Edyn (The Essence Project Book 1) Read online

  "Squeeze my arm as hard as you need to, this won’t feel good," he said. "Ready?"

  I closed my eyes and nodded. His right hand rested gently on my skin near the wound, and he pressed down gently to stretch it open. When he slid the tweezers into my side, I bit down on my lip, and tears welled up in my eyes. I did have to squeeze his arm, hard, with both hands. Fortunately it only took him a moment to dig around and grab hold of the bullet. The jagged edge of the metal scraped the inside of its path as he dragged it out of me, and for a brief moment I felt like I might pass out. But the feeling subsided when I heard the bullet and tweezers hit the floor.

  "Worst part’s over," he said, and kissed me once on the forehead. "Now I just need to clean it and sew it up."

  He poured some hydrogen peroxide onto some gauze and dabbled at the wound. It was a welcome sting of healing. When he was satisfied, he threaded the hooked needle and brought it to my skin. I sucked in a breath, and he glanced up at me with an apology in his eyes.

  "Just squeeze," he reminded me.

  I squeezed his arm again, and waited for the pain to subside. He worked quickly and soon had me stitched back together. I was able to really exhale when he started smearing some kind of ointment on top of the wound. His hands seemed to work without any direction as he finished bandaging it.

  "There," he said. "All better," and leaned down to place one small kiss on top.

  I couldn’t help but smile at that. "Your turn."

  He gave me a quizzical look before he remembered. "Oh, right." Looking down at his own wound, he reached for what he needed to clean it. "This is worse than it looks. I just popped the stitches."

  I watched in awe as he sewed himself back up. He never once flinched or showed any signs of pain. I wanted to be immune to pain the way that he was. I didn’t want it to make me weak. Looking at Ryker, I saw it was the opposite for him. Pain made him stronger, and I wanted that.

  "How do you do it?" I whispered.

  "Do what?" he asked.

  "Embrace the pain?"

  He gave a low laugh. "Plenty of practice."

  "What all did they do to you?" I asked, swallowing hard "At the lab?"

  Sighing, he took a seat next to me and pulled me close. "It doesn’t matter. We’re safe now."

  I frowned. "Was it that bad?"

  He evaded my question with a question. "What about you?"

  "Well, Jophiel sure had a lot of fun torturing me. I don’t know how much of it was for science like he said, and how much was just because he’s a twisted bastard. He cut me, stabbed me, skinned me… Burning me was the only thing that didn’t hurt me."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Whenever he would try to burn me it was like I just absorbed it. There wasn’t any pain or anything with it. Weirdest thing ever."

  "Hmm. Do you ever remember being burned before? As a kid or anything?"

  I thought for a moment. "No, I don’t actually."

  He stayed quiet for a few minutes, lost somewhere inside his head. I kept going over everything myself, confused as ever. Somewhere back in the lab, they were creating embryos from my eggs. Embryos that were half Jophiel. Nausea washed over me at the thought, and I groaned.

  "Are you okay? What is it?" he asked, concerned.

  Tears started rolling down my face. I couldn’t speak.

  "What did he do to you?" he whispered into my hair.

  How did you tell the love of your life that, even though it was all done in a petri dish, that you were going to have children with the man that wanted the both of you dead?

  Except he wasn't a man.

  He’s an angel.

  It was utterly ridiculous.

  "They took eggs from me," I began, but my voice wavered, and I couldn’t finish.

  "Eggs? What do you mean?"

  I started shaking. "They gave me hormone injections and harvested my eggs. They got nine of them. They’re going to combine them with Jophiel’s DNA and implant them into surrogates and study them. Jophiel thinks maybe there’s something in their stem cells that will fix whatever it is that has caused people to be born without souls. Then he’s going to kill them." I could feel him tensing up.

  He got up and crossed to the window. As he looked out, I could see the scars on his back in the dim light of the church. His shoulders slumped. "I don’t know that there’s anything we can do," he said, sounding completely defeated.

  "I know," I whispered. "We can’t go back or he’ll kill us." I could hear him exhaling sharply.

  He turned and walked back over to me. "I’m so sorry, Edyn."

  A thought hit me. "Who knows if it will even work. Jophiel’s not even human. Maybe his DNA won’t be compatible with mine."

  At that, Ryker went rigid.

  "What?"

  He started shaking his head frantically. "No."

  "No, what?"

  "You said he’s an," he hesitated, "angel, right?"

  "Right. So?"

  "You told me before,‘You saw his eyes.’ Edyn, his eyes looked just like yours, when you’re having one of your… episodes."

  I let the words sink in.

  No.

  It was impossible.

  There was no way.

  Absolutely no way.

  "I can’t be." The words barely escaped my lips.

  He took my hand. "Why not?"

  "Ryker, I can’t be a freaking angel. It doesn’t make any sense."

  Laughing, he said, "What part of angels makes sense?"

  I didn’t want to be anything like Jophiel, but his words echoed in my head.

  Now you’re a monster just like me.

  What had I done to my mother? I had forgotten amidst all the chaos that my mother was dead from my own hand. Maybe I was more like him than I thought.

  Ryker tilted my face with his fingers so that I had to meet his gaze. "You’ve always been my angel, so why not be one to everyone else?"

  I shook my head. "It doesn’t make sense, though. I was born in Atlanta. I grew up in Atlanta. Angels are from Heaven, not Atlanta."

  He laughed again. This was entirely too amusing to him. "What about Jophiel and Zak?"

  "They weren’t born here. They’re both stuck here now, but they came from Heaven. I didn’t."

  Screwing up his mouth in concentration, he said, "Well maybe some are born here. What do we really know about them anyway? I mean, we didn’t even know they actually existed until just now. Or maybe you’re some sort of new kind of angel? Hell, we’re not supposed to be here anyway. The Rapture happened over fifty years ago and Jesus didn’t come back for us like scripture said he would."

  My brain wouldn’t process it. "I’m not an angel. I can’t be."

  "It would explain a lot," he pressed.

  "I can’t even think about this right now."

  He squeezed me tighter. "So, don’t. We’ll stay here today to lay low, and tomorrow I’ll contact my people in Nashville and try and get us far away from here. For now let’s just enjoy the fact that we’re both still alive after we thought we’d lost each other. Again."

  I couldn’t argue with that, and I snuggled into the crook of his arm.

  "I love you. You know that right? With every fiber of my being." His breath tickled my ear.

  "Duh," I replied.

  He laughed. "So eloquent."

  I pinched him, and he laughed again. "You know I love you too. When I was stuck in the lab, all I could think about was you," I said. "They let me have your bible and your journal."

  He sucked in a breath. "How much of my journal did you read?"

  I smiled. "Enough."

  "Oh, boy."

  "I feel like it made up for a little bit of the time we lost for me. It was like I was able to see inside your head."

  He was quiet for a moment. "Nobody’s ever read it before. It was just me writing down my thoughts to God."

  "I liked getting to see that part of you," I said and brought his hand gently to my lips.

  His stomach
growled under my hand, and I laughed. I hadn’t realized I was hungry until I heard his own need echoed back at me. "We should eat something," I said, sitting up.

  Ryker pulled some beef jerky and crackers from one of the bags and passed some to me. We spent the rest of that day relaxing and healing. It felt so good to be back with Ryker and putting off our cares until tomorrow.

  He still never mentioned what had happened to him in the labs, and I didn’t push him to tell me. It was obviously something he didn’t want to talk about right now. One day I hoped he would open up about it, but that would come with time, if he ever decided to. Whatever had happened to him clearly wasn’t good, though. It pained me to think about him suffering in any way, but he wanted to suffer silently for now. I tried my best to keep our thoughts off of the labs and to just enjoy each other. We’d had so many lost years we still needed to make up for, and I resolved myself that day to make the most of every moment we had, since so many had already been stolen from us.

  20

  A s all my other wounds inflicted by Jophiel and his men had healed, this latest gunshot was nearly gone in several days. Ryker’s was still healing, and I could tell he was somewhat concerned about it. I knew it hurt him, too. He would occasionally wince if he moved wrong, or if I squeezed him too tightly. In typical Ryker fashion though, he did his best to hide it from me.

  We stayed in the church for three days before we decided to set out and try and make our way to Nashville. I woke early, but Ryker was already up. Watching him through a sleepy haze, I saw him tending to his side. I could see that the skin around it was angry and red, even from a distance.

  "Hey," I said quietly, and his head turned in my direction. "That doesn’t look too good."

  He sighed. "No, I think it’s infected. Hurts like a bitch."

  "We need to get you some antibiotics. Why don’t we go by a clinic today before we get going?"

  Shaking his head, he said, "I don’t want to waste any of our money on that. And I don’t want us to get caught."

  "Ryker—"

  "No, it’s too much of a risk. I’ll be fine. I just need to keep cleaning it really well every day."

  I knew how stubborn he could be, and that there was no sense in arguing with him. It didn’t mean I was okay with his decision, just that I didn’t have a say right now. I said a silent prayer to God to heal him up quickly. If it got worse though, I wasn't going to give him a choice and we were going to get him to a doctor.

  Ryker had gone and bought some brown hair dye, so I painstakingly covered the red that I had grown to love. Ryker assured me that once all this crap was over we could get it dyed back. I think he had loved it as much as I had, but it was too much of a risk because the color was too bright and would attract too much attention. Rinsing it out was an experience. There wasn’t any running water in the church, so I had to sneak over to a nearby house and borrow their garden hose when no one was home.

  That day we found a pay phone and Ryker made a few calls. His friends in Nashville were a little harder to track down than he’d originally thought, but he was finally able to get ahold of them. It was about ten hours from Nashville to where we were just outside of Washington D.C., but they would be here early the next morning.

  We decided to spend the day together like two regular people. At first Ryker was hesitant, but I wanted to feel normal for once. I convinced him that we needed to get some clothes, so we hit up a local resale shop where everything was cheap. Ryker paid for a worn duffle bag for our belongings and a large sleek pocket knife. We counted out every penny we had left. We didn't know how long it would be before we could get more money, so we wanted it to last.

  Neither one of us had ever been to Washington D.C. before so we decided to do a little sightseeing. It was so crowded in the city that we’d blend in without being noticed. We hopped on a bus to take us to the National Mall so we could wander around and see some of the monuments.

  We did our best to look like another pair of tourists, which wasn’t too difficult since we didn’t know where we were. The majority of the monuments and memorials were in a two mile area so we were able to spend the day wandering between them all. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial was my favorite since they had included a statue of his dog. Ryker had liked the Lincoln memorial the best. We saw various war memorials: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, The Korean War Veterans Memorial, and The National World War II Memorial.

  We even had a Rapture Memorial on the National Mall to commemorate the people that had been taken. We overheard a couple talking while we were there. The woman was asking her husband why we needed such a memorial if they were in Heaven now.

  Her husband merely shrugged and said, "Well what if they’re not?" His words gave me a chill that lasted for quite a while after that.

  We found the shade of a large tree and sat beneath it just soaking in the sun. It was nice to relax and spend just a little time not worrying about anything.

  "Do you know how the fighting Pits got started?" Ryker asked me.

  I shook my head. "Do you?"

  He rolled his eyes. "Would I ask you if I didn’t?"

  Smacking him playfully on the arm, I said, "Whatever."

  Laughing, he continued. "There are fighting Pits in all the major cities. They’re not linked up or anything, but they’re everywhere. They started just one in each state capital. Some fat cat senators thought it would be entertaining to watch desperate people fight over souls so they set them all up. The senators would provide the souls, and the two competitors would fight to the death, winner take all. The Pits sort of took on a life of their own after that. I don’t think the politicians ever could’ve guessed what they’d become."

  I laid in the grass with my head in Ryker’s lap as he leaned against the tree. The weather was gorgeous today. I was grateful we’d bought jackets that morning since it wouldn’t be long before we’d need them. I looked up at Ryker and saw that he was sweating while he absentmindedly played with my hair. His face was paler than normal, almost greying, and his eyes were becoming bloodshot.

  "Hey, babe, are you okay? You look like you don’t feel that great."

  He waved me off. "I’m fine. Just hungry."

  I knew he was lying, but he didn’t look like he was in the mood to argue, so I bit my lip. "Let’s go grab something to eat then," I said. "I’m hungry too. How about we go to a real restaurant? Maybe we could stay in a motel tonight too instead of the church? I would love a hot shower, and I bet we could find one that’s not too expensive where we wouldn’t be noticed."

  "Food, yes. I don’t know about the motel though," he said as I stood up. He tried to stand but fell back down.

  "What’s wrong?" There was an edge of worry to my voice, and I reached out my hand to him.

  He took it, and I helped him stand, somewhat wobbly on his feet. "Just hungry," he mumbled.

  "That’s bull, you don’t get like this when you’re hungry."

  "I’m fine, let’s just go eat. I’ll feel better after, I promise," he said and took my hand.

  I didn’t like it. He was lying straight to my face, and I knew he was trying to keep me from worrying which only made it worse.

  I talked him into grabbing a real meal at a small dingy diner that wasn’t too far from the Mall. Prices were cheap so we wouldn’t tear through our money. When our food came, Ryker looked as if he was force feeding himself. He only ate about half of what was on his plate which definitely wasn’t like him. This man could eat an elephant and still ask for dessert. He was still sweating some, and when I reached out to take his hand, I could feel him burning up with fever.

  "Love, we need to get you to a doctor," I said gently. "You’re on fire, and you don’t look good."

  He smirked, but his heart wasn’t in it. "Maybe you’re rubbing off on me. On the fire part, not the looking good part. You always look good," his words were slurred just a bit.

  "I’m serious. We’re going to an urgent care clinic. They’re more discr
ete. We’ll be fine." I set some cash on the table and took his hand with a squeeze.

  He could barely squeeze back. Not a good sign. I asked the girl working behind the counter if there was an urgent care nearby, and she said there was one just a few blocks away. I thanked her and pulled Ryker out of the diner.

  We stumbled down the street, and I noticed after a few minutes that Ryker had started shivering. I placed a hand on his forehead and nearly had to pull it back. I’d never felt someone so hot before. His eyes were glazed over and he was blinking rapidly, trying to focus.

  "Hey, stay with me," I said with a sense of urgency in my voice.

  His balance went, and he fell against the wall of a nearby shop.

  "Shit. Hon, come on, we have to keep going. We have to get you to a doctor."

  "I can’t," he whispered.

  I glanced around frantically, unsure of what to do. Across the street was a small motel with a faded blinking neon sign. I threw the duffle bag over my arm and pulled Ryker’s arm around my shoulders. He was nearly dead weight and panic surged through me.

  I looked for a break in traffic and dragged him across the street to the motel. There was a bench outside the front office. Lowering him gently on to the bench, I watched as his eyes rolled back in his head, his breathing labored.

  "Wait here," I said anxiously.

  He half nodded as I disappeared through the office doors. There wasn’t anyone at the counter when I walked up to it, so I bopped the bell that was sitting there. No one appeared for a few moments so I bopped it again.

  "Alright, alright, I’m coming!" a woman’s shrill voice came from a door in the back. She burst through, her hair in rollers. "What can I do you for?"

  "We need a room," I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  She smacked her gum, before one side of her mouth curled up into a smile. "We? You and your boyfriend?"

  What the Hell did that matter?

  "Yes, please."

  She winked. "I gotcha sweetheart. Name?"

  "Edyn," I replied. "Edyn Evans." I didn’t want to use my real name, just in case.

  Her fake nails clicked away at the computer. "Alright, that’ll be a hundred and twenty-two dollars and forty-six cents with tax."