Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(25)
Not that she didn’t cheer a little inside when she realized that Dag had been the one to send the demon sailing, but did he have no idea of how hard it was to find a master plaster worker in this day and age? It wasn’t the expense of the repair she minded but the logistical hassle.
The Guardian quickly followed his prey, leaping from the desk and landing directly on top of the battered dark entity. With a thunderous roar, he raised one arm high, then slashed downward, punching a hole straight into the demonic figure’s torso. Or where a torso would have been on a human. When Dag drew his hand back, a shriveled black mass about the size of a steroidal grapefruit shuddered and smoked in his palm.
The demon shrieked in pain and outrage, but Dag simply drew back his lips and snarled. Then he took the nasty lump between two powerful hands, dug in his talons, and ripped the thing apart like a warm dinner roll. Immediately, the entity blipped out of existence, and the remains of the black mass burst into flame, then drifted to her floor in a pile of ash.
“A feier zol im trefen. A fire should meet him,” Kylie muttered, then shrugged. “I suppose where he’s going, that’s pretty darned likely.” She pushed herself to her feet and dusted off her hands. She really needed to settle on a cleaning service to start coming in regularly. “I have to say that’s the first time I’ve come across that particular security measure. I don’t think it came from McAfee.”
Dag spun to face her, his hands still coated with the ashy remains of the demon, his mind still clearly in battle mode. The bared fangs gave him away real quick. “Are you hurt?”
He practically spat the question at her and looked about three seconds away from stripping her down to check for himself, but she’d heard adrenaline could do strange things to a person, so she didn’t snap back. She did, however, put a couple of extra cautious feet between them.
Then she waved a dismissive hand. “I’m fine. You know, as fine as someone can be after discovering the code they just cracked had backup security in the form of a slavering demon.”
“That was no Demon.” Dag slowly straightened, shifting into his human form. His eyes raked over her as if trying to determine if she’d lied about some injury, but really she was fine. “If a Demon had entered this room, you would not be leaving it. Facing it alone, I might not, either.”
Kylie felt a roll of unease. “Seriously? What do you call that thing if it’s not a demon?”
“It was a drude. Technically, I suppose your kind might call it a demon, as it is a creature born of the darkness, but it resembles a true Demon in the same way a garden lizard resembles a dragon. There is no comparison in power between them.”
“Oy, well in that case, what are we waiting for? Let’s find some Demons. They just sound like fun!”
Dag opened his mouth on a glower, then closed it with a snap. “I think perhaps you used the rhetorical device of sarcasm to express disdain for this idea?”
“Ding, ding. Got it in one.”
“I would prefer you to speak directly, and with a little more respect, human. You have a bad habit of treating serious situations with inappropriate levity.”
“I see the stick is back,” Kylie muttered under her breath as she moved to retrieve her balance ball and return it to her desk. When she’d jumped off, the thing had rolled nearly out the door.
As she settled warily back in her spot she raised her gaze to Dag. “Now, I’m no expert on black magic, but I am an expert on hacking, decryption, and cybersecurity, so based on timing, I’m going to say that there was a booby trap set on this drive. Break the decryption without a special alakazam thrown in, and some sort of latent spell is activated, summoning the demon. Sorry, the drude. Does that make sense to you?”
“I do not think you summoned the creature, and I certainly had no desire for the encounter, so I see no other explanation,” the Guardian agreed with a hmph.
“Right. In that case, do you still want to tell me that following up on my informant and bringing back that thumb drive was a dead end, Mr. Pessimist Pants?”
Judging by his expression, Dag liked that nickname even less than Goliath, but at the moment, Kylie didn’t care. She felt like she deserved to indulge in a good gloat, seeing as she’d been right and all.
He crossed his arms over his chest and did a fine impression of an unamused and potentially deadly disciplinarian. “That would depend on what we actually find on this device, would it not?”
“Shmulky,” she muttered under her breath, turning back to the computer. What a killjoy.
Back to concentrating on her task, she finally pulled up the file structure on the drive and scanned through the titles. Several looked like word processing documents, a few pieces of electronic garbage, a subfolder of e-mail files, a single spreadsheet, and one video file. A picture being worth a thousand words, Kylie clicked on the video.
Her player program launched, and she found herself looking at a poor-quality film that appeared to have not only been filmed by a low-resolution cell phone camera, but that had also been recorded surreptitiously. Nothing else explained the positively painful angle of the image, or the obscuring black blob covering most of the lower left corner of each frame. Honestly, it was too poorly done to chalk up to mere incompetence. No one under the age of ninety was this bad with tech.
The sound quality sucked rocks of equal if not greater size. She spent a few minutes fiddling with light and sound settings, filters and resolutions, but there wasn’t much she could do to make it more than marginally audible and visible. She waved Dag over and started the clip from the beginning.