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

“We don’t have time for this,” she finally said. “We have to get out of here before Davida and her people figure out that we’re still in their backyard.”

“And go where?” Wyatt asked.

“To find your dad.”

He turned then, the tension only growing as he studied her. “You saw him,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do for him.”

“So you’re just going to give up?”

Wyatt threw his hands up in the air. “What can we do?”

“We can go get him. Joanna said—”

“I don’t care what she had to say.”

“Wyatt, she was trying to help.”

“Joanna?” Stiles walked toward them, coming to a stop just behind Wyatt’s shoulder. “Where did you see Joanna?”

“What’s it to you?” Wyatt asked, glaring over his shoulder at Stiles before he moved around Dylan and walked a little farther up the clear line of the field to the road that sat just a few yards ahead.

Stiles came to Dylan and took hold of her shoulders. “Did you see Joanna?”

He seemed so concerned that Dylan found herself wondering what Stiles’ relationship with her might be. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist, pulling his hand away from her shoulder and sliding her fingers between his.

“Why?” she asked.

“She’s been missing since the day you met her.”

Dylan glanced back at Wyatt. He had come to a stop at the edge of the weed-choked road. He was facing away from them, but, again, Dylan recognized the tension in his shoulders. He was listening despite everything he had said. He wanted to know about his mother even though he was angry at her deception.

“She was in the same place as Jimmy. She called it Luc’s prison, the place where he takes humans to be tried after they’re caught by the Redcoats.”

Stiles’ face lost what little color it had held. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes.” Dylan glanced back at Wyatt again before she lowered her voice and said, “She also told me that they were about to execute Jimmy.”

Stiles squeezed Dylan’s hand, a gesture that wasn’t meant to be comforting. In fact, it hurt quite a bit. His gaze fell from her face to the ground at their feet. Reflexively, Dylan ran her hand over the back of his head, touching the silkiness of his hair with a caress that reminded her again of the kiss they had shared just a day before. In some ways, it felt like such a long time ago. In others, it felt as close as though it had just happened.

“We have to go get them,” Stiles said to the ground.

“We don’t have any supplies.” Dylan ran her hand over his head a second time, her own doubts and fears beginning to take root in her chest. Fears that mirrored those she imagined Wyatt was struggling with. “And I don’t know where the prison is. Joanna didn’t say.”

“I do,” Stiles said.

“Where?” Wyatt said so close to her ear Dylan jumped. She took her hand from Stiles’ head, pulled her other from his grasp. He looked up at her, understanding mixing with the perpetual sadness in his eyes. It only served to make her feel guilty. Of what, she wasn’t quite sure.

She turned slightly, drawing Wyatt into their little circle. He no longer seemed angry, no longer seemed ready to explode. She touched his arm, and he didn’t pull away. He only stood there beside her, his body rigid, and watched Stiles.

“You know so much about everything,” he said, his words sporting sharp edges. “Why don’t you tell us what you know about her, about this place Luc is holding them.”

“You already know all about it, Wyatt,” Stiles said. In complete contrast, Stiles’ voice was filled with an unnerving calm. He touched Wyatt too, laying a hand on his shoulder much like he had done to Dylan a moment ago. “Your father taught you all about it. Taught you to watch for kids coming from there.”

Wyatt stepped back just a single step, but it was enough to make it clear he was shocked by what Stiles had said. Dylan was confused. She had no idea what they were talking about and felt as though she was eavesdropping on an inside joke, something she was never intended to understand. It wasn’t until both boys looked at her that she realized she should have understood, that they had expected her to.

“Genero,” Wyatt said.

Stiles nodded.

Genero.

Dylan was born and raised in Genero.

Dylan had been taught that Genero, a domed city, was begun by a couple of sisters who had sought a way to rebuild society in the aftermath of a devastating war. They began with a dome that was no bigger than a small room. But as people found them, as more people joined their small society, the dome grew until it was the beautiful, love filled city it was now.

Once abandoned in the desert by the council of Genero, Dylan discovered that it was all a lie.

Genero was actually a laboratory, a place where scientists working for the angels were creating hybrids, children with both human and angel DNA, in order to create a child who could help cure the illness created to destroy the angels. Most of the girls there—Dylan had no idea how it had gone for the boys because the boys and girls of Genero were kept separate to avoid any contamination of the gene pool—showed no special abilities, no proof that the hybrid combination had worked. Those who did show abilities were taken into the Administration building for testing. Their DNA was often used to create more hybrid children. But Genero and its children had never shown any promise of discovering the perfect combination of genetics needed to do whatever it was they wanted in order to cure the illness.

Until Dylan.

Dylan was the first to come out of Genero with all the right abilities, all the promise for a cure they had been looking for. But, thanks to Stiles, her abilities remained hidden until she was sent out into the desert to die. That was how Genero took care of the children they didn’t want. They sent them into the desert and allowed them to die. Dylan would have died, too, if not for Stiles. And then Wyatt.

And now they wanted her to go back.

“Why would he take them to Genero?”

Stiles glanced at Wyatt as though gauging his emotional state before he answered. “It’s where they take the humans they find so that they can take whatever DNA they might need. And, sometimes, they use them as…incubators.”

“Incu…what?”

“They use the women to carry the children,” Wyatt said, his voice impatient. “He means that they use them to make the hybrids.”

“Like me?” she asked. “Like me and Donna and the others?”

“Yes,” Stiles said.

She shook her head, her knees going weak as she tried not to consider the implications of it. She remembered a woman she had seen on testing day, a woman whose voice had screamed inside her head, a woman who asked her to save someone…a boy. Dylan hadn’t understood what the woman meant. She had never heard the pronoun the woman had used: him. Now she knew. Now she recognized that the swelling of the woman’s belly had been a baby she was carrying. She hadn’t known that then. None of it had made sense, not like it did now. She shivered at the memory.

“They use angels, too.”

It wasn’t a question. She knew it to be true. That woman had spoken to her without using her mouth, had known that Dylan could hear her. Humans couldn’t do that.

“Yes,” Stiles said again.

Dylan shook her head, a part of her realizing why Joanna was there, why she was still alive. Urgency filled her body like a physical thing in her chest, her limbs. “We have to go,” she said, stepping backward and beginning to rush toward the road.

“Wait,” Wyatt said. “We can’t go there.”

“Why not?” she demanded. “They are your parents, Wyatt.”

“I know.” He turned to look at her. “But we can’t take you to a place where all the people are loyal to Luc and Lily. It would be like walking into their chamber in Viti.”

“He’s right,” Stiles agreed. “It would be stupid to take you there.”

“But we can’t just leave Joanna there.”

“Why not?” Wyatt asked. “After the lies she told you, I would have thought you would be more than willing to walk away and leave her to her fate.”

Dylan stared at him, finding it difficult to believe what he had said. But also finding it difficult to disagree. She had showed Wyatt everything she had seen the day she met his mother. All the lies she had told him about her origins, about her faked death. It had also included information Joanna accidentally showed her as they fled her home just in front of Luc and his invading legion. The death and destruction Joanna and others like her wanted to use on the earth in a desperate attempt to save the human race.

Joanna had said she wanted to teach Dylan so that she could make her own decisions about this war she found herself a pawn in, the war between the angels, the gargoyles, and the few remaining humans. But it had all been a lie. Joanna and her kind simply wanted to use Dylan as a weapon.

A huge, destructive weapon.

“I’m not like her,” Dylan said quietly. “I can’t just walk away, knowing where she is and what her future will be.”

Wyatt shook his head slowly. “No, you’re not,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you should risk your life for her.”

“Wyatt and I can go alone,” Stiles said. “I’ll bring Sam here to stay with you.”

“Oh, we trust Sam now, do we?” Dylan asked. “After he worked with Ellie all that time?”

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Stiles said.

“How do we know that?” Wyatt asked. “He seemed to know.”

Stiles looked at Dylan. “I don’t suppose you could just trust me on this, could you?”

Dylan laughed. “You’re asking me to trust you now? After all the lies you told me?” She turned away, moved closer to the road, and began to dig in the soft dirt with the toe of her boot. She chewed on her lip, thinking about Genero, about Ellie and everything that happened in the past few days. Ellie was another girl from Genero. Dylan had thought she could trust her because she knew Ellie before and Ellie had survived almost the same way she had. The only difference was, Wyatt found Dylan. Ellie teamed up with Sam, a boy from the other side of Genero, from the part of Genero the girls were kept in the dark about.

But that was a lie, too.

Dylan closed her eyes, thinking about the voice she had heard last night telling someone to bring her to the amusement park. She hadn’t known who the message was meant for, but suspected it might be Sam. The voice that had spoken those few words in the night…it was from the same person she had heard speaking to Sam when they were separated days before, the person who somehow blocked her from watching Sam in that way she had.

Sam was working with Ellie, protecting her from detection until she could act.

The same Sam who had kissed Dylan and told her he could wait for her to decide what it was she really wanted.

She could sense him now, not far from here. He was overwhelmed with regret, remorse, and more than a little confusion. It made her heart ache.

“We go together,” she finally said.

“No,” Wyatt began to argue, but stopped when she turned to face him. Maybe it was something about the look on her face. Or maybe he just finally realized there was no point arguing with her.

Dylan looked at Stiles. “Is Sam like us?” she asked.

“No.” He dragged his fingers through his hair, making it look like thin, red spikes. “He’s mostly human.”

“But he’s not from Genero.”

“He’s from another city like Genero. There’s a few out there.”

Dylan nodded. “Go get him.”

“Dylan, we don’t know that we can trust Sam,” Wyatt said.

“I know we can,” she said, trying to infuse her voice with as much confidence as she could. The truth was, she really didn’t know. But she was hoping.

“You tell her, Stiles,” Wyatt said, turning as an ally to the same angel he had just attempted to beat up. “Tell her we can’t do this, that she cannot go to Genero and we cannot trust Sam.”

Stiles studied Wyatt for a long minute and then turned to Dylan. “Tell me your plan.”

Wyatt slapped his own hip in frustration and stormed off, back toward the field where they had been sitting earlier. Dylan watched him, wishing there was some other way. But she knew there wasn’t. They had to have Jimmy on their side, had to have someone who knew the things they didn’t so that they could figure out how to stop Luc and Lily without resorting to any of the drastic measures the gargoyles and the angels wanted to use.

Without the end of the war equating to the end of Dylan and Wyatt and others like them.

I’m doing this for you,
she whispered into his mind.

He didn’t respond.

Stiles moved up beside her. He seemed to want to take her hand, or touch her in some other way. She could see it in the way he lifted his hand between their bodies, the way he studied her face with an intensity that seemed even more penetrating than usual. She stepped back. She needed to think, needed to figure things out.

“Tell me about this prison,” she said.

Stiles gestured for her to sit on the edge of the road. She did, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them. She watched Wyatt move through the long grass, headed toward the stream on the other side of the trees at the far side of the field. She could see his thoughts, knew he was thinking about his dad. But they were not affectionate thoughts, not thoughts filled with longing or desire. They were memories filled with fear. He was desperately afraid of letting his father down. The only thing Jimmy had ever asked of Wyatt was to keep Dylan alive. He was afraid he was about to fail.