Free SOUL MATES (Angels and Demons Book 3) by Brenda L. Harper Page A

let his lips linger against hers for a moment longer, and then he touched her temple with two fingers. Instantly, Caryn disappeared. He’d sent her home, put her to bed, and wiped from her mind the memory of returning to Rachel’s with him. Instead, he replaced her last memories of their night together with a chaste goodnight kiss on her front porch and the impression that it had been fun, but not enough to seek out a second date.
    It wasn’t fair to lead someone like Caryn on. She was too kind—too innocent.
    Stiles sank down on his bed with a heavy sigh. No matter how logical his head wanted to be, this human body wanted to bring Caryn back and finish what she’d started. He stood and began to pace. Stupid damn morals, stupid damn attachments. There was once a time when these things were easy, when he could do whatever he wanted to do without concern for what would happen the next day or the day after that. Why couldn’t he go back there?
    Why couldn’t he stop thinking about Dylan and the pain he constantly felt radiating from her soul?
     
     
    Stiles went to the jail where Wilhelm kept the dark souls they’ve managed to capture in this war. Wilhelm wasn’t there—he was at the dance with Donna—but two of his assistants, other gargoyles, were there.
    “Anything new?” he asked as he walked into the narrow room.
    “Not really,” one of the gargoyles told him. “We’ve been watching this one in the corner. He seems ready to move on.”
    Stiles walked to the end of the room and stopped in front of the door to the last cell.
    “Is that true?” he asked. “Are you ready to let go of the darkness and be received into heaven?”
    The soul’s darkness swirled in its smoky presence. There was a modified version of the lassos Dylan had designed to capture these things wrapped around what might have been its neck if it had been in human form. The darkness of its body seemed to undulate, moving and rotating almost constantly, through the restraint. As Stiles spoke, those movements seemed to increase, running in much quicker waves.
    Pain.
    Stiles slid through the bars in his ethereal form, one of the gargoyles began to protest, while the other urged him to be quiet. “He’s an angel,” Stiles heard behind him. He approached the dark soul and touched it gingerly, almost as if he were afraid of being burned by it. The place where they touched turned a soft gray color, as though the simple act of reaching out had helped the soul rid itself of some darkness.
    “What is his plan?” he asked the soul. “Why is he doing this?”
    Anger. Pain.
    “Where does it come from, this anger and pain?”
    She.
    Stiles studied the soul for a long moment. “She? Do you mean Joanna?”
    The soul didn’t answer. It didn’t know.
    “What did she tell him? We know about the orb. But what else? There must be more.”
    Again, the soul didn’t answer. But when Stiles touched it again, images exploded in his mind.
    Wyatt lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight. “Someone’s down there,” he said.
    Stiles moved up behind Dylan. “How do you know?” he asked Wyatt.
    “I saw a flash of something. Metal, I think.”
    “Are you sure it wasn’t just a reflection off of one of the rides?”
    Wyatt didn’t respond. He just kept watching. After a second he pointed with his other hand, the one not pressed to his forehead. “There,” he said. “A little flash, like someone moving around.”
    “I saw it,” Stiles said.
    Dylan hadn’t, but it didn’t matter. She had already known someone would be there waiting for them.
    Stiles gripped Dylan’s arms and turned her around. “You need to go back.”
    “No,” she said, pulling away from his touch. “I can’t keep running.”
    “You don’t know what might be down there.”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    “Dylan,” Stiles began, reaching to touch her again. But then he was jerked backward, as though hit by a powerful force. Dylan cried out as he fell to the ground,