FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) (15 page)

“Let’s go,” she said.

As they took their first steps into this corridor, Dylan lowered her mental wall. Immediately her mind was filled with whispers, some close, some a distance away. After a second she was able to isolate the ones she wanted.

“They’re in the third room on the left,” she said.

Stiles didn’t acknowledge her words, but his pace immediately picked up speed. He wasn’t quite running, but he was moving quickly. Dylan was afraid he would wrench the door open the moment they reached it, but he held back, moving to the left side of it with his back against the wall. He had a sword in his hands, a golden sword that looked an awful lot like the axe he had wielded more than a few times since Dylan met him. She stood against the right side of the door, Wyatt pressed against the door at her side.

Dylan had considered arming herself for this part of the plan, but decided she was more likely to hurt herself than anyone else. Wyatt had trained her with a knife, but her skills were dangerous to say the least. She had cut herself more often than the melons Wyatt had set up as targets. Besides, Wyatt had more than enough talent and weapons to protect them both.

She caught Stiles’ eyes and began to count off in her head. When she reached three, she laid her hand on the doorknob and imagined it unlocked. It popped under her hand when she reached five. On ten, she twisted it open and jumped through the doorway, moving quickly to her right to allow Wyatt and Stiles to move up in front of her.

She had expected chaos, but the room was quiet. Three men stood beside a bed, studying something that one of them held in a slender tube. On the bed in front of them lay a dark-haired woman, her head moving slowly from side to side, sweat beading her forehead as she tried to form words. But something wasn’t working. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. Dylan had heard her thoughts a few times while they were in the hall, but they were jumbled, confused.

Joanna was clearly drugged.

Stiles marched forward and grabbed one of the men by his shoulder, spinning him around. Stiles buried his sword in the man’s gut without warning, blood gushing onto the floor and all over the man’s white coat.

The other two men jumped backward. The one with the slender tube dropped it and watched in horror as the contents spilled across the tiled floor. “You fool!” he cried, as though the lost tube was more important that the disembowelment of his friend.

“What did you do to her?” Stiles demanded as he pulled his sword free of the first man and turned to the others.

“Nothing,” the third man said, holding up his hands as he backed up so quickly he stumbled back into one of the many trays of instruments strewn around the room.

“You destroyed it,” the second man said, still staring at the broken tube on the floor. “Do you realize what Luc will do to you when he learns about this?”

Stiles didn’t care. He sliced his sword through the air, sending the man’s head flying across the room. The other man screamed like a girl, his voice high and strained. He continued to back up, tripping twice over the spilled instruments until he finally stopped flat on his bottom on the floor. Stiles stood over him for a long minute, but then seemed to realize there was no point in killing this man. He was not a threat. At the moment.

Dylan had rushed to Joanna the moment Stiles attacked the first man and was struggling to release the restraints that held her wrists and ankles to the frame of the bed. Wyatt was on the other side, struggling with the restraints there. He wouldn’t look at Joanna, wouldn’t allow himself to acknowledge her relationship to him. Dylan couldn’t blame him. Joanna’s death had been traumatic enough for five-year-old Wyatt. Seeing her now, knowing what she had done, how she had left him willingly, couldn’t have been an easy thing for him to deal with even if he did have warning.

As Dylan worked at the restraints, she tried to get through the drug cloud that was wrapped around Joanna’s mind. But she couldn’t find a way in. Joanna’s eyes kept slipping closed even as her mouth continued to work in that obsessive way that suggested she had something important to say to someone.

And then Stiles was beside her, running his hands slowly, gently, along the curves of her skull like Wyatt sometimes did to Dylan. It was instantaneous, the effect it had on Joanna. Her eyes opened, and they were bright, aware. She stared up at Stiles and seemed to see him despite his outward façade. She reached up and touched the dimple that had appeared in his chin, smiled as her finger moved slowly up to his bottom lip.

“Stiles,” she whispered.

“I’m here,” he said.

Wyatt was standing across from Dylan, working on Joanna’s right ankle as she finally got the straps released on her left. His head came up when his mother spoke, his eyes falling over Dylan. It wasn’t surprise she saw in his eyes, though. It was something darker, something sadder.

You knew
, she whispered into his mind.

I heard him talking that day…

Dylan moved over to Wyatt’s side of the table and finished unfastening the strap for him. Then she lifted Joanna’s foot from the little support where it rested and pulled the sheet that covered her naked body down over her bare legs. Then she took Wyatt’s hand and led him out the door.

“We should stay,” he whispered.

“Give them a minute.”

He glanced back into the room before allowing Dylan to lead him out into the corridor. She looked from one side to the other, listening with her mind to make sure they weren’t about to be surprised by a group of Redcoats or some other scientists. There was a little alcove a few feet farther down the corridor. She led Wyatt there, thinking it would be a good place to wait until Stiles and Joanna were ready to move on. Wyatt had other ideas.

He pushed her back against the wall and pressed his lips to hers. She sighed and moved closer to him, amused that now she was the taller one, she was able to maneuver in a way she hadn’t yet experienced. Just like everything else about Wyatt’s touch, it was new and exciting.

She ran her hand down his back, and her mind rebelled a little as she felt muscle and bone that wasn’t where it was supposed to be. His female form was petite, the muscle definition under his skin less than what she was quickly growing accustomed to feeling. But his taste was the same, his touch so familiar it made her heart ache. She was so into the feel of him that she didn’t hear them coming, didn’t realize that the voices in her head were not just an echo but actually a group of women walking toward them down the corridor.

“What is this?” a woman’s voice demanded.

Wyatt turned and immediately pushed Dylan back behind him as he often did. But Dylan towered over him and could clearly see the looks of disgust on the faces of the women standing just outside their alcove.

“Explain yourself, guardian,” the first woman demanded.

Dylan stepped forward. “I apologize, councilwoman,” she said, moving into the appropriate half curtsey that she had seen Davida and other guardians offer the councilwomen too many times to count. “I was escorting this guardian to the testing rooms.”

The bald woman stepped forward and studied Wyatt. “Why is she being tested?”

“Abhorrent behaviors,” Dylan said immediately.

The councilwoman turned to look sharply at Dylan. “It seems she is not the only one,” she said, her voice thick with an accent Dylan could not immediately place. “Perhaps you should turn yourself in for testing as well.”

Dylan tried to look ashamed as she dropped her gaze to the floor. “Yes, councilwoman,” she said.

“This is why things need to change around here,” the councilwoman said as she turned back to her companions and led the way down the corridor.

Dylan felt a puff of wind against her neck. She turned and found Wyatt struggling to keep a bad case of the giggles under control. Dylan wrapped her arms around him, pulling his face hard against her chest as she buried her face in his hair and let go with her own uncontrollable laughter.

This was how Stiles and Joanna, clumsily dressed in one of the doctor’s white coats, found them a moment later.

“Stop it,” Stiles said, slapping a hand against Dylan’s shoulder. “She could have had you marched into a cell upstairs.”

“That’s where we’re going anyway,” she said.

“Yes, well, it might be better if we go of our own volition.”

Dylan wiped away tears with both hands, trying not to look at Wyatt because each glance at him made her want to laugh again. She took a few deep breaths and then nodded.

“All right, let’s get moving,” she said.

Wyatt took her hand and led her out of the alcove, stepping cautiously as he checked each of the corridors before leading her back the way they had come.

“This is our hope for the future,” Dylan heard Stiles say behind her.

“Yeah,” Joanna agreed. “Isn’t it great?”

They walked quickly back down the corridor toward the assembly room where Dylan’s group first entered this part of the Administration building. There were more people moving around here, so Dylan had to pay attention to the voices she could hear in her head. She had gotten so used to funneling them out that it took some concentration. It also didn’t help that Wyatt was holding her hand and it was…distracting, to say the least.

They laughter and frivolous thoughts began to fall apart, however, when they came into a shorter corridor, one Dylan did not recognize. The voice began low and quiet in the back of her mind, but it grew in volume until it was the only thing she could hear. She bent her knees, moving into a squat against the wall as Joanna and Stiles rushed on ahead of them. Wyatt squatted in front of her and took her head in his hands, but she could barely feel him.

Don’t let them,
the voice said.

The same three words, over and over again, a scream inside Dylan’s mind that reverberated and returned, the words chasing one another around inside her skull until that was all she could hear, all she could concentrate on, all she was aware of.

“Dylan,” Wyatt whispered, his lips close to her ear. “What’s happening?”

She shuddered, unable to even pull herself out of her own head long enough to explain it to him.

She felt his touch disappear, felt him more than saw him disappear down into the next corridor. Pain began to spread from the top of her head down her neck to follow her spine all the way to the bottom of her tail bone. Tears were running over her hands where they were pressed to her head, to her face. She wanted it to stop, but she didn’t know how to do it.

Don’t let them
.

Don’t let them what?
she finally thought to ask back.

Almost immediately, the voice stopped. The pain stayed, but the voice was gone, the echoes of it slowly receding. And then it was back, but quieter.

Who’s there?

A friend.

The voice became quiet again. Wyatt was back, his hands on her head, her neck, making the pain break up and disappear again. She opened her eyes and looked up at him, saw Stiles and Joanna watching cautiously from behind him.

Help me,
the voice said as it returned.
They want to hurt me.

Where?

Silence. But when Dylan closed her eyes, she saw a dark room and a child, no more than seven or eight, dressed in the coveralls of the youth dorms huddled on a cold tile floor, hiding in the bottom of a cabinet. There were noises outside. Someone was searching for this child, and they were going to find her very soon.

Dylan concentrated, looking long and hard around the room. She could see beds and instruments like all the other rooms they had passed today. The child could have been anywhere. But Dylan was able to peek out the door, saw the bald councilwoman walk past it. Saw Lavina with her.

Dylan knew where they were.

Stay where you are,
Dylan told the child.
I’ll be there soon.

She opened her eyes to find Wyatt staring at her with that stoic expression on his face, the one he wore when he didn’t want her to know how frightened he really was. She touched his cheek lightly, running her fingers over the curve of his jaw in that way she so liked to do. This was it, she realized. This was the moment they would have to say goodbye.

Her heart clenched hard in her chest.

“I have to go,” she said in a low, even tone.

“No.” He immediately shook her fingers off of his face, leaning forward to block her body from escaping. “We stay together.”

“Wyatt—”

“I won’t let you go.”

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “Go find your father. I’ll catch up soon.”

“Dylan, you can’t—”

She touched her forehead to his, sending him an image from her favorite memory of him. It was the day they met, the day she saw him walk out of the trees, his samurai sword strapped to his back, his jeans heavy with the weight of his six shooter at his waist. He looked so much like the cowboys he so admired, but she had nothing to compare it to then. He was just Wyatt, just this beautiful person who had come to save her from the dangers of the desert.

He returned the gesture with an image of his own. She blushed when she saw herself naked for the first time, standing there beside the river that had saved her life the night before. With the image came all the emotion he had attached to that memory. It might have deepened her blush if this had been a different moment, if he had been a different man.