Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel (31 page)

am fine on lead call l8tr. bm

I just about dissolved into a little puddle right there on the line, but I recovered myself and stuffed the phone back in my pocket. “I’m going to kill him,” I told Zoe.

“Yes, Chef,” she said. “Marty! Pick up twenty!”

The next message came at twelve fifteen:
still fine lead playing out

“So very dead.” I shoved the phone back in my pocket. “Eighty-six the tuna! We’re out of tuna!”

The next one came at one thirty-three:
still fine staking out my guy wish u wr here.

“Dead, dead, dead.” I grabbed the squeeze bottle of white truffle oil.

“I wish he’d send you some bad news so you’d quit wanting to kill him,” said Reese. “The boy just plain don’t know how to treat his lady.”

“Gimme two pumpkin soups!” I hollered, tearing a ticket off the machine and shoving it onto the dupe slide. “And where the hell’s my duck for fifteen? Oh, and Reese? Shut up!”

“Working, Chef!”

Chet and Anatole showed up right at two a.m., just as Robert was locking the front door. And I’d been right. They were not happy to see each other. At least, Chet was not happy to see Anatole. Anatole just bowed to my brother and gave his annoying and inscrutable smile some extra airtime.

“Yes, Chet,” I said with a sigh as my brother opened his mouth. “I will tell you what the hell he’s doing here.” I hadn’t had a new message from Brendan for the last twenty-seven minutes, and my shoulder blades were going all twitchy trying to stop my hand from reaching for my phone yet again. “But upstairs, okay?”

“Good evening, Charlotte. Caine,” said Anatole, cool and absolutely unruffled. “Upstairs?”

“You’ll see.”

I don’t have space at Nightlife for a private office, and there are times, such as during closing, when the dining room’s as full of staff as the kitchen. Although you might not have guessed it, I do also just plain get tired of hanging around the back alley. So, over the course of the past few months, I had manufactured a place where I could get a little privacy. I led Anatole and Chet up three flights of
underlit stairs that smelled of various kinds of smoke, out onto the roof, and into to my own private garden.

The wind gusted hard, ruffling my too-short hair and carrying with it the smells of exhaust and impending summer. It rattled the plastic sheeting over beds of baby lettuce and microgreens. The herbs, bush beans, and, most importantly, the tomatoes, stood in their own boxes, waiting for sunlight to replace the tarnished silver of streetlight that reflected off the glass skyscrapers rising all around us.

“What’s all this?” asked Chet, gesturing at my greenery.

“This is what I’ve been up to since you left.” It wasn’t anything close to what the Aldens had, but I’d nailed together the frames for those boxes, helped to haul bags of soil up those three flights of stairs, and set up the blue compost bin by the air duct. This garden was as much mine as the kitchen downstairs.

“This is you breaking about fifty municipal codes,” Chet shot back. “Good going, Charlotte.”

Sensing an impending and possibly lengthy sibling-only digression, Anatole intervened. “Enchanting,” he murmured. “What else have you been keeping secret from me? Us?” he corrected himself as Chet narrowed his eyes.

Sharing is not something I do naturally. But that had to stop. If I was to put an end to the mess the Aldens had gotten me and Brendan into, I needed both Chet and Anatole, whether I wanted to need them or not.

So, I told them how O’Grady suspected Oscar’s death might be murder. I told them he suspected it might have something to do with Adrienne Alden, because of the death of an NYU student that happened around the time of the Five Points Riot. I pointed out that Adrienne Alden and Trudy Lyons had been close friends, except not permanent ones, because Trudy had been trying to warn Adrienne that her daughters were out of control and was chafing at being underpaid. Then there was the fact that Adrienne was
probably trying to control Deanna, the important magical heiress daughter, using a love potion. Except it was Karina, the smart, successful T-typ daughter who introduced the Renaults to Deanna and who had access to a poisonous substance that could mimic the disorientation and blindness that accompanied a stroke. Add to this the detail that Gabriel Renault had an NYU class ring on his hand, or at least he had before Lloyd Maddox stole it. But although he stole the ring, Lloyd left Gabriel lying in peace, near a shoe box full of Henri’s accessories. Oh, and Lloyd had fired Trudy, who was revenging herself by making me a love potion antidote.

When I finally ran out of breath, Anatole had both eyebrows raised. Chet, on the other hand, whistled.

“Wow. Charlotte, that all makes no kind of sense whatsoever.”

“I beg to differ,” said Anatole.

“There’s a surprise,” muttered Chet.

Anatole ignored him. “It explains a great deal about a phone call I received from Henri Renault.”

“Renault called you?” Chet said this to me, as if he couldn’t believe I had left out this detail from my story. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but it was already getting to be one hell of a long story, and I wanted to find out what Anatole had to add to it.

“Renault claims he has the legendary
Popeth Arall
, and he has offered to sell it to me.”

“I thought you didn’t know what the Arall was.”

“I never said that,” Anatole reminded me with gentle smugness. “I said I didn’t know it belonged to the Maddoxes. The legend of the weapon itself has been around for centuries.”

Chet gestured impatiently. “And Henri said he’d sell it to you. And…?”

“Actually, he said he was going to auction it off, but if I wanted it, I could have first chance.”

“What
did you say to him?” asked Chet.

“I told him I would consider it.”

“Does he know you don’t actually have any money?” I put in.

Anatole’s shrug was perfectly noncommittal. “He does not believe it. Anyone as old as I must have amassed a considerable fortune.”

“He’s supposed to be pretty old himself. Why is he shilling for money?”

“This is one among many questions I asked myself. Henri is not as subtle as he thinks he is, but neither is he stupid. In the past, he has run some very long games, and he has used his pretty children as major players.”

A hard laugh burst out of me as I pictured the monocled little vampire, who couldn’t keep his hands off the help, trying to go head to head with Anatole. “Henri Renault thinks he can con
you
?”

That earned me a small smile. “Your faith in my judgment is most flattering, Charlotte. But no, I don’t think Henri believes he can con—to use your word—me. I am certain he
believes
he has the Arall. He heard it was a weapon, he stole a weapon, and he is trying to sell it. Which leaves me with the question, should I try to buy it?”

Chet shoved his hair back, only to have the wind plaster it right back across his forehead, and glowered at us both. He’d been working on that glower. I could feel its cold pricking against my skin. It was an odd reminder that my baby brother was growing up, in a nightblood kind of way. “Will one of you explain to me why we’re standing up here and not sharing any of this priceless info with O’Grady and the Paranormal Squadron?” And that was another one. Six months ago, he never would have suggested going to the police for something like this. It was, I had to admit, a damned good question.

“To begin with,” said Anatole, “I avoid talking to O’Grady if at all possible. Also, because what will make
Charlotte’s life easier is much more important to me than what will make his life easier.” Anatole had a highly personalized code of conduct. I suppose it was a good thing to see it skewing in my favor, but I couldn’t shake the sensation it gave me of the roof shifting underfoot. “What will make Charlotte’s life easier is finding out what this thing Henri has actually is, and quietly returning the stolen property to the Maddoxes.”

“She’s set to ruin the wedding, so how is this going to help her?”

“Lloyd Maddox wants the wedding ruined, so that is not an issue. If she also quietly returns the Arall, he will be more than ready to see that she is left alone so she will have no reason to go talking to the police about any little behavior problems on the part of his grandchildren. A state of affairs I am also happy to help facilitate.”

“Try again, Sevarin,” I said so Chet wouldn’t have to. “You just want to know what Henri’s got.”

Anatole shrugged. Clearly, this little difference of interpretation was of no importance. “I told Henri I would meet with him tomorrow night and we would bargain then. It is my intent to get whatever he has, and allow you, Charlotte, to hand it back to the Maddox clan. You will, I hope, tell them who helped retrieve their property.”

My mouth opened before I had any words. I closed it again. There still weren’t any words. There was something else going on behind those impenetrable green eyes. No one can do enigmatic like an old vampire, and Anatole was pouring all he had into the act. He stood there smiling just enough to show the tiniest corner of a fang. And all at once, I understood.

“Oh, em effing gee,” I whispered. “You’re doing this to get to Lloyd Maddox. If you find out what’s going on with the Renaults, he’ll owe you a favor!”

“I’ve been at his throat, and I’ve been a thorn in his side. I decided to try a new tactic. It is a new age, after all.”

“You’re
going to kill him with kindness,” Chet said, and for the first time I heard admiration creep into his tone.

Anatole’s smile broadened, and smug satisfaction radiated from him like heat off a flat-top grill. “And there is not one thing he can do about it.”

“So where are you going to pull off this fast shuffle you’ve got planned?” Because even to a hardened control freak such as myself, it seemed the best place to be for such an encounter was well out of the way.

Anatole, however, was not going to give me the option. “I thought Nightlife after closing would make an excellent location for an exchange of this nature. Neither too private nor too public.”

“Nightlife?” I stared at him. “You want me to leave you and a thieving nightblood in my restaurant while he’s trying to use you as a fence for stolen magic?”

“Actually, I was hoping you would both be there. I prefer backup for such operations.”

Skepticism strong enough to wilt my lettuces oozed out of Chet. “You don’t think Henri’s going to get suspicious to see me and my sister at your little bargaining session?”

“I think he’s rather expecting it.” Anatole smiled, waiting for me to catch up. He didn’t have to wait long.

“You told him I was your girlfriend, didn’t you?”

“That is an approximate translation of what I told him, yes.”

Chet was giving me a look so pointed, I could have staked him with it. I waved him back. I could handle this one, and turned my best you’re-late-for-your-shift glower onto the senior nightblood. “Anatole…”

“It was necessary to impress upon him you were not to be interfered with. I am afraid our Henri Renault is woefully behind the times. There are only a few connections between nightblood and dayblood that he recognizes, and those are all proprietary.”

That might even have been the truth, but it didn’t make
me back down on my glower at all, even though I sensed that it wasn’t quite getting through to Anatole. I gave it up. I ran my hand through my hair and stared out at the city. We had to get to Henri. We, I, had to find out what he’d actually stolen, as well as what he knew about Adrienne Alden and all the rest of it. At the same time, if I let Henri into Nightlife, there could be real trouble. The last time I’d gotten mixed up in a showdown with nightbloods, there’d been fire involved.

“I’m there the whole time,” said Chet to Anatole.

“What!”
I answered with what was apparently an expected level of calm, because Chet just shrugged.

“You were going to do it anyway.”

“I was not!”

This declaration was not only less than strictly true; it left me with the feeling that I’d suddenly reverted to being six years old. And, for the record? It was no fun at all being six years old with two vampires looking down at you in amused disbelief.

Chet turned back to Anatole. “Brendan’s going to want in too. She’ll tell him.”

“That had occurred to me.”

I was going to have to get some more girlfriends. I’d had it about up to here with the testosterone squad.

“Do I actually need to be here for this?” I demanded. “Because if you two have important man talk, I’ll just go back to my knitting.”

Anatole looked at his watch. “I believe we are finished. Renault will be contacting me later tonight. I’ll tell him we will meet here tomorrow.”

“Not here,” I said. “I’m not risking Nightlife, or any of my people over this.”

Anatole waved, conceding the point. “Where would you suggest?”

“I’ve got a friend with a little place in Midtown.” I was even fairly sure I could talk Mel into going along with the
operation. His sense of drama and gallantry would rise to the occasion, as long as he didn’t have any events planned.

“I will trust you to make the arrangements then,” said Anatole. “Will nine p.m. suit?”

“Would it actually matter if I said no?”

“Of course it would. But I do not anticipate it becoming an issue.”

My answer was cut off by the roof door opening. Zoe leaned out of the stairwell with the air of somebody ready to beat a fast retreat. Smart woman.

“Chef?” she called from her safe distance.

“What’s going on, Zoe?”

“We’re ready to lock up, and Reese says the truck you’re looking for is the Bite Mobile, and it’ll be on the corner of Sixth and Grand for another half hour.”

“Great. Thanks. Tell everybody they can head out.”

Zoe started to pull the door shut but stopped halfway, obviously steeling her nerves. “Is there something I need to know, Chef?” There were claws unsheathing behind those words.

“Not yet, I promise.”

Zoe, however, did not seem to be in a trusting mood. She looked at Anatole, and at Chet, and then back to me. “If the place is burned down tomorrow morning, I’m going to find your ass and hand it to you.”