Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) (6 page)

“And she uses it whenever she gets worked up, angry, frustrated, happy, you name it.” Wynn grinned. “It’s actually a pretty accurate emotional tell. Very useful.”

Kylie glared. “You suck.”

“Ladies.” Knox cleared his throat, looking as if he were sorry to have spoken at all. “Let us focus on the matter at hand, shall we?”

“Right.” Wynn nodded. “We need to find out what Kylie can do.”

Kylie groaned. “Wynn, we’ve been friends for years. You know what I can do. I can finish a crossword puzzle in five minutes without thinking. I can write software, I can program apps, I can tinker with hardware, and I can hack into any computer this side of the galaxy. But that’s it. I don’t shoot lightning out of my fingertips, and I don’t pull rabbits out of a hat. I’m a hacker, not Harry frickin’ Houdini.”

Dag rumbled, “Is that why your eyes change when you watch the computer?”

Kylie turned to frown at him, her stomach slowly twisting under her “Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock” sweatshirt. “What did you say?”

Dag gestured toward the setup on her desk. “Your eyes are brown when you are away from the machines, but when you watch the screens, they change. They develop a green ring around the pupil and glow with a strange light.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it is a human disfigurement of some sort, but it looks more like magic to me.”

Grinding her teeth together kept Kylie from either tossing her cookies or shouting a denial; she wasn’t sure which would have come out first. No one else had ever noticed how her eyes looked when she worked, but then again, she usually worked alone. How had Dag seen it? It must be getting worse.

In the beginning, when she had first noticed the eerie light in her eyes, Kylie had only seen it when she was really deep into something complicated. She had to be concentrating hard and giving her skills a workout before that glow appeared.

At least, that’s how it used to be, but she had seen it more often in the last couple of years, almost any time she focused her attention on something electronic. Still, getting a freaky evil eye from time to time had nothing to do with magic, right?

“Oh, wow. I didn’t know that was even a possibility. Can magic really work with technology like that?” Wynn turned to Knox, her expression excited. “Bran used to say that what Ky could do with a computer was magic, but I thought it was just a figure of speech.”

“Perhaps not.” Knox peered at the camera, his gaze thoughtful. “We tend to think of magic as something organic, something that comes from the earth, but in reality it is greater and more elusive than that. There have been tales of magic affecting machinery for centuries, since humans began to use it so frequently. Usually the two systems are viewed as opposing forces, disruptive and destructive to each other, but it is possible that your friend is able to harness her powers in a way that complements rather than contests the power of human technology.”

“So she’s like a cyberwitch.” Wynn’s eyes twinkled even over the remote connection. “Ha! Now who gets to call who names,
shiksa
?”

“Half
shiksa
. And like you needed an excuse before,” Kylie grumbled, still trying to wrap her head around the idea that what she thought of as hard-earned skill might owe at least a little bit to some kind of supernatural power. She wasn’t sure whether she should feel proud or embarrassed. Had she been cheating all these years?

“If this is the case, perhaps Kylie will be able to use her power to discover the things we have not,” Knox suggested.

Wynn agreed enthusiastically. “That would be amazing. None of us is half as good online as the Koyote, magic or no. How about it, Ky? Do you think you can help us?”

“If I had any idea what you were talking about, I suppose anything might be possible.”

“Don’t pout. Knox is right. El, Fil, and I have been running into dead end after dead end.” The witch sighed. “It hasn’t helped that we’re trying to do three things at once, even if we’re all working on it together.”

“We need to locate the three remaining Guardians, first of all. Dag is right that it will take all of them together to face whatever the Order has planned. Second, we want to locate any members of the Guild who might have escaped the Order’s killing squads until now. Ella, Felicity, and I have learned a lot, first from some books El got her hands on, and my uncle Griffin has taught us a lot, too. He was a Warden back in the day himself. More Wardens means more information, and the more info we have, the better we can fight the Order. So finding the rest of the missing is important.”

Since Bran had been one of those missing for more than a year, it didn’t take a lot of work to convince Kylie of the importance of that task. She just nodded her agreement.

“The third thing is the trickiest, but maybe the most critical. For the last six months, we’ve actively begun looking for the Hierophant.”

“The whosie-whatsie?” Kylie asked, tilting her head as if trying to hear more clearly.

“The Hierophant is the head of the Order of Eternal Darkness,” Dag said, his voice a low rumbling of distaste and anger. “He serves close at the hands of the Seven and is privy to all their schemes and strategies.”

Wynn nodded. “Not to mention being a first-rate schemer himself. He’s basically the brains behind the operation, the head of the snake. If we can find him and take him out, we might send the
nocturnis
scrambling long enough to gain the upper hand.”

“The Hierophant will also be close—physically close—to the place where the Demons are resting and trying to regain their strength,” Knox added. “Finding him could lead us right to the Seven.”

“So, do you think you can do that, Wile E. Koyote?” The look Wynn sent her through the camera was teasing, but earnest. “Can you do a little cybermagic and hunt down the Hierophant for us?”

Kylie lifted an eyebrow. “Are you giving me a choice here?”

“Sure. You always have a choice. This time, it’s save the world, or go down as Demon chow.” Wynn said it lightly, but her eyes weren’t laughing. She meant every word.

Kylie threw up her hands and made a sound of disgust. “Well, since you put it that way…”

Chapter Four

A yid hot ahkt un tsvantsik protsent pakhed, tsvey protsent tsuker, un zibetsik protsent khutzpe.

A Jew is twenty-eight percent fear, two percent sugar, and seventy percent chutzpah.

By the time Wynn was satisfied that Kylie had a firm grasp on the fundamentals of the situation, the night was pretty much over. Literally. The sky had begun to lighten to the dark blue-gray color that presaged the coming dawn. Luckily, Kylie knew this time of day well. In the long and dishonorable tradition of hackers and geeks everywhere, Kylie operated on a night owl’s schedule. She often slept until noon and worked until dawn. Still, this had been an unusually long night, no matter what the clock said.

She stifled a yawn as she eyed Dag, trying to decide what the heck to do with him. Wynn and Knox had made it very clear that they expected her to keep him close, but there was close and then there was in her pocket. Frankly, Kylie didn’t own pockets that big.

She did, however, own a guest room. Well, four of them, technically, but only one of them sported an actual bed. She had no idea how Dag was going to squeeze his ginormous frame onto the queen-sized mattress, but he’d have to figure that one out on his own. No way was she giving up her own bed for the gargoyle, even if it had been bigger. Luckily, she had the same size in the master bedroom.

“Come on,” she said, leading the way out of the office and up the stairs to the second floor. She opened the door to the appropriate room and gestured him inside. “Sorry about the pile of boxes, but I haven’t finished unpacking. At least there are sheets on the bed and towels in the bathroom. It’s that door in the corner. You share with the room next door, but it’s empty, so no worries. Sleep well.”

“Where will you be?”

His words caught her before she could make it back to the staircase. She turned her head just enough to toss her reply over her shoulder. “Upstairs. Also sleeping. Good night.”

Once again his footsteps were silent, at least until he hit the second step behind her. That thing squeaked when you so much as breathed on it. As soon as she heard it, she froze, then slowly spun to face him.

“Where exactly do you think you’re going, Goliath?”

Dag scowled at her, although he did it so often she was starting to think that might be his resting face. “My name is Dag, impertinent human. I am concerned that if you should cry out, you would be too far away from me to hear. How would I come to your aid should you need me?”

She pressed a hand to his chest when he made as if to step forward, then cursed at the tingle of electricity that shot through her palm. “Trust me,” she insisted, “I can be plenty loud when I need to, and if anyone shows up in my bedroom while I’m trying to get some sleep, you’re definitely getting a demonstration of that. Now, once again,
good night
.”

Punctuating her farewell with a gentle shove—which didn’t even rock him on his heels—Kylie turned and started back up the final flight of stairs. Every couple of steps, she glanced backward to make certain he wasn’t following, no matter what her stupid hormones had to say. To her surprise, he let her go, but he watched her until she disappeared around the newel post.

Her skin continued to tingle for much longer than that.

*   *   *

Dag had slept for three centuries the last time he succumbed. He had no intention of closing his eyes again anytime soon. Instead, he took advantage of the human’s retreat to reconnoiter around her home and gather whatever information he could. He did this for the sake of their security; knowing the building’s entrances and exits made it easier for him to defend them. His burning curiosity to know more about the little female had nothing to do with it.

He repeated that to himself a few times, just to be sure.

He found her home to be spacious and structurally appealing, with lots of wooden surfaces and accents colored by the patina of age and stability. Given the small female’s sharp tongue and impudent personality, he found the classic architecture mildly surprising.

He stifled the urge to examine the third floor, which she had indicated held only her private sleeping and bathing chambers. Somehow he thought that if she were to wake and find him prowling through her personal space, she might prove her screaming ability up close and personally. Instead, he first prowled through the level where she had left him before descending to the main floor and making a more thorough survey than he had managed when they initially arrived.

If her home provided any clues as to her character, then the small female appeared to be a study in contradictions. Most of the rooms in the large old house stood empty but for stacks of sealed brown boxes. Only about half of them could boast so much as a single stick of furniture. However, a few select spaces, like the office and the kitchen, brimmed with interesting and amusing indications of a female with an unusual sense of humor and a decided streak of whimsy. This did not surprise him, but the fact that he found such things appealing did.

On the wall of the impressively sized living room hung an enormous print depicting a vessel of some sort posed against a background of stars and empty space. To one side, glowing script proclaimed to any onlookers that someone associated “aim[ed] to misbehave.” An oversized sofa in a nubby material the variegated color of beach sand and a low table looked cozy and inviting, but they proved to be the only fixtures in the room. The rest of the space appeared even darker and more barren in contrast.

He wandered through the main level, finding much the same scene wherever he turned. A room between the living area and kitchen sported not even a box, an echoing cavern between a high plaster ceiling and a gleaming hardwood floor.

Signs of life began in the kitchen, where at least most of the boxes appeared to have been unpacked. Plates, bowls, and drinking vessels in various bright hues filled the expanse of white cabinetry, and several sharp knives hung suspended by a magnet against the wall. A set of canisters on the marble counter depicted a frog-type creature playing a stringed musical instrument, an anthropomorphized pig in a dress and pearls, and a wide-eyed version of a child’s stuffed bear in a polka-dotted bow tie. Despite labels claiming they contained coffee, tea, and sugar, he found each of them as empty as the next.

The office he had already seen appeared to be the room where she spent the most time. If he couldn’t tell by looking around him, he would have known by the way her scent filled the air inside. Already it had committed itself to his sensory memory, unexpected and alluring, and in the enclosed space it teased him mercilessly.

Dag existed for battle, a warrior from the moment of his summoning to his last gasp of air. He had come into being for that singular purpose. Over the centuries it had offered him little opportunity to experience any of the softness of life, from the peace offered by nature’s wonders, to the comfortable companionship of creatures not intimately concerned with the fight against the Darkness. Few humans and fewer human females had therefore ever entered, much less lingered, in his presence.

Still, he could remember no fragrance like Kylie’s. Something inside him had expected sweetness, like sugar or honey, perhaps because of her sweetly delicate appearance. Then she opened her mouth, and he might have expected spice, the sharp bite of cinnamon, maybe, or a bittersweet clove note.

He got none of those. Instead, her fragrance reminded him of the desert, dry and fresh and ancient. Her sweetness came from the smoky depths of gum benjamin and blended with the buttery richness of cedar and the piquant freshness of frankincense. In fact, she smelled to him of the land her ancestors had called Holy, rocky and steep and unexpectedly bountiful. It made him think of a hot sun and warm breezes, of dark eyes and secret smiles.

And, now, it made him think of Kylie.

He should not waste his time dwelling on the human, he reminded himself. His exploration of her dwelling was meant to inform him of her character as it pertained to her role as his Warden. He needed to know if she was quick-witted or deliberate, steady or volatile, courageous or timid.