“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 crea
tures 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.
And hadn’t five minutes of her company in the bell tower provided those answers already? His inner voice smirked. Dag ignored it.
The list of things he had chosen to ignore had grown impressively in the few hours since he had regained his awareness. He would ignore his strange fascination with the small human female who had spurred his awakening. He would ignore the oddity of a female Warden, the first in his many centuries of existence. He would ignore that each of his three woken brothers sported a female Warden whom they now claimed as mates.
Most of all, he would ignore the oldest legend of his kind, the one that told of a bond between a female of power and a Guardian like him that could free him from his endless pattern of sleeping and waking. A legend that offered him a life of his own, free to live according to his desires with a human female at his side to the end of his days.
Irrelevant.
Dag needed to focus on the matters at hand. After speaking to Knox and the witch Warden, Wynn, he understood what the low-level itch at the back of his neck signified. He could sense the threat from the Darkness rising, one greater than any he had faced before. In the past, he had woken to fight against the experimental pushes by the Seven, the subtle probes of their evil seeking a weakness in the prisons that contained them. When matters had become grave indeed, he had even fought beside one or another of his brothers, joining forces to defeat a stronger incursion. Never before had he known anything like this.
The thought of one of the Seven fully present on the human plane nearly staggered him. The last time such a thing had happened predated Dag’s summoning, but each Guardian who ever existed came into the world with the full knowledge of his race, each individual’s experiences cataloged and shared, almost like a hive memory. Each Guardian could access such knowledge at will, so he knew several of his brethren had died returning the Demon to its prison plane of existence. To know also that this time, the Guardians faced the added challenge of fighting without the full strength of the Wardens Guild behind them merely added to his concern.
His greatest worry, however, centered around Kylie herself. He understood that of the current female Wardens, only Wynn had previous knowledge of the Guild and its doings. From what she had told them, only she had any real experience in the practice of magic as well. However, Kylie not only lacked the training of a Guild Warden, she seemed surprised to hear her abilities classified as magic at all. How was such an innocent and unschooled human to face the concerted attack of a nocturni sect, let alone one of the Seven itself?
The answer, of course, was that she couldn’t. Dag would need to remain vigilant, ready to place himself between the female and any harm that might come to her. Unfortunately, he somehow already recognized that doing so might see him incurring an extra level of harm himself—the first from the evil attack, and the second from Kylie herself, enraged at being thrust aside and prevented from fighting her own battles. Already he had noticed her stubborn independence and her sharp tongue, one he would not mind taming, given the correct opportunity.
Dag stood beside her desk and picked up a small, fur-covered object for a closer examination. It appeared to be a child’s toy in the shape of a soft cat, pale gray with darker stripes. But when he picked it up, a recorded voice emerged from it and sang some sort of awkward lullaby. This was the female he was supposed to permit to stand beside him in battle?
What was it she had said several times over the course of the evening?
Oy vey.
* * *
A good five hours of sleep had been exactly what Kylie needed to face the day with renewed energy and a return of her normally optimistic attitude. Well, five hours of sleep and an ice-cold bottle of imported cola. Cane sugar and caffeine, baby—the breakfast of champions.
Especially when accompanied by a toasted onion bagel schmeared with a half-ton of creamy butter.
She had stumbled down from her rumpled bed, popped the top off her soda, and dropped her bagel in the toaster oven before her erstwhile houseguest made his first appearance. She wasn’t sure if he’d been lurking in the living room like the statue he had started out as, or had been inspecting the water seal in her basement. Either way, she had the kitchen to herself one moment, and the next, blam! Instant gargoyle.
Okay, so he wore his human form, but still, his way of moving silently continued to creep her out, especially when she considered what a big guy he was. If she couldn’t walk across the creaky old wooden floors in her supersoft fuzzy socks without making a huge racket, then he sure as heck shouldn’t be able to pull it off. It just went to show that there really was no justice in the world (she had suspected this since she was five, and the kindergarten teacher had let Ari Milner play with the wooden blocks even though Kylie had clearly gotten to them first).
Luckily, she possessed decent peripheral vision, or she would have dropped her soda when he spoke and had to clean up shards of broken glass on an empty and insufficiently caffeinated stomach. “You yell ‘Boo!’ at me, and I’m so not sharing my bagels,” she warned.
Dag paused. “What is a bagel, and why would I want a share in yours?”
A thought flashed in Kylie’s head for a split second, just long enough for her to wonder if he thought she was sexually propositioning him. She had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from bursting out with a belly laugh. Or, you know, jumping his bones.
“Oh, Goliath, you really need to get out more. Here, I got this.” She pulled out another bagel and waved it under his nose. “This, my friend, is manna from heaven, the greatest gift my people have bestowed upon the earth. Watch and learn.”
The second bagel joined hers in the toaster, and she leaned back against the counter to wait for the achievement of golden-brown deliciousness. Dag alternated between eyeing her and the toaster oven in silence. Not much of a talker, was he?
Despite her amusement at the idea that she had used bread products as a tool of seduction, Kylie had to admit that her reaction to the hulking man-shaped monster in her house hadn’t been some sort of post-traumatic stress. He really was just as hot as she remembered, which in itself felt totally weird; not because he wasn’t human, but because he so wasn’t her type.
Kylie knew her people, and she always dated among them. Her boyfriends, hookups, and crushes had always been geeks of one variety or another, either compunerds like herself, or sci-fi fanatics, or academic head cases like Bran. For heaven’s sake, even with all the eye candy in the Star Trek movie remakes, her favorite of the group continued to be Simon Pegg. His character in another movie, Paul, was the closest she’d ever seen to her dream man on the big screen. So why did this giant, muscular, rough-faced, and gruff-voiced behemoth get her panties in a twist every time they wound up in the same room together?
Testosterone poisoning, her inner voice grumbled. Only logical explanati
on. For pity’s sake, open a window or something before you lose control and try to feel him up. Or worse.
Her inner dialog had so distracted her that she nearly jumped out of her skin when the beep of the toaster cut into the silence. Cheeks flaming, she turned to grab a couple of plates from the cabinet, and hopefully a good handful of her rapidly disappearing self-control.
“I’d ask if you want butter or schmear, but since this is your first bagel, you get schmear,” she babbled as she reached into the refrigerator. “It’s only right to get the full experience. Well, fullish. I don’t have any lox in the house. I personally find fish disgusting, especially for breakfast.”
“Are you speaking this Yiddish language again?”
Kylie chuckled. “No, that was all full-on American.” She thrust his plate at him and prepared her own bagel. “You want anything to drink? Coke? I have coffee, too. I don’t drink it, but it seemed polite to keep it in case I ever got company. I have one of those little cup machine thingies.”
Dag lifted his gaze from the white-topped brown delicacy on his plate to blink at her. His mouth opened and closed once before he actually spoke. “More American?” He sounded pretty unsure.
“Yeah, you sound like a man who needs caffeine, and you look like a coffee drinker to me. Hang on.”
She flipped on the machine that lurked mostly abandoned on her counter, then rummaged through a drawer beneath it. It took a minute, but she finally found a K-Cup of indeterminate variety and fitted it into the brewer with a small grunt of satisfaction. Like she would know the differences among the twelve bazillion types of coffee in the world. Dag could take what she gave him and be happy.
A few moments later, she passed him a steaming mug of dark liquid, grabbed her own breakfast, and headed for the office. “Come on,” she called over her shoulder. “This is a working brunch. We’ll eat in here.”
“I am unfamiliar with that term. ‘Brunch.’ Is it more of your Yiddish?” Dag settled in the cat’s chair once again and sniffed his coffee before taking a sip. Kylie decided to interpret his ensuing grunt as approval, given that he went right back for more.
Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) Page 5