Wicked City

by Alaya Johnson

  Sofia paused her chant, reached down to pick up the last bit of chalk and tossed it high in the air. As it sailed above her she spoke again: her rolling, decisive cadences somehow stilling the creature in the circle. It turned to her, but made no other move. The chalk had nearly finished its plunge when she said what must be the final words and it exploded into a shimmering, delicate powder that floated around her like snow. The djinni’s face settled into a single countenance—glowing eyes, a wide forehead and hair that waved behind him. He half smiled in that same way Amir would in a mood of amused condescension. My hands gripped the side of the chair, but Sofia had instructed me to stay where I was.

  “You’ve tied one of my sons to you, and now you want to cut him loose,” the djinni said. His voice was deeper than even Kardal’s, and painfully resonant. I realized who Sofia must have called.

  “Are you Kashkash?” I said.

  The impossibly large smile widened. “None other.”

  “Will you help me?” I tried without success to keep my voice from shaking.

  His laugh made the ovens groan and my chair wobble. I flinched and forced myself to look back. “You know nothing,” he said, “of what I am. Or what you ask me to do.”

  My anger at Amir had receded in a wave of terror and self-doubt. But I clung to its tattered remains because it was all my pride had left. “I know I wish to be free of your son’s binding,” I said.

  Kashkash blinked his monstrous eyes and leaned forward. He could not cross the line of my circle, but he lowered his face until it was even with my chair and just a few feet away. His eyes were as big as my head; each tooth as large as my hand. I couldn’t look at that, but I didn’t dare look away. I stared at his nose, so grotesquely like Amir’s, and trembled.

  “He did not bind you, little human,” Kashkash said. His voice blasted my ears. “You bound him.”

  “I saved his life!” I said. “The binding was just a side effect.”

  He lifted his head to the ceiling again and seemed to consider this. “And yet you hold on to it so fiercely.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He manifested a finger and wagged it in the air. “Someone tested the bond. A foolish trap for my son to have fallen into, but still, a test. Someone else claiming Amir as his vessel should have damaged your bond—maybe even killed you, little human—and yet, here you are, asking me to break something you might have accomplished yourself.”

  That’s what Jimmy Walker had meant to do with his scroll? “I had been hoping to manage it without dying!”

  “Do you know how a bond is tested, little human?” he said, and I felt something like a bell go off inside me, a resonance with a conviction I couldn’t put words to. You haven’t figured it out by now? Amir had said. “The test is power”—he raised one hand—“against desire.” He raised the other. “When they meet, which wins?” His hands smacked together, shaking the floor with its force. Dishes crashed to the floor and I had to stand to keep my chair from tipping.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, when the echoes faded to silence.

  That smile again. “You’ve willed yourself not to,” he said. “You wanted that bond, little human. Enough to stand up against someone who wanted it very badly himself. You fought that battle without even knowing it, and that’s the only reason you’re alive right now.”

  “I…” The bell inside me tolled louder now, making me tremble with its force. I tried to push back.

  “I hate Amir,” I said. “He’s abused my trust, manipulated and deceived me from the moment we met.” But Kashkash’s eyes were too much like Amir’s. The bells thundered like I was in the tower of St. Michael’s. I gasped, closed my eyes, and tried one last time:

  “And he lied,” I said. “About Daddy. He said … he said…”

  How did you get immune?

  I realized I was crying.

  Sophia wasn’t the one I needed to see, Amir had told me. So who? And then I knew.

  “You summoned me,” Kashkash said, “for a purpose. I am not used to being summoned. This great sahir of Washington Street is the only one to have dared it for a very long time. So this is my price, little human.” He paused. “I will grant your wish.”

  I felt as though he had stabbed me in the throat. I stumbled forward. I wondered what would happen if I broke the circle, but I had that much sense remaining.

  “No,” I whispered. “Please.”

  Kashkash’s face turned hard and inhuman. “You have treated my son very badly, Zephyr Hollis. I do this for his honor as much as my own.”

  “But, what will happen to him?”

  “To him? Nothing, provided you keep this one condition.”

  I looked up and wiped my eyes. “What?”

  “Do not bind him again. In word, thought, or deed. If you do, he will go away and may never return. This is the word of Kashkash and it is law.”

  His voice was so loud my ears rang in the ensuing silence.

  “I understand,” I said.

  He nodded. “It is done,” he said, and vanished.

  * * *

  I borrowed clothes from Sofia, who seemed to understand on some level that transcended language what had happened to me in her kitchen. I walked directly to the East Village where the last of the Yiddish theaters were getting out for the night, raucous theatergoers pouring onto the sidewalks to wait for their favorite stars. No one spared me a glance.

  Ysabel lived on the top floor of one of the updated former tenements on Fourth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. Know thyself, the edict of the Oracle at Delphi, had always seemed to me like the vague aphorisms promoted in books of self-uplift. Now I knew it to be a warning, a statement of fear as profound as anything Dante carved above the first gate of hell. I was free, but I felt submerged, drowned by the mistakes of my father and my own willful refusal to see them. I should have come to Ysabel the moment I heard of the murders. Instead, I had ignored every hint of the truth.

  Sofia’s skirt was slightly too large for me; I hitched it up as I climbed the stairs to Ysabel’s apartment. A carved prayer scroll had been nailed into the doorframe. I knocked on the door and fingered it as I waited. I couldn’t read Hebrew. When she had marked a certain bag of blood with the word “forbidden,” I wouldn’t have known what it meant. I didn’t know who would.

  Ysabel’s husband, Saul, opened the door. He was a gaunt man, stooped at the shoulders though still tall. He wore an embroidered yarmulke and was carrying a small, leather-bound book with Hebrew lettering embossed on the front.

  “She’s inside,” he said, wearily. “She’s been expecting you.”

  You haven’t figured it out by now?

  But now I had. At least this much of the puzzle.

  I thanked Saul and let him lead me through the apartment I’d only visited once before. Then the occasion had been a dinner with other Blood Bank volunteers that my daddy would have disapproved of mightily had he known. Now, I wondered at the dishes piled in the sink, the broken crates in the corner of the living room, the dust on the mantelpiece. Ysabel was sitting in a chair in her bedroom.

  “Sit down, bubbala,” she said, gesturing toward the bed. She looks deflated, I thought. Dark bruises beneath her eyes, sallow cheeks, sagging, ghostly skin. I could only imagine how awful this week must have been.

  “It’s my blood, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Yes, dear,” she said, with mingled misery and relief.

  “How…” I didn’t know where to start. I looked around the room instead: the handmade quilt on the bed, the photos on the dresser of Ysabel and Saul, far younger, sitting awkwardly for the picture with a fat-cheeked baby between them. A girl, I guessed, from the ribbon in her hair.

  “How did you find out?” I asked.

  Saul’s voice came distantly from the other room. Ysabel looked up, realized he had picked up the phone, and sunk back into her chair.

  “When you donated that first time. I never once worried—no marks on your arms, no red e
yes, nothing to think you weren’t perfectly healthy. And you are! Perfectly healthy. I didn’t know. I gave it to, to a friend.” She covered her eyes. I wanted to hold her hand, but I didn’t know if she would want me to. I didn’t know if she hated me.

  The first time, she had said. Two years ago.

  “Oh, Ysabel, why didn’t you tell me?”

  She wiped her eyes and took my own hand. “He died,” she said, softly. “I couldn’t bear to burden you with that. It was clear you didn’t know. Always after I would take your bag and mark it so it wouldn’t get lost with the others. Then I’d throw it away.”

  Forbidden, she had written, in careful Hebrew. But never in my sight.

  “You never gave out another bag?” I said. “No one else died?”

  She shook her head. “Never! Except…”

  “Except now,” I finished. “Do you know who stole it? How could they have gotten to it before you threw it out?”

  “I … I grew careless. It’s always so busy at the Bank, you know. Sometimes I would wait a whole day. What did it matter, I thought, no one else knew. But she did.” A sob escaped her lips and she covered her mouth with her hands. “She knew and she took it, right after you gave last.”

  I’d last donated at Ysabel’s around two weeks ago. Just when the letter-writer had sent Bradley Keck the poison blood.

  My throat felt swollen and painful; it hurt to swallow. I shook with tension and exhaustion and the horror of the truth. McConnell had been right to arrest me. Whatever Keck’s guilt and that of his anonymous enabler, it was ultimately my blood that had done the killing. My immunity had turned them halfway back to human again. I should have guessed in the morgue. Amir certainly had.

  Saul walked into the room with a teapot and a cup. “You look like you could use it.”

  Just the sight of the teapot filled me with longing. I hadn’t eaten since that meager meal back in my prison cell, and I hadn’t had a drink in nearly that long. I thanked him so profusely that he laughed, a little bleakly. “Drink as much as you want.”

  I sipped the bitter tea (too impolite to ask for milk and sugar) while Saul said something to Ysabel in soft Yiddish. She frowned but he shook his head and patted her on the shoulder before leaving the room again. I could only imagine how he was taking this situation. Had he known the poor vampire that I’d killed? Did he know—”

  I set down my cup and looked at her. “She?” I said, only now understanding the implications. “You know who took the bag?”

  That meant that Ysabel knew the letter-writer. I could tell the police and Nicholas and clear my name!

  But Ysabel started to cry. “You have to understand, bubbala, I wanted to tell you. Oh, this whole horrible week, how Saul and I argued. But I couldn’t! She is wrong, I understand that, but she’s been hurt so much and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t turn in my own child…”

  Resonances shook me again, and by now I’d learned to pay attention. I felt hazy with disbelief, shock, and a sad understanding. I found myself kneeling on the floor in front of her chair.

  “Ysabel,” I whispered, taking her hand to steady myself. “Who did I kill? The first time, with my blood?”

  “My son-in-law,” Ysabel said, just as quietly. “Michael Brandon.”

  In the other room, Saul unlocked the door with a click. “Tateh,” I heard Judith Brandon say as she walked inside her parent’s home. “Thank you.”

  I looked up at Ysabel, though she slid in and out of focus. I’d been poisoned. Saul had seen to that, and maybe Ysabel had known.

  “Her husband … was a vampire?”

  “He became a bruxa when he worked for old Mayor Herod. They made him leave his job. Terrible business. And then…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, slipping on one elbow to the floor.

  “No, Zephyr,” she said, crying again. “If someone goes to Gehinnam for this, it is me.”

  The last thing I saw was Judith Brandon’s shoes, wet from the rain.

  * * *

  I awoke alone, with my hands and feet bound and a gag in my mouth. This was a common predicament of heroines in the Mary Roberts Rinehart novels my sister Vera loved to read, but I had never imagined it to be quite this uncomfortable. Perhaps I could still count on an intrepid hero to find me before I suffered permanent damage to my shoulders?

  Then I recalled how I had last left the only possible candidate for intrepid hero and allowed myself a sob. No, I could hardly count on Amir’s help now.

  I still felt groggy from the poison, but I forced my eyes open. So, she’d taken me to her office. It surprised me a little, but on the other hand, I could see why she would have deemed her isolated basement lair safe enough. Especially if she had expected me to remain insensate for longer. I propped myself up against a wall so as to get a better view of my latest prison. It was gloomier than I remembered, the only light coming from around the door and its opaque window.

  I was a little surprised to be alive at all, and wondered if this unexpected gift could not be a sign that I was meant to have a chance to repent.

  And to find my goddamned daddy.

  I slid along the slightly dusty floor until I reached the door. I pushed the handle down awkwardly with my chin; locked, of course. I hadn’t expected anything else, but I had to be sure. The sort of person who could plot a serial murder and frame someone else for the crime would tie knots securely and lock a door. I sat back down, the last of the effects of the poison waning. I was hungry, but my thirst felt even more painful than the ropes. A few more hours in here and I’d emulate Coleridge’s ancient mariner.

  I leaned back against the wall. The gag in my mouth effectively prevented screaming—indeed, it almost prevented breathing—and I tried to remember the way to her office from the main hall. Perhaps I could throw myself at the door in case someone happened to pass by? But my legs had been bound in such a way that when I tried to stand, I tipped over immediately. She had probably researched proper knot-tying of prisoners in the public library.

  I fell over a second time and stayed on the floor, struggling to catch my breath. As I did so, I realized that I was staring at Judith Brandon’s desk. And if I couldn’t get out, perhaps I could get in. I wormed my way closer. The stacks of paper on top of the desk might be interesting, but were beyond me at the moment. However, to my delight she had not locked her drawers. I used my chin to pull out the topmost one and then knelt to peer inside. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough light to read well. I could only make out the large font of newspaper headlines, carefully clipped and stacked inside. “VAMPIRE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN!” read one from the New York World. I nosed the topmost ones aside: yes, every one was recently clipped, carefully documenting her murder spree of the past week. She’d also kept any mention of me. I had wondered how the letter-writer knew so much about me. Between what Ysabel must have told her and the newspapers, Mrs. Brandon had learned enough to be convincing. I turned around and used what little dexterity my bound hands possessed to dig deeper into the pile. At the very bottom, my fingers encountered a sheet of much heavier stock than newsprint. I bent awkwardly and pulled it out. I dropped it to the floor and turned around. An old photograph. I could hardly see it in the shadows behind the desk, and so I nosed it closer to the door.

  I recognized my daddy first, though I’d never seen him so young. He was balancing a massive shotgun on his knee, which was perched on a stone. Four other men—two older, two about his age—had posed for the portrait. They stood tall and stern, each one carrying a gun or a stake. A hunting party sometime in the nineties, judging by their clothes and my daddy’s youth. Daddy loved telling stories of his old hunting days, but this didn’t look like anything I’d heard before. The rocks and trees behind them looked like Montana, for one, and I’d thought Daddy did most of his early hunting down south, in Georgia and Tennessee. I recognized one of the older men: Charles Simpson, a strange fixture of my early childhood who would come to town with the intention of drinking with Daddy, fighting,
and then storming off for another year. I remember one year he and Daddy had a fistfight over the fact that I couldn’t shoot straight. He died a few years after that, something wrong with his liver.

  But there were three other men in this picture. A young man Daddy’s age, to his left, with thunderous black eyebrows and a stake in one hand. Another older fellow, looking off to the side like he couldn’t wait to get away. And, on the far right, a negro man, shorter than the others, with a sheathed sword on his back. Together, they looked like a seasoned hunting band, not some group tossed together for the sake of a photo.

  I leaned down and saw that someone had inscribed the photograph in faint ink at the very bottom.

  Gould hunt, 1897, it read. Eric Simoley, Charles Simpson, Daniel Nussbaum, John Hollis, Benjamin Taylor.

  My heart clenched. I recognized another name, but not from my childhood. Zuckerman had told Aileen to investigate “the Nussbaum case,” that it had something to do with the murders. Lily had said it was a dead end: a man who had killed his infant child and then taken his own life.

  Footsteps echoed in the hallway. I picked the photograph up with my teeth and dropped it in the drawer just before Mrs. Brandon turned her key in the lock.

  “I hadn’t expected you to wake up yet,” she said, closing the door behind her. “I would have come sooner.”

  As I couldn’t speak, I contented myself with a grunt.

  “I’ll take off the gag, Zephyr, and give you water if you promise not to scream. No one will hear you in any case, but I’d rather not have the trouble.”

  I wondered if I shouldn’t ignore her and try anyway, but she would just gag me again. I nodded and she untied and removed the cloth.

  “There,” she said. “Now, drink this. And then I believe it’s time that you and I had a discussion.”

  She held the glass of water to my lips. I stared at it, and then decided she was unlikely to poison me again. “A discussion?” I said, after I had gulped it down, with just a little spilled down my shirt. I felt considerably revived, enough so that I started wondering if I could perhaps overpower her and escape.