“Shmulky,” she muttered under her breath, turning back to the computer. What a killjoy.
Back to concentrating on her task, she finally pulled up the file structure on the drive and scanned through the titles. Several looked like word processing documents, a few pieces of electronic garbage, a subfolder of e-mail files, a single spreadsheet, and one video file. A picture being worth a thousand words, Kylie clicked on the video.
Her player program launched, and she found herself looking at a poor-quality film that appeared to have not only been filmed by a low-resolution cell phone camera, but that had also been recorded surreptitiously. Nothing else explained the positively painful angle of the image, or the obscuring black blob covering most of the lower left corner of each frame. Honestly, it was too poorly done to chalk up to mere incompetence. No one under the age of ninety was this bad with tech.
The sound quality sucked rocks of equal if not greater size. She spent a few minutes fiddling with light and sound settings, filters and resolutions, but there wasn’t much she could do to make it more than marginally audible and visible. She waved Dag over and started the clip from the beginning.
“What do you have?”
“You know as much as I do. It’s a video. It was on the drive. Now, watch.”
He stood behind her balance ball, and both of them turned their attention to the monitor. The first few seconds amounted to a lot of shaking and shifting, obscuring both the picture and the sound enough that Kylie couldn’t even make out what they were watching. Gradually, the camera holder seemed to relax a little. The shaking didn’t stop completely, but she figured he (or she) was just one of those guys (or girls) with a shaky hand, because it settled into a low vibration while the sound began to filter through the speakers.
Kylie could see now that the recording showed a portion of a somewhat crowded room. The lights were dim enough that she couldn’t guess at its size or shape, and she realized the only illumination came from actual burning candles. What? Were these jokers some kind of reenactment group obsessed with the Revolutionary War era? It wasn’t like Boston didn’t crawl with those suckers.
Couldn’t be, she decided, because at least a few of the figures on the screen wore thoroughly modern clothing, including the tall one standing in what should have been the center of the frame. The rest of those gathered seemed to be arranged around him, so she guessed this was the guy everyone listened to.
The man wiggled into and out of focus in the poorly framed shot, but Kylie could make out enough to see that he was above average in height and had an average-to-lean build. He wore a gray suit and a bloodred tie, and looked pretty slick, like a lawyer or a businessman, well groomed and well dressed. Pretty ordinary, really. So why was everyone so interested in what he had to say?
Darn it, if she was sitting here watching secret video of an Amway rally, she was going to be really pissed.
The video continued to roll, and for whatever reason, the microphone finally managed to pick up enough of the speaker’s words to provide an audible sound track. Still, she had to lean forward and strain to listen.
“… Masters are unhappy with your current efforts. They have waited too long to be restored to freedom and to take Their rightful place as rulers of this wretched world. And you, children, have failed Them. Each one of you, with each day that passes, you continue to fail Them.”
Kylie got a bad feeling. She twisted her head to look up at Dag. “Um, are they talking about who I think they’re talking about?”
Dag hissed and nodded. That so hadn’t been how she wanted him to respond.
“… failures of late cannot be tolerated. I have visited the circles in question and made the displeasure of the Masters clear, but Their restlessness grows. They hunger, my friends, and it is our duty to provide Them with what They need to grow strong and join us in the physical realm.”
“Which is exactly what we don’t want to happen, right?” Kylie murmured.
“We have been blessed with the presence of Lord Uhlthor now for many months, but His strength is still low, and much was expended in His war against the cursed Guildmen last year. We cannot allow these sorts of setbacks to continue.”
Kylie shuddered. “So Wynn and Knox were right. That was what killed Bran, that Uhlthor guy. He really is out of jail or whatever.”
Dag nodded, his eyes narrow and jaw tight. “So it appears. This confirmation is grave news, but it does offer proof that the Demon is not yet at full strength.”
“Why do you say that?”
His gaze shifted to her, fire burning behind the ebony surface. “Because we still live.”
And there he went again, demonstrating what a smooth talker he was. Be still, her beating heart.
Or not, since that was what they were all trying to prevent.