DARK SOULS (Angels and Demons Book 2)

by Brenda L. Harper

  “Take them to Wilhelm,” she instructed Raphael.

  He immediately disappeared, the naked demons gone along with him.

  She should have been exhausted. Whenever she’d tried new magic, or fought these demons, she’d always been left exhausted. But she felt exhilarated.

  “You’ve been asleep for two days,” Stiles said, somewhat grumpily, when she commented on it to him.

  Dylan walked among the formerly possessed and touched their foreheads and their shoulders, healing the lingering effects of their ordeal. They woke, disoriented, but unharmed. Rachel came out into the street with an ancient contraption…a camera, Dylan thought it was called. She had used it to document what had happened for her library. Then the three of them headed back to her place for something to eat.

  “How did you know to use that thing…that fireball-looking thing?” Stiles asked.

  Dylan shrugged. “I didn’t. It just seemed to happen. Like instinct.”

  “And the ropes? Where did those come from?”

  Dylan smiled as she picked up a carrot and dipped it into the fresh sauce Rachel had made.

  “I know that,” Rachel said. “Wyatt used to tell me stories about cowboys when I was little. That was a lariat.”

  “A lasso,” Dylan corrected.

  “I never could tell the difference between the two.”

  “Neither could I. But if Wyatt were here, I’m sure he’d lecture us about it.”

  Rachel smiled, but Stiles only looked annoyed.

  “You got the idea for a weapon to use against the dark souls from Wyatt?”

  “I did. Raphael told me that archangels were capable of using many different weapons. And when I thought I’d like a lasso to pull the demons from the possessed, one just popped into my hand.”

  “Just like that?”

  Dylan sat back in her chair to study Stiles. “Why have you never called me an archangel? Why didn’t you tell me I was capable of more?”

  “Because you weren’t ready to know.”

  “You’ve never thought I was ready for much of anything. If it had been up to you, I still wouldn’t have made my choice and Luc and Lily would still be walking this earth.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. You’re like an overprotective big brother.”

  There was hurt in Stiles’ eyes when she said that. She immediately regretted it, especially when she remembered the kiss they’d shared in the clearing outside Wilhelm’s prison. She reached for his hand, but he got up and walked away. Dylan started to get up to follow him upstairs, but then she sank back in her chair. What would she say to him that she hadn’t already said a million times before?

  “He’ll be okay.”

  Dylan looked at Rachel. “Stiles is never really okay. He just keeps going.”

  Rachel nodded in agreement. “It can’t be easy, living the way he does. Fighting for something that’s cost him everything that ever mattered to him.”

  He has a lot of regrets…

  Dylan glanced at the stairs. She’d never really seen things from Stiles’ side before. The things he had to do because he didn’t have a choice. All Dylan had were choices, but Stiles never really did. It was his mission, his purpose, to protect Dylan at all costs, and those costs were more than one angel should have to pay.

  She owed him so much more than she was offering.

  Dylan reached over and took Rachel’s hand. “This existence has cost us all.”

  Rachel’s eyes fell to the tabletop, but Dylan knew what she was thinking. She could hear it as clearly as if Rachel had spoken it aloud.

  The war had pulled her out of time and saved her from death, but gave her a little brother who was already grown and forced to raise her as his own. Rachel grew up in a world changed by the war, a world that had allowed her to grow up into adulthood despite the fact that she had been destined to die—that she had died when she was five in another time and another place. And, by being here, she had saved Jimmy from collapsing into himself when his purpose—the rebellion—was no longer needed. Then she saved a large portion of humanity when she was the first tested with the cure to the modified angel disease. She served a wider purpose than anyone could have seen, a subtle purpose that could have meant utter disaster if she weren’t there, if she hadn’t served.

  It all served a purpose. And the more Dylan examined her past, her every action, she was beginning to see that Stiles, Rebecca, and even Jimmy, were right. Everything that happened set her on this road. She was meant to be here, she was meant to evolve and to become whatever God had planned for her. It was her destiny to become the savior.

  Chapter 21

  Dylan stood in the park. It was the middle of the night and most of the town was sleeping. It seemed like the ideal time to practice these new powers that seemed to be manifesting after her trip to heaven. It wasn’t just this heightened vision and awareness, or the new weapons that had appeared in her hand with just a simple thought. There was more to it than that.

  She could feel this new confidence inside of herself—a new awareness. She couldn’t quite explain it, but she felt like she could do anything she put her mind to. She just had to focus.

  But focusing was the problem. Her thoughts were so full of home and Wyatt, of Stiles and Rebecca and what she knew their future held. And the demons. Now she knew she could send most of them home, but there were still the ones that had been here so long they were too confused and too angry to accept the truth. What was she going to do about them?

  Wilhelm thought he was making a breakthrough, but he didn’t want to say anything until he was sure. She wanted to go see him, to force him to explain himself. But, if there was one thing she’d learned about the gargoyles, it was best not to push them.

  And then there were the voices.

  Dylan could hear the thoughts of the people in this town as clearly as if she were standing in the middle of a room full of chatting neighbors. But it wasn’t just the people here. She could hear the voices of people from all over the world. It was as if their thoughts filtered through her before they went on to whatever oblivion they experienced after leaving their owner’s heads. Most of the thoughts were mundane—wondering what the weather will be today, if they should focus on reading or math in class today, how many potatoes were left—every day thoughts that had little meaning. But then there were calls of distress. Some woman in England had just lost her baby in a miscarriage. A man in the capital was overcome with pain from an accident in the building of a new Outlander registration office. These were people who needed help.

  But it wasn’t just the people. She could hear the voices in heaven, too. Every once in a while a voice would come through so strongly that it captured all her attention. They were usually talking about the demons, but sometimes it was about things Dylan didn’t understand. There was confusion in heaven about Earth. They felt like something was out of alignment, that something that should have happened hadn’t, and that was causing a lack of balance. She thought maybe they were talking about her, but she wasn’t sure.

  It was just too much. She couldn’t put up her mental walls as she once could. She couldn’t block it all out. It was as though she’d become hyperaware and she needed to find a way to categorize it all, to shift it around and make it make sense. She had to learn to tune out the things that weren’t important.

  So she sat in the middle of the park with her hands on her knees and her eyes closed. She was trying to feel this newness inside of her. It was like the beautiful balls of light she saw deep in the souls of the possessed. She could feel it—could feel the power of it. It was there that all her abilities lived, where the secret of winning this war with the demons sat. But, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get any closer than just a sense that it was there.

  Dylan slipped into her ethereal form. She hoped that maybe she could find that center easier in the form angels were meant to live in. But that just seemed to pull her further away. She stood, and built
that strange white light on her fingers. She watched it grow and become something more than it had been before. Then, with a quick movement of her fingers, she made it disappear. She held up her hands, palms up, and created another ball. This one, however, was neither light nor fire. This one was solid gold, a beautiful thing that was as solid as it was weightless. She ran her hands over it, fascinated by the intense cold that emanated from it. She had no idea what it could do, but she was confident that when the moment came that she would have to use it, its purpose would show itself.

  She made it disappear and then began to make something else when a sound behind her startled her. She turned, aware in the seconds before she saw him that it was Stiles.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on me.”

  “I wasn’t sneaking. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t making any more impromptu trips to heaven.”

  “No. Just trying to figure out what’s going on with my body.”

  Stiles walked up to her and took her face in his hands, caressing her cheek with his thumbs as he drew her close enough to study her eyes.

  “You mingled with souls up in heaven. Sometimes that causes a greater awareness of your own soul.”

  “I spoke with Rebecca.”

  “I know.”

  Dylan’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve been reading my thoughts again?”

  “You haven’t been hiding them as well lately.”

  “Neither have you.”

  He inclined his head slightly. “It’s our connection, Dylan. Our souls are meant to be tethered and they’re trying to link themselves together.”

  “Why?”

  His thumbs ran over her cheeks once more, and then he dropped his hands and buried them in the front pockets of his pants.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said. “When Joanna died the first time, and I went back to heaven with the other angels, I had a conversation with the Father. He told me that each soul has a perfect counterpart. He said that he had chosen Joanna for me for a specific reason, but my fate had changed and I was destined to be soul mates with someone else and it would be a more perfect union. And when I came back, when I found you in your dreams, I just knew it was you.”

  “You chose me.”

  “No, Dylan, I don’t think I did.” He cocked his head as he studied her. “I thought I had. For a long time, I thought it was my choice. But now…I don’t think I chose you. I think you chose me.”

  She shook her head as she turned away from him. “Raphael said you used to be a lesser angel, but when you fell to Earth, you altered something. That Joanna was destined to stop Lucifer and change everything, but when you fell, her intentions changed.”

  “I don’t know what Raphael’s talking about.”

  “He said that Joanna had an object…”

  Again, a flash of memory burst through Dylan’s mind, a box Joanna pulled out from under a bed. But that was all it was, a flash of memory.

  “You have to remember that Raphael has been watching all his from heaven. He hasn’t been down here living it.”

  “And we have.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did I choose you?”

  “You came to me. You asked me not to kill Joanna.”

  Dylan remembered it like it was yesterday instead of more than forty years ago. She thought Wyatt was dead and she was expecting his child. She’d been able to travel in time for a while, but she was unaware that that was what she was doing. Then, something pulled her back into the time just after the human war had ended and the war with the angels was surging. She found herself in the camp Jimmy had begun building for what would become the main arm of the resistance. Stiles was there, a dagger in hand, intent on killing Joanna’s human form so that she would go back to heaven and could no longer harm Rebecca or the other humans he’d come to love.

  “She is your soul mate. And you have every reason to do what you want to her. But she is also the future mother of my soul mate.”

  “I didn’t go to you. I was called by Jimmy.”

  Stiles looked up, a little surprise in his eyes. “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s what I know. I visited him half a dozen times in the past because he called me to him.”

  “Maybe the second and third times, and all the other times, but not that first time.”

  “You think I was there just to stop you from seeking revenge against Joanna?”

  “Yes. It was prophesized, Dylan. The Trinity told me years before it happened that you would come to me.”

  “And that’s how I chose you?”

  He inclined his head just slightly, not enough to take his eyes from her face, but enough to make it clear that that was what he believed. Dylan shook her head again, even though she’d already suspected this and she had already discussed it before. But it still seemed surreal. How could she have chosen him to be her soul mate when she was grieving the loss she felt when she thought Wyatt had died by Lucifer’s sword? How could she have chosen a new soul mate when what she thought she was doing was preserving Wyatt’s life? How could she have chosen Stiles when she already knew the role he would play in her life? When she already had the privilege of his companionship and the security of his love?

  Was it really ever her choice?

  And if it wasn’t her choice, could she reverse it? Could she make a different choice? Could she, somehow, make Wyatt immortal and make him spend eternity with her?

  Even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t right. And that knowledge, the guarantee of it, made her heart break.

  Wyatt had never really been her soul mate. He was what she needed when she needed him, just as Stiles had been what she needed him to be since before her birth.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  Stiles shrugged. “Can’t promise I’ll have the answer you want.”

  “Do you love me? I mean, beyond the soul mate connection. Do you love me like you did Rebecca?”

  She heard a dozen things flash through his mind as he listened to her questions. Emotion danced in his soul even as he successfully kept it from his expression. She could read him in a way she couldn’t read anyone else. She heard thoughts, felt emotions, but none as strongly as his right now. Not strangers, not the people she wanted to help, not Rachel or Josephine—not even Wyatt. It was almost as though the thoughts he thought, the emotions he felt, were her thoughts and her emotions.

  “From the moment I saw you that day, I knew there was something special about you. It frightened me, to be perfectly honest. And I resented you for a long time because you were the reason I’d had to hurt Jack and that I’d had to leave Rebecca. But, as I watched you grow up, I knew you were remarkable. And when you were banished from Genero and I followed you in the desert, I admired your strength and your desire to survive. You were impressive.”

  Dylan crossed her arms over her chest, waiting for him to get to the point.

  “I knew Wyatt posed a problem, that’s why I manifested into my human form days after he showed up. I couldn’t have you distracted from the goal at hand, and I couldn’t allow him to hurt you.”

  “You told me men couldn’t be trusted. You insisted over and over that Wyatt couldn’t be trusted.”

  “And then he touched you and the first manifestations of your connection made themselves known.”

  Dylan smiled despite herself, remembering the sense of pleasure that had washed through her when Wyatt had accidentally brushed his fingers against hers. It had been overwhelming to her and it had frightened him.

  “I saw you becoming emotionally attached. And that felt wrong.”

  “Was it then when you knew we were connected?”

  “I knew before then, Dylan.”

  “How?”

  “Things happened when I was near you. When you were still in your mother’s belly, I would touch her and I would see flashes of the future, or feel things…and then, when you were born, it would happen at odd times, these flashes. Even when we weren’t together, you would give me g
limpses of the future. I once saw you in the cells below Viti and saw myself break you out. That’s how I knew when and where to go when you and Wyatt were trying to rescue Sam the first time you were taken to Viti. And I saw myself lie to you about Harry and about Rebecca. I didn’t know why then, but I know now that I was trying to protect you from the knowledge of what I gave up for you. I didn’t want to add to your guilt. You do things to me that others never have, not even Joanna.”

  “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

  Stiles stared at her for a long moment, his soul screaming so loudly that it was the only thing she could hear for a minute. But then something else drowned it out.

  Mom, help, please. We need you.

  Josephine.

  In a flash, Dylan was gone.

  Chapter 22

  Stiles heard the call as strongly as Dylan had. He followed, careful not to manifest into his human form where she could see him. He knew Dylan didn’t like him around when a crisis involving her family needed her attention. But he wasn’t about to let her face something as urgent as this sounded by herself.

  She’d gone to Wyatt, back in the city in the bedroom they shared. Stiles, standing back in a corner of the room, using a gargoyle trick to remain invisible, watched as she rushed to his side. He was lying in their bed, turned on his side as he vomited bile into a small bowl.

  Dylan pressed her hand to Wyatt’s chest, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled it away.

  “No,” he mumbled.

  “Daddy, let her heal you.”

  But Wyatt didn’t hear his daughter. He didn’t even seem to be aware of the others in the room—of Josephine, Matthew, and Harry. He was focused only on Dylan.

  “Not this time.”

  “Wyatt…” Dylan took his face in her hands much like Stiles had done to her just moments ago. “Please don’t give up on me.”

  He shook his head even as he began to cough, as more of the thick bile tinged with blood flowed from between his lips. Dylan pressed her palm against his forehead and closed her eyes. Stiles could feel her searching his thoughts, ignoring what was right there in front of her and searching deeper. He felt her desperation and it reminded him of Rebecca’s final moments. Even though he’d known she would one day have to face this reality, he had hoped he would somehow be able to soften the blow for her. But now he could see that had never been a possibility.