Moonshine (2010) Read online

  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 risqué 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.”

  Aileen gave me a wide-eyed look of conspiratorial understanding. I walked back through the dimly lit hall to the bathroom. The water ran into the claw-footed porcelain tub lukewarm at first, and then frigid. My schedule meant I was frequently forced to take cold baths, but I still scowled at the ceiling that separated me from Mr. Brodsky. I was sure he didn’t have to struggle to wash his hair in water only slightly warmer than an icy puddle. Of course, he also had to satisfy the no-doubt terrifying appetite of Mrs. Brodsky. I bet she scrubbed him herself. With steel wool. After a precise two and a half minutes, I leapt out of the tub and quickly dried my prickling skin with the terry cloth. Wet, my hair brushed the tops of my shoulders, but it always dried to a frizzy halo of loose curls that I rarely had the time to tame. Mama’s hair is a beautiful shade of strawberry blond, and hangs straight as a pin to the backs of her thighs. But I have hair like Daddy. Of course.

  When I got back to the room, Aileen had turned down the lamp and was lying upside down on her bed, staring at the ceiling. The hose lay discarded on the floor beside her. I pulled on a cotton nightgown, a gift from Mama on my twelfth birthday, and sunk onto my bed. It might be a lumpy mattress, but it felt like a little corner of heaven after days like this.

  “Anything good happen?” I asked.

  “They are doing it in the dining car of the Oriental Express.”

  I thought about it. “Does that sound uncomfortable to you?”

  “I think it sounds uncomfortable to Verity Lovelace. So,” she said, still looking at the ceiling, “what happened?”

  “Turn Boys. They got this little kid, and I swear he looked
so much like Harry. And I . . .” I wasn’t sure how to even describe the rest of it.

  Aileen turned to face me. “The pols staked him?”

  “Well, no, um . . . actually, I carried him to the school and then one of my students . . . well, I mean, he went to one class but he certainly doesn’t need it. Anyway he’s absolutely not human and he seemed to be able to handle the boy and he said he would take care of him for me if I did him a favor.”

  Aileen took nearly a minute to digest this incoherent torrent of information, and it was even more difficult than usual to read her expression.

  “Are those bite marks on your neck?” she asked, finally.

  My hand flew to the wounds, and I wished I’d had the presence of mind to hide them. Aileen greatly disapproved of some of my “risks,” as she called them, and I hated to give her more ammunition. “It was just the boy,” I said defensively. “He was blood-mad.”

  Aileen pursed her lips. “I can imagine. And what are you, charity-mad?”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “Is it? Back in Dublin, I saw a new-turned child sucker kill thirty factory workers and two pols before they managed to stake him. Bloody hell, Zephyr, you of all people ought to know how dangerous they are. You deal with them every day!”

  Damn, but she was right. I knew it had been crazy when I took him to the school, but every other option had seemed—still seemed—untenable. It just didn’t seem fair to me that the tragedy of children being turned had to be compounded by their being prematurely staked.

  “And though I’m sure this will hardly matter to a crusader such as yourself, you and this student of yours broke the law. You know, one of those ones they actually care about enforcing.”

  “Amir . . . I don’t know how, but I know he’ll deal with it. No one will find out. Not unless you’re planning to—”

  “Zephyr.”

  “Sorry.”

  She was silent for so long I wondered if she had fallen asleep. But she sat up abruptly and extinguished the lamp.

  “So,” she said, still backward on her bed, “do I want to know what this favor is?”

  Finding a vampire mob boss so Amir could kill him? “Probably not.”

  She sighed. “Oh, Zephyr. Why can’t you just go dancing like the rest of us?”

  I thought about Amir and Rinaldo during my entire shift at the soup kitchen the next morning, ladling bowls of thick oat porridge and carefully rationing the brown sugar. I had never really considered myself a vindictive person, but after learning what Rinaldo had done to Giuseppe, and the dozens of other horrors I had heard over the years, I discovered that I was almost eager to deliver him to a just reward. The police sure as hell would never deal with him—they all probably took his bribes. And Defender groups like Troy’s were far too happy staking twopenny vampires and Other nests for bigoted citizens’ pay to bother with real evil. I understood the dangers, of course. I wouldn’t agree to this blindly, but it seemed that if I had a chance, I should try. Amir was right—who would suspect me? And no one here knew of my immunity.

  But first I needed to do some research. As soon as I could politely get away, I decided to take advantage of the forty minutes I had before the picket began. I pedaled like mad to Canal Street and then walked my bicycle over the dust and piles of rubble to the main construction site. The workers were just starting their lunch hour, but I could tell immediately that none of the men lounging on the winches or the ground on this bright afternoon were vampires. No, suckers would still be deep in the tunnel, separated by the sun from these normal, mortal men. The younger the vampire, the less susceptible they are to the burning effects of sunlight. Still, it isn’t pleasant for any of them, and the unnatural contrasts between the pallor of their skin and the red of their feedings is all too apparent in the day. The workers fell silent as I passed them. Self-consciously, I pulled my cloche hat further down, so that it shaded my eyes. A construction site like this was not, as Mama would say, a place where any respectable young lady should find herself. I didn’t fear for my safety, and certainly not for my mother’s Victorian sense of propriety, but the silence and the stares made me wish I hadn’t come down here on such a whim. Couldn’t I have waited until night, when he would have been at home? The men didn’t even catcall, which made me feel annoyed and grateful all at once. Tall and skinny and breasts like bumps on a board—it might be the fashion at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendarily glamorous Long Island parties, but here I felt like a gawky teenager.

  I grit my teeth and reminded myself of how little time I had for this errand.

  “Is Giuseppe here today?” I asked the worker closest to my right—a swarthy man with day-old stubble and a bowler hat tilted on his head.

  “What’s a girl like you want with a sucker?” he asked. His accent was broad and faintly southern. “You’re such a skinny little chit, he’ll barely get a snack.”

  This joke seemed to strike him and his companions as hugely witty, because they practically laughed themselves off their seats. I was about to give up and ask someone else when he finally recovered himself.

  “Hey, Giuseppe!” he yelled in the general direction of the scaffolded mouth of the tunnel. “Got a bleeder here to see ya.”

  Squinting into the shadows, I could just barely see a tall figure materialize in the entrance. I thanked the man and started to walk down the sharply sloping bank.

  One of the men behind me said something that involved “dessert” and slang I didn’t recognize. I felt his friends’ laughter like a splash of ice water on my back as I hurried toward Giuseppe.

  As soon as I walked beneath the ice-encrusted wooden scaffolds, I realized what a mistake I had made. Giuseppe hung back in the shadows so I could hardly see his face, but I could tell from the frightened and furious look in his inhumanly bright eyes that I wasn’t precisely a welcome guest. He was wary, probably because he couldn’t imagine why I would have sought him here. And when he found out? Oh, bloody stakes. I am such an idiot.

  “Miss Hollis? Has something happened? If it’s the money . . .” He looked around and lowered his voice. His right hand was worrying at something in his pocket, his left was pulling at the brim of his cap. I could feel his nervousness, and I’m as much an empath as my bicycle. “I will pay you back, I swear, but—”

  I shook my head quickly, and forced myself not to back up. I would have felt so much safer in the light. “No, no, it’s not about that. I told you yesterday, you only need to pay me back when you can. It’s . . .” I hesitated, and then rushed on. “You see, I’d just wanted to ask you a few questions about Rinaldo.”

  The words, in their unadorned gall, made him freeze. I winced. My plans might have seemed sane in bed or the cocooning safety of a morning soup kitchen, but in the presence of one of the countless victims of Rinaldo’s brutality I felt like a little girl, ignorantly courting death. I almost apologized and left, but Giuseppe roughly grabbed my elbow and forced me deeper into the tunnel. My eyes adjusted to the dim light provided by a few intermittently hung electric bulbs and more gas lamps. I grew aware of the hard, curious stares of the other workers. But I could only hear water, dripping somewhere behind me, and the low-pitched buzz of the electrical lights. Even my footsteps were muffled by the packed dirt and none of the men here put much store in breathing. Their eyes seemed to blaze out of the gloom—predatory, inhuman, watchful. The air smelled like damp earth and something barely recognizable—the curious antiseptic tang of a pack of vampires. I felt like a lamb lured into the lion’s den. Immunity, as Aileen so often warned me, didn’t mean “the buggers won’t bleed you to death.”

  “Zephyr, you know you shouldn’t be here,” Giuseppe said, his voice so low I had to lean in to hear him. We were a few yards away from the nearest vampire, but I knew how good their hearing was. “Has he threatened you?” He looked so worried. But of course he would—how long had he been living with Rinaldo’s terror?

  My breathing was very shallow. I felt light-headed. “Not exact
ly . . .” I said. “But I wanted to know if you’ve ever met him. I mean, in person.”

  I met his incredulous stare, willfulness winning out over pragmatic fear by a hairsbreadth.

  “Is this for one of your societies?”

  I’d heard that emphasis on the last word before, but usually from my father or Troy. I had never expected to hear such derision from one of my students. Of course, I had provoked him. I shook my head slowly.

  “I promised someone I’d help them. I just need some information.”

  “So why come to me? Why here?”

  Breathe in, Zephyr. “I . . . It was thoughtless to ask you here. I apologize. I thought you might know because—”

  “I don’t know anything about Rinaldo, Miss Hollis. I don’t know why you think I do. Now, if you pardon me, I have work.”

  His eyes grew brighter for a moment, and his irises turned black. Inhuman light pulsed behind them in a fluid, mesmerizing dance that would have put me entirely in his power had I not been immune. After a shocked moment, I pretended to relax and angle my neck toward him. I hadn’t been the object of a vampire’s Sway for so long I had almost forgotten they could do it. If only I’d thought to wear some garlic—then I could reasonably pretend to not be affected, since the root tended to impair younger vampires.