Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel (25 page)

I snatched my notes out of his fingers and slapped the page facedown on the counter. “He sent you here to get a sneak peek at the menu.”

“To my shame. But, given what we’ve just heard between the bride and best man, I cannot say I’m entirely sorry I came.” Anatole’s face went still, and I had a nasty crawly sensation, the kind you get when you’ve seen something skitter away that second before you put the lights on. “I
think Henri Renault needs to be found and reminded you are under my protection.”

I could have blustered here; done the whole kick-butt-heroine shtick and insisted I didn’t need his protection. But I could still feel the sharp corners of Jacques’s anger in the back of my throat. He was in the house somewhere, and he wasn’t any too happy with me either. Brendan might have turned my bedroom into a magical Fort Knox, but there was a whole lot of dark city out there for a pissed-off vampire to lurk in, and I worked late nights.

Of course, all of this communicated itself straight to Anatole.

“Do you wish to leave, Charlotte? I will take you home.”

“No. I’ll be all right.” My hand strayed to my pocket, brushing the comforting weight of my spray bottle.

He nodded. If there’s one thing I really do like about Anatole, it’s that he has a healthy respect for my ability to defend myself.

“But you’re right about one thing. Henri Renault’s got to be found.”

“Shall I make inquiries?”

“Can you?”

“For you, Charlotte, I can move mountains. And do not worry; I will find a way to put off my editor about the menu.” Anatole took my free hand and brushed his lips against it. Then he smiled at my entirely useless attempt not to smile, or blush, and started for the door. But there was something else that needed saying before he left.

“Anatole?”

“Wait.” He pressed his fingers to his forehead. “I sense…a threat? Perhaps something related to how my existence will come to an abrupt and dusty halt if I intrude upon your mental space again without an explicit warning?”

“You know me so well.”

Anatole’s eyes sparkled, and I felt those sparks dance across my skin. “Better than you realize, Charlotte.”

The door closed behind him, and I stood there for a long time, thinking. I thought about Brendan and me, and how I kept teasing Anatole even though I knew it was dangerous. And how I kept not telling him to quit coming around after me.

I thought about Jacques, Henri, and Gabriel, and how neither Jacques nor Deanna seemed to know what was going on. I thought about Jacques’s saying he was being ordered to go through with this farce. I thought about all the little stories Anatole liked to drop into conversation and how I had no way to know when he was kidding and when he was being straight with me. I thought about how vampires lie, especially about who they are and where they’ve come from. One of the attractions of becoming a vampire is it’s the ultimate way to reinvent yourself. The nightblood registry was supposed to prevent identity fraud and make sure there’s a public record of who’s who. But there aren’t a whole lot of ways to make sure what goes into the registry is accurate. Gabriel, Jacques, and Henri could be anybody, and be up to anything.

But then, so could Anatole. And I knew that, and I
still
didn’t tell him to stop coming around to see me and walk me places and smile his smile full of promises at me.

At three thirty in the dark of a spring morning, I cleaned the kitchen, packed up the food I’d made, wrote the contents of the fridge and the bread box on the chalkboard glued to the stainless steel fridge, and climbed the stairs to my bedroom, trying very hard not to think anymore.

“You look tired,” said Brendan when we’d finished a brief but pleasant greeting kiss. “Want a drink?”

“Yes. A lot.”

I’d spent most of the day at Nightlife, helping Reese, Zoe, Marie, and Mel coordinate staff and deliveries. It was Monday, so the restaurant was closed. This gave us a chance to work on logistics and to use the kitchen to test and refine our Big Day recipes. Then Reese and I hightailed it back to Brooklyn for the bridesmaids’ tea. Now, those same bridesmaids, and the bride, were off at whatever bachelorette shenanigans they had planned. I could have hidden under that little brass bed upstairs. I could have gone home to Queens for fresh clothes and television. I didn’t. I called Brendan. I was, as he observed with his trained security consultant eyes, tired—deeply, heavily tired. But I was also scared, angry, and confused. To top it all off, people were lying to me, which is not something I take to well even when nobody’s dead. I wanted to be with Brendan. I desperately needed to tell somebody exactly how messed up things were, and he was the only one I could trust with the whole story.

Besides, this was his family. He needed to know what was going on, whether they wanted him to or not.

I followed Brendan into his living room. The first time I stepped into this gorgeous SoHo loft, the place was pristine. It featured white walls, comfortably full bookcases, blond wood floors, and the kind of clean white leather furniture that only a person without kids or pets can own. The place had looked staged for sale.

Since his paranormal security firm got the city contract, however, that had changed. Maps, blueprints, and reports had taken over Brendan’s home. Papers buried the dining room table, created foot-high stacks on the spare chairs, and completely engulfed the coffee table. Schematics big enough to cover one of Nightlife’s four top tables were taped to the walls above Brendan’s desk, which looked like nothing more than a uniform layer of paper on four legs.

I peered at the new representations of city landmarks that had gone up since I’d last been there. “Homeland Security’s going to come knocking on your door if they find out about this.”

“Them? I’ve got them on speed dial.” Brendan knows my drink preferences and had taken to stocking single malts. He poured me a healthy measure of amber liquid and handed it over as I took a seat at the far end of his butter soft leather sofa. It was the one part of the room not drowning in paper. I suspected that was because he’d taken to sleeping on it.

“Thank you.” I sipped the fine scotch and let the heat of the alcohol and Brendan’s presence uncurl in my veins.

Brendan touched my arm as he sat down at the other end of the sofa.

“It’s been a day,” I admitted. “More like a day and a half.”

“I’m not surprised. Did you find anything in Oscar’s office?”

“Oscar tore some pages out of his most recent notebook and shredded them.” I fished out the crumpled piece of list and handed it over. “That’s what’s left, as near as I can tell.”

Time and being carried around in my pocket had not done good things for my pathetic little scrap of a clue. Brendan gave me a meaningful look. I blushed. He went over to his paper-bound desk and switched on the lamp. He bent down under it and held the scrap up about an inch from his nose.

“What’s this first one? ‘Acon’…‘aconti’?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. Whatever it’s written in, I can’t read it. The second line looks like ‘CH’ something, but I don’t think he finished it.”

Brendan was quiet for a long moment, turning the paper this way and that, searching for some angle that would make Oscar’s scrawl legible. “Shit,” he breathed.

“What?”

“This last line. It’s Old Welsh.”

“You read Old Welsh?” I held up my hand before he could give me that special look. “Of course you do. What’s it say?”

“I’m not sure. The guy had truly terrible handwriting. It’s a smeared scrap, and he was copying something he probably couldn’t read. But see,” he said, turning the paper so I could in fact see. “It’s got the double
f
’s and the double
l
’s and
y
’s in the middle of the words. That’s almost exclusive to Welsh.” He squinted at it again. “Can I keep this?”

I waved the scotch glass at him. “Go ahead. I’m not getting anywhere with it.”

“How was Karina when you saw her?”

“She is not okay. She’d been crying and was about to start again. She was drifting too, as if she had too much churning around inside and she was trying to keep it all under wraps.” This would make a lot of sense if she’d killed her ex-boyfriend, or if she knew who did.

“We don’t know for sure it was murder,” Brendan reminded me. “Let alone that it was a Maddox.”

“No,”
I looked down into my scotch. “Except.”

“Should I be sitting down for this?” inquired Brendan lightly.

“Yes.”

Brendan’s attempt at a smile faded, and he sank into his desk chair. Slowly, in simple words neither one of us would have to struggle to understand, I told him about my conversation with O’Grady, and the holes in the garden, and how he’d been harboring suspicions about Aunt Adrienne Alden for a quarter century.

When I’d finished, Brendan bowed his head and scrubbed at his scalp with both hands, hard. “I hate this,” he muttered. “I hate this feeling of trying to choose which family member I’d rather have be a murderer.”

There were no words anywhere in the language that could cover that, so I just took his hand. Brendan squeezed my fingers, hard. But I have strong hands, and I just let him hold on to me for a change.

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

“Me too.” Brendan’s knuckles had gone white. He didn’t let go, and I didn’t ask him to.

“Did…Did O’Grady say anything else about the death of that NYU student?” he asked after a while.

I shook my head. “Maybe Oscar was trying blackmail? He was sleeping with Karina. She may have packed up on her family, but I’d bet money she knew exactly what each one of them was doing.” I remembered how she lied to me about how close in touch with her father she still was. “Maybe she knew about her mother’s history with O’Grady.”

“Or maybe somebody in the house was worried about what Oscar might tell Karina. He was an haute noir chef, wasn’t he?” I nodded. “So he would have had connections around the nightblood community. Maybe he knew something about the Renaults, and they didn’t want him spreading it around.”

I hadn’t thought about that. I was so used to seeing
Oscar as a blowhard, I hadn’t even stopped to think he might actually be a real threat on any front. “It’s possible, except Oscar died during daylight hours.”

“Poison doesn’t have to be immediate.”

Now there was a nasty idea. I could think of several ways poison could be a ticking time bomb, and I wasn’t even trying hard. “There’s another possibility,” I said slowly.

“What?”

“That this doesn’t have anything to do with the wedding. Karina’s working the luxury market in a down economy. Among all the other things he was, Oscar was a tight-fisted bastard. Maybe he got her to develop a perfume for him, and then stole the recipe and broke up with her, with the intent to give the formula to somebody who would make it for cheap.” New York was second only to Beijing for being able to counterfeit designer anything-you-could-ask-for. There was no reason perfume should be tougher to fake than, say, handbags. “That’d explain the list. It’s a perfume formula.”

Brendan picked up the crumpled scrap again. “Maybe, maybe,” he muttered. “If he got it off Karina, it’d explain the Welsh. A lot of us use it as kind of a code for personal messages, since next to nobody outside the family reads it. But would that be enough to kill somebody over?”

“It’d mean the loss of some major dollars,” I said. “If Karina’s business had been taking a hit, it could mean the difference between life and death for her company.”

Brendan nodded. “I could find out some of the financial information, but there’s a risk Karina’d get word I was looking into her business.”

I looked at the dregs of my scotch. “I have an idea,” I told him slowly. “But you’re not going to like it.”

Brendan’s smile was tight and humorless. “I’m braced. What is it?”

“I
do know a journalist who is temporarily on the society beat.”

We locked eyes, and I watched half a dozen emotions chase one another’s tails behind Brendan’s storm blue eyes.

“Call him,” he said finally.

I pulled out my phone and hit Anatole’s number before either one of us could change our minds.

“Good evening, Charlotte.” Even over the phone, Anatole’s voice had a silken quality that made me want to lean closer. “To what do I owe this unique pleasure?”

“Hello, Anatole. I need a favor.”

“Do you indeed?” I could picture the golden sparks dancing in his green eyes. And judging by the way he was carefully not looking at me, so could Brendan.

“A professional favor,” I said to both of them.

“I am most profoundly disappointed,” said Anatole.

“Sorry.”

“What is the nature of this favor?”

“I cannot believe I am about to say this. I need to know if there’s any dish on Karina Alden.”

“May I ask why you would be so suddenly interested in sordid society gossip?”

I rolled my eyes. I swear, Anatole heard the gesture. “Ah. I understand. You are intimately involved with yet more problematic Maddoxes and are looking to extricate yourself. I will, of course, be glad to help in this effort.” There were way too many layers of meaning in that, but I decided to let them all go. “I will, however, expect a favor in return,” Anatole went on.