Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) (10 page)

“Yes. I will rip the heads of the
nocturnis
from their bodies and throw them into the fires of hell.”

“Okay, first of all, ew. And second of all, go for it, stud.” She opened her eyes wide and pressed her fingertips to her open mouth. “Oh, wait, that’s right. You can’t. Because you don’t even know where they are. Which brings us back to my point; that the best thing we can do is follow the clues that lead us in their direction. Once we find them, you can get to ripping. I’ll avert my eyes.”

Kylie watched as the gargoyle struggled with his anger, his hands balling into fists and the muscle in his jaw twitching like a Mexican jumping bean. She continued plowing through her sandwich, and her foot resumed bouncing. What could she say? She had a weakness for good pastrami.

Abruptly, Dag let out a muffled roar, flashed a bit of fang, then relaxed. “I do not like waiting,” he admitted, grabbing the white takeout bag and dropping into King David’s chair like a pouting toddler. “And inaction annoys me. To have been denied more than paltry resistance by the
nocturni
scum who attacked you yesterday, and then to be faced with no real target to pursue today has put me out of sorts. Without a battle before me, I am rendered useless.”

Okay, that she could understand, even relate to. Kylie hated feeling like her hands were tied, too.

Like she said, it was a big list.

“I get it, but I’d hardly call you useless,” she said, crunching into her pickle. She chewed a minute then elaborated. “Of the two of us, you’re the only one who really understands what we’re up against. I couldn’t have gone into Ott’s apartment earlier and known right away that the
nocturnis
were gone and that he wasn’t very high up in the chain of command. That was all you.”

Kylie paused and frowned. “That does bring up a good question, though. It’s been bugging me since we first talked to Wynn and Knox. I get that in the cases of the others, the
nocturnis
knew about them beforehand—where the other Guardians were and that the other girls had magical abilities. But I can’t figure out why anyone from the Order would go after me. I mean, I didn’t know about you guys ahead of time; I didn’t really even think of my skills as anything other than nonmagical; and they might have known you were a Guardian ahead of time, but they didn’t attack you. They attacked me. What’s up with that?”

Dag unwrapped his sandwich, his expression thoughtful. “I had not considered such a question, but perhaps the answer lies in the clue you believe we have collected.” He gestured to the thumb drive she had dumped on the desk in her hurry to get to lunch. “If the dead man was indeed a member of the Order, perhaps he was the one who brought you to their attention. If you indicated curiosity about their business, you may have piqued their interest.”

“I suppose you could be right.” She wrapped up the second half of her sandwich and set it aside. No one had a stomach big enough to finish one of Saul’s finest in one sitting. “And I guess that means it’s time to get back to work.”

Kylie took a long swig of soda, cracked her knuckles, and reached for the thumb drive, plugging it into a free USB port. When her machine recognized the device, she scanned it for viruses (because hello, not stupid) and found it clear. “Okay,” she muttered to herself. “Let’s see what this puppy has to tell us.”

A few key strokes should have brought up the file structure, but instead she got a password prompt. “Security, huh?” She grinned. “Well, we’ll see about that, now won’t we?”

Rising to her feet, she pushed her desk chair out of the way and crossed to the closet. Dag watched her over his partially devoured lunch. “What is wrong? I thought you were examining the device.”

“I am. I’m running a cracker on the password right now,” she answered, pulling a large, inflated yoga ball from inside the closet. “But if this turns out to be half the fun I’m hoping for, the chair isn’t going to cut it. I’m going to need something bouncier.”

His expression told her she continued to baffle him, but then, she baffled most people. Returning to her desk, she positioned the balance ball in place of her desk chair and settled herself on top. The way it bounced and rolled beneath her turned her habitual fidgeting into something productive and worked her core muscles at the same time. Win-win.

Her decryption program continued to buzz through its routine. She knew it could take a while to run through all the possibilities, but waiting patiently so wasn’t her shtick. She considered herself a woman of action. Plus, hadn’t Wynn and her other new friends decided that her tech skills had a little extra oomph behind them compared to those of the average bear? Maybe she should try to really test that theory.

While Dag continued to plow through his pastrami—wow, he was actually diving into his second half, even with the added challenge of a bag of chips on the side—Kylie took a deep breath and cautiously turned her mental focus inward.

She didn’t like to think that she lacked any kind of self-awareness, that she might have missed such a significant part of herself as a latent paranormal ability. It rankled. Then again, how many people in this world actually had paranormal abilities? Didn’t it make more sense for a person to assume they got things done based on skill and education rather than on a bippity, a boppity, and a boo? Logically, why would she have chalked her talent for computers up to anything different from any other techhead in the world? She shouldn’t have.

But then again …

Instinct had always gotten Kylie further than anything else when she ran up against a roadblock in her programming. Sure she had studied and experimented, taken classes and read books and learned from other geeks along the way, but when push came to shove, Kylie always did whatever her gut said would work best. And her gut had never failed her.

Right now, her gut was telling her to single out that set of bits right there. Good. Now rearrange the first and last sets. Okay. Shuffle three places to the left. Aaaannnnd … twist.

The encryption broke.

Usually, when big things happened on a computer, you were lucky to get a new screen popping up. Maybe a beep. On really big occasions, possibly a screen flicker. What you didn’t ordinarily see was a flash of red light and a slowly building swirl of smoke the color of burning charcoal.

Nope, Kylie could honestly say, it was a first for her. Dag, however, seemed more familiar with the spectacle.

With a battle cry that made the plaster walls of her office shake, Dag leaped from his chair, spilling the remnants of his sandwich all over the hardwood floor. In the blink of an eye, he had transformed into his natural shape, wings half spread in the confines of the indoor space, his fangs exposed in a feral expression of hostile rage. His black, glittering gaze was fixed on …

The smoke?

Kylie shook her head, wondering what the hell was happening. Her wondering only lasted about four seconds, though, because that was how long it took for the smoke to condense and take shape.

The shape of a demon.

Well, she was calling it a demon, anyway. If this wasn’t what the Guardians meant when they said the D-word, she didn’t want to meet a real one. Ever.

Tumbling backward off the ball, Kylie scurried crablike away from her desk and the giant, noxious thing that currently perched atop it. If her first impression of Dag had been that he looked like the monster from a childhood nightmare, this thing made her rethink that assessment. It shot straight into the realm of night terrors, and if any child on earth had dreamed up something like this, the future of the human race had come into serious question.

It looked not remotely human. Where a hard look could pick out the human in Dag’s gargoyle face—and the gargoyle in the human—this thing stood so far removed from her species as to have evolved from an entirely different evolutionary tree. Maybe on another planet.

Where the trees were carnivorous.

Black and hulking, it shone head to toe, or possibly just top to bottom, with a slick, sickly sheen, like an oil spill over black water. The weird texture of its hide meant she couldn’t tell if it sprouted fur or some sort of intricate scale pattern. Or both. Or neither. Three glowing red eyes peered balefully from its erstwhile face, the color reminding her of the pool of blood surrounding the body of Dennis Ott, only lit from behind with a malevolent glow.

It hunched over on itself, making its size difficult to discern, but its mass proved intimidating enough given that she couldn’t quite identify any real body parts or limbs within the seething maelstrom. One minute she thought it a roiling ball of tentacles, like an H. P. Lovecraft story come to life; the next it looked like some kind of satanic vision, with squat goat’s legs and overlong, claw-tipped arms alternating with gigantic clawed pincers along an articulated torso. Then she blinked, and she saw nothing but more swirling smoke, an evil genie popped unexpectedly from an unrubbed bottle.

Maybe her human mind just wasn’t equipped to grasp its true form. What Kylie did grasp was that it was evil, and it wanted her dead. You know, after it fed on her immortal soul.

It gargled at her. She didn’t know what to call the sound. Part chitter, part growl, part unholy whine, she could only say that it simultaneously made her want to run far, far away, and to cover her ears, stay right where she was, and vomit. She figured it was what the inventors of the bagpipe had been trying for.

Before she could follow either course of action, Dag struck. He repeated that structural integrity-compromising bellow and leaped at the demon like a wolf on a wounded caribou. The creature shrieked right back and twisted, focusing its burning gaze and noxious smell on the Guardian.

Had she mentioned the thing stank like a landfill inside the pit of hell in the middle of August? Because it did.

Kylie backed up against the wall because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. Part of her screamed at her to run, run like a gazelle, and get the hell out of Dodge while the creatures before her battled it out. That part made some very compelling arguments. Still, another part of her hated the idea of cowering in the corner like the dumb blonde in a cheesy horror movie, and wanted her to charge the forces of evil with a crucifix and a chain saw. Being neither a Christian nor a lumberjack, however, she did not own either of those things.

She also didn’t find the idea of getting in between the two combatants a very appealing prospect. They tore at each other like a couple of wild dogs, teeth snapping, claws slashing, making noises she knew for certain could never come out of a human throat. Becoming collateral damage from a wild swing of a claw or a misplaced kick to the spine seemed somewhat inadvisable for a woman pretty anxious to make it to her next birthday, which was only a couple of weeks away.

Come to think of it, maybe she was thinking about her eightieth birthday. She’d kind of like to be around for that one as well.

The sounds of battle continued as the two inhuman creatures fought for supremacy. Just when she feared her desk was about to become the first casualty of war, a blur of black rose high in the air and then went sailing across the length of the room to leave a dent the size of Detroit in her library wall. Damn it, couldn’t they be more careful?

Not that she didn’t cheer a little inside when she realized that Dag had been the one to send the demon sailing, but did he have no idea of how hard it was to find a master plaster worker in this day and age? It wasn’t the expense of the repair she minded but the logistical hassle.

The Guardian quickly followed his prey, leaping from the desk and landing directly on top of the battered dark entity. With a thunderous roar, he raised one arm high, then slashed downward, punching a hole straight into the demonic figure’s torso. Or where a torso would have been on a human. When Dag drew his hand back, a shriveled black mass about the size of a steroidal grapefruit shuddered and smoked in his palm.

The demon shrieked in pain and outrage, but Dag simply drew back his lips and snarled. Then he took the nasty lump between two powerful hands, dug in his talons, and ripped the thing apart like a warm dinner roll. Immediately, the entity blipped out of existence, and the remains of the black mass burst into flame, then drifted to her floor in a pile of ash.

“
A feier zol im trefen
. A fire should meet him,” Kylie muttered, then shrugged. “I suppose where he’s going, that’s pretty darned likely.” She pushed herself to her feet and dusted off her hands. She really needed to settle on a cleaning service to start coming in regularly. “I have to say that’s the first time I’ve come across that particular security measure. I don’t think it came from McAfee.”

Dag spun to face her, his hands still coated with the ashy remains of the demon, his mind still clearly in battle mode. The bared fangs gave him away real quick. “Are you hurt?”

He practically spat the question at her and looked about three seconds away from stripping her down to check for himself, but she’d heard adrenaline could do strange things to a person, so she didn’t snap back. She did, however, put a couple of extra cautious feet between them.

Then she waved a dismissive hand. “I’m fine. You know, as fine as someone can be after discovering the code they just cracked had backup security in the form of a slavering demon.”

“That was no Demon.” Dag slowly straightened, shifting into his human form. His eyes raked over her as if trying to determine if she’d lied about some injury, but really she was fine. “If a Demon had entered this room, you would not be leaving it. Facing it alone, I might not, either.”

Kylie felt a roll of unease. “Seriously? What do you call that thing if it’s not a demon?”

“It was a
drude.
Technically, I suppose your kind might call it a demon, as it is a creature born of the darkness, but it resembles a true Demon in the same way a garden lizard resembles a dragon. There is no comparison in power between them.”

“
Oy,
well in that case, what are we waiting for? Let’s find some Demons. They just sound like fun!”