Charlie looked alarmed. “Nick, Nick, I’m sure the genie’s got it all figured out. Let’s just follow along and we’ll see Kevin. Right, Zephyr?”
I nodded vigorously, but Amir forestalled my response.
“Listen to your friend, Nicholas,” he said from the library door. “And speak easy. I make no promises if the police get called.”
Amir turned and left. Nicholas looked for a moment like a real thirteen-year-old boy floundering in the wake of a thorough set-down. But Amir was heading away without any apparent worry for the rest of us. Lily hurried behind him and Charlie took Nicholas’s arm to propel him out the door. Nicholas didn’t look very happy, but he didn’t argue.
“Goodness,” I muttered under my breath. I made a quick check again through the windows to the street: no one loitering nearby and certainly no one who looked like a police officer. I dashed back into the hall and hurried to catch up with the others.
We went through the main corridor and then turned left at a large framed photograph of the pathological wing from what must have been the sixties. Two long rows of white beds with thin, emaciated patients and a few hard-faced nurses. Probably tubercular, I guessed, given how common the diagnosis had been in the slums back in those days.
“Zephyr!” Lily’s harsh whisper echoed like a shout in the grand hallway. She stood before an open door to a staircase leading down. We were alone on the first floor.
I looked over my shoulder. “This place makes me nervous.”
“It’s a building full of dead bodies,” Lily whispered, though it seemed unlikely anyone would hear us. “Were you expecting the Ritz?”
I smiled wryly. “That place makes me nervous too.”
The basement was dark and cool. Amir had stopped at a door not too far from the stairs, but that was all I could make out. Nicholas and Charlie weren’t too bothered by the darkness, of course, but Lily and I bumped into each other and made the best of it by linking elbows.
“Do you think you might spare a light, Amir?” I asked.
I thought I saw his head come up, as though he had been bent over. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“To see by,” I said, and Lily giggled.
Amir muttered something—a curse, I thought, though it might have been a djinni equivalent of a spell, for a moment later a crown of flames burst alight around his head.
“Holy shit!” Charlie said, stumbling back into Nicholas, who did not so much curse as growl like a mad dog, which made Lily shriek (though it might have been the vulgar language) and me sigh.
“You know the effect that has on people,” I said, though perhaps I meant the effect it had on me. “Showing off is a sign of ill-breeding.”
Amir gave me a small smile. “Consider it payment,” he said, and turned back to the door. In the light, I could see that it was clearly the bar to our goal: every inch of the iron door had been branded with warding sigils, and—in case those didn’t work, no fewer than five locks and deadbolts.
“Are you trying to break the wards?” I asked.
“Broken,” he said, absently. “I’m trying to pick the locks.”
I was duly impressed, though I wouldn’t dream of saying so. Amir might be young for a djinni, but three hundred years would give anyone ample time to learn useful tricks like lock-picking.
“Zephyr?” said Charlie. “I’m sorry I used such foul language in your presence.”
I nearly laughed. One does not spend any length of time working for the Defenders without developing a healthy tolerance for such idiom. I’d been known to employ it myself, but I supposed there was no need to dull my halo by telling him so. “I quite understand, Charlie,” I said.
“It’s me who deserves the apology!” Lily straightened her hat, obviously trying to regain her composure. “Zephyr spends all her time among the coarser set; I’m sure she’s quite used to it.”
“I apologize, ma’am,” Charlie said.
Nicholas cuffed him. “She don’t deserve it, Charlie,” he said.
Lily drew herself up and for a moment I thought she’d storm out, but journalistic ambition eventually won.
“Amir,” I said, under my breath. “Please tell me you’re almost done? We are developing a situation.”
“Control the cats for another moment,” he said. “I’ve almost got it.”
“Why can’t you just, I don’t know, smoke yourself and unlock it from the other side?”
“Wards,” he said. “I could only crack the ones keyed to humans and vampires. And … there!”
With a gentle click, the door released its locks and glided inward. Amir’s fire cast enough light for us to see more than a dozen gurneys with bodies under white cloth.
“Christ,” Nicholas said, and for the first time it occurred to me that his particular testiness this evening might be a cover for undue emotion. Kevin had been his friend, and now Nicholas could finally pay his respects.
Lily, Charlie, and I followed Nicholas into the room. He pulled back each sheet until he reached the tenth gurney.
“Kevin,” he said, his voice somehow melodic with grief. “I swear, I will kill that bastard. I will crucify him that did this to you.”
Lily flipped open her notebook and started scribbling. I felt the need to restart my heart. Did Nicholas know about the letters? Did he know that someone else was involved besides Madison’s man? But no, his fury was such that he wouldn’t fail to mention an accomplice if he knew about it.
And I certainly wouldn’t tell him.
“The murderer will have a trial,” I said. Danger to myself aside, I didn’t like the idea of Nicholas on a quest for vigilante justice.
“Good for him,” Nicholas said, not taking his eyes from Kevin’s face. I shivered and left the matter alone.
Amir waited from the doorway, following us with his eyes. “Didn’t you say you broke in before?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I should have guessed they would change the wards. I probably left a trace. In any case, there might be an alarm on them, so let’s hurry?”
I nodded. Nicholas, Charlie, and Lily had taken all the available spaces around Kevin’s body, but I was interested in a different victim. I pulled back the sheet covering the last body. Zuckerman, naked in death as I had never seen him in life—curiously appropriate, given our first encounter. Other details assaulted me, but none so forcefully as the single, bare fact of his presence on that gurney.
Occasionally, the morgue did take on poppers, but the exsanguinated remains of vampires could all fit in a box about a foot square, and their investigation was more the provence of forceps and tweezers than scalpels and scales. Each of these bodies had been vampires. I had seen Zuckerman multiple times and been sure of it, and of course Nicholas could hardly have mistaken his friend. And yet here they were, the first vampires I had ever known who didn’t exsanguinate upon death. I peered at Zuckerman’s face again, frustrated by the dim light. The same generous nose and narrow mouth. I suppressed revulsion and used my forefinger to push up his stiff lip. His small fangs were retracted, but unmistakably present. So, a vampire. Dead. With a body to dissect.
What kind of tainted blood would stop a vampire’s exsanguination, but kill him anyway? It was almost like he’d turned human. “But he’s not human,” I whispered. In the chill air of this grim storage room, the words carried.
“None of them are,” Lily said. She was looking at the other two victims and flipping through the papers attached to the side of each gurney. “But they’re changed, somehow.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said, “they smell kind of funny.”
“Maybe that’s cause they’re dead, idiota,” Nicholas said. “Dead and poisoned.”
“That’s what I mean, Nick! The poison makes them smell funny. Not like a regular popper. They smell…”
Lily looked up from her perusal of the first gurney’s clipboard. “Half popper, half human,” she said.
Nicholas stared at her. “What do you mean?”
Li
ly’s hands were shaking, but from excitement or terror I couldn’t tell. “It says here: ‘subject’s central cavity liquefied, gonadal region to third rib. Anterior and posterior, however, definition of organs remains. Heart present but badly damaged and nonfunctional. Portions of extremities also internally liquefied, all consistent with the normal presentation of exsanguinated vampires. No known cause, pending further investigation.”
Absolute silence. From outside came a distant crash of lightning from a summer storm. I understood what this meant. We all did, but perhaps someone had to say it.
“They were turning back,” I said. “And halfway to human, it killed them.”
* * *
Torrential sheets of rain sliced through the streets in merciless wave after wave. First Avenue was deserted as ever; which gave me ample opportunity to admire nature.
At least, as best as I could while being soaked in it. There had been one umbrella in the stand by the entrance door. Amir had given it to Lily, who promptly used it to dash into the street, hail what must have been the only on-duty taxi in a twenty-block radius, and sail off without so much as inquiring whether we needed a ride. Nicholas and Charlie had left soon after our grisly discovery. Nicholas had gone so silent and furious I wondered if he might be having another one of those strange dissociative attacks. I didn’t ask—Nicholas wasn’t particularly safe at his most genial and lucid, let alone moments after he had looked upon the dead body of his friend and vowed revenge.
Which left Amir and me, alone in a summer thunderstorm.
“You really can’t teleport us back?” I asked. Water had overflowed the gutters, leaving it ankle-high at many points on the sidewalk. I sloshed through, refusing to think about the filth. Amir turned to me at the exact moment a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky. For that split second, I took in both his uncanny beauty and his harrowed, drawn expression. He seemed overworked and exhausted—an odd thing to think of a djinni, especially this one.
“Even I have my limits, Zephyr,” he said. “Though it’s flattering that you think me indefatigable.”
“I just thought your djinni business was, well…” I snapped my fingers and fluttered my hands.
Amir gave a short laugh and shook his head. “More like running up a very steep hill for several hours. One’s capacity does give out after a while. So if you’d like your brother back tomorrow, we have to walk.”
I shrugged waterlogged shoulders and forged ahead. I was bothered by Amir’s frank admission of weakness, but I couldn’t quite place why. Perhaps because he had exhausted himself on my behalf? But of course I couldn’t know what other business he’d attended to all day. For all I knew, he’d spent the afternoon in a Shadukiam harem before flitting to Yarrow for the evening entertainment. Indeed, I had to be vigilant around Amir, exactly because his presence always seemed to disarm me. When I saw those coal-dark eyes with their thick lashes, when I heard that gently amused voice and smelled that particular banked-fire-and-oranges smell, I quite frankly lost the good sense God gave me. It was absurd: Amir had lied to me practically since we met. It was almost certain that he had lied in some manner about the fate of his older brother and there was no reason for me to believe that he wasn’t lying now. Of course he looked tired, but there was no reason for me to believe it, or even if I did, to think that all of his travels today had been for my sake.
Yet, Amir had undeniably been attempting to atone for his actions in January. He had even haunted the mayor to help the anti-Faust cause, though the plan had backfired. I recalled how he had stated the exact number of casualties—forty-two, a grim figure so tellingly memorized, as though guilt had branded it on his thoughts. Could I forgive him? Could I at least look past his failings in light of his change of heart? It frightened me how much I wanted to. It frightened me, because in so many ways he hadn’t changed.
“You look nearly as stormy as the weather, Zephyr,” Amir said.
“Merely taking stock of my situation, Amir.”
He wiped the water from his eyes, sober and watchful. “And have you reached a conclusion?” he asked.
He stood very close. Enough so that I became aware of the gentle cloud of steam rising from his exposed skin and wet suit. The smell of him, that very intoxicant against which I had just girded myself, seemed to radiate like a bodily object, filling my nose and throat and pores, sliding down my spine like the hand of a lover, long denied.
I shivered and nearly sobbed. Amir frowned and cocked his head—entirely unaware, it seemed, of his uncanny effect.
A rolling thunderclap shocked me to my senses. I stepped away from him and shook my head, suddenly relishing the cold, clear rain.
“To beware of dangerous things,” I said, to which Amir made no response at all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“You can’t possibly mean to go back there!”
Aileen scowled at me over her toast. We were taking our Saturday-morning breakfast in Mrs. Brodsky’s kitchen. “Not this again, Zeph.”
“You nearly died the last time,” I said. “Of course I’m concerned.”
“You shouldn’t be,” she said, “because I did not nearly die. I was firmly on this side of the veil, Zeph, and surely you can grant that I ought to know.”
I took a deep breath and a long drink of milk. “I bow to your expertise,” I said. “But it was hard on you this Thursday. Perhaps it’s time you finally changed your situation? Found a steadier method of utilizing your talents?”
Aileen gave a bitter laugh and bit off her crust with too much ferocity. “Steadier?” she said, while chewing. “Like what, Zephyr? Please, tell me, what other gainful employment might your average Irish girl with a bit of Sight find in this town? Because as I see it, either I read on Skid Row or I tell fortunes for rich ladies with lettuce to spare.”
I wanted to tell her to give it up entirely, but I knew that the consequences of her ignoring her Sight were even more debilitating than those of her using it. The last time she tried, she had passed out on the factory floor after being accosted by an unwanted vision.
“You don’t have to try so hard,” I said. Aileen raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t interrupt. “Couldn’t you fake them most of the time? Tell a real one now and then to keep the hounds at bay? What difference will it make to the biddies anyway?”
Aileen looked down at the stale crust in her hand, shook her head, and tossed it unceremoniously on her plate. “The difference,” she said, with more weariness than anger, “is the ten clairvoyants who read for the Society on other nights. It’s the hundred other charlatans on Skid Row. It’s that the occupation of a Seer is one with a great deal of competition, and if I don’t try, then others will. Those ‘old biddies’ know their way around the Other Side.”
“At least you could tender your regrets for this appointment? Just relax for a week to recover?”
Aileen slid her plate over the counter to Katya and pulled a defiant cigarette from her case. “I’m perfectly recovered,” she said, standing to demonstrate the point. “And this client pays well enough not to accept regrets.”
I knew I should just leave well enough alone. Aileen was as stubborn as myself—it was perhaps a reason why we made such good friends. But she looked so worn, lighting her cigarette with a jerky motion. She was nearly pale enough to not need talcum powder. “This isn’t smart,” I said.
“Then you’ll just have to let me be dumb.”
“At least tell me you won’t contact Zuckerman.”
She hesitated, then shrugged. “I won’t contact Zuckerman.”
“You don’t sound very sure of that.”
“I’m—what right do you have to know everything I do?”
“Friendship?”
“Nosiness?”
I sighed. “Nosy friendship? Please, Aileen?”
Aileen ashed her cigarette in my cold coffee, but she gave me a rueful smile. “I should have known that one day you’d go do-gooding on me. If you must know, I’m reading for Judith Brandon
. While it’s possible she’ll ask after the officer, something tells me she will want me to do the same thing I’ve done for her the past ten times.”
“Contact her husband?” I asked.
“Or try, anyway.”
Mrs. Brodsky poked her head into the kitchen. “The phone is for you, Zephyr,” she said.
I started. I hadn’t even heard it ring. “Who is it?” I asked.
Mrs. Brodsky frowned and waved her hand. “How do I know? Some woman. Come, you pay for the extra minutes.”
I sighed. Aileen waggled her fingers at me. “Ta-ta, darling,” she said, in a slightly hysterical imitation of Lily’s posh New England accent.
I snorted. “I’ll say hello for you,” I said, and followed Mrs. Brodsky into the parlor.
But much to my surprise, it wasn’t Lily calling.
“Zephyr?” she said.
“Mama? Did something happen to Harry?”
“No, no, he’s fine, sweetie. Everyone’s fine except your daddy. That’s why I called.”
Somehow, I’d managed to not think about the mess at home all morning. Mama’s voice brought back all the stomach-churning anxiety that I’d felt last night after seeing Judah. “I don’t know what’s happened to him, Mama,” I said.
The connection wasn’t the best, with crackles and pops and a distant echo, but I was still sure that I heard my mother sobbing on the phone. I had seen Mama cry before, but not very often. Not in years. “You have to help us, Zephyr. I think your daddy…” She sniffed and hardened her voice. “Listen, dear, I know this won’t sit well with you, but you’ve got to do it for the sake of your family. We need your daddy. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know how much trouble he’s in. But no matter what he did, we have to do something to get him back.”
“You want me to do something to get him back? Mama, I’m no Leatherstocking. I can’t track him across Montana.” Not to mention that I had plenty of my own problems right here in New York.
“It’s not that kind of help,” Mama said, a little faintly.
“I’m sure he’ll be back,” I said. “He’s always come back before, hasn’t he?” I said it to reassure her, but in truth I believed it. My daddy is John Hollis, most famous demon hunter in Montana, and I suppose a part of me has always thought him invincible.
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