FREED (Angels and Gargoyles Book 2) (2 page)

“You’re welcome to a rematch anytime,” Sam said, moving around Wyatt and Ellie to Dylan’s side. “Maybe it was just a fluke.”

“You won fair and square,” Wyatt said, shaking Sam’s hand politely. His warm, blue gaze fell on Dylan’s face for a long second, then he turned and headed back toward camp. Ellie skipped along behind him, grabbing his hand as she reached his side.

Maybe that was why Dylan didn’t pull away when Sam took her hand.

She rubbed her hand now, remembering the feel of the heat of his skin against hers. It was different from the few times Wyatt had held her hand. There was none of that sense of pleasure that often burst through her when Wyatt touched her. But it was still nice. Which confused her even more.

She looked up and saw Davida headed her way. She smiled, sliding over slightly so that Davida could sit beside her.

“How are you?” Davida asked, taking Dylan’s hand in her own.

Dylan immediately laid her head in Davida’s lap as she used to do when she was young. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“Today, we walk to some ruins.”

“And tomorrow?”

Davida didn’t answer. Dylan closed her eyes, lowering the mental wall she had learned to use as a small child to block out the voices that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her. She wanted to probe Davida’s mind for answers. But Davida was stronger than her, knew how to control her gifts better. Gifts Dylan hadn’t even realized Davida had until recently.

“Just ask,” Davida said quietly as she began to stroke Dylan’s hair.

“I just don’t understand what’s happening,” she said.

“I know,” Davida answered. “What do you want to know?”

“Where are we going? Why are we going? Why am I so important—”

“Whoa,” Davida laughed, her hand stilling on the back of Dylan’s head. “One question at a time.”

Dylan rolled over so that she could look up at Davida. “What does it mean when Jimmy thinks about Joanna?”

Davida’s eyes darkened slightly. “You shouldn’t read his mind, Dylan.”

“Sometimes I can’t help it. His thoughts are too strong.”

Pain flashed across Davida’s face. She bit her lip, her gaze moving over the people on the other side of the camp. Dylan followed her gaze and watched as Jimmy spoke closely to Wyatt. Wyatt, as he usually did when alone with his father, looked uncomfortable. Like a leader forced under the thumb of someone bigger, someone stronger. Which, Dylan supposed, was exactly what he was.

“Joanna was his wife,” Davida said, her voice filled with false indifference. “She was killed years ago, when Wyatt was just a boy.”

Dylan remembered an image she had read from Wyatt’s mind once. A little boy sitting beside a broken woman. “A gargoyle killed her.”

“Yes,” Davida agreed.

“Why?”

Davida ran her hand slowly over Dylan’s head again, smoothing the hair away from her face. “The gargoyle thought she was different.”

“How?”

“Like us,” Davida said.

Dylan looked up at Davida again. “Why are we different?”

“That, my love,” she said with a soft smile, “is a story too difficult to go into now.”

“Is it about this war?”

“Yes.” Davida sighed softly. “Many of the things you have been taught are not as accurate as the council of Genero would like you to believe.”

“Like?”

“Like the fact that the sisters founded Genero after a devastating war.”

Dylan sat up and studied Davida’s face. “They didn’t?”

“No,” Davida said softly. “Genero was created by Luc and Lily as a laboratory.”

“To do what?”

Affection flooded Davida’s face as she stroked a thumb over Dylan’s chin. “To create you.”

Dylan turned from Davida, didn’t want to look her in the eye. A part of her felt ashamed for some reason. She really didn’t understand it, didn’t understand why thoughts of Donna suddenly filled her mind. Donna was the closest thing Dylan would ever have to a sibling. Donna and Dylan had shared Davida as their guardian while living in D dorm in Genero. Donna had gifts, too—an ability to heal others—but she wasn’t as careful as Dylan, and, clearly, Davida. She used her gift to heal another of their dorm sisters, and the girl had told. Donna was taken away for testing. Dylan suspected she had been killed until Davida told her they didn’t kill the gifted, they used them to figure out something about genetic code…whatever that was.

“Don’t think like that,” Davida said, touching her head lightly. “It’s not your fault what happened to Donna.”

“Isn’t it? If I had let someone know what I could do—”

“They would have you and all would be lost.”

Davida moved forward a little, pulling Dylan’s head against her shoulder. “You did everything I told you to do. You were strong and smart and you might just save the rest of us.”

“I still don’t understand.”

Before Davida could respond, someone screamed. Dylan sat up, her eyes automatically moving to where Wyatt and his father had been standing. They were no longer there, but running toward the open desert a few yards away.

“Something’s wrong,” Davida said.

“Redcoats,” Dylan said, her mental wall still lowered enough that she could hear a scattering of thoughts flying toward her from those filled with panic around them.

“Not possible,” Davida said. But she clearly heard the same thoughts. She stood and began rushing in the same direction as the others.

Dylan began to follow, trying not to think about Stiles and her morning walk so that Davida wouldn’t know what she had done. Sam grabbed her arm before she got far.

“What’s happening?”

“They found something,” she said, slipping out of his grip. She ran and felt him following close behind. She could hear his thoughts, knew they were about her, and that made her blush.

Dylan brought up her mental wall and ran faster.

“How could a Redcoat be this far from the city?” they heard someone asking as they came up to the group huddled around a dark mass on the ground.

“Are we sure he is a Redcoat?” someone else asked.

“Who would disguise themselves as a Redcoat?” another responded.

Dylan pushed her way through the growing crowd. A few people looked at her, words of irritation on their tongues until they saw who it was pushing through their ranks. Then they simply stepped back, distrust, and a little fear, dancing over their faces.

Wyatt was standing beside his father at the front of the crowd, Davida across from them. Jimmy was crouched down, studying something on the ground. Dylan nearly screamed when she saw what it was, saw the body of the Redcoat who had chased her through the desert that morning. It wasn’t that he was dead that startled Dylan. It was the way in which he was displayed. He was staked to the ground, small, gold nails through his hands and feet as he lay spread-eagled across the dusty ground. Blood pooled beneath each appendage, as well as the larger pool that had collected under his head and shoulders. His throat had been sliced nearly in half.

“Gargoyles,” Jimmy said.

Wyatt glanced at Dylan. She didn’t return his gaze. She knew if she did he would realize exactly what had happened.

She had never seen this side of Stiles.

“Why was he all the way out here?” Sam asked. “I thought you said the Redcoats wouldn’t go outside a fifty mile radius of the city.”

Jimmy shook his head. Dylan didn’t think he would answer, since he hadn’t answered any of the others who were repetitively asking the same question. But he surprised them all.

“The rules have changed,” he said.

Wyatt looked sharply at his father as Jimmy reached over and tugged at the Redcoat’s jacket. When he pulled the cloth away, he revealed a weapon tucked into the man’s belt. It looked a little like Wyatt’s six shooter, but shorter and wider. Jimmy pulled it out and inspected it, turning it this way and that before popping it open. Davida came to nudge Wyatt away so that she could touch Jimmy’s shoulder, her fingers shaking slightly.

“You should leave that,” she said quietly.

“It could be an important weapon,” Jimmy said.

“But you remember what happened the last time—”

“We take all weapons, Davida,” he said in a tone that broke no argument.

Dylan had never seen Davida rebuffed in that way. Neither had she ever seen her back down from a fight as she did just then, moving her hand from Jimmy’s shoulder and stepping back a few paces. She seemed subordinate. No guardian was ever subordinate to anyone except the council.

Jimmy continued to search the body. He ran his hands along the man’s ribs, ran them down along the man’s hips. He even stuck his fingers inside pockets that ran just below the man’s waist. He didn’t find anything else, something he seemed to think was unusual.

“Why doesn’t he have orders? Or his city pass?”

“Maybe he ditched them somewhere,” Wyatt suggested.

Jimmy shook his head. “There’s something not right about this.” He stood and looked around the area as though searching for something. “Why didn’t we see the gargoyles?”

Wyatt glanced at Dylan, while Davida followed Jimmy’s gaze to the skyline. Sam moved up alongside Dylan, blocking her from Wyatt.

“Maybe it was still dark.”

“But why would they only target this one person? There were dozens of us just yards away that might have been targets for the gargoyles,” Jimmy said, his gaze falling momentarily on Dylan before he turned in a circle, his eyes searching the landscape. “We would have been sitting ducks.”

“There are too many of us,” Davida suggested.

“Or they were following this one Redcoat for a reason,” Jimmy said.

Dylan frowned. “Why would they do that?”

Jimmy looked at her, his expression hard. Instead of answering her question, he simply turned and walked away, barking orders to some of the others to clean up the Redcoat and bury it before it attracted animals. Or something worse.

The gawkers began to walk away as the men in the group rushed forward as one to execute Jimmy’s orders. Wyatt grabbed Dylan’s arm and yanked her out of the way. Sam started to follow, but Davida suggested he help the others. He needed experience in this sort of thing, she told him, even as she watched Wyatt and Dylan, curiosity in her eyes.

“Was this about you?” Wyatt asked the moment they were out of earshot of the others.

“What do you mean?”

He stared down at her, his blue eyes almost looking through her. She felt like an open book, and he was a reader searching for the words he needed to find. And then something must have occurred to him, an unpleasant thought that made him look away for a second.

“Stiles,” he said quietly. “That’s what I mean.”

“Wyatt—”

“You were out wandering around alone and now we have a dead Redcoat pinned to the ground.” He glanced at her. “It’s really not that hard to figure out.”

“I just wanted to take a bath.”

“How long has he been following us?”

“The Redcoat?” Dylan shook her head. “I didn’t know he was until he began chasing me.”

“No.” Wyatt looked at her again. “Stiles.”

“Oh.” She ran her fingers through her hair, glancing back over to where the men were trying to remove the nails from the Redcoat’s limbs. Sam was watching them, a shovel in his hands, but he was leaning on it more than he was using it to dig or pry. “Since the beginning, I think.”

Wyatt nodded. “Somehow, I knew that.”

“You can’t still think he’s trouble,” Dylan said, turning back to Wyatt. “He saved us when we were caught in the city.”

“I know that.”

“He wants to help.”

“But he’s a gargoyle,” Wyatt said in a tone that suggested the very idea disgusted him. “How are we supposed to trust a gargoyle?”

“He’s a friend. Can’t you trust a friend?”

Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t have friends.”

Dylan stared at him, unable to believe he could say such a thing. “What about me? And Sam?” She hesitated a second. Then asked, “What about Ellie?”

Again the blue gaze fell on her face, the intensity of it almost too much for her to bear. She wanted to turn away, wanted to escape the doubt and the pain that were all too often an element of that look. She wanted to touch his face, wanted to wipe away the hurt that had buried the little boy she often saw in visions his emotions sent to her. She moved closer to him, a part of her aware of the danger to her own emotions being so close to Wyatt could pose.

“You have to learn to trust someone, someday.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

His eyes were still studying her, but something subtle had changed in them. A little of the anger, some of the steel, had left them. It was as though he really wanted an answer that he could understand.

Dylan laid a hand lightly on his chest. “You have to take people at face value and believe that not everyone is out to get you.”

“I can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “And I don’t know how you can, either. After everything that’s happened—”