Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(62)



That pun she had not intended, but she couldn’t deny its applicability.

Trying to discern the details of the Order’s plans proved to be slow going, but if nothing else, her crawl through the deep Web was turning up some really interesting reading material. She’d known about the deep forever, and used it herself for her more … well, actually, her less officially sanctioned projects, but she had never thought of what a perfect place it was for magic users.

Part of that probably stemmed from the fact that, like most people, she had never believed magic existed. Now that her eyes had opened to that particular world, she found that the anonymity and discretion offered by the deep allowed people all over the world to discuss something that users of the surface Web would have either mocked or tried to copy, with potentially disastrous results.

Kylie got to listen in on a group of ceremonial magicians in Europe discuss the effects of days of the week on the quality of raised energy. She watched a Yoruba priest from Benin counsel a young practitioner in South America on the basis of Oshun’s passion for honey. She even saw a witch in Ireland sending out an enquiry on the sudden uptick in seismographic activity in her area and what magical causes might be underlying.

She freely admitted that she understood almost none of it, but just seeing it all fascinated her and opened her eyes to how much she needed to learn. Especially if she had any intention of sticking with this Warden gig for the long term.

Right. Still not thinking long term. Move it along, Kylie. Nothing to see here.

The problem she ran into fairly quickly was that the short term seemed to be taking. For. Ever.

Every day, she hunkered down in front of the computer and played cyberspy, taking short breaks here and there to run through the magical exercises Wynn had taught her. It quickly evolved into a routine that kept her semisane while still allowing the gremlin of tedium to niggle her brain stem. Meanwhile, Dag seemed to be turning her basement into some sort of arsenal-slash-dojo.

Where he was getting the weaponry she occasionally caught him hauling through her hallways she still hadn’t managed to figure out. When she asked him about his pet project, he only told her that a warrior must train in order to keep himself prepared and ready for battle, and that a Guardian always had access to the tools he needed to perform his duty. From this cryptic nonanswer, she deduced that something about a Guardian’s magic allowed him to create the weaponry out of thin air, the same way he seemed to be able to do with his clothing. Of course, when she asked for a model Millennium Falcon to add to her collection, all of a sudden his power had limitations. Sandbagger.

Actually, the way he explained it to her, and the way she pretended to understand, was that while each Guardian was in and of himself magical, a Guardian could not work magic. He could not wield the power in the way a witch or a Warden could. In other words, he had magic flowing in his veins, but he could not cast a spell the way Wynn could and the way everyone told Kylie she would eventually be able to manage. If she kept practicing.

When she told him that sounded like a cop-out and rolled her eyes at him, he retaliated by kissing her senseless, and she wound up being thoroughly taken on top of her own kitchen island. She enjoyed every darn minute of it, but oy! That granite was cold under her bare skin.

Every day or two, Kylie tore herself away from either her computer or her Dag to touch base with Wynn and share any details she had gathered on the Order’s planned attack. So far, she had managed to narrow down the most likely time for the strike to occur at either the opening banquet on Friday night, at which Richard Foye-Carver would personally welcome attendees and outline the goals and structure of the weekend’s events; or the keynote address, delivered of course by Carver, which would cover the topic of corporate responsibility for the climate changes now affecting so many of the world’s people.

Carver and his speechwriters made it all sound so noble and altruistic. Frankly, it made her a little blechedich.

Wynn, in turn, reported their findings to the other Wardens and Guardians, who had placed themselves on standby in case reinforcements were needed on the day of the attack. Kylie hoped that by the time the date rolled around, they’d have a much better handle on what needed to be done and why.

Finding out the nature of the attack was the problem currently driving her crazy. Her initial theory of some kind of a bomb had been dismissed by the others as unlikely, for the simple reason that it sounded too mundane for the nocturnis, who tended to favor dramatic acts of black magic, dark ritual, and supernatural chaos. Planning a mass murder cum Demon raising at a modern American convention center already stretched the boundaries of (im)propriety for them. Underground caverns, defiled woodlands, and abandoned buildings all ranked as much more traditional choices.

Knox had suggested an old-fashioned armed ambush, with nocturnis flooding into the convention center armed with cursed daggers and simply overwhelming the attendees with huge numbers and the element of surprise. To Kylie this sounded impractical. The welcome dinner was expected to draw about two thousand attendees, all of them the most highly visible and politically influential of the weekend crowd. To stab that many people before a whole bunch of them figured out a way to either escape or fight back would take way more physical numbers than they assumed the local sect could draw upon.

For her part, Wynn theorized a more magical offense, where the most powerful of the nocturni mages would seal the room and summon minor demons to slaughter the trapped humans. This seemed more practical to Kylie, if not equally as gory.

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