Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

his bedroom clock read.
    The clock that existed in real time. Not dream time.
    He shut his eyes against the memory of his death. Brought himself back to the here and now. Dragged in one long breath, and then another. Beneath him, he felt the damp of the sheets. Soaked through with sweat. The throb of adrenaline still coursing through his body.
    In the darkness of his room he lay, recounting the facts to himself.
    He, Brandon Clarkson, was no longer human.
    But he had been, once.
    It had been ten years since his human death. Why he revisited the scene of his own death every night, he wasn’t entirely sure. He would have taken it for a curse if he had not been reborn as something other.
    Angel.
    Immortal, but sent back in a human body. With all the same problems bound up with physical incarnation. Fatigue. Stress. Insomnia.
    Nightmares.
    Reaching for the lamp beside his bed, he switched on the light. Blinking a few times, he squinted in the brightness. He got up and wandered around his apartment. The sleek modern loft in a historic Art Nouveau building was a world away from the alley where he’d died. He stood at the window, looking down at the river thirty stories below, shimmering gold in the hot July night, downtown city lights aglow on the surface of the water.
    Not the Detroit River, but the Chicago River.
    Not Detroit, he reminded himself.
    Not Detroit, where he had been born. Where he had lived. Where he had died.
    I’m in Chicago. Where he now worked as a Guardian in the Company of Angels. Where he had been promoted to supervisor, overseeing his own unit, after his preliminary training in the Los Angeles unit.
    Chicago was a world away from his human existence. A lifetime away.
    In the kitchen, he stood in front of the fridge, reading the words of the decade-old newspaper clipping he kept hanging there. His human life, boiled down to three paragraphs, black ink on yellowing paper.

Slain Officer Killed in Gang-Related Shooting
28-year-old police officer Brandon Clarkson was fatally shot in Detroit’s downtown core on Saturday evening while investigating gang-related activities. Police say he died immediately from his wounds.
A memorial ceremony was held at Campus Martius Park, during which Clarkson was posthumously promoted to detective. His partner, Officer Jude Everett, was also promoted for his “extraordinary bravery” after capturing the man accused of gunning down Clarkson.
Clarkson had served seven years with the Detroit police force. He is survived by his parents, three brothers and his widow, Tammy.

    As he read the words for the three-thousandth time, the old darkness rose in him, bitter and familiar. Somewhere deep inside him, the feeling that he wasn’t entirely good. Not like most of the other members of the Company, whose pure-hearted goodness was beyond doubt.
    Death had made him angry in a way that he had never been in his human life.
    Brandon Clarkson had been born with an eerie sense of how he wanted to live. He had come into this world knowing exactly what he wanted to do.
    Serve and protect.
    He had lived fast. He had loved intensely. But if he had come into the world on a mission, he had left the world in service to that mission. He had been sent back as a Guardian, essentially to do the same thing he had always done. To chase down the most dangerous criminals on earth. To catch the most corrupt beings in existence, humans and demons alike. To protect those who could not protect themselves.
    Now, here he was a decade later.
    With one tiny problem.
    The nightmare.
    Of an endlessly recurring human death that made him feel like some character in a Greek myth. Like Sisyphus pushing the same rock up a hill, over and over. Or Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle every day. Destined to relive the same hellish fate time after time.
    “Let it go,” his superiors, the Archangels, had told him dozens of times.
    Somehow, he could not.
    Not everyone dies young, he thought, pacing around the apartment.
    He did what he always did when he caught himself trapped in his own self-pity. Struck a match and lit one of the candles on his coffee table. Arielle, his former supervisor, had told him, “Light a candle when you need help letting go of the resentment at having to leave your human life.”
    Three thousand eight hundred and ninety-four candles later, Brandon was still waiting for the night his pain and resentment tapered out into wisps of smoke. Burned away like those many