FREED (Angels and Gargoyles Book 2) (9 page)

Dylan buried her fingers in her pockets, her thoughts a whirlwind she couldn’t keep straight. “Demetria said they didn’t know I had gifts despite the fact that my appearance made her wonder…”

“Your test was rigged.”

“By who?”

Stiles just shrugged. “I needed them to dump you out in the desert. I needed to watch over you, and I couldn’t do that if they figured out who—what—you are.”

“But they all know now.”

“They know because Lily has a connection with you. The moment you left the dome of Genero, she could sense you.” Stiles moved close to Dylan, his soft gray eyes studying her face so closely that she felt like he could see her every thought. Almost like Wyatt. “And Davida could read you, too. She sent out word.”

“To you?”

“To others she thought she could trust. But some of them work for Demetria.” He tilted his head a little. “I wasn’t the only gargoyle following you out there. That first night, the noise you heard? It was another.”

“Another?”

“The gargoyle that attacked you and Wyatt in the bookstore.”

Dylan remembered. “The one that came after us later, too. The one that cut you?”

Stiles nodded.

“You saved us.” She turned slightly, her gaze falling to the leaves on the ground. Again she was trying to make sense of the whirlwind in her mind. “You said you needed me out of Genero. But why? Why do you want to protect me?”

Stiles leaned back against the tree again, his hands trapped behind his body in a casual move that made him appear vulnerable. Such an illusion. “Gargoyles were sent here at the beginning of time to watch over the humans. It is our sole responsibility to make sure humans survive no matter what they do to one another, or what the angels or other creatures might do. Some of us take that very seriously. Others realize that what defines humanity has changed since we were first given our assignment.”

“And you’re one of those.”

Stiles studied her for moment. Again. “I have watched humans all my life. Watched them experience joy and love, watched them suffer grief and the pain of heartbreak.” He shook his head, his gray eyes softening. “Humans are amazing creatures, the things they experience, the lives they live. They fit a lot into a very small amount of time. I don’t know if I could live so much if my life were so short.”

“But?”

He smiled. “When you watch something for so long, you begin to see their failings. Humans are amazing creatures, but they have become petty, dark things. They allow their desire for material objects to get in the way of the things that really matter. It was that darker side to them that caused this war in the first place.”

“How did the war start?” Dylan asked, remembering what Lily had told her, but curious if her words had been the truth or more lies.

“Over something called oil,” Stiles said, unwittingly confirming Lily’s story. “But I think it went much deeper than that. I think humans had simply stopped caring about one another.”

Stiles ran his fingers through his thick red hair, pressing the sweat on his forehead into it until it began to darken a little. Then he pressed his hand back against the tree, his eyes again studying Dylan’s face.

“It is wrong to question the orders given by God. We must follow orders no matter what it means to our own safety. But I began to wonder why we were fighting for creatures that were perfectly happy killing their own. And when the angels came, when the fighting changed, when the humans came together to fight a common enemy, I wondered what would happen when the angels left. Would the humans continue to band together, or would they find another reason to destroy one another?

“And then this new breed of human began to appear. It didn’t start in places like Genero. It began in places like this,” he said, moving a hand to indicate the grove of trees where they stood. “Angels seducing humans, whether for fun or love, I was never quite sure. But their children…there was hope in them.”

“There are others?”

Dylan tried to imagine what the child of a human and an angel would look like, what they would be like. But then she realized that this was exactly what she was. They would look like her, like Sam and Ellie, like Donna. There was no obvious difference between them and humans, or even angels and gargoyles in their human forms.

So, how were they supposed to know which was which?

“Many others,” Stiles said. “Quite a few among your resistance, more than you can imagine.”

Dylan chewed her lip as everything he had said filtered through her mind. “But what does all this have to do with why you’ve been helping me?”

“Because I am one of a few who believe that you and others like you should be the future. The human race is done, Dylan. They had their chance and they destroyed it. But you, and others like you, will give new hope to this world, to these people.”

“You don’t think the humans should survive.”

“I don’t think they should be the only ones to come out of this victorious,” he corrected.

Dylan turned back toward the path she had followed to come here, moving far enough down it that she could see her friends sitting in the shade. It occurred to her that she didn’t even know what a human was anymore. She had thought she understood, thought that she and her sisters were all human. But now she knew better. They were hybrids. Ellie and Sam, both born in the same city as she, were probably hybrids, too, if not as completely melded as she was. But what about Bobby and Carver? Were they humans? Were their parents survivors of this war, or some sort of product of the war?

“Why did the angels come here?” she asked without turning, trusting that Stiles had not abandoned her.

“They saw an opportunity,” Stiles said, his voice just a breath from her ear. “They have always hated the humans. They saw the war as their chance to finally get what they wanted: God’s undivided attention.”

“And Luc and Lily?”

“They have always been here,” Stiles said.

Dylan turned toward him. “What do you mean?”

“Luc,” he said, “is an archangel called Lucifer. He was banished from Heaven for tempting the first man and woman to eat from the forbidden tree. For his crime, God forced him to remain on earth and be man’s protector. Lilith was the wife of the first man. She was banished when she refused to follow the rules of Eden.”

“Eden?”

“The garden where they lived.”

Dylan shook her head, still confused. “If Lilith has always been here, why was she not affected by this disease that’s killing her before?”

“A scientist, a human, got ahold of some angel DNA and created a virus that would hurt them, make them weak,” Stiles said, his voice quiet, patient. “It was the humans’ way of trying to end the war. He got the idea from something called bioterrorism.”

“Where did he get angel…whatever?”

“An angel sympathetic to his cause.”

“Not all the angels turned on the humans?”

“No, some chose to fight with them.”

It was all so confusing to Dylan. Of all the things they taught at Genero, angels and gargoyles were not on the list. She turned back to look on her friends, to watch them move around the trees as though there hadn’t been a war, as though they hadn’t all just lost the home they had known all their lives, as though the people they had lived with for the past week, longer for some, had not just been butchered a few days ago.

“Are you on Demetria’s side?” she asked, needing to hear him say it.

“No,” he said, his voice just as quiet as before.

“Are you going to kill me or my friends?”

“No,” a little amusement entering his tone now.

“Are you going to use me to defeat Luc and Lily?”

“No.” Anger. She heard anger this time.

But she had the answers she needed.

Dylan turned back to him. “Sam and I are leaving. Wyatt’s going to take the others somewhere safe, somewhere where those coming after me won’t hurt them.”

Stiles’ eyes narrowed slightly. “Do you really think Sam can keep you safe?”

Dylan lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I think it’s important to keep the others safe.”

“The only person who must be kept safe is you.”

She shook her head. “That’s where you and I differ, Stiles,” she said quietly. “I don’t really care what happens to me. In fact, from everything I’ve learned recently, it seems like my death might be a blessing for the survivors of this fight no matter what side they are on.”

“Dylan—”

She pressed her finger to his lips, no longer in the mood to listen to any more arguments. “I want you to follow Wyatt. I want you to keep him safe until he comes back to me.”

He began to object, but she pressed her finger tighter against his lips. “Please,” she said, a weariness coming into her voice. “I don’t want to be worried about him while I do what I need to do.”

Stiles’ eyes narrowed. “What are you planning?” he asked as he lifted her finger from his mouth.

“Just promise me you’ll keep Wyatt safe.”

He hesitated, but, to his credit, he didn’t argue again. He simply nodded.

Dylan didn’t give him a chance to recant or ask more questions. She walked away, going to find her new escort.

Sam and Dylan walked south; at least, that was what Wyatt called it. Not for any particular reason, really. Just because it was away from where Wyatt and the others had gone.

“Stay together,” Wyatt told them. He pointed to the asphalt road that ran along the back line of the trees that shaded their campsite. “Stay on this road and I will find you.”

He gave a knife to Sam, his six shooter to Dylan. As he handed it to her, he pressed his hand hard against the back of hers. “Don’t get dead,” he whispered near her ear.

Those words rang through her mind for hours as they walked.

Sam didn’t talk much. His mind was busy with half a dozen different things all at once. Dylan could hear some of his thoughts even as she tried to keep her mental wall up. Sometimes when thoughts were strong, when they overpowered everything else in someone’s mind, she could hear them no matter how hard she tried not to. It was that way with Jimmy when he thought about Joanna. That way, too, with Ellie when she was frightened. Which was often.

It was Ellie Sam was thinking about.

He worried that Ellie wouldn’t be safe wherever Wyatt was taking her. He worried that she might need him and he wouldn’t be there to help her. Again there was that sense that he thought of her almost like a sister thinks of a sister…though she was sure there was a different name for what a boy would be to a girl. He also thought about Wyatt holding her hand the night they all went to the stream.

Dylan couldn’t tell how he felt about that. She focused on the road ahead of them instead.

They walked most of the day, not stopping except for a few minutes of rest at midday. By the time darkness began to fall, they were both exhausted. Sam lit a fire and cooked a small bird he’d caught while they looked for a suitable place to camp. It was small, but the meat provided enough protein to allow them a restful sleep.

For Dylan, at least.

She woke in the night to find Sam tossing and turning. They had argued over the need for a guard, but Dylan had insisted it was stupid for both of them to get only half a night’s sleep, or one of them to stay up all night. The fire would scare off any animals, and the gargoyles and Redcoats would come whether they were awake or not, so why waste their sleep time?

She just hoped she was correct in her theories.

The idea of being unprotected clearly bothered Sam, though.

She watched him for a minute in the dim light cast by the moon. It struck her how handsome he was. His jaw was rounded, not square like Wyatt’s, but still a strong jaw that hinted at intelligence. And there was something about the curve of his shoulders, about how wide they were and how they tapered into his arms, but not so narrowly that he seemed weak. She liked to watch him as they walked, liked to see the way the muscles worked in his back. It made her feel…warm.

It was different from the way looking at Wyatt made her feel. But, in its own way, looking at Sam was just as exciting.

He rolled again, shifting toward her.
A nightmare
, she thought. She reached over and pressed a hand to his head, imagining him sleeping peacefully. A moment later he settled down, his breathing regular as he stopped his movements.

They woke with the sun the following morning. Sam wandered off for a while, coming back with the water bottles full and a handful of berries for their morning meal. They shared them as they walked, moving mostly in silence. The landscape changed again about midmorning. It wasn’t like stepping over a barrier between green grass and trees into cactus and dirt, but was more of a gradual change. The cactus began to appear even as the grass continued to dot the fields and ruins they came across.

They stayed to the road, as they had promised Wyatt they would. It took them close to abandoned buildings that looked much like the ones they had seen many times before, buildings with broken glass and empty shelves. Some still had their windows intact, but not many. Others looked almost like they must have before the war, the way they often did in Dylan’s visions of the past. But most had grass and other plants growing in the middle of their floors, flowers blooming where they hadn’t before.