DARK SOULS (Angels and Demons Book 2) (7 page)

“We have to do something about this.”

Demetria shrugged. “I don’t know what. We don’t even know what all they’re capable of. How are we supposed to figure out how to block this one thing?”

Dylan turned on her heel, burning a path in the carpet of Demetria’s conference room as she paced. She couldn’t stop thinking about Stiles. When the demon left the little girl’s body, he’d slipped into his human form and attacked her. The feel of his hands around her throat—the need for air and the fear of hurting him all wrapped up together—it was a feeling she would not soon forget.

It could have been her. It should have been her. If he hadn’t wrapped himself around her, if he hadn’t moved in to protect her, it would have been her. And now he was out there, alone, hurting because of something that was not his fault.

She had to do something.

“We have to find a way to shut them down. There’s got to be something we can do.”

“I know you’re upset,” Demetria said, stepping into her path, blocking her from moving forward. “But I have all my best people working on this. If there’s an answer, they’ll find it.”

“They’re not working quickly enough.”

Demetria touched the side of Dylan’s face, a touch filled with more affection that Demetria had ever shown her before. Dylan focused on her, more out of shock than anything else.

“Stiles will be okay. He’s been through worse than this.”

“I know. I just…I can’t do this without him.”

Demetria smiled softly. “You can do so much more than anyone knows, even you. You just have to have faith in yourself.”

“I need to know how to stop these things. I need to know what they’re capable of so that we aren’t blindsided by something like this again.”

“Wilhelm is trying to figure that out right now.”

“He’s with them? The ones we captured?”

“Yes. He thought that if he could study them—”

“I want to go there.”

Demetria cocked her head, clearly surprised by the request. “I don’t think—”

“I want to go there. I want to talk to them, I want to understand them.”

“Dylan, you are the strongest weapon we have against these things. If you go there and get hurt…”

“I won’t get hurt. Wilhelm will be there to protect me.”

“Are you sure you trust Wilhelm? The way Stiles feels about him, he won’t be pleased with that idea.”

“I know. But Stiles isn’t here.”

Demetria studied her for a long minute, clearly not sold. But Dylan was determined. When they were fighting the angels, she was too often left out in the dark and not given the information she needed to make the right decisions. She wasn’t about to allow that to happen again.

Demetria crossed the room and opened the door.

“Leone, take Dylan to Wilhelm.”

***

The room reminded Dylan of the place she and Sam had been imprisoned under the city of Viti too many years ago to recount. It was dark, the ground was hard, packed dirt, with only a long line of small cells—what she had once thought were boxes with metal bars, until Wyatt explained it all to her—along the back wall. Wilhelm was sitting in a chair in front of one of the cells when Dylan walked in, writing on a pad of paper as he observed the three men pacing in their cells.

“Why are you here?” he asked without looking up.

“I want to learn as much about these things as I can.”

“Do you really think you can learn about them faster than I can?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you except what Stiles has told me.”

That forced Wilhelm to look up. “And what has he told you?”

“You stole Nephilim from the human camps and delivered them to Luc to be used as slaves.”

“That’s a simplification of what I was doing.”

“Is it? Because it sounds to me like you turned on humanity to benefit the angels.”

“I thought I was weeding out a parasite among the humans. I didn’t know that most of them had already been infected.”

“Infected? Is that what you call it?”

Wilhelm set down his paper and turned in his chair to fully face her. “This was sixty years ago. I didn’t know everything I know now.”

“But you were supposed to be protecting humanity from the angels. How could you turn them over, any of them?”

“Because we were told that there would be a Nephilim that would rise up and destroy humanity. And it was our job to protect the human race.”

“Who told you?”

Wilhelm shook his head. “It was a long time ago. I don’t believe it anymore, obviously.”

“But who told you?”

Wilhelm’s expression changed as he studied her. “Why does it matter?”

“Because…another gargoyle said something like that to me. He tried to kill me before I even knew what I was. He said I was different and that my very existence was harmful to humanity.”

Wilhelm’s eyes narrowed. “What happened to that gargoyle?”

Dylan shook her head. “Wyatt and Stiles…they were protecting me.”

Wilhelm rushed her, shoved his fist—which was now the swollen, stone-like fist of a gargoyle—into the center of her chest and drove her back against the wall.

“That was my brother.”

“Why did he think I was a danger to humanity?”

“Because God told us. He said a female child would be born who would choose the destruction of all humanity.”

She wrapped her hands around his massive one.

“It wasn’t God.”

Confusion darkened Wilhelm’s eyes. “He came to us in our dreams. He said we had to destroy the Nephilim—that they would bring into the world this girl…”

“It wasn’t God.”

She stroked his fist and watched as it slowly returned to its human softness.

“They manipulated us. Stiles was right all along.”

“He tends to be.”

Wilhelm turned away, dragging his fingers through his hair as he paced the length of the room. “My brother died for nothing. For a lie.”

“You thought you were doing the right thing.”

“But I wasn’t. I broke my vow.”

One of the men, trapped in the cells, started to laugh.

“Shut up,” Wilhelm said. The torture in his voice was heartbreaking.

Dylan approached the cell that held the laughing man, drawn to something about the laugh. There was something behind it—pain—that made her wonder if it was the man or the demon inside of him that was laughing with such glee.

“You’re Nephilim,” she said softly to the demon. “You were hurt by the angels.”

“What do you know about it?” the man asked.

“What did they do to you?”

The man stepped closer to the cell door, sticking his hands through the slats between the bars. “Take my hands and I’ll show you.”

“Dylan…” Wilhelm said, warning clear in his voice.

But she wanted to know. She wanted to help this tortured soul.

She took his hands and her mind was instantly filled with images that made her heart ache with a deep, soul-ripping sadness. A girl was living alone with her father, fighting to stay alive in the middle of the war. The angels came and they took her mother and her brother. And then they kept coming, taking their resources, their food and water—taking everything. Finally, they came for her. They took her to Genero, implanted a child in her belly, and forced her to endure pregnancy after pregnancy until her body couldn’t take it anymore. Then they put her in a dark room and just waited for her to die.

She created children she never got to hold, babies she never saw. She fought for life only to be used as a human incubator.

“I’m sorry.”

Tears ran down Dylan’s face, dripping over her chin and onto the dark skin of the man whose body this angry soul—Hailey—possessed.

“You don’t know what sorry is,” Hailey told her. “But you’ll find out.”

“You don’t have to be angry anymore,” Dylan said. “Your babies, they’re grown now, they probably have families of their own. You have a legacy that you’ve left behind because of those children.”

“They were abominations, like you.”

“They were. But they aren’t now. Things have changed.”

The man shook his head, but Dylan could feel confusion in the demon—in Hailey. She touched the man’s face, but her hand didn’t stay on the surface of his skin. Her hand moved inside of him and caressed the darkness of Hailey’s soul. And as she touched it, the darkness began to recede.

“What are you doing?” Wilhelm asked, wonder in his voice.

Dylan ignored him. She touched the soul and caressed what might have been its face if it were a human form. And she could see the emergence of a girl’s face, a young girl with blond hair not unlike Dylan’s. She was pretty, with green eyes that were like grass in the spring. There were tears in those eyes and a smile on her thin, pink lips.

“You had a difficult life, but there’s no reason to hang on to all that anger now. You can move on, you can have all the happiness you missed out on in life.”

“He says we can’t,” she said softly, her voice now coming through—a soft, wispy sound that reminded Dylan of Josephine when she was a teenager. “He says we can’t move on, that we’re stuck here forever because of something an angel did.”

“It’s not true. You just have to let go of all that anger.”

Dylan stepped back and let go of the man’s hand, and Hailey came with her. Her soul, now a smoky version of a beautiful girl, stood in front of Dylan. The darkness faded from her like dirt being washed away in the shower. Her smile widened.

“I can feel it,” she whispered.

And then she began to drift up toward the ceiling. Dylan watched, aware that Wilhelm had moved up behind her and was also watching with wonder. In seconds, she was gone. Dylan closed her eyes and felt her leave this realm—felt her slide through the gates of heaven.

“How did you do that?”

Dylan shook her head, even as one of the other men stuck in the cells began to yell as he slammed his head repeatedly against the bars.

“Jack will get you for that. Jack will come for you. Jack won’t let you get away with that.”

He repeated himself over and over again until it was all Dylan could hear.

There were rooms in the building that housed the jail cells, rooms that were dirty and dusty with furniture either rotted through or destroyed by passing Outlanders, but still structurally sound. Dylan cleaned one the best she could, setting a sleeping bag borrowed from Demetria in one corner and a chair and a small desk dragged from another room set in another corner. She lay on the sleeping bag now, trying to focus her thoughts on anything but what was happening downstairs—and Stiles.

The man Hailey had occupied woke after several hours of sleep, unaware of anything that had happened to him in the last two days. Otherwise, he seemed to be perfectly healthy, undamaged by his possession. Wilhelm had Leone take him back to his people and watch over him to be sure another demon didn’t chose to inhabit his body—for whatever reason they chose their hosts. The other man, the one who’d begun to yell so unceremoniously, wouldn’t stop. Wilhelm finally delivered a blow to his temple to make him go to sleep. Neither of them could stand the sound of his words any longer.

She tried to draw out the demon inside the third man, but he sat in a corner of his cell and wouldn’t respond to her voice. It was almost as if his demon was dormant, but it was still in control of the man.

“They can go to heaven,” Wilhelm announced hours later, as though it had taken him that long to process everything.

“But they won’t because they’re hanging on to all this anger.”

He leaned forward in his chair and studied the sleeping man. “Where does the anger come from?”

“Their lives, I suppose.”

“But why? Who lives a life that full of anger?”

Dylan looked at him and shrugged. She was just as confused as he was.

She still was. She lay on her sleeping bag, wondering what caused them to remain so angry, to remain here all these years, and to become what they were. When she touched Hailey, she could feel the intensity of her anger. But she could also feel other things.She could feel memories that were less warped, less touched by the overwhelming darkness that seemed to be the driving force behind her anger. There was something of Hailey’s humanity that was still left inside of her.

Was that the difference? Was that what allowed her to pass heaven’s gates?

What if the others didn’t have any of their humanity intact?

She had hoped this was a way in which they could end this war with the demons, but it was too complicated. The demons had to be willing to talk to her. They had to be willing to let her help them move past their anger. She didn’t think the rest of them would want to sit around and be analyzed by her.

But this had to be a good sign. Maybe they could use it in some other way.

She closed her eyes. Stiles was immediately there. Not him, but her memories of him. She didn’t want to remember him the way he had been after the demon did whatever it was it had done to him. The hatred in his eyes. The power in his touch. It made her shudder each time the memory of it washed over her.

But that wasn’t Stiles.

The things she didn’t want to think about were the only things she could think about.

She rolled onto her side and tried to focus on Wyatt. She hadn’t seen him in days, not since he went back to the capital and she left to fight these demons. But she couldn’t focus on him enough to feel him. She thought of Josephine and Matthew and of the baby they were expecting. She worried that she should be with her, telling her things that only a mother can tell her daughter in a time like this. But a part of her knew that Josephine wouldn’t want that.

Not for the first time, she felt like she was no longer a part of her own family. They had their own lives now, living so far from the city where they made their home. Even Wyatt. And the council’s determination to forget about the angels—to get rid of the angels and gargoyles who were working so hard to protect them—only seemed to emphasize the rift between them.

But Dylan didn’t know who she was without Wyatt.

She closed her eyes, blocking the tears that wanted to spill down her cheeks. She was an angel—at least, that’s what they all told her—but she felt like a human. Her heart was breaking as any human’s would.

You need to keep fighting.

Dylan sat up. The voice was unfamiliar.

“Who are you?”

A friend. You need to keep fighting. You need to learn more about your abilities, more about the things you can do. You can save humanity.

Dylan shook her head, tears spilling over her cheeks. “I don’t think I can.”

You have to believe in yourself.

“How am I supposed to do that? Everything I’ve done, everything we’ve fought for, it’s unraveling. The humans don’t want us around anymore. My family…how am I supposed to help people who don’t want my help?”

They don’t know what’s best for them. They don’t know who you are, what you are capable of. But they need you.

Dylan wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. “And then? After this danger has passed, what happens then?”

Your fate awaits you. You simply have to embrace it.

“How do I do that?”

But the voice—whatever or whoever it was—was gone.

It was all so much easier said than done. She lay back down on the sleeping bag, her thoughts again going to Stiles. If he were here, maybe she would know where to start. But how does one understand their own gifts without a mentor to tell them what is possible and what isn’t? After all this time, after she had come to a point when she thought all this had passed her by. Stiles tried to tell her before—back when they were still fighting the angels—that she had to understand all of her abilities. But now that she was finally ready to do just that, he’d disappeared.

It was just like Stiles.

***

She spent a few hours with Wilhelm and the other two demons the next morning. Neither of them would speak to her. They sat in the back corner of their cells and stared down at the ground, almost comatose, as though waiting for something. It made her nervous, sitting on her hands, so to speak. She felt like something was coming, she just wasn’t sure what.

She went for a walk midmorning. The building where they were staying was surrounded by tall oak trees. Again, it reminded her of the area around Viti. They’d run through the woods after they’d escaped Luc’s prison. Dylan was barefoot in a dress she would never have chosen for herself. Sam was on one side of her and Wyatt on the other. If she had known then what waited in her future, she wondered if she would have kept running, or if she would have surrendered to Luc’s redcoats.

She paused under the canopy of a tall tree and held her hands out. A vine began to grow from the bottom of the tree up over the bark, dancing along like a shadow that suddenly had substance. She’d discovered this gift when she and Wyatt first moved into their house, when a rose bush the city builders had planted in their front yard had died. She remembered how Wyatt had laughed when he saw what she’d done.

He probably wouldn’t laugh now.

She turned to another, larger tree that was dying from lack of sunlight. She held her hands toward it and the dead branches suddenly sprang to life. The tree rose high, soaring above the other trees that were blocking it from receiving life-giving nourishment from the sun.

She walked around, touching trees, bushes, and dying flowers and giving them new life. It was like healing humans, only more basic. More natural. But that was a power she was aware she had. The voice had told her to find abilities she was unaware of.

She closed her eyes and thought about the demons. She thought about the girl she’d healed the day before, Hailey. The way it had felt as she held that man’s hands, as she’d learned Hailey’s story. There was something there, something that had helped Hailey see past the craziness that being trapped had created. But she didn’t know what it was, or how to access it.

She opened her eyes and began to walk again. She held her hands out, palms up, and created a fireball on the tips of her fingers. She nearly laughed when she saw it. She’d dodged a few of these during the war, but had never made one herself. Wyatt had taught her to fight with a sword. She rolled it over her hand, amused that it didn’t hurt. Though she was quite sure it would burn these woods down without a problem.

She flicked her wrist and the fireball disappeared.

These were all tricks she’d seen the angels do during the war. Fireballs, healing, and listening to people’s thoughts. There was nothing new about any of this. She pushed the angels back to heaven during the Battle of Genero, but Wyatt had joined his ethereal form to hers. It was the added power of his abilities that made that possible. She’d done the same thing to the demons, but that had left her too exhausted for it to be a reliable battle plan. Besides, all it did was force them out of their human hosts. It didn’t do anything to stop them.

Every time they seemed to have an answer, it proved itself to be useless.

She stepped out into a clearing and drew her angel wings out. She hadn’t done it in a very long time, too long to even remember when the last time was. Before Josephine. Before her choice. Before humanity became what it was now. She stretched them out, the feel of them moving felt like working a crick out of her neck, like working a muscle that hadn’t been worked in too long. It felt good.

She soared into the air and moved around the area, just stretching them out. She’d forgotten how good this felt, too. She moved past a few birds and over a couple of human settlements. There were still too many Outlanders. Josephine really needed to do something to draw the people together. They’d be safer that way. She could feel their emotions. Except for a few concerns over struggling crops, they seemed fine.

She heard voices in her head as she flew. She assumed it was the humans she was flying over, but the voices grew more intense as she flew away from the human settlements. She didn’t understand what they were saying because they were talking over each other, as though she was in a crowded room full of hundreds of people, all trying to tell her something at once. It felt urgent, these voices. She went back and settled in the clearing. The voices dimmed, but didn’t disappear completely. She didn’t understand; she didn’t understand what they meant.

Stiles, I need you.

Dylan waited for an answer, but one never came.