Dylan ran her fingers over his, pushing them aside to feel her ribs where the gaping wound had been. There was nothing but smooth skin. She sat up a little, pushing, and looked for herself. Nothing. There was blood, still wet and sticky against her skin, but there was no wound.
“It was here,” she whispered.
“There’s nothing,” Wyatt said, his voice filled with wonder.
She looked up at him and saw fear slowly seep into those beautiful blue eyes. He stood and stepped back, but his eyes never left hers. “What the hell?” he whispered so quietly she almost didn’t hear him.
Not hell, the voice said inside her head. It’s as far from hell as one can get.
Chapter 18
There was an awkwardness between them now.
They began walking again the following day, after they both had a full night’s rest and walked to a place Wyatt called a pond to refresh their water bottles. He barely spoke to her, only barking out orders, ignoring her many questions until she stopped asking them. That was three days ago.
Dylan found herself watching him. He confused her. There were so many things she didn’t understand about him, about his species. Why he fought for her, why he made her heart skip a beat when he looked at her in a certain way, why his silence made her feel like she did when Donna once got mad at her and refused to speak to her for a full day.
At night, sometimes, she thought about the young couple she saw in that vision of the city, of the way the man looked at the young girl, at the way he kissed her as though it was the only thing he truly wanted to do in that moment. She wondered what it would be like to have a man look at her in that way. What would it feel like to have a boy kiss her in that way? Was it as exciting as it looked?
She watched him now as he walked a few paces ahead of her. He had learned to slow his pace for her shorter legs, but she still preferred to walk a few feet behind him. It allowed her to watch him without him being aware. She noticed that when he knew she was watching him his movements would become awkward, clumsy. But when he didn’t know…there was a certain grace about him that she thought even he was unaware of.
She found she liked his hands. It was silly, she thought, to like something so common to all humans. But in the mornings, when he thought she was still asleep, she would see him sitting with his back to a tree, one of the books he managed to grab from the bookstore in his hands. She liked to stare at his hands, liked the long, slender fingers, the thick vein that ran diagonally across his left hand, the darkness of his skin and the thick places that suggested hard work. She liked the power she knew those hands contained. She had seen him break thick pieces of wood in two with those hands, had seen him practice with his long weapon—the samurai sword, he told her it was called—seen him soothe a writhing animal seconds before he snapped its neck.
Such power in those hands. And yet, such gentleness.
Sometimes, in the darkness of the night, she saw similar hands moving over the young woman’s head and imagined Wyatt’s hand doing the same to her.
It made her feel funny, those thoughts. Made her belly feel as though she had a bad case of indigestion coming on.
But she kept thinking them anyway.
“Look!” he suddenly called to her.
Dylan picked up her pace and moved beside him. “What?”
He gestured out in front of them. It took a second, but Dylan finally saw it. Sunlight reflecting off of water. Lots of water.
“It’s huge!” she said.
“A lake.”
They looked at each other, and then, as though at some cue, they both began to laugh and run at the same time. It was a race, like the games they played during celebrations in the dorm compound. He won, thanks to his longer, more powerful, legs. But Dylan was close behind. Without a thought, she stripped out of her clothes and jumped into the water, the sensation of the coolness washing over her body the most pleasure she had felt in a long time.
Wyatt joined her, splashing water in her face as she came up for air. She laughed and splashed him back. He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her under the water, his laughter filling the air when she came up again. She kicked her feet in his direction and swam deeper into the water, moving to a place where she could no longer feel the thick, silky mud between her toes.
Wyatt followed, but stayed back out of her reach. He rolled onto his back and floated in the sun, allowing water to fill his mouth before spitting it high into the air. Dylan laughed again when a thin rainbow of colors sprouted from the fountain he created.
“Are there other places like this?” she called to him.
“A lot,” he said. “Not so many in this area, but if we went north, we would find dozens of lakes like this one. Or if we went south, or west, we would eventually come to the ocean.”
“What’s an ocean?”
He glanced over at her. “They don’t teach you geography?”
The puzzled look on Dylan’s face must have answered his question. He shook his head, a look of irritation entering his eyes for a brief second. “I keep forgetting where you come from,” he said quietly.
She swam closer to him. “What is an ocean?” she asked again.
“It’s a huge body of water that surrounds the continent.” He held up his hands, moving them several feet from one another. “There are seven continents…land masses…that make up the world. Surrounding each of them is ocean, bodies of water that are filled with salt and fish and many other creatures.”
“Like this?”
“But they are thousands of miles wide and many miles deep.”
Dylan took a long swallow of the clear, blue lake water. “They had so much,” she said quietly.
“Who?”
“The people before us.”
Wyatt rolled onto his back again and stared up at the sky. “Makes you wonder what started the war, doesn’t it?”
“We were taught that it was a lack of love that began it.”
He glanced back at her. “I think it had more to do with a love of material things. And the fact that there were so many people.”
“They were fighting over stuff?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I can’t imagine that.” Dylan rolled onto her back, too, trying to imitate Wyatt’s float. He glanced at her and nearly choked on the water that he had allowed to fill up his mouth in anticipation of making another of his fountains. She glanced at him, but he had turned and was swimming a few feet from her.
She lay back, enjoying the dual sensations of cool water on her skin and the heat of the sun on her face and her chest. She ran her hands slowly over her breasts and down her belly, her eyes closed as she welcomed the heat of the sun as it glowed a soft orange against her eyelids.
“Don’t do that.”
She opened her eyes and glanced to where Wyatt had been, but he was no longer there. She rolled over, her legs floating down beneath her as she began to tread water. He was on her other side, watching her with just his nose above water.
“What was I doing?”
He didn’t answer.
He turned and began swimming toward the shore.
“Wyatt?”
“I’m going to fill the water bottles,” he called over his shoulders. “We still have several hours of daylight. We should keep moving.”
“Why don’t we just camp here for the night?”
He glanced back at her, but didn’t turn. He was naked, just as she was. As he continued to walk on the soft mud that marked the edge of the lake, she had an unfettered view of the length of his back, of the top of his thighs. Muscle rippled with each movement in a way that was not always obvious when he was fully dressed. It also exposed varying degrees of darkness on his skin. His arms and shoulders, his long, slender back, were a dark bronze, while his legs were a pale peach that was similar to her own coloring.
She wondered what caused that.
“We should get going,” he said.
Dylan stayed in the water, determined
to enjoy the coolness for as long as she could. She had already tired of the constant heat of the day. As curious as she was about the place where Wyatt came from, as much as she wanted to know the people who made up his family unit, she wanted to enjoy this. There was no telling when they would find such a body of water again.
She swam for a while, taking long, even strokes across the calm surface of the water. She moved far out into the center of the lake and lay on her back as she had seen him do, staring up into the sky as though the answers to all her questions would be written there. And then she rolled over and floated on her belly, staring into the depths of the crystal clear water and watched the fish move around below her as though oblivious to her presence above them. She wondered if there was someone in the heavens above her, someone who watched her and Dylan the same way she watched the fish. If so, what did they think of her? Of all the people struggling to survive in this damaged world.
When she looked back toward the shore, Wyatt was standing in the center of the mud, watching her. She waved, but he didn’t wave back.
“Be like that,” she whispered as she began another long, luxurious stroke across the lake’s surface.
She walked out of the water, resigned to his determination to move on. Wyatt tossed her clothing at her, turning his head away as he did.
“Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Refuse to look at me? It’s not like you didn’t see me naked the first time we met.”
“Men aren’t supposed to look at naked women.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer. Dylan was tired of him ignoring her. She yanked on her clothes, the pants and shirt, as he had told her they were called. When he said it, she recalled reading these words in a book. She felt dumb for not putting it together before. The memory of it only fueled her anger.
And then she stomped up to him.
“I don’t like it when you do that.”
He turned and looked at her, surprise clear in his eyes. “Do what?”
“Refuse to answer my questions. It’s not my fault where I come from. It’s not my fault they didn’t teach me the same things you know.”
“I know that,” he said quietly.
“Then why do you keep refusing to answer my questions?”
“Some questions are hard to answer,” he said, stepping back slightly as color rushed into the skin on his face.
“What’s so hard about it?”
He stepped back again. “Relationships between men and women,” he said, gesturing between them. “They’re complicated.”
“Why?”
He groaned. “They just are.”
She stepped closer to him and laid a hand on his chest. He had pulled on his pants, but his chest was still bare. The feel of skin on skin was almost as pleasurable as jumping into a cool lake on a hot day. But what puzzled her was the pounding of his heart under her hand. She could feel it, could feel how quickly it pulsed even as her own heart picked up its pace and seemed to match it beat for beat.
Wyatt lay his hand over hers, smoothing his rough fingers along the tender skin on the back of her hand. And then he stepped into her, closing the foot wide gap between them until she could feel the heat of his breath on her face.
She looked up, saw his intention in his eyes as much as she saw it in her mind as the image jumped from his head to hers. He bent near to her, his eyes slowly closing as the tip of his tongue moved slowly along the angle of his bottom lip. She rolled her head back on her spine, her lips softening to welcome him.
And then there was a huge crash behind them.
“Oh, thank goodness!” a voice cried out.
Chapter 19
He was tall. That was the first thing Dylan noticed about him. Taller than Wyatt, but only by a few inches. But that was the only thing about the two of them that seemed similar. Where Wyatt’s skin was bronze, this new man’s was pale, a sickly white. And his hair was like fire, a bright red that seemed unnatural in the bright sunlight, only serving to make his skin seem that much more pale. His eyes were gray, a soft gray that seemed to absorb the light and glow with a power of its own. Not unattractive. In fact, he had a certain allure that made Dylan look twice.
Wyatt moved around Dylan and stood with her squarely behind him, his hand lying on the butt of the weapon—a six shooter, he had told her—he wore at his waist.
“Who are you?”
The other man held up his hands, palms out to show he had no weapons. “Stiles,” he said. “I come from a city to the east of here.”
“What are you doing out here?”
He shook his head, a sadness coming into his eyes. “There was a fire at our city. There’s nothing left.”
Dylan touched Wyatt’s arm as she slowly moved around him. “What about your people?” she asked.
Stiles shook his head again. “Gone,” he said, his eyes moving to the ground at his feet.
Dylan could feel some of the tension shift in Wyatt’s body, could feel him relax his hold on the butt of his gun. “You should move north,” he told him. “There are a few cities that way who take refugees from other places.”
Stiles nodded. “I’ve heard of them,” he said.
“You should come with us,” Dylan said.
Wyatt grabbed her arm and pulled her away from Stiles. “No,” he hissed in a low whisper. “He can’t come with us.”
“Why not?”
“Look at him,” Wyatt said, gesturing widely with his other hand. “He is too thin, too sick to be of any help in a fight.”
“How many fights do you plan on picking in the next few days?”
Wyatt stared at her, anger making a muscle jerk in his jaw. “Have you already forgotten what happened in the ruins?”
Dylan could feel the color draining from her face, but she didn’t back down. “We can’t leave him here alone. What if something happens to him? That would be on us.”
“How would we know?”
“We would know,” she said quietly.
Wyatt studied her face for a long minute. “And if he tries to cut our throats in the middle of the night?”
“I thought he was too sickly to be much of a fighter?”
“Not much fight in backstabbing.”
Dylan glanced over at Stiles. He had wandered to the edge of the lake and was squatting, cupping water into his mouth with his hands. She noticed that there was a bloodstain on the back of his shirt, just above the waist of his pants.
“He’s injured,” she said quietly, gesturing to the stain for Wyatt’s benefit. “We should help him.”
Wyatt glanced over at Stiles, turning slightly so that his shoulder rubbed against Dylan’s. As it did, she could feel the war of emotions floating through his body. Fear was dominant. But so was empathy.
“Fine,” he said quietly. “We’ll take him with us. But the first sign of trouble…”
Dylan reached up and pressed her lips lightly to the angle of Wyatt’s jaw. A flash of pleasure ran through her, a minor flash compared to the touch of his hands on her head that night the pain burst through her skull, but similar. “Thank you,” she whispered breathlessly.
She felt his eyes on her as she walked over to Stiles and sat beside him.
“We want you to come with us,” she said quietly.
Stiles looked at her, gratitude in his eyes. “Thank you.”
She touched the stain on the back of his shirt. “Are you injured?”
He glanced back as though trying to see the spot himself. He grabbed the hem of his shirt and pulled it forward. “Oh,” he said, “that was days ago. I think it has pretty much healed now.”
“Can I look?”
He shrugged.
Dylan lifted the edge of his shirt. There was a long cut along the bottom edge of his ribs that ran over his spine. But, as he had said, it was mostly healed. Dylan ran her finger along it and watched as the redness of the knitted wound disappeared. She could feel a tingle in her fingertip as s
he did it, knew that it was something inside of her that was healing his wound. All these years she had thought it was only Donna who could do this, but it seemed something inside of her was growing and maturing, that she could do more than she had ever thought possible.
After leaving the ruins, Dylan thought about the wound on her side, the pain in her ankle that had seemed to indicate a broken bone or a dislocation, but which was completely healed by the time she woke the following morning. And she remembered the redness in her skin that disappeared each time she imagined her skin as it was the morning she left D dorm. She had healed herself. To prove it to herself, she had waited until Wyatt was occupied as they settled in for the night a few days later and used her knife to slice into her palm. Within seconds of visualizing it the way it had been before, the wound knitted itself again.
She had done it dozens of times since.
This was the first time she had done it to another person.
Stiles grunted, but he didn’t move, didn’t ask her to stop. Within seconds the healing wound had disappeared. But then she realized it wasn’t the first he had ever suffered. There were gnarled scars all along his back, his skin twisted and tied into knots that marked the places of former wounds.
She bit her lip as she slowly pulled his shirt back over his skin.
“I’m sorry about your family,” she said.
He glanced at her. “Yeah, me, too,” he said.
“We should go,” Wyatt called to them.
Dylan stood and held her hand out to Stiles. “I’m Dylan,” she said. “And our task master is called Wyatt.”
Stiles smiled as he took her hand and allowed her to pull him to his feet. “Nice to meet you, Dylan,” he said.
Chapter 20
They stopped for the night in a long, low field that Wyatt told them was once a place called a farm. Stiles started a fire with Dylan’s dwindling supply of matches while Wyatt went in search of some sort of protein for their evening meal. Dylan sipped slowly from a bottle of water as she watched Stiles move around on his haunches.
FOUND (Angels and Gargoyles Book 1) Page 8
