FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) (12 page)

“Tell us your plan,” Donna said as she moved farther into the room, stopping just beside Demetria. “Tell us how you plan to get us out of Genero.”

Dylan glanced at Wyatt. He was still watching the gargoyles carefully, his hand resting on the butt of his six shooter. But he caught her eye, and she could see the relief that was hiding there. Stiles, too, seemed a little more relaxed than he had been a few minutes before.

Dylan gestured at the chairs arranged around a table a few feet behind them. “We might as well be comfortable. It’s a long story.”

Demetria hesitated, but finally turned to her people and gestured for them to fall back. The gargoyles grumbled, but they did as they were told. Demetria brushed Dylan’s shoulder as she walked past her, nearly knocking her to the ground. Wyatt, thankfully, was at her side, and a simple touch of his hand on her shoulder steadied her. Then Donna came to her, smiling as she held open her arms.

“So nice to finally have you on our side, sister,” she said quietly.

Dylan fell into her embrace. She bit her lip, afraid of the tears that threatened to escape. A leader she might, reluctantly, be becoming, but she was still a seventeen-year-old girl who had just lost her guardian. Dylan buried her face against Donna’s shoulder.

“We have to talk when this is all over,” she whispered.

“We will,” Donna promised, pulling back far enough to see Dylan’s tears, the sight causing a frown to wrinkle Donna’s normally porcelain skin. “We will.”

Dylan shivered. It had to be well over a hundred degrees, but she still shivered.

“You okay?” Wyatt asked.

She didn’t acknowledge him. She didn’t want to admit to him, or anyone else, how bad she felt. The fever had started some time during the night. Her body ached all over, almost as if she had been walking for days. The funny thing was, they had been, but that was days ago. If it was going to affect her, it should have done it then, not now.

It was that light.

She had to do something before they went into Genero.

Dylan rolled onto her back and looked up at the afternoon sky. The sun was bright overhead, but it felt surprisingly comforting, despite the fact that she could almost feel it pulling the moisture out of her skin. She threw her arm over her eyes and sighed.

“We should go find the others.”

“They’re all on their own scouting missions,” Wyatt said.

She just nodded. Something was poking her hip, sharp, like a rock. She shoved a hand in her pocket and pulled out the compass she had carried non-stop since she left Genero. With it came a smooth stone one of her sisters had given her and the wrist bangle Donna had made. The only material possessions Dylan had ever been able to truly call her own. She ran her thumb over the smooth stone, trying to remember what had caused Donatella to give it to her. She couldn’t remember, to be honest. But she had always liked its soft, lavender color. And the bracelet. She held onto it because Donna asked her to, but when Donna was taken from the dorms, it had taken on new meaning. She thought now that she might offer to give it back to her.

The compass had always been something of a curiosity to Dylan. When Davida gave it to her, she said it was a relic from another time and she should keep it to remember that there had been people before them, people who had fought for their existence and lost. Now, with everything she knew about Davida and the war that had, and continued to, rage, she found herself wondering if Davida had other reasons for giving it to her.

Dylan studied the compass, remembering what she had learned about its use from Ruby, and realized that there was something wrong with it. It should have pointed north no matter how Dylan turned it. No matter which way she pointed, the arrow inside the compass always pointed to the same place: the dome of Genero.

“What is that?” Wyatt asked.

“A compass,” she said, letting him slip it from her hand.

He turned it this way and that, just as she had done. Then he pressed it back into her hand. “It’s broken,” he said before crawling back up against the rock behind which they were hiding so he could see down over the small hill where they sat on the dome below.

“Davida gave it to me,” she said as she slipped it back into her pocket. “And a servant girl at Viti told me how to use it.”

“But it should point due north. That one doesn’t.”

“I know,” she said. She ran her thumb over the little stone one more time before she slid that, too, into her pocket. The bracelet she wrapped around her wrist. She didn’t see any harm in wearing it now, after all this time. It was less likely to get lost that way. At least, she hoped so.

“Why didn’t you ask me?”

“What?” She rolled back onto her stomach and moved up against Wyatt, slipping the binoculars from his hands so she could look down at the city.

“How to use the compass.”

Dylan watched a group of workers move along the outer parameter of the dome, the farmers who were in charge of the crops of vegetables and fruit that they cultivated there. One of them looked like one of the women who often brought boxes of vegetables to Anita’s kitchen when Dylan was assigned to work there. It probably was, she realized. For those who still lived in Genero, things had gone on just like they always had. That was an odd concept to Dylan. It seemed to her that so many things had changed since she left Genero that nothing should be the same.

She handed the binoculars back to Wyatt, rolling onto her shoulder to do it. “I wasn’t sure you would be happy to see that I had such an artifact.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “You were always so wary of everything else I said and did.”

He set down the glasses and turned onto his shoulder so that they sat almost eye to eye. “I would have been impressed with a compass, even if it is broken.”

“Really?” She used her thumb to rub a smudge of dirt from his cheek. “It I had known that would impress you, I would have done it the first day we met.”

“Yeah? Were you that interested in impressing me?”

“You were the first man I had ever seen. I was very interested in impressing you.”

“Hmm,” he said, sliding a hand slowly up her arm. “You were pretty impressive on that first meeting.”

“I was?” She thought back to the first moment she saw him, but she couldn’t imagine how she had impressed him with her confusion and awkwardness. “How?”

He chuckled under his breath. “You were naked, Dylan. That would impress any man.”

A memory, one that was not hers, flashed through her mind. Joanna had shown her a great deal in her memories and thoughts that one day they spent together. Part of it was a great many of the memories she had of Jimmy, Wyatt’s father. One memory in particular came back to Dylan now, complete with Joanna’s feelings that came the first time Jimmy lay with her, the first time they shared a physical expression of their feelings.

Her cheeks burned as she related that memory to Wyatt’s comment.

He moved close and kissed her forehead lightly. “Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I forget how innocent you still are in some things.”

He kissed her again, a slow frown creasing his normally upturned mouth. His hand moved over the top of her head, his fingers slipping beneath the collar at the back of her shirt. “You have a fever,” he said.

“It’ll pass.”

“Dylan—”

“Can I ask you something?”

He ran his hand carefully over her throat before pulling it away. “You can ask me anything as long as you promise to let Donna look at you when we get back to camp.”

She gave a noncommittal shrug, grabbing his hand before he could pull it completely away from her and pressed it to the space just above her breast. The coolness of his touch, and the pleasure that came with it, made the fog that threatened to bury her thoughts dissipate a little.

“Have you ever lain with a woman? The way men do when they want children?”

Wyatt’s eyebrows rose. “Are you asking if I’m a virgin?”

“What’s that?”

He chuckled deep in his throat. “You’re about to lead a massive jail break, and you don’t know what a virgin is. There is something truly comical about that.” He slipped his fingers around her jaw and squeezed lightly. “Or truly tragic.”

“Are you, then? A virgin?”

“No, Dylan.” He slipped a thumb over her lower lip. “But, right at this moment, I wish I was.”

Dylan rolled onto her back, using the rock they were hidden behind as a pillow of sorts. “Was it Ellie?” she asked as she stared up into the sun until she began to see spots.

“No.” He picked up her hand and kissed the back of it before he began to roll the bracelet she had put on under his thumb. “You have to understand that kids who grow up in the resistance grow up fast. And there really isn’t any privacy, so we learn about things like sex pretty quickly.”

“Sex?”

“Lying with a woman.” He glanced almost shyly at her. “And it’s not just for making babies.”

“It’s for expressing love, too,” she said, Joanna’s memory making her confident she was right about that idea. And Wyatt confirmed it by nodding. But then he said, “It’s also about pleasure.”

“Like when you touch me.”

“No, a different kind of pleasure,” he said. He slid his fingertips up the tender skin that lived on the inside of her arm, making her shiver with the electric shocks it sent through her nervous system. “There are so many things about the human body you can’t explain with words.”

“Why not?”

“It has to be shown, Dylan.”

“Were you in love?” she asked, watching as he ran his fingers up to her arm pit and then back down, shivering again. “With the one you laid with?”

“No,” he said. He had slid closer to her, his lips just a breath from her throat. She could feel the heat of him, feel his every inhalation and exhalation. She could feel how his breaths were coming in quicker and quicker gasps as he continued to touch her. “I didn’t love any of them,” he said quietly.

“Any?”

And then his lips were on hers and she forgot why she had begun to ask these questions and where they had been leading. All she could think about was the feel of his lips against hers, of his attempts to encourage her to open to him. All she wanted was for him to keep touching her that way.

How could she have ever imagined anyone else could ever make her feel this way?

They were camped about a mile from the domed city of Genero. Dylan sat by the fire while Wyatt and some of the others hunted for the night’s dinner. Demetria was sitting across camp with one of her lieutenants. The two were whispering to each other, each stealing glances at Dylan from time to time. She knew they still did not trust her. But she saw it as something like a victory that they were even here.

Donna settled onto the ground beside Dylan and touched her wrist, the one where Dylan still wore her bracelet. “I remember that,” she said.

“I’ve carried it in my pocket since I left Genero.”

“Really?” Donna tilted her head slightly, her gaze moving across the camp to where Demetria sat. “It seems like such a long time ago when we both lived there.”

“Yeah.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, both lost in their own thoughts. Dylan found herself struggling to keep her thoughts on the business at hand instead of Wyatt. But, somehow, the two had become intermingled in her thoughts. The invasion of Genero was about Wyatt, about finding his father and getting more information on the humans. Jimmy was the only human Dylan could honestly say she knew. The other people she had come into contact with since leaving Genero seemed to either be angels, gargoyles, or hybrids like herself. She needed Jimmy to explain to her what they were all fighting for.

Wyatt needed Jimmy for something a little more basic.

He simply needed his father to guide him into the future.

That was, of course, assuming that she and Wyatt and others like them still had a future.

“You’re not feeling well.”

Donna hadn’t moved, but her confidence in her statement was as strong as if she had reached over and felt Dylan’s burning forehead.

“I think I’ve done something I shouldn’t have,” she said.

Donna turned then, assessing Dylan with her bright, beautiful, green eyes. “You’re capable of healing yourself, aren’t you?”

“Not of this.”

Donna touched her forehead lightly. Like when Wyatt touched her, she felt a soothing pleasure seep through Donna’s fingers into her skull. But this was different, oddly weaker, but stronger at the same time. Dylan’s symptoms almost immediately began to subside. But then Donna’s face began to pale, and Dylan was pretty sure she saw a flash of gold light in her green eyes. She leaned back, forcing Donna’s touch away.

“What was that?” Donna asked after a minute.

Dylan pulled her knees up against her chest and hugged them as she laid her cheek against one knee. “Something happened when I healed Lily.”

“Something, what?”

Dylan shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t understand most of this. I just do it and let things happen the way they will.”