Read FREED (Angels and Gargoyles Book 2) for Free Online Page B

crunching of the glass under her shoes reverberated against the walls.
    She was crossing toward the long, low shelf at the front of the room, the thing Wyatt had called a counter in the previous ruin, when a door suddenly opened.
    “Who are you? What do you want?”
    Dylan spun around, holding her hands up to show she had no weapon. At the door was a man much older than Davida and Jimmy. His hair was colorless, his eyes dark, but covered with some sort of film. He clearly could not see her. His eyes moved wildly from side to side, his head cocked slightly as though to help him hear the noises around him better. In his hands was a long stick, thick and round, as though it had been made rather than scavenged from a tree. He gripped it tightly in two hands that were swollen and deformed, not unlike the way Lily’s hands had been when Dylan first met her.
    “I don’t mean you harm,” she said.
    The man swung the stick in the direction of Dylan’s voice, but she easily stepped out of the way.
    “This is my place,” he said. “You move on.”
    “We only want shelter for the night.”
    “We?” He swung the stick again, as though trying to find her silent companions. “How many?”
    “Six,” Dylan said. “We come from Viti.”
    The man appeared to grow paler, his hands gripping the stick even tighter than before. “I don’t want trouble,” the man said. “I have kept to myself for many years here. I have never done anything against the leaders.”
    “We don’t want to hurt you.”
    “Then why did you come here?”
    She didn’t know why she did it. It was probably not the smartest thing to do. But Dylan felt compelled to touch this man. She stepped forward, careful not to make too much noise so that he could not move out of her reach. And then she grabbed his wrist, wrapped both her hands around it and closed her eyes, dropping her mental wall.
    Her mind was flooded with images. She saw a small child, a girl, dancing around this room many years ago, before the war destroyed the area. She was wearing a pretty little dress with great big ruffles underneath. There was sunshine flowing through the windows behind her, the light making little discs on the edge of the dress sparkle. She was laughing, the sound like the twitter of a bird in the early morning.
    The image changed. The girl was no longer laughing. War had come to their city.
    Dylan’s hand shook as she saw one image after another, saw a world she did not know, but for which she grieved because this man grieved. She saw heartache, she saw pain, she saw darkness. She saw things she could never begin to describe, atrocities that never should have happened to anyone, but had. And could again.
    Tears were running in big, sorrowful drops when she let go of him.
    “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
    The man’s hands were shaking. He did not say anything. He simply stepped back and disappeared behind the door.

Chapter 9
     
    Wyatt and the others chose a building on the other end of the street for shelter. Dylan helped build a fire, but then she made a pallet on the floor in a distant corner of the big, cavernous room. She wanted to be alone.
    Her thoughts were a whirlwind as she tried to consolidate everything she knew. The images that man had shown her with his thoughts had left her with this sense of uneasiness in the pit of her stomach. The idea of food made her nauseous. She couldn’t imagine ever eating again. That’s why she turned her nose up when Sam came over with a leg of meat from a bird Wyatt had killed for their dinner.
    “You need to eat,” Sam said.
    Dylan just shook her head and curled up on her blankets. Sam hesitated, but finally walked away.
    She didn’t think she could sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw that man’s child in a pool of blood, her body viciously torn to pieces. But it wasn’t that child’s face she saw each time she closed her eyes. First, it was Davida. And then it was Donna. Eventually, however, it became