The second time Dag disappeared, he didn’t return for hours. Oh, he didn’t really go anywhere. Kylie could occasionally see him through the windows as he paced around the house, covering all three sides in a uselessly repetitive patrol. More than once she considered going online and buying him one of those big, furry hats the ceremonial guards wore at Buckingham Palace, but when she found herself fantasizing about places to put it other than his head, she decided against it. She doubted he’d stand still long enough for her to lodge it where she really wanted to.
In the end he stayed outside until she gave up and dragged her ass upstairs to bed way earlier than usual. Apparently finding a dead body, being attacked by a minor demon, kissing a gargoyle, and then doing hours and hours of esoteric research could really take a lot out of a girl.
The next morning set a new pattern for the week. After informing her stiffly that he had indeed decided to summon Knox and Wynn to join them in Boston, Dag had spent the rest of that day and every following one performing a disappearing act that would have made David Copperfield proud. He never went far, but he always seemed to find something to do outside, in another room, or as far removed from her presence as possible. Kylie started to wonder if someone had tampered with her shower gel and slipped some eau de skunk in there while she wasn’t looking.
The few times he did deign to speak with her, it always revolved around his “security” concerns. The first words out of his mouth every time he so much as glanced at her were to inquire whether she’d called the alarm company yet, until she did just to get him off her back. The man could teach her bubbeh about nagging.
It wasn’t as if Kylie hadn’t always intended to have a security system installed, she just resented being ordered to do it. In this day and age, property crime was a concern not to be taken lightly, and her lawyers kept telling her that a woman with her money needed to be even more conscious of personal security than the average person. Kylie tended not to think like that, because to her, the money wasn’t a big deal.
Okay, so she was worth more at twenty-three (about to turn twenty-four) than most people were after a lifetime of work and savings, but to her the money that resulted from her work was a total afterthought. It was the work itself she cared about.
When she’d written the app that eventually earned her millions, she had just wanted to see if she could fix a tech problem that bugged her. She hadn’t intended at that point to drop out of college, let alone to be bought out and eventually hired by the very company whose product she had improved upon; that had just happened. And for her, the money was convenient. It meant she could buy a house in a neighborhood she liked, that she could decide what to work on based on what interested her, rather than any other criteria, and it meant she could buy herself a few cool toys when she felt like it.
Really, though, Kylie was a woman of simple needs. She didn’t care about clothes or cars or keeping up with the Kardashians. She had the taste and appetite of a thirteen-year-old (her mother disdainfully amended that to a thirteen-year-old hoodlum, meaning anyone without a trust fund), didn’t travel much because she always had something fascinating to work on at home, and the only person she had to support was herself.
Still, every time she talked to her accountant or her lawyers, they felt the need to harp about the fact that her story of being not just a successful woman, but a wildly successful very young woman in a male-dominated field had earned her enough publicity that she needed to be cautious. If only they knew what she’d gotten into now.
So, installing a security system wasn’t a big deal, and the long-term accumulated nagging meant she had already done all the necessary research and selected both the provider company and the system she wanted long before an actual threat had come on the scene. Her address and the cost of her purchase even assured that the company got her an installation appointment that very week, the day before Wynn and Knox were scheduled to arrive. Kylie just hoped she could learn to use the thing in time to let them in the house without sirens waking the neighbors.