Fangs in Fondant

by Melissa Monroe

  Priscilla stepped out of her van, wrapping the red scarf she wore more tightly around her neck. She didn’t think Olivia would literally go for the throat, but one could never be too sure. The keys pressed hard into her palm as she clenched a fist around them and walked stiffly to the back of the van. As she suspected, Olivia was waiting for her there. The windows of the sedan had steamed over. Had she been so angry it had physically heated the car?

  “You treacherous little—” Olivia began, her face red and heading steadily toward purple.

  “Olivia, nice to see you,” Priscilla greeted in a would-be-calm voice. “I didn’t notice you until you honked.”

  “Oh, that’s complete horse hockey and we both know it,” Olivia said, spitting a little as she spoke. “You knew I’d be having words with you, Pratt. The moment you got my daughter involved, you ensured it.”

  “Maddison was well-compensated,” Priscilla said, slotting the key into the lock. Unlike newer models, she couldn’t use a hand remote to unlock her trunk. Olivia was forced to take a step back as she opened the doors wide. “It wasn’t as if I was stealing her away from you.”

  “It’s manipulation,” Olivia said, jabbing a finger at her. “You know we can’t give her all the blood she needs. Are you just trying to rub it in my face now?”

  Guilt twisted Priscilla’s insides. She’d given Maddison the blood for a job well done, and to take a burden off her small shoulders. She hadn’t expected Olivia to take it like this. She hadn’t been trying to highlight the woman’s shortcomings at all.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I was paying for services rendered, that’s all. I’d hire her on full-time, if child-labor laws and her overbearing mother would let me.”

  Olivia’s face turned puce, and her hands raised a fraction from her sides. “You are lucky that I salvaged the situation, Pratt, or I’d file a restraining order against you.”

  The pieces fell into place then. Olivia hadn’t been stalking her out of town or trying to arrange a come-to-Jesus talk. The steamed windows and the faint smell of garlic coming from Olivia’s back seat now made sense; Priscilla would have bet a dollar that there was an Italian dinner spread waiting in the backseat of the car.

  “That’s a bit extreme,” Priscilla said, retrieving the smaller of the cakes. She wedged it beneath her other arm and closed the door with her foot. “I only hired her on to bake. I wasn’t asking for your trade secrets.”

  Olivia’s eyes shone brightly with unshed tears for a moment and her chin wobbled. “She told you that the clinic isn’t giving us blood. That was private.”

  “I already knew it, Olivia,” Priscilla said, starting up the drive. The shiny BMW waiting in the driveway made her van look like a senior citizen by comparison. The beige sedan didn’t fare favorably against it either. It appeared Kierra was the only one here for the moment.

  “What?”

  “I used to get my blood there as well. I was turned away, same as you.”

  “You always find a way.” Olivia’s voice wasn’t shaking or thick with tears, which Priscilla was grateful for. Crying people were harder for her to deal with than angry people. “And this time you didn’t share.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t want to speak to me after you lost the Mayer contract,” Priscilla said, veering off to take the uneven sidewalk. At least it had been shoveled.

  “I don’t want to talk to you about business anymore. But you could have at least shared the information that was pertinent to my daughter’s survival, Priscilla.”

  Priscilla sighed. “Fine. We won’t talk, except about Maddison. May I please hire her on? She’s a lot of help.”

  “Not a chance,” Olivia said waspishly, marching ahead. Despite herself, she couldn’t seem to shake the polite manners pounded into her by her mother. She held the screen door open for Priscilla, tapping her foot impatiently as she navigated the uneven paving slabs.

  Priscilla paused, tilting her head a little as her ears caught the sound of ... something inside. It wasn’t the chittering, scraping sound of a rat, thank goodness. It was soft, but distinct. A rhythmic tapping, almost.

  “And what’s more, if you pull this stunt again, I’ll call the chief.”

  “And say what?” Priscilla muttered distractedly, trying to puzzle out the sound. “Priscilla Pratt offered my daughter a job? Oh, the horror.”

  “Don’t you dare take that tone with me,” Olivia said, puffing up like an angry bird. “I am her mother and I deserve to have my wishes respected.”

  The noise came again. And again. Priscilla tried to strain her ears and pick up what it might be, but it was difficult through the tirade Olivia was delivering.

  “Shh,” Priscilla finally said, raising a finger for silence. The sound was drifting through the semi-open door. She mounted the stairs and set her packages aside.

  “Don’t you dare shush me, Priscilla Pratt,” Olivia exploded. “I am trying to speak to you and—”

  “Olivia for the love of—would you shut up?” Priscilla didn’t raise her voice often.

  Olivia fell silent, looking angry enough to spit. Her mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds. Priscilla leaned in further, trying to pick up on the odd sound she’d heard coming from the interior of the house.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  The sound came every couple of seconds, as regularly as a leaky faucet. Normally, that’s what Priscilla would have chalked it up to. Robshaw Manor had been devoid of inhabitants since the 1880s, after the family had squandered its wealth. Bellmare’s historical society had made sure the place was taken care of since the mid-19th century, and it had only recently been opened to the public as an inn. Almost no one could afford it; $5,000 was more than most people made in a month, and one night wasn’t worth it. Even so, the happy couple had declared their intention to stay in the Robshaw Inn for a week.

  So on top of a $15,000 wedding, Kierra Cunningham was spending a further $35,000 on her honeymoon inside Robshaw.

  The sound wasn’t accompanied by a hollow echo, like Priscilla would have expected if it was falling into one of the marble sinks. The drops were steady, and the impact dull, as though they were falling on hardwood. Rain? No. There hadn’t been rain in Bellmare for nearly a week.

  Priscilla leaned toward the half-open door and took a deliberate whiff. She stiffened, her grip on the doorframe too tight. The wood creaked ominously in protest.

  “What is going on?” Olivia hissed, thankfully at a lower volume this time.

  “I smell blood,” Priscilla said, glancing back at her unwilling companion. Olivia’s eyes widened a fraction and her mouth formed a little ‘O’ of horror.

  It was one of the things that Priscilla liked about Olivia. Despite her bad temper, she was one of the sharpest pins in the cushion. After raising Maddison, she knew more than most what that statement meant. Vampires were not bloodhounds. Not in the sense that most people thought of them, anyway. They did have scenting capabilities greater than that of a regular human, but Priscilla’s nose would have been put to shame by a werewolf’s or even Anna’s pet beagle, Sunny.

  True, blood was most likely to catch a vampire’s attention, not unlike the smell of bacon might do with a human. It was warm and delicious, and many craved it with an unholy passion. But in an old house like this, she should have been able to scent other things as well. Dust, mold, wood, cleaning supplies, and the overpowering cloud of musk that many of the historical society members insisted on using. But she couldn’t pick up on any of that. Just blood.

  “Stay here,” Priscilla instructed.

  “I will not,” Olivia said, rather loudly. “I’m not letting you go in there alone.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m quite a bit faster than you are,” Priscilla began. “Furthermore, I’m undead. No human maniac is going to take me out without serious preparation first. One gunshot or stab wound and you’re dead, leaving Maddison without a mother.”

  Olivia’s mouth snapped shut and she
gave Priscilla a sullen glare. “I see your point. But what if they sneak out here, hmm? You can’t help me if you’re distracted by all the blood inside.”

  Priscilla paused. She hadn’t thought of that scenario. It was worrying. Was she slipping in her old age, or was she already distracted by the scent of fresh blood? She suspected the latter. She hadn’t fed from a live human and had real, warm blood in so long.

  “Get back to your car and phone Police Chief Sharp,” she said finally. “If something comes after you, floor it. Get out of here and find help.”

  Olivia didn’t look happy, but did as she was bid. Priscilla waited until she’d climbed back into the beige sedan and slammed down the locks before she proceeded forward.

  The door creaked noisily on its hinges as she pushed it further open. That little feature probably delighted the streams of tourists that flocked to the building to hear guides explain the building’s sordid history. Right now, it just irritated Priscilla. Her nose was essentially useless in this situation. Blood overwhelmed her senses, blocking out anything useful she could have gleaned to give herself a few seconds advantage over an attacker.

  Placing her feet carefully to avoid the noisiest floorboards, Priscilla made her way across the room. Someone had lit the candles in the old-fashioned chandelier. They’d been burning a while, if the amount of wax that had dripped onto the floor was any indication. It illuminated the room just enough to see a pair of suede boots sticking out from the central staircase.

  Kierra Cunningham lay crumpled at the base of the stairs, her sweet, heart-shaped face slack, eyes unseeing. The blood dripped onto the floor from a broken post above. Kierra’s arm had been gashed from elbow to wrist, and the pool of blood around the body was enormous. Worse, the girl’s phone lay nearby, cracked, screen still alight and flickering between two webpages.

  Kierra Cunningham had bled to death on the floor of Robshaw Manor, only feet away from the thing that could have saved her life.

  Chapter Three

  “This is outrageous, Arthur, and you know it.”

  Anna’s stony-faced father sat across from Priscilla, the low metal table the only thing between them. His arms were crossed stubbornly over his broad chest. He was in exceptionally good shape for a man staring down fifty. It had a lot to do with his daughter, who dragged him out of bed each day before work to run. Anna’s idea of quality time was training for a race or seeing if she could beat her high score for sit-ups. Arthur’s recent injury had put a damper on those things, but it didn’t seem like any of his bulk had been lost during recovery.

  “I’ll decide what’s outrageous, Miss Pratt. And it’s Police Chief Sharp to you.”

  “Police Chief Sharp,” Priscilla began, trying to keep her voice from betraying her mounting irritation. “I don’t understand why I’m here. If you recall, I was the one who alerted you to this.”

  “No, Olivia Baker called this in. You were found in the house, kneeling over a dead body.”

  Priscilla gritted her teeth and bit back a nasty retort. “I told her to call.”

  “The body was still warm,” the chief continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “And you just happened to be the last one to see her alive. I hear the Cunningham-Porter wedding party was leaning heavily on you to produce results.”

  “They were impatient and had unrealistic expectations,” Priscilla said. “But that’s no reason to kill them, Arthur! I mean ... Police Chief Sharp.”

  The chief’s mustache twitched. She couldn’t tell through the overgrown mass of hair whether he was smiling or if he’d grimaced. “Maybe you were hungry.”

  Priscilla threw her hands into the air—or at least tried to. One was firmly attached to the plastic chair by way of handcuffs. She could have broken through the flimsy material easily, but it would only serve to further irritate Arthur, and the Bellmare PD was a little hole in the wall that received less funding than it deserved. She didn’t feel like paying for the replacement.

  “Oh, honestly, Arthur. Are we going through this again?”

  “You’re a vampire,” he said stubbornly. “There was blood. What am I supposed to think?”

  “That I already have efficient killing weapons?” Priscilla said, deliberately flashing one delicate fang. “If blood had been my goal, why would I have let it spill on the floor? Why would I kill my client before she paid for the second cake?”

  Arthur rubbed the back of his neck with a sigh. His hair had been flattened by a hat earlier in the day. “Look, Priscilla, this isn’t personal—”

  “Oh, for the love of Pete, Arthur, don’t lie. You didn’t like it when Emily befriended me, and you don’t like that your daughter works for me. You have a problem with vampires. You always have.”

  Arthur’s normally pale complexion flushed blotchily, making his skin resemble badly mixed raspberry ice cream. “Now you see here—”

  “I’m not sitting in this cell for the next few hours while you try to pin this on me, Arthur,” Priscilla said, leaning back in the chair. “I didn’t kill Kierra Cunningham. It’s as simple as that.”

  He let out another gusty sigh and slumped in his chair, defeated. “Yeah, I know. The official cause of death was exsanguination, but she was dying anyway.”

  “What?”

  “She was on her way out anyway,” the chief repeated, drumming his fingers on the table. “The toxicology screen came back an hour ago. She was poisoned. Not sure by what yet.”

  Priscilla tried to suppress her natural curiosity at the news. It was no business of hers any longer, if she’d been cleared. “So am I free to go?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Arthur’s eyes were steely behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “It doesn’t prove you didn’t do it.”

  “Arthur—”

  “Don’t start,” Arthur said, eyes glinting dangerously. “I need to remind you that anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” Priscilla said, banging one hand on the table for emphasis. The table dented beneath her fist and her ire evaporated at once. New Year’s resolution number two broken. Don’t damage public property.

  “You’re pretty riled,” Arthur noted. “Something get under your skin, Pratt? An annoying customer, perhaps?”

  “You’re impossible,” she said, shaking her head.

  “All I know is that vampires have a total death toll that numbers in the thousands,” Arthur said, giving her steady eye contact.

  “I think the same can be said of every race and nationality. Your ancestors fought in the Civil War, did they not? How many of their countrymen did they kill in those four short years?”

  “That’s different,” he said, and the color was back in his cheeks. She was not the only one riled by the topic, it seemed.

  “How?”

  “They were in a war,” he said stubbornly. “You don’t even have a reason.”

  “We do,” Priscilla argued. “It’s called hunger. It’s the same thing that drove the Donner Party to eat their dead.”

  “You don’t need to kill.”

  “No, we don’t,” Priscilla agreed. “And I never have, in the 300-something years I’ve been undead. But what can I say? There are gluttons in just about every species.”

  She was breathing hard by the end of the tirade. Until that moment, she hadn’t really comprehended just how angry she’d been with Police Chief Sharp. Yes, there was the bigotry of low expectation that he applied to all vampires that was irksome, but it was more than that. He’d specifically asked her not to attend the graveside service after Emily’s death, the only one she could have been physically present at. She couldn’t set foot in the church. It still stung, even a year and a half later. He’d tried to stop Anna working at her bakery as well, and she suspected the health inspector who’d turned up unexpectedly a month afterward had been his doing.

  “If I’d poisoned the cakes, your daughter would be dead,” she said in a voice of feigned calm. Inside, she was rethinking her previous
stance on the destruction of private property. She could break the chair and force the door open. There would be nothing he could do about it. The bullets his deputy riddled her with wouldn’t necessarily be fatal.

  Arthur flinched. “She eats that much of your food?”

  “Every cookie, cupcake, and candy I make,” Priscilla said, a hint of smugness in her voice.

  “What if you baked something wrong?”

  “Then she’d spit it out and tell me to toss the batch. That’s her job.”

  Arthur finally slumped, defeated. “I was really hoping it was you.”

  “That eager to put me away?” Priscilla asked.

  “I was hoping it would be simple,” Arthur said, running a hand through his already mussed hair. “Open and closed. Vampire baker kills pushy client. Nothing more to see here, folks.”

  “You don’t want the Cunningham family to level a complaint at the department,” she surmised. That made more sense than the knee-jerk profiling he’d done.

  “Oh, it’s too late for that,” he said with a rueful chuckle. “They’ve been on the phone for the last few hours, screaming at my deputies to bring you in.”

  “And you acquiesced to their request,” she finished sourly.

  “If I couldn’t find solid proof it was you, I was actually going to bring you in on this one.”

  That brought Priscilla up short. “What?”

  “Don’t give me that, Pratt. You heard me the first time.”

  “I heard you. I just don’t understand. If you really thought I was capable of something like this, why would you want me anywhere near the case?”

  The look Arthur gave her was torn between amusement and exasperation, as though the answer to the question was glaringly obvious. “Because you’re the best baker in town. I know you’ve got your eye on everyone in town who’s got a smidge of talent and are looking to recruit them or put them out of business. You could at least give me an idea of who I’m working for.”