Wicked City

by Alaya Johnson

  Mama stared to cry again. “This time is different. We need your help.”

  My diffuse anxiety turned sharp as a knife. I had never heard my mother this upset. Something had gone very, very wrong.

  “But what do you want me to do?” I asked.

  She took a deep, shaky breath. “Honey,” she said, “I need you to make a wish.”

  * * *

  Amir had told my mother.

  Not everything, perhaps, but enough for her to realize the potential of my unused wish. Enough to have reasoned her way to the perfect solution to her problems, never mind that they might be the ruination of mine. I could kill him. Indeed, after hanging up the phone, I stormed incoherently around the parlor until Mrs. Brodsky announced that I either use more ladylike language or take myself outside. I went outside, though not very far. To the end of the block and around, past children playing in the standing pools from last night’s rainstorm and old women watching the day from their stoops. It felt like home, and I was possessed of a painful, wistful longing—as though someone had already taken it from me. But who would finally do so? The mayor? The police? My family?

  Amir?

  How could he have used my own mother, clearly at her wit’s end with my father’s antics, to manipulate me into making a wish?

  “Of all the crass, manipulative, selfish—” I paused and gave a bitter laugh. This was Amir, after all. Had I really expected him to perform courier service for my family—fight a golem off of a goddamned roof—without any personal benefit? I had, perhaps, but then I was a naive fool who deserved what she got. Perhaps next week I’d learn that he’d helped me get into the morgue to help cover up some other crime he’d committed.

  I wanted to give him a good piece of my mind, preferably with invective of which Mrs. Brodsky would wholeheartedly disapprove. I marched back down the street to retrieve my bicycle. I wouldn’t let him get away with this, and I was less inclined by the minute to give two figs about the consequences of performing the ceremony with Sofia.

  The temperature seemed to climb a degree for every block I traversed, and my entire back was damp by the time I reached the Ritz. I sighed. Perhaps I should have taken the subway, but I hated to waste a fare just to avoid the heat. I shook myself out after locking the bicycle, hoping that the damp patches wouldn’t show too easily on the burgundy blouse (itself perhaps a mistake in this heat, but everything else needed laundering). The doormen paid me no mind, however, and I studiously avoided eye contact with the concierge. I directed the elevator operator to the fourteenth-floor apartments.

  “You’ll be seeing the prince, ma’am?” he asked, hesitating with one hand on the grate.

  I nodded. The Perfidious Prince, I thought, and stifled a dark laugh.

  We went up smoothly, but upon arrival we were assaulted with the unmistakable sounds of two men in loud argument. I looked down the hallway, but I needn’t have bothered: I recognized Amir’s voice, even muffled through a wall.

  The elevator operator looked around uncomfortably. “Perhaps miss would rather wait in the parlor while the concierge rings up?” he said.

  In other circumstances, I might have given Amir the courtesy. Instead I waved my hand. “Oh, it’s quite all right,” I said, smiling. “He’s expecting me. I imagine that he’s going on again about the Yankees game. Baseball overexcites him,” I said. The man nodded vaguely, as though this didn’t seem quite right, though he couldn’t remember why. I did not wait for him to figure it out; I waved again and set off firmly down the hall.

  I paused before Amir’s door, my hand frozen before a knock. I recognized the other voice, now. Amir and Kardal were engaged in another of their voluble arguments. The language and tone would have told me so, even without the smoke drifting under the door.

  I shook my head. “Bleeding djinn,” I said. “What do they want to do, bring down the fire department?”

  I rapped three times, firmly. “Let me in, Amir!” I called.

  Abrupt silence.

  “Zephyr?”

  “The very same.”

  “This isn’t exactly a good time, Zeph,” he said. “You couldn’t have rung first?”

  “Funny you should mention it,” I said. “Because my mother just called to make the most interesting request.”

  “Ah, did she?” Amir’s voice came more clearly through the door, as though he was standing just on the other side.

  “Yes,” I said. “It seems you and she had quite the conversation.”

  Amir opened the door. He looked tired, though less so than last night. “You might as well join the fun,” he said, and waved me into the sitting room.

  Kardal was seated with precise posture in one of the red brocade chairs. I nodded at him.

  “You haven’t made a wish,” he said. His rumbling tones had now ceased to faze me at all, even when he, as now, made not the slightest effort to appear human. Smoke tumbled from his head and shoulders in dense waves that puddled around his feet like fog. His eyes smoldered blue and white. I had learned through past interactions to better read his moods, though today’s didn’t take much deduction. Kardal was very, very angry.

  “I’ve been having second thoughts,” I said, and crossed my arms over my chest.

  Amir settled against the wall and looked heavenward.

  “You made a promise,” Kardal said, “to make a wish within a week.”

  “It’s only Saturday!”

  “You really mean to wait until Monday?”

  “In any case, I don’t know that your brother’s recent behavior”—I glared at him—“is providing a particularly good argument for my keeping that promise.”

  Kardal barked a laugh, blowing fire from his nostrils like an agitated dragon. “Humans! Your word is as good as your dung,” he said.

  “My word was based on the understanding that I had no other choice in the matter. But as it seems that I can free myself from Amir entirely, you will have nothing to worry about.”

  This caused Amir to step away from the wall. “Zeph, you can’t mean to go through with this,” he said. “Not now. Your father—”

  “Yes, Amir!” I stood, without quite deciding to do so. “Tell me about my daddy. Tell me all about how you manipulated my poor, overwhelmed mother into sobbing over the phone, begging me to make a goddamned wish!”

  Amir couldn’t even look at me. He stared at a vase to my right, his eyes shifty as the damned. “I didn’t mean to upset her,” he said, quietly.

  “Upset her! She made it sound like you told her Daddy had killed someone!”

  Amir sat down abruptly on the coffee table. He looked down at his hands, as though in search of some inscrutable answer. Then he released a stream of what I could only assume were Arabic curses and looked straight up at me.

  “Your brother,” he said, clearly.

  I forgot to breathe. “Harry? But I just saw—”

  “Not Harry,” Amir interrupted. “And not Sonny.”

  “I don’t have any other brothers,” I said, though I was remembering that once I had.

  Mama raised six children, but she’d given birth to eight. I’d had a sister who died in her crib when I could barely walk. Her name had been Lilah and Daddy dug her a tiny grave in the backyard.

  Right beside another one. Older, with just an unmarked cross and wild grass to cover it. My twin brother, Daddy said when I asked. He wouldn’t tell me any more, and Mama just cried.

  Amir waited for me to figure it out. Patiently, I would have said, had I not been overcome with incalculable rage.

  “That child was stillborn,” I bit out, “and Mama still grieved for him years after. What, did you see that sad little grave in the backyard? Did your mean-spirited, self-interested, morally bankrupt excuse for a mind hatch the clever plan? Use a mother’s grief to solve your problems?” I laughed, high-pitched and not a little hysterical. Amir looked frozen in place. He didn’t even try to argue. How could he? “And here I’d fooled myself into believing you. Like every other wo
man in the world, I suppose. He might be a selfish cad for three hundred years, but oh, for me he’ll change in six months! You unleashed Faust on the world,” I said. “Why would you balk at some petty emotional blackmail?”

  Amir seemed shaken, but I didn’t credit it. “That’s not how it was,” he said.

  “Are you saying you haven’t lied to me?” Amir winced. I laughed. “At least you have that much decency.”

  I brushed past him on the way to the door. I felt Kardal’s eyes follow me, but Amir didn’t so much as lift his head. Had the confidence man finally lost his confidence?

  It wasn’t until I’d turned the brass handle that I heard his voice.

  “You’re right,” Amir said. I wondered if I could smell him from even this far away—fire and sulphur, like he was agitated. But when I turned, he looked cool enough. “I lied to you and your mother.”

  “About my brother?” I said, just to be sure.

  He nodded and gave a faint smile. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  I could hardly contain my disgust. “You puerile, amoral—”

  “He’s lying.”

  Amir and I turned in unison to stare at Kardal, who up till now had seemed content to watch our argument with distant interest.

  “He’s … what?”

  “Kardal!”

  “He’s lying about lying,” Kardal said.

  “So … you’re saying my father did kill my brother?”

  “Kardal, you will stay out of this, or I will make you.”

  Kardal gave Amir a look that said, quite eloquently, what he thought of this threat. “Yes,” he said to me.

  Amir shook his head. “Kardal is lying. He wants you to make a wish, that’s all, so he’s trying to salvage the situation.”

  I looked between the two of them. It was like that old riddle, where one guard is cursed to always lie and the other is cursed to always tell the truth, and somehow you had to figure out which was which before the banshee came and ate you.

  Or something like that. Unfortunately, I’ve never been particularly good at riddles.

  “I think you’re both untrustworthy bastards,” I said, “but I know my daddy and I know that whatever his faults, there’s no power on earth that could make him hurt his children. Amir, Kardal, good day. I would very much like to never see you again in my life.”

  “Zeph!”

  I slammed the door in his face. He didn’t open it again, even though I dithered for almost a minute before calling the elevator.

  I cried on the way down, but they train the service staff very well in such places; he pretended not to notice.

  * * *

  I had not known it was possible to convey superiority while wearing nothing but hair curlers and silk stockings, but Lily managed. “You really haven’t heard?” she asked.

  “I haven’t read the papers today,” I said, looking morosely into Lily’s vanity. My hair had grown hopelessly frizzy in the day’s humidity; it flared about my scalp like an ochre halo. Lily had rouged my cheeks and done my eyes, but the effect struck me as more sinister than beautiful. I looked like a corpse with two shiners.

  Lily clucked her tongue. “If it were my freedom at stake, I’d manage to drum up some interest in current events.”

  We had been talking to each other’s reflections in the vanity’s oversize mirror, but at this I turned around. “Oh, out with it already!”

  Lily shrugged and handed me a copy of the New-Star Ledger.

  “ANTI-VAMPIRE LEADER APOLOGIZES FOR MURDERS; VOWS SUPPORT FOR INVESTIGATION,” I read, and then paused. “By James LeRoy? Scooped by your own paper, Lily?”

  “More like robbed,” she said, fists clenching. “Goddamn LeRoy and Breslin. This is my beat and I’d done half of that reporting, but I don’t even get a credit.” Lily sighed and collapsed onto her modern couch. “It’s because I’m a woman,” she said balefully. “Breslin just doesn’t trust me to ‘do it right,’ as he says. He says my womanly empathy makes me bad at hard-nosed reporting. I said I did hard-nosed reporting, just as I saw it, and did anyone else have my connections? And do you know what he told me?”

  “What?”

  Lily drew herself up. “He said, ‘That’s why we took you on, Harding, so they’d better start earning out our investment.’ And I said, ‘I’m a reporter, not a darned stock option!’”

  I gasped. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He kicked me out. So you see why I have to go to this party.”

  I did. I had offered to let her come if she let me borrow a dress, a more than fair arrangement.

  “I’m sorry the New-Star Ledger has become such a trial,” I said.

  I’d been perfectly sincere, but Lily just pouted. “Don’t gloat,” she said. “Read the article, damn them.”

  I shrugged. The paper’s ink had smudged where I gripped it with sweaty hands. Lily’s apartment was on the top floor of a white-brick building in the Upper Sixties by Lexington. She had electrical outlets in every room, but in this weather even two fans did not provide much relief. The article in question was perfectly legible, fortunately.

  Archibald Madison has publicly apologized for the murderous activities of Bradley Keck, the man currently in police custody for the alleged murders of thirteen vampires, including a decorated officer of the vice squad. Mr. Madison, founder and president of the Safety Council, the most prominent organization opposed to the existence of vampires, had employed Mr. Keck, a former indigent, for seven months at the time of the murders. Since the arrest, many have suggested Mr. Keck indiscriminately murdered the vampires at the instigation of his employer and mentor. Early this morning, Mr. Madison roundly dismissed any such inference as “baseless scandal-mongering.”

  “I unreservedly condemn the actions of my former employee,” Mr. Madison said. “I have never, by word or deed, encouraged anyone to harm other creatures, even abominations such as vampires. I have only ever sought legal means for the amelioration of the demographic threat to our city, and I will only continue to do so.” He went on to add, “The Safety Council has a simple mission at heart: to promote a better, human-oriented society, where Others have their proper place.”

  I snorted. Proper place. Under his boot, no doubt.

  When asked whether he still supported the anti-Faust forces opposing the council’s vote on Monday, Madison declined to comment.

  The article went on for a few more paragraphs, about the influence of Madison’s Safety Council and its reaction to the “Faustian menace.”

  “I wonder what he’s up to,” I said. “Declined to comment? Do you think he’ll change his mind?”

  Lily was applying lipstick, but paused halfway through. “Oh, you can bet the mayor is trying. Madison is in a bad position. Either he looks like a hypocrite because he changed sides or he looks like a murderer because he stuck to his convictions.”

  “But he is a murderer,” I said.

  Lily rolled her artfully smoky eyes. “Zephyr, I know you don’t like him, and I’m not saying he hasn’t said some rather incendiary stuff, but it hardly amounts to murder. Bradley Keck murdered those vampires because someone encouraged him to. And I doubt it was Madison.”

  “Well, why not?” I asked. “Someone meant to frame me.”

  Lily puckered blood-red lips and blotted them on a tissue. “I doubt he gave you a thought in his life before this week. I think your letter-writer must be someone familiar with your past, Zeph.”

  I took an extra tissue and attempted to wipe at my eyes. They were still puffy from the hour I’d spent crying earlier today, and the charcoal did them no favors. “That seems rather like no one and everyone, doesn’t it? Next you’ll be suggesting Troy wrote them. Or Harry! Or Daddy!” I choked a little on the last word, remembering Amir’s horrible accusation. My hand slipped, smearing charcoal eyeliner down my cheek.

  “Zephyr!” Lily abandoned her rouge brush and dove for my hands. “My sixteen-year-old cousin takes making-up better than you! No, leave i
t alone, I’ll fix it.” Lily knelt and used a wet cloth to wipe the lining from my eyes before starting again.

  “Well, whoever is the culprit,” she said, moving the pencil with a steady hand, “you had better find out soon. For both of our sakes. Breslin said the morgue story was old news—he buried it in the middle of the paper. I need to give him something big, and that’s definitely the ticket.”

  “Do I actually look like a person to you, or just walking newsprint inches?”

  Lily finished and leaned back on her heels. “Newsprint inches,” she said, with raised eyebrows, “don’t wear Lanvin.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Tammany Wigwam on Fourteenth and Irving had recently been slated for demolition, so the organizers had moved the event to the glittering opulence of the Hotel Vanderbilt’s banquet hall. We arrived punctually, despite Lily’s none-too-subtle inferences that I was a rube for doing so. I didn’t tell her my real reason: a vague unease about the mayor’s reasons for inviting me here. He’d seemed to accept my denials about knowing Amir, but now I wondered if he’d done so too easily. I was a mediocre liar, and Beau James was a born politician—had I really convinced him so easily? But as long he didn’t put Judith’s acquaintance together with Nicholas’s hint of a genie distributor, I didn’t see what even our wily mayor could do about it. Even so, I decided to arrive early. If something seemed amiss, I would hopefully be able to leave quietly.

  I had to admit, Lily hadn’t held back on her side of the deal. She had draped me like a dressmaker’s doll at the positive bleeding edge of fashion, in a she-swore-original Jeanne Lanvin delivered by her mother from Paris just last month. Rust red chenille silk with a swooping back and a flared skirt layered with black. She gave me a bandeau with a white flower and short red gloves with the wrists folded down. I said I looked like a robber bride, or like those girls who pretended to be vampires for certain men in certain brothels.