Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

licked with his tongue, opening her to him ever so gently.
    There was something so exquisitely tender about this demoness, something he had never experienced with another woman.
    He felt her tense.
    “Relax. Stop thinking and just feel,” he ordered.
    “You were right,” she said, sitting up a fraction. “We can’t do this. We should stop.”
    This isn’t part of my fantasy, his brain argued.
    He raised his head for an instant, registering the genuine shock in those green eyes of hers.
    “Why now, principessa? ” he said, drunk on the taste of her.
    She pulled her legs closed, swept up her discarded dress from the floor. She stood and looked down at him as he knelt there still, her fiery green eyes blazing. “You must leave.”
    Go, his gut screamed. Otherwise, she’s going to kill you.
    He stood, bewildered, and turned to leave.
    Opening the door, he passed through the doorway.
    His body braced for the shock of stepping, for the three-thousandth time, into the familiar scene of his nightmare. For the familiar scent of urine and garbage, the alleyway. For the intense pain of the gunshots fired into his back, his neck.
    But none of it came.
    Instead, he came slamming back into consciousness, into darkness, with his heart pounding as if it would explode inside his chest. On the hard concrete of a floor that somehow felt more real, the odor of the room and of his own sweat, somehow more intense than the sensations of the dreamworld.
    And yet, he had not died in his dream.
    Orienting himself, he checked his pocket.
    No watch.
    Not Detroit. Not Chicago.
    Venice.
    Not the brothel, but lying on the dirty floor of a condemned palazzo.
    In the dark, he stilled, listening to the shift and creak of the old building, to the sound of a slow leak somewhere in the back rooms. Water dripped, drop by single drop. And every drop that fell pulled him further back to the reality of waking. He lay wondering if the weary edifice might possibly succumb to the pressure of its thousand years. Might suddenly collapse on top of him, burying him beneath the rubble of decaying brick and unwritten history.
    He lay waiting for a break in the craziest assignment he’d ever been dealt.
    Whether he was awake or dreaming, he hardly knew.
    Reality and dream had become equally unfathomable.
    * * *
     
    Across the canal, the demoness lay in her bed, on her silk sheets.
    Staring up at the splay of light shifting across the ceiling, wondering how the hell the angel had brought her so perilously close to the edge of letting go.
    I’m supposed to be the one seducing him, she thought. I’m supposed to be the one in control.
    And yet there, in his dream, he had made her completely forget herself for a moment.
    She got up and paced around the room. Went to the window to peer out into the darkness, toward where he lay.
    Nothing like this had ever happened before. She had never lost control.
    But this time, it had seemed so real.
    The dream had not been entirely good. There were things she would rather forget, things she had buried centuries ago that she had hoped would never resurface.
    Luciana, La Lucciola.
    She had not thought about such things for a very long time.
    But still, there had been the beauty of him, the nearness of him, the realness of him. She put a finger to her lips, still able to feel the pressure of his mouth against hers, breath to breath.
    She returned to her bed and wept tears that slid onto the sheets and stained the silk, marks that convinced her that she was in the physical world.
    He was still here, in Venice, a stone’s throw away across the canal.
    But he might as well have been living in another century or another universe. Her world, although on earth, would always be partly sunk in hell. She closed her eyes and fell into the dark void of dreamless sleep, hoping that she would find some respite from the painful reality of waking existence.
    * * *
     
    In the past few weeks, Corbin Ranulfson had suffered the most intolerable humiliation of his existence.
    On earth, he had lost his newest hotel to traitor demon-turned-angel Julian Ascher.
    In hell, Corbin had been demoted and stripped of his power to dematerialize.
    But he was determined to show the demon world that he would not be forgotten.
    He had come to Venice in a massive yacht, which he anchored in the Venetian Lagoon, ignoring the human regulations forbidding it. From there, in the shallow waters of the Adriatic, he could view the comings and goings of the