Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

prepared for this. He had made a stupid mistake, coming here. Expecting that what they had shared together had actually meant something to her.
    Fight, he told himself. Get up off the floor and take her down.
    But he couldn’t. Couldn’t move his limbs. Couldn’t marshal his arms to push himself upright, nor his legs to support him. His muscles seized again, his body going rigid as the poison worked its way through his nervous system.
    “What did you shoot into me?” he muttered, furious that his control was fading fast, his vision blurring. Even with his reduced capacity to think, he was more furious at the fact that, whatever she had done to him, it was ultimately his own fault.
    Didn’t expect an answer, wasn’t surprised when she simply smiled, as angelic as the mother of God herself. She stroked his head and murmured, “There now, tesoro mio. It is time to say our goodbyes.”
    “Did you stick me with your goddamned poison?” he ground out.
    Strychnine, arsenic, cyanide…whatever earthly poison she threw at him, he could handle. He would recover from those things. But none of the angels knew for certain what her special concoction contained.
    It had killed a demon. That much, he knew.
    Brandon felt himself slipping, his mind fighting to keep control.
    He had to trust that in the end, there was a reason for everything. Knew that whatever happened to his physical incarnation, even if this particular body died again, well, he would be recycled.
    He forced himself to let go.
    Brandon was stuck in a haze.
    Am I dreaming? he wondered.
    There was no alleyway. No smell of squalor. No shock of bullets entering his body. Instead, a moment of confusion, caught between two worlds, conscious and unconscious.
    He faded into darkness. Dreamlessness.
    Heard her bend down and whisper, “Hush, now. Just let it take you.”
    Screw that, he thought. I’m not going anywhere.
    The small door behind them burst open.
    One of her Gatekeepers— Massimo, Brandon thought—stumbled through it. Near exhaustion, his face smudged with ash, his clothes singed. He choked out, “ Baronessa. Ca’ Rossetti is on fire.”
    Her face, those glittering green eyes trained on Brandon with absolute hatred.
    She was out the door in a flash, not bothering to utter a single word to him.
    The look alone had conveyed everything.
    * * *
     
    Luciana ran out into the mezzanine, down the marble staircase, the quick series of taps that her high-heeled shoes made on the stairs as she ran down them, delicate and light.
    Inside the opera house, the first act was ending. Amid the shouts and the cheering, she and Massimo crossed the foyer.
    Out into the cool summer night. To the boat tethered not far from the entrance.
    He did not question her, but leaped into the boat behind her.
    Neither of them spoke as she drove, cleaving down the canals, veering around corners and finally, nearing her home.
    She felt the heat of it from fifty yards away as they approached. The roar of it, as if a dragon had come thundering up from the depths of the canal to scorch Ca’ Rossetti with its fury. But her own heart thundered much louder. She felt the weight of that organ dropping into her stomach, through the bottom of the boat, down into the dark waters of the canal.
    Ca’ Rossetti burned.
    * * *
     
    Violetta stepped into the box, knowing why she had come to La Fenice tonight—and it had nothing to do with the demoness.
    She had stayed on earth to accomplish this single thing before she went into the light.
    To love Massimo, and to be loved by him. Perhaps that had been part of her lesson here on earth, in the very short but very sweet time they had shared. But she knew that the more important reason for her stay, and maybe the whole reason she had died in the first place, had been for this.
    This single moment, so brief but so important.
    I may no longer have a body, but I have a voice.
    Looking at the angel on the floor, she bent down, and shouted into his ear with all the force of her classically trained lungs.
    “Wake up!”
    He didn’t move, so she shouted again. And again.
    Until she watched his eyes flicker open. Until she was sure he was moving back into consciousness, his hands fumbling for something in his pocket that wasn’t there, then pushing against the floor.
    And then she spiraled upward.
    Upward, departing through a rain of applause, the audience inside La Fenice clapping at the end of the opera, shouts of “Bravo!” creating a tunnel of