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

her eyes taking in everything around her as she made her way to a spot of sublimation, to that place where she expected to be taken away and butchered to help ease Lily’s suffering.
    It was what they wanted, wasn’t it?
    “Too late,” Luc said, his voice deep and raw with emotion. “You waited too long.”
    The words settled in the room with a heaviness that only added to the pain in Dylan’s head.  She reached up to rub her temple, but changed her mind as her eyes fell on Lily’s. Her human form was dying, her spirit weak with the burden of it. But nothing had dimmed her determination, her drive. Dylan could see it in her eyes, those pale eyes that were so like the eyes Dylan had seen in her own reflection.
    “Returning to Heaven can’t be that bad,” Dylan said.
    “Being without my soul mate is like living in Hell!” Luc cried.
    Lily reached over with one of her gnarled hands and touched his perfectly healthy appendage. “Don’t,” she hissed.
    Luc’s anger dimmed just slightly as he looked at her. “I’m sorry, my love,” he whispered, leaning over slightly to kiss the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
    Dylan stopped a few feet in front of the raised platform where their chairs, their thrones, sat. She crossed her arms over her chest as she studied the two of them. “I’m here now,” she finally said. “You’ve got what you wanted.”
    Luc shook his head again. “Biel has said that it’s too late, that anything we might have done before would not work now. Lily only has a matter of hours to survive in this form.”
    “Then why am I here?”
    “To suffer,” Luc said.
    An honest sadness filled Lily’s eyes as the doors behind Dylan, the same doors she had just walked through, opened. A group of Redcoats began to march inside the narrow room, their tall, broad bodies blocking what was hidden behind them. Dylan watched, a weariness pressing down on her shoulders as they moved slowly in that military, disciplined way they had. She even recognized one of them, a tall, blond man. He was the same man Sam had attacked the last time they were here, the man whose throat Sam sliced through when he tried to grab Dylan. The same man who healed instantaneously before their eyes.
    An angel. A militant angel just like the rest of the Redcoats.
    I’m sorry, sister.
    The voice was Lily’s. Dylan looked back at her, caught sight of a single tear slipping slowly from her eye and down the broken skin of her jaw, her throat. When Dylan faced the Redcoats again, she found herself staring into Davida’s eyes.
    “No,” Dylan whispered.
    A Redcoat pushed Davida onto her knees. Her hands were bound in front of her, her clothing torn, her always so neatly coifed hair a rat’s nest of tangles. She was a far more desperate sight than she had been the last time Dylan saw her. She was no longer in charge of this subordinate group. Now she was the inferior one.
    “I did everything I could!” Davida cried. “I did everything you told me to do. I kept her alive. I protected her.”
    “You didn’t bring her to us when she came to the resistance.”
    “I couldn’t break my cover with the humans,” Davida insisted, rising up onto her knees by pressing her elbows into the hard stone floor. “I was instructed to keep the humans in the dark until the Redcoats came.”
    “You could have found a way,” Luc insisted. “You could have snuck her out in the middle of the night, made them think she had run away.”
    “Jimmy would have seen through that ruse, and then it would have been my head on the block.”
    “It is now, too,” Luc said.
    An unseen signal moved the Redcoat closest to Davida into action, the Redcoat Sam had attempted to murder. He pulled a sword out from under his coat and raised it high over his head.
    “No,” Dylan cried, rushing forward to fall painfully to her knees in front of Davida. “No, please,” she said, turning her eyes to Lily, aware that only Lily could stop this.
    Davida began to