Moonshine (2010)

by Johnson, Alaya

“Amir!” Rinaldo screamed suddenly. “I command you to give me more power! Do you hear that? I summoned you, so give it to me!”

  Amir didn’t even have a chance to resist. His eyes rolled into the back of his head; he slumped into a boneless heap on the floor. For a moment, all the air seemed to rush from the room, like the tide going out before a great wave. And then we heard it: a crescendo of noise like a plane swooping overhead. My skin tingled with its effects, but Rinaldo seemed to glow. His hair stood on end. His clothes rippled in the absence of any breeze. He laughed, and it reminded me—though I wish it didn’t—of Nicholas.

  “Try me now, Defender,” he said.

  Daddy wouldn’t have survived. I couldn’t have made it in time. And the thing that saved him had nothing to do with steel or silver.

  “Papa,” Nicholas said, his voice strangled. “Papa, he’s gonna kill me.”

  We all turned to look. Giuseppe had found my discarded, unloaded gun and had placed the barrel on Nicholas’s chest. No one but me, Daddy and Troy knew it wasn’t loaded.

  “You killed my son,” Giuseppe said.

  None of us saw Rinaldo move. One second he was standing over Daddy, and the next he had moved in front of Giuseppe, knocking the gun from his hand. Giuseppe whimpered. Rinaldo snarled and pushed his fist straight through Giuseppe’s chest, like he was no more substantial than a cardboard diorama at a fair.

  “He’s not your son,” Rinaldo bit out, as what was left of his rival seeped onto the floor. Kathryn screamed from the doorway and ran to him, heedless of the vampires and Defenders in her way. She knelt beside the slick exsanguination. She wept. So that’s what it’s like to watch someone you love get killed, I thought.

  Rinaldo laughed again; a child with a new toy. “And I didn’t even have to bleed you!” he said. Had he still failed to understand the power he held over Amir? Then it wasn’t too late. We still had time to kill him. He strolled back to Daddy. When Troy attempted to get in his way, Rinaldo threw him into a bookcase. Troy groaned. I looked at Daddy: a little unsteady now, but gamely holding his ground. As for Amir, he had roused himself from the effort of granting that wish, but he’d given up. If I’d handed him my knife then, I suspect he might have used it on himself. I needed to subdue Rinaldo for Amir’s sake, but at this point anything less than death would risk all of our lives. He was too powerful, and Amir couldn’t take back the wish.

  Rinaldo was playing with Daddy, taking his time. I had one chance. If I didn’t take him out now, he would be unstoppable. If I took him out before Amir had a chance to drink his blood, Amir would die. Amir, who had been responsible for at least a dozen deaths across the city over a drug he’d probably thought was a joke. Amir, who called me habibti, who had tried to stop the imports once he realized what he’d done, who burned when he touched me.

  And my daddy, who was about to die.

  Don’t think. Blade in hand. Take off the damn shoes so you don’t make noise over the floor. No one is paying any attention to you. Keep it that way. Oh fuck, my hand hurts. Ignore it, you’re not using it anyway. Breathe, but not too deeply. One, two . . .

  The strike was textbook-perfect, through the back and under the sternum. I felt the sweet spot, that mushy vampire heart that, when ruptured, turned the rest of their bodies to fetid paste.

  But it didn’t rupture. I wiggled the blade. Nothing.

  Rinaldo roared like a wounded bull. He twisted around so hard the blade shattered in his body. I dropped the useless pommel to the floor and scrambled to get away.

  “You again?” he said, gasping. My textbook strike had at least weakened him, but he was still stronger than any other vampire in that room. How the hell had he survived? Any vampire should pop when a blessed blade hit that sweet spot.

  “You kill me, and you’ll never find your son,” I said, stalling. What could I do? My other blessed blade was hidden under my skirt and he’d snap me in half before I had time to reach it. And it looked like it would take a blessed two-by-four to kill this sucker anyway.

  “I kill you, and I can call your ghost to tell me where he is,” he said, but he hesitated. Good. I saw Daddy stalking him behind me. But would his blades do any better than mine? We needed something different, something unexpected. Rinaldo was a strange vampire, right? So maybe he needed a strange method of killing.

  You’re using the wrong blade.

  Aileen’s brogue came back to me so strongly that for a moment I thought she’d walked into the room. That had been her first vision, the morning after Dore nearly killed her in the alley. I’d dismissed it as nonsense, then. But now . . .

  “Daddy!” I shouted.

  Rinaldo glanced away. Daddy jumped back. I took the short sword, the one passed from Troy to Amir to Mama and then me, the pagan-blessed blade that wouldn’t hurt a normal vampire any more than a butter knife, and jammed it home. The angle was sloppy, sideways through his ribs and then down through the heart. I felt it knock against the lodged silver blade, just barely pricking his sweet spot.

  It was enough.

  His skin seemed to rot into a paper-thin membrane, like a withered onion. Then the blood and rendered fat splashed over my socks and dress. We all stared, silent. Then Nicholas suddenly scrambled up and ran for the door. The three remaining Turn Boys—Charlie, to my relief, and two others I didn’t recognize—followed him out. I didn’t stop them. Neither did Troy.

  Amir stumbled out of the circle. A few trembling steps, and he was beside me and what was left of the body. His eyes were bleak as he looked at his death sentence, but I didn’t see any reproach for what I’d done.

  “Zephyr.” His voice was rough, that of a dying man.

  “I’m so sorry—”

  He put his hand on mine. It was cold as stone. He said something in that other language, a long string of words I couldn’t parse, but made me tremble.

  “Kardal,” he said. “It’s time.”

  Amir collapsed. I caught him, painfully, and lowered him to the floor. His warm brown skin had taken on more than a hint of gray. Kardal came through a moment later, in a form as solid as any I’d seen.

  “Come soon,” he said, as he took his brother from me. I nodded. They vanished.

  Daddy’s hand on my shoulder jolted me. I looked up, and wondered why it was so hard to focus on him. He handed me a handkerchief. Surprised, I wiped my tears away.

  “Come on, little girl,” he said roughly. “Let’s get you back to your mama.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The emergency room at the New York Infirmary had seen some odd sights in the past few days, but surely the arrival early Wednesday morning of seven Defenders and three women covered in vampire gore constituted one of their stranger visits. Troy had been forced to stake one of his men in the tunnels—he’d been about to turn and that sort of useless gesture was a point of honor among people like Daddy and Troy. Derek was pretty badly hurt—Troy carried him in, but the nurses carted him away almost immediately on a gurney when they saw the gashes around his neck and stomach. Which left nine of us, stuffed into the back of the waiting room so the other afflicted didn’t have to deal with the stench. I hardly noticed it. Really, I hardly noticed anything, even my throbbing hand. I kept going back to those last moments when I’d killed Rinaldo. Amir’s face when he lost all hope. I’d done that to him. I’d picked my daddy over him. My daddy and all the other people Rinaldo might kill if he wasn’t stopped. And he’d said . . . what ever it was he said to me. That beautiful language.

  Daddy handed me a fresh handkerchief. Aileen put her arm around me. Kathryn had stopped crying, but she seemed even more dazed than I. We hadn’t wanted to leave her in the tunnels after everything that had happened. She’d come along willingly enough.

  “Kathryn,” I said, since I hardly knew what to do with myself and my thoughts were about to drive me mad, “could you tell us . . . I mean, was Giuseppe your husband? Is Judah your son?”

  She rocked back and forth. “Yes,” she said, her voice filled with the
tears that had ceased pouring down her face. “Yes. We were happy for a while, you know. We had four children. He did some jobs for Rinaldo, but nothing much. Then Rinaldo met me. He . . .” She shrugged. “Rinaldo had . . . violent passions. He loved like an Italian, they say. He loved me. But I was Giuseppe’s. I didn’t want to leave him. Rinaldo wouldn’t let go. He threatened us. He made Giuseppe lose his job. It was hard, but then that boy of his, that Nicholas turned Giuseppe. Rinaldo said my children would be next. So I took Judah—he was too little, then, he still needed me—and I ran away. I left my husband so he’d be safe. I lived with Rinaldo. He was . . . he wasn’t cruel, really. He loved me. He loved Judah. I got used to it.”

  “But then Judah disappeared?” I said.

  She nodded. “Rinaldo was . . . furious. Distraught. He was sure Giuseppe had kidnapped him back. I knew it was Nicholas, though. Rinaldo changed his will to take care of little Judah, and Nicholas . . . he was jealous. Rinaldo loved Nicholas, you have to understand, but in his son he saw something different than a little boy. He saw an instrument, a perfect instrument. You’ve heard his voice? Rinaldo wanted to preserve it. An eternal instrument of perfection, he said. But Nicholas never got over it. It’s such a horrible thing to do to a boy . . . and now he’s done it to my boy, too.”

  She buried her face in her hands, and we waited while she wept. “So I knew,” she said. “I knew that it was Nicholas, but Rinaldo wouldn’t hear a thing against him. He threatened poor Giuseppe, told him he’d kill our children if he didn’t give Judah back. Giuseppe just . . . snapped, I suppose. He couldn’t stand the pressure. He found all this money God knows where and hired you to kill Nicholas and the others. He thought that even if he couldn’t get to Rinaldo, that would send a message. It would finally make him leave us alone.” She paused. “But you, Zephyr, started tutoring those boys. Giuseppe knew what was going to happen to them. He liked you. Didn’t want you to get hurt. So he tried to threaten you, but pretended it was Rinaldo. You were too stubborn, I guess. They all were.”

  “At least your boy is still alive,” Aileen said, into the bleak silence.

  Kathryn started crying again. “My boy was too young. It . . . changes them. He’ll be like Nicholas. Not my little Judah. No more roses . . .”

  He still loves roses. I’d fulfilled Amir’s last wish. I’d found Judah’s mother. But it turned out she didn’t want him.

  A nurse with a pinched expression that might have been disdain, or merely offense at our smell, approached us with a clipboard.

  “It looks like that other one will be okay. Lord knows we need every pint of blood in this city, but we got him some in time. Which of you is next?”

  Daddy went with me to the treatment room. Another nurse took one look at the two of us and insisted we remove all of our clothes and change into hospital gowns. We waited another fifteen minutes or so for the doctor, who then proceeded to prod me for thirty seconds before declaring that I’d cracked a rib and broken my thumb at the base and he’d call for some plaster. Daddy looked uncharacteristically abstracted while the nurse who’d taped my ribs wrapped my hand. He patted my knee, but I wasn’t sure who he was reassuring.

  “You just let that rest for a few minutes, dear,” she said, when she’d finished. The wet plaster was puffy, and made my wrist and hand look like they’d been suspended in a cloud. “You can leave when it’s dry. And you, sir, should come with me—”

  Daddy shook his head. “I want to speak with my daughter for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  The nurse shrugged and walked out, pulling the curtain behind her. An illusion of privacy, at least.

  “Zephyr, sweetie . . . did your mama ever tell you how you came to be immune?”

  I shook my head. I used to ask when I was younger, but both of them always refused to discuss it. I’d never seemed very different, otherwise, from my siblings and the other kids. Eventually, it just didn’t seem that important.

  He cleared his throat. “See, well . . . when your mother was pregnant with you, and we were so happy to be having a baby, an heir, you see, to me and my demon hunting, and I thought about what would make the greatest demon hunter in the world, right? Immunity. A sort of . . . anti-Other power.”

  I frowned. “But, Daddy . . . I don’t have any power. I can’t even summon an ant.”

  He shook his head earnestly. “That’s just the thing, sweetie. That’s your power. That master vampire back there, the one with the fire blood? His bite is strong enough to kill a genie. But you? A horsefly would bother you more.”

  I’d known that. But it took Daddy saying it out loud for me to realize how astonishing and scary the implications were. My very existence was anti-Other?

  “How did you and Mama do it? Why doesn’t everyone?”

  He shook his head. “Never mind that. The point is, Zeph, you can still save that . . . that genie of yours, if you want. I saw you . . . I mean, hell, sweetie, I don’t ever want to see you hurt that bad. You know I don’t approve of his type, but if you want to, then you can save him.”

  My senses dilated: the sudden, intense throbbing of my hand; Daddy’s averted gaze; my labored breathing.

  “How?”

  “Let him drink your blood. It’s blood that did this to him, it’s blood that will get him out.”

  “That’s it?”

  He bit the inside of his cheek. “It’s not nothing. I think it might bind him to you, in that genie way. You’d have his powers. You saw what happened back there, with just that little wish? Their power sort of twists things over here. The longer you wait to wish, the worse it gets. Their powers are . . . strange.”

  “I wouldn’t anti-Other them?”

  He frowned. “Well, they’re his, ain’t they? You’d only be taking them out on loan.”

  I swallowed. “For the rest of my life.”

  “I told you it wasn’t nothing,” he said.

  But he had given it to me anyway. He thought I’d be throwing away my life on Amir, but he’d let it be my decision. I sat up. The wet plaster was heavy, but I didn’t want to wait for it to dry.

  Daddy shook his head. “You sure about this, Zeph?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. But I would do it anyway.

  Kardal didn’t comment on either the hospital gown or my plastered hand. He seemed abstracted with grief, and for a horrible moment I thought I had come too late. Daddy had, reluctantly, cast the summoning spell for me.

  “He’s in the garden,” Kardal said, when we arrived. Let him burn your carpets, I’d said. I remembered the unhealthy chill of Amir’s skin before he fainted. No danger of that now. Amir lay unconscious on the grass. Kardal had dressed him in the older clothes that he favored—a long silk tunic and embroidered over-jacket, tied with a burgundy sash. For once, Amir looked like a prince. But in some ways, he had always looked like that. It was better, I supposed, that he wasn’t awake to make excuses for himself. I’d made my decision, but I didn’t want any false reassurances about his intrinsic goodness.

  Amir had, in full possession of the facts about the drug, released Faust upon an unsuspecting marketplace via the most unscrupulous mob boss in the city. Yes, he tried to salvage the situation, but it was already too late. At least without Amir’s direct pipeline to the purest goods, the effects would probably be more manageable. But Faust was here to stay. And why had he done it? Fun. Kardal had told me that Amir loved our world, but like a boy loves a toy set. Maybe he’d never thought of us as real people with real lives to ruin. After all, he lived on such a radically different time scale. If he became emotionally attached to humans, he’d have to grieve every time they died. He’d have to wonder at the injustice of his long, easy life and the short, nasty and brutish nature of ours. So he collected our artifacts, which lasted longer, and our poetry and our stories and occasionally, when he came across something interesting, he dropped it in our world like a playful god, just to see what happened.

  “And now look what’s happened, Amir,” I whispered.
But he had gone too far away to hear me.

  “Kardal,” I said, “Amir said something in that other language, just before . . . it sounded like, I don’t know, a confession. But rhythmic, like a poem. Jabinya min sakam something.”

  “Ta’jabiyna min saqami / sihhati hiya l-’ajabu / kulama ’intafa sababun / minki, ja’ani sababu,” he said. The words, even in his rumbling bass, sounded gentle.

  “Yes, that’s it!”

  Kardal smiled and touched his brother’s hand. “Abu Nuwas. A great poet from several centuries ago. I was young when he wrote that.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “You wondered at my ills / But my health was the wonder / Each time a bond broke / Through you a new bond came.” He paused. “The rest of it is nice, too.”

  He hadn’t ever asked for my forgiveness, had he? Even at the last, he had hid the meaning of his confession from me.

  I still had one blade left. Strapped to that inconvenient spot on the inside of my thigh, it had been spared any contact with vampires this past night. It felt like an old friend in my hand. Kardal looked at me, but didn’t say anything. I think he could hardly bear to speak.

  I cut my left arm a few inches above the plaster. Deep, since I didn’t know how much blood this would take. I somehow doubted that anyone had ever done this before. I pushed his mouth open and let the blood dribble down. For a horrible moment, it filled his mouth uselessly, spilling over the sides. And then he started to drink. It only took a few gulps, in the end, to bring him back. He stirred and then opened his eyes. I brought my arm down and staunched the cut against the edge of my hospital gown. He looked first at Kardal, whose form had loosened with shock, and then at me.

  “I hope I’m not dead,” he said, “because I’ve gone through a lot of trouble to make sure you two didn’t come with me.”

  Kardal gripped his brother’s hands. “You are . . . Zephyr did . . . Something in her essence saved you.”

  Amir regarded me. “Is that your blood in my mouth, then?”