SOUL MATES (Angels and Demons Book 3) (6 page)

“Let him have some fun for once.”

Rachel looked at her, her emotions written all over her face. She thought it was a mistake. Raphael thought they should be focusing on the fact that Dylan was attacked so close to the place she called home for the moment.

If he had succeeded…

But he didn’t.

Raphael inclined his head slightly. “You are not to be alone any longer,” he said. “I will have one of my soldiers posted outside this door immediately.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“It is,” Rachel said. “You are the future, Dylan. We would be lost if something happened to you.”

Dylan, reluctantly, nodded.

“This is your room?”

Caryn walked around a little, running her fingers over the spines of the few books he’d taken from Rachel’s library and had yet to return. Then she turned and looked at the bed, a soft, knowing smile raising the color in his cheeks.

“Not very impressive, I suppose,” Stiles said.

“No. It’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah?” Stiles walked over to her, resting his hands on her shoulders. “I don’t have a lot, but I don’t really have anything like a permanent home right now, either.”

“My mom always says a person doesn’t need much more than the clothes on their back and a soft place to lay their head at the end of the day.”

“Your mom is pretty smart.”

Caryn turned into Stiles, everything naive and innocent about her suddenly wiped from her pretty features. She studied his face, raising a hand to stroke the curve of his jaw.

“I’d rather not talk about my mom right now,” she said softly.

She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed the center of his jaw. Stiles didn’t need any further invitation. He stole her lips, making them his own with a determination that came from too many years of solitude. His human body had needs that his angel soul hadn’t allowed him to satisfy for much too long. She responded to him and he couldn’t help himself as his body also responded, his hands moving around her waist and drawing her even closer to him. Instinct…this was the basis of that human need to seek out a mate and keep the species going.

This was a part of the process Stiles was familiar with. He’d lain with women before—a few more than Rebecca ever cared to talk about. And Rebecca…she’d been a satisfying lover for as long as her body could accommodate the process. But he hadn’t been with a woman since long before Rebecca’s death. It felt…different. Holding Caryn was nice. He liked the way she felt in his arms. He liked the softness of her feminine body, liked the way she smelled and he loved the way her hands seemed to know how much he liked to be touched along the small of his back.

But.

There was always a but. And this but was all about needing something more than a one-night stand. He was sure Caryn wouldn’t mind seeing him again after this, but he wasn’t sure that was something he wanted. She was nice and everything, but she wasn’t Rebecca. And she would never be Dylan.

Stiles let his lips linger against hers for a moment longer, and then he touched her temple with two fingers. Instantly, Caryn disappeared. He’d sent her home, put her to bed, and wiped from her mind the memory of returning to Rachel’s with him. Instead, he replaced her last memories of their night together with a chaste goodnight kiss on her front porch and the impression that it had been fun, but not enough to seek out a second date.

It wasn’t fair to lead someone like Caryn on. She was too kind—too innocent.

Stiles sank down on his bed with a heavy sigh. No matter how logical his head wanted to be, this human body wanted to bring Caryn back and finish what she’d started. He stood and began to pace. Stupid damn morals, stupid damn attachments. There was once a time when these things were easy, when he could do whatever he wanted to do without concern for what would happen the next day or the day after that. Why couldn’t he go back there?

Why couldn’t he stop thinking about Dylan and the pain he constantly felt radiating from her soul?

Stiles went to the jail where Wilhelm kept the dark souls they’ve managed to capture in this war. Wilhelm wasn’t there—he was at the dance with Donna—but two of his assistants, other gargoyles, were there.

“Anything new?” he asked as he walked into the narrow room.

“Not really,” one of the gargoyles told him. “We’ve been watching this one in the corner. He seems ready to move on.”

Stiles walked to the end of the room and stopped in front of the door to the last cell.

“Is that true?” he asked. “Are you ready to let go of the darkness and be received into heaven?”

The soul’s darkness swirled in its smoky presence. There was a modified version of the lassos Dylan had designed to capture these things wrapped around what might have been its neck if it had been in human form. The darkness of its body seemed to undulate, moving and rotating almost constantly, through the restraint. As Stiles spoke, those movements seemed to increase, running in much quicker waves.

Pain.

Stiles slid through the bars in his ethereal form, one of the gargoyles began to protest, while the other urged him to be quiet. “He’s an angel,” Stiles heard behind him. He approached the dark soul and touched it gingerly, almost as if he were afraid of being burned by it. The place where they touched turned a soft gray color, as though the simple act of reaching out had helped the soul rid itself of some darkness.

“What is his plan?” he asked the soul. “Why is he doing this?”

Anger. Pain.

“Where does it come from, this anger and pain?”

She.

Stiles studied the soul for a long moment. “She? Do you mean Joanna?”

The soul didn’t answer. It didn’t know.

“What did she tell him? We know about the orb. But what else? There must be more.”

Again, the soul didn’t answer. But when Stiles touched it again, images exploded in his mind.

Wyatt lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight. “Someone’s down there,” he said.

Stiles moved up behind Dylan. “How do you know?” he asked Wyatt.

“I saw a flash of something. Metal, I think.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just a reflection off of one of the rides?”

Wyatt didn’t respond. He just kept watching. After a second he pointed with his other hand, the one not pressed to his forehead. “There,” he said. “A little flash, like someone moving around.”

“I saw it,” Stiles said.

Dylan hadn’t, but it didn’t matter. She had already known someone would be there waiting for them.

Stiles gripped Dylan’s arms and turned her around. “You need to go back.”

“No,” she said, pulling away from his touch. “I can’t keep running.”

“You don’t know what might be down there.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Dylan,” Stiles began, reaching to touch her again. But then he was jerked backward, as though hit by a powerful force. Dylan cried out as he fell to the ground, his body stiff as though his nerves had all misfired at the same time.

“That guy is so irritating,” Ellie said.

“What are you doing?” Wyatt asked, his voice surprisingly calm as he slowly stepped in front of Dylan and confronted his former admirer with his hands held at chest level in response to the weapon in her hand. “Stiles wasn’t bothering you.”

“He wanted to keep her from going to the park. I couldn’t allow that.”

“Why? Who are you working with?”

Ellie simply smiled. “You two were so easy, you know? I didn’t even have to beg to get you to take us along with you. You just fell for that wild pig attack like you saved damsels in distress every single day. Davida sure had you pegged.”

“Davida?” Dylan asked. “What about her?”

Ellie just shook her head. “You are so blind, Dylan. Did you really think they would put a bunch of experiments into the dorms without someone there to watch over them? Lily’s not nearly that stupid.”

“What does Lily have to do with this?” Wyatt asked.

Ellie didn’t answer. She gestured with her weapon, the same sort of short, wide weapon the Redcoats had when they’d come searching for Dylan at the resistance camp. “Let’s go,” she barked.

“What about Sam?” Dylan asked.

Ellie glanced over her shoulder. Sam was unconscious on the ground behind her. Dylan couldn’t tell if he had been hit with another of the projectiles from her gun. She didn’t think so. His body was not stiff like Stiles’, or like Bobby’s had been days ago. And he was clearly unconscious. Stiles, on the other hand, was staring up at Dylan and his voice, distant and garbled, was trying to communicate with her. She didn’t know what he was saying, but she had a pretty good guess.

He wanted her to run.

She would have. If not for Wyatt.

“Ellie.”

Dylan’s cheeks burned as she rushed into the building where Wilhelm’s jail was hidden; Raphael and several members of his legion followed closely behind. Stiles was waiting, leaning casually against the wall, as though what he had told her that made her rush out of Rachel’s home before dawn was just a casual comment about the weather.

“Where is she?”

Stiles gestured to a door at the end of the hallway where he stood. “We moved her so that you could speak to her alone.”

“How is this possible?”

Stiles looked at Raphael, as though he expected the archangel to have an answer he didn’t.

“We do not know where angel souls go when they are killed by an angel’s sword,” Raphael said softly. “But we’ve never encountered anything like this.”

“It was always believed that when angels are killed, their souls are reabsorbed as energy and they become a part of the energy that sustains life here on Earth,” Stiles said. “The fact that no angel soul has ever communicated in any way after their death supported this idea.”

“But Ellie’s here.”

“It might not be your Ellie,” Raphael said.

“It’s her.”

Dylan looked from one angel to the other, her eyes settling on Stiles. “You knew her—if you’re sure.”

Stiles met her eye with a steady gaze, his clear gray eyes unclouded by emotion. “I’m sure.”

Dylan nodded. “Then I want to talk to her.”

She started down the hall, but Raphael grabbed her arm. “I don’t think you should go in there alone. This could be a trick.”

“You really think I’d send her in there if I thought she was in trouble?” Stiles asked, still leaning against the wall, but tension clear in the set of his shoulders and the steel in his eyes.

Raphael ignored him. “After what happened earlier…”

“I’m fine,” Dylan said. “I can handle this.”

“What happened earlier?” Stiles asked.

This time it was Dylan who ignored Stiles. She pulled away from Raphael and headed down the hall. Stiles came up behind her and snagged her arm just as Raphael had done. She spun on her heel, a little annoyed at being manhandled.

“What happened earlier?”

“It doesn’t matter. I handled it.”

“Good for you. Now tell me what’s going on. Were you attacked?”

Dylan could see the concern in Stiles’ eyes that went beyond his role as her guardian. There was so much emotion in his eyes—why had she never noticed it before? She had never seen that kind of emotion before, the strength behind it that promised it would never dim, it would never fade. And that frightened her a little. It was too intense.

“What did she say to you?” she asked, trying to keep the moment focused on Ellie.

Stiles hesitated, clearly not ready to let go of the other issue. But he backed down, physically stepping back as he gestured toward the door.

“She didn’t speak much. Just a few words. But she was able to share a memory with me.”

“A memory?”

“The day she walked you into that amusement park.”

Dylan glanced at the closed door. The only people still alive who were there that day were standing in that hallway. Others had known, but they were also dead or banished to heaven for several millennia for their role in the war. Jack James couldn’t have known about it. He was a lost soul by that time, trapped on the Earth in confusion and anger. He wouldn’t have known to watch over her and wouldn’t have been sane enough to gather information and use it against her.

There was no way any of the demons could know about that day unless it really was Ellie.

Dylan had thought Ellie was just another girl from Genero, like she was. When they met, it was at a gathering in Genero to celebrate the end of their time as students there. They’d met again in the desert. Wyatt had saved Ellie and Sam, her male companion, from a wild pig. And then Ellie and Wyatt had had something of a flirtation that caused a great deal of angst between Dylan and Ellie. Dylan didn’t trust her, she hadn’t from the beginning. That proved to be wise when she learned that Ellie was a fallen angel who had been placed in Dylan’s path by her former guardian, Davida, to lead Dylan to Lily’s army when the time was right. Ellie did just as she was supposed to do. Then she died by Joanna’s sword.

Dylan tried to save her.

“You have to go,” Ellie said as blood began to drip from the corner of her mouth.

“I can heal you,” Dylan said as she tugged at the sword still embedded in Ellie’s chest.

“No.” Ellie laid a hand over Dylan’s. “You have to go. You can’t face them alone.”

“I’m not alone.”

“I betrayed you. I betrayed Wyatt. I don’t deserve your compassion.” She caressed Dylan’s hand lightly one last time. “Just promise me you will end this.”

And then she shoved the sword as hard as she could, pushing it in deeper and up to the left, finishing what Joanna had started.

It was a guilty moment that Dylan would never be free of. Ellie died protecting Dylan from Joanna. Even though Dylan had stopped Joanna by inflicting her with the angel disease she had recently taken from Lily, it wasn’t quick enough to help Ellie. And Ellie had proven herself to be just another victim in a game in which they were all just pawns being moved around on a chessboard they couldn’t even see. It wasn’t right. And now…how was Ellie here?

Dylan stole one last look at Stiles, and then she approached the closed door and hesitated only an instant.

“Ellie?”

The soul was pressed against the far wall, the darkness swirling and undulating like images in this kaleidoscope toy Wyatt had made for Josephine when she was a child. Dylan had never seen anything quite like it. The darkness moved sometimes in other demons, but not like this.

“You showed Stiles a memory,” Dylan said softly. “I know it’s you.”

The demon moved, approaching Dylan slowly, as though afraid to come too close. The restraint was still around what would have been its neck if it had had one, so it couldn’t go anywhere and it couldn’t attempt to possess Dylan’s soul. But it could still hurt her—she’d learned that much from her encounters with Jack James and the brief possession Stiles had experienced. Despite that knowledge, Dylan wasn’t afraid.

“You loved Wyatt,” Dylan said. “You wanted him more than I probably did at the time. You understood better what it meant to love another person—to want to be with a man. I was so confused by everything I was learning and by the fact that there was another gender in the world besides female…”

The demon backed up slightly.

“He cared for you, too. We talked about you sometimes, over the years. He always talked about you with affection. He swore your relationship would have always been a friendship, but sometimes I wondered. If you had lived, would he and I have been soul mates? Would we have been married all those years? Would we have had our Josephine?”

The mention of Dylan’s child caused the demon to back up, to hit itself against the wall as though it was a true barrier to its wispy, smoky form.

“I understand why you turned us over to Davida. You were doing what you thought was right. But when Joanna turned on me, you tried to show me the truth, you tried to help me. You gave your life to do the right thing.”

The darkness that was roiling in the demon began to lighten, to turn more gray than black. Dylan approached it and pressed her hand into its smoky form and infused her healing powers into the fading light in its center. As she did, she could see the light begin to burn bright as the darkness seeped away.

And then Ellie was standing before her.

“How?” was all Dylan could say.

She was weak; exhaustion such as nothing Dylan had ever experienced was pressing down on her. But she wanted to talk and to help them understand what had happened to her—what was happening to the Nephilim souls that were attacking the humans.

Stiles sat beside her, pushing a glass of water and a bowl of oats toward her. But Ellie wasn’t interested.

“The last thing I remember clearly is your touching Joanna and her falling. There was pain, horrible pain. You wanted to heal me, I remember that. But there wasn’t time.”

Dylan moved closer to Ellie and took her hand, infusing her with more of her healing powers, pleased when some color came into Ellie’s pale cheeks.

“Then you were gone. And Joanna…”

“She was dead,” Dylan said. “I saw her die.”

“Not her. Her soul. It was lingering, like it couldn’t move on.”

Dylan exchanged a glance with Stiles. “She became a dark soul because of the angel disease,” Dylan said.

Ellie inclined her head slightly, and then stared at the top of the table where they sat. Raphael shifted, causing her to look up again. She seemed intimidated by his presence. It occurred to Dylan to ask him to leave, but she wanted him there in case something went wrong. They had no idea what had happened to Ellie, or why she was still alive. If she suddenly tried to hurt someone…

“What did Joanna do?” Stiles asked, his voice gentler than Dylan thought she’d ever heard it.

Ellie dragged her fingers through her fine, blond hair. “She healed me. And then she did…something. I don’t know what she did, but I was suddenly so filled with pain and so filled with anger that I couldn’t see anything but my hurts and my grievances. Then she said that I would be the first general in her army. She said that she was going to make you pay for what you’d done to her.”

That sounded familiar. Joanna had blown up Genero and had hidden people they’d all thought were dead in the rubble in order to begin her army. Wyatt was one of those, hidden there after Joanna had made it appear that Luc had stabbed and killed him.

“Joanna’s gone. She’s been gone for years.”

Ellie nodded. “I know. I saw her go. I thought that I would go, too, but I didn’t.”

“Tell us about Jack James,” Raphael said. “How does he figure in to all of this?”

Ellie glanced at him and fear swirled in her eyes. But, much to her credit, she nodded, her eyes falling back to the table top.

“Joanna sensed the Nephilim souls after she was changed. After she became one of them, a trapped soul lost in darkness. She began gathering them together, showing them that we all had a common purpose. Most of them were so insane that she couldn’t get them to see the logic in what she was planning. But Jack James…he was a different story. He was more human than the other souls. He was still holding on to everything he’d left behind. And when Joanna realized he was connected to Stiles, he became her pet project.”

Stiles nodded heavily, his guilt a weight on his slumped shoulders.

“She told him about the guardian orb, about the power it held within it. She told him that you,” Ellie indicated Dylan, “were meant to be its owner. You and your future soul mate. She told him if he could possess you, or your soul mate, that he could take on that power and rule the humans for eternity. She convinced him if he did that, if he ruled the world, he could get his revenge on Stiles for destroying his daughter’s life.”

“But Rebecca had a good life.”

Ellie leaned back in her chair, a heavy sigh slipping from between her lips. “Reality is distorted when your soul is trapped like that,” she explained. “Joanna was able to make even the most benign things look sinister. She took Jack to Rebecca and showed him the pain she suffered in childbirth, and convinced him it was Stiles’ fault. She showed him how she suffered when Stiles left her and told him it was avoidable, that Stiles did it out of indifference, not because he had no freewill. She showed him Rebecca making her way to the settlement in the south and convinced him that her life would be ultimately harder there because Stiles was there and he would only hurt her again and again. It didn’t take long before Jack saw suffering in every smile and every moment of pleasure that touched Rebecca’s life. She skewed his perception of human life and turned everything upside down until he couldn’t see truth when it was right in front of him.”

Again, Dylan shared a glance with Stiles. It made sense. That was why Jack wouldn’t believe Dylan when she showed him memories of Rebecca and Stiles together, memories of happy times. Perhaps she’d have more luck if she’d shown him those few memories in which Rebecca and Stiles had been at odds. But, somehow, she didn’t think that would help, either.

“Joanna twisted them all,” Ellie said. “These souls that were already so lost that they didn’t ascend when they could have, she used what kept them here to recruit them for her purposes.”

“What do you mean?” Dylan asked. “What kept them here?”

Ellie glanced at Stiles. “She doesn’t know?”

“We’re all a little confused.”

Ellie focused on Dylan again. “When you were born, the Nephilim souls were blessed so that your soul would be blessed.”

Dylan’s eyebrows rose slightly. She’d never heard it put quite like that, but it made sense to her. “And?”

“And that allowed most of the Nephilim who’d died before that to rise to heaven. But a lot of them were confused, lost in the darkness, and they couldn’t find their way home. The angels were supposed to help them, but many of them were too bogged down in the war. And then you sent all the angels home again.”