CHAPTER TEN

Harry lived on the top floor of the Defenders’ newly relocated headquarters, though I imagined that he could afford something better and more private. He had been working for Troy for nearly six months, after all. Odious as I found him, the man did know how to find well-paying work. But Harry didn’t seem to have bothered. I suppose it made sense: why worry about finding a nicer place when you could just rotate among the poster beds of your wealthy lovers?

“You kept him here?” I whispered, while he unlocked the courtyard gate.

“Where else could I put him? In my pocket?”

“But Troy—”

Harry sighed. “Troy is the least of your troubles, Zeph. For Christ’s sake, you’re not still sweet on him, are you?”

“Perish the thought.” Troy had been my first beau back in Montana, and we were well rid of each other.

Harry grinned impishly and tugged at one of my damp ringlets. “Zephyr has a crush,” he said in the singsong tone of our childhood.

There were no observers here in the garden courtyard. I stuck my tongue out at him.

Inside, the headquarters were silent and dark, and we encountered no one until we reached the landing of the third floor. Troy sat in front of Harry’s door, a sword across his knees and a pistol by his side. Several wisps of dirty blond hair had escaped the rigid cage of his pomade, which told me more about his mood than his flat expression.

“There is an underage vampire in your room,” Troy said, with the sort of calm that presaged violence.

Harry took a step back. He seemed to consider many responses—thankfully, none of them involved the pistol I knew he kept in his vest pocket. Finally, he settled on, “Yes.”

“And how did you intend to manage the situation?”

Harry darted a glance at me. “Have a conversation with him?” he said.

“A conversation.” Troy didn’t reach for the gun, but his hands tightened on the pommel of the sword.

Harry flushed, highlighting his freckles and ginger hair. I recalled that I had rescued Judah all those months ago because of his resemblance to my brother at that age.

“Troy, I know the kid, he’s—”

“An underage vampire,” Troy repeated, in about the same tones one would use for “plague-ridden corpse” or “Boss Tweed.”

It was time to attempt to defuse the situation, though I doubted Troy would listen. I stepped forward. “His name is Judah, I rescued him this January and our parents have been caring for him ever since.”

Troy looked dumbfounded enough to put down the sword. “Your … your parents!”

“Yes. And by our parents we also mean our daddy.”

Troy scrambled up, his righteous indignation in full flower. This was a relief—when Troy engaged in theatrics, no one could be in serious danger.

“How in seven hells did you ever get the great John Hollis to live with an underage vampire? Has he gone mad?”

Quite possibly, I thought.

Harry’s throat worked, and he looked down in embarrassment. “Ah, the kid’s not that bad once you get to know him.”

“Get to know him? Underage vampires are dervishes of destruction. There’s a reason why we have the laws we do, Zephyr. No wonder the police were interrogating us! You made me lie to an officer of the law!”

I rolled my eyes. “No, Harry lied. You were merely ignorant. And you would have remained ignorant if you hadn’t gone around poking your nose in my brother’s possessions.”

Harry looked startled. “Yeah, Troy, what are you doing here?”

“I heard something! I have the right to inspect my own property, and in any case, you must admit, Harry, some of your late-night escapades would make anybody wonder…”

Troy’s face was getting redder than a bowl of borscht. I raised my eyebrows at Harry, who gave me a pleading look. I took pity.

“My brother has become quite the libertine,” I said. “Have some understanding, Troy. You were young once.”

This had the desired effect. “I only turn thirty next year!” he said.

“In January.”

“I am not old,” he said peevishly. “But I suppose you have a point. I enjoyed myself quite a bit at nineteen, I must say,” he must said, and winked at me.

I hoped Harry appreciated the lengths to which I would go for him. “So now, Troy, unless you would like to mire yourself further in our illegal affairs than you already have, perhaps you should go downstairs, polish your weapons, and attempt to forget everything you have just seen?”

Troy seemed to agree with this plan, as he picked up his sword and started back down the stairs.

“He will be gone within the hour, Harry, or I dock your cut!” he called, when safely on the second landing.

Harry sighed. “Yes, sir.” And then, under his breath, “Nosy bastard.”

*   *   *

Judah sat cross-legged on Harry’s narrow cot. He had been looking out the window at the twilit street, but turned around when we came in.

“The gold-hair man is gone?” he asked. Harry nodded. “Good,” he said. “Mama wouldn’t have wanted me to speak to him.” Something about his voice seemed odd to me, but I couldn’t quite place it.

“What did Mama want you to say?” I asked.

“Hello, Zephyr,” he said, rather solemnly. “Mama said I should speak to you, though Harry should know also. Mama wants me to tell you that Daddy is missing,” he said.

Harry frowned. “Missing! Is he out on a hunt?”

“Mama doesn’t know, but I think so. He took his gun and his grimmer.”

I looked at Harry, his worried expression mirroring mine. “Grimmer?” I said.

Judah nodded solemnly. “Yes, the book with magic words.”

“Oh, a grimoire,” Harry said and sat on the bed. Judah scooted next to him and lay his head on Harry’s shoulder. Like a real brother, I thought, and then understood what had seemed odd about Judah’s voice. When we’d first met, his accent had hinted of the Italian of his stepfather. But now he sounded like a true Montana boy, down to the slight twang with which he said “Daddy.” I should know—years of living in New York hadn’t eradicated it from my speech.

“Daddy has a grimoire?” I said. “I’ve never seen him do spell-work.”

In fact, when I had discovered that I had no aptitude for it at all, he’d comforted me by saying that spells didn’t matter to a real hunter, and most of them were useless anyway. I’d had the impression that he disdained the use of anything that wasn’t blunt, physical force.

Harry looked at me oddly. “Well, he never did it around you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget it.”

“Harry, answer the question!”

Perhaps I should not have sounded so imperious, because Harry’s lower jaw took on that characteristic jut of mule-headedness that I recognized all too well.

“I’m an adult,” he said. “You can’t just order me around like we’re back in Yarrow.”

“I’m not ordering you around. Just tell me since when has Daddy became some great spell worker.”

“That sounded like an order.”

“It’s not a bleeding order, it’s a request.”

“Then, in that case,” Harry said, settling back against the wall. “I’ll consider it carefully.”

Judah looked between us with clear-eyed fascination, though he said nothing.

“Judah,” I said, attempting to sound calm. “Do you know anything about Daddy’s spells? Why wouldn’t he use them around me?”

Something like worry flitted over Judah’s face. “Because you’re dangerous, Zephyr,” he said.

Harry straightened abruptly. “That’s—”

“Dangerous? To Daddy?” Daddy could outfight me blindfolded.

“Judah,” Harry said, with a quelling look. Judah fell silent. Harry bounded off the bed and took my hands, peevishness forgotten.

“It’s the magic,” he said. “It goes strange around you. It always has. Not that any of us are much use at witchery—though Mama says Sonny is showing some aptitude—but if you were nearby something would always go wrong. Daddy never cast much, but he always did it in the shed. He told us to work away from you.”

I gaped. “All of you?” I tried to imagine my thoroughly non-magical family gathering speckled toads by the new moon—and the hundred other ingredients even simple spells required—all to secretly cast little charms without my knowledge.

“Betty? Vera? Tess?” He nodded as I named each of my sisters. “And Sonny, too!” When I left home, Sonny (his real name was John Hollis, Jr.) still took most of his meals from Mama’s breast. He couldn’t be older than six, now.

Harry wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Daddy made sure we could do the basics. He said you never knew when it could save you, because sometimes the hunt goes wrong.”

I had to sit down. My heart beat too fast; I could hardly breathe. The bed creaked a little beneath my weight. Judah gave me a worried look.

“It’s okay, Zephyr,” he said, with such unusual gravitas for a child his age that I had to smile. “You have too much, that’s all.”

“Too much?”

Judah blinked, as though it were obvious. “Magic,” he said.

“But I don’t have any magic.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “You’re immune to vampires, Zeph. Have you really never wondered what that means?”

“Of course I did. You know I tried asking Daddy and Mama for years, but they would never say. I guess I…”

Harry looked a strange combination of amused and peeved. I was realizing that while my immunity had become part of the wallpaper of my life, my siblings had probably spent a good portion of theirs wondering about it.

“Forgot about it?” Harry said.

“No. Maybe a little. Do I ask why I have curly hair? Brown eyes? There are things that make up who I am, and that seems fine. The immunity is a little unusual—”

“Have you met anyone else with it?”

“I haven’t asked! I tend to keep it a secret, after all.”

“And why is that?”

“Because—” I cut myself off. He deserved more than the glib answer I felt at the back of my throat. So, why, Zephyr? I thought, and had a sudden image of myself no more than five years old, sitting on my daddy’s knee. We were in his shed and I had a small knife in my hands. He told me that my immunity is our secret, that it can never go past our family. I asked why. He said, “Because they will hurt you for it.”

“Zeph?” Harry touched my hand. I nearly jumped.

“He told me to,” I said, softly.

The three of us were silent for several minutes, while the dying sun sucked the light from the room.

“So,” I said, finally, “you think Daddy cast a spell on me that made me immune? And that’s why I can’t use magic?”

Harry shrugged. “That’s what we all reckoned,” he said. “But it’s not as though Daddy gave us a talk about it.”

“What kind of a spell would make someone immune?” I asked.

Judah had maintained an eerie stillness up to this point—so much so that I’d nearly forgotten he was in the room. But at this, his head snapped up. He looked me straight in the eye. “A bad one,” he said.

I shivered. “Judah,” I said. “Where do you think Daddy’s gone?”

“There was a preacher who asked about you. Not a Bible preacher, the other kind. With the caps and beards.”

Harry nodded. “The rabbi Mama told me of. Do you know what he said to Daddy, Judah?”

“I couldn’t hear,” he said. “But after, Daddy found his grimmer and he left.”

To make another bad spell? But I didn’t ask the question aloud. I didn’t know if I wanted the answer.

Harry stood, massaged his temples, and pulled the string for the ceiling light. I groaned and covered my eyes; Judah didn’t react at all.

“But why spend so much on the Fairie Transport to send you?” Harry said. “I talked to Mama yesterday and she didn’t say anything about this.”

“She couldn’t,” Judah said. “The preacher left a little clay man on the roof. It will tell him if we say anything about Zephyr or Daddy.”

Harry looked baffled, but I recognized that description. “A golem,” I said.

“So the rabbi is spying on Mama. And Daddy left!”

I wrapped my arms around my waist. I felt ill. The situation at home sounded worse than I’d ever heard it. “Maybe he didn’t have a choice?”

“Maybe not,” Harry said. “But I have a feeling that nothing good is going to come out of that grimoire.”

“But the fairies didn’t send me, Harry,” Judah said.

We turned to him. “They didn’t?” I said, a slightly hysterical laugh bubbling up like champagne. “How did you get here, in that case? Flight?”

“I can’t fly,” Judah said, smiling as though he didn’t quite get the joke. “Uncle Amir brought me.”

“Amir! Where’s he now?”

“At home. He’s helping Betty kill the golem.”

Harry threw up his hands and flopped bonelessly on the bed. “Heaven help us,” he said.

My headache was returning. “Amen,” I agreed, and slid to the floor beside him.

*   *   *

My head throbbed like it had taken residence inside a bass drum. One would think that somewhere in the Defenders’ headquarters one might find the remedy for such a situation, but the closest I discovered was a ten-year-old bottle of Dr. Beechman’s Magic Cure-All Tonic. As I imagined that such quantities of laudanum might knock out far more than my headache, I regretfully replaced it next to the ipecac in the woefully out-of-date medicine cabinet. I entered the kitchen in search of a more robust solution, but had only made it as far as the ice closet before being startled by a voice from the door.

“Would you like me to turn on the lights?” Amir asked.

I groaned. “Only if you would like me to stab you.”

This startled a laugh out of him. “I’ve had better greetings,” he said.

Head in hand, heart in throat, I turned to face him. His teeth gleamed, but the rest of him was slightly bedraggled. It looked like he had come in from wrestling a pig. “I’ve had better greeters,” I said. “So, who won? You or the golem? And I do hope my sister made it out better than you did.” Betty was only seventeen, but she had more natural athleticism than either Harry or myself.

Amir shook his head ruefully. “Your sister finally cornered the blasted thing. I had the honors of delivering the final blow.”

I released a slow breath. I hadn’t known until this moment how worried I had been about my family. “Who do you think left it?” I asked.

“A rabbi—or, at least, someone acting the role. Someone clearly thinks your family will provide them with some useful information. Any idea why?”

My head hurt so badly I had to squint to see Amir. I wondered if I would be sick. I cast about for someplace to sit and then decided that the floor was as good a place as any. “I’d ask Daddy if he hadn’t run away,” I said.

Amir knelt. “Zeph, are you—”

“Perfectly fine,” I said. “Why were you at my parents’ house, Amir? I thought you said you were following leads.”

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.

Nicholas stared at her. “What do you mean?”

Lily’s hands were shaking, but from excitement or terror I couldn’t tell. “It says here: ‘subject’s central cavity liquefied, gonadal region to third rib. Anterior and posterior, however, definition of organs remains. Heart present but badly damaged and nonfunctional. Portions of extremities also internally liquefied, all consistent with the normal presentation of exsanguinated vampires. No known cause, pending further investigation.”

Absolute silence. From outside came a distant crash of lightning from a summer storm. I understood what this meant. We all did, but perhaps someone had to say it.

“They were turning back,” I said. “And halfway to human, it killed them.”

*   *   *

Torrential sheets of rain sliced through the streets in merciless wave after wave. First Avenue was deserted as ever; which gave me ample opportunity to admire nature.

At least, as best as I could while being soaked in it. There had been one umbrella in the stand by the entrance door. Amir had given it to Lily, who promptly used it to dash into the street, hail what must have been the only on-duty taxi in a twenty-block radius, and sail off without so much as inquiring whether we needed a ride. Nicholas and Charlie had left soon after our grisly discovery. Nicholas had gone so silent and furious I wondered if he might be having another one of those strange dissociative attacks. I didn’t ask—Nicholas wasn’t particularly safe at his most genial and lucid, let alone moments after he had looked upon the dead body of his friend and vowed revenge.

Which left Amir and me, alone in a summer thunderstorm.

“You really can’t teleport us back?” I asked. Water had overflowed the gutters, leaving it ankle-high at many points on the sidewalk. I sloshed through, refusing to think about the filth. Amir turned to me at the exact moment a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky. For that split second, I took in both his uncanny beauty and his harrowed, drawn expression. He seemed overworked and exhausted—an odd thing to think of a djinni, especially this one.

“Even I have my limits, Zephyr,” he said. “Though it’s flattering that you think me indefatigable.”

“I just thought your djinni business was, well…” I snapped my fingers and fluttered my hands.

Amir gave a short laugh and shook his head. “More like running up a very steep hill for several hours. One’s capacity does give out after a while. So if you’d like your brother back tomorrow, we have to walk.”

I shrugged waterlogged shoulders and forged ahead. I was bothered by Amir’s frank admission of weakness, but I couldn’t quite place why. Perhaps because he had exhausted himself on my behalf? But of course I couldn’t know what other business he’d attended to all day. For all I knew, he’d spent the afternoon in a Shadukiam harem before flitting to Yarrow for the evening entertainment. Indeed, I had to be vigilant around Amir, exactly because his presence always seemed to disarm me. When I saw those coal-dark eyes with their thick lashes, when I heard that gently amused voice and smelled that particular banked-fire-and-oranges smell, I quite frankly lost the good sense God gave me. It was absurd: Amir had lied to me practically since we met. It was almost certain that he had lied in some manner about the fate of his older brother and there was no reason for me to believe that he wasn’t lying now. Of course he looked tired, but there was no reason for me to believe it, or even if I did, to think that all of his travels today had been for my sake.

Yet, Amir had undeniably been attempting to atone for his actions in January. He had even haunted the mayor to help the anti-Faust cause, though the plan had backfired. I recalled how he had stated the exact number of casualties—forty-two, a grim figure so tellingly memorized, as though guilt had branded it on his thoughts. Could I forgive him? Could I at least look past his failings in light of his change of heart? It frightened me how much I wanted to. It frightened me, because in so many ways he hadn’t changed.

“You look nearly as stormy as the weather, Zephyr,” Amir said.

“Merely taking stock of my situation, Amir.”

He wiped the water from his eyes, sober and watchful. “And have you reached a conclusion?” he asked.

He stood very close. Enough so that I became aware of the gentle cloud of steam rising from his exposed skin and wet suit. The smell of him, that very intoxicant against which I had just girded myself, seemed to radiate like a bodily object, filling my nose and throat and pores, sliding down my spine like the hand of a lover, long denied.

I shivered and nearly sobbed. Amir frowned and cocked his head—entirely unaware, it seemed, of his uncanny effect.

A rolling thunderclap shocked me to my senses. I stepped away from him and shook my head, suddenly relishing the cold, clear rain.

“To beware of dangerous things,” I said, to which Amir made no response at all.