Moonshine: A Novel

by Alaya Johnson

  The smoke resolved itself into something vaguely human after Amir frowned at him with literal fire in his eyes. "You are that human my brother has made so much of?"

  If molten rock had a voice, I imagine it would sound much like Kardal--deeper than a tuba and rough and warm. And at the moment, the earth disapproved. I felt myself shaking and tried to stop.

  "Yes, the very same, Kardal," Amir said impatiently. "Could you stop that?"

  "Stop what?" Kardal asked, all too innocently. Ah, definitely siblings. I had too many of my own not to recognize the signs.

  "You're older, right?" I said to the smoky djinn.

  He smiled and grew a little more solid. "Of course."

  Amir rolled his eyes. "It's just three centuries, Kardal. You'd think you're as old as Kashkash, the way you go on."

  "Three centuries?"

  Both brothers stared at me, as though they only now remembered my human lifespan.

  "You'll find that Amir tends to behave like a human one-tenth his age," Kardal said, almost apologetically. "It's because he's still young and reckless."

  I had to smile. "Well, that at least explains the hot dogs."

  Amir gave me a startled glance, both guilty and pleased. "I'm taking her to the boy."

  Kardal's figure billowed, and what I could make of his expression seemed quizzical. "Strange. Now you even collect humans," he said. "You ought to spend more time with your own kind."

  Amir said something in that other language--the annoyance, if not the meaning, came through--and dragged me by the hand like a child's pulltoy through a series of arcaded corridors.

  "So," I said, doing my best to sound unfazed, "where are we?"

  On the far side of an enclosed garden redolent with honeysuckle and a hundred tiny blooming roses, a door led to a spiral staircase. Amir went up ahead of me.

  "My brother's home," he said.

  I couldn't see his face so it was hard to tell if he was being deliberately evasive. "Of course. Where would I address a letter? Thirteen and a half Mad Hatter Lane, Wonderland? That dusty lamp in the corner of the pawn shop?"

  Amir didn't pause his ascent, but he did laugh. I stumbled. "Shadukiam, the fabled city of roses."

  I had heard the name before--or at least read it years ago, when Daddy had brought home an abridged version of Arabian Nights as an apology present to Mama.

  "Do all the djinn live here?" I asked, panting.

  "I don't." His tone was icy. I wished I hadn't asked. Still, I thought of his palatial, isolated apartment and wondered why he would live there when this was an option. Troy had given me a clue as to why he hadn't used his powers with the vampire last night, but that didn't explain much else. His bouts of horrible pain, his mysterious vendetta against Rinaldo . . . his interest in me. Did it all fit into one picture? Amir had taken off his suit jacket and loosened his tie, which combined to emphasize an unaffected, casual beauty. I would have sighed, but I was already taking large gulps of air just to stagger up the neverending staircase.

  How much was he hiding from me? I already knew he was dangerous, but did I have anything to fear? His eyes said no, but Daddy says you don't trust Other eyes. Not if you want to stay alive . . . or human.

  We reached the top of the stairs. Amir drew out a key and unlocked the door while I leaned against the wall with my head between my knees.

  "Your brother . . ." I gasped, between breaths, "should really . . . look into some elevators!"

  Amir put his hand on my shoulder and offered me a glass of water with his other. I had not the slightest clue where it came from, but I guzzled it gratefully.

  "Elevators," Amir said, when I straightened up, "are not very useful to a creature made of smoke."

  "And the stairs are what, decoration?"

  "Of course."

  Amir opened the door. We emerged onto a large, shaded verandah that overlooked vast olive and fig groves bounded by a river perhaps two miles away. The air was thick and redolent with earth and fruit. And to imagine in New York it was a snowy twenty degrees! Kardal's palace felt like Eden. I pulled off my hat and my jacket and set my water on the balcony.

  "Where's the boy?" I asked.

  Feet shuffled behind me. "Say hello to Miss Hollis, Judah."

  I whirled around.

  "Hello, Miss Hollis," the boy said, quietly but unmistakably.

  He'd come back. I wiped--surreptitiously, I hoped--my eyes with the back of my hand and knelt before him in the shadows of a screened room just off of the balcony. "Why, hello, Judah. Do you remember me?"

  His wide brown eyes glowed dangerously, brighter than any vampire I had seen apart from Nicholas of the Turn Boys. He shook his head slowly. The puncture wounds had healed without a scar. His skin was pallid, but his cheeks blushed telltale rose and I wondered where Amir had been getting the blood to feed him. Could he conjure it here like a glass of water?

  "Do you remember your full name, Judah? Your parents? Do you remember where you live?" He shook his head silently to each of my questions.

  I looked up at Amir. His eyebrows were furrowed and his lips compressed to a thin, pale line.

  "Do you think he'll remember anything else?" I asked, hesitantly.

  I felt a sudden blast of heat from him and the boy dashed behind the screen door to the inner chamber. Ten feet in less than a second. I shivered.

  "Judah," I called in a singsong voice, like trying to coax a frightened cat from up a tree. I followed his path through the screen door. "It's okay. We won't--"

  "Mama?" he said. He spun on his heel to face me in the center of a room strewn with cushions. Suddenly, his eyes rolled back and he collapsed to the floor. Amir and I ran forward. Judah's eyes were still open, though I could only see the glowing whites. He trembled slightly, but not like a human having a seizure. He was speaking with a distant calm that disturbed me far more than his most feral growling.

  "Mama, Mama, can we see the boats again? I promise not to be scared this time. I know it's just a horn, I promise."

  "Judah . . . Judah, what do you mean? Who's your mama? What boats?"

  "There's little ones, too," Judah said, his voice growing weaker. "But don't leave me there alone . . ." His eyes drifted shut and his body relaxed into boneless sleep. Amir was giving me a look I could interpret only as panic, so I picked up Judah myself and rested him as comfortably as I could on the pillows littering the floor of the screened chamber. When I came back out, Amir was standing beside the balcony, his hands bent behind his neck.

  "What do you think that was?" I asked, keeping a safe distance away. Amir really did have heat-control problems when stressed.

  "Bloody hell, Zephyr, how should I know? Do you have the Baedeker guidebook for rehabilitating eleven-year-old vampires? Because I seem to have lost it."

  "Amir," I said, "kindly stop blasting me like a furnace."

  The shimmer of heat surrounding his body subsided. And yet I didn't feel entirely cool. His irises glowed like banked embers; the shadows emphasized his powerful jaw line; his gray waistcoat and shirt looked like nothing more than barriers to my sudden desire. A most extremely, flagrantly, humiliatingly not appropriate desire.

  "Sorry," he said, in blessed distraction. He ran his hand through his hair, loosening more tendrils to fall in his eyes. "As my brothers would be happy to tell you, I'm not precisely experienced at this responsibility business. And it's overrated, let me tell you."

  I smiled. "You're the youngest?"

  "Is it so obvious? No, don't answer that." He glanced at the room where Judah slept. "Do you think he remembered something? Maybe when he wakes up he can tell us who he is and solve our troubles."

  I nodded, but I wondered. He had seemed to be in a trance. "If not, it's at least a place to start looking," I said.

  He raised his eyebrows. "Boats. With horns."

  "I await better ideas, oh fiery one."

  "None forthcoming." He sighed. "What will we do with him?"

  I considered. Reckless, his
brother had called him. "I wonder why you care? Somehow, you don't seem like the sort of person who'd normally bother."

  He frowned. "Bother with what?"

  "Caring."

  "I care!" he said indignantly. "In fact, I've always been especially fond of your world."

  I thought about his apartment, filled with priceless artifacts from dozens of different cultures. "About other people," I said.

  His lips twisted. "People," he said, "tend to be too much trouble. Oh, I know you'd be violating some secret do-gooder code to admit it, but . . ."

  Touche. In some ways I did understand his misanthropy. "So why help Judah?" I asked.

  He held my gaze for a beat, and then another. "Maybe I just . . . sympathize a little, Miss Hollis. Surely that's not a crime."

  My heart and head and everything else began to pound as if I was about to get shot out of a cannon. Three beats and I looked away.

  "I'll search for his family," I said quietly. "I'll start in the tenements near where I found him. People should have heard of a missing eleven-year-old boy. Did he remember anything else?"

  "Just his name. And something about the rosebushes reminded him of his mother."

  Rosebushes? "And I'm going to need at least some of the money now for . . . initial expenses."

  "You mean rent money?"

  "What would you know of it, oh prince?" I shot back, annoyed with a number of things too vague or embarrassing to bear consideration.

  He broke into a full, appreciative grin that made my face flush in one magnificent burst. With mocking slowness, he took his wallet from his waistcoat. He pulled out ten twenties and handed them to me.

  "In full, upfront. Now, who says I don't keep up my side of business transactions?"

  I took a discreet sniff of the bills. "It's not the business transaction that really worries me about you, Amir." I realized as soon as I said it that this time I'd cut him.

  "Right, how could I forget? Your continued incredulity that I possess a caring soul."

  "I just wonder about your motives."

  "So the charity girl is the only one with motives pure enough? I seem to recall you having something to do with a great deal of contracted killings of Others not so long ago. With that Troy character? You thought I didn't recognize him? And yet all your famous deeds of charity to the Other community come purely from the spirit of giving, of course. They have nothing at all to do with wanting to erase the guilt of all those innocent Other deaths on your conscience?"

  Bloody stakes, when Amir fought he went for the damn jugular. "They weren't innocent."

  "Of course not. Defenders never act on insufficient evidence."

  I closed my eyes. It was hard to forget some of those kills. The utter shock on their faces . . . the discoveries, later, of children and families and business feuds between the mark and the contractor.

  "Zephyr--"

  "Fine," I said, forcing all of that shut. "I have blood on my hands. Are you pure, then?"

  He shook his head. "I . . . had strong sympathies for his plight. I've been there."

  I could tell that he meant this admission to somehow equate with mine, but the difference between helping someone because you sympathize with them and helping because of a lifelong quest to expiate your own and your father's sins was stark as a silver bullet.

  I let out a shaky laugh and walked to the balcony. God, I was tired.

  "I found a way into the Turn Boys today." My voice was perfectly steady.

  He jumped and sat lightly on the railing. "I shouldn't have said that."

  "Why not?" I said. "It's true."

  He reached out and tugged on one of my frizzy curls. I sucked in a sharp breath. "I'm much too good at hurting you, aren't I? I wonder why . . . Of course it isn't true, Zephyr. Guilt is a reason to donate to the Blood Bank once a month. It isn't a reason to never sleep and stop eating meat and go around the whole city on that damn rickety bicycle of yours from meeting to protest to class with barely a thought for your own survival."

  In the sunlight, his dark skin and hair seemed to beg for me to touch them, to make certain that their beauty was real. Daddy always said there were certain Other charms to which I would never be immune.

  His hand strayed from my hair to my temple. "I admire you more than I can say."

  "How do I know you're not seducing me?" I said, since desire had apparently washed away all barriers between my thoughts and my words.

  His eyes crinkled with laughter. "Am I? I wouldn't appear to be doing a very good job of it."

  Well, Jesus Bloody Christ.

  I kissed him.

  It was a marvelous kiss. Sweet and playfully hungry at first, and then deepening to hard desperation when he picked me up. And tell me I didn't feel like a chorus of angels was singing Handel's Messiah behind us as I finally gave in to the desire that had been simmering since I first met him. Hallelujah! I pressed myself against him with a small groan.

  "I take it back," Amir said, laughing between kisses. "I'm an excellent seducer."

  "I'm an excellent seductress. I kissed you, remember?"

  He laughed again. I loved his laugh. "I couldn't forget. How does 'excellent seducee' sound?"

  "That," I said, "is most assuredly not proper English."

  "Samehni, Miss Hollis," he murmured into my neck. "I'm shocked, I must say, that such a proper country girl would be so . . . forward in her attentions."

  His attempt at "chiding schoolmarm" was ruined by the almost-purr in his voice and his hands even now straying beneath my blouse. "This is," I said, my own delivery hampered by a sudden urge to unbutton his waistcoat, "the modern era, and I am a modern girl who wants . . . some modern . . . affection."

  So perhaps I could not claim as much experience as Lily or Aileen, but I'd kissed boys other than Troy and done more than that besides. I was a long way from Yarrow, and if Daddy objected he could write a letter to the Butte Daily Post about his wayward daughter for all I cared.

  "If you're so very fast . . ." Amir said, kissing my collarbone. I gasped. ". . . then why are you shivering?"

  "I am not," I said, shivering.

  He buried his face in my egg-free hair. "You're not," he agreed. And then, without the slightest hesitation at all, he tipped us over the balcony. The rush of air flowing past us merged with the vertigo of the transition between worlds, and we landed in a mess of laughter and pillows back in his New York bedroom. Momentum tumbled us from the edge of his bed onto the floor.

  "I usually do that much better," Amir said. He started to unbutton my blouse and then paused, looking at me with that disconcerting intensity. My breathing, already none too steady, seemed to stop entirely. I felt torn between scrambling on top of him and backing away carefully, as though from an angry bull. I most emphatically did not subscribe to my parents' backward, Victorian morals. On the other hand, Amir was a djinn, and the ferocity of my desire had become a tad disconcerting.

  "You're turning blue," he said.

  I coughed, and sucked in a much needed gulp of air. He smiled at me--cool, ironic, inviting--and suddenly I was yanking apart his dress shirt, buttons flying onto the Persian rug, while heat seemed to blossom like flowers along both of our bodies. He laughed.

  "Now that," he said, "is modern affection."

  He'd begun to do this curious thing with his teeth and my earlobe when we both froze at the sound of the elevator door opening inside. There were people in the apartment.

  And they seemed to be calling my name. In a sort of daze, I fumbled for the buttons of my blouse. Amir stood up angrily, and threw open the door.

  "Zephyr, dear!" said my mama's voice. "I hope you don't mind us stopping by so suddenly, but your daddy had some business and the local Fairie Transport owed us a trip. We tried your place, but that colleen you live with said you were here. Something about some sort of vision . . . she seems a bit odd, honestly."

  Amir uttered a string of what sounded like foreign curses and met my panicked gaze. For my part, I
was cursing Aileen seven ways to Sunday. A vision, indeed! I'd had no idea she was capable of this sort of petty revenge.

  My mother's voice drew closer: "What a curious sort of place this is! We had to try all the floors. And someone should call the cleaners, I think a rat must have died on the fifth floor . . ." She trailed off, staring first at Amir, half naked in the doorway, and me flushed, blouse tragically askew.

  "Oh dear," she said. "I do hope you used a prophylactic."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Winnie, what nonsense are you spouting at the girl now?" said my daddy.

  "John, dear, maybe we had better come back lat--"

  "Not again, Winnie! Where's my crazy girl? Think this fancy place is hers? Maybe she's doing a lot better with that do-gooder nonsense than I thought . . ."

  He had finally made it to the bedroom door. He froze, the tableau hardly better for my having stood up in my dishabille.

  Daddy's gaze seemed to flay me where I stood and then moved to Amir. I could see the tiny little cogs in his brain working--the horrible bigotry triggered at the sight of Amir's dark skin and curly hair combined with his even worse status as Other. Daddy was halfway to his holsters when I realized I'd need something a little more emphatic than a yell to make him stop. So I reached for the closest object at hand and threw it at him. It shattered with a particularly satisfying crash.

  "Zeph!" Dad said, pistols thankfully forgotten.

  "That was a fourteenth-century Ming!" Amir said, dropping to his knees and cradling the pottery shards. He started to see if they fit back together, but I could tell just by looking it was a lost cause.

  Daddy's hand was bleeding, but he didn't seem to notice. He frowned at me, a cloud of rage building behind his eyes that I knew would find its expression in thunderous denunciations, bullets, or both.

  "Perhaps we could discuss this elsewhere, Daddy?" I said. I tried to physically move them out of the room, but Daddy was peering at Amir the way a scientist might observe a deformed cockroach.