As the evening went on, Sister noticed a strange greenish light in the common room under the north tower. She wasn't surprised to find Alexander inside, staring at a great ball of light he had conjured.
"Excuse me, sir? Are you telling fortunes in here?" she asked him brightly.
"No, not tonight," he replied with a tired laugh as he stared at the green, undulating shape before him.
"Why not?" she whined, "You used to tell our fortunes all the time when Orion and I were small, remember?" Alexander smiled at the memory.
"Will you teach me to read the future, Alex?" Sister pleaded in a sweet tone.
"I already did!" he replied with a chuckle, "Remember how you used to put twinkle lights in that old brandy snifter and set up shop telling fortunes in the coat closet? I was your best customer!"
"No!" she protested, "I mean for real!"
Alexander gasped and gave her a scandalized look, "You mean, you took my money and they weren't even real fortunes?" Sister laughed at his feigned outrage, but soon grew quiet and serious.
"Please teach me!" she begged again.
"I cannot."
"Then teach me some other spells!"
"I don't do 'spells'," he reminded her, "My magic is pure magic. It's part of me. Only a sorcerer can teach spells to mortals."
"I wish I knew a sorcerer," she told him glumly.
"Why?" he asked with genuine interest, "What do you need spells for?"
"A million things!" she exclaimed.
"Like what?"
"Well, first of all, to make Elisa well again so she and Goliath didn't have to go away."
"What else?"
"I could have used a spell to shut that old crazy man up who was following us around tonight."
"Go on," he said, as if he were taking notes.
"I could make myself turn into a human!"
"Why would you want that?" he asked her with a wrinkled face, as if she'd suggested something rather distasteful, but she looked at him like he was crazy.
"So, I could go to school like Orion, of course! It's not even fair. Lyra has the power to change into a human any time she wants and she doesn't even want to go! Meanwhile, I'd do anything to have that power and I can't."
"Maybe you have powers you take for granted as well," Alexander suggested, "Maybe we all do."
Sister shrugged.
"I don't have any powers," she told him matter-of-factly, "I'm not that strong. Orion is much stronger and even Lyra is getting stronger than me. She's already faster. And smarter. The twins are smarter than me too, and even Micah is better at chess and games like that, even if he doesn't like to read that much. Things like strategy, he's brilliant at! That's the really important kind of intelligence, unless there's a criminal somewhere out there who can be stopped by a spelling test!"
"What about Fleet?" Alexander asked and Sister laughed.
"So, maybe I'm not dead last in intelligence, but still it would be nice to have something that made me…important…to the clan."
"And you think magic spells are what your clan needs from you?"
"I mean, I would be able to solve a lot of our problems," she pointed out,
"I could use a spell to stop the Dracon Family from terrorizing half the city," she posited, "Or to capture Thailog."
Alexander frowned. Thailog had orchestrated a recent series of attacks on the clan, with a clear intention to get inside the castle. The clan had thwarted him, and destroyed the machines he was using against them and Thailog had been captured. Xanatos had held him in a facility in New Jersey during the day, trying to figure out what he'd been after and what he had planned to do. After three nights of getting nothing out of him other than that he wished to see Goliath, the clan's leader went there to question him. No one knew what was said and Goliath wouldn't speak of it, but during the course of this 'interrogation', Thailog had broken free and Goliath had faced a life or death battle against his own genetic clone. When Xanatos had attempted to intervene, Thailog immediately turned on him, practically giving up the battle with Goliath in order to take a chance at murdering the man who had ordered his creation. By the time the fiasco was over, Goliath had saved Xanatos from Thailog's wrath, the entire building was engulfed in flames, and Thailog himself had disappeared.
After such an attack, keeping a lookout for signs of Thailog was now one of the clan's priorities. Even Xanatos had men on the job, as Thailog had thwarted him as well, a fact he took rather personally. It was unclear what Thailog's ultimate objective had been, but no one believed they'd seen the last of him.
"I think you should let the grownups worry about Dracon and Thailog," Alexander told her, knowing it was going to sound condescending, but choosing to say it anyway.
"Is that what your green mystic cloud tells you," she asked snidely, flopping back on a large, leather armchair.
"My green mystic cloud tells me that if I were to tell you what you were capable of now, you would never be able to believe it."
"Oh?" she asked, glancing up at him suspiciously, but they were suddenly interrupted by the creak of the door and the arrival of her brother, Micah.
"She's in here!" he announced to the others.
"Great!" Liam declared, pushing past him, "We can tell scary stories in here, without scaring the little kids!"
Orion filed in along with Micah's rookery siblings, who all made themselves comfortable around the room, while the fire crackled in the hearth.
"Have fun, kids," Alexander encouraged them as he pulled the door closed, then retreated to the corner, where he settled with his phone, under a reading lamp, "Try not to make anyone cry or wet themselves!"
He was only half kidding. The children loved trying to outdo one another by inventing the most gut-wrenching, terrifying tales.
"We've got a good one, this time!" Lark told them confidently and Liam gave a mischievous grin while Orion raised a brow at him. The twins' tales were predictable. They always involved some form of artificial intelligence taking over and going on killing sprees, choosing victims one by one, until they had taken over the world. Fleet, on the other hand, always went for straight up violence and gore, trying to impress with his sheer naughtiness, but mostly just grossing everyone out rather than scaring them. Liam, however, was a born storyteller, and his stories were always interesting because they were real, or at least he always claimed they were, and the captivating way he told them would leave any listener wondering.
But Liam didn't wish to go first. He preferred to let the others set the mood. Lyra started off with a tragic story of a lost soul, returning from the grave to haunt his lover until he drove her into madness. Fleet then went on his obligatory recital of blood and guts, centered around an insane former gangster with a chainsaw, until Alexander cut him short, declaring from his place in the corner that he was going to be sick and that it should be Orion's turn next.
"Yeah, his story ought to settle everyone's stomach!" Fleet taunted, and Orion gave him a scowl.
"What do you mean by that?" he demanded.
"Your stories are usually pretty tame," Sister pointed out, "But still interesting! Go on, so Fleet doesn't start in with the screwdriver and the eyeballs again!"
Orion's story was the typical spiel about disembodied footsteps on a dark staircase. His siblings waited patiently to learn which of the predictable punchlines would be delivered at the end, when they were all genuinely shocked by a loud pop and a shower of streamers, followed by the sound of a screeching, cackling laughter coming from the chandelier above them.
"I scared you! I scared you!" Bonnie sang as she swung from the iron light fixture, then landed fearlessly on the leather sofa below. Clearly pleased with herself, she clapped her claws in delight as she looked from her startled siblings to Alexander, who was chuckling at the mayhem from his corner.
"Bonnie!" Orion exclaimed indignantly, "What are you doing in here?"
Bonnie turned around and menaced her claws at her older brother, with a growl, and then a giggle as she hopped into Lyra's arms.
"You'd better get out of here," Lyra told her, "We're telling scary stories and if you get upset, the grownups are going to blame us!"
"I'm not scared! I want to stay and listen!"
"If you get scared, you can't go crying to the grownups," Fleet told her. She shot him a very superior look and stretched out in her older sister's lap, adamant that she would stay.
"Let her stay, then," Lyndon told them.
"Yes! It's our turn next!" Lark added, wiggling with anticipation.
Between the two of them, they told the story of an evil tech wizard who, while trying to create an evil army of mechanical minions, accidentally got his own soul trapped inside one of his robots. Despite the lack of graphic violence, the other children found their story quite disturbing. The idea of a man's soul being forever trapped in a metal coffin, unable to ever pass on to the next realm, but still, unable to fully live, was most unsettling.
"Did he ever get out of the robot?" Bonnie asked in a soft, concerned voice.
"Nope," Lyndon told them confidently, "He was trapped in there forever! And his servant turned off the power source so he couldn't ever move again!"
"But that's too sad!" Bonnie complained, her eyes brimming with tears.
"It's okay, Bonnie," Lark explained, "He's the bad guy. He's supposed to be punished in the end." Bonnie turned away from them and buried her face in Lyra's shoulder.
"It's just a story," Fleet reassured her gently, "It couldn't really happen."
"It could so!" Lyndon cried indignantly.
"No way!" Liam argued, "How could a person's soul possibly be inside a machine? Machines are run by computers. They're just code written on microchips! Right Orion?"
Orion shrugged. Liam's argument made sense. Orion couldn't see how a soul could exist in binary code that was written on microchips. But on the other hand, what was the living body of a human or a gargoyle but genetic code written on cells?
"I'll prove it!" Lyndon declared adamantly, scurrying down from the sofa and rushing to the corner where Alexander sat, pretending not to listen, "Alex! Tell them what you told us when we were working on our Transformer costumes! Tell them about Coldstone."
"What's Coldstone?" Orion asked.
"A cyborg that had three gargoyle souls stuck inside at once," Lark told them excitedly, "And Alex rescued two of them and put them into new robots."
"Real souls?" Sister asked suspiciously.
"Yes! Tell them, Alex! Please?" Lyndon begged, but Alexander looked hesitant to tell them anything.
"They're confused, aren't they?" Liam asked, "Real, living souls couldn't be inside a computer. It had to be some sort of AI personality or something?"
"Oh, they were real souls," Alexander began reluctantly, "Coldstone was possessed by three different mortals. Puck, my teacher, wished for me to separate them, and I did as he asked."
"How did you do it?" Micah asked in amazement.
"I had to convince them to move into the new robots. To do that, I had to use possession." Alexander's typically carefree face seemed a bit perturbed as he spoke.
"What's wrong with that?" Orion felt compelled to ask and Alexander shrugged.
"I was so young at the time. Younger even than Bonnie is now. My teacher was thrilled that I could work such complex magic. But even after all these years, it's a power I still struggle to control."
"But you were able to do the magic?" Sister asked eagerly, "Even back then?"
Alexander nodded, his expression still inexplicably grim. Orion couldn't understand why he seemed so solemn about this memory, when he was normally very confident and even arrogant with his abilities.
"Uncle Alex?" Bonnie asked, her face still somewhat morose, "Why were those three gargoyles trapped inside Coldstone in the first place?"
"They were placed there by sorcery," he explained, looking a bit happier to be off the subject of possession.
"What sorcery? By who?" Sister urged, now far more excited by Alexander's story than any of the others.
"Coldstone was created before I was even born,"Alexander deflected.
"By who?" Sister demanded again, sliding artfully off the sofa and perching on the wooden chair at the desk beside him. Her scrutinizing gaze gave the impression that she wasn't about to accept the typical, sugar-coated moonshine adults loved to hand out.
"Yes, and what for?" Fleet asked in an earnest tone. The former skeptic seemed to have accepted Alexander's word that an ensouled machine had existed and was now just as enthralled as the others. Meanwhile, Orion noticed that Alexander's countenance was showing a level of concern that the children weren't accustomed to, which made them all even more curious.
"This is not my story to tell," he said finally.
"What?!" Fleet cried, "You're going to pull a 'grown up' on us now? We thought you were our friend!"
"Oh, knock it off, Fleet," Orion groaned.
"Yeah," Sister added, her arms crossed and a look of disgust on her face, "Uncle Alexander is far too beyond us now to be peer-pressured by a kid with a second grade reading level."
"I have a third grade reading level!" Fleet yelled in outrage and Alexander snickered. He rose and approached Sister, giving her a playful tap on her ridge.
"How on earth did you grown to be so manipulative?" he asked with an affectionate chuckle.
"Me? Manipulative?" she asked with feigned innocence, "Perish the thought! I mean, how could I expect you, a great and powerful adult, to consider me, an inexperienced, foolish little hatchling, who has been in the world a tremendous six years less than yourself, even capable of comprehending your serious, nuanced adult matters?"
Orion and Liam snickered and Alexander gave them a look before turning a mischievous smile back towards Sister.
"I'm glad you understand, my dear," he cooed as he leant over and kissed her ridged brow, "And for now, I will leave you darling children in favor of a very adult cup of coffee. Good evening."
As he closed the door, leaving a pouting Sister behind him, they all heard a strange popping sound, followed by squeals of disgust as a curtain of black, wiggling spiders burst out of her red hair and tumbled all over the coffee table. The children's cries turned into laughter as the spiders fizzled and transformed into candies wrapped in black, waxed paper.
"Augh!" Sister growled angrily as she pulled a sweet from behind her large, fin-shaped ear and chucked it at Fleet and Micah, who were rolling on the floor with riotous laughter. Micah picked up the candy, unwrapped it and popped it in his mouth, making sure to stick out his pointy tongue at her.
"Mmm," he exclaimed, "Butterscotch!"
As the little ones squabbled for candies on the floor, Sister sat crossly beside Orion on the sofa and began to unwrap one for herself. Butterscotch was her favorite, after all.
"Don't be mad," Orion suggested to her under his breath, "Maybe he'll tell us the rest of the story, later, after these little kids clear out?"
"You don't have to wait that long," Liam told them mischievously.
Orion and Sister turned to him.
"What do you mean?" Sister asked him.
"I know about her," Liam whispered cryptically.
"Know about who?" Orion urged. Liam gave him an urgent look at the loudness of his voice, and glanced at the little kids, who were thankfully still distracted by the candy.
"The sorceress," he whispered to them, "The one who used to belong to the clan." Sister's eyes opened wide.
"Are you serious?" she asked Liam with a mixture of suspense, excitement, and a healthy amount of suspicion. Liam nodded grimly.
"I overheard my dad talking to my grandfather. He knows her. He knows everything about what she did."
Orion wasn't sure if Liam was being serious, or if he had chosen this conversation to segue into his own scary story, but something about his countenance left him uneasy. Suddenly, the door opened to reveal Xanatos' steely-eyed servant, Owen, announcing that preparations were being made for the children to make s'mores around the fire in the courtyard.
"Yes!" exclaimed Fleet, who was particularly fond of setting things on fire, and the others enthusiastically, filed out behind him.
"Will you be joining us?" Owen asked the three older children.
"No thank you, Owen," Sister explained, "We've had enough sweets."
"Very good, Miss Ruth," Owen replied, though his tone conveyed no interest either way. He disappeared, closing the door behind him.
Sister bristled. She detested her given name and refused to answer to it for anyone. Typically, she would have stopped the world to protest, but she was thoroughly distracted by the prospect of an interesting family secret and the possibility of a gargoyle sorceress that she let it slide.
"Alright," she said, rounding on Liam, "What have you got?"
"Her name is Demona," Liam began in his full-on storytelling voice, "She was part of the original clan, but she went crazy and betrayed them. She tried to kill them all. Goliath tried to help her, but she just went crazier and crazier."
Orion and Sister looked at one another incredulously.
"Why would she want to kill her own clan?" Orion asked skeptically, "That makes no sense."
"Yeah," Sister agreed, "Gargoyles don't do stuff like that. We protect each other. We protect our home and our community."
"That's the thing, though," Liam insisted, "She wanted to kill them because they were protecting the humans, and she hates humanity. She wanted to destroy all the humans in the city, even all the humans in the world!"
"That's pretty ambitious!" Sister replied, rolling her eyes. She was now quite convinced that what they were hearing was Liam's "scary story" for the night, and a bit irritated that she had been so easily hooked in at the mere mention of a gargoyle that could do magic.
"My grandfather said that Demona turned all the humans in the city into stone, then shattered over two hundred people in one night! He says she would have killed all the humans if Goliath and Xanatos hadn't stopped her."
"How does your grandfather know this?" Orion questioned.
"Because he found out about her doing the spell and went to try to stop her himself," Liam explained, "And that's not all! She tried another spell that would have killed all the humans in the world eventually, but the clan stopped her just in time."
"So, where is this unthinkably powerful and murderously insane sorceress gargoyle now?" Sister demanded, "Does your grandfather say that?"
Liam's expression grew even more somber.
"He didn't say exactly, but he did say that Xanatos had her. And he was worried about my dad bringing us here," he explained, "I think…she might still be here, in the castle somewhere?"
Orion broke the silence with a chuckle.
"Good story, Bro!" he complimented him, "You had me going! I couldn't tell whether you were serious or not."
"Calling her 'Demona', ought to have been a hint! Who would name someone something like that?" Sister laughed.
"You don't believe me?" Liam asked them.
"No way!" they replied in unison. Liam shrugged, and leaned over the arm of the leather armchair he was resting on, pulling his backpack closer. Inside, he found a binder, which he removed and set on the coffee table in front of them.
"Would you like to see my receipts?" he asked with a smirk. Inside the binder, Liam had a collection of news articles and printed off websites that had been collected by his mother during her extensive research.
"My mom found all this stuff," he told them, "These articles are from the night of where all those people disappeared. And look at this one!" He pulled out a publication that had been distributed by the now defunct Quarrymen Organization.
"It specifically mentions her. Well, it calls her 'the demon', but they said that she had murdered countless humans and was being protected by David Xanatos. They offered a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for her."
"Do you know what that organization was?" Orion demanded of his friend with a tinge of anger in his voice, "They aren't exactly a reliable source!"
"Yeah, but don't you think it's strange that they said a lot of the same stuff that my grandfather said?" he asked defensively, "Unless you think my grandfather is like those guys?"
"I didn't say that!" Orion argued.
"It IS kind of creepy, Ori," Sister admitted as she looked through Liam's papers, "All these different sources…this one even has a quote from the police chief, saying that this dangerous rogue gargoyle was destroyed!...It matches up with what Liam's grandfather said…and Alex did say those three gargoyle souls were trapped by sorcery. Someone had to do it!"
"Someone, but not a gargoyle!" Orion protested, "Not a member of the clan!"
"You don't think a gargoyle can do sorcery?" she asked him frustratedly.
"I don't think gargoyles betray their own kind and go on killing sprees. This whole story sounds like something the Quarrymen made up to get the humans to fear and hate us. Besides, if this was true, why would the grownups not tell us about it?"
Sister paused, considering his point.
"Maybe they didn't think you could handle it?" Liam suggested, "It is kind of disturbing."
"You don't know the kinds of stories our uncles tell us," Orion informed him with a morbid laugh, "They were hatched during the middle ages. Life was brutal back then. Plus, they've been taking Sister and me on patrol with them for a year now. We've seen some messed up stuff! We're not hatchlings anymore! If any of this had actually happened, why wouldn't they want us to know?"
"Unless…" Sister began slowly and anxiously.
"Unless what?" Orion urged.
"Unless Liam was right and Xanatos did imprison this Demona here. What if he does have her hidden somewhere in the castle and they didn't tell us about her because they don't want us to go looking for her?"
'Sure, Sis," Orion laughed, "Broadway says that the locked cabinet in the pantry has his personal snack stash in it, but I'm sure what's actually in there is a sorceress gargoyle, squished really, really small."
"But look at this place, Ori!" Sister told him grimly, "The castle is huge and we only use part of it. And that's not even considering the other hundred and twenty floors underneath us in the Eyrie Building. She could be anywhere!"
A moment of tense silence followed this realization, which was broken by a small gasp and the sound of scampering feet heading toward the door.
"Bonnie!" Sister realized, and turned just in time to see a small blue tail disappear down the hall.
"And that's just great," Orion grumbled, "Now we've traumatized our little sister for life."
"I'm sorry, guys. I didn't mean to scare her! I thought she went for s'mores with the others," Liam said sheepishly.
"It's alright, Bro," Orion reassured him, "She's always been a little sneak. Let's go see if we can calm her down before she finds the adults and gets all our tails in hot water!"