The Demoness of Waking Dreams (13 page)

I am dreaming.

“La Lucciola,”
he said. “They said that was your nickname.”

She laughed. “I should slap you for calling me that. Do you know what it means? It’s the word for ‘firefly.’ Italians use it to refer to a common whore. Because streetwalkers light up the night, just like those small, bright insects.”

“They told me…” He swallowed. “Carlotta told me—”

“So you met her. You believed what that old prostitute told you?” She laughed. “You angels are a gullible sort. And so horny, all of you. When was the last time you had sex? Real sex, I mean.” She ran her finger down the curve of her breast, drawing his eye there.

He swallowed and saw her watch the movement.

She pulled him toward the bed. “Come with me.”

“Your body is sacred,” he said, shaking his head. “You need to treat it as such. I’m not one of your customers.”

“My body hasn’t been sacred for two hundred and twenty years. It may be a physical body, but it isn’t human.”

“It’s still part of the divine,” he said. He knew there was nothing wrong with sex. On the contrary. But sex without spiritual connection, even a fleeting one…

Even in his dreams, he knew better than to go there.

“It’s just a dream. That’s all it is,” she cooed. “If you want a connection, I can give you that. Let me teach you some words in Italian. To speak my language, you must make your mouth very sweet. Watch me,” she said, as if he could tear his eyes away from the movement of her lips, the suggestive and subtle flick of her tongue as she skimmed the tip of it across her upper lip, taunting. “
Ti amo
. That means
I love you.
Is that what you want to hear?”

“Don’t invoke the concept of love. You don’t even know me,” he growled.

But in his pants, his cock stirred, rising to harden.

“Perhaps not. But I know
that,
” she said, addressing his erection. “And it is just like every other of its kind on the planet, angel or otherwise.”

His mind was scrambled in a thousand different directions, trying to decipher what was allowed and what was not. What he could and could not do.

“What is it you really want? Don’t be afraid of your desires.
It’s just a dream.
”

Draping herself along a velvet chaise longue in deep burgundy, she reclined, allowing her legs to part. Fingered the edge of the bra, allowing her nipple to peek out its lace edge. She reached for his hand, drawing it to her breast, his fingers and hers coaxing the heavy globe out of the fabric. The nipple hardened beneath his touch. He flicked it with his thumb, teasing.

“That’s right. Give in to your desires. You’ve been pent up for so long. I know you have.”

No one could have told her that, but it was a good guess.

The right guess
, he thought.

Unable to resist her, he sank to the floor before her, his knees cushioned by the thick carpet. Between her spread legs he bent, running his hands up her pale thighs. Inhaled the scent of her, musky and dark, calling to him. He kissed the inside of her thigh, brushed his lips against the soft skin there, and heard her moan in response. She touched his head, running her fingertips over the coarse stubble on his face while he explored the smooth skin of her inner thigh.

He felt her fingers skim over his broad, muscled back.

“Il mio angelo,”
she whispered. He felt her fingers brush over the tattoo of the angel, tracing over the dark gray lines, the pattern of the wings on his back as he touched her sex through the silk of her panties. Her fingers sprawled over the sinews of his back as she undulated, his arms hooked around her legs, holding her thighs open.

Gently licked with his tongue, opening her to him ever so gently.

There was something so exquisitely tender about this demoness, something he had never experienced with another woman.

He felt her tense.

“Relax. Stop thinking and just feel,” he ordered.

“You were right,” she said, sitting up a fraction. “We can’t do this. We should stop.”

This isn’t part of my fantasy,
his brain argued.

He raised his head for an instant, registering the genuine shock in those green eyes of hers.

“Why now,
principessa?
” he said, drunk on the taste of her.

She pulled her legs closed, swept up her discarded dress from the floor. She stood and looked down at him as he knelt there still, her fiery green eyes blazing. “You must leave.”

Go,
his gut screamed.
Otherwise, she’s going to kill you.

He stood, bewildered, and turned to leave.

Opening the door, he passed through the doorway.

His body braced for the shock of stepping, for the three-thousandth time, into the familiar scene of his nightmare. For the familiar scent of urine and garbage, the alleyway. For the intense pain of the gunshots fired into his back, his neck.

But none of it came.

Instead, he came slamming back into consciousness, into darkness, with his heart pounding as if it would explode inside his chest. On the hard concrete of a floor that somehow felt more real, the odor of the room and of his own sweat, somehow more intense than the sensations of the dreamworld.

And yet, he had not died in his dream.

Orienting himself, he checked his pocket.

No watch.

Not Detroit. Not Chicago.

Venice.

Not the brothel, but lying on the dirty floor of a condemned palazzo.

In the dark, he stilled, listening to the shift and creak of the old building, to the sound of a slow leak somewhere in the back rooms. Water dripped, drop by single drop. And every drop that fell pulled him further back to the reality of waking. He lay wondering if the weary edifice might possibly succumb to the pressure of its thousand years. Might suddenly collapse on top of him, burying him beneath the rubble of decaying brick and unwritten history.

He lay waiting for a break in the craziest assignment he’d ever been dealt.

Whether he was awake or dreaming, he hardly knew.

Reality and dream had become equally unfathomable.

* * *

Across the canal, the demoness lay in her bed, on her silk sheets.

Staring up at the splay of light shifting across the ceiling, wondering how the hell the angel had brought her so perilously close to the edge of letting go.

I’m supposed to be the one seducing him,
she thought.
I’m supposed to be the one in control.

And yet there, in his dream,
he
had made her completely forget herself for a moment.

She got up and paced around the room. Went to the window to peer out into the darkness, toward where he lay.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. She had never lost control.

But this time, it had seemed so real.

The dream had not been entirely good. There were things she would rather forget, things she had buried centuries ago that she had hoped would never resurface.

Luciana, La Lucciola.

She had not thought about such things for a very long time.

But still, there had been the beauty of
him,
the nearness of him, the realness of him. She put a finger to her lips, still able to feel the pressure of his mouth against hers, breath to breath.

She returned to her bed and wept tears that slid onto the sheets and stained the silk, marks that convinced her that she was in the physical world.

He was still here, in Venice, a stone’s throw away across the canal.

But he might as well have been living in another century or another universe. Her world, although on earth, would always be partly sunk in hell. She closed her eyes and fell into the dark void of dreamless sleep, hoping that she would find some respite from the painful reality of waking existence.

* * *

In the past few weeks, Corbin Ranulfson had suffered the most intolerable humiliation of his existence.

On earth, he had lost his newest hotel to traitor demon-turned-angel Julian Ascher.

In hell, Corbin had been demoted and stripped of his power to dematerialize.

But he was determined to show the demon world that he would not be forgotten.

He had come to Venice in a massive yacht, which he anchored in the Venetian Lagoon, ignoring the human regulations forbidding it. From there, in the shallow waters of the Adriatic, he could view the comings and goings of the city.

He ordered Carlotta to make an appearance. When the courtesan arrived in his stateroom, she curtsied graciously. And he thought,
Luciana ought to take lessons.

“What can I do for you, your lordship?” she stuttered.

Corbin grabbed her by the front of her elegantly tailored suit and said, “Very pretty. But let’s dispense with the formalities, shall we? Now why is a whore like you cooperating with the Company of Angels? Why did you feel you needed to take that angel to Luciana’s?”

“I needed to get him out of my establishment. I have a business to run. Girls to protect.”

“And you thought that was the smartest thing to do?” He caught her by the throat.

Their eyes met. “Yes, Corbin. I did.”

“There’s something about you that reminds me of Luciana,” he said.

“Men think all Italian women are the same,” she said, rising to the bait a little. “We are either regarded as hypersexualized or not regarded at all. Not much has changed in the past two centuries.”

For a long moment, he held her pinned against the wall. “You’re a poor substitute for Luciana, but you might do in a pinch. Courtesan.
Cortigiana.
Hora.
Puttana.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, isn’t that what they say?”

Her mouth tightened, but she didn’t dare say anything.

“Deep down, all women are whores,” he said to her, partly because he really believed it, and partly to see her react.

But she was well trained in her trade and simply smiled a simpering smile.

He slipped his hand down the front of her blouse, popping the buttons open. Grabbed her lush breasts, fingered the nipples roughly, then shoved her onto a nearby desk.

And then he opened his trousers and sank himself into her, pumping forcefully until he came, thinking all the while about Luciana and how furious she had made him. When he was done, Carlotta stumbled away, adjusting her clothing. What he sensed in her was not uncommon in the women he fucked, a kind of emptiness and a barely concealed terror. Carlotta knew exactly what he was capable of.

“How long did Luciana work for you?” he said, zipping up his fly.

“As long as she needed. She had to clear her debt to the devil, once he let her out of hell. She was a very popular girl, but as soon as she worked off her debt, she left. It has been hundreds of years since she worked at the gallery. Hundreds of years since I’ve seen her.”

“That many? I don’t believe that for a second. You’re a two-faced lying bitch, just like her.”

“I take that as a compliment,” she said, trying to make light of it.

It pissed him off. She would pay for that later.

In the past, no demon would have dared to contradict him. Since his last run-in with the Company of Angels, he was severely weakened. The underlings could sense it. In the past, Corbin would have taken care of this situation with relative ease, dematerializing in and out of dimensions with the same ease as a human walking through a doorway.

The run-in with the angels had left him stripped of that power. It had lowered his position within the ranking of Archdemons, knocking him from the top of a ladder he had been climbing for many hundreds of years.

Being unseated from that position left him furious.