Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) (25 page)

Kylie nodded. “I’m certain. Don’t ask me why, but there’s not a doubt in my head. It hits all the criteria—first, numbers. It says they expect more than five thousand people to attend from all over the world. All those people will be concentrated in one place for the event. The media will be swarming because of Carver, the topic, and the chance of other prominent world figures attending. The topic is so philanthropic that emotions will be running high, and there will be a huge outpouring from the public if anything tragic happens there. It both feeds the Demons and feeds Carver’s need to appear in public and be adored. I
know
this is when they’ll strike.”

She met her friend’s gaze and watched while Wynn digested her words and nodded. “Okay. I buy it.”

Knox rose and began to pace. “It is a starting point. We should still perform our research to confirm.” When Dag snarled at him, the other Guardian held up a calming hand. “I do not doubt your mate’s sincerity, nor her intuition, but we cannot afford to be careless. I believe Kylie is correct, but we will use our research to verify and to gather further intelligence.”

Kylie flashed the room a grin, a surge of energy filling her. She had a mission, a method, and a goal in sight. “Grab me a flashlight, boys,” she crowed, cracking her fingers and settling in at her computer. “I’m going dark.”

*   *   *

Kylie enjoyed the dark and dangerous aura of the deep Web as much as the next person, but the truth was most of what lurked out there was about as sinister as your average university bulletin board. A little sex, a lot of rock ’n’ roll, and maybe one or two part-time pot dealers. The darknet, the dingiest corner of the deep, did play host to illegal activity and immoral adventures, just the kind of thing to interest the cultist who wanted everything.

Or, you know, a bored NSA agent with an arrest quota.

Its reliance on anonymity made the users of the darknet feel safe in doing things they wouldn’t want to come to light (pun intended), but the rub was that as soon as what was discussed on the Net was put into action in the real world, that anonymity disappeared. When you actually started to do stuff physically, people got the chance to see you doing it and figure out who you really were.

Kylie was counting on that, and kept it as a mantra in her mind while she began to slowly and carefully follow the threads of the
nocturnis’
plans for the April conference.

Knox and Wynn elected to return to Chicago for a couple of weeks. With the group fairly certain that whatever was going to happen wouldn’t happen until late in the month, hanging around twiddling their thumbs together seemed less than productive. Wynn could work more and better magic in her ritual room at home, and Knox could train and prepare from anywhere. They would return once they had all agreed on their plan to foil the Order, and in plenty of time to set themselves up.

Before leaving, Wynn had dragged Kylie away from the computer long enough to give her a few short lessons in what it meant to be a woman of power. Apparently, no one intended Kylie to get away with being a supernaturally gifted hacker and nothing else. Since she knew she had magic inside her now, Wynn fully intended to show her how to use it.

She had to learn to feel it first. Wynn showed her how to turn her attention inward and look for the spark of the power inside her, the little buzz that always lived in the corner of her mind. And here for all these years, Kylie had thought of it as the mark of undiagnosed ADHD. No, Wynn laughingly contradicted her; that was magic.

Once she found the spark, she got a lesson in how to nurture it. How to blow on the tiny flicker and bring it to a small, steady flame, then how to pull on it and let the power in it seep through her until it waited, tingling, in the tips of her fingers, ready to do her bidding.

Wynn, though, wouldn’t let her bid it for
bupkes
. No, teacher witch told her that for now, she needed to concentrate on just learning to recognize the magic and calling it to her command. Anything more advanced would have to wait until they had some real time to concentrate and work together.

Just the idea made Kylie grimace. It was like those three horrible months when her mother had forced her to take piano lessons all over again. Kylie had wanted to rock a little ragtime and the stern, humorless teacher just had her practicing scales over and over and over until the very sound of them made her teeth ache.

At the time, giving up had felt like being released from prison, but to this day, she couldn’t play more than “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano. Wynn assured her that taking the same path with magic practice would undoubtedly lead her at some point to singeing off her own eyebrows. At the very least. So Kylie promised to practice.

Wynn and Knox’s departure left Kylie and Dag alone in the house, which worked out better than she had expected. Her new live-in-the-now philosophy kept her from getting too worked up by analyzing everything that happened between them, and she had to admit the sex continued to rock her world.

That pun she had not intended, but she couldn’t deny its applicability.

Trying to discern the details of the Order’s plans proved to be slow going, but if nothing else, her crawl through the deep Web was turning up some really interesting reading material. She’d known about the deep forever, and used it herself for her more … well, actually, her
less
officially sanctioned projects, but she had never thought of what a perfect place it was for magic users.

Part of that probably stemmed from the fact that, like most people, she had never believed magic existed. Now that her eyes had opened to that particular world, she found that the anonymity and discretion offered by the deep allowed people all over the world to discuss something that users of the surface Web would have either mocked or tried to copy, with potentially disastrous results.

Kylie got to listen in on a group of ceremonial magicians in Europe discuss the effects of days of the week on the quality of raised energy. She watched a Yoruba priest from Benin counsel a young practitioner in South America on the basis of Oshun’s passion for honey. She even saw a witch in Ireland sending out an enquiry on the sudden uptick in seismographic activity in her area and what magical causes might be underlying.

She freely admitted that she understood almost none of it, but just seeing it all fascinated her and opened her eyes to how much she needed to learn. Especially if she had any intention of sticking with this Warden gig for the long term.

Right. Still not thinking long term. Move it along, Kylie. Nothing to see here.

The problem she ran into fairly quickly was that the short term seemed to be taking. For. Ever.

Every day, she hunkered down in front of the computer and played cyberspy, taking short breaks here and there to run through the magical exercises Wynn had taught her. It quickly evolved into a routine that kept her semisane while still allowing the gremlin of tedium to niggle her brain stem. Meanwhile, Dag seemed to be turning her basement into some sort of arsenal-slash-dojo.

Where he was getting the weaponry she occasionally caught him hauling through her hallways she still hadn’t managed to figure out. When she asked him about his pet project, he only told her that a warrior must train in order to keep himself prepared and ready for battle, and that a Guardian always had access to the tools he needed to perform his duty. From this cryptic nonanswer, she deduced that something about a Guardian’s magic allowed him to create the weaponry out of thin air, the same way he seemed to be able to do with his clothing. Of course, when she asked for a model Millennium Falcon to add to her collection, all of a sudden his power had limitations. Sandbagger.

Actually, the way he explained it to her, and the way she pretended to understand, was that while each Guardian was in and of himself magical, a Guardian could not
work
magic. He could not wield the power in the way a witch or a Warden could. In other words, he had magic flowing in his veins, but he could not cast a spell the way Wynn could and the way everyone told Kylie she would eventually be able to manage. If she kept practicing.

When she told him that sounded like a cop-out and rolled her eyes at him, he retaliated by kissing her senseless, and she wound up being thoroughly taken on top of her own kitchen island. She enjoyed every darn minute of it, but
oy
! That granite was cold under her bare skin.

Every day or two, Kylie tore herself away from either her computer or her Dag to touch base with Wynn and share any details she had gathered on the Order’s planned attack. So far, she had managed to narrow down the most likely time for the strike to occur at either the opening banquet on Friday night, at which Richard Foye-Carver would personally welcome attendees and outline the goals and structure of the weekend’s events; or the keynote address, delivered of course by Carver, which would cover the topic of corporate responsibility for the climate changes now affecting so many of the world’s people.

Carver and his speechwriters made it all sound so noble and altruistic. Frankly, it made her a little
blechedich
.

Wynn, in turn, reported their findings to the other Wardens and Guardians, who had placed themselves on standby in case reinforcements were needed on the day of the attack. Kylie hoped that by the time the date rolled around, they’d have a much better handle on what needed to be done and why.

Finding out the nature of the attack was the problem currently driving her crazy. Her initial theory of some kind of a bomb had been dismissed by the others as unlikely, for the simple reason that it sounded too mundane for the
nocturnis,
who tended to favor dramatic acts of black magic, dark ritual, and supernatural chaos. Planning a mass murder cum Demon raising at a modern American convention center already stretched the boundaries of (im)propriety for them. Underground caverns, defiled woodlands, and abandoned buildings all ranked as much more traditional choices.

Knox had suggested an old-fashioned armed ambush, with
nocturnis
flooding into the convention center armed with cursed daggers and simply overwhelming the attendees with huge numbers and the element of surprise. To Kylie this sounded impractical. The welcome dinner was expected to draw about two thousand attendees, all of them the most highly visible and politically influential of the weekend crowd. To stab that many people before a whole bunch of them figured out a way to either escape or fight back would take way more physical numbers than they assumed the local sect could draw upon.

For her part, Wynn theorized a more magical offense, where the most powerful of the
nocturni
mages would seal the room and summon minor demons to slaughter the trapped humans. This seemed more practical to Kylie, if not equally as gory.

Dag had contributed the ever-so-uplifting suggestion of either the dinner or the keynote being merely a decoy. The Hierophant and other
nocturnis
would never enter the room, but would lure the attendees inside, seal the space, and then set the whole thing on fire. Demons, apparently, found souls equally appetizing after a little charbroiling.

Every day, Kylie kept the theories in mind as she dug deeper and spied harder, trying to sift through metric tons of data for the few little kernels of truth that might or might not be buried in the
drek
. It became the kind of mind-numbing, backbreaking work that she’d always sworn to avoid, the very idea of which had made her devote all her free time to her own interests and eventually drop out of college so she would never have to do the grunt work.

The fact that she’d taken this all on not only voluntarily but for free made her an extremely grumpy Koyote. More often than not, Dag turned out to be the thing that dragged her out of her moods and made her remember that grump was not her natural default setting.

Feeling the tension building to critical mass one Thursday afternoon, Kylie pushed away from her computer and went in search of a distraction. These days, nothing proved more distracting to her than descending the stairs to her basement and watching Dag swing giant pieces of medieval-looking weaponry around his sexy head.

When he practiced in his human form—shirtless, of course—was her favorite, because she wasn’t stupid, and hello that was a pretty sight; but oddly enough, she found watching him train in his natural form equally compelling. It might not make her fantasize about sex the same way (no way was anyone that big getting near her with what she knew darned well was proportionally sized genitalia), but his lethal grace and immense power still left her in awe.

Deciding it would be unbecoming to have drool already drying on her chin when she got downstairs, she forced herself to think of work on the short trip to the basement. Fat lot of good it did her, because her dry mouth lasted less than five seconds.

Dag had already stripped off his shirt and worked up a fine sheen of sweat when he appeared in her line of sight. Sucking in a breath, Kylie let her knees buckle the way they wanted to and plunked her
tokhes
down on the bottom of the stairs to watch him train.

His muscles glistened under the fluorescent lights as he flexed and stretched and spun in an intricately choreographed dance of battle. His lean hands wrapped around the shaft of his favored weapon, a massive war hammer Kylie had been unable to move, let alone lift, when she’d curiously touched it.

Unlike other hammer weapons she had seen (yes, she had Googled the things after her first glimpse of Dag in action with one), this one didn’t look like an ice axe with one blunted end. In fact it seemed to have more in common with the type of weapon Thor carried in those superhero movies. Its huge, heavy head was bigger than both Dag’s fists put together, and instead of one end tapering to a point, this weapon saved its spearing for the end of its long handle. Kylie had seen Dag send the head swinging through the air with lethal force and immediately follow with a graceful twirl that had him burying the end of the handle in some imagined foe’s black heart.