Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

attacker tied me up and dumped me in the middle of the Adriatic. I would have drowned had he not tied my bonds as loosely as he did. Once I swam back to land, I searched for you everywhere, but determined that the attacker must have captured you.”
    “He did. I was lucky to escape,” she said. “Where are the others?”
    “Still out searching for you.”
    “Call them in. The ordeal is over. Did you manage to see your attacker?”
    Massimo shook his head. “He was too fast. I have no idea who it was.”
    “He is a member of the Company of Angels,” she told him. “His name is Brandon.”
    The mention of his name passing through her lips made her feel faint; she closed her eyes as a sick feeling passed over her.
    “How badly did he harm you, baronessa? Your hand! And what on earth has happened to your back?” he said, turning her so he could look at it.
    He went to a drawer, produced a pick and quickly removed the handcuffs. She examined her crushed hand. Wincing at the pain, she set the bone of her thumb back into place. Held it there, willing it to stay.
    “I’m fine, ” she insisted. “I will heal quickly. You know that. The immortal body always does.”
    He gave her a long, scrutinizing look.
    She was not fine. Yet, he knew better than to contradict her.
    “What about the hunt?” he enquired. “I trust you delivered your annual sacrifice.”
    For the first time in two centuries, she could not answer in the affirmative.
    His face blanched to a very pale shade of white.
    In his green eyes, she saw her own fear reflected back.
    “Perhaps the devil might still be mollified,” he said quickly. “Perhaps it’s not too late.”
    Luciana nodded. “Go out now and find a human. There’s no time to lose.”
    His mouth thinned into a line; something fierce lit in his eyes. “That won’t be necessary. We have a human in-house that might do the trick.”
    Luciana remembered the female scream that had interrupted her homecoming. The shoe with its trail of blood. She swallowed, remembering how she had wondered what the Gatekeepers had been doing with that woman, and why they had been keeping her here....
    “The Gatekeepers have been keeping her as a plaything. It was the others, baronessa. I never touched her, I swear, and I—”
    “Never mind the details,” she said, waving her hand. “Just go get her.”
    Whatever the Gatekeepers had been doing on their own time was not relevant to Luciana. All that mattered was the possibility of fulfilling her obligation to the devil.
    * * *
     
    “Keep away from that house, my darling girl.”
    Those were the words Violetta Ravello’s grandfather had whispered in her ear every time they passed the confection of stone and marble that sat adjacent to a beautiful courtyard on the Grand Canal.
    “That house is even more cursed than the famous Ca’ Dario,” her grandfather would say. Both of them would shiver at the mention of the now-empty palazzo, whose owners inevitably came to tragic ends. “The gondoliers cross themselves when they row past it.”
    “Why?” Violetta would ask.
    “No one quite remembers,” he would say, furrowing his brow. “The only thing anyone can say is that it’s evil.”
    How many hundreds of times she passed that palace, Violetta didn’t know. But as she rode the vaporetto on the way to the opera house or to her singing lessons, she would look up at the ornate facade, hoping to catch a momentary glimpse of the beautiful men and the woman she sometimes saw through the stone tracery of the windows.
    What fragments she managed to catch did not look evil to her.
    To her, the palazzo looked romantic and wonderful.
    Now, at twenty-one, she finally understood that it was not.
    Her grandfather had been right all along.
    Trapped in this house, she had become a victim of evil. Her mind had been corrupted by the whisperings of her captors. Reality had become distorted until she no longer knew what was real and what was not. She only knew that she hated the men who kept her here, who used her as their plaything, who forced her to take part in their perverse sexual games.
    These men were not human.
    These men were something other. Something evil.
    “You will experience pleasure beyond your wildest imaginings,” they had assured her, “if you’ll just cooperate. If you’ll do what we want.”
    She had resisted. Until she could resist no more.
    Tonight, standing in the semidarkness of the piano nobile, she was quite sure she was going