Help me, the voice said as it returned. They want to hurt me.
Where?
Silence. But when Dylan closed her eyes, she saw a dark room and a child, no more than seven or eight, dressed in the coveralls of the youth dorms huddled on a cold tile floor, hiding in the bottom of a cabinet. There were noises outside. Someone was searching for this child, and they were going to find her very soon.
Dylan concentrated, looking long and hard around the room. She could see beds and instruments like all the other rooms they had passed today. The child could have been anywhere. But Dylan was able to peek out the door, saw the bald councilwoman walk past it. Saw Lavina with her.
Dylan knew where they were.
Stay where you are, Dylan told the child. I’ll be there soon.
She opened her eyes to find Wyatt staring at her with that stoic expression on his face, the one he wore when he didn’t want her to know how frightened he really was. She touched his cheek lightly, running her fingers over the curve of his jaw in that way she so liked to do. This was it, she realized. This was the moment they would have to say goodbye.
Her heart clenched hard in her chest.
“I have to go,” she said in a low, even tone.
“No.” He immediately shook her fingers off of his face, leaning forward to block her body from escaping. “We stay together.”
“Wyatt—”
“I won’t let you go.”
She leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “Go find your father. I’ll catch up soon.”
“Dylan, you can’t—”
She touched her forehead to his, sending him an image from her favorite memory of him. It was the day they met, the day she saw him walk out of the trees, his samurai sword strapped to his back, his jeans heavy with the weight of his six shooter at his waist. He looked so much like the cowboys he so admired, but she had nothing to compare it to then. He was just Wyatt, just this beautiful person who had come to save her from the dangers of the desert.
He returned the gesture with an image of his own. She blushed when she saw herself naked for the first time, standing there beside the river that had saved her life the night before. With the image came all the emotion he had attached to that memory. It might have deepened her blush if this had been a different moment, if he had been a different man.
She kissed him again.
“I’ll meet you up there.”
She pushed his shoulder lightly. He moved back, let her go. She was running down the corridor in the opposite direction they had been heading for just a second before she slipped into her ethereal form.
There was no time to pretend now.
Above her, she heard a siren began to blast through the building.
Chapter 24
They had known the building was likely wired with sensors that would detect angels in their ethereal form. It made sense, since this building was a target for those who might want to break in, or break out. That was why they had broken in in human form.
But there was no time for such concerns now.
Dylan slipped into the room where the child hid just as a woman in the coveralls of a tester opened the door. The child was still under the cabinet, hidden behind a thin, metal door. Dylan pressed herself against the cabinet and watched as the woman searched the room methodically, even stopping to look inside drawers at the bottom of the long, wide desk stuck in one corner of the room. As Dylan watched, however, she became aware that the woman was looking for something else.
She floated over to the desk and watched from directly above the woman. She could hear her thoughts, could hear her thinking the same thing over and over: They’re coming.
Who?
The woman jumped as though Dylan were standing directly behind her and had whispered in her ear. But the thought came as clear as if she had spoken it aloud.
Luc and Lily.
And then her thoughts opened as though a floodgate had been released.
Joanna’s disappearance had drawn attention. That was likely why Lavina and the other councilwoman were wandering the corridors. They suspected that Dylan and Wyatt were here, that they had freed Joanna and they planned to go after Jimmy. Jimmy had been moved to another part of the building.
Dylan lay what would have been her hands had she been in her human form on the sides of the woman’s head. The woman immediately stiffened, her body going rigid and her spine bending backward just slightly. She showed Dylan where Jimmy had been taken. And what waited for Wyatt on the top floor of the Administration building.
Perfect.
Dylan suggested to the woman that she leave and run from the building as quickly as she could move. When she released her, the woman’s body went slack for a minute, her head falling forward on her spine in a most painful way. Then she ran, fast and hard, out the door and down the corridor, moving so quickly that she slipped and fell when she tried to turn a corner. She simply scrambled back up and continued running.
Dylan morphed back into her human form, this time returning to her own. She returned to the cabinet and yanked up the metal door.
“Hey, you’re safe. Come out.”
The child was shaking, her eyes huge in the darkness of the room. She stared at Dylan for a long minute, tears spilling from the corners of her eyes. When Dylan touched her, she could feel pain. They had done something terrible to this child, something that had left her in horrible pain. Dylan pressed her hands to the child’s head and pictured her running in a meadow, her hair filled with flowers and laughter flowing from her lips. In less than a second, she felt the familiar heat in her fingers, the healing power flowing from her body to the child’s.
When she opened her eyes, the child was still crying, but the fear in her eyes had turned into something like surprise and admiration. Dylan gently lifted her out of her hiding place and stood, balancing the child on her hip.
“Thank you,” the child whispered in Dylan’s ear.
“What’s your name?”
“Rachel.”
Dylan studied her little face for a long minute. “I recently met another girl named Rachel,” she said.
The little girl responded by burying her face in Dylan’s shoulder.
Dylan stared at her a moment longer, telling herself that it was only a coincidence, but she was beginning to lose faith in coincidences.
Dylan paused for a while in the doorway, listening for the thoughts of anyone who might be nearby. When things stayed quiet for a full minute, she slipped into the corridor and headed back the way Wyatt and the others had gone. She had already sent a mental message to Stiles, letting him know what the woman had shown her. Wyatt’s voice filled her mind as she was about to turn to the door that would take her through the meeting room and into the main lobby of the building.
Gargoyles have arrived, as planned.
Dylan took a second to send him an image of the room where she stood so that he would know she was nearby. Then she and the girl rushed through the meeting room and into the main lobby. And into the arms of more than a dozen Redcoats.
Chapter 25
“Did you really think you could wander around in my building without me knowing about it, Dylan?” Lavina walked up to Dylan and flicked a nail against her forehead. “We’ve been tracking you since you entered that back door.”
“Then why didn’t you stop us sooner?”
Lativa glanced over her shoulder, her eyes moving around the Redcoats standing behind her. Then she turned back to Dylan and leaned close. “You were walking into a trap. Why not let you hang yourself?”
Dylan pulled the child closer to her, her tiny body so frail she felt as though Dylan could snap every bone in her body if she held her any tighter, but her little arms were almost choking her as they wrapped hard around her neck.
“Now what?” she asked. “You going to take me upstairs and put me in that prison of yours?”
“No. Luc has something special for you.”
“Is that right?” Dylan ran her hand
slowly down Rachel’s back, trying to calm the fear she could feel rising in her. “I’m sure that will be a lot of fun.”
Lavina’s eyebrows rose. “You are a cocky one,” she said. “You must have some powerful friends if I never noticed you in all the time you were here.”
“Yeah, you might have known one of them,” Dylan said, leaning forward almost conversationally, like a friend trying to share a secret. “Davida? My former guardian? The same Davida Luc just murdered a few days ago for doing exactly what he asked of her.”
Blood drained from Lavina’s already pale cheeks. She clearly had not known about Davida’s fate. Dylan was almost happy to be the one to pass on the news, even if it was a shallow victory in a much larger battle.
“If Davida is gone, she only has you to thank for it.”
Dylan inclined her head a little, accepting that piece of responsibility. “That’s true,” she said, her voice lower and less confident than it had been before. “He killed her because he knew how it would affect me. And he was right. Luc is nothing if not a good read of character. He knew exactly how to make me do what he wanted.”
Lavina’s dark eyes had grown even darker. She studied Dylan for a moment longer. Then she slowly stepped back, as though she had seen something so dark in Dylan that she didn’t want to be anywhere near it.
“Take her to my office,” she said to the Redcoats.
They approached her, and one tried to take Rachel from her arms. Dylan refused to let go, until the Redcoat found himself on the losing end of a tug-o-war. It might have been comical for someone who happened in on the scene. But it didn’t feel that way from Dylan’s point of view.
“She goes with me,” she announced.
The Redcoat’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything. He just kept trying to pull the child from Dylan’s arms.
“Let her keep it,” Lavina said. “Doesn’t matter. They’re both headed to the same place.”
The Redcoat did not seem happy with Lavina’s words, but he stopped tugging at Rachel. Instead, he grabbed Dylan’s arm harder than he needed to, turning her and forcing her toward a double set of doors at the back of the wide, narrow lobby. Another Redcoat came up alongside the other. He gave Dylan a little push, nearly causing her to trip. Ironically, it was the grip of the first Redcoat that kept her from falling flat on her face.
More corridors, more doors with windows in them. They took a set of stairs up high into the bowels of the building, walking so long Dylan’s legs began to ache with the added weight of Rachel’s body. The Redcoats eventually stopped and steered Dylan through another set of doors and into another corridor. This corridor was not as stark as the ones downstairs had been. There was carpet and pictures on the walls. It felt strange to Dylan. There had been carpet throughout the dorms, but after more than a month wandering the desert, it felt odd to have something so soft and plush under her feet.
At the end of the corridor was another set of double doors. The first Redcoat shoved Dylan through them so hard that she lost her balance and slammed her hip against a long low desk in the center of the room. The Redcoats laughed.
“Let’s see your gifts get you out of this one,” the first one said.
“Yeah. I bet you’re not nearly as special as everyone thinks you are. You’re just another broken angel,” the second Redcoat said. “Just damaged like the rest of us.”
“The only difference is, you had a choice,” Dylan said.
“Don’t waste your breath,” someone said in a deep, hoarse voice behind her.
Dylan turned even as the slamming of the door sent a tremor through the room. Sitting in a chair behind the desk was Wyatt’s father, Jimmy. He was thinner than he had been the last time Dylan saw him. His cheeks were hollow, his skin a sad yellow color. There were bruises along his jawline, down his throat. She saw that his knuckles were bloody, as though he had often given as good as he got. But his clothes were hanging off of his bony frame, and there was a smell…he had clearly not been living in the lap of luxury for the past few weeks.
“It would be you who would find me,” he said.
“Could be worse,” Dylan said. “We could have just left you here to be executed.”
“So I survive today,” he said with a defeatist gesture, “just so that I can die, along with the rest of humanity, tomorrow.”
“You’ve just given up?”
“What other options do I have?”
“Fight,” Dylan said, her voice shaking with the anger that was building tight in her chest. “You’re the resistance leader. If you quit, what chance do the others have?”
“There are hardly any humans left.” He stood up on shaky legs and turned toward a window Dylan had not seen along the back wall of the office. He pulled back a wooden shade that was shut tight, allowing bright sunlight to suddenly bathe the room with light. “All that is left are you hybrids and the angels. There is nothing left to fight for.”
“There are more humans out there than you think,” Dylan told him, the memory of all those voices coming to her the first time she slipped into her ethereal form coming back to her. “They’re just scattered, hiding, afraid of what awaits them in the open.”
He shook his head. “Maybe once,” he said. “But not anymore.”
“I heard them.”
He turned to look at her and seemed to notice the child in her arms for the first time. Rachel had her head buried against Dylan’s shoulder. Her dark, curly hair was the only thing visible from Jimmy’s point of view. Yet, something about the child caused him to take a step backward, to press himself hard against the window. If the glass had not been intact, he might have fallen through with the way in which he pressed himself against it. The intensity of his stare made Dylan suddenly frightened for Rachel. She slipped her arms tighter around her and stepped back.
“Who is that?” he asked in a voice that she did not recognize.
“A child. She was in trouble downstairs.”
“She comes from here?”
“I don’t know,” Dylan said, turning her head at an odd angle in an attempt to see Rachel’s hidden face. “I assume so.”
“Can’t you read minds? Davida said you could read minds.”
Dylan glanced at him, realizing she had yet to try to read Rachel. She hadn’t had the chance to think about it, or to consider the fact that Rachel’s thoughts seemed to be a little fuzzy. She kissed the child’s forehead as she closed her eyes and concentrated.
She heard Jimmy’s thoughts, realized that the child strongly resembled his sister, Rachel. Heard him thinking about his sister, about her death at the hands of the angels years ago. But she couldn’t get much from Rachel. Just random thoughts. She seemed confused about where she was and why. Her strongest memory was of a building Dylan did not recognize on a road somewhere where it rained quite often and the grass was a bright green that was almost painful to the eye. And of love…the love of a family. But it was just a feeling, not a vision.
“She doesn’t know where she comes from,” Dylan finally said.
“Where did you find her?”
“The first floor. In one of the rooms.”
Jimmy shook his head, as though trying to talk himself out of some knowledge he didn’t want to admit he had. He stepped forward, but paused, clearly not sure he wanted to do what he planned. But then he put another foot forward and slowly, very slowly, came to Dylan. He picked up a handful of Rachel’s hair and pulled it back from her face. His eyes widened as he stared at the child.
“Impossible,” he whispered.
Rachel suddenly came to life. She unwrapped her arms from Dylan’s neck and practically threw herself at Jimmy. To Dylan’s surprise, he welcomed her into his arms, wrapping his arms around as a parent might do a child. His hands shook as he first clutched her to him and then moved them to caress her back, her hair, her shoulders.
“Impossible,” he said into her hair.
“You know her,” Dylan said.
He looked a
t her, and she realized for the first time that there were tears streaming down his cheeks. His lips were trembling as he tried to form the words he wanted to say.
“Thank you,” he finally managed to get out.
And then his thoughts told her what she had wanted to know.
My sister. My older sister, Rachel.
Chapter 26
“Just before the war began, my father moved the family here, to Lubbock, Texas, to study geology at the university. My sister was five,” Jimmy said, gesturing toward Rachel, who was now, so exhausted by her ordeal, sleeping in a little ball in a corner of the room. “I was born the following spring. We were still here when the war began.”
“Your parents—”
“My father joined the military. He felt it was his patriotic duty. My mother took us kids back to Oregon, where she was from. But then the Koreans threatened to bomb the West Coast, so my parents thought it would be best if my mother brought us back here. They had friends here, someone with a bomb shelter who was willing to house us in the event someone decided to attack Texas.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “We were living with these friends and my father had gotten leave. It was the first leave he had gotten in almost two years. We were having a barbecue in the backyard.” He glanced at her and watched as she picked the memory from his mind. A party, she realized, something like the celebration they had in the adolescent courtyard the day before test day. “It was supposed to be a fun, relaxing day. War had been waging for three years, and the end was nowhere in sight. People were coming home in coffins every day. And the attacks on American soil were growing more and more numerous. Never, in the history of the country, had so many attacks happened on our own shores.”
He looked over at Rachel, watched her chest move with each breath as though he was afraid she would stop breathing, or simply vanish. “She was older than that,” he said, his words muffled by the fact that his chin was resting in the palm of his hand. “Almost eleven that day. And I was five.”
FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) Page 12
