SOUL MATES (Angels and Demons Book 3)

by Brenda L. Harper

  “I promise.”

  The light slowly left Jack’s eyes in that moment. As Stiles watched, his soul lifted from his physical being and moved up toward the ceiling. But it stopped there. It had nowhere to go, no home to ascend to. Stiles could feel the confusion and fear.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “What made you desirable to the scientists here will forever trap your soul in this place.” He shook his head, tears rolling slowly down his cheeks as he did. “You are Nephilim, my friend. The descendant of an angel and his human lover.”

  The soul seemed to shudder as it loomed there up against the ceiling. And then it backed away, as though it felt a burning desire to escape. A moment later, it soared through the concrete wall, disappearing into the earth around the subbasement.

  “Goodbye, Jack,” Stiles whispered as he let go of the empty shell of Jack’s body and stood. The wound in his back that he’d sustained in the fighting in Pittsburg sent such a shock of pain through his body that it almost equaled the grief consuming his soul.

  Almost.

  “But you’re not trapped anymore,” Stiles said, tears on his cheeks as they had been on that long ago night. “You can remain here. You just have to let go of the anger, of the grief, and the pain.”

  There was a moment when Dylan wasn’t sure what Jack was going to do. But then the darkness began to disappear, like water down a drain. After only seconds, Jack James stood before them. Dylan had only seen him in Rebecca and Stiles’ memories, so seeing him now was almost surreal to her. He was a handsome man, so tall and dark—reminiscent of Lucifer, but in a more benign way. He stepped forward and embraced his daughter, holding her so tightly that their souls seemed to combine and become one.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes falling on Stiles. “There’s something about being trapped in that way…”

  “I know. I understand.”

  Jack moved around his daughter and pulled Stiles into his embrace. Dylan closed her eyes, so overwhelmed with the rush of relief and peace that flowed through Stiles at Jack’s touch.

  And then Jack turned to her.

  “You are beautiful,” he said, stroking her jaw lightly. “I could see that even when I was in the worst of the darkness.”

  “Thank you.”

  He studied her for a long moment, as though he could see something she couldn’t. And then he just nodded.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “The two of you, you’re going to be okay.”

  Then he turned and disappeared with Rebecca at his side.

  Stiles moved up beside Dylan. “You want to hang out for a few minutes?”

  She didn’t even hesitate. “We have more souls to rescue.”

  Chapter 26

  Dytonia was still in chaos, but it was a different kind of chaos.

  Dark souls had suddenly lost their darkness. The possessed were no longer possessed. Humans walked among bright, confused souls they couldn’t see, picking up the pieces of the short, but traumatic attack. Stiles could see them, however, as could Dylan. And they could see that many of them had no idea what was happening to them.

  “My daughter,” one female soul said, chasing after a human child that was frightened by her touches, but not sure what it was that was frightening her.

  Dylan waved a hand, as she had a habit of doing, and many of the souls simply ascended. A few lingered, those that had been lost for so long that sanity was slow in coming. Dylan approached those, whispering words of comfort before sending them, with a gentle touch, to their home in heaven.

  Stiles turned away, still reeling from seeing Rebecca and Jack together. He was relieved. It was as if a burden he’d carried far too long had been lifted. So much pain he inflicted all those years ago…he wished there had been another way. But he was glad it had finally found some sort of resolution.

  “Stiles?”

  He turned and took a hard step back as Sara—beautiful, talkative Sara—stood watching him.

  “Is this real?” she asked. “Am I really standing here?”

  “You were Nephilim,” he said, approaching her slowly. “Did you know?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t even know what Nephilim meant until you met Rhonda.”

  He wanted to touch her, but her soul’s light was undulating. She was still confused, unsure of where she was or why she was there. He wasn’t even sure she understood that she’d died on that dark day so long ago.

  “Where’s Matthew?” she asked.

  And then he knew she was unaware of what had happened to her.

  “Sara,” he whispered, reaching for her despite his fear that it would upset her. “You died a long time ago, but your soul was trapped.”

  “No,” she said, her voice rising in volume. “I never would have left Matthew. I never would have abandoned Rhonda and Anna.”

  “Anna’s fine,” he said, keeping his voice as calm as he could. “She’s living up north with her husband and children.”

  “No…”

  Sara shook her head, backing away from Stiles as though physically running away would change the truth of the situation. He followed, slowly, with his hands raised where she could see them. He wished he knew how Dylan was calming these souls. He wished he could calm Sara. And then, as if his thoughts had brought her to him, Dylan came up behind Sara.

  “Matthew’s here,” she said more to Stiles than to Sara.

  “Matthew?”

  Stiles glanced at Dylan. Will he be able to see her?

  Dylan shrugged.

  It was worth a try. Stiles closed his eyes and focused on his old friend, the research scientist he had known as Dillon, the man they’d pulled out of the past seconds before his death to heal the angel disease he’d created. The same man who was now married to Dylan’s daughter, and whose own child was named for the best friend he’d lost long after his own death.

  A moment later, Matthew came running out of the house with Josephine not far behind.

  Stiles grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him back even as Sara saw him.

  “Matthew!” she cried.

  But Matthew couldn’t see her.

  “It’s Sara,” Stiles said in a low voice. “She’s confused. I need you to help me help her to ascend.”

  Matthew’s eyes widened. Josephine moved up behind him, but when she realized what was happening, she backed away.

  “Sara?” Matthew whispered.

  “Oh, Matthew!” Sara came close to him. Stiles lifted Matthew’s hands so that he was touching her. But Matthew…he couldn’t see her.

  Stiles glanced at Dylan and she offered him an almost imperceptible nod.

  Just as he had done for Jack, Stiles offered Sara a glimpse into her past.

  She was standing alone at the back of a small alcove that was once designed to be an office, a place to communicate with whoever might be left in the outside world. She was reading something, her eyes glued to two pieces of paper clutched in her hand. When she looked up…she was both surprised and not.

  “Is it over?”

  “His part is over.”

  She cocked her head as though listening to something outside the room. And then she shook her head, clearly deciding she hadn’t heard him right.

  “Where’s Matthew? Is he with Rhonda?”

  “No, Sara.” He stepped closer to her, reaching for her arm, but she jerked away. And then she spotted the blood smeared on his shirt. “What did you do?”

  “Sara—”

  She shook her head, backing up until her spine slammed into the back wall. “What did you do?”

  “I tried to save him.”

  She shook her head again, tears beginning to stream down her face. And then her knees grew weak. Stiles caught her before she hit the ground, and she let him, and then buried her face against the front of his shirt as her tears mixed with her husband’s blood.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I wanted to fix it; I wanted to make it better.”

  The memory of her own
death rushed through her mind. Stiles could see it. The despair. The choice she couldn’t take back. Rhonda’s screams as she realized she’d lost not one friend, but two in the stretch of only a few days.

  She remembered committing suicide.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Matthew, her hands moving over his face even though he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t hear her. But he knew she was there.

  “I love you, Sara,” he whispered. “I always have.”

  Sara moved close to him and pressed her lips to his. He seemed to sense it. He leaned closer to her, his body perched at an odd angle. And then she stepped back as Stiles touched her and showed her his death, Dylan’s rescue of him, and his wedding to Josephine. Sara moved to Josephine and pressed her lips close to her ear. And then she was gone, ascended without so much as a look back.

  “I will,” Josephine said, her eyes raised to the sky.

  “You heard her?” Dylan asked.

  Josephine focused on her mother for a brief second. “I am my mother’s daughter,” she said softly before taking her husband’s hand and leading the way back inside Rachel’s.

  Chapter 27

  If there was ever an excuse for a party, this day seemed like it. Dylan curled up on the couch between Rachel and Josephine, a glass of homemade wine in her hand. Rachel was laughing at something Raphael had said and happy tears filled her eyes. Dylan watched her, relieved that, for once, they were happy tears.

  “The only thing I don’t understand,” Raphael announced to the whole room, “was how and why Jack James managed to possess Gabriel.”

  “The why is easy,” Stiles said, looking over at Dylan. “He believed he could trick her into choosing Gabriel as her soul mate. That way, he would have control over the guardian orb.”

  “Okay,” Raphael said, inclining his head to accept that explanation. “But how did he get to him. As far as I know, Gabriel has not set foot on the Earth since the last time he fell.”

  No one seemed to have an answer for that. “Perhaps he just wanted to take a leisurely walk in a forest and he just happened to pick the wrong one.”

  Dylan nodded. “That’s as good an explanation as any I can think of. I mean, really, he had to have been on Earth for Jack to get hold of him.”

  “Well, let’s hope the next time he goes for a walk, he chooses a safer locale.”

  Laughter drifted through the room.

  Josephine took Dylan’s hand and tugged at it. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Of course.”

  Dylan unfolded herself from the couch and followed Josephine out onto the front porch. Josephine moved close to the railing, staring out at the street to where Sara had stood earlier in the day. She was quiet for a long time, but Dylan didn’t push her. She wasn’t sure she was in a hurry to hear what her daughter had to say to her after the events of this day.

  When Josephine finally turned, there was a tear on her cheek.

  “I was wrong.”

  Dylan didn’t know what to say.

  Josephine took a deep, if shaky, breath. “All my life, everyone talked about how my mother was this angel…how she ended the war and chose humanity over her own kind. You were this larger than life entity, different from everyone else’s mother. And Stiles was always there. I never understood…”

  “I’m sorry, Jo,” Dylan said, going to her and taking hold of her arms so that she couldn’t turn away. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “Daddy loved you so much and I hated that he was always defending you, always telling me I had to be understanding and that I had to give you space. And when he died and you didn’t save him….” She shook her head. “As much as I understood it was his choice, I still hated you for that.”

  “I know.”

  Josephine looked down into Dylan’s eyes and bit her lip, a habit she’d come by quite honestly from her mother. “Today, I finally realized that all those things people have said about you, about how you were our savior and you were meant to make the world better for humanity, was true. Watching you and Stiles with the freed souls…it was amazing.”

  “This is what we were meant to be,” Dylan said. “It doesn’t mean that I’m not still your mother or that I don’t still love you. And it doesn’t mean that I didn’t love your dad.”

  “I know. I know that now.”

  Josephine hugged Dylan and Dylan felt her heart grow and threaten to burst. She’d always felt like an outsider in her daughter’s life and that Wyatt was the only thing that held them together. She’d been so frightened of losing Josephine after Wyatt’s death. But now she could see that wasn’t going to happen. And it made her feel complete.

  “I love you,” she said, pressing her fingers into her daughter’s hair so that she could look her in the eyes. “I love you so much.”

  Josephine just nodded, too emotional to speak.

  Dylan said her goodnights to Josephine, Matthew and the baby, smiling when the baby cooed at her.

  “She said grandma. Did you hear that?”

  Josephine laughed. “She’s only a few months old, Mom. She won’t be saying grandma for another six months or more.”

  “She said grandma.”

  She backed out of the room, chuckling under her breath as she did. Rachel touched her back, whispering a goodnight in her ear as she and Raphael passed on their way to their own bedroom. Dylan turned, her eyes falling to the closed door of Stiles’ room.

  They hadn’t had a chance to talk since she’d made her choice. And they had a lot they needed to talk about.

  She tapped on the door and waited. She could feel his hesitation just as he could probably feel her anxiety. He opened the door, leaning into the frame in a stance that was supposed to discourage her. Instead, it made him seem alluring, as though he was trying to show off his bare chest and the fact that the pants he wore hung so low on his hips that she didn’t need much imagination to imagine them gone.

  “I was wondering if we could talk.”

  “It’s late, Dylan,” he said, his eyes lighting on everything but her face.

  “I know. I just…with everything that happened today, I thought it would be good for us to talk.”

  “I don’t think we have much to talk about.”

  “But I do.”

  He finally looked up and his wary eyes fell on hers. She could hear the hurricane of his thoughts: doubts and misunderstandings, things that had nothing to do with what she needed to say to him. It angered her a little…some of what she heard.

  “For a man who has full access to my thoughts and emotions, you sure are blind. Or deaf. Or both.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Is that right?”

  She grabbed his hand and instantly they were standing in the darkness at a river’s edge. Her river.

  Stiles recognized it immediately and yanked his hand from her touch, turning to storm up the bank. But then his anger and his pride refused to allow him to leave.

  “How could you bring me here? Here of all places?”

  “Why not here?”

  He groaned in exasperation. “This is where you met Wyatt! This is where you grieved so hard for him that I thought you were going to waste away and disappear! Why bring me here now? Why tonight?”

  “This place isn’t about Wyatt to me, Stiles.” She turned to the water, kneeling to run her fingers through it. “Do you remember the first time I came here? Do you remember how you guided me here when I thought I was dying? How you came to me in that invisible little cloaking thing you did, nudging my shoulder when I was so sunburned, so dehydrated, and so exhausted that I was about to fall to the ground and simply give up? Do you remember saving my life that night?”

  “I remember your walking waist deep into the water and then crying.”

  Dylan nodded. “This place was always about you. You brought me here, you saved my life and then you continued to watch over me. You tried to protect me from Wyatt and convince me to stay here and wait until…I don’t know what you were thinking. Until
you came to me, maybe?” She stood again and turned to face him. “After that, I always knew that if I came here—that when I needed a place to hide, a place to fall apart—that you would know to look for me here. That you would watch over me and protect me as best you could. I knew that this place was safe because of you.”

  Stiles didn’t say anything, but he didn’t walk away, either.

  She was encouraged by that.

  “It took me a long time to figure it out,” she said. “I thought that you were my guardian because that was just the way it was. Everyone kept telling me that I chose you, that I went back in time to tell you to come to Genero and watch over me because I chose you. And I thought that was insane because I didn’t have a choice. I told you those things because I already knew you. I knew who you would be in my life. I thought the choice had been taken from me.”

  She stepped closer to him. He didn’t move. He didn’t try to leave, but he didn’t move toward her, either.

  “But then I realized that I did have a choice. I could have said nothing. I could have watched you kill Joanna. Or I could have told you that Joanna was Wyatt’s mother and that you couldn’t kill her because of that. But I didn’t have to mention Genero. I didn’t have to tell you to go there and watch over me. I didn’t have to go back in time at all. Jimmy called me to him, but that didn’t mean I had to respond. But I did. I went into the past of my own free will.”

  “Dylan…”

  “I chose you. I chose you because our souls have been connected since the moment you fell to Earth. From that moment, everything that happened was because my soul was calling to you. My soul already knew you before it even became a living entity. You said yourself that when my birth mother was pregnant with me, you had visions—that I’d shown you things you never could have seen any other way.”

  “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Doesn’t it? Doesn’t everything have meaning?”

  He looked down at her. “And what about Wyatt?”

  She took a chance and pressed her hand to the center of his chest. It was like pressing a puzzle piece into its perfect companion. It felt right to touch him.