DARK SOULS (Angels and Demons Book 2)
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Authors: Brenda L. Harper
DARK SOULS
Brenda L. Harper
Copyright © 2015
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Table of Contents
The dreams came more and more frequently.
Dylan woke more often than not in the middle of the night, a scream trapped in her throat. Wyatt often wasn’t there, but when he was, his presence brought little solace to her tortured soul. Sometimes, when the terror was at its worst, she could feel her mind reach out to Stiles, but she always pulled it back.
They were just dreams.
There used to be a time when, if she couldn’t sleep, she would go join Jimmy on his back porch. But he was gone now. And Martha…she still couldn’t look Dylan in the eye even though it had been months since Jimmy had died. Martha couldn’t believe that Jimmy didn’t want Dylan to heal him—that he hadn’t wanted to continue living. It was something about many of the people who were facing old age and mortality again for the first time in several decades. Either they accepted the inevitability of death, or they fought it with everything they had. There was no in between.
So she lay in bed and tried not to feel abandoned.
Wyatt was in the capital with Josephine, their daughter, and her new husband, Matthew. Josephine was president of the United Alliance of the Americas and Wyatt was a member of her council. Together, they were working to make this world a better place for the survivors of the angel wars. And they were doing a fine job of it. They’d recently passed a law that allowed for the expansion of the scientific communities, allowing them to reproduce some of the medications that had existed before the war—things like antibiotics and antivirals—to help treat the new illnesses the humans had been facing since their Nephilim healing abilities had left them.
Matthew was a driving force behind that law. Before Dylan pulled him out of his own time, he was a scientist who created diseases. Now he was dedicating himself to eradicating them.
Some change was a good thing. Others…not so much.
Dylan missed her family. She missed the way things had been thirty years ago when humanity was just beginning to rebuild itself. Things were different now that everything was…normal. It had been their ultimate goal to return humanity to the way things had been before the war. But now, Dylan felt like she no longer fit in with her own family, let alone the community she had been a part of practically since its conception.
They’d lost their special gifts, their abilities to hear one another’s thoughts, to heal themselves and one another. They were aging, and their bodies were changing as they approached that time when they would be allowed to leave their earthly forms and join their Father in heaven. They were human again.
Dylan was not.
She closed her eyes and let her mind go to Wyatt. It was late where he was, darkness settled like a blanket on the town around him. But he and the other council members were awake, fighting over some issue that caused a few of the men and women to grow quite heated. But Wyatt—there was little that could rattle him. He sat calmly at the head of the table, always in a position of power even when he wasn’t the one in control. As she watched, he raised his hand but never said a sound. Just the same, people stopped speaking and turned their attention on him.
“We’re losing sight of what is important here,” he said softly. “This issue is not about freedom of choice. It is about protecting future generations. The human race once allowed the angels to walk among them. They chose to be ignorant of this fact, chose to allow the angels to have the power to hide and bide their time. The proposition on the table simply asks that this not happen again, that we remain aware of what is going on around us. We need to form an alliance with the angels and the gargoyles, to assure that what happened in my father’s generation does not happen again.”
“And what if the angels rise against us again?” one red-faced man demanded. “What if they decide that we’re not living our lives according to some unwritten rules or that we can’t handle our own conflicts? What if they try to destroy us again?”
Wyatt began to speak, but another man, a small dark-haired man, stood. “We all know that you have certain loyalties to the angels because of your wife, Wyatt. But what about the rest of us? Those of us who can still remember what it was like during the final days of the war?” The man turned to address everyone sitting at the table. “I say we ask the angels and gargoyles to leave and never come back.”
“Don’t be arrogant, Miles,” a woman said. “What makes you think we have a choice over whether or not the angels remain on Earth?”
“It’s our planet.”
“Only because of what Dylan did for us.”
Silence fell over the room as the dark-haired man sank back into his chair. Wyatt stared at his hands even as Dylan silently encouraged him to speak up. But it wasn’t Wyatt who spoke next.
Another woman, a petite blonde woman, stood and addressed the room.
“Dylan and the others were there for us when we needed them. They turned the tide of the war and banished Lucifer and his army. Dylan made her choice and changed everything for us. If not for her, if not for those who fought with her,” she said, inclining her head toward Wyatt, “we would not have the world we have. We would not be the people we are. But the time for fighting is over.”
A few voices rose in agreement.
“It is time that we are given the right to prove we can rise up and be the humanity that Dylan fought for. It’s time we prove that we are deserving of this second chance. And the only way we can do that is if we stand on our own feet.”
With a glance at Wyatt, the woman declared, “It’s time for the angels and the gargoyles to leave. We don’t need their protection anymore.”
There was some applause that rose up around the table, but there were also a few dissenting voices. Dylan watched Wyatt. If she’d been in her human form, if she’d been standing in that room instead of watching through the illusion of spiritual travel, she would have cried out. Despite the fact that her body was so far away, it still hurt with a deep ache that she couldn’t ignore.
Wyatt couldn’t feel her presence anymore. He couldn’t hear her thoughts.
But she could hear his.
Wyatt agreed. Dylan’s own husband, her soul mate, wanted her to leave.
Dylan snapped back into her own body with a suddenness that was almost painful, like one of the elastic bands she’d used to tie back Josephine’s hair when she was little had snapped against her flesh.
She climbed out of bed and pulled on one of Wyatt’s oversized shirts, a button down that fit her almost like a dressing gown. She wandered into the kitchen and made herself a hot cup of tea, her thoughts drifting. She’d been thinking about the past a lot lately, dwelling on moments of her childhood that had seemed innocuous at the time, but were suddenly more significant. Like all those long afternoons she’d spent doing her chores in the dorm kitchens beside Anita, the kindly cook who taught her to peel potatoes and stole milk to give to Dylan as a treat.
Anita. Dylan had only recently come to reconcile her thoughts where Anita was concerned. Her beloved mentor, whom she learned was not a kind cook—was not even a woman. She was Stiles, her personal guardian angel watching over her and protecting her from Lily and Luc, the only one who really understood who Dylan was, what she was to become, and why it was so important that no one learned the truth until her moment came.
Stiles…who had lied to her time and time again to manipulate her into making the choice she ultimately made.
She’d saved humanity. And now they wanted to banish her from their world.
She felt sick to her stomach. It was an emotional thing—if it were physical, her gifts would have healed it before she’d even felt it—but it still felt so real. She sipped at her tea, hoping it would calm her nausea.
Sometimes she thought about her future. She didn’t understand why she hadn’t lost her powers the way the others had. She didn’t understand why she wasn’t aging. Stiles…she could understand why things had not changed for him. He was a pure angel, born at God’s hand, sent to Earth with a purpose. But she wasn’t like him. She was born on Earth—created in a lab, but born just the same. Why was she still here? And where, if she should eventually die, would she go? Was she an abomination, cursed to become something dark and angry when she died, or would she go to heaven and sit at the right hand of God, as humans had been promised in that book they once worshipped—the Bible?
Dylan was one of a kind. Stiles called her an angel born with freewill. But was that really what she was? Or was she something else, something less heavenly?
If the council banished her—if Wyatt banished her—where would she go?
Again, a wave of nausea washed through her. She sank into a chair set by the table and leaned forward, taking long, slow breaths as Wyatt once taught her.
She must have called to Stiles without realizing it. Or maybe he just sensed her distress. Either way, he was suddenly beside her, his hand on her back taking the edge off of the pain.
“Nightmares?”
She nodded despite the fact that he probably knew what she was thinking. He probably knew about the issue sitting before the council as they debated it.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, brushing a piece of hair out of her face.
Dylan stood. “Do you want a cup of tea?”
“I’d love one, but we don’t have time.”
She turned to regard him, noticing for the first time that he was fully dressed even though it was the middle of the night.
“Time?”
“Demetria requests the honor of our presence.”
“Now?”
Stiles offered one of those nonchalant shrugs that was so him.
Dylan sighed as she turned and poured her still nearly full cup of tea down the sink before rinsing it and setting it on a towel to dry.
“Let me shower. I feel like I’ve been walking in the desert for days.”
Stiles didn’t answer. He just watched as she walked away, those gray eyes a mask of indifference. But she knew him. She could see past that mask to the concern that hid underneath.
At least one of the men in her life still cared.
***
They traveled to Demetria’s den in their ethereal forms, arriving in the bright living room as the sun rose. There was activity upstairs as half a dozen gargoyles worked side by side on something urgent. Dylan could hear their thoughts, and she caught little snippets of confusion and fear. Something was wrong.
“You’re here.”
Donna came into the room from somewhere in the back with her arms wide open to welcome Dylan. They hugged; their affection for each other as sisters still was strong despite the differences they’d suffered during the war when it appeared they were on different sides of the fight. Donna worked with the gargoyles, creatures Dylan had not been sure she could trust in the early days after she’d left the domed city of Genero. And Dylan fought with her own small band of loyal—and not so loyal—friends, unsure she could trust anyone. They seemed to be on opposing sides until the entire conflict came to a head.
Now they were just sisters.
“Thank you for coming,” Donna said as she stepped back. “Demetria will be thrilled to see you.”
“What’s going on?” Stiles asked.
Donna glanced at the stairs before she spoke.
“We’ve had reports of odd behaviors, of violence and disorder among some of the human communities. At first, we thought it was just normal conflict—you know, people fighting over land and other commodities—but then it didn’t seem to follow any patterns. It’s like, well, whole communities have suddenly gone insane.”
Dylan thought of her dreams, of a woman named Andrea whose protectors suddenly became sadistic, and a cold chill ran down the length of her spine.
Stiles touched her, clearly aware of the unsettled direction of her thoughts. But she lifted her mental walls, careful to block him. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to know about her dreams until she was positive it had something to do with the gargoyles’ problem.
Donna led the way upstairs. They walked into a conference room Dylan had only visited once before. On that occasion, Stiles had attacked a gargoyle for things he’d done during the war. She could still see where the plaster had been repaired afterward. It made her want to grab his arm, to keep him from doing something like that again. But, so far, he was being a good boy.
“Dylan, Stiles.”
Demetria came toward them with her hands outstretched. Dylan could see the strain on her face, and that was enough to tell her how bad things had gotten. She accepted her welcoming hug, and then walked around the room, lowering her mental walls enough to listen to the thoughts of the gargoyles around her.
They were worried. It took a lot to worry a group of gargoyles.
“Where?”
Demetria turned from a brief conversation with Stiles to answer.
“Mostly down south, a few in the east. We even had a report from Europe.”
“Is there any idea what’s causing this odd behavior?”
Demetria glanced at one of the others. A young gargoyle approached them, his face a mask of fear.
“We don’t know for sure. We thought at first that they might have contracted some sort of illness. Then we thought some sort of plant was causing hallucinations.”
“Why hallucinations?” Stiles asked.
“Because these are perfectly happy, kind people who are suddenly turning on each other for no reason. And the level of violence these people are perpetrating is worse than things we saw before the war.”
“Like?”
Demetria walked to a wall where there were pictures and papers stuck to the drywall. She tapped one picture of a young woman with her chest ripped open by what looked like some sort of wild animal.
“This girl was living in some ancient ruins with her father and several sisters. They tore her chest out with their bare hands because she took the last piece of meat leftover from their dinner.” Demetria pointed to another picture. Dylan couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman, there was so much damage to her face and body. “This girl was beaten by several men—we think they might have been relatives—her brothers, perhaps—and left to wander in the desert until she could no longer move. She died of starvation, dehydration, and animal attacks.”
Demetria started to point at another picture, but Dylan turned away.
“Enough.”
Stiles moved up behind her, but he didn’t touch her. He didn’t really need to. Just having him close eased the emotional ache in her soul. Nothing he could do would take it completely away, but his nearness was like a soothing balm, making it bearable.
“We have our people out monitoring the communities where these things happened, but it seems like once the violence erupts, their lust is satisfied. They go back to being just like they were before—kinder, gentler humans.”
“How is that possible?” Stiles asked.
Demetria shook her head. “In all my time on Earth, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
But Dylan had an idea. She walked back to the wall where Demetria’s team had put up the pictures and the papers; she was drawn to one picture in particular. She touched it, her fingers moving over the soft angles of the young woman’s face. In the picture, she was pale and her body had been drained of blood from cuts on her abdomen, wrists, and throat. But she was still beautiful—maybe more so, what with the contrast of her dark hair against her pale skin.
Andrea.
Dylan had seen her in her dreams…
A woman named Andrea lived in a tunnel just outside the ruin once called London. She hid there during the day and searched for food at night; trying to avoid the men she once called family. They had been kind once, gentle men who would have cut off their right hand before they did anything to hurt her. But that was before everything changed.
That was before the demons came.
Dylan knew what was happening, and it scared the crap out of her.