By the seventh night of nothing, Brooklyn had counted every pigeon on the clock tower twice.

"Forty-one," he announced. "Forty-one pigeons. And one of them is the same pigeon as before, because he moved."

Lexington didn't look up from the newspaper he was taking apart for the comics. Broadway was asleep on the old couch with a box of crackers on his chest, which wasn't really sleep, since gargoyles didn't sleep at night, but he was doing a good imitation. Bronx lay across Goliath's feet and thumped his tail at the sound of Brooklyn's voice, which was more than anybody else was doing.

"Somebody in this city is doing something wrong right now," Brooklyn said. "Right now, tonight. And we're sitting up here reading the funnies."

Goliath closed his book on one claw to keep his place. He looked at Brooklyn for a long moment, and then he looked past him, at the old one in the armchair in front of the television.

Hudson sighed the sigh of a gargoyle whose program was about to start. Then he picked up his sword and stood.

"Come on, then, lad," he said. "We'll go stand watch."

Brooklyn had pictured a lot of things when Hudson said watch. He'd pictured gliding over the park, maybe, or the docks, somewhere with warehouses and shadows and guys in ski masks. He had not pictured a water tower on top of a six-story walk-up on a street so ordinary he couldn't have said what part of Manhattan it was in.

Hudson settled himself on the edge of the roof, wings folded, the sword laid across his knees, and became, in the space of a breath, almost exactly as still as he was during the day.

Brooklyn perched beside him. Below them the street ran three blocks to the river: brownstones and walk-ups, a laundromat with its gates down, a bakery, a corner deli, cars parked bumper to bumper on both sides. A cab went by. Then nothing went by.

"So what are we watching for?"

"The street," Hudson said.

Brooklyn waited for the rest of it. There wasn't any.

Another cab went by. Brooklyn shifted his weight. He re-folded his wings. He scratched an itch on his shin with his other foot. He counted the windows on the building across the street that still had lights on (nine) and then counted them again when one went out (eight).

"When I was younger than you," Hudson said, without moving anything but his mouth, "the old one who led us before me put me on the castle wall for a whole winter night to watch one road. One road, going down to the village. I thought it was a punishment."

"Was it?"

"Aye. Partly." Hudson's good eye crinkled at the corner. "He had no name, mind. None of us did, then. But I remember his voice telling me, if you can't sit still for one road, you'll never be fit to watch a whole country."

"Did anything happen? On the road?"

"A fox crossed it twice. A shepherd came down with a lantern because a ewe had got out. The miller's boy went to see a girl and came back very late and very pleased with himself." Hudson shrugged. "By morning I knew that road better than the people who walked on it. That was the point."

Brooklyn looked down at the street. It still looked like a street.

"Tell me what you see," Hudson said.

"Cars. Buildings. Nothing."

"Tell me again in an hour."

The first thing Brooklyn noticed, because he was trying very hard not to notice that his foot was asleep, was the man with the little dog.

He came out of the brownstone with the green door at what Brooklyn guessed was midnight, a short man in a long coat with a dog about the size of a loaf of bread. They walked to the corner. The dog considered a fire hydrant from every side. They walked back. And an hour later, by the clock on the bank tower downtown, they did it again, the same corner, the same hydrant, the same careful inspection.

"He does that every hour," Brooklyn said.

"Does he?"

"Twice now. I bet he does it every hour. I bet the dog's old."

Hudson didn't say anything, but he didn't have to.

After that it got easier, or at least it got more interesting. A woman on the fourth floor across the street played the same song over and over on a cassette, with the window open, and rewound it each time with a long squeal. A kid on the second floor was reading under his covers with a flashlight, and every time his parents' light came on down the hall, the flashlight went off. A young guy in a hospital uniform came home at one-thirty and sat on his own stoop for ten minutes before he went in, just sitting, with his head back, like the sitting was the best part of the day. The deli man came out at a quarter to two and put a saucer of milk by the curb, and a gray cat came out from under a parked car to drink it.

And at exactly two o'clock the lights came on in the bakery.

The baker was a big man in a white apron with flour on his forearms before he'd even started. Through the front window Brooklyn could see him tie on the apron, turn on the big ovens, and stand with both hands flat on his worktable for a second, the way Hudson stood before a fight.

"Two o'clock," Brooklyn said. "On the dot. Every night, I bet."

"Now you know the street," Hudson said.

Brooklyn opened his mouth to say that knowing the street wasn't the same as doing anything about it. Then he closed it again, because something was wrong with the street.

It took him a moment to see what. The saucer of milk was still full. The gray cat hadn't come back to finish it. The deli man had come out twice now to look under the parked cars, and the second time he'd stood in the middle of the sidewalk with his hands on his hips, looking up and down the block.

"His cat's gone," Brooklyn said.

"Aye. Looks like."

Brooklyn was already half crouched to jump. Hudson's hand came down on his shoulder, not hard.

"Where are you going?"

"To look for it!"

"Where?"

Brooklyn didn't have an answer for that. He looked down at the street, at the cars and the stoops and the alleys between the buildings, about a thousand places a cat could be, and he made himself be still.

He watched the deli man give up and go back inside. He watched the hospital guy's light go out. He watched the baker pull the first trays out of the oven, and the smell came all the way up to the roof, warm and yeasty, and his stomach growled so loud that Hudson snorted.

And then, because he was being still and not looking for anything in particular, he heard it. A thin, cross little noise, from above the bakery, not below it. Up on the third-floor ledge, under the awning of a dark window, a gray shape was pressed against the brick with its tail wrapped around itself, too high to jump down and too proud to say so.

"There," Brooklyn said. "There it is. It went up the fire escape and it can't get down."

Hudson took his hand away from Brooklyn's shoulder.

"Quietly, mind," he said.

Brooklyn went off the roof in a long, flat glide, caught the warm air coming up off the bakery's vent, and rode it down to the ledge without a sound. The cat looked at him with total contempt. He picked it up anyway, very carefully, the way Broadway picked up eggs, and it put all its claws into his arm and complained the whole way down. He set it on the deli's step, right next to the door, and was back on the roof before the deli man could answer the yowling.

They watched the door open. They watched the man scoop up the cat and hold it against his chest and say something to it that was probably not polite, and look all around him, and then, for a long time, up.

Brooklyn held perfectly still. He was getting good at it.

The sky over the river was turning gray when Brooklyn realized they had waited too long to get home.

"It's fine," Hudson said, before he could say anything. "We'll sleep here. The water tower's a fine place for it. Nobody comes up here but the pigeons."

So they stood together on the edge of the roof while the light came up. Brooklyn thought about the pose he'd hold all day, fierce, wings out, a warning to evildoers across the whole neighborhood, whichever one this was. At the last moment he changed his mind and just sat, the way Hudson sat, looking down at the street he knew now: the green door, the cassette woman's window, the bakery, the deli step.

"Hudson?"

"Mm."

"That wasn't really a punishment, was it? The road."

The old one smiled. The sun came over the buildings, and the smile stayed there all day, in stone.

When they woke that night, cracking out of their stone skins into the cool air, there was a white paper bag sitting on the roof ledge between them. Inside were two rolls, still a little warm, and on the outside somebody had written in grease pencil, in big careful letters: FOR THE FELLOWS ON THE ROOF. THANKS FOR THE CAT.

Brooklyn looked at Hudson. Hudson looked at the bag.

"Well," the old one said at last, and handed him a roll. "Somebody else on this street knows how to watch."

THE END

Author's note: I know a baker who saw gargoyles on his roof would probably call somebody instead of leaving rolls. I like to think this particular baker had seen stranger things on that street at two in the morning. If you liked it, or if you have a better count of the pigeons, my mailbox is [email protected].

[ Stone Sleep | Clan Lights, Part 1 ]