Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel

by Sarah Zettel

  “We’ll start on the preparations immediately,” I said. “I’ll begin the shifts at the house with the Saturday dinner. We’ll have two staff here during the day to handle breakfast and lunch, and preparations for evening. I’ll come on to assist with dinner, and I’ll handle things overnight. Felicity and I will draw up the contract for you to review and approve.” Felicity nodded, all smiles. I snapped my book shut. “Perhaps we could see the kitchen?”

  “Of course.” Mrs. Alden got to her feet. “This way.”

  “Have fun.” Deanna waved while keeping her eyes on her phone screen. “Felicity, you stay put. We need to talk gift bags.”

  It turned out the Aldens’ home was stately enough to have an actual back staircase. This led down to the ground floor and, through a white door, to the kitchen. I was expecting that kitchen to be nice. I did not expect to want to set up a cot in the corner and never leave.

  Despite being on the first floor, the room got plenty of light from the windows over the sink and the French doors that led out to the patio and terraced garden. To the left as we came in was what amounted to the hot station; a six-burner cooktop with a built-in grill. Two wall ovens waited next to it. To the right was the cold station with a full-sized, brushed-steel fridge and a matching full-sized freezer. The counters were mostly stainless steel, a favorite choice of professional and practical cooks. The center island, however, had a white marble top, making an aesthetic statement as well as a separate space for pastry. Marie eyed it with approval. The cupboards and cabinets were all laid out so everything from pantry to utensils would be within easy reach. A swinging door led to the dining room. Another, smaller door led out to the sunken porch at the side of the house. Jackets on hooks, a Peg-Board for spare keys, and a line of boots said this was used by those who didn’t want to make the grand entrance through the front.

  “Do you have a regular cook?” I asked. This wasn’t the normal showpiece of a big house. The appliances were all top-of-the-line, and the dishwasher was commercial grade. This kitchen belonged to a serious food person.

  “Actually, I usually do the cooking,” said Mrs. Alden a little wistfully. “Especially when it’s just the four of us—three of us,” she corrected herself. “But with all the extra people, it’s become a bit much. I hope you’ll have everything you need.” Mrs. Alden was glancing around at the cabinets, as if taking a mental inventory of each.

  “I’m sure we will.” I wouldn’t have pegged Mrs. Alden for an enthusiastic cook, but food is a trendy hobby these days. Something was missing, though. I took another glance around and realized I didn’t see any cookbooks or recipe binders. Well, those were probably stored in one of the cabinets. I’d have a good look around later—purely in my professional capacity, of course, not to snoop on my new clients. I’d been cured of all my latent Nancy Drew tendencies last year. No, really.

  “Mom?” Deanna’s voice drifted in from the other side of the swinging door to the dining room. “Brendan’s here.”

  Brendan?

  “Sorry I’m so late. There was an accident on—”

  The door pushed open, and Brendan Maddox walked in. Tall and broad-shouldered with black hair and blue eyes, Brendan is a big man. When he comes into view, my head tends to start spinning, but in a good kind of way. Just then, though, he made my stomach turn over. Brendan and Adrienne Alden looked at me with matching blue eyes, and I knew where my earlier bout of déjà vu had come from.

  “Holy shit!” I remarked to my new client. “You’re a Maddox!”

  3

  “Hello, Charlotte.” Brendan pulled himself together with really impressive speed.

  “Um, erm, ah. Hi.” Never let it be said I do not demonstrate the true depth of my social graces when surprised.

  I wouldn’t call Brendan Maddox my boyfriend. This is partly because the word makes me break out into a cold sweat, and partly because normal people should not become gender-prefixed friends of chefs. We work six nights a week, whether we like it or not, and we are a pack of control freaks with industrial-sized egos. None of this is good for the maintenance of a healthy relationship.

  Not that Brendan is exactly a normal person. He’s a warlock, as I’ve mentioned. He’s also a high-profile paranormal security consultant. The high profile is new. Last fall, his security company landed a citywide contract to provide public spaces with paranormal protection, or protection against paranormals, which is not always the same thing. Since then, Brendan and I have been in a dead heat for the Five Boroughs Happy Workaholic Championship. This might be why we’ve been able to keep seeing each other. Neither of us has had the time or brain cells left over to wonder where our relationship is going, let alone whether it’ll ever get there.

  “Aunt Adrienne said she had some news for me,” said Brendan, looking to Mrs. Alden.

  Aunt Adrienne? I gaped like a fish when it sees the deep fryer.

  “I’m sorry, Chef Caine,” said Mrs. Alden. “I had assumed Felicity told you.”

  Yeah, she would, because any reasonable person would tell the caterer she was hiring that said caterer was walking into a particularly personal minefield. Last fall, a drunken warlock—one Dylan Maddox—burst into my restaurant during dinner rush. By the next morning, he was dead in my foyer. The situation eventually sorted itself out, but a certain amount of bad feeling got generated in the process—not much, but just enough that a disconcertingly large number of Brendan’s relatives would be happy if my head was served up with their steak Saturday night.

  “’Scuse me a second, will you?” I swung myself up the back stairs and charged through to the living room. Felicity was already on her feet. She knew. And she knew I knew.

  “They’re Maddoxes!” I informed her, just in case she’d missed any of the pertinent details.

  “They are Aldens,” Felicity replied with a stunningly bald-faced level of calm.

  “Brendan Maddox calls her Aunt Adrienne.”

  “She was born Adrienne Maddox,” said Brendan’s voice behind me. “She’s my father’s oldest sister, and you should probably know her hearing’s very good.”

  This was Brendan’s way of telling me I might be talking a little loud. I ignored his attempt to change the subject.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded of Felicity.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Brendan. He was smiling back there; I just knew it.

  I turned and glowered at him. “I’ll get to you in a minute. I’m chewing out the wedding planner right now.”

  “As long as I’m on your schedule.” I’d been right. He was smiling. A smile from tall, dark, and handsome Brendan Maddox is a thing to warm the blood and curl the toes of any heterosexual female. I, however, was quite used to it by now. Plus, I was in no mood to have my toes curled. That my toes might have ideas of their own was of no consequence whatsoever. “But why didn’t you call me?”

  “No time,” I answered. “Felicity showed up at Nightlife during dinner prep and dragged me out here.”

  “I didn’t drag you,” said Felicity.

  “You bribed me.”

  “How much?” asked Brendan.

  I told him. Brendan whistled. “That’s a good bribe.”

  “Not bad, all things considered.” I shrugged.

  “Are you still chewing me out?” asked Felicity.

  “’Scuse me,” I said to Brendan. “I gotta take this.”

  A dangerously flippant light crept into Felicity’s eyes. “Oh no, don’t let me get in the way. You go on discussing bribery with your boyfriend while we’re on the clock.”

  I turned again, much more slowly this time. Clearly, she overestimated the power of one smile. “Felicity?”

  “Yes, Charlotte?”

  “Do not under any circumstances act like you’re the one getting the short end here. I will carve you up and serve you as event planner on the half shell.”

  Felicity looked to Brendan, who just held up both hands, indicating that the event planner was on her own.


  “Talk fast,” I said.

  Felicity took a deep breath. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think family of origin for the mother of the bride was important.”

  “You knew how I’d react when I found out,” I corrected her.

  “Okay, you got me.” Felicity waved one hand, maybe in surrender, maybe in dismissal. “I knew you wouldn’t take the job if you knew the bride was related to the Maddoxes. I’m sorry.” This last was aimed at Brendan as much as at me. “But I still need your help, and the fee still stands.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s gone up.”

  “Is everything all right?” Mrs. Alden née Maddox came up the back stairs with Marie right behind her. Her tired eyes were now officially worried-looking, but her voice was as smooth as when we first walked into this room. “Chef Caine? Is there going to be a problem?”

  This was also when it hit me that no matter what was going on, I was in the home of a potential client. I pulled my shoulders back and smoothed down the front of my coat. It was time once again to put my social graces on display. “Well, I think we’ve got everything we need here. You have a lovely home, Mrs. Alden. Brendan, good to see you. Marie, we’re done for now. Felicity, I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? Good-bye.”

  Fortunately, I still had my notebook in my hand, so I could head straight down the front stairs and out the door, past a disconcertingly smug Ms. Lyons.

  The street outside was quiet and treelined. The scent of the East River in spring filled the breeze, and it wasn’t improving anything. I couldn’t believe Felicity would do this to me. No, I could. What I couldn’t believe was that I’d been so dazzled by the potential payout that I hadn’t asked some really basic questions. That was the real problem. Felicity hadn’t just played me. I’d played along.

  Footsteps sounded on the concrete stoop behind me. I turned, expecting to see Brendan, but it was Marie, wearing her best Cakeinator face.

  Not that I even thought that.

  “We also have a few things to discuss, Chef Caine.” You know that feeling you get when your mother calls you by your middle name? Marie could produce it by calling me “Chef Caine.” I opened my mouth to say I was getting us a cab, but Marie held up her hand. “I wish to visit the market. I will call you later, and you will tell me how you plan to proceed.” She tucked her portfolio more firmly under one wrestler’s arm and started briskly down that treelined street.

  The worst part was she was right to be miffed. I was supposed to be a professional. Professionals asked questions and followed up on their suspicions before they put their employees in awkward situations.

  It’s amazing how far you can kick yourself down an empty block in Brooklyn without moving a single inch.

  I heard yet more footsteps on the stoop and gritted my teeth. This had better not be Felicity trying to talk me back into the house. It wasn’t. This time it really was Brendan.

  “Not now, okay?” I said to whatever he might be thinking about telling me. I knew I should add something to demonstrate that my anger wasn’t for him, but nothing inside my head would settle down long enough. I resolutely studied the toes of my street shoes. If I looked up at him, I’d start feeling better. I was not ready to start feeling better.

  “How bad is it?” Brendan walked around until he was in front of me and touched my shoulder. Despite all my good intentions, that got me to look up.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I knew Deanna was threatening to marry a vampire, but everybody was acting like it was going to blow over.”

  Her mother had been planning a massive society wedding since November, and Brendan somehow got the idea this situation was going to “blow over”? He could be such a guy sometimes.

  “Does everybody include your grandfather?” I asked.

  “Everybody except grandfather, but that’s normal.”

  None of the Maddoxes liked vampires, but Lloyd Maddox, Brendan’s politically powerful grandfather, was in a class by himself. If the FlashNews headlines were to be believed, he was at this moment lobbying Albany to require DNA samples and fang impressions to be added to the state nightblood registry, and to expand the antistalker laws, and to make even consensual bites between the living and undead into felony sexual assault.

  “How did you even get pulled into this?” Brendan asked.

  “The wedding planner’s a friend of mine, and the original chef walked out,” I told him. “How’d you get pulled into this?”

  “Aunt Adrienne asked me to drop by—said she had some family business she wanted to talk over. Believe me, I didn’t know it was you. Actually”—he turned his frown toward the house—“it might not be.”

  Perfect. “I do so love being the sideshow.”

  “Any idea why you?”

  That would have been easy to take the wrong way, if I hadn’t been asking myself the same question. Why had Felicity asked me onto this job? There was no way my presence wouldn’t cause more problems.

  Now, we were both staring up at the beautiful house, its windows glowing gold with the last of the evening sun.

  “You do realize this situation makes no sense, don’t you?” I said. That wasn’t just because I had been brought in either. Vampires did not traditionally marry people they wanted to keep near them. Convert them, yes, but marry them…not so much. Blood children didn’t do inconvenient things such as divorce their sires, and they didn’t have to bother with pesky details such as prenuptial agreements. Although, according to Trish, my number two roomie who was also a lawyer, that was changing. I told her I had no desire to hear about the emerging legal field of pretransition contracts—takes all the romance out of it.

  “Want me to see what I can find out?” asked Brendan.

  “Oh yeah,” I answered immediately. Because this was way past the question of why Oscar Simmons, one of the biggest publicity hounds in the restaurant world, had dropped this job without saying one word to the foodie blogs or the gossip columns. This was also beyond how the bride thought her sister was sabotaging the wedding. Someone had gone and deliberately involved me with the Maddoxes and their vampire troubles, again. And he, she, or it and I were going to have a very, very long talk about this.

  4

  After I left Brooklyn Heights, I did what I do whenever my life gets complicated beyond the grasp of a mortal woman. I went back to work.

  By the time I got into the Nightlife kitchen, rolled up my sleeves, and moved Zoe from expediting to supervising the hot line, our early reservations had started to arrive. Kitchen routine folded around me like a comfortable blanket—a hot, damp, loud, fast-moving blanket that smelled of meat, spices, and onion. We had a solidly full house with very few lulls in the action. From nine o’clock on, we were going full tilt. The ticket machine went down once. We ran out of duck for the special; then we ran out of veal for the carpaccio. One of the new servers spilled raw sauce on a vampire from Altoona, and our front-of-house manager, Suchai (a werewolf when he’s not on shift), had to pull the vampire back before she could sink her fangs into my guy’s neck.

  It was a typical night, really. I was in my groove, and after the whole throw-me-for-nineteen-different-kinds-of- loops afternoon, it felt really good.

  By the time Robert finally snapped shut the lock on Nightlife’s front door, my crew members were tired and swearing at one another, but in a good way. I was finally able to take off my apron, open the neck of my coat, drop into my creaking desk chair and take a long swig of water. It was standard to have a bottle or cup at your station, but on a busy night, you could literally go for hours without having a hand free to reach for it. Around me, my crew members cleaned their stations and wrapped up the remaining mise en place to stash away for tomorrow. Satisfaction hung in the air with the exhaustion and the fading smells of good food. Plus, if I squinted at just the right angle, I couldn’t even see the stack of unpaid invoices on my desk.

  “So, Chef, what went wrong in Brooklyn?”

  Zoe was standing in fr
ont of my desk, with her arms folded and her no-nonsense attitude on. Executive Sous-Chef Zoe Vamadev is a petite young woman who has a critical eye on the level of Simon Cowell with a toothache. Her parents are from Bengal and Bali, and she came to the United States by way of Bangkok, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and London. She speaks more languages than a career diplomat, and she’s a good enough chef to give me a serious run for my money, even in my own kitchen.

  “Nothing,” I told her. “At least, not much.”

  Zoe held my gaze a good ten seconds longer, just to make sure I understood she knew exactly when she was being distracted and to suggest that I might want to amend my answer. In another life, Zoe would have made a fabulous trial lawyer.

  “So, we are doing this?” she asked.

  “Who said we weren’t?”

  Zoe waved her hand vaguely. “You know how it is when the chef has her frowny face on. People start wondering…”

  “My frowny face? Who says I’ve got a frowny face?” Because clearly there were problems with discipline on my line I had not previously been aware of.

  Zoe ignored me with an ease that was truly disturbing. “The point is, Chef, we are still doing the Alden wedding, right?”

  “Yes, we are still doing the Alden wedding.”

  “So, what went wrong in Brooklyn?”

  I decided if she could ignore me, I could return the favor. “Make sure you, Reese, and Marie are all here by two tomorrow,” I said. “We’re going to be doing some heavy-duty schedule reshuffling. I’ll need Reese and a backup at the Aldens’ until the wedding. And I’ll need you to be ready to take charge here.”

  Zoe gave me the yes-Chef, and got back to work on the slow, detailed work of closing up a kitchen for the night. I let her go, but not without a twinge or two of conscience. I did owe her an answer. I just didn’t have one. While I buried my nose in close-of-day paperwork, I turned all the events of the afternoon over in my head and came up with absolutely nothing. To make matters worse, Zoe’s question seemed to have gotten stuck on infinite replay in my head. What had gone wrong in Brooklyn? Nothing major. Nothing real. Except that I was there at all.