to leap over it in pursuit of her.

  Where she had vanished, he had no idea.

  Here in Venice, he would never catch her. She would evade him forever, slipping through his fingers as she always had. He would search, but already he knew it would be futile. Like trying to grab a handful of moonlight from the surface of the canal.

  Inside, on the grass of the garden, she had dropped a shining silver object. He picked it up, felt its familiar weight in his hand. Turned it over and ran his thumb over the engraving of the Archangel Michael there, slaying the dragon.

  “Where were you tonight while this was all going down?” he said aloud.

  Behind him, he heard Michael’s voice say, “I knew you could take care of it, Brandon. You don’t need a babysitter.”

  But when he turned around, Michael was not there.

  Tucking the watch into his pocket, Brandon knew why Luciana had dropped it.

  He wondered if she ever truly intended to keep her promise to come back to him.

  He was left standing the middle of that empty garden, with a cluster of fireflies flitting among the wild, fragrant foliage. And the statue of St. George, frozen with his spear poised above his head, yet another warrior preserved in the moment of conquering evil.

  Epilogue

  One year later

  In the burned-out remains of Ca’ Rossetti, Luciana sifted through the ashes of her ruined palace.

  The fire-eaten remnants of furniture and household goods—the charred edge of a table here, a pile of broken dishes there—lay in a jumble amid blackened timber and chunks of fallen concrete. The outer walls, once three-stories high, were badly cracked and crumbling. The roof, torn away completely, gave way to the night sky. The skeleton of the palazzo threatened to tumble down around her.

  Luciana turned to look out over the water.

  The canal, at least, was unchanged and shimmering in the moonlight.

  No wind. No melancholy singing. Only peace.

  Through the empty opening where a wooden door had stood, Massimo appeared. As she knew he would.

  He bowed. She nodded in acknowledgment.

  They stood for a long moment without speaking, in the ruin of the grand palazzo they had both worked so hard to maintain, gazing at the brittle old bones of the home they had loved.

  “Come, walk with me,” she said, pulling him out of the wreckage to stroll in the quiet streets. “Let us leave this place, and I will explain wha
t you have waited so long to hear. I will tell you about your mother. What I know of her last days as a human I found out from my parents, your grandparents, when I returned to Venice, shortly after Carlotta’s death.”

  His face betrayed nothing. He asked no questions, made no comments.

  He simply listened.

  And she began. “It was not customary for a Venetian woman to return to her parents’ home to give birth. But Carlotta arrived nonetheless, soaking wet in the middle of the night, swollen with child. During that long night, after the agony of childbirth, she died. The son she bore was washed and swaddled in the only silk left in the house. Then the baby was taken to the Arsenale and given to a boatbuilder in return for a handful of ducats, just enough to feed the rest of the family.

  “As soon as I was in a position to do so, I searched endlessly for you. It took me until after your human death to finally find you. By that time, you had already been claimed by the devil as one of his own,” she said.

  She remembered her sadness at discovering he had taken to fighting in his early twenties. That after killing a few other young men in fights, he had been killed in a knife fight in a local bar brawl.

  “I negotiated the release of your soul from hell. As far as you knew, you were simply another minion, a Gatekeeper who kept order in one of the great houses in Venice.”

  “I always considered myself lucky to have such a post,” he said.

  Lucky. She had not anticipated that reaction. In the past two centuries, she had not been able to bring herself to reveal his true origins. In her mind, she imagined what her own reaction might be if she were told such a thing.

  Pure fury followed by certain retaliation.

  She had considered it from every angle.

  Better to believe you had died the poor son of a boatbuilder than the abandoned child of a bankrupt noble house, sold to the lower classes to get money for bread. Better to believe your parents were long dead than to know your mother had ignored you completely while existing in excess and debauchery a few miles away…for centuries.

  “My mother is long gone,” he said softly. “She died the day I was born.”

  “How long have you known?” she asked aloud. “That she…that Carlotta…”

  He shrugged. “How could I not know she was my mother? It’s something to do with instinct, I’m sure. I never asked, because I already knew.”

  Luciana groped for words, but they fell so short of what she wanted to express. “Your mother loved you dearly. When she was alive, she was something different. Death changed her. As it changes all of us.”

  Massimo nodded, and she saw in his eyes that he understood.

  “I don’t know where she has gone now,” said Luciana. “There are a thousand possibilities, a thousand places souls go. Places of which even we have no knowledge. But I am certain that wherever Carlotta is now, she is finally free. She has gone beyond both hell and earth.”

  Massimo nodded, head bowed. “And you? What have you been doing this past year?”

  “Searching for a way to exist on my own terms, not the devil’s. I simply cannot do that anymore, Massimo,” she told him. “However, you have to make your own choices. Ca’ Rossetti is yours to rebuild if you so wish, along with the necessary funds. Our old enemies still exist, though, as they have for centuries. They will try to stop you, I’m sure. But you are a survivor. You have the strength to endure.”

  “What will you do, baronessa? Where will you go?”

  She smiled, looking up at the moonlit sky. She would go on searching.

  And she knew in that moment that every prayer to the divine she had ever whispered or even simply thought in the most vague and wishful sense…every desperate plea for mercy she had uttered in her basest moments of hopelessness…all the good she had ever wanted had finally been answered in the best way possible.

  With one glaring flaw.

  One monumental, heartbreaking flaw: she would have to live without Brandon.

  Yet, it was still the best way possible.

  Because an existence with Brandon was impossible.

  A strange sensation tingled at Luciana’s inner wrist. She turned her arm to inspect it. There, on her translucent skin, was a tattoo of a feather. An ordinary pigeon feather exactly like the one she’d picked up from the edge of her worktable when she’d first sensed Brandon’s approach to Venice.

  Gray at the tip, fading to colorless at the base.

  The tattoo had appeared the night she had fled Venice a year ago.

  She touched it and closed her eyes, flooded by the same sense of peace that Brandon’s nearness had brought her during their brief time together. The sense of peace that still came to her whenever she thought of him.

  He is near, she knew. I must leave before he arrives.

  One day, she would find a way to atone for her wrongdoings.

  Only then would she deserve to be with him, she knew.

  I know that day will come. As surely as I know that one day every creature on earth will find peace.

  Heading away from him, she walked quickly along the streets of Venice. Wandering with no particular direction, she walked until the sensation of tingling faded. She walked until she found herself standing on the lip of San Marco’s Basin, where the stone met the edge of the water. She stood there watching a distant flutter of wings, a flock of birds on the edge of the horizon rising into flight.

  * * *

  Brandon felt her presence here, in this city she adored. But although the ashes of Ca’ Rossetti seemed to pulse with the vibration of her, she was no longer there. There was no trace of her in the glass gallery. Nor in the abandoned rooms of the brothel above it. Her summer pied-à-terre on the Lido, too, sat in pristine silence. He roamed the twisting streets looking for her, hoping for a glimpse of her, but she was nowhere to be found.

  The last place he looked was the Redentore Church.

  Same crowds of people, he thought, working his way inside. Same interminable heat.

  But Luciana was not here, either.

  With a fool’s hope, he had thought he might find her in one of the chapels, kneeling in repentance. In the midst of finding some way to forgive herself for her long catalog of sins. In the midst of an epiphany.

  Has she killed again? he wondered. There was no way of knowing.

  He went back to the place he had first taken her, to the ramshackle pensione where he had chained her to the bed, picked broken glass out of her back and watched the fireworks explode over a city into which she had completely disappeared. However, when he arrived at the old Company safe house, it wasn’t Luciana he found there.

  Arielle sat waiting in the modest foyer, as immaculately groomed as ever.

  The perfect angel.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said.

  He wasn’t kidding. They had not spoken a single word to each other in the past year. But he knew exactly what she was doing here. Considering that the pensione was no longer used as a safe house after what had happened last year, Arielle had no other reason to come.

  She’s waiting for Luciana. Or waiting for me. Or both.

  “It’s important for all of us to work as a team,” she said, training her unwavering blue gaze on him. “To ensure there are no further insurrections in this area. I’d expect a bit more gratitude after Infusino and I blew up that factory last year and saved you.”

  “You?” he said, only mildly surprised. “All this time, I thought it was an act of the divine.”

  “Wasn’t it?” Arielle smiled thinly. “We were extremely lucky. We fired the flare gun from the boat into the oven. Most of these buildings are extremely fragile, built on wooden piles that were driven into the lagoon, some of them over a thousand years ago. It didn’t take much.”

  “Do you want me to thank you? You got me demoted afterward.”

  “Demotion is not permanent. In time, I’m sure you’ll work your way back up to your old position as a supervisor,” she said evenly. “Besides,
I didn’t get you demoted. You got yourself demoted.”

  Even if that was the case, it was worth it, he thought. Everything I did last year was worth getting Luciana out of your claws.

  As usual, Arielle wouldn’t let up, but continued to lecture him. “You shouldn’t have taken that helicopter. You shouldn’t have absconded with a detainee. You should never have let her escape at the end of it all. I don’t know how you managed that. There are a lot of things you shouldn’t have done, Brandon.”

  “You weren’t aiming to reform Luciana,” Brandon said, looking down at her impassive face. “You intended to keep her and torture her. And use her for your own purposes.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I would never do that,” she said. She stood sharply, rising to leave. But just as her foot was poised on the doorstep of the pensione, she turned back and added, “Even if I did, there’s no way you could prove it.”

  Her lips curved into a tight smile. For the first time as he looked into Arielle’s blue eyes, he thought that her trademark neutrality was not a sign of equanimity.

  But instead, a sign of something pathological.

  In his room upstairs, he sat down on the edge of the hard bed, struck a match and lit a candle on the bedside table. He opened the window and stared out over the Adriatic by the steady flame.

  Waiting.

  She promised she would come back.

  He lay down on the bed with neither fear nor hope.

  In the past year, he had been completely cured of his nightmares.

  Somehow, she had freed him from reliving the horror of his human death. His dreams had returned to normal, more like the dreams he’d had during his human life. Full of possibilities and impossibilities, experiences and oddities all mixed in together.

  But he had not dreamed of her in the past year, either.

  He closed his eyes.

  She came sliding into his unconscious—though not sharply, not vividly as she had done in the past. The image of her appeared, hazy and mystical, like a mirage flickering in the distance. As he approached her, she was only a phantom of a woman, the shivery touch of a hand and a glimpse of curved, ripe lips half-hidden behind a fall of dark hair.