A Taste of the Nightlife

by Sarah Zettel

  “They sent me a thank-you card.” Which included a gush about how Joshua was happy to retire. Now that he was the star of Melody’s life he didn’t need to be any other kind. Which just goes to show Chet wasn’t the only king of the world taken in by a declaration of eternal love from the undead waif. I had been right, totally and completely right. Chet should have listened to me, and now he knew it.

  The problem was, it hadn’t made anything better.

  “I didn’t know how much he’d miss her. I didn’t know he’d never grow up . . . never grow out of being that stupid football-hero kid. I didn’t know it was going to be forever.” Those last words came out as a whisper. “He’s got nobody left but me, Brendan, and it’s my fault.”

  Brendan sat next to me. I thought—I hoped—he’d put his arm around me. But he didn’t. He just rubbed his hands together.

  So I was right again. Now that he knew what I’d really done, it was too much for him to handle. I was way too far gone to be worth taking care of.

  Batting a thousand was supposed to feel better than this.

  “You can’t go up to Connecticut on your own,” Brendan said without looking at me.

  “You’ve got to get to Margot and Ian,” I reminded him. “Keep your family from hurting themselves worse.” Don’t screw up, like me.

  “At least let me get you on the train.”

  I didn’t have the strength to protest. We could have ourselves a decent good-bye scene. “Okay.”

  And that was that. A call to housekeeping produced my dry-cleaned clothes. While I climbed back into T-shirt, jacket and black slacks, Brendan Googled departures from Grand Central Station and found out there was an 11:22 train we just had time to make.

  His car drove us to the station. We didn’t talk on the way. I was back to my real life now, and he had no place in it. No need to remind either one of us of that. We crossed the great hall of Grand Central under the dome with its sparkling constellations. I kept having these visions of Linus O’Grady and his P-Squad charging past the information booth and announcing that I was under arrest for . . . something.

  But Little Linus didn’t appear. I bought my ticket and Brendan walked me down to the platform to stand beside the battered red-and-blue-striped Amtrak train.

  “You’ll call and let me know you got in okay?”

  “Yes.” He was too tall for Humphrey Bogart and I was too short for Ingrid Bergman, but our problems still managed not to amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

  “This isn’t over, Charlotte.”

  Yes it is. “We’ll talk when I get back with Chet.”

  He leaned in and I closed my eyes. The second kiss surprised me, and it was every bit as good as the first. If it had gone on a second longer I would have started crying all over again.

  Brendan finished the kiss, and I stood there for a moment, seeing my hand on his chest but not remembering when I put it there.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “You too.” I turned away, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to force “good-bye” out of my mouth.

  I climbed aboard the train and made my way forward, where I wouldn’t have to watch him getting smaller when the train pulled out. The car wasn’t even half full. People settled down to sleep, or worked on their laptops or thumbed their BlackBerries. I passed rows of empty seats, but none of them looked right. I crossed into the next car, and the one after that, all the way to the front, until there was nowhere else to go.

  “Hello, Chef C.”

  My head jerked up. There in the very front quartet of seats waited Taylor Watts, with Tommy Jones the alley vamp beside him.

  I whirled around in time to see Julie loom up behind me and grin.

  “Now, you just hold still, Charlotte Caine.”

  Then the world went black.

  24

  Charlotte.

  Now you just hold still, Charlotte Cain. That laughing command blocked out every other thought. There was nothing in my head but her eyes and that laugh. Just hold still.

  Charlotte, look at me. There was another voice. Another scary voice right inside my head with the laughter. This was bad. Really bad. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t even do that.

  Hold still. Hold still.

  You can move, Charlotte, said that other voice. It was familiar. I could almost recognize it. I wanted to recognize it. It’s all right. Just look at me.

  But he couldn’t hear the laughter. He couldn’t see the eyes. I can’t.

  You can. Look at me.

  No, please. Don’t make me. She’d be angry. She’d hurt me. She was right inside my head and she’d split me open if I so much as . . .

  She will not harm you, Charlotte. I will not permit it. Look at me.

  I looked. He had green eyes. I knew them. I knew him. I’d think of his name in a minute. It was in my mind, way back behind the orders and the fear.

  “You are free, Charlotte Caine. You need obey no one. You are free.”

  Something snapped, and the fear and the laughter fell away.

  Then everything went black again.

  “Charlotte.”

  My head hurt. Migraine-level hurt. My throat was dry and my tongue felt like old leather as I cursed. Then I realized my eyes had opened, but I was in.

  “Charlotte?” a man’s voice said from somewhere to my right.

  I shivered and groaned, cursed some more, and sat up. “Who the hell . . . ?” I croaked, but consciousness settled in before I finished the question. “Anatole?”

  “Unfortunately. Are you all right?”

  “Mostly. I think.” I rubbed my hands together and tried to think how I’d gotten into this cold, dark place. I remembered the train, Taylor Watts, and Julie and Tommy the hench vamps. (Or would they be minions? Did henches and minions have separate unions?) Then . . . nothing except Julie’s eyes and I couldn’t move and . . . and . . .

  I’d been whammied. She’d ordered me not to move, and I hadn’t, until Anatole freed me. His was the other voice. Anatole Sevarin had followed Julie Vamplette inside my head.

  I sat there in the dark and decided I wasn’t going to think about that right now.

  “Can you see where we are?” I asked instead.

  “I believe we may be in a restaurant walk-in.”

  “How . . . ironic.”

  “Our captors showing their sense of humor. The front door is directly behind you. I regret I cannot stand up.”

  “Oh. Okay. Hang on.” I turned and pushed myself onto my knees. The floor was ice cold underneath me. I rubbed my hands together and blew on them, and groped out around me. My left hand found splintering wood and brushed something ruffled. I rubbed the ruffled something and my fingertips identified lettuce leaves. Bibb lettuce if I had to guess. Behind that was a wire shelf. I grabbed the upright support and pulled myself to my feet. Dizziness washed over me. Pins and needles danced up my shins, but I stayed standing. With my left hand resting on the shelves, I shuffled forward.

  “I promise you, Charlotte, the next time you and I are alone in the dark, I will arrange for the circumstances to be far more pleasant.”

  I ignored this, as much as you could ignore a vampire metaphorically whistling past the graveyard. My searching fingers brushed a thick plastic flap. Bingo. Those flaps hang over the entrance to a walk-in to help keep the temperature inside stable even while people are going in and out through the course of a dinner shift. I had just found either the walk-in’s front door or a door to the freezer at the back. I rattled the handle. Locked. No surprise there. It also meant this was probably the front door, which was good news. Walk-ins are not like your fridge at home. The door does not control the light. There would be a switch. I skimmed my hands up and down the wall until I felt it, squeezed my eyes shut and flipped it on. My eyelids turned dark red. I counted ten and slowly opened my eyes.

  Yep, walk-in. The wire shelves were crowded with plastic bins of various sizes. White five-gal
lon buckets were stacked on the floor along with wooden crates and cardboard boxes of fresh produce, and blue Rubbermaid tubs of onions and potatoes. Oh, and Anatole Sevarin lying on his side with his hands cuffed behind him. The tattered remains of what had been a black sack hung around his neck.

  “Oh. Shit.”

  Anatole clearly had not fed before he was caught. His skin was sallow and loose and his eyes were sunken. I couldn’t help noticing he was very carefully not looking at me, especially not my neck.

  I crouched down beside him, pushed him into a sitting position against the shelves. I also pulled the torn bag off. I tried not to think about how it looked like it had been chewed open.

  “Thank you,” Anatole said.

  “Can you break these?” I touched the cold handcuffs. They didn’t look quite like the ones I’d been treated to by the NYPD. The locks seemed . . . different.

  He shook his head. “They are made of silver, and very uncomfortable, may I add.” Silver doesn’t produce the same level of toxic shock in vampires that it does in werewolves, but it doesn’t do them any good.

  “Swell.” I collapsed beside him and leaned my head back against the shelf support.

  “So, tell me, how did you come to be here?” asked Anatole. He still wasn’t looking at me. I returned the favor.

  I told him about Connecticut and the spa and my latest attempt to chase my brother down. To my surprise, Sevarin threw back his head and let out a loud laugh. “Brilliant! This may be the ultimate triumph of the capitalist system! Ilona and your brother have found a way to make money from both the diners and the dinner!”

  “I’ll be sure to let him know you’re impressed. So how’d you get in here?”

  Sevarin grimaced. “I don’t know. I had gone back to my apartment to get ready for sunrise. When I woke again, I was here. I admit I was thinking some very unkind things about your Brendan the security expert until Julie arrived with you.” He frowned. “Perhaps I should hire Mr. Maddox. Clearly my personal security is not what I had believed it to be.”

  “Julie and Tommy have got to be working for Shelby or Pam Maddox.” I rubbed my forehead. “But which one?”

  “What rules out your brother or Ilona?”

  I shook my head and wished I hadn’t. “This whole thing is about controlling access to human blood outlets for profit. It’s like Prohibition, or crack cocaine in the eighties; people are fighting over the control of territory and distribution networks. Chet’s working his own angle on that, and since he and Ilona are working together . . .”

  “Unless she has a side gambit of her own.”

  “No.” I’d had a lot of time to think, in the cells and on the way to the train as I sat silently next to Brendan and avoided thinking about him. A lot of things were beginning to make sense “Dylan Maddox was dumped in Nightlife as a warning to Chet, something to do with his particular blood-running scam. Ilona wouldn’t have needed to give Chet that kind of warning. She’s his girlfriend; she could just talk to him. Besides, Dylan was dumped around sunrise, maybe even after dawn.”

  “Which means his body was dropped by daybloods. Given her worldview, it is unlikely Ilona would have trusted such an important job to those not of her own kind. Of course.”

  “She’s one of yours, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t press any further. The truth was, I didn’t really want to know, not yet anyway. The fact that we were discussing my brother’s girlfriend did not make things any better. “Somebody drained Dylan’s blood to sell. I mean, he was dead, why let valuable product go to waste? They had some left and they planted it at Nightlife and then tipped off the P-Squad so I’d be arrested and out of the way. That could have been Margot Maddox. She’s offered me a very big bribe to shut down Nightlife for good. Or it could have been Pam or Bert Shelby trying to get me out of the way so they could use Nightlife as a blood outlet.”

  “You’re certain Pamela Maddox is involved with the blood runners?”

  “She’s doing something that’s got Chet trying to set up an amateur sting operation on her, Margot trying to cover for her, and Dylan getting killed over her. What else could it be?”

  Anatole thought about this. “If you are correct, then it becomes a question of whether it’s a Maddox or Bertram Shelby who’s in charge of the actual operation.”

  I bit my lip and recalled what Robert had said, and all the assumptions I’d made back when this looked just like a little hissy-fit power play.

  And I knew. I knew who’d killed Dylan Maddox.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

  “I agree.” Anatole shifted his weight—and winced.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “You mean what else is the matter? You will notice it’s only my wrists that have been shackled.”

  “Yes?”

  “Because they took the precaution of breaking my leg before they handcuffed me.”

  “Oh. Shit.”

  “I see we are once again in agreement.”

  I tried the door handle again for form’s sake. It didn’t budge. Wires dangled from an open panel above the light switch. Somebody’d taken out the panic button. I peered out the window and saw a dormant kitchen that I didn’t recognize.

  Think. Think. I ordered myself as I turned around, rubbing my hands together and blowing on them. Whether Shelby or a Maddox is in charge, the next person through that door is not going to be your friend.

  I rummaged in my pockets, but turned up nothing useful. My keys and change were all gone. So was my phone, of course.

  I turned back to Sevarin and after a minute was able to make my mouth ask, “If you had . . . if you fed, would you be able to heal the break?”

  Sevarin was silent for a long, nerve-racking moment. “Thank you, Charlotte,” he said softly. “But unfortunately, no. I would feel better, but I would still have the broken leg, and you would be much weakened.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” I tried not to sound relieved. Anatole had already . . . saved me. Again. I should trust him. Why didn’t I trust him?

  I decided not to think about that either. I looked at the door. We still had to get out of here. I looked at the shelves behind me, loaded with produce, mise en place, and bins and buckets of everything from ground beef to salad dressing. I looked at the door again.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll do this the hard way.”

  I rolled up my sleeves and set to work.

  By the time someone came through the walk-in door, I was gritting my teeth to keep them from chattering. I’d switched the light off again and held a rock-hard butternut squash up to my shoulder like I thought I was about to hit a home run. Anatole was back on his side, with the black bag draped loosely across his face.

  “Okay, Chef C, time to go,” said a familiar voice.

  Taylor Watts parted the plastic flaps. Perfect. I held myself very still.

  My ex-bartender took one step into the cooler, hit the Italian salad dressing I’d smeared across the floor and did a perfect Three Stooges pratfall—legs flying, arms flapping, eyes bugged out, loud “whagh!” and best of all, the sharp crack of his skull against the floor. He struggled, but I brought the squash down hard on his forehead. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he went as limp as a vamp at high noon.

  I dropped my vegetable, kicked Taylor on the shoulder to slide him out of the way and turned to Anatole.

  “Get out of here, Charlotte. Call the police.”

  “Sorry. It’s payback time.”

  Anatole was a big guy, but he didn’t weigh more than a full sack of flour. That was good, because otherwise I never would have been able to haul him out of there, especially since I had to walk across my own booby trap to do it.

  “Can you hear anybody?” I murmured.

  “No, but that doesn’t mean we are alone. Charlotte, you have to get out of here.”

  “Working on it.”

  The kitchen was dark and silent. So far, so good. “We’l
l call the cops on the house phone and then . . .”

  “Put the vampire down, Chef Caine.”

  Pamela Maddox, not one perfectly styled blond hair out of place, walked through the swinging door and smiled.

  There are days it truly sucks to be right.

  25

  Pamela Maddox wore a Hillary Clinton pantsuit with only a push-up bra underneath it. Given her level of endowment, she looked like she had a baby butt mooning the world from out of her perfectly tailored jacket.

  I considered bolting, but with my arms full of vampire there was no way I would make it to the exit before Pamela caught up with me, even though she was wearing platform pumps. And that was before I saw Julie and Tommy the Hench Vamps come sauntering in behind her.

  “Sorry,” I murmured to Anatole as I set him on the floor near an empty counter.

  “It was an excellent attempt.”

  Pamela sighed and shook her head at us. “I told Taylor to be careful.”

  “Yeah, well, he always was pretty useless.” I put my hands in my empty pockets and tried not to seem like I was looking around. If she would just come a little closer . . . There was a tenderizing mallet in easy reach, just waiting to make contact with her perfectly made-up face.

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me, Charlotte.”

  “It wasn’t that hard to figure out.” Eventually. Once I realized it had to be either Shelby or a Maddox. Robert had pointed out that Shelby was never in charge of the actual crimes he’d been involved with. He liked to be able to skedaddle and leave other people to take the blame when things went bad. So it had to be a Maddox. It couldn’t have been Margot or Ian, because Brendan had been watching them, and he would have checked on when they’d actually arrived in the city, because he was much less into denial than I was and would want to eliminate Margot right away. That left Cousin Pam.

  “So, now what?” I said out loud.

  “Now you listen to me very carefully,” Pamela said. “Because you’ve only had a small taste of how miserable I can make things for you and your little nightblood brother.”