Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(27)
“Another of the Seven,” Dag bit out. “Shaab-Na. The Unclean. It is often referred to as female.”
“Oh, goodie.”
There was a knocking, shuffling sound and the video cut off abruptly. Kylie cursed and retrieved the file structure. “Crap, that’s it? That was the only video. What the hell was their grand plan? What kind of grand plan ends up summoning and feeding Demons to begin with?”
Dag pushed away from the desk and stalked over to glare at the cindered remains of the drude left on the floor. Kylie had the feeling he was wishing he could put the thing back together just so he could rip it apart again. Hell, she would even have brought popcorn this time.
“The only way to restore a demon to power, or to lend it enough power to escape from the prison to which it has been banished, is to feed it.” His tone was flat and hard, like the pedestal on which he had so recently perched. About as warm, too.
A queasy feeling churned in her stomach. “And Demons eat souls. Right?”
He nodded in a single jerk of his chin.
“Um, not that I really want to know the answer to this question or anything, but how do you feed someone’s soul to a Demon? Even more, how do you feed it enough souls to accomplish what those dybbukim were talking about?”
Dag wore an expression of disgust and barely controlled anger as he shook his head. “There are too many ways. A Demon needs only to lay its hand on a human to grasp its soul, and it is the work of seconds to devour it. Sacrificial rites can also channel the soul into an object that stores it until it is given to the Dark one. There are also spells that can trap souls as they depart from dying humans and hold them for a Demon to ingest.”
“Okay, so that’s three things I never want to see happen.” Kylie shuddered. “But it sounds to me like freeing a Demon or giving one enough power to make it strong again would take more than just a couple of souls. At least I hope so. Didn’t Wynn say they figured the first one got released when an entire village was slaughtered somewhere in the Middle East?”
“She did,” Dag said, looking less kill-y and more thoughtful for a moment. “The Order would need to take that into account.”
“Which means they must be planning something big.”
Oh, how Kylie hated having to say that. Big sounded really, really not good in this particular context. Like, big plate of challah French toast? Awesome. Big sacrifice to some batshit idiots’ demonic overlord? The opposite of awesome, to the nth degree.
“Indeed. We must warn the others immediately.”
“Warn them of what?” When he growled at her, Kylie bounced twice on her balance ball and contemplated using a third one to launch herself straight at the grumpy gus’s head. Somehow, she restrained herself. “No, seriously,” she said. “Warn them of what? That the Order is planning something big? Um, from what I remember of our last conversation, I think that’s exactly what they warned us about, so I hardly think they’re unaware. Until we figure out what the plan is, as well as other piddling little details like who, when, and where, we have no new information to share.”
The glare he shot in her direction could have peeled paint, which made Kylie doubly happy that she rarely bothered with makeup. His lip curled back, revealing a long fang he should not have been carrying around in human form. Pfft. After the last eighteen hours it was going to take a lot more than that to scare her. She’d pulled on her big-girl panties.
Which looked exactly like her other panties, but with a tich more “f*ck you” in the elastic.
“What?” She knew she shouldn’t taunt the poor Guardian, but somehow she just couldn’t resist. This was probably why her bubbeh always told her to stay away from tigers with tails. “You know I’m right. You just hate when that happens. Well, get used to it, snookums, because otherwise you are in for a bumpy ride.”
He stalked over to her. Her grin lasted about three of his long strides. By the fourth, it had slid somewhere into her stomach along with about a billion gypsy moths. That was also when his big, rough hands closed around her and drew her to her feet.
“I swear by the Light that I will find a way to teach you to hold that tongue, female,” he growled and hauled her against him. “Beginning now.”
In one fell swoop—and boy, did she have a new and much deeper understanding of that expression now!—his head dipped and his mouth settled over hers with angry determination. Less than a heartbeat later, her smile waved good-bye to the moths and dove right into those panties of hers, proving once and for all that she was, indeed, a very big girl.
Oy, for a thousand-year-old stone statue who’d barely had time to kill things between naps, let alone to date much, the man could kiss. And kiss. And kiss.
He ate her up with more relish than the bagel and the pastrami combined, seeming to feast on her like Shabbat dinner. His lips felt hot and firm, demanding a response that she had no trouble giving him. She could lose her mind in this kind of kiss, hungry, possessive, and oh so deep.
He entered her mouth and dove straight for her soul, teasing it out with little nips of his teeth and a wicked, taunting tongue. He stroked and sucked and ate at her until she moaned and clutched at him like a drunk on a bender. The comparison seemed apt, given the way her head spun, her balance deserted her, and her skin felt flushed with heat.
More than the kiss had her thoughts in a whirl. Until a few seconds ago, Kylie had been pretty well convinced that Dag hated her, that he tolerated her only because Wynn and Knox had insisted they work together and because he found it unsporting to kill defenseless humans. He certainly spent enough time looking at her like he found her to closely resemble a particularly annoying sort of insect. Like a flea with a vaudeville act, or something. But if this was how he kissed women he hated, she figured the ones he liked must spontaneously combust before he got within ten feet of them.