“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.”
Chapter 11
Whatever had been blocking Dylan’s powers just suddenly disappeared. Her leg began to heal itself with excruciating quickness. She climbed to her feet and went first to Wyatt, taking his face between her hands.
Don’t, he whispered into her mind.
I won’t let you die.
His dark blue eyes searched her lighter ones, his still tightly bound hands coming up to take her face in the tiny space between them. There was a lack of doubt in his eyes, a lack of all the things she had imagined she would see there. There was no pain, no fear, none of the things anyone else in their circumstances would have been feeling in that moment. He had accepted his fate.
She couldn’t do that.
She couldn’t even entertain the thought of a world without Wyatt in it. Just the threat was enough to turn her bones to ice water, to make her long for her own death. Davida’s death was devastating. It tore something from her chest she knew she would never get back. And Sam…dear, sweet, innocent Sam. He had deserved so much more.
But even the idea of losing Stiles was not as world shattering as the thought of Wyatt’s death.
He is your soul mate, your other half. You were meant to find one another.
Lily’s words reverberated in Dylan’s ears as she ran her hand slowly up Wyatt’s chest, her fingers skimming the thin material of his shirt before coming to a rest against his throat a little too like the way Luc had held her own throat moments ago. She could feel his pulse pounding there, could feel the tension in his muscles. He was so alive as he stared at her, so alive and so brimming with life.
Don’t do this.
Dylan reached up and kissed his lips with just the softest touch. He responded, his touch the gentlest it had ever been. When she stepped back, he held his hands out for her, but she turned away.
“You can’t do this, Dylan,” Stiles said.
She ignored him as she approached Lily’s chair under the careful eye of Luc. Her heart was pounding in her chest, but not out of fear. Maybe it was anticipation. Or just shock.
Can you really heal me?
Dylan inclined her head slightly as she took in the lesions that were weeping all along Lily’s fever-weakened body.
What will you do when I heal you?
We’re fighting a war, Dylan. We must end it.
Even if we are on opposite sides of the battle?
Lily touched Dylan’s hand lightly. You are my child. You belong at my side.
And Wyatt?
Lily simply shook her head.
Dylan touched a finger to one of the lesions and it immediately began to knit itself, healing so quickly they could actually see the infected fluids receding into Lily’s damaged body.
“My God!”
Luc had come up behind Dylan and was watching over her shoulder. He moved around her and touched the tender skin where the lesion had been. “You did it,” he said.
“Let Wyatt and Stiles go.”
Luc continued to stare at the healed area, the tension in his body growing, not lessening. “How did you do that?” he asked.
No!
Stiles’ voice echoed through her head. She didn’t look at him, didn’t even move or acknowledge him in any other way. The wall around her thoughts, around her memories, was crumbling under the strain of watching first Davida and then Sam die. Under the realization that if she did not reveal the biggest secret she had that she would lose Wyatt, too. If that wall fell, her thoughts would be open for every angel within a few miles—maybe even hundreds of miles—to hear.
Then everyone would know what Stiles had done. What he planned to do, still.
Dylan touched another of Lily’s lesions, watched as it, too, dissolved the way the other had done. The skin left behind was as soft and delicate as a baby’s newborn skin, perfect in every way. It was as if the lesion had never existed.
“Only soul mates can heal each other,” Luc said, wonder making his voice almost breathless, “and then it is only the soul, the source of the gifts. I don’t understand how you can do that.”
“If you don’t know,” Dylan said quietly, moving her finger to yet another lesion, “than I definitely don’t.”
“You said you did it once before,” Luc said. “To whom?”
No.
Stiles’ voice was quieter this time. Weaker. He was losing faith in his ability to control what Dylan said and did.
About time.
“Let them go,” Dylan insisted again.
Luc ran his fingers over the healed spots on Lily’s arm, his eyes seemingly
unable to move from the soft, slightly pink skin. Without warning, he waved his free arm behind himself, signaling the Redcoats. They immediately began to drag Wyatt and Stiles out of the room.
“I won’t leave her!” Wyatt cried.
“They won’t let you live now, Dylan,” Stiles said. “You know that, you know what’s going to happen.”
She had to turn. She couldn’t keep herself from watching them struggle at the hands of their captors. Tears welled in her eyes once more, still red and swollen from her grief, and rolled slowly down the curve of her jaw.
“Dylan—”
Wyatt reached out to her with his still bound hands. She wanted to go to him, wanted to touch his face one last time. But she knew Luc would never allow it.
Wait for me, she whispered into his mind. I’ll be there.
He nodded, but she saw the doubt he visibly struggled to hide in his eyes.
Wyatt stopped fighting. One of the Redcoats pulled a dagger out of a sheath at his waist. For a brief second, Dylan thought he was going to bury that blade in Wyatt’s abdomen. Again her body, almost without warning, began to slip into her ethereal form. But it stopped when she realized the Redcoat was not intent on hurting Wyatt. He was simply freeing him of his bindings.
Wyatt rubbed his wrists. Dylan could see, even from this distance, the bruising and bloody cuts left by the bindings disappear. His gifts were growing, becoming stronger, without his realizing it.
“Don’t do this, Dylan,” Stiles repeated. “I know you don’t trust me anymore, but please, listen to me on this one last thing. They will destroy you.”
Dylan tore her eyes from Wyatt to focus on her friend. There was fear in his eyes like nothing she had ever seen before, not even in Davida as she waited for her executioner…she didn’t understand. What could Stiles possibly fear? He was going free.
“Finish what we started,” Dylan said.
It took a moment for understanding to flash across Stiles’ face. His body had begun to glow, a faint light growing stronger as the Redcoats pushed and shoved, forcing him toward the door. But it stopped the second his words penetrated the fog of his fear.
“I will,” he said quietly.
“Dylan?” Wyatt studied her face as the Redcoats cut Stiles free, too. Then the door closed and she lost sight of them.
She was alone. Alone in a narrow, dark room with her two most powerful enemies.
And, somehow, she had promised to heal one so they could fight another day.
Chapter 12
“Now.”
Dylan pivoted on her heel, her thoughts whirling a mile a minute even as she tried to keep them boxed up, tried to keep them from revealing everything to the last two people who should hear them. She closed her eyes and thought of a room filled with boxes, of the room where Wyatt had taken her into his arms and held her, touched her, filled her with a wild river of emotions she was suddenly afraid she would never feel again.
Lily gripped her hand, her touch stronger than it should have been in her weakened condition. Dylan opened her eyes and studied eyes that were so much like her own. Was this what it was like to have a mother, to have someone who you could see yourself in? Was this what it was like to have a connection to another human being?
Dylan carefully extracted her hand from Lily’s. “We have to lay her down,” Dylan told Luc.
He, without question, lifted his lover from her chair and carried her through a door Dylan had never noticed before behind the raised platform that held their chairs. Inside was a small chamber where a bed dominated most of the room. The sheets were white, made of some material that was slick and delicate, but stained in multiple places by the yellow and green fluid that seeped from Lily’s lesions.
Luc laid her in the center of the bed, carefully pushing pillows under her head to give her the most complete sense of comfort he could. His affection for her belied the cruelty he had just shown Dylan’s friends, as though he was two people, one who loved with his entire soul and one who hated just as absolutely. Dylan shivered as she watched him offer Lily a soft kiss on her sweat-dampened head.
“You can heal all of her?” Luc asked.
“Yes.”
“If you hurt her—” His hand shook as he pointed a finger in her direction. He didn’t say anything else. It was as though the steel went out of his spine when he said that little bit. As though his fear was so overwhelming that he simply couldn’t find the words to express it.
Dylan moved up to the bed, aware of Lily’s eyes on her. The sick woman could barely lift her head, could only grip with her gnarled hands, but her eyes were just as aware as they had ever been. And they never left Dylan’s face.
Fear bit at Dylan’s soul as she settled onto the bed beside Lily and studied the damage still left to repair. Lily was so much worse than Stiles had been when Dylan found him suffering in the woods. He had burned with fever, but Lily was so consumed by her own that, sitting feet away, Dylan could feel the heat rolling off of her as though a camp fire was burning beside her. Her body was bent and twisted by whatever was causing the swelling of her joints, the lesions were so numerous Dylan couldn’t even begin to guess at how many there were, and bruises all over her thin skin suggested an internal bleeding Stiles hadn’t had when Dylan healed him.
She was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t taken on more than she could handle with the promise to heal Lily.
Lily’s eyes were desperate as she watched Dylan. She reached for her, her twisted hand only making impotent gestures in the air as she tried to grab Dylan’s. In a strange way, the movement reminded Dylan of the death throes of a rabbit she once watched Wyatt kill. She had felt a strange sense of compassion for that animal then. And she felt the same now, that sense of violation, as though Lily’s body was being subjected to some sort of disrespect by the illness that was ravaging.
In that moment, it didn’t matter what Lily had done, what she planned still to do. What mattered was that no one deserved to die in such a manner.
Even if, in truth, Lily herself was not dying. Only the human form that held her spirit.
But it was like saying that the animal had not died, only the flesh that had nourished Wyatt and Dylan’s bodies had died.
It was all death, wasn’t it?
Dylan took Lily’s hand in her own and began to imagine Lily as she had once seen her in a dream. Lily before the ravages of disease. So tall and full of vitality, a woman who looked as though nothing had ever stood in her way and nothing ever would. A woman who knew what she wanted and went after it without a single doubt.
Dylan admired confidence like that.
Did she admire Lily? Was she impressed by all that Lily had done and was capable of doing? She wasn’t sure, to be honest. Dylan had a vague idea of what was right, what was wrong, of the morality of being human. But all of that was based on lies and deceit. Did she really know anything about the choices people made? Did she really know that what Luc and Lily had done to this point was wrong?
Who was it that had the right to decide who lived and who died?
Maybe there was some merit to Luc’s argument that the humans no longer deserved this world, this paradise. Maybe he was right when he said that they had devastated the environment to such a degree that they were essentially destroying the world God had given them. He was likely also right when he said the nuclear weapons the humans had developed and begun using on one another during their war would have destroyed more than just their enemies.
But did that mean that the humans who struggled to survive now, the ones who no longer had access to those weapons and who could no longer support their families without the interference of the angels and gargoyles, were deserving of complete annihilation?
Dylan wasn’t sure.
All she knew was that she could heal Lily. She could fix this little bit of suffering.
If that was true, shouldn’t she do it?
Should someone die because of what they might do?
The answers to
those questions were for someone far smarter than Dylan.
She took Lily’s head between her hands and closed her eyes, focusing on that image of Lily, on the smoothness of her skin, on the brightness of her eyes, of the perfection of her bone structure, until she felt warmth slip from the tips of her fingers into the tender skin of Lily’s temples.
“What are you doing? Lily?”
Luc’s voice was filled with fear, but Dylan only vaguely heard it. That sense of floating began to move through Dylan’s body. She felt unsteady, lightheaded, as though she had stood too quickly. And then the heat in her fingers intensified. She opened her eyes and saw that same golden light she had seen before, the day she healed Stiles, burst from her hands into Lily’s body. Almost instantaneously Lily’s body lifted from the bed, and the bruises and lesions vanished. They didn’t knit themselves together, didn’t heal. They simply disappeared.
Something different happened this time, however. Instead of the light simply dissipating as it had with Stiles, it built and grew, encompassing both Lily and Dylan in its warmth. It pulled them together, allowed Dylan access to Lily’s thoughts in a way she had never had before…and hoped to never again.
She struggled to lift that mental wall the protected her from the thoughts of those around her. Struggled like she had never done before because she didn’t want to see all Lily had seen, didn’t want to know all that Lily knew. She had seen too much already.
She also did not want Lily to see her own thoughts.
Dylan waved her hands, unsure why or what she had thought she would accomplish, but the movement seemed to draw the light back into herself. With it came Lily’s illness, all the darkness that had filled her human form, everything the light had healed. It had an immediate impact on Dylan. Nausea burst through her belly, her chest hurt almost like she had been pounded by a hammer, her head pulsed with a pain more intense than anything she had ever felt. It was a mistake, she realized too late, to take that light into herself. She should have let it go, allowed it to dissipate into the air as it had done with Stiles. But it was too late.
FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) Page 6