FALLEN (Angels and Gargoyles Book 3) by Brenda L. Harper Read Free Book Online

were close. He brought them here.”
    “Dylan,” Stiles groaned, a thin line of blood dripping like a thread of saliva from his mouth, “I didn’t know.”
    There was too much. Too many voices, too many things to concentrate on. Dylan closed her eyes, tried to raise her mental wall to stop the sound from overwhelming her. But, even as she did, she could hear Stiles’ thoughts. They were no longer guarded, no longer controlling what she could hear and what she couldn’t. Angels could do that. She had learned it with Joanna. Angels could control what other angels heard from their thoughts, what they saw of their memories. Stiles was weak. That control was sluggish. She could see what he didn’t want her to see.
    And what she saw was too much.
    Dylan’s knees went weak and her vision dark.

Chapter 7
     
    Dylan woke in a familiar place. She was lying in a warm, silky bed in a room that was bright and luxurious, tables along the side of the room piled high with fluids to make her skin soft and supple, a wardrobe that she knew was filled with glorious dresses and other garments, and a bathtub in the center of the room from which a warm, floral scent emanated.
    “Miss Dylan?”
    Ruby, a human servant, stood at the end of the bed. She was wringing her hands, as though afraid of how Dylan might respond when she spoke.
    “How long have I been here?” she asked, surprised by the raspiness of her own voice.
    “A full day.”
    Dylan sat up too quickly. Her head began to pound. She reached up and took it between both her hands, squeezing in the hopes that the pressure would ease the pain. Ruby watched, her expression weary, as if she expected Dylan to explode, either verbally or literally.
    “My friends?” Dylan muttered.
    “Downstairs.”
    Dylan knew what that meant.
    She had been here once before. That time, it had only been Sam down in the dungeon room with the steel boxes. Wyatt had rescued her that time. She suspected he wouldn’t be able to do the same this time.
    “You need to take a bath,” Ruby said quietly. “They want to see you.”
    “Why bother with a bath?” Dylan asked. “I don’t suppose it matters how clean my body is when they butcher it.”
    Ruby’s eyes widened with something like horror. Dylan simply shook her head, aware that Ruby and the others like her who populated this town, this place designed to serve only one purpose, were unaware of the atrocities going on around them.
    Dylan was in Viti. And she was about to be given an audience with the enemy.
    Without a word, Dylan climbed off the bed and began to disrobe. She was still clad in the dirty jeans and t-shirt she had been wearing for several days. The material of her jeans was so caked in mud that they practically stood up on their own when she took them off. They must have dragged her at some point, she realized. Besides the excessive dirtiness of her jeans, her shirt was torn in places it hadn’t been before. But her body was spotless.
    There were some benefits to being a hybrid angel.
    She climbed into the bath, allowing Ruby to help her control her balance. The pain in her head had not vanished. It lingered like the memory of a wound. She settled in the water, enjoying the feel of the liquid warmth as it settled over her body in a way that she was almost ashamed of. She shouldn’t enjoy it so much, shouldn’t accept the luxuries of the enemy. But, at the back of her mind, she knew she could get used to this. She missed these things that she had so taken for granted when she was growing up in Genero. Missed them more than she had ever expected to.
    Maybe when it was all said and done…
    Ruby helped Dylan wash, rubbing a scented soap into every inch of her skin and scrubbing her hair with some sort of fruit-scented shampoo. When she was clean once more, she stepped out of the tub into a huge towel that wrapped around her body like a hug. She dried off quickly, not thinking about what would happen when she was dressed, about what