Gargoyles: the Resurrection

Nightingale, Part III

Nightstone Unlimited

August 22, 2004

6:03am

Danica Kaine was enjoying a rare moment of rest when the news broke about the fire at a laboratory belonging to rival corporation Majix Technologies. She paid it little heed until her ear chanced to hear mention of a gargoyle sighting, and then her moment of rest was over.

Danica prided herself on being the best, of being indispensible. Of knowing exactly what her employer not only needed but wanted before they did. Minutes after the news broadcast about the explosion, and the follow-up story that came after showing some very shaky handcam footage of a blurry winged shape moving across the sky, Danica placed a call from her office phone, texted from her cell phone while she was waiting, and emailing half a dozen people while she talked after the call was picked up.

Three hours later, she was rewarded for her labors with a ream of information on Majix Technologies and their recent projects, including one extremely classified document code-named Project Lazarus. The files were encrypted, the boys in Acquisitions told her, with some pretty severe security protocols. Which should be nothing to the crack team of hackers Nightstone legally employed, if they ever got off their donut-swilling asses and did what they were paid to do.

She made her way through the halls of the upper levels of the Nightstone Building, heels clicking importantly on the marble-tiled floor, a briefcase in one hand and a fat file folder in the other. There weren't many people up and about this hour of the morning, mostly janitorial staff, but those that were quickly and efficiently got out of her way with respectful, even slightly fearful, nods.

It was nice being the personal assistant for the CEO and founder of the company, Danica reflected as she stepped into the mirrored private elevator leading up to Ms. Destine's penthouse office. Dominique wasn't the first CEO to employ her, nor probably would she be the last. But so far, this was the only job that

"Good morning, Ms. Destine," Danica said respectfully, and stood patiently until her boss gave her the nod over her morning cup of coffee to take the seat opposite her own at the desk. She sat, smoothed her skirt over her knees, and gently laid the file folder on the corner of the desk.

"Good morning, Ms. Kaine," Dominique replied, and took another sip of her coffee. Danica could smell the blend from where she was sitting, Jamaican Blue Mountain. Only the best and priciest for Ms. Destine, but she had to admit, her one taste of the blend had sent her straight to heaven, so she couldn't fault her boss there. Her system quietly let her know that it needed a caffeine jolt, but Danica would never be so crass and impertinent to ask for a cup of Dominique's rare and expensive coffee.

"If I know you," Dominique continued, swiveling to stare out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sunrise creeping over the Manhattan skyline, "and I wouldn't have hired you if I didn't, you've discovered some very important tidbit which you know is in my interests."

"Yes, Ms. Destine," Danica said dutifully, and reached for the file folder she'd put down mere moments ago. She flipped it open and pulled out several pages, quickly scanning the information to ensure she had the proper file and information. "Late last night, there was an explosion at the Majix Technologies laboratory on the Lower East Side," she said, and offered the pages to Dominique. Her boss raised an eyebrow, but took the document and lowered her gaze to it as she took another drink of her coffee. Danica fell respectfully silent as her boss perused the pages. This would be so much faster if she could just lay out all the facts at once, but Dominique rarely had the patience for rush jobs.

"Interesting enough," Dominique finally said when she was done reading, and set the document aside. "Hardly within your job description though."

It was the opening she'd been waiting for. She quickly revised her mental outline of the information to be presented, and discarded several items. "That would normally be true, Ms. Destine," she said and rifled through the pages to pull out a grainy black-and-white image captured from the home-movie footage played by the news outlets. She examined it for a brief moment: it was nothing special, merely a winged shadow against the half moon. She offered it to her employer anyway. "Except for this."

Dominique took the page out of her hand and glanced it over. Her gaze sharpened, her entire body tensed – like a hunter, came the uncomfortable thought in the back of Danica's mind, which she ruthlessly pushed away – and carefully set down her mug. "The news mentioned a gargoyle in conjunction with the lab explosions?"

"Yes, Ms. Destine." Danica pulled several more documents from the file folder, and laid them out in order facing Dominique. "There were multiple eyewitness reports of a gargoyle swooping in to badly damaged sections of the buildings and ferrying people to safety. A lot of the accounts are garbled, and several of the eyewitnesses are questionable at best, with having had such a traumatic event occur, of course, but enough exist, along with photographic evidence, that there were not just one gargoyle, but several gargoyles present after the lab explosion."

Dominique looked sharply up, piercing Danica with her eyes. "If the stories are to be believed," she said, deceptively mildly – Danica had been around long enough to know her employer's tones and moods – "there is already a nest of gargoyles in the city that often undertake such heroic acts as saving victims from harm."

Danica had anticipated this line of questioning, and had taken the liberty of doing some of her own fact-checking. She pulled yet another series of images from the folder and lined them up. "I thought of that as well, ma'am," she said, "and made a few inquiries before I brought this to your attention. I know how valuable your time is, after all. The image that you're holding does not meet the physical proportions of any of the gargoyle images recorded prior to last night. The footage was not of a particularly desirable quality, however, so there is a margin of error."

Dominique's eyebrow only raised further. "Does not meet?" she said wonderingly, then shook her head. "How much of a margin of error, Danica?"

"Eighty-three percent accurate, ma'am. It isn't a perfect guarantee by any means, but the chances are very, very good that the gargoyle so many reported seeing or being helped by last night is a newcomer to the city."

Dominique was silent for a very long time, and Danica resisted the urge to fidget. She watched her boss completely forget her coffee was running cold (and there was nothing Dominique hated more at six in the morning than a cold, wasted cup of coffee) as she read in-depth the package Danica had put together for her. Dominique's facial expressions ran the gamut from surprised to thoughtful to wistful to determined over the course of the next ten minutes, at the end of which she finally put the folder down and nodded at Danica.

"You've done an exemplary job with these files, Danica," she praised, and Danica felt pride surge within her. "I do notice, however, that there are at least a dozen encrypted files you managed to … acquire from Majix Technologies. Most of them dealing with this Project Lazarus…"

"Yes ma'am," Danica replied, and couldn't keep the pleased smile from her face. "I've already made sure that the specialists on the fifth floor are aware of the importance of these files. I sent down a request a little less than an hour ago for it to be made a priority by the teams."

Dominique neatly placed all the scattered pages and images into the folder again, and dropped it in her top drawer, leaving only the grainy image of the unknown gargoyle sitting on her desk. "Thank you for your attention to this project, Danica," Dominique said warmly. "You, with your work ethic and drive, have shown yourself to be an indispensible boon to this company. Effective immediately, I'm giving you a ten percent raise to your salary for your insightfulness and incentive. "

Danica had been hoping for a minor increase; ten percent nearly floored her. But she wasn't such an idiot that she wouldn't take it with grace and dignity. Ten percent extra would go a long way to establishing her lifestyle properly. She smiled and bowed her head. "No, thank you, Ms. Destine. Your generosity is always appreciated."

"Was there anything further, Danica?"

Danica shook her head and gathered her things. She knew dismissal when she heard it, but the ten percent raise outweighed any irritation she might have felt. "No, Ms. Destine. I'll be sure to keep an eye on the news outlets, to see if there's any further coverage of the gargoyle sightings."

Dominique smiled at her, and once again Danica felt a surge of accomplishment. "Be sure to see Rolanda in Personnel about your raise," she murmured, and picked up both her cup of coffee and the file Danica had left on her desk.

Danica reeled out the door and fairly floated all the way back down to her office, dreaming of ten percent extra cars, clothing and apartment furnishings.

oOoOoOo

Church of St. Michael the Archangel

Sunset, 7:43pm

Father Robert O'Brien had been the pastor of St. Michael the Archangel for nigh on twenty years. He had seen births and deaths aplenty, presided over weddings and funerals and christenings without number. He walked every inch of his church a thousand times over in his two decades of being its caretaker, and watched the sun set over the city from the roof of the church nearly every day.

So when his instincts told him that one of the gargoyle statues on the roof of his sanctuary had not been there the night before, he knew to listen.

He leaned on his cane to ease his bad right leg, the persistent remnant of a war wound taken back when he'd been a young padre in Saigon, and pensively studied the unknown statue. He had a pretty good idea of how it had gotten onto the roof without his knowing; if it was a true gargoyle, flesh by night, it was as simple a matter as finding safety before the sun came up.

The gargoyle was female, though that was hard to discern from the way the wings wrapped protectively around her body. Something in the lines of the face, he decided finally, a slender delicacy to the cheek bones and jaw lines that suggested feminism.

It never occurred to him to believe that he was the victim of some unfathomable prank, finding a strange statue atop his roof. Though he'd never met a gargoyle previously, he'd seen enough winged shadows crossing the sky to believe in them. He didn't fall in with the fools in the city that thought gargoyles were something evil to be feared and hunted. Rome knew that gargoyles were protectors, those who kept demons away from their homes; if it had been otherwise, representations of gargoyles and their cousins, the grotesques, would never have been commissioned by the Church for their holy houses.

The last light of the setting sun washed over the roof, stretching long shadows nearly to the doorway on the other side. Father O'Brien shifted his weight again, grimacing slightly as the ever-present twinge in his leg bothered him once again. He rubbed briskly at his thigh, trying to ease the ache as the sun disappeared and twilight fell.

The first pop and crack of stone breaking made him jump, and he hissed in pain as he landed on his bad leg. Only by leaning heavily on his cane did he manage to keep his balance. Then, he leaned forward, intently and interestedly studying the cracks as they ran jaggedly across the surface of the gargoyle's statue.

He only hoped he didn't scare the creature into tossing him off the roof before he had a chance to introduce himself.

oOoOoOo

With sunrise had come blessed oblivion. With sunset came consciousness and the healing of every scrape, scratch and scorch she'd suffered the night before. She roared, exulting in the feeling of being awake and freed from stone sleep, stretching every limb and both wings to their fullest extent. A moment later, the feeling fled, replaced by a creeping dread as she stared out over the unfamiliar and alien cityscape.

She crouched low and clutched at the edge of the roof, trying to pull her fractured memories together. A place of strange machines and odd men. A fire. People in need of rescue. A maddeningly familiar red gargoyle. And then the sunrise. Then more that came, a veritable flood of memories from a time long ago, a time she wasn't even sure she remembered properly. A castle, a wide expanse of virgin wood and wilderness. A princess, the guards. More gargoyles in a rainbow of color. Feelings associated with each one threatened to swamp her and take her into oblivion once more.

She whimpered and clutched her head between both hands as the memories poured through her mind. Desperately, she tried to exert some control, to build a mental dam through which only a little could trickle at a time, but that control kept slipping. That dam kept crumbling under the onslaught.

"Hello there," came a soft voice from behind her.

Instantly, she whirled, her eyes ablaze and her claws extended, her wings and tail flaring out to balance her on the narrow stone edge of the roof. A man with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing black with a white collar and leaning on a cane, stood very still with one hand raised, palm first. She hesitated for a moment, trying to assess if he was a threat or not. But it was so hard to think straight with her head pounding and screaming at her.

"I have no intentions of hurting you," the man continued in a soft, soothing tone. She held her stance a moment longer, then warily relaxed. The human was crippled, she told herself. Like Brother Mathias, a memory whispered, bringing with it the image of a fat, jolly man in a friar's habit with a crutch. She winced, one hand going to her head again.

"I'm Father O'Brien. Robert," the human added, then took a cautious step forward. The hand he'd been holding up to show he was unarmed extended out towards her. "You look in pain. Perhaps I can help."

"What are you doing here?" she snarled, eyeing the extended hand but not reaching out to take it.

"I'm the pastor of this church," Robert replied, and didn't seem to bat an eye at her hostility. Nor did he lower his hand from where it was still reaching out to her. She had to give him credit for his courage.

"The priest. Responsible for seeing to the spiritual and physical wellbeing of my parishioners."

"I'm Brother Mathias, lady gargoyle," the man in the brown robe with the crutch told her, and his eyes danced merrily. "A friar assigned here by Holy Rome to see to the spiritual well-being of Wyvern's residents. They didn't specify if those residents in need of spiritual guidance needed to be human. Did you want to come to my first midnight mass this evening?"

She staggered back a pace as the memory steamrolled through her, but her foot met only air. Thrown off-balance, she fought a losing battle for balance. Before she could tip backwards, however, Robert had taken three quick paces forward and caught her wheeling arm, pulling her back to balance again. He released her wrist as soon as she was steady again, and returned to his distance of three paces.

She stared at him, and he stared back, a look a touch more polite than the one she was sure she was giving him. "Thank you," she murmured finally, and caped her wings around her shoulders. Prudently, she took one step forward, off the stone edge. Just in case.

"May I ask your name, lady gargoyle?"

"May I ask your name, lady gargoyle?" the fat friar asked.

She laughed. "We don't have names like you humans do, unless you humans give us those names, like Goliath, or Bethsabe. …There is one among us that calls me nightingale. You may call me that if you wish, Brother Mathias."

She closed her eyes briefly against the spike of pain that came with the remembrance. "Nightingale," she managed through gritted teeth. "I'm called Nightingale."

The man – Robert – smiled warmly. "Well, Nightingale," he said. "It is a pleasure to meet you." He hesitated for a moment, and she tensed, wondering if this was the moment the attack would come. But he merely tilted his head and in a tone as concerned as any she'd ever heard asked, "Would you like to come inside the church? I have warm food and tea to share, if you're hungry."

She was hungry, she realized suddenly as her stomach growled at the mere mention of food. "I am," she admitted. "You really have no intention of trying to hurt me, do you?"

"Not in the slightest," he said with a small smile and a gesture towards the door on the other side of the roof. "I'm not in the habit of hurting people. I'm a man of God, my dear, not a Quarryman."

"What's a Quarryman?" she asked curiously as he led her into the warmth of the church.

oOoOoOo

Demona sighed in relief as the pain of her forced transformation faded away to a dull ache that would disappear entirely once she indulged in a hot shower. She stretched her wings and tail, then settled herself back down at her desk and reached for her coffee cup and the file her very efficient personal assistant had given her more than twelve hours ago.

She had read it at least a dozen times already, fact-checking through her private channels even her top-level executives, let alone her PA, knew existed. As far as she'd been able to verify, the lab had been doing research into cloning and reanimation, amongst other fringe sciences. Any more than that required codebreakers and hackers. Once Acquisitions cracked the encryptions on the Lazarus files, however, she'd know the full extent of Majix Technologies' research and development.

Demona finished her coffee and studied the grainy still of the gargoyle, cleaned up and enhanced as much as computers allowed for. Details weren't clear, but Demona recognized in the slimness of the wing structure and limbs that the gargoyle was female. There was something about the tail, barely visible as a silhouette against the night sky, that niggled at Demona's most ancient and foggiest of memories, something about the wing structure.

She leaned back in her chair, rubbing her chin as she mulled it over. There had been countless gargoyles over the long centuries of her life she had known, from the original Wyvern Clan to the scattered band of refugees she had led in the waning years of her first lifetime. Clans from Paris, London, the Orient… they all blended together after so long in memory.

The original Wyvern clan…

With a start, Demona whirled in the chair and snatched the photo off her desk again. Yes! That was it! The light hue of the gargoyle wasn't a trick of the light like she'd originally thought. It was the gargoyle's natural color: pure ivory as presented in a black-and-white image! And the tail… she'd only known one gargoyle with light skin to ever have a spade shaped tail. The trio of quills, easy to dismiss as a more common "hand" midway along the wingstruts only cinched it.

"You," she breathed, staring at the photo in disbelief. She gently touched the picture, smoothed her talons over the indistinct face. "I remember you. Ivory, they called you."

With a sense of purpose, she tucked the photograph back into the folder and put the entire file into a locked drawer of her desk. She strode to the full-length window and flung it open, feeling for the first time the night breeze against her skin and wings. She launched herself out of the window, catching a thermal almost instantaneously, and angled her path to take her downtown, to where the last reports of gargoyle sightings had been.

She dared not let herself get too attached to the hope starting to burn in her soul.

oOoOoOo

Castle Wyvern

9:30pm

By the time nine o'clock had come 'round, Lexington had already been put to work pulling whatever news clips he could find from the Internet. He had at least five screens all displaying different information and images at any one time. Broadway and Angela had offered to help as well, but Goliath had told them to take Bronx and investigate the labs that had burned down, to see what clues could be offered there. Broadway, ever the amateur detective, had brightened and hurried off to fetch his investigating kit with Angela trailing behind him.

Xanatos made an appearance ten minutes past the hour, with a bulging stack of paper clippings and what his own sources had been able to gather during the day while the clan was locked in their stone sleep. Goliath had accepted his offerings with grace and civility, and then Xanatos had quietly withdrawn, pausing only to say that the full resources of his family were at the clan's disposal.

For all intents and purposes, the man really did seem determined to prove he had turned over a new leaf. That still didn't mean Brooklyn trusted him though. Xanatos would find some way to weasel out of the life debt he owed the clan for saving his son from Oberon sooner or later. It was only a matter of time.

He flipped through his portion of the pile of files and photographs Xanatos had managed to get his hands on, propping his chin up with his free hand. None of the numbers and analyses made much sense to him, and oftentimes the images were too grainy to make out any details. It was just as likely a blob on the camera lens as it was a gargoyle, he thought. Some of them were that hard to make out.

"Six gargoyles," Lexington said suddenly, breaking Brooklyn out of his inner grumbling. His head snapped around and he stood up, tossing the pages in his hand down onto the table with little regard. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Goliath and Hudson mark their places in their own research piles and approach the computer setup where Lexington was perched.

"Six, ye say?" Hudson stroked his beard as he bent in to peer with his one good eye at the computer screen. Lexington nodded, moved the mouse around and clicked it, then tapped the screen as a video began to play. It was footage of the fire, with indistinct shapes

"This is as clean as I can get the footage," he explained by way of apology. "It's really hard to make out any details, but then again, it usually is when it comes to gargoyles and hand cameras." He bent over the keyboard, tongue tucked intently in the corner of his mouth, and inputted several keystrokes. Red boxes began appearing on the video, and Lexington did something or another with them to make each display on its own screen.

"This is about as zoomed in as I can get," he continued, and Hudson nodded as if he understood every word coming out of Lexington's mouth. The olive-skinned gargoyle pointed to the first, where a bulky, pixilated shape reminiscent of Goliath was plucking what was obviously a human out of the path of the fire. Another blurry shape, small and web-winged, did the same on another screen. It was the same for all four, figures that looked like gargoyles but definitely were not any of the clan pulling humans out of the way of the rampaging blaze caused by the lab explosion.

"I ran recognition software on each figure," Lex said, finally turning around in his chair to face the others. "None of them match any gargoyle living in Manhattan today. Not the clan, not Talon's clan in the Labyrinth, not Demona or the clones… I even checked the records we got from some of the other clans around the world. London and Ishimura, primarily. Some of them are similar to clan members we have in the database… but none of them match enough to actually probably be that clan member."

Brooklyn got lost somewhere around the part where he was talking about Talon's people under the city streets, and he tried to puzzle it out on his own. His best guess was: "So you're saying that these gargoyles, if they really are gargoyles and I'm not just going out of my mind, are brand new to the city, that no one's seen them before last night?"

Lexington shot his brother a glance that was so full of guilt it was hard to meet the smaller gargoyle's eyes. "Well… not exactly. We did get one clear image from last night. I really had to dig for it though." He spun around to type at the keyboard again, and the central screen switched to the very clear, very distinct, image of an female gargoyle with long brown hair and dusky green skin. In the picture, she was lifting a fallen steel beam off a man in a lab technician's coat.

Hudson exclaimed something, and Goliath uttered "Jalapeño!" but Brooklyn paid them no attention. He stared at the for a long time, before finally reaching out to touch the screen with one trembling hand. "Greenskin," he said hoarsely. "My nightingale."

"I owe you an apology," Lexington said softly.

Brooklyn shook his head, still staring at the image. "Not important," he said. "What's important is that we find her. And the others. We need to know how they got here. Who brought them back. Why they were brought back."

"I agree," Goliath said, hands and arms arranged in his classic thinker's pose. "There are many questions that must be answered, and we can only do that by finding our lost clanmates, if they truly are our lost clanmates." He nodded decisively. "Brooklyn, you and Hudson will go to the last place you saw the female. Lexington, you've done excellent work tonight. You should stay here and see what more you can find."

Brooklyn glanced at Hudson, then nodded to Goliath. It was the most logical place to begin looking, since Broadway, Angela and Bronx were already searching the wreckage for clues. Lexington grinned up at the Clan Leader and cracked his knuckles. "I'm on it boss," he promised, and turned to give the array of display screens his full attention once again.

"If she's out there," Goliath said to Brooklyn in a reassuring tone, clapping one massive hand on his shoulder, "we'll find her. We'll find them all."