The Angel of the Alleys

Note: this story takes place in the shared City of Scum setting, as proposed by @StillStunned. If you like what you read here, explore the 'city of scum' tag and enjoy some more grimdark fantasy. All characters depicted in sexual acts are over the age of 18.

The City has many tales. This is one of them.

* * * * *

"Keep hold of her, Roth!"

The voice, although hushed against the night's backdrop, still echoes up from the alleyway and reaches my ears. Perched as I am on the rooftop of a long-defunct tannery, the voice, thick with hormones and too much ale, provides an alternative sensory distraction to the reek of long-rotting leather that still wafts through the roof's cracked shingles.

"You keep hold of her. I'm not the one who almost let her get away." This one is reedy, the voice of a compulsive layabout who only works when he's run out of coin for drink and the cupboard at home is bereft of even a wedge of cheese.

Now the sounds of muffled struggles, the grunts and strains of a female voice deadened by a cloth gag, arrive. There are only two, plus their victim. This should be simple. But still, I wait.

"Be quiet, both of you. Lint, you sure this is the right place?"

And that's why. Three it is, then. The third man's voice reeks of authority, with no trace of any substance to dull his reflexes. Unexpected, but it doesn't change the foreseen outcome in the slightest. They'd have to add two more before I got concerned.

"Stebbins said Brokespine Alley, between Cart Ditch Road and Scorched Street, didn't he?" the alcohol-voiced one replied.

"You tell me, boot-scrape, I wasn't at the meet-up."

"That's what he said!" Roth interjected.

"Well, what time?"

"After eleven."

"Then we're early."

As I scuttle across the rooftop, carefully testing each step before entrusting my weight to timbers which haven't been repaired in Tegas only knows how long, a small scuffle breaks out below me in the shadows.

"Vexx damn you, Roth, I told you to hold her!"

Footsteps echo down the alley as the victim races away from her captors, but there's nowhere near enough light to see, and it isn't long before she slams into a pile of wood and other trash debris, and the footfalls cease in a clattering explosion of noise.

"You inbred sod-busters ever hear of a leash?" A new voice joins the assembled below, coming from the other end of the alley, and this one I recognize only too well. Captain Stebbins, chief precinct officer of the Watch in this part of the City. A man most of the citizenry looks up to as a paragon of sainted virtue, but only because the corruption he's buried neck-deep into is invisible unless, like I do, you know where to look. Four now. Getting dicier. "Get up, lady."

The thwack of a booted foot meeting someone's side a little too hard produces a loud squeak of pain from the gagged captive. More noise as she's hauled to her feet and dragged back to the original trio.

"I sprang you knob-heads from the Nick because I heard you were good," Stebbins continues. "If this is your 'good', I shudder to think what another precinct officer might get for his outlay of coin."

"She's scrappy!" The whine in Roth's voice only grows my already-inflated desire to silence it.

"She works in the Chummed Waters," Lint says. "Every woman in there's scrappy."

"I don't drink in sailors' pubs. How the Nine Hells am I supposed to know that?"

"Enough." The third man, whose name I still don't know, speaks again. "Where's Ristal? I thought he'd be with you."

"Ristal got delayed," Stebbins says. "It's no big deal."

"No big deal, my ass. We're the ones standing out here with our cocks flapping in the breeze."

"And we're going to

keep

standing out here until Ristal arrives with the money. Unless you want to bugger off early and forfeit your share."

Five people now? Great. Pretty soon we'll have enough for a whole Ball-and-Hoop team. This woman better be worth it.

"Hey, uh, Stebbins...?"

"You don't need to whisper, Lint, the alley's deserted front to back. Why do you think I picked it? And what?"

"What if, you know, the Angel shows up?"

"The Angel's a fairy tale, you grub-fart. Grow a pair."

"No she isn't," Roth says. "Beckwin's seen her running the rooftops. Swears it on a stack of Tegas's Sayings."

"Beckwin would claim he passed through Vexx's shadow and lived to tell the tale if he thought it'd get some berk to buy him a drink. What are you so scared of?"

"She killed Horvath though," Lint says. "They found him at the mouth of Dogleg Alley, throat cut ear to ear, and chest open neck to groin."

"And no other gang's ever used that as a calling card?" Stebbins replies.

"I'm just saying, the Archers don't operate over there. It had to be the Angel."

"There

is

no Angel," Stebbins says, smacking the wall beside him for emphasis. "If there was, you think I wouldn't know about it? Are you calling me a cock-comb?"

"No, that's not what I mean."

"Lint, if you're so worried, maybe you should go stand watch. Make sure she doesn't sneak up on us," the third man says. From the inflection in his voice, it's clear this isn't a suggestion. Lint's boots crunch across the debris-strewn cobbles as he heads towards the alley's west entrance.

There won't be a better opportunity to even the odds, so I move with him across the tannery's roof, timing my steps to his gait, and halting as he stops at the end, looking out onto a street lit only by moonlight. To pique his curiosity, I pull a rusting nail free from its rotted mooring, and flick it further ahead of him. It pings off the cobbles and tinkles its way into the street, and I watch as he hunches down and eases himself forward to investigate.

There's a ruffle of wind as I step off the side of the building, but I pull my arms to my sides and land in the alley below, allowing my knees to bend fully as I absorb the impact with my padded footwear. Lint continues to stare out of the alley, looking first to one side, and then the other, as I rise from behind.

One hand taps his left shoulder. As he turns to see who it is, I dart to the right, coming around in front of him. My hand chops into his windpipe, blunting his ability to speak, before my foot connects with an even more sensitive target between his legs. As he begins to double over, my blade melts into his chest, puncturing his heart between ribs. In seconds it's over, and I drag the body into a street-side gutter with the rest of the filth.

One down, and I haven't even broken a sweat. Spotting an easy climbing route where the mortar has chipped away from the stones holding the closest building together, I'm back on the rooftop in moments, headed back towards the meeting place to discover I'm almost too late.

"About time you got here," Stebbins grunts at the approaching mass of fat who must be Ristal. "Lint was already spooked, and these two babies were worried about being home before bedtime."

"These things take time. The merchandise?"

"Here, as promised." Stebbins pulls the woman away from Roth and leads her to Ristal, who looks her over in the dim light.

"Can't tell," Ristal grunts. "One way to know for sure though." With a sudden motion, he seizes the woman's work blouse and tears it down the front. She yelps through the rag, but Roth and the other man secure her arms while Ristal bends in to examine her more closely.

She kicks at the mountainous thug, but it's a frantic, panicked kick, one that I can see coming even from my vantage point, and the larger man swats it aside with one meaty forearm as though her leg is nothing more than a fly annoying a grazing cow. "Birthmark looks right. She's the one."

"You got the money, then?" the third man asks.

Ristal laughs. "Don't worry, Heaton. I got one pretty silver noble for each of you, just as promised."

He reaches inside his tunic, and I slowly twist a wet bandanna across my mouth.

He draws out a coin cord, and I pull the fabric up over my nose.

He begins to undo the knot, and I reach into my sleeve.

As he opens the knot and begins to count out the coins, I hurl the small vial I've extracted from its inner padded pocket down upon them.

By Tegas's wrinkled vestments, the

smell

...! I'm well above them, face covered and prepared for what I thought I was about to experience, but nothing in the Seven Heavens or Nine Hells could have readied me against the stench which explodes through the alley. It's a combination of summer sewage, milled skunk weed, and spoiled milk mixed with wet hound, compounded sulfur, and a week's worth of chamber pot leavings, wrapped in rotten entrails and the carcasses of a thousand dead fish.

The reaction down below is instantaneous, as nausea rips through the four criminals, and one unfortunate victim, who yanks her gag off prior to puking up her guts by virtue of the fact Heaton and Roth released her arms so they can stagger against the wall to do the same.

Where in the fuck did Mendon brew this? More to the point,

how

did Mendon brew this?

Never mind. Some things don't need answers.

With my marks disabled, I drop into the alley, not bothering to disguise my footfalls as I advance on the swooning men.

"Your voice disgusts me," I tell Roth as I yank his head up by his grease-slicked hair and cut his throat from ear to ear with my obsidian blade. Whatever riposte he might have made gurgles to death in his windpipe as I shove him to the ground and advance towards my next target.

"Who-?" Heaton manages before my knee finds his nose, and I drive my knife into and through the side of his stomach, not withdrawing it until it reaches the other side, and the stink of his punctured guts joins the odoriferous chorus in the air.

Ristal is next in line, and he's had enough time to draw a blade of his own, but incapacitated as he is, hasn't the strength to give it a full swing. I raise my left arm and block it with the metal guard sewn across my sleeve, and follow through with a chopping strike that leads the tip of my blade directly into his left eye, and further in. The bulky man freezes, twitches, and collapses with all the grace of a sack of dead puppies. Four silver nobles roll out of his other hand and clatter into the debris packed against the opposite side of the alley.

"You bitch!"

And then there was one.

Stebbins, somehow, has regained his composure. "One day, Angel, the last thing you see before your eyes close will be my seed sprayed over your supine body."

"Promises, promises." I hold my blade up and wait for him to draw his, but he turns tail and flees, the City Watch emblem stitched into his cloak flapping in the wind as he departs into Scorched Street.

I wait another few seconds in anticipation of a trap before gathering up the spilled nobles from the ground, then, holding the cloth tight against my face, I search the other fallen men, pulling their coin ropes and adding their meager copper commons to my collection. Something doesn't sit right, and I check Ristal over again, until I find his other coin rope, this one holding sixteen nobles and four gold crown coins, stuffed into the left side of his under-breeches. The man was definitely compensating for something.

Finally I turn my attention to the tavern wench, gagging and choking away against the wall. "Here, love. It's OK. They're gone." Blade back in its sheath, I gently take the woman's hand and pull her to her feet, leading her down the alley, away from the miasma and into the slightly better light of Cart Ditch Road. "What's your name?"

It's the better part of a minute before she catches her breath enough to speak. "Clara, milady. But... But who are...?"

I draw the bandanna away from my face so she can see me clearly, and draw back my hood, and she gasps in surprise.

"I... By Vexx herself, I've seen you before, but..."

I nod. "One week prior, I sought a drink in the Chummed Waters. You served me well, Clara. I'm glad I could repay you."

She looks down, at her tattered clothes, the remains of her dinner staining what cloth Ristal failed to obliterate in his haste to verify her identity. "I... I m-must get home, but... H-how can I travel like...?"

I remove my cloak and gently wrap it around her. "At ease, my dear. I've a safe room not far from here. I'll escort you, and I promise: you'll come to no harm."

* * * * *

My word is good. One of the city's scavenging ghouls learns my blade doesn't taste good, and we are unmolested by the rest as we make our way to the unmarked rear entrance of the Philandering Flumph. My key opens the lock, and we slip inside, away from watchful eyes. The stone stairs don't creak once as we ascend to the second floor, making our way down a hall and into the second-to-last room on the right, one of the tavern's deluxe suites which features its own indoor bathing tub.

"Here, love. Let's get you cleaned up and soak away the night's chill." While she sits on the cloud-like mattress, I walk to the chamber's tub, which is the main reason I keep this room on permanent reserve. The elegant, claw-footed marble sparkles even in the dim light cast by the bobbing blue spheres up by the ceiling. I scan across the selection of palm-sized gem stones set into a recessed alcove on the wall beside the tub, select the yellow one, and set it into the fitting on top of the copper spigot. Hot, jasmine-scented water begins pouring into the tub. It's a rather basic enchantment, but one of many reasons the Flumph can charge six times the going rate of a common flophouse.

I draw a pile of towels, a bath sponge, and a soap wedge from the closet, and place them on the table beside the tub, then beckon her over. "Go ahead and soak. I'll be back in two shakes with fresh clothes. We'll have to burn these to get rid of the smell, I'm afraid. And don't worry: you're safe in here." I blow her a small kiss and leave to cash in a favor with one of the local clothiers.

* * * * *

I'm back in less than an hour to find Clara ensconced in the sheets, so I place the clothing I've procured on the foot of the bed, remove the gem from the spigot which signals to the water that its time to drain, and work out of my own clothes. Crawling beneath the covers wakes her despite my best efforts to remain quiet, and she turns to face me.

"Milady..." she murmurs, and that simple word carries with it all the power and charm I hoped it would. I match my lips to hers, then she tilts her head back as I begin to explore her neck with my mouth. She is warm, perfumed, skin flushed from both the bath and desire, and I delight in peeling back the bed sheet, exposing her to the soft illumination.

She is not what convention would dictate to be 'attractive', but to me that simply increases the allure. Full-breasted, artistically-pleasing in the hips, the cutest bits of baby fat ringing her stomach, ordinary cheek bones, a just-slightly-too-large nose, but her eyes are warm coffee, her hair a polished charcoal, and her fingers, rough from her serving job, leave a pleasing sensation as they flow across my shoulders and down my back.

She shudders, arched, as my teeth find my way to her nipple, and when I draw the peppermint-colored nub into my mouth, a sigh which seems to come from her lightly-calloused heels fills the room with warmth. Fingers course up into my hair, holding my head in place while I lavish attention on her chest, and I can feel her heart's reverberations as I nuzzle, kiss, and tease.

Long minutes pass as I switch between her breasts, kissing her the way scattered tulip petals kiss the grass beneath them, and though I can feel her desire for release, I refuse to proceed at any pace less than glacial.

I return to her lips, and idly wonder how long it's been since she slept with anyone, if she's always been attracted to women or if this is just an emotional response from the events of the night. Regardless, she seems comfortable enough in her own skin to allow the emotions to flow as they want. Her hands fumble against my chest, and I let her explore and try things as she wishes, a kiss never far from my mouth when she needs reassurances that it's all OK.

When I press myself fully down upon her, and she moves her legs apart expectantly, I know she's ready. Shifting to one side, we lay, face to face, lips to lips, and I slide my hand between her thighs, parting the soft-as-corn-silk hair of her sex with my fingers, exploring, gesturing, tickling, and easing my way inside.

With strokes measured and rhythmic, her breathing intensifies. I push deeper with one finger, and she grips my shoulder, tilts her chin down, and lets out a harder breath that pebbles my skin with goosebumps, so I keep the in-and-out motion going. Soon, she's pushing up against me, matching my motions. Nails dig into me, my left shoulder and my right side, as she grips tighter. I add a second finger, and she works harder, urging me faster, then slower, then faster again with each breath, a bastion of indecision which I slowly and delicately unlock with my finger-work as though it were the tumblers of a mansion door.

She cries, gasps into my shoulder, then leans her head back forcefully into the pillow, eyes squeezed shut, the tendons in her neck tightening, and before I can fully secure my hold on her with my other hand, she is bucking and shuddering, pulling air between her teeth as her legs alternate between straight and relaxed. Her left hand moves between her legs, grasping at my wrist and trying to push me back, so I allow her to so do enough that my fingers slide out of her, but then I pivot my wrist to bring my thumb across her clit, and press, gently but firmly, against the little rosebud and all bets are off.

He legs part of their own accord, and it's a good thing the Flumph's suites have thick walls, because in a few seconds, she's screaming prayers to every two-bit lust goddess of the City's temples, and I'm doing my damnedest to comply with every request that flies from her tongue to my ears. I look to my side, at the mirror on the wall, and watch our reflections, her toes curling, breasts bouncing as she pushes her way through another climax, until everything seizes up and she somehow seems to drop, as though she'd been levitating an inch off the mattress, and goes limp, whimpering in half-lidded bliss as I allow her to ride down the crest of the wave into a small tide pool of calm.

"Milady, I... I have never... Not like that..."

"I've never held such a tigress in my arms either," I say, and for once, it isn't a lie.

"How could I... I mean... What could I do to... Repay this...?"

Slowly, I raise her arms above her head, crossing them against the pillow, and hold her wrists there as I maneuver myself up and over one leg. She opens her eyes, watching me get in place, and there's no argument as I lower myself against her thigh and begin a slow and steady grind.

She has had her fun, and now, I shall have mine.

* * * * *

Some time later, having exhausted my muscles and my nerves, drenched in sweat, I roll off her and we share a tender embrace. I can feel that I pushed myself harder on this one, but it was worth every ache I'll no doubt feel in the morning.

We share a kiss, a second, then our noses touch and bump the way some Elves express playful affection. The rest of the world, as far as I can tell, is still asleep.

I rise from the bed, and reach into my pack, returning with a small vial. "Here. We've still a few hours until the sun burns away the ghouls. Drink this; it will help you sleep."

"Will you meet me again, milady?"

"Worry not, Clara. I'll call again." I'm pretty sure I mean it, too. Damn this City.

She's so trusting, it's adorable. I watch her remove the stopper, sniff the contents, then drink it down in three swallows. The Liquid Sleep is quite effective: in seconds, she's collapsed, limp, breathing softly, so deep in her dreams that even a dragon could not rouse her. Laying back, I slide an arm beneath her shoulder, raise the other under my pillow, rest my head back, and wait.