Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

things went with him. He got extremely out of hand, especially when you entered the picture. Why, all those years ago in Venice when you were seventeen, I told him to leave you. If you had just stayed out of the picture, everything would have been fine.”
    Arielle smiled as the morning sunlight broke into the room.
    And Luciana understood everything.
    Julian had been a priority for Arielle because he had been a personal mission.
    The one who got away.
    And Arielle had been responsible for guiding Julian’s decision to leave Venice two and a half centuries ago. That decision had ultimately ruined Luciana’s human life.
    “You’re not interested in reforming me, are you?” Luciana said finally.
    “Not you. The idea of you joining the Company is intolerable. You will never become an angel,” said Arielle evenly.
    “I have to hand it to you, Arielle. There’s more to you than I thought.”
    “ Grazie. I take that as a compliment,” said Arielle.
    “There is no more poison. It burned to the ground with Ca’ Rossetti,” the demoness said truthfully.
    “Good,” Arielle said. “That’s all I really wanted to know.”
    “Yes, that’s the truth,” Luciana said. And for once, it was.
    “No, actually it’s not.”
    “I swear it all burned. I tried to save some of it, but your colleague stopped me.”
    “Well, no. There’s still some of that poison left. Do you want to know how I know?” Arielle smiled, infuriatingly neutral.
    It’s eerie the way she sometimes reminds me of Corbin, Luciana thought.
    “I found this in your home before I burned Ca’ Rossetti to the ground.”
    She held up one of the little glass vials, which held the poison Luciana had concocted in her workroom in the days before she had left Venice.
    It was empty.
    Luciana looked down at her coffee cup. “American coffee really is poison, isn’t it?”
    Is this how it feels? Luciana thought. I had forgotten.
    The pain of dying was unbearable.
    The poison Arielle had fed her burned through her veins, killing parts of her physical body as it went.
    “How strange to be poisoned yourself, isn’t it? Imagine, after you’ve done the same to so many others,” said the angel.
    Luciana tried to answer back. The word bitch formed on her lips even as she convulsed, caught in a spasm as the cyanide burned through her veins. Arielle looked down at her, that infuriating coolness of hers unchanging as she surveyed the results of her work.
    “Who do you think ordered the burning of Ca’ Rossetti? You may have thought it was Corbin, but I doubt he would ever be so destructive. No,” Arielle said, “I was the one who did it. The reason should be perfectly clear to you. I did so in order to save human lives.”
    Luciana looked up at her from the floor.
    “I think you did it for your own satisfaction,” she managed to gasp. “For revenge.”
    Arielle shrugged. “The reason hardly matters now. What’s more important are the consequences. By burning down your house, I was also able to ensure that you wouldn’t be able to manufacture any more poison. From what I hear, you had quite the little laboratory set up there.”
    The demoness stumbled away, about to vomit.
    “We’re working toward the same thing here in the Company of Angels. Only we call it by a different name.” Arielle smiled. “Disposal.”
    The thought that ran through Luciana’s mind was, I wish it had been different.
    A thousand thoughts and a thousand images rushed into her mind, flooding through her like a wave that washed over her, took her breath away, swept her into unconsciousness. Her parents’ faces…her sister…Julian…the fallen republic of Venice and all the citizens plunged into poverty and humiliation…every face of every human victim she had ever killed…the Gatekeepers she had raised like children…
    And Brandon…
    As the tide of darkness rolled over her, she smiled, suddenly grateful that she had gotten the chance to know him at all.
    A single word rushed into her mind.
    Peace.
    How much time passed as Luciana lay on the floor of that horrible little room, fading in and out of consciousness, carried on the tide of the poison, she had no idea.
    She only knew that when she opened her eyes, Arielle was standing over her, looking down, her blond hair lit by a blaze of fluorescent light from the ceiling above.
    “Get up,” said the angel.
    “You killed me,” Luciana accused, coughing out a little blood.
    “No. I shot you full of cyanide, just like