Wicked City (27 page)

Amir started, but he recovered quickly—smiling and patting my knee. “I was,” he said. “I'm afraid that one didn't quite pan out, but I'm sure you'll agree it was lucky I arrived when I did.”

“Quite,” I said, enunciation brittle. “So what else have you been doing on my behalf? Rescuing old women from burning buildings?”

“Scaring away that police officer who was lingering across the street? Illegally breaking you into the morgue?”

I pursed my lips. Perhaps I was being just a smidge ungrateful. “That officer found me again?”

“It would appear.”

“How did you scare him away?”

Amir smiled like a cat. “I turned into smoke and whispered in his ear that his woman knew his secret.”

“What secret?”

“I have no idea,” he said, “but you humans all have them.”

I recognized the way Amir said “humans.” That mix of imperious disdain and incurable fascination, the way I imagined a scientist might refer to his laboratory animals. Needless to say, it infuriated me.

“So you threatened a poor man just because you could? Will you never stop manipulating us? Yes, Amir, humans have foibles, but perhaps not quite so many as your average djinni.”

I was in high dudgeon, but it still surprised me to see Amir look so deflated. I had expected him to argue with me (perhaps I had hoped so), but instead he bowed his head. “I hadn't meant it that way.”

“How reassuring for the rest of us,” I said, but without much venom. I rubbed my head and wished he would look at me again. “Judah is waiting for you upstairs,” I said. “Harry is with him.”

Amir nodded and left without another word. I wondered what I had done to make him act so strange and contrite. I knew he regretted his actions this past January. I knew, and yet I never missed an opportunity to harangue him for it.

And well I should! But I couldn't quite escape the sensation that my moral high ground had eroded over the past several months. Someone else would have brought Faust if he hadn't, Elspeth had said. But I wished that someone else had. A few minutes later Amir returned, alone.

“Where's Harry?” I asked.

“At the family estate,” Amir said, with a smile. I couldn't help returning it. “He was worried about your mother. He said to tell you he'd come back tomorrow with any news.”

“You're a regular courier service, Amir,” I said, painfully dragging myself back upright. First morgue, then liquor, then sleep.

“Only for you, dear,” he said, and pulled a tin from his pocket. “Here,” he said. “It will work better than whatever swill you had in mind.”

“What is it? Fairy dust?”

“Aspirin,” he said, laconically.

I blushed, and took two.

*   *   *

Given that I was about to be crucified for instigating these murders, I wanted any details to have a public viewing. It seemed to me that the mayor's office was exercising far too much control of the public perception of this case. And that perception was skewing in a direction decidedly
not
in my favor. All together, our merry band numbered five: Charlie, Nicholas, Lily, Amir, and myself. Charlie and Nicholas because I had promised them. Lily and her notebook for my own protection. Lily had the jitters around the two vampires. We had first stopped at the Beast's Rum to get them, interrupting the end of a surprisingly chaste performance of dancing girls. Bruno had been right—the vampires and humans mostly seemed to care about the otherworldly voice emanating from beneath the stairs. The fact that Nicholas had been the one making such beautiful music hadn't reassured Lily. I couldn't blame her for being worried about the two surviving members of the notorious Turn Boys gang. Still, she didn't complain. Lily was getting her promised scoop, and she'd probably spend the evening with Lizzie Borden if she had to.

Once we arrived at the south side of the Bellevue Hospital Pathological Wing, Amir told us to wait and then disappeared. I felt exposed and conspicuous, but hardly anyone passed us by.

“He's been in a long time,” Lily said, looking around nervously. “Are you sure he can do this?”

“Yeah, Charity,” Nicholas said. “I don't know that I trust your smoke belcher.”

“He
said
he can get us in, he can get us in.” I spoke with such authority that they both backed down. It was odd, I thought, that I wasn't more worried. But I trusted him. Sure enough, after twenty-one minutes we caught his signal: the on-and-off flash of lights in the corner windows.

Charlie grinned. “I knew you were right, Zephyr!” he said. Nicholas cuffed him on the back of the neck. Lily sighed and brushed passed all of us. The office windows were behind a short balcony a little over five feet from the ground. Amir shut the lights and stepped onto the balcony while the rest of us slunk into the bushes and trees below. He lifted Lily to the balustrade while Nicholas and Charlie scrambled up with little difficulty.

I stayed on the street to make sure that no one saw us entering, and so I was the last to get inside. Amir lifted me with an ease that would have been uncanny had I given it much thought. I lingered in his arms longer than necessary.

“All clear,
habibti
?” he whispered.

I nodded, dry-throated. He put me down.

The others were waiting inside what appeared to be a medical library. In the moonlight coming through the window, I could just make out the shapes of thick leather-bound volumes with long, incomprehensible titles printed in silver foil.

“I don't see no bodies,” Nicholas said, so loudly that I winced.

“You were expecting them in the library?” Lily said, dripping with disdain.

“Maybe I'm
expecting
smoky here to keep his bargain, eh,
baldracca
?”

I doubted Lily understood Italian any better than I, but the gist seemed clear. She reddened and turned away, her reporter's notebook buckling from the force of her grip.

Charlie looked alarmed. “Nick, Nick, I'm sure the genie's got it all figured out. Let's just follow along and we'll see Kevin. Right, Zephyr?”

I nodded vigorously, but Amir forestalled my response.

“Listen to your friend, Nicholas,” he said from the library door. “And speak easy. I make no promises if the police get called.”

Amir turned and left. Nicholas looked for a moment like a real thirteen-year-old boy floundering in the wake of a thorough set-down. But Amir was heading away without any apparent worry for the rest of us. Lily hurried behind him and Charlie took Nicholas's arm to propel him out the door. Nicholas didn't look very happy, but he didn't argue.

“Goodness,” I muttered under my breath. I made a quick check again through the windows to the street: no one loitering nearby and certainly no one who looked like a police officer. I dashed back into the hall and hurried to catch up with the others.

We went through the main corridor and then turned left at a large framed photograph of the pathological wing from what must have been the sixties. Two long rows of white beds with thin, emaciated patients and a few hard-faced nurses. Probably tubercular, I guessed, given how common the diagnosis had been in the slums back in those days.

“Zephyr!” Lily's harsh whisper echoed like a shout in the grand hallway. She stood before an open door to a staircase leading down. We were alone on the first floor.

I looked over my shoulder. “This place makes me nervous.”

“It's a building full of dead bodies,” Lily whispered, though it seemed unlikely anyone would hear us. “Were you expecting the Ritz?”

I smiled wryly. “That place makes me nervous too.”

The basement was dark and cool. Amir had stopped at a door not too far from the stairs, but that was all I could make out. Nicholas and Charlie weren't too bothered by the darkness, of course, but Lily and I bumped into each other and made the best of it by linking elbows.

“Do you think you might spare a light, Amir?” I asked.

I thought I saw his head come up, as though he had been bent over. “I didn't know you smoked.”

“To
see by,
” I said, and Lily giggled.

Amir muttered something—a curse, I thought, though it might have been a djinni equivalent of a spell, for a moment later a crown of flames burst alight around his head.

“Holy shit!” Charlie said, stumbling back into Nicholas, who did not so much curse as growl like a mad dog, which made Lily shriek (though it might have been the vulgar language) and me sigh.

“You
know
the effect that has on people,” I said, though perhaps I meant the effect it had on
me
. “Showing off is a sign of ill-breeding.”

Amir gave me a small smile. “Consider it payment,” he said, and turned back to the door. In the light, I could see that it was clearly the bar to our goal: every inch of the iron door had been branded with warding sigils, and—in case those didn't work, no fewer than five locks and deadbolts.

“Are you trying to break the wards?” I asked.

“Broken,” he said, absently. “I'm trying to pick the locks.”

I was duly impressed, though I wouldn't dream of saying so. Amir might be young for a djinni, but three hundred years would give anyone ample time to learn useful tricks like lock-picking.

“Zephyr?” said Charlie. “I'm sorry I used such foul language in your presence.”

I nearly laughed. One does not spend any length of time working for the Defenders without developing a healthy tolerance for such idiom. I'd been known to employ it myself, but I supposed there was no need to dull my halo by telling him so. “I quite understand, Charlie,” I said.

“It's me who deserves the apology!” Lily straightened her hat, obviously trying to regain her composure. “Zephyr spends all her time among the coarser set; I'm sure she's quite used to it.”

“I apologize, ma'am,” Charlie said.

Nicholas cuffed him. “She don't deserve it, Charlie,” he said.

Lily drew herself up and for a moment I thought she'd storm out, but journalistic ambition eventually won.

“Amir,” I said, under my breath. “Please tell me you're almost done? We are developing a situation.”

“Control the cats for another moment,” he said. “I've almost got it.”

“Why can't you just, I don't know, smoke yourself and unlock it from the other side?”

“Wards,” he said. “I could only crack the ones keyed to humans and vampires. And … there!”

With a gentle click, the door released its locks and glided inward. Amir's fire cast enough light for us to see more than a dozen gurneys with bodies under white cloth.

“Christ,” Nicholas said, and for the first time it occurred to me that his particular testiness this evening might be a cover for undue emotion. Kevin had been his friend, and now Nicholas could finally pay his respects.

Lily, Charlie, and I followed Nicholas into the room. He pulled back each sheet until he reached the tenth gurney.

“Kevin,” he said, his voice somehow melodic with grief. “I swear, I will kill that bastard. I will crucify him that did this to you.”

Lily flipped open her notebook and started scribbling. I felt the need to restart my heart. Did Nicholas know about the letters? Did he know that someone else was involved besides Madison's man? But no, his fury was such that he wouldn't fail to mention an accomplice if he knew about it.

And I certainly wouldn't tell him.

“The murderer will have a trial,” I said. Danger to myself aside, I didn't like the idea of Nicholas on a quest for vigilante justice.

“Good for him,” Nicholas said, not taking his eyes from Kevin's face. I shivered and left the matter alone.

Amir waited from the doorway, following us with his eyes. “Didn't you say you broke in before?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I should have guessed they would change the wards. I probably left a trace. In any case, there might be an alarm on them, so let's hurry?”

I nodded. Nicholas, Charlie, and Lily had taken all the available spaces around Kevin's body, but I was interested in a different victim. I pulled back the sheet covering the last body. Zuckerman, naked in death as I had never seen him in life—curiously appropriate, given our first encounter. Other details assaulted me, but none so forcefully as the single, bare fact of his presence on that gurney.

Occasionally, the morgue did take on poppers, but the exsanguinated remains of vampires could all fit in a box about a foot square, and their investigation was more the provence of forceps and tweezers than scalpels and scales. Each of these bodies had been vampires. I had seen Zuckerman multiple times and been sure of it, and of course Nicholas could hardly have mistaken his friend. And yet here they were, the first vampires I had ever known who didn't exsanguinate upon death. I peered at Zuckerman's face again, frustrated by the dim light. The same generous nose and narrow mouth. I suppressed revulsion and used my forefinger to push up his stiff lip. His small fangs were retracted, but unmistakably present. So, a vampire. Dead. With a body to dissect.

What kind of tainted blood would stop a vampire's exsanguination, but kill him anyway? It was almost like he'd turned human. “But he's not human,” I whispered. In the chill air of this grim storage room, the words carried.

“None of them are,” Lily said. She was looking at the other two victims and flipping through the papers attached to the side of each gurney. “But they're changed, somehow.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “they smell kind of funny.”

“Maybe that's cause they're dead,
idiota,
” Nicholas said. “Dead and poisoned.”

“That's what I mean, Nick! The poison makes them smell funny. Not like a regular popper. They smell…”

Lily looked up from her perusal of the first gurney's clipboard. “Half popper, half human,” she said.