“I wish I could cook like you do.”
Anita shook her head. “You are meant for far better things, my love,” she said, stroking Dylan’s head gently. “One day, you will change the world.”
It had seemed like the same, comforting words anyone might say to a child. But now, with a different light shining on them, the words seemed to hold so much power.
How? Dylan wanted to ask now. How would she change the world?
She didn’t even know where she was or where she was going.
It would all be so funny if she hadn’t been so completely frightened.
Dylan walked quickly, moving over the unfamiliar terrain without concern to her safety. She just wanted to find a safe place to hide. Somewhere she could think, somewhere no one could find her. No one and nothing. But she knew that was a stupid thought.
She knew gargoyles were capable of amazing feats. What would stop them from finding her now, after they had found her so easily so many times before? And angels. And whatever else might be out there. Was it really possible for her to hide?
Exhaustion caught up with her just an hour or so before the sun went down. She found a tree that seemed to offer some cover, its branches low hanging and heavy, low enough that she could lie beneath them, against the trunk, and be nearly invisible to anyone passing above or below. A brilliant idea. At least, she had thought it was.
Dylan fell asleep almost immediately. She dreamed of Wyatt, saw him walking in a ruin that was filled with odd shapes and angles. She didn’t see buildings, but she saw circles and triangles, saw animals that were painted cheery colors, train tracks that lifted off the ground, boats that had no water on which to sail. He was alone, his clothes dirty and torn in a few places, as though he had been in a great struggle recently. And there was an expression of determination on his face, a look that suggested wherever he was going was of great importance.
Where?
Another question that was likely to go unanswered.
The dream melted, all at once, and morphed into something else. A dark room. A man, his arms in shackles above his head. Blood ran down his arms where he had tugged at the restraints and tried to free himself. His back was bloody, too, covered in thin lines that overlapped one another, making the flesh look like it had been ripped apart by many clawed hands.
Dylan wanted to reach out to the man, wanted to offer some solace. But as she reached her hand out, he lifted his head, and she could see that his hair was a bright red, so red that it was almost unnatural.
Stiles.
She cried out so suddenly, so forcefully, that it brought her out of her dream. She sat up and grabbed her head, a pain bursting between her temples. She gasped, tears falling against cheeks that were already wet.
It was still dark, that part of the night when the stars were gone, but the sun had yet to begin to appear in the morning sky. The darkness was so complete that Dylan wouldn’t have been able to see her hands a few inches in front of her face if she had opened her eyes and given it a try. But she could still hear. Despite the pain pounding in her head, her hearing was still perfect, maybe even stronger than usual because of the darkness. And she heard footsteps.
She pulled back into herself, wrapping her arms around her legs to make the smallest target of herself as she could. She should have stood. If she were on her feet…but it was already too late. The footsteps had come to the base of the tree under whose foliage she hid.
She tried to hear thoughts, hoped maybe she could figure out who it was. But she couldn’t get anything.
It was like when she tried to read the gargoyles.
She waited, all her senses hyperaware of the night around her. The footsteps moved around the tree, impatient hands moving aside branches that hung low with their thick leaves blocking her from view. And then the sounds moved on, to the other side of the tree. And then to other trees in this small copse.
She opened her eyes when the sounds seemed to have receded from her immediate area. She laid her hands on the tree trunk with the intention of pushing herself up onto her feet. She listened a few seconds longer, waited just in case someone, or something, was nearby and might hear her movements. When she still didn’t hear anything, she began to push herself upright.
It was then that he grabbed her.
Chapter 19
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
Ichabod.
She should have known she couldn’t really hide.
Dylan jerked her arm, but he refused to let go. Instead, he yanked her to a standing position. She felt something pop in her shoulder, but it didn’t seem all that important at the moment. She was so angry that she didn’t even feel the pain.
“Let me go!” she cried as she tried to pull away again.
“I think you had better settle down,” he said, jerking her back into his chest. “Or things might not go as well for you as they should.”
Dylan pulled again, but she realized she had no chance of escaping. His grip was just as solid as it had been the night before. She’d do more than dislocate a shoulder if she continued to fight him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“It will all be explained to you soon.”
“Why not now?”
He shoved her forward, forcing her into the limbs of the tree. They scraped against her face as she walked, leaving little scratches behind. But she could feel them healing even before they were fully created. When they were out in the open, he wrapped his arm around her waist and lifted her against his body. She had no warning before he elevated her off the ground. Nausea burst through her. It was different this time. The world was not blurred as it had been before. They must have been moving slower. Or something.
The sun was just beginning to rise, the world bathed in a soft pink that should have obscured everything but somehow made it all more vivid. She could see the ground slicing away beneath her.
All those ruins. All those people.
She wanted to close her eyes, but she was afraid of what she might see.
“Where are you taking me?”
He didn’t answer.
Dylan wanted to fight his touch, but she was afraid if she did, he would let her fall. She still had no idea where she was. They passed over more and more ruins, the broken buildings and destroyed cities, the buildings that belonged to people…families. That concept was still somewhat new to Dylan. All she knew of family before leaving Genero was the idea of sisterhood. The idea that all the girls in the dorms were to love and respect one another because they were the same. Turns out, they weren’t all the same.
Wyatt taught her about families. And then the visions she had seen in the ruins. The memories of that old man and his daughter. It made her wonder how many families had been destroyed in the human war. And how many were still being torn apart in this war between the gargoyles and the angels.
It made little fingers of sadness push and squeeze at her heart.
They flew for a long while. Dylan’s arms began to ache from the pose she was forced to maintain. Her hips, too, began to hurt from the way in which she had to hold her legs to keep them from dangling down below her. This was not a fun way to travel. She was relieved when the earth came closer. That was, of course, until she spotted a walled city below them.
It looked an awful lot like Viti.
“What is this?” she demanded. “Why are you taking me there?”
Again, Ichabod didn’t answer.
But that’s not where he took her. They moved over the city, and Dylan got an interesting look at how it was laid out below them. It was contained within a single building with walls surrounding the wide garden that lay both to its front and back. There were windows evenly spread from top to bottom of the tall building. It looked very much like some of the buildings Dylan had seen in the ruins Wyatt first took her to. And in the vision she had. It wasn’t a new construction, like Genero was. Someone had taken a building from an existing ruin and walled it off. But where was
the rest of the ruin?
And what city was this?
It wasn’t Viti, as she had originally thought.
The wall was the same, but the building was too tall. Dylan remembered walking around and up in Viti, but there were no stairs. It was as if Viti was circular and the corridors simply moved up, one level to the next. She didn’t think that was how it would be in that building. The windows gave it away. She remembered windows on the higher levels of Viti, but they were high in the walls. Not long and wide like these.
“Where are we?” she asked again.
“You are safe,” he said, the first words he had spoken to her since he dragged her away from the relative security of her tree.
“That’s hard to believe,” she said, but the words did have a calming effect on her just the same. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because he hadn’t taken her to Lily and Luc. If he had done that, she would have known exactly where she stood. And it wouldn’t have been good. But now there was at least the hope that whatever was about to happen didn’t mean imprisonment. Or immediate death.
At least, she hoped not.
They landed a few feet in front of a small building that sat alongside a long, deep lake. It was similar to the building where she had first met Jimmy and the rest of the members of the resistance a little more than a week ago. Short and long, it was made of the trunks of trees. There were steps that led to the door and a long, thin window that ran the length of one full side of the front wall. It reminded Dylan of the dorms where she lived in Genero. She wasn’t sure why; it didn’t really resemble the architecture of the dorms. Maybe it was because it was high off the ground. Or maybe it was just the quiet, natural location.
The door opened and a woman stepped out. Dylan knew her almost immediately, but it took her a second to remember exactly where she had seen her before. It was something about her dark curls, the squareness of her jaw. The blue eyes…
“Joanna?”
A soft smile touched the woman’s lips. “You know my name.”
Chapter 20
Joanna set two tea cups on the table beside the teapot. Dylan had never seen anything quite like the thin china, its delicate handles almost too much for Dylan’s clumsy fingers. She was so afraid of breaking them she hesitated to sip at the hot beverage despite feeling suddenly parched. Joanna simply smiled.
“I have more. So if that breaks, it’s not really a big deal.”
Dylan nodded, but she was still extra careful when she slipped her finger inside the rounded space. The heat of the cup felt nice against her palm, the steam a new experience against her face.
“So, how do you know me?” Joanna asked.
Dylan carefully set the cup back down. “Wyatt.”
Joanna cocked an eyebrow. It confused Dylan for a moment, until she realized that she didn’t know what her son was calling himself now.
“I mean Jonathon. He calls himself Wyatt. After Wyatt Earp.”
“Oh.” Joanna studied her own tea for a few minutes. “He always did like those stories of the Old West,” she finally said.
“He reads every one he can get his hands on.”
Joanna smiled, but it wasn’t the same, pleasant smile she had offered before. There was sadness in it now. “How is he?” she asked.
“Good.” Dylan took a sip of the hot tea, the sweetness making her tongue tingle for a moment. She carefully set it back down but kept her hands wrapped around it. “He can take care of himself. He saved me from the gargoyles several times, and he saved our friends from a wild pig once.”
“He always was strong,” Joanna said.
Dylan thought that word wasn’t quite enough to describe Wyatt, but it came close. She slipped her thumb over the painted side of the cup, remembering the one image of his mother Wyatt had ever shown her, the one image that came to his mind whenever he thought of her.
“He saw you die,” she said, her eyes on the cup because she didn’t want to see what might be in Joanna’s eyes as she spoke. “It still haunts him.”
Joanna sat back a little. “It was for his protection,” she said.
“To let him see that?”
“He wasn’t supposed to be there.”
Dylan did look at her then, her curiosity…and maybe a little outrage, too much to ignore. She didn’t ask, but Joanna explained anyway.
“I met Jonathan—Wyatt’s—father not long after the war began. I was supposed to help him. He was a strong leader…he was to do great things for the people, but he needed a little guidance. I was supposed to be that guidance. And I was. For a while.”
“And then?”
Joanna’s thoughts suddenly flooded Dylan’s mind. It wasn’t like she had experienced with the other girls in Genero, wasn’t like the odd vision she often saw with Wyatt. It was a whole life playing itself out in her mind as though the memories were her own. Well-loved memories that were viewed often.
Dylan saw a much younger Jimmy, a man who was not used to letting people in, slowly and painfully falling in love. Quiet moments shared with a woman he saw as his equal. Moments that were meant to be professional, serious, but somehow turned into something a little lighthearted. Moments that became treasured time that he came to look forward to. She saw a first kiss, a first touch. She saw something she had only guessed at, but hadn’t really understood until she not only saw it in Joanna’s memories, but felt it. It was almost as if it was her body he touched, her heart his whispered promises caused to swell.
She witnessed the quiet ceremony in which they bonded themselves to one another. And the moment she informed him he would be a father. Dylan had only known Jimmy a short time, but she never would have imagined he could be capable of quite that much joy. If she had ever doubted his love for Wyatt, it ended in that moment.
Happiness. Dylan had always known what it meant, but had never really understood it until now.
“Why would you want to give all that up?” Dylan asked as the memories faded away.
Joanna sat back, pulling her feet up onto her chair so that she could wrap her arms around her knees. “It became too dangerous for Jimmy. Our enemies wanted to use our relationship to control him. He wouldn’t let me leave, wouldn’t even consider the idea of Johnny and I going into hiding. He was determined to keep us all together no matter what the danger. He always told me, ‘We live a family, we die a family.’”
“Sounds like something he would say,” Dylan told her as she recalled some of the things Jimmy had said to the resistance. “Did he know what you are?”
Joanna’s head came up slightly, her chin pointing at Dylan almost like an accusing finger. “Do you?”
“I don’t think he knew,” Dylan said, avoiding the question. “He doesn’t trust anyone he thinks is different. Even Davida, even though I think the two of them…” She stopped, realizing that what she was about to say might be emotionally painful for Joanna.
“They’re together,” Joanna finished for her. “You’re as easy to read as I am, Dylan.”
That caught Dylan’s attention. She had never thought about what she might be revealing to others who had gifts like hers. “You can see my thoughts?”
“Just like you saw mine. That’s the way it works.”
“Why?”
Joanna shrugged. “I don’t know. Never really thought about it before.”
Dylan sat back, a sense of exhaustion washing over her. “Why am I here?” she finally asked.
“I needed to talk to you.”
“About Wyatt?”
Joanna bit her lip as she tugged her legs tighter against her chest. “I wish things were that simple,” she said. “But you are the center of a lot of attention right now. And I need to make sure you are going to make the right choices.”
“And what would those be?”
She didn’t respond right away. She seemed lost in her thoughts, but she wasn’t opening them to Dylan’s inspection. It seemed Joanna could pick and choose what she wanted to reveal and what she wanted to hide.
Dylan wondered if she could do the same.
If it really mattered.
“Have they explained to you about the war that began all of this?”
Dylan nodded. “Most of it. How the humans were fighting over something no one seems to really understand and the angels got involved.”
“The angels were supposed to come down here and smooth things over, to help those who were already watching over the humans, keeping them safe. But the angels who were here all along had come to the conclusion long ago that the humans were no longer worth saving.”
“Luc and Lily.”
“Yes.”
Dylan sipped her tea again. “I’ve met them.”
Joanna didn’t seem surprised. “They should have stopped the war before it got so out of hand. By the time the rest of the angels came, things were already too far gone. There was no way to end the war without completely devastating one group of humans over another. It was Luc and Lily’s idea to just let the war go on without interference.”
“But not everyone agreed.”
“The gargoyles were fighting themselves weak to protect as many humans as they could. And the angels who came as reinforcement…some chose the gargoyle point of view. Others chose Luc and Lily’s. Others returned to Heaven to wait for the Father’s interference.”
“What do the angels want from me?”
Joanna’s eyebrows rose. “What makes you think we want anything from you?”
“I’m here.”
A slow smile crossed Joanna’s face, touching everything but her eyes. “You are a smart one.”
“So…”
“No,” Joanna said. “First, there are other things—”
Frustration burst through Dylan. She was tired of being told to wait, that there were other things to talk about. She was tired of all of this nonsense. She wanted answers.
“There is nothing else!”
Dylan stood up, nearly knocking over the chair she had been sitting in. She charged toward a long sofa sitting at the back of the room and then back to the table, her hands shaking as she tried to form the words she wanted to say…words she hoped would convey the deep frustration that was beginning to make her breath come in quick, stuttering sobs.
FREED (Angels and Gargoyles Book 2) Page 9
