Gargoyle: Kinswoman

Part 18

Veronica bit down on her inner cheek and waited, pressing the medallion harder into her flesh as he glowered down at her. She steeled herself against what was coming, praying it would not end up with her simply dead and hidden away somewhere, but she couldn't let him intimidate her away from the only chance she had to see her friend once more.

From far, she wanted to ask, at least let me glance at her and see she is happy. But in the end, she kept her mouth shut and tried to reason the arguments in her head that she wasn't that kind of person. Yet her own experience showed, sometimes one needed to be nosy. Like Isilia had been, and thank god she had, or she would probably be looking down at her own body in out of body experience you never returned from.

She held her breath, too scared to turn away. She felt trembles running through her thighs and she squeezed her muscles hard to stop it. Thorwald glanced down at her legs for a second and then looked up with knowing, amused look on his face.

"You have no right to make such decisions for her!" She hissed to get his attention away from the awkward reaction her body was having on calling his bluff. "I wish to see her, not take her away! All I ask is to make sure she is alright and she feels alright in her situation, that's all. Nothing more."

She was scared, she admitted that, but hell if she was discussing it with someone from another species, who probably had no inner understanding on the unique minute reactions human body had to stress.

His expression hardened, but then some couple approached them and he quickly reached out and without thinking, pulled her aside to let them pass. This small action wasn't big, but it broke her determined stare and with it, the confidence she felt.

"I am the head of her family now and I do have that right." He sighed and scowled, when she tensed on the revelation. "That's not it." He looked around, like searching for something before his hand brushed through his hair and he sighed again.

"She has nightmares." He admitted quietly as he pointed towards a small tree trunk set under a huge flowering tree. "About her life back home. They aren't big, but disturbing enough to make her jolt awake in the middle of the night. She is only now beginning to get over them."

"And you don't want anything to jolt her memories." She finished for him. She remembered those dreams. She'd asked once after she noticed the younger woman hadn't been sleeping well, but they'd never talked about them, not really the way it would have mattered.

"I think it relates with why she was supposed to go to jail for." She guessed, but honestly, she didn't know.

He shrugged. "I don't care what they are about. She doesn't remember most of them by morning and I don't care to make her go through it before there is enough time passed that she feels comfortable talking about it."

"A shrink, huh?" She couldn't stop the stab from leaving her lips.

"I don't know, who that is."

She shook her head. "No matter." She felt the edges of her eyes turn moist and she gulped the tears down, figuring there was no good reason to show them. She expected him to apologize, though, for what, she wasn't sure. In long term, she was glad he didn't.

She turned her eyes up in the sky and they sat there for a while in silence. She knew he was looking at her face, but she figured it had something to do with her eyes and didn't care to check. Instead she kept searching for two spots in the sky that would mark the arrival of the other two gargoyles.

She kept thinking about Selene and for the first time during the last months, she thought about searching her from another angle. Maybe she really didn't want to be found? And she was basically jumping the wrong tree, expecting something to fall to her lap, when in reality, there was nothing up there. She wanted to find her, but it wasn't her, who was presumed dead, now wasn't she? If Selene would have wanted her in to her life, she would have found a way to contact her, wouldn't she? If she cared... Maybe she didn't? Many friends left without a single good bye, maybe this was one of those occasions and only she had bangs of loneliness she confused with missing a friend?