DARK SOULS (Angels and Demons Book 2)

by Brenda L. Harper

  The man Hailey had occupied woke after several hours of sleep, unaware of anything that had happened to him in the last two days. Otherwise, he seemed to be perfectly healthy, undamaged by his possession. Wilhelm had Leone take him back to his people and watch over him to be sure another demon didn’t chose to inhabit his body—for whatever reason they chose their hosts. The other man, the one who’d begun to yell so unceremoniously, wouldn’t stop. Wilhelm finally delivered a blow to his temple to make him go to sleep. Neither of them could stand the sound of his words any longer.

  She tried to draw out the demon inside the third man, but he sat in a corner of his cell and wouldn’t respond to her voice. It was almost as if his demon was dormant, but it was still in control of the man.

  “They can go to heaven,” Wilhelm announced hours later, as though it had taken him that long to process everything.

  “But they won’t because they’re hanging on to all this anger.”

  He leaned forward in his chair and studied the sleeping man. “Where does the anger come from?”

  “Their lives, I suppose.”

  “But why? Who lives a life that full of anger?”

  Dylan looked at him and shrugged. She was just as confused as he was.

  She still was. She lay on her sleeping bag, wondering what caused them to remain so angry, to remain here all these years, and to become what they were. When she touched Hailey, she could feel the intensity of her anger. But she could also feel other things.She could feel memories that were less warped, less touched by the overwhelming darkness that seemed to be the driving force behind her anger. There was something of Hailey’s humanity that was still left inside of her.

  Was that the difference? Was that what allowed her to pass heaven’s gates?

  What if the others didn’t have any of their humanity intact?

  She had hoped this was a way in which they could end this war with the demons, but it was too complicated. The demons had to be willing to talk to her. They had to be willing to let her help them move past their anger. She didn’t think the rest of them would want to sit around and be analyzed by her.

  But this had to be a good sign. Maybe they could use it in some other way.

  She closed her eyes. Stiles was immediately there. Not him, but her memories of him. She didn’t want to remember him the way he had been after the demon did whatever it was it had done to him. The hatred in his eyes. The power in his touch. It made her shudder each time the memory of it washed over her.

  But that wasn’t Stiles.

  The things she didn’t want to think about were the only things she could think about.

  She rolled onto her side and tried to focus on Wyatt. She hadn’t seen him in days, not since he went back to the capital and she left to fight these demons. But she couldn’t focus on him enough to feel him. She thought of Josephine and Matthew and of the baby they were expecting. She worried that she should be with her, telling her things that only a mother can tell her daughter in a time like this. But a part of her knew that Josephine wouldn’t want that.

  Not for the first time, she felt like she was no longer a part of her own family. They had their own lives now, living so far from the city where they made their home. Even Wyatt. And the council’s determination to forget about the angels—to get rid of the angels and gargoyles who were working so hard to protect them—only seemed to emphasize the rift between them.

  But Dylan didn’t know who she was without Wyatt.

  She closed her eyes, blocking the tears that wanted to spill down her cheeks. She was an angel—at least, that’s what they all told her—but she felt like a human. Her heart was breaking as any human’s would.

  You need to keep fighting.

  Dylan sat up. The voice was unfamiliar.

  “Who are you?”

  A friend. You need to keep fighting. You need to learn more about your abilities, more about the things you can do. You can save humanity.

  Dylan shook her head, tears spilling over her cheeks. “I don’t think I can.”

  You have to believe in yourself.

  “How am I supposed to do that? Everything I’ve done, everything we’ve fought for, it’s unraveling. The humans don’t want us around anymore. My family…how am I supposed to help people who don’t want my help?”

  They don’t know what’s best for them. They don’t know who you are, what you are capable of. But they need you.

  Dylan wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. “And then? After this danger has passed, what happens then?”

  Your fate awaits you. You simply have to embrace it.

  “How do I do that?”

  But the voice—whatever or whoever it was—was gone.

  It was all so much easier said than done. She lay back down on the sleeping bag, her thoughts again going to Stiles. If he were here, maybe she would know where to start. But how does one understand their own gifts without a mentor to tell them what is possible and what isn’t? After all this time, after she had come to a point when she thought all this had passed her by. Stiles tried to tell her before—back when they were still fighting the angels—that she had to understand all of her abilities. But now that she was finally ready to do just that, he’d disappeared.

  It was just like Stiles.

  ***

  She spent a few hours with Wilhelm and the other two demons the next morning. Neither of them would speak to her. They sat in the back corner of their cells and stared down at the ground, almost comatose, as though waiting for something. It made her nervous, sitting on her hands, so to speak. She felt like something was coming, she just wasn’t sure what.

  She went for a walk midmorning. The building where they were staying was surrounded by tall oak trees. Again, it reminded her of the area around Viti. They’d run through the woods after they’d escaped Luc’s prison. Dylan was barefoot in a dress she would never have chosen for herself. Sam was on one side of her and Wyatt on the other. If she had known then what waited in her future, she wondered if she would have kept running, or if she would have surrendered to Luc’s redcoats.

  She paused under the canopy of a tall tree and held her hands out. A vine began to grow from the bottom of the tree up over the bark, dancing along like a shadow that suddenly had substance. She’d discovered this gift when she and Wyatt first moved into their house, when a rose bush the city builders had planted in their front yard had died. She remembered how Wyatt had laughed when he saw what she’d done.

  He probably wouldn’t laugh now.

  She turned to another, larger tree that was dying from lack of sunlight. She held her hands toward it and the dead branches suddenly sprang to life. The tree rose high, soaring above the other trees that were blocking it from receiving life-giving nourishment from the sun.

  She walked around, touching trees, bushes, and dying flowers and giving them new life. It was like healing humans, only more basic. More natural. But that was a power she was aware she had. The voice had told her to find abilities she was unaware of.

  She closed her eyes and thought about the demons. She thought about the girl she’d healed the day before, Hailey. The way it had felt as she held that man’s hands, as she’d learned Hailey’s story. There was something there, something that had helped Hailey see past the craziness that being trapped had created. But she didn’t know what it was, or how to access it.

  She opened her eyes and began to walk again. She held her hands out, palms up, and created a fireball on the tips of her fingers. She nearly laughed when she saw it. She’d dodged a few of these during the war, but had never made one herself. Wyatt had taught her to fight with a sword. She rolled it over her hand, amused that it didn’t hurt. Though she was quite sure it would burn these woods down without a problem.

  She flicked her wrist and the fireball disappeared.

  These were all tricks she’d seen the angels do during the war. Fireballs, healing, and listening to people’s thoughts. There was nothing new about any of th
is. She pushed the angels back to heaven during the Battle of Genero, but Wyatt had joined his ethereal form to hers. It was the added power of his abilities that made that possible. She’d done the same thing to the demons, but that had left her too exhausted for it to be a reliable battle plan. Besides, all it did was force them out of their human hosts. It didn’t do anything to stop them.

  Every time they seemed to have an answer, it proved itself to be useless.

  She stepped out into a clearing and drew her angel wings out. She hadn’t done it in a very long time, too long to even remember when the last time was. Before Josephine. Before her choice. Before humanity became what it was now. She stretched them out, the feel of them moving felt like working a crick out of her neck, like working a muscle that hadn’t been worked in too long. It felt good.

  She soared into the air and moved around the area, just stretching them out. She’d forgotten how good this felt, too. She moved past a few birds and over a couple of human settlements. There were still too many Outlanders. Josephine really needed to do something to draw the people together. They’d be safer that way. She could feel their emotions. Except for a few concerns over struggling crops, they seemed fine.

  She heard voices in her head as she flew. She assumed it was the humans she was flying over, but the voices grew more intense as she flew away from the human settlements. She didn’t understand what they were saying because they were talking over each other, as though she was in a crowded room full of hundreds of people, all trying to tell her something at once. It felt urgent, these voices. She went back and settled in the clearing. The voices dimmed, but didn’t disappear completely. She didn’t understand; she didn’t understand what they meant.

  Stiles, I need you.

  Dylan waited for an answer, but one never came.

  Chapter 13

  Stiles was in New Jersey.

  It all began here, it felt like it should all end here. He sat on a low wall that was the only thing left standing in Dr. Hatton’s backyard. This was where Davida had brought him when Joanna and Jophiel had left him for dead, where he recovered after he was told he had to survive, and where he was told he had to wait for a woman to come and tell him what his purpose would be. It was here where he began to walk down the path that would take him to Dylan.

  And then he nearly killed her.

  He heard his voice in his head and there was nothing he could do to block it out. He didn’t want to hear it; he didn’t want to know that he was letting her down. It was as if he had stepped back in time, as if he was leaving Rebecca—pregnant and alone—all over again. He wanted to be with her, he wanted to protect her from what was coming. But how could he do that when one of those dark souls could just look at him with fire in its eyes and turn him into a malicious ball of anger again.

  “You need to get over yourself.”

  The last person—or gargoyle—Stiles could ever want to see was suddenly standing in front of him with judgement in his voice.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I know that she’s hanging out with me, pouting over you and struggling to figure out—all alone—what to do about these Nephilim souls.”

  Stiles jumped to his feet and turned away from Wilhelm.

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “I heard what happened. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Tell that to the bruises I left on her throat.”

  “The two of you have to figure this out, Stiles. You’re the only ones who can fight these things without hurting the humans.”

  Stiles just shook his head as he walked away, carefully stepping over the rubble hidden under the tall grass. Wilhelm followed, walking close to Stiles as though they were suddenly friends again.

  “You were right, you know.”

  “I’m always right.” Stiles glanced at him. “What was I right about this time?”

  “What I did. The pact I made with Luc.”

  “You were working on the wrong side.”

  “And you set me up by making me kill that angel.”

  Stiles shook his head. “Micah went back to heaven, which was where he wanted to be. I only expedited things for him.”

  “But you convinced me he was the one Luc and Lily wanted, while you were planning on sneaking Jack James to the redcoats.”

  “So Dylan could be conceived.”

  “Yeah, well, we thought that was a bad idea at the time.”

  Stiles stopped, crossing his arms over his chest as he faced Wilhelm. “What do you mean? Demetria didn’t know anything about Dylan until I told her. How could you have known about her?”

  Wilhelm looked a little sheepish as he stared down at the ground. “We thought she was a danger to the humans. We were told she would make a choice that would give Earth to the angels.”

  “Who told you?”

  Wilhelm didn’t answer. But he looked up, a blush of shame coloring his throat and his pale features. Stiles shook his head as he slowly began to understand.

  “You thought God told you. But it wasn’t God, was it?”

  “My brother…he was naive.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Bartram. He was the one who told me, who heard the voice. He warned me; he told me we had to get rid of as many Nephilim as we could.”

  “And you believed him.”

  “He was my brother. I had no reason not to believe him.”

  Stiles turned away. He wondered if he would have believed one of his brethren if they’d told him the same thing. He might have. There was so much chaos going on back then, so many with opinions of their own, and so many who thought they were fighting for the right side. But who was to say which side was the right side? Sometimes the right side is just the victorious side.

  “You killed him, you know.”

  Stiles glanced back at Wilhelm.

  “I did?”

  “Dylan told me. You and Wyatt killed him when he attacked her shortly after she left Genero.”

  Stiles knew exactly what Wilhelm was talking about. He remembered the gargoyle who’d stalked Dylan from the moment she and Wyatt had entered some ruins on the road to Viti. It was before she knew who she was, and before she knew what she could do. The gargoyle attacked her in an abandoned apartment and had ripped the flesh on her side before Wyatt came to her rescue. And when he returned to her, when he saw that the wound had healed, he nearly abandoned her to the ruins.

  Sometimes Stiles wondered what would have happened if he had.

  “Now we’re even, don’t you think?” Wilhelm asked.

  Stiles studied him for a minute. Then he held out his hand.

  “We’re even.”

  As they shook, Wilhelm did what Stiles might have done under similar circumstances, and transported him back to where he’d left Dylan. They arrived in the blink of an eye—gargoyle travel was not quite as seamless as angel travel, but it was good enough. Stiles stepped back, taking in the jail cells in the back of the musty room.

  “This is where Demetria’s keeping them?”

  “It’s the most secure place we could think of.”

  “And Dylan?”

  Wilhelm pointed toward a high window in the wall. “She’s out walking. She’s been doing it every afternoon for three days now.”

  “Has she gone home?”

  Wilhelm shook his head. “She says Wyatt’s gone, so she has nothing to go home for.”

  Stiles walked to the jail cell closest to him and looked at the man huddled in the back corner. The man didn’t seem to see him and didn’t acknowledge his presence in any way. Stiles waited, a part of him expecting the man’s eyes to turn to fire again. But there was nothing. He couldn’t even sense a thought in the man’s head, an emotion in his soul that was anything more than the anger and hatred radiating from the dark soul.

  “Weren’t there three?”

  “Dylan did something to one of them and made her soul move on.”

  Stiles looked back at him. “The soul mov
ed on?”

  “She took the darkness out of it. I’m not sure how. I don’t even think she knows how.”

  Stiles turned back to the possessed and watched him a while longer. He didn’t understand what they were facing. He didn’t understand what had made these souls so powerful. Once the Nephilim were blessed, he’d assumed they had all ascended to heaven. It never occurred to him that the blessing didn’t extend to those who had already died. But for them to become so powerful sixty years later…what had they been waiting for? What had caused this change? Why now?

  None of it made sense.

  “I’m gonna go to Demetria. I want to see if she’s made any progress with this.”

  “The progress is here. Demetria and the others are simply monitoring the situation.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  Stiles started to morph into his ethereal form. He wanted to get away from there. He didn’t want to see Dylan. He didn’t want to be in a position to hurt her again. But the moment his form began to drift toward the ceiling, he felt her come into the room and felt her aura mix with his. She knew he was there and she wasn’t going to let him leave.

  Stiles had melded with other angels before, when their wispy, smoky ethereal form was the only form angels took. In heaven, angels were not restricted by human forms—by arms and legs and wings. They were just souls that floated around together, exploring knowledge and each other and the world they watched over below them. And it was a peaceful form, an experience that couldn’t be expressed in simple words.

  But when Dylan’s aura mixed with his, it was something more than even heaven. It was a feeling that was so wrapped up in so many emotions that he couldn’t even begin to express them all. It was beyond the human experience, but he was still on Earth and still felt human emotions, so it was a combination of experiences, a feeling that was bigger and brighter than anything he had ever known.

  She was his soul mate and, in that moment, he knew it more concretely than he ever had before. And, from the way her aura lingered, he was sure she felt it too.