“And she uses it whenever she gets worked up, angry, frustrated, happy, you name it.” Wynn grinned. “It’s actually a pretty accurate emotional tell. Very useful.”
Kylie glared. “You suck.”
“Ladies.” Knox cleared his throat, looking as if he were sorry to have spoken at all. “Let us focus on the matter at hand, shall we?”
“Right.” Wynn nodded. “We need to find out what Kylie can do.”
Kylie groaned. “Wynn, we’ve been friends for years. You know what I can do. I can finish a crossword puzzle in five minutes without thinking. I can write software, I can program apps, I can tinker with hardware, and I can hack into any computer this side of the galaxy. But that’s it. I don’t shoot lightning out of my fingertips, and I don’t pull rabbits out of a hat. I’m a hacker, not Harry frickin’ Houdini.”
Dag rumbled, “Is that why your eyes change when you watch the computer?”
Kylie turned to frown at him, her stomach slowly twisting under her “Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock” sweatshirt. “What did you say?”
Dag gestured toward the setup on her desk. “Your eyes are brown when you are away from the machines, but when you watch the screens, they change. They develop a green ring around the pupil and glow with a strange light.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it is a human disfigurement of some sort, but it looks more like magic to me.”
Grinding her teeth together kept Kylie from either tossing her cookies or shouting a denial; she wasn’t sure which would have come out first. No one else had ever noticed how her eyes looked when she worked, but then again, she usually worked alone. How had Dag seen it? It must be getting worse.
In the beginning, when she had first noticed the eerie light in her eyes, Kylie had only seen it when she was really deep into something complicated. She had to be concentrating hard and giving her skills a workout before that glow appeared.
At least, that’s how it used to be, but she had seen it more often in the last couple of years, almost any time she focused her attention on something electronic. Still, getting a freaky evil eye from time to time had nothing to do with magic, right?
“Oh, wow. I didn’t know that was even a possibility. Can magic really work with technology like that?” Wynn turned to Knox, her expression excited. “Bran used to say that what Ky could do with a computer was magic, but I thought it was just a figure of speech.”
“Perhaps not.” Knox peered at the camera, his gaze thoughtful. “We tend to think of magic as something organic, something that comes from the earth, but in reality it is greater and more elusive than that. There have been tales of magic affecting machinery for centuries, since humans began to use it so frequently. Usually the two systems are viewed as opposing forces, disruptive and destructive to each other, but it is possible that your friend is able to harness her powers in a way that complements rather than contests the power of human technology.”
“So she’s like a cyberwitch.” Wynn’s eyes twinkled even over the remote connection. “Ha! Now who gets to call who names, shiksa?”
“Half shiksa. And like you needed an excuse before,” Kylie grumbled, still trying to wrap her head around the idea that what she thought of as hard-earned skill might owe at least a little bit to some kind of supernatural power. She wasn’t sure whether she should feel proud or embarrassed. Had she been cheating all these years?
“If this is the case, perhaps Kylie will be able to use her power to discover the things we have not,” Knox suggested.
Wynn agreed enthusiastically. “That would be amazing. None of us is half as good online as the Koyote, magic or no. How about it, Ky? Do you think you can help us?”
“If I had any idea what you were talking about, I suppose anything might be possible.”
“Don’t pout. Knox is right. El, Fil, and I have been running into dead end after dead end.” The witch sighed. “It hasn’t helped that we’re trying to do three things at once, even if we’re all working on it together.”
“We need to locate the three remaining Guardians, first of all. Dag is right that it will take all of them together to face whatever the Order has planned. Second, we want to locate any members of the Guild who might have escaped the Order’s killing squads until now. Ella, Felicity, and I have learned a lot, first from some books El got her hands on, and my uncle Griffin has taught us a lot, too. He was a Warden back in the day himself. More Wardens means more information, and the more info we have, the better we can fight the Order. So finding the rest of the missing is important.”
Since Bran had been one of those missing for more than a year, it didn’t take a lot of work to convince Kylie of the importance of that task. She just nodded her agreement.
“The third thing is the trickiest, but maybe the most critical. For the last six months, we’ve actively begun looking for the Hierophant.”