Gabriel's City

by Laylah Hunter

“The very soul of generosity,” Drake says with a little bow.

  “You’re new,” the merchant says.

  “Connall an Hanaein,” Drake introduces himself, offering his hand.

  The merchant takes it in a firmer grip than Drake might have expected. “James Sheffield.”

  They’re both lying, and that’s fine. Drake smiles. “Good to meet you at last, after all I’ve heard. A mutual friend would like to offer you an invitation to supper, once your work here is done.”

  Sheffield smiles back. “So good to be welcomed back by friends. You’d better hurry with the unloading, hmm?”

  “Sir.” Drake goes to join Sheffield’s crew in unloading the wagons. Most of them look like they were hired for their ability to discourage highwaymen more than anything else, and they’re ready now to take their pay and go. Nobody does more than grunt acknowledgement when Drake joins them. Suits him fine; the less attention they pay to him, the better. He doesn’t particularly want to be remembered, after all.

  He hefts a keg of peach brandy and carries it into the warehouse to stack beside the others. He can’t decide whether or not he’s disappointed that Sheffield was so quick to believe him. On the one hand, it makes his work easier; on the other, tokens can be stolen and passphrases learned through any number of unscrupulous methods. Small wonder Sheffield’s stuck running some piddling overland slave route, if he thinks that’s precaution enough.

  Darkness falls fast in the mountains; the sun slips behind the peaks to the west and the light vanishes almost immediately. The hired swords grumble as they finish unloading in the gloom, eager to be off. They’ve had a good two weeks on the road, at a wagon’s pace, and probably not a pint of lager to be seen. Drake hangs back while Sheffield pays them.

  “Rotten scavengers,” Sheffield mutters as the last of them leaves.

  “Ah, don’t be so harsh,” Drake says. He’s enjoying the persona he’s falling into—a bit of Sebastian’s casual generosity, a bit of Deirdre’s lilting tease. “Mayhap they’ve loved ones to hurry home to.” A beat, just long enough for Sheffield to frown. “Or it could be they’re afraid to linger and meet the huntsman.”

  “Another of you people’s ridiculous legends? Come on, I have an appointment to keep.”

  “Course, your lordship.” That part is entirely Deirdre, the ability to sneer the word lord. “Wouldn’t do to keep a friend waiting.”

  Drake leads the way down a darkening side street; here and there a lighted window spills illumination over a patch of ground, but they’re few enough in this part of town. At the next crossroads, he turns toward the darker street without a pause.

  “Can you still call the blind huntsman a legend, though, when there’s evidence?”

  Sheffield scoffs. “A blind huntsman, hmm? Can’t be much good at it.”

  “Well, he wasn’t always blind, was he? They say once he could see clear enough to know the perfect shot, every single time. He could drop a boar with a single arrow, he was so good.”

  Sheffield makes another harrumphing noise. “And then he did something foolish, of course.”

  “You know the way of tales,” Drake agrees. “He wronged a woman—and here no man is sure, you understand, whether she was a fearsome mortal maid or the Red Rider herself, but either way, the huntsman mistook one of her hounds for a wolf and shot the beast dead.” He glances over to see Sheffield watching him warily, and shrugs as he goes on. “She changed into a wildcat’s shape and set upon him. Tore his eyes out, savaged him, left him for dead.”

  They turn another corner, down a narrower street. Sheffield stumbles once. “Still nothing to be afraid of. Pathetic, if he ever really existed.”

  “The frightful part comes after.” Drake lowers his voice to a hush. There’s a prickle up the back of his own neck now, a sense of being followed. “It’s his ghost that stalks the streets . . . and takes the eyes of lonely wanderers, trying to replace the ones he’s lost.”

  Sheffield makes such a sour face that Drake has to bite back a laugh. Do they still tell stories of Gabriel in Casmile, or has he disappeared from the streets’ legends already?

  “But perhaps you’re right after all. This way.” There are no lamps down this alley at all, as he knew there wouldn’t be. “Silly to be scared of ghost stories, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” says a sweet tenor from behind them. “There are much worse things than ghosts abroad at night.”

  Drake stuffs his hands in his pockets, watching out of the corner of his eye as Sheffield startles and turns around. “Worse things, hmm? Like what?”

  Soft, delighted laughter. “Oh, any number of monsters. Dragons.”

  There’s screaming after that. But not for long.

  Gabriel’s the first back to their lodgings, but only by a second. Drake catches him around the waist before he can get the door open, and they both stagger, laughing, breathing hard in the thin mountain air.

  “All right, you’ve won your damned race,” Drake says, letting his head fall forward to rest on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Now name your forfeit.”

  Gabriel squirms in his arms, turning to face him. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.” He nips Drake’s lower lip, his fingers curling possessively in Drake’s coat.

  Drake kisses him lightly. “Come on. Inside.” That’s different here, too; Deradan’s people are considerably more suspicious of men whose love for each other is physical. A year ago, Drake might have imagined that someone like him wouldn’t care about that, would dare anyone to take offense at it. But when they arrived in the middle of the winter, chilled and starving and slowly losing the battle against fever, more trouble was the last thing they wanted.

  The room they found to recover in was one of a row lined up against the cliffside above a tavern. They’ve kept it in the months since; though the stone back wall always seems to bleed chill into the room, it’s sturdy and they’ve no complaints about the wind finding a way in. Gabriel stirs the fire back to life when they slip inside, and firelight makes the room look warmer immediately, even if it won’t feel that way for a good deal longer.

  Gabriel looks up from the fireplace and frowns. “What’s wrong?”

  Drake shakes himself. The cold, the local taboos, the thin air that never carries the heavy brine smell of the harbor . . . “It’s still not home, I suppose.”

  “Mmm.” Gabriel sits down on the little pallet they share and starts tugging his wet boots off. “We could leave,” he offers. “That was the last of them, wasn’t it?”

  “One more payment to pick up, and then we’re through,” Drake agrees. Sheffield was the last act of a revenge cycle they’d been hired for after a slave ring stole the wrong boys for merchandise. The whole city’s been talking about the killings. “Probably won’t get work like that again anytime soon.”

  “Not enough people, and definitely not enough travelers.” Gabriel sets his boots by the fire to dry, then raises an eyebrow, gesturing for Drake to do the same. Wading through slush got the blood off their boots, but it doesn’t have much else to recommend it. “We’d have to be quiet for a while if we stay here. Not make any trouble.”

  “We could afford that, though,” Drake says, lining up his boots beside Gabriel’s. The man who hired them to ruin the slave ring owns a substantial stake in the silver mine, and he’s been generous. “We could probably make it to summer on this job if we tried.”

  “I bet you’d get bored.” Gabriel tugs on the hem of Drake’s coat, pulling him down. “You’re not the sort of dragon to just sit on his spoils and guard them.”

  Drake stretches out next to Gabriel, easing an arm under his narrow shoulders. “Don’t think you’d be pleased, either, with all the best stories happening to someone else.”

  Gabriel hums, nuzzling Drake’s throat. “Maybe not. Where are we going, then? Won’t be safe to go back to Casmile yet, not with the size of that fire.”

  “I swear the fire gets bigger every time a new traveler comes in to talk about it,” Drake sa
ys. “To listen to some of them now, it sounds like Deradan should have seen the smoke.” Gabriel bites him. “Ow. Right. Where to next?” He rolls the question over in his mind for a moment; there were so many places that only seemed like distant tales when he heard about them in Casmile, and they must have been all the more unreachable from where Gabriel was standing. “Ever seen a mermaid?”

  “Don’t think they like places as busy as the docks,” Gabriel says, shaking his head. “Why, have you?”

  “I might have, once, when I was very small.” If he closes his eyes, he can picture the beaches from that trip to Jua’za, the golden sand and the distant lumped shapes of rocks half-submerged beneath the waves. “Only at a distance, though, and not for long.”

  He tries to dredge up more details from his memory so he can tell a decent story, but Gabriel only says, “They like warm places, don’t they.”

  Drake laughs. “Had enough of snow?” Gabriel nips his collarbone again, and Drake shoves at Gabriel’s ribs, and their planning is abandoned for a minute in favor of a wrestling match, squirming and grappling and laughing. This time Drake wins, pinning Gabriel, lean and bright-eyed, beneath him, and he claims a kiss for his prize.

  “All right,” he says, breathless. “I’m sick of the cold too. We’ll go south as soon as it’s warm enough to travel, how’s that? Find someplace along the coast that we can terrorize.”

  Gabriel smiles up at him, twining both arms around Drake’s neck. “Leave the Blind Huntsman here, become something else on the road. They’ll tell different stories of us every place we go.”

  Drake traces the line of Gabriel’s cheekbone with his thumb, his heart at once so light and so full he can barely stand it. “And being with you will be better than all the stories together.”

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for reading Laylah Hunter’s Gabriel’s City!

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  No author is an island, and no book is written without a tremendous amount of support and influence. This one owes a great deal to Rachel, my editor, who took my manuscript and honed it to a knife-edge; to Kiwi, who breathed life into Gabriel in the first place; to Ariel, who kept pushing me forward when I doubted myself; to my parents, who still thought it was wonderful that I was writing even when I turned out to be writing street thug romance with lots of stabbing; to the small crew of alpha readers who cheered on the very rough first draft; and to the fans of the Bijou, who convinced me that I could move people with stories of my own. Thank you for everything you’ve given me.

  Resurrection Man

  (in the Bump in the Night anthology)

  Ground Mission

  Cultural Hospitality

  Safe Harbor

  (part of the Evergreen collection)

  Ivory Black, Flecked with White

  (in the Snow on the Roof anthology)

  Direct Connection

  (in the Wired Hard 5 anthology)

  Laylah Hunter is a third-gendered butch queer who writes true stories about imaginary people in worlds that never were. Most of hir work deals with queer characters, erotic themes, and the search for happy endings in unfavorable circumstances.

  Hir mild-mannered alter ego lives in Seattle, at the mercy of the requisite cats and cultivating the requisite caffeine habit, and dreams of a day when telling stories will pay all the bills.

  Connect with Laylah:

  Website: laylahhunter.com

  Twitter: @LaylahHunter

  Goodreads: goodreads.com/Laylah_Hunter

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