Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel (7 page)

“Is this a wedding or a political campaign?”

“With us, it can be kind of hard to tell.”

“Did she say anything about why I’m the one who got tagged as Oscar’s replacement?”

“Not really. She just said when she checked the list of possibilities Felicity came up with, you were the best available.”

Which was nice to hear, but somehow in the light of Oscar’s enigmatic snarking, I didn’t quite believe it. I turned the paper cup in my fingers around a few times, wishing there was yet more coffee in it. “Did your aunt happen to say anything about sister Karina dating Oscar Simmons?”

Brendan’s fork froze midscoot. “Karina’s dating Simmons?”

This I took to be a “no.” I told Brendan about my encounter with Oscar last night.

Brendan pushed his plate away. “Oy.”

“Yeah. And she’s ticked off somebody in the family enough that they’re willing to pay for a smear campaign.”

“I’d put my money on Deanna for that one. They both have their PhD’s in sibling rivalry.”

I thought about bubbly, bright, breathless Deanna. I could see how she might make you crazy. Not that I personally once ever resented my own sibling for being a handsome star athlete or anything.

“So, what’s Karina like?” I asked.

Brendan just shook his head. “I never really got to know her. There’s already a divide between those of us who lived full-time on the estate and those who didn’t, but it’s even bigger between the kids with magic and the ones without.”

“Karina’s not a witch?”

“Nope. She’s a T-typ.” That’s short for “thauma-typical,” the technical term for someone who is not a witch, or a werewolf, or undead, or otherwise inherently magical.

“A T-typ with Maddox relations. That can’t be easy.”

“It’s not.”

“Your grandfather must be having kittens about this.”

Brendan grimaced. “Saber-toothed tigers, more like.”

“I’m surprised he hasn’t been on the talk shows with it.” Lloyd Maddox had no problems taking the Maddoxes’ private fights public. He had a huge repertoire of speeches about the degradation to the culture, the nation, and the
human race itself caused by the Equal Humanity Acts, and he tended to pepper them with personal examples.

“Aunt Adrienne won’t let him.” Brendan smiled grimly.

This merited a double-eyebrow lift. “There’s somebody who can keep your grandfather quiet on the subject of vampires?”

“Oh, Aunt Adrienne’s special. She holds the
Popeth Arall
.”

“Gesundheit.”

“Ha-ha,” Brendan grumbled, and took a last swallow of coffee. “The Arall’s a piece of the family’s power, and it’s passed down the female line. The name comes from a Welsh phrase for ‘in the last resort.’”

As the Maddoxes were one of the great vampire-hunting clans, I assumed this Popeth Arall was an antivampire weapon of some kind from back in the days when that kind of thing was so invisible, most people didn’t believe in either witches or vamps. I thought about all the antiques neatly displayed on the mantelpiece in the living room. Could they be magical as well as old?

“And…?” I prompted Brendan.

“And traditionally the secret of the Arall is passed on when the oldest daughter of the current guardian gets married.”

Understanding pulled a few levers in the back of my mind, and my face fell.

Brendan nodded. “When Deanna marries Gabriel Renault, she comes into possession of some ancient, dangerous magic at the heart of the Maddox family power.”

As little as I liked being able to sympathize with a man who spent his political capital trying to make it legal to put my clientele—and my brother—to the stake, I found it surprisingly understandable why Lloyd Maddox might be just a teensy bit upset by this turn of events.

I took a deep breath. Then I took pride and nerves in
both hands and shoved them behind me. “Brendan, do you think I should get out of this?”

Brendan took a long time answering. They were careful on all the big questions, these Maddoxes. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “On the way here, I kept trying to make up my mind…and now with this thing with Oscar and Karina…I just don’t know. It’s really up to you.”

“Well that’s all very dull and straightforward of you.”

“I’m a dull and straightforward kind of guy. It’s part of my charm.”

“You have no idea.”

Brendan smiled. His gorgeous eyes filled with hope, confidence, and something more—trust. Brendan trusted me to make a good decision, not just the one he wanted, but a good one. Whatever it was, he’d back me on it.

That shook me straight down to my toenails. I’m used to being in charge. I’m used to being both competent and confident. What I am not used to is being trusted, not really. Not by people who matter to me.

I took a deep breath, and, of course, my phone rang.

Fortunately, Brendan was also used to my acutely honed swearing abilities and was profoundly unshocked when I unleashed them now. I grabbed my phone and stabbed the
ANSWER
button.

“Oh my
gahd
, Charlotte!” cried the voice on the other end of my phone before I could let on exactly what I thought of this bit of timing. “Why didn’t you
tell
me? You
know
I’m your first call!”

“Elaine?” Elaine West had been the publicist for me and Nightlife for three years now, and she knew darned well not to go incoherent on me before noon. “What are you talking about?”

Elaine did not seem to hear me. “It’s all
over
FlashNews and the society blogs how you replaced Oscar Simmons for the Alden-Renault wedding. How am I supposed to handle your PR if you don’t
tell
me when you make the news?”

“It’s out already?” Note to self: Find out who invented FlashNews, Twitter, and every other form of social media and fillet them, slowly.

“I must have had fifty calls already asking for quotes.”

“I was going to call you right after breakfast,” I lied. “But…”

“No time,” Elaine snapped. “The vultures are going to be descending any second. Is your fax on? I’ve got some draft statements here about how sorry you are about Oscar’s death and what a…”

“Wait. Hold it! Time out! Burner off!
What
?”

Elaine paused. The pause stretched. Brendan was on his feet and coming around to stand beside me so he could hear, if she ever decided to start talking again.

She did. “Oh, Charlotte. I’m sorry. I assumed someone would have called you right away. Oscar Simmons is dead.”

“Oscar’s dead?” I had heard what Elaine said. Her statement repeated itself, word for word, inside my brain. But I couldn’t understand it. It made no sense whatsoever.

“They say it must have been a massive stroke. He was found in his office during lunch prep.”

“But, I just talked to him. Last night. This morning. He looked fine.” It was a completely stupid thing to say, but I seemed to be cut off from my own rational thought processes.

I pushed Elaine for details, but she stubbornly insisted she had none and went back to trying to pound it into my reluctant brain that she was faxing me some statements for my approval. I hung up on her. Then I hung on to Brendan for a long time.

There’s a deeply awkward feeling that comes from hearing about the death of somebody you don’t like. You don’t want to be glad, and you’re probably not, but at the same time, you feel you should be more upset than you are. After all, that individual was somebody, and now he’s not.

Brendan rested his chin on the top of my head. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I’ve got to get into Nightlife,” I answered, which was true as far as it went. “We’re supposed to be
meeting about the wedding catering today, and this could make things…awkward.”

“And they’re sure it was a stroke?” he asked. He was thinking about last year, and the last body that had crossed my path. I knew he was, because I was too.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “I really, really don’t want to go there.”

“Okay.” He kissed the top of my head, but I was sure he was already going through his mental Rolodex, deciding which of his connections he could pump for information. Brendan was the dependable type.

“You want a lift into work?” he asked.

“Yeah, thanks.” I mustered a smile and went into my bedroom to get my purse. I scrubbed at my face a little and noticed how my cheeks had stayed bone dry. There was something wrong with that. A man was dead. No matter what I’d thought of him, that was worth some sign of grief, wasn’t it?

That was yet another question I had no answer to.

While Brendan navigated city traffic with a skill that was the envy of many a cab driver, I called Felicity. If she hadn’t gotten the news about Oscar’s death, she needed it. If she had, I wanted any extra details she might have in hand. Unfortunately, my call was the first she’d heard about it. Fortunately, she was less frantic than I had expected. The only real tension came when she asked me for the third time to confirm that yes, I was still on the job, and yes, I was on my way to coordinate with my team at Nightlife about how we’d handle the catering schedule. Yes, really. Right now. In fact, I was pretty sure we’d just violated a couple of minor traffic laws in that last intersection to get there thirty seconds sooner.

Brendan very pointedly slowed down to something that might be considered a crawl, if you were the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote was after you.

He did get me to Nightlife, however, and in one piece. When I walked into the dining room, I found Marie, Reese, and Zoe had commandeered a six-top. Marie’s cake samples sat in the center, surrounded by shift charts, staff lists, and a whole bunch of open notebooks. It felt like walking into the restaurant version of the Situation Room.

Or at least it did until I noticed that everybody was looking at something other than me. Marie was looking at Zoe. Zoe was looking at a set of pages covered with notes and sketches. Reese was looking at the kitchen door as though thinking of making an abrupt exit. That was strange, because Reese was at first glance the most imposing person in that room. He has a linebacker’s build, rich brown skin, cornrowed hair and the words
EAT THIS
tattooed on his knuckles. He swears the ink is the result of losing a bar bet, but he won’t tell me what that bet actually was. I throw him the hard cases who come into the kitchen; the ones who think they know more than they actually do, or who might once in a while consider it beneath their dignity to take orders from a woman.

“What?” I asked as I sat down and pulled out my notebooks.

“Nothing,” said Zoe. “We need a list of scheduled events for Alden week, and how many people are you going to need out of the kitchen?”

“Alden week?” I looked at Reese. Reese looked at Zoe. “What?” I said to Reese.

“Nothing,” he said so casually, I was tempted to believe him.

I looked at Marie. The Cakeinator looked back at me over the rims of her glasses, daring me to ask her what as well. I decided to drop back and punt.

“So, I take it you’ve all heard Oscar Simmons is dead?” I tried.

“What?”
Seeing a look of complete shock on the faces of three people who’d been trying to put something over on
you a minute before was one of life’s little pleasures. It also told me that whatever subject they were avoiding, it was not the abrupt demise of a celebrity chef.

As if I needed more orphaned mysteries crowding around my door.

“So, who finally got the
cabrón
?” asked Marie.

The remark was, of course, in very poor taste, not that any of us were going to tell her that. “Nobody as far as I know,” I said. “They’re saying it was a massive stroke. He was found at his desk.”

“Now, that is a surprise,” muttered Reese.

While I was grateful to find that my dislike of Oscar was not the result of some unique personal flaw, this was not the kind of talk I cared to encourage, not when the media might come calling or knocking at any minute. Elaine wasn’t wrong. With Oscar so suddenly dead, so shortly after having suddenly quit a society wedding, assorted columnists and chatty types were going to be clawing after the juicy details, and they’d figure as both replacement and ex-employee, I would have them. Nightlife had to be ready for the onslaught. Too bad city building codes did not allow for shark-filled moats.

“We are all very sorry,” I said firmly, meeting each of their gazes in turn. “Oscar was a true professional and a highly respected member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family during this difficult time.”

“Did he actually have family?” asked Zoe.

“Hear him tell it, he sprang full grown out of the head of Escoffier,” said Reese.

“He sprang full grown from somewhere,” added Marie. “I would not say it was anyplace so elevated.”

“We are all
very
sorry,” I repeated, because obviously my staff had not heard me the first time around. “Oscar was a true professional and a highly respected—”

“Horse’s arse,” announced Robert Kemp, who at that moment strode through the door, his white hair flying and
suit coattails flapping. “Yes, I’ve heard. I would have arrived sooner, but the sodding subway had a nervous breakdown. Flowers to Perception and for the memorial, yes? Thoughts and prayers with the family during this difficult time, yes? Yes.” He tossed his keys down on the host station podium, scooped up the house phone, and began to both dial and regather his trademark aplomb.