DARK SOULS (Angels and Demons Book 2)

by Brenda L. Harper

  Dylan slipped right through the wall, not bothering to hide anything about her nature as she approached the child.

  “Let her go.”

  The child giggled; it was a high-pitched giggle that was so much like the sound a child makes when she’s happily playing. But then the girl looked up at Dylan and Stiles—and even from several yards away—they could see the menace in her eyes.

  “We will make you hurt. We will take everything that matters to you.”

  The voice was sweet, but the words were filled with more hatred than a child could possibly be capable of.

  “Let her go,” Dylan repeated.

  The child held up a hand, a calm, ordinary gesture that seemed so benign. But Dylan suddenly fell to her knees, her hands clawing at her throat. The aura around the child darkened, and its eyes turned a burning orange, like the flames of a fire burning there in her tiny, perfectly formed eye sockets. Stiles had never seen anything quite like it.

  He burst out into the street in his ethereal form and wrapped himself around Dylan. Whatever it was that the dark soul was doing, it tore at his form; it tore at the very basics of his soul. It was pain like nothing he had ever felt before, pain that became everything…all he could think of and all he could feel. He almost forgot why he was there, why he was allowing himself to feel this pain. The pain was so intense that he almost forgot Dylan.

  And it wasn’t just pain. There were these dark emotions: an overwhelming anger, resentment, frustration, and fear. It was so overwhelming. It infiltrated his thoughts. An image of Harry caused him to become unspeakably resentful of the anger Harry had shown him when they were first reunited, and then again when Rebecca died. Thoughts of Rebecca made him unreasonably angry with her for choosing to die—for leaving him. He wanted to find her, to shake her, to tear her limb from limb for hurting him…

  Stiles…

  It was weak, the sound of her voice in his head. He almost didn’t hear it—didn’t focus on it. But it was so familiar.

  Dylan?

  Let it go.

  But he couldn’t. That anger…it felt so real. He could see himself ripping at Rebecca. He could see the look on her face as she lay dying in his arms. He could see that look turn into something like fear or confusion. And that brought him more satisfaction than it should have. He could actually feel his hands around her neck. He could see her eyes swell in her sockets and could see her struggling for breath. It felt good. How long had it been since he’d felt that good?

  Stiles…please…

  He was vaguely aware of hands on him—vaguely aware of being moved. He didn’t understand it. Nothing could move him in his ethereal form. Wasn’t he…? But he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure what was happening, wasn’t sure where he was or what he was.

  What was happening to him?

  Rebecca. He could still see her and could still feel his hands around her throat. But something was different. It no longer felt good.

  “Please, Stiles,” she said. “Please, don’t do this.”

  His hands started to relax, but then a wave of anger burst through him.

  “You left me. You decided on your own that you didn’t want to live anymore.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “But you did. You promised me a lifetime. You could have lived another twenty years.”

  She didn’t speak again. But a bright light filled the room—a bright light that made the features of Rebecca’s face shift and change. First, she looked younger. She looked like the beautiful young girl he’d first seen when he walked into Jack James’ underground community…Survivorville. The anger built inside of him again as he thought of them—of the man who’d taken his place when he was forced to leave, of the gargoyle who’d taken from him his last few days with Rebecca. Wilhelm’s pale face filled his mind. His hands tightened into fists. Just one punch. If he could land just one punch.

  Stiles…

  That light returned; a soothing, healing light that took away pieces of the anger. He could almost see it—see the anger breaking up like pieces of a puzzle. He wanted to hold on to it and feel the pleasure that came with acting on all that repressed emotion. He wanted to hurt someone so that they might feel what it was he was feeling.

  But it became like so much dust on the wind. It moved through his fingers until slowly—too slowly—he regained control over his thoughts and his emotions. He came back to himself and became aware of the world around him. He was lying on a hard floor and something sharp was poking into his back. There were hands on his chest, his shoulders, and his ankles. They were holding him down.

  He opened his eyes and Dylan, with tears in her eyes and bruises on her throat, was leaning over him, her thumbs stroking his temples as her fingers dug into his skull.

  “Hey,” he grunted, trying to reach up to touch her, but hands continued to hold him down.

  “It’s okay,” Dylan said, her voice hoarse, “he’s back.”

  Whoever was holding him didn’t seem convinced. But Dylan let him go. Sitting back on her haunches, she gestured to those around him. After some hesitation, the hands let go. Stiles sat up, his sore body automatically healing bruises and muscle strain. He felt like he’d been in a fight.

  “What happened?”

  “You tried to kill her,” a voice behind him growled.

  Stiles glanced back and regarded one of three gargoyles sitting at full alert around him.

  “I wouldn’t…” he began to argue, but a flash of memory came back to him. He flexed his hands—he could still feel her throat, the way it fit perfectly in the curve of his hands. And the bruises on Dylan’s throat…

  “Did I?”

  Dylan touched her own throat and the bruises disappeared as though they’d never been there. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

  “But I did that.”

  She inclined her head slightly. “The dark soul, it did something to you.”

  Stiles stood up and the gargoyles instantly surrounded him. But, again, Dylan gestured for them to step back. He burst through the door and walked out onto the asphalt of the ruined street, confused by the darkness that surrounded him. It had been barely midmorning when he and Dylan had arrived in this place.

  So much time had passed and he couldn’t remember any of it.

  “What did I do?”

  “It wasn’t you. It was the darkness in those demons.”

  Stiles glanced at Dylan, at the tears in her clothing, and at the weariness in her eyes. He didn’t have to see bruises to know he’d done something horrifying to her.

  “What did I do?”

  She her eyes fell to the ground. “You thought I was someone else. You were confused, consumed by whatever it was that thing did to you. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “But I hurt you.”

  “We fought. But I knew it wasn’t your fault.”

  Stiles lifted a hand to touch her, but the moment he caught sight of it, the moment he realized it was his hands that had done violent things to her, he turned away. He slammed his fist into the broken asphalt, shattering every bone from his fingers to his elbow.

  He’d hurt the one person he was sworn to protect. He couldn’t let that happen again.

  He burst away, disappearing. He pulled up his mental walls and went as far from her as he could get.

  Chapter 11

  “We have to do something about this.”

  Demetria shrugged. “I don’t know what. We don’t even know what all they’re capable of. How are we supposed to figure out how to block this one thing?”

  Dylan turned on her heel, burning a path in the carpet of Demetria’s conference room as she paced. She couldn’t stop thinking about Stiles. When the demon left the little girl’s body, he’d slipped into his human form and attacked her. The feel of his hands around her throat—the need for air and the fear of hurting him all wrapped up together—it was a feeling she would not soon forget.

  It could have been her. It should have been her. If he hadn�
�t wrapped himself around her, if he hadn’t moved in to protect her, it would have been her. And now he was out there, alone, hurting because of something that was not his fault.

  She had to do something.

  “We have to find a way to shut them down. There’s got to be something we can do.”

  “I know you’re upset,” Demetria said, stepping into her path, blocking her from moving forward. “But I have all my best people working on this. If there’s an answer, they’ll find it.”

  “They’re not working quickly enough.”

  Demetria touched the side of Dylan’s face, a touch filled with more affection that Demetria had ever shown her before. Dylan focused on her, more out of shock than anything else.

  “Stiles will be okay. He’s been through worse than this.”

  “I know. I just…I can’t do this without him.”

  Demetria smiled softly. “You can do so much more than anyone knows, even you. You just have to have faith in yourself.”

  “I need to know how to stop these things. I need to know what they’re capable of so that we aren’t blindsided by something like this again.”

  “Wilhelm is trying to figure that out right now.”

  “He’s with them? The ones we captured?”

  “Yes. He thought that if he could study them—”

  “I want to go there.”

  Demetria cocked her head, clearly surprised by the request. “I don’t think—”

  “I want to go there. I want to talk to them, I want to understand them.”

  “Dylan, you are the strongest weapon we have against these things. If you go there and get hurt…”

  “I won’t get hurt. Wilhelm will be there to protect me.”

  “Are you sure you trust Wilhelm? The way Stiles feels about him, he won’t be pleased with that idea.”

  “I know. But Stiles isn’t here.”

  Demetria studied her for a long minute, clearly not sold. But Dylan was determined. When they were fighting the angels, she was too often left out in the dark and not given the information she needed to make the right decisions. She wasn’t about to allow that to happen again.

  Demetria crossed the room and opened the door.

  “Leone, take Dylan to Wilhelm.”

  ***

  The room reminded Dylan of the place she and Sam had been imprisoned under the city of Viti too many years ago to recount. It was dark, the ground was hard, packed dirt, with only a long line of small cells—what she had once thought were boxes with metal bars, until Wyatt explained it all to her—along the back wall. Wilhelm was sitting in a chair in front of one of the cells when Dylan walked in, writing on a pad of paper as he observed the three men pacing in their cells.

  “Why are you here?” he asked without looking up.

  “I want to learn as much about these things as I can.”

  “Do you really think you can learn about them faster than I can?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you except what Stiles has told me.”

  That forced Wilhelm to look up. “And what has he told you?”

  “You stole Nephilim from the human camps and delivered them to Luc to be used as slaves.”

  “That’s a simplification of what I was doing.”

  “Is it? Because it sounds to me like you turned on humanity to benefit the angels.”

  “I thought I was weeding out a parasite among the humans. I didn’t know that most of them had already been infected.”

  “Infected? Is that what you call it?”

  Wilhelm set down his paper and turned in his chair to fully face her. “This was sixty years ago. I didn’t know everything I know now.”

  “But you were supposed to be protecting humanity from the angels. How could you turn them over, any of them?”

  “Because we were told that there would be a Nephilim that would rise up and destroy humanity. And it was our job to protect the human race.”

  “Who told you?”

  Wilhelm shook his head. “It was a long time ago. I don’t believe it anymore, obviously.”

  “But who told you?”

  Wilhelm’s expression changed as he studied her. “Why does it matter?”

  “Because…another gargoyle said something like that to me. He tried to kill me before I even knew what I was. He said I was different and that my very existence was harmful to humanity.”

  Wilhelm’s eyes narrowed. “What happened to that gargoyle?”

  Dylan shook her head. “Wyatt and Stiles…they were protecting me.”

  Wilhelm rushed her, shoved his fist—which was now the swollen, stone-like fist of a gargoyle—into the center of her chest and drove her back against the wall.

  “That was my brother.”

  “Why did he think I was a danger to humanity?”

  “Because God told us. He said a female child would be born who would choose the destruction of all humanity.”

  She wrapped her hands around his massive one.

  “It wasn’t God.”

  Confusion darkened Wilhelm’s eyes. “He came to us in our dreams. He said we had to destroy the Nephilim—that they would bring into the world this girl…”

  “It wasn’t God.”

  She stroked his fist and watched as it slowly returned to its human softness.

  “They manipulated us. Stiles was right all along.”

  “He tends to be.”

  Wilhelm turned away, dragging his fingers through his hair as he paced the length of the room. “My brother died for nothing. For a lie.”

  “You thought you were doing the right thing.”

  “But I wasn’t. I broke my vow.”

  One of the men, trapped in the cells, started to laugh.

  “Shut up,” Wilhelm said. The torture in his voice was heartbreaking.

  Dylan approached the cell that held the laughing man, drawn to something about the laugh. There was something behind it—pain—that made her wonder if it was the man or the demon inside of him that was laughing with such glee.

  “You’re Nephilim,” she said softly to the demon. “You were hurt by the angels.”

  “What do you know about it?” the man asked.

  “What did they do to you?”

  The man stepped closer to the cell door, sticking his hands through the slats between the bars. “Take my hands and I’ll show you.”

  “Dylan…” Wilhelm said, warning clear in his voice.

  But she wanted to know. She wanted to help this tortured soul.

  She took his hands and her mind was instantly filled with images that made her heart ache with a deep, soul-ripping sadness. A girl was living alone with her father, fighting to stay alive in the middle of the war. The angels came and they took her mother and her brother. And then they kept coming, taking their resources, their food and water—taking everything. Finally, they came for her. They took her to Genero, implanted a child in her belly, and forced her to endure pregnancy after pregnancy until her body couldn’t take it anymore. Then they put her in a dark room and just waited for her to die.

  She created children she never got to hold, babies she never saw. She fought for life only to be used as a human incubator.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Tears ran down Dylan’s face, dripping over her chin and onto the dark skin of the man whose body this angry soul—Hailey—possessed.

  “You don’t know what sorry is,” Hailey told her. “But you’ll find out.”

  “You don’t have to be angry anymore,” Dylan said. “Your babies, they’re grown now, they probably have families of their own. You have a legacy that you’ve left behind because of those children.”

  “They were abominations, like you.”

  “They were. But they aren’t now. Things have changed.”

  The man shook his head, but Dylan could feel confusion in the demon—in Hailey. She touched the man’s face, but her hand didn’t stay on the surface of his skin. Her hand moved inside of him and cares
sed the darkness of Hailey’s soul. And as she touched it, the darkness began to recede.

  “What are you doing?” Wilhelm asked, wonder in his voice.

  Dylan ignored him. She touched the soul and caressed what might have been its face if it were a human form. And she could see the emergence of a girl’s face, a young girl with blond hair not unlike Dylan’s. She was pretty, with green eyes that were like grass in the spring. There were tears in those eyes and a smile on her thin, pink lips.

  “You had a difficult life, but there’s no reason to hang on to all that anger now. You can move on, you can have all the happiness you missed out on in life.”

  “He says we can’t,” she said softly, her voice now coming through—a soft, wispy sound that reminded Dylan of Josephine when she was a teenager. “He says we can’t move on, that we’re stuck here forever because of something an angel did.”

  “It’s not true. You just have to let go of all that anger.”

  Dylan stepped back and let go of the man’s hand, and Hailey came with her. Her soul, now a smoky version of a beautiful girl, stood in front of Dylan. The darkness faded from her like dirt being washed away in the shower. Her smile widened.

  “I can feel it,” she whispered.

  And then she began to drift up toward the ceiling. Dylan watched, aware that Wilhelm had moved up behind her and was also watching with wonder. In seconds, she was gone. Dylan closed her eyes and felt her leave this realm—felt her slide through the gates of heaven.

  “How did you do that?”

  Dylan shook her head, even as one of the other men stuck in the cells began to yell as he slammed his head repeatedly against the bars.

  “Jack will get you for that. Jack will come for you. Jack won’t let you get away with that.”

  He repeated himself over and over again until it was all Dylan could hear.

  Chapter 12

  There were rooms in the building that housed the jail cells, rooms that were dirty and dusty with furniture either rotted through or destroyed by passing Outlanders, but still structurally sound. Dylan cleaned one the best she could, setting a sleeping bag borrowed from Demetria in one corner and a chair and a small desk dragged from another room set in another corner. She lay on the sleeping bag now, trying to focus her thoughts on anything but what was happening downstairs—and Stiles.