BROKEN ANGELS (Angels and Demons Book 1)

by Brenda L. Harper

  When the fire was roaring in its little ring, Wyatt came to her. He touched her face lightly as his eyes searched for signs of illness.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m okay.”

  He nodded just slightly, never taking his eyes from hers. “Where’s Stiles?”

  She shrugged. “I think he went exploring.”

  “I think his grief is driving him insane. What the hell did he do to Jimmy?”

  Dylan bit her lip, her own concern for Wyatt’s father burning in her belly, bringing back that nausea to a small degree. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I think he gave him a memory.”

  “Of what?”

  She shook her head. “I had my mental walls up to keep the thoughts to a minimum. I couldn’t see it.”

  “He needs to back off, babe. I won’t sit back and watch him hurt my family.”

  “I don’t think he did it to hurt Jimmy.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think I’ve seen the old man move that fast in years. Whatever Stiles did, it pissed him off.”

  “Like father, like son.”

  Wyatt normally didn’t like being compared to Jimmy. But he didn’t argue this time. Instead, he drew Dylan closer to him and kissed her. She stepped into him, her hands moving slowly up his chest until she could feel his pulse beating just below his skin low in his throat. She loved being so close to him, loved the feel of his hands on her body, and the taste of his lips on her tongue. She wasn’t sure she could ever get enough of this even if they both lived a thousand years.

  But as they lay tangled in each other’s limbs hours later, while Wyatt’s soft snores caused his hot breath to brush against the hairs on the back of her neck, she found herself thinking of things she shouldn’t. Wyatt’s touch had always been able to heal her, even after his other powers had faded. Every time they touched, there was that familiar warmth, that sense of peace that came with healing. But lately…was that fading, too? If so, what did that mean?

  What did it mean that Stiles’ touch could do what only Wyatt’s touch had once been capable of?

  And why was that one moment—that one kiss she and Stiles shared—suddenly constantly on her mind?

  Something was changing, she could feel it. Something undefinable seemed to be infusing itself into her soul. She didn’t understand it and didn’t ask for it or want it. But it was there and she instinctively knew there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  Could Stiles feel it, too? Was Wyatt aware of it? Was she finally going crazy? Or was she simply falling out of love with her soul mate?

  Her heart immediately protested. Wyatt would forever be the most important person in her life. He was…everything.

  She snuggled closer to him, making him moan softly in his sleep.

  She couldn’t imagine her life without him in it. She didn’t want a life without him in it. She’d always kind of assumed that they would go together and move on to whatever came next hand in hand. But he was growing older and she wasn’t. He was changing and she wasn’t. He’d lost his powers—he was more human now than he had ever been. He was different. Or she was different. Or both…she really wasn’t sure anymore. But she was afraid God had plans for them both, and those plans did not include their being together in this world and the next.

  And it was that that scared her. It was that that made her want to resist whatever this change was.

  She wasn’t sure she could survive whatever came next without Wyatt.

  Chapter 15

  The building was still partially intact. Stiles, Wyatt, and Dylan walked through it, knocking over debris here and there in an attempt to find anything that looked like a scientist’s notes or to find a blank spot where someone might have taken some sort of equipment. Stiles didn’t think anyone had touched these ruins in years, except maybe Outlanders passing through who had used it for shelter.

  “There’s nothing here,” Wyatt finally said, giving voice to exactly what Stiles had been thinking.

  “This place, was it important to their process?” Dylan asked.

  Stiles nodded. “It was, for a while. But I don’t think they used it after the human war ended.”

  Wyatt kicked over some more debris, sending dust flying into the air. “You knew about this place?”

  “Yeah.” Stiles sat heavily on the broken remainders of a wall. “Demetria brought me here once. They were working on the elixir here.”

  “Then it would be logical to assume this is where whoever altered the disease got his information.”

  “Not if they moved their notes and equipment before the building was destroyed.” Stiles waved his arm around to indicate the entire building. “Does it look like someone’s been scavenging medical equipment from this place?”

  “We don’t know how long ago this person altered the disease.”

  “I would guess, not long.”

  “And you would know that…”

  “Guys,” Dylan said, “when you said it would be just like the old days, I didn’t think you meant everything about the old days. Can you cool it a little?”

  Stiles stood again. “I don’t think there’s anything here for someone to use. We should move on to the next location.”

  He didn’t wait for a response. He burst into his ethereal form and headed toward Chicago. It was a little strange being back there. The tunnels where he’d first met Rebecca were still there, unharmed from the earthquakes he’d caused to convince Jack James to move the community. Even the farmland—the fields he’d worked with Tyler, Mark, Philip, and the others—was still there, vaguely visible despite the corn and other vegetables that were now growing wild. It had been the beginning of a life that would change Stiles forever.

  Was that why it hurt so much to see it?

  The building in question was downtown, a couple of miles from the old tunnels. He set down on the sidewalk outside, surprised to find that the city was still pretty much intact. There were signs of neglect, of course, but the angel attacks and the human war hadn’t left the many scars that were evident in other ruins of this size.

  He wondered why.

  “Is this it?”

  Dylan stared up at the building’s façade as Wyatt perched on the edge of a water hydrant that was long unused and rusted closed. The toll of moving around with Dylan was beginning to take its toll on Wyatt. He was pale and his breathing slightly shallow. Stiles might have healed him if he wasn’t aware that his touch would not be welcome.

  Dylan, however, was more aware of him than it first appeared. She stepped up beside him and laid her hand on his shoulder, the color immediately reinfusing Wyatt’s face.

  “This is what I saw in Jimmy’s memories.”

  “It’s intact, that means it would be more likely that someone found something inside here,” Wyatt said as he climbed to his feet. “Is there a settlement near here?”

  Stiles shook his head. “Hasn’t been in years.”

  That didn’t seem to faze Wyatt any. He strode to the front door—which was missing—and glass crunched under his boots as he went inside. Stiles gestured for Dylan to follow. He brought up the rear. They walked into a reception area that must have once been a beautiful place. There were remnants of it still—marble on the floors and walls, paintings that had once hung on the wall but which now lay in varying degrees of decay on the floor, furniture of wood, glass, and what could only have been expensive fabrics. But they didn’t even stop to consider it as they made their way to the lab on the third floor.

  Dylan walked slowly, pausing every little bit to listen for trouble. Stiles didn’t sense anything more than wildlife in the area, more wildlife than Jack’s hunters would have known what to do with fifty years ago. But there was no danger they couldn’t handle.

  He knew Dylan was off today. There was something bothering her, but she wouldn’t let Stiles in, so he wasn’t sure what it was. He’d seen her, the night before, sharing intimacies with Wyatt. Her mind had been open then, full of so much emotion he was still working
his way through it.

  Or maybe he was just mixing up her emotions with his own.

  He’d slept a few miles away, deciding it was better to give them their space. And when he slept, he went to the garden for the first time in…he couldn’t even remember when the last time was.

  When an angel sleeps, he doesn’t necessarily have to stay with his human form. Sleep was a human need, a way of recharging a mortal body. When Stiles first fell, he left his body every night, returning to the garden where he’d spent much of his early millennia. After a while, however, he began sticking with his human form, dreaming as his human form dreamt. It made it easier for him to return to consciousness when there was trouble. And then, it just became habit.

  But last night, he had needed to recharge. To remember who and what he was.

  There were friends there in the garden. Fellow angels he knew, others he didn’t, but friends just the same. They spoke to him, offered him welcome, and embraced him as a brother. It was nice to be among his own kind again. But it was also…strange.

  He had been gone for so long—to heaven, it had only been a short while, but by Earth time it had been a lifetime. Not counting the two years he had spent in heaven after the Battle of Genero, he had been on Earth for more than sixty-five years. He’d been among humans and had lived as a human for that length of time. He was different from the bookworm who had first fallen.

  And he still didn’t understand why he remained on Earth.

  “Here,” Wyatt said, shoving open a heavy, steel door at the top of the stairs. “This must be it.”

  “Not here,” Dylan said as Stiles stepped through the door.

  He saw immediately what she meant. The floor was empty. Every piece of equipment, every set of notes, everything that might have existed here at one time was gone. They must have taken everything with them when they abandoned this facility.

  “Are you sure this is the right floor? Maybe another floor…”

  Stiles shook his head, pointing to a glass enclosed space in the far left corner. “That’s where the lab was. You can see where they had their workstations and the gas nozzles for the Bunsen burners. This is the right space.”

  Dylan kicked a wall before she fell into the wall, landing hard on her shoulder. “We’re not going to find anything.”

  “We will. We just have to keep looking.”

  She rolled so that her back was pressed against the wall and studied both of them, Wyatt and Stiles.

  “What if we can’t figure out how this started? How are we going to stop this thing?”

  Wyatt met her gaze, and then turned away as the same fear rushed through his mind. But Stiles wasn’t ready to give up.

  “There’s another place for us to look.”

  “And then? What if Houston is just as empty as this?”

  “Then we find something else. We go to Rachel and see if she knows anybody who’s been looking for scientific notes.”

  Wyatt nodded. “That’s a good idea.”

  “And then?”

  Wyatt groaned. “One step at a time, babe.”

  “Exactly.”

  And then?

  She wouldn’t let it go. She stared at Stiles, the question so clear in her eyes he could almost read the words as though they were stamped to her irises.

  We don’t stop fighting.

  She studied his face for a moment, her eyes softening a little. He got a flash of trees, of a small grove of trees behind something…buildings, before she cut him out again. Then she took Wyatt’s hand and they were off, racing to Houston for the last of Lily and Luc’s labs.

  Chapter 16

  The lab in Houston was in a domed city, a lot like Genero. And it was a good thing, too, because most of the city was under water.

  Dylan stood on the lawn outside one of the dorm buildings. These were numbered rather than given alphabetical designation as they had been in Genero, but that seemed to be the only difference.

  She turned in a circle, looking first at the administration building, and then the windows on the sides of the dorm. She picked out one window in particular, one that was where her room would have been if this were Genero. She could still remember the view outside that window, the dreams she’d had when she stared out of it. If she had only known what her future held for her back then…

  “Let’s do this,” Wyatt said, grabbing her hand and tugging her toward the administration building. “I don’t like the look of those cracks.”

  Dylan looked up and saw the spider web-thin cracks all along the top of the dome. She hadn’t noticed them before, but Wyatt was right. Water was misting down on them, leaving a fine sheen on their skin like sweat after a vigorous run.

  “It’ll hold,” Stiles said, but Wyatt didn’t seem to hear him.

  Even though the outside of the buildings was eerily similar to Genero, inside the administration building was as different as it could possibly get. The décor was warm and inviting; the first floor one huge open space. There was no basement, nor did there appear to be a dungeon in the attic. There were classrooms on the second and third floor and a stretch of offices on the fourth and fifth. The lab was on the top three floors: the sixth, seventh, and eighth. But the equipment was gone, just as it had been in Chicago.

  “They closed this one down, too.”

  Dylan ran her fingers through the dust on one of the many tabletops. “This was planned…organized.”

  “It seems like it,” Wyatt said.

  “That means there wasn’t as much of the hybrid-making stuff going on as Lily and Luc wanted us to believe.”

  “What are you getting at?” Stiles asked.

  She looked at him, the wheels turning in her head. “They were giving everyone something to do.” She dragged her fingers through her hair, her thoughts moving so quickly she could hardly keep up. “Luc told me they allowed the resistance to continue in order to give those they weren’t ready to enslave something to do. He said all the pure humans were already gone by the time I was born.”

  “You know that’s a load of bull, don’t you?” Wyatt asked. “If it was already over, why did they attack us? Why did they chase after us all that time?”

  “They wanted me. They wanted me to heal Lily.”

  “And before that?”

  Dylan shrugged. “You attacked them, they retaliated.”

  “And this?” Wyatt waved his hand around him. “Why is this here?”

  “A decoy. Something to keep the gargoyles busy.”

  Wyatt shook his head. “That’s crap.”

  “Don’t you see? Lily convinced everyone she was creating this new breed of angel that would have freewill. But, in reality, she’d given up on that long before the war started. She’d turned her focus to creating an elixir to fix the angels that were already here.”

  Stiles was sitting on one of the high tables, well back from where Wyatt was pacing. Dylan glanced at him.

  I’m right, aren’t I?

  He didn’t respond, but he didn’t deny it, either.

  And you knew it all along.

  “Then what about Genero?” Wyatt asked. “What was that for?”

  “Me.” Dylan pushed away from the table where she’d been standing. “She was sick. She needed to heal before it got bad enough that she either died, or was forced back to heaven. She’d learned a lot from her attempts to build an angel army with freewill, so she built on that research to create an organ donor.” She shivered a little. “I saw it. I know what she was planning to do with me.”

  “Organ donation. Then why were they so concerned with powers?”

  Wyatt clearly didn’t believe anything coming out of Dylan’s mouth. And she couldn’t really blame him. She’d just told him that his childhood, that his father’s fight against the angels, had all been one lie after another.

  “She wasn’t human, so finding someone whose tissues matched hers wasn’t what she wanted,” Stiles said. “She wanted a new human form that had similar powers to hers, to those o
f all the angels. She needed a human form that wasn’t sick, but was as similar to the way hers had been before the elixir as possible.”

  “And then?”

  Dylan and Stiles shared a look.

  You started this.

  Wyatt looked from one to the other. “Are you going to explain? Or are we just wasting time until the dome implodes?”

  “It never occurred to them that I might be able to heal her with my healing powers.” She shook her head. “She was going to take over my body, Wyatt. She was going to make my body her human form.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  Stiles jumped down from the table. “Angels can do a lot of things you probably aren’t aware of, because by the time you became aware of them, angels had all been altered in one way or another by the elixir.”

  “But switch bodies?”

  “It’s rare. But it’s possible…especially when the donor body is also angel.”

  “You mean partially angel,” Dylan corrected him.

  “No. I mean fully angel.”

  Dylan grabbed Stiles’ arm as he tried to walk past her. “What are you talking about? I’m a hybrid, just like Donna and all the other girls born in Genero.”

  Stiles tried to pull away, but she held fast. Images began to flood her mind as Stiles slowly turned to look at her with that sadness back in his pale gray eyes.

  He lay on a narrow bed much like the one Stiles woke upon during his stay in this place. His face was as white as the sheets covering his naked body, his hair was no longer black, but a gunmetal gray that would have been attractive on his healthy body. But he was no longer that healthy, robust man Stiles had once known. His body had shriveled to nearly nothing, his bones protruding in places that were unnatural, unhealthy. He looked like a skeleton on which someone had stretched a soft, pliable fabric.

  “Who is he?”

  He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t look away, but she could see the resistance in his eyes, the pain and guilt that had caused that sadness this time. Tears filled his eyes and one spilled over, running slowly down his cheek.