A Taste Of The Nightlife Part 24

First headline shone in screaming red: VAMPIRE CHEF HAS BLOOD ON HER HANDS.

It went downhill from there. FlashNews had compiled tons of articles and videos. I saw myself smugly staring up from the thumbnail graphics, looking like I deserved all the puns being applied to the ruin of my life.

CAUGHT RED-HANDED.

b.l.o.o.d.y DISASTER FOR PHILANTHROPIC CHEF.

FANGS, BUT NO FANGS?.

I thumbed the screen off. It was gone. Everything I had worked for my whole adult life-family, job, reputation, all of it. All gone.

Rafe took back his cell phone. "Let's get you out of here."

"Yeah." But where could I go? The vulture flock waited on the courthouse steps, cameras, mics and smartphones held high.

"Chef Caine!" they shouted. "Chef Caine!"

"No comment!" Rafe gripped my arm as he shouldered between them.

The way ahead filled with exploding lights and a blur of voices. They shouted questions, but I couldn't tell one from the other any more than I could see where I was going.

"Chef Caine!"

"Chef Caine!"

"Chef Caine has no comment!" bellowed Rafe.

He was wrong. I had plenty of comments. I just didn't have the strength to deliver them, and if I had, they'd've all been bleeped out on the networks. Which really made me want to open my mouth and give them a taste of what my line cooks got on a Friday night when wee all in the weeds.

Used to get.

"No comment!" Rafe propelled me toward the black town car with tinted windows that waited by the curb. The door opened, and I was folded and pushed into the plush seat. The second the door slammed shut, the driver simultaneously blew the horn and gunned the engine. We squealed away from the clicking, popping, shouting curbside crowd.

"Are you okay?" asked Brendan.

Of course it was Brendan occupying the other half of that plush seat, managing to be spruce, clean, in control and concerned all at the same time.

"For certain minimal values of okay, probably." I pushed my hair back. I hated everything about myself right then-the way I looked, the way I felt, where I was, and most of all where I had just been. More than any of that, I hated what I had to say next.

"You were right. I should have gone straight to O'Grady." One more total screwup by Charlotte Caine to add to the list.

Brendan didn't say "I told you so," despite the fact that he'd more than earned the right to. But I'd known he wouldn't. It was so very much not his style. He was a cla.s.s act all the way, the kind of customer I'd have been glad to have in my place, when I had a place. He would treat the staff well, enjoy the food for what it was, tip generously, and treat his date with consideration. He probably rescued puppies on the weekends and tutored underprivileged orphans.

Whereas I got arrested and terminally fouled up other people's lives trying to help.

"It'll be all right, Charlotte."

"Chet's gone missing," I told him.

"I know."

"Somebody could have killed him, Brendan. Somebody-"

"I don't think so." Brendan cut me off before I could work up more than a small head of hysteria.

"Why not?"

"Because if someone did kidnap Chet, it would be the same people who killed Dylan, and they would want to make sure you knew about it so you would be good and scared of them."

A thin river of hope trickled into my tired heart. "You sound very sure."

Brendan opened his hand to show me Chet's cell lying on his palm.

That thin river swelled into a decent-sized stream. "Did you find anything?"

Secrets gleamed behind Brendan's blue eyes. "Your brother was trying to set Pam up."

"Set Pam up? With who?"

His face went blank for a second before comprehension dawned, along with a look that was dangerously close to amus.e.m.e.nt. "Not that kind of setup. He was trying to pull off a sting operation."

"What? Are you sure?"

Brendan nodded. "He's been recording conversations, e-mailing the files to his home computer and then deleting the recordings off the phone."

"You can tell that?"

"Security consultant, remember?"

I did remember. It just hadn't filtered through my admittedly overworked brain what that might actually mean. "I thought that was with paranormal things."

"You would not believe the number of paranormal things you can do with a cell phone."

Very few answers existed for that statement, and none of them would make me sound intelligent at all. "What else did you find out?"

"Chet had been calling Dylan as well. Given the timing of the calls, and the text messages you found, it looks like Chet and his partner talked Pam into coming to Nightlife. Then they let Dylan know where she'd be. My best guess is they thought Dylan could take Pam back to Ithaca."

"But why are they involved with Pam at all?"

Brendan clearly didn't like any of the ideas he had on this score. "That depends what's going on in Connecticut."

"Connecticut?" Once again I was several conversational steps behind.

"Your brother has been making trips into Connecticut about once a month."

"How'd you know . . . ?"

"The GPS and the Google cache. Your brother's been buying his train tickets and renting the car online."

I sat back, overwhelmed by the urge to go home and run my cell phone through the food processor. For a while, I didn't say anything, just looked out the window, trying to digest everything he'd said. It was then I realized I hadn't asked a very important question.

"Brendan?"

"Yeah?"

"Where the h.e.l.l are we going?"

"Oh. Sorry. I got you a room at the Ritz-Carlton until the Flash vultures are done making little messes all over your front stoop."

"The Ritz!" I shot up so straight the belt dug into my shoulder. "I can't afford-"

"You're not paying."

"I already owe you for my bail!"

"Unless you're planning to skip out on me, I'll get that back." He saw me getting ready to protest and made a "be reasonable" face, the kind that instantly makes you want to stop being reasonable for a long time. "You need to be someplace, and unless you want to brave the feeding frenzy and make your roommates put up with the loss of privacy longer than necessary . . ."

"Nice use of the flanking guilt maneuver."

"Thank you. And wherever you end up it's got to be someplace that neither my family nor your two playmates from Post Mortem can get into."

"And they can't get into the Ritz?"

"Not anymore."

"Client of yours?"

"Yes."

I settled down. This was another one of those times when struggling would just make me look ridiculous. I had nowhere to go and we both knew it. This was my own d.a.m.n stupid fault. We both knew that too.

"Given what we found on his cell, it's possible that Chet's gone to Connecticut now," said Brendan before I had a chance to serve myself up another full portion of self-loathing. "Charlotte, have you got any idea what he's doing up there?"

I told him what Chet had told me, about the spa and about how much money he said it was making. So much, in fact, that he was funneling the extra into Nightlife.

Brendan didn't say anything. He sat there next to me for a long time, not saying anything.

There was something else I needed to know. Though asking the question meant taking the risk of insulting the man who was once again saving my skin, it was not something I could leave alone.

"Tell me you're sure Margot and Ian had nothing to do with Chet vanishing."

Brendan sighed and looked away. He didn't want to answer me, but I was not about to let him off the hook. Not for this. We were way past the small stuff.

"I'm sure. They only found one of the tails I put on them."

"You had more than one. . . ."

"Security consultant, remember?" he snapped. "We were just talking about it? Yes, I put two tails on my own sister because right now I do not trust her. I shouldn't have to tell you how deliriously happy that makes me." He looked down at his own smartphone and thumbed the screen. "My last update is from an hour ago. They're at their hotel, probably on the phone with our grandfather. I just hope to G.o.d they aren't telling him it's time to go all Bruce Wayne on the city's nightblood population. And before you say it, yes, I know she came to talk to you, and I've been really, really wondering when you'd get around to mentioning that."

A wave of nausea at my own helplessness rolled through me. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say to make this better, or to find the way out. Brendan already had plenty of reasons to be angry, at me, at Chet, and at this situation we were only making more complicated. That we were witnessing a private family struggle become painfully public only made it worse.

"I know about the city contract," I said, because at that point honesty was all I had to offer him. "Rafe told me."

My admission did not seem to surprise him at all. "This could save my family, Charlotte. It's a way to put their skills to work legally on a large scale. It'll also bring them out of the shadows, make them rein in . . ."

"Margot and Ian?"

Brendan sighed. "A few facts about the Maddox clan. My grandfather and his siblings made a lot of money-and I mean a lot-dealing with problems n.o.body could openly acknowledge. We were one of the few families able to defend the daybloods against the encroaching nightbloods. Then came the Change Time, and the Equal Humanity Acts, and all that income dried up. Granddad and my great-uncles started spending their time down in Washington lobbying to get the acts repealed, or at least softened. A few bad investments got made, and all of a sudden we were beyond broke.

"Going for the city contract was my idea. I was making good money in paranormal security, so why not bring the whole family into it? There are people in high places who know how much we can do. The connections my grandfather forged are still in place. All this, and it still took months to talk him around to letting me put in a bid."

Brendan watched the city roll past behind the permanent twilight of the tinted windows for a long time.

"We need a way out," he said finally. "If the family is disgraced, if Grandfather decides to call for revenge . . . it'll be a free-for-all."

"How many of you are there?"

"Enough to go toe-to-toe with the whole P-Squad and come out ahead."

I tried to imagine the kind of havoc that could be wreaked by a clan of warlocks turned paranormal Mafia. Then I tried not to let Brendan see me shudder.

The owners of the Ritz-Carlton must have been very satisfied clients. When we pulled up to the entrance, the manager waited beside the doorman to hand over my special key card for the elevator, usher us up to the VIP floor and show us to a suite that could have held my entire apartment and still had room left over. And did I mention the view of Central Park? There was a view of Central Park, slowly sinking into a pool of shadow as one light after another blinked on in the surrounding city. New York was waking up for the evening.

In response to being enveloped in unprecedented luxury after a day of being held hostage to the city's law enforcement establishment, my stomach growled. Loudly. I blushed. It didn't care.

"I'll call room service," said Brendan.

I was ready to fall down and eat the carpet, but some reflexes will not be stilled. "Oh, no, don't. We'll get better . . ."

But Brendan held up his hand, picked up the room phone and punched a b.u.t.ton. "Brendan Maddox in 2018. Can I speak with Chef Martinelli? Yes, I'll hold." And he did, but not for long. "Hey, Pete. How's it going? . . . Saw the review in the Times. They said the duck with five-spice marmalade was unbelievable. Was that meant to be a good thing? . . . Nah, I was just going to go get a burger. Okay, okay, I'm not going anywhere. But I do have company, and I need to make a good impression . . . I'm sure I will be amazed, but you know, again, is that meant to be a g-" From where I stood, I heard the phone slam down.

"That's supposed to be my trick," I told him.

Brendan shrugged. "We were at school together before he quit the MBA program for culinary school."

I looked at him and he looked at me. I wondered if this would feel less awkward if he hadn't just bailed me out of jail. Probably, but not by much.

"If you want a shower, go ahead."

I did want a shower. I could smell myself and there was nothing good about it. With Brendan's rea.s.surance that Chet hadn't been taken up by the Bad Guys, I felt like I might have some s.p.a.ce to get over my very long, very, very bad day. But I hesitated. There were more things I had to say; apologies he deserved, explanations I needed him to hear, things I desperately needed to understand, but I didn't know where to begin.

Brendan crossed the room and touched my hand. "It's okay," he said gently. "Just get your shower. We can talk more when you're done."

Tears threatened. I was so tired. Everything was so messed up, and everything new I learned just piled that mess higher and deeper. But for this moment I was safe, high up above the darkening city, secure in a plush jewel box of a room.

"You keep rescuing me," I whispered. "Why do you keep on rescuing me?"

"Because I want to."