As the tension in the air began to dissipate, Orion felt his heartbeat return to normal.
"Can I play outside now?" Bonnie asked in a timid voice, quite uncharacteristic for her.
The three men looked down in surprise, having clearly forgotten the children for a moment.
"Go outside and play, princess," Angelo conceded gently, "Don't let these two chooches scare you."
Lyra gave Orion a desperate look as he tried to swallow in his dry throat and confirmed, "You go play too, Lyra. I'll wait here and call Brooklyn."
Lyra's eyes widened even further in disbelief.
"That playhouse looks fun," Orion told her in as even a tone as he could muster, "It looks like a cool place to hang out."
Slowly, Lyra nodded her head and rose, gathering up her things and putting them in Orion's backpack, which she hung from her shoulder. Bonnie grabbed her gargoyle doll and followed Lyra through the screen door and down the stairs, clearly relieved to get away from the feuding gangsters. Orion breathed a sigh of relief as well, hoping that if his sisters failed to hold their human forms past sunset, they would at least be hidden from view.
His peace was short-lived however, as Angelo immediately pulled out his phone and muttered, "Mickey, watch them," into his phone. Orion's face must have betrayed his concern because Angelo said,
"Hey, little boss! Forget about it! These guys are just having a typical Sicilian discussion. We're a loud, passionate people, that's all! It's all good. Have an amaretti."
Orion nodded and obediently walked toward Angelo to retrieve a cookie from the basket.
"Hey, what happened to your shirt kid?" Gianni asked, noticing the tear in the top of his hoodie as he reached past him.
Awkwardly, Orion paused. Sister had often criticized him for his lack of skills in deception, and she wasn't wrong. Orion felt his face burning with embarrassment as he tried to come up with a plausible story.
"I, um…Well, we had a run in with the security in the train yard in New York," he explained, "They guy grabbed me and tore my shirt."
"That's no thing, kid," Gianni told him, rising from his seat and going to a hamper that sat beside the back door, where the boys had thrown their backpacks on hooks. He dug down inside it and pulled out a heavy, black, hooded jacket with the word "Sox" emblazoned on the front in white letters.
"Here you go! It's too small for Marco anyway."
"Oh, thanks," Orion replied in surprise, "But you don't have to-
"Forget about it!" Gianni said with a laugh, "You come to Chicago, you gotta have a souvenir, right? And we gotta stake our claim on you now, before the enemy gets to you and you end up rooting for the wrong team!"
Orion froze fearfully.
"What do you mean?" he asked, trying to keep a cool voice while wondering what he was being accused of, "I just got here and I don't know anyone. How could I join your enemy?"
Gianni and Angelo laughed as Gianni took off the tattered hoodie and helped him into the heavier jacket.
"He's talking about the Cubs, little boss," Angelo laughed, "Don't you know baseball?"
"Oh!" Orion exclaimed in awkward relief, "Go Sox!"
Angelo and Gianni laughed again and patted him firmly on the shoulder, but Ragazzi was not laughing or even smiling. In fact, he was looking straight at Orion's exposed polo shirt and studying the school emblem that was embroidered on his left shoulder with the strangest expression. Instinctively, Orion closed the front of the jacket with his hand, in order to hide the emblem, but Ragazzi lifted his gaze to meet his and, though he didn't quite know why, Orion's feeling of dread tightened in his chest.
"You go to the Holman Academy, kid?" he asked in a snide voice.
"Uh..yeah," Orion replied uneasily, not able to come up with any plausible way to deny it.
"That's where we sent Cecilia's boy," Ragazzi told the other men, who were looking a bit intrigued by his sudden shift of demeanor.
"Do you know Joey?" Ragazzi asked Orion casually as he leaned back against the arm of the sofa and poked at his phone.
"Joey?" Orion repeated nervously, "Joseph? Yeah, um. He's in my class."
Ragazzi smiled.
"Did you know that he's my son?" he asked and Orion's eyes widened in surprise and realization.
"N-no sir! I didn't know that. Joseph didn't ever tell us that his dad lived in Chicago. He- he doesn't say a lot." Orion realized that he was stammering and probably sounded either very suspicious or completely foolish. He was hoping it was the later, because he was still reeling from this new information, what it meant, and what Ragazzi was thinking.
"He's a smart boy," Ragazzi replied with a smile, "He knows when to stay quiet. Not all kids do though, right Orion? What did you say your last name was?"
Orion gritted his teeth, trying to think fast. He had always used Elisa's last name as his own at school, but if this was Joseph's father, he surely had ties to the Dracon gang. Elisa was probably the one human they hated more than any other, and if these gangsters found out she was their mother, he had no doubt their heads would be going back to New York without the rest of their bodies.
"It's Gray," he told them, "Orion Gray."
Angelo and Gianni glanced at each other, clearly not buying the lie and now quite interested in why Orion was lying in the first place and what juicy information Ragazzi was hiding behind that sneer.
"Kids can be like that," Ragazzi continued, "They talk. They spread rumors."
"Don't we know it!" Gianni agreed with a laugh, "We never had to do anything to prove ourselves on the school yard. We always had our family's reputation preceding us!"
"And nowadays, with the internet," Ragazzi continued, smiling almost maniacally as he continued to scroll, "Before you know it, the whole world is up in your business! Right, Orion Gray?"
"We don't get in each others' business at school," Orion replied defensively.
"That's good!" Ragazzi replied with a smile, "Because everyone has their family secrets, don't they?"
"I- I don't know what you're talking about," Orion replied, and it wasn't untrue, though he was trying frantically to remember everything he had said around Joseph, which he might have shared with his crazy gangster father.
"What are you on about, Zio?" Angelo asked, clearly becoming a little frustrated with not being in on the intrigue.
"Oh, you are gonna love this, Angelo," Ragazzi said snidely, handing his cell phone to his comrade, "Just look at the prize fish that swam right into our net!"
Angelo's eyes widened ecstatically as he scrolled through whatever Ragazzi was showing him on his phone. Orion squirmed in his seat as the men kept looking from the screen and back to him.
"Hey, get over here!" he called to Gianni, who rose curiously for his turn looking at Ragazzi's phone.
"Col cavolo!" he snorted after a moment.
"Ha!" Angelo shouted, "Didn't I tell you this was good business?"
"The Daily Tattler, boss?" Gianni protested, "I don't believe anything coming out of that rag!"
"It's not just the Tattler," Ragazzi told them triumphantly, "It's all over. That's just one photo, but there are tons online. Anywhere the big boss doesn't have the power to wipe it up and keep it quiet. My man drives Joey to school every day, and he sees who's dropping this kid off and picking him up."
Ragazzi took his phone back and looked at Orion with a wicked smile that made his blood run cold.
"I wonder what's the going rate for three adorable, well-behaved bastardi?"
Angelo seemed to be thinking the situation over.
"If you're right, this could be the deal of a lifetime," he reasoned, "We better be sure before we bring it to the boss."
"Ask him," Ragazzi told him and jerked his head toward Orion, who amid the panic of realizing that he was now possibly the center of a ransom plot, was now also sensing the sun going down over the horizon. It was a challenge for him to keep his human form in any circumstance, but now he was under tremendous fear and stress, and his only comfort was the silence that was coming from the playhouse in the courtyard below. If the girls had transformed, no one had seen them yet. He wondered if Lyra would be able to get Bonnie past the guards and over the heavy iron gate unseen. He worried that she wouldn't think to try without her brother.
He gritted his teeth and dug his nails into the wood of the chair where he sat, as Angelo approached him with the phone.
"Is this you and your sister, little boss?"
Orion tried to focus his blurry eyes and make sense of the image on the phone. It was a photo from a hot air balloon race, several years earlier, just before Alexander had gone away to school. Xanatos Enterprises had sponsored a balloon in the race and Alexander was going to be flying it. He had been taking lessons and was terribly excited about the whole thing. Orion remembered how badly he had wanted to go and ride in the balloon with the Xanatos family. In a particularly manipulative move, Alexander had volunteered to babysit him and Lyra that day, so he could sneak them out without asking.
Orion clearly remembered the hot, loud blast of the engine as they soared gracefully through the sky, and how the shape of the balloon had strangely captured the sounds of the crowd below, so that Orion could pick out individual voices from hundreds of feet above them. Later, Lexington would show him an invention that worked much the same way and allowed the clan to focus in on the sounds of people on the ground when they were patrolling.
Orion had thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the event, but he vaguely recalled the adults' reaction later that night. Goliath and Elisa had not been happy with Alexander. They had said that the trip endangered the children, though Orion didn't understand why. The balloon was quite safe, and of course, Alexander would never have let it crash. Elisa had been most concerned about how much they had been photographed by the press. At the time, Orion had not understood what was so risky about photographs.
"Is that you?" Angelo asked again, a bit of temper rising in his voice.
"Yeah," Orion replied, "It was a balloon race."
"Where were your parents, little boss?"
"Uhh.. I'm not sure. It was a long time ago."
Angelo scrolled down to reveal another photo of Orion and Lyra in the airport, preparing to depart on the Xanatos' private jet. Orion remembered this trip as well and recalled how Owen had ordered the stranger away from the family and both Xanatos' bodyguards and the airport security had gotten involved.
One by one, Angelo scrolled through photos that had been taken of him with the Xanatos family, or being escorted by Xanatos' drivers and private security.
"Where are your parents in these?" Angelo asked.
"I don't know," Orion answered as his whole body strained to keep its shape, "Maybe they were working?"
"Do they work for Xanatos?" Angelo asked.
"Umm. Sometimes," he answered, trying to keep focus.
"How come Xanatos doesn't take his other employees' kids all these places?"
"I-I…" Orion didn't think he could utter another word without exploding, so he shrugged his shoulders.
"Come on, little boss," Angelo coaxed in a gentle voice that was nevertheless tinged with poison, "You can tell me."
Ragazzi reached for his pants pocket and withdrew what looked like a switchblade.
"Do you want me to help speed this up a little?" he demanded callously.
"Sit down, Ragazzi!" Angelo barked, and Ragazzi reluctantly put his knife away and obeyed. Giving his associate a stern look, Angelo pulled his own phone from his pocket.
"Mickey, send the little girl up," he ordered.
"No!" Orion cried frantically, "Listen! Xanatos is just a friend of the family. That's all. He sometimes takes us places."
"And puts you up?" Angelo demanded.
"We live in his building. It's the tallest building in the world. He could rent out to a whole army if he wanted to!"
Angelo gave him a skeptical look, but then they were interrupted by the squeak of the screen door. To Orion's surprise, Bonnie stuck her face, her human face, around the door frame.
"Hi!" she greeted, sending her brother an look that showed she was quite pleased with herself. Orion gazed back with pleading eyes. Bonnie had long been an expert at changing into her gargoyle form during the day, usually at the most inconvenient times possible, but this was the first time she had ever retained her human form at night, and she didn't seem the least bit bothered by it.
"Come here, princess," Angelo cooed, opening his arms.
With a smile, Bonnie approached him and let him pull her into his lap. He took Ragazzi's phone and showed her the photo.
"Hey," he said softly, "You tell Uncle Angelo the truth. Is that big boss man your papa?"
Bonnie looked at the photo in confusion, then glanced up at Orion, who looked back helplessly.
"No!" she said with a confident smile, "That's Uncle David! My father is much, MUCH bigger than him!"
"Bigger than Xanatos?" Angelo asked incredulously.
"Yeah!" she replied in a booming voice, standing on her tiptoes and stretching her arms as far as she could, "Like a giant!"
Angelo laughed.
"I could use a giant!" he told her, "Tell your papa he should come work for us!"
"Okay," she replied doubtfully and scampered back through the screen door to the playhouse.
"Uncle David!" Gianni repeated mockingly with an arrogant smile, "Have you ever heard anything so perverse? I told you there was no way that haughty Greek fatcat sired these angle-faced baby dolls."
Ragazzi gave a defeated shrug.
"So, maybe we only get the 'friend of the family' price," he conceded, "But it will still be worth it to see that arrogant bastard taken down!"
Angelo shot Ragazzi an incredulous look.
"Calm down there, goombah," he scolded with an eye roll, "We don't harbor any ill will toward Xanatos."
"Like hell we don't!" Ragazzi thundered.
"No, my friend," Angelo replied with a dismissive laugh, "You're just like Tonino. You take things too personally! Xanatos is a successful man. A powerful man. A business rival. But it's nothing personal. You make it personal, that's when you start making stupid mistakes, goombah."
Ragazzi slammed his fist on the glass coffee table, making coasters rattle.
"He makes it personal!" he bellowed, "When he comes at us with monsters!"
"Ugh!" Gianni groaned dramatically, leaning back on the sofa, "Again with the monsters?"
Angelo also gave a smug chuckle.
"Little Tony can't hold his turf, so he blames it on imaginary gargoyles."
Ragazzi growled at this accusation.
"They're so imaginary, they tossed me off a rooftop and broke four of my ribs! And they're the ones who jumped us during the meeting of the families. Them and the cops. That's how we lost Aldo!"
"I thought they were working for Xanatos," Gianni protested, "Now they work for the cops? You gotta keep your conspiracy theories straight."
"They work for Maza!" Ragazzi insisted in a maniacal voice that suggested that he'd explained his theory many a time before, "She lends them out to the cops and they do what she says. Xanatos harbors and helps them because they work as his personal security system, protecting his high and mighty tower above us all. In exchange for that, the cops leave Xanatos alone and come after us instead. It's a dirty deal. Why do you think the Dracons keep losing control of the city that's been ours for generations?"
Angelo gave him a dangerous look.
"I don't know. Maybe because the community doesn't feel particularly motivated to put their eggs in the basket of an aging lunatic who squandered all his family's hard-earned resources seeking revenge on some old police lady and a band of invisible flying-lizard-men. It's called 'organized crime' for a reason, goombah, and your man Tony has let it all fall apart."
Orion could see that Ragazzi was seething with rage.
"If it's all crumbling down anyway," he growled, "I just want to see that asshole Xanatos come down with it! And I wouldn't mind a few of those gargoyle's heads mounted on the wall as a tribute to the good old days."
Ragazzi's words made Orion sick to his stomach. His shoulders were already inflamed from the way he clenched his muscles to avoid transforming. His jaw felt like it might shatter if he didn't let his fangs grow out. He was quite certain that his fingernails were already solidifying into talons, but he didn't dare look down. He glanced at the door, wondering if there was any possible way he could get to it unnoticed while they were engaged in this hideous conversation.
Angelo shook his head and chortled at Ragazzi sanctimoniously.
"Ragazzi! What's the matter with you! You have to look at the big picture here! We've been handed an opportunity that is too great to waste on petty revenge! Xanatos is the richest man in the world, and thus far, he has shown great reluctance to… acquiesce… to the way things are done in Chicago . If these carini mean anything to him, that gives us some considerable leverage by which we might inspire some cooperation from the emperor, or at least the prince."
"Cooperation?!" Ragazzi spat like a distempered cat, "Cooperation?! If you think a man like David Xanatos is going to show the family loyalty one moment past getting what he wants…"
But Ragazzi didn't have a chance to finish his thought, as the peace of the evening was shattered with the sound of a child's scream.
"Bonnie!" Orion gasped, and without a moment's hesitation, he leapt to his feet, racing through the door and leaving the stunned gangsters behind him.
Before he had arrived in the courtyard, his wings had burst from his shoulders, tearing the jacket away from him so it hung by one arm. Even as his talons emerged, he sunk them into the back of Mickey, who was aiming his weapon straight at Lyra, as she frantically and awkwardly tried to get enough air in her wings to take off with Bonnie in her arms.
"Go, Lyra! Get away!" Orion screamed at his sister as he took the terrified security guard to the ground and wrestled his weapon away, crushing it just as Brooklyn had taught him. He heard the sickening buzz of a bullet shooting past his shoulder and shattering a chunk of the concrete sidewalk just a foot in front of him. Quickly, he turned to face Andre and the two other men, all looking shocked and terrified as they brandished their weapons at him.
Not giving them the chance to think or wait for a command to shoot, Orion charged Andre and took him down. Orion grabbed his rifle and tried to wrench it away, but Andre wouldn't release it. Using all his strength, Orion forced the weapon down on the concrete above Andre's head, and heard a loud pop, which he hoped meant the clip was dislodged. Either way, Andre immediately let go when the first of several bullets whizzed into the concrete inches from his head.
"Don't shoot you stupid dagos!" Andre screamed for his life, "You're gonna kill me!"
Orion whipped around quickly, racing across the courtyard toward the playhouse while the two remaining men had a silent argument about who should follow first. He found Bonnie crouched next to the plastic house, hidden behind a large, leafy plant and amazingly still in her human form.
"Ori, I don't like this place anymore," she whined, "My friend is scared."
"Come here, Bonnie," he whispered, as he watched the men out of the corner of his eye, trying to discern which way he'd gone, "Do you wanna see me do a trick?"
Bonnie nodded eagerly and gripped Orion tightly around his shoulders. Orion burst from behind the plant, charging toward the nearest man, who happened to have his back to him. It was a maneuver he'd practiced many times before with the clan, but never with an unwilling participant. Orion leaped onto the man's shoulders, using his adversary's height to boost himself into the air and catch a current that carried him to the roof of a nearby shed. The force of his feet had knocked the man to the ground, but he heard the popping sound of the final man's gun, firing at him as he raced across the roof and leaped into the air again, praying that his young wings would find enough of a current to carry him and Bonnie over that fence. His feet grazed the pointed tops of the iron fleur-de-lys that adorned the gate and they disappeared into the neighborhood.
"What happened?!" Angelo bellowed as he and the others made their way into the courtyard, "What was that?"
"You're kidding, right?" Ragazzi replied sarcastically. Angelo and Gianni glanced at each other dumbfounded.
"Whatever it was, boss," Andre informed him, brushing off the gravel and dust from his suit, "It took off with the baby."
"The other ones are gone too, boss," one of the men reported, "I didn't see where they went."
"Well, get after them!" Angelo demanded, "Find them. Catch them. Shoot the gargoyles if you have to, but don't kill the kids! They're too valuable. Bring them back alive."
The men all agreed and raced off to follow their orders. Completely shocked, Angelo Dragoni turned back to enter the house, but balked at the figure of an elderly man, standing in the doorway, with Fiorella clinging anxiously to his knee.
"There, there, piccina," the man whispered as he gently stroked the child's hair, "Did the monsters frighten you? Nonno is here."
"I- I'm sorry, Pop," Angelo said sheepishly, "The kids got away. Or...were taken away. I never expected…I mean, I never seen anything like…"
"Nevermind, son," Dragoni interrupted in a stern voice that silenced the frantic younger man, "It seems my cousin Tony's peculiar infestation has spread."
"We won't let them take our turf," Angelo insisted.
"No, we will not," Dragoni assured him, "Andiamo!"