She had to laugh at his question. “No, brunch is about as Waspy as you can get. It just means a meal you eat sometime between breakfast and lunch, instead of having either of those individually.” She took a bite of bagel and chewed while she eyed him. “You know, no offense or anything, but being a Guardian sounds like a pretty crappy job if you spend most of your existence encased in stone and never get to experience things like brunch and bagels.”
Dag shrugged, eyeing his cream-cheese-topped food with obvious suspicion. “We are not encased in stone, as you say. We become the stone. And it is the reason for my existence. If I am not a Guardian, I am nothing.”
She scowled. “That seems kinda harsh.”
“It is the truth. Guardians are neither made nor born. We enter into this world fully formed, and only because we are needed to fight against the Darkness.”
Finally giving in to the inevitable, Dag crunched into the chewy baked dough and grunted even louder than he had over the coffee. He eyed the treat again, this time with a great deal more respect. And greed.
Kylie’s expression transformed into a grin. “Told you,” she said before turning her attention to her computer monitor. Specifically, the one in the center. Her right foot began to jiggle with energy. “Okay, time to nut up or shut up.”
She got a feeling that comment only sailed by because Dag’s mouth was full, but she was already tapping away at her keyboard and picking up the thread of her months’-long correspondence with last night’s no-showing informant. So far, he provided her most likely foot in the door to the world Wynn had described to her last night.
She looked up briefly when Dag spoke again, just long enough to notice that not even a crumb remained of his first foray into bagel nirvana.
“We have not yet discussed how we will proceed,” he said, his serious expression somewhat marred by the glob of white cream cheese clinging to the corner of his lips.
Kylie bit back her smile. “You don’t think so? Then what do you call that marathon video chat we had last night? A sewing bee? We went through this with Wynn and Knox. The rest of those guys are going to concentrate their efforts on locating the remaining Guardians and any surviving Wardens they can find. I am—I mean, we are—going to take over the search for the Hierophant. I can search in ways the others just don’t have the skill set for.”
He glowered at her. You know, some more. “I remember what was discussed a few hours ago, human. I referred to the fact that the other Guardian and Warden expect the two of us to work together, and we have yet to strategize between ourselves.” He leaned back in his chair with his coffee in hand, his face somehow managing an expression of both stoicism and smugness at the same time. Impressive.
“I must wait until nightfall before I fly over the city,” he continued, “to minimize the chances that I will be seen, but while the sun yet shines I can begin to search for any trail the nocturnis have left around the city. It may take quite some time, and I will expect you to stay close to me and follow my orders. You may still be in danger after the attack on you yesterday.”
Kylie stared at him while he spoke, her brows gradually furrowing and her head tilting farther and farther to the side until her ear nearly brushed her shoulder. “It’s like you actually think you’re going to run the show here. That’s so cute.”
“Cute.” Dag’s features curled around the word as if it tasted putrid. “Female, your unthinking tongue will get you into much trouble one day. I am a Guardian. I have existed to fight this evil for more than a thousand years. I do not merely believe I will direct our actions, I know it. I will ensure it. You may have a human disregard for your own safety, but I am sworn to protect your race, and I will do this whether you like it or not.”
She waved a hand in his direction and turned back to her keyboard. “Nice speech, Goliath, but in the present circumstances, I am way better equipped to find out what we need to know than you are. You think wandering aimlessly around the city is going to get you anywhere? Yeah, maybe in a couple decades or so. I bet you cash money I can put us on the trail of these nocturnal guys in less than an hour. How much you want to bet?”
“Nocturnis. You cannot even remember their name, and yet you think to defeat them by yourself? This makes your wager not only foolish but unwinnable.”
“I never said anything about beating them up with one hand tied behind my back. I’m wily, not suicidal. I plan to stay as far away from Demons and demonic minions as I can during this whole shebang. But when it comes to finding things out, I’ve got the mad skills. I can locate these losers way faster than you can, that’s all I’m saying. I’ll point the can of whoopass, but you and the other winged warrior types can take care of opening it and spreading it around. Happy?”
Dag growled, his fingers tightening on his coffee mug until she heard the heavy stoneware begin to crack. He must have heard it too, because he abruptly set the cup down and rose to pace around the room. “Why can you not speak like a normal human? First you use your secret language, and then you insist on using words and phrases of nonsense. Even though I understand the words, your use of them together makes no sense. You deliberately attempt to obfuscate the truth with your utterings.”
“Whoa. Calm down, Goliath. I’m not being deliberately anything. This is me.” She raised her hands and pointed her fingers at herself. “What you see is what you get. The merchandise might be quirky, but it does not change based on customer complaints.”
This time, the Guardian muttered something in that language Kylie didn’t understand, and suddenly he stood before her not as an irritated hottie, but in the gray-skinned, bat-winged shape of his natural form. He leaned one hand on the floor in his customary crouching position and raised the other to his skull. “Your words make my head throb like a war drum. I lack the energy to maintain a human shape while you continue to speak.”
For some reason, that stung. “Well, you don’t have to be mean about it. I’m not trying to make your life difficult, Goliath. This is a bit of a shake-up for me, too, you know. Or did you not understand the part about how I was clueless about magic, Demons, Guardians, and Wardens less than twenty-four hours ago? You’re not the only one dealing with a big pile of drek right now.”
“My name is Dag!” he bellowed, his fangs exposed in anger, his wings stirring the air until the papers on Kylie’s desk fluttered.
Her heart jumped, then settled back into rhythm. He hadn’t precisely scared her, but she would admit to startled. Startled worked. “Sheesh, I know. I know. Note to self. Don’t give gargoyles nicknames, especially of other gargoyles. You got it.”
“How you made it to adulthood with that tongue still in your mouth is a mystery I lack the power to comprehend.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, the silence punctuated only by the whir of her equipment and his agitated breathing. Kylie had to marvel over the fact that his monstrous form seemed to bother her not a whit, not even as worked up as he was in that moment. She wasn’t afraid of him because of his appearance; in fact, she almost felt more comfortable with him this way. At least when he didn’t look human, she wasn’t constantly distracted by the hotness of his other form. Maybe now she could actually concentrate on her work, cut that hour she’d boasted about down by a few minutes.
“Look,” she finally said, deciding someone had to crack the stalemate or they’d never get anything accomplished. “I apologize for upsetting you. I promise not to call you Goliath again, and I’ll try to be as clear as I can when I talk, but I can’t guarantee I can change a lifetime of speech patterns just for you. Sometimes my mouth starts running before my brain can catch up. Just ask my bubbeh—er, my grandmother. If I say something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask me a question.”
He huffed out a breath, and she almost expected to see smoke shoot from his nostrils, as if he were part dragon or something. “If the time we have spent together so far is any indication, I would never cease questioning you.”
Okay, griping w
as easy to recognize and something she could totally deal with. She gave in to a grin. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you speaking modern English in no time. Then you can brag about being multilingual.”
“I speak twelve languages. I’m just not sure yours is one of them.”
Kylie looked up from her screen and goggled. “Twelve languages?”
“What you call English did not exist when I was first summoned into this existence, not even in England. They still spoke the earlier dialects, until they spoke French.”
“Huh, I didn’t think about it like that. I guess you’re right, though.”
“I speak the older dialect of English, this version you know, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Arabic.”
Kylie blinked at him. “Wow. Remind me to take you with me next time I decide to travel.”
Dag said nothing, just eyed her suspiciously.
Turning back to her work, she began scrolling through the files of correspondence she’d exchanged with the person known as DrkMsgr. There was a lot there, from e-mails to text messages to full-on documents when she had helped him with a couple of tech issues he’d been having. Until now, she had saved the data but she had left it alone. It was rude to dig too deeply into another person’s identity until you had a good reason. Kylie figured a connection to the end of the world finally gave her a good reason.
They had discussed it during the call. Wynn agreed with Kylie that there was a good chance this DrkMsgr character had at least some knowledge of the Order and that he was worth pursuing as a lead. Kylie was about to pursue her tokhes off.
“How do you hope to locate the nocturnis on that machine? I do not think they would be so reckless as to create a—what is it called … a Web site.”
Kylie snorted. “If only people really were that stupid. Though, actually, some of them are. But at the moment, I’m working on the theory that a demonic cult that’s smart enough to have survived a couple of thousand years—”
“At least.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to give them credit for a bit more brainpower than the average Necronomicon-reading teenager. Groups don’t last that long unless they’re smart.”
She turned to her secondary monitor and opened a new file. As she looked back and forth between the two screens, she caught the faint reflection of green light glowing from her eyes. Huh. Maybe she really did have some sort of supernatural power. Cool.
Of course, teleportation would have been cooler. She’d always wanted the ability to teleport. Think about it, no more airports. Ever. Hot damn!
She focused back on her task, for the first time neither ignoring nor attempting to stifle the strange light in her eyes. She also acknowledged the tingle that accompanied it, running down her arms and into her fingertips. Her typing went from rapid to blurred, it was so fast, as she mined through the data she had already collected and then took a metaphorical pickax to cut through to the layers beneath.
As usual, she lost track of time, but she didn’t think it could have been more than twenty minutes before her eyes flashed with a burst of illumination and fixed on the information she’d been looking for.
“Gotcha, Mr. DrkMsgr dude.” She crowed her triumph and sent her chair swirling in a celebratory spin. “What is that supposed to mean, anyway? Dark Messenger? Yeah, right. More like Dork Meshugener.”
Dag, who had spent the last however long alternating between peering over her shoulder and pacing around the room, paused beside her and leaned over the desk, wings fluttering. “What have you found?”
She leaned back and grinned up at him. “That guy I was supposed to meet last night, who said he had information on Bran and all the ‘weird stuff’ he was into—meaning, the Guild and all the rest? Turns out he’s a fellow by the name of Dennis Ott, of 1273 East Adams Boulevard, Apartment B, Brookline, Massachusetts. We’re practically neighbors.”
“He is close?”
“Brookline is just a few miles that way.” She pointed. “We can be making fun of him to his face inside thirty minutes.”
Dag gave a growly rumbling sound, but Kylie recognized this one as less threat and more anticipation. “That, I understood.” He smiled, fangs flashing. “Let’s go.”
“Yeah, um, just one thing.”
“What?” His wings nearly vibrated his impatience.
She coughed to cover her grin and ran her gaze over his large expanse of bare, gray skin, all exposed but for the area under the gladiatoresque kilt he wore as his only garment. It seemed to appear on him automatically whenever he took his natural form. “Just, you know, it’s kind of chilly out. You might want to put on a few more clothes. And a few less wings. Only a suggestion.”
He cursed and in the blink of an eye transformed himself back into Hottie McHotterson, the dark-haired, dark-eyed bruiser in battered jeans and a BU hockey jersey. A classic O’Callahan #17. Was he an actual fan?
Her mind boggled.
“Better?” he growled.
And she was not answering that with a ten-foot pole. Instead, she grabbed her phone and pushed away from the desk. “Okay, let’s roll.”
“Roll?”
Kylie sighed. “Just follow me, big guy. For the moment, I’m driving.”
“We are not in a vehicle.”
“Argh!”
Chapter Five
Men zol zikh kenen oyskoyfen fun toyt, volten di oremelayt sheyn parnose gehat.
If people could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a nice living.
Kylie explained to him that Brookline was a separate city bordering Boston to the west, but he could not detect any demarcation between the two as she guided the vehicle—it did turn out that she had one—along the route to their destination. This second town appeared more like another neighborhood in the burgeoning city he knew rather than a separate entity of its own. After all these centuries, the ways of humans continued to baffle him.
“Okay, we just drove past the address.” Kylie spoke, drawing his attention back inside the cramped confines of the automobile. He’d been concentrating on their surroundings in order to fight the odd distracting effect the female had on him. “I’m going to find parking up ahead, and we can walk back. It’s that converted white Victorian on the left.”
Dag glanced back and saw the large house with white clapboard siding and a wide porch on the front. It looked in need of new paint, and he found the wires trailing toward it from a nearby pole to be both unattractive and potentially troublesome for creatures with wings. Otherwise it appeared ordinary and unassuming. He had difficulty believing one of the foot soldiers of the Seven lived inside.
“You are certain this is correct? I see no taint of Darkness about the place.”
Kylie had half turned in her seat as she began maneuvering the vehicle between two others already parked at the curb. Apparently, she found she could spare enough attention from the task to roll her eyes at him. “What? Nocturna—nocturnis like to decorate the front yard with severed goat heads and human sacrifices on pikes? Somehow I can’t see them wanting to draw that kind of attention to themselves.”
He grunted, but didn’t bother to protest or comment on her smart mouth. Again. But if she knew some of the things he had seen the servants of the Darkness do in the past, she would not be so quick to make fun. He refused to put anything past their evil minds.
He unfolded his large frame from his seat and extracted himself from the car, which the human had assured him was a perfectly normal size (“Not even a compact,” she had scoffed). When he emerged, he felt a wave of gratitude for the freedom. His legs appreciated the chance to stretch themselves as he followed her down the concrete sidewalk to the front of the white house. Kylie approached the front porch, squinted up at some numbers beside the door, then shook her head and turned away.
“We have the wrong address?”
“No, but the numbers by the door are actual numbers, one through four. Our guy’s address said apartment B. I’m
guessing that means basement, and I’m also guessing the entrance is going to be along the side of the house or out in back.”
She led the way down a narrow drive beside the building, gesturing to a low jut of concrete blocks sticking out about three-quarters of the way along. “See? Basement entrance stairwell. Told you.”
Her supposition proved correct. Rounding the low barrier, Dag found the awkward structure to be part of a retaining wall that supported a narrow stair dug into the ground. The tight path led to a white wooden door with two narrow panes of glass at the top. Kylie bounded down the stairs with no apparent worries and knocked before he could stop her.
Hissing, he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her away from the door. “What do you think you are doing, female?” he demanded. “Have you no sense of caution?”
She looked confused. “What do I have to be cautious about? We came here to talk to this guy, right? Well, it’s a little hard to talk to someone if you don’t, you know, meet them. That’s how this visiting thing works. You go to someone’s house, you knock, they answer, you have a conversation. Unless you’re selling something, in which case they probably slam the door in your face.”
“That is not how this works when the person you wish to speak to is a servant of the Darkness,” he snarled. “What if he had warded protection on the door? You could have been harmed. Or what if instead of politely answering your knock, he opened the door only to hex you with a black casting? Until we know who this person is and what he is capable of, we will proceed with caution. Do you understand?”
“Please, I’m not deaf.” She jerked her arms from his grasp and gestured toward the blank surface of the door. “Nor do I appear to be injured or in danger of being hexed at any moment. In fact, I’m guessing the lack of an answer to my knock means that our friend isn’t even home.”
Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) Page 6
