Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

angels, who stood silently, regarding her with their luminous eyes. “We’ll petition for their disposal, too.”
    She shivered, recognizing the seed of something that had been growing in her for a long time.
    Vengeance.
    That which she had hated so much in Luciana was beginning to grow in herself.
    Arielle saw it, but she had no idea how to stop it.
    * * *
     
    Brandon half hoped that the rickety old building would fall down and crush the lot of them.
    He hadn’t gotten far when a wordless scream came out of the building he’d just exited. Not a human scream, but something animal.
    The scream of something— someone —being tortured.
    He rushed back into the building, up the stairs, bounding toward the room where the Gatekeepers were held. Arielle was just exiting it, wiping blood from her hands onto a cloth.
    “The big one’s not talking anymore,” she said.
    “Why not?”
    Arielle said nothing, that inscrutable expression on her face. Brandon went into the room. There was blood all over the floor, running down the Gatekeeper’s chin. He went over to the demon, opened his mouth.
    The Gatekeeper no longer had a tongue.
    Brandon bolted down the stairs. Arielle looked at him calmly, perched on the ledge of a windowsill, looking out at the early morning light bouncing off the canal.
    “I may have been a little overzealous. Sometimes these things are necessary,” she said.
    “Necessary,” was all he could say.
    “It’s not like he’s human,” she said, turning to look at Brandon. “If you begin to sympathize with these demons, you’ll never get the job done.”
    * * *
     
    Across the canal, everyone in Ca’ Rossetti heard the scream.
    “That was Giancarlo,” Luciana said to Massimo, looking up from her worktable. “I know it.”
    “Giancarlo and Antonio are old souls in strong, young bodies,” Massimo assured her. His face, however, had gone as white as the arsenic he was measuring. “They can fend for themselves. The likelihood that something has happened to them…”
    “Screw likelihood, Massimo. I know what I heard.”
    Fury welled up in her. She set down the flask she had been holding.
    They stood looking at each other, not speaking. A staff of Gatekeepers that had taken her centuries to collect, decades to train. Ruined. By that damned angel.
    Massimo’s frown deepened. Finally, he said, “Perhaps now would be the time to…”
    “Go. Take the others and go to Tuscany, or go to Naples. Go somewhere and don’t tell me where.”
    Massimo fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “I’m not leaving you. You need protection, more than any of us. We swore an oath.”
    “You’re just getting in the way here, and presenting more targets for those damned angels,” she said irritably. “We cannot remain cooped up in this house. I would leave, too, if I could. But I have responsibilities here in Venice. I must stay. Go, Massimo.”
    “No, baronessa. Not unless you can convince me that it is absolutely necessary.”
    There was a terrible silence between them. Something of which they never spoke.
    “I cannot tell you that, Massimo. Not right now.”
    “Then I’m staying.”
    Death was not the end. They both knew that. The soul was never destroyed.
    They had both died before, as humans.
    But torture at the hands of the Company of Angels…neither of them knew exactly what that meant. Except for the scream they had both heard carry across the water, a wordless sound that could mean no good.

Chapter Eleven
     
    B randon stormed away from Arielle, slamming out the back door of the dilapidated building for the second time.
    Moments later, he scaled the side wall of Luciana’s palazzo, climbing easily up the ornamental columns and cornices. What impelled him to do so this time, he wasn’t quite sure. Nor did he care. He only knew that he was past thinking.
    What drove him now was pure gut feeling.
    Luciana’s home was like the rest of her, Brandon thought as he popped the lock on her bedroom window and stole inside. Opulent. Luxurious. Sensual.
    Nudes adorned the frescoed walls, satyrs and nymphs in risqué positions, their partially clothed flesh portrayed in sensual colors that looked almost touchable. Swathes of silk and velvet curtained the windows and draped the large, gilt bed that stood in the center of the room.
    But where is the demoness? he wondered.
    The presence of her remaining Gatekeepers and the possibility of capture, he had totally pushed out of his mind.
    She came into