“It’s useless.” Kylie slapped the drive down onto the coffee table and glared at it. “Finding out his identity is essentially worthless to us. Yeah, we know who he is now, but we can’t do a darned thing with that information. We might as well not even have it.”
Dag stepped up behind her and crouched, his big body nearly surrounding her. “I do not agree with that,” he said, flicking the drive with one finger and making it spin. “You say it is impossible to get to this man, and I say there is no one who cannot be reached, especially when a Guardian is involved.”
“And I’m saying we couldn’t get to him if he were a normal human being without getting our heads blown off. That’s without even adding in the dangers that come from him being able to use black magic on top of everything else.”
He tilted his head a bare inch. “That does make things a bit trickier.”
Kylie opened her eyes wide and turned to Wynn. “Their heads really are made of rocks, aren’t they?”
“No.” Wynn defended her fiancé and his brother, laying her hand on Knox’s knees. “Well, maybe sometimes.”
The big Guardian frowned down at his witchy mate. “You doubt my ability to assassinate one member of the Order? When I have another of the brethren at my side? I take issue with this insult.”
“It’s not an insult,” Kylie said. “It’s an observation based on known data.” When both gargoyles would have protested, she held up a hand. “Give it a rest, guys. No one is questioning your kick-ass macho fighting skills. Chill.”
Wynn murmured her agreement, and the Guardians settled back but continued to look disgruntled. Of course, they almost always looked disgruntled, so Kylie ignored it.
Along with the images that flashed through her mind of the one occasion when she’d seen Dag looking a long, long way from disgruntled.
She cleared her throat.
Now that the initial shock of Vic’s revelation had passed, she forced herself to get a grip and do what she always did—figure out what came next. “Okay,” she said, as her foot started bouncing under the coffee table. “We just need to regroup a little and figure out where we really stand. So what do we know?”
“We know the identity of the Hierophant,” Dag snarled. “And we should do something about him.”
“We think we know,” Kylie corrected. “Nothing in the video or in Ott’s notes positively IDs the figure giving the speech as the Hierophant. So all we really know with one hundred percent certainty is that Richard Foye-Carver is a member of the Order of Eternal Darkness.”
“We also know that he’s nearly untouchable,” Wynn reminded the brooding Guardians. “But we also know about this big strike that the local sect is planning to launch.”
Kylie nodded. “Right. I think it makes more sense to focus on that. I mean, the Hierophant has existed forever, right? I mean, there’s always someone around who’s going to step up and lead the nocturnis, whether it’s Carver or someone else. While it’s a nice idea that we could take him out and throw the whole nest of vipers into chaos, (a) we don’t really know that would happen, and (b) it might not be enough to stop whatever they have planned.”
“But if we concentrate on discovering that plan and stopping it…” Wynn followed easily behind her friend’s train of thought.
“Then we accomplish two things at once. We keep the Order from channeling a whole bunch of power to the Seven—”
“Potentially freeing Shaab-Na on top of Uhlthor.”
“—and we buy ourselves more time to figure out if there is a feasible way to take out the Hierophant without getting ourselves killed or put on the fugitive lists of half the nations on earth.”
The Guardians exchanged a silent glance. Kylie could almost hear them whining to each other about how much it sucked when the “human females” stuck their noses into things. Especially when they made such good points.
“Fine,” Dag snapped. He returned to his seat next to Knox, looking like a prince holding court. A big, battered, grump-ass prince with the ability to turn into a gargoyle and eviscerate errant nobles, but still. “But we do not know what the nocturnis have planned, nor when their strike will occur.”
“And that’s what we have to concentrate on finding out.”
“How?” Knox demanded.
Kylie and Wynn exchanged glances, and the witch slumped back with a groan. “Don’t tell me. More research.”
“Hey, I thought you said you were getting good at it?”
“Doesn’t mean I like it,” Wynn grumbled. “And it doesn’t mean I don’t get to try things my way first.”
Kylie raised an eyebrow. “Your way being…?”
“I’ll spell it. You still have that drive from your informant? Or the note? The note would be even better.”
Kylie frowned and thought back. “The drive, yeah. I might have the note, too, but I’d have to look in the office.”