Moonshine: A Novel

by Alaya Johnson

  Lily's mouth twisted. "Why do I think I won't be getting the better end of this bargain? What do you want for it, Zephyr?"

  "Just take this woman down to the Blood Bank on St. Marks Place. Ask for Ysabel. if she can't help her, she'll know someone who can."

  "Wait, why can't you do that? I'm not the do-gooder in this relationship."

  I took a step away and pulled Lily closer to me, so hopefully the vampire wouldn't be able to hear us. "One of these tenement vigilante groups shot her a few hours ago with a silver bullet. Which can kill vampires in less than a day. I don't have time, dearest Lily. I promised Nicholas--you know, the Turn Boy--that I'd meet him at noon."

  Lily sighed. "Fine. Deal. But you definitely have something solid about Faust and Rinaldo?"

  "You know, I'm not sure it's sound journalistic practice to plant information in your sources and then quote the sources for corroborating evidence."

  Lily let the corners of her mouth curve up into a cool, supercilious smile. "What you don't know about journalistic ethics could fill President Taft's belly, Zephyr. And anyway, so long as you have fresh evidence . . ."

  "I do. Just take care of her."

  Lily nodded. "I'll see you later to night. Iris has finally convinced me to attend one of those ghastly meetings."

  She set off at a brisk pace, forcing the vampire to struggle to keep up with her. I shook my head. For a reporter, Lily had certain remarkable blind spots on her observational skills.

  "Miss, sorry, we need to clear the station." It was the police officer Lily had been interviewing. I looked around the station and realized I was the only civilian left.

  "Wait, could you just help me with one thing?" Since I just saved your collective posteriors a few minutes ago. I didn't say that part, but I raised my eyebrows high enough for him catch my meaning.

  "Ah, right. What can I do for you?"

  "I . . . um . . . I think I saw a little boy I heard went missing last Thursday. I'm wondering if anyone reported him missing."

  "On Thursday?" He shook his head slowly. "None that I know of. Now last night and this morning? About seven." He shrugged.

  I let out a slow breath, a little surprised at the depth of my disappointment. If no one had reported a missing child, then he could be one of hundreds of faceless immigrant children. Hell, he could even be indigent, for all I knew. I started to wonder if I'd ever find Judah's family.

  The air outside was shocking cold after the heated mash of bodies inside the station, but I kept myself warm by bicycling furiously the rest of the way to South Ferry. There were a few ships docked when I arrived, and the piers were loaded with goods and milling people. I elbowed my way toward a likely-looking police boat. An officer lounging on the dock looked up when I approached. He listened sympathetically enough when I explained that I was looking for a missing little boy, but offered me no more help than the officers back in the precinct office.

  "Sorry, miss, but there's a lot of parents and kids come to Battery Park. We don't even know all the ones that work on the ships, let alone anyone else."

  Brilliant. "Would you say any of the ships here have particularly frightening horns?" I knew I was flailing, but I wouldn't compound it by looking embarrassed.

  He laughed, as well he might. "Frightening, miss? For a little tyke, maybe. But I wouldn't know what. And none of the big ships dock here. You might try Chelsea."

  "I . . . I don't suppose you'd mind . . . demonstrating? Your horn, I mean?"

  He looked a tad uncomfortable, as though he were belatedly questioning my sanity. I gave him my brightest smile and he shrugged. "Eh, why not? Bill," he called, to one of the men on the boat. "Give the whistle a pull, will you? Lady down here wants to know how it sounds."

  Bill obliged and I gave an involuntary start. Goodness, was that volume truly necessary? Still, it by no means seemed harsh or deep enough to frighten even a susceptible eleven-year-old at all used to the water. Besides, a series of docks like notches on a key went all around Manhattan. None of these seemed very child friendly, and all of them served thousands of ships. Maybe I could try Chelsea, but my shoulders slumped and I barely remembered to thank the officers before leaving. This felt like a dead end. I could only hope Judah remembered something else.

  I had only twenty minutes left before my tutoring session with Nicholas. There were too many things I needed to know that only the leader of the Turn Boys could tell me: where they'd kidnapped Judah, how they planned to run Faust into the city, where Rinaldo's lair was located.

  Nicholas, of course, would kill me before telling me any of it. Which meant I had to trick him.

  The inside of the Beast's Rum was dark as a tomb, and nearly as quiet as one. Blackout blinds had been pulled over all of the windows, and I had to knock for nearly a minute before a shuffling, hooded vampire let me inside. The only sounds came from a few suckers quietly nursing bags of clean blood, and one muttering to himself in the corner. They looked miserable. I spared them my sympathy.

  "Is Nicholas here?" I whispered to the one who had opened the door. He looked up and I realized, with a shock, that it was Charlie. He looked like he'd lost twenty pounds in the last twelve hours.

  "In back," he said, his voice a rough whisper.

  "You look like shit," I said.

  He coughed. "Well. Faust is a kick in the balls."

  "Hope it was worth it."

  His beatific smile surprised me. "Oh, yes."

  I started to walk away, but he reached out to grab my shoulder. I bit my lip against a shudder.

  "Be careful. He's a bit . . . the Faust, you know."

  He seemed worried, insistent that I understand. But I wasn't sure what I needed to know. That Nicholas was crazy? I'd gathered that already. Dangerous? I could handle it.

  "Don't worry," I said, shrugging off his hand. "I'll be fine."

  I bumped into a few tables before I found the door to the back room. A faint gas lamp illuminated the gloom inside. Nicholas sat on the floor, his back against the pile of ruined instruments. His skin was flushed with blood, but oddly pale beneath the blush. Faust with a chaser of Homo sapiens? I hoped the blood had been willingly donated, but I doubted it. His head lolled against his chest. I would have thought him asleep, if not for his glowing, open eyes.

  "I won't let you," he whispered.

  "Nicholas?"

  "Please, not the cage, I don't need it anymore . . ." He didn't look at me, and something about his distant expression reminded me of Judah, hallucinating in Kardal's palace. "There's something in there with me. It roars, Papa."

  My heart pounded. But before I could ask him what he meant, he raised his head. The fit had passed, what ever it was. He looked tired, but lucid.

  His fingers beat an irregular tattoo on the dusty floor. "I didn't think you'd come."

  He had never seemed more childlike, or more alien. "I told you, I need the money."

  I waited, but he didn't seem inclined to move. After a moment, I shrugged and pulled up a chair from the table.

  "Think you can get through the rest of the alphabet?"

  "You know La Boheme? Musetta's waltz? 'Quando m'en vo' soletta la via.' "

  I was shocked. Imagine being made to feel like a rube by an illiterate vampire gangster. "I'm not really sure . . ."

  He started to sing. If I'd been startled by his question, his voice nearly made my heart stop. I'd heard that the Italians would sometimes geld particularly talented boys right before puberty, and that the monstrous operation produced voices that were perfectly and eerily balanced between the falsetto of a boy and the tenor of a man. Nicholas's voice was high as a boy's, but somehow broader and richer. I had never heard a castrato--not even on a phonograph. A castrato voice, of course, had time to mature to adulthood whereas Nicholas's had been frozen, but I imagined that the two sounds could not be dissimilar. He moved his hands, as though in time to an unseen orchestra. His eyes splashed light in the darkened room when he hit that soaring high note. Of course I reco
gnized the song then. My musical tastes might run more toward Negro jazz than Italian operas, but it was hard to avoid such a popular, heartbreaking melody. He cut himself off abruptly toward the end of the song, a gentle vibrato morphing effortlessly into a harsh laugh.

  He stood, cracked the neck off a smashed guitar and hurled it at the far wall. The strings whistled by my face, but I didn't think he'd been aiming for me. Cold comfort.

  "Papa loved that one," he said. His breathing was labored for no reason I could discern. "But he never made me sing it."

  Back to troubled parental relationships, were we? Tread lightly, Zephyr. "Your papa . . . encouraged you to sing?"

  He let off that harsh bark of a laugh again. I winced, expecting another projectile, but he held himself still. "Encouraged. That's a do-gooder word for you. You'd like some others? How's about forced? Threatened? Oh, here's a good one, tortured."

  Tortured? How do you torture someone to sing? But given Nicholas's twisted expression and bright eyes, I was inclined to believe him. "No wonder you hate music," I said.

  "You only hate what you love."

  I sighed. Like Daddy yelling at me one minute and hugging me the next. "Parents," I said, for a moment forgetting that I was talking to Nicholas, and not just a troubled boy, "are a great trial to us all."

  Nicholas took a few quick strides toward me and sat down on the other chair. "So, show me some letters, Charity."

  I reached up to turn on the ceiling light. He made a great show of groaning and shielding his eyes from the light, but he didn't object. I wondered, as I wrote down the second half of the alphabet, why I felt so safe around him, compared to just yesterday. Did I really think he was less likely to snap and kill me? Or maybe it was as simple as knowing thine enemy. If I could predict his rages, there was less to fear. He had an even more difficult time concentrating today than he had yesterday, though I knew he was trying. I wanted to take pity on us both and give up, but I still had to implement my plan. I'd decided to represent the letters with the names of streets that he would be familiar with. And, conveniently, I planned to include as many streets in the vicinity of Judah's attack as possible. It was a long shot, but perhaps with enough prodding he would say enough to give me a clue as to where he'd found Judah.

  "So, L is for Lafayette or Leonard," I said, writing the words down in large, round letters. Nicholas mouthed the word while following my pen with his finger. "Followed by M, which stands for . . ."

  I let the ellipsis hang hopefully in the air for a few seconds. Nicholas looked up at me. "Morris?"

  I allowed myself a small grin. "Yes, perfect." Morris was a tiny street even farther downtown than Leonard or Catherine. Of course, his dredging it up proved absolutely nothing. But why would he pick a street so much farther from his normal area? Because something had happened there recently? I felt vindicated when he picked "Pearl" for P, "Rector" for R. But when we finally reached S, Nicholas balked.

  "This is stupid," he said, shoving the paper away from him so violently that the sheet ripped. "I already know the damn streets. Teach me something else."

  "Well," I said, attempting to speak calmly around the sudden appearance of my heart in my throat, "I think this will be easier for you if we use examples of words you're already familiar with. This is . . . well, especially with Faust around, it's your part of town, isn't it."

  He spat on the floor. I tried not to notice the gentle sizzle of his saliva when it hit the concrete. "My part of town. Ha. Don't let my papa hear you say that. This is his fucking oyster. I just get the scraps."

  I restrained myself from commenting on his mixed metaphor. There was something more important there. His papa owned this part of town? That either meant his papa was the borough president or . . .

  "Rinaldo? He's your father?"

  Nicholas leaned over the table and grabbed my head with his left hand. He pulled me close to his face, as though he were leaning in for a kiss, but romance had nothing to do with his fierce, half-mad face.

  "Just so we understand each other, Charity Do-good. Rinaldo ain't just my father. And what he did to me? Let's just say I don't want to hear nothing else about fucking Water Street, all right?"

  The second most dangerous vampire in Lower Manhattan had his fangs less than an inch from my neck, and I could have danced for joy. Water Street. I'd bet my rent money that he turned Judah there.

  But there were implications that I hadn't thought through. If Nicholas was Rinaldo's son, then he almost certainly knew the location of his father's secret lair. On the other hand, getting it out of him would be that much harder. For all he seemed to hate his father, I didn't want to be the one to detonate that complex welter of emotions I'd seen lurking so close to the surface. Bloody stakes, and I thought I'd had it tough. His own daddy turned him at thirteen. I'd had plenty of reasons to want to take out Rinaldo before. This was just more fuel for the fire.

  I was so tired by the time I turned onto Ludlow Street that I almost fell off my bicycle. My God, I needed to sleep. I calculated that I had three hours before Iris's ad hoc Temperance Union meeting. Any little bit would help. But I'd only stored my bicycle under the staircase when a sudden scent overpowered me. Oranges, frankincense and myrrh.

  "You smell like the three goddamn kings," I said.

  "I think they were ifrits, actually."

  His voice was warm with banked humor. For the first time since Daddy so rudely interrupted us, he actually sounded okay. I turned around. "How are you doing?" I asked. I wanted to touch him, but kept my hands firmly by my sides.

  His lips twisted. "Making do," he said. "If you hadn't come back soon, I was going to check the Tombs."

  "Haven't we already been through this? Give me some credit."

  "It sounded like there was a war on this morning. I thought it more than likely you'd be in it."

  I shook my head. "Stuck in my room, actually. This Faust stuff is a mess . . . I saw some things that first night at the club, but I didn't realize just how bad it was going to be. We have to find Rinaldo. We have to stop him."

  Amir gave me a curious look, almost chagrined. "Stop? I'm afraid stopping him wasn't really part of my plan."

  "Oh, that. After you get back what ever it is he took from you, then."

  "Well . . . ah, I suppose I'd have no objections. But silly me, imagining you didn't approve of extrajudicial assassination."

  That stopped me short. He was right--the plan smacked a little too much of my Defender past for me to do more than squirm uncomfortably. "What other options are there? If we have the chance . . . you know the police won't stop this."

  He regarded me silently for a few moments. "I think, somehow, you are oversimplifying things, Zephyr."

  I didn't respond and he shrugged. "And who am I to lecture you on morality? I prefer a more simple calculus. For example, is your inestimable father anywhere in the vicinity, and if not, would you like to come back with me?" He cupped one hand around the back of my head. Who needed central heating when you had a djinn nearby?

  I laughed. "Tell me again, why exactly are you taking Basic Literacy and Elocution?"

  "I heard a rumor about a teacher."

  "That she was charming? Beautiful? Brilliant?"

  He brushed his lips over my frozen nose and then lingered for a moment on my lips. "That she was good."

  I sighed. I'd take what I could get. "Well, the good teacher has to check one thing before she can avoid her daddy's wrath in your apartment." I took his hand and started walking down the block.

  "Walking? How . . . quaint. Won't you be cold?"

  I scanned the block behind us, but we were alone except for a few children. "You can, uh, zap us there. Just wait until we're away from the street."

  I didn't think it would be a good idea to tell him about the present Rinaldo left for me last night. I didn't want to awaken his latent chivalrous instincts any more than necessary. On the other hand, if someone was following me, I wanted them to learn as little about my invol
vement with Amir as possible.

  Amir gave me a curious look. "Something did happen this morning, didn't it?"

  We walked around the corner. "Just being cautious. Or did you forget that I'm attempting to infiltrate a gang of vicious mobsters so you can kill their leader?"

  He grimaced. "Now you sound like Kardal. "

  A seven-hundred-year-old talking column of smoke? "I do?"

  To my surprise, instead of grabbing my shoulders and winking out of existence, Amir walked to the street corner and hailed a hansom cab.

  "He thinks that I'm insane for getting you involved in this," Amir said as he opened the door and helped me inside.

  "And you think?"

  "That I'm desperate." He shut the door. "Where to?"

  "Ah . . . the Saint Marks Blood Bank," I yelled to the driver through the hatch in back.

  "Blood Bank?" he said. I couldn't see his face very clearly, but he sounded disapproving. " 'S gonna be mobbed today, miss. Not too safe up there."

  Amir rapped the ceiling with his fist. "We pay you to drive, not dispense advice. You heard what she said."

  The carriage started to move a second later, though I thought I heard a string of muttered curses about "flighty flapper girls," and "unprincipled foreign gentlemen."

  Amir settled back in his seat opposite me and stared out the window. I doubted he was looking at the scenery, because his expression was so intense I started to worry that he might accidentally start smoking.

  "So, why the mundane transportation?"

  He looked back at me. "I can't teleport anywhere I haven't been before. Unlike you, I don't spend much time in Blood Banks."

  Something had soured his mood. The reminder of Kardal? I decided to tell him what I'd learned from Nicholas as a distraction.

  "I'm not sure if it has anything to do with Judah, but something is upsetting him on Water Street. And I'm betting that something is Rinaldo."