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Brood of a New Age
26.
When a monster suddenly flew up next to Dante and stared at him from wrinkled, half-iron skin with one normal and one red demon eye, he would have crashed from shock and surprise. But after a few meters his fall was roughly braked. Another thing never seen before, with cold golden metal skin, had grabbed him under the arms. Dante quickly pulled another knife from one of his bracers and jabbed it into the thing's side. His knife broke off and fell - past an old bearded gargoyle gliding beneath him at one point - into the depths.
"Fighting back is futile," proclaimed the creature that had previously startled him so much that he had even forgotten how to keep his balance in the air. And only that Katana flew close to the creatures and spoke calmly over flying wind and the hum of jet engines kept him from resisting further.
"Dante, this is our clan elder Hudson," the old man nodded to Dante. "Coldfire- " She pointed with the flat of her hand to the golden pale bucket that held him like an unloved human and which Dante only now realized had feminine features, "-and this is Coldstone." She pointed at the half-gargoyle-half-machine mix who looked at him grimly and only nodded at Katana in courtesy.
"Those two are - robots?" asked Dante, kicking and trying to free himself from the iron-hard grip.
"Let him go, sister," Katana said. "He's coming with us voluntarily." Coldfire (Katana's sister?) instantly let go of him and he plummeted again several dozen yards before finding an updraft. Broadway laughed at that and Dante would remember that, grimly glaring at the fatso as he rejoined the machines and the real gargoyles.
"My body is that of a robot but I am a gargoyle, foreign Gray one," the gold-covered gargoyle impersonator said in a feminine little-modulated teacher's voice.
"I am a cyborg - and a gargoyle," muttered Coldstone in an equally unmodulated deep bass voice.
"And what's the difference?" asked Dante, glancing suspiciously at the hulk called Coldstone-who kept an equally suspicious "eye" on him. Dante didn't know much about technology from Italy. It just hadn't played much of a role. Of course, their father had let them behind the wheel of one car or another to see if they could be entrusted with such tasks in which vehicles were needed. But most of the time that had gotten pretty expensive. He managed to operate a microwave, turn on and off a radio and a television. Everything that went beyond that frustrated him so much that he preferred to break the device in question. He had already broken and irretrievably lost one of his knives on the golden one, so he would be damned if he was going to take it apart before he knew HOW to take it apart.
He finally got to look at the old gargoyle because he had never seen an old one of his kind before. But that was the one from the TV records. So he had survived. The old man- Hudson, was portly but even from his arms and legs, which were in a kind of doublet or something, you could see that there was more muscle than fat underneath.
The old man noticed his stare and gave him a sort of perky smile, his fangs gleaming in his lower jaw.
"Oi Laddie, you're giving us a lot of trouble," he said in a strange accent but more as a statement than hatefully. That's why Dante wasn't snarky also because he had been taught by his father to show respect to ladies and elders (provided they didn't piss on his leg or were his victims).
"Yes, I understood that it was bad to hurt this people without permission. Mea Culpa," he said, and looked from the effortlessly flying machines to Katana because the sovereign gargoyle woman gave him the least reason to reject her or feel rejected. He drifted a little closer to her.
"You're building yourselves machines that look like gargoyles?" he asked worriedly because then things must be MUCH worse for this American family than he had thought. He and Grace had often wished over the years to meet others of their kind. But they were never so desperate as to develop familial feelings for a piece of technology.
"They are full members of our clan!" rumbled Broadway indignantly from the side before Katana could reply.
"Aye, they are family," Hudson confirmed, touching Coldstone on the shoulder in flight whereupon the latter showed for the first time that his half-artificial face was capable of smiling. Dante looked at Katana in horror, but noticed Broadway's look of annoyance at his ignorance, which Dante tolerated for the sake of fucking peace. But he couldn't quite help himself: "Clearly more than the two toasters have an identity crisis here," he murmured, which was lost in the air breeze high above the city.
.
After explaining to Dante that there was no safer place than the world's tallest building, precisely because of the automatic firing systems, the six gargoyles landed in the outermost, most expansive courtyard of the castle. Dante rubbed one of his aching wing bars. Naples had nowhere near as many tall buildings, and he wasn't sure he'd ever glided so high on such strong winds before.
He looked around - unfamiliar with the castle's already intricate layout from the outside - when he heard a rumble from one of the open doorways. The darkness swallowed even for his eyes the true nature of this new threat, he saw only shadows. Big and bulky- neither human nor gargoyle.
"What is that?" he whispered as he assumed a human bent fighting stance, Hudson behind him making an amused snorting noise.
"If I were you, I'd abandon your hostile posture quickly. Before they devour you."
"Devour me?!" he shouted the second two pony-sized massive monsters with no pupils burst out of the darkness, barking and snorting as they stormed toward him like hellhounds.
"Fuck!" Instantly, two knives were in his hands. Screams sounded in his back, he felt someone trying to grab him from behind, but dodged and ran towards the creatures that wanted to maul him, and presumably the other arrivals (or crush them into scrap metal). The blue thing with the stubby horns on its back was closer to him, set to pounce with its maw wide open, and he raised his knives to drive the blades left and right through its massive fish-fin ears into its brain. But then out of the corner of his eye he saw a red beam and one of his knives was torn from his hand. Now off balance, he fell to the ground, the blue creature jumped over him and a loud whistle sounded from the direction of his group. He saw the green beast with the mane also rush past him and not a moment later the monsters were sitting, tails wagging and panting, in front of Coldstone and Hudson, who patted them roughly and grinned at him as if HE were the idiot.
Next to him, he heard the typical whooshing sound of a gargoyle landing, and when he turned his head, he looked into the jet-black barrel of a gun. A view he had been able to enjoy for the last time in the fight with Giuliano, which sent a cold shiver of vulnerability down his spine. This, however, was a pistol unlike any he had ever seen, in the hand of a gargoyle almost the color of his sister's skin, an eye patch, white hair, and a beak only minimally longer than his own.
"We don't like our beasts threatened with knives," Red said sternly. Dante thought he recognized him from the television footage but this one was probably twice his age and wore some sort of partial armor with breastplate and iron forearm splints. But even though the guy's cold stare was unwavering on him, literally bearing down on him, Dante could gauge what an opponent's shooting was like. This wasn't some mindless, headless idiot who needed only one wrong twitch to pull the trigger. This was a strategist who only fired when he was sure that his counterpart could not be handled any other way. So the gun was more symbolic statement than real threat.
"I didn't know these were your pets," Dante grumbled therefore, little alarmed but displeased. He had fallen, been knocked down, tripped and crashed once too often for his taste in the last two nights.
The red man made no move to put his weapon away, instead reaching out. "You're a little too quick for me to pull out your human toys. Give me those bracers."
"I'm very attached to them."
"I'm not arguing. Either you give them to me or you, your sister, and the human won't be welcome here another minute."
"Mine? My sister is here?"
Red nodded curtly without a trace of arrogant malice as should have been expected from someone who had captured his remaining family. "Grace and Luca are already our guests."
"What have you done to them?" Dante wanted to know, and he almost shouted the last word. Remembering far too fresh pain, only recently past fear for his family, his eyes began to blaze and a growl erupted from his throat that was more inhuman than what he usually let bubble out of him. The knives in his bracers vibrated greedily and he knew he could rip the red one's hand up before he shot, crushing the bones in his hand like grissini. Whether gargoyle bones broke as effortlessly as human ones? More likely not - exploring that was tempting.
"DANTE!" a familiar voice called out just then. Out of the big portal came a whole bunch of gargoyles and humans, including Luca and, at the very front, his sister. Not tied up, not hurt but healthy, she rushed towards him. Forgetting the gun that was probably still pointed at him, Dante jumped up, beaming with joy, and spread his arms.
"Grace!" he shouted, even beckoning to Mister nice guy, who waved back. "Luca! You're here! Awesome. We found the other family all in the same evening and- Grace? Grace, what are you looking at me like that?"
He backed away when he realized his sister was rushing toward him with a less than pleased expression on her face. Instead, she looked downright venomous.
"Dante! You stupid idiot!" she screeched angrily.
All the newcomers thought she was going to lunge at him, snarling. Then they noticed the newspaper in her hand. A rolled-up newspaper. Dante raised his hands and backed away when she reached him, raised her arm and hit him on the beak with the newspaper. All the Gargoyles flinched, but only Brooklyn, Katana and Nashville knew how sensitive a beak could be and that even a rolled-up newspaper could hurt as much as a punch.
"How could you do something like that? We had talked about this!"
"What, what did I do?" he croaked, backing away, shielding his head with his arms.
"The humans yesterday. The Quarrymen! Stupido!"
"What about them?"
"You almost killed them."
"Does the 'almost' bother you?"
"Non metterti contro di me ora! Imbecille! Non posso lasciarti andare da solo per una volta?"
"What happened to your "English only" rule- OUW!"
He tried to dodge her and the newspaper, hands and wings protectively clasped together over his head, but she ran after him like a fury – or a nagging Italian housewive. The whole castle courtyard became the arena of the two Italian gargoyles.
Except for Xanatos and Fox, who obviously had to restrain themselves from laughing out loud at the sight, the Manhattan clan, fully assembled except for Elisa, watched with a mixture of bewilderment and confusion as the new red-skinned female gargoyle drove the much more muscular fellow, whom they had almost considered their new enemy and a terrible threat to the peace of the city, through the courtyard with a rolled-up newspaper like a naughty dog. And he put up with it.
Lexington leaned toward Coldfire but any of the assembled gargoyles could hear him:
"Okay- that mess with the Quarrymen was absolutely over the top- but he didn't deserve that. Or-or did he?" Lexington looked around sheepishly. He was the only one who didn't yet know how violent the injuries to the humans had been.
"They sure have a heated bond," Goliath grumbled and Xanatos who had joined them with Fox - both in the most expensive pajamas with embroidered emblems - because the two ex-villains always appreciated a good show, laughed lightly.
"Oh, a fire like that in some relationships can be very fulfilling in other areas altogether."
Fox laughed as well.
"Like we're just watching Granny chase Sylvester Cat around the house because he ate Tweety. Angela?" said Broadway tonelessly. And like his mate, couldn't take his eyes off the two of them.
"Yes, Broadway?"
"Promise me you'll never hit me with a newspaper no matter how much I annoy you."
"No doubt I'd find something better" she muttered, and if her tone hadn't been so affected by the performance, the line could have been taken for a joke.
"Grace, stop that!" cried the so dangerous looking gargoyle with the scars and the dark red braid, which was already completely disheveled. He had grabbed his red sister's hands and they were struggling with each other like bickering children. "I got it, damn it! That was too much, that was bad. But I was totally under the gun yesterday! You saw my wounds!"
"This clan now thinks we're a bunch of ruthless nutcases!" she shrieked, jerking him off his feet not with her tail but in a flawless sequence of judo moves.
"I don't know if it contradicts that impression when you beat the crap out of me with a newspaper!" her brother shouted from the flagstones, and Grace's gaze flew to her hand with the rolled-up paper. She growled in frustration, still red eyed and seething with anger. Luca stepped out of the group and came up to his friends and put his hands on her shoulders from behind. They both had their backs turned to the others but like Dante, they could all hear him as he spoke softly and urgently like a mediator.
"Grace, it's all right. He-he apologized. We can't change what happened." He took the newspaper she had been kneading between her hands.
"But we tried so hard," she whispered in a squeaky voice.
Luca's voice grew quieter. "They already know here about Dante's dealings with these Quarrymen. They need to discuss in the group whether he ... whether they would take him in."
"Damn it. If they don't want him - then I can't either-"
"Don't think of that Grace. Surely they'll want to assess him themselves."
Luca and Grace looked at each other simultaneously in horror as they realized that Dante had no talent for making a halfway good acceptable first impression in front of people who didn't tick like him. Basically- the first impression he delivered to the others was of five people beaten half to death, two of whom would probably remain permanently crippled.
"My usual prayers aren't enough for that," Grace muttered, and Luca nodded in concern.
Brooklyn, somehow less eager to shoot Dante after the beating the gray delinquent of violence had so submissively taken, had put his gun away. He and Goliath looked at each other- found agreement without exchanging a word.
Goliath stepped forward and cleared his throat.
"Perhaps, we would understand each other better if we spent the evening together. After the last few hours, I'm sure everyone here is hungry. Why don't we eat together and talk."
Luca and Grace looked in amazement at the lavender-haired leader. Grace's posture and facial expression turned mild and grateful.
"We would like to accept that. Thank you."
Luca helped Dante to his feet, who wiped his hands on his pants and was now able to examine the other gargoyles he had never seen before. Goliath approached him first.
"Grace has already told us that you had a long journey and spent two weeks looking for us. Even though your encounter with the Quarrymen was unfortunate and we have serious words to say about it, we are glad that both of you and your human ally found us. I am Goliath, the leader of the Manhattan Clan." He extended his hand and for a few moments Dante looked at the large paw. With claws like his. He took a breath and strangely it sounded like a breath of relief, which had been held for more than just two weeks. Then he shook the hand of the other Gargoyle. The first time he shook hands with a member of the same species. This made him smile although he had been told many times that his smile could make babies cry and always looked devious. But okay - he was a gangster, after all.
"I'm glad to be here. We're glad," he said, glancing briefly at Luca and Grace. His sister now already looked much more suave. Blowing off steam - on him - had done her good. At least something. Probably the other gargoyles thought he was a wimp, but he would show them what the Della Marra siblings were capable of. Of course, they resented him for beating up the humans yesterday. Because they were not good at killing and they feared retaliation from a human superiority, but he could teach them to defend themselves. And fight back. And then gargoyles would leave a bloody trail through the ranks of these Quarrymen and no one in this vast city would ever dare attack a gargoyle again. He was truly what this family needed. They just didn't know it yet.
The gargoyles (and toasters) who had accompanied him now introduced themselves to Luca and Grace. His sister instantly became cheerful and kissed everyone, even the robots left and right on the cheeks without showing irritation. Which proved what an excellent actress she was, or how wistfully she had really longed for other Gargoyles.
"This is Brooklyn, my Second in Command," said the leader of this-what had he called this family? - Clan? Funny. Camorra families sometimes referred to themselves as clans, too.
"So you're his right hand man?" asked Dante as Brooklyn gave him a painful handshake, which he was only too happy to return just as painfully. Red frowned in irritation. "Like Goliath said, I'm the Second in Command. That's a deputy," he said gravely, and Dante stifled the question of why a deputy was older than the chief. Then the leader's daughter stepped out from behind Brooklyn, clearly recognizable by the color of her skin. But otherwise NOTHING reminded of the Gargoyle, which resembled the biblical counterpart. She was an -
"I'm Angela," she said with a friendly smile, and Dante's grin grew three times as wide and three times as honest. He wasn't the kissing type - earlier he had gotten carried away with Signora Katana and the fat man. But this lady carried him away in a completely different way. He put his hands on her shoulders, gave her the usual kisses, just a peak, and let his Della Marra charm play.
"Angela! How appropriate a name can be," he murmured, leaning down, gently bringing her hand to his lips and breathing a kiss on it that was more intimate than what he had bestowed on her cheeks.
"Angela. Se non ci fossi dovrei inventarti. I learned to walk as a child only to find you", he purred in his sonorous smoky seducer voice, which had already been able to distract more than one woman his father provided him with from his eerie appearance.
And his dark magic began to work because the silent brief confusion that such a voice with such words could come from such a scarred, seemingly rude fellow was followed by a soft longing sigh.
His voice was not honey, which caught flies. It was the smoke from the beekeeper's pipe, which could befuddle a whole hive, beguiling, soothing, evoking lethargic indifference to the visible horror as long as his words were in the air. Which, unfortunately, they weren't long because a turquoise blob squeezed himself between him and Angela.
"THAT have been enough kisses now! Italians or not, that's not how it works here."
"Hey, don't panic. That's how Italians talk to stunning women. I just wanted to inquire how the lady was doing. What's going on and stuff."
"Nothing's going on with her," Broadway rumbled, and Dante deliberately misunderstood him.
"That's a shame, really, and ought to be changed," he returned jauntily, giving Angela a very attentive look at which only very good observers could notice the cheeky hint of infinite possibilities. The purple female kept behind Broadway, but her face showed a mixture of confusion, polite amiability and interest. Everything was still wide open.
"YOU'RE not changing anything here," the turquoise male hissed with more hostility than anyone had ever witnessed when it wasn't about organized crime or the Dracons.
Dante raised his hands and smirked. "Calm down, ragazzo grasso. I'm a gentleman. I'll take things slow."
"I'd recommend reverse," Broadway puffed.
Dante glared challengingly at him but an olive green shadow slid into his field of vision at the bottom.
"Those bracers - they're designed to drop a knife in your hand with a swipe of a claw, aren't they? That's what it looked like earlier," noted a handy, bald gargoyle with the knowledge-hungry eyes of a child.
Dante looked down at him with widened eyes.
He gasped for breath.
"Grace!" he exclaimed, and as his sister turned from talking to Signora Katana, Dante grabbed the young gargoyle and held it out to her as if it were a rag doll he had won at the fair.
"Look at this one! Look at this little guy!"
He shifted his grip, grabbed Lexington under the arms so that his flying skins stretched to the max, threw him up so that he shrieked, and caught him again.
"You survived! You little baldy! Oh man, I've never seen a gargoyle kid before but by God I'm even happy about you half-pint!"
"Uhhh Dante - he's not-" began Luca.
"Hahah!" The scarred gargoyle lifted the boy back up higher laughing in the child's horrified face. Dante was a multiple murderer, a klutz, and an emotionally crippled mobster. But he was also Italian. Children had never been among his victims, and he knew that if he was on good terms with the youngest, he would probably be able to warm the others to himself (and his ways) somehow.
"And great that you're interested in my knives! Uncle will teach you some tricks with them later. We'll get along great, you and me, you little flying squirrel. Kids love me!"
"I'm an ADULT!" growled Lexington, face petrified but head fiery red with embarrassment, and Dante grinned even wider and shook the kid teasingly.
"You bet you are! Yes, a big strong man you are!"
He hugged the child to his chest and stroked his bald head. The tree frog was an ugly little guy but that he thought so was something the new cool uncle didn't have to let on.
Three seconds of absolute silence followed, despite the number of people gathered. Then a rasping old man's laugh cut the tension like one of Dante's knives couldn't have done it better.
Everyone else saw with horror that it came from Hudson's throat. The usually grumpy clan elder had his mouth wide open and bared his fangs in a fit of laughter like he hadn't laughed SO hard in his decades, and within five seconds everyone was laughing, even Brooklyn and Goliath. Katana and Angela politely restrained themselves but shook with convulsively held back laughter.
"What?" asked Dante, Lexington still pressed to his chest. He looked to his sister and she had her hands over her face in shame.
"What did I do now?" No one could answer him. Even Xanatos and Fox were laughing, and Macbeth, standing at the back, had last laughed like this when he had read about Shakespeare's death in the newspaper back then. Luca was shaking and trying to keep control of his facial muscles because he was on the verge of snorting himself.
Lexington had begun to kick in his arms and Dante felt something that irritated him so much that he instantly loosened his grip. This allowed the tree frog to launch itself off his chest with its feet and sail away from him in a high arc. He landed meters away on the ground and remained there in the crouching position of an animal. His eyes lit up white and his voice was shrill with indignation and humiliation as he looked back and forth between his laughing clansmen and the perpetrator of this situation. Hissing, he made a veritable cat hump.
"I'm an adult warrior of this clan, dammit!"
Dante was similarly embarrassed about the situation now. Though probably none of the others had seen what he had felt.
"Oh really? Uhhh. Sorry - uhh buddy."
"Oh Dante, how can you put your foot in your mouth like that?" growled Grace, and had she not been naturally red, everyone would have seen how embarrassed she was.
Almost everyone laughed tears and that erased if not the distrust at least the greatest fear of the winged perpetrator of violence for now. But Lexington didn't give a flying fuck that the billowing swaths of potential menace from the bystanders had been drained by this scene.
"This is too dumb for me," he growled, turning another tight, eye-glowing indignant circle on all fours, then pulling away. Alright, now that Dante had gotten that hint, Lexington's physique, if not large, was riddled with defined strands of muscle that maybe, ONLY maybe couldn't belong to a child. How the hell could Dante have known?
Lexington crawled away on all fours like a whipped but very angry dog. As he passed, he lashed out with his tail and flogged it into the back of the knee of a smaller, unrestrained giggling, black-haired gargoyle with Signora Katana's skin tone but Brooklyn's beak.
Dante's voice rose above the waning laughter of the clan as he pointed to THIS half-pint.
"Is that a kid at least?"
Katana stepped up to him with a smirk, her Japanese heritage inevitably leading her to maneuver through what she had just seen with the most dignity and catch herself the quickest.
"This he is. A child of the clan. Nashville - say hello."
"Hello," the little one said, giving him a curious look but keeping slightly behind Katana - perhaps fearful that Dante would smooch and squeeze him as much as the olive-skinned non-kid. Dante smirked. He didn't feel like it, either.
Brooklyn chuckled again. "Oh, man, Lex is going to hold that against us for weeks."
"Only if we keep rubbing it in his face," Hudson muttered, rubbing his jaw muscles, which weren't at all used to this kind of workout.
"A tempting thought," Coldstone grumbled in mechanical manner. He and Coldfire hadn't laughed heartily but had had to calibrate some settings in their software to keep their respective shells from showing how funny that had just been to them.
Broadway patted him on the back.
"We can't pull his tail too much. Otherwise he'll put a bug in you."
"A bug?" , Goliath asked, his eyes wide. The thought that Lexington would be so cruel as to put an insect in his rookery brother's mechanics was just absurd but sometimes the (future) vision Puck had exposed him to just wouldn't get out of his head.
Brooklyn waved it off as a hint that Goliath should forget about it. Coldstone - inevitably familiar with the bug thing because of his altered body - shuddered.
"But he could also make sure that no kitchen appliance, and no TV, works anymore" Coldfire mused as she walked by, and Broadway's and Nashville's grins were instantly replaced by masks of horror. Hudson scowled.
Goliath rubbed his square massive chin and cleared his throat.
"Let's go inside now. We're all hungry." He gave Luca and Grace a friendly smile, and human and gargoyle followed him. The rest of the clan also passed through the great portal. Mac Beth said goodbye (he had gotten his money's worth) and Fox and David Xanatos wished everyone a good night (they would be able to enjoy the outdoor camera shots many times).
Dante looked indecisively at the others. "Me too?" he asked in doubt, not really expecting an answer. Until he felt a warm body next to him and looked into a friendly beaked face.
"Yes, Dante, you too." Katana smiled upliftingly at him. Finally, something that built him up.
"May I?" he asked politely, holding his elbow out to her. Katana was already versed in this custom and hooked up.
They let the two beasts ahead, whom he had momentarily forgotten and who were now grumbling as they pressed through the portal with them as if to guard their ice-blue mistress from the indecent Italian.
As if Dante would ever be indecent in front of Signora Katana! At least not intentionally. She was an upper-class lady. And he was a gentleman.
Thus, he let the mutts have their way and successfully resisted the urge to ram a foot or a knife up their massive asses.
"Non metterti contro di me ora! Imbecille! Non posso lasciarti andare da solo per una volta?" = "Don't mess with me now! You imbecile! Can't I let you go alone for once?"
"Se non ci fossi dovrei inventarti." = "If you were not here I would have to invent you."
Not sure I'll ever write another scene as funny as the one with Lexington and Dante. Can't think of anything funnier right now than Lex hanging in Dante's arms and struggling to get away from his Six Pack (why he would even want to get away from something like that is a mystery to me ^^).
Thanks for reading, Q.T.