Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(19)
She focused back on her task, for the first time neither ignoring nor attempting to stifle the strange light in her eyes. She also acknowledged the tingle that accompanied it, running down her arms and into her fingertips. Her typing went from rapid to blurred, it was so fast, as she mined through the data she had already collected and then took a metaphorical pickax to cut through to the layers beneath.
As usual, she lost track of time, but she didn’t think it could have been more than twenty minutes before her eyes flashed with a burst of illumination and fixed on the information she’d been looking for.
“Gotcha, Mr. DrkMsgr dude.” She crowed her triumph and sent her chair swirling in a celebratory spin. “What is that supposed to mean, anyway? Dark Messenger? Yeah, right. More like Dork Meshugener.”
Dag, who had spent the last however long alternating between peering over her shoulder and pacing around the room, paused beside her and leaned over the desk, wings fluttering. “What have you found?”
She leaned back and grinned up at him. “That guy I was supposed to meet last night, who said he had information on Bran and all the ‘weird stuff’ he was into—meaning, the Guild and all the rest? Turns out he’s a fellow by the name of Dennis Ott, of 1273 East Adams Boulevard, Apartment B, Brookline, Massachusetts. We’re practically neighbors.”
“He is close?”
“Brookline is just a few miles that way.” She pointed. “We can be making fun of him to his face inside thirty minutes.”
Dag gave a growly rumbling sound, but Kylie recognized this one as less threat and more anticipation. “That, I understood.” He smiled, fangs flashing. “Let’s go.”
“Yeah, um, just one thing.”
“What?” His wings nearly vibrated his impatience.
She coughed to cover her grin and ran her gaze over his large expanse of bare, gray skin, all exposed but for the area under the gladiatoresque kilt he wore as his only garment. It seemed to appear on him automatically whenever he took his natural form. “Just, you know, it’s kind of chilly out. You might want to put on a few more clothes. And a few less wings. Only a suggestion.”
He cursed and in the blink of an eye transformed himself back into Hottie McHotterson, the dark-haired, dark-eyed bruiser in battered jeans and a BU hockey jersey. A classic O’Callahan #17. Was he an actual fan?
Her mind boggled.
“Better?” he growled.
And she was not answering that with a ten-foot pole. Instead, she grabbed her phone and pushed away from the desk. “Okay, let’s roll.”
“Roll?”
Kylie sighed. “Just follow me, big guy. For the moment, I’m driving.”
“We are not in a vehicle.”
“Argh!”
Chapter Five
Men zol zikh kenen oyskoyfen fun toyt, volten di oremelayt sheyn parnose gehat.
If people could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a nice living.
Kylie explained to him that Brookline was a separate city bordering Boston to the west, but he could not detect any demarcation between the two as she guided the vehicle—it did turn out that she had one—along the route to their destination. This second town appeared more like another neighborhood in the burgeoning city he knew rather than a separate entity of its own. After all these centuries, the ways of humans continued to baffle him.
“Okay, we just drove past the address.” Kylie spoke, drawing his attention back inside the cramped confines of the automobile. He’d been concentrating on their surroundings in order to fight the odd distracting effect the female had on him. “I’m going to find parking up ahead, and we can walk back. It’s that converted white Victorian on the left.”
Dag glanced back and saw the large house with white clapboard siding and a wide porch on the front. It looked in need of new paint, and he found the wires trailing toward it from a nearby pole to be both unattractive and potentially troublesome for creatures with wings. Otherwise it appeared ordinary and unassuming. He had difficulty believing one of the foot soldiers of the Seven lived inside.
“You are certain this is correct? I see no taint of Darkness about the place.”
Kylie had half turned in her seat as she began maneuvering the vehicle between two others already parked at the curb. Apparently, she found she could spare enough attention from the task to roll her eyes at him. “What? Nocturna—nocturnis like to decorate the front yard with severed goat heads and human sacrifices on pikes? Somehow I can’t see them wanting to draw that kind of attention to themselves.”
He grunted, but didn’t bother to protest or comment on her smart mouth. Again. But if she knew some of the things he had seen the servants of the Darkness do in the past, she would not be so quick to make fun. He refused to put anything past their evil minds.
He unfolded his large frame from his seat and extracted himself from the car, which the human had assured him was a perfectly normal size (“Not even a compact,” she had scoffed). When he emerged, he felt a wave of gratitude for the freedom. His legs appreciated the chance to stretch themselves as he followed her down the concrete sidewalk to the front of the white house. Kylie approached the front porch, squinted up at some numbers beside the door, then shook her head and turned away.
“We have the wrong address?”