Wicked City (4 page)

“Could I wish to no longer be your vessel?” I asked, surprising myself with how meek I sounded.

Amir twisted his lips. “Only if you want to die.”

This surprised a curse from Aileen. “Hell, really?”

“It's a permanent bond, so long as both parties are alive. And call me sentimental,
habibti,
but I'd dearly love for you to avoid suicide.”

“How sweet of you.”

“Is that what's behind all this? You think you can find some way to get out of the bond? I'll grant there are few fates worse than being tied to a wastrel for life, but one of them ought to be your early grave.”

I took one look at his earnest eyes, tinged with humor, self-deprecation, bitterness, and just the smallest hint of literal fire—and stood up. I had taken one step toward him when Aileen started to whimper. The noise was small. She had dropped her sidecar to press her hands against her temples. Then the ground began to tremble.

I might have screamed—certainly, my throat felt very raw afterward—but the earth rumbled like a great bass horn in my ears and the marble cracked with deafening thunder. Amir reacted far faster than I. He plucked Aileen like a rag doll from the divan, turned to me with eyeballs of flame and yelled something I didn't understand. It took a long moment, while cracking stones showered me with powdered mortar and dust, to realize that he was speaking to someone behind me in a language I didn't know.

I turned to see Kardal as he placed a smoky, bilious hand on my shoulder. “My apologies,” he said in that rumbling voice that merged with the sound of breaking stone.

And with that the world turned sideways, blinked, and then vanished entirely.

 

CHAPTER TWO

I spent ten minutes emptying good liquor into an immaculate porcelain bowl. When I decided nothing more could possibly leave my stomach, I stood and rinsed out my mouth as best I could. I wished for a lemonade or at least some food. But there wouldn't be time for that before the evidentiary hearing. I would probably be late, but no help for it.

When I returned to Amir's parlor, he and Kardal were still arguing. Aileen sat on a couch across from them, looking wan and ignored. I sat down next to her.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “What happened?”

“Fine,” she said. “Just a touch of the Sight. Probably brought on by whatever that mess was.”

“Seemed like more than a touch.” I put my hand on her shoulders, but she shrugged me off.

“Can get like that sometimes. It's nothing I can't handle, Zeph, believe me.”

Aileen had discovered an unfortunate inheritance in recent months. The visions of the future and past that had afflicted the women in her family for generations had hit her at a relatively advanced age. When in the grip of one, she lost the ability to see her surroundings and sometimes even control her body. At first she'd made use of her new ability by telling street fortunes, but for the last two months she'd found a far more lucrative gig: the New York Spiritualist Society. She brought on visions for rich ladies with a yearning for spirit photography, ectoplasm, and dead relatives. Considering how much the visions drained Aileen, I didn't think it a particularly good idea. But she paid about as much attention to my advice as I did to hers.

I sighed, and turned my attention to the screaming brothers. Things had escalated far enough.

“Boys,” I said, with a deliberate drawl. “Do you think you could tell us what the hell just happened in there? Because we have places to be.”

Kardal—so bilious he seemed like a cloud with flashing eyes—growled. “Tell her, Amir. Explain what she's done to my home.”

“What
I've
done?” I asked. “I hadn't known you could cause an earthquake by drinking a sidecar. Prohibition must work a lot better in Shadukiam.”

But Amir didn't laugh. He looked genuinely worried, which was never a good sign. “Too much power has built up from your unused wish. It's pooling in Shadukiam. I hadn't thought it would have reached that level—”

“You should have—”

“Fine, Kardal. I should have. I thought it would be safe enough to bring you there, Zephyr, but your presence created a kind of warp. It started to destabilize the forces keeping Kardal's palace together.”

Kardal allowed himself to coalesce into a form recognizably human. “You must make a wish, Zephyr. Even now, it might be dangerous to release so much energy into the world at once, but if you wait any longer, the danger will be much worse.”

I forced down a shiver. “I had no idea the situation was so serious.”

He frowned. “Brother, the council has summoned you about this problem twice in the last month. How could you not have told her?”

Amir tapped his foot in discomfort. “It didn't seem fair.”

“Fair! What's fair, then, destroying my home? Causing problems for all the djinni because of this excess power? Bad enough for you to have two vessels in so many years. Do you think our brothers do not notice? That our father doesn't?”

“Oh, Kashkash preserve us, Kardal—”

“Indeed, you had best hope he preserves you!”

I stood up. They turned to look at me with such a unison of surprise I had no trouble at all believing they were brothers. “Give me a week,” I said.

“Zephyr—”

“It's too long—”

“A week,” I repeated, firmly. “Give me that long, and then I promise to make a wish.”

Give me one more chance to find a way to break this bond before Amir gets stuck with me forever.

Kardal gave me a long stare, and then nodded. “A deal, Zephyr. And Amir, I trust you will not be so foolish as to bring her back to my home before then?”

He didn't wait for Amir's answer, just burst into flame and left nothing of himself but a few ashes on the brocade couch.

“Well, that was exciting,” Aileen said, her acerbic voice cutting the silence.

“I don't think your toast worked, Amir,” I said.

He shook his head with a bitter smile. “You'd think I'd have learned by now,” he said, “to beware making wishes in our city of roses.”

*   *   *

Because Amir had used his previous worldly apartments as a storage facility for Faust, he had determined it would be prudent to move. Instead of finding another warehouse in which to install his flashy, opulent tastes, he'd instead opted to rent a suite of rooms in the Ritz hotel. We left Amir soon after Kardal's more flamboyant departure. The doorman let Aileen and I into the summer heat with barely a lift of his eyebrows, which was good of him, given our disheveled states. My roommate and I parted ways at Times Square.

“Got a séance tonight,” she said.

“Are you sure that's—”

“It's fine, Zephyr,” she said, with a look that said
are you one to talk?

I subsided. “Take care of yourself.”

Her face softened for a moment, and she hugged me. “You too. Make that wish, all right? I felt a bit of what was coming down on that place. It's nothing to trifle with.”

I promised her I would, though of course I could only think about how I might still get out of the bargain entirely.

But right now, I was about to be late for the all-important hearing. I looked longingly at the passing cabs, counted the change in my pocket and then hurried to the subway. Elspeth, the head of our organization, had been invited to speak before the aldermanic council. This was a coup, both for advancing our cause and because she was one of the very few vampires allowed to speak in those halls of power.

I rattled along in the olive-green subway, grateful for the stale air that blasted through the windows and openings between the cars. I glanced at my watch and willed the train to hurry. I supposed I could have found more exciting activities (or at least more restful ones) for my two weeks of summer freedom. My night school classes for the Citizens' Council were on break until the start of August, and so I had thrown myself entirely into volunteer activities. I appeased Mrs. Brodsky with the small savings I'd kept from my share of the bounty from January. It felt like blood money, and so I tried not to consider the matter too deeply. More important that I keep a roof over my head and help stop Faust now than worry about the morality of my actions six months ago.

When I climbed out of the train station I was unsurprised to see people crowding City Hall Park, but I didn't understand why the newsboys seemed to be doing such a brisk business this late in the afternoon. I didn't take the time to look; my watch read three minutes after four, and I winced at the thought of what Elspeth would say about my tardiness. Thankfully, inside it appeared the evidentiary hearings had yet to start. The doors to the council chamber had been thrown open, but people still milled around the lobby. I spotted a flowered hat on an unusually tall head and I smiled to recognize a friend. Iris Tomkins had been widowed years before by her wealthy husband, and remained a marginal member of New York's elite society. She was godmother to Lily's sister, which is how I first met the deb journalist. Iris had devoted herself to causes in lieu of a man, and was one of my chief supporters, if not always the most subtle.

“Zephyr, you made it!” she called, when I had pushed my way closer. Iris, Elspeth, and a few others from the core committee of Friends Against Faust were waiting by the doors for the hearings to begin.

Elspeth frowned. “Late, Zephyr,” she said. That was all; Elspeth had a talent for rigid disapproval. I flushed and mumbled something about the subway.

“There's news,” Iris said. “Have you heard?” She waved one of the papers the newsboys had been selling out front.

I took her copy of
Evening Standard
and read the headline, at least an inch high:
TEN
VAMPIRES
DEAD
OVERNIGHT
and then, in slightly smaller print beneath that,
AUTHORITIES
SUSPECT
FAUST
FROM
LEGAL
VENDOR
.

“They're saying Faust
killed
vampires?” I said.

Elspeth wore a dark gray suit so severe it would not seem out of place at a funeral, but she still possessed a forbidding beauty that defied her efforts to bury it. Curly black hair, held back by a scarf, framed a dusky but still oddly pale face. She had been a vampire for five or so years, and could not have been older than thirty when she turned.

“They're speculating it's poison,” Elspeth said, “though further down they quote a manufacturer on the possibility of it being a bad batch. The end result is the same, of course. Ten vampires dead on the spot. All from one drink sold by fully legal vendors.”

“But Faust doesn't cause exsanguination,” I said, baffled. “Could they have drunk liquor by mistake?”

Alcohol caused unwary (or desperate) vampires to bleed out, often fatally. Which accounted for Faust's runaway popularity in such a short time; vampires could indulge their need for inebriation without mortal danger. Unfortunately, Faust greatly increased their sensitivity to sunlight, so in the immediate weeks after its introduction, dozens of vampires had burned to death accidentally. It also appeared to make vampires dangerously rowdy—though I privately wondered whether it did so any more than plain alcohol's effect on a human.

Elspeth turned delicately on the ball of one foot and faced me with that direct, unnaturally bright stare that I had learned to dread. “There's been some suggestion that they died without exsanguinating. No one knows for sure; the police were apparently quick to cart the bodies back to the morgue.”

I had never heard of a vampire who died without exsanguinating. And if it could happen, Daddy should have told me—my daddy is Montana's most famous demon hunter, though it's a fact I tend to keep to myself. “How is that possible?”

She shrugged. “Maybe it's a side effect of long-term abuse. Maybe it's a judgment from God. No one knows.”

Even before she'd been turned Elspeth would have spent her life dealing with prejudice. Her parents had immigrated here from Syria when she was quite young. She still lived among that community of Christian Arabs at the far southern end of Washington Street, just a block east of the Hudson.

“It may be harsh to say so,” Iris said with relish, “but this might be a great opportunity in disguise. Good people are dead, yes, but what better argument could we have for the dangers of Faust, of the absolute necessity of its immediate prohibition? You must make hay of this in your speech, Elspeth.”

Elspeth regarded Iris impassively, then twisted her lips. “Perhaps before we rush to capitalize upon others' deaths for our own gain we could determine precisely how they died? It might not be Faust at all, and I'm not willing to make such a strong accusation without proof.”

I was reminded again why I continued to support these efforts. Doubtful as I was about the efficacy of prohibition, I still valued Elspeth's essential honesty and clarity of purpose. She could be harsh, but she had a solid core that I could only admire.

Iris frowned, as though she wasn't sure what had just happened. “Why, Elspeth, I didn't mean—”

At that moment, the ushers began shouting for everyone to enter the chamber and take their seats. We hurried to follow Elspeth among the crush of people rushing inside. She had a seat reserved in a special block for evidentiary presenters. I called good luck to her, and she nodded briefly before walking away. Iris and I took ourselves to the public seats, where she secured two near the front by dint of heavy elbows and a gracious man who gave up his seat in my favor. We had a good view of both the speakers and the aldermen. The mayor did not technically have a vote in this council chamber, but he would of course be here for the hearings. Beau James had staked his political fortunes on the outcome of the Faust bill, for better or worse.