1 comments/ 4517 views/ 1 favorites Shadow 01: A Gargoyle Strikes By: Falcinator The night was clear but dark, the moon almost new. A figure slid wraithlike between chimney stacks and air-conditioning head units on the roof of the Strongheim Museum. Its graceful movements and slender curves were feminine, but it reflected no light and showed no skin, covered from head to foot in a bodysuit with the light-absorbing rough texture of kevlar weave. Its feet seemed to be encased in soft boots that fit like gloves, its hands were covered in extensions of the suit and matte-lensed glasses wrapped around its eyes revealing no skin at their edges. The figure slipped across the final open space to the edge of the roof and seemed to disappear into the shadow by the parapet. After a long moment, the figure slid smoothly over the edge of the roof, placing its hands carefully on the brickwork and sliding down head-first. When its hips passed over the parapet, it placed its feet carefully on the brickwork and kept heading down, moving smoothly and keeping three points of contact with the wall at all times. That side of the wall was in shadow, overhanging a narrow alley, and the figure was barely visible at all. The figure moved to the corner of the building, over a busy street, level with the third row of windows from the top. It paused for several seconds, staying absolutely still, then, moving like a pouncing cat, swung around the edge of the wall, into the shadow under the nearest window's awning and, apparently, disappeared. # "Gentlemen! I have called this extraordinary meeting because in the past week we have experienced a series of unfortunate incidents involving our holdings." A manila folder landed on the long, mirror-polished wooden boardroom table. "Three extremely exclusive cars were damaged while being held in valet parking by a firm we have a 5 per cent holding in." Another folder landed on the first one. "A prototype luxury yacht built by a company we have a 2 per cent stake in was destroyed by fire while at its berth prior to its maiden voyage." Another folder. "A fire at a warehouse we own destroyed a shipment of clothes for a chain of stores we have a 5 per cent stake in." Another folder. "A hotel we run as majority shareholders had a surprise health inspection that found evidence of rats in the kitchen. We are partners in the pest-control firm that absolutely guaranteed the entire building was clean. No evidence of rats has been found outside the kitchen, leading to the supposition there was a plant." Another folder. "And finally, the 150-year-old opal ring known as the Goldham Gem was stolen tonight, while you were on your ways to this meeting." There was a collective intake of breath, quickly stilled by the veterans of frequently bloody - literally - boardroom brawls. A final folder dropped from his hand. "MDL Insurance, which we are 30 per cent partners in, covered all these properties and, as of close of trading last night, shares were down 2 per cent. "No, gentlemen, we do not believe there has been a series of unfortunate events. We believe they are connected." # Scail placed the gleaming opal ring carefully on a table and stared at it as she pulled her goggles off her head and found and released the seam to her bodysuit, peeling it off in one continuous motion, gloves and boots integral to the suit. She stood in sports bra and lycra cycling shorts, long-limbed and hard-muscled, skin bone-white and showing every vein and every muscle, and ruffled fingers through her close-cropped raven-black hair, fluffing it and scratching her scalp, without taking her eyes off the gem in its intricate silver setting. The gem represented the next stage of her campaign. Hitting them financially was not enough, she had to make it personal, and stealing this was an insult, a slap in the face they could not ignore. She had to assume they were putting the pieces together by now. She had hit all their local financial assets, even if obliquely, by now and, through them all, their main earner, MDL Insurance. The gem hit their pride. They would now be ready for war, and she was only one of seven possible perpetrators. The question was: did they doubt her death enough to consider her as a suspect? Leaving her equipment where it fell and the ring on the table, she turned and headed into the bathroom, pulling her bra over her head. # The lights in the boardroom had been dimmed. "Tell me," the standing man said, "what explains five different events, of different character, with absolutely no evidence found of any sort? I'm talking a complete forensic sweep, security cameras, the lot - all blank. Thoughts, gentlemen?" There was a long silence until a fat, gravelly-voiced man said "You are referring to Gargoyle." A scornful laugh from a younger member of the table was quickly silenced. "Can anyone tell me," the standing man continued, "why it is so ridiculous to suggest Gargoyle?" "Because we were assured very definitely that all members of the original Gargoyle team had been dealt with," a hard-faced man with military precision in his voice said. "Indeed we were, and why did we believe them?" There was an uneasy shifting around the table. "Get to the point, Iacoca," a harsh voice from the other end of the table snapped. "We were informed there was no way they could have escaped, but we still do not know how they escaped our facility." "Exactly! Gentlemen, the Gargoyle file is reopened. I want special teams at all crime sites, I want all, and I mean ALL assessment measures, testing, all available options taken to determine how these crimes were enacted, how our surveillance and security was blind-sided and what we can do to find whoever, or whoevers, were responsible!" # Bernard stood idly rolling the ring around in his fingers, sipping on his coffee and still half asleep. Scail came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around her breasts and barely down past her waist. "Quite a piece to try and move," Bernard said mildly. "I didn't steal it for profit," Scail said, wriggling a finger in her ear to dislodge moisture still there. "I stole it for revenge." "Ah." Bernard replaced the ring on the table. "How are you, darling?" She dropped the towel on the floor. Her breasts were not large but they were firm and rode high on her pectorals. Every muscle was defined, and every inch of skin stretched tight. Her arms and legs showed a fighter's strength and lean speed. "I'm horny," she said, stepping close and pulling his bathrobe open, revealing a body merely fit and genetically lean. "Ah," he replied, holding his coffee to one side as she stepped closer and thrust her naked hips against his shorts, hard nipples grazing his chest. "Are you sure?" She grabbed his head with both hands and pulled him into a bruising kiss. "I've been out all night, and I was successful," she said. "You know how wired that makes me. You're coming back to bed. You don't have a choice." "I wouldn't dream of trying to resist you," he said as he carefully put his coffee down on the table. "It would hurt too much." "Good." She shoved one hand down his shorts and grabbed his balls, the other hand still pulling him into a kiss, and pushed him rapidly backwards, steering him deftly around the table and around the corner into their bedroom without appearing to use her eyes. By the time the backs of his knees bumped the bed, he was helplessly hard. She released his balls long enough to shove him so hard in the chest he landed with his feet clearing the end of the bed and his head between the pillows, just before the headboard. No matter how many times she did that, and how much he trusted her, it never failed to give him the adrenaline boost of brief, stark, terror. She ripped his shorts off him and then pounced, a blur of movement almost too fast for him to follow, landing crouched above him, teeth bared, before kissing him so hard she drove his head back into the mattress. In the two years they had been together, he had toughened up. He got bruised less, now, and could give more back, but there was no way he could ever meet her on her own terms. He just got used to wearing the bruises as marks of pride. She reached down between her legs and grabbed him around the base of his cock and his balls together, squeezing with precisely measured control while he groaned at the stab of sweet pressure. She slid her other hand beside the first, further back, and began tickling the base of his cock under his balls with her index finger. She slid slowly back, tickling lightly with a nail that extended half a centimetre beyond the tip of each finger, to his anus. He closed his eyes and whimpered, poised delicately on the edge of lust and fear, too terrified by the predatory, possessive, tigerish light in her eyes to look at it any longer. Her fingernail traced around the edge of his puckered anus, probing lightly, while his instinct made it spasm but his intellect told him he needed to submit to anything she wanted to do - she would do it anyway, and it would hurt less if he accepted that. She chuckled, closer to his face than she had been when he closed his eyes, and withdrew her finger, drawing the nail up the length of his shaft with just enough pressure to scratch, drawing sharp pain from his painfully hard cock, until she dug the nail cruelly into the glans, just on the underside of the swelling lips, making his face distort and a sharp cry of real pain explode from his lips. She lunged down, sealing his mouth with hers and pinching his nose shut with a hand he hadn't realised had moved from its position at his groin, and before he had a chance to fully realise that, he was buried deep inside her, the walls of her cunt gripping him no less tightly than her hand had, but all over. He was struggling for breath, eyes bulging out in real fear untempered by his experience of this happening before, or his knowledge of how accurate her judgements were, before she pulled back and released both nose and mouth. She rode him hard, not releasing the pressure, forcing herself down onto him, drawing up far enough that on each downward stroke the pressure in his cock was barely enough to keep him straight enough to force it between her walls. He shuddered and whimpered on each stroke, the pressure sending a searing spike of pleasure from the head of his cock, his hands wrapped around the iron bars at the head of the bed, knowing better than to try and touch her back while she was in this mood. Then her hands dug into his chest, two fingernails on each hand seeking out and pincering a nipple, and he came, painfully, bucking underneath her three times and then screaming as a final stroke on his too-sensitive cock forced a final spurt out of him with no pleasure at all. She relented and relaxed, settling onto him with surprising gentleness and kissing him softly. "Thank you," she whispered. "I'll blow you nicely when you're up to it, but I needed that." He didn't say anything, lying weakly underneath her. # A grizzled, scarred man sleeping in a single bed answered the phone on the second ring. "I would like you to reassemble your team, and begin training immediately," Mr Iacoca said without introduction. "Situation?" "Five forensically clean crime sights attacking our holdings. I've sent a comprehensive team to the last one." "Have a charge number waiting for me in one hour," the grizzled man said before hanging up. # Scail was curled protectively over Bernard, who was flat on his back with his arms still above his head. He could feel the adrenalin draining out of his system making him weak and slightly shaky. He was flaccid just underneath her lean, hard thigh, which was thrown across his belly. When they had met, that weight would have been uncomfortable, but now he barely noticed it. He stirred, stretching slightly, opening his eyes. Hers were open immediately, a lightning-fast flick he had learned to ignore although at first it had given him lizard-woman nightmares. She moved her hand softly from where it had been lying protectively over his heart, sliding gently up to his face as he turned towards her. "Better now?" she asked tenderly. Seeing her face soften was something that only happened once in a normal week, and the genuineness of it unsettled him almost more than everything else about her did, but mostly because it went straight through him and made him want to curl around her in an emotional ball. He forced a smile until it came naturally. "I don't think anything's broken." She didn't take it as an insult, knowing he knew with an engineer's certainty exactly how well she knew her own behaviour and the limits of any human body, particularly his. "No," she said impishly, a demeanour such a well-designed killer should not have been able to achieve, "but is anything still sore?" He laughed at that, a little despairingly and a little hysterically, but still a laugh. "Oh!" he gasped out, "It's still sore! Believe me, it'll take a day to stop being sore, more if I have to pee a lot! But I think it'll keep on functioning!" Her hand slid downwards, gentle as a butterfly's wing, to rest just a millimetre from his sore and shrivelled cock. "May I kiss it better?" He looked at her steadily for a few moments, then a smile split his face. "Only if you want to." She smiled back at him. He had never, as a matter of principle, ever joked about intentions. She slid her leg off him, not touching his genitals by the breadth of an oxygen molecule, rolled onto her belly and tenderly kissed her way down his body, not moving too quickly, just moving with millimetre-perfect pantherine grace as she swam across. He let his arms fall out to the sides, closing his eyes in pleasure this time at the soft, tender brushing of her lips across his skin, tenderly suckling on his nipples then heading further down, circling his belly button as his cock began stirring again. This time her fingers cupped his balls tenderly and softly, tickling the surface of his shaved sack and teasing an erection out of him as her mouth toyed with his cock, skirting it slyly, lips brushing over the junction of his legs and hips on each side, throat not quite touching his thickening shaft until she drew a long, blissful sigh out of him by breathing softly on it a second before her tongue rolled it between her lips. Despite the torture his cock had just experienced, it leapt to attention at the soft, warm, wet touch of her mouth. She lifted it on two fingers, kissing lightly up the shaft and lingering on the underside of the glans where her nail had dug in earlier, travelling up and around to nuzzle around the entire purple head, slowly painting it wet with her tongue. "I can still smell and taste me," she said softly, pitched to excite him and smiling as his cock twitched. She opened her mouth wide and, wetting her lips thoroughly, slid his head inside her mouth before closing her lips gently around him. He murmured happily as she slowly slid her mouth down around him, her lips maintaining a light but unbroken seal around his shaft. The hand around his balls kept up a light, pulsing massage, tickling lightly at the base, towards his anus, making him so hard he felt his veins were full of warm honey that pooled out from his groin and spread throughout his body. She moved slowly, teasing and tickling him, only ever using light pressure and keeping him wet, slowly urging him along towards his climax as he lay and floated in bliss, completely relaxed, not trying to delay or accelerate cumming, letting her control everything again but this time, for his pleasure. She backed off once when his hips started twitching, letting him sit deep inside her throat as her lips brushed his groin and the hand on his scrotum stilled and held it until he settled again, then returned to her slow, long, teasing strokes. He couldn't stop himself moving as the pressure built again, his hips twitching or his legs jerking, an occasional shudder through his torso as she built him without changing speed or pressure or what she was doing. When he came in her mouth it hurt again, but it was worth it. # "I have a result, Mr Iacocca." The middle-aged man did not betray relief or fear through any alteration of his voice, bearing or, if you had the equipment, skin conductivity, saliva production or heart-rate. He knew his value and he knew that he worked as hard and accurately as he was capable of, and that assurance gave him the strongest possible defence against his boss's legendary intimidation. "Show me." The two threaded their way around a lab built to use space as efficiently as possible, not for cost constraints but for efficiency and for efficiency's sake. "This is glass from the museum. It's taken from a windowpane on the same floor as the stolen trinket. We were able to run tests on all windows in place, but had to bring it back here to be sure. "Observe." He woke up a monitor, which showed an unrecognisable but highly regular lunar landscape. "This is the glass, under magnification. It is normally a highly irregular surface, created naturally as the glass cools. This is highly regular, and only one process we are familiar with will create it." "Gargoyle shadow transference," Mr Iacocca said softly. "Correct." "How sure are you?" The scientist tapped some keys, and the view switched to show a different area of glass, this time with one half of the screen organised, one half disorganised, with an irregular boundary between the two. "This is the interface. This is not a coincidence. As I said, Mr Iacocca, only one process we are aware of." "Is there any other evidence?" "Not detectable. Glass is the only substance we have been able to detect Gargoyle signatures on. Even their gecko ability does not leave any detectable mark on any surface. If the thief had bypassed security and opened the window conventionally, we would have no evidence a Gargoyle had been involved. This is the only evidence we have found that the trinket was not magicked away. "A Gargoyle was involved." Mr Iacocca thoughtfully pulled out his phone, unlocked it and tapped it a couple of times. He did not need to call anyone or say anything to make an entire multinational corporation go into instant high-security lock-down. All around the lab they were in, sirens began wailing. # "Honey, they've noticed." Scail appeared in the doorway in about two seconds. Bernard was still dressed in his robe, Scail had put on boxing shorts and sports bra and was breathing barely more than normal despite a slight sheen of sweat on her skin. Bernard sat in front of a square of four monitors, others arrayed to his sides and one more above him playing a 24-hour news network on near-silent. He pointed to the top-right screen. "Trading halts in all their companies." He pointed to the top-left. "Announcements that there will be a temporary suspension of services from the pest-inspection and valet-parking businesses." He pointed to the bottom left, where a lot of red lines of text stood out in separate windows. "Every single one of their servers has had a security upgrade, beginning with simultaneous password changes. It's a local-only upgrade: You have to be physically present to get into each server, individually, reset the passwords again, and restart." He turned around to face her, slouched in his chair. "They've pulled up the drawbridges." She smiled, a cold and terrible sight. "Then we maintain the siege."