Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

stalling. You can’t talk yourself out of this.”
    He took a step toward her, clearly expecting her to back away.
    Instead, she drew up and took a step toward him, holding herself straight, looking him straight in the eyes.
    “Perhaps I’ve come here to repent my sins,” she taunted. She licked her lips, looking him up and down. “If only I could find someone who would hear my prayer.”
    “Unlikely.”
    “How can you be so sure?” she whispered.
    She was so close she could see clouds gathering in his eyes. She imagined that she smelled rain in the middle of a summer so flawless that not a drop of precipitation had fallen in forty consecutive days. She felt the sensation of a coming storm so tangibly that she shivered.
    In the distance, thunder rumbled.
    He reached for her.
    What grazed her wrist wasn’t his fingers, but steel.
    The rounded edge of a handcuff.
    She snatched her hand away with a millisecond between herself and captivity.
    The coldness of it shocked her. Not again. Never again.
    In that sliver of time, she fled down the nave of the church and slipped out the door. Weaving through the crowd of humans, Luciana realized she had made a mistake in thinking she was a match for this man. For when she came out of the church, she saw something totally unexpected.
    Massimo was not there waiting for her, as he should have been.
    Her boat sat empty, tethered at the edge of the fondamenta, bobbing in the canal.
    She glanced behind her.
    The big angel came barreling out of the church, bearing toward her like a freight train. His face was contracted not with anger, but with absolute focus. Sheer determination.
    The look of a man who would not let anything stand in his way.
    The ground shook as he thundered down the stairs toward her, a minor earthquake shaking the pavement beneath them. For a moment, she thought she might have imagined it, but the humans felt it, too, scattering in every direction and grabbing for the security of anything stationary: railings, statues, each other.
    Luciana looked around, but could not find a solid object to hold on to. So she did the next best thing.
    She ran.
    * * *
     
    Damn, she was fast. Faster than Brandon had anticipated.
    The Gatekeeper in the boat had not been such a problem at all. Although he was a big man, he was slow and easy to ditch. And likely still swimming his way back from the middle of the Adriatic where Brandon had dropped him.
    Luciana herself was a different story entirely.
    She glanced at him, looked at her empty boat, and in a quick shimmer of movement, she was gone.
    No time at all was how long it took the demoness to disappear into the crowd. Dissolving into the fading sunlight. Outside, in the golden light of early evening, Venetian families gathered in throngs. Picnic feasts spread on white-clothed tables lined the walkways beside the canal. More revelers flooded back across the pontoon bridge toward the main part of Venice.
    Amidst the rush of the celebrations, Brandon stood still.
    Closed his eyes, willed himself into quietness.
    Asked for guidance in order to track her.
    I must find her. Must not let her escape.
    He felt the movement of her dark vibration, deep in his bones, slightly to the west of himself. When he opened his eyes, he spotted her turned face in the distance, dark hair streaming in the wind as she crossed the pedestrian bridge.
    Without hesitation, he took off after her.
    She moved much faster than any human, slipping easily among the crowd with the lightness that might have belonged to a ghost. But she had a body. He was sure of that. Without even touching her, he had felt the pull of that body back there in the church, remembered the feel of her almost as if he had held her. Trailing her at a distance, fifty feet back, he could detect the dark energy of her, the density of her physical incarnation.
    She glanced back, searching for him, undoubtedly sensing him following. He ducked behind a pillar, waiting until he felt her attention pass over him. After a long pause, she moved onward, farther into the city.
    Luciana crossed the square in front of the basilica of St. Mark’s in a blink of an eye, moving rapidly through the dense gathering of tourists who stood gazing up at the famous domes. She wove into the streets behind the church, farther into the tangle of passageways that might as well have been another universe.
    Everywhere he turned, eroding stone angels and crumbling saints looked down. With their peeling gilt wings