“Did you clean it?” he asked Vincet, and the young pixy shook his head, looking scared.

“No. It was like that when we got here. Vi wakes as if in a trance, mindless as she hits the base of the statue until the burning brings her down. Then she screams until the moon shifts from the top of the sky and the statue lets her go.”

Jenks scratched the base of his wings, puzzled. Though he didn’t move from the back of the bench, his wings sent a glitter of dust over them. Holy crap, he had to pee again.

Vincet pulled his frightened gaze from the white stone glinting in the light of a nearby streetlamp. “I’d fight if I could. I’d die defending my children if I could see it. Is it a ghost?”

“Maybe.” Pulling his hands from his hips, Jenks crossed his arms. It was a bad habit he’d gotten from Rachel, and he immediately put his fists back on his hips where they belonged.

A sudden noise in the trees above them caught them unawares, and while Jenks remained standing on the back of the bench, Vincet darted away, clearly surprised. It was Bis, returning from his circuit of the park under Jenks’s direction. Jenks was used to giving orders, but not while on a run, and he nervously hoped he was doing this right.

With a soft hush of sliding leather and the scent of iron, the cat-size gargoyle landed on the back of the bench, his long claws scrabbling for purchase. Bis could cling to a vertical slab of stone with no problem, slip through a crack a bat would balk at, but trying to balance on the thin back of the slatted bench was more than he could manage. With an ungraceful hop, he landed on the concrete sidewalk between the bench and the statues.