Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel (26 page)

“Sevarin…”

“A professional favor, of course.”

I sighed. “I’ll fax you over a copy of the wedding menu.”

“Not enough.”

Vamp bastard.
“I’ll see if I can arrange for you to be at the tasting for the new nightblood champagne cocktail.”

“And
we will meet privately to discuss this situation.”

“Too far, Sevarin.”

“Charlotte, would I ask this if it were not important?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“That is uncomfortably close to the truth. Very well, it will not be part of the favor, but I assure you, we need to talk.”

“Okay, Anatole, we’ll play this your way. Why do we need to talk?”

“Because I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with Henri Renault.”

That shattered my thoughts as effectively as a brick dropped onto plate glass. “You…You know where Henri is?” I said slowly, making sure Brendan heard every word.

“Alas, no. We conversed over the phone. And you may tell your Brendan if he takes this phone from you, I will not speak to him.”

I looked at Brendan, who did in fact have his hand reaching straight for my phone. Scary.

“Well, what did Henri say?” I asked Anatole. “What does he want?”

“I am not at leisure to speak of it at this time.” That made me wonder where Anatole was, and who he was with. Unfortunately, unlike some people, I lacked the ability to see through cell phones. “I will meet you tomorrow night, and we will discuss recent events in full then.”

Okay, maybe I couldn’t see through cell phones, but I could smell a rat at a hundred yards. “You’re not talking because Brendan’s here and you’re being pissy.”

“Charlotte, you cut me to the quick. I have never in all the years of my existence been ‘pissy.’” But he didn’t add anything else. The amused and patient silence stretched out until I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Okay. I’ll call you tomorrow after sundown.” I very carefully did not look at Brendan.

“And I,
in my turn, will see what I can find out for you about Karina Alden, Oscar Simmons, and Exclusivité.”

I told him thanks, and we hung up. Brendan, as usual was making me be the one to avoid meeting eyes.

“What happened? Why’d Renault call Anatole?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. He wants to meet tomorrow night,” I said, then added, “I said yes, and no. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I expect we’ll find out tomorrow. Sorry.” Too much was happening too fast. I wasn’t used to keeping up with this many different kinds of puzzles. That heavy wave of tiredness I’d ridden in there was looming again, and this time it might just take me all the way under.

Slowly, Brendan stood. He crossed the room until he stood directly in front of me and reached out one finger under my chin to tip my face up toward his.

“I have leftover Chinese takeout in the fridge,” he said quietly.

“You are a god among men,” I answered.

Unfortunately, being full of braised noodles with cloud ear mushrooms, spicy shrimp, and not-so-crispy-anymore duck with plum sauce, all washed down with hot tea and the rest of that glass of scotch, did nothing to convince my body I was not short on sleep. After about the fifteenth jaw-cracking yawn, I agreed to let Brendan drive me back to Brooklyn Heights. He tried to talk me into going back to my own apartment in Queens. Maybe that would have been smarter, but somehow that would have felt like I was retreating, and I wasn’t ready to do that, not yet.

So, Brendan walked me up to my warded bedroom and kissed me at the door. We leaned together for a long moment and fumbled through one of our non-good-bye good-byes. Then I shut the door behind myself, locked it, and flopped down on my back on that brass bed. My eyes closed, and I jerked them open again. They closed again, and this time I
sat up, swearing. There was another call I needed to make before I let myself fall asleep.

I pulled out my phone, hit my brother’s number, and waited.

“C3?” said Chet after the fourth ring. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. Too much.” I’d thought I’d known what I was going to say, but now that I had Chet on the line, all my casual openings had dried up and blown away.

“Um, Charlotte? It’s kinda got to be one or the other of those.”

“Chet…” This was a mistake. I was going to regret this in the morning—later in the morning. But in my head, I kept hearing Karina Alden’s contempt as she talked about her magic-wielding sister, and that got me thinking about all the arguments I’d had with Chet. That, in turn, got me thinking about how many of those arguments I had started, for no good reason at all. “Chet, the whole thing with the loan. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, C3,” my vampire brother said. “Tell you what. You got time to get together tomorrow night?”

“You’ll still be in town?”

“I can be.”

There are moments in your life when you know it’s time to just grow up, and for me, this was one of them. “I’d appreciate that. It’s gotten complicated out here. Oscar’s death is just part of it. Chet, I need your help.”

From Chet’s side of the phone came the kind of absolute silence only the waking dead can project. Finally, he said, “You need my help?”

Oh, crap.
“Chet…”

“You. Need. My help.”

“Do not make this any harder than it has to be.”

“Sorry, but, who are you, and what have you done with Charlotte Caine?”

“Chet!”

The dry, snuffling sounds of my brother trying and
failing to stifle his laughter bubbled through the phone. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”

“The hell you are.”

“So, I’m not, but I will be there.”

“I haven’t told you where yet.”

“Wherever. You’re my sister.”

It took a long moment for me to get my throat loose enough to say anything else. “Thanks, C4.” Chet came after me, so he got to be C4 to my C3. Nobody else calls us by those names. “I’ll call you tomorrow after sunset.”

“I’ll keep the phone on.”

We said good-bye, and I hung up and laid the phone on the nightstand. My eyes stung, and my cheeks felt way too hot, the way they do right before you start crying for no reason at all. Which I was so not going to do.

I dropped onto the cushioned window seat and shoved up the sash so I could inhale a deep breath of spring. I told myself the nascent tears came from being painfully tired. It felt like a million years since Felicity had burst into the Nightlife kitchen. There was so much going wrong in so many different places, I had no idea which way to turn. I wanted rest. I wanted my life back. I wanted never to have said yes to Felicity.

I stared down into the Aldens’ garden, trying to shove all this far enough into the back of my brain to open up room for sleep. My eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness, and I was able to separate the shadows into comprehensible shapes. Standing in the middle of the blobs and blurs of trees and carefully arranged flower beds were two silhouettes—a woman’s and a man’s. They stood close, hands on shoulders, foreheads pressed together. The wind changed direction, rustling my crisp curtains and bringing scattered words with it.

“…Don’t know why I love you…can’t help it…wouldn’t change it…just don’t understand why…”

Well, that makes it unanimous,
I thought as the man,
the nightblood, Gabriel, pulled Deanna closer into his embrace. As I was turning my eyes away, my gaze caught on something else—another silhouette. This one stood on the second-floor balcony that overlooked the garden.

Adrienne Alden watched the vampire lower his mouth to her daughter’s throat. As I stared from my little window, Scott Alden came out to lead his wife back inside.

Despite my best intentions, my eyelids pulled themselves open at nine fifty a.m. and refused to close again. Tired as I was, sleep had been a long time coming. I kept hearing the conflicted words drifting up from the garden.
Don’t know why I love you…can’t help it…

I was young once. I know what it feels like to have your hormones slam you up against the boards but not know why it’s happening with this particular person. Deanna was past that stage, though. At least, she should have been. And Gabriel was undead; he didn’t
have
hormones. Their romance had never made sense, but after overhearing that little scene, it was downright bewildering. I mean, the whole incomprehensible-love-stronger-than-the-both-of-us thing worked in movies like
Brokeback Vampire
, but in real life? Not so much.

Then there was Adrienne Alden, just standing on the balcony watching the show, until her husband came and got her.

It was all a little sad, and more than a little icky.

I stared at the wall for a while before rolling over and staring at my borrowed room, closed door, and the watery Tuesday morning seeping in around the curtains. It was one of those heavy, gray, humid days where you just know
things are not going to get any better any time soon. I did not want to get out of this bed. But I had a job to do. My guy was down there, cooking for a flock of Aldens and whoever else barged in today. The longer I lay there, the longer he was going to be on his own.

I was on shift. I would show up. I would swear a lot and wonder what in the hell I was doing there. I might also seriously consider handing in my notice so I could go join my ex-writer friend on her chicken farm, but I would show up.

It turned out Reese was not on his own. Deanna Alden slumped on a stool at the kitchen island, downing a glass of orange juice as if it were salvation in citrus form. Her sleeveless, scarlet top had a mandarin collar, but I could still see the fresh welts on her neck. The scent of hot butter and frying batter rose from the cast-iron griddle on the cooktop where pancakes lay in two luscious golden brown rows.

“Morning. Sorry I’m in your territory,” Deanna said to me. “Late night and I’ve got to get out to meet the girls. We’re taking the out-of-towners on a shopping tour, and I haven’t got my going-away luggage picked out yet…” She sounded considerably unperky about this bride-oriented to-do list. “Are you married?” she asked me suddenly.

“Never found anybody who could put up with me long enough.” It was pure coincidence that I right then flashed on a memory of Brendan’s fingertip under my chin and his invitation to leftover Chinese. I chose to ignore the smirk on Reese’s face as he got busy with his spatula, flipping perfectly crisped pancakes over onto their pale bellies.

“I never thought I would either.” Deanna sighed. “It’s the best feeling in the world, knowing there’s somebody who wants to be with you forever.” That declaration would have gone over better if she hadn’t been eyeing the pancakes Reese piled onto a plate as if she were planning on marrying them.

I crossed the kitchen to peer out the window to the
dining room. Scott Alden sat alone at the table with a series of what looked like reports spread out in front of him. He sipped coffee, rearranged papers, and did not look up. While I watched, Mrs. Alden came in, dressed in a neat navy blue suit. She pecked him on the cheek and he smiled. She was gone without a word, and he still didn’t look up from his report pages.

At the island, Deanna was layering the pancakes with thick slices of butter. Reese set the maple syrup down beside her. Two pancakes were left on the serving plate, and they were calling my name.

I pulled one of the tall stools up to the island, bypassed the orange juice, and reached straight for the coffee thermos. “So.” It was the most original opening I could manage without caffeine. “Your sister says you and Gabriel met at a charity benefit?”

This was a mistake. Deanna went from tired and starved to utterly furious in less time than it takes brandy to flare up when it hits a hot pan. “You’ve been talking to Karina?”

My next words needed to be spoken very, very carefully, and probably while I was concentrating on making sure I smeared my butter evenly over every cubic centimeter of pancake. “I ran into her at Perception…”

“She’s a liar!” snapped Deanna. “Whatever she said, she’s a liar!”

Whatever
she said?
But Deanna wasn’t giving me time to get a word in.

“Always the smart one, always trying to get me to magic for her. Come on, Deanna. Just a little of the witchy-woo. Who’s gonna know?” This was said in a spot-on imitation of Karina’s voice. “But then
I’m
the one who gets in trouble because she’d always rat us right out to Mom.”

This was something I could completely sympathize with. “My brother used to get me to filch the extra Pop-Tarts, and then he’d eat them in my bedroom, so Mom never found the crumbs in his.”

“Two
sisters, and a grandmother with eyes like a hawk, and I never could learn.” Reese chuckled. “Oh, please, Reese! Just this one time, Reesey-Peesy. Had to go in the army to get away from them.”

“Yeah, well,” mumbled Deanna around a mouthful of pancake. “Except with Karina, the whole point was to get me into trouble. I mean, that was why she introduced me to Gabriel in the first place…”

Those words brought my train of thought to a screeching halt. “
Karina
introduced you to Gabriel?”

“Oh yeah, you didn’t know? It was completely her idea. I should have known something was up when she decided to come to the Save Our Streets gala. She never does the party crap. Always says she’s got business, and Mom lets her get away with it, of course, because she’s not…” Deanna swallowed more pancake instead of finishing that sentence. But I bet the missing words were “a witch.” “She was there that night, though, and she brought Gabriel right up to me. She had plans. I could see them written all over her smug little face.” Deanna narrowed her eyes. “But it didn’t work out her way this time.”