Moonshadows (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moonshadows) wrote2013-06-01 06:34 am
moonshadows) wrote2013-06-01 06:34 am
mGabriel 1
Rain. It made the neighborhood seem deserted, with everyone staying inside out of the chilly showers. Even the punks and thugs were staying off the streets. He didn't mind; made his walk home at the end of his shift kind of relaxing. Like he was some kind of urban panther, king of the concrete jungle, and none dared approach him.
Until there was a noise behind him.
Gabriel Reyes whirled, both hands in the pockets of his POLICE hoodie, one gripping his badge and the other curling into a set of brass knuckles. A slight figure stared back at him, looking young and terrified in her sweatpants and sweatshirt. Pale face, blue eyes, blonde hair pulled back. Fuck. Lost tourist? He shook off the brass knuckles, grateful for his habit of wearing at least one piece of POLICE-emblazoned clothing at all times because he was very aware of how much like a thug he looked otherwise.
"Sir?" she called, her voice thin and quiet over the rain. "Are you Gabriel?"
European accent. Lost tourist. But how did she know his name, did one of the neighborhood abuelas tell her to look for him?
He pulled out the badge and held it up, shaking the hood back at the same time. "Yes. Gabriel Reyes, LAPD. Are you lost? Do you need help?"
She turned and ran, making good time despite what looked like limping with both legs. Right. Gabriel put his badge away, flipped his hood back up, and resumed walking to his apartment. He wasn't going to chase some lost white girl at night. She nagged at him, though, all the way home. Lucio was chilling behind the front desk, oversized headphones, head bouncing with the beat of whatever he was listening to. Gabriel tapped the counter and he sat up, taking the headphones off.
"Gabriel! My man! What can I do for you?"
"Anyone come by asking for me?" Gabriel asked, trying not to frown.
Lucio nodded "Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah, this little blonde chickie asked if you lived here, but then ran away when I said yes. If she comes back, you want me send her up?"
Gabriel frowned out at the rain. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Yeah. Send her up. Thanks, man."
He held out one fist; Lucio bumped it with his own.
"You got it, Gabriel. Hey, have a good night, alright?"
That made him smile briefly. "I'll try."
The elevator beckoned silently from the lobby. Not this time, asshole, Gabriel thought fiercely as he pushed open the door to the fire stairs. It was only four flights. Hardly even a warm-up. Plus, it announced to the abuelas that he was home. One of them - he had no idea how they decided which one - was bound to send her daughter or granddaughter out with a covered dish, to make sure he had a good, hot meal at the end of his day. He appreciated it, he really did. The entire building was his extended family, the family he'd never really had growing up. It was Carmen tonight, waiting at his door with a covered dish wrapped in a towel.
"Mami said you needed something warm after that cold rain," she said as he unlocked the door and held it open for her.
She knew the way to the kitchen, with its little table-for-two in the corner. By the time he'd followed her in, she already had the square dish unwrapped and the silverware set beside it.
"Gracias, Carmen," he said, giving her a brief hug. "Your mami is a saint."
That made her laugh. "Only fair for a saint to feed an angel, then. Hmm?"
Gabriel laughed and mock-lunged for the towel, making as if he would snatch it away and snap it at her bottom. She laughed more and danced out of the way, back towards the door. "You bring that back in the morning, we give you some breakfast to eat on the way to work!"
Then the door closed behind her. Smiling, Gabriel shrugged out of his hoodie and hung it on the back of the chair. You don't have any food, Liao chided any time she came over. Don't tell me you live on delivery. She didn't understand. She couldn't understand. Why do you live in a slum? I know you could afford to live in a much better neighborhood. Gabriel poured himself a glass of water and sat down, lifting the lid to inhale the fragrant steam rising from his dinner. He wasn't just a cop; he was part of the fabric of the community. He knew this neighborhood the way he never could from a middle-class suburb. He became a cop to protect people, damn it, and he couldn't do that as an outsider.
He showered after dinner, shaved and put on a pair of sweatpants with POLICE running down the leg. It wouldn't be the first time he slept on the couch, but if he was potentially getting woken up, he needed to be presentable. A generic black shirt would do. But then a finger of unease traced a path down his spine, and he put on socks and boots. The hoodie was still damp but he shrugged it back on, brass knuckles and wallet in one pocket, keys and badge in the other. Phone needed to be charged; he plugged it in and set it on the coffee table. There; he was as prepared as he was going to get.
Gabriel cuddled up to a wadded-up blanket and stretched out, asleep in seconds without even turning off the lights.
===
Sunlight woke him first, and the realization that he'd rolled onto his back. That didn't seem right; this was too hard a surface to be his couch, but he had blackout curtains in his bedroom. Cautiously, he kept his face relaxed and listened.
Silence. Quiet rustling. Birdsong?
The fuck?
Caution thrown to the wind, Gabriel opened his eyes and looked to his right. Grass. Bushes. A small, pathetic tree. A steep-as-shit wooded slope on the left side, with a game trail winding up into it. He rolled to his left and came up facing-
-a cliff? Holy shit, he'd been sleeping next to a cliff. Four feet and a shitty tree were all that had kept him from rolling to his death in the night. He was on the slope of some mountain, fuck if he knew where. How the hell did he get here, wherever here was?
Okay. Don't panic. Take stock.
Okay.
He was still wearing everything he'd gone to sleep wearing. Wallet, brass knuckles, keys, badge. Knife in the boot. No phone, because that had been on the table. Okay. He felt rested, which meant he'd gotten about eight or nine hours of sleep. Judging by where the sun was on the horizon, he was probably in the same time zone, but the air was cool enough that he was grateful he was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. Whether that was solely from the fact that he was halfway up a mountain or if he had been transported somewhere more north, he couldn't guess.
Right. Stock taken. Next?
There was a path. Paths usually led somewhere, even if that "somewhere" was only relevant to the animals that had made it. Gabriel turned his attention to the path, examining it for signs of human passing. It took several feet, but he saw an impression in a particularly barren bit that looked like a right foot going uphill.
Uphill it was.
The trail, thankfully, did not have many places where it opened up onto the cliff. It switched back in a zigzag up the mountain, with plenty of trees (albeit small trees) and bushes to block his view of the fall that awaited him if he left the trail. Gabriel was thoroughly grateful that he walked to and from the precinct, and that he spent so much time in the ghetto-ass gym the neighborhood thugs had claimed as their unofficial clubhouse. Nothing quite took the fight out of a thug like knowing that the officer who lives in the neighborhood can bench 300 easy and knows enough martial arts to have you on the ground before you can blink.
Of course, being in top physical form just meant that slogging up this shitty-ass trail was only miserable instead of completely godawful. At least it was a chilly day; that kept the sweating down. He still unzipped the hoodie halfway, though.
He had no idea how long he had been climbing when, after a particularly steep section, he emerged into a remarkably flat and even field. He took a long minute to examine his surroundings while catching his breath, vaguely grateful that exertion meant he wasn't starving the way he would be when he cooled down. The open area was mostly dry, scraggly, knee-high grass with some weeds and seemed to be about the size of a really generous lawn in an upper-class suburb. Huge bushes easily 20-30 feet tall and some slightly-taller trees ringed about three-fourths of the perimeter, making it difficult to tell how far the flat area extended. There didn't seem to be any more slope rising up in any direction, though, making this the top of the mountain.
Granted, Gabriel was a city kid, but he was pretty sure this wasn't how mountaintops were supposed to look.
Especially not with the house sitting there.
The trail he'd been following disappeared into the grass, but it was clear that whoever had left that footprint - his current suspect for whoever had abducted him out of his apartment and left him on a fucking cliff - had gone through the grass to the two-story wooden house with a big-ass porch that was just sitting on a mountaintop like it had every right to be there. As he marched through the field, he took stock of the house.
It was weathered, that was for sure, but it was also on a mountaintop and didn't seem to be in disrepair. No broken windows, no missing shingles. Nothing sitting on the porch, either, although there was an area right in front of the steps that looked like, at one point, it had been a stone-paved path. Gabriel tried to guess at where it had led, looked at the bush-and-tree perimeter, and saw what seemed to be another trail leading downhill.
Fuck that. He'd deal with the house first, and leave the woods as a last resort.
There was a big brass knocker on the door. Gabriel knocked firmly a few times and then waited, listening. Mostly silence, some birdsong, someone talking to someone else inside the house. Whoever they were, he couldn't make out age or gender or even words - only emotion, and they were having an argument. Probably about him.
He zipped up his hoodie and knocked again. "Hello! Anyone home!" It was his Cop Voice, the one most people usually heard saying 'open up, this is the police'. It tended to get results, and this time was no exception.
With one last hissed command, footsteps rattled against the floor and Gabriel stuck his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, fingers worming into his brass knuckles and curling around his badge. The door opened to reveal an older woman who looked surprised but also suspicious to see him.
Well, he supposed when you lived at the top of the mountain, you didn't get many visitors.
She was slim, of Middle-Eastern origins or descent, left eye a tawny brown with an Eye of Horus tattoo under the corner and the right one behind an eyepatch. Grey coat, cream-colored sweater, plain pants, blue hijab with silvered hair peeking out from underneath.
"Good morning, ma'am," he said briskly, pulling out his badge and holding it up for inspection. "Gabriel Reyes, Los Angeles Police Department. Mind if I ask you a few questions?"
"You are quite out of your jurisdiction, Officer Reyes," she replied crisply in an accent that said Arabic was probably her native language, but that she'd been fluent in English for at least a decade or two. "How did you get here?"
Gabriel put his badge away. "That was the first question I wanted to ask you, ma'am. I woke up on the cliffside a ways down the trail there-" he nodded with his head to the one he'd emerged from "-with no recollection of how I got there."
The woman frowned. It was the sort of look mothers got when they know one of their precious darlings has gotten into some shit, they just aren't sure yet what the little brat's managed to do. "Why don't I LET YOU INSIDE," she said, shouting the last words over her shoulder into the house, "and we can discuss this further."
She didn't move from the doorway, though, which was just fine with him.
"Ma'am, I saw evidence of someone going up the trail and to this house ahead of me. Do you have reason to believe that the person or persons who transported me here are in your house?"
"Officer Reyes," she said in something between pity and disdain, "we are several hours north of Los Angeles. It is quite impossible for anyone who lives here to have made the trip twice in one night, much less with a passenger."
Gabriel wasn't sure how he felt about that. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he didn't have time to contemplate that because the biggest goddamn dog he'd ever seen in the flesh managed to worm past the woman and get out onto the porch. He wasn't sure what breed the monster was - fuck, for all he knew that was some crazy wolf/bear hybrid. At the shoulder, stood easily as tall as the woman's waist and its head was massive. broad chest, shaggy all over, and could probably seriously injure someone just by being clumsy because it also had the dopiest expression Gabriel had ever seen on a dog short of Goofy. Regardless, when it seemed intent on sniffing his crotch, he backed up and prepared to get a forearm under its chin.
The woman grabbed the shaggy monster by a collar Gabriel hadn't even seen and commanded it back into the house. "That's Jesse," she said apologetically. "He's a gentle soul, but very clumsy. thinks he's a lot smaller than he actually is."
"What breed is he?" Gabriel asked warily. "I've never seen anything like that."
"Mastiff," she answered promptly. A little too promptly. "Why don't you come in, Officer Reyes?"
Well, no reason not to, right? Gabriel followed her inside, past the staircase and several doors before the hallway opened into a living room in what must have been, weirdly, the back of the house. Or maybe the porch was connected to the back door? The living room looked pretty normal for the rest of the house: couches, coffee table, chairs, bookshelves, plants everywhere, furry mountain on a rug.
"Jesse," she said idly, "you stay seated or I get a new fur coat. Would you like some tea, Officer Reyes? Something to eat, maybe?"
Gingerly, Gabriel sat on a couch. "That would be lovely, thank you, Ms...?"
"Amari," she supplied primly. "Ana Amari."
"That would be lovely, thank you, Ms. Amari. I'm still concerned about how I wound up here, though, and how I'm going to get home."
Amari pursed her lips. "That's an excellent question. We're about thirty miles away from the nearest person I know of, and you might have guessed I don't have a car."
Thirty miles. Fuck. He had no idea if that was as the bird flew or as the human slogged along mountain trails, but either way...not good. He was already going to be missed, Liao blowing up his phone wanting to know where the fuck he was. Ana gave him a look of sympathy and patted his shoulder.
"I know it's a bit disheartening, Officer Reyes, but my daughter Fareeha should be back home in a few days and she can lead you to civilization. I'd do it myself, but I'm not as young as I used to be."
The dog - if you wanted to call it that - shifted in an agitated way, and Ana gave it the hairy eyeball.
"I'll be back with tea in a few minutes, and I'll see what I can do for a snack to tide you over until dinner. If Jesse misbehaves, swat his nose."
She left the room. Gabriel and the dog eyed each other. Eventually, Jesse laid his head back down on the rug in attempts to look forlorn and Gabriel sat on one of the couches. A few days. Fuck. How long would Liao wait before getting Lucio to let her into his apartment? Had any of the neighbors seen or heard anything? Carmen's mother would be worried when he didn't stop by to return the dish and get breakfast. Someone would have knocked on his door by now, assuming whoever abducted him hadn't left it open.
He hoped Liao would come looking for him soon enough to gather any evidence the perp left behind. If there was any evidence. Maybe the abuelas would report him missing. Shit. He had to get home.
Amari came back in with a tea tray and set it down. Teapot, teacups, cream, sugar, a plate of little tea cookies, and a...spare plate?
"How do you take your tea, Officer Reyes?"
"I don't usually drink tea," he said, watching her pour into both teacups and then add milk and sugar to one. Then she put the plate on the floor, set a handful of cookies onto it, and poured the tea over them. For the dog, he supposed.
She refilled the cup, added cream and sugar, and handed it to him. "It's my own blend," she said. "From the garden. Try the cookies."
At a loss for anything to say, Gabriel sipped tea and nibbled cookies while Jesse slobbered over his tea-cookie-mush.
"I get the feeling you're not much for small talk," Amari said delicately. "Let me be straightforward, then: I want to ask you a couple of questions."
"Why?" he asked warily.
"I want to get a sense of...you. You're not the first one to awaken halfway down the trail."
He wasn't? Well, wasn't that interesting?
"Alright, what do you want to know?"
"Can you remember anything at all from yesterday?"
With effort, he kept his answer from sounding sarcastic. "Got off shift. Went to the gym. Walked home. Had dinner, showered, and went to bed."
She looked intently at him. "You don't recall meeting any strangers that night?"
The intent look was making him nervous. Especially since he didn't have a clear recollection of his trip home - it was raining, he knew that, but he couldn't bring up any unique memories between leaving the gym and running up the stairs to his floor.
"Did you have any strange dreams?" Amari asked, apparently taking his discomfited expression as an answer.
"None. Out like a light, slept like the dead until I woke up to sunlight on my face."
That's...unusual," she said, frowning. "Most people have strange, vivid dreams before they get here."
"How many people have wound up here?" he asked, almost afraid of what the answer would be.
"Ten in the last few decades. All healthy adults, mostly men but some women. I took them to the nearest ranger station, thirty miles away, and never saw them again."
Well, that wasn't...so bad.
"Anyway, since you'll be staying with us a few days, I need to set some rules. Do not go upstairs. For any reason," she finished sternly.
Suspicious. Gabriel nodded, but made a note of it.
"I'm serious, Officer Reyes. There's...personal things up there."
"Of course."
Amari didn't seem convinced, but she let it go. "Alright. Second, don't go outside without me or Jesse with you. It's dangerous out there."
"I am still interested in finding the person whose tracks I saw on the trail leading here, Ms. Amari." He kept his tone firm and even without being threatening.
She gave him a pointed, slightly-offended look. "The only one who has been up that trail, aside from you, was my husband. He has since left to go hunting, and in any case is incapable of making the journey to Los Angeles by himself. Besides," she added in a softer tone, "he's a very friendly sort. If he had encountered you on his way up, he would have told me if not brought you up himself."
Gabriel nodded to concede the point.
"Third and final rule, you sleep on the couch. I'm afraid I have no spare beds," she finished apologetically.
"Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Amari," Gabriel said with a half-bow. "If you need any chores done, don't be afraid to put me to work."
She looked pleased at that, but said, "Don't be silly. You're a guest. Follow the rules, that's all. If you'll excuse me, I need to check on something upstairs."
"By all means," he replied.
She left the room, leaving him alone with the dog.
===
The afternoon was...annoying. Lunch was fruit and dense, nut-and-seed bread that was filling but mostly flavorless. There was nothing to do but pace and brood; all of Amari's books were in Arabic. He broke up the monotony by doing push-ups, hoodie and boots off to the side while Jesse watched with his dumb dog face. Dinner was more of the same, plus fish. Where the fuck did Amari get fish on the top of a mountain? The husband who supposedly went off hunting never reappeared. Finally, he stretched out on the couch and tried not to worry about his neighbors thinking he was dead.
Gabriel had never been a vivid dreamer. Not since puberty. Before then, he'd had dreams where he started out male - dressed in jeans and a tee, short hair, just one of the boys - and then suddenly he was in a pink dress and pigtails and everyone was laughing at him. But after puberty, those dreams had dried up and while sometimes he woke up knowing that he'd been dreaming, he never remembered anything about them.
Now, however, he was standing in his apartment and he was sure it was a dream because his phone wasn't on the table, plugged in or no. There was no one bringing him food. And when he went into the kitchen, the dish from his dinner wasn't there. A noise from the living room, and then Amari walked into the kitchen and started poking around in his cabinets, ignoring him entirely.
"Do you mind?" he asked sharply.
Amari whirled to look at him. "You can see me?"
He folded his arms across his chest. "No. I'm asking someone who I can't see if they mind not going through my stuff."
"There's no need to be rude," she sniffed.
"Says the woman investigating my cabinets without so much as a hello."
"Hello," she said pointedly. "Now, Officer Reyes, if you don't mind, this is a dream and I would like to finish doing nonsensical dream things like checking the contents of your cabinets."
Dream or not, he didn't like people poking around in his things. Could he control this? He willed a glass of whiskey into his hand; lo and behold, it appeared.
"Go right ahead," he said, sipping his drink and concentrating.
The next cabinet Amari opened exploded with confetti and little rubber cocks.
"Very mature," she grumbled as she brushed little paper bits out of her clothing. Then she opened his fridge and frowned. "Do you have any food in here at all?"
"Don't you get on my case about that," he growled. "It's none of your business what I do or do not eat."
She huffed and went to the linen closet. When she opened the door, he substituted the other-planar view from inside the fridge in Ghostbusters, complete with the devil-dog growling 'Zuul'.
Amari closed the door and glared at him. "Very funny, Officer Reyes."
"Would have been the fridge but I didn't think of it in time." Smirking, he sipped his whiskey.
"This is going to sound odd," she said shortly, "but where would you keep important things?"
"Somewhere safe," he snapped back. "And no, I'm not telling you where. That's a security risk."
"Take a nap," she suggested, reaching for the knob to his bedroom door. "You need rest."
"Aren't I dreaming? Isn't that resting?"
Why was his bedroom door closed? He never closed the door. Turned the room into a furnace.
"I need to concentrate. Stop talking."
Amari muttered something in a language Gabriel didn't know - probably Arabic - and turned the handle.
The room was pitch black. Not just dark, but impenetrably dark. Gabriel's drink turned into his service weapon.
"Something's wrong."
That got him a withering glare that he ignored. "I can handle it, Officer Reyes. Just go to sleep."
"The hell I will," he growled, moving up behind her. "What's in there?"
She whirled and pushed him against the wall. "No, don't-"
"What's in there?" he roared, willing the wall out of the way and side-stepping her, weapon aimed straight at the unnatural darkness where his bedroom should be.
The world tipped and went weird. Something cold tugged at him, making his stomach do flips while he broke out into a cold sweat. Vertigo sent him to his knees, jaws clenched. Amari looked terrified. He found himself curling into a ball, hyperventilating, and looked up at his bedroom door.
An unnatural, stilted, jet-black body reached through the doorway, dripping gooey strands of blackness. Its face was a birdlike skull with blank sockets for eyes. It tilted its head and leaned towards Gabriel, making a soft but somehow inquisitive sound somewhere between a growl an a hiss, and Gabriel had the feeling that it was seeing him for the first time. It stretched out an arm-
Gabriel woke up, heart pounding, soaked in sweat, to find himself sitting bolt upright on Amari's couch. What the fuck was that?
"Bad dream?" a sympathetic voice drawled from right behind him, fuck.
He practically teleported to his feet and about three feet away, hands out, ready to fight. There was a very hairy, very naked man sitting on the arm of the couch near where his head had been. That wasn't creepy at all.
"Who the fuck are you?" he snarled.
The hairy man grinned. "I'm Jesse," he said brightly.
"The fuck you are," Gabriel spat. "What, did you kill the dog and steal his collar?" Only after the words were out of his mouth did he consciously register that the man was, in fact, wearing the dog's collar.
"I am the dog!" the man announced cheerfully.
Gabriel relaxed minutely. "So I'm still dreaming."
"Nope. Sometimes I'm the dog, and sometimes I'm a man."
"Does Amari know?" Gabriel asked, giving up on 'I am the dog' for the time being and falling back on establishing where the lines were.
The man-dog looked offended. "Of course! Everyone here knows. Except you. Ana says that people like you don't like people like us anymore." His head lowered, remarkably like a shamed dog. "She thought it would be better if you didn't see us."
"People like me," Gabriel repeated slowly. "Do you mean cops, Latinos, men..."
"Humans!"
Humans? Then what the fuck was this whackjob? He wasn't really...
"People like you?" he asked, almost not wanting the man to answer.
"Yup! Me, Jamison, Angela, Reinhardt, all those guys. They're upstairs - mostly - because Ana told them to hide."
"And they're...like you." Gabriel couldn't keep the doubt out of his voice.
Jesse - if that was his real name - tilted his head. "Well, I'm the only werewolf."
"Werewolf." Gabriel hated how much sense that one word made.
"Yessir! But we've got a harpy, a pixie, two vampires..."
"Is...Ana...?"
Jesse shook his head, hair waving everywhere. "Naw. She an' Fareeha are witches."
"Riiiiiight." What was her husband, a mummy? Frankenstein's Monster?
"You don't believe me?" Jesse asked, looking remarkably like a kicked dog.
"I'm still holding out hope that this is all a really vivid hallucination," Gabriel said dryly.
Jesse perked up. "Come outside with me!"
Like he was just going to go outside with a naked man who claimed he was a werewolf. "Why?"
"Ana told me to not shift in the house," he admitted sheepishly. "I break stuff. Not on purpose."
Gabriel was too tired to deal with this shit. "Okay. Fine. But then I'm going back to bed."
He followed Jesse down the hall and out the front door, trying not to look at the hairiest ass he'd ever seen on something shaped like a person. The night was chilly, and as Gabriel stood there grateful for his hoodie, a thought occurred to him.
"Hey! If Ana thought it would be better for me to not see you, then why..."
Jesse looked incredibly guilty but then dropped to all fours and started to transform into the walking mountain of fur as if to say sorry, can't answer, turning into a dog now.
Bastard.
The irritation at being denied an answer almost negated the mind-boggling fact that Jesse was a motherfucking werewolf. Smug asshole pranced up and trotted in a circle around him, but he was done. He could deal with this little bombshell in the morning.
"Right. Werewolf. I'm going back to bed."
Ignoring the hopeful nose prodding at him, he walked back inside and down the hall to the living room.
"You have a rug," he said pointedly as the damn mutt seemed about to join him on the couch. "If I wake up covered in dog hair, I'm going to neuter you."
Tail clamped firmly between his legs, Jesse curled up on his rug and gave him a reproachful look, which he ignored. As he was settling in on the couch, however, a tiny Tinkerbell-like figure whirred up and glared at him from point-blank range. At least, he thought it was a glare. Kinda hard to make out expression on a tiny face in the dark.
"Nope," he said preemptively. "I'm not dealing with anything else tonight."
"The fuck, you cunt?" what he assumed was the pixie complained in a tiny Australian accent. "I've been waitin' an entire day to talk to your human ass, and you can't even be fucked to speak to me?"
"You want to talk to my ass?" Gabriel rolled over to face the back of the couch. "Go for it. You want to talk to the rest of me, you wait until morning or you get to spend the rest of the night in my shoe."
The pixie seemed to be trying to cuss him out, but couldn't think of anything better than 'dumb'. Gabriel tugged his hood up over his head and was all set to tune him out when what he imagined was a tiny foot impacted against one asscheek. It felt like someone flicked a skittle at him. Then it happened again, and again, and settled into a rhythm.
Gabriel tightened the muscles in his butt and tried not to laugh as the pixie bitched about hurting his foot.
The kicking didn't resume, the bitching faded out, and Gabriel fell asleep with a smile on his face.
===
"Good morning, Officer Reyes. How did you sleep?"
Gabriel flipped over to see a blearly-looking Ana shuffle in with a steaming mug of probably tea and sit in one of the chairs. He sat up and stretched.
"Well, there was the dream that you were poking through my cabinets that turned into a nightmare when you tried to go into my bedroom," he said mildly, watching for a guilty reaction, aaaand there it was. "Woke up out of that to find that Jesse is shit at following directions."
Ana looked at the dog in alarm.There may have been outrage. The dog slunk out of the room.
"After that, though, I slept pretty soundly." He gave it a beat, then said, "So, what were you looking for, and did you find it?"
"Officer Reyes, just because you happened to dream-"
"Cut the bullshit," Gabriel interrupted in an even tone. "I know that wasn't a dream. Jesse said you're a witch. The pixie has an Australian accent. I'm a cop, Amari. I know when someone's trying to blow smoke up my ass, and I don't like it. What were you looking for, and did you find it?"
They stared at each other for a long minute.
"I was looking for a clue as to why you were brought here," she said calmly. "You said you experienced no vivid dreams, but in my experience, that means you repressed them."
"So you went looking. Did you find anything?"
She ran one hand over her eyes. "I pray I did not."
"That thing with the bird skull," Gabriel said. When Ana nodded, he asked, "What was it?"
A shudder ran through Amari's body, making her grip her mug and sip from it as though desperate for the warmth. "A representation of something very old, very..."
"Evil?"
"To label it such is simplistic at best," she said with a small shake of her head. "All things have a place, even if that place is...distasteful. Nevertheless, it is hard to attribute anything good to that one. It embodies not only death, but violent death. Murder. It requires a host, seeking out another when its current host withers."
That really wasn't what Gabriel had wanted to hear. "What happens if it doesn't get its new host?"
Amari shook her head. "I do not know. There is much I do not know about it. I have never had a reason to pry too deeply into the affairs of the Reaper."
A chill went down Gabriel's spine, instantly making him irritated at letting something that sounded like superstitious bullshit get to him. But the way that thing had looked at him...
"Right. So you think the Reaper wants me to be its new host," he said just a hair too quickly. "You're a witch, the dog's a hairy dude who's not the brightest. Your husband is...?"
"A half-giant," she said somewhat sheepishly. "The pixie is Jamison."
He nodded. "And the vampires?"
"The Shimada brothers. Hanzo is the elder and Genji, the younger."
"Anyone else I should know about?" he asked, one eyebrow raised.
"Only Angela," Ana said, "but she's not here at the moment. She's a harpy."
"A harpy," he repeated, still struggling to accept that reality was a much weirder place than he thought. Fuck, he better not be part of some gendered prophecy bullshit. "Right. Okay. My blood stays inside my body. Anyone tries to bite me, I will act to defend myself."
Amari nodded. "You are a guest, not a hostage or prisoner. Would you like breakfast? I can introduce you to some of the others after you've eaten. Some of them haven't seen a non-magical human in quite some time, if at all, and are quiet eager to meet you." She glanced at the doorway and frowned. "And I'll have a word with Jesse."
"Good luck," he teased. "Breakfast sounds great, thank you."
He did some warm-up stretches after she left the room, and was about to start a set of push-ups when Jesse slunk back in and curled up on his rug, looking properly shamed.
"Ana yell at you?" he asked, doing lunges instead.
The shaggy mutt gave him something like a glare.
"Don't you look at me in that tone of voice," he chided. "You're the one who decided to introduce yourself."
Ana came back a minute later with a tray. Eggs, smaller than the chicken eggs he was used to; slices of tomato with herbs sprinkled over them; something that absolutely was not oatmeal but had honey and little berries in it; and of course, tea.
"Jesse's had his breakfast," she informed him.
The dog, which had been giving him a pathetic, hopeful look, shot a glare her way and laid his head back down.
Gabriel laughed.
"I've informed the others that they may introduce themselves one at a time," she continued, "and cautioned them that you are prepared to defend yourself if you feel threatened."
"Thank you," he said quietly. "And thank you for breakfast."
Amari smiled. "I'll leave you to it. Enjoy, Officer Reyes."
As soon as she left the room he dug in. Nothing tasted quite like anything he was familiar with, but it was all delicious and he was starving after his hike up the mountain and the two light meals Amari had served him. Almost as soon as he'd finished, an elegant and dignified Asian man walked in and gave him a formal-looking bow.
"Reyes-san, I presume," he said in moderately-accented but cultured English. "I am Hanzo."
One of the vampires. He looked...nothing like a vampire. At least, nothing like a Hollywood vampire. He looked...beautiful. A hair two masculine to be pretty, but still attractive enough to trigger his reflexive denial. Gabriel stood and held one hand out. "A pleasure," he said politely.
Hanzo looked at his hand in displeasure. Awkwardly, Gabriel withdrew it.
"I mean no dishonor," he said in that almost hypnotic voice. "The touch of a vampire has..certain effects upon the recipient. We subdue our prey by making them...pliant. Willing. You may have noticed a subtle effect just from gazing upon me and hearing my voice, despite the fact that I am doing my best to not enthrall you."
Well...that would explain why Gabriel felt like he could listen to Hanzo talk for eternity and not get bored. Also the attraction.
"Yes," he said shortly. "Thank you for your restraint."
Hanzo gave him a dry smile. "You are a guest. It would be gravely dishonorable to feed upon you without explicit consent."
"Which I do not grant," Gabriel said evenly.
"Of course not. I wish only to speak with you, if you are willing, and satisfy only my curiosity."
Gabriel gestures at one of the chairs and sat back down on the couch. "Please, have a seat. I'd love to chat. I've never met a vampire."
As Hanzo settled into one of the chairs, Jesse got up and moved to sit next to him, his head on the vampire's knee. Hanzo started petting him absently. "Tell me, Reyes-san, what walk of life have you chosen?"
"I'm a police officer," he answered. "I protect people who need protecting, and do my best to ensure that people who harm others are punished."
"Admirable, I suppose." Faint derision dripped from the words, raising Gabriel's hackles. "Risking your life for other is a noble pursuit, some might say. Others would disagree, saying that the strong are right to prey upon the weak. What would you say to those others?"
Familiar fires of rage leaped up in Gabriel's heart. "That they better stay the fuck away from my neighborhood, because I'm the strongest motherfucker there and I'll prey on them if they lay a single goddamned hand on my people."
If his heated retort surprised Hanzo, it didn't show.
"If humans are said to be sheep," he said mildly, "then you would be the ram protecting the ewes. Your herd is lucky indeed to have such a protector but you, dare I say, are wasted on them."
"Say that again, cabron," Gabriel snarled.
Hanzo leveled a steady, even look at him. "You are wasted as a protector of such a small flock," he said. "It is truly a shame. While there is no dishonor in what you have done, had you been born something other than human, you could have made a much greater mark upon the world. Children would have been learning your name for centuries to come. I almost envy you."
Gabriel wasn't sure what to make of that. One portion of his mind wondered about the Reaper, and what being its host entailed. Could he be a protector while hosting the embodiment of violent death? Was it wrong to abandon those who had looked to him for protection if it meant he could protect a greater...flock?
"Thank you," he said finally. "I think."
That got him a brief, fluttering, dry smile. "I am a predator, Reyes-san. I understand the importance of a healthy flock, and an attentive protector to keep them happy. I was...groomed...for such a role by my father. If I may ask, what put you on your path?"
A horde of memories he'd tried to keep buried for two decades swarmed up. Dresses. Pigtails. Seeing an illustration of a male body and feeling indignant fury that his didn't look like that. Vindication when his pediatrician uttered the words alpha-five reductase and prescribing testosterone.
"I learned what it was like to be the ewe instead of the ram," he said quietly.
Before Hanzo could respond, footsteps and a voice calling Niiii-saaaaan floated down the hallway.
"My brother, Genji," the vampire said, standing. "I will take my leave of you, Reyes-san, so that you may converse with him in peace."
"Sure." Gabriel watched as vampire and werewolf left the living room.
It was surreal to think of them like that, but apparently that's what his life had become because as much as he wanted to go back to his apartment and his neighbors and his life, he couldn't shake Hanzo's assertion that he could do more. Would he be able to settle back down into being a cop when he knew that werewolves and vampires and harpies and witches were real? Were there cops for supernatural creatures? Did vampires operate like gang bosses or Mafia kingpins, were there vampires in his city that he didn't know about? Who took a vamp to justice if he murdered another vamp?
He was so deep in his thoughts that when the young man bounded into the room with an exuberant "So you're the human! I'm Genji!" and stuck out one hand, Gabriel reflexively shook it before the words had registered.
Instantly, he was embarrassingly aware of how attractive the man was with his charming smile, his eyes that promised some kind of promiscuous pleasure, and he found himself blushing as lust surged through him.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Genji said, pulling his hand back to cover his mouth. "I forgot - humans don't do very well with vampires."
So that's what Hanzo was holding back. Familiar rage surged up to replace the lust, the rage of the weak in the face of the strong.
"I am not prey," he ground out, furious beyond words that this unrepentant little shithead had actually made him feel lust and he was pretty sure Genji had 'forgotten' on purpose.
"Ana said you're a guest." The words didn't sound like a statement. They sounded like an invitation for Gabriel to refute them.
Too bad.
"I am a guest," he growled. "I do not consent. And if you touch me again, you may be the one who winds up losing blood."
The smug little shit didn't look intimidated. He looked pleased.
"Good talk," Gabriel said abruptly, and walked out of the room.
Before Genji could follow, he slipped through a door at random and closed it behind him. Once inside he froze, holding his breath, until he heard the vampire's footsteps go down the hall and up the stairs. Only then did he take a closer look at the room he was in. It looked...pretty much exactly the way he expected a witch's workroom to look, with the exception of a tiny bed and tinier workstation set up on one shelf.
A faint whirring caught his attention and when he turned, the pixie was flying towards him.
"Oi! What're you doing in my room?" the thing demanded.
"Came to say hello," Gabriel lied. "Since I was so rude last night. Gabriel Reyes."
The pixie hovered in front of his face, giving him a tiny scowl. "Jamison," he said grudgingly. Then he pointed to the shelf with the tiny bed. "Now sit down, asshole, you're too tall."
Gabriel sat and watched as the pixie opened a cabinet that looked like a standing jewelry box and pulled out a test tube. When he seemed to have trouble getting it propped upright, Gabriel reached out and held it still.
"Thanks," Jamison said reluctantly. He fluttered around collecting bits of leaf and bark and things Gabriel had no names for, then dumped them in the tube and looked up at the human. "Spit in it," he ordered.
Cautiously, Gabriel brought the test tube to his lips and spat into it before putting it back. Jamison immediately grabbed a long matchstick and started stirring it into an ugly, muddy sludge.
"So...what is it?"
The pixie gave him a haughty look. "Well, you're just a dumb human so I guess you wouldn't know, but it's a potion."
Nothing Gabriel would want to drink. "What's it do?"
"It's a secret," Jamison said, rummaging in a drawer of the cabinet for a stopper. "I'm not telling."
"Even though I helped you make it?"
"Nope."
Gabriel stood up. "That's fine. I'll just ask Ana."
Suddenly, there was a pixie in his face. "No! You can't!"
"Watch me," Gabriel growled in his best I'm not bluffing voice.
The pixie sagged in the air. "Fine. But you can't tell anyone! There's a bunch of wood nymphs down the mountain, and I want to play a prank on them. When you throw this, it smells terrible."
"A stink bomb. Okay."
An unseen hand knocked on the door. "Officer Reyes, are you in there?" Ana called through the wood.
With a muttered expletive, Jamison grabbed the tube and flew through a hole in the ceiling.
Gabriel shrugged and opened the door. "Introduced myself to Jamison," he told a slightly-startled Ana.
"Oh. I spoke with Genji. He's been scolded for what happened earlier, and is doing chores now because of it."
It was nice to see the hostess taking the whole guest thing seriously. Gabriel took a deep breath and forced his temper back down. "I appreciate that," he told her. "Thank you. That was a very uncomfortable situation."
Ana gave him a sympathetic smile and beckoned him out of the room and back to the living room. "You've been thrust into a strange world," she said once they'd sat back down. "It was overwhelming for me when I first learned I was a witch, and I was just a child. If I'd been dropped into this as an adult, I don't think I could have handled it nearly as well as you're managing."
A female voice called out from down the hallway, and Gabriel had a flash of hope that this was Amari's daughter and he'd be going home again, but her cry of 'In here, Angela!' dashed that hope.
The slender blonde who stepped into the living room was absolutely a harpy, with white-gold feathers and a studious expression. She was also familiar, and Gabriel scowled.
"Officer Reyes?"
He shot Ana an accusing look. "I thought you said none of the people who live here could make it to LA and back." One finger pointed straight at the startled harpy. "I saw her on the streets of Los Angeles the night before I woke up on a cliff."
"And it has taken her until now to return," Amari countered coldly.
"Still feels fishy," he insisted. "She specifically asked if I was Gabriel. And then I wake up on your doorstep. How did she know my name?"
Amari looked uncertain at that. "An excellent question. Angela, would you care-" The question died unfinished.
Angela was gone.
===
Gabriel gritted his teeth and tried to be patient as Amari and Hanzo argued Angela's potential guilt or innocence, but it wasn't easy. About two or three minutes in, he braced himself like he was about to sort out a domestic, and started asking questions. It kept the shouting to a minimum, at least. Hanzo distrusted harpies - was that personal, cultural, or a species rivalry, he wondered? - and was convinced that Angela was a traitor. He voiced some of the same concerns as Gabriel had regarding the reason Angela would have been in a human city and looking for him, and apparently she had been telling them she hadn't left the forest, which immediately placed her under suspicion as far as Gabriel was concerned. Amari wasn't convinced, and he suspected she had past history with the harpy that was skewing her perception.
In the end, Hanzo and Jesse stormed off to hunt Angela down. Gabriel doubted the wisdom of trying to track a flying creature from the ground, but this wasn't his fight. The pixie fluttered in almost as soon as the front door slammed shut, and apparently hadn't heard any of the arguing. He had seen Angela fly away, though, and once he got through bragging about what a great healer she was, agreed to try to hunt down where she'd gone.
Amari seemed thoroughly disappointed in the whole situation, but waved off Gabriel's apology. She did accept his offer to help around the house, and herded him outside to instruct him in harvesting things from various plants and trees. He guessed that gardening was her thing, both from the plants in the house and how she seemed to relax in the garden, and gently asked her to tell him more about Angela.
There was a lot Amari wasn't saying, but the gist of it as far as he could tell was they'd both been in the same social circle at one point, but Amari hadn't been there when some kind of heavy drama went down and a bunch of friends had either left or died or both. She insisted the harpy had stayed in the forest, which just made Gabriel suspect that whatever Angela was up to, it was also in the forest, but he kept that to himself.
As they brought their baskets of produce inside, a loud clatter came from the front porch.
"That would be my husband," Amari said happily. "He was gathering firewood and hunting. Get the door for him, would you?"
Gabriel went down the hall and opened the front door to see what absolutely looked like a half-giant holding a full-grown deer in his arms. As he watched, the man braced the animal's struggling body between his legs and snapped its neck with his enormous, bare hands.
"A human!" he boomed gleefully as he set the deer on the porch. "Hanzo! Genji! Come get it while it's still warm!" He took two steps towards Gabriel and swept him into a one-armed hug that he couldn't get out of, despite all the marital arts he knew. "Ana! Where have you been hiding him?"
"He just arrived yesterday," Amari called back from the kitchen.
As the half-giant lumbered past the stairs, still holding Gabriel, he saw Genji scamper down them and out the door. Although he couldn't break the giant's hold, he at least managed to buy himself breathing room. As they got to the kitchen, the giant looked down at him in surprise.
"Oh! is it too tight?" he asked in his booming voice.
"Yes," Amari said sharply. "Let him down, you're suffocating him!"
Apologetically, the giant put him back on the floor and introductions were made. Reinhardt was recruited for helping make lunch, and Amari offered to let Gabriel wait in the living room, but accepted his counter-offer to be a kitchen helper. If the burly half-giant who killed a deer with his bare hands was helping prepare food, then damn it, Gabriel wasn't going to pussy out.
Lunch was more nut-seed bread, with vegetables and venison. It tasted weird, but Gabriel had stopped being a picky eater when he moved into his apartment and been adopted by the abuelas. Not only was it polite to eat what someone had made for you, but he was still running on a calorie deficit from yesterday. He helped wash dishes after lunch and then helped Ana make jam while Reihardt told the plot of Shrek in a professional storytelling way. It was pretty neat to hear, actually.
Once the jam was done, Reinhardt fetched some wood from outside and made a fire in the living room's fireplace. Amari settled down with a book, the half-giant settled on a giant pillow on the floor that Gabriel had assumed was for the werewolf, and Gabriel sat on the couch he'd spent so much time on already. He asked Gabriel about his path in life, which led to a surprisingly satisfying discussion of chivalry and the obligation of the strong to protect the weak. Gabriel described his apartment building, and how it may not have been the best but it was where his people lived, so he chose to live there with them and protect them. How the abuelas brought him food so that they could thank him in that small way, and the times frantic women (and some younger sons, boys and teenagers) had pounded on his door late at night or early in the morning, needing a protector.
He could see Ana watching over the edge of her book, see the sympathy in her eye as he described the life he was afraid he'd never go back to. He pretended not to see it.
Dinner was more of the same, with more venison. Reinhardt expressed approval for Gabriel's appetite, which led to a discussion of exercise and strength. Genji slipped into that conversation somewhere, scoffing that he was stronger, but the half-giant chided him.
"Gabriel is very strong for a mortal," he said firmly. "You are weak compared to me. Gabriel has convictions and purpose!" Reinhardt sounded very pleased by this.
"And the Reaper wants him to be its next host," Amari interjected in a tone of vague warning.
Reinhardt looked troubled by that. "He can still do good, surely? And having such a virtuous man at the reins will rein the beast in, no doubt..."
No one looked really convinced by that.
The half-giant invited Gabriel to watch the sunset with him, and he accepted purely to get away from the others. The air was chilly, but push-ups helped that, and they had a depressingly somber conversation about making the best of a bad situation. When they went back inside and Gabriel stretched out on the couch, he wished that whoever had kidnapped him would fucking get on with it already, or let him go back to his life.
===
Gabriel trembled with repressed rage, hands fisted at his sides, blood splattered on his knuckles, his uniform, his face. Liao was yelling at him, threatening to have his badge for that display of police brutality, but his attention was on the EMTs bandaging the perp. Behind them, more EMTs were examining the last victim. Fuck, she looked like she couldn't be older than twelve, dressed up and made up to look at least sixteen.
He remembered this. The girl had been underage, the perp had gone to jail, and within three weeks someone had shoved a sharpened toothbrush between his ribs. The EMTs started shouting as a sharpened toothbrush suddenly materialized in their patient, and through his rage, Gabriel grinned.
This was a dream.
"Shut the fuck up, Liao," he snarled.
Amari fell into step beside him as he stalked away, looking shaken and glancing back over her shoulder.
"If there's something you're looking for, just fucking ask me," Gabriel told her. Knowing that this was a dream calmed him considerably from the rage he'd felt at the time, but made him angry for having his privacy violated in this way.
"Forgive me," she said evenly. "I went looking for the worst thing you had done, to try to gauge how fearsome you might be as the Reaper. Would you care to tell me about this memory?"
Well...he couldn't blame her for that, actually. Supernatural background check. Gabriel rolled his shoulders and mentally cleaned the blood off his skin and his uniform. "Perp was a serial rapist," he started. "Case first came to my attention because I walked into the precinct and a girl from my neighborhood was giving her statement. The boys, they know I take shit like that seriously, so I stood and watched while she finished. Drove her home afterwards. Put the word out along with a cell phone pic of the police sketch. He bounced around, raped nine more women before I got a tip the dude had a young-looking girl and was taking her to a building with rented rooms, if you get my meaning. I got there first, but just barely. Hauled him off of her - she was crying - and just started punching. That's how Liao found me - him against the wall with my hand on his throat, punching, while the girl sat in the corner crying. She looked sixteen. She was twelve."
"Surely the law-"
He rounded on her, holding his temper back but still furious. "She was twelve, Amari! What if that had been your daughter? Would you have wanted me to cuff him and read him his rights, or would you have wanted me to kick the motherfucking ass of the piece of shit who raped your baby girl?"
She recoiled, eye wide, while his breath whistled in and out.
"What's going to make her nightmares go away?" he asked in a more gentle tone. "Being told that her attacker, the man who violated her, has gone to prison? Or the memory of a six-foot powerhouse pulling the bastard off of her and beating his face in?"
"This seems like an awfully personal reaction," she said coolly. "Do you have a daughter, Officer Reyes?"
He turned away. "No. But I know what it's like to have someone bigger than you decide he wants something and not listen when you say no."
"One question," she said. "Liao-"
He didn't hear the rest of the question, because the world suddenly tilted and felt like it was underwater. He turned slowly, laboriously, mouth taking a million years to open so he could ask Amari what the fuck was going on, but when he turned, it was Angela.
Gabriel woke up to the harpy sitting on his chest, pressing a damp cloth to his nose and mouth. He held his breath and thrashed, trying to push her away, shake her off, anything, but he could barely move. Fuck. Trying to remember what to do if you're being drugged wasn't easy while he was being drugged. He blacked out for what seemed like a minute and woke up as she hauled him bodily off the couch and carried him outside. The cold air woke him up a bit, but he still couldn't move.
Angela laid him on the ground and gripped his shoulders with her bird feet. He struggled to keep his eyes open as she started flapping, intending to get an idea of where she was taking him so he could tell Amari if he got a chance. Then she dragged him off the cliff and he struggled to keep them shut.
When he'd wished whoever-it-was would hurry it up, this wasn't what he'd had in mind.
Until there was a noise behind him.
Gabriel Reyes whirled, both hands in the pockets of his POLICE hoodie, one gripping his badge and the other curling into a set of brass knuckles. A slight figure stared back at him, looking young and terrified in her sweatpants and sweatshirt. Pale face, blue eyes, blonde hair pulled back. Fuck. Lost tourist? He shook off the brass knuckles, grateful for his habit of wearing at least one piece of POLICE-emblazoned clothing at all times because he was very aware of how much like a thug he looked otherwise.
"Sir?" she called, her voice thin and quiet over the rain. "Are you Gabriel?"
European accent. Lost tourist. But how did she know his name, did one of the neighborhood abuelas tell her to look for him?
He pulled out the badge and held it up, shaking the hood back at the same time. "Yes. Gabriel Reyes, LAPD. Are you lost? Do you need help?"
She turned and ran, making good time despite what looked like limping with both legs. Right. Gabriel put his badge away, flipped his hood back up, and resumed walking to his apartment. He wasn't going to chase some lost white girl at night. She nagged at him, though, all the way home. Lucio was chilling behind the front desk, oversized headphones, head bouncing with the beat of whatever he was listening to. Gabriel tapped the counter and he sat up, taking the headphones off.
"Gabriel! My man! What can I do for you?"
"Anyone come by asking for me?" Gabriel asked, trying not to frown.
Lucio nodded "Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah, this little blonde chickie asked if you lived here, but then ran away when I said yes. If she comes back, you want me send her up?"
Gabriel frowned out at the rain. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Yeah. Send her up. Thanks, man."
He held out one fist; Lucio bumped it with his own.
"You got it, Gabriel. Hey, have a good night, alright?"
That made him smile briefly. "I'll try."
The elevator beckoned silently from the lobby. Not this time, asshole, Gabriel thought fiercely as he pushed open the door to the fire stairs. It was only four flights. Hardly even a warm-up. Plus, it announced to the abuelas that he was home. One of them - he had no idea how they decided which one - was bound to send her daughter or granddaughter out with a covered dish, to make sure he had a good, hot meal at the end of his day. He appreciated it, he really did. The entire building was his extended family, the family he'd never really had growing up. It was Carmen tonight, waiting at his door with a covered dish wrapped in a towel.
"Mami said you needed something warm after that cold rain," she said as he unlocked the door and held it open for her.
She knew the way to the kitchen, with its little table-for-two in the corner. By the time he'd followed her in, she already had the square dish unwrapped and the silverware set beside it.
"Gracias, Carmen," he said, giving her a brief hug. "Your mami is a saint."
That made her laugh. "Only fair for a saint to feed an angel, then. Hmm?"
Gabriel laughed and mock-lunged for the towel, making as if he would snatch it away and snap it at her bottom. She laughed more and danced out of the way, back towards the door. "You bring that back in the morning, we give you some breakfast to eat on the way to work!"
Then the door closed behind her. Smiling, Gabriel shrugged out of his hoodie and hung it on the back of the chair. You don't have any food, Liao chided any time she came over. Don't tell me you live on delivery. She didn't understand. She couldn't understand. Why do you live in a slum? I know you could afford to live in a much better neighborhood. Gabriel poured himself a glass of water and sat down, lifting the lid to inhale the fragrant steam rising from his dinner. He wasn't just a cop; he was part of the fabric of the community. He knew this neighborhood the way he never could from a middle-class suburb. He became a cop to protect people, damn it, and he couldn't do that as an outsider.
He showered after dinner, shaved and put on a pair of sweatpants with POLICE running down the leg. It wouldn't be the first time he slept on the couch, but if he was potentially getting woken up, he needed to be presentable. A generic black shirt would do. But then a finger of unease traced a path down his spine, and he put on socks and boots. The hoodie was still damp but he shrugged it back on, brass knuckles and wallet in one pocket, keys and badge in the other. Phone needed to be charged; he plugged it in and set it on the coffee table. There; he was as prepared as he was going to get.
Gabriel cuddled up to a wadded-up blanket and stretched out, asleep in seconds without even turning off the lights.
===
Sunlight woke him first, and the realization that he'd rolled onto his back. That didn't seem right; this was too hard a surface to be his couch, but he had blackout curtains in his bedroom. Cautiously, he kept his face relaxed and listened.
Silence. Quiet rustling. Birdsong?
The fuck?
Caution thrown to the wind, Gabriel opened his eyes and looked to his right. Grass. Bushes. A small, pathetic tree. A steep-as-shit wooded slope on the left side, with a game trail winding up into it. He rolled to his left and came up facing-
-a cliff? Holy shit, he'd been sleeping next to a cliff. Four feet and a shitty tree were all that had kept him from rolling to his death in the night. He was on the slope of some mountain, fuck if he knew where. How the hell did he get here, wherever here was?
Okay. Don't panic. Take stock.
Okay.
He was still wearing everything he'd gone to sleep wearing. Wallet, brass knuckles, keys, badge. Knife in the boot. No phone, because that had been on the table. Okay. He felt rested, which meant he'd gotten about eight or nine hours of sleep. Judging by where the sun was on the horizon, he was probably in the same time zone, but the air was cool enough that he was grateful he was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. Whether that was solely from the fact that he was halfway up a mountain or if he had been transported somewhere more north, he couldn't guess.
Right. Stock taken. Next?
There was a path. Paths usually led somewhere, even if that "somewhere" was only relevant to the animals that had made it. Gabriel turned his attention to the path, examining it for signs of human passing. It took several feet, but he saw an impression in a particularly barren bit that looked like a right foot going uphill.
Uphill it was.
The trail, thankfully, did not have many places where it opened up onto the cliff. It switched back in a zigzag up the mountain, with plenty of trees (albeit small trees) and bushes to block his view of the fall that awaited him if he left the trail. Gabriel was thoroughly grateful that he walked to and from the precinct, and that he spent so much time in the ghetto-ass gym the neighborhood thugs had claimed as their unofficial clubhouse. Nothing quite took the fight out of a thug like knowing that the officer who lives in the neighborhood can bench 300 easy and knows enough martial arts to have you on the ground before you can blink.
Of course, being in top physical form just meant that slogging up this shitty-ass trail was only miserable instead of completely godawful. At least it was a chilly day; that kept the sweating down. He still unzipped the hoodie halfway, though.
He had no idea how long he had been climbing when, after a particularly steep section, he emerged into a remarkably flat and even field. He took a long minute to examine his surroundings while catching his breath, vaguely grateful that exertion meant he wasn't starving the way he would be when he cooled down. The open area was mostly dry, scraggly, knee-high grass with some weeds and seemed to be about the size of a really generous lawn in an upper-class suburb. Huge bushes easily 20-30 feet tall and some slightly-taller trees ringed about three-fourths of the perimeter, making it difficult to tell how far the flat area extended. There didn't seem to be any more slope rising up in any direction, though, making this the top of the mountain.
Granted, Gabriel was a city kid, but he was pretty sure this wasn't how mountaintops were supposed to look.
Especially not with the house sitting there.
The trail he'd been following disappeared into the grass, but it was clear that whoever had left that footprint - his current suspect for whoever had abducted him out of his apartment and left him on a fucking cliff - had gone through the grass to the two-story wooden house with a big-ass porch that was just sitting on a mountaintop like it had every right to be there. As he marched through the field, he took stock of the house.
It was weathered, that was for sure, but it was also on a mountaintop and didn't seem to be in disrepair. No broken windows, no missing shingles. Nothing sitting on the porch, either, although there was an area right in front of the steps that looked like, at one point, it had been a stone-paved path. Gabriel tried to guess at where it had led, looked at the bush-and-tree perimeter, and saw what seemed to be another trail leading downhill.
Fuck that. He'd deal with the house first, and leave the woods as a last resort.
There was a big brass knocker on the door. Gabriel knocked firmly a few times and then waited, listening. Mostly silence, some birdsong, someone talking to someone else inside the house. Whoever they were, he couldn't make out age or gender or even words - only emotion, and they were having an argument. Probably about him.
He zipped up his hoodie and knocked again. "Hello! Anyone home!" It was his Cop Voice, the one most people usually heard saying 'open up, this is the police'. It tended to get results, and this time was no exception.
With one last hissed command, footsteps rattled against the floor and Gabriel stuck his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, fingers worming into his brass knuckles and curling around his badge. The door opened to reveal an older woman who looked surprised but also suspicious to see him.
Well, he supposed when you lived at the top of the mountain, you didn't get many visitors.
She was slim, of Middle-Eastern origins or descent, left eye a tawny brown with an Eye of Horus tattoo under the corner and the right one behind an eyepatch. Grey coat, cream-colored sweater, plain pants, blue hijab with silvered hair peeking out from underneath.
"Good morning, ma'am," he said briskly, pulling out his badge and holding it up for inspection. "Gabriel Reyes, Los Angeles Police Department. Mind if I ask you a few questions?"
"You are quite out of your jurisdiction, Officer Reyes," she replied crisply in an accent that said Arabic was probably her native language, but that she'd been fluent in English for at least a decade or two. "How did you get here?"
Gabriel put his badge away. "That was the first question I wanted to ask you, ma'am. I woke up on the cliffside a ways down the trail there-" he nodded with his head to the one he'd emerged from "-with no recollection of how I got there."
The woman frowned. It was the sort of look mothers got when they know one of their precious darlings has gotten into some shit, they just aren't sure yet what the little brat's managed to do. "Why don't I LET YOU INSIDE," she said, shouting the last words over her shoulder into the house, "and we can discuss this further."
She didn't move from the doorway, though, which was just fine with him.
"Ma'am, I saw evidence of someone going up the trail and to this house ahead of me. Do you have reason to believe that the person or persons who transported me here are in your house?"
"Officer Reyes," she said in something between pity and disdain, "we are several hours north of Los Angeles. It is quite impossible for anyone who lives here to have made the trip twice in one night, much less with a passenger."
Gabriel wasn't sure how he felt about that. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he didn't have time to contemplate that because the biggest goddamn dog he'd ever seen in the flesh managed to worm past the woman and get out onto the porch. He wasn't sure what breed the monster was - fuck, for all he knew that was some crazy wolf/bear hybrid. At the shoulder, stood easily as tall as the woman's waist and its head was massive. broad chest, shaggy all over, and could probably seriously injure someone just by being clumsy because it also had the dopiest expression Gabriel had ever seen on a dog short of Goofy. Regardless, when it seemed intent on sniffing his crotch, he backed up and prepared to get a forearm under its chin.
The woman grabbed the shaggy monster by a collar Gabriel hadn't even seen and commanded it back into the house. "That's Jesse," she said apologetically. "He's a gentle soul, but very clumsy. thinks he's a lot smaller than he actually is."
"What breed is he?" Gabriel asked warily. "I've never seen anything like that."
"Mastiff," she answered promptly. A little too promptly. "Why don't you come in, Officer Reyes?"
Well, no reason not to, right? Gabriel followed her inside, past the staircase and several doors before the hallway opened into a living room in what must have been, weirdly, the back of the house. Or maybe the porch was connected to the back door? The living room looked pretty normal for the rest of the house: couches, coffee table, chairs, bookshelves, plants everywhere, furry mountain on a rug.
"Jesse," she said idly, "you stay seated or I get a new fur coat. Would you like some tea, Officer Reyes? Something to eat, maybe?"
Gingerly, Gabriel sat on a couch. "That would be lovely, thank you, Ms...?"
"Amari," she supplied primly. "Ana Amari."
"That would be lovely, thank you, Ms. Amari. I'm still concerned about how I wound up here, though, and how I'm going to get home."
Amari pursed her lips. "That's an excellent question. We're about thirty miles away from the nearest person I know of, and you might have guessed I don't have a car."
Thirty miles. Fuck. He had no idea if that was as the bird flew or as the human slogged along mountain trails, but either way...not good. He was already going to be missed, Liao blowing up his phone wanting to know where the fuck he was. Ana gave him a look of sympathy and patted his shoulder.
"I know it's a bit disheartening, Officer Reyes, but my daughter Fareeha should be back home in a few days and she can lead you to civilization. I'd do it myself, but I'm not as young as I used to be."
The dog - if you wanted to call it that - shifted in an agitated way, and Ana gave it the hairy eyeball.
"I'll be back with tea in a few minutes, and I'll see what I can do for a snack to tide you over until dinner. If Jesse misbehaves, swat his nose."
She left the room. Gabriel and the dog eyed each other. Eventually, Jesse laid his head back down on the rug in attempts to look forlorn and Gabriel sat on one of the couches. A few days. Fuck. How long would Liao wait before getting Lucio to let her into his apartment? Had any of the neighbors seen or heard anything? Carmen's mother would be worried when he didn't stop by to return the dish and get breakfast. Someone would have knocked on his door by now, assuming whoever abducted him hadn't left it open.
He hoped Liao would come looking for him soon enough to gather any evidence the perp left behind. If there was any evidence. Maybe the abuelas would report him missing. Shit. He had to get home.
Amari came back in with a tea tray and set it down. Teapot, teacups, cream, sugar, a plate of little tea cookies, and a...spare plate?
"How do you take your tea, Officer Reyes?"
"I don't usually drink tea," he said, watching her pour into both teacups and then add milk and sugar to one. Then she put the plate on the floor, set a handful of cookies onto it, and poured the tea over them. For the dog, he supposed.
She refilled the cup, added cream and sugar, and handed it to him. "It's my own blend," she said. "From the garden. Try the cookies."
At a loss for anything to say, Gabriel sipped tea and nibbled cookies while Jesse slobbered over his tea-cookie-mush.
"I get the feeling you're not much for small talk," Amari said delicately. "Let me be straightforward, then: I want to ask you a couple of questions."
"Why?" he asked warily.
"I want to get a sense of...you. You're not the first one to awaken halfway down the trail."
He wasn't? Well, wasn't that interesting?
"Alright, what do you want to know?"
"Can you remember anything at all from yesterday?"
With effort, he kept his answer from sounding sarcastic. "Got off shift. Went to the gym. Walked home. Had dinner, showered, and went to bed."
She looked intently at him. "You don't recall meeting any strangers that night?"
The intent look was making him nervous. Especially since he didn't have a clear recollection of his trip home - it was raining, he knew that, but he couldn't bring up any unique memories between leaving the gym and running up the stairs to his floor.
"Did you have any strange dreams?" Amari asked, apparently taking his discomfited expression as an answer.
"None. Out like a light, slept like the dead until I woke up to sunlight on my face."
That's...unusual," she said, frowning. "Most people have strange, vivid dreams before they get here."
"How many people have wound up here?" he asked, almost afraid of what the answer would be.
"Ten in the last few decades. All healthy adults, mostly men but some women. I took them to the nearest ranger station, thirty miles away, and never saw them again."
Well, that wasn't...so bad.
"Anyway, since you'll be staying with us a few days, I need to set some rules. Do not go upstairs. For any reason," she finished sternly.
Suspicious. Gabriel nodded, but made a note of it.
"I'm serious, Officer Reyes. There's...personal things up there."
"Of course."
Amari didn't seem convinced, but she let it go. "Alright. Second, don't go outside without me or Jesse with you. It's dangerous out there."
"I am still interested in finding the person whose tracks I saw on the trail leading here, Ms. Amari." He kept his tone firm and even without being threatening.
She gave him a pointed, slightly-offended look. "The only one who has been up that trail, aside from you, was my husband. He has since left to go hunting, and in any case is incapable of making the journey to Los Angeles by himself. Besides," she added in a softer tone, "he's a very friendly sort. If he had encountered you on his way up, he would have told me if not brought you up himself."
Gabriel nodded to concede the point.
"Third and final rule, you sleep on the couch. I'm afraid I have no spare beds," she finished apologetically.
"Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Amari," Gabriel said with a half-bow. "If you need any chores done, don't be afraid to put me to work."
She looked pleased at that, but said, "Don't be silly. You're a guest. Follow the rules, that's all. If you'll excuse me, I need to check on something upstairs."
"By all means," he replied.
She left the room, leaving him alone with the dog.
===
The afternoon was...annoying. Lunch was fruit and dense, nut-and-seed bread that was filling but mostly flavorless. There was nothing to do but pace and brood; all of Amari's books were in Arabic. He broke up the monotony by doing push-ups, hoodie and boots off to the side while Jesse watched with his dumb dog face. Dinner was more of the same, plus fish. Where the fuck did Amari get fish on the top of a mountain? The husband who supposedly went off hunting never reappeared. Finally, he stretched out on the couch and tried not to worry about his neighbors thinking he was dead.
Gabriel had never been a vivid dreamer. Not since puberty. Before then, he'd had dreams where he started out male - dressed in jeans and a tee, short hair, just one of the boys - and then suddenly he was in a pink dress and pigtails and everyone was laughing at him. But after puberty, those dreams had dried up and while sometimes he woke up knowing that he'd been dreaming, he never remembered anything about them.
Now, however, he was standing in his apartment and he was sure it was a dream because his phone wasn't on the table, plugged in or no. There was no one bringing him food. And when he went into the kitchen, the dish from his dinner wasn't there. A noise from the living room, and then Amari walked into the kitchen and started poking around in his cabinets, ignoring him entirely.
"Do you mind?" he asked sharply.
Amari whirled to look at him. "You can see me?"
He folded his arms across his chest. "No. I'm asking someone who I can't see if they mind not going through my stuff."
"There's no need to be rude," she sniffed.
"Says the woman investigating my cabinets without so much as a hello."
"Hello," she said pointedly. "Now, Officer Reyes, if you don't mind, this is a dream and I would like to finish doing nonsensical dream things like checking the contents of your cabinets."
Dream or not, he didn't like people poking around in his things. Could he control this? He willed a glass of whiskey into his hand; lo and behold, it appeared.
"Go right ahead," he said, sipping his drink and concentrating.
The next cabinet Amari opened exploded with confetti and little rubber cocks.
"Very mature," she grumbled as she brushed little paper bits out of her clothing. Then she opened his fridge and frowned. "Do you have any food in here at all?"
"Don't you get on my case about that," he growled. "It's none of your business what I do or do not eat."
She huffed and went to the linen closet. When she opened the door, he substituted the other-planar view from inside the fridge in Ghostbusters, complete with the devil-dog growling 'Zuul'.
Amari closed the door and glared at him. "Very funny, Officer Reyes."
"Would have been the fridge but I didn't think of it in time." Smirking, he sipped his whiskey.
"This is going to sound odd," she said shortly, "but where would you keep important things?"
"Somewhere safe," he snapped back. "And no, I'm not telling you where. That's a security risk."
"Take a nap," she suggested, reaching for the knob to his bedroom door. "You need rest."
"Aren't I dreaming? Isn't that resting?"
Why was his bedroom door closed? He never closed the door. Turned the room into a furnace.
"I need to concentrate. Stop talking."
Amari muttered something in a language Gabriel didn't know - probably Arabic - and turned the handle.
The room was pitch black. Not just dark, but impenetrably dark. Gabriel's drink turned into his service weapon.
"Something's wrong."
That got him a withering glare that he ignored. "I can handle it, Officer Reyes. Just go to sleep."
"The hell I will," he growled, moving up behind her. "What's in there?"
She whirled and pushed him against the wall. "No, don't-"
"What's in there?" he roared, willing the wall out of the way and side-stepping her, weapon aimed straight at the unnatural darkness where his bedroom should be.
The world tipped and went weird. Something cold tugged at him, making his stomach do flips while he broke out into a cold sweat. Vertigo sent him to his knees, jaws clenched. Amari looked terrified. He found himself curling into a ball, hyperventilating, and looked up at his bedroom door.
An unnatural, stilted, jet-black body reached through the doorway, dripping gooey strands of blackness. Its face was a birdlike skull with blank sockets for eyes. It tilted its head and leaned towards Gabriel, making a soft but somehow inquisitive sound somewhere between a growl an a hiss, and Gabriel had the feeling that it was seeing him for the first time. It stretched out an arm-
Gabriel woke up, heart pounding, soaked in sweat, to find himself sitting bolt upright on Amari's couch. What the fuck was that?
"Bad dream?" a sympathetic voice drawled from right behind him, fuck.
He practically teleported to his feet and about three feet away, hands out, ready to fight. There was a very hairy, very naked man sitting on the arm of the couch near where his head had been. That wasn't creepy at all.
"Who the fuck are you?" he snarled.
The hairy man grinned. "I'm Jesse," he said brightly.
"The fuck you are," Gabriel spat. "What, did you kill the dog and steal his collar?" Only after the words were out of his mouth did he consciously register that the man was, in fact, wearing the dog's collar.
"I am the dog!" the man announced cheerfully.
Gabriel relaxed minutely. "So I'm still dreaming."
"Nope. Sometimes I'm the dog, and sometimes I'm a man."
"Does Amari know?" Gabriel asked, giving up on 'I am the dog' for the time being and falling back on establishing where the lines were.
The man-dog looked offended. "Of course! Everyone here knows. Except you. Ana says that people like you don't like people like us anymore." His head lowered, remarkably like a shamed dog. "She thought it would be better if you didn't see us."
"People like me," Gabriel repeated slowly. "Do you mean cops, Latinos, men..."
"Humans!"
Humans? Then what the fuck was this whackjob? He wasn't really...
"People like you?" he asked, almost not wanting the man to answer.
"Yup! Me, Jamison, Angela, Reinhardt, all those guys. They're upstairs - mostly - because Ana told them to hide."
"And they're...like you." Gabriel couldn't keep the doubt out of his voice.
Jesse - if that was his real name - tilted his head. "Well, I'm the only werewolf."
"Werewolf." Gabriel hated how much sense that one word made.
"Yessir! But we've got a harpy, a pixie, two vampires..."
"Is...Ana...?"
Jesse shook his head, hair waving everywhere. "Naw. She an' Fareeha are witches."
"Riiiiiight." What was her husband, a mummy? Frankenstein's Monster?
"You don't believe me?" Jesse asked, looking remarkably like a kicked dog.
"I'm still holding out hope that this is all a really vivid hallucination," Gabriel said dryly.
Jesse perked up. "Come outside with me!"
Like he was just going to go outside with a naked man who claimed he was a werewolf. "Why?"
"Ana told me to not shift in the house," he admitted sheepishly. "I break stuff. Not on purpose."
Gabriel was too tired to deal with this shit. "Okay. Fine. But then I'm going back to bed."
He followed Jesse down the hall and out the front door, trying not to look at the hairiest ass he'd ever seen on something shaped like a person. The night was chilly, and as Gabriel stood there grateful for his hoodie, a thought occurred to him.
"Hey! If Ana thought it would be better for me to not see you, then why..."
Jesse looked incredibly guilty but then dropped to all fours and started to transform into the walking mountain of fur as if to say sorry, can't answer, turning into a dog now.
Bastard.
The irritation at being denied an answer almost negated the mind-boggling fact that Jesse was a motherfucking werewolf. Smug asshole pranced up and trotted in a circle around him, but he was done. He could deal with this little bombshell in the morning.
"Right. Werewolf. I'm going back to bed."
Ignoring the hopeful nose prodding at him, he walked back inside and down the hall to the living room.
"You have a rug," he said pointedly as the damn mutt seemed about to join him on the couch. "If I wake up covered in dog hair, I'm going to neuter you."
Tail clamped firmly between his legs, Jesse curled up on his rug and gave him a reproachful look, which he ignored. As he was settling in on the couch, however, a tiny Tinkerbell-like figure whirred up and glared at him from point-blank range. At least, he thought it was a glare. Kinda hard to make out expression on a tiny face in the dark.
"Nope," he said preemptively. "I'm not dealing with anything else tonight."
"The fuck, you cunt?" what he assumed was the pixie complained in a tiny Australian accent. "I've been waitin' an entire day to talk to your human ass, and you can't even be fucked to speak to me?"
"You want to talk to my ass?" Gabriel rolled over to face the back of the couch. "Go for it. You want to talk to the rest of me, you wait until morning or you get to spend the rest of the night in my shoe."
The pixie seemed to be trying to cuss him out, but couldn't think of anything better than 'dumb'. Gabriel tugged his hood up over his head and was all set to tune him out when what he imagined was a tiny foot impacted against one asscheek. It felt like someone flicked a skittle at him. Then it happened again, and again, and settled into a rhythm.
Gabriel tightened the muscles in his butt and tried not to laugh as the pixie bitched about hurting his foot.
The kicking didn't resume, the bitching faded out, and Gabriel fell asleep with a smile on his face.
===
"Good morning, Officer Reyes. How did you sleep?"
Gabriel flipped over to see a blearly-looking Ana shuffle in with a steaming mug of probably tea and sit in one of the chairs. He sat up and stretched.
"Well, there was the dream that you were poking through my cabinets that turned into a nightmare when you tried to go into my bedroom," he said mildly, watching for a guilty reaction, aaaand there it was. "Woke up out of that to find that Jesse is shit at following directions."
Ana looked at the dog in alarm.There may have been outrage. The dog slunk out of the room.
"After that, though, I slept pretty soundly." He gave it a beat, then said, "So, what were you looking for, and did you find it?"
"Officer Reyes, just because you happened to dream-"
"Cut the bullshit," Gabriel interrupted in an even tone. "I know that wasn't a dream. Jesse said you're a witch. The pixie has an Australian accent. I'm a cop, Amari. I know when someone's trying to blow smoke up my ass, and I don't like it. What were you looking for, and did you find it?"
They stared at each other for a long minute.
"I was looking for a clue as to why you were brought here," she said calmly. "You said you experienced no vivid dreams, but in my experience, that means you repressed them."
"So you went looking. Did you find anything?"
She ran one hand over her eyes. "I pray I did not."
"That thing with the bird skull," Gabriel said. When Ana nodded, he asked, "What was it?"
A shudder ran through Amari's body, making her grip her mug and sip from it as though desperate for the warmth. "A representation of something very old, very..."
"Evil?"
"To label it such is simplistic at best," she said with a small shake of her head. "All things have a place, even if that place is...distasteful. Nevertheless, it is hard to attribute anything good to that one. It embodies not only death, but violent death. Murder. It requires a host, seeking out another when its current host withers."
That really wasn't what Gabriel had wanted to hear. "What happens if it doesn't get its new host?"
Amari shook her head. "I do not know. There is much I do not know about it. I have never had a reason to pry too deeply into the affairs of the Reaper."
A chill went down Gabriel's spine, instantly making him irritated at letting something that sounded like superstitious bullshit get to him. But the way that thing had looked at him...
"Right. So you think the Reaper wants me to be its new host," he said just a hair too quickly. "You're a witch, the dog's a hairy dude who's not the brightest. Your husband is...?"
"A half-giant," she said somewhat sheepishly. "The pixie is Jamison."
He nodded. "And the vampires?"
"The Shimada brothers. Hanzo is the elder and Genji, the younger."
"Anyone else I should know about?" he asked, one eyebrow raised.
"Only Angela," Ana said, "but she's not here at the moment. She's a harpy."
"A harpy," he repeated, still struggling to accept that reality was a much weirder place than he thought. Fuck, he better not be part of some gendered prophecy bullshit. "Right. Okay. My blood stays inside my body. Anyone tries to bite me, I will act to defend myself."
Amari nodded. "You are a guest, not a hostage or prisoner. Would you like breakfast? I can introduce you to some of the others after you've eaten. Some of them haven't seen a non-magical human in quite some time, if at all, and are quiet eager to meet you." She glanced at the doorway and frowned. "And I'll have a word with Jesse."
"Good luck," he teased. "Breakfast sounds great, thank you."
He did some warm-up stretches after she left the room, and was about to start a set of push-ups when Jesse slunk back in and curled up on his rug, looking properly shamed.
"Ana yell at you?" he asked, doing lunges instead.
The shaggy mutt gave him something like a glare.
"Don't you look at me in that tone of voice," he chided. "You're the one who decided to introduce yourself."
Ana came back a minute later with a tray. Eggs, smaller than the chicken eggs he was used to; slices of tomato with herbs sprinkled over them; something that absolutely was not oatmeal but had honey and little berries in it; and of course, tea.
"Jesse's had his breakfast," she informed him.
The dog, which had been giving him a pathetic, hopeful look, shot a glare her way and laid his head back down.
Gabriel laughed.
"I've informed the others that they may introduce themselves one at a time," she continued, "and cautioned them that you are prepared to defend yourself if you feel threatened."
"Thank you," he said quietly. "And thank you for breakfast."
Amari smiled. "I'll leave you to it. Enjoy, Officer Reyes."
As soon as she left the room he dug in. Nothing tasted quite like anything he was familiar with, but it was all delicious and he was starving after his hike up the mountain and the two light meals Amari had served him. Almost as soon as he'd finished, an elegant and dignified Asian man walked in and gave him a formal-looking bow.
"Reyes-san, I presume," he said in moderately-accented but cultured English. "I am Hanzo."
One of the vampires. He looked...nothing like a vampire. At least, nothing like a Hollywood vampire. He looked...beautiful. A hair two masculine to be pretty, but still attractive enough to trigger his reflexive denial. Gabriel stood and held one hand out. "A pleasure," he said politely.
Hanzo looked at his hand in displeasure. Awkwardly, Gabriel withdrew it.
"I mean no dishonor," he said in that almost hypnotic voice. "The touch of a vampire has..certain effects upon the recipient. We subdue our prey by making them...pliant. Willing. You may have noticed a subtle effect just from gazing upon me and hearing my voice, despite the fact that I am doing my best to not enthrall you."
Well...that would explain why Gabriel felt like he could listen to Hanzo talk for eternity and not get bored. Also the attraction.
"Yes," he said shortly. "Thank you for your restraint."
Hanzo gave him a dry smile. "You are a guest. It would be gravely dishonorable to feed upon you without explicit consent."
"Which I do not grant," Gabriel said evenly.
"Of course not. I wish only to speak with you, if you are willing, and satisfy only my curiosity."
Gabriel gestures at one of the chairs and sat back down on the couch. "Please, have a seat. I'd love to chat. I've never met a vampire."
As Hanzo settled into one of the chairs, Jesse got up and moved to sit next to him, his head on the vampire's knee. Hanzo started petting him absently. "Tell me, Reyes-san, what walk of life have you chosen?"
"I'm a police officer," he answered. "I protect people who need protecting, and do my best to ensure that people who harm others are punished."
"Admirable, I suppose." Faint derision dripped from the words, raising Gabriel's hackles. "Risking your life for other is a noble pursuit, some might say. Others would disagree, saying that the strong are right to prey upon the weak. What would you say to those others?"
Familiar fires of rage leaped up in Gabriel's heart. "That they better stay the fuck away from my neighborhood, because I'm the strongest motherfucker there and I'll prey on them if they lay a single goddamned hand on my people."
If his heated retort surprised Hanzo, it didn't show.
"If humans are said to be sheep," he said mildly, "then you would be the ram protecting the ewes. Your herd is lucky indeed to have such a protector but you, dare I say, are wasted on them."
"Say that again, cabron," Gabriel snarled.
Hanzo leveled a steady, even look at him. "You are wasted as a protector of such a small flock," he said. "It is truly a shame. While there is no dishonor in what you have done, had you been born something other than human, you could have made a much greater mark upon the world. Children would have been learning your name for centuries to come. I almost envy you."
Gabriel wasn't sure what to make of that. One portion of his mind wondered about the Reaper, and what being its host entailed. Could he be a protector while hosting the embodiment of violent death? Was it wrong to abandon those who had looked to him for protection if it meant he could protect a greater...flock?
"Thank you," he said finally. "I think."
That got him a brief, fluttering, dry smile. "I am a predator, Reyes-san. I understand the importance of a healthy flock, and an attentive protector to keep them happy. I was...groomed...for such a role by my father. If I may ask, what put you on your path?"
A horde of memories he'd tried to keep buried for two decades swarmed up. Dresses. Pigtails. Seeing an illustration of a male body and feeling indignant fury that his didn't look like that. Vindication when his pediatrician uttered the words alpha-five reductase and prescribing testosterone.
"I learned what it was like to be the ewe instead of the ram," he said quietly.
Before Hanzo could respond, footsteps and a voice calling Niiii-saaaaan floated down the hallway.
"My brother, Genji," the vampire said, standing. "I will take my leave of you, Reyes-san, so that you may converse with him in peace."
"Sure." Gabriel watched as vampire and werewolf left the living room.
It was surreal to think of them like that, but apparently that's what his life had become because as much as he wanted to go back to his apartment and his neighbors and his life, he couldn't shake Hanzo's assertion that he could do more. Would he be able to settle back down into being a cop when he knew that werewolves and vampires and harpies and witches were real? Were there cops for supernatural creatures? Did vampires operate like gang bosses or Mafia kingpins, were there vampires in his city that he didn't know about? Who took a vamp to justice if he murdered another vamp?
He was so deep in his thoughts that when the young man bounded into the room with an exuberant "So you're the human! I'm Genji!" and stuck out one hand, Gabriel reflexively shook it before the words had registered.
Instantly, he was embarrassingly aware of how attractive the man was with his charming smile, his eyes that promised some kind of promiscuous pleasure, and he found himself blushing as lust surged through him.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Genji said, pulling his hand back to cover his mouth. "I forgot - humans don't do very well with vampires."
So that's what Hanzo was holding back. Familiar rage surged up to replace the lust, the rage of the weak in the face of the strong.
"I am not prey," he ground out, furious beyond words that this unrepentant little shithead had actually made him feel lust and he was pretty sure Genji had 'forgotten' on purpose.
"Ana said you're a guest." The words didn't sound like a statement. They sounded like an invitation for Gabriel to refute them.
Too bad.
"I am a guest," he growled. "I do not consent. And if you touch me again, you may be the one who winds up losing blood."
The smug little shit didn't look intimidated. He looked pleased.
"Good talk," Gabriel said abruptly, and walked out of the room.
Before Genji could follow, he slipped through a door at random and closed it behind him. Once inside he froze, holding his breath, until he heard the vampire's footsteps go down the hall and up the stairs. Only then did he take a closer look at the room he was in. It looked...pretty much exactly the way he expected a witch's workroom to look, with the exception of a tiny bed and tinier workstation set up on one shelf.
A faint whirring caught his attention and when he turned, the pixie was flying towards him.
"Oi! What're you doing in my room?" the thing demanded.
"Came to say hello," Gabriel lied. "Since I was so rude last night. Gabriel Reyes."
The pixie hovered in front of his face, giving him a tiny scowl. "Jamison," he said grudgingly. Then he pointed to the shelf with the tiny bed. "Now sit down, asshole, you're too tall."
Gabriel sat and watched as the pixie opened a cabinet that looked like a standing jewelry box and pulled out a test tube. When he seemed to have trouble getting it propped upright, Gabriel reached out and held it still.
"Thanks," Jamison said reluctantly. He fluttered around collecting bits of leaf and bark and things Gabriel had no names for, then dumped them in the tube and looked up at the human. "Spit in it," he ordered.
Cautiously, Gabriel brought the test tube to his lips and spat into it before putting it back. Jamison immediately grabbed a long matchstick and started stirring it into an ugly, muddy sludge.
"So...what is it?"
The pixie gave him a haughty look. "Well, you're just a dumb human so I guess you wouldn't know, but it's a potion."
Nothing Gabriel would want to drink. "What's it do?"
"It's a secret," Jamison said, rummaging in a drawer of the cabinet for a stopper. "I'm not telling."
"Even though I helped you make it?"
"Nope."
Gabriel stood up. "That's fine. I'll just ask Ana."
Suddenly, there was a pixie in his face. "No! You can't!"
"Watch me," Gabriel growled in his best I'm not bluffing voice.
The pixie sagged in the air. "Fine. But you can't tell anyone! There's a bunch of wood nymphs down the mountain, and I want to play a prank on them. When you throw this, it smells terrible."
"A stink bomb. Okay."
An unseen hand knocked on the door. "Officer Reyes, are you in there?" Ana called through the wood.
With a muttered expletive, Jamison grabbed the tube and flew through a hole in the ceiling.
Gabriel shrugged and opened the door. "Introduced myself to Jamison," he told a slightly-startled Ana.
"Oh. I spoke with Genji. He's been scolded for what happened earlier, and is doing chores now because of it."
It was nice to see the hostess taking the whole guest thing seriously. Gabriel took a deep breath and forced his temper back down. "I appreciate that," he told her. "Thank you. That was a very uncomfortable situation."
Ana gave him a sympathetic smile and beckoned him out of the room and back to the living room. "You've been thrust into a strange world," she said once they'd sat back down. "It was overwhelming for me when I first learned I was a witch, and I was just a child. If I'd been dropped into this as an adult, I don't think I could have handled it nearly as well as you're managing."
A female voice called out from down the hallway, and Gabriel had a flash of hope that this was Amari's daughter and he'd be going home again, but her cry of 'In here, Angela!' dashed that hope.
The slender blonde who stepped into the living room was absolutely a harpy, with white-gold feathers and a studious expression. She was also familiar, and Gabriel scowled.
"Officer Reyes?"
He shot Ana an accusing look. "I thought you said none of the people who live here could make it to LA and back." One finger pointed straight at the startled harpy. "I saw her on the streets of Los Angeles the night before I woke up on a cliff."
"And it has taken her until now to return," Amari countered coldly.
"Still feels fishy," he insisted. "She specifically asked if I was Gabriel. And then I wake up on your doorstep. How did she know my name?"
Amari looked uncertain at that. "An excellent question. Angela, would you care-" The question died unfinished.
Angela was gone.
===
Gabriel gritted his teeth and tried to be patient as Amari and Hanzo argued Angela's potential guilt or innocence, but it wasn't easy. About two or three minutes in, he braced himself like he was about to sort out a domestic, and started asking questions. It kept the shouting to a minimum, at least. Hanzo distrusted harpies - was that personal, cultural, or a species rivalry, he wondered? - and was convinced that Angela was a traitor. He voiced some of the same concerns as Gabriel had regarding the reason Angela would have been in a human city and looking for him, and apparently she had been telling them she hadn't left the forest, which immediately placed her under suspicion as far as Gabriel was concerned. Amari wasn't convinced, and he suspected she had past history with the harpy that was skewing her perception.
In the end, Hanzo and Jesse stormed off to hunt Angela down. Gabriel doubted the wisdom of trying to track a flying creature from the ground, but this wasn't his fight. The pixie fluttered in almost as soon as the front door slammed shut, and apparently hadn't heard any of the arguing. He had seen Angela fly away, though, and once he got through bragging about what a great healer she was, agreed to try to hunt down where she'd gone.
Amari seemed thoroughly disappointed in the whole situation, but waved off Gabriel's apology. She did accept his offer to help around the house, and herded him outside to instruct him in harvesting things from various plants and trees. He guessed that gardening was her thing, both from the plants in the house and how she seemed to relax in the garden, and gently asked her to tell him more about Angela.
There was a lot Amari wasn't saying, but the gist of it as far as he could tell was they'd both been in the same social circle at one point, but Amari hadn't been there when some kind of heavy drama went down and a bunch of friends had either left or died or both. She insisted the harpy had stayed in the forest, which just made Gabriel suspect that whatever Angela was up to, it was also in the forest, but he kept that to himself.
As they brought their baskets of produce inside, a loud clatter came from the front porch.
"That would be my husband," Amari said happily. "He was gathering firewood and hunting. Get the door for him, would you?"
Gabriel went down the hall and opened the front door to see what absolutely looked like a half-giant holding a full-grown deer in his arms. As he watched, the man braced the animal's struggling body between his legs and snapped its neck with his enormous, bare hands.
"A human!" he boomed gleefully as he set the deer on the porch. "Hanzo! Genji! Come get it while it's still warm!" He took two steps towards Gabriel and swept him into a one-armed hug that he couldn't get out of, despite all the marital arts he knew. "Ana! Where have you been hiding him?"
"He just arrived yesterday," Amari called back from the kitchen.
As the half-giant lumbered past the stairs, still holding Gabriel, he saw Genji scamper down them and out the door. Although he couldn't break the giant's hold, he at least managed to buy himself breathing room. As they got to the kitchen, the giant looked down at him in surprise.
"Oh! is it too tight?" he asked in his booming voice.
"Yes," Amari said sharply. "Let him down, you're suffocating him!"
Apologetically, the giant put him back on the floor and introductions were made. Reinhardt was recruited for helping make lunch, and Amari offered to let Gabriel wait in the living room, but accepted his counter-offer to be a kitchen helper. If the burly half-giant who killed a deer with his bare hands was helping prepare food, then damn it, Gabriel wasn't going to pussy out.
Lunch was more nut-seed bread, with vegetables and venison. It tasted weird, but Gabriel had stopped being a picky eater when he moved into his apartment and been adopted by the abuelas. Not only was it polite to eat what someone had made for you, but he was still running on a calorie deficit from yesterday. He helped wash dishes after lunch and then helped Ana make jam while Reihardt told the plot of Shrek in a professional storytelling way. It was pretty neat to hear, actually.
Once the jam was done, Reinhardt fetched some wood from outside and made a fire in the living room's fireplace. Amari settled down with a book, the half-giant settled on a giant pillow on the floor that Gabriel had assumed was for the werewolf, and Gabriel sat on the couch he'd spent so much time on already. He asked Gabriel about his path in life, which led to a surprisingly satisfying discussion of chivalry and the obligation of the strong to protect the weak. Gabriel described his apartment building, and how it may not have been the best but it was where his people lived, so he chose to live there with them and protect them. How the abuelas brought him food so that they could thank him in that small way, and the times frantic women (and some younger sons, boys and teenagers) had pounded on his door late at night or early in the morning, needing a protector.
He could see Ana watching over the edge of her book, see the sympathy in her eye as he described the life he was afraid he'd never go back to. He pretended not to see it.
Dinner was more of the same, with more venison. Reinhardt expressed approval for Gabriel's appetite, which led to a discussion of exercise and strength. Genji slipped into that conversation somewhere, scoffing that he was stronger, but the half-giant chided him.
"Gabriel is very strong for a mortal," he said firmly. "You are weak compared to me. Gabriel has convictions and purpose!" Reinhardt sounded very pleased by this.
"And the Reaper wants him to be its next host," Amari interjected in a tone of vague warning.
Reinhardt looked troubled by that. "He can still do good, surely? And having such a virtuous man at the reins will rein the beast in, no doubt..."
No one looked really convinced by that.
The half-giant invited Gabriel to watch the sunset with him, and he accepted purely to get away from the others. The air was chilly, but push-ups helped that, and they had a depressingly somber conversation about making the best of a bad situation. When they went back inside and Gabriel stretched out on the couch, he wished that whoever had kidnapped him would fucking get on with it already, or let him go back to his life.
===
Gabriel trembled with repressed rage, hands fisted at his sides, blood splattered on his knuckles, his uniform, his face. Liao was yelling at him, threatening to have his badge for that display of police brutality, but his attention was on the EMTs bandaging the perp. Behind them, more EMTs were examining the last victim. Fuck, she looked like she couldn't be older than twelve, dressed up and made up to look at least sixteen.
He remembered this. The girl had been underage, the perp had gone to jail, and within three weeks someone had shoved a sharpened toothbrush between his ribs. The EMTs started shouting as a sharpened toothbrush suddenly materialized in their patient, and through his rage, Gabriel grinned.
This was a dream.
"Shut the fuck up, Liao," he snarled.
Amari fell into step beside him as he stalked away, looking shaken and glancing back over her shoulder.
"If there's something you're looking for, just fucking ask me," Gabriel told her. Knowing that this was a dream calmed him considerably from the rage he'd felt at the time, but made him angry for having his privacy violated in this way.
"Forgive me," she said evenly. "I went looking for the worst thing you had done, to try to gauge how fearsome you might be as the Reaper. Would you care to tell me about this memory?"
Well...he couldn't blame her for that, actually. Supernatural background check. Gabriel rolled his shoulders and mentally cleaned the blood off his skin and his uniform. "Perp was a serial rapist," he started. "Case first came to my attention because I walked into the precinct and a girl from my neighborhood was giving her statement. The boys, they know I take shit like that seriously, so I stood and watched while she finished. Drove her home afterwards. Put the word out along with a cell phone pic of the police sketch. He bounced around, raped nine more women before I got a tip the dude had a young-looking girl and was taking her to a building with rented rooms, if you get my meaning. I got there first, but just barely. Hauled him off of her - she was crying - and just started punching. That's how Liao found me - him against the wall with my hand on his throat, punching, while the girl sat in the corner crying. She looked sixteen. She was twelve."
"Surely the law-"
He rounded on her, holding his temper back but still furious. "She was twelve, Amari! What if that had been your daughter? Would you have wanted me to cuff him and read him his rights, or would you have wanted me to kick the motherfucking ass of the piece of shit who raped your baby girl?"
She recoiled, eye wide, while his breath whistled in and out.
"What's going to make her nightmares go away?" he asked in a more gentle tone. "Being told that her attacker, the man who violated her, has gone to prison? Or the memory of a six-foot powerhouse pulling the bastard off of her and beating his face in?"
"This seems like an awfully personal reaction," she said coolly. "Do you have a daughter, Officer Reyes?"
He turned away. "No. But I know what it's like to have someone bigger than you decide he wants something and not listen when you say no."
"One question," she said. "Liao-"
He didn't hear the rest of the question, because the world suddenly tilted and felt like it was underwater. He turned slowly, laboriously, mouth taking a million years to open so he could ask Amari what the fuck was going on, but when he turned, it was Angela.
Gabriel woke up to the harpy sitting on his chest, pressing a damp cloth to his nose and mouth. He held his breath and thrashed, trying to push her away, shake her off, anything, but he could barely move. Fuck. Trying to remember what to do if you're being drugged wasn't easy while he was being drugged. He blacked out for what seemed like a minute and woke up as she hauled him bodily off the couch and carried him outside. The cold air woke him up a bit, but he still couldn't move.
Angela laid him on the ground and gripped his shoulders with her bird feet. He struggled to keep his eyes open as she started flapping, intending to get an idea of where she was taking him so he could tell Amari if he got a chance. Then she dragged him off the cliff and he struggled to keep them shut.
When he'd wished whoever-it-was would hurry it up, this wasn't what he'd had in mind.