Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

little and retreated.
    She cast an eye around the tidy little room. Yes, the Gatekeepers had done their job maintaining her work space. Dried flowers and plants, belladonna flowers and narcissus bulbs hung from a ceiling rack, awaiting her return. A glass flask and burner set up for distillation stood on one side of the worktable. On the other side was a carefully organized and labeled stand of bottles and vials: scorpion, tarantula, black-widow spider.
    “Buongiorno, bambini,” she called, bending down to peer into a sectioned glass terrarium, where a pair of green mambas slithered. Two pairs of beady green eyes fixed on their mistress, forked tongues darting out in greeting.
    Among other toxins, the mambas’ venom had contributed to the contents of the tiny glass vial around her neck. The liquid in this little vial had taken her months to distill, the rarest of poisons in a perfect combination that had already proven it could kill a demon. Its first victim, a low-ranking demon who had worked as a bellboy in Las Vegas, had gone down quite nicely.
    The contents of this vial, administered to a human victim, would quite literally be overkill. Unclasping the chain from her neck, she transferred the vial of poison into the hollowed-out bottom of a gold lipstick tube, which she slipped into her pocket.
    That poison must be saved for another purpose.
    A purpose that would make everything worthwhile in the end. All the hard work and suffering. All the humiliation, the pain she had endured. All the risks she had taken, the waiting games she had played.
    Her enemies, old and new, would perish screaming her name.
    Her name would echo in their minds as they burned in the depths of hell forever.
    “Soon,” she cooed to the snakes, “but not tonight.”
    She prided herself in choosing precisely the correct poison for every occasion, and distilled them herself. Through poison, one could achieve results that could not be accomplished through other means. The legacy of poison in Italy’s noble houses—the Borgias, the Medici family—was almost an art, too valuable to ignore.
    She perused her choices amongst the rows of bottles and vials.
    White arsenic. The poison of choice for the Borgias.Too slow acting. She would need something faster tonight.
    Hemlock. The poison that had killed Socrates. But it was positively antiquated.
    Strychnine. Entirely too melodramatic. It caused a good deal of unnecessary thrashing and convulsing. Sometimes she enjoyed that, but she could do with something a little simpler for this evening’s purposes.
    Luciana picked up a clear bottle of liquid, held it up to the light.
    Cyanide.
    Perfetto. The perfect poison for the occasion. Clean, effective and incredibly fast acting. Timeless and classic, the Chanel perfume of poisons.
    She decanted a small amount of the cyanide into a second glass vial. And just like perfume, she thought as she strung the second vial on the gold chain around her neck, a little goes a long way .
    * * *
     
    Brandon watched the lights of Chicago recede beneath him as the 747 lifted off from the ground, several hundred tons of metal, passengers and cargo rising into the air.
    Every act of flight requires a leap of faith, he knew.
    A bird, every time it flies, must leap. Must commit itself to the air and trust that its wings will carry it aloft. The same with a plane, barreling along the runway to launch itself airborne.And just like flying, every mission required a leap of faith.
    Leap, and have faith that the divine will guide you where you need to go.
    He had been operating along that principle for the duration of his existence.
    And now, as he sat in his seat with the big plane shaking beneath him, the familiar anxiety niggled in the back of his mind. Fear of falling asleep. He reviled sleeping in public places, in the open where his inevitable nightmare might leave him vulnerable to prying eyes.
    Still, he had no choice.
    When the plane reached cruising altitude, he perused Luciana’s file on his laptop, browsing through the documents relating to her case.
    Now Brandon studied the series of low-resolution photographs. He found himself staring at her pale skin and vivid green eyes, mesmerized by the beauty of her face despite the expression of displeasure she consistently wore.
    “Beauty can be deceptive.” That was one of the first lessons Brandon had ever learned as an angel. Arielle had taught it to him. Despite her continual annoyance with him…despite his