Moonshine: A Novel (3 page)

"What will you do with him?" he asked.

I glanced up at Amir, startled. "I . . . I suppose I hadn't thought of it. I just saw him, and I couldn't leave him there . . ."

The sudden realization of my dilemma cut off my words. What in hell
could
I do? I could hardly bring him back to my boarding house and risk him running wild amongst the other girls. I could leave him here, but what if he broke out during school hours? I would have given him to one of the charitable groups that deal with newly turned vampires, but they had a policy to stake anyone under sixteen. And if even
they
were afraid of the children, what good was I?

I sighed and leaned against the wall by the door. I felt a prodigious headache roaring into the space behind my temples. It had been a long day.

Amir looked at me. I mean
looked
at me, with his dangerously dark eyes and ridiculous eyelashes, just canvassing my face until I could feel the blush radiating from my cheeks. It felt impudent and entirely inappropriate, yet I could not say a word.

"I'll take him," he said, just when I thought I might melt from the intensity of his gaze. "I know a place where he'll be safe. He'll come back to himself. It might take the children longer, but they all do, eventually."

God, how I wished I knew what he was. Or even just who. He was all mysteries, and yet so very physical, a mere foot from me in this damp, freezing basement.

"But . . .
why
?" I was proud of myself for managing to get even that much out.

He smiled. "My own reasons. And I need to ask you a favor."

It's just a smile.
"Like what?"

"I gather do-gooding does not always come with vast monetary rewards? Well, it's a simple request, and I can offer you a lot of money. It's what wastrels have, you see, to make up for their lack of sense and moral fortitude."

I couldn't tell if he was mocking himself or me. It was hardly a surprise to learn that he had money. No one who dressed as well and as carelessly as he could be lacking in funds.

"What do you need?" I asked. This, at least, was familiar territory.

"I need you to find me a vampire."

I blinked, slowly. He was still there. "And why do you think I'm a good person to ask?"

"Because you're immune, somehow. And no one would ever suspect you. Your perverse love of blood suckers is well-known in this town."

Just in time, I started to feel angry. "And why on earth would I help you hurt an innocent fellow-creature?"

His smile could have cut diamonds. "Somehow I don't think you'll mind. Do you want to know who it is?"

"I don't imagine I have a choice."

He cocked his head in acknowledgment. "True enough."

"So who?"

"Rinaldo."

CHAPTER TWO

He spit it out like vampire venom and I could almost imagine that I saw the name burning a hole into the wall behind me. In the deep shadows cast by the lamplight, his naturally imposing features looked positively demonic--and I have hunted demons. I might have felt my own loathing for the mob boss mere minutes ago, but it paled in the face of Amir's hatred. What ever grievance lay between them, I could only imagine it was dangerous.

"
Find
him?" I managed to say, into Amir's closed and expectant silence. "But everyone knows about Rinaldo."

He shifted slightly and the light from the lamp settled in a more reassuring pattern on his face: wide, generous lips, prominent cheekbones and almond eyes that made him look striking. "But has anyone ever seen him? Most of his officers don't even know he's a vampire."

"He is?"

For a moment, I could have sworn that his dark eyes glowed like coals. "Oh, yes."

Before I could check if it was just the reflection from the lamp, he turned away and unlatched the door. The room beyond was dark, but I could just make out the boy lying on the rough brick floor. His eyes were closed, and his chest moved slightly--perhaps once every ten seconds. His skin was still very pale, but a rosy blush now stained his fingertips. I couldn't see his lips. I will not berate myself for a moment of primal panic. Vampires might be people, but they are certainly not human. They are like sentient lions in our midst, and we are their natural prey.

Amir's fingers brushed my neck briefly, where the tiny wounds caused by the boy's attack had already scabbed over. It could have been an accident, it could have been a moment of wordless reassurance, but I felt it like the tingling of laudanum syrup down my throat. I stood beside the door while he picked the boy up from the dusty floor and tossed him over his shoulder. The gesture was oddly tender, but I couldn't read his face. The boy stirred when Amir touched him, but while the movements were unnaturally quick, he did not seem likely to attack. Amir had even stuffed the lonely blue mitten in the pocket of the boy's coat. I did not know much about Awakenings, and even less those of children, but they generally involved a period of animallike feeding and general disorientation that could last for weeks.

"Are you sure?" I asked, nodding to the boy. Amir's simple solution to my problem raised so many questions.
Who are you? How can you be sure it's safe? Why do you seem to care as much as I do?
So many questions, and none I could ask.

"I don't normally involve myself in your kind's affairs, but I'm taking a personal interest."

My kind? I frowned. "How magnanimous."

"If you don't want my help, just say the word."

I looked away. I felt his eyes on me for a moment longer, and then he handed me the lamp and began walking. I followed him, inexplicably afraid of losing them both in the dark. We climbed the stairs in silence, and then walked through the halls, the click of my heels on the stone floors echoing unnervingly. In the entrance hall, I picked up my bicycle and adjusted my bag. Amir paused by the door; I waited.

"So, will you help?" he asked, not facing me.

The boy's red hair stuck out in all directions, stiff with grime. Rinaldo was hardly a simple (or safe) request, but I had no money and not many other options for finding some before Sunday. And there was the boy. Oh, I knew I owed Amir. So did he. Could that be why he had done it?

And really, did it matter? I had never in my life denied someone help when they asked for it. I could hardly start now, just because the person asking was stranger than anyone I'd ever met.

"I'll need to know more," I said.

He turned partly toward me, so the lamplight gilded the edge of his smile. "I'm afraid I don't know much more about Rinaldo, or I'd find him myself."

"But why--"

His expression turned suddenly regal and unforgiving. "My reasons are my business. Think on it. I'll talk to you tomorrow?"

I set the lamp on the ledge by the door and extinguished it. "Well, I promised the Third Street soup kitchen I'd help in the morning and at noon I have to join the fair wages for night workers picket at City Hall . . . I might be able to talk after that, but there's a local-chapter suffragette meeting at six and those always take a glacial
age
and . . ."

I stopped. I couldn't mention
that.
His eyebrows had risen far enough already.

"And here I imagined you writing genteel letters to Tammany Hall. Do you
sleep?
"

"I can't just ignore injustice." I knew I sounded strident and harsh, but I didn't care. How dare he look at me like that, as though he found me ridiculous?

"Apparently not. So even I'm worth do-gooding for?"

"I hardly know you."

He opened the door and I gasped at the sudden blast of freezing air. I fastened the remaining buttons on my coat and quickly reached for my gloves.

"Didn't your father ever teach you not to help strangers?"

He was mocking me again. I looked up at him and gave my best aloof smile. "Lucky for you I don't listen to my daddy."

He laughed--that uncommon, beautiful noise--and turned up the collar of my coat. "Why, Miss Hollis, I declare--is that an accent?"

And before I could respond, before I could
blush,
he was gone and the door was gently gliding shut. The air smelled like him, briefly. Like oranges and frankincense and firewood.

Like nothing human, and nothing I could name.

I bicycled home slowly, barely conscious of the flow of human, equine and motored traffic. Amir had intrigued me since I first encountered him in the back of my classroom, but now I felt as though he had pried apart my brain and tucked himself immovably inside. It was a strange sensation. I was supposed to help him track down a ruthless vampire mob boss who terrorized the immigrants in this city and supplied almost all of the gin joints below Fourteenth Street. A vampire who apparently wouldn't reveal his actual whereabouts to even his own officers. And Amir thought I could find him because I was immune to vampire bites and no one would suspect a local charity worker? But I had to admit the idea appealed to me. Rinaldo had terrorized our community for long enough. Given this opportunity, what moral option did I have but to stop him?
A
bluestocking, Daddy called me, and he didn't mean it as a compliment. And I must be, because otherwise I wouldn't have saved that boy. Amir ought to be able to hold him for now, but eventually . . . I knew that despite my best efforts, we might still have to stake him. The boy would have a family, though. At the least I ought to find them.

I might have been tempted to dismiss the entire affair as a dream if not for the mud stains on my skirt and the bite marks on my neck. I'd have to hide those from Mrs. Brodsky. Five minutes after I left the school, I turned the corner on Ludlow Street from Delancey and wobbled to a stop before Number Eighty-seven. I deposited my bicycle behind the grate under the stairs before nearly falling through the immaculately clean front door. Mrs. Brodsky might have a heart the size of a pea, but she atones for her sins with a scrub brush.

None of that modern urban marvel, electricity, had yet found its way into more than two rooms of our well-scrubbed corner of the universe, and so I made my way through the dark hallway by smell and habit until I reached the kitchen. Katya was by the stove, ladling the contents of a cast-iron pot into a large bowl. None of the other girls were downstairs at this hour, so I pulled up a stool to the small counter and collapsed onto it. It finally occurred to me that I was starving. When had I last eaten? Breakfast? I would have made a more conscious effort to eat food if I could afford it. Troy would sometimes invite me to dinner with him at the Algonquin or some other fabulously high-class restaurant because he knew I could never bear to refuse. I hated how he flaunted his money when so many had such desperate need of it. I attempted to confound him with embarrassing and odd requests for meatless food, but he always just smiled at me and gave an extra-large tip to the waiter. Zephyr Hollis, dining with a demon hunter at the Algonquin. I suppose hunger compromises everyone's principles.

Katya put the steaming bowl in front of me a few moments after I sat down, with a heavy pewter spoon and tall glass of water. She moved slowly now--eight months pregnant and almost bursting with it.

I thanked her and swallowed a few burning mouthfuls of matzo ball and carrot. The broth was thin and oversalted, but I hardly noticed it anymore. After two years of Mrs. Brodsky's meatless soup, I had stopped wishing it were better and generally felt grateful it existed at all. It was all too easy to starve in this anonymous human ocean of a city.

"Where is she?" I asked, when my stomach had stopped feeling as though it were eating itself.

Katya gave a lopsided smile and pointed upstairs.

"Oh, no,
Mr.
Brodsky, again?" Mr. Brodsky was our whispered term for the unmarried sailor our otherwise starched and respectable matron occasionally took up to her rooms for "tea." We wouldn't dream of confronting her with it, but it did give us something to gossip about when she gave any of us lectures for missing curfew.

Katya laughed and began to put away the remaining kitchen utensils. I didn't know if she could speak, but I had never heard her say a word in the seven months she had been with us. Her husband, a construction worker, had been killed when the subway tunnel he was excavating collapsed, suffocating him to death. She discovered she was pregnant a week later--no other circumstance would have induced Mrs. Brodsky to relax her notoriously strict standards of propriety and allow a pregnant girl to live in her boarding house. Katya lived off her husband's meager pension and helped Mrs. Brodsky with the chores.

I bid her good night after washing out my bowl and climbed up to my fourth-floor room. My legs felt like jelly fire by the time I made it there, red-faced and huffing.
Do you sleep?
Amir had asked. Lord, but I felt like I needed a week of it. Aileen was still awake, of course, when I entered our room. She was smoking on her bed and ashing out the window, a twopenny erotic novel with an anatomically impossible cover illustration gripped in her left hand.

She had wrapped a pair of rayon hose around her black curls. These were a substitute for an actual silk turban, which she could hardly afford. Add to this a teddy that looked two sizes too large, and yet still managed to seem perfectly in fashion. Aileen, despite an ineradicable Irish accent, was every inch a New York vamp, and she dedicated hours to maintaining the lifestyle, despite her pittance of a factory salary. She twisted the caps on bottles of holy water, which would have driven me to bloody suicide, but did not seem to bother her all that much. She had perfected, she informed me, the art of screwing tops while simultaneously reading about other people screwing.

She glanced up. "I told you not to teach on a new moon. Did they chase you out of the building? Or did you just roll around in the gutter for fun?"

"Definitely fun," I said, leaning against the door to catch my breath.

"Mother Mary!" she said, when I dropped my coat and she saw the mud now drying on my posterior. "Are you sure you wouldn't prefer the factory?"

I unbuttoned the skirt and kicked it off into the space between our beds. "After today, I'll think about it."

She smiled sympathetically. "Well, I know what will cheer you up. This auteur"--she paused and glanced again at the cover of her novel--"ah, Verity Lovelace, has quite a way with the risque euphemism."

My shirt joined my skirt on the floor and I pulled out a robe from the top of my trunk.

"Better than 'dew-filled love chasm'?" I asked as I unfastened the hooks of my brassiere.

"Oh, you can't imagine. Here." She flipped to a page whose corner she had folded down. " 'Her anus was a perfection of unblemished beauty, its youthful folds ruddy as an apple, with a delicate budding cherry at its center.' "

I unfastened the last clip and took a deep, unconstricted breath. "Oh, my," I said, grinning at her. "Don't tell me he pops her cherry?"

Aileen giggled and rolled over on her stomach. "It's terribly shocking. And rather messy, if you trust Madame Lovelace."

"Aileen, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were interested."

She waved her hand airily. "Oh, who's to say? With the right man, anything could interest me."

"If Mrs. Brodsky doesn't get to him first." Aileen groaned. "She's like your mother away from home," I teased.

"My mother, God rest her soul, wasn't a bloody parole officer."

Our landlady doted on Aileen and had taken a forceful interest in her affairs. She considered me the corrupting influence, of course. There were times when I was tempted to show her Aileen's novel collection. I tied my robe and picked up a terry cloth. "Any hot water left?"

"Not unless you want to heat it yourself. Mr. Brodsky is here, after all."

I grimaced. "Of course. Well, let me know if you come across any other gems."