Wicked City (35 page)

I thought of Amir only as dust to be brushed away. I buried any recollections of our final conversation, of his face as he watched me turn from him. If his voice seemed to bubble up from the murky depths as I watched Sofia prepare the summoning, I firmly ignored it. She
isn't the one you need to see. You haven't figured it out by now?
I heard him say, and I smothered the voice with images of the endless boxes of Faust that Lily had photographed in his possession. He had no moral standing from which to lecture me. He had no further claim on my indulgence and certainly not on my affections. I would bargain with this demon, and Amir would go away, and that would be the end of it.

Sofia stood up. “Is all right?” she said. She looked younger tonight—perhaps from the soft glow of the candles placed around the room. She had changed from a matronly skirt and blouse to a simple black robe. Instead of a tight chignon, she'd bound her thick salt-and-pepper hair in two rope-like braids.

“It will be,” I said, and this seemed to satisfy her. I felt absurd, still in the red dress I was afraid I would have to burn after all this was through. But I had only taken enough time to stop at home and take my remaining cash from the bottom of my trunk, along with ten dollars Aileen had given me without question. If I had dared to clean up and change, I had been afraid my anger would give way. Amir didn't deserve another moment's consideration. Sofia hadn't batted an eye at either my appearance or the dress, though she must have known of my circumstances before arrival. Imperturbability must be a good quality in a
sahir
.

Our language barrier hadn't mattered very much, at this late stage. Sofia had drawn herself a third circle opposite the main one. She stepped inside it and placed the chalk beside her foot.

“I start,” she said. I braced myself, but she kept her hands at her side. “You sure?” she asked, after a moment. “The djinni…” she trailed off, struggling for words. “He not bad,” she said, finally. “For djinni.”

I felt as though she had slapped me. After all I had gone through just to get to this point? “I am sure,” I snapped. This seemed sufficient; Sofia nodded, though I wasn't sure how to interpret the look in her eyes.

She began with a chant, low-throated and insistent. The air had already been stifling, but now it felt as though a charged storm cloud had blown through the windows. My hair began to lift around my head, and the layered skirt of the much-abused dress rustled in an invisible breeze. Sofia continued chanting. In the center of the main circle, smoke began to gather. Faintly, at first, like a guttered candle, and then burgeoning into a roiling, billowing mass. It glowed red and black and smelled like a forest fire. I'd only seen Daddy summon a demon once, and this didn't look anything like that last time. In fact, all that smoke reminded me of a—

Oh no.

Sofia's chant grew louder as the apparition in the circle expanded. It still hadn't resolved itself into anything I could recognize as a figure, but it appeared alive all the same. As though something inside that glowing mass were watching and evaluating me. A djinni. One I'd never met before—I'd been around Amir and Kardal enough to recognize them by the smell of their smoke. I watched it grow to fill the entire space inside the circle. I wondered if it would break through the ceiling, but the smoke seemed content to settle there, towering above the two of us. The smoke now blocked my view of Sofia, but her voice had not ceased chanting once during the astonishing display of her summoning. After another minute, the smoke began to coalesce, collapsing into something resembling a face and torso. I had thought Kardal made little effort to appear human, but this djinni made him look like Rudolph Valentino. His face shifted into shapes like a series of child's masks, though his eyes maintained their singular bright focus on me. His head was at least as large as his torso and anything below vanished into billowing smoke.

Sofia paused her chant, reached down to pick up the last bit of chalk and tossed it high in the air. As it sailed above her she spoke again: her rolling, decisive cadences somehow stilling the creature in the circle. It turned to her, but made no other move. The chalk had nearly finished its plunge when she said what must be the final words and it exploded into a shimmering, delicate powder that floated around her like snow. The djinni's face settled into a single countenance—glowing eyes, a wide forehead and hair that waved behind him. He half smiled in that same way Amir would in a mood of amused condescension. My hands gripped the side of the chair, but Sofia had instructed me to stay where I was.

“You've tied one of my sons to you, and now you want to cut him loose,” the djinni said. His voice was deeper than even Kardal's, and painfully resonant. I realized who Sofia must have called.

“Are you Kashkash?” I said.

The impossibly large smile widened. “None other.”

“Will you help me?” I tried without success to keep my voice from shaking.

His laugh made the ovens groan and my chair wobble. I flinched and forced myself to look back. “You know nothing,” he said, “of what I am. Or what you ask me to do.”

My anger at Amir had receded in a wave of terror and self-doubt. But I clung to its tattered remains because it was all my pride had left. “I know I wish to be free of your son's binding,” I said.

Kashkash blinked his monstrous eyes and leaned forward. He could not cross the line of my circle, but he lowered his face until it was even with my chair and just a few feet away. His eyes were as big as my head; each tooth as large as my hand. I couldn't look at that, but I didn't dare look away. I stared at his nose, so grotesquely like Amir's, and trembled.

“He did not bind you, little human,” Kashkash said. His voice blasted my ears. “You bound
him
.”

“I saved his life!” I said. “The binding was just a side effect.”

He lifted his head to the ceiling again and seemed to consider this. “And yet you hold on to it so fiercely.”

“What do you mean?”

He manifested a finger and wagged it in the air. “Someone tested the bond. A foolish trap for my son to have fallen into, but still, a test. Someone else claiming Amir as his vessel should have damaged your bond—maybe even killed you, little human—and yet, here you are, asking me to break something you might have accomplished yourself.”

That's
what Jimmy Walker had meant to do with his scroll? “I had been hoping to manage it without dying!”

“Do you know how a bond is tested, little human?” he said, and I felt something like a bell go off inside me, a resonance with a conviction I couldn't put words to.
You haven't figured it out by now?
Amir had said. “The test is power”—he raised one hand—“against desire.” He raised the other. “When they meet, which wins?” His hands smacked together, shaking the floor with its force. Dishes crashed to the floor and I had to stand to keep my chair from tipping.

“I don't understand,” I said, when the echoes faded to silence.

That smile again. “You've willed yourself not to,” he said. “You
wanted
that bond, little human. Enough to stand up against someone who wanted it very badly himself. You fought that battle without even knowing it, and that's the only reason you're alive right now.”

“I…” The bell inside me tolled louder now, making me tremble with its force. I tried to push back.

“I hate Amir,” I said. “He's abused my trust, manipulated and deceived me from the moment we met.” But Kashkash's eyes were too much like Amir's. The bells thundered like I was in the tower of St. Michael's. I gasped, closed my eyes, and tried one last time:

“And he lied,” I said. “About Daddy. He said … he said…”

How did you get immune?

I realized I was crying.

Sophia wasn't the one I needed to see, Amir had told me. So who? And then I knew.

“You summoned me,” Kashkash said, “for a purpose. I am not used to being summoned. This great
sahir
of Washington Street is the only one to have dared it for a very long time. So this is my price, little human.” He paused. “I will grant your wish.”

I felt as though he had stabbed me in the throat. I stumbled forward. I wondered what would happen if I broke the circle, but I had that much sense remaining.

“No,” I whispered. “Please.”

Kashkash's face turned hard and inhuman. “You have treated my son very badly, Zephyr Hollis. I do this for his honor as much as my own.”

“But, what will happen to him?”

“To him? Nothing, provided you keep this one condition.”

I looked up and wiped my eyes. “What?”

“Do not bind him again. In word, thought, or deed. If you do, he will go away and may never return. This is the word of Kashkash and it is law.”

His voice was so loud my ears rang in the ensuing silence.

“I understand,” I said.

He nodded. “It is done,” he said, and vanished.

*   *   *

I borrowed clothes from Sofia, who seemed to understand on some level that transcended language what had happened to me in her kitchen. I walked directly to the East Village where the last of the Yiddish theaters were getting out for the night, raucous theatergoers pouring onto the sidewalks to wait for their favorite stars. No one spared me a glance.

Ysabel lived on the top floor of one of the updated former tenements on Fourth Street, between Second and Third Avenues.
Know thyself
, the edict of the Oracle at Delphi, had always seemed to me like the vague aphorisms promoted in books of self-uplift. Now I knew it to be a warning, a statement of fear as profound as anything Dante carved above the first gate of hell. I was free, but I felt submerged, drowned by the mistakes of my father and my own willful refusal to see them. I should have come to Ysabel the moment I heard of the murders. Instead, I had ignored every hint of the truth.

Sofia's skirt was slightly too large for me; I hitched it up as I climbed the stairs to Ysabel's apartment. A carved prayer scroll had been nailed into the doorframe. I knocked on the door and fingered it as I waited. I couldn't read Hebrew. When she had marked a certain bag of blood with the word “forbidden,” I wouldn't have known what it meant. I didn't know who would.

Ysabel's husband, Saul, opened the door. He was a gaunt man, stooped at the shoulders though still tall. He wore an embroidered yarmulke and was carrying a small, leather-bound book with Hebrew lettering embossed on the front.

“She's inside,” he said, wearily. “She's been expecting you.”

You haven't figured it out by now?

But now I had. At least this much of the puzzle.

I thanked Saul and let him lead me through the apartment I'd only visited once before. Then the occasion had been a dinner with other Blood Bank volunteers that my daddy would have disapproved of mightily had he known. Now, I wondered at the dishes piled in the sink, the broken crates in the corner of the living room, the dust on the mantelpiece. Ysabel was sitting in a chair in her bedroom.

“Sit down,
bubbala
,” she said, gesturing toward the bed.
She looks deflated,
I thought. Dark bruises beneath her eyes, sallow cheeks, sagging, ghostly skin. I could only imagine how awful this week must have been.

“It's my blood, isn't it?” I said.

“Yes, dear,” she said, with mingled misery and relief.

“How…” I didn't know where to start. I looked around the room instead: the handmade quilt on the bed, the photos on the dresser of Ysabel and Saul, far younger, sitting awkwardly for the picture with a fat-cheeked baby between them. A girl, I guessed, from the ribbon in her hair.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

Saul's voice came distantly from the other room. Ysabel looked up, realized he had picked up the phone, and sunk back into her chair.

“When you donated that first time. I never once worried—no marks on your arms, no red eyes, nothing to think you weren't perfectly healthy. And you are! Perfectly healthy. I didn't know. I gave it to, to a friend.” She covered her eyes. I wanted to hold her hand, but I didn't know if she would want me to. I didn't know if she hated me.

The first time, she had said. Two years ago.

“Oh, Ysabel, why didn't you tell me?”

She wiped her eyes and took my own hand. “He died,” she said, softly. “I couldn't bear to burden you with that. It was clear you didn't know. Always after I would take your bag and mark it so it wouldn't get lost with the others. Then I'd throw it away.”

Forbidden,
she had written, in careful Hebrew. But never in my sight.

“You never gave out another bag?” I said. “No one else died?”

She shook her head. “Never! Except…”

“Except now,” I finished. “Do you know who stole it? How could they have gotten to it before you threw it out?”

“I … I grew careless. It's always so busy at the Bank, you know. Sometimes I would wait a whole day. What did it matter, I thought, no one else knew. But she did.” A sob escaped her lips and she covered her mouth with her hands. “She knew and she took it, right after you gave last.”

I'd last donated at Ysabel's around two weeks ago. Just when the letter-writer had sent Bradley Keck the poison blood.

My throat felt swollen and painful; it hurt to swallow. I shook with tension and exhaustion and the horror of the truth. McConnell had been right to arrest me. Whatever Keck's guilt and that of his anonymous enabler, it was ultimately my blood that had done the killing. My immunity had turned them halfway back to human again. I should have guessed in the morgue. Amir certainly had.

Saul walked into the room with a teapot and a cup. “You look like you could use it.”