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?
“You mean Wynn?” she asked, stalling for time. She wasn’t sure she was ready for more one-on-one time with this creature. Hopefully her friend would be waiting by the figurative phone.
“The witch. Tell me why you trust her.”
Okay, that was an easy question to answer, and at least it took her own focus off herself, even if she could still feel the gargoyle’s gaze pinned on her like a boutonniere. “Because she’s family.”
Dag frowned. “You share blood? Is she a sister?”
“No, and yes.” Kylie pulled up the chat program and entered Wynn’s number from memory. “Technically, she’s my best friend’s big sister, but I’ve known her for years. To me, she feels like family, related or not.”
“And this other friend? If there is another with knowledge of my kind and of the Order, we should contact her as well.”
“Him.” She snapped the correction and stared at the central monitor while the connection formed. “And you’ll need a Ouija board if that’s your plan. Bran is dead.”
For once, timing worked in Kylie’s favor. The call went live before Dag could reply to her blunt words.
“Gah, finally! I was starting to freak out. You said you’d only be a few minutes. Is everything okay?”
“Wynn, relax. We walked through Boston, not Fallujah. We’re fine.”
“Sorry, it’s just that this is really big news for us.” The dark-haired witch looked sheepish as she shifted to allow another figure into camera range. “We were really getting worried that the Order had gotten to the other four Guardians before us.”
“Yeah, so how about before you go any further here, you go back to the beginning for me.” Kylie leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Not only do I want to know what all this Guardian, demon, Order stuff is about, I also want to know what it had to do with Bran’s death. And don’t even try to sell me that farkakta story about a heart defect again, because I ain’t buying.”
“I’m sorry, Ky. Really. I felt horrible lying to you, but we don’t talk about this stuff with outsiders. It’s the rules.”
Kylie felt a jolt. That stung, more than she had expected. “So now I’m an outsider?”