FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) Read online

  FALLEN

  Angels and Gargoyles, Book 3

  BRENDA LEE HARPER

  FALLEN

  Brenda L. Harper

  Copyright © 2014

  Published by: Rascal Hearts

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For questions and comments about this book, please contact us at [email protected]

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 1

  Dylan set Wyatt down in the middle of a field miles from the amusement park. He immediately stepped away from her, stumbling a little as he got his bearings.

  “I’m sorry,” she started to say, but he waved his hand at her as though he didn’t want to hear what she had to say. Which was fine. She wasn’t sure she really meant her apology. She had to save them, didn’t she?

  I will find you, a voice insisted in her head.

  Davida.

  Dylan’s stomach turned. She lost what little she had eaten that day behind a tree, watching much needed water soak into the dry ground. Wyatt was almost immediately at her side, pulling her long, blonde hair out of the way. And then his arms were around her waist as he led her to a clean, dry place to sit.

  “Did you have any idea?” he asked after a few minutes.

  Dylan shook her head.

  He dragged his fingers through his thick, black curls. “All I keep thinking about is my dad,” he said. “He trusted Davida.”

  “A lot of people did.”

  Dylan leaned forward and rested her head on her bent knees. She couldn’t stop thinking about her former guardian. Davida had been what Wyatt told her a mother was: someone who sat with her when she was sick, offered her encouragement, guided her through the perils of adolescence. And it had all been a lie.

  Just a few weeks ago, Dylan had lived in a domed city where her life was regulated. She knew exactly what was expected of her and how to satisfy that with the least amount of effort. But then, on testing day, the day she was supposed to learn what her role as an adult would be in the city, she was dumped into the middle of the desert, a foreign landscape she knew absolutely nothing about, rescued by Wyatt and Stiles, her friend whom she had thought was a gargoyle but now knew to be an angel, and dragged into this war between the angels and the humans.

  Luc and Lily were running the war, a pair of angels who had lived on earth longer than anyone could recall. Lily was ill. Luc and Lily had begun Dylan’s domed city to create a hybrid, a child who was part angel and part human, enough human to resist an illness created by the humans to force the angels back into heaven. Dylan was to be Lily’s salvation, the child who could provide her with the things she needed to survive. At the same time, Dylan was a unique angel who could be used as a weapon to beat Luc and Lily, something the gargoyles wanted to do. Or she could be used to destroy the world, to cleanse it and leave it healthy for the man and woman the benevolent angels imagined would start the human race again, only better.

  Dylan had believed that Davida wanted to protect her, that she was working with the humans to not only save them, but to save the hybrids, too. Instead, Davida had been working with Luc and Lily all along. It was always her plan to hand Dylan over to Lily.

  And that realization left Dylan wondering if there was anyone she could believe in. Or anything left to fight for.

  “I didn’t know Ellie was working with them.”

  Dylan turned her head, pressing her temple to her knee as she studied Wyatt’s face. “She tricked me, too.”

  He shook his head, as though disgusted with himself. “I should have known,” he said. “I was taught how to pick out the odd ones, the ones whose stories didn’t make sense. I was taught to trust no one…”

  “How are you supposed to survive without trust?”

  He looked at Dylan. “My dad always said the only person you can truly trust is yourself.”

  “But he trusted you. And your mother. And Davida.”

  “And look what that did for him.”

  Wyatt climbed to his feet and paced a few feet from where she was sitting, snatching a leaf off a low-hanging tree branch and tearing it to pieces between his fingers. “I don’t even know if he’s alive,” he said after a moment, his voice filled with something close to grief.

  “He was after the Redcoat attack.”

  Wyatt looked sharply at Dylan, his eyes narrowed slightly. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” She sat up, running her hands over her face. “I saw them. Davida protected them with some sort of force field…I don’t know what it was, but it kept the Redcoats from them.”

  “And then?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, Wyatt. That was all I saw.”

  He started to pace again. His hands were shaking, she could see it when he tossed the broken pieces of leaf to the ground. He tore another leaf from the tree, ripped that one up, too. Dylan just watched, aware that anything she said at this point would likely fall on deaf ears. He was hurt and angry. Wyatt had just learned that his mother, a woman he had seen lying dead in a pool of her own blood, was still alive and healthy. She wasn’t human, wasn’t the woman he had thought she was. And now Davida had turned on them. He wasn’t particularly happy about Davida’s relationship with his father, but he respected her. She had been with his group for more than three years. She was the closest thing he’d had to a step-mother.

  Dylan realized they had both lost a mother today.

  “That thing you do,” he said, gesturing toward her, “when you talk to me in my head. How do you do that?”

  Dylan shrugged. “I just focus on you, on some happy moment we had together, and it just happens.”

  “Can you do that with my dad?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “But you might be able to.”

  He stopped pacing and his head came up, his eyes hard as he studied her face. “Why would you say that?”

  “You’re just like me, Wyatt.”

  He shook his head roughly, his movements almost violent as he turned from her, returning to his pacing path. “I am not like you.”

  “Your mother is an angel.”

  “That doesn’t make me like you.”

  Dylan climbed to her feet and walked to him, grabbing his arm as he tried to move past her. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  He laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “My father grew up in this war, Dylan,” he said quietly. “He saw angels swoop down on the city where he lived and destroy everything that mattered to him.
They used fireballs and swords to kill every living soul in the town. Five years old and he watched his entire family die. It’s not something that is easy to forget.” He pulled his arm away from Dylan’s grip but didn’t step back. In fact, he seemed anxious to stay close to her, for her to see the earnestness in his eyes. “I’ve heard that story so many times since I was little. He hated angels with a passion that was only rivaled by his love for my mom.”

  “He loves you. If you told him—”

  “It would kill him to know my mom was one of those creatures he so detested.”

  “But he trusted Davida.”

  “Because he thought she was a victim, just like him. He thought she had been created in a laboratory and that she only had enough angel in her to make her useful.”

  “And me?”

  “You scared him to death,” Wyatt said. “He expected you to wake up one morning and kill everyone in the camp. The only reason you weren’t in chains was because Davida threatened to leave if he did that.”

  Dylan’s eyes narrowed slightly as she studied him, as she remembered how he had so easily turned against her when he learned she hadn’t told him all she knew about Stiles.

  “Did you believe that, too?” she asked quietly.

  Wyatt returned her stare, studied her for a long minute. “I didn’t know what to think. When I first saw you, I didn’t think you could be what I was told all the kids from Genero were. You seemed so…normal, somehow. Innocent, but normal.”

  “And then?”

  “When you healed yourself, it freaked me out.”

  “Me, too,” she admitted. “I didn’t know I could do that.”

  He cocked an eyebrow, clearly unsure if he could believe her. But he reached up, hesitated a second, and then caressed her cheek lightly. “You still freak me out,” he said. “But I figure if you wanted to hurt me, you would have done it a long time ago.”

  “That was spoken with an overwhelming amount of confidence,” she said, a little bitterness slipping into her voice. She had thought Wyatt was one of the few who didn’t see her as the weird sort of hybrid everyone else saw. Maybe she had been wrong.

  But then he tilted his head slightly and said, “How about this: I trust you, Dylan. And I don’t trust anyone. You know that.”

  “I want to trust you, too,” she said. “I’m just—”

  He kissed her before she could finish whatever it was she was going to say. It wasn’t the rough, passionate kiss he had given her before. This time it was softer, gentler. Made her wish she had toothpaste and a toothbrush. Made her wish she hadn’t kissed Stiles just a day ago. That she wasn’t still processing that kiss, that whole set of emotions.

  She stepped back. She reached up and touched her lips, tried not to see the momentary confusion in his eyes. “We have to decide what we’re going to do next.”

  He turned slightly. “I think we have to find my dad.”

  Chapter 2

  Dylan pushed Wyatt’s shoulders.

  “Lay flat,” she said. “You have to be relaxed.”

  “Are you sure this will work?”

  “No.” She looked down at him, frustration making her honest. “I’ve never tried it with someone I know is human. I’ve never tried it with anyone but you, Davida, and Sam.”

  “Sam?”

  She shrugged. “We got separated. I wanted to check in on him, make sure he was okay. But something blocked me.”

  Wyatt started to sit up again. “What?”

  She pushed him back down. “Don’t know. I heard a woman talking to him, and then the connection broke and I couldn’t get it back.”

  “Is it possible for something to block your abilities?”

  She shrugged again. “Close your eyes. Try to focus on something pleasant you shared with your dad.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  She ran her hand over his eyes. “Relax. Just think about your dad. Something good will come.”

  She watched as he settled down. His eyes stayed closed this time, and he crossed his hands over his heart, even crossed his ankles, as though trying to make a point to her about his level of relaxation. She pressed her hand to his forehead, thinking that if she imagined him talking to his father, it might help. She closed her own eyes and let that sense of floating slip through her, that one that often came before she moved into her ethereal form or slipped into Wyatt’s mind. Her fingers began to tingle.

  “What are you doing?” he mumbled.

  Dylan didn’t speak. She was already drifting into his mind, sifting through his memories of his father. A part of her felt guilty, but not enough to stop. They needed a focus, a place to go. And they needed to do it before Davida and her group discovered where they were and tried to grab them again.

  Wyatt found a memory. He was a small child walking with both his parents out in a field somewhere, one parent on either side, each holding one of his hands. They were swinging him between their bodies. Little Wyatt was laughing and squealing, his voice rising each time his body did. Dylan found herself focusing on Jimmy in the dream. She had never seen him smile before, let alone laugh, so carefree, as he did in the memory. It made her see him in a different light. As more of a man who had lost too much than as the cold leader he had become.

  And Joanna. Was it really possible to be that happy?

  Dylan got lost in the memory for a moment. She had never known a life like that. Her life had been structured, controlled. She lived in a dorm with sixty other girls, sharing her guardian with three others. As she grew older, two of her sisters had gone, and she only shared Davida with Donna. The two of them were lucky compared to the other girls. They had more attention, more affection. But it was nothing like what she was seeing in Wyatt’s memory.

  What was it like to feel that close to someone?

  The memory disappeared. It didn’t fade, it simply disappeared.

  Wyatt had begun to connect.

  Dylan went along for the ride. In a second they found themselves looking down on Jimmy. He was in a dark place, curled into a ball on a floor that appeared to be made of some sort of stone. There was blood drying on his temple and a bruise that ran the length of his jaw. His clothes were torn, and his body underneath was thinner than it had been the last time they saw him, as though he hadn’t had any significant nourishment since that time.

  He wasn’t alone.

  Settled around him were others, some standing, others sitting, a few lying in the same child-like position as Jimmy. All of them showing signs of violence. Dylan recognized most of them as the people she had thought of as Jimmy’s council, the members of the resistance he worked the most closely with. A few she had never seen before. But she suspected they were human, too, other humans trying to fight against the angels, against Luc and Lily.

  Wyatt cried out when he saw his father. The sound reverberated in Dylan’s mind. She reached out for him, forgetting where they were and what they were doing.

  “Father,” Wyatt groaned as he moved close to his dad. “Father, I’m here.”

  Jimmy made no move to indicate he heard him. It wasn’t like when Dylan searched for Wyatt during their times apart. He didn’t seem to know Wyatt was even there.

  But someone else did.

  Jonathon?

  Dylan felt Wyatt’s body tense, felt it with the part of her that was still sitting on the grass beside him, her hand still pressed lightly to his forehead. Dylan turned from Jimmy’s body where it lay on the ground and searched the faces of the people around him. None responded to her. None seem to be aware of her, just as Jimmy didn’t appear to be aware of Wyatt.

  Where was she?

  Dylan slipped out of the darkness, out of the room where Jimmy was, and found herself floating around a tall, square building with too many windows to count. It was familiar, somehow. Not this place, but the smooth walls, the long corridors, the colors and feel…something she couldn’t really put her finger on.

  There were people everywhere, humans huddled on t
he ground with their families. Or others. She wasn’t sure which were humans, which were hybrids like her and Wyatt, and which were other creatures hiding in plain sight. It was too easy for the gargoyles and the angels to disguise themselves. For all she knew, they were all creatures of one type or another.

  So many. She didn’t understand. What was this place?

  And then she saw her.

  Joanna was sitting in a corner, her back to the wall and her knees pulled up tight against her chest. Her eyes were closed. Dylan went to her, hovered over her with her consciousness, or whatever it was that allowed her to see these things.

  What is this?

  Joanna’s chin came up. She opened her eyes and focused almost exactly on the spot where Dylan looked down on her.

  “You brought him here,” she said aloud, clearly not concerned that those around her would wonder who she was talking to.

  He wants to help his father.

  “He better hurry, then,” she said. “They plan to execute him.”

  What do you mean, execute him?

  Joanna gestured around herself. “This is Luc’s prison, Dylan. This is the place where he brings the humans who somehow managed to survive arrest by the Redcoats. This is where they are put on trial and executed for crimes against the angels.” She looked up to where she thought Dylan was, but her eyes were off just a little. “This is the end of the road for humanity.”

  Then what are you doing here?

  Joanna laughed. That’s all. She just laughed for a long time, the sound worse than the squeal of a butchered pig, the pain of a dying child. It was worse than anything Dylan had ever heard before.

  It was the sound of an angel who has lost hope.

  Chapter 3

  Dylan opened her eyes back in the green grass where her physical body sat. She pulled her hand away from Wyatt, and he almost instantly opened his eyes, too.

  “Why didn’t he talk to me? Why didn’t he respond when I called to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Dylan said.

  She had no answers for him. She could see the questions before they even formed on his lips, could read the pain in his eyes. There was nothing she could say to him.