Moonshine (2010)

by Johnson, Alaya

  “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 involvement 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.”

  Some of the strain left his eyes. “Good. We’re getting closer. Of course, it’s all moot if your father massacres the Turn Boys first, but still. What about Judah?”

  I sighed. “Manhattan has a lot of boats. No luck on South Ferry; all the big boats dock elsewhere. Chelsea?”

  “That’s miles away from the Turn Boys. Didn’t you say the neighbors heard them coming from farther south?”

  I bit my lip. “You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense. He must be from the neighborhood. Maybe Nicholas attacked him after an incident with his father? I never thought I’d feel sorry for a vicious murderer like that, but . . .”

  “Zephyr,” he said, “you’d feel sorry for Jack the Ripper.”

  He kissed me. I wasn’t prepared for it, and t
he shock bubbled from my chest to my toes like a bottle of exploded soda pop. My fingers felt around the rough edges of his ears before lacing themselves in his hair. I might have moaned. I think I moaned.

  The hansom jerked to a stop and the cabbie rapped on the ceiling. “I won’t have none of that, you hear?”

  I giggled. “You run a clean establishment,” I muttered in my best Mrs. Brodsky impersonation. Amir paid the cabbie and we alighted onto St. Marks Place in a fashion significantly higher-class than I was accustomed to.

  Amir brushed back my hair and whispered in my ear, “You should hurry, don’t you think?”

  The room was so crowded that at first I couldn’t find Ysabel. I saw only a few humans—the rest were vampires, the signs of Faust withdrawal clear on most of their faces. After a night of Faust, they were desperate for real nutrition. But I doubted the Blood Bank had enough for all of them. Ysabel and a younger assistant were hauling a crate of blood bags from the storage room. The golem was patrolling the area between the desk and the far wall. I’d never seen it do more than shuffle aside before, and the sight of it in full motion was almost unnerving.

  When she saw me, Ysabel hollered my name and leapt over the golem to hug me. “I’m so glad to see you!” She looked around the room and shook her head. “Some day, eh? These times, I tell you. Saul says we’re living like the Canaanites, and now the Faust has come to smite us. I just think it’s a shame, and I don’t mind saying so.”

  Behind us, Amir coughed. Ysabel yanked on my shoulder until I was low enough for her to whisper in my ear. “Is that a Mohammedan, Zephyr?”

  I straightened abruptly. Amir wouldn’t have even needed Other hearing for that. “Ysabel, meet Amir. I’m helping him with something.”

  Amir gave a small bow, which I could have hit him for. He really did think he was the prince of Arabia, didn’t he?

  “But I’m curious as to your opinion about Faust. Don’t you agree that it can only benefit the city if its vampires have an outlet for personal enjoyment?”

  Ysabel’s lip curled. “Oy vey, don’t you have eyes? Look at these bruxa! They look like they’re having fun, do they? Burning in the sun and then about to starve to death. Zephyr, where’d you find this me-shuggener?”

  I glared at Amir. “He found me,” I said. “And he’ll wait outside.” Apparently the full force of my fury was enough to convince him to beat a hasty retreat. What the hell was he thinking? Defending Faust because it was fun? In the middle of a Blood Bank mobbed with desperate vampires? Before Ysabel could ask me more questions about Amir, I asked her about Lily and the vampire from this morning.

  Ysabel’s angry demeanor vanished immediately. “Oh, of course, the poor bruxa. She was weak, you know, but you saved her life. We got that bullet out just in time.” She clucked her tongue. “Silver bullets on an innocent bruxa. What’s the city coming to? But that girl who was with her? You’d have thought she was in a garbage pit the way she held her nose. And then she insisted on asking everyone all these questions. You have some strange friends, bubbala.”

  I restrained a smile. I could only imagine Lily’s distaste at having to come to such a low-class slum. But she was a good reporter: she’d never let anything get in the way of a story. I thanked Ysabel and promised to come by tomorrow morning to do what I could to help. The feeling of a hundred hungry vampire eyes resting on my neck was enough to make even my skin crawl. I left as soon as I could.

  Amir was leaning against a lamppost, his hands in the pockets of his tweed sports jacket. He was watching the street boys cleaning horse manure and hawking a dozen different broadsheets. I could tell immediately that his buoyant mood had vanished. It made me feel guilty. He didn’t look up when I stepped beside him.

  “Why aren’t they in school?” he asked. “Isn’t that what boys do, now?”

  “Not if their families can’t afford it. Or if they don’t have any families.” I thought about the tenements filled with orphaned or stolen children, with the landlords who forced them into virtual slavery. But something stopped me from mentioning it to Amir.

  “It’s not so different from before, is it? I thought . . .” He shook his head. “I practically live in your world. Kardal’s always complaining that I’m more human than Djinni. And Kashkash knows I often can’t stand Shadukiam. But sometimes, I swear, it’s like I don’t know humans at all.”

  I considered how hard it was for some of the immigrants I taught to acclimatize to life in this country. A djinn with the same troubles?

  “Why did you say that back there? About Faust. Can’t you see what it’s done already to these people?”

  Amir didn’t respond. He seemed very tense—he radiated enough heat now that I’d begun to sweat beneath my coat. Then he gripped my hand very tightly. What was wrong with him? Was he having another attack? But no, it didn’t look quite like that.

  “Will you come back with me, habibti? Forget about all this for a while?”

  Something I’d said bothered him. It didn’t take much to deduce that. But I didn’t care, at least for now. He was staring in my eyes, his skin was touching mine, and I was melting like the puddle of snow at his feet. I nodded. We flew through nothing at all, and when we arrived I was the first to open my eyes, the first to see the macabre present waiting for him in his front hall.

  A revenant tomcat—larger and mangier than the one that greeted me the day before—stood in a lake of blood. Not its own—several gallons of blood had been liberally splattered all over the room, but where it had come from was unclear. The cat launched itself toward us as soon as we arrived, screeching like its voice box was broken. The smell made me gag as I fumbled for my knife. Amir was faster. He grabbed the cat while shoving me aside, and then snapped its neck with such force that he nearly decapitated it. He tossed the still creature back on the floor, his lip curled in disgust. A horrible aftertaste of rot and hot tar almost overpowered the normally salty, metallic musk of blood.

  “Goodness,” I said, trying to control my breathing. “No need to be so overenthusiastic.”

  Amir whirled on me. “Bloody hell, Zephyr. Go home.”

  I walked into the emergency meeting of the Manhattan Temperance Union fifteen minutes late, my hands scrubbed so clean my skin cracked. My hair was damp and dripping down the nape of my neck. I was attempting not to think about the red stains on the sleeves of my blouse. Really, I was attempting not to think about much at all. Iris was holding forth in the front of the room, detailing the horrors she’d witnessed walking through the streets that morning. Lily leaned against the wall by the door in back, scribbling furiously. She nodded to me and then cocked her head toward the front of the room. I followed her gaze and saw an older man in the second row calmly writing in a reporter’s notebook. A photographer stood nearby, and snapped a few blinding shots of the crowd and Iris. I sidled up to Lily.

  “Competition?” I whispered.

  “The Sun, those bastards. My story about the riot at the precinct made the front page of the evening edition, and now everyone wants to cover the Faustian Nightmare. They trotted out Bill Oliver for these old bags, if you’d believe it. Don’t you dare talk to him, Zephyr! This is my story.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s tracking your big Faust exposé?”

  She closed her eyes and crossed herself. “Good Lord, I hope not. He’ll make a hash of it and take the credit.”

  A woman in the back row turned to us angrily and put her finger over her lips. “Shh!”

  Lily rolled her eyes and lowered her voice. “Anyway, I think my dear god-aunt’s going to call you up in a second.”

  I caught a sob in my throat and massaged my aching temples. I was sure they hurt a good deal less than Amir’s, but that wasn’t much comfort. I hadn’t wanted to leave him there, alone. He hadn’t let me stay.

  “Zeph . . . are you okay? Are those bloodstains—”

  I caught her eye and shook my head. “It’s been a long day,” I said. “We’ll talk later.”

 
“And now I’d like to introduce someone I think you all know,” said Iris, utterly oblivious and in her element. “Zephyr Hollis. Though perhaps you’d know her better as the vampire—”

  “Thank you, Iris!” I shouted from the back of the room. I wasn’t sure if I could stop myself from screaming if I heard that moniker one more time. But once I made it to the Sunday-school podium and the eyes of every woman in that room focused their curious, severe stares upon me, I wondered what on earth I was doing. I mean, I hated the Temperance Union. I’d certainly never been shy with my opinion of their activities. I was half the age of their average member. I’d been able to vote since I turned twenty-one. To me, they were dinosaurs. To them, I was a know-nothing communist upstart, trying to take over their movement. And I expected them to listen to me about Faust? Iris thought my notoriety would give me more credibility. She didn’t seem to understand that most of these women hated me for it.

  “For every life alcohol destroys,” I said, “Faust will destroy a dozen. I saw it today. Unless we act now, Faust could tear apart this city.” I tried to be persuasive, but my mind felt numb from the grisly scene at Amir’s—all that blood, the dead stray cat, the secret I kept about Rinaldo’s “gift” the night before. I discussed all the immediate effects of Faust: blood-madness, severe burns, street vigilantes, public panic. Perhaps Prohibition was the wrong tactic, I said, but we needed to organize immediate public health measures in order to curtail the disasters already rippling through the community. “I’ve worked my whole life to improve human-Other relations. This threatens to destroy all of our progress in just a few weeks.”

  It wasn’t much of an ending, but it was all I had to say. I left the podium to a few scattered, halfhearted claps. The local chapter president then opened up the floor for comment. A woman in the front row stood up so quickly she rocked her chair backward. She wore a tight cap pinned to her graying bun and a dress so hopelessly Victorian it actually featured a hint of a bustle.