Reaching, reaching, upward, upward…
To hang in the cosmos for a single, shining, glorious instant. An instant as long as eternity and shorter than the blink of an eye. But he knew he could not stay there forever.
Not yet. There were things to be done.
And then falling, plunging downward at a dizzying velocity, traveling faster than matter.
Because he, Brandon, was constructed of pure light.
He landed with a jolt, the light of his soul crashing back into his physical body.
Lying in bed. Howling a keening cry of mourning for the life he had just lost.
Just as he did every time he woke from this nightmare.
Every single fucking night for the past ten years, he awoke shivering in terror.
Thanking God that it was only a dream.
Because the first time it happened, it hadn’t been a dream.
That time, it had been real.
Three o’clock in the morning.
That’s what time his bedroom clock read.
The clock that existed in real time. Not dream time.
He shut his eyes against the memory of his death. Brought himself back to the here and now. Dragged in one long breath, and then another. Beneath him, he felt the damp of the sheets. Soaked through with sweat. The throb of adrenaline still coursing through his body.
In the darkness of his room he lay, recounting the facts to himself.
He, Brandon Clarkson, was no longer human.
But he had been, once.
It had been ten years since his human death. Why he revisited the scene of his own death every night, he wasn’t entirely sure. He would have taken it for a curse if he had not been reborn as something other.
Angel.
Immortal, but sent back in a human body. With all the same problems bound up with physical incarnation. Fatigue. Stress. Insomnia.
Nightmares.
Reaching for the lamp beside his bed, he switched on the light. Blinking a few times, he squinted in the brightness. He got up and wandered around his apartment. The sleek modern loft in a historic Art Nouveau building was a world away from the alley where he’d died. He stood at the window, looking down at the river thirty stories below, shimmering gold in the hot July night, downtown city lights aglow on the surface of the water.
Not the Detroit River, but the Chicago River.
Not Detroit,
he reminded himself.
Not Detroit, where he had been born. Where he had lived. Where he had died.
I’m in Chicago.
Where he now worked as a Guardian in the Company of Angels. Where he had been promoted to supervisor, overseeing his own unit, after his preliminary training in the Los Angeles unit.
Chicago was a world away from his human existence. A lifetime away.
In the kitchen, he stood in front of the fridge, reading the words of the decade-old newspaper clipping he kept hanging there. His human life, boiled down to three paragraphs, black ink on yellowing paper.
Slain Officer Killed in Gang-Related Shooting
28-year-old police officer Brandon Clarkson was fatally shot in Detroit’s downtown core on Saturday evening while investigating gang-related activities. Police say he died immediately from his wounds.
A memorial ceremony was held at Campus Martius Park, during which Clarkson was posthumously promoted to detective. His partner, Officer Jude Everett, was also promoted for his “extraordinary bravery” after capturing the man accused of gunning down Clarkson.
Clarkson had served seven years with the Detroit police force. He is survived by his parents, three brothers and his widow, Tammy.
As he read the words for the three-thousandth time, the old darkness rose in him, bitter and familiar. Somewhere deep inside him, the feeling that he wasn’t entirely good. Not like most of the other members of the Company, whose pure-hearted goodness was beyond doubt.
Death had made him angry in a way that he had never been in his human life.
Brandon Clarkson had been born with an eerie sense of how he wanted to live. He had come into this world knowing exactly what he wanted to do.
Serve and protect.
He had lived fast. He had loved intensely. But if he had come into the world on a mission, he had left the world in service to that mission. He had been sent back as a Guardian, essentially to do the same thing he had always done. To chase down the most dangerous criminals on earth. To catch the most corrupt beings in existence, humans and demons alike.
To protect those who could not protect themselves.
Now, here he was a decade later.
With one tiny problem.
The nightmare.
Of an endlessly recurring human death that made him feel
like some character in a Greek myth. Like Sisyphus pushing the same rock up a hill, over and over. Or Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle every day. Destined to relive the same hellish fate time after time.
“Let it go,”
his superiors, the Archangels, had told him dozens of times.
Somehow, he could not.
Not everyone dies young,
he thought, pacing around the apartment.
He did what he always did when he caught himself trapped in his own self-pity. Struck a match and lit one of the candles on his coffee table. Arielle, his former supervisor, had told him,
“Light a candle when you need help letting go of the resentment at having to leave your human life.”
Three thousand eight hundred and ninety-four candles later, Brandon was still waiting for the night his pain and resentment tapered out into wisps of smoke. Burned away like those many cylinders of wax.
On his dining-room table, his cell phone vibrated, jarring his attention away from the yellow flame. It was a message from Michael, the patron saint of cops and warriors himself. From the Archangel who was now his direct boss. The words he read on the phone’s screen made him frown.
You have a new assignment. Return to your unit headquarters immediately. Assemble your unit and contact Arielle.
Brandon pinched out the flame of the candle with his bare fingers. Then he headed out the door.
Heaven had called.
Chapter Two
I
f humans knew the extent of the unseen elements at work in the world, it would probably drive most people bat-shit crazy.
Behind the wheel of his self-modified Dodge Challenger, Brandon sped through the empty streets of downtown Chicago, blaring the stereo so loud he could feel the guitar riffs buzzing in his bone marrow. He made the fifteen-minute drive to his destination in ten.
Punching his code into the electronic security system, he entered the mirrored-glass office tower. Took the elevator up to the forty-seventh floor. The office might have been just another upscale business—a law office or a consulting firm.
Instead, it housed the city’s unit of the Company of Angels.
He unlocked the massive glass front doors, slid them open, flipped on the lights. One by one, the other Guardians began to trickle in. Every seat around the circular boardroom table was filled, all thirty angels assembled. Brandon clicked on the plasma video screen to start the three-way conference call with Michael and Arielle, along with the thirty angels in the L.A. unit.
“Guardians, a very serious situation has developed,” Michael said.
The Archangel’s image appeared on one-third of the screen, his luminous wings spread behind him, iridescent and beautiful. But the wrinkles in his face were deep set with worry. The words he spoke brought a hush over the two units of Guardians present. All pairs of jeweled eyes watched, riveted to the screens as Michael continued.
“Luciana Rossetti has escaped.”
The name meant nothing to Brandon. One-third of the screen showed the L.A. unit, and on it, Arielle’s face registered the smallest twinge. A tiny flicker of annoyance passed over her habitually neutral expression. In the ramshackle legal-aid clinic that served as the L.A. unit headquarters, she sat at the head of her boardroom table, her posture ramrod straight, her blond hair as perfectly coiffed as ever.
But she had definitely cringed. Brandon had seen it.
“Luciana is a Rogue demon,” Michael said quietly. “As you all know, Rogue demons are not ordinarily at the top of the Company’s priorities. They rank in the middle of the demon hierarchy. However, Luciana Rossetti is in possession of an extremely dangerous poison. A poison that could cause serious harm to every one of us.”
There was a long, horrified pause before the angels began murmuring to each other.
Arielle spoke over them, her smile unnervingly calm. “With all due respect, I don’t understand why the Chicago unit needs to be involved in this assignment.”
Behind her, the thirty angels of the L.A. unit nodded, settling back into quiet.
Michael said, “Every city in the world has a unique unit of Guardians dedicated to protecting it. We all know that. But Brandon’s approach is different. We Archangels contacted Brandon because we thought the assignment could benefit from his particular approach.”
No hand-holding. No babysitting. No New Age bullshit.
The total opposite of Arielle and her crew.
“The L.A. unit is totally capable of handling this assignment. Luciana Rossetti escaped on my watch,” Arielle said in that infuriatingly neutral tone of hers, which he had endured for three years under her supervision. “The L.A. unit has this covered.”
“What’s your plan?” Brandon said tersely. “Are you going to hold a yoga class and hope the target shows up? Break out the acoustic guitar, start singing a round of ‘Kumbaya’ and pass a communal joint?”
Behind Brandon, some of the angels in the Chicago unit snickered.
“Stop,” ordered Michael. “I didn’t call you in to start an argument.”
“Does Brandon even know who Luciana Rossetti is?” Arielle said to Michael. “He doesn’t even know who we’re talking about.”
“Then we’ll show him,” said Michael.
On the video screen, a full-color image of the demoness appeared, a grainy image, captured from afar. Whoever had snapped the picture had caught the target in a bad moment. Or perhaps she only had bad moments.
Yet, she was undeniably beautiful. In the photo, she was suspended in midturn, tendrils of dark hair whipping in the wind around a face whose full lips and haughty, defined cheekbones could have graced the cover of
Vogue Italia.
But what caught Brandon, what made him literally stop and stare, was her glittering green eyes, so vibrant and snapping with life that they seemed to leap off the screen.
A shiver ran through him.
In both boardrooms, there was a pause and a hush as the angels looked at her picture. Behind Brandon, one of the male Guardians let out a low whistle.
“Enough,” Brandon said, cutting off the inappropriate behavior by holding up his hand.
Michael switched the image back to the live video stream.
“Luciana Rossetti,” Michael said, “is no ordinary demoness. She’s fiercely independent and fiendishly clever, like all Rogues. But she is much more than that. She is a poisoner par excellence and a Mata Hari of the demon world. She escaped from the Company a few days ago. She’s dangerous in her own right, but she has risen to the top of the Company’s Most Wanted List because she has created a poison with which she killed another demon.”
If it can kill a demon…
It can kill an angel.
Every angel in both Los Angeles and Chicago fell silent.
Michael continued, “We need to catch Luciana before she uses this poison again—on our kind. Or worse, before she manufactures another batch of it and distributes it among the demons. She has the ability to unleash a weapon of unparalleled power. It would give them an edge over us. An edge from which we might never recover.”
Both units were still for a moment, as though the earth had stopped its rotation and for a brief moment the world seemed to come to a halt. Every one of the angels was thinking the same thing, Brandon was certain.
If that poison got into the wrong hands, it could mean the end of our kind.
“Furthermore, we have also received word that Archdemon Corbin Ranulfson is planning to retaliate,” Michael continued. “Some of you may not know, but Corbin was recently defeated by the Company and lost his empire’s flagship hotel. If Corbin strikes at us, he will strike to destroy. He is one of the most powerful demons in America. We believe that he was weakened in the last attack, but may be seeking to recover some of his lost powers. Three days ago, Corbin was sighted in hell, but word on the street is that he has been seen again, on the surface. We have every reason to believe that Corbin will search out Luciana. For the poison.”
“Is he connected with her?” Brandon asked.
“She’s his lover,” said Michael. “Luciana is our only link to Corbin. And we believe she has returned to Venice. We must bring her back to America.”
“We’ve got to find out what she’s done with the poison,” Arielle said, “and pump her for whatever information is inside that evil head of hers. I think this is a case for disposal.”
Disposal.
The word sent another hush through the conference rooms.
“
Disposal
is the term we sometimes use in the Company when an individual is to be returned to the divine,”
Arielle had told Brandon, back when he was a fledgling angel, training under her.
“Technically, the soul never dies. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. But a disposal means that a person no longer has a distinct identity.”
Luciana would cease to exist.
As a rule, Brandon didn’t agree with disposal. Normally, Arielle didn’t, either. If she was so set on disposal in this case, he wanted to know why. But there was no time for that right now. First, he needed to catch the demoness and bring her back to America.
“Michael, please email me the rest of the file via secure transfer,” Brandon said. “I’ll go to Venice myself. And I’ll finish briefing myself on the plane.”
“Why you?” Arielle ground out.
“I can get the job done,” he said.
Not a single one among the sixty angels disagreed with him. He disliked being arrogant in any way. But time was of the essence, and in the past he had found that it paid to be up front with Arielle.
Michael nodded.
Arielle shook her head, clearly frustrated. “Fine, do it your way. Of course, you’ll work with members of my team. We were the last ones who saw her, and—”
“I work alone,” Brandon stated.
Every angel in the Chicago unit knew that.
“As a supervisor, I’m a leader and a team player,” Brandon explained. “I foster an environment of trust, so much so that my unit virtually runs itself. There is rarely dissent among my team. We all consider ourselves equals. I’m available for mentoring when the younger angels need guidance. I manage, but I don’t micromanage.” He paused, cleared his throat. “But in the field, it’s a different story.”
When Brandon Clarkson worked, he was a lone wolf.
He went undercover alone, and he never took anyone with him. After the trauma of his human death, he would not put another angel at risk the way he risked himself. He would never allow anyone to suffer as he had suffered.
“I’m going in alone,” he said.
Arielle blinked rapidly, her mouth pressing into a line so flat it almost disappeared. Then she said, “This matter is far too important. You’ll need backup. Won’t he, Michael?”
Brandon crossed his arms and stared at the video screen as intensely as he would have done if they were standing in the same room. “Arielle, if I have to clean up your mistakes, I’m doing it on my own terms.”
“There are rules in the battle between angels and demons,” Arielle shot back. “Rules that cannot be—”
“Broken?” Brandon finished. “My ass. Rules are made to be broken.”
“Stop!” Michael ordered. “The Company must remain strong. There is no point in bickering amongst ourselves.”
“At least call Infusino, our contact in the Venetian unit,” said Arielle. “He can help.”
“I don’t need help,” Brandon said. “I will handle this alone.”
Arielle’s eyes flickered with determination, and he knew she was about to launch into an extended rebuttal. He had been the victim of Arielle’s long-winded speeches in the past. He wasn’t going to sit through another one tonight.
He cut her off at the pass, pushing the button to cut off video feed from the L.A. unit.
One-third of the screen went black. He shouted into the speaker, “Sorry, Arielle. Technical glitch. Michael, I’ll talk to you when I’m back on American soil.”
“Wait,” said a male voice Brandon did not recognize. “I’m Julian Ascher, the newest member of the L.A. unit.”
Around the table of the Chicago unit, the Guardians looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Julian Ascher, former Archdemon, had just been converted into the Company after almost two hundred and fifty years. He had been brought in by one of Arielle’s underlings, a neophyte angel whose innocence and naïveté were unmatched in the Company. Not everyone had agreed with Arielle’s tactics, and her scheme had been the subject of debate within the Company lately.
Don’t judge,
Brandon reminded himself.
It’s not your job to judge.
“Just listen for a second,” Julian said. “Although I’m not proud of it, I was once Luciana Rossetti’s lover. I have certain information about her that will help you track her down.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Brandon, listening.
“Luciana has a deal with the devil that keeps her out of hell. Every year, she has to provide a human sacrifice to pacify the Prince of Darkness. She’ll be at the
Redentore
Church tomorrow night, at seven o’clock in the evening. Without fail, she selects her victim from that church. You’ll find her there. But be careful. Luciana is extremely skilled at using men to get what she wants. She will stop at nothing”
“Duly noted,” Brandon said. “Thanks for the advice.”
“Bring Luciana back as quickly as you can,” said Michael. “And don’t be afraid to call for backup if you need it.”
“Good luck,” said Arielle as coldly as the last time they’d spoken.
Brandon was intimately familiar with exactly how cold Arielle could be. But in any case, he had no time to worry about Arielle and her moods right now.
Right now, I’ve got a job to do.
* * *
To Luciana, walking into Ca’ Rossetti was like walking into a jewel box.
In the high-ceilinged
piano nobile,
the main floor of Ca’ Rossetti, her staff of Gatekeepers scrambled to assemble to welcome the demoness home. The heels of her shoes clicked on the marble floor as she inspected the condition of the palazzo. Every surface sparkled, from the intricate mosaic floors to the Murano chandeliers. The walls were adorned with rich swathes of silk damask and lavish murals. Every square inch of floor, every gilded table, every lacquered cabinet and crystal vase, every cornice and curlicue was polished and shining.