Death Over Easy

by Tawdra Kandle

  Lucas reached for my hand and linked our fingers. He pressed a kiss to my cheek. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Jackie is my future. I would die for her, and I plan to live with her for the rest of our days, however long or short that time is. But I’ll be honest. The idea that we were manipulated by someone . . . it doesn’t sit well.”

  “You weren’t manipulated, Lucas.” Veronica turned her cup in one slow circle. “I didn’t force Cathryn’s hand. That night in Cape May, when you’d gone out and Cathryn sat alone in her room at the Star on the Sea, I let her hear my thoughts. I wanted her to be prepared. But I didn’t threaten her, and I didn’t warn her specifically. The choice was hers. And she made it herself.”

  “But what about my choice, Veronica? You made that for me, didn’t you? I don’t remember you asking me if I wanted to be turned. I didn’t even have as much of a say in my future as you did when Diego changed you.”

  “Of course you’re right, Lucas.” Veronica spoke softly. “My only excuse is that when I realized what had to be done, time was of the essence. My prognosticator friend, when she told me about you and Jackie, had explained that you were destined to be a death broker. You were going to be a key player in the upcoming battle. But she said it was unclear as to which side you would join. Shortly before I spoke with her, I had made a disturbing discovery. Diego had joined with the forces of the Hive. He’s working with them. I feared that he might try to recruit you for their purposes.

  “I had seen enough of you in Cape May that I had faith you’d choose the light, not the dark, and I knew that giving you the gift of vampirism would make you more powerful. It would give you—all of us—an advantage against the dark.”

  Lucas didn’t drop his gaze from Veronica’s face. “All good reasons. But you never offered them to me.”

  “I did not. You wouldn’t have believed me if I had tried to tell you. And . . . the change had to be that night. It had to be simultaneous with your evolution to death broker or it wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t have changed after the evolution was complete. I didn’t have any choice.”

  “So you seduced me.”

  I knew this, in theory. Lucas had told me the story early in our relationship. At the time, it hadn’t mattered; neither of us were children, and we both had history. But now, faced with this exquisite woman across from me, someone who would always have something in common with Lucas, a bond that he and I would never share, a spark of jealousy zinged through me.

  “I didn’t know any other way. I was honest when I told you that I’ve never changed anyone else. Catching your eye in the bar, plying you with alcohol . . . all of it was the only way I knew.”

  When Lucas didn’t respond, Veronica added, “Think about this rationally, dear one. If I had come to you and told you all of this the day we met, what would you have said?”

  He lifted one shoulder. “Probably, I would’ve thought you were whack job. But I guess we’ll never know, will we?”

  “Veronica.” I had a question, too. “Why did you come to us now? Lucas and Cathryn have been searching for you ever since he came down to Florida. Why tonight?”

  She regarded me with fond compassion. “You already know the answer to that question, Jackie. Or at least you know part of the answer, even if it’s one you wish were not so. I’m here tonight because the time is coming when we must all join together to fight the darkness, once and for all. You and Lucas will leave your friends here and prepare for the war.”

  I nodded. “That’s the part I know. What about the part I don’t?”

  Her mouth twisted. “When I began to watch over my family from afar, all those years ago, I made myself a promise. I would never interfere with their lives, not unless it was in the direst of circumstances. I knew, for instance, that I could never watch any of my descendants go hungry if I could feed them. Nor would I ever stand by and let them commit any horrendous act. But otherwise, I was determined to remain only a spectator. To do otherwise was unfair.

  “I kept that promise until I realized the demon was still active and in direct opposition to the mission of Carruthers. And even then, I stayed in the background. But now I’m going to have to go against what I felt was the right thing to do all these years. I’m going to interact with them, speak with them . . . and I suppose before I did that, I wanted an ally. I wanted to explain myself.” She spread her long fingers on the table and stared down at them. “When I look at Cathryn and at her mother Diana, I don’t see two virtual strangers. I see bits of my Benito and Adriano. I see some of my granddaughters, whom I watched grow up from babyhood to be old women. I see my own mother and father, and my sisters and brothers, all long dead now and forgotten by everyone but me.” She gazed at us imploringly. “For centuries, I’ve been alone. Now that I’m about to change that, I’m terrified. All I ask is that you tell Cathryn what I’ve done. I want to help defeat the Hive.

  “I want to help you save the world.”

  “THESE CUBES ARE too big.”

  I lifted my eyes from the cutting board in front of me to see what Charlie held in her hand. She’d scooped up some of the potatoes I’d just finished chopping and was now giving me what I’d privately begun to call her stare of death.

  “They’re fine.” I wasn’t in the mood to play culinary wars. We had a limited amount of time in the diner’s kitchen; I didn’t like to try to work around the regular cooks who served our customers, so I’d decided that Charlie and I would work after hours as much as we could. Tonight’s goal was prepping the two potato dishes, as we could easily re-heat them on the morning of the brunch. Earlier in the week, we’d made the sausage patties. The French toast and bacon had to be done on the day of the event, and the omelets would be made to order.

  I hadn’t co-cooked with anyone professionally since the last summer I’d worked at my dad’s restaurant in upstate New York. And even then, my partners had been people I’d known all of my life, including my brothers. We’d had a rhythm, and since most of us had been trained by the same person—my dad—we kept that rhythm easily. We flowed like a river.

  But things weren’t quite the same with Charlie. As quiet as she was most of the time, in the kitchen, she was bossy and dominating. She was as sure of her ability to cook as she seemed insecure about the rest of her life. And she certainly never hesitated to tell me when I was doing something wrong.

  “They’re not fine.” She jiggled her hand so that the small squares of red potato tumbled against each other like dice. “If the potato cubes aren’t uniform, they won’t cook evenly. Some will be raw and others will be burnt.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have a ruler for measuring fucking potato squares.” I dropped the knife on the counter and glared at Charlie. “This isn’t the food Olympics. We’re not cooking for the president or the Queen of England. They’re a bunch of old people who won’t be happy unless they have something to complain about. By offering them a variety of potato sizes, we’re giving them that chance. Look at it as a bonus.”

  If I’d expected Charlie to back down, I’d have been disappointed. “It doesn’t matter who we’re cooking for or how important you think the meal is. Every time, we should be giving it our best. Otherwise, what’s the point in doing it at all?”

  I turned my back to her and held tightly to the edge of the counter, my fingers turning white while mentally I counted to ten. I liked Charlie. At least in theory, I did. When I lay in bed at night, reviewing my day, I was usually grateful that she was part of it. Maybe not during the time I was actually interacting with her, but afterward, sure. The during part drove me crazy sometimes.

  I knew that some of my anxiety had nothing to do with Charlie. In the days since Veronica’s visit, I’d been walking on eggshells, waiting for the something to happen. After she’d left that night—well, technically it has been the following morning by the time she’d disappeared down my front walk—I’d texted Nell that we were fine and would call in the morning. I should’ve known better, because within moments o
f me hitting send, Lucas’s phone was ringing.

  He’d talked to Cathryn for at least forty-five minutes, trying to condense her many-times-over great grandmother’s story into a reassuring sound bite. In the end, Cathryn had decided that she would plan a trip down to see us, since there was no way I could make a trip up to Carruthers at the moment, and Lucas didn’t feel comfortable leaving Mrs. Mac and me.

  Which brought me to the second reason for my constant state of anxiety. There hadn’t been any more suspicious deaths since Rachael Hilton had died, but I was still worried about Mrs. Mac. She’d had a couple of weird phone calls—just hang-ups, but still. We were all on edge, and anything out of the ordinary made us even jumpier. Charlie had begun sleeping at her house every night; it was her own idea, which did help to endear her to me. A little bit, anyway.

  I had even called Nell to ask if there were any kind of protection spell we could extend from Mrs. Mac’s home all the way to the other side of Lucas’s property. But she’d told me regretfully that none of her spells worked to ward against humans; they would only ensure that we were alerted to the presence of supernatural evil, not the same kind that lurked in the heart of man . . . or woman.

  The police hadn’t been much help, either. They’d figured out that whoever was murdering these women had been wearing gloves, and they believed the perpetrator was a male, judging from the size of the finger marks. Still, they couldn’t be certain. Some women, I’d noticed, had rather large hands. I found myself surreptitiously checking the hand sizes of the Ms. Florida Senior Living Pageant contestants, just in case.

  All of the surviving contestants had been warned to be on alert and not to allow strangers into their homes. Privately, I felt that was useless advice, since it seemed the murder victims had allowed the killer into their houses. But it didn’t hurt to make everyone aware. Although we were worried about Mrs. Mac, there was no evidence that she was in any more danger than the rest of the would-be beauty queens, despite her loud proclamations that she was the next most likely winner and thus had her head on the chopping block.

  I was just about to tackle my next potato when I felt Charlie come up behind me. She reached around and took away the colander of potatoes, replacing it with a bowl of red, green and orange peppers.

  “You work on the peppers, and I’ll finish the potatoes. Makes more sense, anyway. And when you’re finished with the peppers, you could start grating the potatoes for the hash browns.”

  “Are you sure I’m capable of handling that job?” I heard the resentful bite to my own words.

  But Charlie could take it as well as she dished, and she only shrugged. “Size doesn’t matter when it comes to shredded potatoes. They’re just going to get mixed up in the batter, shaped and fried.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to reply to that, so I shut my mouth and began slicing and dicing the peppers.

  It was odd, I mused as I chopped that some people came into my life unexpectedly and immediately took up an important role. That hadn’t been the case in my first thirty years or so, when my family and childhood friends had dominated the landscape of my days. Even with Will, my erstwhile fiancé who, it had turned out, had been married with kids all the while he was planning a future with me, it hadn’t been love at first sight. He’d wooed me, taking months before we even had our first date. That had made his ultimate betrayal even more painful. I’d been careful and cautious and looked before I leapt. And what had it gotten me? A houseful of wedding gifts I had to return and an endless supply of sympathetic, pitying looks from people who’d heard that poor Jackie had been duped.

  Maybe that was why, when I’d met Lucas, I hadn’t been so hesitant. After all, if being careful hadn’t helped me suss out a loser before, why bother? And as it had turned out, Lucas was the most honorable, upright man I’d ever known outside my dad and my brothers. Even taking into account his death broker/half vamp status, he still took better care of my heart than anyone I’d ever dated. I hadn’t needed to hear Veronica’s words about the two of us being fated for a lifetime together to know that was true.

  Opening the door to Lucas, though, had meant a whole passel of new friends. Nichelle, Rafe, Nell . . . even Cathryn, though I still wasn’t sure either of us would term each other friends. And then I’d met Crissy Darwin, who still messaged us regularly from the road and from Nashville, where she’d gone to launch the next phase of her recording career. Now, Charlie had joined the mix. I wasn’t sure if she complicated things or would, in the end, make our lives easier, but she seemed to be here to stay.

  We hadn’t talked about Reg’s bar since the day we’d gone over there to pack up dishes. Neither Lucas nor I wanted to push her. He had, however, gently inquired as to whether or not she wanted to have some kind of service to send Reg off into the next life.

  Charlie had deferred, saying Reg wasn’t religious and wouldn’t want a fuss. She pointed out that even if we had a funeral of sorts, it was entirely possible that the three of us would be the only ones in attendance. I’d begun to argue that having owned a bar for years, his patrons would likely take part, but Lucas had shot me a warning glance and a slight shake of his head. We’d dropped the subject.

  I glanced over my shoulder and watched her knife fly through the potatoes, creating evenly-sized cubes. She clearly had both talent and passion when it came to cooking.

  “Why did you go to culinary school?”

  If my breaking the silence between us surprised her, Charlie didn’t react. Her fingers never missed a beat. I half-expected her to shrug and give me a one-syllable answer. But instead, I heard her inhale a deep breath.

  “It was mostly because of Reg. Not that he pushed me or thought it was a good idea, but he’s the one who taught me the basics of cooking. When Aunt Val and I moved in with him . . . well, I loved Aunt Val. She was cool, and she took good care of me. She worked hard, and for a long time, we had that ‘you and me against the world’ thing going for us. But a cook she was not. Her idea of meal planning was to go through the aisles at the grocery store and dump as much frozen crap into her basket as possible. Sometimes she’d tried to see how long we could go without shopping—she hated it—so she’d stock up the freezer and buy shit like powdered milk.” Charlie shuddered.

  I laughed. “She was probably from the generation that believed the more you could do with packaged food and the microwave, the better. I had friends up in New York when I was a kid whose parents were like that. They used to be so jealous of the homemade meals my dad cooked. We didn’t even own a microwave for a long time.”

  “Aunt Val didn’t always know how to work the stove, but yeah, the microwave was her best friend. It just wasn’t important to her, you know? Meals were something we had to do to stay alive, but they didn’t have to be important. We never owned a table until after she met Reg.”

  “Ah. Things changed at that point?” I finished another pepper and reached for a new one.

  “Oh, yeah. The first time I met him, he cooked for us. He made us fried chicken, mashed potatoes and collard greens. I remember Aunt Val told him I’d never eat all that—the closest thing I’d had up to that point was out of a frozen dinner tray, and we never had anything green on our plates—but I loved it. And Reg loved watching me eat.

  “After that, I wanted to learn how he did it. I guess part of me figured it was only a matter of time before he dumped Val or she dumped him, so I’d better get all the education I could while Reg still liked us. So he taught me the basics.” In one swift and efficient move, Charlie scooped the cubed potatoes from the cutting board into the large bowl at her side.

  “What did your Aunt Val think of that?” I imagined she might have been a little defensive about this guy she’d just met offering her niece a different perspective on cooking. And eating.

  “At first, she was just surprised. She told me later that she’d never had any clue I wanted more when it came to our kinds of meals. She and my mom had been raised the same way she was bringing me up, so s
he didn’t know any different. Once she said to me that she always figured home-cooked meals and families eating around a table were things that only happened in television shows. Like, it was some kind of fairy tale.”

  I bit the edge of my lip. “That’s kind of sad.”

  “Yeah, it was. Once she understood that I wasn’t really being critical of her ways—I just wanted to make our lives better—she was fine with Reg teaching me. And pretty soon, it was clear the two of them had it bad for each other, so I began to relax and trust that we were really going to stick together, you know? We moved in with him over the bar, and that was the best thing ever. I had access to a kitchen all the time, and Reg and I used to watch cooking shows together. Some of it we’d laugh at, but a lot of the recipes we actually did try ourselves.”

  “What did Reg like to cook? When I think of a bar, I think mostly fried stuff and burgers.”

  Charlie nodded. “Yeah, you’d be right. Reg . . . well, if you ever saw him, you’d understand that he wasn’t vegetarian. He didn’t eat clean. He told me that there was too much good food in the world to ever consider the word diet. So sometimes we’d make onion rings at midnight, or we’d have mozzarella sticks as our main course. Reg was a great cook, but he wasn’t much of a nutritionist.”

  I remembered Lucas telling me that Reg’s fatal heart attack had come on the heels of a breakfast that included cheese fries. I decided Charlie was being generous in her description.

  “Anyway, though, after Aunt Val got cancer, I started researching different ways food could affect things like healing and disease. But I was just a kid, and she was pretty far along before she was diagnosed. She wouldn’t even try to change how she ate. Even after she died, Reg wasn’t very interested in what I was learning about food and health—we were both pretty depressed in those days. We cooked together more than we talked.”