Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(10)
“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.”
“Well, I, for one, am not stepping anywhere until someone tells me the whole farfoilt story.”
Maybe it was the Yiddish that finally got through to Wynn, for after all that her friend had the decency to look abashed. “Right. On it. Introductions, then the story. Promise. Guardian, I am Wynn Powe, Warden to your brother Knox. Kylie, Knox is like … uh, sorry, I didn’t catch his name.”
Kylie pressed her lips together. Apparently Wynn had not met the love of her life at a store she supplied with bath products as the woman had originally said. “Dag. Dag, Wynn. Wynn, Dag. Story. Now.”
“Absolutely. Just do me a favor? Try not to hate me or think I’m crazy until I get it all out, okay?”
And finally, Kylie got to hear the story. It sounded like a fairy tale, or a high-fantasy novel she’d glanced at while she wandered through the bookstore. Shelved somewhere between Terry Brooks and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, the world found itself faced with a great danger. Just as there is Light in the universe to give life and peace to all living things, so there is a Darkness that seeks always to devour goodness and to remake the universe in its image. Because Darkness, like Light, can never be completely destroyed, the only hope of keeping it at bay is to divide it and contain it, to keep it from pooling its power and devouring all that goes before it.
At the point where the world was most at peril in the face of this great evil, a group of immensely gifted magic users joined together to summon forth a power capable of defeating the Demons who make up the Darkness.
That power took the form of the Guardians—seven immortal warriors, one for each of the Demons they would combat. The mages did not create the Guardians but merely called them forth from the Light, fully formed and ready for battle. Their purpose became their titles, because they existed to guard humanity from the servants of evil.
The mages quickly realized, however, that the Seven Demons of the Darkness could not be entirely destroyed. They were formed from the Dark itself, and so will exist forever in the same way that the Light will exist forever. In order to contain them, they were separated from each other to prevent them from feeding each other’s power, and each was banished to a desolate plane where it was imprisoned for eternity.