Little One's vindication in the knowledge that Leader had been wrong was satisfying, but short-lived. After the first hours spent in Nolee Carroll's care, he made up his mind to leave that part of his life behind him and give the dead no more thought.
Besides, there were too many interesting things here to dwell on the past.
The shiny metal and glass boxes and the glittering discs in Nolee's 'living room' together formed an array that told stories on its little window, performed by images of humans and moving paintings of fantastic creatures. It was these story-discs she called deeveedees that occupied his time when Nolee finally had to retire to bed. She showed him how to push the little buttons on the 'remote' to make the stories play, and then promised him that she would wake up shortly before dawn to see him off to sleep.
"Whatever you do," she had told him, "Don't go outside. You could get lost, or the neighbors might see you. I don't know how gargoyle-friendly they'd be."
"I will not leave," he'd promised her, hungrily eyeing the bread-and-meat conglomeration she had prepared for him. He wanted to tell her how grateful he was, how wonderful it was to at last be warm and sheltered and fed. Little One found his habit of keeping his mouth shut hard to break, but finally mustered up a timid "...thank you."
Nolee smiled, her white teeth like a brilliant crescent moon against her dark skin. "You are very welcome."
As she went upstairs, Little One drank in the unfamiliar glow of kindness, and sat down in the middle of the living room floor to savor every bite of the sandwich and the rich taste of cold, fresh milk. He told himself to remember to tell Nolee how delicious it was, and though he had no idea what sort of beast a blo-nee was, its meat was especially tasty.
Then he took up the remote and carefully touched the little green triangle. The window on the storytelling 'teevee' sprang to life, and Little One sat, immediately enthralled.
It was a tale about a clever and brave girl who, without meaning to, won the love of a prince and together they unmasked the girl's 'stepmother' (whatever that was, though the character in question looked a lot like Sister in one of her more petulant moods) for a greedy schemer out to steal the prince for her own offspring. That was about all he understood in the midst of all the maneuvering, human terms for ties that weren't family, and ridiculous social dancing. He wondered if all that complication was normal for the human world, and he had an uneasy feeling that it was. Inwardly he quailed; how was he to survive?
Nolee, though, was a reassurance. So far she had been direct and open to him. You are very welcome, she had told him. And for the first time in his life, he did feel welcome. Though she had mentioned something, a question that, as the story concluded, made him think very seriously about his future prospects.
Gargoyle... like those things in New York? That meant she had heard of gargoyles before they had met. Somewhere in this Newyork place there might be gargoyles. A clan, perhaps. Little One entertained a brief fantasy of being with younglings his own age, of having some elder brother teach him the proper way to hunt game, of storytelling at a rookery mother's knee.
Then, quite rudely, the specters of Leader and Sister rose up in his mind, sounding off every scornful rebuke. Moonbrained hatchling. Scrawny weakling. Troublesome burden.
Little One brooded on this for quite some time after the deeveedee story had ended.
At length, he made a deal with himself. He would try to stay with Nolee as long as she would permit, and if they found out for certain where these other gargoyles were, he would try to meet them. If they turned out to be goodhearted and welcoming, he would go with his own kind. But if they were cruel to him, he would go back to Nolee and ask if he could stay with her forever. And if she would not have him, he would either try to find another friendly human or live in the woods by himself.
Never again, he promised himself, would he be the willing target of contempt and derision.
--------
Nolee blinked at her alarm clock and had to think for several moments why it had been set to go off hours before her earliest class. The sun wasn't even up yet.
Oh. Little One. She reached for her housecoat as she rolled out of bed, fighting back a yawn, and made her way downstairs, hoping he hadn't gotten too bored or scared and had run off. She wasn't sure he'd understood her instructions on changing DVDs out, let alone the remote.
He was sitting in the living room floor, right where she'd left him, but the TV was running an infomercial for a rotisserie. Little One had one of her school books open in front of him, and he was so intent on it that he didn't notice her coming up right behind him.
"Whatcha got there?"
As innocent a question it was, Little One sprang up as if stung, wheeling around and leaping away from the book, his wings up. "Nolee! I-- I am sorry!"
She blinked. "Sorry for what?"
He cringed, darkening with a guilty flush. "Your book. I only... I only wanted to look at it."
Nolee crouched. "Hey, that's okay. I don't mind." He looked as if he were expecting a blow. She had to wonder how his elders had treated him. "You can look at any book you want as long as I'm not using it."
His wings came down, and he sat up, eyes big and serious. "I can?" Then he deflated with a sigh, as if disappointed.
"What's wrong?" Nolee was beginning to learn that he wasn't in the habit of volunteering his thoughts; she'd have to poke a little to get him to speak up.
He flicked a claw at the book, sinking into a full-blown sulk. "I do not understand it."
She looked down at the book in question and had to bite back a giggle. "Little One, that's calculus. Nobody understands that."
Little One gazed longingly at the book, and he looked so disheartened that she moved to sit next to him, putting her hand on his bony shoulder. Gonna have to fatten this boy up a little, she thought. "But I've got plenty of other books. Do you want to learn how to read?"
Nolee didn't know what prompted her to ask that, nor did she know when she'd find the time... but the look on Little One's face turned so hopeful and jubilant that she didn't care. "I'll take that as a yes," she said, "But the sun's about to come up. You turn to stone, right?"
The little gargoyle nodded, sneaking little glances at the book as if it were a forbidden fruit.
"Let's get you back down to the basement, then. Nobody'll see you if they look in a window. And I'll skip the end of my psych lecture so I can be here when you wake up."
"And you will teach me?" he asked, his voice low but full of anticipation.
"We'll start, yes."
After she watched him turn to stone (and what a fascinatingly bizarre tucking-in it was) Nolee went back upstairs and picked up her calculus book. Smiling and shaking her head, she looked at it for a moment and had to wonder. He had obviously encountered books before, or he wouldn't have known what it was. Perhaps he had some inkling of what it meant to understand what was in a book. His curiosity and desire for understanding had certainly been plain enough.
I just signed over my free time to teach a kid gargoyle how to read, she mused to herself. Wonder what I'm getting into.
Well, to borrow the Little One's notion, there was a need for understanding. So Nolee went to her computer. It was time she started paying attention to the gargoyles' press.
"I have class in four hours," she muttered as her ancient dial-up squealed its way online. "I should be getting a little more sleep."
Typing "gargoyles" at a search site netted her a near-useless mixture of junk, mostly forums and news boards about gargoyle sightings and conspiracy theories. Articles from legitimate news outfits were vague and more or less regurgitations of the little Nolee already knew. And she could purchase a faux-stone resin replica of a gargoyle from the Notre Dame cathedral for only one hundred and forty-nine dollars if she clicked here now.
She narrowed the search terms, refining it to real gargoyles, new york.
The top result made her stomach flip: THE GARGOYLE MENACE.
Almost reluctantly, she opened the site.
WE MUST ACT NOW TO SAVE HUMANITY.
There are demons in the skies, hiding in the shadows of night that threaten our very existence. These demons are GARGOYLES. Manhattan is a city gripped with fear of these nightmare beasts. YOUR CITY COULD BE NEXT. We must keep humanity PURE.
They come to kill and destroy all we know and love. They are the ENEMY of humanity. PROTECT yourself and your children from these soulless monsters. They know nothing but death and destruction.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
JOIN US.
WE ARE THE QUARRYMEN.
A pain in her hands made Nolee notice that she was gripping the calculus book in her hands with a knuckle-popping force. With a deep breath, she relaxed and read the page again. The words almost boiled on the computer screen with the force of the hate they had been written in. It didn't help that it was blood-red text on a black background, and the grainy photo of a snarling purple glowing-eyed face only enhanced the effect.
The bellicose website continued to seethe in the same manner for another three screen-fuls before Nolee had finally had enough.
She could only take so much garbage before the urge to vomit would overtake her. Even if she hadn't met the shy grey gargoyle child, she knew it for what it was. Her parents hadn't raised a fool. And especially knowing Little One, it worried her that anyone would buy into that hatemongering.
Him, soulless? Little One, who acted as if he'd committed a heinous crime in daring to touch her math textbook?
She realized now how wise she was to keep him out of sight. One whisper of a gargoyle here... well, there was no telling what an internet whackjob would do these days. She would protect him by hiding him and teaching him. She'd make the time to do it, too.
--------
Little One dreamed of turning the pages of a book, endlessly scanning the indecipherable scrawlings. Page after frustrating page. His dreaming mind drifted in and out of this exercise, each time turning more pages and never seeming to reach the end of the enormous tome.
Dusk finally came, and he shook free of his stone skin with a yowl. Nolee was there waiting for him, sitting on the bottom step. She stood as he shrugged off the last dust of sleep, staring at him. He squirmed uncertainly. Direct attention had hardly been a good thing heretofore... but this was Nolee.
"Goodness," she remarked with a smile. "That was something else."
It took him a moment to figure out she was talking about his awakening, a typically explosive little event. He'd never given it any thought. To a human, it might seem unusual, he supposed. He doubted that Nolee would have been similarly delighted by the sight of someone like Leader waking up, flinging bits of stone skin everywhere and roaring like a thundercloud.
"Hello, Nolee," he greeted her hopefully, remembering the previous pre-dawn's conversation.
"Hello yourself," she replied, holding out her hand. "You hungry?"
The constant answer to that question was 'yes', of course, but... "May I read, too?" he ventured boldly, taking her hand.
She laughed as they went up the stairs. "Oh, you're just too cute for words, Little One."
--------
First, she sat him down at the table with a fresh primary-lined pad and a pencil. In careful capital letters she had printed the alphabet, and instructed him to simply copy the letters while saying them aloud as he did so. After a moment of fumbling the pencil in his little claws, he peered at the double rows of letters.
"Ay," Nolee said, pointing to the first letter.
"Aaayyy," Little One repeated, and put the point of the pencil to paper, his face a mask of concentration. Presently a lopsided but firmly-drawn capital A appeared below Nolee's precise example.
"Bee." She proceeded to the next letter. And so it went, one letter after another. Nolee wondered how many repetitions he'd have to make, if he was actually learning the shapes and names of the letters and not just parroting as many children might at the start of learning to read. She only had to wonder as far as the letter O.
"Oh. Oh..." Little One murmured, digging a little circle in the pad with the now-dulled point of the pencil. "Oh... oh..." Here he paused and chewed at his lip, a fang exposed. And instead of following Nolee's finger to the next letter, he lingered on the O, tracing the shape a few more times.
Then he went back one letter. "En. Ennnnn."
Forward one. "Oh."
He looked up at Nolee, the first time his eyes had left the pad since the start of the exercise. "Ennnn-oh..." he muttered, head tilted to one side. "Nnnoh... Is this how your name starts?"
She blinked. Halfway through the alphabet and he was already starting to put phonics together? "Uh-- yes, that's exactly it."
"Which is... 'lee'?" he asked, looking back down at the letters.
"That's two letters," she said. "Well, three, but the last two are the same." She touched the pad with a finger. "See if you can figure it out. You've got the right idea, just sound the letters out..."
"Lee... eee-- E. N-O... E is the end."
"That's right. Can you find the middle letter?" How old is he? He's too smart to look that young, but then, what do I know about how gargoyles age?
"Lllllee," he murmured, pencil tip roving back over the written letters. "...aye... jay, kay... el. Ell." He looked up again. "L."
Nolee could only smile in amazement, and watch him go to the blank margin and print NOLEE. With a triumphant jab of a claw, he declared, "That is your name."
All she could do for a moment was shake her head in wonder.
Little One's face fell. "Is it wrong?"
"No, no, you got it exactly right," she assured him. "You just got it right so fast, is all."
Comforted, he tapped the written name. "Why are there two Es? It is 'eee' by itself."
"Not exactly. Two Es makes the eee sound. One E is... well, I'd be 'Nole' with only one E."
He frowned. "Why?"
This led to a discussion on long and short vowel sounds, I-before-E (except-after-C), those weird consonant marriages that produced 'th', 'sh', and 'ch', and it took a yawn for Nolee to notice it was two in the morning.
"Humans sleep at night," Little One remarked, sounding slightly amused.
"Guess it's a good thing I don't have any class or work tomorrow." Nolee stretched her arms above her head and yawned again. "I should get to bed. You want anything to eat before I turn in?"
"Yes." He hopped out of the chair and followed her to the fridge. "Nolee, will I read soon?"
Pouring a glass of milk, she nodded over her shoulder at the table. "You keep that up, sooner than I think. You're a very quick study."
"I hope so." Little One sounded impatient. "I want to read. I want..." He fumbled for words, his tail twitching agitatedly. He looked up at Nolee, his expression in earnest. "I need to."
"Don't worry. You will."
