FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3)

by Brenda L. Harper

  “And how did they—?”

  He sat back, his eyes coming back up to hers again. “Wyatt.” Stiles glanced toward the front of the house, even though there were no windows through which he could possibly see Wyatt. “When the two of you found each other, there was an instant energy.” He shook his head, looking for a way to explain it but finding it difficult. “I felt it before he happened to find you by that lake. Just the fact that he was within a few miles of you made your body snap to life, allowed your gifts to strengthen. And then when you were together…even when you didn’t touch there was something, some energy that played off of your gifts and seemed to send out this wave—”

  He stopped and ran his fingers through his hair. “I told myself it was just because you were the same, you were both hybrids. But I knew better.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, pushing away from the wall to join him again on the long, low swing.

  “I mean, I knew the two of you were soul mates, but I tried to keep you apart because I was afraid what would happen when Luc figured it out.”

  “Wyatt and I—”

  “—are two halves of the same whole.”

  “So our gifts are stronger when we’re together.”

  “And you can heal each other’s souls.”

  “Do all angels have a soul mate?”

  He nodded slowly. “Luc and Lily are soul mates. Davida’s soul mate was an angel named Nathaniel. He was one called back to Heaven at the beginning of this war.”

  “And you?”

  He shrugged. “My soul mate chose to marry a human man.”

  An image of Joanna popped into Dylan’s mind. She didn’t want to believe it at first, but then she began to remember moments in which Stiles said and did things that should have made her wonder. Especially his response to learning Dylan has seen her in Genero.

  “But Nephilim don’t have soul mates.”

  She was still thinking about Joanna, so it took Dylan a moment to understand what Stiles had said. “Nephilim? Isn’t that what Luc called Wyatt?”

  Stiles nodded. “Nephilim are children of angels and humans.”

  “Like Joanna and Jimmy.”

  Stiles’ already pale face lost a little more color. “Like Wyatt.”

  “And me.”

  “No,” Stiles said, shaking his head slowly as he reached for her hand, but pulled back at the last second. “In all logic, you should be Nephilim. But you’re not. Nephilim don’t have souls. They don’t have some of the gifts angels have. They are oddities, creatures that often grow too large and wreak havoc on those around them. But you…” He shook his head again. “I can’t readily explain it, and neither can anyone else who has met you.”

  “When they created me in Genero—”

  “The scientists manipulate the genetic codes of the children they create there, trying to extract only the genes they think will fight this illness and not others that could impede any healing abilities. That is why most of the children in Genero and the other laboratory cities look like humans or angels in their human forms.”

  “But Wyatt—”

  “Something changed.” Stiles reached for her hand again. This time he took it. “You changed things. Nephilim disappeared when you were born. Angels were sent home. And those who stayed, they could sense the change, but no one knew what it was.” He squeezed her hand lightly. “When Joanna became pregnant with Wyatt, she was frightened about what it would mean for him. His birth was a difficult one. We weren’t sure she would survive. He was a big baby, big and he had this ferocious appetite. It seemed like all Joanna’s fears were confirmed. And then…” He shook his head. “It all changed.”

  “You were with her.”

  “She was my soul mate. I couldn’t let her go through that without some support.”

  “But Jimmy—”

  “Thought I was a gargoyle who was there to protect her.”

  Dylan stared out into the yard again. All those insects, buzzing and jumping in the long, green grass. What would happen if she walked over there and began stomping on them with her feet? What kind of chaos would erupt in their tiny world? And if one of them had to choose, which would win out? The crickets? The spiders? The beetles? And what would that world be with all but one set of insects annihilated? Would it be the same? Would it be better? Worse?

  Who had the right to make that choice?

  “You think humans and hybrids can live together.”

  Stiles squeezed her hand. “I think they would be stronger together.”

  “What if you had seen the future and it showed that humans and hybrids would simply continue fighting, just like the angels and humans are now?”

  He thought about it for a long minute. “I think there would be some animosity. I think they would have to fight to find a way to coexist. But I think they would eventually learn to get along.”

  “Even if the humans could not differentiate between the hybrids and the angels who are oppressing them now?”

  “There is a difference,” Stiles said as he again squeezed her hand. “Even the oppressed will see it eventually.”

  “Even if the hybrids cannot have children of their own?”

  Stiles stiffened a little in the seat beside her. “Who told you that?”

  She shook her head, pulling her eyes from the grass and turning to study his familiar gray eyes. “Do you think they could still coexist?”

  “There is no way to predict what might and might not happen, Dylan. Humans have surprised us before. And the hybrids? They are still such a huge unknown that we cannot even begin to guess where they might lead humanity. For all we know, they are the answer to everything humans, angels, and gargoyles have been asking for millennia.”

  “A group of Nephilim created in a lab?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” he said, pressing his shoulder hard into hers for a long second.

  She nodded, a smile slipping across her lips for the first time in what felt like forever when Wyatt came out the door, wiping his hands on a dish towel he had tucked into the front of his jeans.

  “So, what’s the verdict?” he asked.

  “About what?” Stiles asked back.

  “Weren’t you two talking about the next adventure you plan to drag me into?”

  Dylan let go of Stiles’ hand and stood, her head spinning a little as she steadied herself with a hand on the low railing.

  “I think we need to wait until she’s fully healed before we go anywhere,” Stiles said, concern in his voice.

  Dylan’s head injury had failed to heal with her own ability to heal herself. And it had not, thus far, responded to Wyatt’s healing touch. She suspected it had something to do with the light she had drawn into herself when she healed Lily. She had never felt so weak, so mortal, in all her life. But she knew time was growing short.

  She began to express that very idea when Stiles said, “We were talking about my betrayal of the two of you.”

  Wyatt’s eyebrows rose. “Then you admit you brought the Redcoats to us.”

  Stiles stood, moving his back against the front of the building as though he suspected Wyatt might attempt to injure him again. “I did,” he said in a strong, clear voice.

  “Why?” Wyatt growled, tension moving through his shoulders almost in a visible wave.

  “For Joanna,” Dylan guessed.

  Wyatt glanced at Dylan even as he tried to keep his eyes on Stiles. “What do you mean, Joanna?”

  Stiles met Dylan’s gaze, gratefulness almost palpable there. “Davida promised Luc would release Joanna from the prison at Genero if I delivered Dylan to him. She said he simply wanted to talk to her. But he lied to all of us.”

  “Davida paid the ultimate price,” Dylan said quietly.

  “And Joanna is still a prisoner,” Stiles confirmed.

  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. “Noth
ing 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.”

  Chapter 16

  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.

  Chapter 17

  “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.