Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

driving, he walked. He wandered for a long time, thoughts churning as he crossed bridges and navigated narrow lanes, until he was lost in the tangle of streets and water.
    Someone who has brought me so much joy, if only for a brief moment…she couldn’t be all evil, could she?
    He looked up at the sky, at the multitude of stars above. Nothing had been resolved. If anything, their interlude had complicated things beyond imagining, the dreamed quality of their encounters brought into flesh, brought into reality.
    And the demoness herself. His mind had difficulty pinning her down. The thought of her was elusive, shifting, transitory. Maiden, dragon. Seductress, Madonna. It seemed as though every thought he had ever conceived about womanhood existed inside of Luciana. All of those images and feelings, shifting and changing beneath the surface of her skin.
    Maddening.
    An old iron gate caught his eye. It seemed to pop out of the laneway, the ornately wrought metal appearing to glow a little, the vines curling up it seeming to beckon to him, swaying a little in the breeze. He walked toward it, looked inside but could not see.
    Pushed it open, heard the creak of its disused hinges, and walked into a garden.
    Inside, fireflies clustered over a statue in the center of the garden.
    As he walked toward it, he saw a statue of St. George slaying the dragon.
    What it meant, he had absolutely no idea.
    Because the most maddening part of the whole situation, he realized, was that at this point, he was nearer to being swallowed by the dragon than slaying it.

Chapter Twelve
     
    M assimo steered the boat across the dark lagoon, into the marshy waters near the island of Sant’ Ariano. The mysterious little island had been deserted for centuries, since the sixteenth century, when the city of Venice decided to use the island as an ossario, an “ossuary.”
    A dumping ground for the bones of dead Venetians.
    Luciana had first come here as a young human woman, searching for snakes on the island rumored to be infested with them. And snakes were vital in the formulas for poisons she had researched in old apothecaries’ handbooks. But she had found something else here.
    Someone else here. Someone who had helped her master the art of poison far beyond what she could have learned on her own.
    “Wait here for me,” she told Massimo, embarking from the boat and taking the flowers with her. “This is a matter I must resolve on my own.”
    A strange mist drifted on the surface of the lagoon, unusual for high summer in Venice. Luciana’s shoes crunched over the earth. She steeled herself against the knowledge of what was crushed beneath her hard soles. Until about a century ago, bodies had simply been dumped in piles. Then the city officials decided to flatten these piles, leaving bone chips and shards all over the island. A wall had been erected around the island, hiding its contents from public view.
    Walking over the uneven ground now, Luciana sensed the energetic trace of thousands of people who had lived and died, their bodies ground into shards and composting quietly with the earth here. Something less than ghostly, the bare essence of them left behind, a fine sort of memory etched on the air.
    She forged farther, until she found a small, broken-down building. The roof had long been torn off, and overhead, tree branches interwove to form a natural roof, moonlight shining through the gaps. Spiders had taken up residence, the sticky residue of the webbing pasting itself to her fingers, attaching itself to her hair.
    Disgusting, she thought as she pushed her way into the small, enclosed space. What a terrible idea it was to come here.
    “Zitella?” Luciana called.
    Perhaps the old crone was gone. It had literally been ages since she had been there, ages since she had needed the kind of help that this woman could give. Perhaps she was not there.
    But among the rotting walls, she recognized her old mentor.
    The master alchemist, the master poisoner.
    Seated in a chair, exactly the way she had been two hundred years ago. Her white hair piled into a neat bun at the back of her head, her black widow’s weeds unchanged in style, shapeless and covering her frail body. Decrepit. Her bony fingers pointed up toward Luciana, thin and spindly in the moonlight, beckoning her closer.
    Zitella’s age was impossible to guess. Even two hundred years ago, when Luciana had come here as a young widow, desperate for a way out of a terrible situation,