13. Settling Debts
Settling Debts
Gabriel
T he gray light of pre-dawn filtered through the heavy velvet curtains of the Mourning Lark, painting the room in shades of charcoal and bruise-blue.
Gabriel lay staring at the plaster ceiling, the weight of his sleeping mage pinning him to the mattress.
Miles was starfished across his chest, a warm, solid reality that usually grounded Gabriel’s spinning thoughts.
This morning though, the grounding wasn’t taking.
Miles was drooling on his bare chest. Under normal circumstances Gabriel would have adjusted him, or woken him to tease him, or woken him for a morning fuck. Today he just stared at a hairline crack in the ceiling plaster.
Yesterday had been… plenty . The confirmation that Rookgate Manor wasn’t just haunted but aware sat in his gut like swallowed lead.
It wanted him. That was the worst part. It wasn’t just a pile of stone and timber; it was a desperate, traumatized thing that had looked at Gabriel and decided he was its property.
Or its savior. Or its master. The lines blurred, and that terrified him.
He’d spent his entire life escaping the role of possessed object .
Being claimed by a building that fawned over him like a beaten dog while simultaneously trapping him in its ribcage felt too much like the old days.
A master who was also his slave? The symmetry made him want to vomit.
Scritch. Click.
Gabriel froze.
The sound was faint, barely audible over Miles’s soft snoring, but Gabriel knew it well. Metal on metal. Tension wrench in the keyway. Someone was raking the tumblers of their suite door .
“Miles,” Gabriel poked his mage’s ribs hard.
Miles grunted, shifting heavily. “Mmmph? Pancakes?”
“Wake up.” Gabriel sat up, shoving Miles’s dead weight aside. “We have company.”
The lock clicked. The handle turned.
The door swung inward, and the sudden flood of hallway gaslight was blindingly bright against the gloom of the room.
Three silhouettes stood framed in the doorway.
Two shapes in the front—one wiry and one bulky—but it was the figure in the rear that triggered Gabriel’s survival instinct.
The man stood with legs braced, hands weaving a complex, glowing pattern in the air.
“Down!”
Gabriel didn’t wait for Miles to process the command.
He grabbed the waistband of Miles’s sleep pants and threw his own weight to the right, rolling them both off the high mattress.
They hit the floor in a tangle of limbs and curses just as the air above them ripped open with a roar like a furnace door.
A lance of orange fire incinerated the space they’d occupied a second ago. The smell of scorched feathers and burning linen filled the room.
“My coat!” Miles scrambled on hands and knees toward the wardrobe, eyes wide. He was defenseless. A mage without his components was just a man with a high vocabulary and no shield. Both of them had nothing but the pajama bottoms in which they had slept.
Gabriel rolled to a crouch, feeling naked without the daggers usually strapped to his forearms. He scanned the room for anything lethal. The caster in the doorway was already tracking Miles, hands glowing with a second charge of thermal energy.
Gabriel lunged for the washstand. He gripped the heavy ceramic water pitcher, shouted a guttural, meaningless sound to draw the caster’s eye, and hurled the vessel with everything he had.
The pitcher smashed into the doorframe inches from the caster’s head, showering the group in water and ceramic shrapnel. The spell fizzled out in a chaotic spark of steam and light.
A wiry figure—lean and fast, a mirror to Gabriel’s own skillset—stepped past the sputtering caster. His arm whipped forward. Gabriel saw the glint of steel and dropped flat. A throwing knife thudded into the wall plaster right where his throat had been .
Before Gabriel could scramble upright, the three attackers surged into the room, boots heavy on the floorboards.
Gabriel’s bare feet slapped against cold floorboards as he rolled away from the knife-thrower’s follow-up strike and found a low crouch. The blade whistled past his ear, close enough to feel the displaced air.
Miles had abandoned the wardrobe. He dove for where his satchel hung on the bedpost, fingers stretching for the leather strap.
The bruiser got there first.
A meaty fist caught Miles in the ribs, lifting him off his feet and sending him crashing into the nightstand. The lamp light shattered. Glass scattered across the floor like frozen stars.
Gabriel didn’t think. His hand closed around a shard of the broken water pitcher and launched himself at the bruiser’s exposed back.
The man was built like a wardrobe himself, all slabs of muscle under cheap leather armor. But he’d made the mistake of turning his back on Gabriel to pursue Miles.
Gabriel dropped low and drove the ceramic shard into the meat of the bruiser’s thigh, just above the knee.
He felt the edge scrape bone, felt the hamstring part like wet rope.
He screamed—a high, surprised sound—and his leg buckled.
He went down hard, grabbing the wound, suddenly very uninterested in Miles.
The knife-thrower was on Gabriel before he could recover.
A boot caught him in the shoulder, spinning him sideways.
He hit the floor, rolled, and came up in a crouch facing his counterpart.
The man had drawn a proper fighting knife now, no more throwing games.
His stance was loose-limbed and lethal. Balanced. Patient.
Shit.
Across the room, Miles had finally gotten his hands on the satchel. He was on the floor fumbling inside, blood running from a cut on his forehead where he’d hit the nightstand.
The caster’s hands were glowing again. Orange light pooled between his palms, building toward another thermal lance. He was aiming at Miles.
“No—” Gabriel started forward, but the knife-thrower stepped into his path, blade weaving a defensive pattern.
Miles looked up. Saw the caster. Saw death building in those cupped hands .
Miles abandoned the satchel. He shoved his hand blindly under the bedframe and whipped out the heavy glass bottle of Sunmere red they’d forgotten there.
Miles hurled the bottle. It tumbled end-over-end through the smoke. Heavy, dark glass met bone.
THWACK.
The sound was sickeningly dull, like a butcher’s mallet hitting a side of beef. The bottle shattered. The man’s eyes rolled back so far only the whites showed, and he dropped stone dead, his nose driven back into his skull.
Miles sat frozen on the rug, staring at the corpse, his jaw slack and his eyes wide.
He stared at his empty hand. At the spreading pool of blood and the splash of wine mixing together.
“Oops.”
The knife-thrower’s head whipped toward the fallen caster. Everyone was staring at the unexpected tableau. A heartbeat of distraction.
Gabriel closed the distance in two strides.
He caught the man’s knife arm, redirected the blade past his own hip, and drove his elbow into the exposed throat.
Cartilage crunched. The knife-thrower staggered back, choking, and Gabriel followed, wrenching the blade free, reversing it, burying it under the man’s ribs before he could recover.
The body slumped against the wall.
Silence. Then the bruiser’s wet moaning from the floor, hands still clutched around his ruined leg.
Voices from across the hall.
“No, Wendy, leave it!” A man’s voice.
“I will not!” A woman answered.
The fight had been loud, too loud for the pre-dawn quiet of a respectable inn.
The door across the hall flew open. A woman in a nightgown stood there, candle in hand, mouth already forming a question.
She saw the bodies. The blood. Two half-naked men standing in the wreckage.
She screamed.
The hallway filled with the sound of slamming doors and rising voices.
The woman’s scream had acted as a dinner bell for the curious, and now a man in striped pajamas and a pot-bellied merchant were peering into the room, faces pale and eyes wide.
From the stairwell, a rough voice bellowed for the Watch .
Gabriel stepped over the corpse with the cratered skull, his adrenaline crash leaving him jittery and sharp. He looked at Miles, who was staring at the shards of the bottle.
“Oops?” Gabriel wiped a splatter of someone else’s blood from his cheek. “You bash a man’s brains in with a vintage noir, and all you have to say is ‘oops’?”
“It was... heavier than I expected.” Miles looked like last night’s dinner might make a reappearance. He touched his own bleeding forehead, seemingly surprised by the wetness. “I didn’t think it would....”
“Not judging, darling. Impressed.”
The meat-shield on the floor let out a ragged, gurgling sob, clutching his ruined hamstring. The sound seemed to break the trance of the audience in the hall. The weight of a dozen eyes shifted from the carnage to him.
He was standing in the center of a charnel house in nothing but loose drawstring pants.
Sweat cooled rapidly on his bare chest, making him feel shrunken and exposed.
He wasn’t a fighter or a lord in that moment; he was a spectacle.
A curiosity for the neighbors to gawk at.
The old instinct to hide, to make himself small and invisible, locked his joints. He couldn’t move.
Miles moved for him. He abandoned his spot on the floor and snatched Gabriel’s silk dressing gown from the hook. He got Gabriel into it and cinched the belt tight with trembling but gentle hands before pulling on his own robe. It was a shield, flimsy as it was.
“Alright, that’s enough gawking! Shoo!” Mistress Riding tutted from the stairs. She bustled through the crowd on the landing, clad in a shapeless woolly dressing gown and hair-papers, swatting the merchant’s arm with a folded newspaper like he was a misbehaving cat.