Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

floating down the canal. Into the fornace, the dark vessel sailed on a river of flame. Death’s ferryman extended his withered arm from within his black cloak, steering into the heart of the boiling inferno. Moments later, the boat emerged, and as it floated past them, Luciana looked down and saw the body of the Archdemon stretched along its floor. With a nod of his head in her direction, the demon gondolier gave a single push on his pole and drifted away.
    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