Moonshine (2010)

by Johnson, Alaya

  He went ahead of me through the revolving doors. I buttoned my jacket, replaced my hat and followed him. Outside, it had begun to snow again, an earnest dusting that was rapidly building on the inches left last night. I sighed. Bicycling in the snow could be fun, but I was tired of coming home covered in mud puddles. We were halfway down the stairs when Troy—caked with snow and without even a hat to cover him—called out to me.

  “Oh, you’re back?” I said. He glared at me. Amir moved a few steps closer, as though to protect me, but I rolled my eyes and waved him away. Honestly, Troy was a giant blond baby with a love of violent projectiles. I’d had a huge crush on him when I was sixteen. He had been my first kiss. I’d had some crazy notion of him asking Daddy for permission, but instead he made me promise not to tell. In retrospect, I could only be grateful that he’d been mature enough to realize neither of us wanted anything approaching “till death do us part.” Daddy loves him.

  “Did you get your money back?” I asked, when he didn’t say anything.

  He laughed humorlessly. “Funny you should ask that, Zephyr. The fellow that sold the sword to me swore it was blessed.”

  I squinted against a frigid gust of wind. “Well, I’m sure he did.”

  “Oh, he proved it. He keeps a pet ghoul. The damn beast sizzled, Zeph. Like a fried egg.”

  I grimaced. “To call you a Neanderthal, Troy, is an insult to hairy protohumans.”

  “Do you have it?” Amir asked, surprising both of us.

  Troy looked at him for a moment and then shrugged. He removed the short sword from the holster under his jacket. Amir held it gingerly, as though it were some fragile object . . . or it burned him.

  “It’s blessed,” he said shortly, handing it to me. I unsheathed it and stared at the slightly curved blade.

  “But, he held it less than a foot away from a fairie!”

  Troy looked smug enough to burst. “I guess she wasn’t a fairie, Zeph.”

  “She was,” I said, emphasizing the words with a few experimental swipes. The air whistled past the dangerously sharp blade. “I’m a hundred times better at recognizing Others than you are.”

  “It wouldn’t affect a fairie,” Amir said. “It’s strongly blessed, but not Christian.”

  “Not Christian?” Troy repeated, stupidly, as though the thought of other religions had never once crossed his tiny Defender mind. “What good is it, then?”

  Amir glanced at me for a moment, his mouth quirking with delicious, shared mockery. “Not much, in this country,” he said.

  Troy stamped his foot, leaving an angry print on the snow. “Oh, bloody Christ.”

  “Could I buy it off of you?”

  “Why the hell not. Who are you, anyway? Nice of you to introduce us, Zephyr.”

  I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at him. “Amir, meet Troy; he knows my daddy. Troy, meet Amir, he’s . . . a temporary employer.”

  Troy looked surprised. “Employer? You’re not getting into the business again, are you?”

  I shook my head vehemently, as this was a little uncomfortably close to the truth.

  Amir handed Troy fifty dollars. “I think that should satisfy?” he said.

  Troy pouted. “I paid eighty for the damn thing.”

  “I imagine that’s more than anyone else will give you for a pagan blade,” Amir said, allowing a measure of his disdain to show.

  Troy considered for a moment and then pocketed the money. “Right. Jesus, it’s cold out here. I’ll see you around, Zephyr. If you’re looking for more work, you know where to find me.”

  “Under a damn rock, I hope,”

  I muttered as he ran up the steps. Amir laughed. “Old friend?”

  “Slim pickings in Montana.”

  We were in a palace. I hadn’t had time to notice our surroundings—just some vague impressions of marble arches and trickling water. As far as I could tell, Amir had taken us here by closing his eyes and snapping his fingers. After a mercifully brief instant of pure, stomach-inverting vertigo, I staggered against Amir and realized that we were certainly not in Manhattan anymore. We stood in an arcaded courtyard, facing a pillar of smoke that was apparently Amir’s brother Kardal.

  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, “ar
e 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 . . .”

  Touché. 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.”