A Taste of the Nightlife (25 page)

“
Probably
legal?”

“Beats definitely illegal,” he countered. “Look, you’ve been talking to Taylor Watts, haven’t you? What Taylor caught me and Marcus talking about was filtering money
into
the account, not taking it out. There was no way he was going to believe that, and I couldn’t tell you—” He stopped when he saw my disapproval and started again. “I didn’t
think
I could tell you, so I figured I’d pay him off while I got everything sorted out. I got him the job at Post Mortem because I didn’t trust him and thought Bert Shelby could keep an eye on him.”

“And what about my menu? When I stopped by Post Mortem the other night I couldn’t help but notice how they’ve ripped mine off, ingredient for ingredient.”

“Charlotte, I swear on my own grave I did not sell him your menu. I’m an idiot, but I wouldn’t do that to you. Taylor probably sold it to him because he was pissed about being fired.”

I didn’t know where I was anymore. I didn’t dare stop to look for an address or landmark. I had a hoard of nightmares behind me. If I broke stride, they’d catch up.

“So you have been blood running out of Nightlife,” I said slowly. “And that’s where this money’s been coming from.”

“No. This is not blood running. It’s not even close—and none of our product goes through Nightlife.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me what you’re doing?” I shouted.

Chet stopped in his tracks and turned to face me. He was completely white and his dry eyes didn’t even flicker as he loomed over me. “What’s the real problem here, Charlotte?” he demanded, and I felt the question hammer against my brain. “Is it that I might actually have an existence without you? Or is it just because I didn’t ask your permission to go get an afterlife?”

“You’re in the middle of a of blood scam with a girlfriend that you won’t even tell me about—”

“Because you have this great history of letting me manage my own relationships!”

“This isn’t about that!”

“Of course it’s not! This is about you finding out that maybe I don’t
need
you! No, sorry. That’s not it either. It’s about you finding out
you
might need
me
!”

My hand swung out toward his cheek and the world blurred. Pain reverberated up to my shoulder like I’d struck an iron bar. My brother had hold of my wrist, and I couldn’t have shifted his grip any more than I could have picked up a crosstown bus.

“No more, Charlotte,” Chet said, and I saw his fangs flash in the streetlight. “Not now. Not ever.”

My eyes locked with his, and he held nothing back. Chet pushed hard against my mind, willing his way inside, willing me to give in, to believe, to obey. My wrist felt like glass in his hand. He could snap it in two if I didn’t obey. This wasn’t my brother. This was the nightblood, the vampire. My brother was dead and gone, and I was the one who’d killed him.

“Charlotte?” Chet whispered, and his grip loosened just enough for me to pull away. The blood had run out of my face and my heart was racing a mile a minute. I backed up until I stumbled against a parked car. I had to get away. I had to.

Chet stood there for a moment, his hand held exactly in the same position as when he’d grabbed me.

Then he took two steps back, turned, and ran away into the dark.

19

Things got kind of disjointed for a while after that. I made it home somehow. I remember my phone ringing in a shifting stream of discordant tones until I shut it off and threw it against the wall. I remember telling Trish and Jess to leave me alone four or five times each before they finally took me seriously. I remember standing at the kitchen counter and crumbling farmhouse Cheddar into little pieces. Somewhere in there, there was also a certain amount of curling up into a tight little ball and sobbing myself sick.

Eventually, however, my brain got tired of the hysterical shtick and came back home—bleary-eyed, shamefaced and wanting to know if there was any coffee left. I forgave it and made the coffee. I melted cheese crumbs onto a piece of toast and ate that with an apple and some slices of prosciutto. I took a shower and put on clean clothes. By then it was ten a.m. and I went to work.

I know this sounds either utterly cold or utterly ridiculous. But for me it was an affirmation. I had to believe there would be a way out of this mess, for me and for Chet. Because I had to believe that, I also had to be sure there was something for us both to find our way out to. If I didn’t get Nightlife back up and running, that something wouldn’t be there.

Besides, if I kept busy, I wouldn’t have to think about Chet’s hand around my wrist, or the fear I’d felt when he looked down at me on that dark and empty street.

So I worked. First it was two solid hours of sweet-talking suppliers. We couldn’t open without food, and we had no food. We also, despite what Chet claimed to have been doing, had no money. The amount of tap dancing I did around that little tidbit could have gotten me the lead in the Broadway revival of
A Chorus Line
.

Then I sat down with Robert and Suchai and the schedule pad to hash out the front-of-the-house situation. We had just enough hands to make it through a Saturday rush, if it was a light one. Suchai knew some experienced servers who might be looking to pick up some extra cash, and I told him to call them. Then it was the PR hour with Elaine West. We needed to let people know we’d opened again, but not too many, in case we stumbled coming out of the gate. To my surprise, she agreed that Saturday should be a kind of test opening and we held our announcements down to just the old Internet—she would reach out to a couple well-known foodie bloggers and big mouths.

Zoe and Reese, my sous chefs, and Marie-Our-Pastry-Chef showed up right on time at four p.m. Then came the time I needed more than I needed food or sleep or even answers.

We went into the kitchen and we started to plan the menu. We’d make it simple—keep the best sellers, like the pumpkin soup and the carpaccio, but switch up things around the edges. Anatole had complimented the lamb-and-rosemary combination; we could work that up pretty easily. We could add my warm pomegranate salad as well. Zoe sketched out an idea for what she called a night-and-day duck tasting. Reese thought the emergency blood-sausage-and-pasta dish that we’d made to help clean out the walk-in had legs, especially with winter coming, and I told him to run with it. Marie had an orange-hazelnut milk shake she wanted to try for the dessert menu, and I had to agree when she said now was the time to add in that Mexican drinking chocolate we’d been talking about, in a formula that could be spiked with booze or blood, depending on the guest.

It was a marathon. Possibilities started getting inside us and opening up the hope we’d all been keeping on ice. It was like the time before we opened all over again, when everything was new and anything could happen. Arguments broke out and had to be settled by a trip to the market to bring back fresh product so that the experiments could be cooked up and tasted, and dissected and tasted again.

Sometime after midnight, we sent out for Chinese food. The plum sauce gave Zoe some new thoughts for her duck tasting. Marie considered kumquats as milk shake flavoring, while I sketched out plating designs in the battered notebook that had languished in my desk drawer since the disasters started. It felt so much like my normal life I found myself having to bend low over my carton of noodles with cloud ear mushrooms and sugar snap peas to hide the way my eyes were leaking around the edges. I kept eating and talking and sketching, because I didn’t want to stop to think about how the sun had gone down outside. Chet would be awake by now, and he wasn’t calling. It was okay, I told myself. If Chet was still too pissed to talk to me, I was still way the hell too pissed to talk to him.

Because he was wrong. Beginning to end, top to bottom. The fact that he was involved in something so huge and massively screwed up that it created at least one dead body and he
still
couldn’t tell me about it was proof positive exactly how wrong he was.

“Chef?” Marie had been out to the bar to get a bottle of cognac and now she pushed through the swinging doors.

“Oommpk?” I asked, caught in inelegant midslurp of some very long, very good braised noodles.

“Somebody out front asking to see you.” She handed me a business card. I swallowed, and took it.

The name on the card was Anatole Sevarin.

He couldn’t just text me like a normal person? No, of course not.
I wiped my mouth and tossed my napkin on the desk. “I’ll be right back.”

Anatole waited beside the host station, looking as cool and immaculate as if last night had never happened.

“Good evening, Chef Caine. I’m glad to see you made it home all right.”

“Me too, to tell you the truth.” Which was the sum total of my available pleasantries. “Has something happened?”

“You mean something new? No. But as it has become clear that you will not be leaving before the early hours, I thought I would extend an offer to see you home.”

I stood there for a while, rearranging those words into an order that made sense. “You’ve been watching the door?” No, not quite right. “You’ve been watching
me
?”

“Between the Maddoxes, Ilona and the fact that you have not yet called Detective O’Grady, I feel I was perfectly justified in my actions.”

“How did you know I didn’t call O’Grady?”

“Because if you had, you would not currently be holding staff meetings in your kitchen.”

Score one for the vampire detective. “Are you going to call him?” I asked.

“Are you?”

I bit my lip and glanced toward the bar. For obvious reasons, we don’t keep a mirror there, just glass shelves full of imported liquors, waiting for the thirsty and the curious. “Not yet,” I said.

“How long are you going to ask for this time?”

That cut, deep and clean. “I don’t know.” If I called O’Grady we wouldn’t have our opening. I’d have to tell him all about Chet, and the accounts, and Margot’s million dollars. This last shouldn’t have bothered me, because of course I wasn’t going to take it. I’d already decided that, because I was going through with the Nightlife reopening. Right?

But then, I hadn’t called the number on her card and told her absolutely no yet either. Of course, I hadn’t dumped that blood down the drain yet either. I was keeping my head down, thinking about food, pretending I’d already gotten past the disasters and the nightmares. I jammed my hands into my pockets. Unfortunately, as a strategy, my putting a fine dice on denial was not making things any less messed up.

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced toward the kitchen door just in time to see somebody duck away from the portal. Probably Marie. It occurred to me that the last thing I wanted was for my staff to overhear this particular conversation.

“Perhaps we should continue this on the way home?” suggested Anatole.

“Yeah.” My shoulders slumped under the weight of the inevitable. “Perhaps we should.”

It went against the grain to go home while my sous chefs were still working, but I hung up my kitchen whites, collected purse and jacket and headed out, with Anatole Sevarin right behind me.

“Shall we walk?” he asked as we stepped onto the pavement.

I shivered, but nodded. The air was damp and the sky clouded over, the particular pale gray of city clouds reflecting the lights back down on us. It was going to rain soon, but right now the fresh air would feel good.

Anatole held out his arm. I held out my best “you’ve got to be kidding me” look. He shrugged and started up the street. We strolled along for a few blocks, ignoring the passersby and being ignored. Nothing to see here. Move along, city. It felt surprisingly soothing.

But silence isn’t my natural mode, and slowly the press of questions in my head was too much to ignore.

“So, that thing Ilona said . . .” Not the best opening, but it was all I had. “ ‘You could be a king of our kind’?”

“Ilona, in case you had not noticed, is a little dramatic.”

“I did notice, yeah, but king?”

“How to explain?” Anatole pursed his lips. I would have bet my neaycheck (which would probably be nonexistent after we paid off our suppliers) that he already knew exactly how to explain, but Anatole did like his little show. “Dayblood culture is obsessed with youth and beauty. These things are equated with power and wealth. They are to be sacrificed for, worshipped, and extolled in story and song.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re shallow.”

The corner of Anatole’s mouth curled up briefly. “As are we. But where daybloods worship youth, nightbloods worship age. Age is all the things to us that youth is to you. And I—as I believe I have mentioned—am very old.”

“How old?”

“My first master was Ivan the Terrible.”

He had to be joking, but he just looked down at me with that all-too-familiar raised-eyebrow challenge, waiting for me to try to make him deny it.

“Wow,” I said.

Anatole shrugged.

“But why an obsession about age? You’re immortal.”

“We have the potential to be immortal,” he corrected me. “The truth of the matter is that most of us have a shorter existence than you do.”