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I was lucky the crowd had grown so large, and that Marcel Boucher had opted for theatrics instead of quietly alerting the police to my presence.
What was he doing there anyway?
I slipped away from the crowd unseen, and kept running until I found a small courtyard with an oak tree large enough for me to hide behind. I leaned against its gnarled trunk, closed my eyes, and caught my breath.
How could Dorian have done this? And how does one find a gargoyle who’s on the lam in a city he knows better than you?
“Zoe?”
I froze.
“Zoe, is that you?”
The voice wasn’t that of Marcel Boucher’s. Or that of anyone I recognized.
“What are you running from?” a second voice asked.
Neither of the voices sounded like police officers there to arrest me. It wasn’t the friendly tone. I wasn’t naive enough to think the police wouldn’t lull me into a false sense of security. It was the age of the two women who spoke. They were young voices. I would have sworn they were the voices of teenagers.
I peeked out from behind the tree and saw two young women, who didn’t look much older than their teens, if that, approaching me.
“I thought that might be you,” the taller woman said in French. “We have a mutual friend.”
“Dorian?”
She raised an eyebrow and looked at her friend. “I told you it was her. Now we don’t have to call her.”
My head throbbed. I was no good at night. I was out of my element and badly needed to recharge, but I had to focus and navigate the precarious situation of asking two French teenagers how they happened to know a living gargoyle.
“Um, how do you know Dorian?” I asked.
“He wants you to know he didn’t do it,” the other woman said. “But he intends to find out who did.”
They introduced themselves as Lakshmi and Alix. They were university students who were having a drink with friends at the bar down the street when they saw someone dressed in a costume running down the alley next to the bar.
Both Alix and Lakshmi were into the cosplay scene and loved attending conventions, so they followed him, disappointed because they thought they’d missed one happening that week.
When they caught up with him, they saw he was dressed as a famous gargoyle of Notre Dame, and thought he was part of the publicity to raise money for the cathedral.
“I thought our angel and demon costumes were good,” Lakshmi said, “but Dorian’s costume is one of the best we’ve ever seen. Do you know if he made it himself? I couldn’t tell if he was shy or selfish, if he didn’t want us to steal his costume designer source.”
“He rarely tells me everything either. He asked you to find me?”
“Dorian is a character,” Lakshmi said. “He said you’d accuse him of this museum robbery. He swears he didn’t do it. But he didn’t want you to worry that he might not come home tonight.”
I groaned.
“You two are way more into role playing than we are,” Alix said.