Moonshine: A Novel (2 page)

I cursed and struggled away from his mouth. Amir now had him gripped by the waist and was slowly prying him off of me.

"Did he bite you?" Amir gasped. To my distant amusement, he seemed quite concerned.

"Vampire gums are not known to be fatal."

"Oh, should I just let him go, then? Since you find this so easy."

"I am perfectly capable of dealing with this myself, Amir," I heard myself saying, despite the copious evidence to the contrary.

With an odd, dangerous smile, Amir lowered his brush-thick eyelashes and let the boy go. With a noise like a cat strangling to death on a hairball, the boy launched himself at my neck. The fangs, dull as they were, were good enough to break my skin at a direct attack. I shrieked--still more out of annoyance than fear--and reached deep into my pocket for my switchblade. Pure blessed silver, that blade, a gift from Daddy before I left home. I'd never used it after I left Troy. I'd almost forgotten it was there.

With a practiced movement, I laid the dull edge of the blade against the exposed, pallid flesh of his collarbone. He flinched away from the burning touch of blessed metal. The hesitation was enough to allow Amir to yank him off of me fully. For a moment I had the absurdly funny view of a little vampire struggling like an upturned cockroach.

I stood up. Only a little blood had escaped the tiny puncture wounds on my neck, but I wiped it away carefully and adjusted my wilting collar.

"It bit you?" Amir asked, his voice quiet. The vampire's noises were gentler in Amir's grip. Apparently, it did not regard him as quite so tasty a meal.

I shrugged. "Barely a scratch," I said. Still, my heart was racing.

"Even less can turn a person."

My, how serious he sounded. It made me smile. "Oh, don't worry about me. What time is it?"

Warily, he reached for his watch, hanging freely from his waistcoat. "Three minutes past."

I cursed, and picked up my bicycle. "I must go. Would you . . .

please, there's a room in the basement I think will hold him. Could you take care of him for me? Just until I'm done. I wouldn't normally ask this, but . . ."

He smiled, but it didn't quite reach those dark eyes. "You're late. Go ahead. I'll just have to miss dear Mr. Hamilton tonight."

I barely registered his gently mocking tone, as I was already up the stairs and opening the door to the school. I knew
The Federalist Papers
wasn't the most popular choice as a learning text, but I've always felt recent immigrants to this country should at least be aware of the ideals of its founding--even when they did not live up to the reality.

"Thank you," I said to him, awkwardly, from where he still stood on the steps. The vampire seemed to hardly trouble him at all, now. Not for the fist time, I wondered
what
precisely Amir was. Surely not human.

"Zephyr," he said, just before I shut the door behind me. "How do you know you won't turn?"

His voice was so strange and devoid of mockery that I paused and, to my surprise, answered him.

"Why, because I can't turn, of course. I'm immune."

"Is that . . . normal, for humans?"

I shrugged. "I've never met anyone else with it." And I'd long ago given up asking my parents how it had happened.

"Oh," was all he said. Since moving to the city, I'd managed to keep that peculiarity of mine from everyone except my roommate. I would have wondered why I'd so blithely revealed it to Amir if I weren't already so late.

"Good evening, everyone," I said as I opened the door.

A few responded with a strained, "Good evening, Miss Hollis." I hardly counted it as rudeness. It was a new moon, after all.

"We'll continue with Alexander Hamilton's Federalist number ten today," I said, hoping that work would distract them from noticing that I looked like a drowned mongoose. Papers rustled and the electric lamps above us flickered. Had he taken the boy to the basement? Could he manage alone? Class had never seemed so long, and nearly half my students wanted to talk to me after. I could hardly rein in my impatience when Sarra, a solidly human Russian who attended my night classes because of her late hours at the sewing factory, insisted on quizzing me about the proper interpretation of the eighteenth amendment.

"So it says only the
selling
of alcohol is illegal?" she repeated, with determined emphasis. Clearly, this issue had been weighing upon her ever since she discovered this nation's draconian stance on her home country's national beverage.

"Because," she continued, "Boris has cousin, Naum, maybe you heard of him? Came here two years ago, and has a . . . you know,
method
with potatoes in a bathtub . . ."

She paused here, as though she expected me to beg for the recipe. Internally, I shuddered, but made the appropriate noises of appreciation. My solitary experience with a professional liquor (scotch, and possibly the foulest potion I've had the displeasure of drinking) made me more than wary of bathtub
gin
, let alone potato vodka.

"But, Miss Hollis, Naum is
family
and it is just a little alcohol and--"

"It's a gift, right?" I said quickly. "You won't give him any money?"

She pursed her lips, but seemed happy enough to nod. "Gifts, maybe. Gifts okay, yes?"

I smiled slightly. "It's not illegal to drink alcohol, Sarra. Just to sell it." A curious loophole that provided the semilegal rationale behind a hundred gin joints. "You don't have anything to worry about."

She nodded, satisfied. "Good. I bring you some next time. Have a nice day, Miss Hollis."

She handed me back the tattered classroom copy of
The Federalist Papers
, and turned to leave. I put it back with the others on the shelf and mentally steeled myself to discover what had happened to Amir and the vampire boy. However, when I turned back around to leave, I saw Giuseppe Rossi, a vampire who lived in a basement tenement in Little Italy and had been attending my classes for the past year, standing quietly by the door. I had never known him to linger after class--his family was large and his wife absent, which left him with little time. Curious, I put the last of my papers into my bag and slung it over my shoulder. Giuseppe spoke English very well, but he still had difficulty reading.

"Miss Hollis," he said, when I was halfway to the door. I paused. His skin was pallid under the yellow electric lights. Not a hint of blood tinged his lips or fingertips. It had clearly been a long time since his last feeding. Concerned, I stepped closer. Was there a polite way of asking where he got his supplies? I knew of a few who would help him, if he could no longer afford the street corner blood vendors.

"Yes, Giuseppe?" I said.

"I . . . have a problem. I would not have bothered you with it, only I'm afraid for my family and you're the only one I know who can help." He raised his eyes. "Or, perhaps, will help?"

I walked the rest of the way toward him and gripped his hand briefly. "Of course, Giuseppe. You must know that I'll do anything I can."

He smiled, relieved. "Yes, I had hoped . . . see, Miss Hollis, when I first came to this country, I was not like this. I had a wife. She had given me three children, and carried our fourth. It was hard, but we were happy. And then one night, when I left the factory late, they found me."

My throat felt dry. I had heard too many such tales, but each one hit me with the force of fresh tragedy. Daddy says I feel too much, but I don't. He's a demon hunter. He just feels too little.

"Who?" I asked.

"That little gang of young
vampiri
, the ones Rinaldo lets run wild."

Oh, God. That little boy, covered in bites and gone mad in the basement. "The Turn Boys," I said.

It wasn't a question, but he nodded. "They turned me. My wife, she tried, but in a year she ran away. That's what I get for not marrying a good Italiana, they said. I needed blood, and money. The tunnel work . . ." He shrugged.

I had forgotten he did work on the new tunnel that would soon run from Canal Street into New Jersey. A good job for a vampire, even one as young (and proportionately sun-resistant) as Giuseppe. But it wouldn't pay nearly enough for his four children.

"So, I went to Rinaldo," he continued. "I delivered for him. Just a few times a week. And he gave me blood and money. It worked, for a while. But last week . . . I was delivering a little outside his territory. Some boys from another gang jumped me. The Westies, I think, but cannot prove. They took everything. Rinaldo says he doesn't care, that I owe him the money."

How I hated these mob bosses, self-styled kings of the neighborhood, who could destroy one man's life so callously. As if it were his fault that some rival gang had stolen the delivery.

"How much?" I asked, dreading the answer.

"Two hundred dollars."

I sucked in air, sharply, between my clenched teeth. That was more than I made in three months of teaching.

"I have one hundred," he said, "but I need to borrow the rest. He says he will . . . my children . . ."

Giuseppe looked close to tears and I realized I had never seen a vampire cry. With hardly a thought, I put my hand over his again and looked firmly into his unnaturally clear, bloodless eyes.

"You'll get through this, I promise." I reached deep into my pocket and pulled out the small stash of folded bills I had received just that morning from the local Citizen's Council, which paid my meager teaching salary each month. "Here," I said, pressing it into his hand, "this is fifty dollars. If you need help in the future, I hope you'll ask me or the Citizen's Council . . . even Tammany Hall would be better than
Rinaldo
."

I couldn't imagine what would have possessed him to get involved with the notorious bootlegger, Other-exploiter and gangster. He let the Turn Boys run wild, after all, and the Turn Boys had destroyed Giuseppe's life.

Giuseppe pressed the bills briefly against his cheek and then turned away, as if to wipe his eyes.

"I have no words," he said, finally. "I swear, I will pay you back, Zephyr."

The sound of my first name brought my thoughts back, abruptly, to Amir. "Only what you can," I said. Suddenly I was desperate to leave. How long had I lingered here?

Thankfully, Giuseppe pressed my hand only briefly before leaving. I waited to hear him exit the front doors before I shut the lights, and then made my way by memory through the deserted school halls and into the basement.

As I did so, it slowly dawned on me that I had, in a moment of impulsive pity, given away my entire month's salary. My rent would be due at the boarding house in three days--a full twelve dollars, paid in cash and upfront. Mrs. Brodsky would hardly be sympathetic. Indeed, I could be assured of being soundly turned out in the middle of a New York winter with my belongings strewn about me on the sidewalk. I shuddered at the thought. Mrs. Brodsky was willing enough to serve me dinners without meat--who was she to complain if her boarders wanted cheaper food for the same price?--but she was decidedly lacking in basic human compassion.

"Well," I said to myself, as cheerfully as I could, "you have at least three more days of that lumpy bed."

"Do most do-gooders talk to themselves as frequently as you?"

Amir was below me on the basement steps, carrying an oil lamp and looking quite as good as he had two hours before, when he
hadn't
been wrestling with a freshly turned vampire in an abandoned school basement. This bothered me more than it should. I felt positively dowdy beside him.

"Do most wastrels accost innocent women on staircases?" I said. It was uncharitable of me, seeing as how he'd just risked life and limb for my sake. No matter that it didn't seem to show.

He laughed--it was rich and warm and made me blink in the weak light. "A wastrel, am I? What kind of a wastrel attends immigrant night school?"

I crossed my arms over my chest and forced myself to breathe. "I haven't figured that out, yet."

He laughed again. I had never heard anything quite like it before. "Are you coming down, or will we just argue on the steps all night?"

Feeling decidedly silly, I followed the wavering light of his lamp down the stairs.

"Are you all right?" I made myself ask, when the silence had lasted for half a minute. I was surprised by how keenly I meant the question.

He shrugged. "The boy can't hurt me. I'm surprised you lasted as long with him as you did."

I took this as a compliment. "How is he?"

He paused before a closed door a few feet away from the steps. "Sleeping. I brought him a few pints."

He had an odd look on his face, wistful and angry all at once. I almost touched the sleeve of his gray wool sweater, but some self-preserving instinct stopped me. I somehow knew that touching Amir would not be the innocent gesture of sympathy and friendship it had been with Giuseppe. He was feral and mysterious and Other, a combination I found too fascinating to be safe.

"Why such a small child?" he asked softly. "What possible purpose . . . ?"

His question seemed so strangely naive. "Sport," I said. "The Turn Boys play with humans like cats play with mice. And far more cruelly."