SOUL MATES (Angels and Demons Book 3)
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Authors: Brenda L. Harper
SOUL MATES
Brenda L. Harper
Copyright © 2015
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. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Wyatt was dead.
Time had passed, yet it still felt like yesterday. Dylan lay curled in her bed at Rachel’s, alone in the dark, her thoughts flowing with memories of Wyatt. They had more than forty years together, but her thoughts continuously returned to the first few years of their time together. To the day they met. To the first time Wyatt had kissed her. To the day they’d promised to always be together.
Forty years and it still felt like yesterday.
Perhaps that’s what happens when one doesn’t age. Dylan was still that young girl—inside and out—who was pushed out into the desert with no idea of what lay ahead. Now she knew more of who she was, but she was still learning. But she didn’t have Wyatt at her side to help her.
She rolled over and stared at the ceiling, her thoughts dancing around in her head so fast she could hardly keep track. Wyatt was so very much a part of every thought, but so was Josephine, her daughter. She felt a divide in their relationship. She’d had to make a choice between family and the role she was to play in humanity from this time forward and that choice…she wasn’t sure she’d done the right thing as a mother.
Dylan was an angel—an angel born of Earth, born from the manipulation of angel DNA and human DNA. She was one of a kind: an angel with all the gifts of an archangel, but the only angel in existence with the gift of freewill. She could choose what she wanted to do with her gifts, what she wanted to do with her life. And that choice was sometimes harder than it might seem.
Dylan married the love of her life forty-five years ago and chose to live her life with him and their child. He was everything to her—her lover, her companion, her soul mate. But then their soul mate connection broke and his ability to heal her and to communicate with her without words ceased. He aged. She didn’t. He was human again, no longer blessed with the gifts his mother—an angel—and his father—the son of an archangel—had bestowed upon him. All of humanity had reverted to human form over the past forty years for reasons unknowable to Dylan. Only she and Stiles—an angel and her personal guardian—retained their angel gifts.
These changes seemed inconsequential, at first. But then other things began to change. Dylan began to hear the voices of humans, begging for help. She dreamed of them, of humans being attacked by these dark, unholy souls that she thought of as demons. And her gifts were growing stronger and her ability to use them changing. And then there was Stiles.
She’d known for more than forty years that he was without a soul mate. She knew that the death of Wyatt’s mother, Joanna, had left him untethered to another angel. And she knew he’d chosen her to be his new soul mate. But she always thought there would be time—that she wouldn’t have to tether her soul to his until she was ready. And, as long as Wyatt was alive, she wasn’t ready.
But now Wyatt was gone.
Dylan was meant for greater things. She’d been told since she was young that she would one day be important to this world. She had thought that meant she would make a choice between humanity and the angels. A choice she made decades ago. But now she knew there was more in store for her. She was meant to be a leader. She was meant to take on a role she wasn’t sure she was capable of.
She was meant to become the guardian of the human race.
Dylan rolled over again, growing tangled in the sheets on her borrowed bed. It sounded so stupid, thinking it like that. She had yet been able to make herself speak the words. Yet, she’d already made a decision that had established her in that very role. She forced the human governing council—of which her daughter was the leader—to bow down to her demands.
She chose her new role over her relationship with her only child. And soon she would have to choose Stiles—she would have to tether her soul to his—to complete what his fall from heaven had begun.
It was confusing to her, this whole mess. Every time she thought it made sense, someone explained some new aspect of it all to her. Stiles fell to Earth and altered something. She wasn’t sure what, but something. With his fall came Joanna’s defection from the angels to aid Lucifer’s army…Lucifer being the angel who’d been on Earth since the beginning of time as the guardian of the human race. With Joanna’s defection, he turned the tide of a human war and turned it into a war between the humans and the angels. Lucifer’s army rid the world of pure humans, leaving behind just the Nephilim—humans whose DNA was contaminated by angels through generations of cross breeding. To continue their war, Lucifer’s soul mate, Lily, created an elixir that allowed the angels to have freewill. Stiles took that elixir and had a friend, Matthew—whom he knew as Dillon—alter it to create a disease that would send the angels back to heaven. Lily was infected with this illness, but instead of going home, she used the labs where she created the elixir to create human/angel hybrids she could use to heal herself. It was in one of those labs that Dylan was conceived.
It was from there that things got really muddy for Dylan. Stiles watched over her from the moment she was conceived because he was told to by a woman he’d met years before. That woman was Dylan. Dylan traveled back in time and told Stiles he would be her guardian, that he would help her mature and make a choice that would save humanity. And by telling Stiles this, Dylan chose him as her guardian and—somehow—as her future soul mate. But Dylan had already known Stiles as her guardian when she went back…she was never aware she had a choice or that she could have chosen someone else. So, was it really her choice?
Dylan hadn’t even gone back in that time to see Stiles. She was called there by Jimmy, Wyatt’s father. There was some sort of soul mate connection between them, too, but Dylan destroyed it by accidentally revealing she was traveling through time—something humans definitely could not do and angels could only do in limited ways, yet she could do it as freely as though she were taking a stroll to the park—breaking his heart and turning him into a bitter man who raised his son to question everything around him. It was this distrust in Wyatt that kept him and Dylan apart much longer than their affection for one another should have allowed. If she had known that…could she have done something to prevent what she’d done to Jimmy?
And why did she have a soul mate connection to all three men? Weren’t soul mates supposed to be a once in a lifetime thing?
And why did everything always come back to Stiles?
Joanna was Stiles’ first soul mate. She was the reason he fell from heaven. Joanna was also married to Jimmy—she married him shortly after Dylan broke his heart and he stopped drawing her back to his time—and Joanna was Wyatt’s mother. Joanna also happened to be friends with Jophiel, Jimmy’s father. It was because of Jophiel that Joanna met, and married, Jimmy. She was there to watch over Jophiel’s one remaining child. And Stiles, it seemed, killed Jimmy’s mother as well as Jophiel. He didn’t kill Rachel, Jimmy’s sister, but then Dylan pulled Rachel out of the past and gave her back to Jimmy to raise as his child even though she’d been the older sibling before her death during that long-ago barbecue.
Confusing.
Just thinking about it all sent Dylan’s head reeling.
And then there were the lies and inconsistencies that Stiles allowed her to believe. There were so many that she was still straightening them all out in her head.
Not that any of it mattered anymore. All that mattered now was that the demons were attacking innocent people and she was supposedly the only one who could stop them. However, no one seemed to know how.
She could fight them. She could send those that were receptive home. But she didn’t know how to stop them.
How do you stop a Nephilim soul that has been trapped on Earth for generations—for millennia—and had all that time to build up anger and resentment and hatred?
Dylan kicked at the sheets to bare her legs, tucking her hands under her head as she stared up at the ceiling. How was she supposed to be the guardian of humanity if she didn’t know how to stop the one thing that was hurting them the most?
Just then Stile came bursting into her room.
“I know. I know what their purpose is,” he announced in a state of excitement.
She rolled over and focused on him through blurry eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I know what they want.”
Dylan sat up, dragging her fingers through her hair. “What?”
“The object Joanna brought down from heaven. It’s still here. He’s looking for it.”
“How does he know about it?”
“Joanna found him, she spoke to him. It must have been while she was building her army to use against you. She must have told him.”
“Then why doesn’t he know where it is?”
“He’s insane. But now we know. Now we know how to stop them.”
“We take their purpose,” Dylan said as she came to understand.
Dylan climbed off the bed and snatched her pants off the back of a chair. “We need to talk to Raphael. We need to get his army out looking for it.”
“Stop.” Stiles grabbed Dylan by the arms and forced her to look up at him. “I think I know where to start.”
An image filled Dylan’s mind and she nodded. She knew exactly what he was thinking.
They flew over the area, looking for trouble before they made themselves vulnerable by landing on the overgrown vegetation that had overtaken land that was once a well-manicured yard. The house had always sat between fields—corn and cotton, mostly—alongside a lake that formed after humans stopped monitoring a small dam that directed the flow of water in this region. Even though the landscape was altered, the corn and cotton spreading over the yard along with other weeds that were no longer kept in check by man’s pesticides and mechanical removal, the house looked pretty much the same.
This was where Stiles had first set eyes on Joanna after his fall to Earth.
She stood on the porch, her eyes raised heavenward. Stiles had never seen her in her human form. She was…different. Beautiful, by human standards. Her hair was long and dark, made full with thick curls that begged to be touched. Her jaw was square, her body slender, but strong. And, even from this distance, Stiles could see that she had haunting blue eyes that seemed to see everything and nothing all at once.
He could stare at her for hours.
You came for me.
That was familiar, the sound of her voice in his mind. That was how they had always communicated. He heard her voice inside his head so often that he sometimes forgot which thoughts were his and which were put there by her, by her voice.
Stiles moved around the house again, trying to figure out who was there and why they were hiding themselves from him. Nothing. Not even a hint. Just Joanna sitting on the front steps, waiting patiently for him to materialize for her.
Waiting. Just like he’d been doing for much too long.
“Hello, Joanna,” he said quietly as he slowly settled on the ground in front of her.
A slow smile slipped across her full lips just a second before Stiles was slammed to the ground by two large, heavily muscled humans.
He should have known then that everything had changed. They said now that it was his falling from heaven that had changed things, but he knew better. He knew Joanna. She’d never had a malicious bone in her body—so to speak—until she fell. Unless God instructed her specifically, she never would have done anything that would hurt angel or human. Never. But in those months after he fell, she’d left him for dead, joined Lucifer’s army, and led a battle against humans that resulted in thousands of deaths.
That wasn’t the Joanna he knew. The Joanna he knew had saved his life when Lucifer wanted to kill him for interfering with his collection of servants—servants stolen from the human refugee camp where Stiles had lived with Rebecca. But then she turned on him again by trying to turn Dylan from her goal, by trying to stop the salvation of the humans.
Joanna died a terrible death—infected with the angel disease Dylan had extracted from Lily—and her soul was condemned to suffer on Earth rather than going wherever it was angels’ souls went. And then she returned—a form of her, anyway—and she tried to raise an army against Dylan, but she failed when Dylan made her choice.
But not before she could tell Jack James, the leader of these dark souls who were attacking the humans now, where he could find a box she’d brought with her from heaven. A box that contained something very powerful, something that could give Jack power over all of humanity.
They had to find it.
Stiles saw it that day, when he first found Joanna here. He didn’t see what was inside of it then, but the way she snatched it from him and slid it under the bed made him suspicious. He looked later, pulling it out and sneaking a peek. He’d regretted doing it at the time. It was a precious object that could have meant the destruction of all—humans, angels, and gargoyles—if Joanna had so chosen. But she never did. She drew strength from its presence, but she never used it and had never given it to whoever it was meant to belong. And that was a mystery all on its own.
When things were so clearly going wrong, why didn’t she use it?
Dylan landed on the ground with more grace than even an angel should possess. He paused for a moment, pretending he was still enjoying the return of his wings, gliding over the area with his eyes on the ground. But, in truth, he was enjoying the sight of Dylan, a sight he’d enjoyed from afar for what felt like a lifetime now. She was so familiar to him that it sometimes felt as if her face was his, and that her eyes, her hair, the curve of her jaw, were all the same he saw in the mirror whenever he bothered to look in one. But sometimes, like now, she felt as new to him as his first taste of soup had in that homeless shelter.
She wasn’t sleeping. He could see the evidence in the smudges under her eyes. And she wasn’t eating, as evidenced by the fifteen pounds she’d lost over the last few weeks. She was too thin, too fragile—but still beautiful. Her hair was like sunlight and her eyes like the clearest ocean. And her skin was the color of lightly toasted bread, but with the texture of fresh cream. He wanted to touch her, to draw some of her grief from her soul so that she might heal faster, and so that she might choose him sooner. But he knew from experience that she needed to feel her pain in order to properly process it. So, he didn’t touch her. He just watched from a distance.
Dylan made her way up to the front steps. She was hesitant, likely expecting the thin boards of the steps to be rotten, but they held under her weight.
He wasn’t the only one who’d met Joanna here. Dylan’s first meeting with her was here, too. Mammon, Joanna’s angel lover, had found Dylan alone after the gargoyles had grabbed her companion, left her wandering in an unfamiliar place and then brought her here. It was here that Joanna had tried to convince Dylan that the angels didn’t mean her any harm, that they only wanted to teach her to live up to her potential. It was also here that Dylan had seen the box; she saw it as Joanna urged her to realize her ethereal form for the first time, though she probably didn’t realize the significance of it. But Stiles did as he watched the memory play out in Dylan’s mind.
Joanna grabbed Dylan’s hand and ran for the back of the house. Dylan nearly tripped trying to keep up with her. Joanna burst into a bedroom and dove for the bed. At first Dylan thought she might be trying to hide underneath, but realized that she was looking for something. A box, she discovered as Joanna backed up and jumped to her feet.
“You have to transition into your ethereal form,” she said.
Dylan just shook her head. She had no idea what Joanna was talking about.
“Close your eyes,” Joanna said, moving her own hand over Dylan’s eyelids, encouraging them to lower. Images exploded in her mind, images of colorful creatures moving freely through the air.
“Concentrate,” Joanna whispered. “You are an angel. Imagine yourself floating free of your human form.”
“I can’t,” Dylan said, pulling back.
Joanna dropped the box before she grabbed Dylan’s head between both her hands and squeezed slightly. “Listen to me,” she hissed. “You have to do this. Lucifer is coming.”
Dylan stared at Joanna. “How do you know?”
“I know.” She surprised Dylan by kissing her forehead lightly. “Think of John—Wyatt. Think of the last time you were together. Think of happiness.”
Dylan closed her eyes again. She could feel the pressure of Joanna’s hands on her head, but it was not an unpleasant pressure. Her thoughts were scattered. At first, all she could think about was the sound of flames cracking and popping in the next room, of the heat of it beginning to come toward her. Then she thought of Luc and Lily, of the things they had done and what they wanted to do. But as she stood there, as Joanna continued to hold her head between her hands, Dylan’s thoughts began to settle down.
She thought of Sam. Thought of the night he kissed her. A different kind of heat moved through her body just at the memory. It made her ache in a weird sort of way. She wanted to hold on to the memory, wanted to hold on to Sam. But then the image of his battered face, the one Wyatt showed her, flashed through her mind and all the calm that had descended on her disappeared.
“Concentrate,” Joanna said again, her voice a little less calm than it had been before.
Dylan squeezed her eyes, as though the act of doing that would cause the images in her mind to physically change. And, in a way, it did. She focused on Wyatt this time, and pictured his face as it had been during their conversation earlier. She pictured him dragging his fingers through his hair and shoving his hands into his jeans pockets as though it would stop him from saying or doing something he didn’t want to do.
She pictured the frown wrinkles on Wyatt’s forehead and her own fingers gently wiping them away. And she imagined him smiling, imagined that dimple that sometimes appeared in his cheek in those rare moments of levity. It didn’t happen often, so she felt special when it appeared for her. She felt that way now. She felt that tenderness that often made it hard to breathe whenever he looked at her.
“That’s it,” Joanna whispered.
Dylan’s thoughts moved again to the kisses she and Wyatt had shared behind that wall of boxes, to the feel of his urgency as he ran his hands under her shirt. She had never felt anything quite like that before. It confused her, her own body’s reaction to him. And his body…she had felt things she did not understand and wasn’t sure she ever would despite what she had seen in Joanna’s memories of her romance with Jimmy. It occurred to her that she never wondered why Wyatt had touched her that way; she never had the chance to ask him what it had meant.
But the memory of it was just as exciting as the moment itself had been.
As Dylan concentrated on Wyatt, on his touch, she felt her body begin to become light. Joanna whispered encouragement. There was warmth that traveled between Joanna’s fingers and Dylan’s mind. It was as if Joanna was infusing Dylan with something…a sort of magic, perhaps.
And then the earth was no longer under her feet, but a distant object floating far below her.
“Follow me,” Joanna said.
Dylan looked around and spotted Joanna’s pure blue color far ahead of her. She began to feel heavy again as she concentrated too hard on Joanna and on her need to reach her. But the moment she stopped trying, it was as if she just soared.
Stiles could feel the pain that sliced through Dylan with that memory. Remembering Sam—how he’d been hurt by the gargoyles when he’d been stolen from her—and then remembering one of the first times she and Wyatt shared intimacy so soon after his death…it was hard for her. Again, Stiles wanted to go to her, but he knew his presence was the last thing she’d want right now. He loved her enough to give her that space despite the pain that was eating him up at his inability to help her.
Dylan hesitated at the door, her hand on the knob. Stiles watched as she gathered her emotions, her thought still so filled with the past. And then she pushed the door open and immediately his name was on her lips.
“This isn’t right.”
Stiles landed silently on the porch behind her. Dylan was in the doorway as though she was afraid to fully enter the building for some reason. He moved up behind her and peeked around her shoulder.
“What’s the matter?”
“It shouldn’t look like this.”
Stiles frowned, not quite sure what she meant. But then he remembered a small detail from her memory—
and then the building exploded into flames
—that made it all too clear. The place should have been a pile of ash. Instead, the inside of the house looked almost exactly as it did the last time Stiles had walked through this door.
He moved around Dylan and walked into the main room—a large living room/kitchen combo. There were teacups on the table and plates in a rack on the kitchen counter, all absent of dust, dirt, or any other sign of passing time. It was as if someone had just cleaned the kitchen and walked away, leaving it in pristine condition.
“How is this possible?”
Stiles touched the counter top and felt a vibration that seemed to come from the molecules themselves.
“This shouldn’t be,” Dylan insisted. “The house was bombarded with fireballs. There should be nothing here but ashes. When I saw the roof still intact, I thought windows…but this?”
“It’s the box.”
Dylan cautiously moved into the room, coming up behind Stiles. Hesitation in her touch, she pressed her fingertips to the countertop as he had. He turned just in time to watch her eyes widen, to watch her response to the vibration deep in the wood and plastic and laminate that made up the countertop.
Her eyes moved to the back of the house and Stiles nodded. She was drawn to it from that little touch. She made her way across the living room, her eyes moving over and lingering on the couch for a second. As she looked, Stiles could see a scene play itself out in her head:
“You let us teach you so that you have the knowledge you need to make the right choices.”
“Teach me what?”
Joanna’s smile touched her eyes this time. It made them dance, reminding Dylan a little of Wyatt in the few lighthearted moments they had shared. “To be an angel,” she said.
Dylan shook her head. “I’m not an angel. I’m a freak of nature. An abomination.”
“No.” Joanna came to her and cradled her face in her hands the way Davida often did when she knew Dylan was particularly upset. “You are a child of God.”
“I was created in a lab.”