Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel

by Sarah Zettel

  This was not the kind of building just anybody could wander into. I had to give my name to the guard at the desk, who in turn had to make sure somebody upstairs would agree to take charge of me before he’d agree to give me a pass and buzz me through.

  That somebody turned out to be Karina Alden herself.

  “Charlotte. I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said by way of an extremely left-handed greeting as I stepped off the elevator. But considering the last time she’d seen me was in the company of Linus O’Grady, I couldn’t really blame her for the lack of warmth.

  At some point, Karina had swapped out the designer dress for black slacks and a long white coat that buttoned all the way up to a high, closed neck. It looked like a cross between a lab coat and my own chef’s uniform. A bitter smell hung around her, something that vaguely reminded me of the taste of AA batteries.

  I must have made a face. “Sorry,” said Karina. “I’ve been in the aromatics lab. It can get a little strong.”

  “You were looking kind of rough…before. I wanted to see if you were okay.”

  “You did or O’Grady did?” Karina was clearly not in the mood for any kind of verbal dance. This was a state of being I could completely respect.

  “Linus O’Grady is not going to send me to ask his questions for him.”

  She thought about this. “No, I suppose not. I’m sorry. It’s been a very bad time.” Her face had that blotchy red complexion that indicated either a four-martini lunch or a recent crying jag. I was betting on the crying jag. In fact, she looked drawn tight enough to snap.

  That, at least, I could help with, which helped ease any guilt I might have about coming to poke at a woman who could be guilty of nothing but lousy relatives and terrible taste in boyfriends.

  “Have you had dinner?” I asked.

  Karina eyed my shopping bag. “You did not bring a casserole.”

  “Curry hot pot.”

  As a trained chef, I can spot the moment when someone’s stomach starts doing the thinking for them. I saw this moment blossom in Karina Alden’s brown eyes, and I smiled. “Got a microwave in this place?”

  Before much longer, the two of us were seated in a small lunchroom tucking into curry and rice heaped onto paper plates, and washing it down with bottles of sweet tea from the vending machine. Karina ate hungrily and steadily. I waited until her fragrant, steaming helping had shrunk by about half, before trying out the opening I’d worked out all the way across to Midtown. Now was the time to pray Felicity had been right about the breakup.

  “He was a royal pain in the ass,” I said.

  Karina choked on a swallow of tea and regarded me warily. “Don’t tell me you dated him too?”

  “No. Dodged that bullet.” I smiled and said a silent prayer of gratitude for accurate relationship gossip. “But I saw him in action.”

  “I wish I had. I don’t know if it would have mattered,” she added wearily. “The whole thing was stupid, and I knew it was stupid, and whenever he wasn’t around, I regretted it. But when he was around”—she shook her head—“it didn’t matter if it was stupid or not. It was just so much fun.”

  I let that one settle. Exclusivité took up a large chunk of this floor, which meant the rent alone would be more money than Nightlife saw in a good month. We’d passed doors labeled DEVELOPMENT LAB: AROMATICS, and RESEARCH, and ANALYSIS, as well as a half-dozen private offices. Karina had to work long and hard to keep this all going. I could understand the attraction of a little fun.

  “At first it was strictly business.” Karina took another sip of sweet tea. “Oscar was looking to add boutiques to his restaurants with specially branded products. He wanted a fragrance with his name on it, and he’d come to talk to us about making the juice. Things sort of went from there.”

  “Your mother said it was your idea to have him do the wedding.”

  “She said that?”

  I nodded, and Karina turned her head away, but not before I saw the anger burning underneath her carefully applied blush.

  “I had nothing to do with his getting the wedding job,” she said grimly. “Oscar went after that all on his own. I haven’t talked to Deanna since before she announced the engagement, and I don’t expect we’ll be talking much again in the future.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. Oh.” Karina set her jaw. It completely changed her face. When she was just sad, she had a softness about her. But as the anger took over, that softness melted, leaving behind nothing but stone and steel. “You see, I’m not the important one. I’m not the heir to the big magical empire, so none of the Maddoxes give a damn about what I do or where I go. Deanna looks at that and sees freedom. She doesn’t see that Dad and I can just be thrown overboard. It doesn’t matter if I tell the Maddoxes all to go screw themselves and walk out. Nobody cares. They care about keeping Deanna happy and passing on the damned…magic.”

  “But if the…magic is something you inherit, wouldn’t the Maddoxes be a little worried about Deanna marrying a vampire?” The list of things vampires cannot do includes making babies. It’s kinda tough to pass something on to the next generation if there’s not going to be a next generation.

  “It’s been mentioned,” said Karina blandly. “Mom insists she’s got the whole thing handled. I heard her telling Grandfather.” Karina took a long swig of tea. “She says there’s nothing for him to worry about. She says marriage or no marriage, this affair won’t last, and she’s got the…magic safe. That was before Gabriel and Deanna really went lovey-dovey, though.” She added to the tea bottle with a frown.

  “So, Deanna and Gabriel had been going together for a while?”

  “Oh yeah. We’d been seeing Gabriel and his blood relations around a few parties, and Deanna’d been flirting with him. Trying to cause trouble yet again. Everybody’s always cleaned up after her, so nothing she could do would go really wrong, for her anyway. It was part of that whole witchy-princess thing.” According to Brendan, the Maddox clan had a roughly democratic structure. If you broke too many rules, you could be voted off their particular island. But from what Karina was saying, it sounded as though the heir to the Arall got immunity from that challenge.

  “Mom’s tried everything to bring her in line,” Karina went on. “Taking the car, cutting off her allowance, kicking her out of the house…When we were teenagers, I don’t think a week went by without some new shouting match between them.” She poked her fork into the curry, turning over pieces of lamb as though looking for more pleasant memories. “Anyway, dating a vampire was about the only thing she hadn’t tried. Jumped right in with both feet. I knew she would,” Karina added softly, but then she shook herself. “Anyway, she wakes up one morning and tells me she’s in love. I thought it was just another part of the game. I thought we—” She cut herself off and shook her head hard. “God, this has just gotten so messed up.”

  That was another one of those understatements, but it wasn’t going to do either of us any good if I pointed that out. “And it’s family, which makes it worse.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Yeah, I kind of do.”

  “No, you…oh.” Then she clearly remembered whom she was talking to. “Well, maybe you do.”

  I helped myself to a little more rice so I wouldn’t have to look at her while I said, “Must be hard on your dad.”

  “Probably. I wouldn’t know.” She shrugged and speared a piece of carrot with her fork. “We haven’t talked much since I walked out.”

  In a way, it was a relief to meet somebody without a world-class poker face. But the fact that I could read her meant I was reading yet another uncomfortable question. Why are you lying to me, Karina? Are you trying the act out for O’Grady? Or for your mother?

  I decided then and there to go for the approach I knew best—the direct one. “Karina, the cops think Oscar might have been murdered.”

  “I know,” she told the last of her tea, quietly, sadly. “I’m not surprised.”

  “Do you
have any idea who might have done it?” Karina scowled at me, and I shook my head. “I’m not asking you to tell me.” That was not strictly true, but there are limits to how far you can force some issues. “But, if you do have any ideas, you can trust O’Grady. He plays fair.”

  Karina got to her feet. She picked up her paper plate, took it over to the garbage, and pitched it. She kept her back to me for a long moment. “Anybody could have killed him,” she said. “Anybody at all.”

  When Karina did face me again, the look I got tried to be pointed but melted quickly—and I suspect involuntarily—into pleading. “I’m sorry. I’m getting really stupid now. I need to go home.” Her eyes shone bright with tears and badly suppressed anger. This woman had been crying a lot already today. She was about to start again, and she didn’t want witnesses.

  This was something else I could understand.

  I collected my tote, said my good-byes, and left her to it. She trusted me enough to make my own way back down that long hallway, past all those doors with their neatly engraved brass plaques. I read them over, and I thought them over, all the way down in the elevator.

  Here’s the thing. One of the reasons I’d been able to go on at length with O’Grady about all the ways you couldn’t poison someone at a restaurant is because any formally trained chef knows all kinds of ways you can make people sick, or even kill them. We all get extra classes at culinary school designed to make sure we don’t accidentally poison our clientele, or blind them, or paralyze them, or cause massive organ failure. And believe me, if stupid enough and angry enough, I could do all of that and a little bit more.

  But mine wasn’t the only profession that handles potentially hazardous chemicals. My stomach clenched as I turned through the revolving door and out onto the sidewalk where the city’s lights held back the dark. I liked Karina Alden. I did not want to be thinking like this about her at all.

  In a blatant attempt at self-distraction, I yanked out my phone and tried Brendan’s number for the umpteenth time. This time, he actually answered.

  “Are you sorry?” I asked him as I ducked across Central Park West. Brendan owed me an apology for all those messages I’d left on his voice mail that he hadn’t answered.

  “Yes,” he replied. We’d sort out exactly what he was apologizing for later. We always did. “But things have gotten a little crazy here.”

  “Where’s here and how crazy?” I asked.

  “ICE, and Henri Renault’s disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” I repeated. Columbus Circle was spinning. I had to stop before I staggered. A woman in a black pantsuit banged against my shoulder and brushed past, muttering about tourists.

  “Oh, believe me, heads are rolling,” said Brendan in a tone that made me suspect he was personally responsible for a few of the decapitations. “But it doesn’t change anything. He’s gone.”

  “But…but…how? It’s barely an hour since sunset! How would he have time to break out?”

  “Somebody must have stolen his body. According to my buddy here, Rafe Wallace showed up this afternoon with a writ of habeas corpus all ready to go, but somebody’d beaten him to it.” Considering the term translates to “you can have the body,” that was almost funny.

  “Was it those two guys who staged the raid?” I asked. I didn’t ask, Was it your grandfather or your aunt?

  “It’s being checked out,” said Brendan tightly, and I swallowed my other questions. He didn’t know, and all I would do with my prodding was remind him how much he didn’t know. “They keep the nightbloods in a basement lockup until they can be processed. You need to sign in and out, and there’s a bunch of other paperwork, none of which is on file for Renault.” I could hear the explosion building under his voice.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I wish. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay,” I said, which was fairly true anyhow.

  “Be careful, all right, Charlotte?” he said softly. “I’m really not loving the direction this mess is going.”

  “I will if you will, Brendan.”

  “I will.”

  We stood there, not saying good-bye for a very long time.

  19

  If it hadn’t meant leaving Reese in the lurch, I might not have gone back to Brooklyn that night. As it was, I didn’t have a whole lot of choice.

  Fortunately, I came through the side door to find Reese involved in nothing more alarming than going over his own notes and checklists, his phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder while he tried to sweet-talk a friend of a friend into signing on as an extra set of skilled hands for the advance prep work. Also fortunately, his head was so far into logistics space, he was happy to keep the conversation to the wheres and hows of the Big Day, which was fast approaching, and I was happy to let him. We synched his lists to my lists and drew up a set of questions we needed to be sure were answered about the remaining pre-event events. I heard that night’s dinner had been a daybloods-only affair before. Not even Gabriel had put in an appearance.

  I thought about the missing body of Henri Renault. It was a daring daylight raid, so Gabriel couldn’t have pulled it off. But he might have paid somebody to do it for him—such as the two agents who had already raided the house.

  I didn’t say anything about this. Brendan had most definitely already thought of that and would be following up on it. I concentrated on wrapping things up and sending Reese home before anything else out of the ordinary could happen. I locked the porch door behind him and turned around, wiping my hands on my trousers.

  It was going on midnight. A normal person who kept normal hours would be exhausted, but this was the middle of my normal workday, and I was buzzing with energy. Around me the house had gone still and quiet. Adrienne and Deanna at least would be at a bridal shower that had been arranged by one of Adrienne’s charities. Scott might be with them, or he might not. I pictured him coming out of Karina’s building again, not looking up from his PDA.

  I was able to deal with the peace and quiet for all of thirty seconds before I had to start cooking.

  Deanna and her bridesmaids were expecting the full, formal English blowout for tea tomorrow—little sandwiches, cakes, the lot. Marie and her people, of course, were handling the cakes. But the sandwiches were my responsibility.

  I turned the radio on low for some classic rock background noise, unrolled my knives, and started chopping up cucumbers, watercress, smoked salmon. I got some eggs on the stove to boil for a curried egg salad. Bread for finger sandwiches needs to be a little dry, so I switched knives and started slicing that up too.

  My hands moved and my eyes measured and monitored mostly by instinct, leaving plenty of room in my brain to try to sort out the events of the day. I wondered how Gabriel was planning on keeping Deanna from realizing the whole ICE raid was some kind of put-up. I wondered if he knew what had happened to the gun or his sire, and if the two were currently in the same place. He must have known something, because he had tried really hard to keep her out of the way while he dealt with it—unless that was about something else altogether. Henri was old enough that he could very well be an illegal, or at least an undocumented, vampire. He might even have neglected to get himself on the official nightblood registry. I wondered about Karina and her laboratories, her affair with Oscar, and her assertion that anybody could have killed him.

  Around one a.m., I heard the front door open and the sound of footsteps overhead and then on the stairs. The Aldens had returned and were heading up to bed. I wondered about Scott Alden and just how far he’d go to keep the people around him happy. I wondered if his wife knew he had seen Karina today. I thought about how Trudy believed Mrs. Alden capable of arranging a wedding with one hand and sabotaging it with the other. She also called Mrs. Alden by her first name when she wasn’t being careful, had pet names for the girls, and tried to get between the family and federal agents. There was history there, and it wasn’t just attached to the paycheck.

  It wa
s all just too damned weird and too damned complicated. To make things even worse, Reese had been right about the Aldens’ kitchen. As I moved around it, I kept seeing what wasn’t there. There was next to nothing in the pantry—no old cans of water chestnuts, or that extra can of cranberry sauce bought for last Thanksgiving. There were none of the sticky, mostly full bottles of liquor found in every house because there’s always somebody who ten years ago thought blueberry schnapps sounded like the latest taste sensation. The separate wine refrigerator was also half-empty. And although Mrs. Alden said she did the cooking, she had no cookbooks, no old aprons or fraying hot pads, no battered utensils or wooden spoons with their handles worn and stained with use. This was a kitchen without a past. Where had it gone?

  I couldn’t find an answer for that either.

  Finally the eggs finished, and I put them in a pot of water to cool so they could be peeled. While I was waiting, I pulled a stool up to the kitchen island and spread out my notebooks on the marble. I stared at them without really seeing them. Then I pulled out that scrap of a list I’d retrieved from Oscar’s office, turned the lights up full, and squinted at it.

  The handwriting hadn’t gotten any better. The first word could have been “actonin,” “action item,” or “agorium.” The next word looked as though it started with a CH, but the next letter could have been the beginnings of a b, or the numeral three or a wiggly p for all I could tell. The last line was nothing but word salad with a lot of extra vowels sprinkled on for seasoning.

  I laid the scrap down beside my notebooks. I should be peeling eggs and gathering seasonings rather than wasting time trying to decipher Oscar’s shopping lists. As illegible as it was, I was sure the scrap was part of a list of some kind. Or, given that it came from a chef’s notebook, a recipe.

  But as I stared at the whole mess, a wave of sadness rose up from the depths of nowhere at the bottom of my brain. All those plans, all those great ideas and that enthusiasm, and they were drowning under the weight of somebody else’s screwups. I swept the loose pages into a heap. I had to get away from them. I pulled open the French doors and stepped out onto the patio, breathing the night air in deep to try to clear my head.