Wicked City (38 page)

“So after a rousing game of backgammon,” he said, and I elbowed him, “I decided, why the hell not, and arranged for him to visit the compound. He must have gotten there this morning if he cabled you.”

“Wonders upon wonders,” I said. The bartender poured my sidecar with a flourish and pushed it closer to me. “I'm very grateful to you, however you effected it,” I said.

“The least I can do, Zeph.” He looked up. “Would you mind terribly if I left you alone for a few minutes? There's a gentleman who just walked in…”

I laughed. “Off with you! Don't stay with your old maid of a sister.”

Harry gave me a strange smile and sauntered off. I sipped my sidecar and watched Lily and Aileen laughing together in the corner. I felt very content. A man sat down beside me.

“I'd buy you a drink, but you already seem to have one.”

My breath hitched a little, but I covered it with a sip. Strong, like everything at Horace's. “Then I suppose you'll just have to get me something else.”

Amir turned to me. “Would a ride to my apartment suffice?”

“Goodness,” I said. I looked at him, bereft of pretense. I had said I loved him and he had disappeared with hardly another word. And now he found me again with nothing less than a proposition? I might love him, but I doubted I would ever know what to make of him. How do a djinni and a human love? What could he really feel for me?

But still, he seemed both pensive and hopeful. It seemed like my answer mattered, and that was a great comfort.

“What's the rush?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I have a trip to take in the morning. And some things I'd like to say to you.”

This was more than enough to take me out the door and into the waiting taxi. We were silent on the ride over, me glancing nervously at his pensive profile and then out the open windows. The air was heavy and wet; we drove through Central Park, and it seemed to me like we were in a jungle. I could smell the flowers and the leaves, just as much a part of the air of this city as exhaust or manure.

I realized that we were headed to the east side, away from the Ritz.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“I thought it prudent to rent new rooms,” he said, “when I was afraid you might go to trial. And then it seemed like a good idea anyway, circumstances being what they are.”

This sounded ominous. “What sort of trip are you taking?”

“In due time, Zephyr,” he said. I wished, suddenly, that I had drunk more back at Horace's. I was too tipsy to feel in control, and not splifficated enough to feel brave. I longed for him in that desperate, headlong, unthinking way that had always terrified me. I loved him, but I didn't understand him.

The taxi pulled over in front of a building fronting Central Park on Sixty-first Street. A doorman helped me out while Amir paid the driver.

“Eric,” Amir said, when the taxi had driven off, “this is Zephyr Hollis.”

The doorman nodded as though this meant something to him, and held out his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, miss. Just let me know if you need anything. The lift is this way.”

He directed us to the elevator, and we took it to the seventh floor.

“Not the penthouse?” I said, when we stepped into the carpeted hallway. “Such restraint!”

Amir laughed in that way he had, like he hadn't meant to and couldn't quite regret it. “It had already been let,” he said. “They assured me these rooms were equally spacious. But I have it on good authority the building is owned by communists.”

“In that case, I forgive you for being an instrument of capitalist hegemony.”

Amir unlocked a door at the far end of the hallway. “My relief,” he said, “is boundless.”

The furnishing was surprisingly spartan, given my familiarity with Amir's opulent taste. Oak table and chairs in the kitchen, two seats and a coffee table in the parlor, and absolutely nothing in the foyer.

“When were you planning to move in?” I said, frowning.

“I'm not,” he said.

“I thought you said you just let the apartment?”

“Yes. Zephyr … do you think we could sit?”

I felt frightened, for no reason I could articulate. I didn't like his expression. It reminded me of before, when he was dying of vampire poison and he wouldn't tell me. Only he wasn't dying, and I wasn't going to jail, and perhaps I didn't know what had happened to my daddy, but overall, really, things had turned out remarkably well and why did I insist on thinking otherwise?

“Where, Amir?” I said, far too acidly. “The floor?”

“There's a couch in the parlor,” he said mildly. I blushed and followed him to it.

“So what's all this about?” I asked. He sat as far away from me as possible. We had not touched once this evening. I looked at his hands and wondered what it might cost for me to try. “Where are you going?”

“I have to leave tomorrow at dawn,” he said, which I noted did not answer my question. “I'm not sure when I'll be back. Or if.”

“If?” I let out a baffled laugh. “You sound like you're going off to war.”

“Something like that,” he said. He looked almost serene. But all I felt was this horrific certainty that I had been right; that everything would not work out in the end. That the man I had finally admitted I loved now seemed to be leaving me forever.

“What is
something like
a war? If you don't want me just say so, no need to make up such melodrama.”

He had been looking away, but now he whirled on me. His expression was a revelation: a longing as deep and passionate as my own, as rife with self-doubt and blame and as convinced of its own futility. I gasped. Had he always felt this way about me? Had I just ignored what I didn't want to see?

“Zeph.” His voice broke. He wanted me but dared not touch me. The heat of him, that smell I had never been able to forget, reached out across the river separating us. Two feet, a million miles, it was all the same when my eyes met his across an unbridgeable distance. I thought,
Can I trust you? Will you always want me?
But these questions had no answers. So I asked one that did.

“Why did you give the mayor the old Faust?” I asked. The bill had passed just as Judith claimed; the last two hold-out aldermen relented after receiving proof. I couldn't say that the result upset me very much, in the end. Elspeth would find other means to fight. I would back out gracefully. Elspeth had been remarkably kind during our last, awkward conversation. She said it was clear that we could no longer work with each other on this issue, and I didn't deny it. But she had said something else, something that had resonated deeply with my newfound understanding of myself.

“Do not blame him too much for his nature,” she had said. “Or you for yours.”

I knew she was speaking of Amir. And I knew she was right.

But now Amir laughed incredulously. “You tally every mark against me, don't you? And I know I'm swimming against the tide, but I try to earn a few points in that other column, just to offset the matter, just in the general spirit of persuasion, but who am I fooling? Certainly not you,
habibti
. Nothing I do now can come close to equaling the single black mark of Faust. So why did I do it?” He shrugged. “Because you were rotting in a jail cell and no one could get to you and there was a judge with a fair mind to bow to the howling mob outside and ship you to the Ludlow Street jail for the foreseeable future. So I took myself to the mayor's office and encouraged him to send a message to the bench that bail would be acceptable, so long as it was suitably high, and I gave him the bottle and that was that.”

I slipped off my shoes and pulled my knees to my chest. There was too much going on inside; I had to hold it close, or else it might burst.

“A business transaction,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, his eyes black, “or a coward's ploy, though you're too polite to say so. I hadn't the guts to keep you in prison for your own principles, so I violated them to get you out.”

“Amir—”

“But it will be all right,” he said, a cruel parody of my earlier thoughts. “I'll be gone in the morning. I just need to tell you some things before then.”

“But I don't—”

“First,” he said, as though he hadn't heard me. “This apartment is yours. I've leased it in your name, with the whole matter paid up for the next three years. I've arranged for my bank to send you an allowance—”

All of this was entirely astonishing to me, but I couldn't bear to hear his falsely bright, brittle voice any longer. “Amir!”

I stood up in my stockinged feet. Amir put down his hand and looked up at me. I couldn't make out his expression at all, except he smelled like frankincense and that had never been a bad thing before.

“Maybe I haven't entirely forgiven you, or maybe I'm not sure, but for heaven's sake stop arrogating to yourself all the blame for everything that Faust has done. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps Faust would have found its way here no matter what? The man had invented it, after all. What did you think he planned to do, store it in his basement? You saw an opportunity, and you seized on it. Perhaps your opportunity was a thoughtless social experiment, a little joke, a game, but someone else would have heard of this wonder drug. Someone else would have brought it to the city for all the money it could make. You've been hoarding the blame like it's pirate's treasure. Haven't you any humility?”

Amir stared at me. He opened his mouth and closed it. The frankincense smell grew stronger, and an ember seemed to light in his eyes. He started to tremble and I had a moment of fear before I understood that he was laughing.

“Humility,” Amir said. “
Humility
!” He slid from the couch to the floor, so that, to my utter astonishment, he knelt before me. “Zephyr, darling, Zephyr,
habibti, wild spirit which art moving everywhere; destroyer and preserver
—”

“What?” I took his hands.

“Shelley,” Amir said, still laughing.

“First you're off to war and now you're quoting dead Romantics?”

“‘Ode to the West Wind,'” he said, and I felt very warm and very full.

“Why are you laughing?”

“You love me.”

“Didn't I say so!”

Amir took a deep breath, quieted. “Princes are not generally given to humility,” he said, “but I shall endeavor to be an exception.”

His hands felt so warm in mine, so happy and perfect that I knelt down myself. I put one hand against my cheek and felt, through his fingers, how wide I was smiling. “I believe this is the point at which you indicate reciprocal emotion,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Say you love me, you dolt.”

Very carefully, like I was a Fabergé egg he was stealing from a jeweler, Amir took my face between his hands.

“It needs saying?”

“Always, everywhere. Otherwise I'll find means of convincing myself it isn't true.”

“That would be a shame,” he agreed.

“Because it's true?”

He smiled. I kissed him. It took quite a long time, that kiss, and never once did I consider where our noses should go or whether his hands had strayed too low or any of the hundred innumerable things that had run through my mind during other, inadequate kisses. His hands in my hair, mine around his waist. I climbed into his lap, just to get closer.

“Yes,” he said, after we had finished.

I felt groggy with joy, too stupid to remember what I had been saying just five minutes before. “Yes, what?”

“Yes I love you, you dolt.”

*   *   *

It hurt, at first. I hadn't expected it to, given the number of erotic novels Aileen had passed my way over the years. In my naiveté, I'd expected that such advice would overcome the hundred ignorances and confusions involved in conjoining two bodies, however temporarily.

But Amir was a patient and tender lover. He even offered me the use of a condom, though he admitted that there was no chance of a djinn and a human producing a baby. I bravely said I trusted him and he laughed and put it on anyway.

“I don't blame you for doubting me,” he said. “I hope I can earn your trust, if I return,” he said, and I ignored that
if I return
as thoroughly as I had once ignored my love for him.
I will make him stay
was my only thought.

Afterward, we lay together, my head against his shoulder, his arm around my back. I hardly moved and my only thoughts were a lazy, disbelieving joy, a languor that suffused my entire body. Amir stroked my hair with his other hand. I wanted to keep the moment forever, I wanted to tell him I loved him and beg him to never leave, I wanted to plan a hundred things we could do together just tomorrow, but instead I fell asleep.

When I awoke, Amir wasn't in the bed. I sprung upright, in blind panic, but he was seated just a few feet away in a chair facing the window. It was the room's only other piece of furniture.

He turned to me. “I was just going to wake you,” he said. “I have to leave soon.”

“Still? I don't understand. Where could you possibly have to go?”

Amir walked over to the bed. His clothes were strange: white silk pants and a loose top of the same pristine shade. The sort of outfit that Kardal favored.

“I'll make it simple,” he said. “No time for anything else. When Kashkash agreed to release the binding, he told you that you must never bind me again.”

“Yes,” I said. “And I didn't!”

He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. I reached for his hand unthinkingly. “You did. Kashkash is very clever,
habibti
, and not particularly nice. He said you couldn't bind me in thought, word, or deed. Well, that includes bindings other than becoming a vessel. He understood quite well that you couldn't help binding me.”