“Of course not,” she said. “We are sisters.”
Chapter 20
Dylan lay in the darkness, her eyes closed, but, somehow, she could still see the imprint of the campfire on her lids. She could feel Wyatt lying behind her, not touching, but close enough that she could feel the heat of his body pulsing against hers. The fever had returned. And the weakness that seemed to be its constant companion.
Tomorrow they were to put her plan into action. She needed to be in top form. But this thing…that light was like an oppressing force. She couldn’t shake it, and she didn’t know what to do about it.
She tried, for the hundredth time, to imagine herself as she had been in peak condition, before all these things began happening, before she saw Davida and Sam struck down under Luc’s sword. Before she knew the truth of her own origins and the future that lay so heavily on her shoulders. In the past, if she thought of it long enough, hard enough, it would simply become reality.
But not this time.
Frustrated and too nauseous to sleep, Dylan kicked her blanket away and slipped away from the camp.
A couple of gargoyles were standing guard, but they didn’t give her more than a passing glance. She walked toward the domed city that lay just over a soft rise in the land, her thoughts again on the past. There were a lot of happy memories. She had thought it would be the last moments she and Davida had spent together that would filled her mind now, but it wasn’t. It was those happy memories that haunted her.
Life in Genero was organized. There was a time for studies, a time for working, and a time for recreation. One was not to mix up one with another. No student was to be outside when it was time for study, or be inside when it was time for recreation. Everyone lived by this schedule, and it had never occurred to any of them to fight it. Life was what it was, and it had always been that way. Why would it occur to them to fight it?
Guardians had their own schedule. They were only supposed to spend set time with their charges. The rest of their days were filled with chores and administrative duties. Most guardians also saw no reason to fight these guidelines.
Davida did.
Davida was not supposed to enter one of her charges’ rooms after lights out, but Davida was always there when Dylan woke from a nightmare. She never had to cry out, never had to use the communication devices the students had in their rooms to ask for whatever they might need in the night. Davida was always just there.
Dylan knew now that Davida was an angel. Therefore, she had heard, and probably seen, most of Dylan’s thoughts. That was how she knew when Dylan was having a bad dream before she was awake. But it didn’t explain her amazing compassion, her penchant for a kind of affection guardians were not supposed to show their charges. Although love for one’s sister was something Genero’s council promoted, they felt that too much physical affection was harmful to a child’s capacity to become self-aware and self-reliant. Davida didn’t agree.
Dylan had reached the top of the rise in the ground. She could look down over the city of her birth, the place where she was created and raised in high hopes that she would become exactly what she was. She could almost see D dorm from here, could imagine it sitting there in the darkness, the rooms filled with a new group of adolescents, a new group of guardians. She vaguely wondered who they had gotten to replace Anita now that Stiles was with her and her group.
All the problems Dylan thought she had when she was a student there seemed so trivial now. Petty arguments with other students. The profound loss of Davida when she was only fifteen. Watching Donna being escorted to the Administration building after she healed one of their fellow students, listening to her voice as she worried about her future.
It was all nothing compared to the reality of losing Davida and Sam to such violence. To the realization that she was saddled with the responsibility of deciding which race would survive and which would be annihilated or returned to their rightful homes.
What would happen to the hybrids if she chose the humans?
The angels would return to Heaven. Their human forms would cease to exist, but their spirits would live on. But there was no guarantee that the same would be true of the hybrids.
Would she and Wyatt and the others like them be doomed to become dark spirits, roaming the earth until anger simply consumed them?
Wyatt wasn’t the only one who picked up the odd book here and there. Dylan had found several books at the library where they had met the gargoyles. Each discussed Nephilim, the creatures Luc had insisted she and Wyatt were. Most of the books disagreed on whether Nephilim have souls, on whether they are sanctioned by God or products of the devil. But they all agreed on one thing: Nephilim were not welcome in Heaven or Hell. They were doomed to wander the earth for all of eternity, anger and bitterness building until they lost what they once were and became something one of the books referred to as a poltergeist.
Dylan didn’t want to forget who and what she was.
And she really didn’t want that for Wyatt.
But the alternative didn’t seem any better. She still was not sure what she was going to do.
Dylan settled in the grass at the top of the little rise and watched the sleeping city below her. Stiles had taught her and Wyatt how to morph into other shapes and forms, how to become humans who looked completely different from their current appearance. Dylan had made Wyatt laugh when she morphed into a tall, thin man she imagined looked a lot like the angel she had referred to as Ichabod. And she had her own laugh at his attempt to morph into a petite blonde but somehow got the shape of the face, the mouth wrong. And then they learned how to look like gargoyles.
It was that last form she took now, slipping in and out of the form with almost no effort. She wanted to be able to do it at a moment’s notice. They had no idea how quickly they would be overcome by the Redcoats when they made their way into the city in the morning. She didn’t want one of the Redcoats to know what was happening before their plan had progressed beyond the first stage.
“Are you nervous?”
Dylan jumped to her feet, a gold axe appearing in her hands without her even being aware she had called it. Stiles was watching her from a few feet away. He smiled, a strange reaction to the combative pose in which she stood. But then, he knew who she was. Maybe that took some of the threat out of the situation.
She morphed back into her human form, the axe disappearing along with the marble skin and rusty movements.
“Not nervous, exactly,” she said. “Just worried it won’t all play out the way I hope it will.”
“Every plan has a few holes, Dylan.”
“Maybe.”
He came to sit beside her. As he settled into that crisscrossed way he had, he studied the city below them just as she had been doing. “They won’t know what hit them,” he said.
“Genero is filled with children,” Dylan said. “What happens to all of them if it goes wrong?”
“What happens to them if we do nothing?”
Dylan was quiet for a long time, her thoughts moving from one thing to another. Stiles said nothing, did nothing. He simply sat beside her, his very presence something of a comfort all in its own. She worked the plan over in her mind, trying to find those holes Stiles had mentioned but finding it difficult, even to her own critical thought processes. It should go perfectly. There wasn’t a contingency they hadn’t thought of, a second they hadn’t carefully outlined and worked out.
“This war has to end,” Stiles finally said.
“What if I made a mistake healing Lily? What if I just prolonged the inevitable?”
Stiles touched her knee, laying his long, almost delicate fingers against her denim-covered skin. She could feel the heat of him, could feel how alive he was in just that simple touch.
“You did it to save Wyatt. No one can blame you for that.”
“But what if by saving one, I’ve doomed all the others?”
“And what if by saving the one, you saved someone who’s going to play t
he ultimate role in ending this chaos?” He leaned close, close enough so that she could see his beautiful gray eyes even in the darkness of the coming dawn. “You never know until you let it all play out.”
“Do you really think that this is the right thing to do?” She waved a hand at the city below her. “Do you think this will end the war?”
“I think if you believe it, then that’s all I need to know.”
Dylan shook her head. “I wish people would stop looking at me like I’m some sort of savior.”
“But that’s what they all think you are.”
“Why?”
Stiles squeezed her knee before taking his hand away to rub his own face, a weariness she had not seen until recently weighing heavily on his shoulders. “Before the war, before the humans turned on one another, before the angels came, there was a book called the Bible. In this book it said that one day God would send his son back to earth in what is called the second coming. This second coming would be hailed by wars and famine and natural disasters…all things that happened just before the angels came to earth to interfere in the humans’ war.”
“Second coming?”
“In the early centuries of this world, God sent his son, Jesus, to save the humans from themselves. He used gifts to show the humans that God existed. But this group of people, called the Romans, didn’t believe he was the son of God. He was persecuted and then executed on a cross. On the third day after his death, he returned to Heaven, human form and all.”
“Is that possible?”
Stiles looked away. “It was a statement, a way to get the humans to believe in God and all he wanted for them. It worked for a long time. He and Jesus were the basis of most religions among the humans for many millennia. It was only in the last hundred years or so that humans began moving away from God-based religions and began believing in other things, things they thought had more basis in proof.”
“And then the war came.”
“The war came and humans forgot about God, forgot about everything except the hurts and anger that propelled them to kill one another. It was then that Luc asked for help from the angels. But rather than attempt to show the humans that there was still something bigger than themselves, something they could believe in, Luc and Lily encouraged the angels to take advantage of the humans’ hatred for one another and take over the earth.”
Dylan pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them, feeling as though she needed that little bit of support as she tried to imagine the world Stiles was painting for her.
“They lost their faith.”
“They lost everything,” Stiles said. “In the past, when bad things happened to humans, they almost always turned to God and religion. But that had stopped.”
“And still the angels came to save them.”
“We did.” Stiles gestured back toward the camp. “The gargoyles were overwhelmed in their attempts to save the humans from themselves. Luc and Lily and their legion had initially attempted to help, performing what the humans called miracles here and there, but the humans’ lack of belief in even what was happening right before their eyes made them bitter. It didn’t take long for other angels to begin feeling the same way. Within a short time, Luc and Lily had pulled a great many of the angels over to their side of the argument. Only a few fought them. Then God called the angels back to Heaven and sent those of us who had stayed in Heaven down in their place. But a lot of them, those who had chosen Luc and Lily’s side, chose to stay.”
“How could they do that without free will?”
“Luc.” Stiles climbed to his feet. “He taught them how to resist God, how to turn on their Father. When they did, they lost some of their gifts, but others grew in strength. They became something different, something dark.”
“Demons,” a voice behind them said.
Dylan twisted to look behind her. Wyatt was standing almost exactly where Stiles had been when she first became aware of him. He had his hands deep in his pockets, pushing his jeans down on his slender hips in a way that made him look longer, leaner. It made her heart skip a beat, not just because of the vulnerability it seemed to lend him, but because of the beauty she was so drawn to in both his physical and spiritual being.
A part of her wanted to jump to her feet and feel his lips against hers as they had been earlier in the day. She even reached up and touched her lips with the tips of her fingers as she thought about it.
“Exactly,” Stiles said, pulling Dylan out of her own head.
“Demons? What is that, exactly?”
“Evil,” Wyatt said at the same time Stiles said, “Redcoats.”
“Redcoats?”
“Redcoats are angels who elected to stay with Luc and Lily when the others were called back to Heaven. They are changed by their resistance to God’s will, changed in a way that has not only altered their gifts, but also their characters.”
Wyatt was nodding along to everything Stiles was saying. “They no longer believe in God as the supreme being,” he added.
Dylan stood and stretched, touching her toes a couple of times to try to work a kink out of her back. Each time she bent over, however, her head pounded as though there were a great pressure inside just bursting to get out. She was a little unsteady when she stood straight. Wyatt was immediately beside her, even though Stiles had been closer. His hand rested on her hip as the length of his body pressed against her side. It sent shivers of pleasure through her body, taking from her the ache in her head for a few minutes. A part of her wondered, though, if it was their spiritual connection that caused the pleasure, or it a little of it was brought on by something else.
“So what does all this have to do with the second coming?”
“The second coming is supposed to be a time of judgment, when God will send his only child back to earth and that child will decide who deserves to ascend to Heaven and who deserves to languish in suffering.”
Dylan shook her head. “I still don’t understand.”
Stiles opened his mouth to say something more, but Wyatt beat him to it.
“They think it’s you,” he said.
“Me?”
Stiles looked down toward Genero. “The first coming, Jesus, was born to a virgin. You were created in a lab.”
“And you have gifts that no one has ever seen before,” Wyatt added.
“I’m not a boy,” Dylan said, the only argument that came quickly to her befuddled mind. “The last one was a boy and you said he was God’s only child.”
“Gender’s not really an issue in Heaven,” Stiles said.
Dylan shook her head. “I think all of you have gone insane.” She pulled away from Wyatt and walked back toward the camp a few hundred feet before she turned and pointed a finger at the two of them. “I think all this stuff—this war and the fighting and the illnesses and the death and grief—I think it’s driven all of you insane.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Wyatt called to her, “my dad argued against the idea, too.”
“Great.” She laughed almost hysterically. “The only time the two of us agree.”
“It’s a lot,” Stiles said. “But, right now, it doesn’t really mean much, Dylan. The only thing that matters is the plan for tomorrow.”
“A plan that everyone is rushing to execute because they think I’m some sort of leader.”
“You are.”
“I’m not.” Dylan turned away again, pacing a few feet in either direction, burying her fingers deep in her thick, blonde hair, a little sickened by the dirt and debris she could already feel trapped there again. “I’m just a kid,” she whispered. “Just a kid who wants a good bath, a warm bed, and someone to care about me.”
That’s all any of us want, a voice whispered in her mind.
Ellie.
Chapter 21
“Tell me something else,” Dylan said.
“Anything,” Stiles and Wyatt said together, like a chorus.
She turned to them again, studying their familiar faces
. “If the angels who defied God and stayed down here when they were ordered back to Heaven became devils, why did angels like Davida and Ellie hold onto their gifts?”
“They were with the rest of us,” Stiles said, gesturing toward himself. “We didn’t come down here until after that, until God sent us down to clean up the mess the first legions had made.”
“But they turned.”
Stiles inclined his head a little. “Not exactly,” he said. “We all just have different ideas of how to fix this thing.”
“Davida’s was to work with Luc and Lily,” Wyatt said.
“Davida, Ellie, and Lavina joined Luc and Lily to get information, to learn what their plans were. They were to gain their trust.”
“But Davida was about to turn Dylan over to Lily,” Wyatt said.
“Sometimes when you pretend to be something, it’s hard to separate reality from fiction.”
The words lay heavily between the three of them.
Dylan turned and began to pace again. Where are you? she asked the voice in her head.
Close, was the only answer she got.
She closed her eyes and flooded her mind with memories of Wyatt’s touch earlier in the afternoon, of the taste of his lips and the feel of his hand on her hip. It wasn’t hard to let those memories linger. They had actually been close to the surface all day and seeing him, feeling his touch again, only made them stronger.
In just a few seconds, she felt the weight of the angel’s consciousness disappear.
She couldn’t help the smile that slipped over her lips.
Wyatt came to her and slid his hands up and down the length of her arms. “We should get some rest before tomorrow,” he said.
She moved into him and pressed her head against his chest, the rough beat of his heart rumbling against her forehead.
“Good night,” Stiles said a little stiffly as he walked past them and back toward camp.
“Do you think this thing will work tomorrow?” Dylan asked a few minutes later, still sitting contentedly in Wyatt’s arms.
FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) Page 10
