Page 50 of Throwing Shade
“Fine.” I had no desire to be singled out anyway.
We reached the bar and Laurent rapped the top twice. “Eh, conard. You here?”
“Oi,” a male voice with an English accent boomed. “Go bugger yourself.”
The bartender emerged from under the bar and I broke into a sputtering cough.
Broad-shouldered but stocky, he wore a long silver necklace that came almost halfway down the fitted blue shirt that clung to his bulging biceps. Tattoos covered both arms, including a scorpion about to strike and the phrase “no regrets.”
Two words came to mind: fuckboy and… I laughed delightedly, eyeing his rock-hard skin. Not rock-hard abs—skin made of gray stone, along with a wide face, large ears and stubby horns.
Laurent and he exchanged man-bro slaps on the back.
I cleared my throat. “You’re a—”
“Brit?” the gargoyle said. “Yeah. Been here since the nineties.”
“The eighteen nineties?”
He snorted, wiping down the bar top with a rag. “Cheeky, ain’tcha? Nah, shit went pear-shaped on a job and I had to leg it across the pond. Decided I liked it here.” His massive biceps cracked faintly as he moved.
“Are there a lot like you?” My head swam with visions of dark forms swooping in the night sky that might not have been birds.
His expression darkened. “You got a problem with my kind?”
I clapped my hands. “Are you kidding me? I spent an entire summer during university finding gargoyles in Europe.”
“Here we go,” Laurent muttered, but he didn’t even glare at me. I was totally growing on him.
The gargoyle rolled his black eyes and I swear I heard the sound of marbles. “Notre Dame. Them boys get all the credit.”
“Sure, but also the ones on the Milan Cathedral and Il Boccalone.” I ticked off items on my fingers. “Cologne Cathedral and Holy Cross Church in Great Ponton.”
The gargoyle’s face lit up. “My cousins live there.”
“And you’re all sentient?”
“Nah. Only some of us were hit with animator magic way back when, and of those, even fewer evolved to have intelligence. Most of my kind are a pretty face on a water spout.” He held out his hand. “Harry.”
“Miri.”
His fingers enveloped mine, but his grip was gentle, and his skin was as smooth as silk. “What’s your poison?”
“This isn’t a social call,” Laurent said.
“Soda and cranberry, please.” I surveyed the club in the mirrors behind Harry. “I can’t believe all this exists.”
Harry filled a tall glass with ice and sprayed soda from the dispenser into it. “How’s that, luv? New to town?”
I’d found the wardrobe, fallen down the rabbit hole, survived the tornado, and entered a world rife with possibility and reinvention. “Something like that.”
On the bar was a small bowl of matchbooks with “Bear’s Den” written on them. I helped myself, intending to have them on hand when someone made a hate crime in my bathroom.
Harry added cranberry juice, the red liquid swirling through the glass until it all turned a rosé color. “Here you go.”
I tried to pay him but he waved me off.
Harry jerked a thumb at Laurent. “This one can owe me.”
