A Taste of the Nightlife (32 page)

“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-gallon 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?”