FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) (7 page)

But did that trump all the evil they had done together, and all they planned to do?

“Him first,” Luc said, gesturing at Sam the moment the mess had been cleared and the human woman was escorted from the room.

“No,” Sam muttered as two Redcoats grabbed him by the arms and dragged him closer to where Dylan continued to sit.

“What do you want from us?” Wyatt demanded.

Luc hesitated. And then he began to laugh.

“You dare to speak to me?” he demanded. “You lowly human, son of the rebel leader. You dare to speak to me?”

Wyatt stepped forward, his eyes moving regretfully over Dylan as he inadvertently stepped in the edge of a pool of Davida’s blood. “What will you gain by killing us?”

“Satisfaction,” Luc said. “Revenge.”

“That won’t save her human form,” he said, gesturing toward Lily.

“No,” Luc agreed. “But it will make me feel better. Besides, you,” he gestured around himself, indicating Sam, Wyatt, Stiles, and Dylan, “are all going to die anyway.”

“So give us a fighting chance.”

“I did,” Luc thundered, his voice ricocheting off the stone walls of the room. “I gave you more than she gave my wife,” he said, indicating Dylan. “And this is downright humane compared to how I had wanted to kill you.”

He was done arguing after that. He turned to the Redcoats and made a gesture that could not be mistaken as anything but what it was. A death sentence.

Dylan couldn’t stop herself. She tried to morph into her ethereal form a second time, her need to save Sam so palpable that she nearly made it. She could see the light glowing around her, could feel her body begin to move toward her friend. Even saw the hope come into his eyes as he reached for her. Sweet, innocent Sam, who had never meant to hurt anyone.

They manipulated him. They were angels, under the orders of Luc and Lily.

Davida. Lavina.

The day of testing, the women of Genero knew that the miracle hybrid had been born, that she was living in Genero. There were a few guesses as to which girl it was, but no definitive proof. Davida was convinced it was Dylan, but when she failed to show her gifts during the test, she began to doubt her conviction. That was, until Lavina, the head of the Genero council, realized that someone had altered the test. By then, it was too late. Dylan had already been taken out into the desert.

Ellie had been placed in E dorm to watch over another girl there, a girl like Donna who had shown impressive healing abilities. However, that girl proved to be just another dud. Testing showed that she could heal herself and the other humans, but her powers were useless when used with angels. So, when the truth about Dylan came out, they sent Ellie into the desert with her male companion, a boy brought to the desert from another lab city, another hybrid who had the uncanny ability to find plants that offered lifesaving moisture and nutrition. He was to keep Ellie alive while she searched for, and found, Dylan.

And then things took a turn that no one could have foreseen.

Dylan arrived in Viti as she was supposed to. Safely arrested and brought to Lily and Luc. But her connection to Wyatt had proven a liability. Davida had to play along, had to help plan her rescue. But it was to be a short lived rescue until the Redcoats could capture Dylan again. Davida made sure Ellie was Dylan’s constant companion, even encouraged what she saw as a budding romance between Dylan and Sam in order to always have eyes on her.

Dylan wasn’t supposed to escape the Redcoats when they attacked the resistance camp. Davida sent her away with Wyatt and the others, but they had such a short head start that the Redcoats should have found them easily. Davida had not counted on Stiles’ interference, on him leading Dylan and the others to the buried vehicles in the desert. And she had not counted on Demetria’s interference, or Joanna’s sudden reappearance in this long, drawn out drama.

When Dylan insisted on separating from the others, Davida once again saw an opportunity. Sam was her agent. She simply used Lavina to manipulate Sam, to encourage him to lead Dylan to Davida and a band of Redcoats. Instead, the angel Dylan had called Ichabod came and took her to Joanna. Thwarted again, Davida pressured Lavina for results. Lavina was the woman Dylan had heard speaking to Sam after they were separated, the same woman who had blocked Dylan from seeing Sam, from hearing his thoughts or feeling his presence. And it had been Lavina who had instructed Sam to make sure Dylan ended up in that amusement park where Davida and the Redcoats were waiting for her.

Sam had never done any of it of his own free will. He was lied to and manipulated.

He was used.

And he paid the ultimate price.

Pain was all that existed.

Dylan woke on the stone floor, her body bent at an odd angle over Davida’s, her hands outstretched for Sam, who lay in a similar pool of blood just a few feet away.

There was screaming and yelling all around her. Dylan could not focus on the voices, on what they were saying. It was just pain, white hot pain that throbbed between her temples like a living being that writhed and slithered there, pain that was only rivaled by the torment that twisted inside her chest, in that place where she once had a heart full of love for her guardian and her friend.

Wyatt somehow broke free of the Redcoats that stood behind him, holding his shoulders, and dropped to his knees in front of her. His hands, bound at the wrist by thick, black cords, pressed themselves against her skull, wrapping around her head as though it were just a child’s toy. Instantly pleasure seeped in where the pain lived, breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces. Tears flowed freely down her cheeks, first tears of grief and then ones of relief.

“Get him away from her,” Luc demanded of the Redcoats.

“No,” Stiles said, shoving one Redcoat with his hip as he turned and smacked the other in the jaw with his tied hands. “Don’t you see what he’s doing?” he cried as yet another Redcoat came up behind him and wrapped his arms around him, immobilizing him even as he continued to fight.

Luc moved away from Lily, coming to stand just inches from Dylan’s outstretched body. As he watched, his eyes began to widen.

“Not possible,” he said in a voice that revealed how very possible it was.

“Luc,” Lily mumbled.

He immediately turned back to her, gripping her outstretched hands between his own. “He’s healing her,” he whispered harshly.

Lily only nodded.

Luc shook his head. “Not possible. They’re hybrids. They aren’t even real angels.”

“It is possible,” Stiles said. “She is not typical. She’s different, something new.”

“But him…he’s Nephilim. He can’t do that.”

“There’s something about her that makes him more,” Stiles said, his voice almost as mystified as their conversation was becoming to Dylan.

The pain was nearly gone. She reached up and ran her hand over the back of Wyatt’s, mindless of the smear of blood she left behind on his tan skin. Wyatt leaned down and kissed the center of her forehead, making the last of the pain just dissipate, dissolving at his touch and disappearing as though it had never been there.

The smell of blood had become so thick that Dylan felt as though she was breathing in a fog bank, as though everything would forever taste of the reality of death. She struggled to sit up, the pain gone, but a weakness she couldn’t immediately explain was weighing her down, as though the half dozen Redcoats in the room were holding her against the stone floor with just the certainty of their presence.

“Him,” Luc suddenly said, breaking the silence that had fallen over the room. “He’s next.”

“No.”

Stiles was the first to object, shaking off his captor and stepping forward even as the Redcoats anticipated his movement. One Redcoat slammed the butt of his sword into Stiles’ gut, forcing him to bend double as the blow pushed the air from his lungs.

Dylan thought at first that Luc had indicated Stiles. But realization sank in as another Redcoat stepped forward and grabbed Wyatt by the shoulder, ripping his shirt as he pulled him to his feet.

“No!”

Dylan cried out as she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around Wyatt’s legs. The dual movement, the yank at his shoulder and Dylan’s grip at his ankles, caused Wyatt to fall backward into the Redcoat. Dylan immediately moved up his body, frantically pushing at the Redcoat’s hands as he tried to get a firm hold on Wyatt and lift him to his feet again.

“You’re only prolonging the inevitable, Dylan,” Luc said, kicking at Wyatt’s legs as he moved up close to her. “If it’s not Wyatt now, it will be in five minutes. What difference does it make?”

“What do I have to do to make this stop?”

Luc laughed. And then he kicked out at her, landing his foot squarely in the center of her thigh. Pain flashed through Dylan in her thigh, but also in her head as her body automatically attempted to heal the bruise forming just under her skin.

“You had a chance to make this right,” Luc said. “You chose to run away.”

“Then let me make it right now.”

“Dylan,” Stiles said, his voice a warning she knew she should heed, but was somehow unable to.

“Don’t you get it?” Luc asked, reaching down to grab Dylan by the front of her dress. The material ripped as he used it as a handle to lift her body from the tangle it had become with Wyatt’s. One moment she was just a heap on the floor, the next she was hovering above it, Luc’s shockingly strong grip holding her a full foot above the stones. He held her so that her face was just inches from his. “You were Lily’s one chance to recover from this illness, her one chance to stay here with me and rule over these weak, pathetic humans. But you spat on that, spat on Lily, on our love, on our desire to make things better in this Godforsaken world.”

“You want to kill them all.”

“Not all.”

“Oh, yeah.” She turned her head slightly, thinking of Ruby, who was probably standing just outside the door, waiting to take Dylan away, whatever might be left of her when this was all said and done. “Just the ones you can’t enslave,” she said.

Luc shook her, causing the bodice of her dress to rip that much more. “You have no idea what it’s been like to sit down here for millennia, watching these humans destroy the gifts God gave to them. Polluting the water, the air. Procreating to the point that they were running out of space to house themselves. And then the nuclear weapons.” He moved his face closer to her, so close that she could smell the sourness of his breath. “Tell me,” he hissed, “what kind of people destroy themselves with a weapon that guarantees that even the innocent creatures of the world, the bacteria and the marine life and the animals, will die too?”

“You can teach them to live a better life,” she said. “You don’t have to annihilate them.”

“Don’t you think we’ve tried?”

“Then it’s over,” Dylan said. “Why not go back to Heaven and let them finish it themselves?”

“And give up this paradise?” Luc shook his head. “This has been our home longer than it was theirs. We deserve it.”

Dylan laid her hands on his shoulders, glancing nervously at the floor below her. His grip on her bodice was making the material give way along the seams under her arms, across her back. In a moment, the dress would disintegrate and she would fall to the stone floor without the ability to repair any injuries she might receive. Luc shook her again, her last words bringing back the anger and grief that had motivated him to begin this ordeal in the first place.

“We deserve this,” he repeated. “Me and Lily. But you took that away, too.”

“No, please,” Dylan cried as he again shook her, his strength causing her head to whip back and forth on the top of her spine, causing pain to seep through her shoulders up the back of her neck.

“This is why you have to pay. You will watch everyone you love die.”

“No,” she cried again. “Please.”

He pulled her so close to his face that she could feel the moisture of his words splatter across her cheek. “Starting with your soul mate.”

Luc dropped Dylan to the floor. Something in her leg shattered as she landed. She cried out and Wyatt was immediately at her side, gathering her hard against him as though he could shield her from the injury that had already occurred. Dylan pulled away from him even as the Redcoat who had fought her over him once before returned for a second round. Instead of fighting the Redcoat, Dylan turned to Luc. She wrapped her arms around his legs, held him so tightly that he couldn’t just shrug her off.

“Show some dignity,” he hissed as he bent to push her away.

“I can heal her.”

“Don’t, Dylan,” Stiles said, his voice strained by the pain of the blow to his belly.

Dylan looked up at Luc, trying to ignore everything around her even as she became aware of the grunts of the Redcoat struggling with Wyatt behind her. “Please,” she moaned, “please, I can do it. Let me try.”

Hope bloomed in Luc’s eyes even as he was attempting to take it from Dylan. He bent low, wrapping a single fist around Dylan’s throat. “If you’re lying to me,” he said close to her ear, “I will kill you in the most unimaginable way possible.”