DARK SOULS (Angels and Demons Book 2) (11 page)

“You shouldn’t have done that. She’s not ready.”

“You can’t keep protecting her, Stiles,” Rachel said, coming up behind him and laying a calming hand on his arm.

“But it wasn’t his place to do this.” Stiles jabbed a finger at Raphael.

Rachel tried to draw Stiles backward, but he jerked free of her touch. He marched to the bed where Dylan lay unconscious, his movements slowing as he settled down beside her. He pressed a hand to her forehead and visions of heaven immediately danced in his head as he did. They weren’t really dreams, but they weren’t memories, either. And then he saw Rebecca’s face.

Stiles stiffened even as his eyes closed so that he could concentrate on that one image. She looked so happy, and young, like she’d been when he’d first met her. Her smile…it hurt to see that smile again, but it was good, too. It was good that she was in heaven and that she was okay—that she wasn’t one of the dark souls. Despite everything, he’d held on to that fear, afraid that she would be stuck here, in pain, and angry with him and the world at large.

He’d never felt relief quite like he felt in that moment. It was okay now. He could let her go now.

Stiles opened his eyes and smoothed the hair away from Dylan’s forehead. The visions streaming from her mind to his shifted. She was slipping into dreams—dreams of Wyatt and Josephine, of the children in the classes she taught, of Stiles and Rebecca, and of the people in the city where they lived. There was distress in her dreams, a fear he didn’t quite understand. He tried to wipe it away with his healing touch, but it only dulled it momentarily and then it returned at higher level than before.

“You have to let her do this,” Raphael said, coming up behind Stiles and laying a hand on his shoulder. “Her soul needs to process.”

Stiles jerked out from under Raphael’s touch. “Don’t help anymore.”

“Stiles.”

There was warning in Rachel’s voice, but he didn’t care. He wanted them to leave; he wanted to be alone with Dylan. He never should have allowed this to happen; he never should have let her go off with Raphael. He never should have allowed Raphael to enter their radar. Once again, this was his fault and Dylan was paying the price.

“I’m sure you’re needed elsewhere,” he said, glancing back at Raphael, his gaze falling over Rachel, too. “I’ve got this.”

Raphael immediately backed away. Rachel hesitated, but then Raphael offered her his hand and she took it quite willingly. Stiles thought he saw a bit of a crush developing there. He hoped Rachel knew what she was getting herself into.

Stiles pulled a chair close to the bed and settled back, watching over Dylan as she slept. He’d done this so many times in the past that he could hardly recall how many. When she was an infant, she was a foreign thing, a ball of screams and needs. When she was a little older, she was lightening in a small, cute human being. And then she was a grown woman, the same age as Rebecca when he first set eyes on her, full of wonder and excitement. She was a beautiful girl who only wanted to be normal, but she didn’t even know how to define normal.

He wanted so much to help her. He knew the woman she’d become, he’d met her once years before her birth. He didn’t know then what kind of impact she’d have on his life. He was too busy trying to destroy Joanna for hurting Rebecca. But, if he had known, he didn’t think it would have changed anything. He would have walked the same path and would have loved the same women. He would have given up everything for her all over again.

Dylan was too important to the world for him not to sacrifice himself for her. And, if it came to that, to that ultimate sacrifice, he would do it in an instant.

He’d never felt that way for Joanna.

It was…foggy, his memories of those moments before he fell to Earth. He remembered a deep need to stop Joanna and to take her back to heaven, to once again be whole with his soul mate. But he couldn’t remember who told him, or why. He couldn’t remember the exact instructions, just the impression of them. It had never seemed to matter before. But now, with everything Dylan was beginning to understand about her own existence, about her actions from the moment she’d left the domed city, he was beginning to wonder if there was a reason why he didn’t remember.

Why was it so important for him to retrieve Joanna? Soul mates often lived millennia apart, one serving heaven while the other served the humans. His situation with Joanna was not unusual. And she hadn’t been gone long. A few human years, just minutes in heaven time. It shouldn’t have been that important that she return to heaven, but it suddenly had been. Why?

He ran his hand over the back of Dylan’s hand. Not that it mattered, really. If he hadn’t fallen, he never would have met Dylan. She might still have existed, and might still have saved humanity, but he wouldn’t have been at her side to watch. He would not have had the chance to love her as a friend, and then…

She was dreaming of Wyatt again. It hurt more now than it had before. Before he chose her to be his soul mate, he didn’t like to see her with Wyatt, but he’d learned to accept it. When he found his way back to Rebecca, it was even easier to see them share kisses and hold hands. But then their connection broke. Wyatt could no longer heal her and he could no longer hear her thoughts or feel her emotions the way he had before. And those things grew between Stiles and Dylan. He could heal her quicker, more efficiently than he had before. He heard her voice in his head more often, even at times when she thought she was blocking him out. And he felt every one of her emotions, and knew how hurt she was by Wyatt’s actions these last weeks, how afraid she was that she would never figure out how to stop the dark souls.

Their souls were connecting. They weren’t tethered yet. But it was beginning.

***

Stiles fell asleep. So much time passed. Dylan shifted between nightmares and visions of heaven, almost as though her brain was a computer attempting to compute everything she knew, everything she had seen and felt in heaven. He tried to keep the darkness to a minimum, but his interference only seemed to make it harder on her, so he backed off and watched from his chair and had fallen asleep.

He had dreams that were nearly as wild as hers were—dreams of people screaming for his help, people in dire situations, crying in pain, in grief, and in anger. He couldn’t separate one voice from another; he couldn’t understand what it was they wanted him to do. And then he heard laughter and it was a voice he knew.

Jack.

“You can never help them all,” he said. “You can try, but you’ll never be able to stop us all, and you’ll never be able to save them all.”

“Don’t you remember,” Stiles asked, “how you helped the people? How you worked so hard to make sure Rebecca would have a peaceful world in which she could build her family?”

“I remember how you turned me over to the Redcoats. I remember how they tortured me, forcing me to lay in that domed city and suffer the most excruciating pain. I remember they took things from me that I could never get back.”

“And created a child who made all your dreams for the world come true.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the humans anymore.”

Just as the words were out and spinning around in Stiles’ head, he felt an overwhelming anger and fear that wasn’t coming from him or Jack. It was so intense that it pulled him out of his dreams.

He sat up, disoriented for a minute. And then, all he was aware of was Dylan, of the sobs slipping from between her lips. He climbed back onto the bed and pulled her against his chest.

“It was only a dream,” he said, smoothing her hair over the back of her head. “It was only your imagination.”

“No, not this time.” She curled into him in a way she wouldn’t have done if she wasn’t so upset. “They’ve done it. They’ve decided to banish us.”

“Oh, Dylan…” He pulled her closer, raining kisses over her head. “I’m sorry.”

He held her for a long time and listened to her sobs crescendo and then fall. He felt her struggle to find reason in what the humans had done. She felt betrayed, and he couldn’t blame her. She’d done everything for humanity. She’d saved them from Luc and Lily, and they were rewarding her by sending her away from the only home she had known.

Her sobs turned into hiccups, and her pain began to dull as she drifted back into a light sleep. But then the door burst open and Rachel rushed inside.

“They’re back.”

Her senses should have been dulled from the lingering effects of sleep, but they weren’t. Dylan felt stronger and more aware than she ever had. She could see them now; she could see the darkness of the demons weaving around the purer souls of the people they possessed. She could feel the anger and hatred that seeped from their darkness. She could feel their pain. It was as if it were her pain, too, as if their hurts were amplifying her own.

She held a sword in her hand. She clutched it like it was a lifeline that was the only thing capable of saving her from this pain. But she knew she couldn’t use it, that it wasn’t necessary.

Raphael and his legion stood behind her. Stiles stood beside her. They watched as more than a dozen possessed humans walked toward them. They weren’t just men this time, but men and women and children. One of the women smiled at Stiles and then her eyes began to glow with fire. She felt the fear slice through Stiles and saw the memory in a flash of a second. This was what the child who had infected him, who had turned him into a killing machine, had done.

She raised her hand, intent only on offering some sort of protection—or maybe just consolation—to her friend. Instead, the demon suddenly began to unfurl itself from around the possessed soul. There was confusion in the eyes as the fire disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

Dylan wiggled her fingers and the soul leapt from the woman’s body and she collapsed. The men behind her stomped on her fingers and ankles as they stormed over her. The soul lingered over them, its anger tripled as it focused on Dylan.

“Go home,” she said softly.

And it did. The darkness wrung itself free from the soul, dripping down on the people below like tea from a washrag. The soul, growing lighter the higher it climbed, returned to heaven as the other—Hailey—had done.

“How…?” Stiles began to ask, but then the others reached their column.

Stiles stepped forward and, like before, used the hilt of his sword to fight off the possessed. They were vicious in their attack, grabbing at him with their hands and slashing out with their teeth, fighting him with everything they had. Dylan had never seen such viciousness in a battle, not even during the war.

But, the thing was, the possessed were moving around her like she was inconsequential. As if she weren’t even there.

She closed her eyes and she could still feel them. She could still see their dark souls writhing around the pure souls of the possessed like spiders building a spider web. Just the vision of them made her feel sick. It made her want to rub at her flesh to remove the stickiness of their touch—and they weren’t even touching her.

There was something else she saw when she closed her eyes. She saw not only the pain that spurred these souls on, not just the anger that made them listen to whoever was telling them to fight, but she saw a spark of something beautiful that they were trying to snuff out. It wasn’t just the possession that turned these things on. It was the chance to snuff out this spark of beauty inside of these humans that drove them.

But she could see it in them, too.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said so quietly that she didn’t expect anyone or anything to hear her. “You don’t have to snuff out their light. You can nurse your own. You can make it whole again.”

Silence fell around Dylan. Without opening her eyes, she relinquished her sword and traded it for a warm bud of light that she could see through her eyelids. It lit and grew on her fingertips, filling her hands with a glow that was so golden and so bright that the humans had to turn away as it continued to grow. When she tossed it into the crowd of the possessed, she saw—her eyes still closed—the demons immediately let go of the beauty they were trying to control inside of the possessed, and saw their own beauty grow as the darkness slipped away.

It didn’t happen to all of them, but it happened to enough of them that the possessed army fell to just three.

When Dylan opened her eyes, she had something else in her hand—an object that resembled an old-fashioned lasso that Wyatt had once shown her in one of his many books. She snapped it and then shot it out toward one of the still-standing possessed. The moment the thing touched the human’s flesh, the soul began to scream. And then it slipped out of the human’s body, releasing that ball of beauty, and was trapped in the golden length of the lasso.

Stiles stared at Dylan almost as though he had never seen her before. She offered a slight shrug, a proud smile sliding across her lips before she realized what she was doing. Then she offered the free end of the lasso to him. Before Stiles could respond, Raphael took it.

Dylan pulled another lasso from her otherworldly arsenal and snagged the remaining two demons.

“Take them to Wilhelm,” she instructed Raphael.

He immediately disappeared, the naked demons gone along with him.

She should have been exhausted. Whenever she’d tried new magic, or fought these demons, she’d always been left exhausted. But she felt exhilarated.

“You’ve been asleep for two days,” Stiles said, somewhat grumpily, when she commented on it to him.

Dylan walked among the formerly possessed and touched their foreheads and their shoulders, healing the lingering effects of their ordeal. They woke, disoriented, but unharmed. Rachel came out into the street with an ancient contraption…a camera, Dylan thought it was called. She had used it to document what had happened for her library. Then the three of them headed back to her place for something to eat.

“How did you know to use that thing…that fireball-looking thing?” Stiles asked.

Dylan shrugged. “I didn’t. It just seemed to happen. Like instinct.”

“And the ropes? Where did those come from?”

Dylan smiled as she picked up a carrot and dipped it into the fresh sauce Rachel had made.

“I know that,” Rachel said. “Wyatt used to tell me stories about cowboys when I was little. That was a lariat.”

“A lasso,” Dylan corrected.

“I never could tell the difference between the two.”

“Neither could I. But if Wyatt were here, I’m sure he’d lecture us about it.”

Rachel smiled, but Stiles only looked annoyed.

“You got the idea for a weapon to use against the dark souls from Wyatt?”

“I did. Raphael told me that archangels were capable of using many different weapons. And when I thought I’d like a lasso to pull the demons from the possessed, one just popped into my hand.”

“Just like that?”

Dylan sat back in her chair to study Stiles. “Why have you never called me an archangel? Why didn’t you tell me I was capable of more?”

“Because you weren’t ready to know.”

“You’ve never thought I was ready for much of anything. If it had been up to you, I still wouldn’t have made my choice and Luc and Lily would still be walking this earth.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. You’re like an overprotective big brother.”

There was hurt in Stiles’ eyes when she said that. She immediately regretted it, especially when she remembered the kiss they’d shared in the clearing outside Wilhelm’s prison. She reached for his hand, but he got up and walked away. Dylan started to get up to follow him upstairs, but then she sank back in her chair. What would she say to him that she hadn’t already said a million times before?

“He’ll be okay.”

Dylan looked at Rachel. “Stiles is never really okay. He just keeps going.”

Rachel nodded in agreement. “It can’t be easy, living the way he does. Fighting for something that’s cost him everything that ever mattered to him.”

He has a lot of regrets…

Dylan glanced at the stairs. She’d never really seen things from Stiles’ side before. The things he had to do because he didn’t have a choice. All Dylan had were choices, but Stiles never really did. It was his mission, his purpose, to protect Dylan at all costs, and those costs were more than one angel should have to pay.

She owed him so much more than she was offering.

Dylan reached over and took Rachel’s hand. “This existence has cost us all.”

Rachel’s eyes fell to the tabletop, but Dylan knew what she was thinking. She could hear it as clearly as if Rachel had spoken it aloud.

The war had pulled her out of time and saved her from death, but gave her a little brother who was already grown and forced to raise her as his own. Rachel grew up in a world changed by the war, a world that had allowed her to grow up into adulthood despite the fact that she had been destined to die—that she had died when she was five in another time and another place. And, by being here, she had saved Jimmy from collapsing into himself when his purpose—the rebellion—was no longer needed. Then she saved a large portion of humanity when she was the first tested with the cure to the modified angel disease. She served a wider purpose than anyone could have seen, a subtle purpose that could have meant utter disaster if she weren’t there, if she hadn’t served.

It all served a purpose. And the more Dylan examined her past, her every action, she was beginning to see that Stiles, Rebecca, and even Jimmy, were right. Everything that happened set her on this road. She was meant to be here, she was meant to evolve and to become whatever God had planned for her. It was her destiny to become the savior.