But it couldn’t last long. There was too much they had to do.
Chapter 26
It hurt Dylan to look at Sam.
Wyatt guided her through the woods to the camp, his hand on the small of her back. Everyone stared as they moved into the little clearing where they had built their fire and laid out their pallets. Ellie jumped to her feet, her mouth open but no sound emerging. Carver and Bobby seemed only partially interested, as though girls simply appeared out of the woods every day.
Sam was lying on his back, staring up at the sky. He didn’t seem to realize what was going on around him, so Dylan could study the bruises that had formed along his jaw, on his cheeks, and around his nose. One eye was swollen completely shut. The other was open, but only enough to see the redness underneath.
It physically hurt to see.
“Welcome back,” Carver said with a crooked smile.
Bobby wiggled his fingers and smiled.
Sam rolled his head on the soft blanket he had balled up to use as a pillow. He stared for a long minute before a slow smile spread across his swollen lips. “Hey,” he muttered.
Dylan went to him, dropping on her knees beside him before she slowly ran her hands over his face. The bruises disappeared as she touched him, as though her fingers sucked up the color and the fluids that so distorted his handsome face. He closed his eye as she touched the bruises there, the redness disappearing like it had never been there.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Hey, don’t be.” He sat up, wincing at something Dylan had yet to find and repair. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Who did this?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Dylan tilted her head a little, a frown touching her lips. “Was it gargoyles?”
He shook his head again. “I really don’t remember,” he said, touching the side of his head. “The last thing I remember is saying goodnight.” A hint of a blush touched his cheeks as he studied her eyes for a long minute. “And then I was lying in a clearing.”
“You weren’t in that field?”
“No. Whoever it was must have moved me.”
“And then Stiles found him,” Wyatt, who had come up behind them, said.
Dylan glanced back at him. “Did Stiles say anything?”
“No. Just told me you were safe.”
Dylan’s frown deepened. How did Stiles know anything about what had happened to her that night, let alone that she was safe? He hadn’t been anywhere near them when Ichabod came for her. How did he know she hadn’t been taken by someone else, someone a little more threatening?
“When was the last time you saw Stiles?” Dylan asked.
Sam didn’t answer. Wyatt simply shrugged.
Dylan touched Sam’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and focused her healing gift on his entire body, in a hurry and not really interested in exploring him for more injuries at the moment. At least, not while Wyatt was watching. Then she pulled herself to her feet again.
“We need to talk,” she said to Wyatt.
“Whatever you have to say, you should probably say to everyone,” Ellie announced.
Dylan looked at her, unable to help her surprise at Ellie’s assertiveness. Ellie was a lot of things—a history buff, a clingy dependent, a boyfriend thief—but she was not assertive. Without Sam and Wyatt, Ellie wouldn’t even be there. Without their patience, their knowledge, their willingness to help her out, she would never have made it outside of Genero.
And she had the gall to stick up to Dylan.
“I’m not sure you want to hear what I have to say,” Dylan said.
“I think I have a right to know.”
Dylan opened her mouth to argue when Wyatt slid his hand over her shoulder. “She’s right, Dylan,” he said. “I think we all have a right to know what’s going on.”
“We don’t even know where you’ve been,” Carver said without looking up from a book he seemed deeply interested in.
Distrust swirled around Dylan so palpably that she could almost feel it. Only Bobby and Sam seemed to be on her side. And Bobby only because he rarely spoke and always had that cocky smile on his lips.
Dylan held her hands up to show she didn’t have anything to hide. “Fine,” she agreed. “What do you want to know?”
“Where were you all this time?” Ellie asked immediately. “And why did you leave Sam behind?”
It was a question, but it sure felt like an accusation to Dylan. She turned slightly and saw the same question in Wyatt’s eyes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she saw the same thing in Sam’s eyes.
Sam, too.
It was only fair, she supposed. She had questioned her faith in them. It was only fair that they question her.
“There was an angel,” she said. “He came to our camp in the middle of the night and took me away. Said that there were gargoyles coming and he needed to take me to safety.”
“But you let him leave Sam behind?” Ellie asked.
“I didn’t have much choice.” Dylan turned to Sam. “I never would have left you alone if I had an option.”
“I know,” he said with a slight nod.
“He grabbed me before I was even fully awake. If I had realized—”
“It’s okay,” Sam said, moving to her side. “I get it.”
Dylan studied his face, looking for some sign that he was lying. She didn’t see anything. He seemed genuinely understanding, but there was something off about him. Dylan started to touch him, to just lay her hand on his arm, but stopped. She wasn’t sure why.
“Where did he take you?” Carver asked.
“Who?” Dylan responded, lost for a second.
“The angel.”
She stared at Sam for a minute longer before turning away. “To another angel,” she said. “Eventually, anyway.”
“Why?” Wyatt asked.
Dylan moved from the center of the campsite. She wanted to be able to look at them all instead of turning in circles to face each person as they spoke. She leaned back against a tree, her gaze moving slowly from face to face. Carver had put down his book and was watching her closely. Bobby was smiling, as always. Ellie stood where she had been from the moment Dylan walked into the camp, her arms crossed over her chest and her legs spread apart, as though ready to defend herself. Sam’s stance mirrored hers almost perfectly, but his shoulders were slumped, his hips rolled back slightly, his position less tense than hers.
And Wyatt.
He was watching her, his expression as unreadable as ever. But, somehow, she didn’t feel the same hostility rolling off of him as she had encountered before. He was listening.
It was a start.
“Just like the gargoyles, the angels want to use me against Luc and Lily.”
“Why?” Ellie asked.
A thought flashed through her mind, one that was not really her own. Horrible things, things she had seen when she touched Joanna as they flew in their ethereal form. She shuddered, unable to even begin to figure out how to put it all in words. So, she buried it in a nonchalant, nonthreatening statement.
“I don’t know. The same reason, I suppose.”
“Is that what they said?” Carver asked.
“Not exactly.” Dylan couldn’t help but look over at Wyatt. Her secret weighed heavily on her mind. There was so much she needed to tell him, but she didn’t even know how to begin. And she couldn’t stand the way he was looking at her. She had finally won his trust, somehow. And now she was betraying him every moment she refused to tell him the truth.
She pushed away from the tree and began to pace a little. “Look,” she finally said, her back to her friends, “this is about me, about something they all want from me. I don’t expect any of you to get involved. In fact,” she looked particularly at Ellie, but her gaze moved over all of them, “I don’t want you involved.”
“Dylan—”
It was Sam who was the first to object, but Wyatt stepped forward, too. She shook her head, h
eading off any discussion.
“I need to find Davida,” she said, her voice shaking a little when she said her guardian’s name. “But I don’t expect any of you to come with me.”
“You can’t go alone,” Wyatt said.
“But you can’t come with me. What if the same thing that happened to Sam happens to you?” She gestured at Sam, indicating his face that was now free from bruises, as handsome as it had been before whatever, or whoever, had attacked him. “I can’t risk that.”
“And what if they find you again? And this time they don’t want to just talk?”
Dylan ran her fingers through her hair, that old nervous habit coming back even when she tried so hard to break it. “They won’t hurt me. They need me.”
Wyatt refused to believe that. He moved toward her, held his hands up as though he wanted to touch her, but he didn’t. Instead, he stood a few feet in front of her and studied her face, as though trying to read her thoughts. That’s exactly what it felt like, as though he were probing at her with his thoughts. It caused images she didn’t ask for to dance in her mind.
Her rushing toward him after her killed a wild pig.
Confusion on her face, then the beauty of understanding blooming as he explained some concept that had been foreign to her.
Her voice in his head, bursting into his thoughts as they were growing into a panic.
Her body in his arms as they hid behind a wall of boxes.
He was thinking of her. And with those visions came emotions that were so scattered across the scale that she couldn’t decide if he cared for her or not. He wanted to, she could feel that. But his father’s voice was always at the back of his mind, warning him that girls from Genero were different. “Especially this one,” she heard Jimmy’s voice whispering. “She’s dangerous, Jonathon. She might be the only thing that can save humanity, but she is also one of them. Don’t trust her.”
He had never gone against his father before.
She wasn’t about to let him do it now.
Chapter 27
Dylan hadn’t had a proper bath since her short stay in Viti. There had been pots of warm water in the resistance camp, but that never really seemed to get the worst of the dirt. Especially in those places that weren’t uncovered when others were around.
There was a stream not far from where Wyatt had chosen to hide their friends. Dylan wandered down to it while the others prepared a small meal. There hadn’t been a lot to talk about after Dylan announced her intentions to go find Davida on her own. Ellie had been on Dylan’s side for once, telling everyone she thought it would be best if they all stayed as far from her as possible. Carver had agreed, though his vote seemed to waver a little under Wyatt and Sam’s arguments. And argue they had, pounding their opinions against her will until she finally bent and agreed to allow one of them to travel with her. She had until morning to decide which it would be.
But she planned to be long gone by then.
She undressed and waded into the water. The stream was not very deep, less than the length of her calf. But when she sat on the slimy rocks that made up the streambed, the water came up to her waist. She leaned back and sighed. This had to be what it was like to be in paradise. The water ran over her with a steady pull that seemed to knead every knot that hid in the muscles of her arms, her back, her hips.
When had she last felt this good?
She tried not to think. She wanted to just enjoy sensation. The water on her skin, the rocks on her back. The little fish nibbling at her toes. But without something to focus on, her mind refused to forget.
The things she had seen in Joanna’s mind as they flew over the earth frightened her more than anything else she had seen since leaving Genero. It was one thing to know what Lily wanted to do to her, to know the gargoyles planned to destroy her after they used her. It was another to see exactly how someone wanted her to use her gifts.
She refused to do it. She would not be the weapon that would destroy all her friends, all her enemies, all of this world. It didn’t matter how far from goodness they had all fallen. She could not be a part of the annihilation of so many. How was that better than what Luc and Lily wanted?
Dylan shook her head, her hair floating like seaweed in the water.
She needed Davida.
Davida would tell her what to do. She would know the answer. She would be able to help Dylan find a better way to save the humans and the hybrids, a way to make it possible for them all to live happily on this earth without having to destroy anything.
It was the only answer.
She closed her eyes and focused on Davida’s face. She felt herself floating in the water, felt a breeze move lazily over her bare belly. But nothing else happened. She was not taken to Davida, didn’t fly over her as she seemed to do with Wyatt. When she thought of Davida, nothing but her face, a memory of her face, floated in Dylan’s mind.
What did it mean?
When she thought Davida was dead, she saw her in her dreams. When she thought Davida had abandoned her, she heard her voice in her mind. Davida would not abandon her.
Not by choice.
Dylan opened her eyes and stared up into the sun. She didn’t want to entertain the one thought that echoed through her mind.
What if Davida had not survived the Redcoat attack?
Tears blurred her vision even as a whisper spoke inside her mind:
We need to talk.
Stiles.
Chapter 28
Dylan took her time crawling out of the stream. She stopped to use a small bar of soap Sam had given her, scrubbing her hair twice to make sure she had gotten on the dirt and mud out of it. She scrubbed her toes, too, even though she usually resisted that thorough of a cleaning.
Made him wait while she stewed in her irritation.
She dressed, forming the words in her mind she wanted to say to him.
Like, how did you know I had been taken?
Like, are you working with the angels?
Like, how could you allow Sam to get beaten up so badly?
But then she followed the stream to the pine tree he had showed her when he asked for her company, and all those thoughts died away as quickly as they had been born.
He was sick.
“Stiles?” She dropped to her knees beside him. He was curled into a ball at the base of a tree, his legs pulled tight against his chest as he shivered despite the heat of the evening sun. She touched his shoulder and pulled back just as quickly, the heat radiating off of him almost hotter than the intensity of a campfire.
He moaned, not even strong enough to speak with the power of his mind. All she could hear were more moans, as though it was the only sound he knew to make. She climbed over him, took his face between her hands. He opened his eyes, those beautiful gray eyes, but they were out of focus.
He was dying.
There were lesions on his arms, long, thin wounds that looked almost like knife marks. There was no blood, just a foul-smelling green fluid that was sticky to the touch. She began to touch them, but Stiles grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away.
“Don’t,” he whispered. “You can’t—”
His words were lost as he began to cough. Blood splattered in tiny, perfect dots over his hand and along the front of his white t-shirt.
“Let me help you,” Dylan said, leaning close to him as she again reached for him. He tried to pull away again, but he was too weak to do much but roll his head back against one shoulder.
“Coming,” he muttered.
“Shh,” Dylan said, running a fingertip along the bottom curve of his lip.
He tried to pull away again, but, again, he was too weak. The movement just caused him to cough again.
She didn’t know what to do. There seemed to be so much going on inside of him. The fever, the bloody cough, the lesions. She wasn’t sure where to begin. There was blood and green ooze everywhere, on his clothes, his skin, on her hands. She had to help him.
Dylan pressed both of her
hands to his chest. “No,” he cried, his voice stronger for that brief second, but was lost a second later in another cough. She closed her eyes and thought of all the people, all the wounds, she had healed since she figured out she could do it. She thought of the pain that disappeared from her body when she repaired her burned skin those first few nights out in the desert, when she fixed the damage to her shoulder after her arrest in Viti. She thought about Wyatt and the way his touch broke apart and destroyed the pain that sometimes settled in her head. And then she thought of Donna, the way her touch had healed Denise’s hand that day in D dorm, that day Dylan watched her march away and realized that Genero was not as much about love as it was power. She just hadn’t had a name for it then.
She could feel a tingle build in her hands. It was warm, like she had pressed her hands to the metal prep table as Anita was kneading a ball of bread dough with her strong, always tender hands. And then that sense of floating that had filled her as she moved into her ethereal form for the first time seemed to wash through her body, leaving her a little unsteady as it passed. When she opened her eyes, her hands were glowing a soft gold, the light moving from her body to his.
When the light dimmed and she pulled away, Stiles was just as pale as he had ever been. But his eyes were bright once more, and the lesions on his arms were gone. Not just healed, but completely gone. He sat up and ran his hands over his body as though he could not believe what was perfectly obvious.
He was healed.
“Dylan,” he whispered, his hands sliding over his arms, his chest. He said nothing more, just her name. But his eyes were wide with surprise. And wonder.
“You’re going to be okay,” she said, stroking his cheek lightly with the side of her hand. “Well enough to lie to me another day, anyway.”
FREED (Angels and Gargoyles Book 2) Page 12
