A Taste of the Nightlife

by Sarah Zettel

  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) tha
t 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.”

  “But . . . but . . .”

  “Think, Charlotte. We are helpless during the day when you own the world. You can stay up late into the night, but we cannot remain conscious after sunrise. You can form a gang, a mob, an army. We can congregate in a large group, but for more than a few of us to cooperate for a long time is nearly impossible. And despite our boasts that we are the very pinnacle of the food chain, daybloods are exceedingly dangerous prey. In a group, appropriately armed, there is nothing more deadly than your kind.”

  “Why don’t you stay away from us, then? Do like the separatists say and scatter into the countryside.”

  “That is the other thing we don’t talk about. We don’t just want your blood, we want your presence. We crave it.”

  “You love us and are doomed to destroy us?” I meant it as a joke, but considering everything that had happened lately, it maybe fell a little flat.

  “You have been watching too many bad movies.” Anatole’s flicker of a smile came as a relief.

  “So, how old is Ilona?”

  “She was turned about forty years ago.”

  “Kids these days.”

  Anatole stopped in his tracks and turned toward me. The light caught in his golden hair but left his eyes sunken in shadow and turned his skin uniformly white. He was not human. He was Other and the fear that had come over me the night before when it was Chet I walked home with struggled to make its prime-time comeback.

  “With the young Maddoxes running about the city with their stakes, I am less than amused about that at the moment.”

  “Sorry.”

  Anatole nodded his acceptance of my apology and we walked on. Cars rolled past. Lights flicked on and off in the windows over our heads. The city was going about its business and expecting nothing more than for us to go about ours.

  I probably could have let things lie, but I didn’t. “Something’s going on with the Maddoxes.” There’s no way Margot Maddox offered me a million dollars because it might stop a blood-runningscam that her cousin might be helping out with. “It’s not just Brendan trying to keep his relatives under wraps.”

  “Something else to inquire into.”

  “I hope he’s okay,” I whispered. I should have found time to think about him today. I should have checked in.

  “Have faith, Charlotte. I have a feeling your Brendan has been looking out for his family for a long time.”

  It was a measure of how far out of it I was that I didn’t say anything about the “your Brendan” remark. Anatole noticed it too, and got a very strange look on his face before he turned toward the eastern horizon.

  “It is almost sunrise. I will find you a taxi.”

  God, is it that late? I glanced at my watch. Yeah, it was. “Thanks. I’ll let you.”

  “Ah!” Anatole laid his hand over his heart. “The lady accepts my gifts. My heart may dare to hope. . . .”

  “Don’t get carried away.”

  This time the smile was real, and it held. “It is not to be helped. Russian, remember?”

  He stalked over to the corner and stood, staring down the street like he was willing it to produce a taxi. I let him be. I was not ready to handle what looked like a touch of jealousy from Anatole Sevarin. Not that it was warranted. Between the debacle at the theater and the fact that he hadn’t called me any more than I had called him, it was pretty clear Brendan didn’t want anything more to do with me.

  He hadn’t called me, had he? I pulled out my phone and found I’d accidentally switched it off at some point. At least, it probably was an accident, or maybe reflex. Unless it was more of that fine-dice denial I’d been working on all day.

  I pressed the POWER key and checked my messages. There were three new ones, none of them from Brendan. I stomped on my disappointment. Two were voice messages from Elaine West, and the other was a text from Chet. It had been sent back at 7:18. I immediately thumbed that one. A single line appeared on the screen.

  Where the hell is he?!

  I swallowed around my heart, which seemed to have filled the back of my throat, and hit Chet’s number. It rang, and rang, and I got voice mail. I hung up and hit REDIAL.

  The fourth ring cut off in the middle. “Chet, you asshole, what are you doing?”

  It took me a minute to recognize the outraged voice. “Doug?”

  “Charlotte?” I could picture Chet’s roommate wrinkling his Neanderthal-grade forehead.

  “What’re you answering this phone for? Where’s Chet?”

  “Fuck if I know. I was out last night and I got back in from work and half his stuff is cleared out and his phone and keys are on the table.”

  My brain, which was already imploding from adrenaline and lack of sleep, froze solid. I could make no sense of this. None whatsoever.

  “I gotta go, Doug,” I whispered.

  “I wouldn’t care. You know, whatever, but rent’s due.”

  “Yeah.” I hung up and stood there, a statue on Lenox Avenue. A yellow cab pulled up, waiting, and I still didn’t move.

  “Charlotte?” Anatole was beside me as though he had materialized there. “What is it?”

  “Chet.” I was still staring at the phone. “He’s gone. That was his roommate, Doug. He said Chet’s cleared out his stuff and gone.”

  Anatole took me by both shoulders. “Charlotte, listen to me. I am almost out of time. Who is Chet’s sire? If he thought he was in real trouble, that’s where he’d go.”

  “We don’t know where she is.” The lie I had spoken for five years came easily to me, even with Anatole’s eyes looking straight into mine. “She vanished.”

  “That is not possible,” he said sternly. “A sire does not abandon the ones they deliberately turn. There is a connection, a need.”

  Memory dragged me under. The dark alley, hungry, eager eyes, the tightly folded wad of bills in my hands.

  Just a few minutes . . .

  Anatole made a strangled noise deep in his throat. “I do not have time to understand this now. Go to O’Grady. Immediately. You must tell him what has happened.”

  “But—”

  “Charlotte!” He shook me, and I felt how much he was keeping a rein on his strength. “This is not a game! Promise me you will call O’Grady!”

  “Why do you care?” Tears trickled down my face. When had they started?

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes!”

  “Preserve me from daybloods. Charlotte, I do not want to see you arrested and thrown in jail because your brother is too stupid to exist! Now will you promise to call O’Grady?”

  I nodded and Anatole straightened up and let me go. “Thank you. Now, get in the cab and go home.”

  I hesitated. “Will you be okay?”

  “If I am not delayed by more foolishness, yes.”

  I climbed into the cab, awkward and one-handed because I couldn’t manage to put my phone down. The door closed behind me, and when I looked back, Anatole was already gone.


  “Where we goin’?” asked the cabbie.

  “Fourth and Bleecker,” I said.

  I’m sorry, Anatole.

  20

  I had to lean hard on the buzzer for a full minute before Doug let me in.

  I never liked Doug. When not actually out on the street he tended to dress in torn T-shirts and crumpled boxer shorts. He never learned the art of the clean shave, and he had a forehead that proclaimed direct descent from the Clan of the Cave Bear. Chet said my real problem was that the one time I’d offered to make him dinner, Doug had dumped catsup all over my steak au poivre. But Chet also said Doug paid his rent on time, he didn’t mind sharing an apartment with a vampire, and whatever he was into, it never came home except in the form of the occasional hookup.

  “So where is he?” Doug shuffled into the kitchen, pulled a can of Mountain Dew out of the fridge, popped the top and chugged half. I watched, unable even to muster a queasy feeling.

  “I don’t know.” Chet’s cell lay on te table, along with his apartment key, just like Doug had said. There was also a stack of junk mail, old copies of advertising flyers and a few issues of Circulation. I sorted through it all, vaguely hoping to find a note, or a business card, anything that might tell me where my brother had gone.

  “Well, if you don’t know, who does?”

  “I don’t know.” There was no note. I pocketed his cell phone and keys and turned to the living room. The laptop where Chet kept Nightlife’s books was gone. The books that Chet admitted he was cooking, just not in the usual way. He said. Except I couldn’t exactly trust what Chet said right now.

  He’s not dead, I told myself as I moved away from the empty makeshift desk. If someone had killed him and wanted to make it look like he took off, they wouldn’t have taken the computer and left the cell.

  Unless they didn’t care what it looked like. Unless all they really wanted was to know what he’d been doing with the money. From where I stood, it looked like he was working with Shelby and Taylor Watts as well as Marcus the Mystery Nebbish. Maybe he was putting money into the Nightlife accounts not to help the restaurant but to hide it from his partners. Maybe they found out about it. Or maybe he just got mixed up with someone who was out for undead blood, like the Maddoxes. Maybe Margot Maddox got tired of waiting for me to accept her payoff and had decided to take a more direct route to stop the reopening, right through Chet.