“Stiles?”
“The fool decided to heal your…what is Rachel? Your cousin?”
“Aunt-in-law.”
“Oh.” He kind of nodded. “That makes more sense.”
“Stiles healed Rachel?”
“He did. And it knocked him off his feet. I don’t think Harry has ever been more concerned about his father, if I’m reading their relationship right.”
“You probably are.”
Matthew smiled. “I’ve always been pretty good at gauging relationships.”
“The cure.” Dylan gestured at the empty syringes in his hand. “It works?”
“So far, so good. We’ve injected twelve patients and each one has already begun to show improvement.”
“Only twelve?”
“That’s all the doses the first patch made. But we’ve got several people working on making more, so we should be able to have all the sick injected by this time tomorrow.”
“Good.”
Dylan started to stand, but a wave of dizziness caused her to fall back down onto the couch.
“When’s the last time you slept?”
She shrugged. “It’s been a while.”
“You should get some sleep. I’ll stick around and watch over your family.”
“Don’t they need you at the hospital?”
“I’ve actually been told to go get some sleep myself, so they probably don’t want to see my ugly mug for a couple of hours.”
“Then go get some sleep. You can have my bed.”
Matthew began to argue, but then he stopped. “You aren’t one to let someone disobey your orders, are you?”
“Not really.” She touched his shoulder and just like that they were standing in the master bedroom. “No boots on the bed.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Matthew sat on the edge of the bed and tugged his shoes off before he lay back with a heavy sigh. “Nice,” he sighed.
“I like it.” Dylan pulled a blanket up over him. “Stiles is okay?”
Matthew nodded. “He collapsed, but he came to right away. Harry made him go home and told him to get some sleep.”
“A lot of that going around.”
“A lot of people burning the midnight oil the last few weeks.”
Dylan nodded. She touched Matthew’s forehead and he was asleep before she could say goodnight.
She went into Josephine’s bedroom to check on her family. They were asleep, peaceful now. Josephine’s breathing was smooth and even, less ragged than it was before. And Wyatt’s forehead was cool to the touch. She pressed her hand to the center of his chest and felt the disease releasing from his cells. She closed her eyes and drew it out, feeling his body heal as she did. She did the same with Josephine, ignoring the heavy ache that settled between her shoulders as she did.
Then she settled into a chair and closed her eyes, finally allowing herself a few moments of rest.
She wasn’t asleep long when she felt herself separate from her body like she used to do when she traveled in time. She didn’t want to travel and didn’t understand where she was going. Usually she had some sort of destination in mind before she departed her body, a feeling that drew her in one direction or another. Not this time.
When she arrived…wherever, she found herself in the middle of a crowded city. There were cars on the many streets, cars like her electric model, but different—bigger and faster. And there were people, everywhere. She thought for a moment that she had gone into the past; back to before the war began. But then she saw a sign, the name Dytonia written on it.
Dytonia. That was the name of the city where Rachel lived. It was a new city, one that hadn’t existed in the past.
This was the future.
Humanity was thriving. All these people were walking in the sunshine, talking to one another; children were laughing and playing in the many parks. It was a beautiful sight, exactly what they had all fought to protect.
This is you. This is your purpose.
That voice…the man from the garden.
She moved over the city, her aura glowing brightly in the warm sunlight. She watched people go about their daily lives: fathers going to work, mothers playing with their children, and sometimes the father staying with the child while the mother went to work. She saw happiness, joy, security, and trust. She saw kindness. She saw love.
And then she saw herself.
She was sitting in a small dwelling—an apartment, she thought Wyatt had once called these places—reading a book, curled up on the couch. A noise, or a sudden thought, caused her to look up. And then a bright smile slid across her lips as she watched a man come into the room with a small dog dancing on the end of a leash in front of him.
“We should really get a female dog next time,” he said. “This one decided to stop at every corner, sniffing every inch of the street looking for someone to pick a fight with.”
“Aw, Eddie wouldn’t do that, would you Eddie?”
She laughed as the dog jumped into her lap and licked her face.
The man came deeper into the room, moving out of the shadows. Red hair seemed to glow like a halo on the top of his head, his familiar grin like a small knife slicing at her heart.
He leaned down to kiss her, the “her” sitting on that couch. And she responded warmly, sliding her hand over the angle of his jaw with an intimacy that left no question as to their relationship.
“No,” Dylan whispered to herself.
That is your future, the voice told her. With that, comes this.
“No,” Dylan repeated.
But the thing was, she had always known. Somewhere, deep inside, she had always known.
But that didn’t mean she was ready to give up what she had just yet. And she had freewill. That didn’t necessarily have to be her future.
Chapter 27
Stiles slept for what seemed like hours, but it was really only a few minutes. He woke in the bed he’d shared with Rebecca, lying there for the first time since the night she’d died. He rolled toward her side of the bed and gathered her pillow in his arms, taking a deep breath of her scent.
“I’m sorry,” a voice said.
Stiles rolled over and found Harry sitting in a chair in a corner of the room.
“You’re sorry for what?”
Harry gestured to the pillow in Stiles’ arms. “For being so pissed at you. For blaming you for her death.”
“Don’t be sorry. You had every right.”
“Maybe. But I knew better than to doubt your love for her. And I knew she was ready. I just…I wasn’t.”
“Neither was I.”
Stiles got up and crossed to his son, dropping to one knee in front of him. “I don’t blame you for hating me. I should have been there for you.”
“You were. After a while.”
“After you were grown.”
Harry shrugged. “You did the best you could. It was my fault. I built you up in my head to be this bigger than life kind of guy. You and Dylan both. And when I realized that you weren’t what I imagined, I was disappointed.”
Stiles smiled. “I think I would have been disappointed too.”
“I hear all these stories about you…you really were pretty awesome.”
“Were?”
“Are.” Harry smiled. “It was pretty impressive, you and Dylan pulling some poor guy out of the past to get him to cure this thing. I don’t know what we would have done without Matthew.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of owed him something.” Stiles stood up and settled back on the edge of the bed to pull on his boots. “Where is Matthew, anyway? Still at the hospital?”
“No, I sent him over to Dylan’s to get some rest. He said he was staying there.”
Stiles nodded. “Did you send the cure for Wyatt and Josephine?”
“Were they sick?”
“Yeah. Matthew knew. I’m sure he took something to them.”
Harry followed Stiles out of the house. It was dark, late in the night. “You
should get some sleep,” Stiles said to his son.
“I think my body has forgotten what it’s like to sleep.”
“It’ll remember.”
Stiles touched his forehead, and then took him home in a deep slumber. Alone, he walked in the streets, his mind reaching out to the townspeople, feeling the joy of those who had family who had received the cure. Rachel was already taking liquids, sitting up in bed and having long conversations with her brother. Another who had been on the edge of death was laughing at his brother’s bad jokes. It was working, this cure. Matthew had done it again.
Stiles stopped at the cemetery and stood beside Rebecca’s grave. There was so much he wanted to say to her, but he knew it wasn’t necessary. He could almost feel her spirit wrapped around him, could almost feel the remnants of her love clinging to him.
“I’ll never forget you,” he whispered to her.
And then he turned away. The living needed him now.
Chapter 28
The cure worked quickly. Most of the sick were back to their normal routines within a few days. A few had to stay in the hospital, their illness so close to the end when they received the cure that it took more time for their bodies to heal.
Stiles helped duplicate the results, providing enough of the cure to send it to the other cities. In a short time, the disease was eradicated from their region with instructions going out to other areas that had not yet been affected. It never hurt to prepare.
Josephine was back to work within a few days; her gratitude to Matthew was profuse. They seemed to hit it off, spending a little more time with each other than Wyatt was comfortable with. But Dylan was pleased. It made Josephine come home more often since Matthew was still staying with them.
The weird dreams stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Dylan didn’t mention them to Wyatt and she had no plans to tell Stiles. She told herself it was exhaustion that had caused it. And maybe it was. Maybe it was just the workings of her overtaxed mind.
She could almost make herself believe it.
Life slowly settled back into something like normal. The dead were missed. Dylan found it difficult to look at her shrunken group of students without remembering Benji. The cemetery was a little more populated than it had been predicted to be this early in its existence. There were constant reminders.
But Stiles and Harry were friends now. And Rachel had decided to move her library to their town, to be closer to Wyatt and Jimmy and the rest of the family. So, a few good things had come out of the whole mess.
Dylan was walking with Wyatt late one evening, not really talking, just holding hands and watching the others who were also out for a late walk.
“Josephine asked me if I would be interested in taking a position on the council,” Wyatt suddenly said.
“Oh?”
“She said she could use my common sense.”
Dylan smiled. “I can see that.”
He lifted Dylan’s hand to his lips and kissed the tips of her fingers. “I think I’m going to do it.”
“What does it entail?”
He shrugged. “I’ll have to attend all the council meetings and make myself available to the people. It’ll mean a lot of travel to check in with the city councils.”
“Travel?”
“Yeah. You don’t mind, do you? You’re so busy with your class and whatever shenanigans you and Stiles are always getting into.”
“I haven’t talked to Stiles in days.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure he’ll find another excuse to drag you out of here sometime soon. He always has.”
Dylan stopped walking, forcing Wyatt to stop too. He looked at her, a mask of innocence on his face. “What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’? Are you accusing me of something?”
“No, of course not. I just know Stiles. And I know the hold he had on you.”
“It’s not about Stiles. When we go off together, it’s usually to help someone, or to stop something from happening.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you acting like a child?”
Wyatt’s eyebrow cocked slightly. “Is that what I’m doing?”
“Whatever happened to, ‘where I go, you go’?”
“That’s still true, Dylan.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her softly. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just telling you that I’m okay with your doing whatever you have to do.”
“Are you?”
He kissed her again, a little harder this time. And then he slid his arm around her and said, “Let’s go home.”
***
Time passes slowly when there is no joy, or happiness. But when you want to hold on to every passing second, time flies by so quickly you can hardly keep up.
Wyatt took the council position and Dylan traveled with him at first, trying to stay in the background as he built his reputation. But her story had been told so many times, becoming so elaborate, that she couldn’t help but overshadow her beloved husband. He never would have asked her to stay home; it never would have crossed his mind. But she could see it was a gift that only she could give to him.
She filled her days with her classes, tea with her few female friends, and an art class that went terribly wrong. Artistic she wasn’t. She and Jimmy spent a lot of afternoons sitting silently side by side on his back porch—a few nights, too.
Her life was changing. Not hers, really, but the lives of the people around her. They were growing older and their interests were changing. They were growing. But she was staying exactly the same.
“It’s like time just stands still for you,” Matthew said one night.
She looked over at him, not sure what she had said or done to make him say such a thing.
He smiled softly. “You and Stiles. You both look exactly as you always have, as you did the day I first met you. It’s fascinating.”
“Not so fascinating for me.”
“Is it weird, having a daughter who is older than you will ever be? At least, on the outside?”
Dylan nodded. “Sometimes I look at her and I think, that’s what I should look like.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Matthew asked, leaning close to her so that he was nearly whispering in her ear. “I think Josephine feels the same way sometimes.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded. “It’s strange for her, to introduce her mother to strangers…the nineteen-year-old girl.”
Dylan had never thought of it that way before. “And you? How does she introduce you to strangers?”
Matthew blushed, a first as far as Dylan knew.
“We’ve discussed that, actually. We were going to wait until we could get you and Wyatt together. But, since you asked, we’ve actually decided to get married.”
Despite the fact that she’d suspected it, Dylan was still surprised. “When?”
“If it was up to me, a month ago. But Josephine wants a big wedding.”
That was a new phenomenon in their city. For a long time, when a couple declared themselves married, they were. But now, everyone wanted to have a ceremony, with pretty clothes and lots of people to witness their declaration of love. Stiles told her it was something people in the past did, usually in a building devoted to the worship of God. She didn’t really understand the point, but if it was what Jo wanted, she was willing to do just about anything.
“A wedding?”
“A wedding.”
“Did you do one of those before, with your first wife?” Dylan asked.
“We got married in a small chapel in her home town.”
“Then you probably know more about planning one of these things than we do.”
Matthew shrugged. “It’s really the bride’s place to do the planning.”
“Hmm, fun.”
But, it turned out, it was lots of fun. Josephine was so excited. And the neighbor ladies who’d had weddings of their own were more than happy to come over and tell them everything they would have to do. Dylan made the dress, which was a test
of her patience, but she had never been prouder than she was the moment she watched Josephine walk on that purple carpet on her father’s arm. She was so beautiful that Dylan found it hard to believe she was that tiny, wrinkled baby that had come from her womb.
The whole night, she watched. She watched Josephine promise to love Matthew forever and listened to him make the same promise to her. She watched them dance and listened to their laughter. Saw the tears in Josephine’s eyes when Wyatt whispered words of love and pride in her ear. She watched, and she felt like an outsider, someone who happened to come across this beautiful moment and stopped to soak in some of the happiness.
This no longer felt like her family. She no longer felt a part of them.
Even when Wyatt held her in his arms and whispered his awe at the fact that they had created this perfect human being together, she felt distant. And when he took her to bed that night and touched her, his hands as gentle and kind as ever, she didn’t feel that excitement, that warmth that had always been a part of who they were, of what they were.
All she could see when she looked at her husband was how old he had become. All she saw was the white that had grown from his temples to the once dark curls that often fell over his forehead. All she saw were the heavy wrinkles beside his eyes and along the curves of his lips.
She didn’t belong here anymore.
And that only made her want to hold on that much tighter.
Chapter 29
Stiles was sitting on his front porch, reading a book he’d borrowed from Rachel’s collection. It was about a boy and his dog, a sad tale that made him want to track down the author and suggest a few edits to the end of the story.
If only he had Dylan’s ability to travel in time.
He was about to put the book down and go find something to eat when he heard the soft tap of a walking stick. He looked up, surprised to see Jimmy walking up his front steps.
“Didn’t know you knew how to read.”
“Like I’m supposed to believe Rachel doesn’t tell you everything.”
“Of course she does. And I tell her a few things, too. Who do you think told her to loan you that book?”
BROKEN ANGELS (Angels and Demons Book 1) Page 14