back. Montolbano laughed and leaned back. I tried a bite of crab cake. It was very good, and the chili didn’t send me diving for my water glass.
“I didn’t want this in the courts, and I didn’t want the organization I love to tear itself apart over this fight. I went back to the constitution and the bylaws of the Screen Actors Guild and found a clause about arbitration. Our lawyers said the wording was vague, but I decided to interpret it
“That being?” David asked.
“That I can force everybody into an arbitration when it’s an in-house dispute. The human actors screamed and the Alfar actors screamed, but I don’t give a crap. I want this settled peacefully. The studios and networks and producers fuck us over all the time. Weakening ourselves by fighting each other is just stupid.”
“So, what are you looking for?” David asked.
“Everybody to stop fighting,” Jeff said. He reacted to David’s expression. “I know, I’m being naive. Look, the human actors have real grievances. I know. Hell, I’ve started to lose roles to Alfar, but there has to be a solution.”
“Quotas?” I suggested.
“Which have had less than stellar outcomes,” David said.
“And have, at times, been absolutely necessary,” I countered.
“I kind of hate that,” Jeff said. “It’s like getting a part out of pity.”
“So, every part is won on pure merit?” I couldn’t hide the sarcasm. “Guess the casting couch is just a myth.” For some reason I was feeling argumentative.
“No, it’s real, and of course people get parts for reasons aside from merit. It happens because of family connections, because they’re owed, or because someone wants to get in their pants. But to force a set quota on the industry—” He shook his head.
“And the Powers wouldn’t much like it either,” David said in his dry way. “We’re a very small percentage of the population. We don’t want the perception that we wield disproportionate power.”
“Worried about peasants with pitchforks,” I said.
“Always,” David said, then added, “Well, tomorrow we’ll start hearing evidence and see if we can find that solution.”
Our main courses and the stack of exotic french fries arrived, carried by a young, very pretty waitress. I wondered if she’d bribed the waiter to get to bring the food or if there was an unwritten rule about giving every aspiring actor a shot at the famous actor-producer-director?
“Who are you planning to have eat with you?” David asked. “I’ve watched Linnet eat. Birds consume more.” It was spoken in that way men have when they are trying to prove they know more about you than the other male in the room, which meant I couldn’t let it pass.
“First off, birds actually eat a lot considering their size, and you know I’m always hungry … especially when I get nervous or stressed.”
“Are you nervous now?” Jeff asked with a teasing grin.
“Well, duh. I’m having dinner with a famous movie star and heartthrob.”
“Well, good, then you’ll help me with the fries.”
For a few moments Jeff was busy doctoring his gigantic hamburger while our waitress hovered; she kept leaning across the table to offer both David and Jeff an unrestricted view of her decolletage. She seemed to focus more on David—there is something so alluring to women about a man who seems unattainable. I wanted to take her aside, and tell her it was probably hopeless. Some vampires and werewolves would skate dangerously close to the edge of the ban on turning women by forming relationships with them—I’d had a client who was married to an abusive werewolf, and of course there was my own stupid and disastrous one-night-stand with a vampire lawyer in our office—but many followed an almost monastic rule and just didn’t get involved. David struck me as that sort. The waitress seemed to get my telepathic message because she moved away from the table.
I took a sip of my lobster bisque, and nibbled on a Cajun fry. Then a sweet potato fry. Then a garlic parmesan fry. Add to that the creme fraiche in my soup, and I mentally added another twenty minutes to the time I would spend in the gym tomorrow.
“So, Linnet, I checked you out. Both of you,” he added with a nod to David. He turned back to me. “But you’re way more interesting,” Jeff said. I was once again treated to that total focus that locked his eyes on mine. “But I’m nosy, so I’ve got to ask: You were fostered in a vampire household—what does that mean, exactly?”
“That when I was eight years old my parents sent me off to live with a vampire in his household.” I wasn’t surprised at the question. Most human families never meet a vampire, much less send a child to one, and the whole custom must seem strange.
“Why would they do that?” Jeff asked. “It seems sort of cruel.” He laid his hand lightly on mine.
“For access,” David said in a too loud voice. I slipped my hand from beneath Jeff’s, and David seemed to relax. “We tend to be rich and successful. Easily accomplished when we live for centuries. Humans are attracted by power and money.” He shrugged. “We have both.”
“You used to be human,” Jeff said. David just stared at him. It’s hard to meet a vampire’s direct gaze, and David was giving it a little more punch than normal. Jeff proved to be no different than any other human. The actor cleared his throat and asked, “Okay, maybe not so much, but what’s in it for the vampire?” Jeff asked. “Why raise a human kid? Looking for a steady supply of food? Kidding,” he added after David stiffened.
I shook my head. “We’re considered
“Also, she’s female,” David added. “We don’t feed on women.”
Jeff turned his thousand-watt smile on me and leaned in a little closer. “Their loss, my … er our gain, huh?”
David stiffened, but I didn’t even blush because it sounded so trite and canned. Not that I would have bought it anyway. I had a feeling an actor’s flirtation was about as real as an Alfar’s glamour. Not that Montolbano wasn’t handsome as hell, and very charming, and he seemed bright, but he was married, which was a nonstarter for me. Even if I was interested in Montolbano, spending time with him wouldn’t look all that good. While not an actual party in the arbitration, he had forced the parties to the table. Caesar’s wife and all that.
And I was still hurting over the loss of John. I’d never actually been on a date with John. We’d gone straight to making love, sharing fear and deadly danger, and finally he had sacrificed himself and stayed in Fey (a place he hated) so his bat-shit crazy Alfar mother would release me and my clients, but I didn’t actually know him all that well. I knew he was a changeling who had been switched for a human infant. That he had followed in his human foster father’s footsteps and joined the police force. That after twenty years with the Philly police force he’d retired and turned private investigator doing a lot of work for my firm, IMG. John described himself as a blue-collar elf, and it fit.
And I was, by God, going to free him, though I had no expectations about what our relationship might be or become after he returned.
David’s voice pulled me out of my navel gazing. “I was surprised when I heard you speak in person,” the vampire said to Montolbano. “You don’t sound like you do on screen.”
“Wow. You go to those newfangled talkies?” The response to my teasing was a glare.
“We do move with and adapt to the times.”
“Just very slowly,” I added sotto voce.
“I heard that. I apologize,” he added with a nod to the actor. Montolbano was laughing.
“You two, you’re like…”
“What?” asked David, his tone a bit dangerous.
Montolbano shook his head. “I can’t really figure it out. But to answer your question, no, I don’t sound the same on screen. Given my looks, I affect a touch of a Central European Eurotrash accent, but I’m a kid who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.”
“Get out of here!” I said.
“Yeah, really. I keep my background pretty quiet, all part of that privacy mystique, but I’m fifth generation in the States. My great-great-grandfather came over and opened a restaurant in Brooklyn. Then Granddad decided the rest of the country deserved real Italian food, so he moved the family to Nebraska.”
“Wow. I understand that actors put on roles, but that makes you seem like a complete chiseler.”
“Not content to follow in the family business, I take it?” David said, and he made it sound like Jeff was some
