Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) (16 page)

Okay, that eased her panic. A little. “Fine, but they still need to be untied before they wake up, right?”

“I can see to it in a moment. First, I need to know if you sustained any injury.”

Confused and impatient, Kylie shook her head. “I’m fine. King David—
A broch!
King David!”

Kylie tore away and flew back to the office, heading straight for the closet where the cat had been thrown. She found him struggling to free himself from a tangle of hoodies she had stacked inside for cold days. She reached for him, earning herself a sharp hiss, followed by a plaintive mewl when he realized who she was.

“Oh,
bubeleh,
I am so sorry,” she crooned. “Come here,
boychik
. Let me see what that mean man did to you.” The sudden dimming of the area told her that Dag had followed and stood in the doorway, blocking the light from the room. “The tech threw King David in here after he jumped on his face and nearly clawed his eyes out. I need to get him to the vet and have him checked out. If he’s hurt, I’m going to rip that
nishtgutnik
’s
putz
off and feed it to him.”

She finally managed to untangle the cat and picked him up, cuddling him briefly to her chest. He endured the affection for a moment, even head-butting Kylie’s chin and purring before squirming out of her grip and dashing toward the nearest exit.

“
Bubbee,
wait,” she called after him, scurrying to follow. Dag put a hand out to stop her.

“The cat seems fine. It moved with no sign of pain or stiffness and easily covered the distance to the door at a run. I believe it objects to the idea of a physical examination. Much like someone else I could name.”

Worried and irritated, Kylie snapped her reply. “I already told you I’m not hurt, stone face, so lay off. I really don’t think now is the time for you to decide you’re ready to play doctor.”

Dag stiffened beside her a split second before the unintended double meaning to her words registered with Kylie. She felt her cheeks go hot and shouldered past him to return to the captives in the dining room.

She cleared her throat. “What I mean is, the guy barely laid a hand on me. I jumped out of the way as soon as I saw the look on his face, not to mention the wire in his hand. And King David attacked him before he was able to do me any harm. So I’m fine. No need for a physical exam. From a doctor. Or anybody else, really. I’m good. All systems go.”

“You are babbling,” Dag observed, his words thoughtful. “The idea of an examination makes you uncomfortable? This makes me believe you are being untruthful about your lack of injury.”

“No, really. I’m not bleeding, I’m not limping, my pupils are evenly dilated, and I’m having no trouble breathing. Satisfied?”

“You cannot see your own eyes react to changes in light, so how can you be certain about their dilation?”

Kylie ground her teeth together. “Do you really think I got a concussion from running and screaming?”

“You are the one who raised the possibility, not I.”

Oy gevalt!
God give her strength.

She took a deep breath and tried not to push it out with all the hissing force she had built up. “For the last and final time, I am unhurt. If my status in this regard should change at any time, I promise on my grandmother’s life that I will inform you immediately. Without passing go, without collecting two hundred dollars. Now, if you don’t mind, I think the more important task at hand is to untie the guys in the other room before one of them wakes up and thinks they’ve been kidnapped by the crazy Jewish lady and the big scary guy who talks like he’s definitely not from around here. Mmkay?”

Without waiting for his reply, she spun on her heel and marched down the hall and the devil take the hindmost. Her mouth twisted into a frown as she patted her hip and realized she had left her phone back in the office so she couldn’t check the time. She needed to know exactly how many more hours it would be until Wynn arrived.

Then she needed to go online and see if there were any liquor stores in the greater Boston metropolitan area that either delivered, or were staffed by employees open to a little judicious bribery. This jailbreak/bitchfest was going to require something a whole lot stronger than the couple of bottles of wine she had stowed in the kitchen.

Like vodka, maybe.

Or tequila.

What was rotgut, anyway? Kylie had always been curious.

Or, hey, did anyone in Boston sell moonshine?

*   *   *

As soon as the workers had been freed, Dag found himself battling against the need to disappear somewhere far, far away from his little human female. He needed space, lots of space, and time away to deal with the reaction he had experienced when he realized she had been attacked once again.

The sound of her scream of mingled fear and anger would echo inside his mind for the next thousand years. At least. He had stood beside the male human, watching as he marked and cut the opening to install the high-tech security control panel near the house’s main entrance. One moment, he had felt nothing but boredom and the restless need to hurry this process along so that he could clear the premises of the strangers he had been forced to allow within his territory. The next, his ears had registered Kylie’s scream, and his mind had exploded in a white-hot lightning storm of rage and terror.

Someone was threatening his female. The creature would have to die.

For the first time in his existence, his change had taken him by surprise, muscles and tendons stretching and snapping as his body reshaped itself into his natural form without his choice or consent. The human at his side had uttered a hoarse cry, then promptly passed out at Dag’s feet. The action had been enough to remind the warrior to first secure the area, but taking the three minutes required to capture and secure the three workers had nearly cost him his sanity. The moment he dumped them in the empty dining room, his instincts would no longer be denied. They drove him immediately to Kylie’s side.

He barely remembered the sight that had greeted him as he flew through the office door. A red mist obscured his vision, and all he had been able to pick out was the sight of Kylie huddled in a crouch beneath the window. The fact that her eyes were wide and animated and that he could see the rapid rise and fall of her chest were the only reasons why the house around them remained standing.

The feral temper inside him had urged him to seize the male and rip his head from his shoulders. He wanted to taste the man’s blood, to see the life drain from his eyes, and to know that the foul piece of shit realized that in seeking to harm Kylie Kramer, he had actually sought his own death.

It took a moment for the sight of the cat clinging to the human’s face to register, and for a split second, Dag envied the cat the ability to sink the points of his claws into the man’s flesh. He could almost feel the soft parting of skin and muscle, the click of talon against bone, but then the human wrested the cat from his head and flung it across the room. Dag had gotten one glimpse of the man’s glinting, darkly clouded eyes in the instant before his fist grasped the front of the uniform jumpsuit, but as soon as it felt his touch, the spell on the man shattered. The demonic influence winked out, and left Dag holding a confused, terrified, and cowardly victim of the same attack that had threatened his female.

He threw the man down in disgust and hurried to Kylie’s side. Where he, of course, was greeted not with gratitude, or even an understandable accusation based on his failure to prevent such an attack, but with calmly delivered questions and the sass to which he was quickly becoming accustomed.

This did not mean he approved. He disliked the sensation he seemed always to have in her presence of being somehow off balance. A new experience, it made him question his ability to anticipate danger—hadn’t he missed the threat of the
drude
and again of the hexed worker until each had nearly succeeded in harming his female? How could he guarantee her safety if being near her created such distracting turmoil within him?

Definite turmoil. Among other things.

He struggled against a flood of unfamiliar emotion every time he drew near to the small human, unfamiliar for more than one reason. For centuries, he had believed that his kind lacked the capacity for the relentless current of feelings that seemed to plague the mortal world. He experienced only the emotions suited to his purpose—rage at his enemy, determination to win victory, hatred of the Darkness, loyalty to his cause. No other had been allowed to distract him, but he could not recall when anything had tried. Yet now, the addition of one tiny mortal female into his presence had shaken the very foundations of his identity. How could he remain a Guardian when all he truly cared about guarding now was Kylie?

Dag brooded over the question throughout the afternoon and long into the night. He sought meaning in the change and found his thoughts returning again and again to the same point, to the conclusion that he had avoided since that first conversation with Knox and Wynn.

Perhaps Kylie was meant to be his mate.

For centuries, the legend had mocked him. He knew of no Guardian in millennia who had been freed according to the stories of the first of his kind. It had become a fairy tale among the brethren, and Dag had dismissed it as easily as any other story meant for children and fools. He would live forever in service to the Light unless an enemy managed to destroy him first, in which case a new Guardian would be summoned. No other option existed, certainly not that a woman of power would come before him and free him from his magical sleep forever. It had seemed not just improbable but entirely impossible.

Until Kylie.

The idea that he could have been so wrong disturbed him. It pointed toward the kind of mistake that could get a human or a Guardian killed, and hadn’t that very thing nearly happened twice? Perhaps the only way to combat the problem was to give in to it.

That idea had his instincts rumbling a satisfied noise that reminded him disturbingly of King David’s loud purr. The instant that he entertained the thought, something inside him settled and he felt a sense of calm like nothing he had ever experienced. It was as if something had clicked into place within him, a piece he hadn’t known was missing yet whose absence had kept the whole machine from operating at peak efficiency.

A fresh wave of energy flooded him, strength reinvigorated his body, clarity at once settling over his mind. It felt as if Fate had simply been waiting for him to see the truth, and now that he had admitted it, he could once again become everything he had always been meant to be.

Guardian, protector, warrior.

Mate.

A smile of satisfaction crept over his features, then just as quickly drained away. He had just accepted the fundamental truth that Kylie Kramer was meant to be his, but one question still remained.

How was he going to break the news to her?

Chapter Nine

Az men est khazer, zol khotsh rinen iber der bord.

If you’re going to eat pork, get it all over your beard.

It took the security company a good half hour to regain consciousness and another few minutes for their brains to reset so that none of them spent too much time wondering where the last hour or so had disappeared to. Plus, Kylie needed some time to come up with an explanation for the scratches and puncture marks all over the face of the one who had attacked her.

Scattering pieces of broken glass beside him and leaving an exposed electrical wire hanging out of his hand turned out to be the best she could come up with. She explained that he had accidentally electrocuted himself, knocking over a vase that fell on his head and accounted for his wounds. The fact that he accepted this at face value made her wonder if the hex the
nocturnis
had put on him had left the poor fellow with permanent brain damage.

Even with the delay, the crew managed to finish the installation in one day, if you didn’t bother to note that it was full dark by the time they cleaned up behind themselves, loaded up their van, and drove off into the night. Whatever the bill turned out to be, Kylie figured she still wouldn’t be paying them enough.

Did they have a bonus clause in case of attack by evil Demon-worshipping magic users? If not, they might want to look into that.

Dag’s first reaction to having the house empty again had been to prowl through every inch of it—from attic to basement and everywhere in between—checking the locks on each point of entry, be it window, door, or (probably) magical portal. Honestly, she wouldn’t be surprised if he reacted to finding a mouse hole by demanding the rodent inside provide proof of identity and swear an oath that it was not now, nor had it ever been, a member of the
nocturni
party.

Kylie left him to it and took a few hours to play with the new toy, experimenting with camera feeds, security settings, and alarm tones before finally calling it a night. Another attack meant another early bedtime. At this rate, someone was going to take away her membership card to the UberGeek Society of Night Owls.

Of course, she wound up waking early, and by eleven found herself shuttling boxes out of the second guest room and into the smallest of the four. It was bad enough making an unwanted visitor sleep surrounded by the detritus of her long-ago move, somehow she couldn’t live with making people she had technically invited—and one of whom she actually liked—do the same.

Dag found her there, shoving a stack of boxes into a corner where it would be out of the way until she felt like dealing with it. Which at this rate, should be right after her retirement.

“What are you doing?” the Guardian asked. “You are normally asleep at this time, or in your office working.”

“Early to bed, early to rise.” She shrugged. “I’m clearing the boxes and stuff out of Wynn and Knox’s room so they don’t feel too crowded. Once I set up the mattress in there, it started to feel pretty cramped.”

That was the truth. Luckily, she’d had the forethought to order a bed for the couple as soon as they confirmed they would be visiting. It had been delivered the other day, before the security-installation debacle. At the time, she’d been preoccupied with combing through Dennis Ott’s thumb drive with a fine-tooth comb, so she’d had them lean the mattress and box spring up the against the wall and hurried them outside just to silence Dag’s grumbling. It had mostly worked, but it meant she had to deal with setting it all up today, since Wynn and Knox would arrive later in the afternoon.