Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

Mediterranean rhythm. The rich and heavy vowels called to him despite the clear disdain of her message. “If you know what’s best for you, you’ll turn back now.”
    She vanished.
    Left in the emptiness by himself, Brandon had no sense of space, no idea where to go. Intuitively, he knew that if he stepped forward, he would walk back into the unavoidable dreamspace of his human death. But he had no choice. There was nowhere else to go. So he walked forward, felt his body shift into another place, enclosed by brick walls, suffused with the too-familiar scent of urine and garbage. He turned the corner. Into the same alley.
    The first bullet exploded in the back of his spine.
    The second, into the back of his head.
    He awoke, as he always did. In a cold sweat, feeling incredibly sad that he had died.
    But there was something unusually disturbing about this dream.
    Even more distressing than his usual nightmare was the fact that the dream had changed.
    He had never seen that bare black space. Had never seen a woman in his dream.
    “Heated hand towel, sir?” The flight attendant’s normal, human voice jarred him fully into the waking world. He took the towel, wiped the sheen of sweat from his face.
    Reminded himself again where he was.
    Not in a filthy alleyway in Detroit.
    On a plane, flying over the Atlantic, toward Italy.
    To catch a demoness.
    To find a woman he had not even met, who had already begun to invade his dreams.
    * * *
     
    Luciana looked up from her worktable, jolted out of her reverie. Her mind reached for the memory of the man she had envisioned, but his image faded too quickly to grasp.
    A rumble, a disturbance blurred the air unlike anything she had ever felt before. She shivered.
    On the edge of the table, just beside her hand, lay a feather.
    She picked it up, examining it.
    Dark gray at the tip, fading to dirty white at the bottom of the shaft. An ordinary feather, the kind pigeons left all over the city. Due to the city’s recent measures to cull the population of winged rats, the flying nuisances infested Venice in fewer numbers than before. However, plenty of them remained.
    Where this particular feather had come from was a mystery to her.
    The window was closed, and the workroom remained sealed.
    How very curious, she thought. But no matter.
    Taking the feather between her thumb and forefinger, she tossed it in the garbage. Along with the vague feeling that it might be connected with the man in her dream.
    Who cares, she thought. How many thousands of men’s dreams had she invaded in the past? She did not even know. She was a virtuoso at this type of manipulation. An expert at navigating their desires. One more man would be as easy to discard as the rest of them.
    She went downstairs to find her head Gatekeeper.
    “Prepare the boat,” she told him. “It is time to begin the hunt.”
    As the boat cleaved its way up the Grand Canal and out into St. Mark’s Basin, the salt-tinged breeze off the Adriatic whipped through Luciana’s hair. She closed her eyes, and the image of that single feather floated in her mind’s eye again.
    “Just there,” she said to Massimo, pointing to a mooring post near the church.
    She stepped up to the fondamenta beside the canal, tilting her head to look up at the imposing marble facade of the church, at the monumental classical Roman pillars combined with the round lines of a Christian cathedral. People filed through the large open doors. Inside, hundreds of humans were gathering for the opening ceremony of the festival.
    Eyeing the crowd funneling into the church, she wished she could cull the whole lot of them. Just get rid of them, like the city had done with the pigeons. Instead, she would have to choose just one, a single victim. It should not be a problem. These witless humans never seemed to suspect what was coming for them.
    “Wait here for me,” she instructed Massimo. “This shouldn’t take long.”

Chapter Three
     
    B randon felt his lost humanity weighing on him as he entered the place he knew he would find her. Looking up at the marble facade of the Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, he scanned the huge white building, looked at the figures decorating it.
    Why here, of all the sacred places in Venice?
    Why not St. Mark’s, the massive basilica across the canal?
    Why not Carnival, the most famous of Venice’s festivals?
    The questions flickered in his mind as he walked through the open doorsand into the church. Inside, he slipped