“We face Wolves every day. They don’t attack us often anymore, but for years it was almost a daily event. You, Emilian Kalakos”—it was the first time I’d heard Niko say his entire name—“are out of your league here. When Janus is dealt with, you should leave. The creatures that live in the city make Wolves seem as puppies.” Niko finished washing off the stitches with another surgical scrub.
“And I’m not wanted.”
“You may have saved Cal. You did save me. It’s appreciated, but it doesn’t wipe out the past. Your opportunity to make amends has long come and gone.” He slipped his shirt back on and put the first-aid kit back together and handed it to Kalakos in case he needed it. He didn’t want him around, didn’t want him at all, but Nik, contrary to what he was saying and unlike his father, did do what was right from the very beginning. Not a lifetime later.
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.