Rocked by Love (Gargoyles Series) (32 page)

Provided you didn’t look closely enough to see the dead, flat, empty void behind the man’s smiling eyes.

Kylie shifted in her seat and glanced down at the time displayed on her phone. T-minus eight minutes. She wondered if her nerves would survive the wait.

“Relax,” Dag whispered, leaning down to place his lips near her ear. “Your worry will only slow your responses. Do as Wynn advised you and breathe slowly.”

“Easy for you to say, Goliath. You were made to fight Demons. I was made to eat latkes and kvetch about the state of the world. There’s a big difference.”

“No,” he disagreed, brushing his mouth against her temple. “You were made to set me free, little love, and to spend a lifetime by my side. Never forget that.”

Well, when he put it that way …

It didn’t do away with Kylie’s nerves, but it allowed her to press them back enough to manage a deep breath. The feel of his huge, warm hand enveloping hers didn’t hurt, either. Both gave her courage, and if all else failed, she would do the one useful thing her father had taught her—fake it with authority.

When the lights dimmed and music began to hum through the loudspeakers, she felt every muscle in her body go tense and had to force herself to shake off the instinctive reaction. Adrenaline, Wynn had taught her, could be her friend or her enemy. Enough of it would sharpen her senses and hone her reflexes, helping her out in tight situations, but too much could make her freeze and leave her vulnerable to attack.

Fight or flight. Kylie sure as
shudden
intended to fight.

The focus in the room turned to the stage where a small, portly man in a wrinkled pair of khakis and an ill-conceived shirt-and-tie combination appeared behind the podium to introduce the keynote speaker. With a forced-casual glance she saw the ushers who had manned the doors step inside the room and pull the panels closed behind them. All perfectly innocent actions to ensure privacy and minimize the chances of outside interruptions and distractions, but to Kylie it smacked of sinister intent. The ushers to her appeared more like guards, stationed at the exits to prevent any attempt at escape.

She forced her attention back to the man speaking at the front of the room. Kylie barely heard a word he said. While the music had gradually lowered and then turned off, the buzzing in her head had quadrupled in volume. She felt as if a swarm of bees had nested in her ear canals and settled in for a long honey-making chat. She couldn’t seem to sit still, either. Her habitually bouncing foot shook so fast her eyes could barely focus on the movement.

Beside her, Dag shifted, his gaze moving over her with obvious concern, but she couldn’t do much to reassure him. She couldn’t even reassure herself. Something was so very, very wrong. She felt it in her bones.

Obviously, they all knew something was wrong with this meeting; the eight of them wouldn’t be here otherwise. But this was a wrongness that didn’t quite fall in with the kind of wrong they were expecting. Something else was going on, something that seethed beneath the surface of the room’s energy, like a great dark snake stalking its prey. If she listened closely to the sound waves beneath the buzz, she swore she could hear it hiss.

She laid her hand on Dag’s leg, trying to think of what to tell him, how to describe the sensation crawling under her skin, but he had his gaze focused on the stage like most of the others in the auditorium. She wanted to shout to get his attention, but she couldn’t even manage a whisper. It was like her voice had become locked inside her and she couldn’t find a key.

“And so without further ado, ladies and gentlemen,” the man at the podium intoned, “it is my pleasure to introduce the organizer of this event, the inspiration for good works around the globe, and today’s keynote speaker, Mr. Richard Foye-Carver.”

The audience stood to applaud. The move should have made it impossible for supershort Kylie to even see the stage, let alone the tall, fit man currently striding across it, one arm lifted to wave to the crowd. Providence, though, had carved a path through the bodies, leaving her a perfect sight line to the man of the hour.

She could see every detail as if she occupied a much closer spot than her seat at the back of the room. She saw his perfectly coiffed, elegantly graying hair and his expertly tailored suit. She saw the healthy tan of his skin and the flashing white of his disarming smile. She even saw the way he leaned down to shake hands with a few attendees who approached the stage for the chance to bask in the fame and glory that surrounded his noble acts.

She saw all of that, but beneath it, she saw something else.

As if she viewed a data construct or a hidden code, Kylie stared at the man with a hazy green veil before her eyes. The filter seemed to blur his outer appearance, make it vaguely translucent, and show her an image of what rested inside.

The sight made her want to scream.

Her hand flew to her mouth, instinctively protecting against the quick rise of nausea. Bile choked her and her mouth flooded with sour saliva as the thing seethed and writhed beneath the skin of the man. She had no words to describe it, nothing to compare it to, no frame of reference for the mass of rotten, festering evil that hid within the photogenic masculine exterior. She couldn’t name it, but she knew instinctively what it wasn’t.

It wasn’t human, and it wasn’t something they had been prepared to face.

Clinging to Dag’s hand, she used every bit of strength she could muster to pull him down to her. Of course, she couldn’t force a Guardian to move, so she had to wait until he turned his attention toward her and leaned in close, a clear mask of concern molding his features.

“What is it?”

Kylie lifted a hand and pointed to the stage.

“Demon.”

Chapter Eighteen

Got zol af im onshikn fun di tsen makes di beste.

God should visit on him the best of the Ten Plagues.

Dag’s first reaction was denial, simple and instantaneous. He and his brothers had discussed the Seven at length. They knew Uhlthor had been freed but lacked the strength to take his full form, and they knew the goal of this action by the Order was to free Shaab-Na from its prison. Neither of them could have entered this room without the power of a major sacrifice.

And Kylie did not know what a real Demon was. She had thought the lowly
drude
qualified, when it was barely more than an unthinking insect compared to the evil of the Seven. She could not know the reality of a Demon.

Yet she stared at the stage as if the gate to hell itself had opened before her. Her skin had paled to a hue so white, he feared she might faint at any moment. She shook from head to toe, fine tremors he didn’t believe she even noticed, and her dark eyes had gone stark and wide, her pupils so dilated he could barely see the chocolate brown of her irises.

She looked as if she had seen …

A Demon.

Scowling, he turned his gaze toward the front of the room and opened his sight to the man on the stage.

“Nazgahchuhl.”

He spat the name and looked immediately to his brothers. This event they had not prepared for. Another of the Seven had been freed from his prison and had hid among the humans while awaiting his moment to strike. The Corruptor had been using the body of the Hierophant to walk among humanity and the Guardians had not seen the truth.

Shame and rage flooded through him. He and his brothers had failed to respond to a Demon’s rising, had allowed one of the Seven to gather its supporters and arrange this complex and massive strike against humanity. And now his own mate was in danger.

At the center of the stage, the Demon in the man’s body spread his arms to encompass the entire audience and raised his voice to allow every word to reverberate through the sound system. “Thank you, friends, for the enthusiasm of your welcome, and allow me also to thank each and every one of you here in this room for the enormous contribution you are about to make to the future of this world.”

Dag tensed, ready to leap forward, when the lights blinked out and everything descended into hell.

*   *   *

This is. So. Not. Good.

Kylie saw the lights blink out and instinctively dropped to the floor. She couldn’t have explained why, because it wasn’t like she suddenly came under attack from a flock of pigeons, but her butt hit concrete a split second before Dag roared out his battle cry.

She felt the rush of air under his wings while her eyes tried to adjust to the dark and realized once and for all that the excrement and the bladed wind machine had just become very close acquaintances. She and the rest of the humans in this auditorium had just come under attack from a Demon.

She knew Dag had doubted her at first, but when he’d seen what she saw, he’d spat out a name that made her skin crawl. She had no doubt she’d been correct, and no idea how this changed their carefully laid plans.

Who was it who had come up with the whole “splitting up” part of the plan? Because right at that moment, she wanted to give that person a good, swift kick in the
tokhes
.

Built like a theater, the convention center auditorium lacked windows, so when the lights went out, it became black as pitch. Kylie could literally not see her hand in front of her face, not even when she waved it around close enough that she could feel the breeze it stirred on her skin.

She shouldn’t have worried, though, because a source of light presented itself soon enough, in the form of the sickly, putrid red light of the energy four robed
nocturnis
directed into four corners of the room. Well, it looked like they’d been right about one thing.

Patsh zikh in tuches un schrei, “hooray!”
Slap your butt and yell, “hooray!” It might end up being the only thing they got right, but it could prove to be the most important.

Gathering the slightly bent and worn edges of her courage, Kylie pushed herself to her feet and faced the
nocturni
in her corner of the room. He stood perhaps twenty feet away, his face illuminated by the light of his tainted magical energy. She could see the malevolent excitement in his eyes and the cruel line of his mouth as he chanted something she didn’t understand and had no desire to translate. She just wanted it to stop.

She inhaled deeply and reached inside herself, finding the spark of magic at her core. This time it leaped immediately to life, going from ember to blaze in a blinding flare of pale green light. She accepted the surge of energy with gratitude, letting the magic flow through her, under her skin, and down her arms until her fingertips itched like a thousand bug bites.

Then she raised her hands and let it loose.

It struck the
nocturni
in the side, catching him off guard and making him cry out not in pain, but in anger. His gaze swung toward her, but his hands remained pointed at the swirling vortex of darkened energy at the end of his stream of magic. Instead of responding to her attack he shouted something and another robed figure rushed out of the darkness toward her.

Kylie yelped and dodged, managing to put a row of chairs between her and her attacker, but it interrupted her concentration, and her hold on the casting
nocturni
broke apart. Damn it. She had to stop that portal.

Unable to see in the dark, her attacker ran right into the row of chairs and tumbled head over heels into a tangle of plastic and metal. Chairs slid and skittered across the floor, giving Kylie enough time to run to the end of the seating area and into the open outer aisle. It made her more vulnerable, but it also gave her a lot more room to maneuver.

Her gaze zipped around the room looking for Dag, finally catching sight of him at the front of the room. He and Kees seemed to be attempting to catch the Hierophant/Demon host in a pincer move, approaching the inhuman entity with wary caution. She didn’t want to distract him from an enemy she knew was a lot more powerful than the one she faced, but darn it, she could use a little help here.

Apparently, she wasn’t the only one. The initial buzz of confusion caused by the loss of light had turned into widespread panic when the magic had begun to fly. People screamed and shouted, pushing and shoving as they tried to rush toward the nearest exits. The ushers continued to block the way, erecting some kind of magic barricade that contained the audience to the center of the room. Like cattle in a pen.

She pressed herself against a concrete wall to avoid the pushing and shoving of overwrought conference attendees. It really seemed like that was something the Wardens should have planned for a little better. She’d give up any one of those defensive spells Wynn had taught her for something that would just freeze the mass of humanity in place.

And make them stop screaming. Do not forget to stop the screaming.

An odd, low popping noise reverberated from the far corner of the room. Immediately, Kylie’s gaze swung in that direction in time to see another swirling vortex of energy splinter open like a miniature star gone nova. A moment later, deformed figures sprang forth into the auditorium, long, claw-tipped arms swinging out to catch human prey, huge maws opening to show rows and rows of dripping, threatening teeth. They looked like sharks and gorillas and psychopathic dust bunnies all rolled up into one slavering, grasping bundle of evil.

And they kept coming.

She heard Ella scream, a sound of mingled pain and frustration, and knew she must be hurt in order to have allowed the portal in her quadrant to open. She needed help, but first Kylie would have to ensure her own area didn’t add to the nightmare.

Screams of panic had turned to abject terror and agony as the demonic minions began to feed. She could hear the crunching of bones and a wet, sucking, tearing sound that she didn’t even want to know the source of. Keeping her eye on the prize, she quickly found the
nocturni
she had already jolted once and began pushing through the crowd to get to him.

She could see the edges of the vortex before him begin to glow, and she knew she didn’t have much time. Raising both hands, she began casting as she ran, concentrating on forming the bubble Ella had said would trap a fellow caster and turn his own spell against him. For a moment, she thought she saw a shimmer begin, but then someone knocked into her from the side, interrupting her concentration and snapping the spell in two.