The Demoness of Waking Dreams (15 page)

“What are you doing, harboring her here in your rooms?” Luciana asked.

Massimo pushed Violetta behind him, placing himself between the two women. “Don’t hurt her.”

“What am I going to do to her now? She’s already dead,” Luciana said flatly, “and the devil wouldn’t accept her soul as a sacrifice.”

“I wanted to find some way to help her,” he admitted. “If the sacrifice had gone according to plan, her soul would have been stuck in hell. But since the devil didn’t take her, at least she was able to return to earth as a ghost. She deserves our help.”

“Nobody benefits from pity, Massimo,” Luciana said, shaking her head. “Really, you should have come to me once you realized she was here. There are some things that refuse to remain hidden. Well, Violetta, what do you have to say for yourself? Not so brave now that you realize what it’s like to be dead, I see.”

“I thought this would end and I would be able to leave this place,” the girl gritted out. “I saw a light when I died. I tried to go into it, but I could not. Am I going to become a demon?”

“That’s quite unlikely,” said Luciana, sighing. “You must be able to guess that not every human becomes a demon or an angel when they pass over. There are exceptional circumstances.”

Circumstances that this child would neither be able to fathom nor endure.

Luciana knew that instantly by looking at her. Had known it when they had sacrificed the girl. Violetta was too fragile. And altogether too good.

“You need to move on. Just let go,” Luciana told her. “There’s nothing holding you here.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Not just yet,” said the girl, a fraction more solid than she had been an instant ago.

“If you still had a body, I would give you a good shake,” said Luciana. She had never encountered such a situation before. After all the sacrifices that had ever occurred within the walls of Ca’ Rossetti, no soul had ever stayed around afterward. Each and every one of them had been ferried away in the devil’s funerary gondola, after Luciana had delivered them in front of the Redentore Church. Now, she thought bitterly,
if only Brandon had not screwed up the hunt, everything would be fine.

“Your stubbornness is commendable, but it’s not helping you now. Find the light, and go into it,” Luciana told her, making a shooing motion with her hands. Then, a little more gently, a little more cajolingly, she said, “That’s what I would do, if I could.”

“Why can’t you?” Violetta asked.

“Why do you think?” Luciana snapped. “Use your head. I’ve killed people. A lot of people. Demons are not just allowed to leave when we feel like it. But you are. You should go.”

“I’m not ready,” said Violetta defiantly. “I still have things to do here.”

Luciana threw her hands in the air. “For the love of God, what
things?
There is nothing keeping you here except your own stubborn beliefs, and your own fear.”

“There must be something we can help her do. Say goodbye, perhaps,” said Massimo.

“No,” said Luciana. “We owe her nothing. More important, we have no time to deal with this right now. We have much more pressing things to worry about. If you didn’t notice, the angel is still out there. Watching us.”

Violetta vanished, the wisp of her image trailing into vapor as she passed through the surface of the wooden door. Massimo’s gaze followed her, and a small frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. He tried to hide it, but Luciana saw something she didn’t like: the slight parting of his lips as he started to call after Violetta.

“You,” she said, pointing at the Gatekeeper, “don’t call her back here. Don’t even think about her anymore. You’ve got to keep your wits about you. Love doesn’t exist for demons.”

“Yes,
baronessa,
” he said quietly.

“Forget the girl. Just let her go. We need to do something about this angel.”

She peered out the crack in the draperies of Massimo’s window, wondering if this perspective would afford her a better view of Brandon’s hiding place. But outside, there was nothing but the empty canal, and across it, the crumbling palazzo sat dark and quiet. No movement.

“I need to go out,” she said, shutting the curtain with a snap. “Being trapped in here is driving all of us insane. We must show the angels that we won’t be kept penned in like animals.”

She could feel Brandon’s rugged energy from across the canal. Could almost feel as a palpable sensation the twitch of his hard muscles, the uncomfortable shifting of his big body. Itching to run, to grasp, to capture. To
do.

You could not force a seduction, she knew. Especially not with a man like this.

A hunter must hunt.

So give him something to hunt.

Someone
to hunt.

“Brandon is a man of action—that is one thing we know for sure. Undoubtedly if I leave this house, he will follow. I cannot stay in here a moment longer. I need to remember who I am,” she said, more to herself than to Massimo. “I need to go hunt. And I will flush the pigeon out of his hiding place at the same time.”

“Isn’t that taking an unnecessary risk,
baronessa?
”

She smiled. “Not at all. It will serve two purposes. You know the expression in Italian—
Prendere due piccioni con una fava.
The English translation is literally ‘to take two pigeons with one bean.’ But the real equivalent is ‘kill two birds with one stone.’ That, my dear Massimo, is what I intend to do.”

She smiled to herself.

The English had such a violent way of expressing the same idea.

But in fact, the English saying expressed precisely what she planned to do.

* * *

The sun had just set over Venice, casting the city into a dim light. Across the street, Brandon saw a shape flicker, the merest hint of a shadow moving. He leaned forward, peering closer. And saw the figure of the demoness leaving through the side entrance of the house, a hooded cloak drawn over her head. She looked around covertly, then made a quick dash into the alley behind the house.

He jumped up, running across the bridge after her.

He tracked her as she wove through the streets, her dark cloak trailing behind her. There was something different about her, Brandon thought. Something hesitant. Was she in doubt about what it was she wanted? And why had she left the house?

She walked in halting steps. Stopped. He saw her enter a doorway.

He followed the sweep of her cloak.

She turned.

And
she
wasn’t Luciana.

The girl’s face was paler than the living.

“Who are you? And where is she?” Brandon said, grabbing for her arm. “Where’s Luciana?”

He found himself holding a fistful of empty cloak, the fabric draped from his hand as the girl pulled out of the garment entirely. She looked at him with an astonished stare, ghostly eyes flickering with slight anger in the dim light.

“If you’re talking about the
baronessa,
I have no idea. She went somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

He looked at her closely, wondering why she had been inside Ca’ Rossetti.

“What did they do to you in there?” he asked.

She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters is that I need to finish what I have to do. And then I will find the light.”

“That’s right,” he told her. “You’ve got to go into the light. They can’t hold you, you know. If you did nothing to merit damnation, you are not the property of the devil,” Brandon said.

“Of course I know that,” the girl said, pulling herself up proudly.

“Let me help you. Tell me what I can do.”

She stared at him, sending a chill through him. She opened her mouth to speak, as though she had gotten a flash of clarity, had realized something of great importance.

Then she vanished into thin air.

I hope you find whatever it is you’re searching for,
he thought.

God knew there were enough lost souls wandering the streets of Venice.

Brandon headed back into the night, resolving to take care of some unfinished business of his own.

* * *

As Luciana prepared to exit the palazzo, she looked out the window and saw the girl fleeing through the side door. And saw Brandon follow.

I don’t even need to flush that pigeon out of his hole,
she thought.
The girl has done it for me.

Smiling to herself, Luciana waltzed right out the front door, stepped into her boat and drove up the Grand Canal to the Piazza San Marco.

The trip was a short one, and as she navigated her way up the canal, she wore a little smile on her face. Even after two and a half centuries as a Venetian, she never tired of this square, its beauty as stunning as when she had been a young girl.

Ah, yes, it felt good to be out in the open air again.

Back on the hunt.

She docked the boat at a mooring post and headed toward the action.

On this balmy midsummer evening, every table was packed in the big open-air square of the Piazza San Marco, every
caffè
full to capacity, crowds entranced by the many small orchestras playing classical music that wafted into the air. The vendors were out in full force, hawking every sort of Venetian souvenir to the hordes of tourists.

Finding victims in San Marco is like shooting fish in a barrel,
thought Luciana.

She ordered a Cinzano and settled in to watch the crowd.

Across the pool of crowded tables, a tourist fixed his half-drunk gaze on her.

Tourists,
she thought nastily,
are more annoying vermin than the pigeons we worked so hard to cull. So perhaps I’ll do my civic duty tonight and rid Venice of one more nuisance.

She smiled, enticingly. Waited for the tourist to come over.

Over the past two centuries, she had heard every pickup line imaginable.

“Hai da fare per I prossimi cent’anni?” What are you doing for the next hundred years?

“Fa caldo qui, o è perchè ci sei tu?” Is it hot in here, or is it just you?

“Tu sei il mio sogno proibito.” You’re my forbidden dream…

What came out of this one’s mouth was no better than she expected.

“Was your father a thief?” he said in English.

“Yes. He stole the stars from the sky and put them in my eyes,” she said with a roll of those eyes skyward, toward the stars from which they were allegedly stolen.

“You, too, are a thief,
belissima.
You stole my line.”

“We Venetians are thieves at heart,” she said, leaning forward to give him a good look at her ample cleavage. She widened her eyes as she looked up at him, and made her voice very sweet as she said, “Half our treasures are looted from religious wars. The facade of our most famous basilica of San Marco
is a
miscuglio…
a medley of stolen columns taken from foreign temples. Inside, its altars are decorated with jewels filched from other cities, other churches. Even the famed Horses of San Marco, the four bronzed statues, were so famously robbed away from the Byzantine Empire.
Sì,
even the body of San Marco himself was stolen, his remains thieved out of Egypt by Venetian merchants in the ninth century.”

Tourists loved this story. Just as they loved finding an authentic Venetian.

And like all the rest of them, this one ate it up.

He pulled out the chair next to her. “May I?”

“Only if you’re in the mood for trouble,” she said, running a suggestive finger along the edge of her neckline, along the top of one perfect breast.

He laughed, his eyes almost popping out of his head. “On the contrary. I think I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“Not exactly,” she said. “However, a trip in the other direction can be easily arranged.”

He laughed at the odd statement, thinking it was a joke.

Well,
she thought.
Can’t say I didn’t warn him.

He flagged the waiter over and ordered two Cinzanos. When the drinks came, she thought about how easy it would be, what a subtle movement it would take to poison him. A slight squeeze of the fingers could decant a single drop of poison into his drink, too quick for his feeble human mind to even detect.

Under the table, his hand rested on her thigh. Gave it a squeeze that made her want to kick him. Made her want to poison him right here in the square. To leave his dying corpse sitting in this metal chair, for one of the
caffè
waiters to find.

But to do so would draw undue attention to herself. To take a risk that she couldn’t afford. Not right now.