A Taste of the Nightlife (35 page)

“It’s over, Pammy,” I croaked.

“You think so?”

The witch staggered to her feet. She thrust her hand onto the still-lit stove burner and came up with her palm cupped around a ball of flame the size of an apple. These Maddoxes liked to play with fire, and Pam was nothing if not game. I struggled to grab hold of Anatole’s chair, to get him behind me, for all the good it would do. Pam grinned at me, whispered another word and dropped the fireball onto Tommy Jones.

Tommy burst into flame, burning blue, like brandy at Christmas. His flailing arm caught the rack of chef’s coats. The fire jumped to the fabric and set it alight, scorching the ceiling tiles and sending black smoke pouring through the kitchen. The roar of the flame almost drowned out the vampire’s last scream as he collapsed into a heap of stinking ash. They’d disappointed Pam and she had no more use for them, except as fuel. Burning shards of Tommy and clean laundry fell into the puddles of wine left when Pam shattered the bottle and my leg. Fire leapt up across the floor. The nonskid rubber mats in front of the line stations caught a heartbeat later, filling the air with fresh stink and black smoke. This time the sprinklers stayed quiet.

“What the hell!” hollered Taylor. Fire evidently trumped post-vampiric suggesting and he was running for the door.

“Bye-bye, Charlotte Caine.” Pam Maddox smiled down at me and then sauntered away after Taylor.

“No!” howled Anatole, but she didn’t even look back. He tried to shove himself after her, but this time he overbalanced and toppled onto the floor, and the fire kept right on burning, edging across the rubber floor mats, looking for more vampire.

It was going to be the last thing I ever did. The counter was hot already, but my hands were tough. The air seared my skin, but I’d reached into plenty of ovens. I could take it. I could take it. I swore and retched and hauled myself upright.

“Pammy!”

She turned, and my thrown egg caught her right between the eyes.

“Gotcha!”

Pam screamed and as I knew she would, she charged me. This is why vanity is a deadly sin. It can make you stay in a burning building to attack some smart-ass who was dead anyway for the crime of ruining your makeup.

I threw another egg, and another. Pam howled in outrage and rubbed frantically at her eyes. But the yolk was too thick and the heat was already cooking it into a maver her eyes. She stumbled blind around the burning kitchen. She hit the stove, screamed and bounced and fell. I was choking and laughing one second, and just choking the next because I got a lungful of hot smoke. I fell beside her; onto my knees, onto my side, right beside Anatole.

That was okay, because it was over. I’d done it. I was coughing my lungs out and fire crawled down my throat and into my eyes, but I’d stopped her and all her plans to control my brother, to threaten my parents, to destroy my life. I’d done it without my cavalry and my sneaky little brother.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered and I coughed again. It was too hot too close, I couldn’t breathe. I was going to die. Anatole was going to die. Here and now and nobody would ever know I was really, truly sorry.

Charlotte!
cried a voice in my head.

Cold hands grabbed me, jerked me up. Arms like stone held me tight and there was a sense of motion and blazing air grated hard over my seared skin.

Air. Air. My lungs rasped and burned. Cold air flowed down my throat and somehow that hurt worse than the burning air had. I gasped again. I cried and breathed and choked.

And my little brother—my soot-streaked brother who never knew enough to stay the hell out of my kitchen—laid me down on a gurney and stood back to make room for the bald EMT who slammed an oxygen mask over my face. Beside him, Little Linus was explaining something to a uniformed cop, with Brendan, and Margot, and Ian right behind him. And Anatole. Anatole lay on another gurney sucking hard on a bag of blood.

We were alive. All of us. We’d made it. I smiled and drew the sweet, delicious air into my burning lungs.

Then I passed out cold.

27

There was, in the end, a whole lot of explaining to do.

However, it had to wait for three long, painful weeks until my throat and lungs had healed up enough so I could talk again. By that time, the worst of the bandages had come off my hands, so I could supplement my croaking with text messages.

I had to tell Linus O’Grady everything, of course. After Little Linus, I had to tell everything over again to Rafe Wallace, Trish, Jessie, Elaine West, a district attorney named Colman DuPres, a judge named Dali Singh, twelve of my peers whose names I never found out, and the whole rest of the world via every kind of media known to modern humans.

We were in the headlines way too long. Despite the fact that our bank account was a lot healthier than I had thought, a large chunk of it had to go toward paying an extensive set of fines related to being careless with fire. That Bert Shelby had been letting his premises be used for illegal activities somehow kept us from having to pay for actually burning down Post Mortem, which was good, because what money we had left over had go toward paying Rafe Wallace.

Trish and Jessie decided not to kick me out on my rear, although after all the times they had to duck the paparazzi combined with the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to pay my share of the rent for a while, I wouldn’t have blamed them. But while I’d been busy with my new career as budding arsonist, Jessie had made her bid for Saleswoman of the Month with Mary Sue Cosmetics and said she’d be glad to put her bonus toward keeping me sheltered. Trish reminded me how they depended on my way with a tuna casserole to keep Georgie changing the light-bulbs regularly.

If there was hugging and crying and other heavy-duty female bonding after that, that was our own damn business.

The only nagging ache was that in all this time, the one person I didn’t hear from was Chet. Oh, I saw him in court, and whenever there were papers to sign, but other than that, he kept his distance. He resigned from Nightlife via text message. He paid up his rent for the next six months with Doug, packed his things and moved out, without sending me a forwarding address. I only knew he moved at all because Rafe Wallace mentioned it.

In response, I sat on my hands. I didn’t call. I didn’t text. We both needed to get used to the fact that I wouldn’t be looking after him anymore. I promoted Suchai to front-of-the-house management at Nightlife, hired a new accountant, and added the words
let it go
to my vocabulary.

It wasn’t like I had nothing to do myself. As soon as I could croak a coherent sentence into a phone, I got hold of Zoe and Reese and told them we were going ahead with the plan for a soft reopening for Nightlife. We held it on a Friday and filled the house with friends and family, leaving just enough room for a little foot traffic, which we did get. Robert and Suchai worked together like they’d been meant for each other. Zoe’s duck tasting was a complete hit, as were Marie’s new dessert beverages. My warm pomegranate salad didn’t go over too badly either.

But that wasn’t what was important. What was important was we had all made it through, and that included Nightlife itself. I was in the kitchen. I was home. I was sure that anything and everything else would follow eventually. Most days, anyway.

This time, it sucked a whole lot less to be right. Early one frigid Monday morning, Inez—one of our dishwashers—and I were locking up when I felt someone familiar watching me. I turned, and there was Chet.

“Hey, C3,” he said.

“Hey, C4.”

“You’re looking good.”

“You’re a liar.” My hair had been badly singed in the fire, and I’d had to hack it off to within an inch of my scalp. I also had a burn scar on the side of my throat that made me look like I’d almost lost a fight with Sweeney Todd.

He shrugged. “Yeah, but you knew that. Walk you to the subway?”

I waved good-bye to Inez and Chet and I started walking side by side. December had settled in properly, and my breath showed silver in the streetlight. I huddled in layers of fleece. Chet didn’t even have a hat on.

“So, what’s going to happen with your . . . spa?” I asked finally.

He sucked on his cheek. “Well, Ilona wants to keep it going. It funds Final Curtain. Marcus too. He thinks it’s the wave of the future. Rafe Wallace says he’s got a partner in contract law who can update our client agreements, and they’re all just waiting to find out if they’re going to need to buy me out.”

I said nothing and Chet cocked his head at me.

“Do they need to buy me out?”

“Not my decision,” I said without looking at him.

“Cut it out, Charlotte.”

There were a hundred things I could have said. I couldn’t stand his girlfriend and the feelas mutual. The spa was still a great big gray zone as far as the law was concerned, and the Maddox family was apparently already pushing legislation in Albany to prevent the importation of human blood across state lines for purposes of consumption. The ones who weren’t busy working with Linus O’Grady and the Paranormal Squadron to update the city’s magical and paranormal defense strategies, anyway.

Despite all this, I knew the right answer, and for a wonder, I was actually able to say it. “What do you want to do?”

Vampires can’t let out long breaths, but all the tension left Chet’s shoulders right then. “I’m good at this, Charlotte. I like dealing with the clients and the staff. I like being management. It’s something I built. . . .”

“You built Nightlife,” I reminded him. It sounded like a last-ditch attempt to hold on to him, and maybe it was.

Chet ducked his head. “You built Nightlife, Charlotte.”

And if this wasn’t the right answer at that moment, it would be, given time. “Okay then.”

“Really?”

“Really.” I smiled up at him. “But, Chet?”

“Yeah?”

I grabbed my brother’s collar and yanked him down to where I could look in his eyes. “You lie to me again and I will ship your coffin to the nearest solar panel farm. Get me?”

“Got you, C3,” said my little brother, and if I hadn’t known it would be all right before, I did now.

Not that Chet was my last piece of unfinished business. Another piece was waiting for me when I got back to Queens. He stood at the door of my building, looking killer handsome in a dark overcoat, white scarf and black fedora.

Anatole bowed when he saw me come around the corner, and held out a bunch of roses.

“For me?” I let my eyes widen in mock surprise.

“As is this.” He pulled a newspaper out of his overcoat pocket.

I unfurled an issue of
Circulation
, which had been folded back to reveal a headline.

A TASTE OF THE NIGHTLIFE

You will have heard a great deal about Nightlife, the debut restaurant of Chef Charlotte Caine. The establishment and its owners have been keeping the media gossips hunched over their screens for weeks now. But what’s been lost in the headlines and attempts to milk the assorted scandals beyond their useful life span is the fact that Nightlife is a good restaurant. Chef Caine’s passion and attention to detail shine through in the parade of creative, but refreshingly unpretentious food. More than this, however, Nightlife is a convivial gathering place, where one can always enjoy a good evening over good food.

There was more, but I couldn’t read it, because I would start bawling.

“Anatole.”

“Shhhh . . .”
He laid a cool finger against my lips. “Your thanks is shining in your eyes.”

I removed his finger. “What are you up to?”

“I am delivering you a good review, and flowers,” he said.

“And . . . ?”

th="1em">“And my thanks,” he said, “for not abandoning me at Post Mortem.”

The roses were deep red and surprisingly fragrant. I wouldn’t put it past him to have thought of that. I hated bland flowers.

“I owe you my life, Charlotte.”

I was going to have to text Miss Manners and find out what the polite response was in this particular situation. As it was, I shrugged and turned away so I could rummage one-handed for my keys until the flush left my cheeks.

I knew Anatole was smiling. “I also believe we had discussed the possibility of my seducing you,” he said.

“That was not a discussion,” I reminded him. “That was you making a pass at me.”

“It most certainly was not.
This
is me making a pass at you.”

Very gently, Anatole lifted my hand to his mouth. He brushed his lips across my knuckles, and then across the palm. I lost the power of independent movement. Anatole smiled, and moved in close. He lifted the roses from my other hand and laid them on the half wall by the door. He pressed his mouth against my forehead, and then against my cheek while he ran his graceful, sensitive hands up my arms and around my shoulders.

“I am fully aware of the competition,” he murmured against my ear. His chest brushed mine. He felt far more solid than I would have expected and that realization made my heart flip oddly. “All I ask is that you consider the possibilities, Charlotte. All of them.” The words sent a shiver straight down my spine that had nothing to do with fear.