Chapter Three
Darf min gehn in kolledj?
For this I went to college?
He told her to call him Dag. When she tried to add Hammarskj?ld or Nabbit to the end, he got cranky. As in, “bared his five-inch fangs and hissed like a frickin’ cobra” cranky. Some people—er, mythological entities—had no sense of humor. He proved this when he mumbled something about teaching humans to hold their tongues around their betters.
On a night where the surprises just kept coming, Kylie got a biggie when her stone-faced companion deposited her at the base of the belfry and went from monstrous to monstrously hot in the blink of an eye. Actually, if Kylie had blinked, she’d have missed it, because one minute he looked like the gargoyle of her nightmares, and the next he looked like a former member of the BU hockey team—tall, muscular, human, and as if he’d taken more than one stick to his face over the years.
It took her a full minute to pick her mouth up off the ground and another to catch a glimpse of the creature he had been in the completely normal man standing before her. His features had been so animalistic in his other form that she wouldn’t have believed they could translate into anything quite so attractive, if she had believed they could translate at all.
His prominent jaw, heavy brows, and nearly flat nose had been refined into something completely masculine and utterly arresting. They hinted at a mixed racial heritage that perfectly suited the golden hue of his skin. No one should have that color of skin in Boston at this time of year, all caramel and supercreamy latte, but it worked on Dag. As did the height that skimmed just under the six-foot wire—more than tall enough for her to have to look way up at him—and the musculature of an athlete who believed all sports should be contact sports.
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.