“Well,” she managed. “I’m thinking that this maybe explains why this guy was willing to answer my questions about demons, Guardians, nocturnis, and Wardens.”
Dag frowned thoughtfully. “Perhaps, perhaps not. It explains his separation from the Order and his negative feelings for it and all it represents, but does it fully account for his remaining alive past his release from police custody? Or his continued collection of information on the group and the decision to share it with a stranger such as yourself.”
“Hey, I’m not that strange.” She ignored his skeptical look, mostly because she’d seen it before when she’d said similar things to others. “But yeah, I can see it as a motivating factor. Someone sucks the soul out of the person I love, and I’m going to want to bring those sons of bitches down. And I’d take help from just about anyone who offered it.”
He appeared unconvinced. “How did you offer to help him, precisely? I was under the impression that you merely asked questions and expressed an interest in certain concepts surrounding the struggle between Darkness and Light.”
“Does all that cynicism ever give you heartburn?”
“You have already experienced one attack by a minion of the Darkness. Do you truly wish for another?” He stared at her with those burning black eyes of his until she wanted to check her skin for burn marks. “You are in danger. Until we know the source of the threat we cannot assess its gravity. Would you prefer to be taken unawares?”
Kylie glared at him. “I thought you didn’t approve of sarcasm, Rock Hudson.”
He ignored her and gestured to the computer screen. “We must assume that this human was intelligent enough to hide from the Order after he escaped their clutches. One who had seen so much of their operations would never be allowed to live unless fully indoctrinated and devoted to their cause.”
“You’re right.” Kylie considered that, her lips pursing as she thought. “That makes me wonder if Dennis Ott was his real name or some sort of alias. If I wanted to avoid a group of crazy psychopaths who knew my name and all the other pertinent details of my identity, the first thing I would do is change my name. I’d also leave town pretty quick, but if he did want some kind of revenge on the Order, he may have felt sticking around offered him the best chance at bringing them down.”
“He had no chance of ‘bringing them down’ as you say. The Order predates him by thousands of years. If my brothers and I have not managed to destroy it by now, he had no hope of besting our attempts.”
“So he was an optimist. A naïve, totally-out-of-his-depth optimist, but still. It doesn’t really matter to us who he was before he got mixed up with the nocturnis, I’m assuming, but if you’re interested, I can see if I can find anything on his real background.”
Dag shook his head. “That is unimportant. What matters is that even though he made an effort to hide from them, the Order still found him and killed him. If he was equally careless in concealing his connection to you, it would explain why the nocturnis are already looking for you. If they believe he shared his knowledge with you, they will not like leaving a loose end untied.”
Oh, wow. Kylie hadn’t even thought of that. “Um, maybe I should stop procrastinating and go ahead and order that home security system I’ve had my eye on…”
“Any measures you take to increase the security around you are worth exploring, but relying on mundane human methods would be folly. I will begin regular patrols around the building and will take full charge of your whereabouts at all times.”
She couldn’t say she liked the sound of that; to her it smacked too much of the life of a prisoner. On the other hand, she liked the sound of dying from a knife to the throat and the gut even less. “I guess we’ll be busy for the next little while, then, huh?”
“Very.” Dag looked grim. “In addition to doing what must be done to increase your safety, we still have unanswered questions raised by the contents of this device. Who was the man in the video recording? Based on his words, both what he said and how he said it, I believe there is a possibility he may have been, if not the Hierophant, then one very close to the ruler of the Order.”
A surge of excitement raced through her and Kylie sent up a quick prayer. “Oh, please let it be that easy!” She called up a new program and did a few quick fiddles, capturing a screen shot of the man’s blurry image and saving it as a separate file. “I got the film as clean as I was able to, but I know a guy who’s an expert with imaging. If anyone can do something to get a recognizable face from this shmuts, it’s him. I’ll shoot it his way and see what he can do.”
The Guardian grunted his approval of the idea. “Good, but there is more. How are we to discover the details of this grand plan the nocturni mentioned? Clearly we must put a stop to anything that could raise so much power for the Seven. Both for the greater good, and for the sake of the hundreds of lives that would be lost.”
Kylie sent her e-mail to Vic, the wonder imager, zipping through the ether, then returned her full attention to Dag. “No, you’re absolutely right. Whatever it is, we need to stop it, which means first off, finding out what ‘it’ is. There are still a couple of files on here that I haven’t gone over yet. It’s possible they could tell us, or at least point us to where we can look for more info.”
“Digging deeper only increases the danger to you, and by extension, the larger cause.”
She scowled. Seriously, the guy was a bad influence. “Are you saying we don’t look? That we just let it happen?”
“Of course not. But perhaps it would be safer if you did as the other man did not and left this city for a different location, one where you would be harder to find.”
“That’s a joke, right?” Kylie knew the answer to that, but he needed to hear how ridiculous his suggestion sounded. “First of all, no frickin’ way. Second of all, what? You’re just going to send me away somewhere where I won’t have my very own Guardian watching my back? Are you going to paint a target on it, too?”
“Do not be ridiculous. You could travel to the home of the witch. She is your friend, and my brother would guard you just as I would. You would be safer away from here.”
“I call that blote. Bullshit. All I would be is away. Safer’s got nothing to do with it. If they want to find me, they’re going to find me. If you really want to keep me safe, you’d be better off bringing Wynn and Knox here where they can both help guard me and maybe teach me to better guard myself. I’m a Warden now, right? Well, I’m not going to be a very good one until someone shows me how.”
When he opened his mouth to protest, she bounced right up off her ball and got up in his face. Or as close as she could be from more than a foot below it. “And you can add all that fine, rational logic of mine to this: I flat refuse. You want me out of here, you’ll have to drag me out, kicking, screaming, and plotting in my head the quickest way back. I don’t like taking orders, and I hate being treated like a child.”
Number five on the List, actually.
By the time she finished her little speech, she stood before him on the tips of her toes, leaning so close that her chest nearly mashed itself up against his. She had her shoulders pulled back, her eyes narrowed, and her chin practically pointed at the ceiling. Her hackles were raised, her back was up, and frankly, she was a little surprised that smoke didn’t seem to be pouring out of her ears, because she was mad, she was determined, and she was all worked up into an epic case of shpilkes.
Then she blinked and got a good look at Dag’s expression.
All of a sudden, the shpilkes became tingles and dropped down to concentrate in a very specific place—namely, right between her thighs. What did it say that every time the two of them worked each other up, Kylie’s mind turned immediately to sex?
And her mind still lagged about three steps behind her body, it seemed, which for the first time in her life was working more slowly than someone or something else.
The tension between them could not be cut by a knife. Kylie guessed it would require
a chain saw at the very least. Maybe a laser torch. Dag’s black eyes had turned nearly red, so brightly did the fires that normally flickered within now burn. She felt pinned in place, breathless and aching, and damn him for being the cause of it all.
For the span of several pounding heartbeats, she waited for his hands to close around her, for his mouth to crash down once again and consume her the way he had just a few hours ago. She could feel the crackling energy of lust sparking between them and knew anything could happen at any moment. Any. Thing. At. All.
But she wasn’t expecting the roar.
Throwing back his head, Dag released a roar even louder than the battle cry with which he had greeted the drude. This time, her plaster actually did crack, a small section of it raining down from the ceiling even as the Guardian spun and shot from the room faster than the sound could travel.
Kylie stood there and watched him go, a light coating of dust in her hair and a vow to get even growing in her heart.
So Mr. Rocks for Brains thought he could just walk out on her every time things between them got a little heated? Oh, he would learn the truth, and Kylie T. Kramer would teach it to him, one day very, very soon.
She hoped he took notes, because it was going to be a long and thorough lesson.
Chapter Eight
Di velt iz sheyn nor di mentshn makhn zi mies.
The world is beautiful but people make it ugly.
The second time Dag disappeared, he didn’t return for hours. Oh, he didn’t really go anywhere. Kylie could occasionally see him through the windows as he paced around the house, covering all three sides in a uselessly repetitive patrol. More than once she considered going online and buying him one of those big, furry hats the ceremonial guards wore at Buckingham Palace, but when she found herself fantasizing about places to put it other than his head, she decided against it. She doubted he’d stand still long enough for her to lodge it where she really wanted to.
In the end he stayed outside until she gave up and dragged her ass upstairs to bed way earlier than usual. Apparently finding a dead body, being attacked by a minor demon, kissing a gargoyle, and then doing hours and hours of esoteric research could really take a lot out of a girl.
The next morning set a new pattern for the week. After informing her stiffly that he had indeed decided to summon Knox and Wynn to join them in Boston, Dag had spent the rest of that day and every following one performing a disappearing act that would have made David Copperfield proud. He never went far, but he always seemed to find something to do outside, in another room, or as far removed from her presence as possible. Kylie started to wonder if someone had tampered with her shower gel and slipped some eau de skunk in there while she wasn’t looking.
The few times he did deign to speak with her, it always revolved around his “security” concerns. The first words out of his mouth every time he so much as glanced at her were to inquire whether she’d called the alarm company yet, until she did just to get him off her back. The man could teach her bubbeh about nagging.
It wasn’t as if Kylie hadn’t always intended to have a security system installed, she just resented being ordered to do it. In this day and age, property crime was a concern not to be taken lightly, and her lawyers kept telling her that a woman with her money needed to be even more conscious of personal security than the average person. Kylie tended not to think like that, because to her, the money wasn’t a big deal.
Okay, so she was worth more at twenty-three (about to turn twenty-four) than most people were after a lifetime of work and savings, but to her the money that resulted from her work was a total afterthought. It was the work itself she cared about.
When she’d written the app that eventually earned her millions, she had just wanted to see if she could fix a tech problem that bugged her. She hadn’t intended at that point to drop out of college, let alone to be bought out and eventually hired by the very company whose product she had improved upon; that had just happened. And for her, the money was convenient. It meant she could buy a house in a neighborhood she liked, that she could decide what to work on based on what interested her, rather than any other criteria, and it meant she could buy herself a few cool toys when she felt like it.
Really, though, Kylie was a woman of simple needs. She didn’t care about clothes or cars or keeping up with the Kardashians. She had the taste and appetite of a thirteen-year-old (her mother disdainfully amended that to a thirteen-year-old hoodlum, meaning anyone without a trust fund), didn’t travel much because she always had something fascinating to work on at home, and the only person she had to support was herself.
Still, every time she talked to her accountant or her lawyers, they felt the need to harp about the fact that her story of being not just a successful woman, but a wildly successful very young woman in a male-dominated field had earned her enough publicity that she needed to be cautious. If only they knew what she’d gotten into now.
So, installing a security system wasn’t a big deal, and the long-term accumulated nagging meant she had already done all the necessary research and selected both the provider company and the system she wanted long before an actual threat had come on the scene. Her address and the cost of her purchase even assured that the company got her an installation appointment that very week, the day before Wynn and Knox were scheduled to arrive. Kylie just hoped she could learn to use the thing in time to let them in the house without sirens waking the neighbors.
The alarm company crew of four men arrived early on Thursday morning. Well, early for Kylie anyway, who still operated on hacker time. Having to drag her tokhes out of bed and be presentable for company by ten did not make her a happy camper. Nor did the way Dag appeared the moment the men arrived and proceeded to hover over her like a badly trained guard dog while the crew went about their work.
“Will you please lighten up?” she demanded as she leaned against the kitchen counter and sipped her soda. At that moment, two of the techs were working in her office, wiring the window alarm and laying the groundwork that would allow her computer system to sync with and control the security as a central hub. They had strict instructions to get everything ready, but not to touch her computers or other electronic equipment until she was present and could set up the interface herself. No one touched Kylie’s babies but Kylie.
“No,” Dag growled. “I will not relax until this work is complete and these humans have been escorted off these premises. I am uncomfortable with so many strangers in the house.”
Kylie rolled her eyes. “You realize this was all your idea, right?”
“That makes no difference in my reaction to four strange humans wandering about this space unsecured.”
“Well, admitting you’re irrational is the first step, I hear.”
The low rumble of his growl vibrated through the marble behind her. Kylie ignored it. Frankly, the last five minutes had encompassed more communication than he’d managed with her over the last five days combined. She might just as well have dragged his sorry-assed statue form into the house with her for all the company he’d provided. King David had offered her a better conversational partner.
Kylie looked over when one of the workers peered in from the door to the hall. “Excuse me, ma’am? I need your approval before I drill to install the front door control panel.”
“Right.” Kylie set her soda bottle on the counter behind her and rubbed her condensation-covered hands against her jeans. “Coming.”
Dag followed so close on her heels he might as well have asked for a piggyback ride. Just as she was about to turn on him and potentially take his balls for hackysacks, another worker approached from the office.
“Uh, I’m about to run the wire through to the computers, but someone said something about not messing with the setup already there. Do one of you want to supervise while I do this?”
The worker didn’t bother to hide either his disgruntlement at his work being second-guessed or his boredom with the tedium of his job. Charming fellow.
Beside her, Dag growled, crowding her back against the partial stairway wall as if unable to decide which of the jumpsuit-clad menaces from Beanpot Security and Electronics was the most likely to whip a demon out of his back pocket and wave it at her.
Oy, if she had to roll her eyes at him again, she was going to sprain something.
Patting his chest, she transitioned the reassurance into a quick shove and stepped away from him. “Okay, big guy. You go with the fellow by the scary front door, which I haven’t been allowed within twenty feet of since the weekend, and I’ll go back to the office to make sure Prince Valiant over there doesn’t hurt my babies. If another drude materializes out of thin air, I promise to scream real loud and high-pitched so you can come save my delicate female tokhes. Okay?”
Not waiting for a response, because when one came, she knew she wouldn’t like it, she nudged the Guardian toward the front door and turned to head back to the office. As soon as Wynn arrived, Kylie was going to either enlist her help to stage a jailbreak, or have the biggest, alcohol-fueled bitchfest ever recorded. No other way could she think of to cope with Grumpy McGrumperson for another solitary minute. She’d lose her mind.
She stepped into the office behind the slightly stocky and visibly scruffy security technician and surveyed the scene. Ignoring the bare patch in the ceiling left the other day by Dag, the company seemed to have done minimal damage to the plaster. A couple of small, neat holes indicated where they had inserted wire and fished it through the walls, but overall, Kylie was pleased at the lack of significant destruction.
Not that the room didn’t look like an electronics bomb had gone off in the middle of it, because it did. Bundles of wires and spools of cables lay piled on the floor, the desk, and most other available surfaces. Tools and equipment spilled out of a large open bag and sat piled near a partially open window, and three boxes of new components lay open in the middle of the floor.
In the midst of it all, Kind David lay in his fur-covered chair with his paws curled under him and his slitted gaze fixed on the scene. He must have decided the job required close royal supervision, because generally he never stuck around when strangers came to the house, especially not several of them at once. Least in sight was one of his favorite games.
Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) Page 11