Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel

by Sarah Zettel

  “You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?” I said.

  “I do try to be thorough.”

  Yes. Yes you do. I felt my forehead bunching up as I tried to keep my thoughts from showing on my face. It wasn’t going to work, but my forehead tried anyway. You’re debating the merits of selling the Arall versus keeping it for yourself as if you’ve been having this argument for a while. But who would you have been arguing with? And if you were on the side of keeping it for yourself, who was on the side of selling it to…who? Who would pay a lot of money for a surefire antivamp weapon? Let me rephrase. Who wouldn’t pay a lot of money for a surefire antivamp weapon?

  But, of course, if you were a vampire, you might not see the money as being worth it. You might pretend to go along, all the while scheming how to keep the Arall for yourself.

  But a double cross required a patron. That patron had to want the Arall, either to keep, or to sell to the highest bidder. Scott Alden might want to do it, especially if Scott had gotten involved in one of the recent spate of banking disasters like so many other high-flying money managers. Karina Alden might want to do it, if her own very exclusive business had taken a hit from the whims of fashion or the bad economy or both. Lloyd Maddox might want to do it to very, very quietly get around centuries of family tradition, and really take the fight to the nightbloods.

  Scott, Karina, and Lloyd. Which of them are you double-crossing here, Henri?

  Anatole gestured impatiently. “I need to see what you have, Renault. Then we will discuss price.”

  “Bien sûr. And I must know you are capable of meeting my price. As I am about to enter retirement, I am afraid it will be high.”

  Without breaking eye contact, Anatole reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small black velvet bag. Gently, he tipped it up over his palm and out dropped a single white diamond the size of my thumb.

  “Oh. Em. Effin’. Gee,” whispered Chet as he trotted down the stairs to get a better look. I had to agree with him. The diamond was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. This was crystallized perfection that begged you to pick it up, look at it closely, and lay claim to it, because it was such a pretty, pretty thing.

  “Ahhhhh…” Henri sighed like Reese confronted with a really good steak. He plucked the diamond up to hold between his thumb and index finger and brought it close to his eye. The stone caught the lobby’s warm light and reflected it back as brilliant rainbows.

  “There are twelve more just like it.” Anatole smiled a very little. He also watched Henri very, very closely. Tension radiated from every inch of him, wrapping around me and making it hard to breathe.

  “Really, Sevarin?” Henri—reluctantly I thought—returned the stone to Anatole’s palm. I didn’t even see Anatole snatch it away, until his hand was pulling back out of his pocket. “Don’t tell me you picked over some Romanov bones in your time.”

  “Certainly not. Let us say there was a certain aristo lady who wished to keep her head more than she wished to keep her jewels.”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake, was Anatole going to try to snow him with one of his stories? Except from the sparkle in Henri’s eyes, it seemed to be working.

  Henri fingered his chin thoughtfully. “I find I am in a mood to be generous, Sevarin. I will take eleven of the diamonds for the Arall.”

  “And I find your generosity does not set me at ease, Renault. You will get six. Three now, and the rest when I have confirmed it is indeed the Arall you are selling me.”

  “Pah. You see what he does to me, your lover?” Henri waved his hands in a gesture somewhere between dismissal and despair. I pressed my fists against my thighs to remind myself not to start swinging for the “your lover” crack, although it was an even bet whether my first target would be Henri, Anatole, or Chet. Because I could feel my brother trying not to laugh. “I could have ten times the worth of these jewels from Maddox to give his precious family secret back to him, and years of blackmail besides. Ten.”

  “And you would for all that time be a target to him as you never had before. Seven stones.”

  I was starting to get itchy, and not just because of the tension bleed-over from Anatole. I didn’t like Henri’s delaying tactics. They gave me the nasty feeling that while he stalled us all here, something else might be going on.

  “What’ve you got?” I said.

  Both Henri and Anatole turned toward me. The weight of the sudden attention of all three nightbloods threatened to squash my thoughts flat, but I pushed it aside. “This is all kind of pointless if he hasn’t got the Arall, isn’t it?”

  “If you were a man, ma chérie, I would have to call you out for that.”

  “Wouldn’t be my first brawl,” I shot back before Chet had time to start getting all manly. “What about it?”

  Henri sighed, rolled his eyes, and shook his head at the heavens. “Sevarin. Can you not…”

  Anatole’s fangs gleamed in the lobby light, and this time it wasn’t because he was smiling. “As Charlotte herself would say, Renault, you really do not want to finish that sentence.”

  “Very well.” Henri reached into his jacket’s side pocket and brought out a pair of leather gloves. “What I am going to bring out looks very like a pistol. Please do not overreact.”

  Henri put the gloves on and then pulled a handkerchief-wrapped bundle out of his pocket. He peeled the cloth back carefully to reveal the little silver pistol I had last seen on the mantel of the Aldens’ living room.

  Anatole stretched his hand out toward the gun. His face tightened, and he withdrew, slowly.

  “Charlotte, if I could prevail upon you?”

  I took the pistol out of Henri’s hand. It was light, way too light, and too smooth. I tilted the barrel away from me. The gun sloshed.

  And I started to laugh. I laughed in great big whoops that doubled me over so hard I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t help it. Because the Arall was a potion, and it had been sitting on the mantelpiece the whole time, and Henri really had stolen it, despite all the precautions Adrienne wanted to make sure everybody watched her take.

  “Charlotte, what the hell’s the matter with you?” demanded Chet.

  “It’s a squirt gun!” I howled. “The most powerful antivamp weapon the Maddoxes could come up with, and they put it in a squirt gun!”

  Chet stared, and then he chuckled, and then he threw back his head and shouted. “Hands up, nightblood! Squirt! Squirt!” He mimed shooting with two fingers. “And there’s Lloyd Maddox staring down the barrel. Squirt!”

  “If you two are quite finished,” drawled Anatole, “you might recall that is a squirt gun full of poison.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sorry.” I wiped my eyes, and Chet bit his lip, which is something you should be careful about when you have fangs. I held the squirt gun up again. Actually, like Henri’s little Old World dandy act, it was a terrific disguise. Even if someone would believe you’d keep the family’s secret weapon on the mantel, they’d never believe you’d put it in a kid’s toy.

  All at once, my urge to laugh dried up and blew away. Because if this was the Arall, that meant Henri had known what he was stealing before he’d taken it, which meant someone had told him what to look for. That someone knew a secret even Brendan didn’t know. Slowly, I raised the barrel of the pistol. All three vampires moved away from me. But I just turned the little squirt gun over to find the plug for the reservoir and popped the cap. A bitter, unpleasant smell wafted out, one that was like the taste of AA batteries.

  Of all the senses, smell is the most evocative. It wakes up memories you didn’t know your brain had kept. And in that moment, I knew what exactly had happened, and how and why. Carefully, I fixed the stopper back into place.

  “Did you offer to sell it to her, or did she pay you to steal it?” I whispered.

  “Who, Charlotte?” asked Anatole.

  “Karina Alden.”

  Right then, Henri charged.

  30

  He never had a chance.<
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  I threw myself sideways, and the next thing I knew, Anatole’s rock-hard arms were around me. The world spun, and we were up the stairs and on the landing. Back on the main floor, Chet had Henri straight-armed over his head, held by belt and collar. All he needed was a mask and my brother would have been ready for Pro-Wrestling: Nightblood Xtreme.

  “Let me go!” screamed Henri.

  “You tried to jump my sister!” shot back Chet. “You’re lucky I don’t take your head off!”

  “Are you all right, Charlotte?” asked Anatole, calmly but slowly loosening his hold on me.

  I meant to answer yes. But now that I was sure the whole great honkin’ mess surrounding the Arall did originate with Karina Alden, I was sure about several other things too.

  “No! No! Anatole! Brendan!” The string of unwelcome realizations flooding my brain also swamped coherent speech. “He’s going over there! Phone! Where’s my phone!” I didn’t wait for an answer. I stuffed the squirt gun in my pocket and bolted down the stairs to the coat check counter where I’d left my purse and jammed both hands in. Chet shuffled sideways, keeping Henri held over his head. I punched Brendan’s number.

  “Uh, Charlotte?” said Chet gently. “This guy’s getting wiggly.”

  “One second.” The phone rang. “Come on. Come on. Comeoncomeoncomeon.”

  “Put him down, Caine,” said Anatole. “I think Henri knows better than to try that again.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chet swing Henri down and set him on his feet, bend him over the marble coat check counter, and press his hand down on the back of Henri’s neck. But all I really paid attention to was how my phone rang, and rang, until it sent me to voice mail.

  I swore and hung up, then punched Brendan’s number again. Henri struggled against Chet’s grip.

  “Hold still,” ordered Chet.

  “Or one of us will most certainly break your neck,” said Anatole calmly. Henri froze, his cheek pressed flat against the counter. “It’s all a matter of appealing to reason, you see.”

  Brendan’s phone rang and rang, and I got sent to voice mail again. “Damn it!”

  “What’s happened?” asked Anatole.

  “Brendan. He’s gone to the Aldens’ house. Trudy asked him to go. She told him that Deanna had found out what had happened with the love potion and wanted the antidote.” Karina would kill him. Everything was on the line for her now, including her freedom once O’Grady got the whole story, and then there was whatever the Maddoxes would do to her when they found out what she’d done to them. “I’ve got to get out there.”

  Anatole’s face went absolutely still.

  “I’ll take you,” said Chet quickly, stepping around Henri.

  “No,” said Anatole. “I will go with her.”

  “I’m not going to argue this one, Anatole,” Chet began, but Henri seemed to think this was a good time to bolt for the exit. My brother reached out almost casually and snagged him by the collar, jerking him off his feet. He choked and flopped down next to Chet, glaring up at him. Chet ignored this, but he also kept hold of Henri’s collar.

  Anatole faced Chet, serious as the grave. “Someone has to confine this creature and fetch O’Grady out to Brooklyn.”

  “You…”

  But I’d had enough. We were wasting time. “Figure it out!” I snapped. “Or I’m going on my own!” I would. I had to. I couldn’t stand there. She’d kill him. She might have already killed him. It’d been hours since I got that last phone call. Anything could have happened.

  No, no, it didn’t. Don’t think it. He’s alive. We’ll be in time.

  “Caine,” said Anatole, “are you strong enough to protect Charlotte from the Maddoxes if they go on the attack? Be very, very sure of your answer.”

  “Shit,” hissed Chet through his fangs.

  I dug into my purse again and tossed Chet O’Grady’s card. Vampire that he was, he snatched it out of the air with his free hand. “Tell him everything,” I said. “And make sure you put this”—I dropped the squirt gun on the counter—“someplace safe.”

  Chet nodded. “Go,” he said to me before he turned his hard, dry eyes to Anatole. “If she gets hurt, I’m coming after you, Sevarin.”

  “If she gets hurt, I’ll deserve it.”

  Running out the front door with Anatole right behind me, I charged into traffic. A yellow cab squealed its brakes and came up with the bumper brushing my knees.

  “Brooklyn Heights!” I shouted as I hauled the door open.

  “You crazy?” said the bearded, coffee-skinned man behind the wheel. “Get out of my cab! I’m off duty!”

  But Anatole pushed his way in beside me and dropped the diamond in the cash drawer. “Get her there alive,” he said. “Beyond that, we don’t care.”

  There aren’t a lot of times I’ve regretted not having a car. That ride, though, was one of them. I closed my eyes, gripping the hang strap with one hand and Anatole’s cold, hard fingers with the other, while the cab slid and skittered through traffic, its horn blaring in one continuous blast of sound.

  He’s not dead, I told myself. He can’t be dead. He isn’t dead. We’ll be in time. He’s not dead.

  But Karina Alden was already a murderer. She’d killed Oscar. She’d used poison so Linus would waste his time chasing after Adrienne rather than looking at Karina and what Karina was up to. What Karina was up to was getting her hands on the Arall so she could analyze it and reproduce it in her lab to sell it to the military, or whoever else might be buying. Once Karina made the sale, she’d be able to pay her father back for the money he’d fronted for her to start Exclusivité. Or maybe they would just split the profits and finally get the hell away from the Maddoxes, because it was really hard to be the T-typ in a magical family.

  But it was being the T-typ that gave Karina the ultimate cover with her relatives. Nobody paid attention to her. She said it herself. She didn’t matter. She could be thrown overboard. She’d been given her perfume company by her father who just wanted her to be happy. None of her magic-wielding relatives had so much as raised an eyebrow. They probably didn’t even realize how much she knew about their magical secrets. Why would they care? Even though she’d dedicated herself to building up a profession where she could analyze and reproduce complicated chemical formulae, she couldn’t do anything with them, could she? Not anything important. Not anything magical. And even if she could hire an outside witch, how would she get the formula for the Arall, or anything else? Adrienne certainly wouldn’t tell her, and neither would Deanna, because Deanna hated her.

  Enter Gabriel Renault, two-hundred-year-old professional party guest. Karina figured out the blackmail he planned, but she had a better idea, and she invited him over to her office one night. They’d had a friendly little chat, and she thought she had enlisted him for her purposes and that he drafted his blood children to help.

  But then it all went wrong because Deanna and Gabriel fell in love. They now wanted to look after each other, and this lover’s impulse left both Henri and Karina high and dry, just as Adrienne Alden had planned when she administered the potion. In love, Gabriel and Deanna wouldn’t want anything to do with stealing and selling the Arall. Deanna wouldn’t want such a powerful antivampire weapon out where anybody could use it, and Gabriel would be sensitive to Deanna’s wish to stay alive with a chance to fulfill her dynastic obligations, which included keeping the Arall’s secret in family hands.

  And they would stay in love until Adrienne had taken care of the rest of the blackmail and the rest of Gabriel’s blood family, and was ready to do him in. Except she hadn’t known Karina and Henri were working together. And no one had predicted that Henri would try to run, or that Jacques would find a support group courtesy of my brother, Chet.

  “Brendan’s smart,” I whispered. “If I put it together, he can. He’s set something up. It’s already over. He’s a security specialist. He’ll have already figured it out. He did. He had to. He’s okay. He’s okay. He’s okay.�
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  Something cold settled into my veins. My frantic thoughts stilled and receded back from my consciousness. This was Anatole, I realized with a disturbing level of calm. Anatole had reached into my mind without permission. He was sharing his calm, distancing me from my own fear.

  And God help me, I sat there and I let him do it.

  Anatole made the cabbie stop a block from the Aldens’ house. We climbed out, and the driver gunned the engine and was gone, leaving us alone beneath the streetlights. It was that dead time of the night, between everybody who had to get up in the morning being home in bed or in front of the TV and everybody else still being out and about. We had the street to ourselves.

  Anatole had withdrawn his chill presence, and my thoughts were my own again. Fortunately, they’d decided to calm down and get serious.

  “You saw the wall around the Aldens’ back garden?” I said to him. “Can you get over it?”

  Anatole considered. “You are thinking you will go in and distract Karina while I sneak in the back?”

  “You can find Brendan if they’ve got him hidden, and get him out.”

  “I can find Brendan, but you must realize neither one of us is going to leave you with Karina Alden.”

  “You can do all the macho heroics you want, as soon as you’ve got Brendan with you.”

  I could feel Anatole forcing the cold distant air he carried with him to wrap around his emotions like a cloak. He was shielding me from him, and himself from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, shaken. “I’m sorry, Anatole. Please, don’t…”

  Anatole waved his hand carelessly, but he also turned away. “I knew what I was doing when I offered to accompany you. Give me five minutes; then make your entrance.”

  And like that, he was gone, and I was alone. I bit back a curse and started walking. The curtains had been drawn on the brownstones so no one could see me go by. My clogs sounded too loud on the concrete. This wasn’t normal. I was in the middle of Brooklyn, and the world around me felt utterly empty. I couldn’t even hear the traffic, let alone any voices. A black town car trundled slowly down the middle of the street, and I pulled my shoulders up to my ears, trying to huddle in on myself. Fear simmered in my veins, working its way up to a full boil.