Moonshine

by Alaya Johnson

  Surreptitiously, I reached into my pocket and gripped the silver switchblade. Was Giuseppe really planning to bleed me? But after a few seconds the light dimmed and his eyes returned to their normal light brown. A warning, then.

  The harsh set of his mouth softened. “So maybe you remember how dangerous this is,” he whispered. And then, louder, “Let her pass!”

  He stalked away. The other men in the tunnel seemed to lose their rigid focus on me.

  Well, there’s nothing dishonorable about a retreat. Otherwise known as getting the hell out of here before I’m eaten alive. Quickly, I picked up my bicycle from where it had fallen earlier and hurried to the exit. I wanted to run, but it seemed undignified and anyway, I didn’t want to do any more damage to my reputation than I had already. I could hear the whispers now: “That night-school teacher got ran out of the tunnel by a bunch of suckers. And she teaches ’em, too, the sap.”

  I was underneath the outer scaffolding and about to reemerge into daylight when a large icicle came loose from a wooden plank above me. Before I could duck, someone snatched it out of the air with inhuman speed. Sudden alarm burned away the fear and left me angry and battle-ready. I whirled on my rescuer, the switchblade in my palm before I was aware of even grabbing it. He stood half in the sunlight, perfectly still, as though flaunting his Otherness. And he was Other in more ways than just the obvious, for though his skin turned almost gray in the light, it was chocolate brown in the shadows. He held the icicle in his left hand. None of the ice melted around his fingers, and it looked like nothing so much as a stake. An incongruous picture. When it became obvious to even my slow brain that this man had no intention of attacking me, I relaxed and nervously pocketed the blade again.

  “Th-thank you,” I stammered. The man was older than most of the other workers here—well, at least his appearance was older. From his graying hair and beard, I judged him to be at least fifty when he turned.

  “You’re that teacher, right? The vampire suffragette? What do you want with Rinaldo?” he asked, after looking at me for an uncomfortably long moment.

  I cursed to myself and attempted to come up with a plausible, innocent explanation. Like, “Oh no, I was asking about my brother named Rinaldo, not the infamous mob boss. How silly!” Also, vampire suffragette? Oh, my reputation.

  “I . . .” I’m criminally stupid? “I don’t really—”

  He cut me off with a smile that was oddly reassuring. “No one’s ever seen Rinaldo. Least not one of us. Sure as hell not Giuseppe, poor fool. Closest we ever get is his second, that Dore. A century old if he’s a day.” He twirled the icicle, blindingly fast, in his fingers for a moment and then let it fall and shatter on the ground. “You don’t want to meet Dore, and you sure don’t want to get noticed by Rinaldo. So whoever you’re helping, do you both a favor and tell him to scat. You’ve had better ideas, you know?”

  My mouth twisted in a derisive half-smile. Truer words had never been spoken. I started to respond, but he just nodded and walked back inside.

  The prosaically human jeers of the men as I hopped back on my bicycle were almost reassuring. At least their eyes didn’t glow. At least, however poorly restrained, they did not long for my blood.

  My voice was unusually breathy during the chants at our “Night Hours, Equal Pay” City Hall demonstration. Our Honorable Mayor Jimmy Walker, who owed half his good fortune to his looks and the other half to Tammany Hall, was considering a veto on legislation that would help increase the wages of Others who worked night shifts on construction sites and factories. I hadn’t helped organize this demonstration, but I was a member of both citizens groups that sponsored it—the Human Coalition for Others Rights and the Family Action Committee for Nonhuman Laborers. I attended their meetings only occasionally, as I was already so busy with my thirty-one other societies. Daddy says I’m a bit of an overachiever. Aileen says I’m a softhearted moron. I’m sure they’d have a great deal to discuss if the earth imploded and they managed to meet.

  I was standing next to Iris Tomkins, a woman whose dedication to progressive causes was matched only by her girth. She was in the minority of local activists who could claim some social standing among New York’s elite. On the bottom rung, to be sure, but Iris played her role as society dame to the hilt. I rather liked her, particularly because she shared my opinion of the frequently tendentious ramblings that passed for discussion at suffragette meetings. She described herself as an Anarcha-Feminist Socialite—Emma Goldman with just a dash of Oscar Wilde. Right now, her bellowing chants of “Fight for the night—Jimmy, do what’s right” made my labored contributions perfectly unnecessary.

  Eventually, I just gave up and mouthed the words. It would appear that my vampire confrontation skills were sorely rusted. Before, with Daddy or Troy, I had never been so unnerved after a fight. Of course, I had never been alone in a cave full of them. I had never been threatened by someone I had known for more than a year, and I had never seriously considered courting the danger of a master vampire.

  Dear old Jimmy was obliged to walk past us on the way to his car about an hour after noon. The press had arrived in force by then, and were snapping photographs and scribbling notes throughout our crowd. I was standing in the front row, my right arm trapped in Iris’s sturdy elbow and my left holding up one end of a sign that read:

  JIMMY, WOULD YOU TAKE 50¢ A NIGHT?

  Iris had decided to bolster my apparent lack of spirits with her own, which she correctly judged to be more than sufficient for two people. Her voice was so strident she was practically singing the chants. I leaned on her and was grateful for the support. It seemed to have slipped my mind to eat anything this morning, despite the fact that I had given breakfast to hundreds of indigents.

  “Are you okay, dear?” Iris paused, midchant, to ask. I straightened immediately and then waited for the white haze to clear.

  “Oh, sorry, I think I’m just a little hungry.”

  She nodded sympathetically and patted my hand. I was spared any remonstrances about my deplorable eating habits because “Beau James” Walker, the Night Mayor of New York himself, was standing less than two feet away from us.

  I had to give him credit. He knew we hated him, and he saw the press as well as anyone, but he appeared as though the situation didn’t perturb him at all. He took his time going down the steps, chatting with his aides and exchanging a smile and a word with those who came up to speak to him. He didn’t ignore us, either. Just looked to both sides and waved, as though we were some welcoming party. As well he might, I supposed. He was a popular mayor. A handsome, clever dilettante in an age where the creative pursuit of leisure seemed to have become the national aesthetic. Never mind that the infant mortality rates in some Lower East Side tenements and Harlem were enough to make God weep, or that Others and Negroes were routinely treated as less than human. Some people had a great deal of money, and the press was happy enough to pretend that the rest of us had some too.

  He had paused near the two of us, and for some reason when he turned to answer his aide’s questions, his eyes locked on mine. Almost as if he recognized . . . Before I could really pro cess what he was doing, he walked past his aide and stopped in front of me.

  The gossip press had nicknamed him the Night Mayor due to his penchant for all-night parties, and he had the pallor of a man not much given to daylight. He wore a navy fedora and a cream silk suit, which I was forced to admit combined to a rather devastating effect. His smile was curious and very self-assured.

  “I seem to recall seeing you before.”

  “I . . . you do?” It was the best I could manage, as my wits had taken a holiday. I needed some food, very badly.

  “Last week, was it? Some demonstration about infant mortality? You must like coming here.”

  He remembered me? Thank God, that woke me up. “Well, you seem to have difficulty separating morality from financial interests. We thought we’d point you in the right direction.”

  He laughed, tipped h
is hat at me, and walked into the cab of his silver-trimmed Duesenberg.

  Iris was positively jumping in excitement, and several protestors crowded around us as soon as he drove off.

  “Ah, that was excellent, Zephyr. Excellent. They’ll be sure to print that in the paper tomorrow. How clever! You’re like our own Dorothy Parker!”

  I looked at her and laughed. “The Algonquin has better food.”

  “So, how often would you say you demonstrate here?” I looked up. A female reporter, surprisingly enough, had managed to squeeze in beside Iris.

  “Oh, maybe twice a month. Well, once a week, lately.”

  The reporter—devastatingly beautiful and impeccably attired, with a mauve silk cloche hat over her perfectly bobbed auburn hair and a low-hipped day dress that must have come straight from Chanel—scribbled in her notebook with a small smile.

  “Aren’t you busy,” she said, looking back up.

  Her lips were glossy and cherry red, her eyebrows plucked to delicate arches. I resisted the sudden urge to smooth out my own. Iris leaned over so she was directly in the reporter’s line of sight—as though anyone could have missed her—and declared, “The injustices of our present mayor’s administration are so numerous that we could hold a different demonstration each day of the week without exhausting them.”

  The reporter turned to Iris and then beamed. “My, Mrs. Tomkins, you’re looking well. And as active as ever, I see. My mother always said you’d tire of these social causes someday.”

  Iris paused, and then gave the reporter a hard look. “Oh, Lily Harding, is that you? Goodness, how you’ve changed, I didn’t even recognize you! How is that dear mother of yours? Still gardening?”

  Iris gave Lily one of her patented hugs—the kind that would threaten to strangle an African rhinoceros—and they fell to renewing what appeared to be a lifelong acquaintance. Iris was the godmother of Lily’s younger sister and she and their mother had attended the same boarding school. Lily was present in an official capacity as the Other beat reporter for the Evening Herald.

  “And my young friend here,” Iris said, after they had finished catching up with each other, “has already made quite a name for herself. She teaches a night school on the Lower East Side, if you would believe it, filled with all sorts of vampires and demons and skinwalkers. She is quite fearless.”

  Lily gave a bit of a wide-eyed glance at the poster we were carrying, and I shrugged my shoulders at Iris’s unthinking hypocrisy. I understood how hard it was for even those who fought for their equal treatment to regard Others as anything besides dangerous animals.

  “Zephyr Hollis, right?” Lily said. “They call you the vampire suffragette.”

  I could hardly contain my wince. “I’m late to the party, apparently. I heard that for the first time this morning.”

  She gave that small, knowing smile again. It was certainly smug, but held enough humor for me to warm to her slightly. “And?” she said.

  “I shall strive to take it as a compliment.”

  She laughed at that, and it was such a beautiful, refined ladylike little thing that all my warm feelings vanished in a sudden freeze. God’s blood, but I felt like a braying wildebeest next to this paragon. So, of course, Iris immediately suggested that she take us both out to lunch and refused to be gainsaid, even when I pointed out that I had taken my bicycle to the rally. Apparently, she knew of a method by which a bicycle could be affixed to the back of a car with some rope and little trouble. She hailed a taxicab while Lily and I stood on the street corner, forced to engage in mutually wary small talk.

  “Where are you from, originally? Surely not New York? You have a bit of an accent.”

  I was reminded of Amir’s comment the night before, and blushed. “Montana,” I said, briefly. “The town of Yarrow. And you must be from Long Island.”

  She arched those perfect eyebrows. “My,” she drawled, “however did you guess? Manhasset, to be precise.”

  I just looked at her, carefully taking in the patterned silk scarf, pearl ear bobs, and countless other testaments to generational wealth and privilege, and smiled. We locked gazes for a moment and then she looked away, which I counted as a victory. Over her shoulder, I caught a brief glimpse of a tall figure, standing still in the milling crowd. I could only see the back of his head and just a bit of his cheek, but for a moment I was convinced that it was Amir.

  I gasped a little and wondered if I should call out to him or run over. My mother’s voice chastised me that it would be unseemly to appear so eager—though, so eager for what? Someone momentarily blocked my view of him, and when I could see again, he had vanished. Which was odd, because Amir was quite tall enough to stand out in any crowd.

  “See someone you know?” Lily asked.

  “I . . . I thought so, but I was mistaken,” I said, ignoring her hauteur. By this time Iris had found a cab, and I reluctantly followed Lily into it.

  Lily engaged Iris in an exclusive conversation for the entire trip, on subjects she knew I could have nothing to contribute. Well, who was I to refuse a free meal because of social awkwardness? I couldn’t say I minded being left out of the conversation. My thoughts had fastened onto Amir and refused to let go. Had he really been to the rally? And if so, why? If he contacted me today, surely I would have to give my final answer to his request for help. And even though I knew what the prudent response should be, I found I was still inclined to be reckless.

  After an only minimally awkward meal where Lily and Iris dined on some outlandishly priced prime rib and I ate cucumber sandwiches with potato leek soup, Iris excused herself to go “freshen up” in the facilities. Left alone again with Lily, I was made exquisitely aware of how much our posh surroundings complemented her, and how out of place they made me. The boy might have ruined last night’s conservative shirt collar, but I had more where that came from. I yearned for Lily’s fashionably low V-neck blouse and knee-length jacket. Privately, of course. Outwardly, I was perfectly serene, I’m sure.

  I was still thinking about Amir and how to even approach his request. It had occurred to me over lunch that if Lily was an Other beat reporter, and I needed information about Rinaldo, we might be ideally placed to make a deal with each other. Seeing as how horribly my great idea had turned out this morning, I attempted to consider all the angles. Then I gave up because I knew I was going to ask anyway.

  “You know,” I said, as soon as Iris left, “I have a great deal of contact with Others.”

  Lily gave me an appraising look and leaned toward me. “So I’ve heard. I’ve been meaning to find you.”

  “I need some information, and I think you might be able to help.”

  “Perhaps. What do I get out of this?”

  “I feed you stories. I could make your career. Tenement abuse. Other police corruption. I could tell you the location of Defender raids before they happen.”

  I could tell that my offer excited her, because her eyes had gone quite innocently wide and her foot began tapping the floor incessantly. Very good, Zephyr. Now you’ve dangled the bait, you just need to reel in the fish.

  “And what information do you need?”

  I hoped I didn’t look as nervous as I felt. Mentioning this vampire’s name seemed to be the conversational equivalent of a stick of TNT. “Everything you know about Rinaldo. Any rumors, any sightings, any activity. I need it. I’m looking into . . . something. If it pans out, you’ll get the exclusive. And believe me, it could be huge.”

  She frowned. “Rinaldo? You mean that gin runner out of Little Italy? But he’s not even my beat. Crime is at least five promotions away.” She rolled her eyes.

  I smiled and lowered my voice to a whisper. It didn’t look as though anyone was close enough to hear, but I wasn’t stupid enough to trust that. “Oh, but it is your beat. Rinaldo is a vampire. He controls a gang of young vampires called the Turn Boys who terrorize the neighborhood. But no one’s ever seen him. No one knows where he is. But, I figure, a sucker that powerful must
come out to play. I want to track him down, but I need some help. I can move in certain circles.” I looked at my clothes with a self-deprecating smile. “You can move in others.”

  She matched my whisper. “You think he might have infiltrated society?”

  “He’s rich enough. And older vampires are better at disguising what they are.”

  She leaned back in her chair and let out a very unladylike whistle. I liked her better for it. “Dear God. This is some goddamn story. Are you serious?”

  “Perfectly.”

  She grinned and clapped her hands. For a moment, she looked like a delighted child, not a sophisticated young ingénue. “Well, for the record, you’re crazy. Even the veterans at my paper hardly touch Rinaldo.”

  “But you’ll help?”

  “You’re lucky, Zephyr Hollis. Because I’m pretty crazy, too.”

  We were still smiling at each other when Iris returned to the table.

  “Well, look at the two of you!” she said, negotiating her way back into her chair. “Did something amusing happen while I was gone?”

  “Oh, just that Zephyr is going to help me become the most famous female journalist in the country.”

  Iris looked at me, the laugh lines around her eyes crinkling. “Goodness, is that so? You should come to our suffragette meeting to night, Lily. We’re debating prophylactics.”

  Lily looked so genuinely horrified that I had to smother a laugh.

  “Don’t even think of it!” She shuddered. “A suffragette meeting. I’m already a journalist. Don’t ask me to commit social suicide.”

  Iris and I attended the suffragette meeting together, and I sat back while she held forth on the “multiple, incontrovertible” benefits to the active promotion of prophylactic birth control. “It will help improve the lives of the lower classes by an immeasurable margin,” she said, and then made heavy use of Margaret Sanger. There were a few men present, and I found myself peering around the crowded room to see if I spotted Amir. I didn’t know why I thought I would see him, and the excitement I felt at each false alarm was enough to make me want to sink to the floor in embarrassment. It was just that he was so unfamiliar, so completely different in looks and manner and speech than anyone I’d ever encountered.