Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series)

by Christine Warren

  “It’s not an insult,” Kylie said. “It’s an observation based on known data.” When both gargoyles would have protested, she held up a hand. “Give it a rest, guys. No one is questioning your kick-ass macho fighting skills. Chill.”

  Wynn murmured her agreement, and the Guardians settled back but continued to look disgruntled. Of course, they almost always looked disgruntled, so Kylie ignored it.

  Along with the images that flashed through her mind of the one occasion when she’d seen Dag looking a long, long way from disgruntled.

  She cleared her throat.

  Now that the initial shock of Vic’s revelation had passed, she forced herself to get a grip and do what she always did—figure out what came next. “Okay,” she said, as her foot started bouncing under the coffee table. “We just need to regroup a little and figure out where we really stand. So what do we know?”

  “We know the identity of the Hierophant,” Dag snarled. “And we should do something about him.”

  “We think we know,” Kylie corrected. “Nothing in the video or in Ott’s notes positively IDs the figure giving the speech as the Hierophant. So all we really know with one hundred percent certainty is that Richard Foye-Carver is a member of the Order of Eternal Darkness.”

  “We also know that he’s nearly untouchable,” Wynn reminded the brooding Guardians. “But we also know about this big strike that the local sect is planning to launch.”

  Kylie nodded. “Right. I think it makes more sense to focus on that. I mean, the Hierophant has existed forever, right? I mean, there’s always someone around who’s going to step up and lead the nocturnis, whether it’s Carver or someone else. While it’s a nice idea that we could take him out and throw the whole nest of vipers into chaos, (a) we don’t really know that would happen, and (b) it might not be enough to stop whatever they have planned.”

  “But if we concentrate on discovering that plan and stopping it…” Wynn followed easily behind her friend’s train of thought.

  “Then we accomplish two things at once. We keep the Order from channeling a whole bunch of power to the Seven—”

  “Potentially freeing Shaab-Na on top of Uhlthor.”

  “—and we buy ourselves more time to figure out if there is a feasible way to take out the Hierophant without getting ourselves killed or put on the fugitive lists of half the nations on earth.”

  The Guardians exchanged a silent glance. Kylie could almost hear them whining to each other about how much it sucked when the “human females” stuck their noses into things. Especially when they made such good points.

  “Fine,” Dag snapped. He returned to his seat next to Knox, looking like a prince holding court. A big, battered, grump-ass prince with the ability to turn into a gargoyle and eviscerate errant nobles, but still. “But we do not know what the nocturnis have planned, nor when their strike will occur.”

  “And that’s what we have to concentrate on finding out.”

  “How?” Knox demanded.

  Kylie and Wynn exchanged glances, and the witch slumped back with a groan. “Don’t tell me. More research.”

  “Hey, I thought you said you were getting good at it?”

  “Doesn’t mean I like it,” Wynn grumbled. “And it doesn’t mean I don’t get to try things my way first.”

  Kylie raised an eyebrow. “Your way being…?”

  “I’ll spell it. You still have that drive from your informant? Or the note? The note would be even better.”

  Kylie frowned and thought back. “The drive, yeah. I might have the note, too, but I’d have to look in the office.”

  “I may be able to do a trace, especially if it’s handwritten, and find out where he was over the past few weeks. Maybe we can find the Order’s meeting spot. Sure, it’s a long shot, but it beats the alternative.”

  “Then I’ll take the alternative,” Kylie said. “I think I might have to go to the deep for this one. If the Order is going to have any online presence, or if its members are going to set up any online communication, it’s going to be there. I don’t think they’re Instagramming ritual snapshots.”

  “The deep?” Dag asked.

  “The deep Web,” Kylie clarified. “The dark Web, the darknet.”

  They all gave her the same reaction—the blank stare. Really, dealing with geeks was just so much easier sometimes.

  She tried to break it down for them. “Basically, it’s all the places on the Internet that don’t get indexed and aren’t searchable on your average search engine. You can’t Google it. It’s only accessible to anonymous users—you know, theoretically—and it tries to keep the identities of its users anonymous through complex routing and other little tricks of the trade. But anyone who wants to discuss things that are illegal, immoral, or liable to cause one form of government authority or another to come after them, that’s where they hang out.”

  “Sounds perfect for our little friends.”

  “Which is why I’ll be taking a look. You just say a prayer for me that I don’t stumble across anything too gross while I’m looking. Some of the shit people talk about down there is just nasty.”

  Dag watched her shudder and frowned. “And what will Knox and I do while you two search for the answers to this nocturni strike?”

  Kylie and Wynn exchanged glances before Wynn turned to her fiancé and fluttered her eyelashes. “Sit around and look pretty?”

  He bared his teeth at her.

  “You guys are still in charge of security,” the witch said, more seriously this time. “Plus, we’re going to need someone or someones to scout out any places we think might warrant interest from the Order in terms of good target locations. I know Knox would prefer I not go out exposed like that.”

  “And don’t forget,” Kylie added, “I meant it when I said that when the shit really hits the fan, I am not going to be charging into battle armed with a laptop and a gaming headset. Wynn and I might be hogging the glory for the moment, but when it comes down to kicking ass and taking names? That is aaaallll you two.”

  “Three.” Wynn grinned. “I’ve found out I’m pretty good in the buttocks-booting department.”

  Kylie laughed. “I’ll take your word for it. But me? I’m really more of a central-command, support-staff, civilian-noncombatant sort of a girl. I’ll just bring the popcorn.”

  * * *

  While Dag took Knox to check the outside perimeter of the house (Knox already being familiar with it from his earlier flyby of the bedroom window. Thank goodness they’d been at the back of the house where no one could see his gargoyle ass flapping away), Kylie and Wynn took care of putting away the huge quantity of leftovers.

  Although, come to think of it, the two enormous Guardians ate even more than she would have suspected. Stagnant like rock their metabolisms clearly weren’t.

  Kylie was sorting through a drawer full of reusable takeout containers looking for matching lids and bottoms when Wynn threw the first punch.

  “So, did you and Dag get the whole mate thing worked out?”

  Seriously, it hit like a fist to the solar plexus, one Kylie had not seen coming. She felt positively winded. “What?” she managed to choke out.

  “When you guys went upstairs before dinner.” The witch scraped rice into a plastic tub and had the chutzpah to smile at her. “It sounded like you could use some time to talk things out.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. You think an hour is enough time to deal with the idea of everyone in the world assuming I’m now the destined life partner of a hunk of limestone with an attitude? Az a yor ahf mir. I should be so lucky, but my mind isn’t quite that flexible, hon.”

  “What does it have to flex around? And don’t exaggerate. Me and Knox—okay, and Fil, Spar, Ella, and Kees—are not the whole world. We’re six people.”

  “No, you’re three people and three mythological creatures who should not exist in my version of reality. Four, when you add in Dag. You don’t think this is the kind of news that takes getting used to
?”

  Wynn gave Kylie the same look her grandmother used to use when Kylie told her the half-dozen missing cookies had been too burnt to serve to guests. “You’ve had a week to get used to the fact that Guardians exist and Demons are plotting to enslave humanity. If you weren’t capable of grasping it, I’d be visiting you in a psych ward by now, so don’t give me that excuse. The new facts of life are not what’s giving you trouble here.”

  Kylie pouted as she piled leftovers into the fridge. “Why should I not have a little trouble with all this? You had a big ol’ head start when it happened to you.”

  “On the subject of Wardens, Guardians, and the Order? Yeah, I did. But when it came to mating a great big hunk of winged badass, I did not, and I’ll thank you to remember that.”

  Groaning, Kylie climbed onto a stool and buried her face in her arms. “Wynneleh, it’s just too much,” she mumbled into her own forearms. “I don’t know what to do with all this.”

  “Really? Because judging by the crack in the plaster behind the headboard in your guest room, I’d say you knew exactly what to do this afternoon.”

  “There are knives hanging right over there.” Kylie glared. “Don’t make me stab you.”

  Wynn laughed. “What? I’m not allowed to know you had sex? Or I’m not allowed to know it was good enough to crack your plaster?”

  “Neither. Either. Both. Yes. No.”

  “Maybe?” Her friend’s amusement rang clear, but at least she didn’t laugh again. “Look, I’m not going to tell you that I took to this whole mating thing like a duck to water, either. I don’t think any of us did, and it’s natural to have doubts. It’s weird, it’s fast, and it came out of frickin’ nowhere, am I right?”

  “Oy vey, are you right!”

  “Right. But this wasn’t really nowhere. I know you’re not really religious, and I’m all witchy-witchy-woo-woo, which you don’t really get, but I do honestly believe that the Goddess, or God, or Fate or whatever you want to call it, has a hand in all of this.”

  “Is the hand attached to a mouth that can’t stop laughing?”

  Wynn snickered. “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong about all this. There’s a reason why we—you and me and Felicity and Ella—why we’ve been able to wake up the Guardians, and why we’ve been able to do it now, when clearly the danger from the Order is building. There’s a reason why the old Wardens have gone missing, and why what’s happening now bears so many similarities to the legend of the first Guardians and the females of power.” She paused. “Please tell me that Dag at least told you that whole story after what happened this afternoon. I mean, after we talked in here earlier.”

  Kylie nodded.

  “Okay, so you know that when the old ways stopped working, that was when the women woke the Guardians and helped defeat the Seven. The Guardians couldn’t do it alone; they needed the special bond they had with their mates. They drew strength from it and that strength was necessary to their victory. So maybe the same thing is true now. Maybe we’re necessary to help Dag and Knox and the others keep the Order from winning.”

  Kylie heard her words and understood what she was saying. She even maybe believed some of it, but she still felt as though there were some kind of trap closing around her. Or maybe an Acme brand anvil dangling by a rope above her head. “You mean, I should just lie back and think of England,” she said, sighing.

  “Oh, hell no!” Wynn scoffed. “I’m much more an advocate of sitting up and riding him like a cowgirl. I just mean that maybe if you just stopped fighting quite so hard and stopped trying to make everything make sense, things might fall into place without your help. You have to remember, Koyote girl, that life is not a program you can debug, or a line of code you can tweak until it all does what you want it to. It’s a little bit more complicated than that.”

  Oh, how she hated it when other people made all the sense. She lifted her head and narrowed her eyes at her friend. “I still might stab you.”

  “Ha! I’d like to see you try. You’d have to get through my fiancé first, and he can’t stand the sight of my blood.”

  And that reminded Kylie of all the things Wynn had gone through since she had been dragged into this mess well before Kylie had gotten involved. Wynn hadn’t just been hurt, attacked, shot at, and nearly killed, she had lost a brother.

  It all came back to Bran, and his loss was what had motivated Kylie to start digging around in the first place. She didn’t want anyone else to lose their own family the same way, stolen from them by a group of people too greedy for power to see the lives of others as anything other than fuel for their evil fires.

  Stopping the Order was the most important thing Kylie could ever do. Could she do that without the giant Guardian by her side?

  Did she want to?

  Chapter Twelve

  Az dos harts iz ful, geyen di oygen iber.

  When the heart is full, the eyes overflow.

  Dag entered the room warily, nearly tiptoeing over the cool floorboards, entirely unsure of his welcome. A smart warrior, a cautious warrior, would have executed a strategic disengagement and given his mate the time she had told him she needed to sort through her feelings and the crucible of events she had already been through.

  He wasn’t that smart. Or maybe he simply wasn’t thinking with his brain at that moment. Either explanation could be true. Possibly both.

  He hadn’t come upstairs for sex, though. At least, that hadn’t been his primary motivation. He simply needed to see Kylie again, to be near her without the distraction of their temporary guests or the plans of the nocturnis. She had burrowed her way under his skin, and the only way to soothe the constant itch was to be near her, to smell her, to touch her, to feel the warmth of her small energetic body that somehow appeared restless even while lying still.

  “I guess not growing up with a strict bubbeh, or you know, at all, means I shouldn’t give you too much grief for not knocking.”

  Her voice floated out of the dark, quiet and relaxed, more amused than annoyed. Dag let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “I did not wish to wake you if you slept.”

  “Yeah, not sleeping.” She shifted, her skin shushing across the smooth sheets. He could see well in the dark, but she remained curled on her side, the puffy height of her covering obscuring her face from his angle near the door. “You might as well come in.”

  He crossed immediately to the bed and reached for the blankets.

  “Whoa! Hold up there, Quick Draw,” she said, holding out a hand to stop him. “I meant come into the room, not climb into my bed. I’m pretty sure we still have a few things to talk about.”

  Dag swallowed his disappointed sigh and sat on the edge of the bed, on top of the covers. He noticed the smaller size of this mattress compared to the one downstairs and couldn’t help but picture how close they would have to curl together to both fit. His mate wished to talk, so he would talk with her. He just wished he possessed more skill at the activity.

  “You have questions,” he guessed.

  She frowned. Now that he sat beside her, he could see her expressions clearly, and this one looked confused but not angry. He felt a stirring of hope.

  “Actually, I’m not even sure I do,” she murmured. Both of them instinctively kept their voices low, unwilling to disturb the intimacy of the quiet, darkened room. “I mean, I think I understand everything everyone has told me, so I don’t need to ask how this all works, or what the legend says, or what my role is in all of this. My mind gets all those things. At least, it gets that they’re things you all think are true, and I have no concrete evidence to disprove any of it.”

  Dag struggled to sit still and listen, to not lean toward her and try to make her see things the way he did. He might not have known this female for a long time, but he already knew that trying to rush her or pressure her would only result in frustration for him and more stubbornness for her.

  “The only question that keeps popping into my head is why,”
she continued, tucking one arm under her cheek to raise her head on the pillow. “And it’s not even clear to me which why I mean. Why me? Why you? Why would Fate care about the love lives of ordinary women and a bunch of stone statues? Why do men have nipples? Honestly, at this point they all seem equally relevant. So no, I don’t have any questions, because I don’t even really know what it is I want to know.”

  He tried hard to wrap his head around her words, which as usual she had strung together and knotted into sentences that took him time and effort to untangle. Finally, he said, “I cannot think any of those questions has an answer. Even if they did, I am unsure the answer would satisfy you.”

  She pulled a wry face and stuck her tongue out at him. “That big a balagan, am I? A big, crazy mess?”

  “No.” Dag shook his head. “But you seek answers that do not exist, because Fate does not operate in ways the living can understand. She has Her own rules and Her own agenda.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s pretty clear.”

  He had to gather himself before he asked his own question. “Do you object so strongly to me that you wish to deny our connection?”

  She gave a long, heavy sigh. “That isn’t it. There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with Fate. There’s not even anything wrong with the situation. I mean, if you take away the Demonic evil and its madcap minions. I’m not even sure what I feel is an objection to begin with. I don’t really know how to articulate any of what I feel.”

  In the dark, his hand reached out and closed over hers. He rubbed his thumb over the back of her dainty fingers and squeezed gently. “Simply try.”

  Kylie looked away from him, turning her gaze to the shadows filling the room. “I think maybe I’m kind of hurt.”

  She spoke so softly, he had to strain to hear her, and when he did, he felt a jolt of shock and guilt. “I have hurt you?”

  “No! No, you really haven’t.” The corner of her mouth hitched up just a tiny bit, and she squeezed his hand in return. “I was talking about Fate. It seems so strange to think that Fate could send me some perfect mate, some guy I’m destined to love and be loved by forever when it couldn’t even be bothered to make my parents give a crap about me.”