The encryption broke.
Usually, when big things happened on a computer, you were lucky to get a new screen popping up. Maybe a beep. On really big occasions, possibly a screen flicker. What you didn’t ordinarily see was a flash of red light and a slowly building swirl of smoke the color of burning charcoal.
Nope, Kylie could honestly say, it was a first for her. Dag, however, seemed more familiar with the spectacle.
With a battle cry that made the plaster walls of her office shake, Dag leaped from his chair, spilling the remnants of his sandwich all over the hardwood floor. In the blink of an eye, he had transformed into his natural shape, wings half spread in the confines of the indoor space, his fangs exposed in a feral expression of hostile rage. His black, glittering gaze was fixed on …
The smoke?
Kylie shook her head, wondering what the hell was happening. Her wondering only lasted about four seconds, though, because that was how long it took for the smoke to condense and take shape.
The shape of a demon.
Well, she was calling it a demon, anyway. If this wasn’t what the Guardians meant when they said the D-word, she didn’t want to meet a real one. Ever.
Tumbling backward off the ball, Kylie scurried crablike away from her desk and the giant, noxious thing that currently perched atop it. If her first impression of Dag had been that he looked like the monster from a childhood nightmare, this thing made her rethink that assessment. It shot straight into the realm of night terrors, and if any child on earth had dreamed up something like this, the future of the human race had come into serious question.
It looked not remotely human. Where a hard look could pick out the human in Dag’s gargoyle face—and the gargoyle in the human—this thing stood so far removed from her species as to have evolved from an entirely different evolutionary tree. Maybe on another planet.
Where the trees were carnivorous.
Black and hulking, it shone head to toe, or possibly just top to bottom, with a slick, sickly sheen, like an oil spill over black water. The weird texture of its hide meant she couldn’t tell if it sprouted fur or some sort of intricate scale pattern. Or both. Or neither. Three glowing red eyes peered balefully from its erstwhile face, the color reminding her of the pool of blood surrounding the body of Dennis Ott, only lit from behind with a malevolent glow.
It hunched over on itself, making its size difficult to discern, but its mass proved intimidating enough given that she couldn’t quite identify any real body parts or limbs within the seething maelstrom. One minute she thought it a roiling ball of tentacles, like an H. P. Lovecraft story come to life; the next it looked like some kind of satanic vision, with squat goat’s legs and overlong, claw-tipped arms alternating with gigantic clawed pincers along an articulated torso. Then she blinked, and she saw nothing but more swirling smoke, an evil genie popped unexpectedly from an unrubbed bottle.
Maybe her human mind just wasn’t equipped to grasp its true form. What Kylie did grasp was that it was evil, and it wanted her dead. You know, after it fed on her immortal soul.
It gargled at her. She didn’t know what to call the sound. Part chitter, part growl, part unholy whine, she could only say that it simultaneously made her want to run far, far away, and to cover her ears, stay right where she was, and vomit. She figured it was what the inventors of the bagpipe had been trying for.
Before she could follow either course of action, Dag struck. He repeated that structural integrity-compromising bellow and leaped at the demon like a wolf on a wounded caribou. The creature shrieked right back and twisted, focusing its burning gaze and noxious smell on the Guardian.
Had she mentioned the thing stank like a landfill inside the pit of hell in the middle of August? Because it did.
Kylie backed up against the wall because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. Part of her screamed at her to run, run like a gazelle, and get the hell out of Dodge while the creatures before her battled it out. That part made some very compelling arguments. Still, another part of her hated the idea of cowering in the corner like the dumb blonde in a cheesy horror movie, and wanted her to charge the forces of evil with a crucifix and a chain saw. Being neither a Christian nor a lumberjack, however, she did not own either of those things.
She also didn’t find the idea of getting in between the two combatants a very appealing prospect. They tore at each other like a couple of wild dogs, teeth snapping, claws slashing, making noises she knew for certain could never come out of a human throat. Becoming collateral damage from a wild swing of a claw or a misplaced kick to the spine seemed somewhat inadvisable for a woman pretty anxious to make it to her next birthday, which was only a couple of weeks away.