Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(36)



Dag followed so close on her heels he might as well have asked for a piggyback ride. Just as she was about to turn on him and potentially take his balls for hackysacks, another worker approached from the office.

“Uh, I’m about to run the wire through to the computers, but someone said something about not messing with the setup already there. Do one of you want to supervise while I do this?”

The worker didn’t bother to hide either his disgruntlement at his work being second-guessed or his boredom with the tedium of his job. Charming fellow. Beside her, Dag growled, crowding her back against the partial stairway wall as if unable to decide which of the jumpsuit-clad menaces from Beanpot Security and Electronics was the most likely to whip a demon out of his back pocket and wave it at her.

Oy, if she had to roll her eyes at him again, she was going to sprain something.

Patting his chest, she transitioned the reassurance into a quick shove and stepped away from him. “Okay, big guy. You go with the fellow by the scary front door, which I haven’t been allowed within twenty feet of since the weekend, and I’ll go back to the office to make sure Prince Valiant over there doesn’t hurt my babies. If another drude materializes out of thin air, I promise to scream real loud and high-pitched so you can come save my delicate female tokhes. Okay?”

Not waiting for a response, because when one came, she knew she wouldn’t like it, she nudged the Guardian toward the front door and turned to head back to the office. As soon as Wynn arrived, Kylie was going to either enlist her help to stage a jailbreak, or have the biggest, alcohol-fueled bitchfest ever recorded. No other way could she think of to cope with Grumpy McGrumperson for another solitary minute. She’d lose her mind.

She stepped into the office behind the slightly stocky and visibly scruffy security technician and surveyed the scene. Ignoring the bare patch in the ceiling left the other day by Dag, the company seemed to have done minimal damage to the plaster. A couple of small, neat holes indicated where they had inserted wire and fished it through the walls, but overall, Kylie was pleased at the lack of significant destruction.

Not that the room didn’t look like an electronics bomb had gone off in the middle of it, because it did. Bundles of wires and spools of cables lay piled on the floor, the desk, and most other available surfaces. Tools and equipment spilled out of a large open bag and sat piled near a partially open window, and three boxes of new components lay open in the middle of the floor.

In the midst of it all, Kind David lay in his fur-covered chair with his paws curled under him and his slitted gaze fixed on the scene. He must have decided the job required close royal supervision, because generally he never stuck around when strangers came to the house, especially not several of them at once. Least in sight was one of his favorite games.

“Okay,” Kylie said, resting her hands on her hips and surveying the area around her desk just to make sure no one had gotten overexcited and touched her equipment. “Why don’t you tell me where you’re at and we can go from there?”

When the tech didn’t answer immediately, Kylie looked up to find him standing not by the bundle of cable where she’d last seen him, but less than two feet away from her. He still had the cable in his hands, but now he held a length of it in between his beefy fingers like a garrote, and when her eyes met his, she could see the crazy in them. They looked black and cloudy and entirely glazed over.

He lunged at the same instant that she screamed and threw herself backward to escape imminent strangulation. She heard a loud crash from the hall, a curse from her attacker, and a fierce yowl from King David, but she had no idea which came first. Everything seemed to unravel into chaos and her only thoughts weren’t even real thoughts; she operated purely on instinct, throwing herself on top of the balance ball that had been pushed aside near her desk, rolling off the top, and using her legs to propel it into the crazy technician’s path.

The tech kicked the ball away, the force of impact sending the inflatable sphere of rubber bouncing off half the vertical surfaces in the room. Every time it pinged and ricocheted, Kylie felt the hysterical urge to giggle. It almost made her feel as if she were featured in one of her Coyote namesake’s cartoons. Any time now, someone was going to come out with a “Meep! Meep!” and she was going to lose it.

With the giant ball out of his way, the tech moved faster, cornering her in the space below the other, unopened window and laying his length of cable against her throat. Before he could exert any pressure, though, a golden blur flew into the picture and plastered itself against the man’s head. He screamed and jerked back, and Kylie could see an enraged King David hanging onto the technician’s face with tooth and claw.

The cat had puffed himself up to nearly twice his normal size, and his tail whipped back and forth like a cobra on meth while he proceeded to try and dig his way inside her attacker’s skull. Judging by the blood and screaming, he might even be making some decent progress.

And her lawyer had told her to get a dog. Pfft.

Kylie scrambled to her feet, preparing to dart past the fracas into the hall and immediately to Dag’s side, when the mountain figuratively came to Mohammed. Dag appeared in the doorway, skin gray, fangs bared, and humanity nowhere to be seen. Since no other tech accompanied him, either he had already killed them, or seeing him in his natural form had scared the unsuspecting workers to death. In the moment, she didn’t really care which.

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