Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

point-blank, aimed toward his chest.
    The shots rang out, as they always did.
    First one, then the other, the same familiar noise he had heard so many times before.
    But not the same pain. No doubled flare of pain exploding in the back of his body.
    Because they were fired into another body instead.
    Faster than a human, Luciana had launched herself in front of him, taking both of the bullets. One of them hit her square in the middle of the chest, the other in her throat.
    He caught her as she fell.
    Held her as though he would never let her go. Even as she bled out on the concrete, and he was unable to do anything to stop it. She smiled as her eyes fluttered shut.
    * * *
     
    And then Brandon awoke, sweating in fear as he had done every night for the ten years before he encountered the demoness. Awoke with a pain and a knowledge that, at that moment, felt heavier and more terrible than death.
    He fought through the haze of confusion, trying to recount the facts to himself.
    You can’t die in a dream.
    He definitely knew firsthand that it wasn’t true.
    She had taken a bullet for him. It had only been in a dream. But it had happened. She had experienced all the same suffering of death as he had.
    He bolted upright. Beside him, the bed was empty.
    He remembered where she had gone.
    Remembered the last words she had said in the dream, after closing her eyes.
    “I’m going to kill that bastard.”

Chapter Twenty-One
     
    V engeance. If Brandon wouldn’t seek it on his own behalf, Luciana would do it for him. She would slay this one last dragon of his human life, and put it to rest finally. Because Brandon was too good a man to do it himself.
    As Brandon slept, she picked up the car key from the dresser.
    Slipped out of the motel room, quietly closing the door. And drove.
    As Luciana boarded a plane from Seattle to Detroit, she felt a pang of something that felt almost like sadness. She, Luciana, was not good. Brandon might be convinced otherwise, but she was evil at the core. She had been for centuries, and she would continue to be, until the end of time.
    There’s not an ounce of forgiveness in me, she thought.
    The strange part was that she no longer cared about Julian.
    Staring out the window at the urban sprawl below as the plane descended toward the Detroit Metro Airport, she pondered it. The lightness within herself. The refreshingly peaceful feeling when she ran the syllables of his name through her mind. For the first time in centuries, she no longer felt like vomiting when she thought about him.
    Well, she thought to herself, that has nothing to do with forgiveness and everything to do with Brandon.
    * * *
     
    It took Luciana the better part of a day to arrive at Brandon’s former home, a small bungalow in a suburb of Detroit in which his wife still lived. A pair of small blond-haired boys roughhoused in the yard outside. Children who, under different circumstances, might have been Brandon’s.
    “Are your mama and papa here?” she asked them with her sweetest smile.
    “Mommy’s at the store,” the younger one said.
    “Don’t talk to her,” said the older boy, a child of about six. He squinted up at Luciana with an ornery look on his face. “We’re not ’posed to talk to strangers.”
    Sighing patiently, she said, “This time it’s okay, darling.”
    The littler boy peered at her and said with the brutal honesty of the very young, “You’re prettier than Snow White from the movie. But you’re badder than her evil mommy.”
    “Well, now, that’s not fair. Even at my worst, I have never laid a hand on a child,” she told him.
    Two pairs of small blue eyes squinted up at her, relentlessly accusing. If Brandon had melancholy thoughts about missing out on fatherhood, he ought to take a look at these two, she thought. It would cure him of those thoughts immediately.
    She smiled pleasantly and said, “But you could be the first, little man.”
    The small one screamed then, a high-pitched sound that Luciana had only ever heard come out of malfunctioning electronics and once when she had jammed on the brakes of a car. The bigger one joined in, belting out, “Daddaaaaaaaay!”
    The screen door banged open and a big, burly man came out. “Boys? Who you talking to out there?”
    Jude, she thought. The man of the hour.
    “Hello there, sir. I was just having a conversation with your bambini… what is the word in English… I believe it translates to spawn,” she said cheerfully. “But now