Free FOUND (Angels and Gargoyles Book 1) by Brenda L. Harper Page B

again.
    He moved around a low table that marked the entrance to the alcove and disappeared. Dylan dropped to her knees and slipped the knife out of the waistband of her broken coveralls, holding it so tightly in her right hand that her knuckles turned white. She closed her eyes so that she could listen without distraction. In a second she could hear the thump of books falling from shelves. With that came a heavy sound of breathing, almost like the huffing sound she had heard her first night outside of Genero.
    They’ve come for you.
    Dylan’s eyes opened and she searched the alcove around her. “What do you mean?” she whispered aloud, too distracted to keep her words inside her head.
    You must survive. You must fight.
    And then the voice was gone. She wasn’t sure how she knew it was gone, that entity that continuously helped her over the last few days, but it was.
    She tightened her grip on the knife.
    A noise to her right made her pull back into herself, making as small of a target of herself as she could. Silence fell heavy in the cavernous room. Dylan bit her lip, fear skittering through her chest, making her heart skip a few beats. She closed her eyes again, reluctantly this time. Instinct screamed at her to keep a watch, to keep her eyes on the space around her. But with her eyes closed, she could hear something.
    It was breathing, each breath a slow, measured beat. It was close.
    And it was thinking only of death.
    Dylan’s eyes opened again.
    She wanted to cry out, wanted to bring Wyatt to her side. But this time she listened to instinct and stayed as still and quiet as she could.
    She even slowed her breathing as best as she could.
    Suddenly there was a loud noise at the front of the store. Dylan jerked, the noise startling her even as she tried to ignore the fear trickling through her body. A book on the shelf against her side banged to the floor. She closed her eyes, became aware of the quickened breathing of…whatever it was that was stalking them. And then it was gone, rushing off toward a second sound at the front of the store.
    A collision of some sort sent quivers through the walls, seeping into Dylan’s body through her touch against the shelf beside her. She bit her lip, imagining Wyatt clashing with some unseen foe. But then he was at her side.
    “We have to go,” he whispered harshly in her ear.
    Wyatt grabbed her hand and pulled her through the debris of the store. They ran in a low crouch away from the sounds of fighting to a large, metal door with a thick piece of metal across its middle. Wyatt pushed hard on the metal and the door slammed open, tossing them out into the sunlight. They ran down a narrow street onto a wider one, rushing around crumbling buildings and low, oddly shaped vehicles.
    They ran for a long time, passing many buildings before Wyatt finally pulled her up the steps into another building, this one further in decay than the bookstore had been. They ran up a set of stairs and into a small room that was filled with rotting furniture.
    “We’ll be safe here for a while,” he said as he pushed the warped door as tight against its jamb as it would go.
    “What happened back there?” she asked.
    Wyatt shook his head as he went to the front windows and pulled back the clothes that covered them, his eyes scanning the street down below. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    “Something was there.”
    “Gargoyles,” he said.
    Before Dylan could ask for an explanation, he turned to her and gestured for her to sit on one of the battered, smelly chairs. She sat on the edge, careful not to touch the green mold that was growing on the chair’s arms. Wyatt came over and sat across from her, pulling a wooden chair with most of its cloth cover rotted away close to her.
    “Gargoyles are mythical creatures that once lived in distant places in the last society. Books say that they were placed on the top of buildings, usually religious buildings, to protect the