The Blue Blazes Read Free Page A

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    WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU YOURE LATE  
    Mookie doesn’t know what to say so he texts back nothing.
    He knows the address, at least. East Village. Little Poland. Tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Wila’s. Good golabki. Killer kielbasa.
    He thinks to take a cab, but most the time they don’t stop for a big scary bastard like him. And fitting into the back of a cab sucks. It always feels like one of his elbows is going to bust out a window, or his head is going to pop up through the roof. He’s been in tighter places – the Great Below isn’t always roomy, what with its tight labyrinthine hallways and suffocating chambers – but somehow the back of a cab always makes him feel claustrophobic. And out of control.
    And Mookie doesn’t like to feel out of control.
    But today, no choice. Cab’ll move quicker than he can on foot. And he’s already late.
    To stop a cab he steps out in front of one. Brakes screech.
    He gives the chipmunk-cheeked Sikh behind the wheel the address. The Sikh gives him a look of bewilderment and maybe even fear. But Mookie just growls and the man flips the meter and drives.
    At this hour, the streets are crowded. People going to work. Or looking for work. Or tourists coming into the city. A hippy woman on her cell bumps into a reedy little black dude struggling past with a Great Dane that looks more horse than dog. A Korean pushes a bike with a bent wheel. Homeless guys push shopping carts filled with cats and blankets, booze and busted-ass dreams. Men with loud ties pass women with short skirts. Children run to school, mothers trailing after.
    None of these people get it.
    It’s not their fault. He knows that. They’re ignorant. Blind. Eyes stapled shut. It’s like how nobody in this city looks at anybody else. They don’t look because they don’t want to see. Someone gets mugged, another yells “rape,” and nobody comes calling. People get beaten to death in stairwells, cries rising up through the building so that half the apartments can hear it, and by the time someone calls the cops, the body is cold, the blood is thick, and the killer is on the L train ten blocks away.
    They don’t know what lies beneath. What walks around them.
    Maybe it’s because they know. Secretly. They feel it vibrating in the deep of their bones, twisting in their stomach like an unspoken and misunderstood fear. Some part of the primal animal mind tells them, hey, right now, something awful – not someone, but some thing – might be walking right next to you. Sizing you up for a snack. Thinking to drag you down into the dark and stuff you full of its fingers and tongues and lay eggs in all your holes. The monsters are here. You know it, I know it – so why even look?  
    Mookie’s not blazing. Not right now. So he’s just as blind as the rest of them.
    But that doesn’t change what he knows.
    He knows that the monsters are real.
    And they’re here. Hidden in plain sight.
     
    Skint is an ashy, dry-skinned albino. Sells flowers all around TriBeCa to make a buck. At least, that’s what he wants people to think. Nora knows him for something else: he’s a guy who brings people together. He knows everybody. Sets up meetings. He’s not an info broker like that Snakeface in Chinatown, but he can plant a whisper in every ear that matters.
    He’s also not human. Not all the way, anyway.
    He’s a half-and-half. Were she Blazing, she’d see a long-limbed freak with skin like cracked vellum and eyes like unpopped blood blisters.
    Thankfully, right now she’s Blind.
    She shoves a cuppa coffee in his free hand. In the other hand, he holds a bundle of roses. Other flowers sit in makeshift containers around his feet.
    “Little Miss Thing,” Skint says. “Whadda you want?”
    “Bought you Starbucks,” she says, smiling.
    “I don’t drink Starbucks. Their coffee tastes like burned pubes.”
    “I think you’ll like it.”
    “I said I don’t drink this nasty-ass–” Suddenly he stops. Weighs