Dag growled, his fingers tightening on his coffee mug until she heard the heavy stoneware begin to crack. He must have heard it too, because he abruptly set the cup down and rose to pace around the room. “Why can you not speak like a normal human? First you use your secret language, and then you insist on using words and phrases of nonsense. Even though I understand the words, your use of them together makes no sense. You deliberately attempt to obfuscate the truth with your utterings.”
“Whoa. Calm down, Goliath. I’m not being deliberately anything. This is me.” She raised her hands and pointed her fingers at herself. “What you see is what you get. The merchandise might be quirky, but it does not change based on customer complaints.”
This time, the Guardian muttered something in that language Kylie didn’t understand, and suddenly he stood before her not as an irritated hottie, but in the gray-skinned, bat-winged shape of his natural form. He leaned one hand on the floor in his customary crouching position and raised the other to his skull. “Your words make my head throb like a war drum. I lack the energy to maintain a human shape while you continue to speak.”
For some reason, that stung. “Well, you don’t have to be mean about it. I’m not trying to make your life difficult, Goliath. This is a bit of a shake-up for me, too, you know. Or did you not understand the part about how I was clueless about magic, Demons, Guardians, and Wardens less than twenty-four hours ago? You’re not the only one dealing with a big pile of drek right now.”
“My name is Dag!” he bellowed, his fangs exposed in anger, his wings stirring the air until the papers on Kylie’s desk fluttered.
Her heart jumped, then settled back into rhythm. He hadn’t precisely scared her, but she would admit to startled. Startled worked. “Sheesh, I know. I know. Note to self. Don’t give gargoyles nicknames, especially of other gargoyles. You got it.”
“How you made it to adulthood with that tongue still in your mouth is a mystery I lack the power to comprehend.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, the silence punctuated only by the whir of her equipment and his agitated breathing. Kylie had to marvel over the fact that his monstrous form seemed to bother her not a whit, not even as worked up as he was in that moment. She wasn’t afraid of him because of his appearance; in fact, she almost felt more comfortable with him this way. At least when he didn’t look human, she wasn’t constantly distracted by the hotness of his other form. Maybe now she could actually concentrate on her work, cut that hour she’d boasted about down by a few minutes.
“Look,” she finally said, deciding someone had to crack the stalemate or they’d never get anything accomplished. “I apologize for upsetting you. I promise not to call you Goliath again, and I’ll try to be as clear as I can when I talk, but I can’t guarantee I can change a lifetime of speech patterns just for you. Sometimes my mouth starts running before my brain can catch up. Just ask my bubbeh—er, my grandmother. If I say something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask me a question.”
He huffed out a breath, and she almost expected to see smoke shoot from his nostrils, as if he were part dragon or something. “If the time we have spent together so far is any indication, I would never cease questioning you.”
Okay, griping was easy to recognize and something she could totally deal with. She gave in to a grin. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you speaking modern English in no time. Then you can brag about being multilingual.”
“I speak twelve languages. I’m just not sure yours is one of them.”
Kylie looked up from her screen and goggled. “Twelve languages?”
“What you call English did not exist when I was first summoned into this existence, not even in England. They still spoke the earlier dialects, until they spoke French.”
“Huh, I didn’t think about it like that. I guess you’re right, though.”
“I speak the older dialect of English, this version you know, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Arabic.”
Kylie blinked at him. “Wow. Remind me to take you with me next time I decide to travel.”
Dag said nothing, just eyed her suspiciously.
Turning back to her work, she began scrolling through the files of correspondence she’d exchanged with the person known as DrkMsgr. There was a lot there, from e-mails to text messages to full-on documents when she had helped him with a couple of tech issues he’d been having. Until now, she had saved the data but she had left it alone. It was rude to dig too deeply into another person’s identity until you had a good reason. Kylie figured a connection to the end of the world finally gave her a good reason.
They had discussed it during the call. Wynn agreed with Kylie that there was a good chance this DrkMsgr character had at least some knowledge of the Order and that he was worth pursuing as a lead. Kylie was about to pursue her tokhes off.
“How do you hope to locate the nocturnis on that machine? I do not think they would be so reckless as to create a—what is it called … a Web site.”
Kylie snorted. “If only people really were that stupid. Though, actually, some of them are. But at the moment, I’m working on the theory that a demonic cult that’s smart enough to have survived a couple of thousand years—”