Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(23)
“Yes. I will rip the heads of the nocturnis from their bodies and throw them into the fires of hell.”
“Okay, first of all, ew. And second of all, go for it, stud.” She opened her eyes wide and pressed her fingertips to her open mouth. “Oh, wait, that’s right. You can’t. Because you don’t even know where they are. Which brings us back to my point; that the best thing we can do is follow the clues that lead us in their direction. Once we find them, you can get to ripping. I’ll avert my eyes.”
Kylie watched as the gargoyle struggled with his anger, his hands balling into fists and the muscle in his jaw twitching like a Mexican jumping bean. She continued plowing through her sandwich, and her foot resumed bouncing. What could she say? She had a weakness for good pastrami.
Abruptly, Dag let out a muffled roar, flashed a bit of fang, then relaxed. “I do not like waiting,” he admitted, grabbing the white takeout bag and dropping into King David’s chair like a pouting toddler. “And inaction annoys me. To have been denied more than paltry resistance by the nocturni scum who attacked you yesterday, and then to be faced with no real target to pursue today has put me out of sorts. Without a battle before me, I am rendered useless.”
Okay, that she could understand, even relate to. Kylie hated feeling like her hands were tied, too.
Like she said, it was a big list.
“I get it, but I’d hardly call you useless,” she said, crunching into her pickle. She chewed a minute then elaborated. “Of the two of us, you’re the only one who really understands what we’re up against. I couldn’t have gone into Ott’s apartment earlier and known right away that the nocturnis were gone and that he wasn’t very high up in the chain of command. That was all you.”
Kylie paused and frowned. “That does bring up a good question, though. It’s been bugging me since we first talked to Wynn and Knox. I get that in the cases of the others, the nocturnis knew about them beforehand—where the other Guardians were and that the other girls had magical abilities. But I can’t figure out why anyone from the Order would go after me. I mean, I didn’t know about you guys ahead of time; I didn’t really even think of my skills as anything other than nonmagical; and they might have known you were a Guardian ahead of time, but they didn’t attack you. They attacked me. What’s up with that?”
Dag unwrapped his sandwich, his expression thoughtful. “I had not considered such a question, but perhaps the answer lies in the clue you believe we have collected.” He gestured to the thumb drive she had dumped on the desk in her hurry to get to lunch. “If the dead man was indeed a member of the Order, perhaps he was the one who brought you to their attention. If you indicated curiosity about their business, you may have piqued their interest.”
“I suppose you could be right.” She wrapped up the second half of her sandwich and set it aside. No one had a stomach big enough to finish one of Saul’s finest in one sitting. “And I guess that means it’s time to get back to work.”
Kylie took a long swig of soda, cracked her knuckles, and reached for the thumb drive, plugging it into a free USB port. When her machine recognized the device, she scanned it for viruses (because hello, not stupid) and found it clear. “Okay,” she muttered to herself. “Let’s see what this puppy has to tell us.”
A few key strokes should have brought up the file structure, but instead she got a password prompt. “Security, huh?” She grinned. “Well, we’ll see about that, now won’t we?”
Rising to her feet, she pushed her desk chair out of the way and crossed to the closet. Dag watched her over his partially devoured lunch. “What is wrong? I thought you were examining the device.”
“I am. I’m running a cracker on the password right now,” she answered, pulling a large, inflated yoga ball from inside the closet. “But if this turns out to be half the fun I’m hoping for, the chair isn’t going to cut it. I’m going to need something bouncier.”
His expression told her she continued to baffle him, but then, she baffled most people. Returning to her desk, she positioned the balance ball in place of her desk chair and settled herself on top. The way it bounced and rolled beneath her turned her habitual fidgeting into something productive and worked her core muscles at the same time. Win-win.
Her decryption program continued to buzz through its routine. She knew it could take a while to run through all the possibilities, but waiting patiently so wasn’t her shtick. She considered herself a woman of action. Plus, hadn’t Wynn and her other new friends decided that her tech skills had a little extra oomph behind them compared to those of the average bear? Maybe she should try to really test that theory.
While Dag continued to plow through his pastrami—wow, he was actually diving into his second half, even with the added challenge of a bag of chips on the side—Kylie took a deep breath and cautiously turned her mental focus inward.
She didn’t like to think that she lacked any kind of self-awareness, that she might have missed such a significant part of herself as a latent paranormal ability. It rankled. Then again, how many people in this world actually had paranormal abilities? Didn’t it make more sense for a person to assume they got things done based on skill and education rather than on a bippity, a boppity, and a boo? Logically, why would she have chalked her talent for computers up to anything different from any other techhead in the world? She shouldn’t have.