Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

disagreement with her management style…at the heart of it, Arielle knew what she was doing. She had told him, “Don’t equate beauty with goodness, even though it may seem angelic. Demons can also take the form of beauty. They like to mimic the divine. And demons are drawn to beauty. They love to defile it.”
    Luciana was no ordinary beauty. She was exceptional. And apparently, she also loved to destroy exceptional beauty.
    According to the file, her human life had been remarkably sad, scarred by family tragedies and betrayal. But reading through her lengthy history of misfortune, he felt nothing but disgust for her. She had been plagued by hardship, yes. But the choices she had made had been consistently bad. Tracing the steps of her biography, the more he read, the more horrified he became by the details of her grisly sacrifices, overwhelmed by the catalog of atrocities. He skimmed through a note in the file, marked History of the Redentore Festival:

Venice suffered from a devastating outbreak of the plague between 1575 and 1577, which killed more than one-third of the population. The Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, or Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, was erected as an offering to the divine and a plea for liberation from the deadly disease.
On the third weekend in July, Venetians celebrate the Redentore Festival to commemorate the disappearance of the plague. A temporary bridge is erected on floating pontoons, leading from the main part of Venice to the Island of Giudecca, where the Redentore Church is located.

    Every year, as Julian Ascher explained, Luciana chose to kill a victim at this festival.
    Why she did that, Julian had not explained.
    There must be a reason.
    Brandon leafed through her file, looking for an answer. But if there was an answer, it didn’t lie within the folder he had received.
    He himself had faced difficult choices in life. However, at every turn, he had consistently made decisions driven by the desire to benefit humankind. Motivated by altruism. Geared toward forgiveness. Anything else lay beyond his realm of comprehension.
    “At their core, demons are just like us,” Arielle had insisted, back when she had been his supervisor. “They’re just passionate beings who have made a big mistake. They don’t recognize that their true nature is divine. It is our job to teach them that. To bring them back into the light.”
    Not all of them wanted to come into the light. Not all of them were ready. Looking at Luciana’s pictures, he was pretty sure this demoness was comfortable exactly as she was. Firmly ensconced in the dark, taking full advantage of all its powers and privileges.
    With the file in his lap, he shut his eyes for a brief moment.
    And he stepped into the too-familiar landscape of his usual nightmare.
    The same full moon illuminating the sky. The same cool evening breeze.
    The same smell of urine and rotting garbage, the same dark alley.
    And, yet, when he turned the corner to enter the alleyway, it wasn’t the place of his death that he entered. Instead, he walked into an empty space, devoid of anything, like an empty theater stage used in a minimalist production. No props, only a bare black wooden floor.
    Into this blank space, the demoness emerged out of the darkness.
    A wraith forming out of mist, she then solidified into a more concrete figure that seemed to Brandon utterly hypnotic. Out of thin air, her tall, slender body materialized with its impossibly lush curves. Skin so pale and so perfect he itched to reach his hand out and test the velvet texture of it beneath his fingertips, to hold the flawless curve of her cheek in his hand.
    From the grainy photos, she stepped into living flesh, incarnated so vividly that he had no doubt that she was real. In an instant, he forgot completely that he had ever felt disgust for her. Looking at her, the sole emotion rushing into his brain, flooding into every part of his body, was desire.
    God in heaven.
    “You’re not real,” he said, reaching for her. His fingers, roughened from his weekend mechanic tinkering, accustomed to the unforgiving motor parts of metal and rubber, caught on the silk of her dress. He reached out toward the fine porcelain of her skin to touch her face. Yet, he could not reach her. “You can’t be real.”
    So exotic. So beautiful. And, as she was in the photos, so incredibly unhappy.
    “You have no idea what you’re doing,” she said in a siren’s voice, honey-soft and lilting with a