III #2
The desperate necessity for mass transit in the lower portion of the city had seen to the creation of the Manhattan Railway and the spectacular locomotives that ran its elevated rails above the streets.
Powered by simple steam pneumatics installed underneath the tracks, the locomotives pulling the passenger cabs were propelled up and down the lengths of Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues at all hours of the day, with the exception of no Sunday service on Second and Ninth.
I was quite an admirer of the whole setup.
I took the first three steps, stopped abruptly, and turned.
The addition of the stairs had brought me to eye level with Gunner, who’d been walking behind me, and it was an odd experience—looking at him straight on instead of up.
I looked up at everyone, after all, but with Gunner, I found that I sort of…
enjoyed it. Perhaps it was because he never used his six feet as a means to threaten or overpower.
“That wasn’t what I meant to say.”
Gunner asked, “Which part?”
“All the parts.” I shook my head and asked, “No Stetson?”
“Hardly matches the trends of Broadway.”
“But I’m certain you’ve got that Waterbury.”
Gunner’s mouth twitched and his eyes had that amused glint to them. He tugged back the lapels of both his winter and suit coat to show he’d gone with a black shoulder holster instead of a low-hanging hip holster. “What sort of man do you take me for?”
“One prepared for anything.”
“I can’t rest on my laurels, Gillian.” Gunner hid the weapon. “I’ve a reputation to uphold.”
“And you’re number one on the wanted list again,” I concluded.
“Are you flirting with me?” There was the smallest suggestion of a playful lilt to Gunner’s voice.
“Simply stating the facts as they are.”
“I do appreciate a man who strokes my ego.” Gunner reached a hand toward my face, but I leaned back, allowing him to caress only air. “Let me touch you,” he said, very calm and very matter-of-fact.
“Not here.”
“Who’s to see?” Gunner countered, taking a look over his shoulder at the empty stretch of sidewalk in our wake.
I inhaled a shaky breath. “There are over a million people in this city,” I answered. “Anyone might see.”
Gunner stared at me. It was that look of dissection, where he took me apart to study my blackened inner workings. “One million,” he eventually repeated, and a plume of cold air escaped his mouth.
“That’s right.”
Gunner’s gaze briefly flicked overhead at the rumble of an incoming train. He started up the stairs, brushed by me, and said, “I see little has changed during our brief separation.”
The cold air on my face as Gunner moved by felt as if I’d been slapped. I turned and watched as he continued up toward the platform. “What does that mean?”
“You’ve been taking breaths that do nothing for you.”
The Buchanan bachelor hotel stood on the corner of Twenty-Seventh and Fourth Avenue.
It was an eight-story love letter to architect H.H.
Richardson, the fellow responsible for Trinity Church in Boston.
Romanesque revival in style, The Buchanan was built with a mixture of red brick and brownstone, and adorned with a polychromatic facade, arched windows, and a copper roof.
The falling snow was sticking to the fire escape that ran down the building’s front.
Gunner stopped at the curb and stared at the structure. “You live in a hotel?”
“It’s an apartment hotel,” I corrected. “No kitchen, but I have access to the restaurant on the top floor. It’s becoming popular in the city—long-term living exclusive to unmarried men.” I looked up at him and concluded, “Very private.”
“How interesting.” He took a step onto the street.
“Gunner?” I said, so quiet that I was certain the snow was louder and he hadn’t heard me.
But Gunner turned.
“I want to apologize.”
Gunner moved back to my side—too close—no, not close enough—and asked, “For?”
“Our conversation at the El.” I lowered my head and stared at the snow collecting on the buttons of my shoes.
It was easier to lay bare my cowardice when one of the most courageous men I knew wasn’t boring a hole straight through my heart with just a look.
“I realize that I was the one who made you come here—”
“No one makes me do anything,” Gunner interrupted. “Even you.”
“Right. Of course. I meant to say, I’m grateful you’ve come to New York. But that sort of expression of romance isn’t—we can’t. There are certain establishments on the Bowery where we could touch and be around others, but—”
“Gillian.”
“Yes?”
“Stop staring at your shoes.”
I swallowed hard and raised my head.
Gunner’s face had softened around the edges.
I’m not certain I’d have even noticed the change before that all-too-brief tumble in the sheets together, but after having witnessed Gunner’s unguarded expressions during the throes of passion and sated bliss afterward…
well, I’d memorized that look. Carried it with me.
I’d been the one to do that to him, and it was incredible.
“Do you remember what I told you in Arizona?” Gunner asked.
“I remember everything.”
He smiled. Just a little. Just enough. “Some men like us, they find happiness. You’ll be one of them, so long as you stop apologizing for your existence in this world.” Gunner put his free hand briefly to his own chest and patted. “ This doesn’t change, but attitudes do. Starting with your own.”
Twenty seconds ago, I had been Atlas, bearing the sky on my shoulders, a burden that was to be mine for all eternity. And then it was like someone had found me on the most western edge of the world and lifted enough weight that I was able to raise my head and see the stars for the first time.
“Gunner—”
With no warning, the atmosphere prickled around me, raised painful gooseflesh across my body, and then a faraway searing heat burrowed itself under my skin.
Fire .
I turned sharply to face east, studying the distant stairs to the El platform from where we’d disembarked at Third Avenue.
I shifted my focus to study the thread-like appendages of magic as they flowed around a few pedestrians, but the energy didn’t linger, didn’t light them up like a lighthouse on the ocean’s edge.
Where had that artificial spark come from?
I quickly tugged my gloves off, shoved them into my coat pocket, and held one out, palm up.
I allowed the tendrils of raw and unused magic to coil around my scarred fingers, then closed my fist over it and gave a tug.
Like a bullet shot, the magic carried my own energy along two separate pathways in a dizzying rush before each fractured and splintered into a tangle of—something that made no sense.
I could feel the whisks of a spell originating somewhere in the chaotic fray of the Five Points downtown.
But the detonation was significantly closer.
And manufactured for sure. There was a gaping wound in the atmosphere where the spell hadn’t replaced the borrowed magic with the lifeforce of the caster.
“Gillian?”
I startled, lost the visual hold on the magic around me, and turned to see Gunner had reached into his coat, hand resting on the butt of his Waterbury.
“I’m okay.” But even as I heard myself speak, I distantly registered how automatic the answer had been.
How disingenuous I sounded. I was quite adept at lying, but this injury to the atmosphere was so sudden, so toxic, and so perplexing that I was too distracted to attempt sincerity.
What was I to do? I couldn’t inform Moore. Not exactly, anyway. And I couldn’t leave Gunner in order to ferret out the cause on my own—not when this evening had been so anticipated and he’d traveled so far.
“Gillian,” Gunner said again, a bit more insistent.
I hesitated to shake the event off but flexed my hands a few times and did my best to ignore an after-current that rippled through me as if the heartbeat of the city had shuddered.
“Come with me,” I told Gunner before hastening across the street, snow crunching underfoot as I approached the front doors to the hotel.
“What was that?” Gunner questioned, his long legs and sure stride keeping an easy pace with me.
“Never mind it,” I answered.
“Good evening, Mr. Hamilton,” the doorman called as we approached.
“Dawson,” I greeted the doorman, who wore a long coat and hat.
We stopped before the door he held open, and I motioned to Gunner.
“This is—John Gaylord. A friend of my family’s.
” I glanced at Gunner in time to watch him tip the bowler he wore at a rakish angle toward Dawson.
“He’ll be a guest of mine for a few days. ”
Dawson didn’t appear to find the story suspicious. He said to Gunner, “Welcome to The Buchanan, Mr. Gaylord.”
“Thank you,” Gunner answered.
“Happy New Year, Dawson,” I said.
“And to you, sir.”
I stepped into the lobby, shook my coat, and then walked down a short hallway.
The lower portion of the walls were paneled with polished mahogany.
Above that were living motifs built into the walls—an amalgamation of switches and screws and cogs, all moving in an unhurried harmony to depict murals of the New York skyline.
The wall art transitioned from day to night in time with the gentle ticktock produced by the gleaming mechanisms. Rounding the corner, I took the stairs on the left.
The handrail was cut from the same dark wood as the walls, and the iron-wrought balusters shone from a recent buffing.
“John Gaylord,” Gunner murmured to my back.
“Quiet.”
“If that name was any less inconspicuous, it’d be suspect.”
He had a point, I supposed. With his six feet of perfectly sculpted masculinity, eyes like sapphire brooches seen on Millionaire’s Row, and that husky commanding voice, Gunner stood out.
Anyone with lingering appreciation for his uncommon aesthetic would have surely expected him to have an uncommon name to match.
But that name belonged to me.