The bakery was Augie’s dream.
It was a small storefront on a corner that got good light in the morning, with a dusty display case that had once held bread and a brick oven that hadn’t been lit in years.
The windows were streaked with grime, and the floorboards creaked underfoot, but the bones were good.
The building had the solid, enduring feel of old Brooklyn: the thick plaster walls, the iron radiators, the tin ceiling with its pressed patterns of fleur-de-lis.
Augie stood in the middle of it, his hands in his pockets, and described what it would be: the bread, the pastries, the regulars who would come for the smell and stay for the company.
His voice was different here.
Softer.
Hoping.
“First legitimate business I ever owned,” he said.
“No bootleg.
No skims.
Just bread.”
Bankole leaned against the doorframe, watching the dust motes drift in the slants of afternoon light.
The street outside was quiet: a dog sleeping in a patch of sun, a woman hanging laundry on a second-floor line, the distant clatter of a horse-drawn wagon on the cobblestones.
“It needs work,” Bankole said.
“Yeah.
But I got time.” Augie kicked a loose floorboard, sending up a puff of old flour.
“I got time, and I got a guy who owes me a favor for that thing with the harbor crew last week.”
The harbor crew.
The No-Maj gang that had been leaning on Augie for a cut of his bootlegging profits.
He could still see Jimmy the Nose the way he’d looked three nights ago, cornering Augie against a stack of crates behind the warehouse, two of his men fanned out to block the alley’s only exit.
Jimmy hadn’t raised his voice.
He hadn’t needed to.
“You’re a week behind, Constantine.
Weeks cost extra.”
“I’m good for it.”
“You’ve been good for it four times running.
My patience isn’t a bootlegger’s virtue.” Jimmy had nodded at the nearest man, who cracked his knuckles with theatrical care.
Bankole had let the Seeking flare, quiet, unremarkable, a wizard’s instinct dressed up as a hunch.
It had shown him the ledger inside Jimmy’s coat pocket, and inside it, three pages back, a debt of Jimmy’s own to a man in Providence who didn’t forgive slowly.
“Funny thing about ledgers,” Bankole had said, stepping out of the shadow at the alley’s mouth.
“They cut both ways.” New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
Jimmy had gone very still.
“Who’s this?”
“A friend who reads faster than you’d like.
Providence sends its regards, by the way.
Said to mention the amount out loud if you’d forgotten it.”
He hadn’t said the number.
He hadn’t needed to.
Jimmy’s face had done the arithmetic for him, and his men had backed off the crates without waiting for an order, the way men do when they’ve decided a fight isn’t worth the version of themselves that survives it.
Augie hadn’t said anything until they were three blocks clear.
Then: “What in God’s name was that?”
“A conversation.”
“That wasn’t a conversation.
Jimmy the Nose doesn’t back down from conversations.
I’ve seen him not back down from a gun.” Augie had kept glancing at him sideways the whole walk home, the way a man looks at a dog that’s turned out bigger than the collar suggested.
By the time the alley emptied, Augie had a truce and Bankole had a debt he hadn’t asked for.
It had been small.
Invisible.
A wizard’s work laundered as luck.
But Augie knew.
And Augie’s crew knew.
And the favor Augie owed him was real.
“What exactly did you do to them?” Augie asked, not for the first time.
“Jimmy the Nose went from ‘pay up or else’ to ‘we’re square, good luck with the bakery’ in a single afternoon.”
“I found something he valued more than your money.”
“What?”
Bankole considered how much to say.
The truth, that he had located a hidden ledger and a debt Jimmy owed to a man far more dangerous than himself, was too specific.
The lie, that he had simply talked to the right people, was too thin.
“A leverage point,” he said.
“Everyone has one.”
“You don’t have to pay me back,” Bankole added, because the words felt right even if they weren’t quite true.
Favors were currency in this city, and he was learning to spend them carefully.
“That’s not how favors work.” Augie turned to face him.
“You helped me.
I help you.
That’s how it goes.”
“I didn’t help you so you’d owe me.”
“I know.” Augie grinned, warm and crooked.
“That’s why you’re good people.
But I’m still gonna pay you back.
That’s how I work.”
Bankole didn’t know how to accept being owed to.
He had spent his whole life, both lives — owing nothing to anyone, keeping his debts low and his distance lower.
Having a man look at him with open gratitude and call him good people was a kind of warmth he didn’t have a name for.
“You’re going to go legit,” Bankole said.
“Open this bakery.
And I’m going to be in the background, running from the law.”
“Good.
Then I’ll know where to find you when I need a favor.” Augie clapped him on the shoulder.
“Family rates.”
They left the dusty bakery together, stepping out into the cool afternoon air.
The street was coming alive with the evening rush, workers heading home, the smell of cooking oil from a nearby tenement, a boy selling newspapers on the corner.
A woman called out to Augie in Italian, and he answered in the same language, his accent rough but fluent.
Bankole walked home through the No-Maj dark having gained a brother and a debt, and the uneasy new knowledge that people, too, were creatures he would want to keep too safe.
The gas lamps flickered on as he walked, one by one, casting pools of yellow light on the wet cobblestones.
A trolley rattled past, its bell clanging.
The city was vast and indifferent and full of dangers he couldn’t yet name.
But tonight, it also held a bakery that was going to open one day, and a man who called him good people, and a case full of creatures who trusted him to keep them safe.
That was something.
He thought of Jimmy the Nose’s ledger, three pages of debt he’d read in a single borrowed heartbeat, and of how easily the same trick could turn on him if he ever misjudged who was holding the book.
Augie had a truce bought on a threat nobody but the two of them would ever understand.
Bankole had a favor he couldn’t refuse and an underworld that now knew Augie kept strange, lucky company.
He set both facts alongside Thren and Nettle and Hal, one more bond in a roster that kept refusing to stay small, and didn’t let himself wonder yet what it would cost to keep a No-Maj safe the way he kept a Bowtruckle safe.
Not tonight.
Tonight there was a bakery with good bones and a friend who called him family rates, and that would have to be enough to carry home.