Renaissance: n. rebirth.

"I dunno about these communicators, Lex." Brooklyn eyed the earpiece, held pinched carefully between two claws. "Won't it be a tad annoying to have the whole clan listening in on everything we say out on patrol?"

"It's only when you push the button on the side, genius," Lexington retorted, elbow-deep in components on his worktable. "Though I know why you're so worried, with that potty-mouth of yours."

Brooklyn clamped one hand over Lexington's bald head and poked the device into the smaller gargoyle's ear. "Lessee, how does this thing go in? Sharp pointy end first, right?"

Lexington pretended to ignore what his rookery brother was doing, nonchalantly operating a small tool to assemble the last earpiece. "That would be a neat trick, since there is no sharp pointy end."

"C'mon, Brooklyn, give Lex some credit," Elisa said, coming into the gargoyles' den. "I think it's a great idea. Goliath and I have been using the same thing for a while. Just think- if anyone gets into trouble or needs backup on patrol, you just call for it instead of trying to hunt somebody down."

Brooklyn smirked and waved her off. "I know, I know- gotta modernize. It just kinda makes be nostalgic for the old nights when you could just light a signal fire on the moors."

"Ah, but a signal fire didn't have two-way secured channels and homing beacons," Lexington said, swiveling his chair to face his computer. "And the communicators don't have that lovely peat bog smell."

"What, you can't program that in somehow?"

Lexington favored the clan second with devious look. "Don't tempt me." He returned his attention to the screen, tapping busily away at the keyboard. "Now for the moment of truth…"

"Be still my heart," Brooklyn stage-whispered, earning an elbow jab from Elisa.

"A-ha!" Lexington crowed, pointing to a blinking dot on the screen. "The tracers work! All ten communicators read as located in Castle Wyvern."

"Ten?" Brooklyn asked. "There's only seven of us. Six who can actually talk. Who else is coming to the party?"

"Spares. Never hurts to have extras lying around, if I don't have time to throw together a new one for some reason." Lexington picked one of the communicators up and fitted the plastic hook over his pointed ear. He then handed a second one to Brooklyn. "Ah, a volunteer. Go and circle the castle a few times to test it."

When Brooklyn started to heave an exaggerated sigh, Lexington rolled his eyes. "Oh, like you have anything else to do tonight."

"Boss, we've got a customer complaint."

Victorio Tenelli looked up from his desk, almost grateful to have an interruption from the stack of papers looming over him. He loved running the restaurant left to him by his parents, but the paperwork could get horridly boring. "About the food, Jesse?"

The waitress nodded her head. "It's a lady, said everything was terrible. Demanded to see the manager. It was kinda weird, though, she ate everything, even got a dessert."

Rubbing his temples, Victorio got up from the chair and took a deep breath. "Did you offer her a coupon? Free meal?"

"Oh yeah, first thing. If Marcus had been any more polite to her he'd have choked. She just got madder and wanted to talk to you."

He sighed. The last thing Victorio wanted to deal with after a long night- right at closing time, to boot- was a problem customer. This isn't real fettuccini alfredo because I went to Italy last year with my sister and we had REAL Italian fettuccini alfredo and it was much better than this stuff and I should know because I went to Italy…

"All right, let's go settle this," he said. "Just stop me if I start to call her an idiot in my native tongue, capisco?"

"Sure thing, boss-man."

He followed the young waitress through the kitchen, which was conspicuously empty, and through the swinging doors to the dining area.

"SORPRESA!"

Every cook, waiter, waitress and even the busboys jumped up from the tables surrounding the path to the kitchen entrance, jolting Victorio out of his walking-dead mentality. Only when his employees broke into a poorly translated version of 'Happy Birthday' in Italian did he realize that he'd been set up.

"Which one of you nutcases squealed about my birthday?" he pretended to bellow once the song was over and he could stop laughing. "I'll fire the miscreant!"

"Ah, Vitto, who would want to have the job of being your little sister, anyway?" piped up a voice from the crowd. "You make terrible tortellini and your gelato stinks!"

"Rissa!" Victorio laughed. "You are dead when we get home."

The gathered employees let out a collective "Oooooo…" Rissa Tenelli only grinned at her older brother and went to give him a hug.

"Hey, does anyone want to know how old he really is? He's thirty-mmpph!"

"Okay, let's have food now," Victorio said, looking around innocently as Rissa pawed at his hand, which was clamped over her mouth. She eventually pried herself free and elbowed her way past the cooks. Ducking into the little hall that went to the restrooms, she grabbed a wheeled cart and pushed it back into the dining room. Sitting on top of the cart was an enormous eight-layer red velvet cake, iced in white chocolate and festooned with raspberries.

Rissa giggled as she saw the look on Victorio's face when she pushed the cart into view. It had taken some doing for the cooks to make the nearly foot-tall cake without Victorio noticing. At one point the layers each had had separate hiding places in various unused pots when Victorio, as head chef as well as proprietor, insisted on making an entrée for a VIP customer himself.

As the private party commenced, Rissa made certain to rescue two slices of the cake to take to her uncle. Antonio Milano, though he usually went by Anthony, ran an ice skating rink in midtown and had been unable to get away for Victorio's surprise party.

After a little while, Rissa hugged her brother. "Have fun, Vitto. I'm going to see Zio Tony."

"Okay, Riss. You be careful on the bus!"

"Pssh. I'll fight off the muggers with your cooking."

Victorio pretended to look over his shoulder. "Security! There's an unruly skater punk making trouble!"

Rissa's parting sally was to stick out her tongue as she picked up her ice skates. Laughing, she half-walked half-ran down the street to the corner to wait for the bus.

She loved doing things like that for her family. It made her wish she had more relatives so that she could pull these pleasant stunts more often. But not tonight- she was looking forward to a short workout on the ice and then a quiet night at home with schoolbooks.

As she sat down on the bench at the bus stop, she wondered about the field trip to some lab for her science class, thinking about how best to get through it without getting into trouble for being bored.

There were times when Tanner DeRue liked being bigger than everyone else. His personality was such that he would be the target of endless torment and teasing all through grade school had he been any shorter or skinnier. He preferred to spend his free time reading and was remarkably soft-spoken for a teenage boy. He liked being six and a half feet tall and broad-shouldered, because nobody made fun of a linebacker if he wanted to read Shakespeare for the heck of it.

"…just don't throw it to anybody not wearing blue, Richards, can you handle that?…"

It was the linebacker part of it that sometimes made Tanner wish he wasn't so huge. The Adelphi Avengers had never really registered on the high school football radar as a stellar team, as any young man with an ounce of talent had been lured to more prestigious schools. So when Tanner showed up in the ninth grade looking as if he could take the entire Dallas defensive line by himself, the coach had begged and pleaded until Tanner, with nothing else to do, agreed to play.

"…and please have the good sense God gave you and get out of the way when you see Casey running…"

Tanner didn't hate playing, but neither did it seem to thrill him the way it did his peers and teammates. Still, he must have been doing something right, because they had managed to win two games-

"DeRue! Just keep doing what you've been doing, kid."

-and the coach loved him. He was beginning to think that football might be the only thing he was good for. Heaven knew he saw no other directions to go.

"Alright, let's call it a night. Hit the showers, people."

Tanner walked wordlessly back to the field house with the other players, stripping the bulky padding from his shoulders as he went, nodding to his teammates when they spoke to him.

"Tanner! Yo, wait up." A quarterback by the name of Barry Green jogged up alongside Tanner. "That science trip is tomorrow, right?"

"To the Nightstone labs, yeah, why?" Tanner replied.

"Oh, man, I still can't find my notebook. Mr. Harris is going to kill me!"

Tanner looked at his teammate from the corner of his eye, knowing what was coming next. "You can copy mine." Again.

Barry grinned and thumped Tanner on the back. "Man, you are a lifesaver."

Considering how badly you need the grade to stay on the team, I guess so, Tanner thought. He snorted at the irony of it: a football jock was supposed to copy schoolwork from an easily intimidated nerd, not a fellow player.

Then his mind turned to slightly shallower pursuits as he thought of who he'd try to sit next to on the bus on the field trip: a certain Italian pixie named Rissa Tenelli.

Chapter one: Trickery and Deceit

It took an absurd bit of maneuvering and a bit of luck to get her to sit by him on the bus. It was absurd because Tanner DeRue and Rissa Tenelli were little more than acquaintances, and a consequence of Tanner's quiet nature was that few people ever actually noticed him. He supposed a trade-off for being less than popular (even for a football player) was that he had to be a little manipulative to get a little attention from a girl.

Tanner grabbed the first unoccupied seat he came to, sitting squarely on the aisle so that anyone passing by would have to squeeze past him to sit beside him. A few of his fellow classmates eyed him, nonverbally asking permission to sit, but he stared dumbly back and did not move to allow the other to pass.

When Rissa stepped up into the bus, Tanner promptly scooted over. The movement caught her eye and she flashed a smile at him before hopping into the spot.

"This seat taken?" she asked him, tucking her purse into her lap.

"I guess it is now," Tanner replied, then mentally bludgeoned himself for how stupid it had sounded. But she laughed as if he had said something rather clever and he had to smile back.

It was girls like Rissa that could make him forget how much he hated school dances.

"So you picked out a college yet?" she asked, rooting in her purse for something.

"Uh… no, not really." The bus rumbled out of the school parking lot and Tanner tried to focus on not sounding like a complete dullard when he realized she was starting an actual conversation.

"I bet you get lotsa football scholarships," she commented. Rissa took a comb out and began pulling at a section of her hair, working loose the dark brown curls that had become entangled.

Tanner shrugged. "Maybe, but I don't think I want to play ball the rest of my life, I guess."

Rissa nodded. "I applied for the art school down in Georgia, but I'm not sure if I want to go that far away."

"Art school? You do art?" You do art. What are you, cro magnon man?

Rissa grinned at him, which made him think he'd scored a point. "Yeah, I do painting, mostly charcoal, pastels, y'know. Do you want to see my sketchbook when we get back?"

Tanner's smile and reply were unrehearsed and strangely devoid of nervousness. "I'd love to."

"Good morning, and welcome to Nightstone Unlimited," said the well-dressed brunette who met the group in the foyer. "I'm Lena and I'll be your guide through the labs today. Nightstone is proud to be one of New York's leading companies in the fields of…"

Rissa was too busy mentally reviewing her sketchbook, which lay in her locker back at the school, to pay much attention as the guide prattled on like a recording. Why, oh why, had she offered to let Tanner look at her sketchbook? The spiral-bound pad was full of obscure art class assignments, scribbled caricatures, and odd gesture drawings. Some pages required much explanation to let the viewer know it wasn't alien hieroglyphs. Such explanations usually gave the impression that Rissa really was a flaky art student.

She took comfort in the fact that Tanner wasn't like most of the other football players. She liked to think they were casual friends, as he had never been anything but gentlemanly towards her. He had always struck her as unusually shy, which was at odds with his large, imposing frame, and he didn't seem the type to laugh at her messy sketches.

Someone bumped her elbow, jarring her out of her thoughts. Rissa hurried with her classmates and into the next room.

Computers hummed along the walls, odd instruments sitting at workstations seemingly at random throughout. A few Nightstone scientists glanced up at the throng of high school students entering and Rissa could see the horror and annoyance in their expressions. She could imagine that they weren't thrilled to see thirty-plus teenagers in their lab full of delicate machinery.

"In this lab we have developed some of the most precisely controlled surgical lasers," their guide was saying. "With the aid of digital microphotography we can see…"

It was all very fascinating. Rissa let it flow in one ear only so it could complete the trip out the other, and amused herself by trying to guess what certain strange devices were for. She was deep in contemplation of a contraption that seemed to be the unholy offspring of a cuisinart and a vacuum cleaner when she realized her class had moved on without her.

To her chagrin, even the scientists had gone elsewhere, leaving Rissa alone in the lab. Hoping her teacher had not noticed her absence, she walked swiftly across the room towards the door she thought they might have gone.

She stopped. It was dark behind the partly-open door, which meant the class couldn't have gone that way, so she started to turn around. A familiar voice made her stop.

Tanner? she wondered, turning back towards the darkened room. A flicker of light from within caught her eye…

"…hope I'm not bothering you. You look kinda busy."

"Oh, don't be silly. I always have time for curious young minds," another voice said. "My experiment here isn't some grand secret, so if you have any questions at all, please, ask."

Rissa peeked inside. There was Tanner, standing in front of a tall cart of some kind, and next to him was a red-headed woman in a white lab coat. On the top of the cart was some clear container. Within it danced strange liquid sparks of light.

"It looks like those cheesy lightning balls you get at novelty shops," Tanner said, touching the side of the container. The light-strands jumped and twisted in response.

The scientist laughed, but the sound was without any real mirth. "Same principle, different execution," she replied, opening a hatch on the side of the container. "This operates without a conductor rod, without the special gases, and…" she reached her hand inside and let the blue-white light gather around her fingers. "…is safe to touch and manipulate with your bare hands."

The scientist withdrew her hand, bringing out a squirming mass of the eldritch light. Shadows played eerily across her face, and the hair on the back of Rissa's neck rose for no apparent reason.

"That's really wild," Tanner was saying, hesitantly reaching to touch the twisting lights. The scientist smiled at him.

"Indeed.

"Humana nationis

Acceptum conformationis

Sanguis nocturnus et silex in dies."

The writhing light suddenly flushed a pale green-yellow and sparks leaped out of the scientist's hand. Both Tanner and Rissa, who still eavesdropped from the door, jumped in surprise. A few sparks landed on Tanner, disappearing harmlessly, and Rissa was given an extra jolt as a spark darted across the room and landed on her shoulder.

Rissa hopped backwards away from the doorway, swatting at her shoulder, but the little witchlight had vanished. A peculiar tingle crawled through her skin.

"What was that?" she heard Tanner's voice ask.

"Oh, I wouldn't worry. Normal fluctuations," the scientist's voice replied. "I guess it doesn't like classical Latin poetry, eh?" She chuckled. "But you had best catch up with your classmates. I'd hate for you to get into trouble."

"Uh, right…" Tanner appeared at the door a moment later, blinking as if confused. He saw Rissa and shrugged. "Scientists are really weird," he said, but the joke seemed to fall flat.

Rissa couldn't shake the strange chill that had gripped her spine. "I guess so… C'mon, we'd better catch up."

Tanner nodded, frowning distractedly, rubbing his hands together.

Zoë DeRue greeted her twin brother at the door with a snarl. "Tread lightly, T. Dad's on the phone with mom."

Tanner, who hadn't even stepped over the threshold, grimaced. As if the throbbing pain in his skull and dull ache in his hands weren't enough, he had to suffer an evening of their mother muttering false niceties to her ex-husband in New Orleans. Zoë and Tanner had long since become used to the strained relationship their parents had, but the phone calls always seemed to cast a pall through the modest midtown apartment.

Zoë took Tanner's knapsack while he shrugged out of his jacket. "I got to the phone first this time," she said, glancing over her shoulder. "Dad wants to visit next month sometime."

"Really? That'd be great. We haven't seen him in months," Tanner replied, massaging his temples.

"It'd be great if mom didn't act like a caged tigress," Zoë retorted. "I better go dig up Steel Magnolias. Mama Hyde will need the distraction once she's off the phone."

"Hey, tell her I want to talk to- "

From the living room, there came the beep of a cordless phone being shut off.

"Nevermind. What's for dinner?"

"It's barely getting dark," Zoë said, poking her brother in the arm. "They feed us at school, you know. And did you suddenly forget how to operate a vending machine?"

"Yes, Z, the knowledge fled my brain in terror when this headache hit me." Tanner moved into the kitchen and rummaged in the obligatory junk drawer for the bottle of painkiller usually kept there.

"You poor baby." Zoë gave him a shove. "Aspirin's in the den with mom. Hurry while there's still some left."

Tanner went into the living room, almost tripping over his mother's legs as she sprawled on the couch, one arm draped over her face.

"Zoë, sweetie, whatever you do, don't marry someone like your father."

"Hi, mom," Tanner greeted her, going straight for the aspirin bottle on the end table.

"Tanner? Practice over already?" She sat up. "Your father wants to come up next month."

Tanner's hands were oddly uncooperative when he tried to twist off the cap. "Z told me… darn it."

"You okay, hon?" Regina DeRue eyed her son.

"Yeah, I just have a- aaaaaah!" It suddenly felt as if his hands had been impaled upon ice picks, pain stabbing hotly through his palms and down his fingers. Twinges of stinging spots flared up down his spine, and the aspirin bottle skittered out of his hands.

"Tanner!" Regina was on her feet.

"T? What's going on?" Zoë ran into the living room.

"Ow ow ow…" Tanner rubbed his hands, the pain subsiding as quickly as it had come, a steady ache now pervading his body. "I… I think I'm okay. I just- I just need to go lay down for awhile."

Rissa felt like putting her fist through the ice. Two things stopped her- she'd probably break her hand and her uncle wouldn't be very happy with her.

Her skates seemed two sizes too small, and her balance was horrid. For the life of her she couldn't figure out why every jump, spin and turn she tried landed her bum-first on the ice. A splitting headache and a knot of pain in her back weren't helping matters.

Finally she made her way back to the sitting area beyond the edge of the rink. She slipped the plastic protectors over the blades of her skates and stalked over to the rental desk.

"Zio Tony? You got any Tylenol or maybe a big sledgehammer?"

A middle-aged man with graying hair approached the counter. "Ah, bambina, you got a bad head?"

"Si, I can't get anything right on the ice tonight." Rissa pulled at her hair to emphasize her frustration.

"Well, I don't got any pills, bella, but you go wash your hands and I'll make you some hot tea, how 'bout?" Antonio smiled sympathetically and gave his niece a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

Rissa nodded, and avoided the other rink patrons as she made her way to the ladies' room.

The sun seemed to stare balefully at Tanner through his bedroom window as it dipped slowly below the Manhattan skyline. A strange restlessness had overcome him within moments of shutting himself in his bedroom. He couldn't get comfortable in bed, so he paced the length of the room a few times before staring out the window.

The ache now drummed like a heartbeat in his bones.

Rissa dutifully washed her hands, automatically checking for scrapes on her knees and elbows that she may have picked up in one of her tumbles on the rink. The cold would have numbed her to the inTury, so she always had to be thorough.

She stared at her reflection in the mirror, trying to ignore the painful throbbing in her head. It felt like her shoulder blades had been twisted out of shape… her skin tingled…

He decided to tell his mother he was sick. Tanner was a step away from his door, reaching for the knob, when the sun vanished completely.

White-hot pain flared up through him, locking him into place. For a moment he thought he was going to pass out, but the sight of his outstretched hand quickly shocked him out of feeling the terrible pain that wracked his body.

He had somehow lost a finger, and two of the remaining four were stretching, elongating.

Rissa hissed through her teeth, gripping the sink in her hands as her skin burned and suddenly flushed a brilliant green hue. She let out a horrified squeak, but had no time to react further when her feet suddenly tumbled out from beneath her. Three large green talons burst through the white leather of her expensive skates, and she received another shock when she realized they were her toes.

A sharp spur on each heel forced her now-outsized feet to break out of the skates, popping the laces like so much overcooked spaghetti.

The pain drove Tanner to his knees on the floor. His mangled hands continued to reshape, and now a dark coal grey color bled through the normal tanned brown of his skin. He was too stunned to yell, to call for help, as he felt something tug at the base of his spine. There was the sound of a ripping seam at the seat of his jeans.

Tanner's second jolt out of the pain came as he sensed the carpet underneath his tail.

Rissa panicked. She clawed at the nearby stall divider to stand up, too busy trying to cope with her new feet to notice the deep gouges her fingers- now tipped with wicked claws- left in the metal post. The churning knot in her back now unfolded, and with a snapping like sails being unfurled, she felt the coolness of the air against the wide membranes of her wings.

Tanner watched in morbid fascination as his grey skin stretched and webbed across the gap between the two elongated fingers on each hand, leaving only his thumb and forefinger free. He almost didn't notice the long strut growing from his elbow until it, too, began spreading the web of skin from the outermost finger, and then up the underside of his arm. The membrane continued to extend, straining at the sleeve of his t-shirt until the fabric tore down the sides.

His hand twisted, the palm drawing shorter on the outer side, and his long fingers bent sideways outward in a way that Tanner half-expected to hurt. Then the weight of the growing span of skin and fingers turned his hands down, palm inward, and it hit him.

His arms and hands had become wings.

Thump thump thump. "T? What's going on in there?"

Rissa clutched at her shirt, which threatened to tear wide open if she took so much as a deep breath. The back was ripped to shreds due to the appearance of her wings, held together by a few strips of cloth behind her neck and just underneath the wing membranes.

A tail was snaking its way out of one leg of her shorts. The base of the tail soon was cramped uncomfortably in the backside of her shorts, but she had bigger concerns.

Like the fact that her uncle was tapping on the restroom door, calling her name.

She spotted the tiny window near the ceiling that led to the alleyway behind the rink.

Tanner was thankful the lock on his door only required two fingers to operate. How he retained the presence of mind to get up and walk across the room on three-toed, awkward feet after the bizarre transformation he had just undergone, he would never know.

He gaped uncomprehendingly at his hands/wings and slowly turned to the mirror that hung on his closet door.

"T?" Zoë continued to bang on the door. "Are you okay?"

The face of a nightmarish stranger stared back at Tanner from the mirror. His jaw had jutted forward to accommodate the huge tusks that protruded up out of his mouth. His eyebrows had been replaced with a heavy ridge of bone, from which sprouted four horns. Pointed ears stuck up out of his dark red, almost black, hair. The hair, in fact, was the only thing that seemed to have escaped unchanged.

"T! Open up, bro!"

Tanner slowly shook his head, feeling the weight of his horns. He made his way to the window beside his bed and carefully undid the latch, fumbling with his unwieldy claws. He hated doing this, but until he knew what had happened to himself, he couldn't let his sister and mother see him like this.

"T, ferpeetssake, open up."

He hooked his thumbs under the windowframe, sliding it up with perhaps a bit too much force; his thumbclaws left deep grooves in the wood as he pushed it open. He tore the screen with one swipe of his finger.

"I'm s-sorry, Zoë," Tanner said, his speech somewhat slurred by the protruding fangs. "I have to gg-go."

"What? T!"

Tanner eased one arm out the window, holding the long wing-fingers back against his forearm until he'd gotten his head and shoulder outside. Then, forgetting the altered state of his hand, splayed his fingers to grab onto the brick of the outside wall.

His wing spread wide over the wall. Hooklike claws at the tips of his wing-fingers latched into the bricks with a crunch, and without realizing it, his two normal fingers dug deep into the brick as well, giving him a surprisingly secure hold.

Holy crap. I can punch holes in brick. What's happening to me? And my arms… my wings… they're so big…can I actually fly with these things?

His sister banging on the door brought him out of his thoughts. Keeping his wing-hand firmly anchored, he swung his legs out one at a time to stand on the small ledge beneath the window. There was no fire escape; that was off his mother's bedroom. The ledge was barely a foot wide, but the talons of his six toes also gave him more than adequate purchase in the concrete rail.

It was fortunate for him that he wasn't on the street-side of the apartment building. He made a large moth-shaped target with his wings spread over the face of the wall. But unfortunately, there were people using the walkway directly below him.

He let go of the bricks with one wing-hand and reached upwards, sinking his claws back in. He lifted a foot and dug his talons into the brick, then reached the other arm up. Slowly at first, then with more confidence, he climbed up the three stories to the roof.

Once there, he shook the brick dust that had accumulated on his wing membranes off and backed away from the edge of the roof. The impetus to get out of sight had been taken care of…

Now what?

He leaned back against the nearest air-conditioning unit and slid down, his tail automatically swinging out of the way before he could sit on it. He let the shock of it all wash over him as he stared at his outstretched wings.

What am I going to do?

He sat for what seemed like ages, his head down between his knees and his wings tented around him. He let the noises of the city occupy his mind, figuring it was better than panicking, until he could decide on a course of action. What does one do when one has spontaneously transformed into a winged monster?

He was brought out of his troubled thoughts by a sound in the air. A thrum, a vibration of the wind. Tanner lifted his head to see a dark shape blotting out the stars, swiftly growing larger as it descended towards him. He hastily got to his feet, wondering if he should be running.

When the winged creature alit on the edge of the roof, he almost did.

She straightened up, the wind playing out her blood-red hair. She shrouded herself in her blue wings, then stepped off the ledge.

"Friend?" Her voice carried a note of surprise. "Where did you come from?"

It dawned on Tanner, and he could have hit himself for not figuring it out sooner- she was one of those gargoyle creatures, and now, it seemed, so was he.

"Who are you?" he asked, and was chagrined to hear how nervous he sounded.

"I am called Demona," she replied, drawing nearer. "Do not fear, friend, I will not hurt you."

"I- I'm Tanner, but- but…"

"But what? I'm so glad to find another gargoyle has come to my city," she said, smiling benignly at him.

"But I'm not a gargoyle," Tanner managed to get out, despite still slurring around the fangs. "At least I wasn't… until a while ago…"

Demona's eyes grew wide with disbelief. "This… is not your true form?"

"No!" Tanner emphatically shook his head. "It just happened, out of the blue! And I have no idea how or why."

"Sorcery!" Demona breathed, baring her fangs. Tanner flinched in spite of himself, fearing he'd said the wrong thing. "You were robbed of your true form by sorcery. I would stake my life on it."

"Sorcery?" Tanner repeated. "You mean magic? But that's- that's impossible."

"Oh, magic is very real, my young friend," she replied, putting a hand on Tanner's arm. "You stand as proof to that, if you truly are a human."

"But what could have done it?" Tanner asked, backing away from her.

"A very good question. We gargoyles have many enemies among the humans of this city… and even among ourselves. Fortunately for you, I am well-versed in matters of magic."

"You mean you can help me?" Tanner perked up. "You can change me back?"

Demona stretched out her hand to him. "If you will allow me…"

Tanner eyed her hand, which unlike his was separate from her wings. What could it hurt? He needed to at least find out who or what did this to him, and this Demona seemed to know what she was talking about.

"Alright," he said, folding his wing-fingers back and taking her hand.

She smiled at him. "Verba mea voluntatis vestrum

Optatio mea iam sapientia."

It was as if a swarm of wasps had suddenly built a nest inside his brain. Tanner reeled back, grabbing at his head, his whole body shaking violently. A rumble sounded from the base of his chest, and he snarled loudly, trying to get away from the horrible din that rattled in his skull.

"Be silent, fool! And stop thrashing!" Demona's voice cut through the buzzing, and Tanner jerked to a standstill, the growl in his throat dying before it could become a full-voiced roar.

"Do you hear me?" Demona's voice was no longer pleasant and friendly, but cold and commanding.

"Yes," Tanner said, barely able to hear himself think- let alone hear himself talk.

"Good. You are nothing more than muscle to me. Cannon fodder. Do not think for one moment the gargoyle shape I gave you makes you my equal." With a snap, Demona unfurled her wings and turned towards the edge of the roof. "Now come with me."

Without thinking to question her through the dissonance in his head, Tanner spread his own wings and followed her into the night sky.

Elisa Maza met the rink owner at the door. Several other officers had already arrived at the scene, and she flashed her badge to the first one who approached her.

"Maza, 23rd. What've we got?"

"Evening, Detective," the officer replied. "This's Anthony Melano. His niece went missing from the ladies' room."

"My Rissa, she had a headache, wasn't doin' so well on the ice," Antonio said, gesturing helplessly as he led Elisa inside. "She goes to the girls' room, I try to hunt down some aspirin or somet'ing, no luck. I get to the door here, I hear all kindsa noises. Scratching, banging…"

"Was your niece the only one in the restroom at the time?" Elisa asked.

"Si. I watched her go in, nobody else go in or out." Antonio followed her past the yellow police tape and into the bathroom. "Looka that- my Rissa is a tiny girl, detective, she can't do that!"

Elisa looked where he was pointing, a small window over the sinks. The frosted glass had been shattered, the metal grillwork ripped from its screws. The wooden frame around the window had been crushed in a few spots. On the wall around the window were scratch marks, and deep gouges marred the nearby stall divider. A pair of white ice skates lay ruined on the tile floor, the leather and laces torn and shredded.

Very strange. "Any idea who would want to hurt you or your niece, Mr. Melano?" Elisa asked, squatting to examine the gouges on the metal stall post. She had seen marks like these before, many times and in many places. But… what gargoyle would have been in the ladies' room at a small midtown ice rink?

"No, nobody, she is a sweet girl," Antonio replied, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. "Please, you have to find her. This damage, it can be repaired… but I cannot replace my niece."

Elisa stood, looking carefully at the window, the post, and the skates. "I'll do my best, Mr. Melano. I promise I'll get to the bottom of this."