A few key strokes should have brought up the file structure, but instead she got a password prompt. “Security, huh?” She grinned. “Well, we’ll see about that, now won’t we?”
Rising to her feet, she pushed her desk chair out of the way and crossed to the closet. Dag watched her over his partially devoured lunch. “What is wrong? I thought you were examining the device.”
“I am. I’m running a cracker on the password right now,” she answered, pulling a large, inflated yoga ball from inside the closet. “But if this turns out to be half the fun I’m hoping for, the chair isn’t going to cut it. I’m going to need something bouncier.”
His expression told her she continued to baffle him, but then, she baffled most people. Returning to her desk, she positioned the balance ball in place of her desk chair and settled herself on top. The way it bounced and rolled beneath her turned her habitual fidgeting into something productive and worked her core muscles at the same time. Win-win.
Her decryption program continued to buzz through its routine. She knew it could take a while to run through all the possibilities, but waiting patiently so wasn’t her shtick. She considered herself a woman of action. Plus, hadn’t Wynn and her other new friends decided that her tech skills had a little extra oomph behind them compared to those of the average bear? Maybe she should try to really test that theory.
While Dag continued to plow through his pastrami—wow, he was actually diving into his second half, even with the added challenge of a bag of chips on the side—Kylie took a deep breath and cautiously turned her mental focus inward.
She didn’t like to think that she lacked any kind of self-awareness, that she might have missed such a significant part of herself as a latent paranormal ability. It rankled. Then again, how many people in this world actually had paranormal abilities? Didn’t it make more sense for a person to assume they got things done based on skill and education rather than on a bippity, a boppity, and a boo? Logically, why would she have chalked her talent for computers up to anything different from any other techhead in the world? She shouldn’t have.
But then again …
Instinct had always gotten Kylie further than anything else when she ran up against a roadblock in her programming. Sure she had studied and experimented, taken classes and read books and learned from other geeks along the way, but when push came to shove, Kylie always did whatever her gut said would work best. And her gut had never failed her.
Right now, her gut was telling her to single out that set of bits right there. Good. Now rearrange the first and last sets. Okay. Shuffle three places to the left. Aaaannnnd … twist.
The encryption broke.
Usually, when big things happened on a computer, you were lucky to get a new screen popping up. Maybe a beep. On really big occasions, possibly a screen flicker. What you didn’t ordinarily see was a flash of red light and a slowly building swirl of smoke the color of burning charcoal.
Nope, Kylie could honestly say, it was a first for her. Dag, however, seemed more familiar with the spectacle.
With a battle cry that made the plaster walls of her office shake, Dag leaped from his chair, spilling the remnants of his sandwich all over the hardwood floor. In the blink of an eye, he had transformed into his natural shape, wings half spread in the confines of the indoor space, his fangs exposed in a feral expression of hostile rage. His black, glittering gaze was fixed on …
The smoke?
Kylie shook her head, wondering what the hell was happening. Her wondering only lasted about four seconds, though, because that was how long it took for the smoke to condense and take shape.
The shape of a demon.
Well, she was calling it a demon, anyway. If this wasn’t what the Guardians meant when they said the D-word, she didn’t want to meet a real one. Ever.
Tumbling backward off the ball, Kylie scurried crablike away from her desk and the giant, noxious thing that currently perched atop it. If her first impression of Dag had been that he looked like the monster from a childhood nightmare, this thing made her rethink that assessment. It shot straight into the realm of night terrors, and if any child on earth had dreamed up something like this, the future of the human race had come into serious question.
It looked not remotely human. Where a hard look could pick out the human in Dag’s gargoyle face—and the gargoyle in the human—this thing stood so far removed from her species as to have evolved from an entirely different evolutionary tree. Maybe on another planet.
Where the trees were carnivorous.
Black and hulking, it shone head to toe, or possibly just top to bottom, with a slick, sickly sheen, like an oil spill over black water. The weird texture of its hide meant she couldn’t tell if it sprouted fur or some sort of intricate scale pattern. Or both. Or neither. Three glowing red eyes peered balefully from its erstwhile face, the color reminding her of the pool of blood surrounding the body of Dennis Ott, only lit from behind with a malevolent glow.
It hunched over on itself, making its size difficult to discern, but its mass proved intimidating enough given that she couldn’t quite identify any real body parts or limbs within the seething maelstrom. One minute she thought it a roiling ball of tentacles, like an H. P. Lovecraft story come to life; the next it looked like some kind of satanic vision, with squat goat’s legs and overlong, claw-tipped arms alternating with gigantic clawed pincers along an articulated torso. Then she blinked, and she saw nothing but more swirling smoke, an evil genie popped unexpectedly from an unrubbed bottle.
Maybe her human mind just wasn’t equipped to grasp its true form. What Kylie did grasp was that it was evil, and it wanted her dead. You know, after it fed on her immortal soul.
It gargled at her. She didn’t know what to call the sound. Part chitter, part growl, part unholy whine, she could only say that it simultaneously made her want to run far, far away, and to cover her ears, stay right where she was, and vomit. She figured it was what the inventors of the bagpipe had been trying for.
Before she could follow either course of action, Dag struck. He repeated that structural integrity-compromising bellow and leaped at the demon like a wolf on a wounded caribou. The creature shrieked right back and twisted, focusing its burning gaze and noxious smell on the Guardian.
Had she mentioned the thing stank like a landfill inside the pit of hell in the middle of August? Because it did.
Kylie backed up against the wall because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. Part of her screamed at her to run, run like a gazelle, and get the hell out of Dodge while the creatures before her battled it out. That part made some very compelling arguments. Still, another part of her hated the idea of cowering in the corner like the dumb blonde in a cheesy horror movie, and wanted her to charge the forces of evil with a crucifix and a chain saw. Being neither a Christian nor a lumberjack, however, she did not own either of those things.
She also didn’t find the idea of getting in between the two combatants a very appealing prospect. They tore at each other like a couple of wild dogs, teeth snapping, claws slashing, making noises she knew for certain could never come out of a human throat. Becoming collateral damage from a wild swing of a claw or a misplaced kick to the spine seemed somewhat inadvisable for a woman pretty anxious to make it to her next birthday, which was only a couple of weeks away.
Come to think of it, maybe she was thinking about her eightieth birthday. She’d kind of like to be around for that one as well.
The sounds of battle continued as the two inhuman creatures fought for supremacy. Just when she feared her desk was about to become the first casualty of war, a blur of black rose high in the air and then went sailing across the length of the room to leave a dent the size of Detroit in her library wall. Damn it, couldn’t they be more careful?
Not that she didn’t cheer a little inside when she realized that Dag had been the one to send the demon sailing, but did he have no idea of how hard it was to find a master plaster worker in this day and age
? It wasn’t the expense of the repair she minded but the logistical hassle.
The Guardian quickly followed his prey, leaping from the desk and landing directly on top of the battered dark entity. With a thunderous roar, he raised one arm high, then slashed downward, punching a hole straight into the demonic figure’s torso. Or where a torso would have been on a human. When Dag drew his hand back, a shriveled black mass about the size of a steroidal grapefruit shuddered and smoked in his palm.
The demon shrieked in pain and outrage, but Dag simply drew back his lips and snarled. Then he took the nasty lump between two powerful hands, dug in his talons, and ripped the thing apart like a warm dinner roll. Immediately, the entity blipped out of existence, and the remains of the black mass burst into flame, then drifted to her floor in a pile of ash.
“A feier zol im trefen. A fire should meet him,” Kylie muttered, then shrugged. “I suppose where he’s going, that’s pretty darned likely.” She pushed herself to her feet and dusted off her hands. She really needed to settle on a cleaning service to start coming in regularly. “I have to say that’s the first time I’ve come across that particular security measure. I don’t think it came from McAfee.”
Dag spun to face her, his hands still coated with the ashy remains of the demon, his mind still clearly in battle mode. The bared fangs gave him away real quick. “Are you hurt?”
He practically spat the question at her and looked about three seconds away from stripping her down to check for himself, but she’d heard adrenaline could do strange things to a person, so she didn’t snap back. She did, however, put a couple of extra cautious feet between them.
Then she waved a dismissive hand. “I’m fine. You know, as fine as someone can be after discovering the code they just cracked had backup security in the form of a slavering demon.”
“That was no Demon.” Dag slowly straightened, shifting into his human form. His eyes raked over her as if trying to determine if she’d lied about some injury, but really she was fine. “If a Demon had entered this room, you would not be leaving it. Facing it alone, I might not, either.”
Kylie felt a roll of unease. “Seriously? What do you call that thing if it’s not a demon?”
“It was a drude. Technically, I suppose your kind might call it a demon, as it is a creature born of the darkness, but it resembles a true Demon in the same way a garden lizard resembles a dragon. There is no comparison in power between them.”
“Oy, well in that case, what are we waiting for? Let’s find some Demons. They just sound like fun!”
Dag opened his mouth on a glower, then closed it with a snap. “I think perhaps you used the rhetorical device of sarcasm to express disdain for this idea?”
“Ding, ding. Got it in one.”
“I would prefer you to speak directly, and with a little more respect, human. You have a bad habit of treating serious situations with inappropriate levity.”
“I see the stick is back,” Kylie muttered under her breath as she moved to retrieve her balance ball and return it to her desk. When she’d jumped off, the thing had rolled nearly out the door.
As she settled warily back in her spot she raised her gaze to Dag. “Now, I’m no expert on black magic, but I am an expert on hacking, decryption, and cybersecurity, so based on timing, I’m going to say that there was a booby trap set on this drive. Break the decryption without a special alakazam thrown in, and some sort of latent spell is activated, summoning the demon. Sorry, the drude. Does that make sense to you?”
“I do not think you summoned the creature, and I certainly had no desire for the encounter, so I see no other explanation,” the Guardian agreed with a hmph.
“Right. In that case, do you still want to tell me that following up on my informant and bringing back that thumb drive was a dead end, Mr. Pessimist Pants?”
Judging by his expression, Dag liked that nickname even less than Goliath, but at the moment, Kylie didn’t care. She felt like she deserved to indulge in a good gloat, seeing as she’d been right and all.
He crossed his arms over his chest and did a fine impression of an unamused and potentially deadly disciplinarian. “That would depend on what we actually find on this device, would it not?”
“Shmulky,” she muttered under her breath, turning back to the computer. What a killjoy.
Back to concentrating on her task, she finally pulled up the file structure on the drive and scanned through the titles. Several looked like word processing documents, a few pieces of electronic garbage, a subfolder of e-mail files, a single spreadsheet, and one video file. A picture being worth a thousand words, Kylie clicked on the video.
Her player program launched, and she found herself looking at a poor-quality film that appeared to have not only been filmed by a low-resolution cell phone camera, but that had also been recorded surreptitiously. Nothing else explained the positively painful angle of the image, or the obscuring black blob covering most of the lower left corner of each frame. Honestly, it was too poorly done to chalk up to mere incompetence. No one under the age of ninety was this bad with tech.
The sound quality sucked rocks of equal if not greater size. She spent a few minutes fiddling with light and sound settings, filters and resolutions, but there wasn’t much she could do to make it more than marginally audible and visible. She waved Dag over and started the clip from the beginning.
“What do you have?”
“You know as much as I do. It’s a video. It was on the drive. Now, watch.”
He stood behind her balance ball, and both of them turned their attention to the monitor. The first few seconds amounted to a lot of shaking and shifting, obscuring both the picture and the sound enough that Kylie couldn’t even make out what they were watching. Gradually, the camera holder seemed to relax a little. The shaking didn’t stop completely, but she figured he (or she) was just one of those guys (or girls) with a shaky hand, because it settled into a low vibration while the sound began to filter through the speakers.
Kylie could see now that the recording showed a portion of a somewhat crowded room. The lights were dim enough that she couldn’t guess at its size or shape, and she realized the only illumination came from actual burning candles. What? Were these jokers some kind of reenactment group obsessed with the Revolutionary War era? It wasn’t like Boston didn’t crawl with those suckers.
Couldn’t be, she decided, because at least a few of the figures on the screen wore thoroughly modern clothing, including the tall one standing in what should have been the center of the frame. The rest of those gathered seemed to be arranged around him, so she guessed this was the guy everyone listened to.
The man wiggled into and out of focus in the poorly framed shot, but Kylie could make out enough to see that he was above average in height and had an average-to-lean build. He wore a gray suit and a bloodred tie, and looked pretty slick, like a lawyer or a businessman, well groomed and well dressed. Pretty ordinary, really. So why was everyone so interested in what he had to say?
Darn it, if she was sitting here watching secret video of an Amway rally, she was going to be really pissed.
The video continued to roll, and for whatever reason, the microphone finally managed to pick up enough of the speaker’s words to provide an audible sound track. Still, she had to lean forward and strain to listen.
“… Masters are unhappy with your current efforts. They have waited too long to be restored to freedom and to take Their rightful place as rulers of this wretched world. And you, children, have failed Them. Each one of you, with each day that passes, you continue to fail Them.”
Kylie got a bad feeling. She twisted her head to look up at Dag. “Um, are they talking about who I think they’re talking about?”
Dag hissed and nodded. That so hadn’t been how she wanted him to respond.
“… failures of late cannot be tolerated. I have visited the circles in question and made the displeasure of the Masters clear, but Their restlessness grows. They hunger, my friends,
and it is our duty to provide Them with what They need to grow strong and join us in the physical realm.”
“Which is exactly what we don’t want to happen, right?” Kylie murmured.
“We have been blessed with the presence of Lord Uhlthor now for many months, but His strength is still low, and much was expended in His war against the cursed Guildmen last year. We cannot allow these sorts of setbacks to continue.”
Kylie shuddered. “So Wynn and Knox were right. That was what killed Bran, that Uhlthor guy. He really is out of jail or whatever.”
Dag nodded, his eyes narrow and jaw tight. “So it appears. This confirmation is grave news, but it does offer proof that the Demon is not yet at full strength.”
“Why do you say that?”
His gaze shifted to her, fire burning behind the ebony surface. “Because we still live.”
And there he went again, demonstrating what a smooth talker he was. Be still, her beating heart.
Or not, since that was what they were all trying to prevent.
The video rolled on.
“Our efforts to weaken the Guild have brought some success, allowing us to summon the first of our Masters from His prison, but the latest reports are disturbing. We have been told that three females previously unknown to our sources within the Guild have appeared and succeeded in waking three of the Guardians. And I need hardly tell you that our Masters find this news greatly upsetting.”
She hoped it gave them heartburn. The literal kind that Dag had recently inflicted on the drude.
“This is disturbing indeed, but it answers many questions I had over the destruction of the Guild headquarters,” Dag murmured, his gaze still fixed on the screen. “Such a feat should never have been possible. If somehow the ranks of the Wardens were infiltrated by the nocturnis, it would make the accomplishment much easier to believe.”
“Sounds like you were right, then. Do you think that’s also how they were able to get to so many of the Wardens? And why the ones who left have been so hard to find? If they really are in hiding and other Wardens had a part in the threat against them, they probably don’t know who to trust anymore.” She took his grunt for agreement. “We need to let the others know about that as soon as possible.”
Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) Page 8
