The food also served as a source of distraction, although by the time she had trooped downstairs either everyone had developed a conscience, or Dag had told them where to shove the knowing glances. Everyone seemed to be on their best behavior.
Dag finished relating the story of yesterday’s security installation and the hexed workman who had attacked Kylie. Fortunately, he left out the mea culpas and kept things short, so she didn’t feel tempted to shove her chopstick into his ear. Much.
“I’d say that answers the question of whether or not this Ott guy let Ky’s name slip before they killed him,” Wynn said with a wince. “They had to have been watching the house and waiting for an opportunity to have managed something like that. Definitely not a random-target thing.”
“Yeah, I think we’ve pretty much come to that conclusion all on our own.”
“The question is how much they believe she knows,” Knox said, turning to Kylie. He and Dag had elected to sit on the sofa (“like adults,” he had said) while she and Wynn sat tailor fashion on the floor of the living room. “That they will wish you dead is a certainty, but their level of determination to see it done sooner will depend on how many of their secrets they believe you possess.”
“I’m not sure how we figure that out. Obviously, they know that I had contact with Dennis Ott, or whatever his name was when he was mixed up with the Order. But they didn’t find the drive in his pocket, or I’m assuming they would have taken it, so they don’t know that we’ve read his journal or seen that video.”
“Speaking of, any word from your AV guy yet?” Wynn asked.
“Vic?” Kylie shook her head. “No, but it should be any day. He’s squeezing me in as a favor, but I know he’ll get to it as soon as possible. He likes me.”
Dag growled at that, and Kylie ignored him. Well, she rolled her eyes, then she ignored him.
“The sooner the better.” Knox set aside his water glass and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “If Dag’s theory is correct, and the video actually shows us the identity of the Hierophant, we cannot have that information too soon.”
“Either way, it’s important,” Wynn said. “But our real task now is figuring out the details of this big strike the local sect has planned and when it’s going to happen. We can’t let them raise enough power to return Uhlthor to full strength, let alone give them a shot at freeing Shaab-Na as well.”
Kylie pushed away her plate and shook her head. “I’ve been over that drive with a fine-tooth comb. If Ott knew the details, he didn’t save them on there.”
“Which leaves us where?” Wynn asked.
“Nowhere very useful. Maybe you guys wasted your time coming all the way out here.”
Wynn scoffed. “Wasted what time? It’s a two-hour flight and, oh yeah, you’re my friend, so it’s such a hardship to see you.”
“There is no waste,” Knox assured her. “What the Order had planned here sounds bigger than what they attempted in any of the cities where we have faced them so far. It is only right that we should join forces and deal with this threat together.”
“We merely need to discover the nature of it,” Dag said. “Then together we shall defeat it.”
Kylie nodded. “Okay, okay. Enough with the rah-rahs. What do we actually do at this point? I mean, where do we start?”
Before anyone could make a suggestion, someone knocked at the front door. This time, Kylie even heard it. “Hold that thought,” she told them, pushing to her feet and hurrying to answer the summons. When she caught Dag following her, she felt an instant of irritation before logic kicked in. She didn’t know who was on the other side of the door, she wasn’t expecting any visitors, and she’d been attacked twice (three times, if you counted the drude) in the last week. Maybe having backup wasn’t such a bad idea.
Too short to reach the peephole, she brushed aside the gauzy curtain covering the sidelight before she opened the door. When she saw who was on the other side, she nearly plotzed.
Brushing aside Dag’s concern, she wrenched open the door. “Vic? What on earth are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in New York!”
The genius of digital video she and Wynn had just been discussing stood on her front steps shivering in the chilly night air and looking decidedly sheepish. “Yeah, well, I came up to give a seminar this weekend, so I thought I’d bring you your clip. I should have called first, but I wanted to surprise you. Did I come at a bad time?”
Victor Gill could have posed as the poster boy for Kylie’s People, the geeks and geniuses she had always befriended, dated, and slept with before her gargoylization. Standing on the short side of average at around five feet nine inches, he had a lean, lanky build, and the kind of casual, preoccupied appearance of someone who paid more attention to a computer screen than to clothes, hairstyles, or cultivating more than a passing acquaintance with sunlight. He wore dark-framed glasses over his exotic dark eyes, and the dusky skin tone of his Korean ancestry kept him from a kind of glow-in-the-dark pallor.