FOUND (Angels and Gargoyles Book 1) (11 page)

Stiles shook his head again. “Gone,” he said, his eyes moving to the ground at his feet.

Dylan could feel some of the tension shift in Wyatt’s body, could feel him relax his hold on the butt of his gun. “You should move north,” he told him. “There are a few cities that way who take refugees from other places.”

Stiles nodded. “I’ve heard of them,” he said.

“You should come with us,” Dylan said.

Wyatt grabbed her arm and pulled her away from Stiles. “No,” he hissed in a low whisper. “He can’t come with us.”

“Why not?”

“Look at him,” Wyatt said, gesturing widely with his other hand. “He is too thin, too sick to be of any help in a fight.”

“How many fights do you plan on picking in the next few days?”

Wyatt stared at her, anger making a muscle jerk in his jaw. “Have you already forgotten what happened in the ruins?”

Dylan could feel the color draining from her face, but she didn’t back down. “We can’t leave him here alone. What if something happens to him? That would be on us.”

“How would we know?”

“We would know,” she said quietly.

Wyatt studied her face for a long minute. “And if he tries to cut our throats in the middle of the night?”

“I thought he was too sickly to be much of a fighter?”

“Not much fight in backstabbing.”

Dylan glanced over at Stiles. He had wandered to the edge of the lake and was squatting, cupping water into his mouth with his hands. She noticed that there was a bloodstain on the back of his shirt, just above the waist of his pants.

“He’s injured,” she said quietly, gesturing to the stain for Wyatt’s benefit. “We should help him.”

Wyatt glanced over at Stiles, turning slightly so that his shoulder rubbed against Dylan’s. As it did, she could feel the war of emotions floating through his body. Fear was dominant. But so was empathy.

“Fine,” he said quietly. “We’ll take him with us. But the first sign of trouble…”

Dylan reached up and pressed her lips lightly to the angle of Wyatt’s jaw. A flash of pleasure ran through her, a minor flash compared to the touch of his hands on her head that night the pain burst through her skull, but similar. “Thank you,” she whispered breathlessly.

She felt his eyes on her as she walked over to Stiles and sat beside him.

“We want you to come with us,” she said quietly.

Stiles looked at her, gratitude in his eyes. “Thank you.”

She touched the stain on the back of his shirt. “Are you injured?”

He glanced back as though trying to see the spot himself. He grabbed the hem of his shirt and pulled it forward. “Oh,” he said, “that was days ago. I think it has pretty much healed now.”

“Can I look?”

He shrugged.

Dylan lifted the edge of his shirt. There was a long cut along the bottom edge of his ribs that ran over his spine. But, as he had said, it was mostly healed. Dylan ran her finger along it and watched as the redness of the knitted wound disappeared. She could feel a tingle in her fingertip as she did it, knew that it was something inside of her that was healing his wound. All these years she had thought it was only Donna who could do this, but it seemed something inside of her was growing and maturing, that she could do more than she had ever thought possible.

After leaving the ruins, Dylan thought about the wound on her side, the pain in her ankle that had seemed to indicate a broken bone or a dislocation, but which was completely healed by the time she woke the following morning. And she remembered the redness in her skin that disappeared each time she imagined her skin as it was the morning she left D dorm. She had healed herself. To prove it to herself, she had waited until Wyatt was occupied as they settled in for the night a few days later and used her knife to slice into her palm. Within seconds of visualizing it the way it had been before, the wound knitted itself again.

She had done it dozens of times since.

This was the first time she had done it to another person.

Stiles grunted, but he didn’t move, didn’t ask her to stop. Within seconds the healing wound had disappeared. But then she realized it wasn’t the first he had ever suffered. There were gnarled scars all along his back, his skin twisted and tied into knots that marked the places of former wounds.

She bit her lip as she slowly pulled his shirt back over his skin.

“I’m sorry about your family,” she said.

He glanced at her. “Yeah, me, too,” he said.

“We should go,” Wyatt called to them.

Dylan stood and held her hand out to Stiles. “I’m Dylan,” she said. “And our task master is called Wyatt.”

Stiles smiled as he took her hand and allowed her to pull him to his feet. “Nice to meet you, Dylan,” he said.

Chapter 20

They stopped for the night in a long, low field that Wyatt told them was once a place called a farm. Stiles started a fire with Dylan’s dwindling supply of matches while Wyatt went in search of some sort of protein for their evening meal. Dylan sipped slowly from a bottle of water as she watched Stiles move around on his haunches.

“What was the name of the city where you lived?”

“Collins,” he said.

“Where was it?”

He pointed to his left. “West of here.”

Dylan took another, slow sip of her water. “Didn’t you say east before?”

Stiles stopped moving, holding his hand just over the lazily smoking wood. “Did I?” he asked before he bent to blow on the sparks beginning to glow there.

“Yes, I think so.”

The fire burst into life. Stiles stood and walked over to Dylan, settling on the ground beside her. “I guess you caught me,” he said.

“At what?”

He looked down at his hands, running them slowly over the rough fabric of his pants. “I’m not really from a city.”

“Then where did you come from?”

He glanced at her. “My people never settled in one community or another. We always just wandered the lands, living off of what was left of the land and what we could find in the ruins.”

“Where are your people now?”

“Mostly dead,” he said as he again ran his hands over his pants. “It is a hard life, living out here without the safety of a community to guard us.”

Dylan took one last swallow from the water bottle before handing it to Stiles. “Why did you lie?”

He took a long drink before he answered. “Because your friend, Wyatt, doesn’t look like the kind of guy who would be too kind to a wanderer.”

Dylan thought of Wyatt’s resistance when she suggested Stiles travel with them. “If he knew you can defend yourself, he might have been a little more open to the idea.”

“I doubt it,” he said. He glanced at Dylan. “Men like Wyatt do not like the idea of competition in their immediate circle. They like to be the dominant one.”

She shook her head. “Not Wyatt. He just wants to survive.”

“He wants you,” Stiles said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

He glanced at her, his gray eyes softening as he studied her face. “You’ll figure it out, soon,” he said, touching her hand lightly. “But you should know he is not the only man out there. He’s not the only one who could make you happy.”

Dylan frowned, confused by the intensity of Stiles’ words. “I don’t understand,” she whispered, but Stiles had pulled away from her and busied himself piling the dry wood beside the fire as Wyatt came into view a few dozen yards away.

Dylan climbed to her feet and walked out to meet Wyatt. She slipped one of the rabbits from his hand. “I don’t know how you find them so quickly,” she said.

“Disappointed I’ve come back too soon?” he asked.

She glanced at him. “Why would I be?”

His gaze moved to Stiles, but he didn’t say anything.

“He’s not as useless as you think,” Dylan told him. “He built that fire in less time than it would have taken me.”

“Have you noticed how pale he is?”

Dylan shrugged. “So?”

“So, he hasn’t spent a lot of time in the sunlight. If he had, his skin would be darker.”

She looked from Stiles to Wyatt, remembered the paleness of Wyatt’s legs when he climbed out of the lake. “Maybe he found shelter in one of the ruins.”

Wyatt shrugged. “Maybe.”

They joined Stiles beside the fire, and the three of them worked together to prepare the rabbits for the fire. Stiles knew what to do, and he did it quickly, proficiently. Even Wyatt was impressed, Dylan could see it in the grudging way he handed Stiles the fourth rabbit, as though it was the prize for the quickest. Wyatt then moved away from the fire, settling beside his bag a yard from the two of them. It was his habit, Dylan knew, to sit alone for a while after a long day of walking.

Dylan and Stiles were silent as they watched over the cooking rabbits. The smell of the roasting meat drew the attention of animals in the area. They could hear the call of an animal Wyatt had called a coyote. Dylan had never seen one, but she had nightmares of a small, long-legged animal that made that same noise. A shiver ran down her spine as she listened.

“Don’t worry,” Stiles said as he leaned over to check one of the rabbits. “They won’t come near the fire.”

She nodded gratefully.

They ate their meal, the same meal they’d had over and over the last few days. Dylan no longer tasted it. It was just nourishment, and it was better than the dryness of her carb crackers. Afterward, they each silently picked a place to sleep and settled into the tall, sweet-smelling grass. Sleep overcame Dylan almost immediately, an exhaustion she was slowly coming to recognize as the new normal settling over every bone and muscle in her body. Her last thought was of Wyatt, of the soft snores coming from his direction that were comforting in a way she could never begin to explain.

She dreamed of Davida.

They were lying together in the softness of Dylan’s dorm room bed, whispering in the darkness so that they would not be found out by one of the other guardians. Davida was not supposed to sit with her charges as she did. When a toddler or a child had a nightmare, the guardian was supposed to offer reassurances and then encourage the child to go back to sleep. Davida had never done that. She crawled into the bed with Dylan and whispered stories to her, sometimes until the sun began to peek through the thin glass of the dome.

She was whispering to her now. But the story was different.

“You aren’t the only one taken outside the dome the day of the testing,” Davida whispered in her ear. “There are others, others who have information you need. You must find them.”

“But what if I can’t?”

“It’s important, Dylan,” Davida said, brushing a hand over her cheek as she had often liked to do. “Find them, Dylan. Find them quickly.”

Dylan jerked to wakefulness, sitting up quickly in the fading darkness of dawn. She was overwhelmed with a sudden sense of loss as she reached for Davida and realized she was not really there. Tears stung her eyes as she slowly lay back down and wrapped her arms around her own body.

“You okay?”

Dylan rubbed the back of her hand over her cheek before she rolled over and looked up into Wyatt’s familiar face. “A dream,” she whispered.

He touched the curve of her jaw with the back of two fingers, so much like the way Davida once touched her that it made her chest ache. More tears began to roll down her cheek as she rolled back onto her side. She felt Wyatt shift, expected him to move back to his own chosen sleeping spot, but instead she felt the heat of his body as he settled down beside her. After a moment, she pressed her body back into his side, drawing a limited amount of comfort from the touch of his body against hers.

“We should be there in a couple more days,” he said in a rough whisper.

“And then what?”

An image burst through her mind. A man, tall and much too thin, his face covered in some kind of dark dust, rushing toward Wyatt. Relief on the man’s face, relief and an overwhelming amount of love.

It made Dylan miss Davida that much more.

“What’s he called?”

“Who?” Wyatt asked.

“The man who is your family.”

Wyatt rolled toward her, laying his hand on her arm to pull her toward him so that he could see her face. “What do you know about my family?” he asked, more curious than anything else.

She studied his face for a moment. “I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

Wyatt cocked an eyebrow, clearly not buying what she was saying. He bit his lip, a cloud moving slowly over his face as he thought again of the man. Images of him, some clearly from years ago because the man was younger, healthier. And images of more recent times, of a man struggling against some unnamed force.

“Father,” Wyatt said quietly.

“Father.” Dylan tried it out in her own mouth, forming the word slowly. “Is he like a mother?”

“Yes.” Wyatt ran his hand slowly over the length of her arm. “Mother and father are partners. They make children together and raise them.”

“Raise them?”

“Care for them. Make sure they are safe from danger and that they have the things they need to stay healthy.”

Dylan closed her eyes, again pictured Davida as she had been in her dream. “Then you have two guardians.”

“Yes.”

“You’re lucky.”

The movement of his hand on her arm stopped for a second. And then it began again, slower, his fingers playing over the tender skin inside the curve of her elbow. “I suppose so,” he said.

“They took mine away,” Dylan whispered.

“Why?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Still lying partially on her side, she leaned back into him, enjoying the security that washed over her at his nearness. “Maybe because of the stories she used to tell us.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Stories about the founding sisters, about children who vanished because of the things they could do or the deformities that marked their bodies.”

Wyatt stiffened. “What kind of things?” he asked quietly.

Dylan rolled onto her back so that she was staring up into his face. His eyes were dark as he studied her intently. “It’s not important—”  she began to say, struggling to sit up. But Wyatt pressed his hand to her shoulder and refused to allow her to move.