DARK SOULS (Angels and Demons Book 2) (6 page)

Chapter 9

“We don’t know how to stop them.”

Dylan stepped around the chair she’d been occupying just a moment before and approached her daughter, making the men standing a short distance behind her nervous. Josephine lifted a hand and the one man who had begun to approach Dylan backed away.

Dylan sat on the edge of the table and took Josephine’s hands in her own.

“This is serious, Jo. These things, they can make innocent people do horrifying things. It’s important that the people take precaution against them.”

“And how do we do that if you don’t know how to stop them?”

“The gargoyles have—”

“Gargoyles? You aren’t suggesting we let those creatures into our cities?”

Dylan didn’t even glance at the council member who had spoken. She had asked for a meeting alone with Josephine, but she’d insisted that the council attend. She was not a monarch like the leadership that was developing in Europe. She was part of a larger government and she would not discuss an issue that affected the whole population without members of the council present. Therefore, four of the seven members were present. Including Wyatt.

“The gargoyles have seen these things,” Dylan continued, her focus solely on Josephine. “They will recognize them if they come close to the humans.”

“What you are suggesting is ludicrous,” the same man who had interrupted her a moment ago said. He was the same red-faced man who had suggested the angels should leave.

“Is it any more ludicrous than having dark souls possessing our people?” Josephine asked.

Dylan smiled softly. That was her daughter.

“I’m only suggesting one or two gargoyles per city. They would be in their human form. No one would be aware of who they were or why they were there.”

“Will they be able to stop these dark souls from hurting the people?” another councilperson asked.

Dylan sat back and glanced over her shoulder, her eyes falling briefly on Wyatt’s familiar features. Then they moved on, landing on the face of the woman who’d spoken. Dylan recognized her, too, as the woman who said that humans needed to learn to stand on their own two feet.

“They will recognize them when they arrive. Once we know where they are, Stiles and I can fight them.”

“I thought you didn’t know how to stop them.”

“We don’t. Not yet. But I can force them out of the human bodies.”

Which was something she and Stiles had argued about just that morning. He didn’t want her to do it again. When the dark souls—the demons—attacked the gargoyle building, she had gone on instinct, using the same energy she’d used to send the angels home during the Battle of Genero. She hadn’t expected it to work, nor had she expected it to take so much out of her. But it did work. Stiles, however, was concerned that it would take too much of a toll if she did it too often. He thought they could find another way. But, until then, Dylan wasn’t just going to sit back and watch people get hurt.

Josephine gripped Dylan’s hand, drawing her attention back to her. Dylan could see the concern in her daughter’s face, but there was something else that suddenly became apparent. Dylan could see it in her daughter’s aura. It was very dim, which was probably why she’d missed it before, but Josephine’s concern made it brighten a little.

Josephine was pregnant.

“Is it safe,” Josephine asked. “What you can do?”

Dylan touched her daughter’s cheek with the back of her hand, caressing it with more affection than she’d ever thought herself capable of.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said softly, so softly that no one but Josephine could hear. “You just worry about my granddaughter.”

Josephine’s eyes filled with tears. She pressed Dylan’s hand closer to her cheek, but she didn’t say anything, too overcome with emotion to make her voice work. Dylan leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Then she stood and strode to the door.

“Hey,” the red-faced man called after her. “We aren’t done.”

Dylan didn’t even stop. She’d done what she felt was her civic duty. Now she was going to do what she knew was right.

The gargoyles were already settling into their assigned cities, taking on faces that would be familiar to their neighbors, blending in so well that the humans would never know they were there.

She didn’t want to hide. She didn’t want the secrets that had led to Lucifer’s decision that the humans were incapable of coming back from the brink of destruction. But she also would not sit back and wait for a bunch of confused, arrogant men and women to debate the issue while people were dying. Even when two of those arrogant people were two of the three most important people in her life. Well, four, now.

Stiles was waiting for her outside the council room.

“What did they say?”

“They’re still debating.”

He grunted as he slipped his arm through hers. “You know, they’ll never consent.”

“I know.”

“What happens if they find out we’ve gone ahead with the plan, anyway?”

She shrugged. “Chances are good they won’t figure it out. But, if they do, we’ll just point out the fact that we’ve saved lives by going ahead with it without their consent.”

“I don’t know how much you’ve learned in the past sixty-two years, but humans rarely care about things they can’t actually see and touch.”

“They’ll learn.”

“When did you become so optimistic?”

Dylan smiled as they stepped out into the bright sunshine of an early spring. She felt more optimistic than she probably should have. Learning there is a grandchild on the way can do that.

***

It was late when Wyatt stumbled into the house, exhausted from a long day at the capital. He should have spent the night in the room he had at Josephine’s. But Dylan knew why’d he’d come home. She’d been waiting for him.

She was standing at the windows along the back wall of their living room, looking out toward Jimmy’s back porch a few yards across the way. She missed their conversations and missed sitting with him when sleep was just a fleeting thought. She could really use his advice, especially now, with all that was going on.

“They decided against the gargoyles.”

Dylan didn’t acknowledge his words. Didn’t turn to greet him. An emotional exhaustion had settled over her the moment she’d heard his hand on the doorknob. She didn’t want to fight with him tonight.

“But you’ve already brought them in, haven’t you?”

Dylan slowly turned. “Am I supposed to sit back and let these demons attack people and do nothing?”

Wyatt stepped deeper into the room, dropping his overnight bag on the floor. Dylan looked at it, noting the wear and tear it showed after moving back and forth so much these past few years. It was like a symbol of the wall that had grown up between them. She wasn’t even sure what it was that had laid the foundation, she just knew that there was a wall and it was growing so tall that she was afraid it would soon be impossible to climb over it.

“Are these things really as bad as you say they are?”

“The gargoyles have pictures.”

“Pictures? How did they get that technology?”

Dylan turned back to the windows. “I don’t know. Maybe they found a camera in the ruins somewhere. Or they took them from wherever they got the computers they’ve been using.” She shrugged. “Not everyone is insisting on remaining in the dark.”

“Is that what you think we’re doing?”

“I think you’re just repeating bad patterns.”

“Because we want to prove that we can take care of ourselves?”

Dylan turned, a retort was on her lips that was as cutting as a knife. But she stopped when she caught sight of her husband. He was bent over with his hands on his knees as if he couldn’t quite catch his breath. She went to him and touched his shoulder and felt the pain in his joints. She drew some of it away, but not all. She knew he didn’t want her to heal him. She knew that he would pull away if she even took just enough to make him comfortable enough to stand straight. So she just took the edge off and then led him to the couch.

“Have you been taking the pills Harry gave you?”

“Sometimes I forget.”

“Wyatt, you can’t forget.”

He moaned as he settled on the low couch. His eyes were closed as he settled back, his face so thin and weary that she almost didn’t recognize it. She touched his cheek; she wanted only to share a little affection. He grabbed her wrist in a surprisingly strong grip despite the fact that his arthritis was beginning to cause his fingers to become misshaped.

“Why do you want to stay with me?”

Dylan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I’m nearly sixty-five. My body is falling apart. My hair is falling out and my skin is loosening. I don’t even resemble the man I was when we first met.”

“Of course you don’t. That was forty-five years ago.”

“But you didn’t sign up for this.
I
didn’t sign up for this.”

Dylan tilted her head just slightly, confused by what he was saying. He could see it—she saw that in his eyes. He took her face between his hands and pulled her close, pressing his forehead to hers.

“When we married, I thought we would grow old together. But the older I get, the younger you seem to be.”

“But I’m still me and you’re still you.”

Tears filled his eyes. “But that’s it. I’m not the same, Dylan. I’m not the man I was back then. I’m this frail, dying man—”

“Don’t say that.”

“You know it’s true. You probably know it better than I do.”

Dylan slid her hands over the back of his. He was right. She could feel the small pieces of his soul that were starting to separate from his human form. She could feel the cancer that would one day cause the full separation. She’d healed it before, but it always seemed to come back. And each time it returned, it grew faster than the time before. She was afraid to heal it now, afraid that it would grow so quickly that she wouldn’t feel it until it was too late.

“Let me take the pain away,” she whispered.

He leaned into her and pressed his lips against hers.

“I love you,” he whispered against her lips. “You make me feel young and hopeful. You make me feel like anything is possible.”

“It is, Wyatt.”

“Then how did we end up on opposite sides of everything?”

She ran her fingers through his hair, drew the pain away a little bit at a time.

“You took a council position.”

“I want to serve the people. I want to make a difference, like my father did once.”

“And you serve them well,” she said, moving her hands to his shoulders and then his upper arms. Wyatt sat back and she took his hands between hers and watched as the damage from the arthritis disappeared. “But I think you’ve forgotten what brought us here, what we had to do to get here.”

“I remember,” he said, his eyes sliding closed as she slid her hands over his knees and his ankles, taking the pain from every joint on his body. “I remember what it felt like to be in an ethereal form, to join my aura with yours, and to banish the angels from our world with just the power of your commands.”

“Do you?” She climbed onto his lap and pressed her hand to his chest. The cancer fought her, as though it were a living thing; it fought her insistence that it leave his body. “Do you remember what you said to me when it was all over?”

“’Where you go, I go.’”

She studied his face for a long minute. “There was no time limit on that, was there?”

He groaned as he slid his hands—his pain-free hands—up her spine. They kissed, long and slow, a kiss like those they shared early in their relationship. It was like taking that first sip of lemonade on the first day of summer. It was so familiar, yet such a treat.

But then he pulled back. His eyes were clearer now; the pain that had clouded them for so long was finally gone. He studied her face, his hands moving over her back, her throat and her jaw, touching her with a familiarity, but also with a sense of exploration that was incredibly exciting.

“Why,” he finally whispered, “do I feel like I’m holding you back from something important?”

“I’m not going anywhere. Especially now.”

“Why now?”

“Josephine,” she said, sitting back a little when the confusion in his eyes made it clear that he didn’t know. “We’re going to be grandparents, my love.” She leaned close and kissed his bottom lip, drawing it between her teeth for a brief second. “It’s going to be a perfect little girl, born in the winter.”

A slow smile that looked so much like the rare smiles her Wyatt used to bestow on her touched his eyes, making them shine in the faded light.

“That is definitely a reason to stick around.”

Stiles stood on the corner of what had once been a busy intersection, but was now a weed infested chunk of concrete. There were few people in this settlement, but enough to attract the attention of the dark souls. He could sense them; he could feel the poison of their erratic thoughts. And he could hear the whispers of violence they were encouraging their hosts to engage in.

There are four,
he told Dylan.
Three are coming my way, and one is headed in your direction.

Do you want me to come to you?

No. Stay where you are and keep an eye out. I’ll let you know if I need help.

She was half a mile away, sitting in a dark room with three gargoyles that had infiltrated this particular community and had alerted Dylan and Stiles to the imminent danger less than an hour ago. He wanted her as far away as possible because he knew she would do the same thing she’d done at Demetria’s. He wasn’t sure her body could handle that right now. She was still recovering her energy three days later.

The three men possessed by the dark souls came around the corner of a pile of rubble that was once a three-story building. They walked side by side, like a group of cowboys in the Old West. Stiles almost expected them to carry guns at their waists like the ones Wyatt used to carry.

“Leave them,” he said in the most authoritative voice he could manage.

The men looked at him, anger flashing through their auras.

“You have no power over us.”

“I won’t let you hurt these people.”

One of the men laughed. “Do you really think you can protect them? Just you and that pretty little girl?”

Stiles grabbed his sword and lifted it above his head. “I’ll do whatever I need to do.”

“You can’t harm humans.”

“You’d be surprised what I can do if it involves protecting that pretty little girl.”

Fear flashed through the leader’s eyes, but he didn’t back off. He approached Stiles, stalking him like a wild animal might its prey. His eyes never left Stiles, but he moved in a roundabout way, as though he was hoping that if Stiles made an approach, he would miscalculate where to strike. Stiles was unconcerned about such a miscalculation. He’d fought angels, humans, and gargoyles. This was no different.

Stiles was almost relieved when the man pulled an ax out from behind his back. He’d been reluctant to fight an unarmed man. This, at least, made the fight a little more balanced.

The man took a wild swing at Stiles, missing him by nearly a full foot. Stiles didn’t even move, just remained where he was with his sword still high above his head. Another strike, the man came a little closer and nearly nicked the front of Stiles’ left shoulder. He dropped his sword then, striking the wooden handle of the ax hard enough to nearly cut the thin wood in half.

The man cried out in frustration, taking another swing that connected with the side of Stiles’ neck. But the fractured handle cracked before the blade could do much damage. The cut was healed before the blade even hit the ground.

Stiles pressed his hand to the man’s forehead and the man instantly fell to his knees. The power of Stiles’ touch did not force the dark soul out, but relaxed the consciousness of its host. Another of the three men rushed at Stiles, one with a long, curved blade, and the other with another ax. They were no better with their weapons than the first, swinging wildly and missing Stiles by feet. Like the one before, Stiles was able to knock them out without much effort.

Send the gargoyles.

Stiles stood over his victims until two gargoyles, bulky in their natural forms, arrived and gathered the bodies. They’d decided that the best thing to do was to lock up the possessed until they could ascertain if the dark souls had left their bodies and were unlikely to come back. Demetria knew of a place…Stiles hadn’t bothered to ask. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to know.

The moment these three were secured, he went to Dylan, still waiting inside that dark room.

“Have you seen it yet?”

Dylan shook her head, not bothering to turn from the window where she was keeping watch. “There hasn’t been anyone on the street since we got here.”

“It’s here. Close. I can feel it.”

“So can I.”

Stiles moved up behind her and watched uneasily. The others had shown themselves without concern. Why wasn’t this one? And then a small child came out of a door in a building across the street, a girl no more than five or six years old. She looked so much like Rachel had at that age that the resemblance was uncanny. Stiles could feel Dylan stiffen as she saw it, too.

“Why would…” she began to say. But then they both realized all at once that the dark soul, the fourth dark soul that they both felt, was inside that child.

Jack had been right when he said this was personal.

Dylan slipped right through the wall, not bothering to hide anything about her nature as she approached the child.

“Let her go.”

The child giggled; it was a high-pitched giggle that was so much like the sound a child makes when she’s happily playing. But then the girl looked up at Dylan and Stiles—and even from several yards away—they could see the menace in her eyes.

“We will make you hurt. We will take everything that matters to you.”

The voice was sweet, but the words were filled with more hatred than a child could possibly be capable of.

“Let her go,” Dylan repeated.

The child held up a hand, a calm, ordinary gesture that seemed so benign. But Dylan suddenly fell to her knees, her hands clawing at her throat. The aura around the child darkened, and its eyes turned a burning orange, like the flames of a fire burning there in her tiny, perfectly formed eye sockets. Stiles had never seen anything quite like it.

He burst out into the street in his ethereal form and wrapped himself around Dylan. Whatever it was that the dark soul was doing, it tore at his form; it tore at the very basics of his soul. It was pain like nothing he had ever felt before, pain that became everything…all he could think of and all he could feel. He almost forgot why he was there, why he was allowing himself to feel this pain. The pain was so intense that he almost forgot Dylan.

And it wasn’t just pain. There were these dark emotions: an overwhelming anger, resentment, frustration, and fear. It was so overwhelming. It infiltrated his thoughts. An image of Harry caused him to become unspeakably resentful of the anger Harry had shown him when they were first reunited, and then again when Rebecca died. Thoughts of Rebecca made him unreasonably angry with her for choosing to die—for leaving him. He wanted to find her, to shake her, to tear her limb from limb for hurting him…

Stiles…

It was weak, the sound of her voice in his head. He almost didn’t hear it—didn’t focus on it. But it was so familiar.

Dylan?

Let it go.

But he couldn’t. That anger…it felt so real. He could see himself ripping at Rebecca. He could see the look on her face as she lay dying in his arms. He could see that look turn into something like fear or confusion. And that brought him more satisfaction than it should have. He could actually feel his hands around her neck. He could see her eyes swell in her sockets and could see her struggling for breath. It felt good. How long had it been since he’d felt that good?

Stiles…please…

He was vaguely aware of hands on him—vaguely aware of being moved. He didn’t understand it. Nothing could move him in his ethereal form. Wasn’t he…? But he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure what was happening, wasn’t sure where he was or what he was.

What was happening to him?

Rebecca. He could still see her and could still feel his hands around her throat. But something was different. It no longer felt good.

“Please, Stiles,” she said. “Please, don’t do this.”

His hands started to relax, but then a wave of anger burst through him.

“You left me. You decided on your own that you didn’t want to live anymore.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“But you did. You promised me a lifetime. You could have lived another twenty years.”

She didn’t speak again. But a bright light filled the room—a bright light that made the features of Rebecca’s face shift and change. First, she looked younger. She looked like the beautiful young girl he’d first seen when he walked into Jack James’ underground community…Survivorville. The anger built inside of him again as he thought of them—of the man who’d taken his place when he was forced to leave, of the gargoyle who’d taken from him his last few days with Rebecca. Wilhelm’s pale face filled his mind. His hands tightened into fists. Just one punch. If he could land just one punch.

Stiles…

That light returned; a soothing, healing light that took away pieces of the anger. He could almost see it—see the anger breaking up like pieces of a puzzle. He wanted to hold on to it and feel the pleasure that came with acting on all that repressed emotion. He wanted to hurt someone so that they might feel what it was he was feeling.

But it became like so much dust on the wind. It moved through his fingers until slowly—too slowly—he regained control over his thoughts and his emotions. He came back to himself and became aware of the world around him. He was lying on a hard floor and something sharp was poking into his back. There were hands on his chest, his shoulders, and his ankles. They were holding him down.

He opened his eyes and Dylan, with tears in her eyes and bruises on her throat, was leaning over him, her thumbs stroking his temples as her fingers dug into his skull.

“Hey,” he grunted, trying to reach up to touch her, but hands continued to hold him down.

“It’s okay,” Dylan said, her voice hoarse, “he’s back.”

Whoever was holding him didn’t seem convinced. But Dylan let him go. Sitting back on her haunches, she gestured to those around him. After some hesitation, the hands let go. Stiles sat up, his sore body automatically healing bruises and muscle strain. He felt like he’d been in a fight.

“What happened?”

“You tried to kill her,” a voice behind him growled.

Stiles glanced back and regarded one of three gargoyles sitting at full alert around him.

“I wouldn’t…” he began to argue, but a flash of memory came back to him. He flexed his hands—he could still feel her throat, the way it fit perfectly in the curve of his hands. And the bruises on Dylan’s throat…

“Did I?”

Dylan touched her own throat and the bruises disappeared as though they’d never been there. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“But I did that.”

She inclined her head slightly. “The dark soul, it did something to you.”

Stiles stood up and the gargoyles instantly surrounded him. But, again, Dylan gestured for them to step back. He burst through the door and walked out onto the asphalt of the ruined street, confused by the darkness that surrounded him. It had been barely midmorning when he and Dylan had arrived in this place.

So much time had passed and he couldn’t remember any of it.

“What did I do?”

“It wasn’t you. It was the darkness in those demons.”

Stiles glanced at Dylan, at the tears in her clothing, and at the weariness in her eyes. He didn’t have to see bruises to know he’d done something horrifying to her.

“What did I do?”

She her eyes fell to the ground. “You thought I was someone else. You were confused, consumed by whatever it was that thing did to you. It wasn’t your fault.”

“But I hurt you.”

“We fought. But I knew it wasn’t your fault.”

Stiles lifted a hand to touch her, but the moment he caught sight of it, the moment he realized it was his hands that had done violent things to her, he turned away. He slammed his fist into the broken asphalt, shattering every bone from his fingers to his elbow.

He’d hurt the one person he was sworn to protect. He couldn’t let that happen again.

He burst away, disappearing. He pulled up his mental walls and went as far from her as he could get.