“Provided the information is accurate. I would not put it past any member of the Order to create such a document and populate it with false information for the purpose of throwing outsiders off the track.”
“I don’t know. That sounds like a pretty elaborate red herring, especially when you’re going to save the thing on a drive designed to ensure said outsider gets eaten the minute they try to access it.”
Dag grunted. “Perhaps. But I find myself unable to trust any information provided by this source of yours. Why would a member of the Order agree to give its secrets away? To do so is not only a risk to the other nocturnis, but also a direct betrayal of their Demonic masters. To do so practically invites a hideous death. Why take such a chance?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, but I thought Ott’s death did look pretty terrible. I mean, we both assumed the nocturnis were the ones who killed him. Maybe this was the reason why.”
“You could be right. The only way we will know for sure is to verify the information he has provided. Was he able to list full names for any of the nocturnis he mentions?” Dag felt a surge of excitement. Perhaps he could use a good hunt to distract himself from his attraction to the female.
“Three. I’ve already started basic searches on them to see what comes up. I’ll let you know as soon as I find something.”
He could almost feel his wings rustle with impatience, but he supposed he would have to content himself with her assurance.
“I was just getting ready to open the word processing documents when you came back,” she told him. Her gaze darted to the side toward him, but she made no mention of why he had departed in the first place. Good. His control was already stretched thin at times, like whenever he inhaled too deeply and caught a whiff of her intriguing, intoxicating scent. Or whenever his memory strayed back to—
No. He cut that thought off without mercy. He felt no need to test his own resolve so soon. Better to give it time to harden.
Damn it. He had to avoid words like “harden.” They proved deeply unhelpful.
Clearing his throat, he leaned slightly back in his chair. Any increase in the distance between them had to help, right? “Proceed,” he instructed.
She shot him a look he felt hard-pressed to interpret. Either she simply wanted to ensure she had heard him correctly, or she visually took his measurements for a funeral shroud. Fortunately, she chose not to enlighten him but went back to work instead.
While she sorted through more files, and he waited in his ergonomically correct yet still-not-as-comfortable-as-the-cat’s chair, the feline in question woke from his nap and stretched. A yawn followed, as did the quick pass of a tongue over white whiskers, before King David climbed to the arm of his chair and peered closely at Dag.
The Guardian returned the steady, yellow stare and allowed the cat to assess him. In fact, he returned the favor. He recalled that Kylie had said the cat came and went as he pleased, actually a stray who paid her visits rather than a pet of hers, and its appearance backed that up.
Though the King looked strong and healthy, he also had the look of a cat who had faced a life less pampered than the average housecat. A small piece of cartilage had gone missing near the tip of one pointy ear, and an old scar cut across the cat’s face, nearly carving one cheek in half. Whiskers had long since grown in on either side of the silvery line, but directly in its path, no hair grew at all. Large for a domestic cat, the feline likely weighed more than fifteen pounds, Dag estimated, all of it lean muscle.
Well, almost all of it. He imagined it gained at least a pound or two from sheer attitude, just like its mistress.
Whatever the cat thought of Dag, it neglected to share that information. After a thorough survey, the cat pirouetted on the arm of the chair and leaped to the ground, padding silently across the hardwood floor to Kylie’s side. Stretching up on its hind legs, the cat rested one paw against her leg and used the other to bat her arm in silent demand.
Without pausing in her work, Kylie lifted her right elbow up into the air to allow the cat a clear path into her lap. King David took immediate advantage of the opening, jumping up to circle twice before curling up on the female’s denim-clad lap. Dag could hear the animal’s satisfied purr from several feet away.
Then he heard the hitch in the female’s breathing a second before she spoke. “Oh, wow. Dag? I think I might have a clue as to why Ott decided to turn against the Order.”
“What do you see?”
“I think they killed his girlfriend.”
* * *
Kylie had been about seven seconds from running after Dag when he reappeared in her office door. Luckily, the complete inability of her own legs to hold her up prevented that from happening.
It would have set a very poor precedent if she had gone searching for him and attempted to cajole him out of his snit. It might have led him to believe first of all that he held the upper hand in their relationship, which clearly could not be allowed to happen; and even more damaging, it might have indicated to him that he was in the right in this particular situation. Since there was not a right made of lefts in kissing a woman as some kind of twisted punishment, then running off as soon as she got all hot and bothered, Kylie had a duty to ensure he had no chance to interpret things that way.
The problem with this little strategy of hers was that Kylie’s personality didn’t lend itself to extended snits. Sure, she had a temper, but it tended to flare hot and fast and burn itself out before she had a chance to build up to holding a grudge. She occasionally thought someone deserved to have her carry one with their name on it, but quite frankly, she found it to be a big waste of energy. There were so many more interesting and entertaining things to do in the world. Why would she want to expend all that energy on hating someone when she could just ignore them?
With Dag, she only managed that for a few minutes. Her determination suffered its first crack when he looked as if he intended to evict King David from his chair. Considering that the cat had been sitting in the chair for way longer than the gargoyle, and that the cat hadn’t pissed her off in the last few hours, no way was Kylie going to let that happen, so she had been forced to speak to warn him off such a stupid move.
The crack got larger when he managed to ask her the completely civil and surprisingly nonarrogant question of what she had found in the files. Given his history so far, she had expected him to demand that she tell him everything so that he could decide what was important or not, or to simply take over from her and pat her on the head like a good little human. If he had tried it, she had been fully prepared to bite his fingers off. She almost felt cheated when she didn’t have to.
But the final crack in her armor of annoyance appeared when King David gave the Guardian his formal stamp of approval. Oh, it was a subtle thing, but the cat had taken a good long look at Dag and decided the warrior would be allowed to stay. From the King, that amounted to a ringing endorsement.
Okay, so King David left a lot of things to subtext, but given that he hadn’t bitten, scratched, hissed at, or sprayed urine on Dag, his reaction to the giant male absolutely constituted approval. Other men and women who had ventured into Kylie’s house hadn’t fared nearly so well in the past.
By the time she had skimmed the contents of the first document Dennis Ott had written and saved on the thumb drive, most of her anger had dissipated. Honestly, she knew the kiss should never have happened. For all intents and purposes, she and the Guardian were coworkers, and even she knew that office romances were a bad idea. Better to keep things on a professional level so that everyone knew where they stood and no one got hurt.
But, damn it, she wanted to be the one to make that mature and logical decision. She didn’t want it thrust on her when the one who kissed her went running from the scene of the crime as if he’d just eaten a piece of bad sushi. That was not how a woman wanted someone reacting to one of her kisses. She wanted him to burn for her, to be consumed with her memory day and night. She wanted a man
to try and move heaven and earth just to keep her safe—
The words jumped off the page at her, and Kylie felt her eyes go wide. Bouncing twice on her balance ball, she called out to the Guardian. “Oh, wow. Dag? I think I might have a clue as to why Ott decided to turn against the Order.”
“What do you see?”
“I think they killed his girlfriend.”
Dag surged to his feet and shredded the distance between them in one long stride. “Show me,” he rumbled.
“This document?” She pointed at the screen. “It’s like a diary almost. Entries aren’t dated, but they’re all written in the first person and appear to discuss both events in someone’s life and that person’s thoughts and reactions to those events. Some are only a few sentences, some several pages long. I started at the most recent and scrolled backward, but this name caught my eye.” She highlighted “Annie Mulhollow” in a streak of yellow. “I recognized it. It’s one of the three full names on the spreadsheet.”
Dag pressed one palm against the desktop and leaned in to read the text that filled the screen. “But wouldn’t that make the girl a member of the Order?”
“Here.” Kylie scrolled forward. “Keep reading.”
She followed the text right along with him, but she had already scanned ahead. Those speed-reading classes in grade school had certainly come in handy tonight.
The journal entry read like a cross between a memoir and a manifesto. It began with the story of two young college students, plagued by curiosity and a deep dissatisfaction with the average middle-class lives they had been born to. Although they had every advantage—loving families, places in a respected university, friends, and each other—they still felt as if they should have something more. That inner restless greed had made them the perfect targets for a charismatic upperclassman who promised them not only excitement, but the chance for power and achievement beyond their wildest dreams.
The young man, referred to only as Alistair, had introduced the couple to a secretive and exclusive world that operated in shadows, and whispered seductive tales of wealth, power, and influence that could all be theirs for the taking. All they had to do was join. All that was required was to do as they were told.
When it started, Dennis wrote, it had seemed like a joke, like something out of a movie, all Skull and Bones meets the Hellfire Club. Sure, there were weird, elaborate ceremonies where the established members chanted the names of “demons” and called on the dark ones to grant them power, but no one really believed in any of that stuff, and the benefits rocked.
The “club” provided more than illicit thrills, it chipped in to cover the shortfall when the university raised tuition for the spring semester and Dennis didn’t quite have the money to cover the bill. When Annie’s car got stolen and wrecked, the club bought her a new one, one ten times better than the one she lost. Plus, the booze and drugs flowed like water, and it was really good shit. Sometimes, after Dennis drank from the ritual chalice, he almost swore he could see the faces of the “demons” his new friends liked to talk about so much.
Everything seemed great, fun, awesome, until the night he and Annie were offered their initiations into the inner circle.
The description of what happened that night provided almost no detail. Indeed, the vagueness of it initially made her frown. Kylie’s first question was whether he chose not to describe the event, or whether he could not, because he’d never actually been there. Within a few more sentences, though, she came to an entirely separate conclusion—Ott could not describe the event because what had happened scarred his psyche so deeply, his mind fractured and sealed off the truth in order to preserve the man’s sanity.
During his initiation, the secret ceremonies he had previously watched with a cynic’s amusement took on a new and terrifying seriousness. The demonic faces Dennis Ott thought of as products of a drug-induced hallucination became frighteningly real as the cult’s inner circle summoned a being they called Master to emerge from the depths and feed upon their offerings.
To the young man this now seemed less an initiation and more a human sacrifice, and he realized that tonight’s ritual chalice—the one he and Annie alone had shared—contained a paralytic agent, rendering him unable to move as a creature from a psychopath’s nightmares had appeared in a swirling mist above their heads. Its form had not been the scary part. It manifested as a humanoid shape on top, thick mist below, like a cartoon genie. Of course, Disney rarely made the smoke below one of their characters writhe like tentacles or doomed, tortured souls.
Animators also tended not to give their creations eyes that shone with malevolence and hunger, slick like fresh blood, black like old engine oil, and deep like the abyss of hell. If they had, the cartoon industry would have folded like cheap patio furniture.
The creature struck Annie first, lifting her into the nauseating parody of an embrace. It hovered with her high above the ground, opened a mouth full of multiple rows of sharp, blackened teeth, and let out a shrieking cry that seemed to rend the very fabric of reality. As the noise continued, a strange glow began to form over Annie’s limp body and slowly spiraled into the Demon’s gaping maw. The nocturnis continued to chant as the thing fed until the glow abruptly blinked out and Annie fell bonelessly to the ground.
That would have been enough trauma for anyone, but Ott’s nightmare was far from over. If Annie had died in that moment, he would have raged and grieved and gone to his death cursing the Order for all he was worth, but things got even worse. Annie did not die. In fact, after a moment of still silence, she gathered herself together and rose calmly to her feet. She slapped at her clothes to remove the dust and debris, then turned and thanked the nocturnis for their services.
“Our Master will take the second now,” she had said.
Kylie blinked and looked away from the text to meet Dag’s gaze. “How is that possible? Can a human being survive having their soul fed to a Demon? Or did it possess her somehow?”
The Guardian’s brow furrowed deeply. “It does not appear to be possession, as the author makes no indication that the Demon disappeared from view. If it had entered the girl’s body, it would no longer appear to the others in its vaporous form. I am guessing that the Demon took her soul, but left her animus in order that she continue to serve the Order.”
“Um, okay. What does that mean?”
“Think of a human as a nut,” Dag suggested, which Kylie let slide because now did not seem to be the time for cracking jokes. And look, there went her subconscious anyway. “The shell is the body, the soul is the kernel, and the animus is the husk or bran that surrounds it. When a Demon consumes a human soul, it can devour the insides completely and feed off the animus as well, or it can leave the animus behind and eat only the meat of the soul. With an animus remaining in its body, the human becomes a tsineh. It walks and talks and functions much as it did previously, but with no soul it is entirely devoted to the needs and wishes of the Demon who devoured it.”
“Oh, ick.”
Dag made a noise of agreement. “The question, then, is how did this Dennis Ott avoid the same fate?”
“You’re right. I’m guessing ‘clean living’ is not going to cut it as an answer.”
They returned to the text. The answer quickly emerged as one of two options: either Ott’s guardian angel deserved combat pay, a Medal of Honor, and an immediate seat at God’s weekly poker game; or dumb luck really did favor the mentally challenged. The cops had busted up their party.
“Folg mik a gang,” Kylie breathed. “You’ve got to be shitting me. How does anyone not made entirely of rabbits’ feet and lucky pennies get that kind of break?”
Dag pointed at the screen. “Apparently, it happens when they brag to jealous acquaintances about the ‘good shit’ their private club provides them. And when they deliberately punch a police officer in order to be arrested and removed from the scene.”
“Yowza. I suppose that’s one way to get out of a sticky situation. Why were none of
the others arrested?”
“I suspect that none of the substances found were illegal, either because they used more esoteric ingredients, or because they used magic to eliminate any traces of banned substances.”
“Wow. Don’t let that strategy get out to the world of professional sports.” Kylie scrolled down the page, her gaze skimming over more text. “Oy vey, does that really say the guy had himself exorcised? As in, ‘I need an old priest and a young priest’?”
“It appears so. That may explain the lack of a taint in the apartment, despite his initial involvement with the Order.”
Kylie looked at him, curious about that statement. “You mean the Catholic stuff really works?”
“Not in the way you imply.” Dag shrugged. “Any strong faith in goodness can work effectively against the Darkness. Religious rituals and acts of faith are magical workings by another name. They possess power to affect the world. That does not mean that any one human religion has all the correct answers to the meaning of life. It merely suggests that if this man believed in the power of the Catholic Church to remove the taint of the Darkness from him, he may have influenced the efficacy of the ritual.”
“All righty then.”
Kylie leaned backward, suddenly remembered she was balanced on her ball, not sitting in a chair, and righted herself with only minimal flailing of the arms. At least she didn’t accidentally elbow Dag in the crotch. Though on second thought, it did feel like a bit of a wasted opportunity. She also disturbed King David’s nap, to which he reacted poorly. He jumped to the floor with a hiss and stalked away, the tip of his tail twitching all the while.
Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) Page 10
