“Lily wants me because she thinks I can cure her illness. She wants to become strong again so that she and Luc can annihilate the humans and destroy the gargoyles that have been fighting on their side.
“The gargoyles want me because they think I have powers that even I’m not sure I have, and, if I did, don’t know how to use. They think with me on their side, they could crush Luc and Lily, especially if they can keep me from her. The only problem with that plan is that the gargoyles want me dead when everything is said and done.”
She turned and looked at Joanna, stopping her frantic pacing so that she could study a face that was more familiar than it should have been.
“So, tell me what the angels want.”
Joanna stood. Her body began to glow a soft, pure blue. It was like looking into the perfect flame of a campfire that was beginning to go out. And then wings, long and beautiful, that same pure blue, stretched out in the narrow room, each point brushing the walls on either side of the room as they flexed.
“We want to teach you.”
Chapter 21
Dylan needed a few minutes. Joanna said she understood. Dylan wasn’t sure it mattered.
She walked out of the building, the bright morning sunlight burning her eyes for a moment. The angel—at least, she thought that was what he was—who had brought her to this place was nowhere to be seen. But she suspected if she tried to run toward that tall, enclosed city he would come after her. Instead, she walked to the lake. Water. Always something she had never really thought about before. In the last few weeks, however, it had become everything. It was a lifesaving liquid that kept her from dying of dehydration. It was a lake where she first met Wyatt. And it was another lake where she met Stiles.
She crouched down and picked up a few stones. She thought about Sam and how he had thrown stones into the stream that night. She hoped he was safe.
She closed her eyes, pressing fingers to both her temples. She concentrated on Sam, but like before, nothing happened. She couldn’t even feel him. Normally when she did this…but again, she had only done it a few times, and it was almost always with Wyatt.
So she began to focus on him instead. She pictured his face the way she had seen it the last time they were together. His jaw tight with emotion, his eyes a darker blue than normal. He hadn’t wanted her to go. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because he didn’t trust Sam. She knew it was important to him that she stay safe simply because it was what his father expected. Or maybe it was because of that kiss…
The moment the thought moved in her mind, she couldn’t help but remember the feel of his hands on her back, of his lips on hers.
And that was what brought him to her.
She could see him walking on grass. He was still north of where she had gone with Sam. And he was alone. Where was Ellie? And Carver and Bobby? Where was Davida? She had promised to catch up with them if they kept traveling east. Why hadn’t she caught up yet? Was she all right?
She watched as he walked for a few minutes, these thoughts spinning around in her head. And then he stopped, as though he thought he had heard something. He looked around, turning in a full circle, before he began walking again.
Be careful, she thought.
He stopped again. “Dylan?” he asked. And then he shook his head and began to walk again.
Surprise pulled Dylan back a little, blocked her vision of him. She opened her eyes, the brightness of the sun striking her blind for a second. She moved into a sitting position, dropped her hands into her lap, and closed her eyes again. After a few minutes of concentration, of again reliving those few moments alone with Wyatt behind the wall of boxes, she could see him once more.
Where are you?
Like before, he stopped walking and looked around. “Dylan?” he asked again.
It’s me.
“Where are you?”
I don’t know. Far away.
He ran his fingers through his hair, his forehead wrinkled with a frown of confusion. “How can I hear you?”
I don’t know, she repeated.
Can you hear me? he asked without using his lips.
Yes.
Are you safe? he asked as he began to walk again, his hands buried deep in his front pockets, as he often did when he was concentrating.
I think so, she said, trying not to think of his mother. She didn’t know how this worked, but she didn’t want him to see what she had seen without some sort of warning.
I saw Stiles last night, Wyatt told her. He said you and Sam got separated.
Did he? Does he know where Sam is?
A picture filled her mind, Sam, his face bruised, but alive and well. Relief rushed through her so quickly it surprised her. Wyatt reacted, too, missing a step in his steady tread. He didn’t stop, but the image suddenly disappeared.
Where is everyone? Dylan asked.
Wyatt dragged his fingers through his hair a second time before tucking his fingers back into his jeans. Left them at a ruin north of here. Stiles took Sam there, too.
And Davida?
She hasn’t caught up yet.
That wasn’t right. Dylan didn’t understand how Davida couldn’t have caught up with them yet. They had moved quickly, but not so quickly a person alone, without Ellie dragging them down, wouldn’t have caught up. If she had walked dawn to dusk, she should have caught up with them by now.
Dylan couldn’t shake the idea that something was wrong.
I’m sure she’s fine, Wyatt said.
Where are you?
Stiles told me you were just west of here. I’m on my way there.
How did Stiles...? She began to ask a question she knew Wyatt would not know the answer to, so she stopped. She simply told him, I’m not there anymore.
Wyatt stopped walking. He shook his head, that frustrated pinch that was becoming familiar on his lips. She wished she was physically there with him, wished she could smooth those wrinkles from his forehead, his cheeks. And then thoughts of Sam threatened to intrude.
“Wyatt,” she whispered.
What do you want me to do? he asked, giving her control for the first time.
Go back, she said. Stay with the others. I’ll find you.
She watched as he rolled his head, staring up into the sky as his movements ceased. Finally, he nodded and turned a little, the movement so graceful it made her feel as though she were watching something unique, something beautiful.
Will you tell me where you are?
I don’t know, she said, somewhat regretfully. She tried to send him an image, a snapshot of the lake, but she wasn’t sure it worked. She was trying so hard to keep a wall around her memories of Joanna that she was not sure how well she was communicating what she wanted. All of this was still too new.
Come to me again, he said as the edges of the vision began to disintegrate.
“I will,” Dylan said aloud as she opened her eyes.
That was one promise she was convinced she would be able to keep.
Chapter 22
Joanna was waiting quietly on the couch when Dylan walked back inside. She hesitated a moment, but only a moment. She settled on the couch beside Joanna and laid back, let exhaustion float through her.
“You should rest before we do this,” Joanna said. “Repair your shoulder.”
Dylan ran a hand over her shoulder, the one that had popped when Ichabod grabbed her under that tree. She had forgotten about it. The pain was like a distant memory, playing at the corners of her mind, but not really the focus. But when Joanna mentioned it, it suddenly began to ache.
“It’s not bad,” she said.
“You can heal yourself.”
It was a statement, not a question. Dylan felt like it was a test. She looked at Joanna for a second, and then she ran her hand over the shoulder and felt the pain dissipate. It was like sand falling through her fingers the way it sifted away. Just gone.
“You’ll eventually be able to do it instantly, the moment the injury takes place,” Joa
nna said.
Dylan remembered the scratches on her face from the tree. They had healed instantly, but they were small wounds. A dislocated shoulder was bigger.
“I don’t know about something like this—”
“That’s part of what I want to teach you.” Joanna stood and held out her hand to Dylan. “Come on, I’ll show you to your bedroom.”
“I can’t stay,” Dylan said.
Joanna studied her face for a moment. “You have so much you need to understand.”
“I have friends who are out there somewhere, wondering where I am.”
Joanna sat back down and took Dylan’s hands between her own. “Your friends have watched over themselves for this long. Surely they can survive a while longer.”
“That’s not the point.”
“You are something unique, Dylan,” Joanna said, studying her face with such an earnest expression that Dylan wanted to trust her. She wanted to believe that Joanna was there to help her. But she was so confused about the people she should have been able to trust and the people she thought she could, but now suspected she couldn’t. She wondered if she could really trust anyone.
Even an angel.
“People keep telling me what I can and cannot do,” Dylan said. “They all have their own agendas. I’m not even sure what it is I want to do, let alone what I should do.”
“It must be confusing,” Joanna agreed.
“You still haven’t really explained what happened the day Wyatt saw you die.”
Joanna let go of her hands and sat back on the couch. She stared at her own hands, as though the memory played out there. Dylan almost expected her to send the memory to her, to show her how that day went down. But she didn’t. And when Dylan tried to find it on her own, she couldn’t see anything.
Finally, Joanna let loose a long, slow sigh. “It was supposed to be Jimmy,” she said.
Only then did she let Dylan in.
Twelve years ago, the cities weren’t just ruins. Not yet. People still lived in them, though they had to stay inside as much as possible to keep the angels from finding them. They had learned how to shutter their minds, how to camouflage their hiding places so that the angels could not use their supernatural abilities to find them. Some of the humans were lucky enough to have gargoyles on their side, gargoyles who used a sort of cloaking capability to hide them. That was how so many humans had managed to stay alive even after Luc and Lily ravaged whole communities with their fireballs and their control over the last of the human military.
It was in one of these cities where Jimmy and his family lived. There was a whole group of people with them, people who looked to Jimmy and Joanna as leaders. They taught them how to stay safe, how to avoid the angels and how to call for help when they found themselves in a difficult situation. Taught them how to scavenge food. How to find water, cloth, material to make tools. They were helping people live.
It was late afternoon. Joanna and Jimmy had just come back from a field, where their community was cultivating vegetables. It was several miles from the city, far enough that they hoped the angels would assume it was just seedlings sprouting from seeds blown across the countryside from distant agricultural areas. They were both tired from the long walk, the day spent in the sun. But happy in each other’s company.
“I forgot I promised to stop by Sheila’s and check on her baby boy,” Joanna said as they passed a doorway that seemed to lead into the ground. “I should go.”
Jimmy grabbed her hand as she turned toward the doorway. “Don’t be gone long,” he said, kissing her gently. It was a tender kiss, one that reminded Dylan of Sam’s soft whisper of a kiss just a few nights before. “If you are, I’ll have to come looking for you,” he told her as he reluctantly let go of her hand and watched her walk away.
Joanna looked back once, but not the second and third time she had wanted to. She was afraid he would see the grief on her face, that it would tip him off to what she was planning. Instead, she focused on the ground in front of her, walking carefully down the stone steps into a dark world that seemed so alien to Dylan, even as she watched with the sense of familiarity that came with Joanna’s memory.
A gargoyle was waiting for her in the darkness. She didn’t even hesitate as she walked toward him.
“Be quick,” she said. “I don’t want them to find you here.”
“No problem,” he said in the rough, rusty voice that Dylan was beginning to associate with gargoyles.
And then he sliced her throat open with his axe before catching her and twisting her head, breaking her neck with a quick snap.
Joanna fell to the ground, her body as lifeless as Dylan had seen it in Wyatt’s memories. It wasn’t even a full minute later when the little boy came running into the tunnel. The gargoyle was still there, against the wall, hidden only by the darkness of the tunnel. He watched as seven-year-old Wyatt fell to his knees and attempted to cradle his mother’s head in his arms. A woman, a stranger to Dylan but someone the memory recognized as Susan, came next, calling to Wyatt. Others came when Susan screamed. None of them thought to move the child away. There was some debate as to whether Jimmy should be brought to the tunnel or if her body should be moved before he saw it.
The debate was without purpose, however. Jimmy arrived moments after his son.
It had hurt Dylan to see Wyatt’s memory of his mother’s death. His emotions had been raw and intense, even all these years later.
But to see Jimmy grieve...
Joanna broke off the memory as if she couldn’t handle seeing that part, either.
“I had a kid go to our dwelling and tell him I needed him the moment Jimmy arrived. I thought he would be the first to find me.” She shook her head a little, as though trying to dislodge the memory. “Johnny was with a friend who was supposed to be in the library that day. But her assignment changed while we were gone. I didn’t know…”
Joanna brushed tears from her cheeks. “I didn’t want it to go that way.”
“You couldn’t have thought that either of them would handle your death well.”
She shook her head. “I was trying to protect them.”
“You left your son with hurt and anger that have defined the way he looks at the world.”
Joanna’s tear-filled eyes focused on Dylan. “You saw his memory,” she said with some surprise.
Again, it wasn’t a question. Joanna stared at Dylan, but she got the feeling it wasn’t really Dylan she was seeing. Joanna reached over and touched her face lightly, a stroke, a passing touch. In that instant, Joanna somehow pulled up that vision and saw the moment from Wyatt’s point of view. Her beautiful face twisted into something dark as she turned from Dylan.
“Were you aware of him grieving you?” Dylan asked.
Joanna didn’t answer.
“You must have been,” Dylan said, as though she had answered. “You have it in your memories, so you must have been aware of everything. But I don’t understand. How could you survive what that gargoyle did to you?”
Joanna leaned forward, burying her face in her hands for a long second. She shuddered, her entire body vibrating with emotion. Dylan nearly reached over and touched her shoulder, almost offered some sort of consolation. But then Joanna sat up, and her face was as serene as if they had been talking about the weather.
“Angels can only be killed by a weapon wielded by another angel. The gargoyle can leave an angel wounded, but not dead, no matter what they do.”
“But your neck broke.”
“My neck was repaired the moment Jimmy lifted me up and returned it to the proper position. And the axe wound began to knit itself about the same time.”
“But he couldn’t tell you were still alive?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Yeah.” Dylan ran her hands over her thighs. “Everything about this world seems to be. It almost makes me miss Genero.”
Joanna surprised Dylan by laughing. “I can understand that.”
Dylan turned
on the couch, resting her back against the armrest and curling her feet underneath her. “Can I ask you something?”
Joanna waved her hand. “You can ask me anything.”
“What exactly does Lily want to do with me?”
“She wants to harvest you for parts.” Joanna lifted a sleeve of her blouse, revealing long, thin scars along her forearm. “The disease affects the skin, the joints, and some of the organs. I began showing symptoms about a year ago.”
Dylan touched her scars, unsure if that had been her intention in showing them to her, but curious about them. As she ran her finger along the raised edge of one, the edge began to settle down. To disappear. Dylan quickly pulled her finger away before Joanna noticed.
Had she really healed something Joanna’s body couldn’t heal on its own?
“What did you do about it?” Dylan asked in an attempt to keep Joanna distracted. Or maybe it was to distract herself.
“There was a girl, like you. She donated blood for our scientists to make a sort of vaccine with.” Joanna lifted her sleeve a little more, showing Dylan a long, thin mark on the inside of her elbow. “It was experimental, but it kept the illness from progressing much further.”
“You’re going to be okay?”
Joanna shrugged. “I guess we’ll see.”
“But it’s gone further than that with Lily.”
“Yes.” Joanna’s eyes narrowed slightly each time Dylan said Lily’s name. She pushed her hair out of her face, her eyes moving around the room as she considered what she was going to say. “She will have to return to Heaven soon.”
“If she goes to heaven—”
“The illness can be eradicated.”
Dylan frowned. “Could she return?”
Joanna shook her head. “Unlikely. Once she goes back, I’m sure the Father will have a few words for her.”
Dylan ran the fingers of both hands through the tangles of her pale hair. “But if she were to get me back somehow, she would survive?”
FREED (Angels and Gargoyles Book 2) Page 10
