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Brood of a New Age

27.

Broadway had already prepared a huge pot of minced meat und zucchini and everyone sat at the table, dipping homemade bread into the cold soup, which even Dante visibly enjoyed. The robots or cyborgs didn't eat, of course, and the beasts were back wherever, which was just fine with Dante. Lexington joined them later - presumably out of unabated curiosity but sat as far away from Dante as he could - which was even more to Dante's liking. After a few minutes, a beautiful, exotic human woman came into the kitchen with hurried steps. Already when she was embraced by Goliath, she gave Grace and Luca- but especially him- a long serious look that somehow sprayed venom. But when, after another brief round of introductions, it turned out that she was the detective who, among other things, had to deal with his confrontation with the Quarrymen, Dante simply wrote her off as yet another person he wouldn't be able to warm up to here. Even if it amused him that Grace and he had a human of their own who was a detective and so did this clan.

This Elisa Maza sat down at the long side of the table next to Hudson and near Goliath, who with a warm smile eased some of the resentment he had initially sensed from her. Dante grinned. So that's how it was. Good thing it was apparently acceptable here to have human women as lovers. If it didn't work out with this Angela, he would have to rely on someone like her.

Everyone listened to Grace tell her story (the one she had made up with Luca) as well as she could. Dante, still a little dejected because he had been scolded by his sister - and in front of the whole clan - said as little as possible. Of course, it hurt his pride a little to be chased around like a naughty dog in front of other gargoyles, but he had known beforehand that he had overdone it with the humans, of which four out of six were not really a threat. Somehow he was glad that the truth towards Grace was out now. And also that she had worked on him a little, albeit in an embarrassing way. His sister was the most dear thing in the world to him. If he had destroyed her chances of being accepted into the clan, he could never forgive himself.

A little reassured, he watched as the whole clan hung on her and Luca's lips as they recounted their first encounters. In their version, Luca still met Grace in a church and saw a demon with glowing red eyes crawling spider-like across the sandstone facade toward him. In her version, he still pulled out his gun out of terror because he didn't know what kind of creature was approaching. It was all close to the truth. The only thing they left out was that Luca was looking for mysterious Camorrakillers who had made a diabolical pact with Della Marra and were killing according to his wishes. Everything that had to do with father they glossed over into the image of a huntsman with moral integrity, who had not only saved the last two Gargoyle children of Italy from certain death, but had also taken them in and raised them. And because he didn't know what gargoyles were capable of with their bodies, but he suspected that they would have to defend themselves without him at some point, he had taught them how to use knives and weapons. How else could they have explained Grace's gun and Dante's bracers on his arms and legs.

For some minutes there was a voracious silence in the room but Nashville, although vigilance, downright wariness of any stranger had been drilled into him virtually since hatching, had recovered from his temporary fit of shyness after the chaotic scenes with the Italians and simply could not stifle this question any longer.

"How were you able to get one?"

Dante looked at him, chewing. Noticed where the boy's eager eyes were looking. Chewed some more. And more. Then swallowed and smiled.

"Cool, isn't it? Wasn't easy."

"I haven't seen a gargoyle with a tattoo in any time."

Dante would have passed over the boy's odd choice of words if his father hadn't cleared his throat next to him at that moment. The older red gargoyle continued to eat seemingly unaffected but Dante knew that kind of throat clearing. From his own father. Authoritative and admonishing. There were a thousand words in that clearing of the throat, which was meant to be meaningless to others. Thousand words and not the most affectionate.

Dante smirked when he saw the ice-blue boy flash a fang briefly in annoyance and then turn his attention intently back to his food. There were obviously father-son issues here. Perhaps a lever on how he could win over at least one member of the clan.

"So you went from near-enemies to allies?" asked Brooklyn seemingly eager to continue the clan's intelligence gathering (because nothing else was going on here even if it was supposed to seem like a casual informal conversation). Even Grace and Luca had to hear the always a little critical if not skeptical undertone in Brooklyn's voice but didn't show any irritation about it.

"And what were you doing in that church at night anyway?" wondered Broadway, sounding unrelatedly critical.

Luca smiled. He wasn't the best liar (probably not a good quality for a detective) but Grace and he had practiced that for months. His words sounded lighthearted in the way that only the truth basically could.

"Actually, I was looking for a local gangster. I was surveilling a house across the street from the church and saw her shadow creeping into the church out of the corner of my eye. A coincidence."

Luca smiled at Grace and she smiled back. "Thanks to Grace and Dante, I was able to stop him and his entourage."

"Actually, I stopped Giuliano," Dante mumbled meekly between bites. He had tried really hard to keep a low profile but he wouldn't let anyone take credit for Giuliano's death.

"So you fought crime in Naples," Goliath said nodding appreciatively, and Dante snorted softly, glaring at him.

"I wasn't interested in crime. I just had a bone to pick with my cousin."

Grace cleared her throat loudly and her angry glare at her brother wasn't even noticed by him. All the other gargoyles were staring at Dante.

"Another gargoyle of your clan was a gangster in Naples?" asked Coldstone as if he didn't get that Grace and Dante had been the ONLY gargoyles in all of Italy.

"I didn't say that. Guiliano was a human. Father was his uncle, so he was our cousin. With the emphasis on WAS." He bit contentedly off his bread while it seeped into the other gargoyles that Dante not only then and still called this criminal part of his family but he also seemed proud to have killed him.

"You must understand," Grace said slowly. "Giuliano was rotten to the core. He resented ... Father for raising us as if we were humans. As if we were his children. He thought that -," she shrugged affectedly. "He thought it was perverse and unholy. And as Father grew older and more frail, he interpreted the equal affection and attention Father gave us as the insanity of an old childless man. And worse, he used the faith of others against us. He used our own religion as a weapon."

"In Italy," Luca murmured, "religion is often more important than the state. The farther south the more. And beings who look like Grace and Dante - like demons. Demons who disputed his place in the family. Guiliano could not accept this. He even convinced an old local priest in his sermons to incite parishioners to look out for demons and hellspawn, and if in doubt, hunt them down and kill them."

"Like Castaway and the Quarrymen," Angela muttered in horror.

"The strategies of these mangy scoundrels are similar all over the world," Hudson muttered.

"And a few months ago Giuliano and his people tried to kill us and Father. Father didn't survive," Grace whispered and Luca gently put a hand on her quivering shoulder. Dante just looked at her sadly.

"Killing in the face of one's own mortal threat or to protect your loved ones is a different case, of course," Goliath said carefully and where Coldfire and Coldstone agreed and the other former Medieval Gargoyles including Brooklyn nodded, Katana remained politely silent. She loved her Gajin mate with all his faults. But sometimes, even after years, his lax treatment of death or other deviations from her Bushido code annoyed her. She had learned to accept that over the decades of time dancing. But that didn't mean she couldn't remind him of Japanese virtues every now and then when they were among themselves.

"So you avenged the misdeeds of your ... cousin," Goliath wanted to clarify in conclusion. He was visibly struggling with the word or the idea of how natural it seemed for Dante to call this Giuliano cousin. But Dante couldn't leave it at that either.

"Father was old and wouldn't have had unlimited time anyway. I was mainly avenging myself," he said, enjoying the questioning looks on him. He tried not to notice his sister's gaze.

He raised a hand to his face and traced the cross-shaped scar above his eye with a pointed claw.

"Giuliano," he commented.

Then he pointed to the scars above his chest.

"Giuliano."

Then he raised his wings with their cuts at the edges, equal to those of the old warrior Hudson though nearly a hundred years of life lay between the two gargoyles.

"Giuliano."

Scars on his arms. "Giuliano." Hands. "Giuliano." He raised his west, showing several bulging light scars there. By now, everyone had stopped eating.

"How did ... that Giuliano manage to hurt you so much? So much that your stone sleep couldn't heal it?" asked Angela softly, and Dante gave the beauty his most horrifying monster smile.

"I didn't get all my wounds in one night. He tortured and tried to maim me for decades. For as long as I can remember. He was ..." Dante plucked his goatee, looking thoughtfully at the ceiling, until he came up with the right word. "He was very experimental in figuring out what a little gargoyle body like mine could and couldn't heal."

"Why did you put up with that?" asked Nashville, and Brooklyn didn't like the hateful tone in his son's voice at all. Dante tilted his head as if considering what to say in response. Grace next to him put her hand on his, and where it outwardly seemed like a comforting gesture, Dante knew the true message. The threat not to shatter her finely crafted tall tales with one stupid sentence. He patted her hand patronizingly.

"I was small. And Giuliano was family. Why do kids let their older siblings or fathers beat them?" Dante looked at Grace and where he smiled bitterly her expression was pure suffering. "Because they're afraid that if they don't, the anger will be focused on others. Because they want to keep the family together. And because they're not strong enough to change anything."

"No family should be like that", Broadway muttered, and his hand had found Angela's beside him, too.

"It was the only family we had." Dante shrugged his shoulders and continued happily. "But I got stronger. And in the end, he got what he deserved."

"He deserved a strict trial," Luca hissed, giving Dante a look that was colder than usual.

"A Camorra-unfriendly trial in Italy?!" bickered Dante with a cruel laugh, tolerating the pain as his sister reflexively kicked him under the table. "And even if there had been something something like that -. No court case would have outweighed my pain. My fear for father and Grace for years! The stabs with screwdrivers, the cracks in my wings from broken glass bottles, the beatings with windshield wipers and fire extinguishers, and the fear of death every morning before petrifying! No lax human jurisprudence would have outweighed the suffering of a monster that doesn't even officially exist!"

"We are not monsters! We are gargoyles!" shouted Grace, and Dante snapped his beak shut even though he wasn't finished. But the hurt look on her face silenced him.

"Sorry," he mumbled ruefully and continued eating.

The rest of the clan also continued to eat, and if the mood had not been ideal before, it was now somewhat in the basement.

It wasn't until dessert - a homemade fruitcake - that Grace began to tell again, in response to Katana's polite inquiry, how they had spent the months since they had learned of others of their kind.

Between scraps of their story, they ate largely in silence.

Nashville had first eyed Dante across plates and pots, and was doing the same with Grace. The red gargoyle woman was beautiful (but no comparison to Graziella he thought even if they were both Italian and had similar names).

Grace looked up from her plate and smiled broadly when she noticed Nashville looking at her. The boy immediately lowered his head again, seemingly embarrassed. This didn't escape the notice of most at the table, and where Brooklyn raised an arch of his brow questioningly, Goliath smiled knowingly.

Dante, on the other hand, didn't stop eyeing Angela since she had touched him on the shoulder while handing out the plates of cake because he had appeared crestfallen again after being corrected by his sister. Angela cleared her throat and nudged Broadway, who was concentrating on his second piece of cake. The two exchanged a quick glance. And when he looked to Dante, his previously dessert-blissed expression turned serious.

Broadway emphatically put his hand on Angelas and raised his voice.

"Dante. It was very brave of you and your mate to take this trip on yourselves. We all think so."

"My mate?" Dante frowned and looked at Grace and Luca. "Mate? I wouldn't call Luca my mate. We're more like ... Acquaintances who tolerate each other?"

Luca weighed his head back and forth and couldn't seem to decide whether to deny or affirm that assessment.

"No," voiced Lexington, who had been most reticent since coming to the table. "Your mate. He meant Grace. You and her."

"I don't get what you mean. I'll get the dictionary. I don't get what the Yanks mean," he said, turning to Grace, and she too shrugged.

He had already stood up when Goliath, smiling indulgently, gestured him to take his seat again.

"We mean mates in terms of life partners. Like Elisa is my partner."

"Or Katana mine," Brooklyn said, and Broadway grinned broadly as he too raised a finger. "Like Angela is my mate. Forever and ever."

All the women gave their partners warm looks. Males and females blushed.

"Oh, how romantic," Grace crooned, placing both hands over her heart in a touching gesture. Luca nodded, grinning broadly, and Dante imagined Mister Clean looked remarkably relieved to see these harmonious couples. Nashville made a disapproving gagging sound and Dante would have liked to make one, too, so saccharine was this. So Detective Exotic wasn't just a bedtime story and Angela had the hots for the fat guy.

Dante smiled, hoping it looked conciliatory. "Okay. Brooklyn and Signora Katana - sweet. And Goliath and Elisa- I don't have a problem with that. It's hard to fuck a human because they are really fragile but in times of need the devil eats mosquitoes." He looked at Angela. "But as for you, gorgeous- sure about the forever and ever? Time and diabetes are your enemies."

Broadway joined in the already threatening rumble of Goliath and only the admonishing touches of their respective partners could keep them from doing worse.

Grace boxed her brother in the side and he winced under the pain of her elbow spur.

"What?!"

"Dante meant that love is the highest power within us. It can transcend anything and racial boundaries are irrelevant when you truly love," Grace hastened to say.

"Yes. That's what I meant. Hey, I'm the last one to accuse anyone for their desires-". Dante's brief know-it-all look at Lexington was returned by the web-wing's killer stare. "In fact father has often supplied me with wh- Ow!" gasped Dante as now Luca kicked him hard. He would get back at the human for that.

"The mates thing just confused us. In the dictionary, mates come first under buddies," Luca said placatingly.

"Mates to us are life partners. Like spouses only without a human wedding. We thought you and Grace-." said Broadway, his chest swelling in anticipation of victory.

"Wow." Dante and Grace looked at each other, both faces frozen in both enlightenment and disgust. Then they both shook their heads vigorously.

"What are you guys thinking? We're brother and sister!" the gray one said stridently.

"Maybe you were raised like siblings but you're not. Not by blood," Lexington said, looking at Dante with his googly eyes like he was dumb.

Now it was up to the winged mobster to grumble and press his hands on the tabletop that his claws made the wood crunch.

"Say that again, shorty?"

Lexington didn't seem to take the threat seriously (Still he hadn't been enlightened as to how violent Dante could be) and rolled his eyes cockily. However, he had never had any trouble filling in gaps in others' knowledge. "You can't be siblings because there are no direct blood relatives in a clutch."

"Huh?"

"Females only lay one egg at a time. I'm not saying it's biologically impossible for two to be laid but even then your facial physiognomy is too different even if one of your parents had a beak and the other part had a human face."

"What did you mean by clutch?" asked Luca where Dante and Grace sibling-like shared the same reaction of open mouths and beaks in bewilderment.

"Well - The clutch of eggs," said the little web-wing, raising his brow in sullenness.

Again questioning looks were exchanged among the Italians.

Hudson shook his head with a stern face.

"He who does not know his origins cannot have a future," he murmured almost philosophically but with a pitying undertone.

"Oh by all the four directions of the sky," Brooklyn muttered. "You really grew up among humans. Gargoyles - we - and you. Gargoyles always hatch from eggs."

"Or why did you think you didn't have bellybuttons?" asked Broadway.

Dante and Grace grabbed their stomachs at the same time, and if their expressions hadn't both been so stunned and self-conscious it would have made the others laugh again. As it was, though, it was just ... unsettling. And sad.

Katana dabbed her beak with her serving dish and slowly rose. "After we clean up, we should show them Egwardo."

.

Half an hour later, Dante, Grace and Luca were all squatting in front of the hollow in the brood cave deep in the belly of the castle.

"Oh my God," the Italian detective muttered softly.

"It's an egg," the toughest Camorra killer south of Rome said tonelessly as if in shock. Grace patted his shoulder while she couldn't take her eyes off the unhatched congener, whose shell shone a little from a strange greenish-yellow diffused light from which it was impossible to tell whether it came from the moss itself growing here and there or from the distant faint spots embedded in the ground.

" I can see that, Dante."

"No Grace, you don't understand. It's a giant, purple, speckled egg. "Dante said kind of frantically, pointing at the thing with flat hands. Then he looked around until he found first Angela and then Katana's face in the bystanders, and asked the sympathetic gargoyle woman as if he wished she would deny it.

"One of you girls laid that? You sure?"

Where Katana only smiled politely and perhaps a little proudly, Broadway folded his massive arms in front of his chest and looked down at Dante with a hard gaze.

"It doesn't matter who laid it. The brood belongs to the whole clan. Everyone is mother and father."

"I don't believe it," Dante said, kneading his fiery red braid unsteadily and looking more childlike than ever. He seemed to be talking more to himself as he moved his hands around the egg as if estimating its size. "This egg is so huge. Much bigger than the third Rossi child and that was an 11 pound roast at birth."

"We don't like strangers touching our egg," Coldstone said frostily, and Bronx and Fu-Dog, who were being held by him, growled in agreement, to which Dante remarkably obediently drew his hands to himself.

"No, I'm not touching it. I'm just- Gesù, Maria e Giuseppe, it's SO big."

"Thank you, we're quite proud of it too," murmured Brooklyn who was standing on the other side of the hollow also with his arms and wings folded, keeping a close eye on the three Italians- but especially on Dante.

"And an egg takes ten years to hatch? Ten years?" asked Luca in disbelief and Hudson as well as Goliath confirmed and told tersely about egg laying and incubation cycles. Everyone stood up and where Grace and Luca were again listening attentively to the leader of the clan, Dante stood a little apart a hand on his neck as if his air was being stifled.

"Dante - you're all pale," Katana said, and everyone raised their eyes, flabbergasted that the bull in a china shop with the gangster attitude tolerated her gently stroking a damp strand of hair from his face. He nodded without taking his eyes off the egg.

"Are all Gargoyle eggs- like that?" the gray one asked, looking at Katana.

"Yes, Dante-kun."

"But how- how does that work? Yours- I mean yours-." His gaze flitted to Katana's midsection for just a second.

"The females unhinge their pelvic girdles for egg-laying. Like snakes doing mandibular dislocation. Extra bones and flexible tendons help. And when laying, the egg skins are soft and pliable," said Coldfire, and her robotic voice - though feminine and oddly sweet - still echoed artificially in the brood den like the voice of the narrator of a nature documentary.

Now Luca and Grace sounded like twins as they said "Oh." in unison.

Dante stumbled away from the hollow past the other gargoyles and Elisa Maza.

"Oh God, I think I'm going to-" he held his hand in front of his beak and looked miserable. Grace jumped to him and put a hand on his shoulder in alarm.

"Please Dante! Please don't throw up," she pleaded in alarm.

He croaked in suffering. "I'm holding back. Honest."

A few times he inhaled the warm, humid air. Something in him was stimulated in this environment that he could not name. Despite the nausea he felt comfortable although it was toasty, stuffy and steamy. Was it because he and Grace had been in such a cave on the other side of the world many years ago? Had they also been hatched in such a cave?

Again he took a deep breath and then sounded almost like his normal snarky self again as he turned to Grace and grinned mischievously. "Okay... I can live with it if I have to find a girlfriend among the human population. But you have the choice of either waiting another twenty years for the little guy to man up in that regard, or you take small and googly-eyed with the odd wings but he's probably more-."

"HEY!" cried Lexington, offended.

"-but either would feel like child abuse. Maybe the Hobbit's egg wouldn't be quite so huge!" he joked, chuckling.

"Enough of that right now!" exclaimed Broadway indignantly, his eyes as well as Lexington's aglow at his insolent remarks.

"Dante, I don't think we're going to get into that subject for a while," Grace said, and would have hit him again with the newspaper if she'd had one and hadn't known full well that Dante was only being like this because the whole thing scared the hell out of him.

"That suits me fine. The mood here is in the basement - literally." He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jeans. "I really need a smoke right now - and I'm assuming this is a non-smoking area. Mazel tov for -" he pointed again at the egg "- that one."

Then he literally fled up the stairs.

Grace rubbed her face wearily with both hands while Luca came to her to offer comfort if she wanted it.

"I'm so sorry," she said, looking to the other Gargoyles. "He's usually ... less bad. Really. Please believe me."

Goliath grumbled loudly, and it sounded like a deep rumble so that Grace and Luca - who didn't know how to interpret natural gargoyle sounds of that kind at all - were backing away from him.

"I think -," Goliath said with a certain caution, considering all the members of his clan with serious eyes. "- That we must all strive for Grace and especially Dante to learn what it means to be Gargoyles. I'm counting on each of you to do your part." Especially Broadway and Lexington defiantly pushed out their already protruding lower jaws. But no one contradicted the clan leader. The clansmen were dismissed for the rest of the night to attend to private matters.

The Manhattan Gargoyles are really mean to inflict so much truth on the two newcomers right away.

Everything they thought they knew or never thought about is instantly questioned.

But that's how it is in most situations where people with such different knowledge and backgrounds come together.

Thanks for reading, Q.T.