She squeaked, this time the sound escaping her throat instead of being confined to her brain. Again with the Muppet noises. “Magic? Me?”
He nodded, this time leaning forward until his head was just inches from hers. When he inhaled a slow lungful of air, she could see his chest expand. “Magic. You do not smell like a witch, though.”
A laugh choked out of her before she could stop it. “What does a witch smell like? Eye of newt or toe of frog?”
He didn’t appear to get the joke. “It depends on the witch. I have never met one who practiced an amphibian form of magic.”
Oy vey. Did he always take things so literally? Kylie squeezed her eyes shut and raised a hand to rub against her forehead. She’d just realized how much it ached.
Come to think of it, just about all of her ached. Maybe that explained why she felt so off at the moment. She’d never spent much time in her life imagining how she would react if she were ever confronted with a mythical creature, but if she had, this wasn’t what she would have bet on. She liked to think of herself as a scrapper, not as the girl who quivered at the prospect of a little gory disembowelment and some stilted conversation about witches.
Witches.
Her eyes flew open and her hand dropped so fast she nearly smacked her own ass. “I know a witch.”
He rumbled something in response, but she had stopped paying attention. She was already dialing her phone. Witches knew about magic, right? So Kylie would bet her brownstone that one particular witch knew quite a bit more than that. After all, said witch had been related to a guy who collected information on demons. What were the chances she knew nothing about them herself?
The phone rang twice then a voice answered. “Hello?”
“Well, hey there, Wynn,” Kylie all but purred, her eyes narrowed as if the other woman could see her accusatory expression. “How are you doing?”
“What’s wrong?”
That gave Kylie pause. “Wrong? Why do you think something’s wrong?”
“You called me Wynn.”
“That’s your name, right?”
“Wynn,” the witch repeated. “Not Winnie-the-Pooh, not Pooh Bear, not Wynn-abago. Not even Wynneleh. You never just call me Wynn. Sooo … what’s wrong?”
Kylie pursed her lips and tried not to pout. Trust her friend to seize control of the conversation just when Kylie was trying to exact a little revenge. Totally unfair. Time to regroup.
“Yeah, well, I have a question for you,” she said, her gaze still locked on the glowering gargoyle. “What’s big and gray and stone all over and says I smell like magic?”
“Ohmygods.”
“What girl likes to be told she smells, I ask you. Not, ‘wow, what’s that perfume you’re wearing?’ but straight up, ‘hey, you smell funny.’ It’s not flattering.”
“Oh. My. Gods!”
Okay, that was a somewhat more satisfying level of response. Of course, Kylie couldn’t quite tell if Wynn was stunned, excited, or, you know, having an aneurysm.
“Personally, with those manners, I wouldn’t have thought he was a friend of yours,” Kyle continued, “but then, I wouldn’t have thought Bran and you were big ol’ demon hunters or some such, either. I guess maybe we shouldn’t rely too much on assumptions, huh?”
“Knox! Come here! We found one!” The change in volume told Kylie her friend had lowered her phone to call out to her new fiancé. Who apparently knew more about all this than Kylie did. That grated. “Ky, I can explain everything, but first I have to ask. Are you okay?”
“Oh, you’re totally going to explain, my friend, and you’d better make it good.”
“I mean it, Kylie. Are you okay? Are you hurt? Where are you?”
The urgency in Wynn’s voice made Kylie frown, turning some of her anger into concern. Just a skosh, mind you. “I’m fine.” She waved her hand dismissively and her ribs protested. “You know, relatively,” she qualified. “And I’m in Boston, natch, in a church, of all places. Nothing has caught fire yet, but I’m just in the belfry, so maybe it doesn’t count.”
A moment of silence. “You’re in a church belfry?”
“Yeah. Flew here. Imagine my surprise.”
Wynn cleared her throat. “Right. About that. You see…”
That was pretty much the point where the creature watching Kylie so closely seemed to lose his patience. “This witch you speak to, what does she know of the Darkness? Is she in league with the Order? How do you know you can trust her?”
In her ear, her friend let out an excited squeak. “Oh, wow, was that the Guardian? What’s his name? Where did you find him? Can I talk to him?”
“Yes, let me speak with the witch, human.”
Wynn babbled enthusiastic agreement in Kylie’s ear, and the gargoyle held out his serving-platter-sized paw for her phone. Kylie shook her head and took a step backward. She always reacted poorly to high-pressure tactics. “No, you know what? Before you all have your little kaffeeklatsch, I think somebody needs to explain a few things to me. Beginning with what the fuck is going on?”
The huge gray creature actually winced, but Kylie had to admit that could be the result of her voice rising an octave and about twelve decibels rather than an attack of conscience. On the other end of the phone, Wynn mumbled something conciliatory.
“Kylie, I know,” her friend said. “I know you deserve a whole bunch of explanations right now, but this is kind of a long story, and at the moment it’s really, really important to make sure that you and the Guardian are safe first. Like, earthshakingly important. You shouldn’t be out in public right now, especially since I’m assuming that one or both of you were just attacked by nocturnis.”
That was disconcertingly accurate. “How did you know that?”
“Another part of the story. It just seems to be the way these things happen at the moment. I will explain everything, I promise, but first and foremost, you need to get somewhere safe. Can you get home? Fast?”
Kylie wanted to dig her heels in and refuse to move until she got the answers she wanted, but something in Wynn’s voice made her grudgingly restrain herself. “I’m not all that far from my house. I don’t think. I don’t think he flew me more than a few blocks.” She looked at the gargoyle, who shook his head. “Yeah, I can get home in a few minutes. But what about tall, stone, and grumpy?”
“He needs to go with you.”
She knew Wynn was going to say that. That didn’t mean she had to like it, did it? She just couldn’t decide if her instincts were trying to tell her that sticking with the Guardian was the best idea ever, or the key to impending doom.
“Because you’re the genius wunderkind they call Kyle E. Woyote, that’s why.”
“Really? You’re gonna blow rainbows up my tokhes? Now, of all times?”
“If it will get you and the Guardian somewhere safe and private with a video-chat connection, I will blow rainbow-covered sparkly unicorn fairies up your butt, Ky. This is serious.”
“You know how wrong that sounded, right?”
“Koyote, please.”
Channeling the urge to scream out her frustration into a low, hissing growl, Kylie spat out her agreement. “Fine, I’ll bring the thing—and I do mean The Thing, capital T, capital T—home with me, but I am calling you back the minute we get in the front door, Wynn, and I’m not going to be satisfied with simple explanations. I want everything.”
“Oh, trust me, sweetie, there is no such thing as a simple explanation for this. You’re going to get as many answers as you can handle, which will be about a hundred more than you’re going to understand.”
“Don’t sell me short, Pooh Bear. I’m a genius, remember? I can understand almost anything.”
“How about the end of the world?”
Chapter Three
Darf min gehn in kolledj?
For this I went to college?
He told her to call him Dag. When she tried to add Hammarskjöld or Nabbit to the end, he got cranky. As in, “bared his
five-inch fangs and hissed like a frickin’ cobra” cranky. Some people—er, mythological entities—had no sense of humor. He proved this when he mumbled something about teaching humans to hold their tongues around their betters.
On a night where the surprises just kept coming, Kylie got a biggie when her stone-faced companion deposited her at the base of the belfry and went from monstrous to monstrously hot in the blink of an eye. Actually, if Kylie had blinked, she’d have missed it, because one minute he looked like the gargoyle of her nightmares, and the next he looked like a former member of the BU hockey team—tall, muscular, human, and as if he’d taken more than one stick to his face over the years.
It took her a full minute to pick her mouth up off the ground and another to catch a glimpse of the creature he had been in the completely normal man standing before her. His features had been so animalistic in his other form that she wouldn’t have believed they could translate into anything quite so attractive, if she had believed they could translate at all.
His prominent jaw, heavy brows, and nearly flat nose had been refined into something completely masculine and utterly arresting. They hinted at a mixed racial heritage that perfectly suited the golden hue of his skin. No one should have that color of skin in Boston at this time of year, all caramel and supercreamy latte, but it worked on Dag. As did the height that skimmed just under the six-foot wire—more than tall enough for her to have to look way up at him—and the musculature of an athlete who believed all sports should be contact sports.
I’d make contact with that in a heartbeat.
She slapped her hormones back and threatened to lock them in a cage if they didn’t behave themselves. Still, she couldn’t argue with their taste.
His transformation from boogeyman to babe came with a convenient set of clothing: worn jeans, battered work boots, and a navy peacoat perfectly suited to the weather. At least Kylie didn’t have to worry about him freezing to death as he trailed after her on the route back to her house. That allowed her to worry about other things, like how soon she could get the explanation she’d been promised, why she wasn’t way more freaked out by the adventure of the past few hours, and where might be a convenient place to hide the bodies of a gargoyle and a witch if they didn’t make with the story time, like, yesterday.
Sure, Kylie might be small, but she was sneaky, smart, and mean, so she figured if she needed to make a few bodies understand the inadvisability of messing with a woman with a high IQ, a nearly unlimited disposable income, and connections to the underbelly of the Internet, so be it. She had every faith she could come out on top.
Dag moved so quietly—eerily quietly—that she found herself glancing over her shoulder several times on the way home just to make certain he was still there. When she led him up the steps to her front door and slipped her key into the lock, she tried to tell herself that she had no reason to feel a twinge of regret that he hadn’t disappeared on the way. She had a feeling at least half the story she needed to hear would turn out to be his, so better to have all hands on deck.
Even if a small place in the back of her brain did try to argue that a simple random mugging and a nice little coma up at Mass General might be an easier out.
Her house was dark and empty, not even her sometimes cat—a stray that came and went as he pleased and guarded his independence with tooth and claw—around to give the place a spark of life. It didn’t usually bother her; to tell the truth, she didn’t usually even notice. But something about bringing a stranger back to a house where she still had moving boxes in most of the rooms more than a year after moving in made her feel awkward for a moment.
Kylie reacted to her discomfort the way she always did—by lifting her chin and brazening her way through it. Fake it with authority was the family motto, after all; at least for their branch.
“Office is this way,” she said, flipping lights on as she led the way toward the back of the house. “It’s got the best setup for a video call.”
Dag said nothing, merely followed her on those unnervingly silent feet. She didn’t even notice him looking around at the mostly undecorated and barely lived-in areas of the house, and she stole peeks. Lots of them.
Investment value aside, the three-story-plus-basement historic brownstone was wasted on Kylie. She used maybe three rooms on a regular basis—her office, her bedroom, and the en suite bathroom. Even the kitchen only got as much use as required to unpack and serve herself takeout. As she often said, she spoke two human languages and coded in at least five more, but cooking was not one of them.
The silence of the house stretched to include Dag, since he made not a sound as she led him into her office off the kitchen. The real estate agent had described it as a study filled with natural light and well insulated to cut down on the noise from the rest of the house. Kylie called it her Batcave. Or Acme headquarters, depending on her mood.
Her huge, battered desk barely took up a third of the space in the room, so she had filled the rest of it with books, equipment, toys, and other assorted things that only existed to make her smile. Aside from her Aeron desk chair, the only other seat in the room was a battered old armchair with faded toile upholstery and a cushion permanently indented with the impression of King David’s feline backside. It also sported a layer of his orange fur that would have made her grandmother plotz.
She gestured to it with one hand as she set her keys on the edge of her desk. Internally, she debated whether a gargoyle could be allergic to cats, and whether she should hope this one was. Petty, maybe, but she wouldn’t mind seeing the source of her discomfort in a little distress of his own. “Go ahead and sit. It will take me a minute to boot up and put the call through.”
He obeyed without a word, relaxing into the seat without bothering to brush off the hair or remove his dark coat. Of course, brushing would have proven entirely ineffective, but the coat simply disappeared just before his butt hit the chair. Show-off.
Maybe she should get her nose checked out, because it seemed to her that if magic had a smell, Dag should be reeking of it. Funny, but all she could smell when she got close enough was stone and ash and warm male skin.
Damn it, at this rate she was going to need a whip and a chair to deal with her hormones. Down, girls.
Forcing herself to focus, she powered up her computer and busied herself shrugging out of her own coat while the password prompt appeared on the screen. As always, the steady light of the three monitors and the hum of the cooling fans on the CPU soothed her, and she found it a lot easier to ignore the gargoyle in the room now that she was back in control. Sit Kylie Kramer down in front of a computer with enough juice, and she could rule the world. At least part of it legally.
“Tell me something of the witch.”
He issued the demand in a deep voice that reminded her of distant thunder and sweet pipe smoke. Kylie felt herself twitch at the sound, but hoped it would be disguised by the barricade of screens half blocking his view. Hey, a girl could dream, right?
“You mean Wynn?” she asked, stalling for time. She wasn’t sure she was ready for more one-on-one time with this creature. Hopefully her friend would be waiting by the figurative phone.
“The witch. Tell me why you trust her.”
Okay, that was an easy question to answer, and at least it took her own focus off herself, even if she could still feel the gargoyle’s gaze pinned on her like a boutonniere. “Because she’s family.”
Dag frowned. “You share blood? Is she a sister?”
“No, and yes.” Kylie pulled up the chat program and entered Wynn’s number from memory. “Technically, she’s my best friend’s big sister, but I’ve known her for years. To me, she feels like family, related or not.”
“And this other friend? If there is another with knowledge of my kind and of the Order, we should contact her as well.”
“Him.” She snapped the correction and stared at the central monitor while the connection formed. “And you’ll need a Ouija board if that’s your plan.
Bran is dead.”
For once, timing worked in Kylie’s favor. The call went live before Dag could reply to her blunt words.
“Gah, finally! I was starting to freak out. You said you’d only be a few minutes. Is everything okay?”
“Wynn, relax. We walked through Boston, not Fallujah. We’re fine.”
“Sorry, it’s just that this is really big news for us.” The dark-haired witch looked sheepish as she shifted to allow another figure into camera range. “We were really getting worried that the Order had gotten to the other four Guardians before us.”
“Yeah, so how about before you go any further here, you go back to the beginning for me.” Kylie leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Not only do I want to know what all this Guardian, demon, Order stuff is about, I also want to know what it had to do with Bran’s death. And don’t even try to sell me that farkakta story about a heart defect again, because I ain’t buying.”
“I’m sorry, Ky. Really. I felt horrible lying to you, but we don’t talk about this stuff with outsiders. It’s the rules.”
Kylie felt a jolt. That stung, more than she had expected. “So now I’m an outsider?”
“Kylie, no. That’s not what I meant, I just—”
Movement in her peripheral vision distracted her as Dag rose and rounded her desk to stand beside her. “I think the witch simply referred to the fact that you are not a member of the Guild, and therefore not normally privy to matters of our concern.”
Wynn’s face lit up, and she inclined toward her monitor as if to get a better look. “Was that him? Where is he?”
Dag leaned over Kylie’s shoulder to peer at the screen. “I am here. You are the witch?”
“Um, I’m a witch; the witch is just a little too much pressure, to be honest.”
Kylie shrugged, deliberately knocking into the Guardian with her shoulder. “And I’m still here. Or would you rather I gave you two some alone time to bond?”
“We three.” The large man seated beside Wynn spoke for the first time. He had the same gravel bed under his voice that Kylie heard every time Dag opened his mouth. “However, I believe the best strategy would be for all four of us to remain in contact until we have finished our discussions and agreed on our next steps.”
Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) Page 3
