by Sarah Zettel
The Alden house was a place brimming with luxury, but this was surely the greatest of them all; a private green space in the midst of one of the world’s busiest cities. The night breeze swirled the aromas of herbs and fresh flowers together, completely erasing the smell of the nearby East River and any exhaust that might have been tempted to spill over from the expressway. I inhaled deeply and wandered up the central paved path, heading deeper into those lovely green scents. It would be way too easy to get used to this, although, being me, I wondered if there was enough light back there for tomatoes and zucchini.
Someone had gone through a lot of trouble to create a garden that matched the house. The place was neatly terraced, and the formal beds planted thick with carefully tended plants. Flowering vines and ivy climbed the brick walls. I passed a full-grown rosemary bush and stooped to take in the resiny scent. I wondered if there were chives, or maybe some basil, and I started mentally building compound butters for my tea sandwiches.
That was when I saw the first hole.
It was a black gap in the undergrowth big enough for both my fists. Even in the uncertain light spilling over the privacy wall, it stood out as completely incongruous among all this carefully tended shrubbery. I squatted down to look closer. Maybe somebody’s cat had gotten loose and done a little digging? But no, something here had been ripped out by the roots, but the plant itself was gone. And whoever did it was in too much of a hurry to bother with the little dangly bits left behind. Plus, a couple of feet to the right, there was another hole. I turned around and pushed aside the branches on some ornamental shrub (if it didn’t produce food, how would I know what it was called?), and found two more holes. One was big enough to bury a young watermelon.
Oh joy. New weirdness, fresh from the farm. I stood up slowly and dusted off my hands. Just what I need.
I stood there, trying to breathe deep and recover the calm I’d had such a fleeting hold of. It didn’t work, mainly because the back of my neck was starting to curdle. I made myself turn slowly. If that was Henri or one of his boys drifting up behind, I was not going to let him see me freaked.
But there was nobody, just me and this garden full of holes. At least, that was what I thought, until I lifted my gaze to the patio and the French doors. There was somebody in the kitchen. It was a man—Lloyd Maddox.
He stood so the dim light filtering out from the kitchen glimmered in his stark white hair and outlined his torso, which was still powerful even though he had to be pulling seventy. My hand dove into my pocket and gripped my phone before I had a chance to even think about it. My hand wanted to call Brendan for a rescue. Fortunately, my head was still in charge. I would not retreat behind Brendan this time. Sooner or later, I was going to have to get used to dealing with this man, and, sooner or later, he was going to have to get used to dealing with me.
I strode into the kitchen. Lloyd, with an air of obvious graciousness, stood aside so I could snap on the light. The only thing worse than someone trying to loom at me is that same person trying to loom at me out of the dark.
“Hello, Mr. Maddox,” I said. “Something I can do for you?” Does your daughter know you’re here? Have you got a key, or did you whammy the door? I really needed to stop stacking up questions like that. I felt as if I were giving myself mental hives or something.
“Where was he?” Lloyd returned. “The vampire? During the raid?”
I thought about telling him to go flambé himself, but then I shrugged. If I was going to up the hostilities, I wanted there to be some point to it. “Under the sink,” I said.
“Good choice.” Lloyd crouched down in front of the cupboard and pulled open the door. He stared hard at the dark interior, then ran his fingertips around the edge of the door, rubbing them together as if checking for dust.
“I’m slowing down in my old age,” he muttered.
“I know a whole bunch of people who will be happy to hear it.” To prove I was well and truly over being impressed by him, I opened the stainless steel dishwasher and started loading bowls and knives. Thick, cold silence settled in behind me. I kept loading dishes. Lloyd kept being silent. In fact, he stayed there being silent until I closed the dishwasher and turned around. Now, he leaned against the kitchen island, watching me. It was the pose of a much younger man, and I had the sudden impression that this man very much knew his own strength. My hand suddenly itched for something to hold, preferably something sharp.
“I can see why he’s taken up with you.” Lloyd pushed himself away from the island, very casually putting himself between me and the door to the dining room. “You’re his type.”
“Cheap shot,” I said. “Am I supposed to go all jealous now?”
Maddox shrugged. “Just making an observation.”
“Look, how about a deal? You don’t try to intimidate me, and I will stay in my kitchen, cook the food, and go away as soon as the job’s done.” The job that currently includes figuring out who killed Oscar and might be trying to incriminate your daughter.
“Except you’re not going away, are you? You’re going to keep dating my grandson.”
Of course he’d bring it up now, when he had the home-court advantage. Everything I knew about this man said he really knew how to pick his battles. “Brendan and I are a separate issue.” I struggled to keep my voice even. “It’s also none of your business.”
The corner of Maddox’s mouth curled up in an ice-cold smile. “Am I supposed to go all contrite now?” He planted both hands on the counter. He didn’t lean forward; he didn’t need to. He just laid claim to all the space around him. “You have no idea what you’re getting into, Ms. Caine.”
“That is not only not your business; it’s not your problem.”
“You’re wrong. It is my problem. I value human life, Ms. Caine. You are risking yours, and I don’t want you to risk Brendan’s.”
That startled me. “I’m risking my life?” My heart froze and then hammered back to life. Did I mention I’d almost gotten killed a few months back? The experience left my adrenaline on a hair trigger.
“Yes, you are, by pretending the monsters are no threat to us, and by coming here and helping them take over my family.”
Ah. Okay. He wanted to drive us over to big-picture territory. I felt oddly disappointed. For a second, I thought I’d seen a flash of something in Lloyd Maddox that didn’t show up in the sound bites—the father and grandfather underneath the mover and shaker. “I’m just here to cook,” I said. “If there’s anything else going on, it’s none of my business.”
That was a mistake. Lloyd moved forward, looking at me so hard, I could see the flecks of darkness behind his blue eyes. “He told you about the theft. Don’t bother to lie. I can see the truth.”
Anger started to build, and I welcomed it. Anger I could use. It would chase back the fear. “With me, that’s not much of a trick,” I said. “Yes, he told me. And you’ll notice I’m not calling the cops, or doing anything else that will raise a fuss.” About the theft, anyway. “I’m standing right here having a nice, civilized conversation with my employer’s father.” Fortunately, this once I didn’t have to worry about my lack of poker face. Lloyd expected to see anger and nerves, and he was getting an eyeful.
“You have no idea what’s happening here.”
“You already said that, and you know what? You’re right. I don’t. I don’t know why Deanna’s marrying a vampire. I don’t know why Adrienne’s not telling the cops her house got robbed. I don’t know why Oscar Simmons is dead, and I really don’t know why Linus O’Grady is asking me about how he might have gotten poisoned on the job.”
I admit it. I was hoping to piss him off enough that he might drop an unguarded word. I should have known better. Lloyd Maddox just narrowed his eyes. The air closed in around us, thick and heavy. I remembered this was a warlock in front of me, an old, powerful warlock, and I was on my own here. I’d hoped anger would burn the fear out of my brain, but fear was putting up an unexpectedly good fight. My hand sl
id into my pocket, and my fingers curled around my mini–spray bottle. I carried holy water for vampires, but the enhancements I’d put in might just buy me time to make it to the door if Lloyd decided to level up the menace.
“You all think you’re so clever,” Lloyd sneered. “So progressive and so worldly. You shake your heads at the old warriors, and you say it’s such a shame we were fools for so long. You think they’re not monsters anymore. But they are, and they’re monsters of our making.” He leaned close, and although I desperately did not want to, I saw Brendan in his eyes again; Brendan in forty years, bitter and worn down by too much death and too much change. “Maybe you’ll get your own way and have all the monsters you want surrounding you. But I will protect my family. If the monsters take me down, and I have to fight my way out of hell to do it, I will come back for them all.”
Each and every word hammered me into place. He was gone before I could move again. Shaking, I slowly slumped down onto the nearest stool and buried my face in my hands.
I believed Lloyd Maddox, completely and utterly. He would stop at nothing to save the lives of his family. I also believed he saw himself as a warrior. He might even value human life, like he said. But he wouldn’t let that value get in the way of beating back the monsters he saw invading his city, and his family.
I also believed he hadn’t staged the fake ICE raid. Lloyd Maddox would not stoop to a trick like that. He’d come down on the Renaults like the wrath of God, but they’d know where that wrath originated. This also meant it was very unlikely he’d do anything as petty as interfere with the catering, so I could cross him off the list of people who might have gotten Oscar to quit the job.
But if Oscar had discovered something that would threaten the Maddox family, would Lloyd be willing to move the chef over into the monster column? My throat closed down around my breath, because I could believe that too—easily.
Thefts and threats and weddings, oh my. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to clamp down on the urge to laugh. But what else could I do? My life had been seesawing from the scary to the ridiculous since Felicity burst into Nightlife. Now, to add to the fun, I’d gotten Lloyd Maddox to make a personal threat. Score one for me.
My tired brain stopped there, turned around, and backtracked. I had gotten Lloyd to make a threat, right after I’d pointed out Linus O’Grady was looking into the possibility that Oscar had been poisoned.
Slowly, thoughtfully, I got out my cell phone. Finding the business card the detective had given me, I dialed the number. While it rang, I glanced around at all those doors I had no way to lock, and I headed back out into the garden.
Linus picked up in the middle of the fifth ring. “O’Grady.”
“Why would Lloyd Maddox care that you were trying to figure out how somebody could be poisoned in a restaurant?” I replied.
“Chef Caine.” O’Grady sighed. For a long time, he didn’t say anything else. I could hear the gears turning in his finely tuned cop brain. If he answered me, he’d expect something in return. That was okay. Given everything that had been happening lately, I was more than ready to be on Linus’s side. So far, he and Brendan were the only two people in this disaster who didn’t seem to be operating from some hidden agenda, and I was counting myself there.
Finally, he said something. “Twenty-five years ago, before there was the separate P-Squad, I was on a team investigating the death of a design student at New York University. I was sure the kid had been poisoned, but I couldn’t prove it. Then, I was told to lay off. I didn’t have the clout to keep the investigation open, and I was afraid it’d be the end of my time as a cop if I tried. So, as ordered, I laid off. The death was put down to anaphylactic shock, a bad allergic reaction,” he added. I was glad he couldn’t see my face right then. Why, thank you, I’d never heard what anaphylactic shock is. I only cook for a living. “I not only got to keep my job; I got promoted. But I’ve been waiting for another sudden death to come down on somebody who’s annoyed the Maddoxes ever since then,” he went on softly. “Because these things never happen just once.”
I may not be a trained cop, but I’m very good at putting things together. “You suspected a Maddox poisoned the NYU kid?” O’Grady said nothing, and I made a frightened and educated guess based on timeline. Twenty-five years ago, Adrienne would have been about twenty-one. “You suspected Adrienne Maddox.” Calm, composed, steely Adrienne Alden, married to her number-crunching money man, living in her perfect house, lunching with her exclusive group of connected ladies, was a murderer?
“And her father had enough pull in Albany in those days to get the right phone calls made.”
I turned in place, counting holes in the garden, smelling herbs and springtime.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I tried to tell O’Grady and myself. “Why would she poison a chef? A chef who quit? If she was going to kill anybody, why not the vampires who were pulling a number on her daughter?”
“I don’t know,” Linus admitted. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been waiting too long to prove I was right. It looks like a stroke with Chef Simmons, after all, not shock.”
“But you don’t believe that. You think maybe she’s just gotten better over time.”
O’Grady also apparently didn’t feel like answering me. “How come I’m getting this call now?”
I opened my mouth. I meant to tell him. He needed to know what was going on, if only because it would look really bad if somebody else told him I’d been at Perception. But something clicked softly behind me. I spun around. The handle on the side door was waggling back and forth, trying to turn. My brain snapped straight past fear and came up against anger. My right hand came down on top of my knife roll.
“Chef Caine?” prompted O’Grady.
“You damn well better belong here!” I shouted. “Or you’re getting up close to the business end of a meat cleaver!”
“Chef?” O’Grady’s voice went very, very calm. “Talk to me, Charlotte. What’s happening?”
The door handle stilled. Silence followed. My fingers wrapped around the comforting curve of my chef’s knife handle. I’d hunt around for the cleaver later if I needed it.
“Ah, Charlotte.” Anatole Sevarin’s far-too-cheerful voice vibrated through the door. “I sense you are still awake.”
20
“Sorry, Detective,” I croaked. “I’ve got to go.”
“Do you need backup?” replied O’Grady in that same unhurried, even tone. “Just say good-bye if you do.”
“No thanks. I’m all set,” I said, although I was not sure this was entirely true. “Call you tomorrow.”
I hung up on a very unhappy detective.
“This had better be good, Sevarin.” I snapped the lock and tore the door open.
Anatole stood on the side porch, looking cheerful and elegant in his particular, masculine, middle-European way. One long hand rested on the shoulder of a much shorter, less elegant, and distinctly sulky vampire, who just happened to be Gabriel Renault’s blood brother, Jacques.
“This says it belongs here.”
Jacques’s dark hair was disheveled, and his shirt was even more rumpled than it had been when he ran out of the house. The look he gave me was so sour, my skin puckered up in response.
“I thought you were on the run from ICE.”
“ICE?” repeated Anatole. “ICE was here?”
“Not really.” I glowered at Jacques. “But you knew that before you ran out of here.”
“What are you talking about?” Jacques shot back.
“I was wondering something similar,” murmured Anatole.
I ignored Anatole. “Maybe I should just go get Lloyd Maddox back here, and you can tell him what’s going on.”
“You wouldn’t do that.” There was some slight satisfaction in seeing that I’d made somebody nervous for a change, because Jacques had turned to Anatole. “She wouldn’t do that?”
“She might. I sense a deep and burning anger emanating from within her.”
>
This brought up yet another question. “Anatole, why are you even here?”
Anatole sighed, and an air of wounded dignity came over him. “That, I’m afraid, is a short and not entirely complimentary story. May I come in?”
“No,” said Jacques.
“Yes,” I said, and paused, squinting up at Anatole. “Can I invite you in here?”
Anatole stepped across the threshold, pushing Jacques in front of him. “Apparently you can.”
“How’d you find him?” I asked, not caring particularly which of them answered.
Jacques beat Anatole to the punch, which was not something I’d seen happen a whole lot. “Sorry to disappoint, Chefy, but there’s no mystery here.”
“Mind your manners, Renault.” Anatole’s voice dropped into that deep register that makes the hind brain want to crawl away and hide. “She might not turn Lloyd Maddox onto you, but the cleaver is not out of the question.”
Jacques rolled his eyes. He still smelled like onions. What kind of vampire smelled like onions?
“I was circling back to the house to find out if the coast was clear, or if I’d have to find someplace else to be for sunrise,” said Jacques. “Your boyfriend was lurking on the street outside. I surprised him.”
“You’re kidding.”
Anatole was just then scrutinizing the cooling pot of eggs. I, on the other hand, was having a painful coughing fit, because it was better than outright laughing at Anatole in front of Jacques.
I shouldn’t have bothered. Nobody was fooled. I just gave Anatole an excuse to do the wounded-dignity thing again. “I was distracted.”
“You were blind.”
The temperature surrounding the vampires dropped ten degrees, and my skin tried to do a lurch to the left and take my body with it. I dug down hard and held my ground.