FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) (11 page)

Wyatt stepped back slightly. “Then what? What do we do now?”

Dylan moved to Wyatt’s side, running her hand gently over the curve of his shoulder. “Nothing has changed,” she said. “We still need to find your father. We still need to save him and Joanna from that prison.”

“You still want to march into Genero?” Wyatt asked, his voice revealing just how smart he thought that plan was. “You might as well put the rope around your own neck, Dylan.”

“They won’t know it’s us,” she said.

Stiles perked up a little at that. He pushed away from the wall and began to move around Wyatt, assessing him in a way that made Wyatt stiffen as he pressed himself closer to Dylan and as far from Stiles as possible.

“What are you doing?” Wyatt finally asked.

“Trying to imagine what you’d look like as a gargoyle.”

Wyatt was nervous. He was moving around the room as though he couldn’t control his movements. Dylan wanted to grab him and make him sit, but she was as nervous as he was. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she was still lightheaded from the head injury that was still not quite healed.

It worried both Stiles and Wyatt that she wasn’t healed. Neither said anything to her, but she could see them watching her when they thought she wasn’t paying attention. And she heard them talking last night, heard them whispering in the darkness as if she wasn’t just a few feet away.

Even Stiles, who seemed to know everything about everything, especially those things related to angels, couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t healing.

The consensus seemed to be that it wasn’t good. That wasn’t something she needed to hear. She already knew it wasn’t good.

They were about to go up against Luc and Lily’s Redcoat army.

No, it wasn’t good.

It didn’t take special powers to know that the gargoyles wouldn’t be happy about it, either.

They were sitting in the middle of a ruin, a building that Wyatt told her was once a library. A place full of books. It seemed appropriate for this meeting. The first time Dylan ever saw a gargoyle was in a bookstore.

Dylan walked among the books, running her fingers over the dusty spines. Some of the shelves had broken, or simply fallen, from the lack of human interaction. But many were still intact. She wondered what this room looked like when it was still part of a society, when children looked forward to coming here and having books read aloud to them, when adults still felt a little tingle of anticipation when they found a book they had never read or a new book that had never been cracked open before their fingers touched it.

Almost as though her thoughts conjured it up, a vision filled her mind. Bright light, some of it natural, some of it from the quietly buzzing lights overhead. There was no dust, nothing to make her nose tickle in the cooler air. The silence was just as prominent in the vision as it was in the present, but there was an undercurrent of excitement as people moved around Dylan, adults touching the book spines as she was, children following behind with their hands clasped behind their backs in an attempt to behave until it was time to go to the place where books for their age groups waited.

One man stood at a shelf that held particularly large, cumbersome books, constantly comparing the numbers printed on the spines to a piece of paper clutched in his hand. A small child about five or six stood behind him. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, but over the jeans was a skirt made out of some sort of rough, transparent material. As she waited, she held the skirt out from her body and made a series of movements that were filled with a grace and concentration that suggested a maturity far above the child’s apparent age.

The girl looked up at Dylan, almost as though she could actually see her standing there. She smiled a shy smile that disappeared when Dylan didn’t immediately respond. The child made another of those movements, pulling her feet tight together and bending her knees so deeply she looked as though she might fall if she hadn’t had her hands out in circle in front of her body, a movement that was so filled with grace Dylan almost wished the child was real so she could ask how she had done it. The girl looked up again, another smile on her sweet little face. Dylan couldn’t help but smile back, so touched she was by the child’s effort.

The girl curtsied, a sign of respect Dylan had read about in one of Wyatt’s western novels.

“Can you see me?” Dylan asked.

“Of course,” the child replied.

“That’s not possible.”

The child just giggled. The man turned. “Shush, Rachel,” he hissed under his breath. “We are in the library.”

The girl, Rachel, nodded. “Yes, Daddy.”

As soon as the man turned back to the shelf, Rachel slipped over to where Dylan stood. “What’s your name?” she asked as she slipped her hand into Dylan’s.

“Dylan.”

“I’m Rachel,” the girl said. “My brother’s at home with my mommy. His name is James, but we call him Jimmy.”

“That’s a good name,” Dylan said as she dropped to her knees so that she would be face to face with Rachel. “Are you close to your brother?”

“He’s just a baby,” she said.

Dylan smiled. “It must be frustrating, having a crying baby around all the time.”

Rachel nodded. “I can’t practice my ballet in the house anymore. Mommy says it’s too noisy for Jimmy.”

“He won’t be little forever,” Dylan said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to practice in the house again very soon.”

“Rachel?” The man turned from the shelf again, a stack of books balanced in his arms. “We have to go, kiddo. Mommy needs us to watch Jimmy while she goes to class.”

“Okay, Daddy.” Rachel leaned forward and kissed Dylan’s cheek lightly. “I know you’ll make the right choice,” she whispered.

Then she was skipping away, taking the hand of a man who looked almost exactly like Wyatt’s father.

Jimmy.

“They’re coming, Dylan.”

Dylan opened her eyes, not even aware they had been closed. She was still in the library, but it was no longer bright and open, now filled with shadows and dust. She sneezed, her nose aching in the second afterward, as though the sneeze had been sitting there for a long time awaiting release.

“You okay?” Wyatt asked, moving up behind her and helping her up from her knees.

“Yeah,” she said, even though she wasn’t quite sure. What was that? What had just happened? Was she hallucinating now? Could it be the head injury?

She didn’t have time to really worry about it. A crash sounded from the front of the room, marking the entrance of Demetria and her crew of gargoyles.

Dylan began to careful trek over the pile of books that were piled on the floor in this corner of the abandoned library, but Wyatt grabbed her arm.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “They’re not going to be happy with me. I’m sure they know about Lily by now.”

“We don’t have to do this,” Wyatt said, running his hand slowly up the length of her arm. “We can figure out another way to get into Genero.”

“We need help.” Dylan moved into Wyatt, laying her head on his chest for a long second. “I know you’re worried, but I don’t see any other way around this.”

He kissed the top of her head, his arms coming slowly around her, his touch gentle at first, but then becoming something different, something tighter. The familiar sense of pleasure that often came with his touch did not disappoint this time. She could feel it moving through her body, little waves that made her want to stand there like that for the rest of her life. She couldn’t imagine a life without this, without him.

But that was exactly what she was having to consider, wasn’t it?

“We should go.”

He didn’t let go right away. In fact, his grip tightened slightly, as though the idea of letting her go didn’t sit well with him, either. But he finally did step back, his arms falling to his sides almost reluctantly.

“I’m with you, no matter what you decide to do,” he said, reaching up to brush a piece of hair from her cheek.

“I know.”

She stepped up on her tip toes, pressed a kiss to his cheek, and then turned to greet her guests.

Her very unhappy guests.

“You have a lot of nerve inviting us here after what you did,” Demetria said, her legion of gargoyles growling almost as one as they moved forward to show their undying support of their leader.

“The war is not over yet,” Dylan said.

Demetria took a step forward, her axe suddenly appearing in her hand. Stiles moved between her and Dylan, a similar axe in his hand. Wyatt, too, stepped forward from where he had been standing at Dylan’s back, his hand reaching for the hilt of his samurai sword.

“Stop,” Dylan said in a quiet but commanding voice, a voice she barely recognized as her own. “Fighting each other isn’t going to do much to stop Luc and Lily.”

“Neither is healing Lily moments before she was to be called back!”

Dylan could feel the color leave her face. She crossed her arms over her chest, more to combat the sudden chill that filled her bones than in an attempt to look fierce. If it had the latter effect, however, she wasn’t about to argue.

“What’s done is done,” Dylan said so quietly that everyone had to stop moving to hear her. “What we need to concentrate on now is the future and the end of this war.”

“How do you propose we end the war now?” Demetria asked. “We had a plan. We had everything worked out. And you, in one stupid move, ruined it all.”

“Not all,” Dylan said. She moved forward just a few steps and laid her hand on first Wyatt’s and then Stiles’ shoulder. They both moved aside, but only far enough to leave a gap for Dylan to walk through. “Do you still want to save the humans?”

Demetria’s eyes narrowed as she studied Dylan over the blade of her axe. “Of course.”

“Then help us.”

“Help you do what?”

“Save Jimmy and the other humans from Genero.”

There was a titter of discussion behind Demetria, the gargoyles shaking their heads and whispering in their rusty voices. Their voices only rose with each expression of incredulity until Demetria raised a hand.

“That’s impossible. That dome is impenetrable.”

“We both know that’s not true,” Dylan said. “You managed to get in and out of there fairly easy a few times.” She pulled the compass from her pocket. “And Davida did, too,” she said, holding it up where Demetria could see it.

Dylan knew Demetria recognized the compass, could see it in the widening of her eyes, in the flush of color that suddenly erupted on her cheeks. “Maybe,” she conceded, “but that was one or two people at a whole time. Not an entire legion of gargoyles.”

“You have cloaking abilities.”

Demetria shook her head, her disbelief only increasing with every sentence that fell from Dylan’s lips. “The place is overrun with angels,” she said. “They would see us coming a mile away.”

“We want them to.”

Demetria started to turn away, but stopped as a slow smile began to slip across her face. “You want to get caught,” she said.

“What better way to break into a prison?”

“Okay,” Demetria said slowly, turning back toward Dylan with her axe balanced between her two hands, tipping back and forth in a show of dexterity. “But how do we get out?”

“That’s where the angels come in,” Donna said as she came into the room through the tall, broken doors at the front.

Pleasure, almost like Wyatt’s touch, rushed through Dylan when she saw her sister. She had worried she would not be here, that she would not have a chance to see her again. But that pleasure was tempered by the realization that she would have to tell Donna about Davida’s death.

Not a pleasant thought.

“She’s exactly right,” Stiles said. “There are more than just humans in that prison. There are groups of angels there, too.”

“Angels who gave themselves willingly to be used as lab rats,” Demetria said, her words punctuated when she spit on the ground near Dylan’s feet. “Who cares about the angels? Without them, without their betrayal, we wouldn’t be in this place.”

“Not all of them,” Stiles said. “Some fought alongside the humans and gargoyles.”

“Until something better came along,” one of the other gargoyles said.

Demetria shook her head. “I won’t go along with a plan that relies on a bunch of angels. They’ve betrayed us too many times.”

Stiles glanced at Dylan, but Dylan didn’t back down. “Then you plan to just let all those humans be executed?”

“If you hadn’t healed Lily, Luc would probably have gone back to Heaven with her.”

“And left who in charge?” Dylan let her eyes travel slowly around the room. “Do you think whoever took Lily and Luc’s place would have been any kinder to the humans? Do you think they would have just given up and gone home, too?”

Demetria bit her lip, chewing on a corner of it as though it helped the wheels that Dylan could see turning in her head. She would have loved to hear what was going on in there, but Dylan was afraid to lower her mental wall with so many angels and gargoyles in the room. Not only would it risk information overload, but she was worried about the lingering effects of the light she had absorbed when she healed Lily. The head injury was still making her a little lightheaded. She wasn’t sure her taxed energy stores could take anything more, and she had to be in peak condition when they arrived at Genero.