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I took a deep breath.
But before I could speak, Mateo did. “Ma’am,” he said, swishing his tail, “I’m going to have to ask you to calm down or leave the exhibit. Unless you’re the thief’s accomplice.” He eyed the kid.
“I wasn’t trying to steal anything, I swear,” the kid cried. “Jenny dared me to do it.”
But Jenny was long gone. The mother looked around. “Where’s my little girl?” She ran out of the room, looking for her missing kid.
I looked at the boy, who was still struggling to get away from me, then at Mateo.
“Looks like they both abandoned him,” Mateo said, winking at me. “Should we wait till the cops get here, or just throw him in the dungeon?”
The museum didn’t have a dungeon, but the kid didn’t know that.
“Ohh, I think the dungeon is full,” I said, playing along. “Maybe this one isn’t that bad. Hey kid, what’s your name?”
“Ry-ryan.”
“Ryan, do you promise to follow the rules from now on, and be careful not to bump into people?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
I pointed to the guy in the coffee-stained shirt. “Go apologize to that man for bumping into him.” I let Ryan go, and he did exactly that. The man gave me a thumbs-up.
“Okay, now sit on that bench until your mom gets back. You’re off the hook this time.”
Go figure, the kid was suddenly very well-behaved.
According to the information I was getting in my earpiece, Jenny had hightailed it down the hall and had been “caught” by Officer Cooley, who was patrolling outside.
The mother returned with Jenny in tow and gathered her son up like he was the most precious thing in the world, giving me a glare that told me exactly what she thought of me. Then they left the exhibit, whispering about how hideous monsters really needed to invest in glamour spells and how some women must be blind or seriously messed in the head to actually go out with the truly monstrous ones, even if some of us were rich like “that Gunnar guy”.
She had no idea Iwasthat Gunnar guy.
I knew full well that gargoyles were not a well-accepted type of monster. Never had been, not even before The Wall fell. Vampires were, thanks to pop culture, and shifters usually were too, since they had fully human forms. But I couldn’t turn into a human, even if I tried. The best I could do was hide behind a glamour spell.
Sure, there were some women who found us attractive, with or without the illusion spell in place, but most women wanted the beast to turn back into the handsome prince at the end of the story. The ones like Lillian, who seemed to honestly find me attractive just the way I was, irresistibly so even, were not the norm. Most reacted to me the way that woman had.
It wasn’t just the way I looked, either. It was that gargoyles had originally been created to be nothing but mindless beasts to guard buildings. We weren’t supposed to have thoughts and wants of our own. We were…less.
“Wow. The more things change, the more they stay the same,” said Mateo. He understood, perhaps more than most. He truly looked like a monster, with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion. For bonus points, he also had the wings of a wyvern, so he was a real amalgamation of parts. He couldn’t shift into a fully human form, either. His lion-man form was as close as he got, though he could become more leonine with four limbs if he so chose.
The worst part was that the word manticore came from an old Persian word with its roots in Greek and Latin that meant man-eater. Talk about a bad rep. Many other monsters had the same problem. Just ask the ogres. At least I didn’t need to deal with that.
The parade was winding its way toward the museum, and most of the visitors stepped outside to watch it pass by.
“How are you two holding up?” Officer Cooley asked us. “Aside from having to babysit and parent small children, that is.”
Despite being fully human and devoid of magic, she and her partner Hayes always ended up getting assigned to the special jobs that required working with magic and monsters.
I shrugged. “Eh. It’s like this every year.”
We’d only ever had one attempt at stealing the gold nugget, and that had been a long time ago, before Cooley’s time.
Liam and Seth, the wizard-witch and demon duo, came to relieve us from our post.
Cooley narrowed her eyes at Seth. “You. You stole my cruiser.”
Seth stuck both hands in the air in mock surrender. “That was months ago, and it was an emergency. Technically, it wasn’t even me who drove it. It was Eamon.”
