Disclaimer:
This is a work of fan fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, except as acknowledged below, is purely coincidental (or would be if there were any such thing).
The Gargoyles and Gargoyles characters are on unauthorized loan from Buena Vista/Disney. Several guest characters herein (Jeremy Lowell, Christopher Williams, and Alison Michaels) have appeared in previous fanfic pieces (blatant plug! -- "Hurt Hawks" by Cochran & Levin, "Lost And Alone" by Fay), and are glad to be visiting the Gargoyles universe again with their original authors. Christopher Williams, Jeremy Lowell, Laura, and the black-and-tan drinkers (Surgabis!), you know who you are. Brian and his cohorts, however, are all products of our own twisted imaginations, and are not intended as accurate representations of students at the various universities the characters attend. (That's so we don't get sued for slander by Columbia and/or NYU. Oops, is that a spoiler?...)
We are taking a few liberties with the NYU campus. The dorm building on West 8th Street, among other details, may or may not actually exist.
The Amsterdam Cafe is real, and can be found in New York City, on 120th and Amsterdam. The Alma Mater statue, the sundial, Butler Library, Low Library, and College Walk are all the property of Columbia University. "The Hunting Of The Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits" is by Lewis Carroll. Columbus Circle and Central Park are the property of New York City. Pete's Wicked Ale, for those of you not in the know, is the Official Ale of the Philolexian Society. "Calvin & Hobbes" is a comic strip by Bill Watterson. The Silver Chair is part of the Chronicles Of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. The Museum of Natural History and the Haydn Planetarium are also the property of New York City, and were made possible by grants from some very very rich people. "The Twilight Zone" is a television show created by Rod Serling. The Hollow Hills is a novel by Mary Stewart. Special appearance by the Worker's Local Union 2110 and Barnard College Security. No actual stone statues were harmed in the writing of this story. (And, as always, do please let us know if we've missed anyone.)
Chronology:
This story takes place during and after the events in the three-part Season 2 Finale, "Hunter's Moon." The authors have determined that said episode is set in late autumn, 1996.
Dedication, Acknowledgments, and Sundry Self-indulgent Statements:
This one is dedicated to all Gargoyles fans who live in and around the Tri-State Area. This city is definitely ready for you guys.
Apologies to Merlin the Great and Terrible, and all other crossover writers, for referring to the X-Files as just a TV show. (Keep in mind -- the speaker in that scene doesn't believe in gargoyles either, the fool.)
A tip of the wing to the rest of the Dreamer Clan [Laura, Merav, Liz, Gabe, Tirtzah], and when are we meeting next? and can Kellie come this time? Save us some M&M's.
Hi to Kellie's brother Peter, who has been given every reason to doubt his sister's sanity.
Special thanks to Hurricane Edouard for heading out to sea instead of hitting the eastern seaboard on Labor Day, thus letting us travel to meet each other for the one day of final editing we needed to complete this story.
Apologetic grins to the guard at Grant's Tomb, from the three women who were eating lunch on the stairs on Sunday, June 30; now you know what we were talking about!
[Enter RUMOUR, painted full of tongues.]
RUMOUR:
Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?..
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace, while covert enmity
Under the smile of safety wounds the world....
Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it....
-- HENRY IV, Part 2, Induction ll. 4-20 ff.
11:15 pm [Two days before Hunter's Moon]
I hate this, Alison Michaels thought to herself as her new roommate dragged her into the Amsterdam Cafe. It wasn't exactly a bar; less than half of the customers were actually indulging in drinks. It was more of a hang-out, a place where students could study and eat and take in the news of the day. The layout reminded her strongly of a bar, though...and she hated bars.
"So this is AmCaff," Rachel was saying. "My brother just started working here last week, and he says his band is probably getting a gig at one of the other places in the neighborhood by next week, maybe the West End...."
The cafe was crowded this time of night, and nobody bothered to look up at the new arrivals. The only one who noticed their presence was the dark-haired young man wiping down the bar, who bore a distinct resemblance to Alison's roommate Rachel. Seeing Rachel, he grinned and waved.
"There he is now," Rachel said, and started toward the young man. "Hi, Marcus!" she called cheerily.
"Heya, Ricky," he called back. "Who's your friend?"
Alison raised an eyebrow. "Ricky?" she said.
Rachel ignored her. "Marcus, this is Alison, my new roommate." Marcus tipped her a small jaunty salute, and moved away to help a customer who had just taken a seat at the bar.
Alison gave a small sigh of relief. "Okay, I've seen the place and I've met your brother, can we go now?"
Rachel just laughed. "Don't be silly! There's a spare table. What do you want to drink?" Still talking, she pulled Alison over to a table near the bar and plopped her down in a chair.
Alison sighed, this time in frustration. She knew that her new roommate was trying to be friendly, but she could be such a pain sometimes. The two were complete opposites, even down to their appearances. Alison was tall, with blond hair tied back in a neat ponytail, storm-gray eyes, and a simple dress. Rachel was in jeans and an Animaniacs T-shirt. She had pale brown eyes, almost golden, and raven black hair that fell around her shoulders like a mane. Alison tended to be quiet and shy. Rachel was so full of sheer exuberant energy that if you put her on a bicycle and hooked it up to a generator, she could run a small city.
Alison wished she could be back in her dorm. Or better yet, out on some rooftop with her other three friends. Her favorite pastime was sitting on her dorm roof, using their pet Bronx as a backrest, and either reading to them or listening to them read. Brooklyn in particular had a wonderful reading voice. She'd often wondered if he could sing as well as he spoke.
But as far as she knew gargoyles didn't sing.
Anyway she ordered a diet Coke, and surveyed the place more thoroughly. The decor was mostly polished wood paneling and marble tile, seats cushioned in dark red vinyl, a chrome strip running the length of the bar. The lights were designed to look like old-fashioned gas lamps. There were TV screens adding to the general noise, currently tuned to a football game. In general, it wasn't bad, though it still didn't look like anyplace she particularly wanted to be.
A noise attracted her attention. A trio of well-built, muscular young men (jocks, she thought dismissively) were sitting at the bar, talking in loud voices. Two were from NYU, her own school, the third she didn't recognize -- probably a Columbia student. The largest was telling his two companions about how a friend of a friend had come across one of the "gargoyle monsters" in Central Park.
"Said it was the biggest ugliest thing he ever saw. I mean it had fangs three inches long. It jumped the guy like a cat. I think it was trying to suffocate him with its wings."
Alison's eyes narrowed. "Stupid jerk," she said under her breath, with a bit of a growl in her voice.
"Shh," her roommate admonished her. "I wanna hear this. He's talking about those gargoyle things."
Alison listened to the guy. Very little of what he said was true about the gargoyles she knew.
"That poor guy. He was sure he was a goner!" the NYU jock kept saying.
Alison couldn't stand it any longer. "What color was he?" she asked.
Rachel looked embarrassed. "Alison!" she protested.
The guy turned and looked at her. "Huh?"
Alison raised her voice and repeated it. "What color was he? All gargoyles have fangs and most have wings, but each one has distinctive features. No two gargoyles look alike."
The three glanced at each other. The one who had been speaking was startled into answering. "Ahh, I think he said it was green."
"Did he have hair?" Alison asked just as sternly as before.
"Nnnnnno," he said, "uh, I don't think so."
Alison almost laughed. It had to be Lexington this guy saw. "Standing up, that one's half your height. What on earth was your friend afraid of?" she said challengingly. "They don't attack innocent people. I don't know what your friend was up to, but it can't have been good. He probably tied the guy up or just decided to frighten the wits out of him." When the jock didn't answer she asked. "Well, did he actually hurt the guy or didn't he?"
-----
He'd been only half listening to the conversation going on at the bar, but he was beginning to pay more attention. How did that blonde know so much about gargoyles? The questions she was asking showed that she knew a suspicious amount about them -- she'd clearly recognized the guy's description of Lexington. Could she have seen them once?
Beside him, his roommate Christopher shot a glance at him. He returned the glance, raising one eyebrow Spock-fashion, and muttered "Fascinating." Christopher rolled his eyes, then turned back to listen as the NYU guy opened his mouth to answer the blonde.
"Hey, quiet for a second!" someone said suddenly. "Hey Marky, turn that up, would you?"
Obligingly, Marcus turned up the volume on the television set, which had switched from a football game to a news broadcast.
" -- WVRN special report on the destruction of the Twenty-third Precinct House by the monsters known as...gargoyles." The image of the reporter cut to a close-up of a snarling face which was in no way human, then to a shot of five or six winged creatures leaping from a rooftop and leaving a scene of utter devastation behind them. "Urban myths no longer," the reporter's voice continued grimly, "these creatures launched a completely unprovoked assault on our city's finest...."
The blonde gasped, her horrified eyes fixed on the screen. Her lips moved soundlessly, shaping a single word, the same word that rang in his own mind: No!
Beside him, Christopher drew in a sharp breath, his hand clenched on the edge of the table, his knuckles going white.
The newscaster continued, his voice nearly drowned out by the sudden uproar in the cafe. "You see?" the NYU guy was shouting. "You see what those monsters did? What more proof do you need?"
"No!" the blonde cried out. "You don't understand!"
No one seemed to hear her in the tumult. "Gargoyles..." "...Did he say twenty-third precinct? My dad works at the twenty-third precinct!..." "What? What happened?..." "Shut up, I'm trying to hear this!..." "It's a trick -- " "They blew up the police station?!..."
Jeremy felt himself shaking with mingled fear and fury, started to rise --
A hand grabbed his wrist, tightening painfully. "Don't," Christopher said, his voice pitched for Jeremy's ears only, low and intense. "You're not going to help them this way."
"But -- "
"Don't."
He forced himself to relax, to settle into his seat, and stared fixedly at the tabletop. It couldn't be. The gargoyles -- his friends -- attacking the police station? Impossible.
"It's impossible," the blonde's anguished voice was saying, weirdly echoing his own thought. Still watching the table, he pricked up his ears and listened.
-----
The NYU jock swung around to face her. "Open your eyes! You just saw them leaving the scene of the crime! If they didn't blow up the station, who did? You know the police have been after them for months now -- they probably just decided to strike first!"
"But they aren't like that," Alison said helplessly.
"So how do you know so much about gargoyles, huh?" he demanded, leaning forward aggressively. "What makes you the expert?"
Alison swallowed. She had let her temper get the best of her again. Now she was stuck in this conversation. "Nobody ever said I was an expert," she said defensively, "But at a guess, I probably know more about them than you do. I mean, you've never even talked to them." The moment the words came out of her mouth she wished she could swallow them. It looked like Rachel's impulsiveness was rubbing off on her.
Across the room, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a sandy-haired young man look up sharply, staring intently at her.
-----
"So how do you know so much about gargoyles, huh?" one of the NYU students was saying aggressively to the blonde. "What makes you the expert?"
"Nobody ever said I was an expert," she said defensively. "But at a guess, I probably know more about them than you do. I mean, you've never even talked to them."
Jeremy looked up sharply. Talked to them?
"They talk?" The guy was looking at the blonde in frank disbelief. One of his companions smirked at the others and tapped the side of his forehead significantly. "Lady, you been drinking too much."
"Let me see if I've got this straight," Jeremy said aloud, ignoring Christopher's stare. "You'll believe that they can blow up a building, and that they deliberately chose the police station to attack...but you won't believe they can talk?"
The NYU guy turned to glare at him. Jeremy gave his best winning smile. "Just curious," he said lightly, picking up his glass.
"Good one," Christopher muttered sarcastically under his breath. "Look, you wanna just advertise to everyone here just how much we know about gargoyles? And maybe how we know it?"
"Worry wart," Jeremy muttered back.
"Look, it doesn't matter whether they talk or not," an Asian woman at another table was saying forcefully. "They're dangerous. They shouldn't be allowed to just run wild in the city like this." Without looking, Jeremy felt Christopher wince at that; it was too close to something he had said once.
-----
"Yeah," another voice agreed. "I mean, there's got to be some way of getting them off the streets and under control."
Alison had forgotten everything but her anger by now. "I don't believe I'm hearing this from college people! Since they showed up the city's been safer at night. I can walk to night classes now where I couldn't two years ago! Nobody will admit it, but ever since the gargoyle sightings started -- "
Rachel grabbed onto Alison's arm. "Allie, calm down."
Alison pulled away from her friend. "Don't call me that, Rachel!" she snapped. At the moment the nickname hurt too. Brooklyn liked to call her Allie. Alison had often wondered if it was unnatural for him to call anyone by their full name. He shortened Lexington's name more than half the time, and once he was comfortable with her Alison quickly became Allie.
Ricky stared at her, but didn't say anything.
One of the jocks cornered Alison again. "So if you know so much about them, do you know where they live?" he asked threateningly.
She glared at him. "No." And if I did know I wouldn't tell you, creep, she sneered silently. The truth was, the guys never had told her where they lived. They'd been worried about her part-time employer, Mr. Macduff -- Macbeth, she corrected herself, his name was Macbeth -- following her to their home. Apparently, he'd been their enemy once, and their relationship now was uneasy at best. All of which meant that now, when they were in trouble and might need her help again, she had no idea how to contact them.
"Maybe they just live out on the streets. Like, sleep in cardboard boxes and stuff like that," someone from a far table said.
"They live in Central Park," someone else offered, gesturing with a bread stick. "I know someone who sees them there all the time. They only come out at night though, that's why nobody's ever seen them during the day."
"So where do they sleep during the day?"
"I dunno, in trees or something. They fly, don't they?"
"No, they live in abandoned subway tunnels under the city. My boyfriend's sister saw one of them once."
"Who cares where they live? They should just get rid of them all, is what they should do."
Again Alison's temper reached the boiling point. She couldn't stand listening to this any longer. "Rachel, I'm going."
"Alison," Ricky began.
Alison cut her off. "No, you were wrong this time. I told you this was a mistake. I'll see you at the dorm."
Rachel grabbed onto her arm and swung her around so Alison was forced to look into the younger girl's eyes. "Alison, what's with you tonight? What aren't you telling me?"
Alison stared into Rachel's liquid brown eyes. Tiny flecks of gold sparkled and danced in them. Alison felt an urge to pour out her unhappiness and tell her friend everything.
She fought the compulsion down. Not here and not now. Out loud she said, "I'll tell you another time, Rachel. Right now, just let me get out of here." Alison made for the door and left the cafe just before the tears started to fall.
-----
"Who cares where they live?" someone at the bar was saying. "They should just get rid of them all, is what they should do."
"Well, if we could find them during the day, when they're asleep...."
The blonde, who had been whispering angrily to her companion, rose abruptly and started for the door. The dark-haired girl who'd been sitting with her looked miffed, but didn't follow.
Jeremy pushed his chair back and stood up. "Be right back," he told Christopher, and hurried after her.
He caught up with her on the street outside. "Wait a second!"
She barely glanced at him, then kept walking.
"Please!" He broke into a trot to keep up with her. "I heard you talking in there. About the gargoyles."
"What about it?" she snapped, still moving.
"Well, uh...." He swallowed. "You know them too, don't you." It was not quite a question. "I mean, you've met them. You've talked to them."
"Yeah, so?" she started, then stopped in her tracks and turned to face him as she realized what he had said. "Hang on. What do you mean, 'too'?"
Jeremy hesitated, wondering how much he could safely tell. "My roommate and I...met them, a couple months ago. The one you were talking about? The small one? He's my friend."
She looked at him suspiciously.
What the hell, Jeremy decided, go for broke. "His name's Lexington."
Her eyes widened in recognition, but narrowed again instantly. "That doesn't prove you're his friend."
"No, and it doesn't prove you are either, but it looks like we both know him." Jeremy offered his hand. "I'm Jeremy. Jeremy Lowell."
The blonde girl wavered for a moment, then took his hand and shook it. "Alison Michaels."
"Wanna go back in and start over?"
Alison winced at the thought. "No...I can't, not back in there. Do you want to go for a walk?"
Jeremy smiled. "Give me a moment."
-----
Ricky eyed the guy left behind. "Hey, Marcus," she said over her shoulder. "Got a minute?"
"What's up, sis?" Marcus leaned over the bar.
She tilted her chin at the young man left at the table. "You know that guy?"
"Not really." Marcus shrugged. "Columbia, I think, grad student. Doesn't come here too often."
"What about his friend, the guy who left?"
"He was in my Freshman English class last year. I think his name's Jerry, something like that. No, Jeremy. A little on the weird side, but pretty much harmless. Why?"
Ricky traced patterns in the condensation on the side of her glass. "No reason. Just curious." Curious as hell. First little miss cool-calm-and-collected is boiling mad because people are saying that the gargoyles are dangerous, then this other guy we've never seen before has almost exactly the same reaction. And then he follows her when she leaves.... She chewed absently on her straw. Something's going on here.
"Well..." Marcus turned to go. "Holler if you need anything."
"Right." Ricky watched the other guy for a few moments. Well, more than one way to skin a cat...or whatever. She took her soda and walked over to the guy's table, sliding into the spot Jeremy had vacated. "Hi," she said, smiling. "Okay if I sit here?"
-----
"...After that, I saw them about every two weeks, but I'd get notes from Lex at least once a week. He'd leave them over by my boss' house or break into my dorm room and leave them on my bed. He still won't tell me how he does that without anyone seeing him...." Alison's smile was faint and wistful, and disappeared as she continued speaking. "I was supposed to see them tomorrow. They wanted me to meet their new clan member, a female, but then -- Jeremy, I think they were living in the tower, and someone was trying to kill them."
"You think?" Jeremy said.
"You know Brooklyn?" she asked.
"We've met."
"Well, I got a good close look at the news broadcast with the gargoyles leaving the tower, and I saw him. He was carrying Lexington. I think he was hurt or something. And the big one, their leader -- he was carrying Hudson. Jeremy, something's wrong, I know it. They're in trouble."
Jeremy frowned. He had noticed the same thing during the broadcast, Lexington held limply in Brooklyn's arms as the gargoyles took flight. Another gargoyle, an older one -- Hudson, Jeremy thought -- was hurt too.
"But who..." Jeremy turned to the girl walking beside him, feeling a chill tug of night wind rush up the street. "Who could hate them...so much...that they would do something like that? I mean, I understand some people might be afraid, might not understand, but to destroy the police station just to get at them..."
They reached a corner, and they stopped, the light against them. Alison had her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket as the wind tugged at her skirt. She pulled one hand out of the jacket and pushed her hair back from her face, then turned to him with a small but heartfelt smile. "I'm just glad we ran into each other," she said. "I mean, at least your friend Christopher knew about it, he was there, you've had someone to talk to about it. I guess I can talk to Mr. Macduff sometimes, but he's not exactly approachable, if you know what I mean."
The light changed, and they stepped in unison off the curb. "What about...?" Jeremy began.
"Ricky? No." Alison shook her head. "Sometimes I feel guilty for not telling her. I think she would get it, you know? But..."
They passed the Barnard gates and fell silent for a moment, mindful of the security guard there. Jeremy stepped to one side to avoid the blue POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS barriers, the remnants of the Workers' Union 2110's daily vigil on the continuing strike. A few placards and banners flapped dispiritedly in the night wind.
"But I promised them," Alison continued. "It's not my secret to tell."
Jeremy chewed his lower lip worriedly. "After that news broadcast, I don't think they're exactly a secret any longer."
"That's what worries me."
-----
It was a statement, not a question, but Christopher had the impression she expected him to answer. He turned his head so they were face to face, then quickly looked away, his eyes going to the opposite wall.
"Your friend seemed to follow her in a hurry," she said. "Do they know each other?"
"Not as far as I know." Christopher shrugged, turning again to look at her. The dark-haired girl's eyes were brown and gold, like clear honey in a glass held up to a light.
"Do you think they're real?" Ricky said suddenly.
Christopher, who had lifted his glass, choked in mid-swallow. "What?" He began to cough.
Ricky patted him on the back. "The gargoyles. Do you think the news report's true, or is it all a big hoax?"
Christopher suddenly found the cafe awfully confining. He tensed in his chair, wondering if Ricky would follow if he bolted for the door.
"I don't know," he finally said with a shrug, reciting the answer he'd rehearsed. "Not enough evidence to say for sure either way. I guess they could be real."
He could feel her eyes on him, and had a sudden urge to blurt out the whole story. Oh, no, they're no hoax. See, last fall my roommate found one with a broken wing, the one called Lexington. I set the wing, but then I shot him with a tranquilizer dart...I think Lexington's forgiven me for that, but I'm not so sure about Brooklyn. But gargoyles, that's nothing. You should have seen the six-foot-three panther with wings that showed up with Brooklyn and Broadway... Christopher hastily gulped down the rest of his drink, perhaps to make it impossible to speak.
Ricky had her head tilted slightly to one side, her chin resting on her hand. "Would be something, wouldn't it, if they were real?"
Christopher looked at her sharply. She wasn't quite looking at him, and she hadn't sounded knowing, or ironic. Maybe a bit...wistful.
"Yeah," he said. "Something."
-----
A young woman with a strident voice was standing on the Low Library steps and using it, and a crowd of students had stopped to listen to her speech. "These creatures are terrorizing our city, and the police do nothing! The conveniently destroyed robots, the vanished evidence -- all part of a massive cover-up to keep us from knowing the truth! We've got to reclaim our city from the gargoyle menace, and if it means taking to the streets ourselves, then that's what we'll have to do!"
The crowd's responses ranged from shouts of approval to jeering laughter, but the young woman had clearly made an impression.
"And I thought the Take Back The Night rally was intimidating," Jeremy muttered to Alison.
"The what?"
"Later."
They moved on. In front of the Alma Mater statue, a small clutch of students was sitting and talking. "But, look, the point is, does anyone know how many of these gargoyles there are?" a girl was saying intently. "They could be an endangered species. We shouldn't be trying to kill them."
"Well, what are we supposed to do then? Just let them tear up the city?"
The girl frowned. "Of course not, but there's got to be a humane way of restraining them. Tranquilizer guns, maybe, and find out what their natural habitat is so we can send them back there. I wonder how they got to New York in the first place?..."
Next to the sundial on College Walk stood another group, and the two paused to listen to their conversation. "...cloves of garlic, wooden stakes, crosses -- I mean, that's for vampires. These aren't vampires."
"So, like, how would you kill one?"
The one who'd spoken first shrugged. "Shoot it, I guess. Gargoyles aren't bulletproof, are they?"
Jeremy walked faster.
"He's right, they're not bulletproof," Alison said quietly.
He nodded miserably. "I know. If their hide won't stop a tranq dart, it sure won't stop a bullet. Alison, what do we do? This whole town is about to go up in an anti-gargoyles riot!"
Alison shook her head. "I don't know if there's anything we CAN do. I don't even know where they are now, and unless one of them comes to me I've got no way to contact them -- I can't even send them a message!"
"Of course! I'm an idiot!" Jeremy said suddenly, slapping one hand to his forehead. Alison backed up a moment, clearly afraid that he had finally lost his mind, but he hurried on, the words rushing out of him and tumbling over each other. "We can't send them a message, but I know who probably can!"
Alison looked at him incredulously. "What?"
"When I first saw the guys, Lex's rookery brothers, they had a cop with them and I met him. Detective Bluestone, Matt Bluestone. He's their friend, so talking to him is safe, and he just might know where the guys are and if they're okay!" He could see understanding and sudden hope dawn on her face, matching his own excitement. "I have his number back at my apartment. I'll give him a call and let you know."
Alison dug in her pocket for a pen and a scrap of paper. "Here, let me -- " She scrawled seven digits on the paper and pressed it into Jeremy's palm, then squeezed his hand tightly for a moment. "You don't know what this means to me."
"Hey, friends of the gargoyles have to stick together, right?" Suddenly his watch beeped the hour, and he glanced down at it. "Oh man, I gotta get back to AmCaff! I have to give Christopher a lift -- that's my roommate -- he's got to get to the lab at Columbia Presbyterian to check an experiment in about fifteen minutes."
Her distaste at the idea of going back into the Cafe was evident, but she nodded. "I'll walk with you if you tell my friend in there that I'm waiting outside."
"Not a problem." The two began to walk back towards Amsterdam avenue.
-----
Jeremy unlocked the door and stepped into the dark dormitory room. Flicking on the light switch, he stepped over a shirt and some socks lying on the floor, opened the small refrigerator beside the desk, and took out a half-finished bottle of soda, noting absently that there weren't many left; he'd have to make a grocery run soon. Gulping the soda down, Jeremy settled into the swivel chair in front of his computer screen.
But distracted, he didn't turn it on.
Of all the hangouts of all the colleges of all the nights....
It had been one of those amazing twists of life, meeting Alison. He was glad that there were others out there who knew, and understood, but a part of him also felt a touch of regret at having to share that incredible secret. Oh, of course there was always Matt Bluestone and his partner Detective Maza, but that was different. They were cops -- grownups, Jeremy thought wryly. For a while, he'd thought Christopher and himself had to be the only college students anywhere to know a gargoyle personally.
He restlessly turned his chair back and forth, then stopped it, his glance falling on the dark glass of the window. It reflected his own face and the rest of the room, though he could faintly see the dark brick wall on the opposite side of the shaft. There were still some marks on the bricks; either the superintendent hadn't noticed or didn't think it was worth repairing. That had been interesting, trying to explain the broken window to the supe. But the claw marks remained, eight straight gouges on the building wall, always reminding him. He remembered, on a night almost a year ago, seeing the shards of glass on the floor, and heard again his own voice, high with shock and fury: What did you do to him?
Now it seemed as though the whole city had gone mad. The image on the TV screen, of Lexington limp in Brooklyn's arms, haunted him. Jeremy got up and began rummaging through the papers on the computer table. He knew he'd left that number around here somewhere....
Finding the correct scrap of paper, Jeremy located the phone under his astronomy notebook and dialed.
As the phone rang and rang again, the count going up to seven, Jeremy thought wildly You dolt, the station clock tower just blew up a few hours ago, they're not going to be answering the phones!
But on the tenth ring, a harried-sounding operator answered. The noise in the background made it sound like he had reached a hurricane relief center. People were shouting orders, phones were ringing, and there was a crashing noise as if someone were moving furniture. Jeremy asked for Matt Bluestone.
"Detective Bluestone is out on assignment," came the operator's voice, rising over the clamor. "Is this an emergency?"
Emergency? Oh, nooooo...it's just that some mutual friends got caught in an explosion, they're being unjustly blamed for it, and now they're on New York's Ten Most Feared list.
"Well, not exactly," he said aloud. "But it is urgent."
"You can give me your number, and I'll tell him when he checks in."
Jeremy gave it to her and hung up. Then he paced for a while, checked his E-mail, tried to read some Asimov, paced some more. Finally, in desperation, he started picking up the clothes and books on the floor, threw away the soda cans on the table, and began to wonder if there was a dustbuster in the apartment.
The phone rang half an hour later. Jeremy grabbed it halfway through the first ring. "Hello?"
"Jeremy? It's Christopher. You were supposed to pick me up about twenty minutes ago -- is something wrong?"
D'oh! Jeremy rubbed his forehead with one hand. "No, nothing's wrong. I'll be there in a few, okay?"
-----
Christopher draped his jacket over the back of the chair, opened his briefcase on the desk, and took out a small stack of papers. With a sigh, he sat down, took out his red pen, and stared at the first page. Freshman biology papers, to be graded and handed back by next Thursday. Again.
The first three papers went by in a dull, uninspired blur; the fourth had a mistake in it that made his skin crawl, and he was just beginning to consider pitching the whole thing to become a Classics major when a cheerful voice said his name for what he realized was the third time.
"Uh...Christopher?"
He looked up and summoned a smile, automatically covering the paper he was grading. "Hi, Laura," he said to the dark-haired girl who had stopped by his table -- one of the students in the Intro to Biology lab he taught. "How's it going?"
"Pretty good." She hefted her armload of heavy books with a tiny grunt. "Okay if I put these down for a moment?"
He nodded, and she thumped the books down on his desk with a sigh of relief. "Doing research?" he asked.
"Uh-huh." She restacked the books carefully, and Christopher noticed the somewhat eclectic assortment: two on evolutionary theory, one on rare animals that Nature threw up to make life difficult for biologists, one on solar physics, and one on...Christopher blinked. And one on Gothic architecture.
I don't want to know, I really don't. "On what, exactly?" he said aloud.
Laura flushed slightly. "Well, it's kind of...it's not for a paper or anything, I'm just trying to figure something out on my own."
"Oh?"
"Uh-huh." She glanced down at the cover of the topmost book. "I'm trying to determine the evolutionary origin of the gargoyles."
Christopher buried his face in one hand. "How interesting," he mumbled.
"Yeah, it's really fascinating stuff, I'm -- " She broke off. "Oh, I'm sorry, you're busy, right? I'll, I'll just...um...go now. See you Thursday?"
"Right," he said, trying to sound cheerful. "Thursday."
She waved and moved on with her stack of books, and Christopher stared down at the paper he had been grading for a long time, without seeing it.
-----
Jeremy threw open the door and made a beeline for the answering machine, not even bothering to remove his keys from the door first. The red "new message" light was blinking. One message.
He hit the button with considerably more force than necessary. "You have. One. New message. Message was received at. Twelve. Thirty-two. PM..."
"Cmon, c'mon..." Jeremy muttered savagely.
There was a beep. "Hi, Jer, it's Larry. We're gonna be running that White Wolf GURPS campaign this weekend, and I need to know if you're gonna be there. Gimme a call, okay? Bye."
Jeremy groaned aloud. For once, he couldn't have cared less about what happened to his character in the role playing game...or to the entire Games Club, for that matter.
The phone rang. Jeremy dove for the receiver and grabbed it, knocking the phone off the table so that it crashed to the floor, where it landed mercifully on a pile of clean laundry. "Hello?"
"Jeremy? It's Matt Bluestone. Is everything okay?"
"I was gonna ask you the same thing. We were hanging out at AmCaff last night, and then we saw the news broadcast, they said the gargoyles attacked the station clock tower, but we saw them, they were hurt. And then these guys at the bar started saying stuff.... Detective Bluestone, is Lex okay? And the others? What's going on?"
The detective sighed. "Wish I knew. The guys are at Elisa's. They'll be okay after a day's sleep. Look, I'm sorry it took so long for me to get back to you. We've been...kind of busy."
"But -- who bombed the clock tower?"
"I can't explain it all right now, but we think it was a group that calls themselves The Hunters."
There was a silence.
"The Hunters...." Jeremy repeated softly. He shuddered.
"Yeah," Detective Bluestone said grimly, understanding. A note of bitterness came into his voice as he added "One of them was someone Elisa thought she could trust, too. The gargoyles found her in her apartment last night, half-conscious, just coming around from some tranq he injected her with, the -- " he muttered something unflattering under his breath.
"Look, Detective Bluestone -- "
"Under the circumstances, Jeremy...call me Matt." "Matt...we want to help. All of us, me and Christopher and Alison -- "
"Alison?"
"Another friend of Lex's."
"Oh...right. That must be the girl who helped Lexington when he had amnesia; the guys told me about her. Anyway, Jeremy, I don't know exactly what you kids can do. You'd all be much safer staying as far away from this mess as you can. In fact, I'd recommend leaving town. New York is about as serene as a pressure cooker right now."
"We're not going to leave, Matt. How can you expect us to just turn our backs on them when they need help? Besides," he added lamely, "midterms are coming up next week." He'd almost forgotten. He was usually a strong student, but it all seemed so irrelevant just now.
"Easy, kid. I was just going to say that maybe, on the other hand, the gargoyles' human friends should stick together. You can keep your eyes and ears open, and if you see any trouble, or if you find out anything that could help, just call and let me know."
"You got it," said Jeremy.
"Wait -- the phone's no good, the station's a mess. But I can probably get hold of a pair of long-range communicators. I probably won't have time to meet with you directly, but I'll leave it for you at the station house, okay? Just come in sometime tomorrow and tell them who you are, and they'll give it to you."
"Okay. Listen, Matt, thanks. You won't be sorry."
"And Jeremy," Matt added, before he could hang up. "I'm doing this so you three can act as a look-out. Don't get yourselves into trouble, okay?"
"Sure thing, Matt." Jeremy glanced at the window. "Believe me, the last thing we need around here is more trouble."
-----
Alison closed her eyes and rolled over for what seemed like the hundredth time that night.
"You're not asleep either, are you?" Rachel's voice said from the opposite bed.
Alison ground her teeth. "No."
Ricky sighed audibly, and the springs in her bed creaked as she sat up to peer at the clock. "Well, it's six o'clock. We might as well get up."
With a sigh, Alison opened her eyes and looked at her roommate. "Thanks for putting up with me. I'm afraid I haven't been very good company the last few days. I've just been in a really foul mood."
"Don't sweat it," Ricky said lightly. "But it might make you feel better if you talk about what's bothering you."
There she went again. Ricky had told Alison about her father, who was a well-known psychiatrist, and she apparently took after him; she could never see someone else with a problem and not try to help solve it. As much as Alison wanted to talk about Lexington and the others to Ricky, to have one more person understand...no. Unless she could get their permission to tell, she would have to keep their secret for them, even from her roommate. "Maybe later, okay?"
The morning passed without event. Alison found herself unable to concentrate on much of anything, even her breakfast; at one point she realized she had been staring at the five or six choices of dry cereal in the cafeteria for several minutes without seeing them. She ended up having to grab a bagel instead and run for class. Since the incident at the bar two nights ago she'd been tense, keyed up, as though something ominous and threatening was building up on the horizon like storm clouds. And on the other hand, like a patch of sunlight through those clouds, was Jeremy. Meeting him had been like an omen, a portent telling her that she was not the only friend the gargoyles had in this dark time.
You know you're losing it when your internal monologues start sounding like a fantasy novel, Alison thought wryly. Yet somehow, she couldn't even summon up genuine scorn for herself.
Classes went by in a blur; even Shakespeare (they'd just started Much Ado About Nothing, one of her favorites) failed to hold her interest. The margins of her notebook filled up slowly with doodles of winged silhouettes, castle walls, and small faces with wide eyes and pointed ears, as she tried to at least appear as though she was paying attention.
She kept thinking about her conversation with Jeremy two nights ago. He'd told her how he met Lexington, and she'd told him her own story. They had laughed about how similar their initial encounters had been; more telling, in a way, was how similar their reactions to Lexington had been. Here was something they had never encountered before in their lives, and their first thought was that it was hurt and needed help; it hadn't even occurred to them to be afraid of it. How many more people would react as Christopher had, or worse? How many would persist in viewing them as monsters, to be feared and hated -- or as things, to be studied and explained -- and refuse to see them as people at all?
And why hadn't Jeremy called her yet?
Just after lunch she was supposed to do some research for Macbeth at his house. He noticed her lack of concentration right away. "Do you even see the pages you're looking at?" he asked, startling her out of her daydream.
"I'm sorry...I haven't been myself for the last few days."
Macbeth gave her a searching look. "Worried about your friends?" When she looked at him, surprised, he said, "Aye, I saw the broadcast. I think you needn't fear for them so. After a day's sleep they would have been fine. They're very hard to kill. Believe me." He paused, and looked away for a moment. "I should know."
"But why haven't they called me?" Macbeth looked out of the library window. "Most likely they forgot that you would be worried. They'll probably send you a note in a week or so, once they deal with whoever attacked them. For they'll be doing that, make no mistake; and in that case you should feel sorry for whoever was fool enough to attack them in the first place." A wry half-grin tugged at his mouth. "An angry Demona is one thing. A whole clan of gargoyles who are angry for a good reason is another thing altogether." He straightened and reached out to close the book on the table in front of her. "Now since you can't keep your mind on your work, you might as well go home. We can do this again next week."
Alison thanked her boss and left the gothic-style mansion behind her. Since she didn't seem to be able to concentrate on anything today, she decided to take a walk. Better call Ricky in case she starts wondering where I am....
Alison wondered what silly way Ricky would answer the phone this time. After three rings she heard Ricky's voice say, "It's your quarter, shoot."
"Hi Ricky."
"Allie? Where were you? I called your boss a few minutes ago and he said you left early."
"I know, that's why I'm calling now. I'll be home later tonight."
"In that case, do you want that cute Columbia guy's phone number? He called before and said he had some of that information you wanted. He wanted to meet you by Columbus Circle, and I told him you'd call him back."
Information?... The guys! "Yeah Ricky, give me his number!"
Ricky sounded amused at her eagerness. "Okay, okay. Uh, it's eight-five-three something. Hang on." She rattled off the rest of the number.
Alison scribbled it down on a scrap of paper. "Thanks, Ricky, you're a doll." With that Alison hung up the phone and fished out a second quarter to call Jeremy.
-----
First Alison, the other night at AmCaff; then that guy Christopher, the same night; and now Alison again. Usually people told her everything without her even having to ask questions. And these two (three, if she counted Jeremy) were almost forcing themselves not to talk to her; it was something of a new experience for her. They wanted to talk -- she could tell that much -- but they weren't, for some reason.
She glanced down at the scrap of paper in her hand, with Jeremy's message scrawled on it. Columbus Circle, huh? Wonder what would happen if I showed up there myself? A slow, mischievous smile spread over her face. Well, only one way to find out.
Ricky grabbed her denim jacket and was out the door.
-----
"You don't have to be here, Chris," Jeremy said to Christopher as they emerged from the subway station. He was glad that Alison had returned the call, and she seemed very eager to see him. To his surprise, Christopher had volunteered to come along. Jeremy had a feeling that it stemmed from some of the guilt he still felt from when he'd shot Lexington with the tranquilizer. Ever since, he'd felt a twinge of responsibility for the undersized gargoyle.
Christopher picked up a paper from the newsstand on the corner, and showed Jeremy the third page. A picture of Goliath and the headline "IS THIS REAL?" was spread out on it. "As long as the papers are running this, yes I do," he said. "And don't call me Chris."
Jeremy sighed, and paid for a bottle of juice from the newsstand. As he opened it and took a swig, Christopher glanced through the paper and blew air out from between his teeth with a hiss. It was a sure sign he was unhappy with what he was reading. "I am never going to trust the media again. No matter what," he said.
Jeremy leaned over his shoulder to read.
"It's that bad, isn't it," said Alison's voice from behind him.
He jumped, spilling a few drops of juice onto the newspaper. "Don't do that," he said, turning to her. "Hi, Alison."
"Jeremy, what did you hear?"
"They're okay. All of them are okay. Matt told me that they were at a friend's house."
"Matt?"
"Matt Bluestone -- the detective I told you about, their friend? His partner is their friend too, and they're at her place. They're okay."
Alison breathed a sigh of relief. "I can't tell you how good it is to hear that. I was so worried about them. Do you know where the place is that they're staying?"
Jeremy shook his head. "No, I don't even know his partner, let alone where she lives. At least we know they're all right." He took a closer look at Alison, whose face was pale and slightly hollow. "You look like you haven't eaten all day."
Alison gave a small, wan half-smile. "To tell you the truth, except for a half a bagel this morning I haven't. No wonder I couldn't do anything today, I'm operating on an empty tank."
Jeremy grinned. "We can fix that. How about I buy you dinner? I know this really great place up on Columbus Avenue and eighty-first."
"Can we walk?"
It was still a nice evening, cool but not cold. "If you like," he said. "Christopher?"
Christopher shrugged, with a smile. "Sure, why not. Central Park West's the quickest way up there, if you're talking about that Thai place."
They were about to leave when they heard a pair of voices by the entrance to the park. One of them, a petulant female voice, was loud enough for her words to be overheard clearly.
"Brendan, can't we just take a cab? It's getting dark. If we take the shortcut through the park we might run into those monsters again." They turned to look, and saw the speaker, a blond woman in a green pantsuit and a matching headband, facing a harried-looking man with brown hair.
Alison's face grew hard as it had in the cafe two nights ago. "You wouldn't happen to be talking about the gargoyles, would you?" she said, loud enough to be heard.
"Here we go again," muttered Jeremy.
The woman turned to her. "You've seen those things? Aren't they dreadful?"
The look in Alison's eyes grew dangerous. Jeremy and Christopher exchanged glances, then backed up and gave her some room.
Alison took a step forward with each phrase, her voice rising slowly. "Yes I have seen them, and no they are not dreadful, and they're not monsters, and I'm sick and tired of people talking about them like they're terrorists or something! The city's been so much safer since they came -- "
"Are you insane?" The woman's face was twisted with loathing. "How can you defend those -- those creatures?"
Christopher's eyes narrowed, and he stepped forward to stand beside Alison. "What was that word? Let's hear it again, please."
"Creatures," the man repeated belligerently, louder. "And what else would you call them? They're not human -- "
"Creatures. No, that seems to be appropriate." His voice was coldly polite, controlled. "Perhaps more so than you know. Do you know the derivation of the word, sir?"
"Huh?"
"The word 'creature.' Comes from the word 'create,' originally. Means 'creation,' or 'that which has been created.' Really ought to be pronounced 'cre-ay-ture,' like that," Christopher said, still with that icy control. "Now tell me, sir: don't you think that maybe, just maybe, whatever created them -- " he slapped the newspaper with the back of his hand, indicating the gargoyles -- "is the same thing that created us?"
The couple stared at him. So did Jeremy, but for a completely different reason. In all the time he'd known Christopher -- going on three years, now -- he had never heard him speak about religion except in an academic context. So far as he knew, Christopher wasn't religious at all...but to hear him speaking now, one would never have known it.
"Think about it," Christopher continued, the cold civility in his tone giving way to an equally cold anger. "Look at them. And look at yourselves. Do you honestly think that this race, with all its imperfections and weaknesses, is the best that the Creator could do?"
"They're not human," the woman said weakly.
"Ma'am, there are times when it seems to me that it would be a source of personal pride not to be human," Christopher snapped, and turned his back on the two. "I've had enough," he said to Jeremy in a low voice. "Let's get out of here before I say something I'll regret."
Before they could take two steps the three heard applause on their left side. They turned to see Ricky leaning against one of the trees lining Central Park West, clapping. On her face was a smile recognizable as an appreciation of wit.
"Very good," she said wryly, making a small salute to Christopher. "Are you an English or Philosophy major?"
Christopher started to speak, stopped, and started again. "Ah... um... well...actually I'm Pre-Med."
"You too? So am I, but I'm also Pre-Psych. My dad's a psychiatrist and he thinks I'll be good at it too. I like helping people, and people like to talk to me anyway." She took Christopher's arm with a total lack of self-consciousness. "Did I hear you guys say you're going to that Thai place on eighty-first and Columbus?"
Alison let out a sigh composed of equal parts weariness and amusement. "Yeah. Wanna come with?"
Jeremy knew that Rachel was Alison's friend, but as far as both of them were concerned, she was in the category of doesn't-know-the-guys. "Uh...is it safe to talk with her around?" he whispered to Alison.
Alison smiled dryly. "Good luck getting her to leave," she whispered back.
"You were great back there," Ricky was saying to Christopher. "'A source of personal pride not to be human...' That sounds so familiar. Who's it by?"
Christopher flushed slightly. "Hobbes."
"Thomas Hobbes? The philosopher? I thought you said you weren't a Philosophy major."
He flushed darker, and avoided her eyes. "Um...no. Hobbes the tiger. From the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes?"
Ricky's delighted laugh rang out above the street.
-----
The last dim purples of the sunset were fading when they finally made it to 81st street. Halfway past the white stone steps heading up to the Museum of Natural History, Alison raised a hand and stopped walking. "Wait a minute -- do you hear that?"
The only thing Jeremy could hear was a conversation a short distance away, coming from the far side of the museum steps. A burst of male laughter rippled through the cool evening air towards them.
"I know one of those voices," Alison said coldly. She started to move toward the museum steps. Jeremy, Christopher, and Ricky glanced at each other and followed. Jeremy swallowed a curse at what they found.
There were six of them, four Jeremy recognized from the argument at the Amsterdam Cafe, sitting on the front steps of the museum laughing and drinking beer. The banners announcing the current exhibitions were backlit eerily by the floodlights. The rest of the museum was dark.
One of the guys from the cafe stood up and raised his beer bottle in a toast to the rooftop. "Hey, they could be up there right now. Who knows?"
"Sure, Brian," laughed another. "And if one landed in front of you right now, you'd pass out on the spot."
Alison, Jeremy, Christopher and Ricky stopped to listen, keeping back behind the huge equestrian statue of Roosevelt. One of the banners above them was advertising a new Sky Show at the Haydn Planetarium. It made Jeremy think of Lexington, about the small gargoyle's awe of moon, stars, and galaxies. He'd meant to take Lex there someday, but hadn't figured out how yet.
The one named Brian turned back to his friends. "And you wouldn't?"
His friend grinned up at him from the steps. "Naaah."
"Guys, this is dumb," said one, sitting back with his elbows leaning on the step behind him. "They're not real. You've been watching too much of the X-Files."
Brian turned to scan the rooftops speculatively. In that area there were a few medium-sized pre-war apartment buildings, and street after street of old brownstones. The conical towers of the older part of the museum rose against the night sky, as if waiting for something to glide down and perch on it.
"Care to place a little bet on that, Kevin?"
Kevin sat up, setting his beer bottle down beside him on the steps. "What are you talking about?"
"Fifty dollars says I can prove to you that they're real."
"Uh-oh," Jeremy breathed.
Kevin shrugged, grinning again. "Sure, if you want to blow that much on a myth, I'm game."
"A gargoyle hunt, huh?" one of the others said with a chuckle. "Well, that's something different."
"I've got a baaad feeling about this," muttered Christopher.
The six of them stood up and went down the steps to the sidewalk, arguing about where the gargoyles might live, how big they were, what they ate. They didn't notice the four other college students standing in the shadows behind the larger-than-life statue of the horse and rider.
"So where do we start looking?"
"Downtown."
"Yeah, on really tall buildings."
"No, I think they live in the subway system...."
"Maybe we should bring some kind of weapons, a baseball bat or a net or something."
"A net?" Someone snorted loudly.
"...or in the sewers...."
"No, stupid, that's Ninja Turtles."
The group started moving down Central Park West. Jeremy looked at his companions. "You don't think they could actually...."
Christopher shook his head uneasily. "I don't think so. I mean, this is a big city, think of the odds."
Alison bit her lower lip. "Maybe we should follow them. What if they did...find something? Or even -- " She suddenly seemed to remember Ricky and trailed off, glancing over her shoulder at her roommate.
Ricky was looking at them with her head tilted to one side, fixing them with a curious golden-brown stare, her dark hair falling over one shoulder. With the glow of a streetlight behind her, edging her in shadow, there seemed to be something almost ethereal about her, something otherworldly.
Then her mouth twitched as if she were trying not to laugh, breaking the image. "Don't look at me like that." She let out an exasperated puff of air between her lips, blowing a strand of dark hair out of her face. "You people are transparent as amber, you know that? Look, just follow my lead, okay? If they want a hunt, we'll give them one. A Snark hunt."
She walked confidently past them and headed for the other group of college students. After a moment, the other three hurried after her.
Ricky stepped up behind a straggling member of the group and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned. "Yeah?"
She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb at Alison, Jeremy, and Christopher clustered behind her. "My friends and I couldn't help but overhear your conversation."
The rest of the gang had stopped and turned, listening with expressions ranging from annoyed to skeptical to curious.
"If you're hunting gargoyles," Ricky continued, and reached back without warning to grab Jeremy by the arm and pull him forward, "my friend here might know something."
Jeremy nervously straightened his glasses. "Uh, hi."
"You know something about gargoyles?"
"You bet he does," Ricky said confidently. "You know how all the stories you hear happened to someone's cousin's boyfriend's brother? Well, here's a guy who's actually seen them with his own two eyes." Her fingers dug into his arm, silently signaling him to play along.
An inspiration born of panic came to Jeremy as he realized what Ricky was doing. Snark hunt, huh? "Yeah...." he said slowly. "I was in the park a few weeks ago, one afternoon, and I saw them." He didn't have time to make up his lies in advance, and had said "afternoon" on impulse, but it was probably a good idea, he decided; might as well confuse things as much as possible.
"I saw them too, I was there," Alison put in, stepping up beside Jeremy in an uncharacteristically bold gesture. "Let's see, they were perched on the rocks on the shore of the lake...by the waterfall...you know, where no one ever goes because it's too steep?"
"Come on, we'll show you," Jeremy said, gesturing toward the park.
Jeremy and Alison found themselves thrust into the lead amid shouts of approval. The group crossed the street and made their way into the park.
"We've got to go south from here," Jeremy said, turning to go into the darkness beneath an arched bridge. For a moment he wished he'd brought a flashlight. Oh well, at least in a large group there wasn't much chance of getting mugged or attacked.
An occasional black lamp-post lit the park, circles of light beyond the trees. Everything seemed very quiet, except for the rustle of the wind. Jeremy felt his heart pounding hard in his chest as he and Alison walked at the head of the group. A spot right between his shoulders felt prickly, as if he were on stage and any tiny mistake he made would be amplified. Matt's warning about staying out of trouble came back to him, but he shrugged it off. How much trouble could they get into, just leading a bunch of other New York City college students off on a Snark hunt?
The phrase made him grin in the darkness. It had been some time since he'd read Lewis Carroll, but he still remembered "The Hunting Of The Snark" and its ill-fated ending. The term was so much more satisfying somehow than "wild goose-chase."
The path started to climb as they moved deeper into the park. Ricky and Christopher moved up to keep pace with Jeremy and Alison, and behind them they could hear the others whooping it up.
"Jeremy, are you sure this is a good idea?" Christopher hissed.
Behind them, they heard a voice say "D'you think we could kill them if we stabbed them with a wooden stake?"
"No, that's vampires, you idiot."
"You want them anywhere near someplace where Lex and the others might actually be?" Jeremy shrugged deeper into his jeans jacket.
They reached one of the transverses, and Jeremy stopped to climb over the wooden railing. On the other side of the road was a dark mass of dense undergrowth, and beyond it, the gleaming surface of the lake.
"It was near the top of the waterfall, over this way," Jeremy called out, turning to follow the line of the shore.
To reach the spot, they had to leave all regular trails and push their way through the tangled brush on the shoreline, clambering over increasingly rocky ground. Alison reached up and disentangled a branch from her light hair. "If I'd known I'd be going on a hike, I'd have worn jeans," she muttered. Christopher trailed just behind them with Ricky close beside him, then Brian and Kevin and the others.
"Ow!" Brian let out a curse. "Hey, Spectacles, how much further is it?"
"Not far," Jeremy called back, then swallowed. It began to occur to him that this wasn't as good an idea as it had seemed. There were enough lamp-posts in the park that the woods weren't pitch black, but it was still hard to see without a flashlight. He turned to look through the trees, trying to see some fragment of the city, and caught a glimpse of a few apartment buildings.
Over an hour had passed by the time Jeremy felt solid stone under his feet, and emerged from the trees onto the top of a massive rock formation, open to the sky. A few yards ahead was the stream that tumbled down in a waterfall about twenty feet or higher. Below them, the water of the lake spread glimmering to the opposite shore, the full hunter's moon overhead reflecting golden off the rippling surface. A cold fall wind touched his face as Alison stepped out beside him. She turned to look south, and Jeremy followed her gaze. Even this far away, they could still see Castle Wyvern, surrounded by a haze of light at the top of the Xanatos Enterprises building, towering above anything else in the city.
"So, where are they?" a loud voice demanded behind them. Brian had his arms folded expectantly, while his cronies gathered around him, Christopher and Ricky beside them.
Jeremy made a show of looking around carefully. "I dunno...this all looks different at night. Maybe it was further down shore. No, I think it was here. We've got to look around for signs of them, that's all -- "
"Look, Specs, there's nothing here but bare rock."
"Then it was probably further down shore. Yeah, I think it was, because we were right near the cove...." Jeremy started to step back into the trees.
Brian reached out and stopped him, putting his hand flat on Jeremy's chest. He stared hard at the shorter boy for a moment. "Wait a sec. You look familiar."
Kevin turned to look hard at Alison, then let out a short laugh of surprise. "It's the guy from AmCaff the other night. And the 'gargoyle-girl.'"
A laugh rippled through the other four.
"No, I think you must have us confused with someone else," said Alison with a weak smile. "Anyway, I'm sorry we led you all this way for nothing. I guess we just don't remember very well, we were kinda distracted...."
"What's say we call it a night?" Jeremy said, forcing himself to sound cheerful, stepping back from Brian's palm.
"Yeah, Brian," Kevin said, tossing aside his empty beer bottle. "This is a waste. Forget the bet, okay?"
"She seemed awfully upset with us the other night," Brian said, dark suspicion in his tone. He turned to fix Alison with a glare. "You know something about those freaks?"
Anger flickered across Alison's gentle features, and she opened her mouth to protest -- then clearly thought better of it. "We don't know any more than you do," she shrugged.
"Now why don't I believe you?" Brian's hand shot out and grabbed Alison's arm, jerking her towards him.
"Hey!" Jeremy reached out to help Alison pry Brian's fingers from her arm, as Christopher and Ricky moved forward.
"Listen, big mouth," Ricky said, hands on her hips, her eyes glinting dangerously. "Why don't you try and use the brains that got you into college and just back off? What's the big deal?"
"Yeah, cool it, Brian, huh?" Kevin touched his friend's shoulder, but Brian shook him off roughly.
"They just led us around by the nose," one of the others, a tall wiry-looking guy, called out accusingly. "They don't know anything about gargoyles."
"I dunno, Mitch," Brian said slowly, without taking his eyes off Jeremy. "I think maybe they know more than they're telling us."
Pushing Kevin aside, the other four stepped forward to stand behind Brian. Ricky continued to glare at them, and as Alison and Jeremy retreated a few paces, further out onto the rock, Christopher reached out and pulled her back. "Uh, guys," he said in a strangled-sounding whisper, "I think the Snark is a Boojum."
"Paul?" Brian exchanged a look with the guy on his right, a short, broadly built boy with shaggy brown hair. Without warning, the shorter one moved forward with an athlete's speed and grabbed Jeremy's arms, wrenching them both behind his back.
Christopher leapt at the shaggy-haired guy holding Jeremy, but another of Brian's gang -- the one he'd called Mitch -- tackled him, pinning him to the surface of the rock.
Paul had forced Jeremy to his knees. Brian reached down and took hold of a handful of Jeremy's hair, jerking his head back. "Okay, smart guy, what do you know about gargoyles that you're not telling us?"
"Let go of him, you jerk!" Alison shouted. She tugged at Paul's arm, but he simply shrugged her off, and Alison sat down hard on the rock. She winced, and he snickered.
Mitch had Christopher pinned to the rock and was kneeling on his chest. Christopher gasped for breath, trying to push him off, but the other guy was a lot heavier.
Ricky's eyes had narrowed with fury, and the gold in them seemed almost to glow. She planted her foot on Mitch's shoulder and shoved, hard. He tumbled aside, freeing Christopher, who lay there gasping for a moment.
Mitch scrambled to his feet, turning angrily on the dark-haired girl. She stepped back quickly to avoid him --
But she hadn't realized how close to the edge of the rock she was. Her rubber-soled shoes gripped the stone for a split second, then skidded, and Ricky slid down the side of the rock, frantically trying to get a handhold on its rough surface.
"RICKY!" Christopher threw himself flat on his stomach above her, and gripped her wrists in his hands while she scrabbled for a toehold. With one last pull, she was back on the flat top of the rock, gasping as she tried to catch her breath, lying on her side with Christopher crouched next to her. Regaining her composure, Ricky started to push herself to her feet, but Christopher took her hands and helped her up whether she needed it or not.
For a moment they stood face to face. Ricky gave him a slow, deep smile that echoed in her eyes, and for a moment Christopher forgot his own name.
A cry from Alison brought both of them back, and they turned simultaneously as Brian pulled Jeremy from Paul's grasp and twisted his arm sharply up behind his back. Jeremy gasped with the pain but didn't make any other sound.
"Brian, what are you -- "
"Shut up, Kevin. They played us for fools. Soaked us, you might say. So I say we soak them."
Paul snickered. "Works for me."
Christopher moved forward, his eyes on Jeremy's face, but Mitch stepped into his way, long arms folded across his chest. "What are you talking about?" Christopher demanded.
Brian pushed Jeremy closer to the edge of the rock, one hand on the shorter boy's shoulder, one twisting his arm. "Anyone in the mood for a midnight swim?"
"Wait a second!" Christopher's voice rose in outrage. "That's got to be a thirty-foot drop! And it's cold, that water's probably just above freezing!"
Paul grabbed Alison around the waist from behind, and tried to move her forward while Jeremy struggled in Brian's grasp.
"Let -- me -- go!" Alison grated between clenched teeth.
He didn't, naturally.
"All right," Alison snapped, suddenly furious. "That's IT!" So quickly that none of them quite realized what was happening, Alison curled her right hand into a fist, drew it back, and landed a punch squarely on Paul's nose. He dropped her and staggered back, landing with a crunch in a thorn bush.
"All right ALLIE!" Ricky shouted gleefully, pumping one fist in the air.
Jeremy hooked his ankle around Brian's and pulled, throwing his weight backward so that they would fall onto the rock and not over the edge. They fell together in a tangle of arms and legs, and Jeremy twisted out of Brian's grasp. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed Alison's left hand as she stood shaking her right hand in pain, and yelled "RUN!"
The four of them plunged into the trees, followed closely by the sound of crashing underbrush and one clogged-sounding voice howling " -- my FACE, she hurt my FACE, I think my freaking NOSE is broken -- "
"One of these days, Jeremy," Christopher panted as they flew through the trees toward the path. "One of these days, you're going to listen to me when I try and tell you something's a bad idea!" If we live that long, he thought, but didn't say it aloud.
They ran.
-----
Outside the shattered west portal of the cathedral, Matt Bluestone stood with his hands jammed into the pockets of his trench coat, standing in the middle of, yet somehow apart from, the surrounding chaos. Police cars with their red lights flashing, swat teams with deadly-looking assault rifles, police barriers to hold back a crowd growing progressively more unsettled. The cathedral rose still majestic behind the chain-link fence, its remaining stained-glass windows dark, reflecting the rotating red lights. A full moon hovered over the cathedral's towers, tinted a deep golden -- hunter's moon, Matt thought, and shivered -- and a cold fall wind swirled through the night.
Somewhere inside the cathedral were the gargoyles. Outside were a great many New Yorkers prepared to shoot them on sight. Matt strained to see any sign of movement beyond the stained glass, anything to let him know what was going on inside.
The whole thing was rapidly becoming a surreal nightmare. It was as if all of his and Elisa's fears for the gargoyles had become reality, all in one night. And Elisa was still missing, on top of everything else. Matt huddled deeper into his coat. Life had been so much simpler when all he had to worry about was tracking down The Illuminati.
The crowd, still worked up over the sight of Lexington and Brooklyn entering the cathedral earlier, began to shout indignantly, demanding answers, demanding action. Matt caught the word "monsters."
Morgan came over to him, casting an anxious look at the cathedral. "It's your call, Detective Bluestone. But if we don't do something soon, we're going to have a riot on our hands."
"I know, I know," Matt answered impatiently, wishing fervently for an answer.
An ambulance pulled up, siren wailing, and screeched to a halt. The back doors opened, and Elisa climbed out.
Followed by Jason Canmore, in body armor.
Matt lunged at Jason, but Elisa stepped between them. "Hang on, Matt. It's all right. He saved my life. He wants to help."
Matt looked at his partner. She looked pale and exhausted, and her clothes and hair had a bedraggled look to them, as if they had been recently very damp and then had dried. He wondered why she had arrived via ambulance -- then decided he was better off not knowing. When Matt hesitated, sending a skeptical look at Jason, Elisa reached out and touched his shoulder lightly. "Trust me."
When Elisa Maza asked Matt Bluestone to trust her, he listened.
"All right," he said. "You two had better get in there. I don't know how much longer I can hold off the unsettled masses." Elisa darted away in the direction of the gate leading through the chain-link fence. As Jason turned to follow her, Matt reached out and grabbed his arm in a pinning grip.
"Anything happens to her -- or to any of the gargoyles -- and I'm holding you responsible, Canmore."
Jason nodded, and as Matt let him go, he ran off after Elisa. Matt itched to follow -- but he could help them best from out here.
The time seemed to drag. His mind went to Jeremy and Alison, to the patent concern in Jeremy's voice when he had asked about Lexington and the others. Along with Christopher, that made three more on their side. Jeremy had come to the station earlier that day to pick up the commlink, but he hadn't checked in for a while -- he hoped the kid hadn't gone and done something foolish.
An explosion sounded from within the cathedral, and the apse lit up with a momentary blaze. Behind him, a gasp rippled through the crowd. The tension of the fall night cranked up several notches. As Matt took an automatic step forward, towards the source of the explosion, he heard the sharp, quick sound of a laser blast.
Elisa, what's going on in there? he wondered. He had an awful vision of the task force moving in, of himself searching through the devastated cathedral, looking and hoping not to find bodies both human and non...of seeing a crumpled wing beneath the rubble...
A scream like the cry of a panther ripped through the night. Matt looked up, and saw an unfamiliar gargoyle take flight from the cathedral roof. From that distance, he had just a glimpse of wild red hair, some sort of tunic, and a feminine shape beneath the wings. A moment later, the rest of the gargoyles emerged one by one on the sloping cathedral roof, teetering a bit as the wind tugged at their wings. He couldn't see Elisa anywhere among them.
"It's now or never, detective," Morgan said, with an uneasy glance at the murmuring, shifting crowd. They had spotted the gargoyles and were pointing and exclaiming angrily. A swat team member nearby cocked his rifle nervously.
"All right," Matt said reluctantly. Elisa, where are you? He was getting tired of asking himself that question. "Signal the choppers." His glance went to the shattered portal of the cathedral. "We're going in. But I want them alive!" He could only hope that his orders would stand, that the task forces wouldn't get trigger-happy.
A rhythmic, steady pounding filled the night as the NYPD choppers approached the cathedral, searchlights blazing. A light caught the gargoyles clustered on the roof and they flinched away, shielding their eyes from the light. Matt felt his heart jump into his throat.
"STOP WHERE YOU ARE," a voice bellowed over a bullhorn.
There was nowhere for Goliath and his clan to go. If they took flight, the chopper would shoot them down and ask questions later, orders or no orders. A cop's first duty was to protect and serve. The officers in that chopper, Matt knew, viewed the gargoyles as a threat to the citizens of New York. It didn't matter what the truth was. Unable to tear his eyes from the roof, Matt hoped for a miracle.
And one came, in a most unexpected guise.
Rising up from the other side of the sloping roof of the nave came a second chopper. It was black with red trim, and had a big red "X" running along its side. Matt let out a muttered curse of astonishment.
With the lights blazing from both the NYPD chopper and the newcomer, it was difficult to make out exactly what was going on up there. Except it looked very much as if David Xanatos was offering the gargoyles a means of escape.
The NYPD chopper fired several times, tearing holes in the cathedral roof. Matt saw Goliath and the others dart forward and climb into Xanatos' helicopter. The sleek black flying machine rose from its hovering position over the roof and turned in mid-air, ready to take flight.
On the ground near Matt, the swat team raised their guns, aiming at the chopper, intending to bring it down.
"Hold your fire!" Matt yelled. He ran in front of the swat team. A few of them, surprised, twitched their aims aside so they wouldn't hit him. "That's an order," Matt commanded, and the swat team lowered their weapons.
He looked up, and saw the Xanatos chopper flying swiftly away to safety, headed towards the Aerie building. The irony of it struck Matt all of a sudden. Xanatos had been trying to hoodwink the city for so long into believing he was an upstanding citizen, just so he could continue to carry out his double-dealings without suspicion. Now the people of the city would view him as an enemy, the rescuer of the hated monsters -- yet David Xanatos had just done the city the greatest favor he could ever do for it. The greatest favor he could ever do Elisa, Matt, or the gargoyles.
Turning to watch the ground-level of the cathedral, Matt held his breath. Why hadn't Elisa come out yet? He was about to go in after her when she emerged. Elisa and a blond woman in body armor were carrying Jason Canmore by his arms and legs. He was unconscious.
Matt signaled the EMS workers in the ambulance, and they scrambled to pull out a gurney. Elisa and the blond woman deposited Jason gently onto it. Then the blond woman climbed into the ambulance with them. There was an oddly sad expression on Elisa's face as the ambulance pulled away.
"You okay?" Matt asked.
Elisa nodded absently, and he saw her glance go to the roof of the cathedral. Her brows knit in concern and bewilderment. "Where are they?"
"You're not going to believe this..." Matt began.
"Matt, WHERE ARE THEY?"
"Xanatos's chopper just showed up and saved them."
"I don't believe it." Elisa had the look of one who has just stepped into the Twilight Zone.
"Yeah," Matt said. "I had a hard time believing it myself. And I saw it with my own eyes."
The communicator in his coat pocket suddenly crackled into life.
"Matt?" It was Jeremy's voice.
Matt pulled it out, ignoring Elisa's astonished look. "Jeremy?"
"Uh...Matt? You busy right now?" Jeremy's voice was breathless, as if he had been running.
"Kind of...why?"
"We're in Central Park, me and Christopher, Alison's with us...um, and her roommate Ricky. We tried to lead some other college kids on a wild goose chase, but they caught on and now they're pretty mad...I think they want to throw us in the lake."
"You...what?" Matt shook his head as if to clear it. "Never mind. Where in the park?" he added sharply.
"Behind Belvedere Castle...the Shakespeare Garden at the moment..."
"Hold on, kid, we'll be right there. Keep in touch."
Matt turned and bolted for Elisa's car. Behind him, he heard her footsteps, following.
"Morgan," Matt yelled, and the beat cop's head swiveled around. "Alert the Central Park patrol, code one, Belvedere Castle. And hurry!"
"Right, detective." Morgan ran off to a squad car to rally the cavalry.
"Jeremy...Lex's friend?" Elisa said as she scrambled into the passenger seat of her car. For once, she made no protests about letting him drive.
Matt pulled away from the cathedral and drove across town at a speed no sane New Yorker would entertain under normal circumstances. He nodded, pulling out the red alert light and placing it on the roof as they hared along. "Alison's with him, along with Christopher and some girl named Ricky."
"Sounds like Lex has quite a fan club," Elisa said.
That young gargoyle, through no fault of his own, had given them all quite a bit of trouble during Elisa and Goliath's absence. "Yeah," Matt said, turning onto Fifth Avenue. "If Brooklyn's hair hadn't already been white I think it would have turned white after Lex turned up missing not once, but twice." He chuckled. "He seems to have pretty good luck with the people he runs into, though."
The Plaza Hotel appeared on their left, and Elisa grabbed the dashboard as Matt turned the car sharply into the park. "Do you think they're okay?" she asked, as they sped north under the trees.
Matt knew she was referring to Jeremy and the other kids, not to the gargoyles. "Hope so," he said. "I mean, it's just college kids, out for a bit of fun, but..."
"Yeah," Elisa finished grimly. "I know. Just drive, will you?"
-----
"Do you think we lost them?" Jeremy bent over to rest his hands on his knees as he gasped for breath.
All four of them had stopped under a small grove of trees. Christopher leaned against the trunk of a pine tree, while Ricky and Alison bent over like Jeremy. They had come at a dead run almost the entire way from the waterfall.
Around them the park was dark and shadowy, lit by the occasional sudden brightness of a street lamp, hazy through the trees. In the middle of the night, the park did look different, transformed from the familiar green and friendly urban playground into a twilight part-concrete/part-forest world. Jeremy saw a slender, pseudo-Victorian lamp post glowing on a grassy, open slope below the grove. Irresistibly, it made him think of Lantern Waste. It also brought back a few unpleasant memories from elementary school, of being chased like this, like the two kids in The Silver Chair, and knowing he wasn't big enough or strong enough to win if he were caught, no matter how hard he fought. He used to wish he could escape from the bullies through a magic door the way Jill and Scrubb had.
Yeah, like now would be nice.
Voices and the sound of footsteps came from beyond the rise of the path that ran a few yards from the grove.
"Guess not," Jeremy said sourly, and they all began running again, headed north.
"Maybe it's not even them," Alison said hopefully, keeping pace with him. Her ponytail was coming loose, strands of hair falling into her eyes before she roughly brushed them back as she ran.
"You want to stick around and find out?" Christopher said, passing them at a good clip.
In a spurt of adrenaline-produced energy, the four pushed off the path and through the low-hanging tree-branches, emerging onto the East Drive. Jeremy and Alison glanced back and saw six figures about a hundred yards down the drive, gaining.
Above them, ahead and to the left, Jeremy saw Cleopatra's Needle rising to touch the night sky. He darted ahead of the others and left the road, finding the footpath he knew was there. It had been created by years of feet taking a shortcut, a muddy dirt path leading up the steep bank, under an overhang of trees to the Needle.
"Up here!" Jeremy yelled, turning back to make sure the others saw him. Alison turned off the road and followed him up the steep path. Ricky and Christopher were just behind them. As Alison brushed past the small tree, she accidentally let the branches snap back, provoking an outcry from the other two.
"Sorry," Alison hissed, as they emerged on the deserted path by the needle. The ancient obelisk was an eerie, almost awesome sight in the half-light, but they had no time to stop and be properly awed.
The four took the steps leading down to the intersecting path in two bounds, brushing under the pine trees into the darkness below.
Ahead of them, the darkness lightened with a clearing of the trees, and Jeremy recognized the vast open space of the Great Lawn. But the ground was torn up from the refurbishing. The piles of boulders stacked under the moonlight made the field look like the aftermath of some terrible battle. A chain-link fence rose on either side of the path leading between the lawn and Turtle Pond, and above the pond rose Belvedere Castle, lit by three street lights that threw the stone walls into stark light and shadow.
Jeremy started down the path between the pond and the lawn, but Christopher yanked him back. "Don't -- if we're caught there, we'll be trapped."
"Come on," Ricky whisper-shouted, trying to keep her voice down so they wouldn't be heard. She darted onto the intersecting path, headed uphill.
Almost as one movement, the other three followed, trailing Ricky. They ran under the bronze statue of King Jagiello of Poland, astride his horse with his two crossed swords upraised, and followed the path as it curved around, heading up through the woods to Belvedere Castle.
At the top of the hill, with the drained pond far below behind another chain-link fence, the path ended. Steps cut out of the bedrock itself led up to the castle terrace. They had no idea whether or not they were still being followed as they ran across the flagstones. From this height, they could see the rippling canopy of the park and the glittering lights of the city spread out for miles. The outdoor theater below was empty and dark, shut up for autumn.
For a moment, Jeremy considered hiding in the castle tower, then remembered that for one thing, it would an easy place to get trapped, and for another, the castle was locked for the night anyway.
Instead, they pelted across the flagstone terrace and ran down the flight of steps on the other side, leading to the Shakespeare Garden. At the bottom of the steps, they left the path and scurried under the pine trees to huddle against the castle wall that rose above their heads.
Jeremy crouched in the dirt and began digging in his pockets.
"What are you doing?" Christopher demanded.
"I forgot I had this," Jeremy whispered, pulling out the small communicator Matt had left for him.
"Wait," Alison said, kneeling next to Ricky. "Someone needs to be a lookout, or they could be right on top of us before we know they're coming."
"I'll go." Christopher, keeping his head low, climbed up the steps and vanished.
Jeremy adjusted the frequency on the communicator, pressed the call button, and held his breath.
The speaker crackled. "Matt?"
"Jeremy?" Matt's voice sounded staticky and hollow.
"Uh...Matt? You busy right now?"
"Kind of..." The NYPD detective sounded a bit distracted. Jeremy thought he heard helicopters in the background, the sound of a siren.... "Why?"
"We're in Central Park, me and Christopher, Alison's with us...um, and her roommate Ricky," Jeremy explained, talking fast. He held the communicator in one hand, balancing himself with his other hand touching the stone wall. "We tried to lead some other college kids on a wild goose chase, but they caught on and now they're pretty mad...I think they want to throw us in the lake."
"You...what?" Matt said incredulously, and Jeremy winced. "Never mind. Where in the park?"
"Behind Belvedere Castle...the Shakespeare Garden at the moment..."
"Hold on, kid, we'll be right there. Keep in touch." Jeremy heard Matt saying something to somebody, before the communicator clicked and went silent.
Jeremy, Alison, and Ricky leaned their backs against the wall and sank down to a sitting position, resting while they could.
"Chris?" Jeremy whispered loudly.
"I can't see them anywhere." Christopher leaned his head over the edge of the wall to look down at them, so suddenly they all started. "And don't call me Chris."
The minutes ticked by. Jeremy pressed the illumination button on his watch, and wondered if they should keep going. But for the moment, their hiding place seemed safe. As a cold wind rustled through the trees and bushes, the night seemed to have an expectant, tense feel, as if their pursuers might leap out with brutal yells if they moved or even breathed too loudly.
Beside him, Alison yawned and hunched down farther into her light jacket. Before he knew what was happening, she leaned her head on his shoulder, naturally, without awkwardness, as if it belonged there.
And suddenly, he wouldn't have missed this night for anything.
He must have dozed, because suddenly he heard Christopher let out a hissed curse, then a thump as he leapt down the stairs.
"Okay, guys, time to move. They're coming up the path to the castle. But I only saw three..."
"Uh, oh. Don't like the sound of that." Jeremy gently moved forward and Alison stirred and raised her head.
"Maybe Kevin talked some of the other guys into quitting." Ricky scrambled to her feet and moved towards the steps. "Have they seen us?"
"I don't think so. They're walking fast, but not running. I think they just decided to check the castle out. Come on, let's go."
They had to cross the relatively open plateau of ground between the castle and the Shakespeare Garden. A concrete path ran between two grassy patches, framed by a split-rail fence tangled with vines and overhung with trees. The four moved out cautiously, trying not to rustle the pine branches as they ducked under them and headed up the path.
Ahead, at the entrance to the garden, a shadow moved, and Brian stepped out onto the concrete path. Christopher skidded to a halt so suddenly that Ricky bumped into him from behind.
Brian smiled nastily. "Gee, guys, we've been looking all over for you. Didn't you like our party?"
The sound of footsteps came from behind, and the four turned back to the castle steps. There stood three of Brian's other buddies -- including Kevin, who stood a little behind the other two, his expression less than enthusiastic about the proceedings. The shaggy-haired guy, Paul, wasn't with them, and neither was Mitch, the tall one who'd pinned Christopher before.
Jeremy turned back to glare at Brian. If all four of them rushed him, they could probably get by, but such a move would bring the others instantly on top of them. (And where were the remaining two?) He would guess that Kevin and the others wouldn't do anything unless Brian started it.
The other three came down the steps slowly, then stopped on the path. Christopher and Ricky turned to face them, ready. Alison stood at Jeremy's shoulder, glowering fiercely at Brian. Jeremy curled his hand into a fist, wishing for the thousandth time in his life that he wasn't so much smaller, didn't look so non-threatening behind his glasses.
A mad energy rose in him, composed of equal parts fatalism and recklessness, and Jeremy stepped off the path and slowly moved towards Brian from the side. What the heck, if he was going to get beaten up by these jerks, he might as well have some fun before the end of it.
Amused, waiting, Brian folded his arms and turned to watch him.
"So I guess you've got us trapped now," Jeremy said, walking in a circle around the taller boy, who kept turning, following his movements. "I mean, what are you going to do? Because I don't see a lake you can toss us into." He gestured at the greenery. "Maybe you're just going to beat us up."
With a light, quick movement, Jeremy feinted a punch, shadow boxing at Brian's face. Brian leaned away, annoyed, and Jeremy darted around to his other side. "Of course, my friend Christopher there is also sort of strong, and don't forget Ricky...and Alison already gave your buddy Paul a bloody nose...and two of your guys aren't here, so it's four against four. So if you did try to beat us up, you guys would probably get pretty banged up too, and that'd really suck, wouldn't it?" Jeremy began bobbing on the balls of his feet, shifting his weight from left to right, the way he had seen Lex do it once. "So what are you going to do with us?"
Brian began to resemble a large bear baited by a buzzing mosquito.
Christopher uncertainly turned away from the three on the steps to keep an eye on Jeremy, a bewildered look on his face.
Jeremy faked another punch, then again circled Brian. "See, it looks to me like you'll actually need brains to figure out what to do with us...which I guess means we're off the hook."
Brian's faintly amused look faded. Jeremy folded his arms, imitating Brian, and grinned facetiously.
"You little -- " Brian swung. Jeremy ducked, darted to the left, then launched himself at Brian in a body-blow to the stomach. His shoulder connected with Brian's midsection, and he clearly heard the whoof of the larger boy's breath being knocked out of him. Hey, not bad, he thought mildly.
"NOW!" Jeremy yelled, and plunged for the entrance to the garden, past the doubled-over Brian.
The three on the steps moved fast, but Kevin stopped to kneel by his friend, and then there were only two after them as they ran past the sundial and leaped down step after step, following the twists and turns of the stone path as it wound its way downhill through the flower beds.
As they vaulted down the last step onto the path below, Jeremy realized Brian had recovered and was trailing the other two, Kevin behind him. Ahead of them was the unpainted wooden building of the marionette theater, beyond which the path intersected with a wider one, just above the West Drive. The best thing to do would be to run like heck for the west side, and get out of that cursedly empty park --
Without warning, Jeremy felt an impact from behind, someone wrapping their arms around the legs of his jeans. He landed hard on the pavement on his stomach, and felt his cheek scrape against the surface of the path as his glasses flew from his nose. He distinctly heard the tiny crunch of a lens cracking as they landed a few feet away.
"Gotcha!" snarled a voice in his ear -- Paul's voice, he and Mitch must have circled around through the Shakespeare Gardens to intercept them here --
Squirming, Jeremy tried to face his assailant, but Paul had pinned his hands to the ground and had one knee on the small of his back. Blurrily, he saw Christopher and the girls stop, turn around, start to come back...
And then came the roar of a car engine, and light, blinding light, striking his face. Jeremy squinted and averted his head, and felt the weight leave his back.
"Cops!" someone exclaimed, and someone else swore viciously, and then there was only the sound of running footsteps.
Jeremy got to his feet, seeing the red light rotating on the roof of the red car, which appeared to be a '57 Chevy. The light sent an eerie flickering over the trees, which seemed to be staring down at the red-blinking intruder with a startled air.
Christopher ran over to him. "Jeremy? You okay?"
"Yeah, sure," Jeremy said absently, shading his eyes to see the car. His glasses, where were his glasses...
Alison knelt and picked them up, and handed them to him. He put them on and saw the world more sharply again, streaked with cracks, but clear.
"Aw, man!" Matt stepped out of the car and slammed the door vehemently. "Jeremy, I thought you said you were going to stay out of trouble!"
-----
Jeremy sighed. "They said they were going to hunt for gargoyles. Maybe they wouldn't have done any harm...but that was just six too many out in this city, wanting to hurt them...so we decided to do something about it. They were talking about getting baseball bats, and wooden stakes...what if they found them at dawn?"
Detective Maza took her eyes from the road for a moment to look at them in the rear-view mirror, an odd expression on her face. "You're bleeding," she said, and reached over to pop open the glove compartment. "Here." She tossed Jeremy a small first-aid kit.
He reached up to touch his cheek, and his finger came away streaked with blood and dirt. Funny, he hadn't felt it. Jeremy pulled out a gauze pad, dabbed it to his face, and winced.
"Here," Alison said beside him, taking the pad. "Let me."
Jeremy stared stoically ahead as Alison dabbed at the cut -- but somehow it didn't hurt when she did it.
"That was still an incredibly stupid thing to do," Matt said, turning to look at them.
"Tell me about it," Christopher muttered, sitting in the corner.
They came to a red light. Jeremy leaned forward, between the detectives' seats. "We'd do it again, you know."
"Yeah," Detective Maza said softly. "I think you would." She grinned at Matt suddenly. "Remind me someday to tell you about the first time I got chased through the park by gargoyle hunters."
"The gargoyles," Alison said suddenly. "Are they all right?"
"Yeah, they're safe," Matt said. Detective Maza seemed about to say something, then glanced back at them and closed her mouth. "So where should I drop you guys off?"
-----
Alison opened her eyes, squinted at the sunlight coming in through her dorm window, and groaned. How late had they been up last night? Three a.m.? Four? She ought to be used to it; she stayed up all night often to study for exams or just hang out with the people in her dorm, talking or watching videos. Then again, that was a bit different than being chased for hours through Central Park and almost being bodily thrown into a freezing cold lake.
She glanced over at the bed on the other wall; it was empty, rumpled, unmade, which either meant Ricky was just down the hall or had gone out for the day. Ricky almost never made her bed, except to straighten the blanket a bit. "Why bother?" she'd said with a grin. "I'm just going to mess it up again when I go to sleep."
The stone heads under the eaves of the pre-war building across the street caught her eye, and she quickly glanced away. More reminders -- as if she didn't worry every second already.
Alison went to her one class that day, which started at 10:35 am. It was Statistics, a boring sort of class under the best of circumstances; this time she didn't remember a word, and afterward she once again found the page in her notebook covered in doodles of wings. She scrawled herself a reminder to pick up the class notes from someone else. Later.
Wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, unable to concentrate on schoolwork, she tried to watch TV in the dorm lounge, but her mind kept wandering. She called Jeremy at one point, but there was no answer; he was probably in class. At noon there was another news report, a follow up/recap. Alison picked up the remote, aimed it at the screen, and viciously stabbed at the power button with her thumb, prompting a cry of protest from a guy sitting in a nearby armchair.
"Here," she said, tossing the remote at him. "Go ahead, rot your mind."
Several times Alison picked up the phone to call Jeremy again, then reconsidered. She thought of going downtown to hang around outside the police precinct house in the hope that she'd learn something, and thought better of it. Then, feeling a bit silly and sure she'd never live it down if Ricky caught her, she'd stood quietly in the middle of her dorm room, pressed her fingers to her head, and willed Lexington to send her some sort of message. That didn't work either. Of course, she realized sourly. It's daytime. He's asleep.
Finally, in desperation, she thought that re-reading a comfortable, familiar, favorite book would take her mind off it; in the past, that had always worked when she was upset about something. Alison located The Hollow Hills on her bookshelf and settled onto the bed with her feet tucked under her.
An hour later she was trying again, for the fourth time that afternoon, to read the page she was on, and suddenly a paragraph came into focus with terrible clarity:
The Amsterdam Cafe (Amsterdam Avenue, off 120th St.)
Jeremy Lowell had lost all interest in his plate of extra-hot buffalo wings several seconds ago.
"It's impossible," Alison protested. "Gargoyles wouldn't have attacked the police station."
The thin blonde's voice was rising in pitch and volume, and several of the other denizens of the cafe had fallen silent to listen. A group of students drinking black-and-tans and Pete's Wicked Ale had stopped their conversation about anarchy and croquet, and were watching with interest. Jeremy knew this group, by sight if not by name; a Columbia debate/literary society that made fun of its own pompousness more often than not. He'd seen them last spring in front of the Thinker statue on Philosophy Lawn, engaged in a deep discussion on the topic of "consciousness" and passing around a bottle of wine. Most of them he only knew because they were also members of the Games Club. If anyone would be sympathetic toward gargoyles, he thought perhaps they would...but for the moment they seemed more inclined to watch the argument without getting involved.
"They're dangerous," someone was insisting. "They shouldn't be allowed to just run wild in the city like this."
Jeremy took another swallow of his drink, trying to look casual as he attempted to listen to every conversation in the room at once and keep an eye on the blonde girl at the same time.
Ricky was still listening to the conversations, mostly about gargoyles, though drifting onto other topics now. The sandy-haired guy who'd followed Alison came back in and had some hurried words with his friend. Then he grabbed his coat and ran out again.
They walked up 120th Street, talking.
Ricky leaned her chin on her hand and stared hard at Christopher. "I wonder why Alison's so upset."
Jeremy and Alison turned onto College Walk to cross the campus, and stopped talking for a moment.
12:58 am [One day before Hunter's Moon]
120th Street, between Amsterdam and Morningside
11:15 am [Day before Hunter's Moon]
Butler Library, Columbia campus
1:30 pm
120th Street
5:59 am [Day of Hunter's Moon]
NYU Dormitory, West 8th Street
Ricky put down the receiver slowly. Her curiosity was eating her alive. What were they hiding?
5:30 pm
Columbus Circle
The four walked up Central Park West, Jeremy and Alison behind Ricky and Christopher. Rachel was talking up a storm, about her father's work, her brothers, her studies. Christopher didn't seem to be talking much, in comparison to her, though later Jeremy was to recall with some surprise that he had told her a considerable amount about himself -- though nothing, fortunately, about the gargoyles. She knows he's hiding something, he realized at one point, and hoped they'd be able to get through the rest of the evening before she discovered what it was.
7:45 pm
St. Damien's Cathedral
7:38 pm
Central Park, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art
"Okay, let's take this from the top," Matt said slowly, after introductions had been made. He turned in the passenger seat to look at the four of them squeezed into the back of Detective Maza's car. "You decided to tell these guys you saw gargoyles at the waterfall...why?"
9:00 am [Day after Hunter's Moon]
NYU Dormitory, West 8th Street
Four gargoyle statues -- just statues, she was sure -- spray-painted with bright blood red colors. All of them were chipped and scratched, as if someone had been trying to smash them. The right hand on one of them had been missing.
That could have been Brooklyn, or Lexington, she thought helplessly. If only they would contact her! She rolled over on her bed and again tried to read her book.
She wasn't exactly sure when she closed her eyes.
-----
They were running, running, through the dark alleyways of the city, the pavement cracked and treacherous underfoot. Behind them, the angry shouts and curses were growing closer. She stumbled, but Lexington was there next to her, and Brooklyn and Broadway on her other side, slowing to help steady her.
The hue and cry filled the world behind them, an ugly sound of mindless hate and fear. FREAKS, they were shouting, and MONSTERS, and other words...and mixing with them, roars and shouts of wordless savagery.
She stumbled again, nearly went down. Lex grabbed her hand and half-dragged her along, shouting "Alison, hurry!"
An ominous brightness bloomed in the east like some deadly flower.
"We're not gonna make it," Brooklyn was saying beside her, his voice hoarse and rasping.
A streak of livid, pale light slipped over the eastern horizon. As the first sliver of sun rose above the edge of the world, there came the chilling sound of flesh hardening into stone, and the three gargoyles froze, went grey and cold.
"We've got them now!" shouted a voice in triumph. Alison spun around to see the leader of the mob -- Brian! -- striding toward them, his eyes alight.
"No! Don't hurt them! You don't understand!" She took a step forward, intending to protect the statues with her own body if necessary, but suddenly her feet wouldn't move. She looked down at her legs.
Her legs, which were slowly turning to stone.
"NO!" she screamed.
Brian brandished a crowbar over the nearest gargoyle, who happened to be Lexington, and roared, "I say we finish these monsters off once and for all!" An answering roar of approval came from the mob.
"Don't! Please, no!"
A chant was rising from the crowd, growing louder and louder. "Kill the monsters! KILL THE MONSTERS!"
Brian raised the crowbar over his head, aiming the blow at Lexington's statue. "Let's start with this one!" he shouted.
"Lexington!"
The crowbar came down, impacting with the gargoyle's slender neck, sending shards of stone flying everywhere --
"LEX!!"
-----
"Alison! Wake up!"
Alison's eyes opened sharply. Ricky's hands were on her shoulders, shaking her. The Hollow Hills lay open on the bed next to her, and the phrase "broken and defaced" caught her eye, then blurred --
With a shudder, Alison buried her face in the pillow and cried.
Ricky was taken aback by Alison's tears. "Hey, Allie, it was just a bad dream. Everything's okay."
"I couldn't stop them!" she whispered between sobs. "I was right there, and I couldn't stop them. They were going to kill Lex, and the others -- and I couldn't protect them!"
"Who's Lex?" Ricky asked.
Her voice snapped Alison fully awake, and she realized what she'd been saying. She sat up with Ricky's help, and sniffed hard, once. "I'm okay, Ricky. It was just a dream," she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and trying to keep her voice from trembling.
"Uh-huh. Right. Sure," Rachel said in a tone that Alison recognized as Ricky's are-you-going-to-sell-me-a-bridge-next? voice. Ricky plopped down on the bed next to Alison. "You know if you don't talk about nightmares they're going to come back to haunt you, so tell me what happened."
Alison wanted to, more than anything she'd ever wanted before. She fought the compulsion down. She couldn't just tell anyone about the guys, not without their permission! "I...I can't. Ricky, I'm sorry, but it isn't my secret to tell."
Ricky looked at her oddly, then instantly made the connection. "It's the gargoyles, isn't it," she said softly. "You're friends with the gargoyles."
"I didn't say that!" Alison nearly shouted.
Ricky jerked back as though Alison had slapped her. Her brown-gold eyes went wide with shock.
Tearing her eyes away from Ricky's with an effort, Alison glanced out the window. The sun had long set and the moon was high, shining pale gold through a thin film of gathering rain clouds.
I have to find the guys tonight, I have to. Alison jumped off the bed and grabbed her jacket. The last few nights had grown cooler. "I've got to go out, Ricky. Don't wait up for me."
Alison's sudden change in mood confused Ricky for a moment. "Wait -- where are you going?"
"I...I have to check on a project for Mr. Macbeth."
Ricky made a face. "Hello! Earth to Alison! Remember me? The shrink's daughter? I'm the one who can spot a liar in the next borough. Do you think I'm believing you?"
Alison's voice grew cold as she stepped out the door. "Ricky, right now I don't care what you believe." She slammed the door, shutting out the sight of her roommate, sitting there on the bed, staring after her.
She's right, though, Alison thought, automatically heading for the nearby subway stop without conscious decision. I have to talk to someone. That someone was going to be Jeremy. She knew the gargoyles trusted him, and he could get in touch with Detective Bluestone, who knew where the gargoyles were and possibly, just possibly, might tell them. One way or another, I have to talk to the guys tonight. I have to see for myself that they're safe.
-----
8:20 pm
Times Square subway platform
She called him from a pay phone on the subway platform some twenty minutes later. "Hello?" came Christopher's voice over the line.
"Christopher? It's Alison. I need to talk to Jeremy."
"Hi, Alison. I'll get him, one sec."
There was a long pause. Then Jeremy's voice, full of concern, came through the phone. "Alison? What's wrong?"
"Jeremy? I have to talk to the guys, tonight."
"But we don't -- " Jeremy began.
"Tonight, Jeremy! I won't be able to sleep if I don't see them. I have to know they're safe!" She could hear her own voice rising uncontrollably, a brittle, near-hysterical edge to it, and choked it down.
"Okay, okay, calm down. I'll see what I can do. Where are you?"
"Uh, I'm at the Times Square subway station...."
"Okay. Listen, why don't we meet..." He considered. "Up by College Walk on Columbia campus? Near the gates? It's about fifteen minutes by subway from where you are. You know the way?"
"Yeah. I'm on my way up."
"Great. I'll see you in a few." There was a click, then a dial tone. Alison hung up the receiver and took the stairs down into the subway two at a time, fumbling in her pocket for a token.
-----
"Great. I'll see you in a few." Jeremy hung up the phone. "Christopher, do me a favor? Call Matt. Tell him Alison needs to see the gargoyles tonight." He grabbed his jacket.
Christopher looked up at him. "What's wrong?"
"She's nearly hysterical! She's worried sick about the guys. If they can't contact us she's going to need me. I've got to be waiting there when she gets here." He was almost out the door again when the phone rang a second time. This time it was Ricky.
"Chris, has your friend Jeremy heard from Alison?"
Christopher was tempted to lie, but he couldn't bring himself to. "Ah, yeah, he's on his way out to meet her. Is anything wrong?"
"I think so. She's been acting funny all day, and a little while ago I woke her from a killer nightmare."
"Don't worry. Alison's on her way up here to meet Jeremy."
"I want you there." Rachel said insistently.
Half a dozen suitable replies came to mind. Can't you come yourself if you're worried? Alison and Jeremy are adults, they can take care of themselves. I can't, I've got all these papers to correct.
"Okay," he heard himself say.
"Columbia gates?"
"That's where they're meeting."
"Good. See you there in...twenty minutes? Great. Bye, Chris." A click, and the phone hummed a self-satisfied dial tone.
Christopher looked at the receiver for a moment, bemused, then put his thumb over the disconnect button. "Looks like we're all meeting there, then. Rachel's on her way too. You go ahead, I'll join you as soon as I make that call to Detective Bluestone."
-----
8:35 pm
The Eyrie Building
Owen Burnett entered the arboretum, and watched a moment as the four gargoyles played Monkey-in-the-Middle with Bronx as the Monkey. It was the only place in the castle that Bronx could get adequate exercise. Owen was surprised that it had only taken a single night for them to feel at home here again. Though if Xanatos were watching, they probably wouldn't feel so comfortable. Right now the youngsters were working off some of the pent-up energy they'd accumulated over the last few nights. They wanted to lay low for a while before going back out into the city again, so they took their energy out on each other in games.
Finally he managed to catch Lexington's eye. Lexington noticed him, threw the ball to Brooklyn and scooted away behind a bush. Almost instantly Owen was next to him.
Lexington looked into the eyes of Xanatos' personal assistant for a moment. He still found it next to impossible to believe that this same man was the Puck. Even so he wasn't playing the part of the trickster right now. He kept his voice hostile as he said, "What do you want? Can't we play here? There's not much else to do."
"There is nothing wrong with you playing here. Mr. Xanatos has made it clear before; you and your clan have the run of the castle as long as nothing is damaged severely. You have a telephone call from Detective Bluestone. He asked for either you or Brooklyn. He said it was urgent. Something about two student groups from Columbia and New York University."
Lexington's eyes widened. He hadn't thought about Alison, Jeremy, or Christopher in weeks. The last few nights had driven them completely out of his head. Alison had a habit of being slightly overprotective of him. She must have seen the broadcasts on the news and gotten worried.
"I'll be right there," he told Owen. He saw Broadway miss the ball; with a leap, he caught it and threw it back, making sure that Angela was forced to chase after it. When Brooklyn and Broadway went after her, Lexington held them back. "We've got a problem, guys. Matt's on the phone and I think it's about Alison, and Jeremy."
Brooklyn glanced at where Angela was looking for the ball. "Broadway, keep her busy. Come on, Lex."
The two raced to the office where Owen was waiting. "Line three," he said calmly. Lexington hit the button, then toggled it to speaker mode. "What's up, Matt?"
Matt's voice sounded troubled. "That NYU friend of yours, Alison?"
"Yeah?" Brooklyn answered.
"I think she's worried about you. She doesn't know me, but she's met Jeremy. Christopher called twenty minutes ago. Said something about her having to see you."
"She's probably worried after those news broadcasts," Lexington thought out loud.
"I think it's worse than you know," Matt answered. "All day we've had reports of gargoyle statues being vandalized. Graffiti mostly, but some serious damage -- mutilations, I guess you could call them. From what Christopher told me she was bordering on panic. You guys have to let her know you're okay. Christopher said they're going to be around Columbia campus for the next half-hour or so, but I don't know if it's a good idea for you guys to go out."
Lexington didn't say anything but the look he gave Brooklyn said it all. He was going whether Brooklyn liked it or not.
Brooklyn understood. He owed Alison big time, and Jeremy was a good friend too. Maybe it was because of the circumstances under which they'd met, but both humans had a habit of worrying about Lexington.
"We're going," Brooklyn said. "If I know Allie, she won't be able to sleep till she's seen us in one piece. You can meet us there if you want."
Matt's voice now sounded worried. "Sorry, no can do. It's Elisa's night off and I can't sneak out tonight."
"We'll be fine. It shouldn't take us long anyway." Brooklyn reassured him. This was going to be a very short visit. As soon as Matt hung up, Brooklyn turned to Lexington. "Get Broadway and meet me up on the old north wall."
Lexington nodded. "Can't you just call it the east wall now?"
Brooklyn sighed. He just couldn't think of it as the east wall. For most of his life that wall had pointed north. He didn't answer Lexington's question, and instead teased him a little himself. "And later, we're going have to have a little talk about this habit of yours of collecting mother hens."
Lexington grinned at that and scampered off.
-----
Back in the arboretum, Broadway called Lexington over. "Hey, where did you guys go?"
Lexington didn't know what to say with Angela there, so he ignored the question. "Uh, Broadway...have you seen that cookbook from NYU around?"
Broadway knew of only one thing from NYU. He caught on right away. "I think I know where it is. I'll show you."
"Where are you going?" Angela asked.
"I just have to find something for Lex. I'll be right back. You don't have to come. We'll be right back," Broadway hastened to reassure her. He tossed the ball to her and followed Lexington out of the arboretum.
Bronx came and nudged Angela's leg for the ball. She knelt down and patted Bronx's side. "No they won't," she told the watchdog, her voice compounded of equal parts irritation and amusement. "They're definitely up to something, those three."
Bronx whined and twisted his head to look up at her. She scratched his leathery head on the good spot, behind the ears. "Want to follow them and see what they're up to, boy? Hmm? Would you like that?"
Bronx let out a short yarp and wagged his stub of a tail.
Angela grinned. "Me too. Come on."
-----
She managed to track them to the east wall of the castle. She hid herself as she heard Brooklyn speaking. "A good thing Elisa is off tonight. She and Goliath are at her place. We won't be missed. Hudson said he'd cover for us if he got back early."
"You mean you haven't told Goliath about them yet?" Lexington asked.
Brooklyn looked a little hurt. "There hasn't been time the last few nights. I'll get around to it. Don't worry."
"Get around to what?" Angela asked, stepping out from concealment with Bronx at her heels.
Brooklyn and the others froze, staring at her. She stared right back at them, hands on her hips, waiting.
"Uh oh," Lexington said very quietly.
"Um..." Brooklyn started. "Nothing really."
Angela tilted her head to one side and drummed her fingers on her hips, with a glare that would have done her biological mother credit. "What aren't you telling my father?"
Lexington had a feeling that Brooklyn would try to put her off again if he didn't do something. Blast him! Why didn't he want to tell Goliath about Alison and Jeremy? He moved forward, putting Brooklyn and Broadway at his back. "Angela, it isn't anything bad. It's just that some friends of ours are worried about us since they heard about the clock-tower being destroyed. We just want to let them know we're all right."
"My father doesn't know these friends of yours?" Angela raised her brow ridges in an expression she'd picked up from Princess Katharine.
"We didn't meet them until after he took off for Avalon," Brooklyn said. Lexington caught a slight edge to his brother's voice. Angela didn't catch it, but Lexington and Brooklyn had been best friends since as long as he could remember. Something was bothering him. He could tell every time they asked him if he'd mentioned Alison to Goliath yet.
"So why haven't you told him?"
Brooklyn's tone went defensive. "I'll get around to it. I just want it to be me to tell him. Okay?"
Lexington sighed. That's all Brooklyn kept saying, but...well, this wasn't the time to pursue it. Right now he wanted to go see Alison. "Angela, just promise you won't say anything about our friends to Goliath, all right?"
Angela didn't understand but agreed readily enough. "All right, but I still don't see why."
You and me both, Lexington thought to himself. "Okay," he said, "Now let's go. Matt said Alison was really upset."
The three gargoyles next to him nodded, and one by one they opened their wings to catch the breeze.
-----
8:50 pm
The main Columbia gates (116th and Broadway)
"There she is," Jeremy said sharply, pointing. In the small crowd coming up from the subway steps, a familiar slender figure with blonde hair emerged, looking about her. "Alison! Over here!"
She turned, hearing him, and relief broke over her features as she hurried over. "I'm so glad you're here," she said, clasping his hand in both of hers. "Both of you," she added, looking at Christopher. "I'm sorry I'm late, the train got stuck up by 96th. Have you heard anything about the guys?"
Jeremy nodded, starting to speak. Christopher raised a hand in a silencing gesture and waved them over to the small niche where the wrought-iron fence of the gates met the concrete wall. The three of them clustered there, out of the main flow of pedestrians.
"Matt says they're staying at the Eyrie building now, if you believe it," Christopher said in a low voice. "Something about David Xanatos saving their lives last night. Looks like gargoyle-saving is turning into a popular sport in this city."
"Almost as popular as gargoyle-hunting," Jeremy said ironically. "But they're okay?"
Christopher nodded. "He said he'd try to get word to them, and tell them where to find us. I told him we'd be hanging around here most of the night."
"Listen, that reminds me," Alison said suddenly. "I think Ricky may have figured it out. I mean -- " she gave a short laugh -- "she'd have to be pretty dense not to know something's up, considering how much of a wreck I've been since that broadcast, but I think she knows about our friends.... What?"
That last word was directed somewhat accusingly to Christopher, who was nodding. "She definitely knows," he said. "She called us about five minutes after you did. And she's on her way."
"Oh, no," Alison groaned.
Jeremy's eyes widened, staring at something behind her. "Um...guys," he said in a stifled tone that made the others look at him sharply, "I think maybe we'd better wait for Ricky somewhere else?"
"What?"
"Don't look now, but our friends from last night are just on the other side of those gates. I said don't look!"
Alison, who had started to turn, instead bent as if to retie her shoelace and cast a look across the fence with her head safely lowered. "It's them all right," she said quietly as she straightened. "All six."
"You don't think they're here looking for us, do you?" Jeremy said.
"Could be," Christopher said grimly. "They saw us first in AmCaff, they probably figure this neighborhood is a good place to find us. I think maybe we should move. Slowly -- let's not draw attention to ourselves."
"Where to?" Jeremy asked.
"Someplace indoors and crowded," Alison said. "And safe."
Christopher nodded. "There's a Haagen-Dazs just down the block and across the street," he said. "Sound good?"
Alison looked at Jeremy. "I have this sudden urge to go and get myself a raspberry sorbet."
"Let's go," Jeremy said tensely. "I really don't want to run into those guys again."
They were halfway across Broadway, waiting on the median strip for the cars to stop passing in front of them, when Jeremy risked a look back.
Brian and the others were definitely waiting there for someone; the six were facing in different directions, scanning the crowds passing by. All except one -- Kevin, that was his name -- was sitting on the bench nearby, looking at the pavement under his feet.
And then one of them saw him. Mitch, the tall lanky one, locked eyes with him for an instant, then grabbed Brian's shoulder and pointed. Brian turned, saw where his friend was pointing --
Jeremy swore under his breath.
Brian was circling past the fence, toward the gates, with four of the others behind him --
"They've seen us," Jeremy said sharply.
Christopher threw a glance over his shoulder and swore, then broke into a run. "Come on!"
The other two followed suit. Jeremy started to turn down Broadway, towards their original destination, but Christopher was heading down 116th. "This way! We're gonna have to try to lose them."
The three pounded along the sidewalk, headed downhill towards the park. Brian and the others were half a block behind them and closing fast, preventing them from doubling back towards Broadway, which was well-lit and more populated. Below them 116th Street slanted sharply down towards Riverside Park, shadowy in the night. Across Claremont Avenue rose the curving mass of a pre-war dormitory building.
Christopher ran with a determined, grim expression, and Jeremy could almost hear the gears clicking in his analytical head as he tried to find a way out of this mess. Alison looked scared, but ran easily, pulling a few paces into the lead. Jeremy put on an extra burst of speed as the three began to run across 116th, which was virtually free of traffic, a black concrete river flowing down to the park.
With a tiny flutter of beginning panic, Jeremy realized they might not get out of this one. It was worse than the first time, when Brian and his buddies had just been out for kicks; now they were just plain mad. No one knew they were in any kind of trouble. And he had given the communicator back to Matt. Well, they'd just have to get themselves out of this one.
Somehow.
And then, from the clouded night sky, he heard a familiar sound -- like heavy canvas, beating the wind.
-----
"You're sure Matt said the Columbia gates?" Brooklyn crouched on the roof of one of the twin neo-classical buildings framing the wrought-iron gates, scanning the walk below.
"Of course I'm sure," said Lexington irritably.
Angela, her wings folded around her shoulders like a cape, pointed east, to the other end of College Walk. "Uh, guys...there are two gates."
They turned to look. "There's no one there either," said Brooklyn.
"So where are they?" Lex's forehead creased with worry.
Broadway turned to him. "Don't worry, I'm sure they're fine." He chuckled. "After all, I guess we've had more than our share of trouble lately."
As he spoke, Brooklyn and Angela had turned to look across the street. Both of them abruptly went very still.
"Uh oh," Brooklyn said slowly, his eyes, like Angela's, fixed on something below.
"Uh oh what?" Broadway demanded.
"Do you see 'em?" Brooklyn asked Angela.
"Is that them?" Angela asked with quiet urgency.
"I'm afraid so."
"Uh oh what?"
The other two gargoyles hurried to the edge of the roof to look.
"Alison! Jeremy!" Before the others could move, Lexington had spread his wings and shot forward off the roof at a near-impossible speed.
Angela's jaw dropped. "How did he...?"
"You were saying about trouble?" Brooklyn shook his wings out into gliding position and tensed to leap. Oh man, are my wings gonna be sore later... "Let's go!"
One after the other, the three remaining gargoyles launched themselves from the rooftop.
-----
On the street below, Jeremy, Alison and Christopher skidded to a stop and looked up, astonished relief on their faces. And their pursuers also came to a hesitant standstill, also looking up, with a very different expression on their faces.
"Lex!" Alison cried out.
Lexington went into a dive towards one of the pursuers, eyes blazing white, with a piercing battle-scream. The young man fell with Lexington's full weight on his chest, yelling in terror, his arms up to shield his face. Most of his companions stood frozen, staring, but as Brooklyn's shadow passed over them, one knelt and picked up something from the pavement.
It happened so fast that Brooklyn wasn't sure what he had seen. The human drew back his arm and threw something up at them. Something that shot into the air in an arc, whistling past his ear. And then, behind him, he heard Broadway let out a howl of pain and rage. Turning in midair, he saw Broadway start to go down, saw Angela dive after him a split second too late to grab him and slow his fall. Broadway tumbled over once in the air, and landed in a heap on the pavement.
Lexington, still sitting on the young man's chest, turned sharply.
"Broadway!..." He scrambled off, and was already at Broadway's side as Brooklyn and Angela landed.
Jeremy and Alison shoved past their stunned erstwhile pursuers, who were helping up their fallen leader, then slowed, shocked.
"Broadway?" Lexington put a hand on his rookery brother's shoulder, and Broadway stirred, looking up at him. "You're gonna be okay," Lex went on, in a low voice that seemed to struggle not to shake. He put his other hand under Broadway's arm to help him sit up. "You're gonna be okay," he said again, as much to reassure himself as for Broadway's sake. "It's all right."
Leaning against his small brother, Broadway managed to pull himself into a sitting position. His normally cheerful, broad face was twisted into a grimace of pain. His hand clutched the edge of his wing; a few inches away there was a jagged tear about four inches long.
"It's not -- too -- bad," he said, noticing the concerned faces of the others. "It'll heal -- at sunrise."
Brooklyn stood there silently, his wings drooping but not yet neatly folded over his shoulders. He saw Angela's face furrow in sympathy, then harden as she turned to the stocky, shaggy-haired human who had thrown the broken piece of pavement. Her eyes were blazing, and he knew his own were doing the same; he could feel the familiar heat of battle rage as he, too, turned slowly away from his fallen rookery brother to face the one that had struck him down.
But before he or Angela could spring, Jeremy stepped across his line of vision. The slight, sandy-haired young man's eyes were unnaturally dark, glinting behind his glasses. His breath hissed through clenched teeth as he stepped toward the other human.
"I should kill you for that, Paul," Jeremy said in a cold, controlled voice that made Lexington look up at his friend in surprise.
And the other human, who was short but more muscular than Jeremy, took an involuntary step backwards.
Abruptly Christopher stepped up from somewhere, and after a quick apprehensive glance at Brooklyn, he stood solidly at the gargoyle's shoulder, the gesture of a comrade in arms. The glow in Brooklyn's eyes flickered briefly. Christopher usually acted as though he expected Brooklyn to hit him at any moment. And he couldn't blame the human -- Brooklyn knew he didn't entirely trust Christopher; the human had shot Lex with a tranq dart once, and neither of them had forgotten it. Still, it bothered him every time Christopher flinched.
Then Alison and Jeremy moved to stand beside Christopher, and Angela took up a position on Brooklyn's other side -- a united front with Lex and Broadway behind them. Broadway was on his feet, leaning on Lexington, the shoulder of the injured wing hunched painfully. He wasn't going to be able to fly on that tonight, Brooklyn realized.
It was then that they heard it...the tiresome, familiar, hateful cry.
"Monsters!"
"Look...over there...."
The people walking along the brightly lit avenue above had stopped in small clumps. True to form, the New Yorkers had stopped to gape at a spectacle.
"What are they?"
"...dinosaurs..."
"They're real. My god, they're real..."
"...I read an article in..."
The crowd began to move down 116th, converging on them. "You kids -- get away from them!" someone called to Jeremy and the other two humans. "They're dangerous!"
"Damn right they're dangerous!" The kid Lexington had pinned faced the crowd, pointing dramatically behind him at Lexington, who was hunched over as he struggled to support Broadway. "That little one attacked me!"
"Shut up, Brian!" hissed Alison, sharply but low enough to go unheard by most of the crowd.
"Monster-lover," he hissed back.
At Brian's words, a murmur rippled through the crowd, and the mood subtly changed from gaping wonder to fear...and a touch of anger. As though echoing the crowd, a faint rumble of thunder growled somewhere behind the lowering clouds.
"Wait!" Jeremy's voice rang out, cutting through the murmurs. He stepped forward, his arms spread, palms flat as if to show he was unarmed. "You don't understand. They were protecting us -- from him." He pointed accusingly at Brian.
"They aren't monsters," Alison added, not angry this time, but pleading.
"They're those creatures that attacked the police station!" a woman in the crowd called out heatedly. "I saw the news report! They're a menace!"
"Police station?..."
"...blew it up...saw it on the news..."
"Gargoyles..."
"...they wrecked St. Damien's Cathedral last night, too..."
"A few weeks ago," Brian called, over the rising buzz of conversation, "that little one -- the one who attacked me just now -- jumped a friend of mine in the park."
"Aw, Brian, we're not back to that again, are we?" Jeremy scowled.
"It's not true," Alison protested. "He's twisting the story around, that's not what happened!"
"She's the one who's confused," Brian countered. "They don't realize how dangerous those monsters are. Even that small one there -- he could have killed me just now."
"Oh, puh-leeze," Lexington muttered. "I just sat on him -- I didn't even scratch the jerk."
"Quiet, Lex," Brooklyn said sharply.
The small crowd had begun to press in, forming a rough horseshoe around the upper corner of 116th and Claremont, cutting off 116th from Broadway with a fine disregard for traffic. The gargoyles and the three humans moved closer together, standing back to back.
"We should try to capture them, bring them to the authorities," someone in the crowd suggested.
"Yeah, or the zoo," someone else snickered.
"...too dangerous, we should call the police or someone..."
"The police? These things already trashed the police!..."
"If we disappear," Brooklyn said to Jeremy in a low voice, "think they'll leave you guys alone? Most of them are probably just after gargoyles...."
"I don't think so," Lexington said, Broadway's arm across his shoulders as they stood near Alison. "What about whatsisname, Brian?"
"Angela and I can carry Broadway, but you can't carry a human by yourself, Lex."
Broadway shook his head. "You guys go ahead. Forget about me. I can't fly right now -- but I can still fight."
"No!" Brooklyn's voice rose sharply, then modulated. "We're not leaving anyone behind. And we're not fighting if we can help it."
Jeremy had been looking hard at Lexington. "Lex -- " he said suddenly. "Have you ever carried Alison?"
"What...?" Alison looked at him.
"I don't think so," Lexington said uncertainly.
"But she's a lot lighter than me or Christopher -- so you could carry her, what, a few blocks maybe?"
Lex considered. "I could try," he said determinedly.
"Okay," Jeremy said quickly. "Take Alison with you and get out of here, get to where it's safe, we'll be all right -- "
Alison glared and hit him on the shoulder, not hard, with the back of her hand. "Don't be an idiot," she said furiously, and swallowed hard.
"Well, what are we going to do? Back away slowly, don't make eye contact?" Christopher said sarcastically.
"I think it's a bit late for that," Jeremy said.
"How about -- back away quickly?"
A single distinct voice, male, rose without warning from somewhere in the surrounding faces. "GET THEM!"
Like a breaking tide, with Brian and his gang at the front, the crowd surged forward. Which left only one way out -- the rapidly narrowing opening of the horseshoe, at the bottom of the hill, where 116th Street opened onto Riverside Drive.
They ran. Brooklyn, Angela, Lexington and Broadway dropped to all fours to run faster, their wings folded over their backs as they bounded beside the three humans, flanking them as if to protect them. Broadway limped slightly, but managed to keep pace.
They reached the corner of 116th and Riverside, and dashed across the street towards the shadowy mass of the park. "This way," Christopher barked, swerving to run uptown, along the tree-lined paved path that bordered the park. "We won't have a chance in there -- the ground's too uneven, it'll slow us down."
"Didn't we just leave this party?" Jeremy panted as they rounded the corner, following him.
-----
Ricky took the steps up from the subway station two at a time. Alison was bound to be here already, and she didn't want to miss any of this little meeting. Whatever it took, she was going to find out, once and for all, just what was going on.
The sound of running feet and shouting came to her even before she emerged from the stairwell. Something's happening, she thought with a flicker of interest as she took the last few steps and looked around. There seemed to be some disturbance further down 116th street, and people were converging on the spot, presumably to get a better look at whatever it was. She skirted around a sidewalk bagel-seller to get to the Columbia gates, where the others would be waiting; maybe one of them would know what --
They weren't at the gates.
Ricky turned slowly to look at the people around her, hurrying toward the source of the commotion. Without conscious thought, she found herself heading across Broadway, stopping next to the Barnard Quad dormitory building on the corner of 116th, where the street began sloping down.
And from that vantage point at the top of the slope, she was the first to see the four winged shapes wheel and dive above the gathering crowd.
Frozen in shock, she braced herself against the corner of the dorm building and watched as the smallest of the winged creatures plunged toward the street with a high-pitched roar, as the thrown rock tore through the largest one's wing. People ran by her to join the crowd of onlookers, brushing past her, unnoticing and unnoticed.
Jeremy's voice rose above the crowd, protesting, and Alison's joined him. She could see them now, Christopher with them, standing by the gargoyles in a defensive little huddle at the junction of 116th and Claremont, with the crowd forming an arch that neatly cut them off from Broadway.
The gargoyles. Real, almost close enough to touch. And her friends, standing there with them against those who would do them harm. The proof stood before her, and even though she had suspected it, nonetheless her whole mind was a single blaze of frightened, exultant delight. It's true! It's TRUE!
Distant thunder grumbled behind the low-hanging clouds, and abruptly Ricky became aware of the dangerous mood of the crowd. The muttering was getting louder. One voice rose above the others, and with a start she recognized the ringleader of the guys they'd tangled with in the park. Ohhh man. Trouble. Definitely trouble. These are the guys who wanted to go hunting gargoyles....
And Alison's nightmare earlier that night came back to her; Alison's voice, muffled by her pillow, choked with sobs: "I was right there, and I couldn't stop them. They were going to kill Lex, and the others -- and I couldn't protect them...."
"GET THEM!" shouted somebody, and the crowd closed in like the jaws of a trap. Her friends and the gargoyles turned and ran, towards Riverside Drive, where they turned right. Uptown. And the crowd followed them.
Ricky spun around and ran up along Broadway, her mind racing. Drunk on xenophobia, the crowd -- she refused to even think the word "mob" -- was not in a mood to be reasoned with. Only one thing could stop them now. Someone had to shock them into realizing what they were doing. Someone. Somehow.
There was very little clear idea in her head of exactly what she intended to do when she headed them off, but that didn't really bother her. Ricky was used to improvising.
The security guard at the Barnard gates caught her eye; a grey-haired, tough-looking woman speaking rapidly into her CB. She looked up as Ricky slowed in front of the gates, and called "You better get inside, miss; word says those gargoyle monsters have been sighted in the area. Could be dangerous to stay outside if they show up."
Well, no help there. "Thanks," she called back aloud, and was about to start running again, when something else caught her eye.
The blue POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS barriers were still up, but the strikers were apparently all gone for the night. They'd left some things behind: some placards, a couple of whistles and other noisemakers...and a bullhorn.
Ricky had vaulted over the barriers and snatched up the bullhorn before the security guard saw her, and took off down the street again with a silent prayer of thanks to Local 2110. I'll return it when I'm done, I promise!
As she rounded the corner of Broadway and 120th, the first light drops of rain began to fall.
-----
They ran up Riverside Drive, no more than a block ahead of their pursuers. Rain was beginning to fall, a light pricking drizzle that barely made it through the trees.
A stitch was forming in Jeremy's side, and his heart hammered painfully in his chest. "This way!" he shouted hoarsely, turning to dash across the street just ahead of a long line of cars; the traffic would cut off pursuit for a while at least. Ahead of them, beyond a colonnade of trees and a stretch of flat marble tile, was the familiar wide stairway and domed roof of Grant's Tomb. If we can just get inside --
His friends followed him, through the rustling trees and across the rain-slick stone, toward the floodlit building. They'd be safe inside, the guards wouldn't let the mob in, they'd be safe --
As they stumbled up the broad stairway, Alison let out a sharp gasp and caught at his arm. "Look," she choked, pointing. One of the two statues on either side of the steps -- eagles in flight, wings raised -- had been halfway smashed, its wings broken off, half its head missing.
Jeremy felt sick. Oh, god --
They reached the top of the steps just as the crowd poured across the street and began charging down the lane between the trees.
Jeremy grabbed the door handle and tugged. Nothing happened. He tugged again, rattling the door, then stopped; a despairing groan escaped him as he saw the small, polite sign informing him of the landmark site's open hours. Which did not, apparently, include nine-fifteen p.m. on week nights.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the approaching crowd, at his two companions, at the gargoyles, and had a crazy urge to pound on the door and scream "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" at the top of his lungs.
Angela eyed the crowd with a cynical expression. A small wind had picked up, blowing her dark hair forward around her face. "We could probably scare them away without much effort," she said in a low dangerous voice, sounding for a moment almost exactly like her father.
"NO!" Brooklyn snarled, turning on her, his eyes igniting for a split second. "I'm sick of scaring people! I'm sick of being a monster! That's not what we're here for!"
A loud, piercing whine cut through the air -- the unmistakable sound of amplifier feedback. Humans and gargoyles alike pressed their hands to their ears and cried out in mingled pain and anger.
The source of the noise was standing on the high, wide ledge at one side of the stone steps, at an equal height with the columns at the top of the staircase. A young woman with long dark hair, silhouetted against the floodlights, holding a bullhorn in one slender hand.
Ricky.
When she was certain she had the crowd's attention, she raised the bullhorn and spoke, her voice amplified above the shouts and curses. "I SEE YOU FORGOT YOUR TORCHES," she said, her tone one of cheerful, angry mockery, a sort of all-right-let's-fight! attitude that had the immediate effect of getting the crowd's attention. "I HOPE SOMEONE REMEMBERED TO BRING THE ROPE, AT LEAST, OR THIS WON'T BE A SUCCESSFUL RIOT AT ALL."
A stunned silence descended.
Ricky looked surprised. "WHAT? NO ROPE? HOW ON EARTH DO YOU EXPECT TO LYNCH THEM WITHOUT A ROPE?" She scanned the crowd, searching. "NO ROPE, NO TORCHES, NOT EVEN A CHAIN OR A SHOTGUN AMONG YOU. WHAT KIND OF HANGING MOB IS THIS ANYWAY?"
Her voice grew less mocking, more angry. "FOR THAT MATTER, WHAT KIND OF COLLEGE CROWD IS THIS? I MIGHT AS WELL BE IN MISSISSIPPI BACK IN THE SIXTIES. OR MAYBE GERMANY, IN THE THIRTIES?" She took a few steps along the ledge, leaning forward to harangue the crowd. "LOOK AT THEM! YOU'VE GOT THEM BACKED AGAINST A WALL AND THEY HAVEN'T EVEN TRIED TO FIGHT THEIR WAY THROUGH. ANY CLAW WOUNDS AMONG YOU? BRUISES?" She waited a long moment, speaking only when the silence grew to the point where someone from the crowd might have tried to speak. "I THOUGHT NOT."
She continued to pace up and down the ledge, glaring down at the crowd. The wind whipped her dark hair into a wild mane behind her, and her golden eyes blazed; in the floodlights and the light misty rain, she seemed almost to glow, a bright aura surrounding her. "YOU'RE ALL SUPPOSED TO BE COLLEGE-EDUCATED PEOPLE -- HAVEN'T YOU LEARNED ANYTHING FROM THE HISTORY/HUMANITIES REQUIREMENT? YOU'RE READY TO ATTACK THESE CREATURES WHOSE ONLY CRIME IS THAT THEY'RE NOT LIKE YOU! NOT BECAUSE THEY'RE EVIL, BUT BECAUSE THEY'RE DIFFERENT! AND YOU'RE ALSO READY TO ATTACK THESE THREE FOR THE CRIME OF DEFENDING THEM!" She waved her free hand, the gesture taking in Christopher, Jeremy and Alison, crouched against the pillars and staring at her in stupefaction.
Ricky stopped pacing and stood there on the ledge. The hand holding the megaphone dropped slowly, until it hung loosely at her side. "Well, I'm not afraid of differences," she said clearly. Unamplified, her voice was still loud enough to carry over the now silent crowd.
With all eyes on her, she strode up the ledge, jumped down to the top step, and headed toward the gargoyles with a deliberate, measured stride. Holding out one hand to Brooklyn in greeting, she said in that same clear voice: "How do you do. My name is Rachel O'Neill."
Brooklyn was impressed. Despite the human girl's speech -- and he had no doubt she meant it -- he knew that his size and his appearance were enough to intimidate the bravest of humans if they weren't familiar with gargoyles. She was playing to the crowd. And he would have to as well, if her effort was not to be wasted.
His first impulse would have been to shake her hand, greet her with his usual easygoing informality...but something told him a different approach might work better.
He stepped forward, letting his wings flare wide with a sound like a kite being shaken by a gust of wind, then swept one wing forward about his arm in a low court bow. "My lady Rachel," he said, took her hand gently and bent over it. "I am called Brooklyn, second in command of the Manhattan gargoyle clan. My thanks for your timely aid, and for your eloquence on our behalf. As you have said, my companions and I are concerned for the safety of our human friends. We desire nothing but to live in peace with your kind and to protect those who need it."
He could feel her hand shaking as he took it lightly between his talons. Instinctively, he tightened his grasp in what he hoped was a comforting manner, and felt her hand stiffen, then relax and grip his hand tightly.
With a small smile, he rose and released Rachel. He gestured to the other three gargoyles, and again said in a courtly tone, "May I present to you, my lady, my rookery brothers Lexington and Broadway, and my clan sister, the Lady Angela." Softly to Angela and Broadway he whispered, "Wings down, guys, but slowly. We do not want to startle anyone right now."
He glanced at the crowd. Their little performance was doing some good. The people weren't looking at them like monsters anymore. They were looking at them as if they were creatures of legend now. Like a unicorn, or one of Oberon's children. Well, just about anything was better than being chased by an angry mob.
Ricky greeted each gargoyle in turn, with a bit of stage flair. Good thing she knows what to do, Brooklyn thought. I just hope this keeps working.
Brooklyn drew himself up again and addressed her, this time with a little half bow. "And now, my lady, I regret to inform you that we must take our leave. I entrust to you the safety of our friends. I can see that you are as courageous as you are wise, and I know you will care for them."
Ricky was mute, but had the presence of mind to drop a small curtsy.
He turned with a flourish and beckoned to the others, carefully testing his talons against the wall. Under his breath, he murmured, "Okay guys, you know the drill. Very slowly, and keep wings down until we reach the top. Angela, you and I will help Broadway. If we're lucky, no one will panic."
The four gargoyles reached the top of the building. Angela and Brooklyn got on either side of Broadway, and opened their wings to the wind. They glided off the roof top, holding Broadway between them with Lexington on their right flank. Broadway had his good wing unfurled, but needed Angela and Brooklyn to keep him aloft.
They dipped down once toward their friends, then caught an updraft and soared off beyond the high gothic tower of Riverside Church.
Lexington looked back as they cleared the tower. The humans in the crowd were moving toward the four who stood at the top of the steps, but they didn't seem hostile. "I hope they're gonna be all right. I don't like leaving them with that mess to clean up."
Brooklyn glanced across at his rookery brother. "I think they'll be okay. They have that girl Rachel with them. Wasn't she something? She held them all back with her voice alone."
Angela gave Brooklyn an amused look. "You didn't do so bad yourself."
Brooklyn beamed under Angela's compliment. "Never thought I'd have to do that again. Remind me to thank Hudson later for teaching me court manners. Oh, and Lex, don't forget to leave Alison a message. We'll meet on her dorm roof in three days."
"Will do," Lexington replied.
"You okay, Broadway?" Brooklyn asked, as they veered towards midtown.
"Better now," he said, glancing from Brooklyn to Angela. His voice sounded stronger. "But you know guys, all this excitement's made me kind of hungry."
"Why am I not surprised?" said Lexington.
-----
The crowd was dispersing at last. The three had tried to answer as many questions as they could without exposing the gargoyles' weaknesses: yes, they were friendly and always had been; no, they didn't know where they lived; no, they were not in the habit of signing autographs. Brian and his gang had apparently vanished before the gargoyles had left, to nobody's particular surprise -- or regret.
"Thanks, Rachel," Alison said when the four were finally alone. "I thought we were dead for sure back there."
"Hey, it wasn't just me, pal -- your large winged friend performed pretty well himself," Ricky said with a grin.
Christopher smiled as well. "I wonder how long it would take for them to give an Oscar to a gargoyle."
Jeremy tried to visualize Brooklyn at the Academy Awards, but couldn't. "He sure deserved one, though."
Ricky took Christopher's arm and dragged him several feet ahead, heading down Riverside Drive. "Well, now that I've joined the 'Save The Gargoyles Club,' will you guys please, please tell me how you met them?"
Alison laughed at that, slipping her arm through Jeremy's as they walked. "All right, all right. Let's get back to the dorm though. This is a long story."
Jeremy could hear Ricky's voice ahead of them. "So, Christopher, still think it'd be a source of personal pride not to be human?"
Christopher chuckled. "Nah." There was a pause. "Call me Chris."
Jeremy blinked.
The light rain began to slack off as the four turned up 120th street, over the glittering pavement, towards the morning.