FREED (Angels and Gargoyles Book 2) (21 page)

“That would be great,” she said, sighing.

Dylan bit her lip to keep from saying something she might regret later. Instead, she threw her arm over her eyes and tried to pretend she wasn’t enjoying this break and that she wasn’t thinking very seriously about taking a nap.

“Restless night last night?” Stiles asked as he moved into her sunlight and settled down beside her.

“You could say that,” she said.

“Shouldn’t go off on your own.”

She lifted her arm enough to peek at him. “What makes you think I did?”

Those eyes. They always seemed to see right through her. She lowered her arm again so that she wouldn’t have to watch him watching her.

“I need to find Davida.”

“You need to stay alive.”

“I can do both.”

“Dylan,” he said, that warning tone making her wish she could get up and walk away. But it was like all those times when Demetria lectured her on the importance of getting her lessons done in a timely fashion. Walking away would only make him more determined to make sure she heard what he had to say. “The next time you decide to go wandering around, take me with you.”

“Don’t you follow anyway?” She glanced at him again. “Isn’t that the point of a guardian angel?”

“I’m not your guardian angel.”

“Then what are you?”

He sighed. There was a lot in that one sigh. It brought to mind the feel of his lips on hers once again. She felt the blush even before the heat rose against the flesh of her arm. She hoped he didn’t see it. But a part of her knew he did.

“We’re just a mile or so from the place I wanted to camp tonight,” Wyatt said as he finally rejoined them. “We can be there before dark if you guys want to get up and move on.”

“My feet were hurting,” Ellie said, a pout so clear in her voice that Dylan didn’t have to look at her to hear it.

“We just need a few minutes,” Sam added.

Another sigh. This one not as saturated as Stiles’, but still full of emotion. Wyatt didn’t like to be made to wait when there was something he wanted. Dylan pushed herself up reluctantly, telling her tired body that it would only be another few hours. Just more time.

“We should go,” she said even as she dropped her fingertips to the ground to stretch out her back.

“Where?” Ellie asked. “Why can’t we just stay here tonight?”

“There’s a place a little farther up that I want to check out,” Wyatt said. “It was a park before the war.”

“We’ve seen parks,” Ellie said.

“You’ve never seen one like this,” Wyatt said, a smile in his voice even though his face lacked any emotion.

“Let’s go,” Sam said to Ellie. “I’ll give you another foot rub when we settle down for the night.”

Ellie pushed her bottom lip out to reflect the pout that remained in her voice. “Only if you promise,” she said.

“I promise,” Sam said with a soft smile.

Dylan’s eyebrows rose. She had never seen them talk to each other that way. She had seen others do it, young couples in the resistance. It was called flirting. At least, that was what Davida had told her. It was weird.

Dylan walked away, stepping back onto the road even though Ellie was still struggling to put on her boots and Wyatt was taking advantage of the delay by downing the contents of one of his water bottles. Stiles, loyal Stiles, was at her side. They climbed the slight incline in the road where Wyatt had been standing when Dylan called him back. It was a little steeper than it looked. Dylan was a little short of breath by the time they reached the top, so she didn’t immediately look down into the small valley below.

“Ellie sure is a handful,” Stiles said. “I don’t know how Sam can be so patient with her.”

“You’re an angel. Aren’t you supposed to have infinite levels of patience?”

Stiles shook his head. “I don’t know what fairy tales you’ve been reading, but angels have shorter tempers than humans sometimes.”

Dylan chuckled, another comment on the tip of her tongue when she finally looked down at the world below them. And saw a huge round shape, a circle in the middle of a concrete park. And the circles of a train track with no train to ride it. And she knew behind those were boats with no water on which to sail.

This was where someone was supposed to bring her. But who? And why?

“What is it?” Stiles asked.

Dylan shook her head. Was it Wyatt? He was leading them today, and it was his plan to camp there tonight. But she was pretty sure the message she had overheard hadn’t been meant for him. No one else had been this way before. No one else knew what was out here in this war-ravaged countryside. Ellie had even stopped just before they were in a place to see it. Why would she do that if she was supposed to take Dylan there? Would Sam or Stiles have stopped if it was one of them who was meant to take her there?

Nothing made sense anymore.

“Dylan?”

She turned and watched her friends walking toward them. Wyatt was out front, charging toward them with that same determined look on his face. It was almost like a repeat. Hadn’t they been here once before? Hadn’t he led her into danger once before? And it had begun on a little rise like this one. She had trusted him blindly that time. What would happen if she did it again?

She studied his dark blue eyes, eyes that had grown so familiar in such a short time. She wanted to trust him. There had to come a point when it was no longer a thing to be debated. Either she trusted him, trusted that he wasn’t intentionally walking her into danger, trusted that if there was trouble he would have her back. Or she didn’t. It was simple, really.

So simple, she realized, she had known what she would do all along.

“It was called an amusement park,” Wyatt said as he, Sam, and Ellie crested the hill to join Stiles and Dylan.

“Why did they call it that?” Sam asked.

“Because he was designed to entertain people,” Wyatt told him. “They had these things called rides, things that moved in strange ways and…I don’t know. They just found it exciting.”

“Where did you learn about it?” Ellie asked.

“I read about it in a book,” he said. “There’s a great bookstore down there. They have all kinds of books about the park and other places that used to be in the area around here.”

“You’ve been here before,” Stiles said.

“A few times,” Wyatt admitted. “It’s not that far from some of the ruins my dad used to send me to scout out.”

A little tension squared Wyatt’s shoulders when he mentioned Jimmy. Dylan touched his arm. He didn’t pull away. She saw that as encouragement. But then she realized he was studying the park down below them so intently, he likely hadn’t noticed her touch.

“What is it?” she asked.

He lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight. “Someone’s down there,” he said.

Stiles, who seemed to constantly be watching Dylan closely, moved up behind her. “How do you know?” he asked Wyatt.

“I saw a flash of something. Metal, I think.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just reflecting off of one of the rides?”

Wyatt didn’t respond. He just kept watching. After a second he pointed with his other hand, the one not pressed to his forehead. “There,” he said. “A little flash, like someone moving around.”

“I saw it,” Stiles said.

Dylan hadn’t, but it didn’t matter. She had already known someone would be there waiting for them.

Stiles gripped Dylan’s arms and turned her around. “You need to go back.”

“No,” she said, pulling away from his touch. “I can’t keep running.”

“You don’t know what might be down there.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Dylan,” Stiles began, reaching to touch her again. But then he was jerked backward, as though hit by a powerful force. Dylan cried out as he fell to the ground, his body stiff, as though his nerves had all misfired at the same time.

“Guy is so irritating,” Ellie said.

“What are you doing?” Wyatt asked, his voice surprisingly calm as he slowly stepped in front of Dylan and confronted his former admirer, his hands held at chest level in response to the weapon in her hand. “Stiles wasn’t bothering you.”

“He wanted to keep her from going to the park. I couldn’t allow that.”

“Why? Who are you working with?”

Ellie simply smiled. “You two were so easy, you know? Didn’t even have to beg to get you to take us along with you. You just fell for that wild pig attack like you saved damsels in distress every single day. Davida sure had you pegged.”

“Davida?” Dylan asked. “What about her?”

Ellie just shook her head. “You are so blind, Dylan. Did you really think they would put a bunch of experiments into the dorms without someone there to watch over them? Lily’s not nearly that stupid.”

“What does Lily have to do with this?” Wyatt asked.

Ellie didn’t answer. She gestured with her weapon, the same sort of short, wide weapon the Redcoats had when they came searching for Dylan at the resistance camp. “Let’s go,” she barked.

“What about Sam?” Dylan asked.

Ellie glanced over her shoulder. Sam was unconscious on the ground behind her. Dylan couldn’t tell if he had been hit with another of the projectiles from her gun. She didn’t think so. His body was not stiff like Stiles’, or like Bobby’s had been days ago. And he was clearly unconscious. Stiles, on the other hand, was staring up at Dylan, and his voice, distant and garbled, was trying to communicate with her. She didn’t know what he was saying, but she had a pretty good guess.

He wanted her to run.

She would have. If it hadn’t been for Wyatt.

They walked at a much slower pace than before. Apparently, Ellie hadn’t been completely lying about her sore feet. Or maybe it was the necessity of keeping a weapon on them that forced her to walk slower. Whatever it was, it gave Dylan time to figure out what her next move should be.

Too bad she didn’t have any brilliant ideas.

“Why would you do that to Sam?” Dylan asked at one point. “What did he do to you?”

“Sam was a puppet,” Ellie said. “Just someone to help make my cover story.”

“Was he a student at Genero?”

“No,” Ellie said. “From what I understand, he had never heard of Genero until Lily put him up to this little charade.”

Dylan ran her fingers through her hair, annoyed to discover her fingers were shaking. She glanced at Wyatt, tried to see if he was holding up all right. She shouldn’t have worried. His face was as impassive as ever, but there was anger snapping in his eyes. He wasn’t going to take this lying down.

“Then it was you? You’re the one they told to bring me here.”

“You heard that?” Ellie clicked her tongue, making a noise that gave voice to her irritation. “They told me they could block your powers. Keep you from hearing the majority of my thoughts.”

“Who told you that?”

Ellie didn’t answer.

Block her powers. Dylan remembered how she had tried to find Sam after they were separated, after Ichabod had grabbed her in the night and flown her away. It was like someone had blocked her then, kept her from seeing and hearing him and the people around him. Someone with a voice she had recognized.

She tried to remember it now, that voice. Had it been Lily? Or one of the women she had met in Viti? Could it have been Ellie? She didn’t think so. Whoever it had been, she hadn’t heard the voice often enough to be able to recognize it easily. Lily’s she would know, even if they had only really met once. Lily occupied enough of her dreams that her voice was imprinted on her memory permanently. And Ellie’s, she would have known her immediately. She still had no idea who it could have been.

Ellie marched them right up to what must have been massive gates once. Parts had fallen over, while other parts appeared to be missing. Ellie nudged Dylan with that weapon in her back. Dylan picked up her pace, moving into the park at a quicker pace.

“They’re in the back, near the tall roller coaster,” Ellie said.

“What’s a roller coaster?” Dylan asked.

“This way,” Wyatt said, grabbing her hand and leading her down a brick path that led around some of the odd contraptions—rides, Stiles had called them—and into the heart of the park.

When I say, you move into that…whatever form and get out of here,
Wyatt said to her without glancing at her, without moving even a single muscle in his expressionless face.

I’m not leaving you.

He did look at her then, a softness coming into his eyes for a brief moment.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Ellie said, jabbing her weapon into Wyatt’s back, “but you need to stop.”

They walked a few moments more in silence. When they rounded a corner where there appeared to have been some sort of body of water at one point, a man stepped out of the shadows and confronted them.

“Finally made it?” he asked Ellie.

“Finally,” she agreed.