Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(80)

“What is it?”

Kylie lifted a hand and pointed to the stage.

“Demon.”





Chapter Eighteen

Got zol af im onshikn fun di tsen makes di beste.

God should visit on him the best of the Ten Plagues.


Dag’s first reaction was denial, simple and instantaneous. He and his brothers had discussed the Seven at length. They knew Uhlthor had been freed but lacked the strength to take his full form, and they knew the goal of this action by the Order was to free Shaab-Na from its prison. Neither of them could have entered this room without the power of a major sacrifice.

And Kylie did not know what a real Demon was. She had thought the lowly drude qualified, when it was barely more than an unthinking insect compared to the evil of the Seven. She could not know the reality of a Demon.

Yet she stared at the stage as if the gate to hell itself had opened before her. Her skin had paled to a hue so white, he feared she might faint at any moment. She shook from head to toe, fine tremors he didn’t believe she even noticed, and her dark eyes had gone stark and wide, her pupils so dilated he could barely see the chocolate brown of her irises.

She looked as if she had seen …

A Demon.

Scowling, he turned his gaze toward the front of the room and opened his sight to the man on the stage.

“Nazgahchuhl.”

He spat the name and looked immediately to his brothers. This event they had not prepared for. Another of the Seven had been freed from his prison and had hid among the humans while awaiting his moment to strike. The Corruptor had been using the body of the Hierophant to walk among humanity and the Guardians had not seen the truth.

Shame and rage flooded through him. He and his brothers had failed to respond to a Demon’s rising, had allowed one of the Seven to gather its supporters and arrange this complex and massive strike against humanity. And now his own mate was in danger.

At the center of the stage, the Demon in the man’s body spread his arms to encompass the entire audience and raised his voice to allow every word to reverberate through the sound system. “Thank you, friends, for the enthusiasm of your welcome, and allow me also to thank each and every one of you here in this room for the enormous contribution you are about to make to the future of this world.”

Dag tensed, ready to leap forward, when the lights blinked out and everything descended into hell.

*

This is. So. Not. Good.

Kylie saw the lights blink out and instinctively dropped to the floor. She couldn’t have explained why, because it wasn’t like she suddenly came under attack from a flock of pigeons, but her butt hit concrete a split second before Dag roared out his battle cry.

She felt the rush of air under his wings while her eyes tried to adjust to the dark and realized once and for all that the excrement and the bladed wind machine had just become very close acquaintances. She and the rest of the humans in this auditorium had just come under attack from a Demon.

She knew Dag had doubted her at first, but when he’d seen what she saw, he’d spat out a name that made her skin crawl. She had no doubt she’d been correct, and no idea how this changed their carefully laid plans.

Who was it who had come up with the whole “splitting up” part of the plan? Because right at that moment, she wanted to give that person a good, swift kick in the tokhes.

Built like a theater, the convention center auditorium lacked windows, so when the lights went out, it became black as pitch. Kylie could literally not see her hand in front of her face, not even when she waved it around close enough that she could feel the breeze it stirred on her skin.

She shouldn’t have worried, though, because a source of light presented itself soon enough, in the form of the sickly, putrid red light of the energy four robed nocturnis directed into four corners of the room. Well, it looked like they’d been right about one thing.

Patsh zikh in tuches un schrei, “hooray!” Slap your butt and yell, “hooray!” It might end up being the only thing they got right, but it could prove to be the most important.

Gathering the slightly bent and worn edges of her courage, Kylie pushed herself to her feet and faced the nocturni in her corner of the room. He stood perhaps twenty feet away, his face illuminated by the light of his tainted magical energy. She could see the malevolent excitement in his eyes and the cruel line of his mouth as he chanted something she didn’t understand and had no desire to translate. She just wanted it to stop.

She inhaled deeply and reached inside herself, finding the spark of magic at her core. This time it leaped immediately to life, going from ember to blaze in a blinding flare of pale green light. She accepted the surge of energy with gratitude, letting the magic flow through her, under her skin, and down her arms until her fingertips itched like a thousand bug bites.

Then she raised her hands and let it loose.

It struck the nocturni in the side, catching him off guard and making him cry out not in pain, but in anger. His gaze swung toward her, but his hands remained pointed at the swirling vortex of darkened energy at the end of his stream of magic. Instead of responding to her attack he shouted something and another robed figure rushed out of the darkness toward her.

Kylie yelped and dodged, managing to put a row of chairs between her and her attacker, but it interrupted her concentration, and her hold on the casting nocturni broke apart. Damn it. She had to stop that portal.