Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel (23 page)

Of course he’d bring it up now, when he had the home-court advantage. Everything I knew about this man said he really knew how to pick his battles. “Brendan and I are a separate issue.” I struggled to keep my voice even. “It’s also none of your business.”

The corner of Maddox’s mouth curled up in an ice-cold smile. “Am I supposed to go all contrite now?” He planted both hands on the counter. He didn’t lean forward; he didn’t need to. He just laid claim to all the space around him. “You have no idea what you’re getting into, Ms. Caine.”

“That is not only not your business; it’s not your problem.”

“You’re wrong. It is my problem. I value human life, Ms. Caine. You are risking yours, and I don’t want you to risk Brendan’s.”

That startled me. “I’m risking my life?” My heart froze and then hammered back to life. Did I mention I’d almost gotten killed a few months back? The experience left my adrenaline on a hair trigger.

“Yes, you are, by pretending the monsters are no threat
to us, and by coming here and helping them take over my family.”

Ah. Okay. He wanted to drive us over to big-picture territory. I felt oddly disappointed. For a second, I thought I’d seen a flash of something in Lloyd Maddox that didn’t show up in the sound bites—the father and grandfather underneath the mover and shaker. “I’m just here to cook,” I said. “If there’s anything else going on, it’s none of my business.”

That was a mistake. Lloyd moved forward, looking at me so hard, I could see the flecks of darkness behind his blue eyes. “He told you about the theft. Don’t bother to lie. I can see the truth.”

Anger started to build, and I welcomed it. Anger I could use. It would chase back the fear. “With me, that’s not much of a trick,” I said. “Yes, he told me. And you’ll notice I’m not calling the cops, or doing anything else that will raise a fuss.”
About the theft, anyway.
“I’m standing right here having a nice, civilized conversation with my employer’s father.” Fortunately, this once I didn’t have to worry about my lack of poker face. Lloyd expected to see anger and nerves, and he was getting an eyeful.

“You have no idea what’s happening here.”

“You already said that, and you know what? You’re right. I don’t. I don’t know why Deanna’s marrying a vampire. I don’t know why Adrienne’s not telling the cops her house got robbed. I don’t know why Oscar Simmons is dead, and I really don’t know why Linus O’Grady is asking me about how he might have gotten poisoned on the job.”

I admit it. I was hoping to piss him off enough that he might drop an unguarded word. I should have known better. Lloyd Maddox just narrowed his eyes. The air closed in around us, thick and heavy. I remembered this was a warlock in front of me, an old, powerful warlock, and I was on my own here. I’d hoped anger would burn the fear out of my brain, but fear was putting up an unexpectedly good
fight. My hand slid into my pocket, and my fingers curled around my mini–spray bottle. I carried holy water for vampires, but the enhancements I’d put in might just buy me time to make it to the door if Lloyd decided to level up the menace.

“You all think you’re so clever,” Lloyd sneered. “So progressive and so worldly. You shake your heads at the old warriors, and you say it’s such a shame we were fools for so long. You think they’re not monsters anymore. But they are, and they’re monsters of our making.” He leaned close, and although I desperately did not want to, I saw Brendan in his eyes again; Brendan in forty years, bitter and worn down by too much death and too much change. “Maybe you’ll get your own way and have all the monsters you want surrounding you. But I will protect my family. If the monsters take me down, and I have to fight my way out of hell to do it, I will come back for them all.”

Each and every word hammered me into place. He was gone before I could move again. Shaking, I slowly slumped down onto the nearest stool and buried my face in my hands.

I believed Lloyd Maddox, completely and utterly. He would stop at nothing to save the lives of his family. I also believed he saw himself as a warrior. He might even value human life, like he said. But he wouldn’t let that value get in the way of beating back the monsters he saw invading his city, and his family.

I also believed he hadn’t staged the fake ICE raid. Lloyd Maddox would not stoop to a trick like that. He’d come down on the Renaults like the wrath of God, but they’d know where that wrath originated. This also meant it was very unlikely he’d do anything as petty as interfere with the catering, so I could cross him off the list of people who might have gotten Oscar to quit the job.

But if Oscar had discovered something that would threaten the Maddox family, would Lloyd be willing to move
the chef over into the monster column? My throat closed down around my breath, because I could believe that too—easily.

Thefts and threats and weddings, oh my.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to clamp down on the urge to laugh. But what else could I do? My life had been seesawing from the scary to the ridiculous since Felicity burst into Nightlife. Now, to add to the fun, I’d gotten Lloyd Maddox to make a personal threat. Score one for me.

My tired brain stopped there, turned around, and backtracked. I had gotten Lloyd to make a threat, right after I’d pointed out Linus O’Grady was looking into the possibility that Oscar had been poisoned.

Slowly, thoughtfully, I got out my cell phone. Finding the business card the detective had given me, I dialed the number. While it rang, I glanced around at all those doors I had no way to lock, and I headed back out into the garden.

Linus picked up in the middle of the fifth ring. “O’Grady.”

“Why would Lloyd Maddox care that you were trying to figure out how somebody could be poisoned in a restaurant?” I replied.

“Chef Caine.” O’Grady sighed. For a long time, he didn’t say anything else. I could hear the gears turning in his finely tuned cop brain. If he answered me, he’d expect something in return. That was okay. Given everything that had been happening lately, I was more than ready to be on Linus’s side. So far, he and Brendan were the only two people in this disaster who didn’t seem to be operating from some hidden agenda, and I was counting myself there.

Finally, he said something. “Twenty-five years ago, before there was the separate P-Squad, I was on a team investigating the death of a design student at New York University. I was sure the kid had been poisoned, but I couldn’t prove it. Then, I was told to lay off. I didn’t have the clout to keep the investigation open, and I was afraid it’d be the end of my
time as a cop if I tried. So, as ordered, I laid off. The death was put down to anaphylactic shock, a bad allergic reaction,” he added. I was glad he couldn’t see my face right then. Why, thank you, I’d never heard what anaphylactic shock is. I only cook for a living. “I not only got to keep my job; I got promoted. But I’ve been waiting for another sudden death to come down on somebody who’s annoyed the Maddoxes ever since then,” he went on softly. “Because these things never happen just once.”

I may not be a trained cop, but I’m very good at putting things together. “You suspected a Maddox poisoned the NYU kid?” O’Grady said nothing, and I made a frightened and educated guess based on timeline. Twenty-five years ago, Adrienne would have been about twenty-one. “You suspected Adrienne Maddox.” Calm, composed, steely Adrienne Alden, married to her number-crunching money man, living in her perfect house, lunching with her exclusive group of connected ladies, was a
murderer
?

“And her father had enough pull in Albany in those days to get the right phone calls made.”

I turned in place, counting holes in the garden, smelling herbs and springtime.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I tried to tell O’Grady and myself. “Why would she poison a chef? A chef who
quit
? If she was going to kill anybody, why not the vampires who were pulling a number on her daughter?”

“I don’t know,” Linus admitted. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been waiting too long to prove I was right. It looks like a stroke with Chef Simmons, after all, not shock.”

“But you don’t believe that. You think maybe she’s just gotten better over time.”

O’Grady also apparently didn’t feel like answering me. “How come I’m getting this call now?”

I opened my mouth. I meant to tell him. He needed to know what was going on, if only because it would look really bad if somebody else told him I’d been at Perception.
But something clicked softly behind me. I spun around. The handle on the side door was waggling back and forth, trying to turn. My brain snapped straight past fear and came up against anger. My right hand came down on top of my knife roll.

“Chef Caine?” prompted O’Grady.

“You damn well better belong here!” I shouted. “Or you’re getting up close to the business end of a meat cleaver!”

“Chef?” O’Grady’s voice went very, very calm. “Talk to me, Charlotte. What’s happening?”

The door handle stilled. Silence followed. My fingers wrapped around the comforting curve of my chef’s knife handle. I’d hunt around for the cleaver later if I needed it.

“Ah, Charlotte.” Anatole Sevarin’s far-too-cheerful voice vibrated through the door. “I sense you are still awake.”

“Sorry, Detective,” I croaked. “I’ve got to go.”

“Do you need backup?” replied O’Grady in that same unhurried, even tone. “Just say good-bye if you do.”

“No thanks. I’m all set,” I said, although I was not sure this was entirely true. “Call you tomorrow.”

I hung up on a very unhappy detective.

“This had better be good, Sevarin.” I snapped the lock and tore the door open.

Anatole stood on the side porch, looking cheerful and elegant in his particular, masculine, middle-European way. One long hand rested on the shoulder of a much shorter, less elegant, and distinctly sulky vampire, who just happened to be Gabriel Renault’s blood brother, Jacques.

“This says it belongs here.”

Jacques’s dark hair was disheveled, and his shirt was even more rumpled than it had been when he ran out of the house. The look he gave me was so sour, my skin puckered up in response.

“I thought you were on the run from ICE.”

“ICE?” repeated Anatole. “ICE was here?”

“Not really.” I glowered at Jacques. “But you knew that before you ran out of here.”

“What
are you talking about?” Jacques shot back.

“I was wondering something similar,” murmured Anatole.

I ignored Anatole. “Maybe I should just go get Lloyd Maddox back here, and you can tell him what’s going on.”

“You wouldn’t do that.” There was some slight satisfaction in seeing that I’d made somebody nervous for a change, because Jacques had turned to Anatole. “She wouldn’t do that?”

“She might. I sense a deep and burning anger emanating from within her.”

This brought up yet another question. “Anatole, why are you even here?”

Anatole sighed, and an air of wounded dignity came over him. “That, I’m afraid, is a short and not entirely complimentary story. May I come in?”

“No,” said Jacques.

“Yes,” I said, and paused, squinting up at Anatole. “Can I invite you in here?”

Anatole stepped across the threshold, pushing Jacques in front of him. “Apparently you can.”

“How’d you find him?” I asked, not caring particularly which of them answered.

Jacques beat Anatole to the punch, which was not something I’d seen happen a whole lot. “Sorry to disappoint, Chefy, but there’s no mystery here.”

“Mind your manners, Renault.” Anatole’s voice dropped into that deep register that makes the hind brain want to crawl away and hide. “She might not turn Lloyd Maddox onto you, but the cleaver is not out of the question.”

Jacques rolled his eyes. He still smelled like onions. What kind of vampire smelled like onions?

“I was circling back to the house to find out if the coast was clear, or if I’d have to find someplace else to be for sunrise,” said Jacques. “Your boyfriend was lurking on the street outside. I surprised him.”

“You’re
kidding
.”

Anatole was just then scrutinizing the cooling pot of eggs. I, on the other hand, was having a painful coughing fit, because it was better than outright laughing at Anatole in front of Jacques.

I shouldn’t have bothered. Nobody was fooled. I just gave Anatole an excuse to do the wounded-dignity thing again. “I was distracted.”

“You were blind.”

The temperature surrounding the vampires dropped ten degrees, and my skin tried to do a lurch to the left and take my body with it. I dug down hard and held my ground.

“Where’s Henri?” I asked Jacques.

“I don’t know.”

For all his refined control, I could feel Anatole’s curiosity prowling the room like a cat curling around my ankles. I’d take the time to explain later—maybe—once I figured out how much I wanted him to know. Right now I wasn’t going to waste the chance to get some answers out of Jacques. “He’s your sire. Of course you know where he is.” The connection between blood children and their sires defied distance, and time. Chet’s sire, a sixteen-year-old fidget of a girl vamp, had run out on him with a pretty-boy actor years ago, and he still could have told me exactly where she was. Not that I ever asked. That was another one of my life’s complexities that I tried very hard to ignore.