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Brood of a New Age

90.

"If this is a trick, Graziella, then-"

"I'm not here to argue," she nagged at the eighty-year-old Second of the Clan who gave his mate a Did-the-kid-really-just-strike-that-tone-toward-me look. Graziella pulled Goliath and Katana, whom she already knew best apart from Nash, behind her and the mighty clan leader visibly struggled to be pulled through the castle by someone so small and resolute.

"I've just instructed Owen to ramp up security, freeze the elevators, set the motion detectors on the battlements for anything and anyone that isn't in the system in terms of skin color, shape, size and heat signature. The system will be running in three minutes. Not enough time for whatever intruders infiltrate the castle," assured Xanatos, who was walking with Fox in the center.

Lexington hopped ahead. Sonny was wedged further back between the Coldstone and Coldfire and where other teenage boys would have found such a collection of cool creatures just awesome, he was sweating like a pig around so many fangs and claws. Even Angela's assurances that they wouldn't hurt him didn't help. Again, he found it incredible how much calm his bossgirl was capable of considering the circumstances.

"Nashville can't be gone. You'll see," Lexington said for the third time as he stood on his hind legs after the long escort into the belly of the castle and entered the code that caused the door to the rookery to slide open.

"You'll see," Graziella returned snappishly. She had said they didn't have time. But these gargoyles were just like human adults. They didn't believe children until they rubbed their noses in the truth.

Goliath opened the door after the bolts in the titanium core slid audibly back.

Everyone saw the scratch marks on the inside of the door. But that didn't make anyone hesitate.

They looked down at the trays stacked neatly on the landing.

Three trays. Numerous bowls and plates, thermoses and glasses. Broadway, still plagued by guilt, had not dared to bring Nashville food. Hudson had taken care of that. But Broadway had at least wanted to express how he felt with what Nash got to eat. He had made Nashville's favorite dishes and loaded much more on the trays than the child would be able to eat.

Fried chicken breasts with potatoes, enough that Broadway himself would have been full. Apple pieces whose skin was cut so that each piece looked like a rabbit. A whole bowl of Scotch eggs. A big pot of ramen soup. And a dozen triangular onigiri dumplings filled with pickled pork and sweet bean paste, the recipe Katana had had dictated Broadway months ago. Accompanied by tea and lemonade. But every tray he had placed on the top landing of the rookery was now empty.

"There, you see," Brooklyn said. "Nashville ate everything that was placed here. Do you need any more proof?"

"Yes!" replied Graziella, sparkling at Brooklyn as defiantly as the red gargoyle looked at her.

"That doesn't prove anything. Maybe one of the dogs ate it all. Nashville's been sitting in a cage since last night." She stepped over the trays with a big stride.

"Neither Bronx nor Fu were in the rookery yesterday or today. Cuddling with the beasts is not part of his punishment," Coldstone replied as they all hurried after Graziella.

"This is our rookery!" said Brooklyn, aghast at the casual insouciance with which the gangster child took the stairs. He showed good stamina in keeping up with her. "No uninvited guests are allowed here."

"I'm not interested in your eggs. If I have to poke your big red nose at the fact that Nash isn't here and needs our help, I will."

"Well listen-!" proclaimed Brooklyn, falling silent as Goliath, who was walking behind him, put a hand on his shoulder. His Second took a deep breath.

"Okay, I'll be cool. Let's play her kid's game if she wants to see Nash so bad. But after that, it's off to the interview room. And my beak is not my nose!" he declared more gruffly than his rank and age would actually allow. If this was Graziella Dracon's true face, it was just one more reason for his son not to be allowed to associate with her. This girl was a bad influence AND a brat!

When they arrived downstairs, Brooklyn began to call out, bored and quite confident of getting an immediate response.

"Nashville! Your little frenemy is here!"

His voice echoed through the cave. But no answer echoed back.

"Nash. Graziella wants to come see you," Goliath now called out. No answer.

When Goliath's voice had also faded away, silence fell over the rookery cave like an oppressive veil into which a dark foreboding was woven. Brooklyn laughed mirthlessly although his heart suddenly seemed to beat to the bottom of his beak. He was there. He couldn't be gone. Brooklyn knew it for sure. He glanced at Katana, who was looking around uncertainly and had by instinct automatically moved to her second egg and now had a hand on the shell.

"Nashville. I know you're mad at us. But Graziella is really here."

He nudged the child, whose actually well-tanned complexion looked pale and greenish-yellow in the dim glow of the cave.

"Call him," he ordered, already feeling like the boy who couldn't do his magic trick at the annual talent show in front of all his classmates.

Graziella looked at him coldly as if she couldn't believe how unspeakably stupid he was. Then she turned her head, opened her mouth and shrieked

"NASHVILLE!" so shrill and loud that all humans and gargoyles flinched and there was even a small shrill feedback in Coldfire's sensors under which she cringed. Her echo gradually died away in the cave, which was not huge but could not be overlooked due to numerous boulders, stalactites and stalagmites.

"Where is he?" Lexington asked quietly, and like him, Goliath and Broadway, Brooklyn started moving. Within a minute they had peered behind every rock, behind every ledge even in cracks in the wall that were far too narrow for their youngest clan member. Then Brooklyn was standing in the middle of the cave, next to his partner, panting as if the brief search had taken everything from him.

"Where is he?" he repeated, looking around stunned among his clansmen, all of whom looked equally perplexed, even distraught.

"A fault in the door lock?" asked Coldfire, and Lexington shook his head. "That's what my system would have fed back to me. The alarm would have played through the entire castle, even to our Two Ways."

"Xanatos," Elisa said, glancing at the billionaire, who looked remarkably concerned as well as Fox. "We need access to the cameras."

"There aren't any here in the rookery," he said.

At her critical look, he raised his hands defensively. "I practice respecting others and letting them have privacy. I didn't have cameras in the delivery room with my wife, and this is the clan's delivery room."

"He's right. I can track every entrance and exit through the door from the rookery. But there's no surveillance equipment down here," Lexington muttered, looking unhappily at Brooklyn as if he had an answer.

"Is one of the secret passages here? The kind Demona used to get into the castle during the Lost Nights?" asked Broadway, rubbing his chin musingly. Xanatos shook his head. "Not that I know of," he admitted ... though he hated to admit such a thing.

Brooklyn turned to Graziella, eyes lighting up.

"Where is he?" he rumbled lowly, and it was more menacing than if he had raised his voice. But unlike Sonny, who stood by the pleasantly human (or human-like) Xanatos couple, Graziella almost spat in his face, and her anger and tone was very similar to Nashville's from a night earlier.

"At - my - house! He's sitting there all alone in a cage and my dad hasn't killed him yet only because I said I wanted him as a pet! But that won't last long because Tony is a gangster and he hates you like you hate all gangsters. Do you believe me now?"

"We believe you," Goliath said, puffing resolutely like a bull while clenching his fists and lighting up his eyes. "We believe you and we will free him."

"But ... but who ate the meals?" muttered Angela in confusion.

Lexington wandered around the cave, eyes wide.

"This is too weird to-AHH!"

In a far too quick burst of slapstick, Lexington's legs slid out from under him and he landed back first on the ground.

"Ouch, my back," he croaked, letting Coldfire and Broadway help him up.

Immediately after, he raised his clawed foot like a human checking to see if he had stepped in dog shit.

"Bwähhh, what's THAT!" he said with obvious disgust - and that was really something special for a gargoyle from the Middle Ages.

Without hesitation, Coldstone ran his mechanical index finger over the sole of his foot, from which dripped pinkish mucus.

He raised his hand in front of his red artificial eye, licked the indefinable mass, which elicited sounds of revulsion from some of those present, then a low whirring could be heard in the cave as his analysis program ran through.

"Tracheobronchial secretions and saliva. Immune defense cells. Some lung tissue and blood." Coldstone's eyes found Katana's and Brooklyn's. "Nashville's DNA."

Brooklyn hadn't noticed that his legs had given way under him, but suddenly he felt the soft sand and stone of the hatchery floor against his legs. He pressed his claws into the sand, keeping himself from being pulled under by a maelstrom of rising panic. He felt his mate's hands on his back but they were shaking and that was frightening. Or was it just him shaking?

"No! NO, it can't be," he whispered, hearing his blood rushing in his ears. He looked up at Katana and saw his own horrified visage in her dark equally horrified eyes. "It's been so long. It-it can't. Not again. Not again," he said, hugging her just so he could hold onto her. And she clung to him because instantly she wrapped her arms around him.

"What's wrong with you? What happened here?" asked Goliath, who had joined them on the ground. Katana pulled herself together faster than Brooklyn at her clan leader's question, rising with a disconcerting heaviness, and despite her Japanese heritage and usually pulled-together manner, her face was contorted with worry.

"Nashville had a seizure. He hasn't had one in years. But this sputum is proof," she stated, helping Brooklyn to his feet as well. Supporting each other, the pair suddenly looked much older and at the same time more helpless than ever.

"He... the laddie has a disease and you didn't tell us?" asked Hudson quietly.

"And the pattern continues," Grace grumbled, and Luca was glad that she was standing in the back with him and that maybe they couldn't all hear her.

"He doesn't have a disease!" blurted Brooklyn, then bit his lower lip. "I mean, it's not a - we don't know what it is, okay? All the doctors said he was perfectly healthy. Even right after a seizure, he's ... physically fine. After his stone sleep at the latest, he was always back up to speed. For the most part. And these seizures are so rare."

"In the future, they called it absences. For lack of a better term. But it's ... not like an epileptic seizure in humans. There's no medication and no cure because it's not a disease. It's ... something else."

"Why didn't you tell us something like that?" asked Angela softly, sounding genuinely hurt.

Katana smiled sadly and apologetically at her. "We thought he wouldn't get another one. He hasn't had any for many years. Even some human children grow out of their epilepsy. And if we had told you ... wouldn't you have been more careful with him out of concern and love? He already felt so alienated. We didn't think we should put that stamp on him too when we really thought it wasn't going to come back to an absence."

"Okay. He's had such a ... absence," Luca said firmly, making a cutting off hand gesture. "But that doesn't change the fact that he's stuck at Graziella's place and -."

"We don't know if that's not why he went to her in the first place," Brooklyn said wearily. He had his arm around Katana but it was hard to tell who was supporting whom because both were quite pale and miserable looking. Which was a sign to all the clan members, even Graziella and Sonny, that there was more, much more to it.

The girl stepped up to Brooklyn and looked up at him. Not with disgust this time, but with concern. Her voice was that of a small bird.

"What has this AbsenceDisease done to him?" she asked. Katana stroked her cheek-noticing how warm the child was.

"He's convulsing and spitting up this mucus ... and he's seeing things."

"What things?"

"Aurelio said he sees the future," Brooklyn muttered, taking a shaky breath. "That old senile geezer. But ... he sees something then. Nothing coherent. Nothing you could really do much with - until it comes to these things. Last time he was so young and he could explain to us the individual images he saw but didn't know about the contextual message they meant. Or if they meant anything coherent at all. And if he had one again now, and saw things that he was trying to put together in his head - it could drive him to make terrible decisions simply out of the hope of changing this supposed, imagined future or individual images from it."

All the gargoyles gathered in the rookery stared at Brooklyn. Until Sonny spoke for the first time.

"So your son ... pukes up ectoplasm when he has a dark premonition..."

"'That's magic,'" Broadway muttered.

"It's ... not - I don't know what it is. Nobody knows. He hasn't had it in years. We thought it was over. It would have grown out. And he only had it before big disasters that affected the clan. And not even on all - otherwise you can believe me, some of our Timedancer missions would have been easier. Lastly-" Katana put a hand on his arm, silencing him. He exhaled with a gasp.

And was grateful that his mate finished the job.

"It's not important."

"Let's look at the facts. Nashville had an absence. And probably that's why he disappeared despite the rookery arrest. We won't find out what he saw. We have to free him first and get him to safety," Goliath said, and with a purposeful, powerful stride, he set off past the others and up the steps, knowing that everyone would follow him.

"How did he get out of the rookery? And why was the food gone?" asked Grace behind him.

"We'll find out about that, too, when we rescue him. We'll move as a clan. We won't take any chances by spreading our power to attack."

As they stepped out of the brood cave so Lexington could re-engage the security system behind them, Luca faced Goliath and looked at him sternly.

"This is your plan? Burst into a potential criminal nest with the whole clan? What if this ... Absence vision showed just that. Brooklyn said Nashville had this ... Visions before disasters. Disasters that affect the clan. What if it's exactly the wrong thing for all of us to rush in to save him? That could be a bloodbath, and not on the human side."

Goliath looked at him seriously. Not angry, just serious. Luca was still wearing the scarf. But how Grace had already been giving him looks all evening. Very inconspicuous. But unambiguous. And how now, at this moment, when Luca had brazenly raised his voice against his still half-baked battle plan. She knew of his nefarious deed. And therefore he knew he could not rely on her loyalty. Not when it came to one of his clansmen where he had previously injured one of Grace's clansmen. It would be impertinent to demand that even though the red female's skills would clearly be an advantage in battle.

Goliath took a deep breath. He looked at both the Italian detective and the red female and gave them both the way out that no one dared to ask for at the moment.

"Grace, Luca. This mission can be very dangerous. I can't ask you to fight alongside us. I also think ... that the striking power of our clan is sufficient. I will take your comment into consideration as we move forward. May I ask you ... if it is all right with you, to watch over our homestead until we return?"

Where Luca looked confused for a moment, Grace nodded immediately. Her smile from the first nights had completely faded. It remained a cool, polite ... professionalism.

"With pleasure, Goliath. We will guard the castle. You have survived as a clan before us, and you have withstood dangerous situations. This time it will be the same. I will pray for your success and safety."

"Thank you."

When the two were gone and the remaining people headed off in the opposite direction, Hudson spoke up.

"We could have needed the las."

"It's not right to drag those two into our fights," Goliath muttered, glad that Brooklyn had caught himself enough to remark:

"A sneak attack would really be preferable as Plan A. Quick in, quick out, if we can."

"Yes. We will all glide over there. We'll survey the location, look for enemies, and when we're sure there's no hidden larger superior force of armed people waiting for us, just you and I will go in and free Nashville." Goliath smiled with almost youthful belligerent delight. "There is hardly a cage that could withstand me."

"But Nashville also wears an electric shock collar. One like the one you wore in court," Sonny opined.

"We'll get over that hurdle when we get there. Lexington, grab whatever tools you need to crack a system like that," Goliath instructed over his shoulder as they walked through the castle's corridors.

"No problem - in five on the battlements!" He shouted, sprinting four-footed past everyone to gather suitable paraphernalia.

"All right! We could have saved ourselves the last fifteen minutes if you adults had believed me," said Graziella venomously, who had squeezed past all the gargoyles, robots, and billionaires to walk like a little queen next to Clan Leader and Second.

"Yes, Graziella, we should have. We shouldn't have doubted you. Nashville is lucky to have you," Katana said sympathetically. The child smiled at her in high satisfaction. But she looked very tired.

"I hope your plan doesn't involve maiming or killing a bunch of people," Sonny said, backing away as Coldstone leaned toward him and fixed him with one living and one cybernetic eye.

"Who are you again?" he asked.

"I-I'm Sonny. You probably know my father as Glasses."

"Well excellent, the Dracon Syndicate offspring are dancing in and out of our house," Broadway said with a sigh.

"I'm not particularly comfortable here either!" said Sonny defiantly, clearly bolder by Graziella's nonchalant treatment of the creatures as well. "But my bossgirl wants to help you flying bozos and Nashville so take what you get and be thankful for it," he jangled, hurrying to walk more briskly that as they now entered the great hall and finally had more space he could position himself closer to the humans.

"We are grateful. Very much so," Angela gushed. "You have to tell us everything you know. Where Nashville is and how they're holding him. How many people are guarding him."

"We don't know that. We left the property an hour ago. By now, there may be more people there."

"We're not taking any chances. If Brooklyn and Goliath see that more help is needed on the ground the whole clan will be there as back-up. And I'll notify my colleagues to clean up after you immediately," Elisa said.

"You can't kill anyone. These are our families," Sonny insisted seriously.

"We will try not to use deadly force," Coldstone assured, and it was hard to tell if his mechanical tone or his true feelings made him sound so unaffected by possible human deaths.

"I mean it. At least Glasses and Tony have to survive. We're kids, we can't exist without our parents or guardians. I may be able to. But Graziella would go to an orphanage."

Sonny looked around between gargoyles and humans. And everyone, even Xanatos and Fox looked repulsed by his cool assessment regarding the dead and their status as children in this world. There was something very unloving and calculating about it.

"We will all try to be careful not to kill any of the humans present," Katana said now in real serious tone.

"Well, let's get going," Graziella stated.

"Not you, of course! You kids stay here at the castle where it's safe," Brooklyn said.

Graziella curled her upper lip up in a gargoyle-like snarl. "I will not abandon Nashville!"

"You've notified us, and we're going into action now. Leave it to the adults."

"You adults are just screwing up!"

"You and Sonny are kids! You're no help to us. We can't fight if we have to worry about you two getting hurt."

Graziella stared at him coldly.

"If you talked to Nashville like that all the time, it's no wonder he thinks he's not a real clan member."

Brooklyn stared at her. He knew Nash didn't feel taken seriously by the circumstances and restrictions he was under. He had voiced that. But ... Not a real clan member ... Was that what Nashville had thought? All this time? For months? Or even years? And to this human child he told it. The thought that his son felt this way, hadn't been able to tell anyone but an outsider, made him feel sick to his stomach. And he had locked him away, too. Instead of just listening to him. If they were human, a social worker would have been sent after him himself long ago. Rightfully.

Graziella shook her head, and though she was sweating (unusual within the castle walls) and though she looked tired and weak, there was something sublime, unyielding and honorable about her. Qualities which Brooklyn actually associated with Goliath.

"I have sworn the oath. I'm Nashville's friend. He doesn't want that anymore- but I am. I'm not going to sit here on my ass while I have to fear for him."

"And I'm not letting Graziella run off alone with you," Sonny said just as adamantly.

"You kids are really-" began Hudson.

"I think Sonny-" Graziella interrupted him, sounding quite thoughtful now, and completely artificial in the process.

Her right hand smirked. "What do you think bossgirl?"

"I think I can't even remember where I live. Not the street, Not the address."

"Oh weird, I can't remember that either."

"Yes. No wonder. We're just stupid kids, after all."

"Ohoh," Broadway said.

"I suppose the only way I could find the house again would be from a bird's eye view."

She crossed her arms and smirked at the crowd. As if in slow motion, even Goliath could only shake his head in disbelief. None of those present could say anything until Xanatos snorted.

"Doesn't look like you have a choice."

"No. Nonono. Did an entire gargoyle clan, a detective, and two billionaires just let themselves be blackmailed by an eight-year-old and her minion?" asked Brooklyn in horror.

Goliath puffed stoically that it echoed in the hall.

"I think...we'll bring the children with us. However, you will remain out of sight."

"Of course. Whatever you say," Graziella replied, smiling toothily.

All together they now went out. Where Lexington was already waiting with a huge fanny pack, with the straps pulled through his pirched wings. He handed out Two-Ways to all the gargoyles.

"'Adorable fanny pack,'" Coldstone muttered sullenly, and Lexington, grinning, raised an index-finger claw to his rookery uncle.

"I'm a trendsetter. In ten years, we'll all be wearing these."

"Just over my circuits," Coldstone muttered.

I had to divide the chapter because in the next chapter everyone (really everyone) starts moving and that fits better thematically with the next chapter title: Forces.

Maybe the separation of all following chapters is a bit off. There are many cuts between different groups. Hard to decide where to make the chapter separation there.

Thanks for reading, Q.T.