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Souls of the Night

106.

The silent shock that had gripped all the gargoyles of the Manhattan clan when my cell phone rang fell away after a few seconds, and that showed up in very different ways in different members of the clan which was best described as a frantic general clumsiness. Nashville dropped his silverware into his plate, clinking. Goliath knocked his water glass over so that half the table was flooded. Angela was nearly swept away by Broadway's snap-open wings as they both jumped up from their bench, causing it to topple backwards. The dogs jumped up and barked in alarm, bumping into each other like clumsy puppies. Tachi shrieked a "fuck" so loud it would normally have earned her a week's sewing machine ban, had Katana not at that second slammed a plate against her beak, which Heather's paws had sent soaring as she jumped into the middle of the table. Peas and mashed potatoes sailed through the air, different tableware breaking under Heather's weight while she, like a cat, hunched over and screeched " PICK IT UP!" in my direction. And while Brooklyn dragged the kicking Hatchling off the table which caused even more food to fly and tableware to break. I, who had already pulled my phone out of my pants pocket, so awkwardly that I had ripped open a seam with my claws in the process, almost dropped my device. It bounced around in my hands as if I were the clumsiest gargoyle in the universe, my fingers struggled several times with the slide button without picking up and the ringing seemed to become more and more urgent, penetrating and pleading. Until finally I managed to press the button and pushed the damn thing to my head...,

"ALEX!", I screeched and heard a pained "Arrgh!" from the line probably because I had yelled directly into his ear.

"Make it loud," whispered Katana, massaging her plate-hit beak chin, and Heather, who had been silenced - by Brooklyn's hand over her mouth - grunted approvingly in his clamp grip.

With shaky hands, I disengaged from the apparatus enough that I could put it on speaker while fighting tears of relief. Finally- FINALLY he had answered. Finally Nathaniel would be helped and this pressure would be lifted from me - from us. Finally I would be able to take him in my arms again, unburdened, to kiss him.

"ALEX! Alex, thank God. Nathaniel is-"

"I know," his voice rang through the room, filled with people but dead silent. "I heard your last message. Do you have any idea why his body is reacting this way?"

Stunned again for a few seconds, I looked up into the faces of my brothers and sisters.

"Don't you know!?" I exclaimed shrilly, wishing I had only misunderstood his last words. Why did he ask ME why Nathaniel's body was burning and petrifying? It was HIS spell!

"You need to know what's going on! You have to break the spell!"

"No spell of mine has ever affected anyone like this before. Never! I have no idea where these side effects like you called it came from," Alex said, and I could hear in his voice how perplexed he himself was - totally out of character for a kid who had arrogance and supposed infallibility almost in his DNA.

I gasped and tried to remain calm. Or regain composure. Tried to unpack my intellect and analytical problem-solving skills even though all I wanted to do was scream and kick like a toddler denied free choice in front of the candy shelf at the supermarket. But I could feel my facial features, which had been laboriously kept positive or at least neutral for the past week, crumpling down like old sandstone. I put a shaky hand over my eyes that no one saw how wet they were but any idiot had to hear how my voice sounded.

"Can you come back? Please. Please come back."

Short, painfully final silence on the other end. Then after a few seconds, "I- rather not. I'll try. I'll try to come back early. But-.

"Can you turn Nathaniel back when he's only a statue. Tell me Alex!", I demanded roughly as I was not interested in buts, ifs and maybes. And to my horror he avoided a direct answer.

"That's not how the spell was meant to be. It shouldn't have come to this. Listen Lex. I'm going to assume there are two possibilities."

"I'm trying everything!", I said frantically. "I'm fighting. All the time, every night! In Bali and with the Japanese clan they can't help me, in London I can't get anywhere even though I've gone through EVERY damn book in the library with Calister. Those batty idiots from Paris are no help at all, and China I'll try next but-"

"Lex!" shouted Alex imperiously over my erratic croaking. I looked up and everyone else had their ears perked up too so as not to miss a word, not a sound. "Listen! He's not allowed to fight! You're not allowed to fight. Just let it happen."

"Let what happen?" asked Broadway, who was now crouched between the dogs that they also shut up. I gave him an annoyed look but in truth I would have asked the exact same thing.

"The change. And if he does mentally fight this change-" Alex continued, "-then he must not be a gargoyle. Not in any way. Ever."

"What do you mean? He IS a gargoyle, after all!", I returned, and the phone crunched under the pressure of my hand.

I looked around in confusion among the others, who had equally questioning expressions. And although I couldn't see Alex (Face-Time, Skype and other things didn't work at all on Avalon, even the normal phone connection was problematic), I thought I could hear Alex slapping a hand against his forehead, annoyed with me or himself.

"Okay!" he then said fitfully. "How is that - you and him have to-"

Loud static noise made me almost throw the phone off me. Again, everyone looked frozen in shock for a few seconds, trying to comprehend what had just happened. I looked down at the phone whose static stopped. Call ended, connection disconnected.

"Alex? Alex! What must he and I do?", I shouted even though I knew better than anyone that he couldn't hear me anymore. Barely able to coordinate my fingers, I pressed the callback button and dropped the phone on the tabletop as the obnoxious woman's voice announced that the subscriber was unavailable.

I put my trembling hands in front of my face. "This can't be happening," I muttered. "Two seconds - one second longer. Why? Why is this happening? How can I change this? How can I- where can I find a solution? Shit! Shit shit shit!"

"Kuso," Tachi and Katana repeated at the same time, and Brooklyn took his hand from Heather's mouth, but she remained in his arms, looking at me with moist eyes as if I had all the answers as an adult. "He was just going to say it. I didn't get what he was trying to say."

"Neither did the rest of us," Goliath said, setting his glass back upright with an unhappy look on his face.

"What do we do now?"

I rumbled in displeasure. "I'll pick up where I left off. Calister will give me the postal address of the Chinese clan's human allies. And from there I'll see how I get on."

"But Alex said-" Nash began.

"Did you understand what Alex meant?", I asked defiantly, looking at him provocatively that he squirmed under my hard gaze as if he was much younger than he was. "Did you get it? Because I didn't. Did any of you understand?" I looked around between the others. Angela shook her head. "Not be a gargoyle anymore? How is that going to work?"

"No more fighting," Goliath repeated thoughtfully, and again had that Rodin-like thinker's pose he often took while sleeping.

My voice sounded strange and bitter even to my ears. "He was going to tell me. There are ways to help Nathaniel. Heavens. Why did the connection break?"

"That was Oberon," Tachi hissed, her eyes blazing red. "That fucker broke the time barrier."

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"Ahhh," Alexander's cell phone fell out of his hands. It sparked briefly, then it was dead except for the small haze of smoke that indicated it was now just scrap metal.

Irritated, he looked up at one of the castle windows where Luna, Phoebe and Selene were standing. Selene's finger was still smoking from the energy beam that had wrecked the time barrier and his cell phone.

"You damn hags," Alex muttered as the three of them turned away, smirking wickedly.

These goats were like Oberon's own Gestapo. No modern technology on Avalon, no phone calls from Avalon unless Oberon allowed it. He could have told himself they were just obeying and upholding Oberon's laws. But they were having too much fun pissing him off for they had not heard the conversation on Lexington's part or the content of the voice messages and did not know exactly what was going on, but they had probably heard that Alex had said h would try to leave early. And even though, or perhaps because, they hated him with a passion - as much as immortals were capable of hating with passion - they would tell on him to Oberon so that he would stay against his will and finish the training. Alexander could already feel at the edge of his fey consciousness the force fields going up around Avalon and enclosing the island, making it impossible to leave or come in any way. Almost impossible.

And what could he do about it? He couldn't turn to Oberon or Titania like a child who tells on his older sisters because they broke a toy he was not supposed to play with in the first place. Oberon had already sensed that he had cast powerful magic shortly before his arrival - something for which he really should have gotten Oberon's permission and for which he was probably being so harsh on Alex as punishment.

No, would Oberon find out that he had interfered so much in a mortal's life-and worse, that the "side effects" changed him so much ... Alex didn't know what could happen to him, to Puck, indeed to the whole clan. Oberon could reverse Alex's spell- and Nathaniel would be lying there again- with a broken neck- a living corpse. And maybe, assuming there would be no problem if no one could remember, he would even erase the memory of the clan and their human familiars. Turn it so that they no longer remembered Nathaniel Sharif - erasing the feelings of Lexington and Nathaniel - just a strange void in their hearts where affection and love had been. So much for not interfering in mortal lives.

Even before the force fields went up, Alex could not have simply escaped from Avalon - that would only lead Oberon on Nathaniel's trail. But whatever it was, Oberon couldn't know what was going on with his clan. The truth was that Alexander didn't know why Sharif was hibernating longer and longer. Or why he was burning. It was highly unlikely, after all, that he could wake up a fully petrified Gargoyle. Not if he SHOULD remain petrified by other effects!

Alex thought again, for the first time since his arrival, of that dark being he believed he had seen when he had cast the spell over the human. This dark, billowing creature - the personification of Sharif's depression as Lexington had speculated in his last voice mail? Alex had no experience with that. If it was really this being that he had ... awakened or enraged with his magic-. And if this being caused these side effects-. Then only these two possibilities he had mentioned came into question to probably avert Sharif's fate. Putting the car in reverse gear - or full speed in fifth gear. Or the use of the medium that Alex had already used for Nathaniel Sharif's transformation. Whereby he had not been able to finish this sentence. And the previous ones he had expressed much too cryptically - because of hecticness and confusion about the circumstances and Lexington's desperate mood. Sometimes being Puck's student really had its disadvantages. He didn't want to talk in riddles- but sometimes he did without realizing it and then wondered when no one understood him.

No. Alex couldn't tell anyone what was bothering him. He had to trust that Lexington and the others were smart enough (or instinct-driven enough) to find solutions on their own. Worried, he raised his head. Only to see Ares lurking in a dark farther entrance to the castle. The tree above him rustled in agreement.

"Yes," Alexander Xanatos whispered. "There is nothing I can do about the situation in Manhattan at the moment. If I have to flee Avalon, I'll do it at the very last minute. Then when I really have no hope that Lex and Nathaniel can work things out. But until then, I'll distract myself with a problem I might be able to solve. Are you coming?"

More rustling - this time without a breeze - that seemed to laugh at him. "Will you at least wait for me in my room, to comfort me a bit later?" he asked, and the bark under his fingers seemed to grow warmer for a moment. That was enough for Alexander. He pushed himself off the tree trunk, picked up his scrap and headed for the doorway where Ares had disappeared.

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"Maybe it's just not meant to be," Angela muttered as she and Nashville picked up shards. I lifted my eyes from my phone on which I had just typed another message to Calister that I needed IMMEDIATELY the address from China that he had wanted to get for me already yesterday.

"What did you say?" I whispered, not recognizing my own voice.

She looked at me with wide eyes, probably hadn't expected me to listen at all. I slowly rose from the table without taking my eyes off her, and she lowered her ears as if she herself were no older than Heather, who had left the room with Goliath so that food residue could be washed out of every fold of her wings and out of her hair.

"I didn't mean that-" she began, and I heard a growl come from my throat. Wood splintered under the claws of my hands propped on the table.

"Easy for you to say." I hissed threateningly.

"Lex. We know you're extremely stressed. But Angela didn't mean it and you know it," said Brooklyn, who had just finished washing the dishes that hadn't been destroyed.

I laughed out and felt absolutely in the right and disgusting at the same time when I said:

" A mate AND an egg in the hatchery. But if even the hint of that kind of happiness is within my grasp - and threatening to be snatched away - then IT SHOULDN'T BE?"

"Lex, stop it," Broadway said, standing in front of Angela, who had grown smaller and smaller under my words.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"None of you have any idea how I feel. You don't even want Nathaniel in the clan."

"That's not true," Tachi said.

"I'm not an idiot, Tachi. I know how Nathaniel appears to you. How ... fragile he is. No gargoyle should be like that. No human ally should be like that. You think like that, I know it."

"I think you'll come down now, brother," Brooklyn said, and Katana stood beside him.

"I'm calm, can't you see that?"

"You're on the verge of freaking out, we can tell. You're not usually like this."

"I'M not usually like this?" I spat back at Broadway, who had just said that. "Gargoyles are fighters! But you don't fight-, you sit on your asses and-"

"Enough Lexington," Katana rumbled in her Second in Command voice.

I puffed out a breath. "Every single one of you would move mountains when it came to your mates."

"Nate is not your mate. You both don't know what you are to each other because you both can't open your yaps," Tachi shouted because she knew that, aside from Heather, she was the only one who could have said something like that or something similar in this situation without me going for her throat. But it was hard for me. Even though I wanted to put her in her place, even yell at her, I just sparkled at her. And she held my gaze.

Brooklyn cleared his throat. "We're going to try to help you. You don't have to do this alone."

"Because you guys are so much better at tracking down sources on the Internet than I am."

Brooklyn approached me and I looked up at him angrily. He smiled mildly as if I were a petulant child and put his hands on my shoulders.

"A gargoyle is never a lone wolf. That's not our way. You're so irritable because you don't exercise enough. Because you don't fly. The last three nights you've even been petrified in the dungeon. You need solar energy again or it will eat away at your body and mind. You can help Nathaniel better, and think about how you can share the burden with all of us once you've slept outside again. We know you like to act rashly and hastily when you're in your guardian mode. It's a very normal gargoyle trait."

I slapped his hands off and backed away from him. "Don't analyze me, great time-traveling clan leader! Don't you dare psychologize me."

"No one is going to abandon, Nathaniel," Angela tried again, and I saw the anguish on her face. About me snapping at her like that, but probably mostly about her thinking that I would assume she could give a damn about Nathaniel. I couldn't bring myself to apologize to her. I would do it later when I had solved Nathaniel's problem.

"I still have a few aces up my sleeve," I said as I slowly backed away from table and clan. I didn't like the way everyone was looking at me. Like I was crazy. Crazy to fight, crazy not to rest even for a day. But I knew I couldn't do that. I couldn't risk slacking off. I felt that if I slowed down now for a day - and that night would have been crucial to save Nathaniel - I would perish knowing that. And in my current state, it wasn't certain that if I slowed down for even one night, I would be able to get back to top form. Like a machine cut off briefly from its energy supply, it could no longer restart, could no longer power up. Grimly, I shook my head. "I can't slack off. I ... am not angry with you if you just don't have the skills to help me. But don't stand in my way either. I won't tolerate any distractions. I will not let him down, ever."

No one could say anything after this quarrel. It often happened that clan brothers and sisters disagreed with each other. But that a clan member, which was not even the clan leader, went so out of the skin, and shot against almost all clan members even clan leader and his second, that was extraordinary. And that even a hatchling was threatened not physically but by stares - by the one who was closest to a rookery keeper for the young in the clan - was even ... frightening. It was near sunrise but no one expected to find Lexington on the battlements. No one expected him to be sitting at this table in the near (perhaps even distant) future. Brooklyn stood in front of Lexington's place at the table and moved his hand across the tabletop where his youngest brother, gentle and loving, highly intelligent, passionate about his interests and cerebral had his claws pressed into the wood.

Everyone was silent and he felt their gazes on him. He suspected that even if Goliath were here and had witnessed the scene, he would be equally at a loss as to what to do in this situation. He had always known that it was not only an honor but also a responsibility to be first Second in command and then clan leader. He had experienced so much - during his time travel and in later years in his own time - but this situation, this sword of Damocles that hovered so threateningly close to the lifeline of his clan - that was distressing. And paralyzing. They had fought so many enemies, and often they had barely escaped with their lives. But this was so different from a fight with an opponent of flesh and blood. Or even with a child of Oberon. It almost seemed to him ... as if he and the clan were fighting against his brother - against Lexington. Because he was so stubborn. So dogged. Because his heart threatened to shut down his head and his reason.

He looked at Katana beside him and smiled. Love could make you so strong. But when that love was threatened - almost anyone who truly loved would perish from it. Lexington was about to perish! Until now, he had assumed that Nathaniel, with his weak character structure, needed Lexington. But it was different. They needed each other and the way it looked at the moment Nathaniel's body and life were hanging on the silk thread but at the same time - on the same thread Lexington's mind. If they lost one, the other would be lost as well. But he would not let that happen. He regretted that his brother thought they would not want Nathaniel in the clan. He was sorry that he and the others were accused of not doing anything. It was absolutely true that claws and teeth would not help in this battle. This was foreign territory for him. But that did not mean that they would go down without a fight.

They were Gargoyles, after all. They would at least try to save Nathaniel and thus also Lexington. For it seemed obvious - if Nathaniel's would not wake up, his fleshly body would perish, that would drag Lexington's psyche into the abyss.

He licked his lips again and then spoke up in the oppressive silence.

"Tachi." His youngest looked at him, more understanding and strategic skill in her gaze than he probably possessed himself. Sometimes that look frightened him. Sometimes it made him unspeakably proud. He suspected she would have done the deed anyway after that scene - with or without clan leader instruction.

"Give me the list and cross out what you've decided to do."

She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out her notebook, complete with pen, which she actually used to make little mental notes on her drafts. She unfolded the note inside and crossed out one of the names on it.

She pushed the piece of paper towards him and he nodded at her obvious choice.

He skimmed the other names. London and Bali already crossed out. Paris had a question mark. He sensed Goliath's powerful presence coming into the room before he even heard his claws on the stonefloor. Heather jumped on the table next to him. "Where's Uncle Lex?" she asked.

"Lexington will be working for himself for a few nights. I don't want anyone to disturb him. But we have other plans. We're looking for parallel solutions." Heather nodded, glanced briefly at the list, tapped one of the top names with a pointy child's claw, and sounded like an adult as she said. "I'll do that - it's a given."

"Okay. But don't strain yourself. Nash?"

"Yeah?" After Lexington's freak-out, his usually petulant loud-mouthed oldest was downright affable and serious. It struck Brooklyn that he liked him better in the other way.

"You watch Heather with her attempts. You have to pull her out then, okay?"

"Sure- I'll do that, Brooklyn."

"Good." He slid the note to Goliath. "Goliath, put Elisa in the picture. She'll want to help and may have some different ideas and options than we do. If not - what would be your choice?"

Goliath pointed to the name of an old acquaintance.

"He could help. But for me alone, his library is too big."

"Angela, Broadway? Can you fly ahead? Even with three of you, it might cost you a few nights."

"That's no problem," Angela said, her face lighting up eagerly in hopes of making up for her careless words to Lexington. And Broadway nodded eagerly as well.

"Okay - me and Katana are flying to northwest Harlem. Tomorrow night everyone sets out and everyone reports to me. Tachi - before you do anything else tomorrow night, play us all a recording of Lexington and Alexander's phone call on our cell phones so we can all replay it if necessary. Every word could be important. We're not giving up that easily."

He smiled confidently to the group, and his family members - returned the gesture.

Now the clan members spring into action to save their two brothers and uncles (yes- I already count Nate among them). The next chapters become filler, illuminating what is being done, and these chapters extend over several days. Some I only briefly touch on, some I extend for different reasons.

Thanks for reading, Q.T.