"Excuse me?" Vernita replied incredulously.

"Did I stutter?" Sister replied with a raised brow. She had heard that retort on a TV show once and it seemed to fit the character she was playing.

"She said she wants to join the gang!" Marco exclaimed in amazement.

"Your friend understood me just fine," Sister pointed out, "Must be your hearing, Vernita."

Vernita gave an outraged gasp.

"Well, I have exceptional hearing," Sister told them, tugging at a star-shaped earring that adorned her wide-rimmed ear, "And I heard you talking about how you want a gargoyle to protect your neighborhood. And I said to myself, why, that sounds like the perfect job for me!"

Vernita's eyes narrowed suspiciously and she folded her arms.

"Why?" she demanded.

Sister balked a little internally. She hadn't prepared very well for this interview.

"I'm a gargoyle!" she laughed arrogantly, "Protecting is what I do! I just arrived here in Chicago, and I'm going to need a protectorate. I was gliding by and heard the little one in trouble, so I stopped to lend a hand with those two thugs that looked like they were going to beat her into the ground. Then I heard you guys talking about wanting a gargoyle and I thought, why not me? Why not make this place my new protectorate?"

Sister spread her arms and wings open, gesturing toward the unprepossessing drainage ditch full of litter and gangster brats and tried to maintain an approving expression.

"You saved Occhi?" Vernita clarified, glancing down at the little girl, half hidden behind her hip, "Is that right?"

Fiorella nodded earnestly, demonstrating with her small hands the force at which Sister had attacked her enemies and tossed them into the trash cans. Then she glanced back at Sister and betrayed half a shy smile. Sister smiled back, gaining a little more confidence.

The rest of the gang all looked at each other in disbelief, each hoping someone else knew how to proceed.

"Don't you already work for David Xanatos?" Nico asked suspiciously.

"Never heard of him," Sister lied.

"You didn't come from the same gargoyles they got in New York?" Marco pressed.

"Nope."

"Where did you come from then?" Stanley demanded.

"Look," Sister replied in a mildly aggravated tone, "I'll admit, I don't really have any references. In case you haven't noticed, I'm just a kid. I'm new in the warrior business. If you want to try to find yourself an older, bigger, stronger, more threatening gargoyle and try to convince him to abandon his protectorate to come work for a gang of kids and guard your bridge, be my guest. But you said you wanted a gargoyle and I'm here and currently available. What do I have to do to join your gang?"

"Well, ummm," Marco replied uneasily, "See, we weren't really thinking that you would join the gang exactly."

"Yeah," Nico agreed adamantly, "Not just anyone can join! You gotta be family!"

Stanley rolled his eyes and Vernita snorted indignantly.

"Or a good friend of the family!" Nico quickly added.

"Well, if you weren't thinking of making a gargoyle part of the gang," Sister asked in an innocent voice, "What were you thinking they'd be?"

Nico looked at his cousin for some support, but Marco was staring awkwardly off into the dark.

"Well, Vernita?" Sister pressured the gang leader, who was glaring at her with contempt, "If you don't want me IN the gang, what else did you have in mind?"

The heavy silence hung there for a moment until Marco cried out,

"An associate! You could be our associate!" Nico exclaimed suddenly.

"Yeah!" Marco agreed with relief, "An associate!"

Sister looked at them curiously.

"An associate?" she repeated hesitantly, "What does that mean?"

"It means you work for us!" Vernita verified, "Exclusively."

"Well, it means we have an arrangement," Nico expanded, "You take care of us and…we take care of you."

Sister seemed to consider this notion.

"You've already seen how I can take care of you," she pointed out, strutting past Vernita and patting Fiorella on the shoulder, "But how exactly can you take care of me?"

"Don't you turn to stone when the sun comes up?" Stanley suggested.

Sister tried not to let her unease at this inquiry show. For a moment, her own rookery mother's voice seemed to blare in her mind. Adelpha's distrust and dislike of humans were hardly unknown to the hatchlings, but she was forbidden by the clan to speak to them on the subject, and had, in general, acquiesced to this edict. But there were a few crucial pieces of advice that she had risked thwarting the rules to impart to her impressionable young ones and the first of these was this,

"Never allow a stranger to know where you sleep!"

Sister chuckled nonchalantly and replied, "As far as you are concerned I do. Do you think I would stroll around in the daytime, like this, when anyone could see me?"

Nico glanced at Vernita and shrugged.

"What do you want then?" she asked, still scowling. Clearly, a gargoyle with a will of her own had not been in her plans.

"First of all, I want to find these other gargoyles you were talking about. Where were they?"

"They were at our house," Marco explained, "But they're not there anymore."

"Well, let's go back there and see if we can find some clues to where they might have gone!" Sister replied excitedly, but was soon suspicious when Vernita snorted and the rest of the gang laughed along at the suggestion.

"Sure, you can do that," Vernita said sarcastically, "If you just wanna turn yourself in to old man Draconi!"

"Who's that?"

"Who's that?!" Marco cried in a scandalized voice, "He's the leader of the Draconi family!"

"And that is?"

The gang gaped at Sister and Vernita rolled her eyes at her ignorance.

"They're the most powerful family in Chicago," Stanley explained, "They've been running things in here since before my grandma was a kid! They get what they want and no one stands in their way."

"And you work for them?" Sister asked.

"Everybody in this neighborhood does," Vernita replied flippantly, "Whether they know it or not."

"Why do the Draconi's want gargoyles?" Sister asked.

"To keep control of our turf," Marco told her, "Gargoyles have been giving trouble to some of our cousins in New York."

"Oh, I see," Sister replied with an understanding she didn't have to fake, "That's why you're scared of us."

"Draconi's ain't scared of nothing!" Nico replied angrily, "We just won't tolerate any interference in our operations."

Sister had to chuckle at Nico's borrowed terminology.

"That's what the grownups say," Marco explained in a less temperamental tone, "But Vernita figures that if David Xanatos can use gargoyles to work against us, why can't we get em to work for us?!"

"As your associates," Sister clarified, "I think I get the picture now."

"Good," Vernita replied snidely, "Now you know what we can do for you. And what we can do TO you, with just a text message."

Sister turned to Vernita slowly, glowering at the implied threat.

"I'd be careful if I were you," she growled, "We have barely broached the subject of what my clan could do to you! If your New York cousins are alive to tell the tale, they must have gone easy on them. I promise you, you do NOT want us as your enemies."

"Whoa, whoa!" Marco exclaimed, "Let's all calm down here! Who said anything about enemies? We're legit! We want to work together!"

"Yeah!" Nico agreed, clearly shaken by the unfriendly turn of the conversation, "We wanna be partners!"

"Hmm…" Sister thought out loud, pacing dramatically away from Vernita, and facing the more cooperative hoodlums of the bunch.

"I like the sound of that," Sister said finally, though she kept her tone purposefully noncommittal, "But I want to meet these other gargoyles you were talking about. I wanna hear what they have to say about working with the Draconi family. If I could convince them…"

"Yeah!" Nico cheered excitedly, but then his face fell, "But we have no idea where they went."

"And with that reward out," Marco added, "Someone's bound to find them before we do."

The rest of the gang nodded in agreement, and they all fell silent again, trying to think of the best course of action. Suddenly, Fiorella's eyes widened, and she pulled again at Vernita's coat sleeve.

"Siren?" Vernita repeated, after the small girl whispered in her ear, "That old kook? What's he gonna know?"

"Girl, Siren knows everything!" Stanley informed her with a shake of his head.

"If he knows so much," Nico challenged, "Why's he living in the park?"

"That's not where he lives," Stanley retorted with an eyeroll, "He just hangs out there."

"And creeps everyone out," Marco complained.

"Well, we don't have access to networks of security cameras and gangsters like the grownups do," Vernita replied with both a hint of pragmatism and skepticism, "So it's Siren or nothing. What do you say, Gargoyle?"

Sister shot Vernita a death glare.

"Hey, what's your name?" Marco asked, realizing that she was the only one who had not been 'introduced'.

Sister was caught off guard by this. She didn't quite know what to say. She certainly didn't think "Sister" was a moniker that would strike fear in their hearts. Besides, that was reserved for those who loved her and she didn't think any of these punks deserved that honor. Slowly, a brilliant idea came to her and a slightly sardonic smile spread across her lips.

"You can call me 'Ruthless'," she replied, "Now where can I find this Siren?"