Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

way to go was up. And so they went. Up toward the roof. Dragging her, he pulled her through the house. Outside, to the air. Cool air that burned her lungs.
    On the rooftop, it was like standing on top of a bonfire, on the last log that was yet to be consumed by the flames. Beneath them, the building was going to collapse. He pulled her toward the edge of the roof.
    “Jump!” Brandon shouted over the noise of the fire beneath them.
    The roar was deafening. She thought of what she had seen in hell. The image of Harcourt flickered before her. Of the pile of dead girls. Of Carlotta.
    “Don’t just stand there! Jump!”
    In the end, it wasn’t her who made the decision. It was all him.
    Flinging himself off the roof, he pulled her through the air with him. He leaped from the top of the building just as it exploded into flames, the burning heat shooting up into the night sky behind them.
    They fell in a graceful arc that seemed to last forever. She wished it would, the two of them plummeting downward amid a gray rain. Not feathers this time, but the ashes of her home littering the night sky.
    * * *
     
    He knew the moment he lost her. Not in body, but in soul.
    It was the moment he jumped off the rooftop, pulling her with him.
    You can’t force someone to take a leap of faith.
    But he did, grabbing her in his arms and flinging them both into the dark space over the canal, half expecting them to land in a dreamscape.
    Instead, they landed in the real world, in the murky water of the Grand Canal.
    * * *
     
    Down, down they plunged.
    So far down, so cold, so dark that she thought she might as well stay here instead, beneath the water. Waiting for the dragon she might call up from its depths to drag them away, to join the corpses of so many victims she had dumped here over the years. Or to meet the devil’s ferryman, who might arrive in his black funerary gondola to row their bodies away to the underworld.
    Whoever came for them, their final destination would remain the same.
    But Brandon would not relent. There was something so unbreakable about this man. He pulled her up, upward, until the air singed her lungs and once again ignited in her somewhere deep down the will to exist.
    But that existence was not without pain.
    When she screamed, nothing came out of her but a thin wail. So whisper-fragile that it was as if her voice, her very soul, had been sucked into the flames along with her home.
    Vaguely, she heard Brandon’s voice above her, comforting, rationalizing.
    Whatever he said didn’t even register.
    Centuries of history. History for which she had fought. The last remnants of a family legacy she had struggled to preserve. Gone. Burned to ashes.
    She screamed again, wordless rage drowned by the frenzied human activity around the building, the Venetian firemen already rushing to the scene with their hoses, pumping water from the canal onto the burning building.
    And them.
    The goddamned Company of Angels.
    Standing up on the rooftops around Ca’ Rossetti. Watching it burn.
    In the late evening, lit by the flames that consumed her ancestral home, stood a line of half a dozen figures dotting the neighboring rooftops. She recognized most of them, but her attention swung like the scope of a rifle, fixing on two figures in particular, two Company supervisors she had not expected to see here tonight.
    Arielle, the bitch who had thwarted her plans in America, supervisor of the L.A. unit.
    Infusino, her old nemesis, supervisor of the Venetian unit.
    Brandon hauled her out of the water, into a boat that someone had pulled up beside them. Covered her with a blanket, rubbing the canal water out of her despite the fact that her most pressing need at this moment was far from dryness.
    It was revenge.
    * * *
     
    The flames of hell were green. Brandon was sure of it when he looked into her eyes.
    When they had gotten far enough away from the building that the fire was no longer visible, she turned toward him.
    “Angels,” she hissed, spitting the word out. An accusation, a swear, a profanity. “You fight dirtier than any demons I’ve ever met.”
    “I’m not sure who set your palazzo on fire,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t anything I had planned, nor was I involved.”
    As they navigated down the Grand Canal, they saw another figure, amber eyes glowing in the dark. Corbin Ranulfson smirked down at them from the balcony of one of the grand hotels.
    “This is not our doing,” he said. “You saw yourself. It