by Sarah Zettel
I watched him for a while, but he wasn’t watching me anymore. For the first time in our acquaintance, Oscar Simmons had dismissed me—and not just a little, but absolutely, the way you dismiss someone you’ve beaten.
Except I had no idea what game I’d just lost.
The uneasy ripple up my spine came back, and it brought friends.
6
Somewhere, a phone was ringing.
I dragged the covers off my face and, on reflex, tried to shove the hair out of my eyes. My bedside clock read nine twenty, which is in fact way-the-hell too early when you remembered I hadn’t gotten to bed until five in the morning. Out in the living room, I could hear Jessie, my number one roommate, singing about bad romance.
I flopped backward and stuffed my head under the pillow.
My phone rang again. I lifted the pillow and glared at it. Jessie switched from bad romance to putting rings on it. The phone rang again. This had to be Felicity. I punched up the screen, ready to read her the riot act.
“I’m sorry,” said a male voice while I was still drawing breath.
“Brendan.” I was going to have to assign him a ring tone. Except every time I thought about it, it felt too much like making some kind of commitment.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I slumped back against the wall and tried to push my too-short hair out of my eyes yet again.
“I’m sorry for not coming by last night after your shift, even though we really need to talk, and for calling so early in your personal morning now. Anything I forgot?”
“That’ll do for now. What’s going on?”
“I’m downstairs.”
I lifted the blind with one finger and peered out. A familiar figure stood beside the half wall that ringed my building’s courtyard, waving his cell phone in the air, as if he knew I’d peek, which he probably did. I’m nothing if not predictable.
“You are not expecting me to invite you up for breakfast,” I said into the cell phone, just to make sure Brendan understood making me wake up before eleven o’clock was a definite relationship misdemeanor.
“I brought dosas.” Down below, Brendan pointed to the white bag and a cardboard beverage tray on the wall beside him. “And coffee.”
“Jessie!” I hollered toward the living room. “Hit the buzzer!”
I hung up on the sound of Brendan’s chuckling.
Fortunately, my other roommate, Trish the Lawyer, had headed out to her office hours ago. This left the bathroom clear so I would be able to meet Brendan both looking and smelling civilized. I came into the dining room, wearing my usual off-duty combination of faded jeans and plain T-shirt (red today) with my hair slicked back under a red headband as a compromise between aesthetics and speed. Brendan moved around our dining nook. He, of course, looked edible, and would have even if he hadn’t been setting out plates for the spicy Indian crêpes he’d brought.
“You are forgiven,” I said loftily as I sat down and peeled back the lid on a very large cup of coffee.
“You may want to hold up on the forgiveness”—Brendan forked a dosa onto my plate—“at least until after we eat.”
I eyed him with what was not entirely feigned trepidation as I handed across a napkin. “So, is this a bribe, or the breakup meal?”
“You’re breaking up?” Jessie ducked her head out of her bedroom. “What’d she do?”
I should have known. Jessie’s gossip radar was second to none. “You were just leaving, weren’t you, Jess?” I frowned hard at my roommate as she emerged from the hallway.
“Not if Brendan’s breaking up with you.” She plopped herself down in the third chair. As usual, Jessie VanReebeck was immaculately groomed. Her heart-shaped face was spectacularly made up, and her floral-print swing dress perfectly matched her strappy sandals and dangling earrings. Jessie possessed this uncanny ability to look fun, approachable, and professional at the same time, and I tried not to resent her for it.
“Why are you breaking up with her?” She fixed Brendan with a surprisingly steely glower.
“Because I’m carrying Mayor Thornton’s love child.”
I snarfed a hot gulp of coffee. Jessie blinked, and Brendan lifted his soulful, apologetic gaze to her without cracking even a hairline of a grin. Not to be deterred, Jessie scooted her chair around to face me. “Why’s he breaking up with you?”
“There’s nothing to break up.” But as I said this, my heart gave a strange and not entirely comfortable squeeze. I craned my neck so I could see past Jessie to Brendan. “You’re not breaking up with me, are you?”
“I am not breaking up with you. I promise.” That knee-weakening smile worked even better when he turned it on soft and low.
“There,” I said to Jessie. “You can go now.”
“Actually…”
“You can go now.” I reminded her in my best being-slow- is-hazardous-to-your-health voice. Jessie, unfortunately, had been exposed to this voice enough that she was beginning to develop a tolerance. But then, it always did work better on people I could fire and to whom I did not owe rent money.
With a look intended to make me aware of the extent of her magnanimity, Jessie got to her feet and made her way to the front door, pausing only to collect her tiny handbag and large makeup case. If someone can pointedly close a door behind herself, she did.
Brendan arched his eyebrows.
“She’ll try to make me tell her everything later,” I warned him.
“Duly noted.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, occupying ourselves with the simple business of enjoying breakfast and each other’s company.
“So,” I said when the edge had been taken off both my hunger and the caffeine jones. “Did you manage to get anything out of your aunt Adrienne?”
“Not much.” Brendan scooted a bit of crêpe on his plate to the right and then the left. This was something he did when he was thinking hard. It drove me mildly nuts, but I was learning to live with it. “She apologized for all of this happening now, when we’re already in the news with the city contract. She said that she really had no choice and that Deanna had been utterly determined to have things her own way. Resisting or forbidding would just make her take her tantrum out into the wider world. It was better, she said, to go along so that as many details as possible could be kept strictly in the family.”
“Is this a wedding or a political campaign?”
“With us, it can be kind of hard to tell.”
“Did she say anything about why I’m the one who got tagged as Oscar’s replacement?”
“Not really. She just said when she checked the list of possibilities Felicity came up with, you were the best available.”
Which was nice to hear, but somehow in the light of Oscar’s enigmatic snarking, I didn’t quite believe it. I turned the paper cup in my fingers around a few times, wishing there was yet more coffee in it. “Did your aunt happen to say anything about sister Karina dating Oscar Simmons?”
Brendan’s fork froze midscoot. “Karina’s dating Simmons?”
This I took to be a “no.” I told Brendan about my encounter with Oscar last night.
Brendan pushed his plate away. “Oy.”
“Yeah. And she’s ticked off somebody in the family enough that they’re willing to pay for a smear campaign.”
“I’d put my money on Deanna for that one. They both have their PhD’s in sibling rivalry.”
I thought about bubbly, bright, breathless Deanna. I could see how she might make you crazy. Not that I personally once ever resented my own sibling for being a handsome star athlete or anything.
“So, what’s Karina like?” I asked.
Brendan just shook his head. “I never really got to know her. There’s already a divide between those of us who lived full-time on the estate and those who didn’t, but it’s even bigger between the kids with magic and the ones without.”
“Karina’s not a witch?”
“Nope. Sh
e’s a T-typ.” That’s short for “thauma-typical,” the technical term for someone who is not a witch, or a werewolf, or undead, or otherwise inherently magical.
“A T-typ with Maddox relations. That can’t be easy.”
“It’s not.”
“Your grandfather must be having kittens about this.”
Brendan grimaced. “Saber-toothed tigers, more like.”
“I’m surprised he hasn’t been on the talk shows with it.” Lloyd Maddox had no problems taking the Maddoxes’ private fights public. He had a huge repertoire of speeches about the degradation to the culture, the nation, and the human race itself caused by the Equal Humanity Acts, and he tended to pepper them with personal examples.
“Aunt Adrienne won’t let him.” Brendan smiled grimly.
This merited a double-eyebrow lift. “There’s somebody who can keep your grandfather quiet on the subject of vampires?”
“Oh, Aunt Adrienne’s special. She holds the Popeth Arall.”
“Gesundheit.”
“Ha-ha,” Brendan grumbled, and took a last swallow of coffee. “The Arall’s a piece of the family’s power, and it’s passed down the female line. The name comes from a Welsh phrase for ‘in the last resort.’”
As the Maddoxes were one of the great vampire-hunting clans, I assumed this Popeth Arall was an antivampire weapon of some kind from back in the days when that kind of thing was so invisible, most people didn’t believe in either witches or vamps. I thought about all the antiques neatly displayed on the mantelpiece in the living room. Could they be magical as well as old?
“And…?” I prompted Brendan.
“And traditionally the secret of the Arall is passed on when the oldest daughter of the current guardian gets married.”
Understanding pulled a few levers in the back of my mind, and my face fell.
Brendan nodded. “When Deanna marries Gabriel Renault, she comes into possession of some ancient, dangerous magic at the heart of the Maddox family power.”
As little as I liked being able to sympathize with a man who spent his political capital trying to make it legal to put my clientele—and my brother—to the stake, I found it surprisingly understandable why Lloyd Maddox might be just a teensy bit upset by this turn of events.
I took a deep breath. Then I took pride and nerves in both hands and shoved them behind me. “Brendan, do you think I should get out of this?”
Brendan took a long time answering. They were careful on all the big questions, these Maddoxes. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “On the way here, I kept trying to make up my mind…and now with this thing with Oscar and Karina…I just don’t know. It’s really up to you.”
“Well that’s all very dull and straightforward of you.”
“I’m a dull and straightforward kind of guy. It’s part of my charm.”
“You have no idea.”
Brendan smiled. His gorgeous eyes filled with hope, confidence, and something more—trust. Brendan trusted me to make a good decision, not just the one he wanted, but a good one. Whatever it was, he’d back me on it.
That shook me straight down to my toenails. I’m used to being in charge. I’m used to being both competent and confident. What I am not used to is being trusted, not really. Not by people who matter to me.
I took a deep breath, and, of course, my phone rang.
Fortunately, Brendan was also used to my acutely honed swearing abilities and was profoundly unshocked when I unleashed them now. I grabbed my phone and stabbed the ANSWER button.
“Oh my gahd, Charlotte!” cried the voice on the other end of my phone before I could let on exactly what I thought of this bit of timing. “Why didn’t you tell me? You know I’m your first call!”
“Elaine?” Elaine West had been the publicist for me and Nightlife for three years now, and she knew darned well not to go incoherent on me before noon. “What are you talking about?”
Elaine did not seem to hear me. “It’s all over FlashNews and the society blogs how you replaced Oscar Simmons for the Alden-Renault wedding. How am I supposed to handle your PR if you don’t tell me when you make the news?”
“It’s out already?” Note to self: Find out who invented FlashNews, Twitter, and every other form of social media and fillet them, slowly.
“I must have had fifty calls already asking for quotes.”
“I was going to call you right after breakfast,” I lied. “But…”
“No time,” Elaine snapped. “The vultures are going to be descending any second. Is your fax on? I’ve got some draft statements here about how sorry you are about Oscar’s death and what a…”
“Wait. Hold it! Time out! Burner off! What?”
Elaine paused. The pause stretched. Brendan was on his feet and coming around to stand beside me so he could hear, if she ever decided to start talking again.
She did. “Oh, Charlotte. I’m sorry. I assumed someone would have called you right away. Oscar Simmons is dead.”
7
“Oscar’s dead?” I had heard what Elaine said. Her statement repeated itself, word for word, inside my brain. But I couldn’t understand it. It made no sense whatsoever.
“They say it must have been a massive stroke. He was found in his office during lunch prep.”
“But, I just talked to him. Last night. This morning. He looked fine.” It was a completely stupid thing to say, but I seemed to be cut off from my own rational thought processes.
I pushed Elaine for details, but she stubbornly insisted she had none and went back to trying to pound it into my reluctant brain that she was faxing me some statements for my approval. I hung up on her. Then I hung on to Brendan for a long time.
There’s a deeply awkward feeling that comes from hearing about the death of somebody you don’t like. You don’t want to be glad, and you’re probably not, but at the same time, you feel you should be more upset than you are. After all, that individual was somebody, and now he’s not.
Brendan rested his chin on the top of my head. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I’ve got to get into Nightlife,” I answered, which was true as far as it went. “We’re supposed to be meeting about the wedding catering today, and this could make things…awkward.”
“And they’re sure it was a stroke?” he asked. He was thinking about last year, and the last body that had crossed my path. I knew he was, because I was too.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I really, really don’t want to go there.”
“Okay.” He kissed the top of my head, but I was sure he was already going through his mental Rolodex, deciding which of his connections he could pump for information. Brendan was the dependable type.
“You want a lift into work?” he asked.
“Yeah, thanks.” I mustered a smile and went into my bedroom to get my purse. I scrubbed at my face a little and noticed how my cheeks had stayed bone dry. There was something wrong with that. A man was dead. No matter what I’d thought of him, that was worth some sign of grief, wasn’t it?
That was yet another question I had no answer to.
While Brendan navigated city traffic with a skill that was the envy of many a cab driver, I called Felicity. If she hadn’t gotten the news about Oscar’s death, she needed it. If she had, I wanted any extra details she might have in hand. Unfortunately, my call was the first she’d heard about it. Fortunately, she was less frantic than I had expected. The only real tension came when she asked me for the third time to confirm that yes, I was still on the job, and yes, I was on my way to coordinate with my team at Nightlife about how we’d handle the catering schedule. Yes, really. Right now. In fact, I was pretty sure we’d just violated a couple of minor traffic laws in that last intersection to get there thirty seconds sooner.
Brendan very pointedly slowed down to something that might be considered a crawl, if you were the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote was after you.
He did get me to Nightlife, however, and in one piece. When I walked into t
he dining room, I found Marie, Reese, and Zoe had commandeered a six-top. Marie’s cake samples sat in the center, surrounded by shift charts, staff lists, and a whole bunch of open notebooks. It felt like walking into the restaurant version of the Situation Room.
Or at least it did until I noticed that everybody was looking at something other than me. Marie was looking at Zoe. Zoe was looking at a set of pages covered with notes and sketches. Reese was looking at the kitchen door as though thinking of making an abrupt exit. That was strange, because Reese was at first glance the most imposing person in that room. He has a linebacker’s build, rich brown skin, cornrowed hair and the words EAT THIS tattooed on his knuckles. He swears the ink is the result of losing a bar bet, but he won’t tell me what that bet actually was. I throw him the hard cases who come into the kitchen; the ones who think they know more than they actually do, or who might once in a while consider it beneath their dignity to take orders from a woman.
“What?” I asked as I sat down and pulled out my notebooks.
“Nothing,” said Zoe. “We need a list of scheduled events for Alden week, and how many people are you going to need out of the kitchen?”
“Alden week?” I looked at Reese. Reese looked at Zoe. “What?” I said to Reese.
“Nothing,” he said so casually, I was tempted to believe him.
I looked at Marie. The Cakeinator looked back at me over the rims of her glasses, daring me to ask her what as well. I decided to drop back and punt.
“So, I take it you’ve all heard Oscar Simmons is dead?” I tried.
“What?” Seeing a look of complete shock on the faces of three people who’d been trying to put something over on you a minute before was one of life’s little pleasures. It also told me that whatever subject they were avoiding, it was not the abrupt demise of a celebrity chef.
As if I needed more orphaned mysteries crowding around my door.
