by Rob Thurman
Kalakos proved to be as stubborn as Niko. Genes do sometimes tell. “You have a tattoo as well. Same black and red, but a different language. I do not recognize it.” What does it say? went unspoken, as Niko wouldn’t threaten to make Ping-Pong balls of his eyes; he’d do it first, warn after the fact.
But Niko did answer. “‘Brothers Before Souls.’ Cal’s gift, albeit drunken, to me.”
When I had a choice at one point to revert to human, at least temporarily, or stay as I was born and far more able of keeping my brother alive, I’d made my decision and it needed no thought. I would do anything for Nik, whether it be light, gray, or the dark at the end of the road. Before the father of my half brother, before my friends, before my life, before the world itself, and, yeah, before my soul. It was my promise to Niko, and he might not have wanted it, but it was his and he knew what the tattoo meant.
Exactly what it said.
“Can you match that?” Niko asked.
“No.” Kalakos settled back as I checked the mirror again. He turned to face out the window. “No, I can’t.”
At least the bastard wasn’t making excuses anymore.
“There’s a tunnel under Atlantic Avenue?” I asked skeptically standing in the parking lot of a funeral home in Brooklyn. I felt out of place not wearing a heavy gold chain with a thick patch of chest hair showing. I knew I didn’t belong behind a funeral home. I was alive, and if I weren’t alive, my body would be scraps in some beast’s stomach, not laid out like a plastic doll in a coffin.
“More than a tunnel,” Robin answered with exasperation. “Niko, I know he can read. I’ve seen him do it. Can’t you deprive him of food or bathroom privileges until he learns one new thing a month?”
Niko was stiff and limping, but we all were. “I could, but then bathroom privileges would become the kitchen sink or the corner of the Dumpster outside. He’s an adult. I don’t like it, but that means he’s entitled to embrace his ignorance. Cal, beneath Atlantic Avenue…”
“Is a tunnel built in ye olden days. It was big enough for two locomotives to pass each other side by side. They closed it down before the nineteen hundreds. Now it’s a tourist attraction. You can go down a manhole back at the Court Street intersection on some guided tour.” I’d reloaded my Glock and tucked it in the back of my pants and pulled out my shirt, the blood on it now reddish brown, to cover it up. The xiphos I gave to Niko to tuck away in his coat. “So bite me. Who’s the genius now?”
Robin slapped his forehead. “I forgot. Ishiah has those crass ‘unknown facts of NYC’ bar napkins that were delivered by mistake. I saw them at the Panic.”
With an internal shudder, I wished that had been all I’d seen at the Panic.
“Yep, a mistake,” I said, pushing the Panic far from my thoughts, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I read them, because I’m not dense.” In reality I would’ve, as Niko said, embraced that lack of knowledge thoroughly, but bartending had its slow moments; a Wolf had thrown another Wolf through the TV and the wall behind it, and porn was not allowed in the Ninth Circle. Your boss and your best friend doing it was no problem, but no porn in the bar. I didn’t get it either. Ishiah had some weird rules.
Until the new TV arrived, I read napkins.
“Regardless of your newfound brilliant knack for trivia, not all of the tunnel is a tourist trap. At least half of it was walled off and that is where the market is.” Goodfellow walked us to the back of the funeral home and knocked.
A few moments later it was opened by a man in his fifties with a long, narrow face, eyes moist with unshed sympathetic tears, a charcoal suit, a deep, somber voice, and a box of Kleenex in one hand. “You’ve come to the wrong door, but how can I direct you in your time of sorrow?”
“Relax, Jackie boy. We just want to go downstairs,” Robin said.
The eyes overflowed with tears and Jackie snatched a Kleenex, which I’d thought was for distraught clients, to blow his nose. “Sorry, Rob. I’m trying out some contacts and they’re eating my goddamn eyes alive. I can barely see ya. Sure, get your asses in here before Pinky brings the police running with all that blood.”
Me being Pinky. Goodfellow and that damn shirt he’d forced on me would make sure that nickname stuck around for a year or so.
“How’s the wife? She up front?” We followed Goodfellow up the stairs and inside while he talked up Jack the Snot Machine.
“Yeah, snooty bitch.” He frowned. “She wants me to go by Jacques instead of Jackie while we’re working, so’s we seem fancier. Then we ran out of embalming fluid a week ago—a shortage on fricking embalming fluid, you ever heard of shit like that? And that’s when the bus wreck happened. Family reunion. Been coming to our funeral home to be stuffed in overpriced boxes since great-great-great-whoever. So’s I’m out raiding every grocery store in Brooklyn for that runny maple syrup. Almost like water, cheap-ass shit. But it runs through the embalming machine like a dream. And I’m thinking, Praise Jesus and halle-fucking-lujah, ’cause twenty of those suckers are stacking up in the morgue and starting to go off in a bad way.” He opened a door off the hall marked, JANITOR ONLY. DANGEROUS CLEANING SUPPLIES. FLAMMABLE. “But that ain’t the end of it. The next morning Grandma Nosy wants to know before the service why her father smells like a pancake breakfast.” He stepped back out as we stepped in. “Eh, what can you do? It’s always something.”
“That, Jackie, is truer than you know. Good luck with the wife and the waffles.” Robin gave him the Brooklyn aim of the finger and firing of the thumb before closing the door behind us.
“He’s human,” I said.
“That he is.” Robin unlocked another door on the other side of the room. It was double bolted and had a security pad for a password.
“He doesn’t know about Monster Mart?” I persisted.
“No. That would only mess with his tiny mind, and Jackie has far too little to endanger. Besides, a zombie or vampire running a funeral home? What a cliché,” he noted with disdain.
The door opened. “He thinks I’m a drug dealer or a gun runner or run a white slave ring. As long as I pay him something every month, he minds his own business.” There were more stairs and no light as the door shut behind us. Robin clapped his hands and half domes of plastic sprang to a soft white light. They sat on the stairs and up against the wall. “Pick up the pace. We have a few blocks to walk, and every once in a while I get blood leeches nesting down here. Fourteen feet long. Not something you want to get tangled up in because you’re too slow.”
All of us limped faster while Robin explained the marketplace was in the part of the tunnel walled off from tourists, civilians, and the homeless. Also all the monsters had their own ways in. Some species shared: the Wolves, the revenants, the vampires. Others, like Goodfellow, preferred their entrance private.
About two blocks later we walked through a massive brick arch that had to be as thick as a man was tall. The ceiling was brick too and about ten feet high. And beyond the arch were booths, tents, tables…anything you could imagine from an ancient bazaar to a white-trash yard sale was here.
“You…stained with blood. I see your past, right before me. I’ll tell it to you for a sip of fresh blood.” To my right, a creature crouched on the wet brick floor. He…I thought…he was stirring a spidery seven-jointed finger around a cracked plate of intestines. I didn’t have to think twice on that. I’d spilled enough that I knew what they looked like. Eyes of dark gold streaked with fungus green studied me, the slippery mass before him, and then me again. It could’ve been a salamander from its moist skin—if its mother mated with about twenty South American face-eating spiders at once and a snake to top it off for the mottled green-and-gray forked tongue.
“No, thanks, froggy. I’ve lived it once. I can do without the rerun.” I kept moving until the hand wrapped around my forearm twice over.
“For two sips I’ll tell your present and future. I see those as well,” came a needy, sibilant hiss. “Everyone wants to know what lies be
yond and what lies within.”
He stood four feet tall and I could’ve bent down to his level, but I didn’t. I grabbed his neck and jerked him off the ground up to mine. I stared into his eyes—close enough that I could see a perfect reflection of myself in the black pupils. “You have no idea what lies within me,” I said, soft, smooth, and hungry. Not for food, but for fear. “Go back to your bowl of Campbell’s Cup o’ Guts before I let you see if you can read your own intestines with more fucking accuracy.”
To give me credit…it had been a long day.
I dropped him then with the unpleasant sound of a snail squashed under your shoe. “If that’s the best this place has, Goodfellow, we are wasting our time and I’m spending more of mine in a pink shirt.”
“Lighten up, Pinky.” Robin grinned. “All fairs, carnivals, markets, bazaars have their fakes. Be grateful he isn’t a real expert in extispicy and doesn’t have the true sight or he’d be screaming the ceiling down. We’d die in an avalanche of brick.”
“I focused on the one word that interested me. Extra spicy?” I stepped over the tentacle of the Bride of Cthulhu who was browsing a jewelry stand.
“No, Taco Bell. Back to the bar napkins for you. Extispicy…the ability to read omens and predict the future by reading entrails.”
“Cal calls that lunch and hasn’t delivered a prediction yet,” Niko said dryly. Kalakos stayed behind us, but not too far. He thought he’d seen and hunted the unclean. He was a babe in the woods. I didn’t recognize one-fourth of what was roaming around down here and I hoped I didn’t run into them upstairs.
Sometimes things are so nasty that you don’t want to get close enough to do your job. Carrying a gun in one hand and a barf bag in the other because their ugliness was beyond extreme wasn’t worth the money. But then I saw something else. There was a shimmer to one side. Not the love-at-first-sight idiocy shimmer, but a true shimmer of what I thought was a silver-blue light. But when I glanced over, there was no light. There was a woman.
As I stopped to get a closer look, she was already facing me. She, like Cthulhu’s main squeeze, was at a jewelry stall. A choker of polished black tears and garnets or rubies cut into star shapes hung from her hand. “It’s beautiful and it’s sad, isn’t it, sugar? But family is that way. I had it special-made to remind me. Life is shorter than we know and we’d best get our asses out there and kick up our heels.”
The choker looked nice on her when she held it to her throat. Her accent reminded me of my trip down to South Carolina, Southern, although not quite the same Southern, but neither of those things were what caught my attention most of all. Not close to it.
She looked like me.
Her skin was as pale as mine, and that was hard to find. Her eyes were the same exact gray, her hair the same black only with a slight wave to it. If we were together—not that we were, and where had that thought come out of in the middle of this mess? I felt a twitch below. Oh yeah. That’s where. If we were together, we’d look like one of those bizarre brother/sister-looking couples you see. Walking mirror images—she was close to my height too; not quite an Amazon, but definitely not fragile. Her smile, it was all me too. Wicked and wild, but without the shadows. “What’s the matter, sugar? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I started to get a scent off of her. She wasn’t human, not down here. So what was she? Goodfellow put an end to that quickly. “Ah, gamiseme tora. No, no, no. I can’t.…Trixa would kick my…No, no. I apologize, Ms.…?” He knew her, but he didn’t know her name? Or from the shifting from foot to foot was he waiting for the name she was using?
“Charla Tae-Lynn.” Despite the name, she was no countrified Alice down the rabbit hole, this chick. No way. “But this one”—her hand straightened the collar of my bloody, torn shirt—“he can call me Tae. Three names can be a mouthful and then some. And if I want a mouthful, there are lots more pleasurable mouthfuls to be had, ain’t there, sugar?” My brain fried at the double entendre. She winked, slapped my ass—which enjoyed it thoroughly—and disappeared into the milling crowd.
“Who…?”
“No.” Goodfellow shoved me along in the opposite direction.
“But…”
“No.” He kept shoving. “You think Delilah is hot shit? That one would eat Delilah alive and have room for the whole Lupa pack for dessert.”
“What is she?” Niko asked. “She has a…presence.”
“Presence? Presence? You’ve no idea. And we have enough trouble. Given another day, Cal won’t have a dick to insert anywhere anyway. He’ll be Janus mush or locked in with a pit of succubae that he wants nothing to do with and they want even less to do with him. Either way, his sex life is on hold. How about we get to work and try to do something about that…and save our lives, if that’s not too much to ask for?”
We ended up at the last stall next to the bricked-up wall. This place was unbelievable. It reminded me of the trade shows where, hand to God, the guns were all within the law, Officers, until five minutes later when the cops were gone and you were being shown the latest in the highly illegal, mean-as-rattlesnake-poison, newest design of machine gun to come out of Israel. So new you could feel the packing grease on the stock.
“This is, as I said, my last guess. We hit the black market to see if anyone had been asking about a nine-foot artifact of assassination, and there’s no one better to ask than my old friend the Artful Dodger.” He was trying to summon up the old Goodfellow energy, but the shape we were all in, none of us felt like being upright, much less bargaining with a thief. And if he went by the Artful Dodger, he was a thief. But so was Robin and he had no equal.
Dodger grunted, unimpressed with Goodfellow’s praise.
“Although it’s probably pointless, as Janus’s type are gone for all time or not for sale. But if someone needed Janus, whether he already possessed him or stole him, a Rom perhaps or someone more Grimmly inclined, that doesn’t mean we make the assumption he had the words to activate him. If they didn’t, and as Hephaestus isn’t talking—sanely—this would the only place to find them. Words sell for more than gold or anything else often enough.”
Dodger grunted in agreement on that one.
“And if a Rom did buy them, it would be here, as I doubt more and more that Hephaestus entrusted them to some of the Vayash; it would be like giving your car keys to a two-year-old and telling him to take a drive around the block. Disaster.” Robin leaned against the booth, yawning, exhausted as we all were. “If it were Grimm, on the other hand, he’d drive Janus like Andretti with a Viper.”
The Dodger grunted at him again—a “get off, you lazy bastard” one. I had to admire him. He could grunt with the best of them.
Hoping the stall was sturdy, I watched Robin lean harder, as equally unimpressed with Dodger as Dodger was with him. He yawned again before returning to his train of thought. “If those words were found here, then we might find the second set. The ones that put the Statue of Liberty’s boyfriend back to sleep. Dodger, can you point us in the right direction? I know you’re more about the glitter and shine than that boring reading and writing.”
“Money, lives, and blood no object?” The grunt became a question. “And I learnt me some lettering. If it makes money, I learn.”
“Good for you, and price no object? Who do you think you’re talking to? Who got you the Trojan horse while Troy fell? And it was on fire at the time. If my business wasn’t serious, I’d take it to Walmart.” He lifted a shoe off the damp black-green fungus creeping across the floor and the rivulets of sewer water that seeped into anything belowground in the city. “At least they mop at Walmart. I’ve heard people say so.”
“Lemme look, guvnor.” That he mixed with a grunt and grumble to keep his vocal cords in the game. He swept jewelry, silver and gold teeth, metallic nuggets—all that was shiny and covered the threadbare black velvet into a large Tupperware bin. Robin didn’t go to Walmart, but this guy did. Putting them away, he then pulled out and slammed down a book as
thick as a NYC phone book but wider, bigger, and the cover was definitely made of tanned, dark brown human skin. It was the frigging Necronomicon, and if it wasn’t, it should’ve been. “I’ve expanded me business.” Dodger chortled slyly. “On my way to being a right proper gentleman now, I am. I am. Rich I’ll be, sitting up in some fancy roost like you.”
Goodfellow groaned. “Don’t start that again. Not that accent. If you can’t do it correctly, don’t do it at all. I cut your tongue out once. Don’t make me do it again.”
Cut it out, huh? It’d grown back nice, though, hadn’t it? Which meant…
The guy was short, had to be six inches under five feet, and he looked odd, as if the face of a ten- or twelve-year-old boy had aged while the rest of him, including his child-size hands, didn’t grow. He had a face that would substitute for a prune, mud brown hair cut in a bowl cut, and eyes that matched the mud of his hair. He looked human, but I’d bet Kalakos’s left nut, right one too, that he wasn’t. Down here Niko and the gypsy were the only humans walking around. As for me, there was no dual citizenship in monster–human land.
I leaned a few inches closer for a whiff to get a trace of what he really was. I narrowed my eyes. All I was getting was human, every last cell. I tried elsewhere, the last refuge of a human on the outside but a paien on the inside, their minds—that was always the difference. It took but one cell to get you in the club, and where better to hide it? And from the faintest trace I detected, it was one cell. One damn cell to have him crossing the line. That was a trick.
And developed into a bigger one than I thought, as Dodger was giving me the same once-over.
“Monster.”
This time I wasn’t the one saying it. Dodger was. He said it to me as he grew two feet taller, his arms became wings, his head narrowed, his mouth became a beak, and black feathers covered him. The irises of his now round eyes were a white full-moon shine. They made his feathers appear blacker. The night and the moon, as one.
