Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(9)
I’d make contact with that in a heartbeat.
She slapped her hormones back and threatened to lock them in a cage if they didn’t behave themselves. Still, she couldn’t argue with their taste.
His transformation from boogeyman to babe came with a convenient set of clothing: worn jeans, battered work boots, and a navy peacoat perfectly suited to the weather. At least Kylie didn’t have to worry about him freezing to death as he trailed after her on the route back to her house. That allowed her to worry about other things, like how soon she could get the explanation she’d been promised, why she wasn’t way more freaked out by the adventure of the past few hours, and where might be a convenient place to hide the bodies of a gargoyle and a witch if they didn’t make with the story time, like, yesterday.
Sure, Kylie might be small, but she was sneaky, smart, and mean, so she figured if she needed to make a few bodies understand the inadvisability of messing with a woman with a high IQ, a nearly unlimited disposable income, and connections to the underbelly of the Internet, so be it. She had every faith she could come out on top.
Dag moved so quietly—eerily quietly—that she found herself glancing over her shoulder several times on the way home just to make certain he was still there. When she led him up the steps to her front door and slipped her key into the lock, she tried to tell herself that she had no reason to feel a twinge of regret that he hadn’t disappeared on the way. She had a feeling at least half the story she needed to hear would turn out to be his, so better to have all hands on deck.
Even if a small place in the back of her brain did try to argue that a simple random mugging and a nice little coma up at Mass General might be an easier out.
Her house was dark and empty, not even her sometimes cat—a stray that came and went as he pleased and guarded his independence with tooth and claw—around to give the place a spark of life. It didn’t usually bother her; to tell the truth, she didn’t usually even notice. But something about bringing a stranger back to a house where she still had moving boxes in most of the rooms more than a year after moving in made her feel awkward for a moment.
Kylie reacted to her discomfort the way she always did—by lifting her chin and brazening her way through it. Fake it with authority was the family motto, after all; at least for their branch.
“Office is this way,” she said, flipping lights on as she led the way toward the back of the house. “It’s got the best setup for a video call.”
Dag said nothing, merely followed her on those unnervingly silent feet. She didn’t even notice him looking around at the mostly undecorated and barely lived-in areas of the house, and she stole peeks. Lots of them.
Investment value aside, the three-story-plus-basement historic brownstone was wasted on Kylie. She used maybe three rooms on a regular basis—her office, her bedroom, and the en suite bathroom. Even the kitchen only got as much use as required to unpack and serve herself takeout. As she often said, she spoke two human languages and coded in at least five more, but cooking was not one of them.
The silence of the house stretched to include Dag, since he made not a sound as she led him into her office off the kitchen. The real estate agent had described it as a study filled with natural light and well insulated to cut down on the noise from the rest of the house. Kylie called it her Batcave. Or Acme headquarters, depending on her mood.
Her huge, battered desk barely took up a third of the space in the room, so she had filled the rest of it with books, equipment, toys, and other assorted things that only existed to make her smile. Aside from her Aeron desk chair, the only other seat in the room was a battered old armchair with faded toile upholstery and a cushion permanently indented with the impression of King David’s feline backside. It also sported a layer of his orange fur that would have made her grandmother plotz.
She gestured to it with one hand as she set her keys on the edge of her desk. Internally, she debated whether a gargoyle could be allergic to cats, and whether she should hope this one was. Petty, maybe, but she wouldn’t mind seeing the source of her discomfort in a little distress of his own. “Go ahead and sit. It will take me a minute to boot up and put the call through.”
He obeyed without a word, relaxing into the seat without bothering to brush off the hair or remove his dark coat. Of course, brushing would have proven entirely ineffective, but the coat simply disappeared just before his butt hit the chair. Show-off.
Maybe she should get her nose checked out, because it seemed to her that if magic had a smell, Dag should be reeking of it. Funny, but all she could smell when she got close enough was stone and ash and warm male skin.
Damn it, at this rate she was going to need a whip and a chair to deal with her hormones. Down, girls.
Forcing herself to focus, she powered up her computer and busied herself shrugging out of her own coat while the password prompt appeared on the screen. As always, the steady light of the three monitors and the hum of the cooling fans on the CPU soothed her, and she found it a lot easier to ignore the gargoyle in the room now that she was back in control. Sit Kylie Kramer down in front of a computer with enough juice, and she could rule the world. At least part of it legally.
“Tell me something of the witch.”
He issued the demand in a deep voice that reminded her of distant thunder and sweet pipe smoke. Kylie felt herself twitch at the sound, but hoped it would be disguised by the barricade of screens half blocking his view. Hey, a girl could dream, right?