BROKEN ANGELS (Angels and Demons Book 1)

by Brenda L. Harper

  Stiles hadn’t known that Dillon had thought about the future. He’d always said he knew he would die in the war. But, as seemed common in humans, he’d held onto hope.

  Hope, like love, were emotions Stiles had never really understood. How could someone feel hope in the bleakest moments of their life? All the people who’d died in the war, each one of them had hope that the war would end before it came to their part of the world. All the people who’d fought the angels despite their clearly superior strength did it because they’d had hope. Hope had given them strength, and that was a good thing. But their hope was often based in illogical ideals and that was something Stiles never really understood.

  He closed the notebook and tucked it inside the pocket of his jacket, an old leather jacket he’d found in some ruins years ago. As he watched, several groups of people walked into the hospital, two or three of them were clearly ill. In the three hours that Stiles had been sitting up there, he’d counted fifteen sick entering those doors.

  This hospital only treated, on average, a hundred patients a year.

  Stiles went into the hospital and walked among the patients, touching one here and there. Harry was standing at the nurse’s station, reviewing a chart while simultaneously giving instructions to Lucy, one of two nurses who worked the day shift.

  “Harry.”

  He looked up. “I don’t have time right now, Stiles.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Harry gestured to the crowded waiting room. “We’re a little busy.”

  “I can see that. But that’s what I need to talk to you about.”

  Harry’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what you want to talk about? My mother just died and all you have to say to me is something to do with the common cold?”

  “Harry—“

  He turned and walked away without saying anything else. Stiles could feel his anger rolling off of him in almost palpable waves. He wanted to go after him, but someone cried out in a room behind the nurse’s station. Lucy turned and ran, the color draining from her face. Stiles followed. His heart sank as he peered around the doorway and saw the patient lying in the hospital bed.

  Keely. She was the sixteen-year-old granddaughter of Miranda, one of the original city council members. Her nose was running with thick, green mucus, her cheeks flushed with the heat of a fever. She was coughing and the napkin she held to her lips was spotted with blood.

  But it wasn’t any of that that worried Stiles.

  What worried Stiles were the lesions beginning to mark the flesh of her neck and face.

  He’d seen those lesions before.

  Chapter 6

  “Can you tell me which countries were in the English Pact?”

  Dylan watched as half a dozen hands went up among the children sitting before her. It was always the same children, the ones who listened to every word that dropped from her lips. So she chose little Bobby, the son of one of Josephine’s schoolmates. He was daydreaming, his eyes resting on a tree across the park instead of on what was going on in front of him.

  “Bobby,” she had to repeat twice. “Will you answer the question?”

  Just as he finally looked up, Benji began to cough uncontrollably. Tony reached over and patted him on the back, but that only seemed to make it worse.

  Dylan reached over and lifted him up, running her hand over his back, her healing powers immediately searching for the source of his discomfort. It was odd, though. He continued to cough despite her touch.

  “You okay, Benji?”

  He nodded even as a fresh spasm of coughs turned his little cheeks red.

  And then Virginia began to cough. And Sally, too.

  “Class dismissed,” Dylan said, causing those who were free of the cough to squeal with delight. Dylan lifted Benji into her arms and held Virginia’s hand as she led them home.

  As they walked, she again tried to use her powers to heal them, but again her touch had almost no effect. She had never had that happen before.

  “Take him to Harry,” she told Benji’s mother. “He’ll know what to do.”

  And she hoped that she was right.

  She went home and burst into her ethereal form just to reassure herself that she could. What if her powers were beginning to fade, just as everyone else’s had? She hadn’t been terribly keen on the whole idea of having powers when they’d first begun to manifest, but that was thirty-seven years ago. She’d gotten used to having them now.

  She moved over the city, suddenly aware of something dark that had settled over a few of the people in town—and quite a few more in the hospital—something she couldn’t quite understand. Something was wrong.

  From her city, she drifted over other cities in North America, and then South America. She traveled as far as Europe in that state, recognizing the darkness in almost every city she drifted over.

  What was going on?

  Stiles.

  I know, came his immediate answer. Meet me at your house.

  ***

  Wyatt, Josephine, and Harry joined Dylan and Stiles in Dylan’s living room. They sat on the couch with a cup of tea in their hands in a scene of simple domesticity. Dylan couldn’t sit still. She paced in front of the back door, pausing from time to time to look over at whoever happened to be speaking at the moment.

  No one was speaking right now.

  “The symptoms are similar to the common cold,” Harry finally said. “An antibiotic would probably be useless. We’re treating with fluids and cough suppressants at the moment.”

  “What about the lesions?” Stiles asked.

  “Only a few have presented with those. Most of them only have upper respiratory symptoms.”

  “And no one has died?” Josephine asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?” Dylan glanced at Harry. “Are you expecting deaths?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Dylan nodded as she began to pace again. That was another thing about their people. Up until recently, the most common ailments that took people to the hospital were minor cuts, broken bones, and the birth of new generations. Illness was rare and often easily treated.

  “I think you’re overreacting,” Harry said. “We’ve been seeing more illness lately, that’s true. And more natural death,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “This is probably just a part of that. There were epidemics of this type before the war. I’ve read about them and I’ve prepared my staff for the possibility. We’ll deal with it.”

  Dylan didn’t believe it. Her instincts told her this was not normal.

  And she could see in Stiles’ face that he felt the same way.

  “Thank you, Harry,” Josephine said. “That’s all we needed. You should go back to your patients.”

  Harry glanced at Stiles before his eyes fell on Dylan. “We have this under control.”

  Dylan turned away, stepping to the door and staring out into the yard through the small window. She heard the front door close and felt Wyatt move up behind her.

  “He’s a good doctor,” he said softly. “You have to trust him.”

  Dylan turned and moved into his arms, relieved to feel the warmth of his touch.

  “I’ll talk to the council,” Josephine said. “But I really don’t think there’s reason to be alarmed yet.”

  They’re being naive.

  Dylan glanced at Stiles and nodded.

  But what could they do about it? If they were wrong, and Harry was right, they would just incite a panic. But if Harry was wrong…

  Dylan didn’t know what to do.

  Chapter 7

  Stiles went back to the hospital after leaving Dylan’s, walking among the patients that were coughing and sneezing in the waiting room. The number had more than doubled since that morning. He recognized the little boy that Dylan had been so concerned about. His little face was pale and his coughs were weak—a bad sign. Stiles touched his forehead and tried not to acknowledge the hope that b
loomed in his mother’s eyes, but his healing power seemed confused by what it sensed inside of him.

  He couldn’t heal these people any more than Dylan could.

  He left, walking through the streets like a dejected mortal. Stiles had never questioned his Father’s intentions. All through the war, all through the pain of watching humans he had come to care for dying at the hands of angels and gargoyles alike, he never questioned God. Things are more complicated than the humans could ever have guessed when they’d written their Bible. God gave humans freewill, which gave them so many choices that it was often difficult to predict which path their lives would take. That made it difficult for God to interfere. That was why he couldn’t stop Lucifer and his legion from engaging in a war against the humans, why he couldn’t simply end the war once it had begun, and why he had to give the choice to someone with freewill.

  But now…he didn’t understand what God was doing with these people now.

  Hadn’t they been through enough? Did he really have to introduce some illness that threatened everything they had fought so hard for during the war?

  And that was exactly what Stiles was afraid was happening. This illness…if it spread everywhere as quickly as it was spreading here, and if people began dying as Stiles feared…if…if…

  He found himself in the cemetery. He couldn’t remember walking there. He simply looked up and Rebecca’s unmarked grave spread out in front of him. He sat in the grass and ran his fingers through the soft dirt that was mounded over the box holding her body. He closed his eyes and he could see her as she was the first time he’d seen her…

  Laughing over the heads of a half-dozen children was a woman who was no more beautiful than any other woman he had seen, no more alluring. But there was something about her that seemed to speak to his soul.

  She was so beautiful, with her dark hair and smile that was like pure sunshine. That was still the way he saw her, even as that dark hair faded to gray and then white, and even after that smile was dimmed by the ravages of age. He never saw her wrinkles, never noticed the age spots she was so conscious of. She told him once he should go find a younger lover.

  We look ridiculous—me and my white hair and wrinkles, and you still looking like you did the first time I saw you.

  He didn’t care. He hadn’t fallen in love with her outer beauty. It was the radiance that came from her soul and the purity of her heart that won him over.

  “I thought you might be here.”

  Stiles looked up and his heart raced for a moment. He thought for a second that he was staring into Rebecca’s face, as it was all those years ago. But then she shifted and the moonlight shone on her face.

  Gemma.

  “Hey,” he said, holding out his hand to her. “What are you doing out this late?”

  Gemma took his hand and settled onto the grass beside him. “Paul agreed to watch the kids so I could get some fresh air.”

  Gemma was Harry’s eldest child, a beautiful woman in her own right, a nurse who worked the morning shift at the hospital with a husband and two kids at home. She was more accepting of Stiles as her grandfather than Harry was at accepting Stiles as his father. Maybe it was because he had been a part of her life from the beginning, having reunited with her grandmother a mere month before her birth. Or maybe it was simply because she had inherited her grandmother’s pure heart.

  She laid her head on his shoulder. “She had a good life.”

  Stiles picked up more of the dirt covering Rebecca and watched it run through his fingers. “She deserved better than me.”

  “What could be better than an angel as a lover? Especially one who looks like you?”

  Stiles shook his head. “She deserved a man who stayed at her side consistently, not someone who came and went without notice.”

  “From what I understand, she had notice. And she also knew that you would come back into her life.”

  “I suppose. But do promises really make a difference?”

  “They did for her.”

  Stiles was quiet for a while and his thoughts were dark despite her attempts to comfort him. He felt unworthy of everything he’d been given. He felt that he didn’t deserve to be here with these people, to be the only angel left to watch over them. And he definitely didn’t feel worthy of the promise made to him after the war, that he would one day be tethered with the soul mate of his choice.

  There were too many lies…

  “I should have saved her.”

  Gemma sat up. “What do you mean?”

  “It was a heart attack. I felt it coming on. I could have stopped it. But she asked me not to.”

  Gemma was quiet for a moment, touching the mound of dirt herself, and running her hand over it as if she were petting a large dog. And then she took a deep breath as though to steady herself.

  “A couple of days before she died, Rebecca came by the house to see the children. She was moving a little slowly, deliberately, as if she was hurting. I asked if she needed something, if I could take her to the hospital and have Daddy prescribe something. You know what she said?”

  Stiles studied her face, but he didn’t ask. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  But Gemma continued anyway.

  “She told me that she’d lived a long life. That she’d seen the world before the war, before everything changed. She’d lived through the loss of her mother and then her father. She’d known great love, contented love, and the love of a mother for her children. She said she’d experienced just about every high and low that a human being is meant to know.” Gemma stopped, a soft smile touching her lips even as a single tear fell from her eye. “Then she said that she believed there was a cycle of life that had been disrupted by the war, but that nature was slowly trying to repair that disruption. And that she was ready to be a part of that cycle again.” Gemma reached over and touched Stiles’ arm. “She wanted to die. She was ready for whatever comes next.”

  “But that’s just it,” Stiles said softly. “I no longer know what comes next.”

  “But isn’t that part of the mysteries of life? We aren’t supposed to know.”

  Stiles studied her eyes—eyes so much like his own—and wondered how a whole species could be so content with the unknown. He had no idea what God had planned for him next, and it scared the crap out of him. If he could know, he would. But these people…they were either very brave, or very naïve.

  But it made him admire them all the more.

  He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. Before he could stand, she grabbed his arm and pulled him back down in front of her.

  “Don’t let your grief take you from us, Granddad,” she said, calling him by that title for the first time since she was a small child. “As much as some people resist the idea, we still need you.”

  Stiles looked away, his body hot with shame. His first instinct was to tell her no one needed him anymore; that his only reason for sticking around had been Rebecca, and she was gone now. But then…he was an angel and he was thinking like a human.

  He touched her hand.

  “I promise, I won’t go anywhere.”

  Chapter 8

  Days passed and more people became ill. Dylan’s class dwindled from twelve students to eight, then six, and then none. She visited the homes of her ill pupils and saw the fear and anger on their parents’ faces. And then they began to die.

  The first was a young mother whose skin had broken out in lesions. Harry said she had gotten a staph infection, and it was that secondary infection that killed her.

  The second was an elderly woman. Harry insisted it was her advanced age that contributed to her death.

  The third was Benji, the small student in Dylan’s class. Again, Harry insisted it was his age and his immature immune system that had contributed to his death.

  Dylan had a hard time believing that.

  “It’s happening in all the cities,” Josephine told them. “None of the doctors have ever seen anything like it before.”

&nb
sp; “What about Rachel?” Wyatt asked.

  Everyone glanced at him. Rachel, Jimmy’s sister, lived in another of the cities—a place called Dytonia—where she acted as something of an historian. She collected the books salvaged from the ruins, repaired them, and catalogued them so that people looking for information from the past—such as doctors studying human anatomy and disease—could go to her and access her wealth of information.

  Josephine shrugged. “She can’t seem to find anything about this, either. She says there are illnesses with similarities, but none that match it exactly.”

  As she spoke, Stiles stood against the wall with that perpetually bored look on his face. But Dylan knew him. And she could see the tension in his shoulders. How many times had she seen him like that in the past only to discover he knew something that could shed light on exactly what they were struggling to figure out?

  What do you know?

  He glanced at her, just the slightest shake of his head was her only answer.

  I know you know something. If you can help these people—

  He straightened and walked from the room.

  Dylan started to follow, but Wyatt grabbed her hand.

  “Where are you going?”

  She turned into him, her lips parting to explain, but he was focused on Josephine, who was still explaining what the council was doing to fight this illness.

  “…several of the doctors believe that they can slow the progression of the disease with something called an antibiotic,” Josephine continued. “They’ve found record of their use and they believe they can replicate it fairly easily.”