A Taste of the Nightlife

by Sarah Zettel

  Unfortunately, my blossoming hopes of holding reality at bay for the length of one intimate, delicious dinner were dashed in short order. First Trish called, demanding to know where the hell I was and what the hell had happened to me. When she responded loudly to my mention of the Ritz, Jessie ripped the phone from her hand and said they had to come over right now, so I wouldn’t be alone. It took five minutes of wrangling to convince Roomies One and Two that this would be a bad idea, because where they went, the FlashNews mob was sure to follow.

  Then it was time for the second tail Brendan had on Margot and Ian to check in. The other Maddoxes were still in their hotel, and should he stay put? The answer was yes.

  Then it was Elaine West, demanding to know where I was and what the hell had happened and telling me we had to talk first thing in order to work out how to spin this, and she could come to the Ritz straightaway for a confab, and oh, she was sending me her bill for overtime.

  Then it was another of Brendan’s people. Then it was Suchai. Then it was Marie.

  But by the time we got to the chocolate-hazelnut gâteau with candied citrus peel, raspberry sauce and bittersweet chocolate curls, I found myself thinking about one of the people we hadn’t heard from. A new knot of worry tightened in the back of my neck.

  “Maybe I should call Anatole,” I said carefully. I still wasn’t entirely sure how Brendan and Anatole felt about each other, especially after the huge mess at Ilona’s theater. Especially now that Brendan and I had kissed. “He was with me when I found out Chet had taken off.” I said this to the dessert plate. “I should let him know what’s going on.”

  “I called him from the courthouse.” This was another surprise and it jerked my gaze back up to see Brendan checking his phone again. “No message yet.”

  “Is this the part where you say, ‘He’s a big vampire, I’m sure he’s fine’?” I asked, one hand already on my phone.

  “No. You should try calling.”

  I thumbed my way through my contact list until I found Anatole’s number and put the phone on speaker. It rang only once before the voice mail answered. “This is Anatole Sevarin. I regret that I cannot speak with you at this moment. If you would be so kind as to leave your message and contact information, I will return your call as soon as it becomes possible.”

  “The man’s physiologically incapable of constructing a short sentence,” I muttered. “Anatole, it’s Charlotte. Call as soon as you get this.”

  I hung up and bit my lower lip. That the call went straight to voice mail didn’t mean anything. Anatole could be on the other line, or maybe his battery had died, or he was in a dead zone. He’d call back in a minute.

  My excellent meal sat heavily in my stomach.

  “I’m overreacting, right?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Brendan thumbed his own phone again. “Keith? I need a confirmation on your targets.”

  “You don’t think . . .”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m checking. Yeah, Keith, I’m still here. . . . Yeah? . . . Did you check the trip wire? Okay. Stay sharp.” Brendan hung up, but he didn’t meet my eyes. Instead, he stared out across the black pool of Central Park. I looked at the crumbs and the bones on our plates, the half-empty wineglasses and the disarray of the rolls and crispy breadsticks. I felt the silk sliding against my skin and my scarlet-tipped toes digging into the thick carpet. Chet was not the only idiot in the family. I was an idiot too. A completely selfish idiot. While I’d been wasting time getting the star treatment, the rest of my life was still headed on the fast track to the drain.

  I shoved my chair back. “I can’t stay here. We’ve got to find Chet and find out what he’s got on Pam and whoever she’s running around with.” How many spas could there be in the Connecticut phone book? We had the number. We should be able to backtrack—unless of course that was Marcus the Nebbish’s number. . . .

  Brendan sighed and looked at the remains of dinner, and I could tell he was missing all the things we hadn’t had a chance to get around to. “I think I can help you narrow down where he is,” he said.

  “You’ve got a tail on him too?”

  “I wish, but no. We’re going to have to try magic.” The prospect of showing off that aspect of his abilities did not seem to please him, which surprised me a little. Who wouldn’t want to whammy their way through life?

  “Let me see what I can MacGyver up here.” Brendan glanced around the room. “And we’re going to need Chet’s cell phone.”

  “Because I would not believe the kinds of paranormal things that can be done with a cell phone.”

  His quick smile did not reach his eyes. “We used to do this kind of thing with mirrors, but if you can get the person’s cell phone it works a lot better. It’s the phone’s nature to reach other people. In fact, with you here, that sympathy will be reinforced, because your brother calls you a lot. I should be able to get a good connection.”

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything.” I gave him the phone.

  While Brendan rummaged around the room, I stayed quiet and focused my energies on not obsessively checking my own phone to see if Anatole or Chet had sent a text. Brendan, in the meantime, got the sash off the complimentary bathrobe and pulled a pen and notepad from the desk drawer. He unscrewed the top on the salt shaker and poured a neat white circle on the floor around the dining room table. Housekeeping was going to love that. Finally, he cleared a space on the tablecloth and set both candles in it.

  “I need your hand.”

  I extended my hand between the candlesticks. Brendan laid Chet’s cell in my palm. He wrapped the sash around my wrist, then looped it around the top and bottom of the phone and tied the cell to my hand in a loose but complex knot. And yes, being tied up by Brendan did make my brain go all sorts of new and inappropriate places.

  “You can find Chet with a cell phone, but you can’t find Cousin Pamela?” I said, mostly to distract myself.

  “Pamela’s a witch. Not a very powerful one now that she’s separated from the family, but she is still a witch.”

  Brendan laid his palm over the phone and my hand. “No matter what you see next, Charlotte, I need you to keep quiet until we’ve got the connection, okay?”

  I nodded. Brendan gazed into the candle flame and began to whisper. I couldn’t make out any of the words, but I could feel a new warmth rising between us that had nothing to do with intimacy or candles. It was good he gave me warning to keep quiet, because what he did next was wrap his hand around the candle flame.

  I heard the sizzle. I smelled the smoke. Brendan didn’t even flinch, and he never stopped whispering. His eyes became unfocused and he stared into the distance, holding the fire, holding the cell phone, and me. But whatever he saw, it wasn’t me, or anything else in that room. Slowly, he uncurled his fist from the candle flame. Hot prickles ran across my skin like a spatter of warm oil. That hand drifted slowly down to pick up the pen and hold it poised over the pad. I felt something pushing, and then something pulling, and then something snapped into place. Brendan did not glance down, or even blink. He did scribble something, in big, loopy cursive letters.

  “Got it.” Brendan lifted his hand off mine and pushed the paper toward me. The address was in Hartford.

  “What time is it? I’m going out there.” I tried to picture the Metro North train schedule. Unfortunately, I never went to Connecticut. Unlike Chet, I never found the time. I reached for the knot tying me to the cell phone, but Brendan touched my hand.

  “It’s almost ten.”

  “There’s ot to be another train.” I had totally screwed this up. I’d let myself be lulled by the prospect of being a guest for once. I’d thought for a second someone else could take care of me.

  “Charlotte, you’ve had no sleep and you’ve just gotten out on bail.”

  “Your point?” I picked the knot on the sash loose and yanked off the sash. The phone went cold and the candle winked out. Brendan winced. Probably I’d just broken some sympathetic
bond or something. I’d apologize later.

  Brendan grabbed my hand. “Wait until tomorrow.”

  “We don’t have until tomorrow. By tomorrow whoever killed Dylan Maddox could have caught up with him.” If we’d found this spa, they could. If they didn’t already know about it. I mean, it didn’t seem to be a secret from anybody else, did it? Ilona knew, and their partner, and a whole bunch of investors and guests. . . .

  Brendan said nothing, but I heard his question anyway. “I’m not calling O’Grady. Chet’ll just run again.”

  “Yeah, but you won’t be blamed for anything when he does.”

  I had no answer to that. I just needed my purse, my clothes—my real clothes—and my shoes. I had to get out there and drag my stupid, thoughtless brother home before he did anything else to bring himself closer to getting killed.

  “Charlotte, when are you going to stop protecting Chet?”

  “I’m responsible for him.” The room phone had about a billion specialty buttons and I couldn’t find which one was for the laundry.

  “Why?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Not good enough,” said Brendan. “He’s lying to you, he’s run out on you, he’s gotten you arrested, and you’re still covering for him. This is way beyond ‘He’s my brother.’”

  Coming from the man who had people following his sister around to make sure she didn’t go ninja on the nightblood population again, that was just too much.

  “It’s also none of your business.”

  “Still not good enough.”

  Who the hell did this guy think he was? What did he think he knew about me and Chet? He didn’t know jack. He had no business asking. I drew myself up, fury building to Saturday night dinner rush levels. My line cooks would have all been backing up by now. Brendan just stood where he was, arms folded, radiating patience. In that instant I knew that even if I yelled myself hoarse, he’d just keep standing there. I couldn’t frighten him, and he clearly didn’t think I could shock him.

  What if I did tell him what really happened? What would he think of me then? Maybe I should do it. Maybe after he knew the whole story, he’d give up this insane idea that he could take care of me. That’d be good. He could just walk away before one of us really did something stupid.

  The problem was, even though I opened my mouth, I had no idea where to begin. I’d never told this story. There had never been anybody I could even consider telling.

  “My parents live in Arizona,” I said.

  “You told me that.”

  “They moved there after Chet was . . . turned. It was my father’s idea. And you were right. He wanted to go someplace really sunny. And Mom wouldn’t leave Dad, so she went I see them at Christmas. Chet e-mails Mom.” At least, I thought he did. “Anyway, before they left, Mom said to me, ‘You have to look after him now.’ ”

  “Why you?”

  “There’s no one else.” That wasn’t what I wanted to say. That had nothing to do with it. Well, a little to do with it. But this wasn’t the important part, the part I hadn’t been able to tell Anatole, or anyone else.

  “Why can’t Chet take care of himself?”

  I scrubbed my hands across my face. The words had all jammed together inside my brain, and I couldn’t move any of them.

  “Charlotte . . . how was Chet turned?”

  A few words fell out of the brain jam. They weren’t the right ones yet, but they were a start.

  “We grew up in Buffalo. I was the strange one. Chet was the athletic one.”

  “Football or hockey?”

  I almost smiled. Those were the only two sports that meant anything on that side of the state. “Football. High school champion and Hollywood-level handsome. By the time he was seventeen, he was king of the world. Colleges were lining up to recruit him.” Memories tumbled over each other; of misty autumn drizzle cold against my cheeks; the smells of charcoal and roasting peppers from my king-sized hibachi; the harsh glare of the fluorescents next to the open side of the rust-bucket Vanagon I’d bought for five hundred bucks. I sold sandwiches, bratwursts and pocket pies out of that van during the games, and listened to the crowd shouting my brother’s name. “Have you ever . . . have you ever seen what happens to a topflight athlete when it’s time to go to college?”

  “I’ve heard stories.”

  “They’re all true. I was living at home then, saving my money for culinary school. When the recruiters came . . . it was crazy.” All those bluff, hardy men sitting in the living room, with their beefy hands and their ties in the school colors, talking about the excellence of their universities’ academics, all the while checking out Chet like they’d check out some chick in a bar, wondering how he’d perform once they got their hands on him. “The money was just the start of it. They’d take us to campus and keep me and my parents busy with the tours and shopping and stuff, while they took him over to ‘take a look at the facilities,’ and ‘meet the players.’”

  “Parties?” asked Brendan.

  I nodded. “And girls. And booze, and pot. I smelled it on him.” My hands shook like they didn’t want to let go of all this truth. “I tried to say something. I swear to God, I tried. But my parents wouldn’t listen. They thought I was jealous because my brother was actually going to be successful instead of working in a diner. I tried to talk to Chet, but what could I say? Everything he’d ever wanted was being handed to him, and he knew he was king of the world, so of course he could handle it.”

  “And he met his nightblood sire at one of the parties?”

  “Melody Linkowski.” Tall enough to look down on me, she had that flat, willowy build that looked good in spaghetti-strap dresses with swishy ruffled skirts. Her chestnut hair curled into long ringlets around her skinny white shoulders, and her coffee brown eyes hadn’t had time to grow old yet.

  “She was all of sixteen when she turned. She cruised the campus parties, looking for meals. There were so many girls at the football parties, wo’d notice one more? Chet charmed her. He could always charm anybody, even Dad. And she . . . He told me she’d decided they were soul mates. He laughed about it.” My words faltered. “She was a sixteen-year-old vampire girl. She thought she’d find a human to be her true love, just like . . .” Just like in that stupid, stupid movie.

  “When did you find out Chet was feeding her?”

  We were getting closer.

  “I saw the bite marks. Chet decided to go to SUNY Buffalo, and she came up from Alabama to be with him. She started sharing blood with him during his freshman year, and of course he got stronger, didn’t need sleep, healed faster. . . .” My whole body trembled now. We were almost there. “I was at school by then, and I’d gotten a part-time gig in the city with a caterer. I was home only some of the time. I tried to get him to give her up. I begged. I threatened. He told me he could handle it. He had it all under control. She loved him. She’d do anything he said. She was just a kid, it was no big deal.”

  “And then he didn’t make it back to the dorm one night and your parents got a phone call.”

  “She said she loved him. She said they were soul mates, like in Midnight Moon, and now they’d be together always . . . and I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .” I couldn’t let her get away with it. She’d taken his life. She’d made him into one of her kind because he was too stupid to see what she really was, and I hadn’t stopped her. Chet thought he’d be king of the world forever because Melody Baby had put the bite on him. I was so angry, I could have staked them both. Maybe that would have been better.

  “Charlotte, what did you do?”

  Chet had thrown his whole life away because instead of listening, he’d let himself be snowed by a vampire named Melody, for God’s sake.

  I sat down, hoping that would still some of my tremors. Wrong again.

  “You ever hear of Be Positive?” I asked.

  “That’s the network for friends and relatives of vampires?”

  “They were having this big fund-raising banq
uet. I was on the catering team. This was five years ago.”

  I watched reality slowly rearranging itself in Brendan’s head. Five years ago. He was putting it together with the billboards and posters all over town. With the endless replays of the last interviews and video clips on FlashNews. It was one of those things you couldn’t miss, even if you wanted to. “Five years ago Joshua Blake disappeared after an appearance at a Be Positive banquet. . . .”

  “Dinner dance. Seven-course meal, with eight kinds of hors d’oeuvres and a plated dessert.”

  Brendan’s mouth opened, and closed, and opened. “You got Chet’s sire into the banquet,” he breathed. “You got a teenaged fan-girl vampire into a party with the reigning angst-actor of his day.”

  “Chet told me she’d seen Midnight Moon a million times. She’d gone on and on about how she and Chet were going to be just like Trent and Clarinda in the movie. She was too stupid, too permanently sixteen, to know she was deluding herself.” So I was going to prove that too. In the face of all Chet’s denials and protestations through his brand-new fangs, I was going to prove to him that I was right.

  “I told her about the party, and where to meet me.” The back alle, her eager, hungry eyes, the wad of bills. “We slipped the guy on the door fifty to take a smoke break while I walked her through the kitchen in a borrowed uniform.”

  “Joshua Blake vanished.” It had been all the media could talk about for months. The rumors were nonstop. His body had been found in Chicago. Richard Gere had smuggled him out to a monastery in Tibet. He’d been spotted with Elvis at that Burger King in Kalamazoo.

  “Melody Linkowski vanished too.” Not that anybody else cared. But Chet never heard from her again. So much for the eternal bond between sire and vamp. “They set up house on a ranch outside Duluth.”

  “How do you know?”