Read Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams for Free Online

pictures, he was pretty sure this demoness was comfortable exactly as she was. Firmly ensconced in the dark, taking full advantage of all its powers and privileges.
    With the file in his lap, he shut his eyes for a brief moment.
    And he stepped into the too-familiar landscape of his usual nightmare.
    The same full moon illuminating the sky. The same cool evening breeze.
    The same smell of urine and rotting garbage, the same dark alley.
    And, yet, when he turned the corner to enter the alleyway, it wasn’t the place of his death that he entered. Instead, he walked into an empty space, devoid of anything, like an empty theater stage used in a minimalist production. No props, only a bare black wooden floor.
    Into this blank space, the demoness emerged out of the darkness.
    A wraith forming out of mist, she then solidified into a more concrete figure that seemed to Brandon utterly hypnotic. Out of thin air, her tall, slender body materialized with its impossibly lush curves. Skin so pale and so perfect he itched to reach his hand out and test the velvet texture of it beneath his fingertips, to hold the flawless curve of her cheek in his hand.
    From the grainy photos, she stepped into living flesh, incarnated so vividly that he had no doubt that she was real. In an instant, he forgot completely that he had ever felt disgust for her. Looking at her, the sole emotion rushing into his brain, flooding into every part of his body, was desire.
    God in heaven.
    “You’re not real,” he said, reaching for her. His fingers, roughened from his weekend mechanic tinkering, accustomed to the unforgiving motor parts of metal and rubber, caught on the silk of her dress. He reached out toward the fine porcelain of her skin to touch her face. Yet, he could not reach her. “You can’t be real.”
    So exotic. So beautiful. And, as she was in the photos, so incredibly unhappy.
    “You have no idea what you’re doing,” she said in a siren’s voice, honey-soft and lilting with a Mediterranean rhythm. The rich and heavy vowels called to him despite the clear disdain of her message. “If you know what’s best for you, you’ll turn back now.”
    She vanished.
    Left in the emptiness by himself, Brandon had no sense of space, no idea where to go. Intuitively, he knew that if he stepped forward, he would walk back into the unavoidable dreamspace of his human death. But he had no choice. There was nowhere else to go. So he walked forward, felt his body shift into another place, enclosed by brick walls, suffused with the too-familiar scent of urine and garbage. He turned the corner. Into the same alley.
    The first bullet exploded in the back of his spine.
    The second, into the back of his head.
    He awoke, as he always did. In a cold sweat, feeling incredibly sad that he had died.
    But there was something unusually disturbing about this dream.
    Even more distressing than his usual nightmare was the fact that the dream had changed.
    He had never seen that bare black space. Had never seen a woman in his dream.
    “Heated hand towel, sir?” The flight attendant’s normal, human voice jarred him fully into the waking world. He took the towel, wiped the sheen of sweat from his face.
    Reminded himself again where he was.
    Not in a filthy alleyway in Detroit.
    On a plane, flying over the Atlantic, toward Italy.
    To catch a demoness.
    To find a woman he had not even met, who had already begun to invade his dreams.
    * * *
     
    Luciana looked up from her worktable, jolted out of her reverie. Her mind reached for the memory of the man she had envisioned, but his image faded too quickly to grasp.
    A rumble, a disturbance blurred the air unlike anything she had ever felt before. She shivered.
    On the edge of the table, just beside her hand, lay a feather.
    She picked it up, examining it.
    Dark gray at the tip, fading to dirty white at the bottom of the shaft. An ordinary feather, the kind pigeons left all over the city. Due to the city’s recent measures to