Wicked City (14 page)

“I believe I have won, dear,” he said.

“I still have a few moves!”

“Yes, but each of them ends with me winning.”

He said this with his typically inscrutable imperiousness, but Aileen just bit her tongue and smiled ruefully. “I can see the future, you know,” she said.

“I do,” said Kardal, solemnly. “One of my brothers can, as well. It is a burden.”

Aileen sighed, closed her eyes. “Isn't that the buggered truth,” she said slowly. “You might as well show me how you'll win.”

She moved a piece—a knight, I guessed, from its L-shaped progression, though this chess set had the oddest figurines I'd ever seen. It took his queen—I knew that because I'd stepped closer, and could see the somehow feminine sweep of her robes and bracelets up and down her arms. For a moment I could have sworn that the figurine closed her eyes and
fell,
but Kardal scooped it up and it looked ordinary enough.

“Here,” he said, and moved his bishop (though it looked far more like a minaret tower than any bishop I'd ever seen). Freed by the death of his queen, he had a clear shot at her king. Which he took, with due reverence.

Aileen clapped. “Well played,” she said. “You're even better than my da.”

He inclined his head.

“Does Amir play?” I found myself asking. Aileen looked up, startled, but Kardal merely shrugged. He'd known I was there.

“When he thinks he'll win,” Kardal said.

“Does he?”

For the briefest of moments, Kardal's punctiliously human form seemed to billow. “Not always,” he said.

Aileen leaned back against the doorjamb. “He's been waiting for you,” she said, unnecessarily. “I invited him in, but he said he liked it out here.”

“Is Amir all right?” I asked, though I swear I meant to say something else.

“Well enough,” he said. “We've had to call council. It seems Kashkash is displeased.”

I remembered hearing that name before. “Your father?”

His expression didn't change, but he still seemed dismissive. “A human could not understand. Every djinni owes Kashkash fealty. Both good and … unreformed.”

Unreformed? That was as accurate a depiction of Amir as any. “And Kashkash wants me to make a wish?”

Kardal's eyes turned just the slightest bit orange—a hint of glowing coals. “You have promised to make a wish. I have told them so. I am here to warn you.”

“Warn?” A jolt of terror shook my stomach. My familiarity with Kardal had made me forget how utterly menacing he could be when he wished. I half expected him to intone a prediction of my imminent demise. I took a step backward.

He was implacable. “I know what you have been attempting, Zephyr Hollis. I know of the woman you spoke to, and the thing you wish to accomplish.”

“How…”

“That woman, the
sahir
, she is known to me. I suspected you might try such a thing. I made sure I would know if you approached her.”

My heart was hammering too fast and hard for coherent thought. “But, I had already
promised
you…”

“Much too glibly,” he said. “After all these months, you finally agree? You forget I know you a little. Yours is the stubbornness of a rock: it holds until it shatters.”

I swallowed with difficulty. “Does Amir know?” I asked.

Kardal shook his head. “If he does, not because I have told him.”

“Why haven't you?”

“Because he would let you try,” Kardal said, enunciating each word with the voice of rumbling stones. “He knows how little you want to be tied to him. Do you know he could have compelled you? Months ago, when the council first started to be concerned, there were a dozen ways he could have tricked or cajoled you to do his bidding. You humans might be our vessels but you are rarely our masters. And yet here we sit, months longer than any human vessel has ever waited since the days of Kashkash himself. Do you know how this looks to others? The embarrassment Amir has caused our whole family?”

“I'm sorry—”

“Are you?”

Fear compelled honesty. “A little?”

“Then accept your lot and make a wish! You endanger more than yourself and Amir the longer you wait. This power we wield is not entirely in our control. There are too many paths it can take out in your world.”

“Kardal, you say I've held out the longest of any vessel. But am I the first to try to break away?”

He held himself still, even for a djinni. “No,” he said.

“Did any succeed?” I asked.

“One,” he said. “He lived a long, happy life.”

I felt relief like blood returning to a sleeping limb. “And his djinni?”

Kardal looked unmistakably bleak. “The hundred and fortieth son of Kashkash, and my brother two before me, has not returned to Shadukiam in the five centuries since his exile, and none of us remaining may speak his whole name, nor remember his fire lest we risk the same fate.”

I felt as if someone had slapped me. All I could hear was a high ringing. All I could smell was Kardal: smoke and ash and charred earth—not nearly so sweet as his brother.

“Consider carefully, vessel,” said Kardal in my ear. “Perhaps you don't see him so very differently from how he sees you?”

Kardal vanished before I could summon the courage to ask what he meant. I half fell on the highest step, my legs shaking too badly to hold me up. Aileen had pressed herself into the door.

“Those brothers!” she said.

I forced myself to take deep, calming breaths. “He knows about the
sahir
!”

“The witch? What are you going to do?”

I stared at her. Forcing Amir into a lifetime of exile seemed like a harsh bargain. Assuming Kardal was telling the truth. “God, I don't know,” I said.

Down on the sidewalk and to our left, something metallic crashed against the basement fence. I dragged the back of my hand quickly across my eyes.

Agent Zuckerman gave me a cold nod. With the sun on its way down, he could have passed for human in his wide-brimmed fedora and suit. I could barely move. Would he arrest me now, with a vampire murderer on the loose and two angry djinn demanding my fealty?

But his hand was on the rear tire of my bicycle, and his expression was rueful, not triumphant.

“Special delivery from the vice squad,” he said, nodding at the bicycle.

“You're…”

“Giving it back,” he said. “And informing you that our department is following other leads.” He gave me a speculative look.

“Apart from me?”

He shrugged. “You're still high on our list, Miss Hollis. Good day.”

He started to walk away and then paused. “You do keep interesting company though. Having business with certain kinds of Others isn't always a good idea.”

Consorting with a djinni? Surely that couldn't be illegal. “Don't sound so excited,” I said.

He fixed me with that intense, abstracted stare, as though I were more statue than human. “Oh, I'm going to get you for something, Miss Hollis. The way you do business.” He tipped his hat at me. “Be seeing you,” he said.

He had a spring in his step as he ambled back down the street. I closed my eyes.

“Maybe I should make that wish,” I said.

“Haven't I been telling you so!”

She had. And it was time I decided what to do about it, once and for all.

*   *   *

Something rapped at our window. Aileen snored on, but I hadn't been able to sleep very well in the heavy, wet heat. And there was something else—a smell that lingered in the still night air that hadn't been there a moment before. Like a wet cave and metal and rot. I knew that smell; it kept me quiet on the bed, my breathing steady as I ever so slowly reached for the blessed blade that I had lately kept beneath my pillow.

The rapping came again, quiet but deliberate. Then the smell grew just a little stronger, and I knew that it had climbed over the sill. I turned on the bed, restlessly, as though in sleep. The vampire knelt beside me. For a kiss, for a peek of my breast through the lace of an oversized teddy? I didn't wait to find out. I sat up and lunged forward in one smooth motion, surprising the vampire into staggering backward against the wall. I snapped open the silver blade, pressed it into his neck, rubbed at my sleep-fogged eyes with one hand—

“Nicholas!”
I said.

The very same grinned, a familiar expression that both pleased me and reminded me to be wary.

“You're a little violent for charity, you know that?” he said. “You want to put that down? It might make me excited.”

I moved my arm as though I'd been burned. I sheathed the knife in a quick motion and tossed it on the bed. Perhaps not my smartest idea, but I'd asked him to find me, and it would be a poor show of confidence to keep a knife between us. To my left, Aileen jerked upright and cursed.

“What the hell is he doing here?”

The last (and first) time Aileen had met Nicholas, he'd been dueling with his father while she cowered in a corner.

“Your Zephyr asked me,” Nicholas said, and laughed. Nicholas had the voice of an angel condemning you to death—inhumanly beautiful and terrifying.

“Zephyr—” Aileen's voice held a warning.

“We'll go to the hallway,” I said quickly, and Nicholas allowed me to push him out the door.

“What's this about?” I whispered. It was dark, but I could see him clearly in the moonlight. He looked just the same as I remembered him: apple-red cheeks, too-bright eyes, light brown hair in a deceptively boyish cut. He was several inches shorter than me but I never felt the advantage. When Rinaldo turned Nicholas, he did more than just preserve a beautiful adolescent voice. He warped his son's adolescent mind, twisted it into a shape that was part madness, part genius, and all dangerous.

It was lucky that Nicholas liked me.

“I liked your note,” he said. “I read it myself.”

“That's great, Nicholas! Has someone been teaching you?”

He shrugged. “Charlie and me've been practicing. He knew a bit more, so.”

It was strange that I even cared. After all, I'd only started to tutor Nicholas in an effort to spy on his gang of child vampires, and, by proxy, his mob-boss father, Rinaldo.

“So, Charity, rumor has it you've been nosing around Faust again,” Nicholas said, leaning with cat-like grace against the wall.

“People have been dying.”

“
Suckers
have been dying. You care?” He laughed again. “Of course you do. Even if you and your Defender friends kill a few of us yourselves every now and then.”

“You
wanted
me to kill your—Rinaldo.”

“Of course I did.”

“So do you know anything about this? Did more die last night at the Rum?”

He shrugged. “I know plenty, I know nothing. How much will you give to find out, Charity? What's it worth?”

Careful now. “What do you want?”

His mouth twisted and he leaned forward—just close enough for me to smell the hint of Faust on his breath. “A working dick and somewhere to stick it,” he said.

I froze. I would have choked, but I had that much self-control. I wondered if he was having another one of his fits—succumbing to a madness that took him into another world. But no, he grinned, perfectly lucid.

He giggled and slapped his thigh. “See your face!” he said. “You should see your face, Charity!”

“Nicholas, tell me something useful or go,” I snapped. “I need to sleep.”

He nodded and leaned back against the wall. “The poison caught two of us drinking at the Rum last night. One died right there—oh, you should have seen it, Charity. Shook like a doll in a dog's mouth. Then he started to upchuck, blood and blood and something tar black. Then he fell into the mess and died.”

“You mean he exsanguinated?”

“Exsanguinated,”
Nicholas mocked, exaggerating my diction. “No, the sucker didn't pop, and yeah I'm sure he was a sucker and yeah I'm sure he's dead. Just lost it all over the floor and his skin turned the color of a gravestone and he died.”

My skin felt the shock before the rest of me. Hot and cold chased each other down my arms and stomach. Blood rushed to my cheeks. I thought,
So it's really true
.
They are turning human before they die.

But I couldn't be sure of that on just Nicholas's word alone. Not yet. “And the other?” I asked.

“Dead too. Just took longer. Long enough to get an ambulance to take him. City won't say nothing about them now.”

“So how do you know he's dead?”

For a moment Nicholas looked like the thirty-year-old man he probably was. “Because he was one of mine, Charity. He escaped that pit of hell with your crazy daddy and Defenders, but he gets caught by a bad bottle of Faust. I trailed the ambulance. They only take corpses to that part of Bellevue.”

I couldn't quite bring myself to offer condolences. I remembered what the Turn Boys had done to this neighborhood, back in their heyday. Still, his grief was real.

“I got the bottle,” he said. “Something funny about it.”

“You drank—”

“I'm not stupid, Charity. Just smelled it. Something funny. I gotta know who did this. Me and Charlie, we gotta know. This isn't right. A fight, that's one thing, but you can't go around poisoning people's liquor, killing whoever happens to drink it. That's wrong and I'm going to make them pay.”

I shuddered. I doubted Nicholas would leave much when he was through with his revenge.

“I'll help you catch them,” I said, “if you just do me one favor.”

“A favor?”

“Do you have any of the original bottles of Faust?”

His bright eyes widened. “Why, you want some?”

“Just tell me.”

“Nah, I don't. Nobody does, far as I know, except maybe that nigger genie.”