Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel

by Sarah Zettel

  “Where’s Henri?” I asked Jacques.

  “I don’t know.”

  For all his refined control, I could feel Anatole’s curiosity prowling the room like a cat curling around my ankles. I’d take the time to explain later—maybe—once I figured out how much I wanted him to know. Right now I wasn’t going to waste the chance to get some answers out of Jacques. “He’s your sire. Of course you know where he is.” The connection between blood children and their sires defied distance, and time. Chet’s sire, a sixteen-year-old fidget of a girl vamp, had run out on him with a pretty-boy actor years ago, and he still could have told me exactly where she was. Not that I ever asked. That was another one of my life’s complexities that I tried very hard to ignore.

  It was easy to do that right now, because the way Jacques was looking at me said he clearly thought I was shy several dozen IQ points. “Henri’s not my sire.”

  “What?”

  He hissed through his fangs. “You think I’d still be here if my sire had run off? Gabriel is my sire, and my mortal brother. Henri is our father, but he’s only Gabriel’s sire.”

  And here I’d thought that sort of thing happened only with certain Arkansas vampires. “But you must know where he planned to head out after the theft.”

  “Theft?” Jacques’s jaw dropped.

  “Theft?” murmured Anatole.

  “Imbecile! Idiot!” shouted Jacques. He added a lot of other insults to go with the first two. Even with the French I’d garnered in bars and back kitchens, I had a hard time keeping track of them all.

  I waited until he’d calmed down. “So, where’d he go?”

  “I know nothing about it.” Jacques ran both hands through his hair. “If I did, I’d rip his throat out for you myself.” He added a whole nother string of French obscenities to bring home the point.

  I waited until he was done, then turned to Anatole. “Is he telling the truth?” Anatole might joke about acute undead senses, but they were real, and he never hesitated to apply them.

  Anatole contemplated the other nightblood for a long, cool moment. “I believe he is.”

  “Shit.” I ran my hand through my too-short hair as my hopes for figuring this mess out in record time crumbled.

  “And there you have it,” sneered Jacques. “Now you may trust me when I also say I came back here because the one who is my sire has absolutely lost his mind, and someone has to look out for him before he wakes up with a stake through the heart.”

  All this time I’d been thinking about the vampires through Maddox eyes. I hadn’t really stopped to think about the Maddoxes from the vampire point of view. What would it be like to lay yourself down at sunrise, aware that the entire vampire-hunting clan knew exactly where you were, and that there was nothing at all you could do about it? I could see how Jacques might question everybody’s undead sanity in such a situation.

  “So, what was up with threatening me in the alley the other night?”

  “I wasn’t threatening you. I was warning you,” Jacques shot back. “The word around is you and your brother are all right. I didn’t see any reason for you to get mixed up in this merde. But I’m starting to wonder why I bothered.”

  That was most definitely and entirely not what I expected to hear. It was so much not what I expected to hear that I opened and shut my mouth a few times without getting any actual words to come out.

  I don’t know whether it was the whole pissed-off-vampire vibe sizzling through the air that woke somebody up, or plain old insomnia, but there was movement overhead. The vampires both noticed it too, and we were all staring at the door to the back stairs by the time Deanna Alden pushed through.

  “Jacques!” she cried. “What are you doing here? Did Gabriel get you out? Where’s Henri?”

  “I don’t know.” Affecting nonchalance, Jacques reached down a wineglass from the cupboard. “I was too busy running away to keep track.”

  “You don’t know?” She grabbed his arm and spun him around to face her. “You haven’t heard from them? Do you even know if Henri’s all right? How did you get away?”

  I felt my forehead furrow up tight. Either Deanna hadn’t realized yet the raid was a fake, or we were back to her being one hell of an actress. She certainly had the air of somebody who’d worked herself into what my grandmother would have called a real dither. Exhibit A: She was grabbing hold of a vampire. Exhibit B: She had a second, strange vampire in her kitchen, and she hadn’t even noticed. Exhibit C: She was asking all about whether Henri, her fiancé’s sire, was okay, but she hadn’t said a word hinting at the theft. I wondered what Gabriel was up to that kept him too busy to call Deanna and reassure her that everything was okay. It seemed kind of a big detail to overlook when he had to be counting on her to stay put and not make things messier.

  Jacques evidently noticed the misplaced emphasis and decided to play along. “I expect I got away because I’m faster, and yes, I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “You shouldn’t even be here,” Deanna went on. “Somebody could be watching the house.”

  “I assure you, Miss Alden, no one is watching the house.” Anatole stepped forward. “I would not have accompanied Jacques here otherwise.”

  Deanna jumped about a foot and came down with a hard glower and a raised hand, and I put another point in the column for the really-worked-into-a-dither theory. Anatole simply cocked his head at the young witch’s throwing hand and generated an air of mild regret.

  Deanna lowered her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said with a dignified calm she probably learned at her mother’s elegant knee. “You are?”

  “Anatole Sevarin, Miss Alden. I truly must apologize for intruding at this time of night.”

  Anatole’s turning the charm on full blast is always an entertaining sight. Mischief sparked in his eyes as he gave Deanna one of his old-fashioned bows. Deanna did her best to return a penetrating glower. He remained perfectly composed under her scrutiny, and Deanna melted—slowly, but she melted. I could feel him suppressing his smile. He knew if he didn’t have her in the palm of his hand yet, he could as soon as circumstances required.

  For the record, that strange, uncomfortable twinge I felt way under my rib cage could not possibly have been jealousy.

  “Are you a friend of Gabriel’s?” Deanna asked Anatole.

  “Of Chef Caine’s. I was coming to see her when I met Mr. Renault.” He gestured toward Jacques. In answer, Jacques rolled his eyes and poured himself a big glass of sangria from the pitcher in the fridge. Deanna, on the other hand, was clearly trying to square the fact that I had charming Russian nightbloods visiting me on the job with the other, well-publicized fact that I was dating Brendan.

  I was grateful when she decided she had more important things to deal with. “All right then, we’ll leave you to it. Come on, Jacques. We need to talk.”

  “About time.” Jacques gulped the last of the sangria, slapped the glass on the counter hard enough to make me wince, and followed her out the door and up the back stairs.

  “Anatole…,” I began.

  But Anatole had cocked his head and held up his hand. I shut my mouth. I could feel Anatole straining, and my shoulders tensed in response. His attention focused completely on the space above us, sensitive to any vibration. I had no doubt he’d be able to hear anything Deanna and Jacques whispered, even if they’d gone up to the roof.

  “What’re they saying?” I breathed.

  “Do you really want to hear?”

  I hesitated, recognizing this stood a good chance at being one of my bad ideas. But it was also a chance to get some answers to go with the mountain of questions I’d accumulated, so I nodded.

  Anatole wrapped his hand around mine. I felt a quick, numbing current reverberate through my bones. Then, I heard pounding footsteps and harsh voices. It took me a second to realize that they were so rough and distorted, because I was experiencing whispers turned up to eleven. I was hearing Deanna and Jacques through Anatole’s ears, and that wasn’t all I w
as getting. I could taste Deanna’s living anger, hot, gritty, and metallic.

  “You should be glad Gabriel’s not here. You’d be dust.” She forced the words out through clenched teeth.

  “And you’d be glad to tell him, wouldn’t you?” Jacques’s contempt was strong vinegar mixed with camphor. It leached through plaster and wood to try to tangle around me, but it couldn’t get a grip. I was beyond its reach, sheltered by Anatole’s sang froid, literally, his cold blood.

  More anger. This batch was raw, green, sulfurous and hot on the tongue. “If you weren’t Gabriel’s brother…”

  “We would not be having this conversation,” Jacques finished for her. “You’re right. Because I would have drained you dry months ago.”

  “Try it.” Pure heat, the taste of fire, the rasp of smoke on the back of the throat. Fear threatened, but couldn’t quite reach.

  “Oh, believe me, we’ll get there. Compulsions fade, baby girl. They all fade.” Jacques was getting closer, casting the force of his presence over her, trying to smother the flame of her nerve.

  “You don’t even want to be here. You keep telling everybody. Why don’t you just go back to your pathetic little truck and leave us alone?”

  Truck? I got an abrupt and incongruous smell of onions. But my thoughts got no further, because Jacques was talking again, and his words dug jagged edges into my palate. “Listen to me very carefully, baby girl. You’ve gotten your damned Maddox hooks into my brother, but it will not work with me. I’ve been ordered to go through with this farce, and I will, but I hope you are ready to watch your back for the rest of your pathetic little life, because I will not forget this, and I do not forgive.”

  Silence surrounded me—thick, cold, awful silence, broken only by the sensation of Anatole’s light hand holding mine and his preternatural calm flowing through my veins. Slowly, Anatole pulled his presence back, and I sucked in a great, long whoop of air. How the hell long had I forgotten to breathe?

  Anatole took no notice of my gasping for oxygen. “He’s left her. Gone upstairs. The lock has turned on a door. Deanna is very angry. Jacques should be more circumspect. That baby girl has very adult protectors.”

  I was having a tough time focusing on Deanna and Jacques, though. I was getting my breath back and my ears were ringing, and I’d just overheard a conversation happening in whispers a floor above me, and, incidentally, I’d kind of allowed Anatole into my personal brain space.

  I glowered at him. He waved me back. “You said you wanted to hear.”

  “You didn’t say you were going to get into my head.” I stopped. “How’d you do that anyway?”

  “I am a vampire of many talents, and you let me in.” He was looking toward the back stairs. “What do you suppose Jacques meant about Deanna’s ‘Maddox hooks’?”

  “No idea.” I slumped onto my stool. I suddenly didn’t feel so good; not sick, exactly, just shaken. As though my insides had been rudely rearranged and were now trying to find their way back to their normal places. “I thought Gabriel or Henri had put the whammy on Deanna maybe to get to the Arall, but it sounds like Jacques thinks Deanna’s put some kind of witch whammy on Gabriel…”

  “The Arall?”

  “Yeah, you know.” I waved my hand. “The big, magical antivamp nuke that Adrienne Alden’s in charge of, that might or might not be what Henri Renault ran off with the other night.”

  “No. I did not know.”

  “Oh. Shit.” Brendan was going to kill me. The thought was so calm and certain, it could have come from Anatole. “I’m used to your being up on this stuff.”

  “You may recall the Maddoxes do not like me, and they are therefore hardly likely to share with me their deep magical secrets.”

  “Yeah, that would make sense.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m sure something else can go wrong here. I’m sure it’s coming any second now.”

  “You may also recall,” Anatole said, letting his smile creep into his voice, “that I do not like the Maddoxes and so am hardly likely to tell them when I discover their secrets.”

  That was cold comfort, but it was all I had. It was also very clear that I needed to stop talking. “You should go. I need to get some sleep.”

  “Charlotte,” he said softly.

  “Oh, please, Anatole…”

  “Are you all right here?”

  That stopped me, less because he asked than because he was perfectly serious. “I’m fine.”

  “I think you are not fine.” He was right next to me. The cold that always surrounded him was reaching for me once more. It felt familiar now, which did not make me entirely happy. Neither did the way his green eyes had gone dark and contemplative. “I think you are frightened, Charlotte, and this concerns me.”

  “I’m not frightened.” Anatole arched one eyebrow. “Okay, I’m frightened. But not for me. I’m frightened about where this mess is going and the fact that the wedding I was counting on to pay my bills is heading straight to the nether regions in a handbasket, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to—”

  “To Brendan?”

  “So?”

  “So, I will clearly have to work harder. I find I am not yet ready to cede the field.”

  There was a whole lot I could have said to that, especially as pertained to any idea I might be a battleground, or a prize. Except the idea that Anatole felt willing to fight for what he would no doubt call my attentions was doing strange things to my brain, and the soft spot right under my rib cage. Especially since those warm promises and mischief were getting a fresh seasoning of something new. It was partly concern and partly something else—something I couldn’t name, or didn’t want to.

  Get it together, Charlotte. I groped for the closest snark I could find. “How much of this is because I’m dating somebody else and how much is because he’s a Maddox?”

  Anatole chuckled. “My mathematics are terrible, but for the sake of argument, we will say it’s a seventy–thirty split.”

  I should know better than to ask this vampire rhetorical questions. It was time to change the subject. “You never did say what you were doing lurking on the street out front.”

  “Ah.” I expected Anatole to deny he’d been lurking, but he instead picked up the top sheet off my pile of menu notes and perused them closely. “As you know, like you, and unlike your Mr. Maddox, I must work to maintain myself…”

  “Pity about that whole stock market crash back in ‘twenty-nine.”

  “It was the revolution back in ‘nineteen. The Bolsheviks were absolute murder on the banking system, and I had to barter a large number of diamonds to get safely out of St. Petersburg.”

  This one might possibly be true, or Anatole might just be waiting for me to accuse him of lying again so he could give me one of his laconic comebacks. Real vampires don’t do snappy. Either way, following up wasn’t going to get me anyplace I actually wanted to go. “You were saying, about work?”

  Anatole sighed. “The society writer for Circulation has met with a most unfortunate accident. Something to do with a soon-to-be former lover, a concurrent lover, and a blunt instrument. I did not inquire closely into the details, but he is not expected back to work for some time, even after he is able to sit down again. I am filling in for him, and my editor was most interested when he heard you were taking over the catering duties for the Renault-Alden wedding.”

  I snatched my notes out of his fingers and slapped the page facedown on the counter. “He sent you here to get a sneak peek at the menu.”

  “To my shame. But, given what we’ve just heard between the bride and best man, I cannot say I’m entirely sorry I came.” Anatole’s face went still, and I had a nasty crawly sensation, the kind you get when you’ve seen something skitter away that second before you put the lights on. “I think Henri Renault needs to be found and reminded you are under my protection.”

  I could have blustered here; done the whole kick-butt-heroine shtick and insisted I didn’t need his protection. But I coul
d still feel the sharp corners of Jacques’s anger in the back of my throat. He was in the house somewhere, and he wasn’t any too happy with me either. Brendan might have turned my bedroom into a magical Fort Knox, but there was a whole lot of dark city out there for a pissed-off vampire to lurk in, and I worked late nights.

  Of course, all of this communicated itself straight to Anatole.

  “Do you wish to leave, Charlotte? I will take you home.”

  “No. I’ll be all right.” My hand strayed to my pocket, brushing the comforting weight of my spray bottle.

  He nodded. If there’s one thing I really do like about Anatole, it’s that he has a healthy respect for my ability to defend myself.

  “But you’re right about one thing. Henri Renault’s got to be found.”

  “Shall I make inquiries?”

  “Can you?”

  “For you, Charlotte, I can move mountains. And do not worry; I will find a way to put off my editor about the menu.” Anatole took my free hand and brushed his lips against it. Then he smiled at my entirely useless attempt not to smile, or blush, and started for the door. But there was something else that needed saying before he left.

  “Anatole?”

  “Wait.” He pressed his fingers to his forehead. “I sense…a threat? Perhaps something related to how my existence will come to an abrupt and dusty halt if I intrude upon your mental space again without an explicit warning?”

  “You know me so well.”

  Anatole’s eyes sparkled, and I felt those sparks dance across my skin. “Better than you realize, Charlotte.”

  The door closed behind him, and I stood there for a long time, thinking. I thought about Brendan and me, and how I kept teasing Anatole even though I knew it was dangerous. And how I kept not telling him to quit coming around after me.

  I thought about Jacques, Henri, and Gabriel, and how neither Jacques nor Deanna seemed to know what was going on. I thought about Jacques’s saying he was being ordered to go through with this farce. I thought about all the little stories Anatole liked to drop into conversation and how I had no way to know when he was kidding and when he was being straight with me. I thought about how vampires lie, especially about who they are and where they’ve come from. One of the attractions of becoming a vampire is it’s the ultimate way to reinvent yourself. The nightblood registry was supposed to prevent identity fraud and make sure there’s a public record of who’s who. But there aren’t a whole lot of ways to make sure what goes into the registry is accurate. Gabriel, Jacques, and Henri could be anybody, and be up to anything.