FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) (6 page)

There were some benefits to being a hybrid angel.

She climbed into the bath, allowing Ruby to help her control her balance. The pain in her head had not vanished. It lingered like the memory of a wound. She settled in the water, enjoying the feel of the liquid warmth as it settled over her body in a way that she was almost ashamed of. She shouldn’t enjoy it so much, shouldn’t accept the luxuries of the enemy. But, at the back of her mind, she knew she could get used to this. She missed these things that she had so taken for granted when she was growing up in Genero. Missed them more than she had ever expected to.

Maybe when it was all said and done…

Ruby helped Dylan wash, rubbing a scented soap into every inch of her skin and scrubbing her hair with some sort of fruit-scented shampoo. When she was clean once more, she stepped out of the tub into a huge towel that wrapped around her body like a hug. She dried off quickly, not thinking about what would happen when she was dressed, about what was currently happening to her friends downstairs. She tried not to think of anything at all.

Thoughts were no longer her own. She had to be careful who might be listening in.

The pain in her head actually helped at this point. The pain was becoming more intense the longer she stood upright. It made it nearly impossible for her to think about anything except how much she wished Wyatt was there to run his hands over her skull. Only his hands seemed capable of healing this kind of pain.

Ruby helped her into a bright red dress that clung to her chest, her abdomen, but then fell into a soft, easy skirt that seemed to swish around her legs each time she took a step. Her hair was twisted into a braid and the touch of a brush wiped color into her cheeks, removing the paleness that seemed to be more prevalent today than during her past visit.

“Do you know what they want?” Dylan finally asked.

Ruby shook her head. “I am not told things like that. I simply do as I am asked.”

Dylan picked up the hairbrush Ruby had used on her hair and thought about the other servant who had taken on some of these chores during her last visit. “Where is Becky?” she asked.

Ruby’s eyes fell to the floor, but not before Dylan saw the hint of a tear in the mirror in front of her. “She was punished.”

“For what?”

Ruby’s eyes came up, a new defiance in them that Dylan had never seen before. “For your escape,” she said.

“But Becky had nothing to do with it,” Dylan said. “She wasn’t even here when I left.”

“She was punished because the Redcoats cannot be,” Ruby said.

Dylan turned and took her hand. “Where is she? Is she all right?”

“No.” Ruby pulled away. “We should go.”

Instead of moving toward the door, however, Ruby slipped something from her pocket and pressed it into Dylan’s hand. It was a relic Davida had called a compass. Dylan had carried it in her pocket since she left Genero, but she had no idea what it was or what it could do. But with just a touch, Ruby showed her with the thoughts swirling through her mind. Not only that, but she showed Dylan how to use the compass to find Becky.

Dylan met her gaze, trying to wrap all the information Ruby had just given her into a nice little compartment and store it away for future use. She slipped the compass into a pocket of her dress and stood, running her hands over the material that covered her hips, her thighs, straightening it so that she would look her best as they walked down the long corridors to the chamber where Luc and Lily waited. Ruby dipped her chin slightly.

It was time.

Ruby stepped up to the double doors and laid her hands on the handles that would allow them to open. She hesitated a moment, but she did not turn to look at Dylan. It was as though she was waiting for some other signal. Dylan took a deep breath to settle her pounding heartbeat, the pain in her head overwhelming for just a moment. But then it began to recede as she stepped forward, a hand on Ruby’s shoulder enough to tell her it was okay, that she could open the doors now.

It was surreal, how much like the last time this moment was. They were sitting in their chairs as they had been before, Luc on the left, Lily on the right. But there was no joy on Luc’s handsome face, only pain. His skin was paler than before, making his black beard and hair seem darker than before. And his eyes. Like pools of darkness, they stared at Dylan with accusation written on every microcosm of space.

Lily was slouched, her broken human form no longer capable of the basic energy required to keep her head balanced between her shoulders. Her fingers were curled into claws, lesions weeping all along the bare skin of her arms, her neck. Her skin was like paper, the veins and muscles underneath ropy and visible, reddened in places where lesions were trying to pop out but had yet to make an appearance.

She was unrecognizable.

Dylan walked slowly down the narrow room, her eyes taking in everything around her as she made her way to a spot of sublimation, to that place where she expected to be taken away and butchered to help ease Lily’s suffering.

It was what they wanted, wasn’t it?

“Too late,” Luc said, his voice deep and raw with emotion. “You waited too long.”

The words settled in the room with a heaviness that only added to the pain in Dylan’s head.  She reached up to rub her temple, but changed her mind as her eyes fell on Lily’s. Her human form was dying, her spirit weak with the burden of it. But nothing had dimmed her determination, her drive. Dylan could see it in her eyes, those pale eyes that were so like the eyes Dylan had seen in her own reflection.

“Returning to Heaven can’t be that bad,” Dylan said.

“Being without my soul mate is like living in Hell!” Luc cried.

Lily reached over with one of her gnarled hands and touched his perfectly healthy appendage. “Don’t,” she hissed.

Luc’s anger dimmed just slightly as he looked at her. “I’m sorry, my love,” he whispered, leaning over slightly to kiss the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”

Dylan stopped a few feet in front of the raised platform where their chairs, their thrones, sat. She crossed her arms over her chest as she studied the two of them. “I’m here now,” she finally said. “You’ve got what you wanted.”

Luc shook his head again. “Biel has said that it’s too late, that anything we might have done before would not work now. Lily only has a matter of hours to survive in this form.”

“Then why am I here?”

“To suffer,” Luc said.

An honest sadness filled Lily’s eyes as the doors behind Dylan, the same doors she had just walked through, opened. A group of Redcoats began to march inside the narrow room, their tall, broad bodies blocking what was hidden behind them. Dylan watched, a weariness pressing down on her shoulders as they moved slowly in that military, disciplined way they had. She even recognized one of them, a tall, blond man. He was the same man Sam had attacked the last time they were here, the man whose throat Sam sliced through when he tried to grab Dylan. The same man who healed instantaneously before their eyes.

An angel. A militant angel just like the rest of the Redcoats.

I’m sorry, sister.

The voice was Lily’s. Dylan looked back at her, caught sight of a single tear slipping slowly from her eye and down the broken skin of her jaw, her throat. When Dylan faced the Redcoats again, she found herself staring into Davida’s eyes.

“No,” Dylan whispered.

A Redcoat pushed Davida onto her knees. Her hands were bound in front of her, her clothing torn, her always so neatly coifed hair a rat’s nest of tangles. She was a far more desperate sight than she had been the last time Dylan saw her. She was no longer in charge of this subordinate group. Now she was the inferior one.

“I did everything I could!” Davida cried. “I did everything you told me to do. I kept her alive. I protected her.”

“You didn’t bring her to us when she came to the resistance.”

“I couldn’t break my cover with the humans,” Davida insisted, rising up onto her knees by pressing her elbows into the hard stone floor. “I was instructed to keep the humans in the dark until the Redcoats came.”

“You could have found a way,” Luc insisted. “You could have snuck her out in the middle of the night, made them think she had run away.”

“Jimmy would have seen through that ruse, and then it would have been my head on the block.”

“It is now, too,” Luc said.

An unseen signal moved the Redcoat closest to Davida into action, the Redcoat Sam had attempted to murder. He pulled a sword out from under his coat and raised it high over his head.

“No,” Dylan cried, rushing forward to fall painfully to her knees in front of Davida. “No, please,” she said, turning her eyes to Lily, aware that only Lily could stop this.

Davida began to laugh. “You still don’t get it, do you?” she asked, her lips close to Dylan’s ear. “It was always you or me. Do you really think I gave a damn about you? Do you really think all those things I said and did had anything to do with you?”

Dylan shook her head. “I know you, Davida,” she whispered.

“You know nothing,” Davida grunted roughly against her ear. “You were a job, nothing more.”

Dylan ran her hands over Davida’s face, stared into her familiar hazel eyes. Remembered long nights when she had nightmares and Davida would come to tell her stories, to take away the fear. Remembered illness during which Davida fussed over a slight fever. Remembered hugs and kisses, remembered words of advice, shared laughter. Dylan had never known a mother’s love, but Davida had given her something that was even more precious than that. Davida had given her love not out of a sense of responsibility to an infant she had grown in her belly, a child she was tasked with raising, but because it was her nature.

Davida’s betrayal, the truth of her place in this drama that was Dylan’s reality, could not convince Dylan that her memories were based on lies, that Davida’s love for her and Donna was false.

“I don’t care,” Dylan said as she wrapped her arms around Davida’s neck. “You loved me. You can’t fake that.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Davida groaned, her voice breaking as tears began to course down her face. “Love breaks you, it makes you weak.”

“No,” Dylan whispered. “It makes you stronger.”

A Redcoat grabbed Dylan by the shoulder, nearly pulling it out of socket as he yanked her to her feet. Dylan wasn’t even completely out of the way when a flash of steel marked the final second of Davida’s life. Dylan screamed as bright red blood mixed with the brightly colored fabric of her dress, matching it so perfectly that Dylan could barely tell which was Davida’s blood and what was part of the dress.

Dylan jerked from the touch of the Redcoat and returned to Davida’s lifeless body, cradling her head, barely connected to her twitching body, into her lap. Tears came like she had never felt them before, her chest aching with pain that rivaled any physical pain she had ever felt. Nothing would heal this pain. Nothing would take away this hurt.

“If she reacts this way to someone who betrayed her, I can only imagine how she will react when we execute someone she really cares about,” Luc said, too much glee in his voice.

As though brought on by his words, the doors opened once more.

As Dylan watched, the Redcoats escorted first Sam and then Stiles into the room.

Behind them came Wyatt.

“No!”

The lightness Dylan associated with the move from her human form to her ethereal one flashed through her body. But just as she began to change, just as her body began to become a pillar of light, it stopped. Pain, like the flash of a blade through her skull, burst into her head, making her vision darken at the edges.

“Don’t even try it,” Luc said. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

“They’ve blocked your powers,” Stiles said.

Dylan looked up at her friend, taking in the bindings on his wrists, the bruises on his face, and guessed they had done the same thing to him. “How?” she whispered, but realized it didn’t really matter.

“Which one first?” Luc asked Lily, watching as the Redcoats lined Wyatt, Sam, and Stiles up just a foot or two behind Davida’s still twitching body. The moment the Redcoats let him go, Sam turned away and vomited on the stone floor. The stench wafted around the room, making Luc jump from his throne.

“Clean that mess up!”

One of the Redcoats immediately fled the room, returning a moment later with a human woman who had with her a mop and bucket. It seemed they were all to sit back and relax while the mess was dealt with, as though the bloody corpse in Dylan’s lap was nothing but scenery.

Dylan leaned forward and kissed Davida’s quickly cooling temple.

I’m sorry,
Lily’s voice said in Dylan’s head.

Make him stop,
Dylan responded.

When no answer came, Dylan shifted. Luc was pacing beside Lily, his hands seemingly unable to keep from touching her in one way or another. He ran his fingers over her wrist, touched the hem of her blouse, even ran his palm over her lesion-covered throat more than once, smearing the fluids that were dripping from the sickness. There was agony in every gesture. There was no doubt in Dylan’s mind how much Luc loved Lily.