Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(14)
Kylie lifted an eyebrow. “Are you giving me a choice here?”
“Sure. You always have a choice. This time, it’s save the world, or go down as Demon chow.” Wynn said it lightly, but her eyes weren’t laughing. She meant every word.
Kylie threw up her hands and made a sound of disgust. “Well, since you put it that way…”
Chapter Four
A yid hot ahkt un tsvantsik protsent pakhed, tsvey protsent tsuker, un zibetsik protsent khutzpe.
A Jew is twenty-eight percent fear, two percent sugar, and seventy percent chutzpah.
By the time Wynn was satisfied that Kylie had a firm grasp on the fundamentals of the situation, the night was pretty much over. Literally. The sky had begun to lighten to the dark blue-gray color that presaged the coming dawn. Luckily, Kylie knew this time of day well. In the long and dishonorable tradition of hackers and geeks everywhere, Kylie operated on a night owl’s schedule. She often slept until noon and worked until dawn. Still, this had been an unusually long night, no matter what the clock said.
She stifled a yawn as she eyed Dag, trying to decide what the heck to do with him. Wynn and Knox had made it very clear that they expected her to keep him close, but there was close and then there was in her pocket. Frankly, Kylie didn’t own pockets that big.
She did, however, own a guest room. Well, four of them, technically, but only one of them sported an actual bed. She had no idea how Dag was going to squeeze his ginormous frame onto the queen-sized mattress, but he’d have to figure that one out on his own. No way was she giving up her own bed for the gargoyle, even if it had been bigger. Luckily, she had the same size in the master bedroom.
“Come on,” she said, leading the way out of the office and up the stairs to the second floor. She opened the door to the appropriate room and gestured him inside. “Sorry about the pile of boxes, but I haven’t finished unpacking. At least there are sheets on the bed and towels in the bathroom. It’s that door in the corner. You share with the room next door, but it’s empty, so no worries. Sleep well.”
“Where will you be?”
His words caught her before she could make it back to the staircase. She turned her head just enough to toss her reply over her shoulder. “Upstairs. Also sleeping. Good night.”
Once again his footsteps were silent, at least until he hit the second step behind her. That thing squeaked when you so much as breathed on it. As soon as she heard it, she froze, then slowly spun to face him.
“Where exactly do you think you’re going, Goliath?”
Dag scowled at her, although he did it so often she was starting to think that might be his resting face. “My name is Dag, impertinent human. I am concerned that if you should cry out, you would be too far away from me to hear. How would I come to your aid should you need me?”
She pressed a hand to his chest when he made as if to step forward, then cursed at the tingle of electricity that shot through her palm. “Trust me,” she insisted, “I can be plenty loud when I need to, and if anyone shows up in my bedroom while I’m trying to get some sleep, you’re definitely getting a demonstration of that. Now, once again, good night.”
Punctuating her farewell with a gentle shove—which didn’t even rock him on his heels—Kylie turned and started back up the final flight of stairs. Every couple of steps, she glanced backward to make certain he wasn’t following, no matter what her stupid hormones had to say. To her surprise, he let her go, but he watched her until she disappeared around the newel post.
Her skin continued to tingle for much longer than that.
*
Dag had slept for three centuries the last time he succumbed. He had no intention of closing his eyes again anytime soon. Instead, he took advantage of the human’s retreat to reconnoiter around her home and gather whatever information he could. He did this for the sake of their security; knowing the building’s entrances and exits made it easier for him to defend them. His burning curiosity to know more about the little female had nothing to do with it.
He repeated that to himself a few times, just to be sure.
He found her home to be spacious and structurally appealing, with lots of wooden surfaces and accents colored by the patina of age and stability. Given the small female’s sharp tongue and impudent personality, he found the classic architecture mildly surprising.
He stifled the urge to examine the third floor, which she had indicated held only her private sleeping and bathing chambers. Somehow he thought that if she were to wake and find him prowling through her personal space, she might prove her screaming ability up close and personally. Instead, he first prowled through the level where she had left him before descending to the main floor and making a more thorough survey than he had managed when they initially arrived.
If her home provided any clues as to her character, then the small female appeared to be a study in contradictions. Most of the rooms in the large old house stood empty but for stacks of sealed brown boxes. Only about half of them could boast so much as a single stick of furniture. However, a few select spaces, like the office and the kitchen, brimmed with interesting and amusing indications of a female with an unusual sense of humor and a decided streak of whimsy. This did not surprise him, but the fact that he found such things appealing did.
On the wall of the impressively sized living room hung an enormous print depicting a vessel of some sort posed against a background of stars and empty space. To one side, glowing script proclaimed to any onlookers that someone associated “aim[ed] to misbehave.” An oversized sofa in a nubby material the variegated color of beach sand and a low table looked cozy and inviting, but they proved to be the only fixtures in the room. The rest of the space appeared even darker and more barren in contrast.