Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel

by Sarah Zettel

  This time, I’d found Gabriel’s room. I could tell, because he was lying on the bed, in a pair of dark pajamas.

  When you see them on TV, vampires during the day just look asleep. When you see them in reality, they look like what they are—dead. The blue stone in the ring on Gabriel’s hand had more life than his open eyes. His jaw hung loose, and his hands and feet were completely limp. His skin had gone slack against his bones and had turned dull and waxy yellow. I knew from experience it wouldn’t matter how many times I told myself that body was going to get up and walk. Right now, it was a corpse, and I reacted to it as I would to a corpse—with fear, revulsion, sadness and an immediate desire to get the hell away from it. But I couldn’t, because I had to see what the corpse’s room had to tell me. Probably nothing. Hopefully nothing. Please, let there be nothing.

  It is possible there are creepier ways to spend your time than searching a vampire’s bedroom while that vampire is staring at you with day-dead eyes. Cleaning out an Old Country werewolf den, for example, or going for a midnight row in the Black Lagoon. After a while, though, the whole enterprise started to feel more than a little silly. Honestly, nothing says overreaction like poking around through somebody else’s sock drawer. Gabriel owned several pairs of black and gray socks and a few matching black and gray silk handkerchiefs. I lifted the silk carefully aside, and found nothing. Going through the other drawers, I found shirts, and ties, and jeans, and nothing. I went through the bathroom and found men’s toiletries. I went through the closet and found slacks hanging up neatly and a classic black tux, all ready for the Big Day. The shoes were lined up underneath, and had nothing in them but arch supports.

  But there was also a shoe box. With the feeling of having nothing left to lose, I opened it. In a nest of tissue paper waited the black patent-leather footgear obviously meant to go with the tux. I closed the box again, and was about to put it back, but I moved a little too fast, and something went clink.

  I shook the box. Clink. I tore off the lid, pulled out the black shoes, and a slither of gold spilled onto the closet floor, clattering loudly enough to wake the dead. I looked over my shoulder. The dead stayed still. So, thankfully, did the door.

  I poked at the glittering pile carefully, as if it might bite me. When I realized what it was, I sucked in a sharp breath as if it had bitten me, because in that pile were a monocle on a gold chain, a gold pocket watch, and a watch chain with all kinds of gold dangly bits hanging off it, like charms from a charm bracelet. There was a heavy gold signet ring too.

  All Henri Renault’s old-school bling had been hidden away with Gabriel Renault’s wedding day shoes. I lifted up the tissue paper to check under the shoes. There was a slim leather wallet. Inside were a state nightblood registry ID and an ATM card, both with the name Henri Renault on them.

  I put the gold and the wallet back where I’d found them, closed the closet, and turned away.

  “Gabriel, what have you done?” I whispered. Gabriel, of course, didn’t answer. His dead eyes stayed still, and the blue gem in the carved gold ring on his hand glittered dully in the rain-filtered light. I meant to head for the door and get out of there before someone could catch me being an idiot. But my eyes wouldn’t come along with the rest of me. They had picked up some very uncomfortable ideas from looking at Henri’s jewelry hidden in the closet, and now kept staring at that ring on Gabriel’s limp hand. I gave up and moved to the bedside, my heart thumping and my mouth dry. I bent close and took a good look.

  Gabriel Renault, who was supposed to be from the “Gay Paree” of at least a century ago, had a class ring on his withered hand: New York University, 1987.

  That was when I heard the footsteps in the hall outside.

  My brain froze, but my body kicked into high gear, and I dove for the nearest hiding place—straight under the bed. My head cracked against the mattress rail. The world spun, and Gabriel’s loose arm shook down to smack me in the butt. I gave a squeak I was extremely glad no one else was around to hear. I was also suddenly flat on my stomach under the bed without quite knowing how I’d gotten there.

  The door clicked and the hinges sighed and I held my breath, noticing vaguely that Trudy had been busy in here too. As with that empty double room, it was nowhere near as dusty under Gabriel’s bed as it should have been.

  A pair of well-polished men’s dress shoes with pressed blue trouser cuffs walked to the foot of the bed and paused. They turned their toes toward the dresser. I bit my lip as I heard the drawer scrape open and the rustle of cloth. The man grunted, and the shoes turned again, and then went still. I slid my hand over my mouth and tried to muffle the sound of my breathing with my palm.

  The man in the polished shoes was more methodical than I had been, and much, much slower. Those shoes traveled back and forth across that room at least a dozen times, while I went from terrified, to embarrassed, to impatient, to needing to pee really badly, and back to terrified, because the polished shoes walked right up to the edge of the bed, and their owner grunted again. There was more rustling cloth, and at last the shoes retreated toward the door. I went limp and pressed my forehead against the floorboards. The door opened. The shoes paused in the threshold.

  “You can come out now, Chef Caine,” said Lloyd Maddox. “Neither one of us will be talking about this.”

  And he shut the door behind him.

  23

  First, I ran for the bathroom. Then, I came back and checked Gabriel’s hand. Yes, the ring was gone. Lloyd Maddox had thought it was important too, and he’d taken it. But I also checked the shoe box. The monocle, watch, chain and wallet were all in place. I don’t know if Lloyd didn’t understand the significance, didn’t find them, or just didn’t care.

  There was, however, the possibility he had gotten hold of the same thought that had crawled into my head—that against the odds, Gabriel had killed Henri sometime after Henri had called Anatole. Maybe because Henri had called Anatole.

  But probably Gabriel didn’t kill Henri. It was somewhere between horrendously difficult and impossible for vampires to break from their sires, let alone actively rebel against them. My brother’s sire had waltzed out on him years ago, and he still wore the ring she gave him. Also, Gabriel probably wouldn’t commit murder and then just stuff the evidence in a shoe box while he was out cold for the day. Probably. Unless he hadn’t had time to do anything else with it before the sun came up. But probably I was being paranoid. Probably.

  I started down the back stairs. This was going to be a very long day, and I could tell already that even a good bout of cooking was not going to settle my jangled nerves. I needed to get out of this house. I needed to be on familiar ground, even if just for a little while. I’d slip the keys I’d borrowed back into place on the Peg-Board, leave a note for Mrs. Alden, and catch a cab back to Manhattan. I’d spend a few hours in my own kitchen, bossing around my own people. When the sun went down, I’d find out what Anatole had to tell me. I’d save thinking about how I was going to ask a major favor from Chet for later.

  But as I was formulating this grand plan, a new sound drifted up the back stairs. Below me, a woman was swearing. It was the tight, forceful kind of cursing done by someone who really didn’t want to be overheard. So, of course, I pushed immediately through the kitchen door to see what was going on.

  What was going on was Trudy was slumped against the French doors, cradling her head in her hands and swearing a blue streak. She saw me and straightened up before I had to say anything stupid such as, Are you okay?

  “What happened?” I asked instead. I figured this was somewhat less stupid.

  “I’m fired,” Trudy croaked, letting her hands flop to her sides.

  “What? Who…how…” My stammering stopped as quickly as it started. “Lloyd Maddox.”

  “I got back in time to meet him on his way out. He said he’d be telling Adrienne I wasn’t to be trusted anymore, and he didn’t even tell me why. He’s going to get her to fire me, and she’ll do it too.” I
started to say that wouldn’t happen, but the words never made it out, because she was right. Mrs. Alden would do it.

  “Jesus, Trudy, I’m sorry.”

  “Twenty-five goddamned years,” Trudy spat. “Thrown it all away. I thought I knew them. I thought I understood…” She pulled a tight face and shook her head.

  I pulled out a stool from by the kitchen island. Trudy climbed onto it and sat there, running her hands across her face, and across her smooth gray hair. I couldn’t put an arm around her; we weren’t on those kinds of terms. Setting down a box of Kleenex within easy reach, I then did the only other thing I could think of. I opened the fridge. Marie had sent over a blueberry coffee cake, so I cut a generous slice and set that down next to the tissues.

  “You don’t have to…,” started Trudy.

  “Yes, I do. I’m incapable of offering sympathy without food. It’s a chef thing.” I pulled out the coffee beans and the filtered-water pitcher.

  Trudy’s puckered mouth twitched into a fleeting smile. “When my sister had her first kid, I went over every night for two weeks and just…cleaned. It was how I could take care of her.” She made another face. “We take care of our own. What a crock.”

  “The Aldens?” I started the coffee brewing and came to sit down beside her.

  Trudy nodded, staring out the French doors at the garden. “Twenty-five years, can you believe it? Twenty-five years I’ve been cleaning up after them. I came to the city to come out, and here I am…”

  Twenty-five years ago was the Change Time, when the paranormals started to open the coffin, or the broom closet. Trudy had just said she’d come to the city to come out. That meant either she was gay, or…

  “Trudy, are you a witch?”

  “Of course I’m a witch!” Trudy stared at me as if I’d started shedding IQ points on her clean floor. “You don’t think Adrienne and Lloyd would let anybody in their house they didn’t have a hold over, do you? Don’t know how you got in,” she added with a frown.

  “You’d be surprised.” I pulled the coffeepot off its burner and poured us both cups, even though Trudy hadn’t so much as looked at her cake. “Okay, maybe you wouldn’t. Did your family know the Maddoxes?”

  “Pffft.” Trudy lifted the cup, looked at the black liquid, and put it down again. “We’re so far down the ladder, we can’t even see the rung the Maddoxes stand on. No. I just ran away from home.” She picked up the coffee cake and bit into it. Marie’s own brand of magic was at work again. “I’d spent my life up until then being told I had to hide what I was,” she mumbled around her mouthful. “But everybody knew what was happening. Vampires were coming out into the open, and the witches and the weres and all the rest were being hauled out too—either to stand with them or fight them. Of course, it was happening in the cities first. I thought, New York, that’s the place for me. I’ll be a dancer and a witch, and I’ll have my own place and…” She shook her head. “I got here just in time for the Five Points Riot.”

  “Jesus,” I whispered. As a neighborhood, Five Points doesn’t actually exist anymore. Once, it had been a gang-ruled slum. Now it’s just another set of Manhattan streets. But for some reason, back in the mid-1980s, the area became the big hangout for the newly outed but still legally nonhuman paranormals, and the name was revived. Then, one day, somebody decided to go in and clean Five Points’ nonhuman residents out. Vigilante gangs armed with stakes and knives started going house to house, “laying to rest” every nightblood they could find. Some witches and weres joined the vigilantes. Some lined up to try to stop them, and found themselves fighting hand to hand and spell to spell with their own kind. The cops stayed away in droves, and the riot went on until sundown. Then, the vampires that the vigilantes hadn’t finished off woke up, and the real fun started.

  But toward morning, the vampires seemed to go crazy. They started attacking their own side, and each other, in a mindless fury. No one knew quite why it happened. Vampires do not cooperate well with their own kind. Some people thought that natural enmity combined with a mob mentality in some kind of bad feedback loop. Other people thought one of the witches in the crowd had gotten off some kind of nuke-level antivamp spell and driven them all insane, although no one had ever admitted to anything. If Maddoxes had been in the fight, that theory suddenly sounded a whole lot more likely.

  I didn’t ask which side Trudy had been on. I didn’t ask what she’d seen or done, although given how little she’d seemed to know about vampires, and the fact that she was working for the Maddoxes, I thought I could guess. But I just let her eat coffee cake until she was ready to start talking again.

  “Adrienne got the Maddoxes to take me in afterward,” she went on finally. “I didn’t have a degree, and I’d busted up my knees during the fighting, so the dancing was out…I wound up taking whatever cleaning jobs I could get to make ends meet. When Adrienne married Scott Alden, she asked me to come work for them. I was so grateful. I had my own kids by then, and their father was a bum and…” She swigged some coffee. “Anyway, it was fine. I could study magic if I wanted, and I had steady work and my schedule was flexible enough that I could take care of my own kids, and then here comes this thing between Deanna and Gabriel and”—Trudy made an exploding gesture with her free hand—“poof! Suddenly I’m working for the Wicked Witch of Brooklyn Heights, and being told to keep my mouth shut and to remember I can be shoved out the door anytime. And Grandpa Lloyd has decided the time is now. Take care of our own,” she repeated to her empty plate. “Yeah, right, as long as I remember my place and don’t ask for a raise.”

  “Why the change? I would have thought…after everything…that you and Adrienne were friends.”

  “Yeah, you’d think, wouldn’t you? By the way, this coffee cake’s terrific.”

  “I’ll tell Marie. She’s brilliant on a regular basis.” I waited.

  “Adrienne and I were friends,” Trudy said softly. “Until I told her she shouldn’t let Deanna get away with the crap she was pulling with this vampire ‘boyfriend.’ I told her those girls didn’t give a damn about the family and they would not stop until they’d really broken something, and that something might just be her.” Trudy paused. “But she wouldn’t listen to me. She never did. She was the responsible one. The fixer. She was going to fix this, and I was going to stay where I belonged.” She shook her head hard. “I gave up. I just gave up. You can’t blame me, can you?”

  “No,” I said. And I really couldn’t. In the back of my head, though, I was thinking, So, Adrienne Alden is another control freak. I should have recognized it, even under all that poise and calm. Maybe because of all that poise and calm.

  “Adrienne married a man who needed her, badly. She raised two kids so they’d know exactly who and what they were. Karina was there to be family for Scott, and they were supposed to stay together in their T-typ box. Deanna was supposed to be family and heir for Lloyd and the Maddoxes and stay in the witch box. There,” Trudy said, miming dusting her hands. “All nice and even, as long as everybody stayed put.”

  Except when it came down to it, Adrienne couldn’t control her branch of the family any more than Lloyd Maddox could. That thought must have showed, because Trudy nodded.

  “There was that thing with Dylan Maddox last year, and then Brendan went public with a way to make real money and a new reputation by working with the city and the vampires rather than against them…You have no idea what that’s done to the family.”

  “He doesn’t talk about it,” I murmured.

  “Well, it ain’t been pretty,” said Trudy. “Especially since Deanna started seeing Gabriel. Now we’ve got Lloyd Maddox coming in every day and browbeating Adrienne about not being able to control her own daughters, and how she doesn’t understand how important she is. And…well, today I’m coming in and Lloyd’s going out, and he decides to start in on me about not taking proper care of the woman who saved my skinny white ass all those years ago, took me in, and gave me a home and a job. And so, I’m fired.”
>
  “I’m sorry,” I said again, but at the same time I noticed Trudy’s eyes were completely dry, and while she was picking at coffee cake crumbs, she hadn’t once reached for the Kleenex.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s my own fault really, and…well, and I’d actually made up my mind I needed to get out of here a while ago. But…well, I thought I’d have at least a little more time, but it’s all hit the fan and…What am I going to do?” she demanded suddenly. “My one girl’s in California and the other’s in Texas, and they’ve both got full houses and mortgages, and I’ve got nothing except years of maid service and a pair of bum knees. My savings won’t last a week, and who’s gonna hire me?”

  “I would.”

  Trudy shook her head. “Don’t.”

  But I wasn’t listening. Finally, here was something I could help with. “Have you got any supervisory experience?”

  “At the Roosevelt Hotel, but that was ages ago…”

  “You’ve worked hotels? Great.” There was a notepad by the phone. I pulled out my phone, opened the address book and scribbled down a name and number. “Here. Call this, ask for Peter, and tell him Chef Caine sent you. Their hotel’s head housekeeper just quit. The manager’s a good guy, but you’ve got to have backbone to deal with him.”

  Trudy stared at the paper as though it might burst into flame; around this house, you never knew. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, and I know it’s not legal for them to ask, but find a way to slip in that you’re a witch. Apparently, they have real problems with out-of-towners leaving little half-used Viagra amulets around…”

  Her eyes narrowed as the despairing housekeeper was rolled under by the hard-bitten survivor. “What do you want for this?”

  “I want to know why, if Lloyd Maddox has enough influence with Adrienne Alden to get you fired, he hasn’t stopped Deanna’s wedding,” I told her. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s all right. The number’s good either way.”