“You’ve done your job well in my absence,” she noted, casting a particular eye over the sprawling interior.
The Gatekeepers snapped into a neat row, identically clad in their working uniform: jeans and snug black T-shirts. Each taller, darker and more handsome than the last. There in the main hall, she nodded.
“Giancarlo, Antonio, Federico, Cesare, Salvatore, Massimo,” she greeted them each as she inspected the line. “Thank you all. You may return to your duties, and I must return to mine. There is precious little time left today, as I must prepare for tonight’s hunt.”
She turned, ready to ascend the staircase to the second floor.
Just then, a female scream from the rear of the palazzo pierced the congenial atmosphere. The suffering in that sound was palpable; it was like an animal keening in pain. Luciana stopped. Her gaze tracked downward, to the bloody footprints glistening on the marble floor hidden behind one of the Gatekeepers. To the gray-skinned goblin the size of a small dog skittering along the edge of the wall, cackling to itself and dragging a woman’s shoe. More blood seeped from the heel of that shoe, trailing a thin, scarlet line across the otherwise-immaculate floor.
Not a muscle twitched among her staff.
Not a single eye blinked.
They were hiding something. Or more precisely, some
one.
Luciana maintained her smile.
“Whatever—or more precisely whomever—you’ve got back there,” she said, waving a hand in the direction of the scream, “just make sure you clean up the mess. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. Come, Massimo. I need you to unlock my workroom.”
He dutifully followed along behind her as she mounted the stairway, the white marble overlaid with rich red carpet cushioning her footsteps.
“Did you happen to conclude your business with Julian Ascher while you were in America,
baronessa?
”
She closed her eyes briefly, fingertips skating along the carved stone balustrade of the curved staircase. The stairs teetered beneath her momentarily, the world tilting on its side. Every muscle in her body contracted. Her jaw tightened and her stomach threatened to expel the meal she’d just consumed.
“Don’t speak that name in my presence again,” she hissed, unable to contain her fury.
“Yes, of course,
baronessa.
I’m so sorry, I…”
She was held together so tightly it ached; she felt the pressure of her gritted teeth and wondered if they would break. Then she turned back to face Massimo and said, “If you must know, Julian has joined the angels.”
“Do you mean he died?” Masssimo wondered.
“No,” she said, pivoting to glare at him. She pressed her lips together for a long moment. “He was—” she paused before sneering out the word “—
redeemed
and joined the Company of Angels.”
The Gatekeeper kept his own mouth shut, knowing better than to ask more questions.
She turned and continued up the stairs. Tried not to think about him, although that was impossible.
“Would you like to lie down for a few hours,
baronessa?
Perhaps you should rest.”
She had work to do before tonight. She touched the little vial hanging around her neck.
“There’s no rest for the wicked, Massimo.”
All over Venice, people were preparing.
Luciana had her own preparations to make. Her own offering to procure. Her own homage to pay.
And it was not to the Redeemer.
On the third floor of Ca’ Rossetti, Luciana strode the length of the hallway to a small room at the end.
Despite its size, it remained one of the demoness’s favorite rooms.
The windows overlooked the Grand Canal, and the eastern sunlight poured in during the late mornings. Outside, passersby floated along the canal in gondolas and
vaporetti
, on transport barges and fishing boats, completely unaware of what went on within. What had been going on for centuries.
The fine art of poison.
“You’ve kept everything in the prescribed conditions, as I instructed?” Luciana asked Massimo as he unlocked the workroom door.
“Yes,
baronessa,
” the Gatekeeper nodded.
“Thank you, Massimo. You may return later.”
“If it’s all the same to you,
baronessa,
I’ll stay to assist you.”
She suspected he wanted to stay to keep an eye on her, but after her ordeal, she needed solitude to clear her head. To think. “I’m
fine
. I’ll call for you if I need assistance.”
She gestured for him to leave with a wave of her hand.
He hesitated, but bowed a little and retreated.
She cast an eye around the tidy little room. Yes, the Gatekeepers had done their job maintaining her work space. Dried flowers and plants, belladonna flowers and narcissus bulbs hung from a ceiling rack, awaiting her return. A glass flask and burner set up for distillation stood on one side of the worktable. On the other side was a carefully organized and labeled stand of bottles and vials:
scorpion, tarantula, black-widow spider.
“Buongiorno, bambini,”
she called, bending down to peer into a sectioned glass terrarium, where a pair of green mambas slithered. Two pairs of beady green eyes fixed on their mistress, forked tongues darting out in greeting.
Among other toxins, the mambas’ venom had contributed to the contents of the tiny glass vial around her neck. The liquid in this little vial had taken her months to distill, the rarest of poisons in a perfect combination that had already proven it could kill a demon. Its first victim, a low-ranking demon who had worked as a bellboy in Las Vegas, had gone down quite nicely.
The contents of this vial, administered to a human victim, would quite literally be overkill. Unclasping the chain from her neck, she transferred the vial of poison into the hollowed-out bottom of a gold lipstick tube, which she slipped into her pocket.
That poison must be saved for another purpose.
A purpose that would make everything worthwhile in the end. All the hard work and suffering. All the humiliation, the pain she had endured. All the risks she had taken, the waiting games she had played.
Her enemies, old and new, would perish screaming her name.
Her name would echo in their minds as they burned in the depths of hell forever.
“Soon,” she cooed to the snakes, “but not tonight.”
She prided herself in choosing precisely the correct poison for every occasion, and distilled them herself. Through poison, one could achieve results that could not be accomplished through other means. The legacy of poison in Italy’s noble houses—the Borgias, the Medici family—was almost an art, too valuable to ignore.
She perused her choices amongst the rows of bottles and vials.
White arsenic.
The poison of choice for the Borgias.
Too slow acting. She would need something faster tonight.
Hemlock.
The poison that had killed Socrates. But it was positively antiquated.
Strychnine.
Entirely too melodramatic. It caused a good deal of unnecessary thrashing and convulsing. Sometimes she enjoyed that, but she could do with something a little simpler for this evening’s purposes.
Luciana picked up a clear bottle of liquid, held it up to the light.
Cyanide.
Perfetto.
The perfect poison for the occasion. Clean, effective and incredibly fast acting. Timeless and classic, the Chanel perfume of poisons.
She decanted a small amount of the cyanide into a second glass vial.
And just like perfume,
she thought as she strung the second vial on the gold chain around her neck,
a little goes a long way
.
* * *
Brandon watched the lights of Chicago recede beneath him as the 747 lifted off from the ground, several hundred tons of metal, passengers and cargo rising into the air.
Every act of flight requires a leap of faith,
he knew.
A bird, every time it flies, must leap. Must commit itself to the air and trust that its wings will carry it aloft. The same with a plane, barreling along the runway to launch itself airborne.
And just like flying, every mission required a leap of faith.
Leap, and have faith that the divine will guide you where you need to go.
He had been operating along that principle for the duration of his existence.
And now, as he sat in his seat with the big plane shaking beneath him, the familiar anxiety niggled in the back of his mind. Fear of falling asleep. He reviled sleeping in public places, in the open where his inevitable nightmare might leave him vulnerable to prying eyes.
Still, he had no choice.
When the plane reached cruising altitude, he perused Luciana’s file on his laptop, browsing through the documents relating to her case.
Now Brandon studied the series of low-resolution photographs. He found himself staring at her pale skin and vivid green eyes, mesmerized by the beauty of her face despite the expression of displeasure she consistently wore.
“Beauty can be deceptive.”
That was one of the first lessons Brandon had ever learned as an angel. Arielle had taught it to him. Despite her continual annoyance with him…despite his disagreement with her management style…at the heart of it, Arielle knew what she was doing. She had told him,
“Don’t equate beauty with goodness, even though it may seem angelic. Demons can also take the form of beauty. They like to mimic the divine. And demons are drawn to beauty. They love to defile it.”
Luciana was no ordinary beauty. She was exceptional. And apparently, she also loved to destroy exceptional beauty.
According to the file, her human life had been remarkably sad, scarred by family tragedies and betrayal. But reading through her lengthy history of misfortune, he felt nothing but disgust for her. She had been plagued by hardship, yes. But the choices she had made had been consistently bad. Tracing the steps of her biography, the more he read, the more horrified he became by the details of her grisly sacrifices, overwhelmed by the catalog of atrocities. He skimmed through a note in the file, marked
History of the Redentore Festival:
Venice suffered from a devastating outbreak of the plague between 1575 and 1577, which killed more than one-third of the population. The Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, or Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, was erected as an offering to the divine and a plea for liberation from the deadly disease.
On the third weekend in July, Venetians celebrate the Redentore Festival to commemorate the disappearance of the plague. A temporary bridge is erected on floating pontoons, leading from the main part of Venice to the Island of Giudecca, where the Redentore Church is located.
Every year, as Julian Ascher explained, Luciana chose to kill a victim at this festival.
Why
she did that, Julian had not explained.
There must be a reason.
Brandon leafed through her file, looking for an answer. But if there was an answer, it didn’t lie within the folder he had received.
He himself had faced difficult choices in life. However, at every turn, he had consistently made decisions driven by the desire to benefit humankind. Motivated by altruism. Geared toward forgiveness. Anything else lay beyond his realm of comprehension.
“At their core, demons are just like us,”
Arielle had insisted, back when she had been his supervisor.
“They’re just passionate beings who have made a big mistake. They don’t recognize that their true nature is divine. It is our job to teach them that. To bring them back into the light.”
Not all of them wanted to come into the light. Not all of them were ready. Looking at Luciana’s 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.