Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) (11 page)

Dag opened his mouth on a glower, then closed it with a snap. “I think perhaps you used the rhetorical device of sarcasm to express disdain for this idea?”

“Ding, ding. Got it in one.”

“I would prefer you to speak directly, and with a little more respect, human. You have a bad habit of treating serious situations with inappropriate levity.”

“I see the stick is back,” Kylie muttered under her breath as she moved to retrieve her balance ball and return it to her desk. When she’d jumped off, the thing had rolled nearly out the door.

As she settled warily back in her spot she raised her gaze to Dag. “Now, I’m no expert on black magic, but I am an expert on hacking, decryption, and cybersecurity, so based on timing, I’m going to say that there was a booby trap set on this drive. Break the decryption without a special
alakazam
thrown in, and some sort of latent spell is activated, summoning the demon. Sorry, the
drude.
Does that make sense to you?”

“I do not think you summoned the creature, and I certainly had no desire for the encounter, so I see no other explanation,” the Guardian agreed with a
hmph.

“Right. In that case, do you still want to tell me that following up on my informant and bringing back that thumb drive was a dead end, Mr. Pessimist Pants?”

Judging by his expression, Dag liked that nickname even less than Goliath, but at the moment, Kylie didn’t care. She felt like she deserved to indulge in a good gloat, seeing as she’d been right and all.

He crossed his arms over his chest and did a fine impression of an unamused and potentially deadly disciplinarian. “That would depend on what we actually find on this device, would it not?”

“Shmulky,”
she muttered under her breath, turning back to the computer. What a killjoy.

Back to concentrating on her task, she finally pulled up the file structure on the drive and scanned through the titles. Several looked like word processing documents, a few pieces of electronic garbage, a subfolder of e-mail files, a single spreadsheet, and one video file. A picture being worth a thousand words, Kylie clicked on the video.

Her player program launched, and she found herself looking at a poor-quality film that appeared to have not only been filmed by a low-resolution cell phone camera, but that had also been recorded surreptitiously. Nothing else explained the positively painful angle of the image, or the obscuring black blob covering most of the lower left corner of each frame. Honestly, it was too poorly done to chalk up to mere incompetence. No one under the age of ninety was this bad with tech.

The sound quality sucked rocks of equal if not greater size. She spent a few minutes fiddling with light and sound settings, filters and resolutions, but there wasn’t much she could do to make it more than marginally audible and visible. She waved Dag over and started the clip from the beginning.

“What do you have?”

“You know as much as I do. It’s a video. It was on the drive. Now, watch.”

He stood behind her balance ball, and both of them turned their attention to the monitor. The first few seconds amounted to a lot of shaking and shifting, obscuring both the picture and the sound enough that Kylie couldn’t even make out what they were watching. Gradually, the camera holder seemed to relax a little. The shaking didn’t stop completely, but she figured he (or she) was just one of those guys (or girls) with a shaky hand, because it settled into a low vibration while the sound began to filter through the speakers.

Kylie could see now that the recording showed a portion of a somewhat crowded room. The lights were dim enough that she couldn’t guess at its size or shape, and she realized the only illumination came from actual burning candles. What? Were these jokers some kind of reenactment group obsessed with the Revolutionary War era? It wasn’t like Boston didn’t crawl with those suckers.

Couldn’t be, she decided, because at least a few of the figures on the screen wore thoroughly modern clothing, including the tall one standing in what should have been the center of the frame. The rest of those gathered seemed to be arranged around him, so she guessed this was the guy everyone listened to.

The man wiggled into and out of focus in the poorly framed shot, but Kylie could make out enough to see that he was above average in height and had an average-to-lean build. He wore a gray suit and a bloodred tie, and looked pretty slick, like a lawyer or a businessman, well groomed and well dressed. Pretty ordinary, really. So why was everyone so interested in what he had to say?

Darn it, if she was sitting here watching secret video of an Amway rally, she was going to be really pissed.

The video continued to roll, and for whatever reason, the microphone finally managed to pick up enough of the speaker’s words to provide an audible sound track. Still, she had to lean forward and strain to listen.

“… Masters are unhappy with your current efforts. They have waited too long to be restored to freedom and to take Their rightful place as rulers of this wretched world. And you, children, have failed Them. Each one of you, with each day that passes, you continue to fail Them.”

Kylie got a bad feeling. She twisted her head to look up at Dag. “Um, are they talking about who I think they’re talking about?”

Dag hissed and nodded. That so hadn’t been how she wanted him to respond.

“… failures of late cannot be tolerated. I have visited the circles in question and made the displeasure of the Masters clear, but Their restlessness grows. They hunger, my friends, and it is our duty to provide Them with what They need to grow strong and join us in the physical realm.”

“Which is exactly what we don’t want to happen, right?” Kylie murmured.

“We have been blessed with the presence of Lord Uhlthor now for many months, but His strength is still low, and much was expended in His war against the cursed Guildmen last year. We cannot allow these sorts of setbacks to continue.”

Kylie shuddered. “So Wynn and Knox were right. That was what killed Bran, that Uhlthor guy. He really is out of jail or whatever.”

Dag nodded, his eyes narrow and jaw tight. “So it appears. This confirmation is grave news, but it does offer proof that the Demon is not yet at full strength.”

“Why do you say that?”

His gaze shifted to her, fire burning behind the ebony surface. “Because we still live.”

And there he went again, demonstrating what a smooth talker he was. Be still, her beating heart.

Or not, since that was what they were all trying to prevent.

The video rolled on.

“Our efforts to weaken the Guild have brought some success, allowing us to summon the first of our Masters from His prison, but the latest reports are disturbing. We have been told that three females previously unknown to our sources within the Guild have appeared and succeeded in waking three of the Guardians. And I need hardly tell you that our Masters find this news greatly upsetting.”

She hoped it gave them heartburn. The literal kind that Dag had recently inflicted on the
drude.

“This is disturbing indeed, but it answers many questions I had over the destruction of the Guild headquarters,” Dag murmured, his gaze still fixed on the screen. “Such a feat should never have been possible. If somehow the ranks of the Wardens were infiltrated by the
nocturnis,
it would make the accomplishment much easier to believe.”

“Sounds like you were right, then. Do you think that’s also how they were able to get to so many of the Wardens? And why the ones who left have been so hard to find? If they really are in hiding and other Wardens had a part in the threat against them, they probably don’t know who to trust anymore.” She took his grunt for agreement. “We need to let the others know about that as soon as possible.”

“Finish this first.”

“… and so when we return, I will share with you all what the Masters have decreed you might do to aid Their cause and momentarily sate Their hunger. It will require organization and effort, as well as total dedication to our cause, but when we succeed we will not only have restored the Defiler to power, but have freed His Sister from the torture of Her foul prison.”

Kylie groaned. “Why do I think he’s not talking about some random blonde out at MCI Framingham?”

“Another of the Seven,” Dag bit out. “Shaab-Na. The Unclean. It is often referred to as female.”

“Oh, goodie.”

There was a knocking, shuffling sound and the video cut off abruptly. Kylie cursed and retrieved the file structure. “Crap, that’s it? That was the only video. What the hell was their grand plan? What kind of grand plan ends up summoning and feeding Demons to begin with?”

Dag pushed away from the desk and stalked over to glare at the cindered remains of the
drude
left on the floor. Kylie had the feeling he was wishing he could put the thing back together just so he could rip it apart again. Hell, she would even have brought popcorn this time.

“The only way to restore a demon to power, or to lend it enough power to escape from the prison to which it has been banished, is to feed it.” His tone was flat and hard, like the pedestal on which he had so recently perched. About as warm, too.

A queasy feeling churned in her stomach. “And Demons eat souls. Right?”

He nodded in a single jerk of his chin.

“Um, not that I really want to know the answer to this question or anything, but how do you feed someone’s soul to a Demon? Even more, how do you feed it enough souls to accomplish what those dybbukim were talking about?”

Dag wore an expression of disgust and barely controlled anger as he shook his head. “There are too many ways. A Demon needs only to lay its hand on a human to grasp its soul, and it is the work of seconds to devour it. Sacrificial rites can also channel the soul into an object that stores it until it is given to the Dark one. There are also spells that can trap souls as they depart from dying humans and hold them for a Demon to ingest.”

“Okay, so that’s three things I never want to see happen.” Kylie shuddered. “But it sounds to me like freeing a Demon or giving one enough power to make it strong again would take more than just a couple of souls. At least I hope so. Didn’t Wynn say they figured the first one got released when an entire village was slaughtered somewhere in the Middle East?”

“She did,” Dag said, looking less kill-y and more thoughtful for a moment. “The Order would need to take that into account.”

“Which means they must be planning something big.”

Oh, how Kylie hated having to say that. Big sounded really, really not good in this particular context. Like, big plate of challah French toast? Awesome. Big sacrifice to some batshit idiots’ demonic overlord? The opposite of awesome, to the nth degree.

“Indeed. We must warn the others immediately.”

“Warn them of what?” When he growled at her, Kylie bounced twice on her balance ball and contemplated using a third one to launch herself straight at the grumpy gus’s head. Somehow, she restrained herself. “No, seriously,” she said. “Warn them of what? That the Order is planning something big? Um, from what I remember of our last conversation, I think that’s exactly what they warned
us
about, so I hardly think they’re unaware. Until we figure out
what
the plan is, as well as other piddling little details like who, when, and where, we have no new information to share.”

The glare he shot in her direction could have peeled paint, which made Kylie doubly happy that she rarely bothered with makeup. His lip curled back, revealing a long fang he should not have been carrying around in human form.
Pfft
. After the last eighteen hours it was going to take a lot more than that to scare her. She’d pulled on her big-girl panties.

Which looked exactly like her other panties, but with a tich more “fuck you” in the elastic.

“What?” She knew she shouldn’t taunt the poor Guardian, but somehow she just couldn’t resist. This was probably why her
bubbeh
always told her to stay away from tigers with tails. “You know I’m right. You just hate when that happens. Well, get used to it, snookums, because otherwise you are in for a bumpy ride.”

He stalked over to her. Her grin lasted about three of his long strides. By the fourth, it had slid somewhere into her stomach along with about a billion gypsy moths. That was also when his big, rough hands closed around her and drew her to her feet.

“I swear by the Light that I will find a way to teach you to hold that tongue, female,” he growled and hauled her against him. “Beginning now.”

In one fell swoop—and boy, did she have a new and much deeper understanding of that expression now!—his head dipped and his mouth settled over hers with angry determination. Less than a heartbeat later, her smile waved good-bye to the moths and dove right into those panties of hers, proving once and for all that she was, indeed, a very big girl.

Oy,
for a thousand-year-old stone statue who’d barely had time to kill things between naps, let alone to date much, the man could kiss. And kiss. And kiss.

He ate her up with more relish than the bagel and the pastrami combined, seeming to feast on her like Shabbat dinner. His lips felt hot and firm, demanding a response that she had no trouble giving him. She could lose her mind in this kind of kiss, hungry, possessive, and oh so deep.

He entered her mouth and dove straight for her soul, teasing it out with little nips of his teeth and a wicked, taunting tongue. He stroked and sucked and ate at her until she moaned and clutched at him like a drunk on a bender. The comparison seemed apt, given the way her head spun, her balance deserted her, and her skin felt flushed with heat.

More than the kiss had her thoughts in a whirl. Until a few seconds ago, Kylie had been pretty well convinced that Dag hated her, that he tolerated her only because Wynn and Knox had insisted they work together and because he found it unsporting to kill defenseless humans. He certainly spent enough time looking at her like he found her to closely resemble a particularly annoying sort of insect. Like a flea with a vaudeville act, or something. But if this was how he kissed women he hated, she figured the ones he liked must spontaneously combust before he got within ten feet of them.