FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) (17 page)

Rachel suddenly came to life. She unwrapped her arms from Dylan’s neck and practically threw herself at Jimmy. To Dylan’s surprise, he welcomed her into his arms, wrapping his arms around as a parent might do a child. His hands shook as he first clutched her to him and then moved them to caress her back, her hair, her shoulders.

“Impossible,” he said into her hair.

“You know her,” Dylan said.

He looked at her, and she realized for the first time that there were tears streaming down his cheeks. His lips were trembling as he tried to form the words he wanted to say.

“Thank you,” he finally managed to get out.

And then his thoughts told her what she had wanted to know.

My sister. My older sister, Rachel.

“Just before the war began, my father moved the family here, to Lubbock, Texas, to study geology at the university. My sister was five,” Jimmy said, gesturing toward Rachel, who was now, so exhausted by her ordeal, sleeping in a little ball in a corner of the room. “I was born the following spring. We were still here when the war began.”

“Your parents—”

“My father joined the military. He felt it was his patriotic duty. My mother took us kids back to Oregon, where she was from. But then the Koreans threatened to bomb the West Coast, so my parents thought it would be best if my mother brought us back here. They had friends here, someone with a bomb shelter who was willing to house us in the event someone decided to attack Texas.”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “We were living with these friends and my father had gotten leave. It was the first leave he had gotten in almost two years. We were having a barbecue in the backyard.” He glanced at her and watched as she picked the memory from his mind. A party, she realized, something like the celebration they had in the adolescent courtyard the day before test day. “It was supposed to be a fun, relaxing day. War had been waging for three years, and the end was nowhere in sight. People were coming home in coffins every day. And the attacks on American soil were growing more and more numerous. Never, in the history of the country, had so many attacks happened on our own shores.”

He looked over at Rachel, watched her chest move with each breath as though he was afraid she would stop breathing, or simply vanish. “She was older than that,” he said, his words muffled by the fact that his chin was resting in the palm of his hand. “Almost eleven that day. And I was five.”

He shifted, pressing his back against the front edge of the desk. Dylan was sitting beside him, her legs tucked under her. She watched him struggle with his memories. She could hear his thoughts, could feel the pain that he still associated with that time, with the people in his past, with his sister. Dylan had only felt love like that on two other occasions: when she touched a blind man in an old ruin and when Joanna showed her memories of her relationship with Jimmy.

“The angels came that day,” he said. “Bursting out of the sky alongside the gargoyles, darkening it until their bodies were all we could see. My father said we shouldn’t be frightened. He had fought beside angels on the battlefield, and he believed they had come to protect us. That they knew something was coming and they were there to warn us.”

Jimmy shook his head. “I remember how excited I was. My father talked very little about his experience on the battlefield, but the angels and gargoyles was one thing he talked about quite frequently. So, seeing them in the flesh was like being a part of something that was so important to my father.”

Dylan could have closed her eyes and watched the moment play out again and again in his memory. Could have seen everything he saw, remembered it like it was her own memory. But she wanted to leave him the dignity of telling her himself. She waited while he struggled with it. The vision she could not see without seeking it out, but the emotion was different. She could feel the pain, the grief, the fear that came with the memory. She wanted to reach over and reassure him, remind him that it had happened long ago. But she knew the last thing he wanted from her was comfort.

“It was only after the gargoyles had landed and began moving among those on the street that the angels began shooting what looked like fireballs at us. At first, I thought it was some sort of game. I think maybe my mother did, too, because, although she was holding my hand, she didn’t pull me away or make me dive for cover. It was only after my father grabbed her and pushed her toward the underground shelter that she began to understand.

“We ran, I remember that. Ran so fast that my little legs could barely keep up. Rachel was sitting with a group of kids on the other side of the yard. My father yelled to her. I remember…” He paused for a second, clearing his throat. “I remember she looked up and smiled this beautiful smile. I remember thinking how perfect it was, how Rachel it was. And then a fireball exploded right where she was sitting. My father fell to his knees and screamed. I looked up in the sky, and this angel…”

He sat up a little straighter, balling his hands into fists and pressing them hard against his thighs. “He was laughing,” he said, his voice so filled with hatred that it practically dripped in thick, long strings over the front of his dirty, torn clothing. “It was Luc, and he was laughing as if it was a joke. As if he hadn’t just murdered my sister and the two or three other little kids she had been sitting with.”

His gaze wandered over to Rachel again. She was still asleep, more peaceful in that moment than any of them had any right to be. Dylan could hear voices in the hallway, both with her ears and her mind. The Redcoats were standing guard outside the door. She had hoped Wyatt or Stiles would have contacted her by now, but things were silent on that front. She could only pray that the plan was going well on their part.

“My mother either didn’t see Rachel die, or she simply understood just how desperate the moment had become. She kept running, pulling me along by the arm.
Pulled my arm out of the socket, still gets sore on rainy days.” He rotated his shoulder joint as he spoke. “She threw me through the low door of the shelter just as the angels turned their attention on her. I saw her explode into flames, saw her scream as the pain rushed through her body. My father came up behind her, tried to put them out, but he couldn’t. Instead, he pulled her into his arms and held her until they were both burning.”

Jimmy shuddered. Emotion was raging through him so violently that Dylan suddenly began to fear for his health. But then he stood up and began to pace, working out the energy that came with the emotion, and slowly his thoughts settled into something close to coherent thought.

“How is she here?” he finally asked. “How is my sister, younger than she was when she died, sleeping right there?”

“I saw her,” Dylan said, her head turned away from Jimmy as she tried to sort out her own thoughts.

“Saw who?”

“Rachel.” She turned to look at the child. “I saw her in the library with your father.”

“How is that possible?”

Dylan continued to watch Rachel, unable to offer Jimmy a response that made any sense to herself, let alone one that he would accept. “She was that age when I saw her,” she did say. “Almost exactly. But she was dressed the way they dressed then, in jeans and a shirt. But she had this skirt-like thing on over the jeans. She told me she liked to do some kind of dancing—”

“Ballet. She wanted to be a ballerina.”

Dylan sighed as she climbed to her feet. “I don’t know how any of this is possible,” she finally said. “How there could be angels, how gargoyles can be our enemies and then our allies, how someone could think that seventeen-year-old kid could be the salvation or destruction of entire races of people. All I know is that she’s here and there must be a reason for it.”

“What did she tell you when you saw her?”

Jimmy’s tone was deep, grave. Dylan chewed the inside of her cheek as she allowed the conversation to replay itself in her mind. “We talked about you. You were just a baby, and she was annoyed that your mother wouldn’t allow her to practice her dancing in the house when you were sleeping.”

“She did it anyway,” Jimmy said, his voice a little choked. “My parents used to tease her about it.”

“When they were leaving…”

Dylan hesitated. Her eyes again moved over the sleeping child. She hadn’t seen it before, but it seemed so clear now. The soft curve of her cheeks, the curls in her hair, the slightness of her body. There was no doubt this was the same child she had seen before, in the vision of the past. The same little girl who had spoken to her. Dylan had thought it strange, but again, her gifts changed and evolved almost every time she used them. So she hadn’t really thought about how odd it was that someone in a vision of the past, of a scene that took place in another time, had spoken to her. But now she was beginning to wonder if time was more fluid than they thought it was.

Had she brought this child into the present somehow?

“What?” Jimmy asked, taking hold of Dylan’s arms to force her to concentrate on him.

“She told me something odd.”

The older man, weak as he was from his time in captivity, shook her roughly. “What did she say?” he demanded.

“She told me to make the right choice.”

“Choice?” His brow creased deeply as he stared at her, as though he thought she was talking in circles. “What choice?”

She stepped back slightly, causing him to grip her tighter. She could feel bruises form on her arms just as she felt the warmth of her healing gift begin to heal them. Another voice had joined those outside the door, a woman’s voice. Dylan could hear her thoughts, could hear her trying to block them from the two Redcoats still standing guard.

They didn’t have much time.

“Who should live and who should die,” she said quickly. “Who will survive this war.”

“And you think that’s your choice?”

Dylan laughed, unable to keep the bitter sound from dropping from her bottom lip.

“It’s not one I ever wanted,” she said.

Jimmy’s grip became even more painful. If not for the sudden thump of a body falling against the door, he might have caused real damage. When the second body fell, he pushed Dylan out of his way and rushed to Rachel, carefully picking her up off the floor while whispering words of comfort against her tiny ear.

Lavina burst through the door, a weapon just like the one Ellie had used against Stiles days ago in her hand. She pointed it toward Jimmy, who took a quick step backward and turned slightly in a painfully inadequate attempt to shield Rachel’s body.

“Let’s go.”

“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Jimmy announced.

“No, Jimmy, it’s okay,” Dylan said. “She’s working with us.”

Lavina’s eyebrows rose, as if this was news to her. But she dropped the weapon to her side, pressing it up against her leg. “We have to get moving,” she said. “Luc is due to arrive any moment. You can’t be up here when he arrives.”

Lavina and Dylan both watched Jimmy, letting him decide what to do. Anger and fear chased each other across his face before he finally appeared to make a decision. He pulled Rachel higher up on his hip and then marched toward the door. Lavina followed, leaving Dylan to take up the rear.

The two Redcoats that had been sitting guard on the door were now lying paralyzed on the floor, clearly suffering the effects of Lavina’s weapon. It was a good thing, too, because their thoughts, the look in their eyes, suggested the ability to move even a small finger would have caused Dylan a great deal of pain.

Lavina ran around Jimmy and rushed to the same doors the Redcoats had led Dylan through just a short time before. Jimmy hesitated once more before moving past her onto the stairwell landing. Dylan followed, but when Jimmy turned toward the lower stairs, she shook her head.

“Wyatt and the others are up on the prison floor.”

“Wyatt?” Jimmy gasped, as though he had assumed his son was far from here. “What is Wyatt doing up there?”

“Putting our plan into place.”

“What plan?”

Dylan looked from him to Lavina, who had come into the stairwell and closed the door. The area was small, the air stifling, as there were none of the vents that offered the cool, moving air that filled the rooms out in the corridor. Dylan rolled her eyes, a little too aware of how little time they had to discuss things.

“You need to go downstairs and find a safe place to hide,” she said to Jimmy. “And you,” she added, turning to Lavina, “need to go greet Luc and Lily like everything is perfectly normal.”

“Just like that?” Lavina asked. “What makes you think I won’t tell Luc that you’re up there?”

“Because you and Davida were friends, and you’re just as angry with him for what he did.”

Lavina studied Dylan’s face for a long second. Dylan knew the moment she told Lavina about Davida’s fate she would help her. In fact, she had been counting on it. Lavina was an angel, and she could block her thoughts from other angels at will. But she had been unable to hide her emotions the moment the words were out of Dylan’s mouth.

“You came here to help the humans,” Dylan said, moving close to her so that they had the appearance of intimacy despite the small space and the fact that their voices carried, even when they whispered. “You and Davida. You only joined Luc’s legion to get information and to quietly sabotage him. And now, you are going to do exactly that.”