Gargoyles and Gargoyles - The Goliath Chronicles belong to Walt Disney /Buena Vista, not to me. I'm not making money out of this, please don't sue. Thanks for the beta-reading, Samuel.

Seeing Jasmine is not believing

Matt Bluestone was starting to feel quite ashamed. His partner had knocked him down and made a prisoner escape, after all. And there was something else that was wrong but he didn't know what exactly. "Elisa was acting a bit strangely" he explained again to Captain Chavez. "And she called her cat Cagney a she. I didn't pay attention to it at first but I'm practically sure her cat is a male."

"What are you suggesting?" Maria Chavez asked.

"Either my partner has serious memory problems or this was not the real Elisa."

Maria Chavez thought about. This seemed quite difficult to believe. She could protest and take for granted that conspiracies-obsessed Matt Bluestone was imagining his partner kidnapped by aliens or she could trust him and let him investigate as he wanted.

She decided for the second option.

oOOOooOoOO

In the clock tower, Elisa was starting to feel crazy. Proteus had come one evening with Sevarius who had immediately started working on various instruments the shape-shifter had brought to him. Sevarius didn't understand how evil Proteus was. He seemed happy to work on the cell samples of this murderer. He sang while working. And he was the worst singer Elisa had ever heard (well, maybe second after the banshee).

"This creature is a murderer" she explained him for the umpteenth time, losing patience. "You won't get anything by working for him!"

"You have great DNA" the mad scientist answered.

"What?"

"I had a look at it when I was working on… Demelza, Delilah, I can't remember the name. Do you know that Native American people share an enzymatic code that can be found nowhere else on earth?"

"I don't care! That guy is using you, he'll kill you without a thought as soon as he has his clones!"

Sevarius frowned. "Pity. He has the most beautiful genetic code I have ever seen. I could work on it for hours. Do you know if there are others like him?"

"The stairs to the police station are just here. You just have to go down, ask Captain Chavez and tell her I'm upstairs with a killer. Quick, he may come back at any moment!"

"Good. I'd like to have more cell samples."

oOOOooOoOO

Castle Wyvern, atop the Eyrie building

Goliath was just coming back from patrol with Hudson when Matt Bluestone entered the courtyard. The red-haired detective told the leader of the Manhattan clan about his suspicions. Goliath remembered things that had been worrying him, too. Elisa was acting out-of-character. She was refusing to let him touch her and yet she was acting more enticingly than Jessica Rabbit. There was something wrong going on.

His suspicions were confirmed when he tried to phone her. Nobody was answering back. A phone call to her parents taught them that she had hardly answered their phone calls. She hadn't visited the Labyrinth for ages, either.

"Lad, it must be sorcery" Hudson supposed.

"Sorcery?" Matt objected, puzzled. He did believe in UFOs and in conspiracies but not in magic. Goliath frowned.

"She was already under a spell once" he explained, thinking of the time Puck had turned her into a gargoyle. "But I don't know many people who could do that. Puck and… Demona could."

Goliath and Hudson exchanged a look. Finding Owen for an explanation was easy: they knew where he was. The explanation by itself could be slightly trickier. As for Demona, finding Dominique Destine's name in the yellow pages could be relatively simple. But negotiating with her wouldn't be easy task. And by the way, why would she cast this kind of spell on Elisa instead of plainly killing her?

They decided to ask Owen for an explanation first. Demona would come later.

oOOOooOoOO

New Olympus

In his cell, Suetorp was bored. He turned into Taurus once again. And then into Boreas. And then into Cerb. He went back to his usual form once again, looked at his hands and frowned. Some green stuff had appeared on his hands. It was itching slightly.

"I got a virus!" he shouted. "I need a doctor!"

"Shape-shifters don't get viruses!" Taurus retorted.

"I got a virus, maybe because I'm a clone, look at my hands!"

Taurus went to have a look and sighed. "This is not a virus, you are just faking!"

"Proteus escaped from prison by seducing a young trainee. He killed her, by the way. Then he took her form and left to her brother's home. The kid had been working on a cloning machine for weeks. He killed the boy too, did the necessary to make it look like a suicide, cloned himself into me and left the island!"

Taurus didn't ask questions. This was getting worrying. He had been feeling a bit guilty about the death of the girl, Lasa. Maybe she was too naive for being a cop. But perhaps she would still be alive now if he had warned her better against Proteus. When he was thinking of it, it was true that her brother had supposedly committed suicide the night she had been killed, which had traumatised their whole family. Could it be possible that the two deaths were linked?

He decided to pay a visit to the victims' family as soon as possible.

oOOOooOoOO

Lasa was a dryad, a partly plant being. Traditionally, dryads are pacifists; this was why Taurus had been reluctant to accept her as a trainee. They had a particular grudge against humans, who used to kill them thinking they were trees, but they were otherwise very slow and kind. The thing was, refusing Lasa would have been discrimination.

He knocked at the door of her parents' home. A green-skinned woman of about 120 or 130 years old (the equivalent of her mid-forties for a human) opened and frowned. "Officer Taurus?"

"I need to talk to you. It's about…"

Sap tears started running down the woman's cheeks. "Lasa? What do you want me to say? I tried to tell her that police was no job for a dryad, she just wouldn't listen! And why did you let her approach that Proteus knowing how dangerous he was?"

Taurus felt uneasy. It was not the same time he had to confront an upset citizen, this was part of his job. But this was about Proteus, the creature who had murdered his father. "Not only. Do you know if your son Los…"

"I'm trying to forget those tragedies, don't you understand? I have three other children and I want…" She started crying again. A baby started shouting somewhere and a boy who looked very much like his dead elder sister entered the room and looked at the minotaur, embarrassed. "Sir, my mother needs to rest and my little sister is crying, could you please come back later?" he asked pleadingly.

Taurus nodded. He could handle a killer or a psychopath but a mother in distress was somehow too much for him. The boy accompanied him, looking serious. "She is not all right. You had better not come back again."

"I see she is upset. But there are things I need to know about your big brother's suicide," he explained

"He didn't kill himself!" the boy retorted, shocked. "He had just received a note saying he could have a scholarship at the college if his project of a cloning machine was good enough so he was working nights and days. My dad says he was a genius, and he was only 55. And he had a new girlfriend too. He couldn't do that, he was too happy!"

"Do you think it could be an accident?" the detective asked.

"They said he drank weed-killer. But we dryads don't have weed-killer in our homes."

"Maybe he was using it for one of his projects" Taurus suggested.

"You don't know my mom. She would have found it in no time and made regret having it."

"Do you know someone who would have wanted to kill him?"

The boy thought about. "A jealous person, maybe. His cloning device was nearly perfect, there was just the green stuff that appeared later on the subjects. Only a few more weeks working on it and he would have had his scholarship. This was not fair," the child said bitterly.

"Yes, it was unfair" Taurus approved. "Green stuff, you say? What did it look like?"

"An abnormal kind of moss. Tell me, are you going to find the person who killed my big brother?"

"I will," the detective said firmly. "And he is going to pay for it."

To be continued…