DARK SOULS (Angels and Demons Book 2)

by Brenda L. Harper

  Dylan gave Rachel an impromptu hug, relishing the feel of another human being after all those weeks she’d laid alone with only the ghostly presence of Stiles to keep her company.

  She pulled away and walked off, not looking Rachel—or anyone—in the eye as she did. She brushed away the few tears that escaped her eyes, releasing her wings as she stepped out onto the street. She was not supposed to be here. They were not supposed to be in populated areas anymore. But the people of Dytonia had chosen to openly defy the order of the United Alliance of the Americas’ council. They understood the help Dylan, Stiles, Raphael, and their army represented.

  Too bad Josephine didn’t see it.

  “Ready?” Stiles asked.

  “Let’s fly.”

  Stiles tilted his head slightly. “You fly. I’ll meet you there.”

  “No. I want to fly together. We’ve never done that.”

  “There’s a reason for that.”

  Even as he said it, Dylan remembered helping him heal a wound on his back and seeing gnarled scars higher up, where his shoulder blades were. She’d seen them so many times since that she hardly ever thought of them. But now…

  “How did it happen?”

  Stiles shrugged. “I pissed off the wrong guy.”

  He said it in a way that was meant to be flippant. But Dylan knew him too well. She could see him too clearly. It was painful, the loss of his wings. It was humiliating, and painful—both physically and emotionally. There was something about the angel who’d done it…Mammon. Dylan could see the man in Stiles’ memories as clearly as if she had been standing there when it had happened. It was an angel she knew—a loyal servant of Joanna’s.

  “Why didn’t you heal yourself?”

  “The angel sword, it makes healing a problem.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  He shrugged again—again trying to appear nonchalant. But she knew him, and she knew this was wrapped up in some of those regrets Rebecca had talked about. She was supposed to help him let go of such regrets. And that, she knew, was something she could do even if she couldn’t give him the one thing he wanted most desperately.

  She moved closer to him and stroked the low corner of his jaw. That was all…just a simple touch. And the most beautiful, exotic wings grew out of the center of his back.

  “You don’t have to hold on to your regrets anymore,” she said softly, kissing his chin every so lightly.

  Tears welled in his eyes. She had never seen Stiles cry, not even when Rebecca died. But there were tears.

  And then he burst into the sky and they were flying like birds through the warm afternoon air, laughing as they sailed so close to one another that they should have collided, but they didn’t. For the first time in a very long time, Dylan felt carefree and as close to heaven as she could get without actually traveling there.

  Chapter 27

  “Purpose,” Wilhelm said with confidence. “They have some sort of purpose.”

  “What purpose?”

  Wilhelm shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Dylan stood beside the jail cell where two possessed still sat, staring unseeing at the bars of the cell. They were thinner now, still refusing to take any nourishment. Wilhelm had to bring in a doctor who knew how to force feed them nutrients through some sort of tube. They wouldn’t die, but they wouldn’t thrive as long as those souls refused to budge inside of them.

  “What makes you think they have some sort of purpose?” Stiles asked. “What if it’s just decades, or generations, of built up anger?”

  “I thought of that. But when they speak, they talk about their leader, Jack. They say that Jack has a plan for them and that we will regret interfering.”

  “They said that?”

  Dylan glanced back at Stiles. “Jack? As in Rebecca’s father?”

  Stiles nodded slowly. He hadn’t had a chance to tell her about his conversations with Jack James.

  “Did he ever have a connection to Joanna?”

  “No. Joanna attacked our camp once, but I don’t think she ever came near Jack. She was too busy trying to kill Rebecca.”

  Dylan turned back to the jail cell. “What is he after?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It could be almost anything,” Wilhelm said. “It could be some imagined thing, for all we know. These souls seem to be marginally insane.”

  “Have you learned anything else about them?” Stiles asked.

  “Not really. The bare souls Dylan provided for us refuse to do anything but sit in their boxes. Whenever a human comes too close, they try to possess them, so we’ve had to take precautions. But that’s about it.”

  “We need to know more.”

  Dylan reached her hand up and felt a golden lasso fill her palm. She gestured for Wilhelm to open the cell door. He did, without hesitation, his notebook raised to take notes as he watched her closely. It was just like during the battle. The soul came away with barely a tug of the rope, immediately releasing from the possessed man without any kind of fight.

  “Go home,” she said, wiggling the fingers of her other hand. The soul did as it was told, the darkness draining from it as it slipped from the lasso and disappeared through the ceiling of the cell.

  The second, however, did not cooperate quite as dramatically. It came free of the possessed man, but it refused to return home, laughing at her suggestion. Wilhelm and Stiles helped lower it into a box made of something Dylan didn’t even want to understand. And then it was carted away with the help of Wilhelm’s assistants.

  Dylan touched the men who were lying unconscious in their cells. Their bodies healed quickly and the darkness the demons had left behind dissipated; the damage done from the lack of food and water was gone in an instant. The men fell into a peaceful sleep from which they would wake refreshed—none the worse for wear except for several months of lost time.

  “Now all we have to do is figure out their purpose.”

  “Exactly,” Wilhelm said.

  “Easier said than done,” Stiles said.

  ***

  Dylan and Stiles flew back to Dytonia, taking the long way, flying over territory they’d once walked over during the war. It amused Dylan to see how resilient the earth was, how it had changed and shifted over the ruins, swallowing them whole. At the same time, however, the areas that had always been wild were still wild, yet still recognizable. She knew the field where the javelin attacked Sam and Ellie, and where Wyatt had kissed her for the first time. There was the wooded area where she had healed Stiles of the angel disease. So many memories…

  “How do you do it?” she asked Stiles.

  “Do what?”

  She flew close to him, grabbed his hands and pulled him close enough that the wind didn’t drown their words.

  “How do you deal with generation after generation of memories?”

  “Just like anything else, you learn to compartmentalize.”

  “That’s something I definitely need to work on.”

  Chapter 28

  Days flowed into weeks and those flowed into months. Rachel made them permanent guests in her house, offering them bedrooms next door to one another. Raphael had a room of his own, too, but Stiles suspected he didn’t sleep in it often. It was impossible to miss the looks he and Rachel shared whenever they were in the same room together, and they were often in the same room searching through the archives Rachel had spent the last thirty years building. They were hoping to find something, anything that might tell them about the dark souls. But, so far, the archives had left them wanting.

  Dylan was better. She sometimes snuck off on her own, walking for hours at a time. It was during those times that her grief for Wyatt overwhelmed her. Stiles felt it, and he knew her grief lived in a little ball deep in her chest. But she had it under control. Most of the time.

  They worked together to uncover her growing powers. She liked to fly and to play with her ability to create weapons. She pulled every knife and sword Stiles could imagine out of h
er otherworld armory, sometimes surprising him with her skills. But he also knew that some of the credit sat with Wyatt. He was a lover of Old West folklore. He’d taught her a great deal about weapons, more than Stiles ever could have.

  One afternoon, she created this golden ball that was dense, but apparently useless.

  “What are you going to do, bean your enemies in the head with that?”

  “I don’t know. I keep seeing this in my head, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “It must come from something you’ve seen.”

  Dylan shook her head as she ran her fingers over the surface of the ball. “I think I would remember these carvings if I had.”

  Stiles moved closer and saw that, in fact, the ball did have carvings on its surface. He knew them immediately. They were of an ancient language that dated back to Cain and Abel, to the ark and Noah.

  “May the holder of this object always have a pure heart and a clear mind.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what it says.” Stiles pressed his finger to the ball to show her, but then the ball began to glow with an intense light that was like the glow of an angel.

  “What did you do?” Dylan demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  Stiles pulled his finger away and the glow stopped. But when he touched it again, it began to glow again.

  Dylan stared at the ball with wonder in her eyes.

  “It must have something to do with our connection.”

  “I know this,” Stiles said softly, a memory moved slowly through his mind.

  There was a chair stuffed into a corner and a large piece of furniture filled with separate drawers—a dresser, he thought it was called—beside a set of tall windows. On top was a box, a small wooden box.

  The box flashed through his mind again, a box filled with something no earthly being would ever understand, yet posed such a tremendous danger to them all.

  “Technicalities,” Joanna said, moving away from Stiles and picking up the small box that she kept under her bed. She opened it and touched with just the tip of her fingers the thing she kept inside.

  “Joanna.”

  “Why does it always come back to Joanna?” Dylan asked.

  He studied Dylan for a long minute. “It does. It started with Joanna. I fell because of Joanna. You were born because I fell. Joanna…she must have been a part of an alternate fate.”

  “Alternate?”

  “The Father is a careful guy. Because humans have freewill, he likes to have lots of contingencies. If a human chooses the wrong path, he likes to have something in place to ensure the human comes back to the right path.”

  Dylan inclined her head slightly. “I get that. But what does that have to do with this?”

  “Maybe he had a contingency plan in place for the angels, too.”

  “I’m not following.”

  Stiles touched the ball again and watched as it lit up brighter than the sun. “Joanna had one of these. It was lit already, prepared for transfer to its new owner. She just hadn’t handed it over yet.”

  Dylan’s eyes widened. “Oh, no, I remember that…the box. I remember seeing her with it. When she had Ichabod—Mammon—bring me to her lakeside cabin. Lucifer was coming and she pulled it out from under her bed as we prepared to leave. I thought she was pulling it out to rescue it. But…what if she’d been planning to give it to me, but something changed her mind?”

  “I’d say you’re on the right track.” Stiles took the ball from Dylan and it disintegrated, turning into a fine powder that flowed from his fingers. “Raphael said that Joanna had a different purpose before I fell, didn’t he?”

  “He said she was supposed to stop Lucifer, but changed her mind the moment you fell.”

  “Because, by falling, I set everyone on a different path. I ensured your birth.”

  “But you didn’t fall of your own freewill.”

  “No. I fell under someone’s orders. But…whose?”

  “What do you mean, whose? I thought you were only allowed to obey God?”

  “Me, too. What if God sent Joanna down here to choose another Lucifer, another archangel to watch over the humans, but something changed, and something showed him that the path of fate he had her walking was altered and left room for something else to happen…something bigger? What if God told me to fall so that I could push everyone’s fate down that other road? And Joanna’s change of mind was actually God altering her purpose?”

  “Choose another Lucifer?”

  “Lucifer was just the first archangel to watch over the humans, but he was never intended to be the only. And the power that made him stronger than all the other archangels—that made him the man in charge—was an object like the ball you keep building. I only saw it in pictures in the archives we keep in heaven—that I kept in heaven—but then I saw it in Joanna’s lakeside house.”

  “In a box.”

  “In a box. Why would Joanna have something like that?”

  “And now? When we become soul mates…”

  “It’ll be ours.”

  Dylan stepped back a few steps, the idea staggering to her.

  “We will be the new Lucifer.”

  Chapter 29

  Dylan closed her eyes and pictured a dozen souls floating up to heaven, the darkness washing from their souls like dirt from a gardener’s hands. When she opened them, her vision came true as a dozen souls left the bodies they’d possessed. But others remained, laughing.

  “Do you really think you have made a dent in our number?” a voice asked in her head. “We are more than you can even imagine.”

  She pulled a candlestick from her arsenal and lashed out at the nearest possessed whose demon had refused to let go of its tether to this world. She struck the man on the back of the head and he fell like a ton of bricks. The body was unhurt except for a knot on the back of his head.

  This was so ineffective.

  A possessed woman lashed out at Dylan, its eyes flashing fire as it reached for her. Dylan could feel the anger and hatred seeping from the demon’s soul. Its darkness searched for her grief, searching to expose her with its exaggerated pain. Dylan immediately wrapped her soul in a protective barrier as Stiles had taught her, but this demon was different; it was more powerful than any she’d come up against before. She fought it as her soul sought the basic, pure ball of beauty she knew existed in the darkness somewhere. When she found it, something odd happened. She shifted out of time.

  Dylan was transported from a battleground outside of a southern city in the United Alliance to an unfamiliar city.

  She was standing in the middle of an unpaved street, watching a horse-drawn wagon speed toward her. She held up her hands to ward off the trampling she knew the horse was about to offer, but it went right through her like she was in her ethereal form.

  Laughter sounded from a window across the way, pulling Dylan from her fright and her confusion. She knew the sound and knew it was important to her in some way. She crossed to the building and walked right through the door and into a large, open room filled with nothing in the warm summer afternoon but a few tables and a bored man behind a long bar. She went up the stairs and found herself in a bedroom where a young woman was lying in a short, heavy bed with another young woman.

  “We’ll get out of here someday,” the dark-haired woman said. “We’ll take our savings and ride the train all the way to the ocean.”

  “And then we’ll buy a small farm and never want again.”

  “And never lay with a nasty cowboy who hasn’t washed in months.”

  The blonde woman giggled. “Do you think there’s a man out there that has bathed more than three times a year?”

  “Don’t care. I won’t lay with a man—any man—ever again.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  The dark-haired woman groaned. “What’s to like about it? If God intended for women to endure a man that way, he would have made their bodies smaller and better tasting.”

  The blonde
giggled. “He would have made them taste like chocolate.”

  “Like my momma’s chocolate cake.”

  They giggled together, moving close like small children sharing a secret. Their happiness was quickly shattered, however, as a man burst through the door.

  “Where is it?” he demanded.

  “What?” the dark-haired girl asked as she sat up and pulled the younger, smaller girl behind her back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The money I hid in my boot. I had it before I came up here with you, but now it’s gone.”

  “You probably drank it, you dumb fool.”

  The man pulled a gun from under his heavy coat, waving it at the dark-haired girl’s head. “You give me my damn money, or I’ll kill you both.”

  “And then you’ll never get your money back.”

  The man didn’t even hesitate. He pulled the trigger; the noise was deafening. Dylan tried to grab his arm, but she couldn’t. Her fingers just went right through the solidity of his body. He fired again and again as screams and blood and bone jumped and flew around the room. Then he walked away, cursing under his breath as he did.

  “What’s happened?” the dark-haired woman asked.

  She could see Dylan, now that her soul had separated from her body.

  “You’ve been killed,” Dylan answered, reaching for her.

  The woman moved into Dylan’s arms, taking some measure of comfort from her closeness. And then she turned, and suddenly panicked as she remembered her friend.

  “April?” She returned to the bed, but her friend was no longer there. She was floating just below the ceiling, watching the scene in confusion.

  “Where am I?”

  The dark-haired girl turned to her blonde friend and pulled her down into her arms.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s over. We’re going somewhere else, somewhere beautiful.”

  But then the blonde’s soul turned black, and the darkness of the demon soul swirled with anger and hatred. The dark-haired girl jerked away.

  “You’re not my friend. You’re not April!”