FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) (14 page)

Dylan twisted to look behind her. Wyatt was standing almost exactly where Stiles had been when she first became aware of him. He had his hands deep in his pockets, pushing his jeans down on his slender hips in a way that made him look longer, leaner. It made her heart skip a beat, not just because of the vulnerability it seemed to lend him, but because of the beauty she was so drawn to in both his physical and spiritual being.

A part of her wanted to jump to her feet and feel his lips against hers as they had been earlier in the day. She even reached up and touched her lips with the tips of her fingers as she thought about it.

“Exactly,” Stiles said, pulling Dylan out of her own head.

“Demons? What is that, exactly?”

“Evil,” Wyatt said at the same time Stiles said, “Redcoats.”

“Redcoats?”

“Redcoats are angels who elected to stay with Luc and Lily when the others were called back to Heaven. They are changed by their resistance to God’s will, changed in a way that has not only altered their gifts, but also their characters.”

Wyatt was nodding along to everything Stiles was saying. “They no longer believe in God as the supreme being,” he added.

Dylan stood and stretched, touching her toes a couple of times to try to work a kink out of her back. Each time she bent over, however, her head pounded as though there were a great pressure inside just bursting to get out. She was a little unsteady when she stood straight. Wyatt was immediately beside her, even though Stiles had been closer. His hand rested on her hip as the length of his body pressed against her side. It sent shivers of pleasure through her body, taking from her the ache in her head for a few minutes. A part of her wondered, though, if it was their spiritual connection that caused the pleasure, or it a little of it was brought on by something else.

“So what does all this have to do with the second coming?”

“The second coming is supposed to be a time of judgment, when God will send his only child back to earth and that child will decide who deserves to ascend to Heaven and who deserves to languish in suffering.”

Dylan shook her head. “I still don’t understand.”

Stiles opened his mouth to say something more, but Wyatt beat him to it.

“They think it’s you,” he said.

“Me?”

Stiles looked down toward Genero. “The first coming, Jesus, was born to a virgin. You were created in a lab.”

“And you have gifts that no one has ever seen before,” Wyatt added.

“I’m not a boy,” Dylan said, the only argument that came quickly to her befuddled mind. “The last one was a boy and you said he was God’s only child.”

“Gender’s not really an issue in Heaven,” Stiles said.

Dylan shook her head. “I think all of you have gone insane.” She pulled away from Wyatt and walked back toward the camp a few hundred feet before she turned and pointed a finger at the two of them. “I think all this stuff—this war and the fighting and the illnesses and the death and grief—I think it’s driven all of you insane.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Wyatt called to her, “my dad argued against the idea, too.”

“Great.” She laughed almost hysterically. “The only time the two of us agree.”

“It’s a lot,” Stiles said. “But, right now, it doesn’t really mean much, Dylan. The only thing that matters is the plan for tomorrow.”

“A plan that everyone is rushing to execute because they think I’m some sort of leader.”

“You are.”

“I’m not.” Dylan turned away again, pacing a few feet in either direction, burying her fingers deep in her thick, blonde hair, a little sickened by the dirt and debris she could already feel trapped there again. “I’m just a kid,” she whispered. “Just a kid who wants a good bath, a warm bed, and someone to care about me.”

That’s all any of us want,
a voice whispered in her mind.

Ellie.

“Tell me something else,” Dylan said.

“Anything,” Stiles and Wyatt said together, like a chorus.

She turned to them again, studying their familiar faces. “If the angels who defied God and stayed down here when they were ordered back to Heaven became devils, why did angels like Davida and Ellie hold onto their gifts?”

“They were with the rest of us,” Stiles said, gesturing toward himself. “We didn’t come down here until after that, until God sent us down to clean up the mess the first legions had made.”

“But they turned.”

Stiles inclined his head a little. “Not exactly,” he said. “We all just have different ideas of how to fix this thing.”

“Davida’s was to work with Luc and Lily,” Wyatt said.

“Davida, Ellie, and Lavina joined Luc and Lily to get information, to learn what their plans were. They were to gain their trust.”

“But Davida was about to turn Dylan over to Lily,” Wyatt said.

“Sometimes when you pretend to be something, it’s hard to separate reality from fiction.”

The words lay heavily between the three of them.

Dylan turned and began to pace again.
Where are you?
she asked the voice in her head.

Close,
was the only answer she got.

She closed her eyes and flooded her mind with memories of Wyatt’s touch earlier in the afternoon, of the taste of his lips and the feel of his hand on her hip. It wasn’t hard to let those memories linger. They had actually been close to the surface all day and seeing him, feeling his touch again, only made them stronger.

In just a few seconds, she felt the weight of the angel’s consciousness disappear.

She couldn’t help the smile that slipped over her lips.

Wyatt came to her and slid his hands up and down the length of her arms. “We should get some rest before tomorrow,” he said.

She moved into him and pressed her head against his chest, the rough beat of his heart rumbling against her forehead.

“Good night,” Stiles said a little stiffly as he walked past them and back toward camp.

“Do you think this thing will work tomorrow?” Dylan asked a few minutes later, still sitting contentedly in Wyatt’s arms.

“I think it’s better than sitting around doing nothing. And, if it gets my dad out of there alive, all the better.”

It was the first time Wyatt had admitted out loud that he wanted to rescue his dad. He had been the first to bring up the desire to find Jimmy, but he seemed to give up when he realized his father was in Genero and that would mean placing Dylan in danger. It had seemed more important to Wyatt to honor his promise to his father than it was to save him. But Dylan had known it wasn’t the complete truth.

In a way, his acknowledgement made her feel better about tomorrow.

He kissed the top of her head. “Do you think he’s still alive?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.”

A tension that had begun to build in his body gave way and he relaxed around her, wrapping his arms tight around her shoulders. He moved to kiss the top of her head again, but she leaned back so that he could find her lips. It felt like Heaven to be in his arms again, or what she thought Heaven must feel like. And when she tasted him, felt him tasting her, it pushed her into a place she was sure no one else’s touch could ever take her.

After a minute, Wyatt pulled away. “We should go back to camp,” he said.

“Not yet,” she said.

She ran her hand slowly up the angles of his throat, her fingers grazing over the rough patches of hair on his chin, along the edge of his jaw. She wanted to memorize everything about him, wanted to remember this moment just in case.

She didn’t want to admit to herself what that really meant, didn’t want to think about what might happen in the morning. She just wanted to stand there in that moment and remember everything about Wyatt.

“Me, too,” he whispered against her lips as he leaned in to kiss her again, responding to something she hadn’t said, but with which her thoughts had been obsessing all day. Dylan sighed as she opened herself to him once more, their touch lingering until long into the dawn, morning finding them wrapped in each other’s arms on that small rise of land, reluctant to separate.

They walked up to the back side of the dome as though they belonged there, each in their human forms wearing the simple coveralls that were the uniform of Genero. A group of farmers watched them as they passed not far from the dome wall, their curiosity tempered with fear. Most pretended they did not see them, just kept their eyes down on the ground in front of them, their hoes working quickly against the poor weeds that dared to grow among the corn and melon plants they were carefully cultivating.

“This is never going to work,” Demetria hissed under her breath as she slowed her step and moved back next to Dylan. “They’re never going to let us in.”

“It only has to get us close.”

“Not working,” Demetria said again.

Dylan didn’t respond. She just kept walking, struggling to get used to the longer gait of the adult female form she had taken for this part of the plan. She was taller, her legs stronger, leaving her struggling with the length of her stride. Wyatt had joked that she was getting him back for all the times he had forced her to keep with him when they were first together.

He moved up behind her and tugged at the back of her coveralls. “We’re almost there,” he said.

She reached back and squeezed his hand before moving forward, taking up a position at the front of the line.

They were headed for the same door Demetria had had Donna snuck out of the day she was supposed to send her to the Administration building. It was beside the tall, rolling doors that hid the cavernous room at the bottom of the Administration building that held the vehicles adolescents who showed no promise on their tests were taken into the desert in. Dylan had left the domed city by this means, though she had no memory of these doors or the immediate terrain outside of the city because her vehicle had no windows in the back.

She laid her hand on the handle of the door and closed her eyes, imagining it unlocked. After only a few seconds, she felt the handle pop under her hand. She twisted it open and motioned for her companions to walk through.

Step one begun.

Wyatt, hidden in the façade of a woman roughly Davida’s age, touched her hand as he moved past her. Demetria rolled her eyes when she saw it, shaking her head a little at Dylan as though she was still the head guardian of Dylan’s dorm. As though she still had control over Dylan’s behavior. But she also saw amusement, and maybe a little envy, in her eyes.

The moment they were through the door, Demetria and her team turned toward the left, toward the farmers who had spotted them walking along the dome. Dylan slipped through the door and joined Wyatt and Stiles, who was wearing the façade of a young girl, where they waited against the wall of the Administration building. Stiles led the way, directing them through another door that led into a corner of the vehicle room.

The smell hit Dylan with a power that was like a slap in the face. She remembered this smell, remembered the vague fear that came when the strangers in this room injected her with something she didn’t understand, knocking her out and causing her body to be unresponsive when she finally woke. She hadn’t been frightened up to that moment, had simply assumed this place was just another test on a day when everything was a test.

How wrong she had been.

The memory, however, made her wonder what had happened to all the other girls she had been escorted down the corridors with. Each had been taken to a different door, each escorted to a different fate. How many had survived? And how many had been driven into the desert like Dylan? How many of the girls she had grown up with were no longer alive?

It was a sobering question.

“This way,” Stiles hissed in his normal voice, a voice that seemed so odd in the face of an angelic little girl. It had been a reason to giggle earlier. Not now.

They followed Stiles through the cavernous room to the door that opened onto the corridor. Stiles led them farther down the corridor, to a place Dylan had not seen. There were more doors, each with a big window in it so that they could see into the rooms. Some were too dark to see anything, but others were well lit. Some of the things Dylan saw beyond those windows made her stomach turn and acidic bile rise in her throat.

She had seen them before. Rooms filled with rows of beds. Each bed had been empty then, but there were trays of instruments beside each. Dylan had assumed at the time that they were part of the test, rooms where girls were watched and tested. But it had never occurred to her to wonder what those tests consisted of.

Now she saw.

Wyatt ran a steadying hand over the top of her head. “Try not to look,” he said.

She glanced at him, biting her lip so hard she could taste her own blood. She knew what she was thinking, and she knew he agreed. She didn’t have to read his mind to see it. It was written all over his face.

This ends today.

They rounded another corner, the third since they left the vehicle room. This corridor was longer, the light a little dimmer. “Just ahead,” Stiles whispered, giving Dylan a look that asked whether she was really prepared for this.