Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

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