Fangs in Fondant

by Melissa Monroe

  “Bellmare is a small town,” she said, rising to her feet before she was reminded of the cuff on her wrist. The chair slid forward with her with a strident squeal against the tile floor. “I’m sure you can figure this out on your own.”

  “What do you want, Pratt? An apology? I don’t have it in me. All the cupcakes in the world don’t change the fact that you’re dangerous. I don’t like leaving my daughter alone with dangerous things.”

  Despite herself, she felt a softening toward the man. Though his mistrust was insulting and, frankly, misplaced, it wasn’t personal. He’d suffered several losses in the last year. She could allow him to be paranoid where Anna was concerned.

  “Fine,” she said, sitting back down with a sigh. “How about this, Arthur? I help you bring in the killer, and then you give me the benefit of the doubt from here on out, hmm? Sound fair?”

  Arthur looked downright sullen, but he eventually relented. “Deal. But if you ever cross the line, Pratt—”

  “You’ll arrest me,” she said dryly. “As well you should. Will you please remove these restraints? They’re cutting off my circulation.”

  “You don’t have circulation,” Arthur grumbled, but did as he was asked. He rounded the table, drawing a mass of keys from his pockets. It took him a few minutes to find the right one and slot it into the cuff attached to her wrist.

  When she was free, she rubbed her wrist. Steel didn’t burn vampires. They weren’t relatives of the fae, as some scholars suspected. But it wasn’t exactly comfortable either. Silver was the killer for vampires. It slowed healing enough for a vampire to die, just like a mortal. Thank God for modern alloys, or she’d never have been able to run a bakery. Silverware used to be made of, you know, real silver.

  “How close is it to dawn?” she asked with a yawn. She had a sense it was close. Vampires had something of an early warning system where the sun was concerned. It didn’t hurt them, but it was annoying to be caught out in it. Too much time in the sun and vampires became extremely photosensitive and irritable to boot.

  “It’s five thirty,” Arthur said, glancing at his watch. “I feel you, Pratt. It’s been a late night for all of us here at the station too.”

  “I need sleep,” Priscilla said. “I’ll give you a call after the sun goes down.”

  “We need you, Pratt.” Arthur’s tone was equal parts plea and warning. “Don’t you dare mislead us.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Chief,” she said, giving him a sleepy, unguarded smile. He eyed her fangs warily. She rounded the metal table and made a beeline for the door then turned back to find him staring at her warily.

  “Oh, and Chief? There’s one more thing.”

  “Go ahead, Pratt.”

  “If we’re going to be working together, call me Priscilla.”

  She didn’t wait to see how he’d take that request. She turned on her heel, pulled open the thick steel door with ease, and strode out of the room, waiting for his heartbeat to even out behind her.

  Chapter Four

  Priscilla hesitated, then scratched Olivia Baker’s name off the list.

  She’d been compiling a list of likely culprits for the chief since waking at five thirty. Her legal pad was covered in scratch marks and eraser shavings. She hadn’t done any of her usual prep work, and as a result the bakery looked a little bare. It didn’t matter much. Business had slowed to a crawl in the wake of Kierra Cunningham’s death and the subsequent news coverage.

  It had made for juicy storytelling. There hadn’t been any gory deaths in Bellmare for a while. Deaths, when they happened, stayed in the obituaries, where they belonged. Now, someone of relatively high social status had perished in one of Bellmare’s haunted locales, the night before her wedding. It would have been reported on even if it had been a tragic accident.

  FATALITY CAUSED BY FRIGHTFUL FANGS, OR FOUL PLAY?

  Priscilla was seized by a desire to buy every single one of the newspapers in the rack outside the courthouse and then burn them as an effigy to reactionary journalists everywhere. Sam Hodges, a news reporter whom she generally liked, had written a sensationalist article about Kierra’s death as soon as it made national news. And she wasn’t the only one. When the reporters had gotten wind that the victim had last been seen in public berating one of the handful of vampires in town, it had become a media field day.

  The victim was last seen berating a vampire in her own shop. The alleged perpetrator is a 377- year-old vampire who …

  “I’m 355,” Priscilla muttered to herself. “Seriously, did no one read Parliament’s guide on vampire society? You don’t count the human years!”

  Well, that went by preference, especially for those who were very young and liked to use their human years to boost their age. But when she’d passed the century mark, she’d begun doing it like everyone else. Namely, she counted from the time she was turned, not the total age. That was the way the government liked it on her tax returns, and it was easier than trying to do anything else.

  No one had actually said her name, but everyone knew what the reporters were implying. Which was why she’d devoted herself to aiding Arthur, even though the enmity between them hadn’t decreased one iota.

  The problem with a list like the one presently in front of Priscilla was that she knew everyone on it. Knew them well enough and for long enough that the idea of any of them committing a crime like this sounded absurd. How could she implicate anyone in the murder? Most of the people on her list had probably never seen the woman, let alone spoken to her. None of them had had a reason to poison the irritating bride-to-be, or the opportunity to do it. She still wasn’t sure what had been used to poison Kierra Cunningham, or what killing her had accomplished.

  Her list was depressingly short, and she was sure she was going to destroy any faith Arthur might have placed in her when she handed it over. So far it contained only four names. Anna Sharp, Maddison Baker, Mrs. Jameson, and Becca Peckman. With a sigh, she scrawled Olivia’s name beneath the portion she’d struck through. Five names looked better than four. She could personally vouch for the innocence of Anna and Maddison, as they’d been working in her shop when the crime supposedly took place. So that cut the list down to three.

  Mrs. Jameson was a mild-mannered woman and the wife of the pastor, so Priscilla thought it unlikely she had anything to do with the murder. The pastor’s wife would have probably baked whatever the Cunningham party needed for free, if she’d been asked. That was the sort of woman she was.

  Becca Peckman was only nineteen, and as far as Priscilla could tell, hadn’t had anything to do with Kierra before her death.

  That just left Olivia. She had the means, and Priscilla felt guilty for even thinking it to herself, but she also had a motive. Priscilla was the only real competition to Olivia’s business in the area. If she were implicated in something nasty like, say, a murder, it might make people think twice about buying from her.

  Priscilla shook her head, trying to shoo the thought like an irksome fly. Bad-tempered, Olivia might be, but she wasn’t spiteful. And if she’d had a hand in Kierra’s death, why would she have shown up to the Robshaw Inn with a spread of food she’d never serve? If she was the murderer, she could have come back during the daytime, long before Priscilla arrived, and stolen Kierra’s body. To Priscilla and everyone else in Bellmare, it would have seemed as if Miss Kierra Cunningham had simply gotten cold feet the day before her wedding—the perfect excuse.

  “Whatcha workin’ on?” Anna asked, grabbing the waiting apron as she breezed through the door. She was early. It was only six.

  “I’m compiling a list of names for your father. He wants to know who in town is a competent baker. He thinks one of the dishes was poisoned.”

  “It wasn’t one of ours,” Anna said with a frown, rounding the counter. “I told Daddy as much. If you’d poisoned Miss Priss, I’d be dead too.”

  “That only leaves three names on my list,” Priscilla groused. “He’s going to fire me. I want to solve
this, Anna. I want him to give me a chance.”

  Anna chewed her lip thoughtfully as she set out the supplies for the day. “I think you’re being too specific, Priscilla. I mean, yeah, that’s a list of the good bakers in town, but you don’t have to be especially talented to make mints.”

  “Huh?” Priscilla paused, pencil hovering over Olivia’s name once more. Her former friend would probably have a fit if she knew she’d made it onto a list of murder suspects.

  “Oh, come on, Priscilla,” Anna said, hand flying to her hip. She looked slightly put out. “You have to have figured it out. Those flower mints that Miss Priss wanted? They’re the only thing you didn’t make that was eaten by the wedding party.”

  “Except for Olivia’s food.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Anna said, wagging a finger at her. “Kierra was already dead by the time you and Olivia got there, so it couldn’t have been her food either. It had to be something she ingested that day.”

  Priscilla felt a little slow. When Anna laid the facts out like that, it seemed blatantly obvious. “I was tired,” she said defensively. “I hate working mornings.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Anna said, smirking a little. “Don’t worry about calling Daddy. When they found out that the bride had been poisoned, they rounded up the rest of the bridal party. Everyone else came out clean.” She shrugged. “I guess somebody had it out for the bride.”

  “But who?”

  “Every retailer from here to New York, I’d bet,” Anna said, tying her hair up. The hairnet went on over it and she began to mix the batter for the Saturday night special, double chocolate chip cookies.

  “Probably,” Priscilla agreed, moving into the kitchen to help Anna. The task was as simple and repetitive as breathing, so it didn’t take long for her mind to wander.

  Anna was right. Maddison, Priscilla now remembered, had given Kierra a list of names days before she’d died. She needed to know who was on that list, so Priscilla only saw two options moving forward. Either she had to make contact with Maddison, against her mother’s wishes, or invite her erstwhile friend out for drinks and try to wheedle the truth out of her.

  At the moment, the latter seemed the scarier of the two.

  Priscilla swathed herself in scarves. Sometime during the day, while she’d slumbered unawares, the wind had begun to howl and spray snow over the streets. Some enterprising young person had shoveled the snow off the sidewalks in front of the door of her shop. When she stepped out into the night, the only traces of snow were those the wind had blown back onto the concrete. She bowed her head against the wind and began the journey to the Baker residence.

  It would have been faster to use the company van, and she knew it. However, she was sure the sight of it anywhere near Olivia’s house would serve only to antagonize the woman. Besides, walking was an underrated pastime in Priscilla’s opinion. In a world that valued instant gratification, people so rarely went anywhere slowly. It was why they tended to miss things.

  Then again, most people never walked at night, even in a town such as this. There was an instinctive terror of the dark hardwired into all humans. Some overcame it with time and discipline, but it was still there, lurking in the back of their head when the nights were long and the wind howled outside their bedroom windows. Darkness made humans acutely aware of their limitations and how helpless they were against the creatures that lived within it.

  Priscilla trailed her fingers along Landry’s frost-covered windows as she passed. The frost didn’t melt like it might have under a human hand since her body didn’t circulate blood or keep a constant heat. By the time she reached the Baker’s house, she’d be as cold as the air outside. Which, according to the digital sign that flashed in front of the court house, was 29 degrees Fahrenheit.

  She stopped briefly at the four-way to let a Chevy pass, then crossed the street. The suburbs of Bellmare weren’t the sort of cookie-cutter housing that could be found in larger cities. They were a series of new homes built in 1901 by Frederick Larson, rented out to recent immigrants to the United States, after European immigration to the United States had become popularized in the twentieth century. Now they were rented, or bought, by anyone who could afford them. The property value was lower than anywhere else in Bellmare, and most people who moved into town ended up in what was jokingly referred to as Larsonburg.

  Priscilla’s boots tapped rhythmically against the pavement as she made her way down the street, humming tunelessly. In the church recording she’d received, Pastor Jameson had led the congregation in a rousing chorus of “Victory in Jesus.” She’d had the melody stuck in her head all week. She kept the volume low, though. She’d always been a notoriously poor singer, even as a human, so much so that she’d been banished to the back pews during services until she’d stopped going at age twenty. Her voice had not improved with her looks, much to her sire’s annoyance. It wasn’t the reason he’d eventually left, but Priscilla still jokingly claimed that her voice could drive a man away at thirty paces.

  She took another right in fifty feet and smacked right into someone. She backpedaled for a few steps, a little stunned. She’d been focused on her feet— vampire speed or not, she was still subject to the laws of physics and could go down on the less well-cleared streets she now walked—and hadn’t extended her other senses at all to sense obstacles. Was she really so accustomed to acting human that she’d started to slip?

  The smell was her first clue to the man’s identity, though the sight of a used duster was as much a giveaway as the tobacco stink.

  “Sorry about that, Tobias,” Priscilla said, taking an awkward step closer so he could see her in the gloom.

  “It’s fine,” Tobias muttered, turning away from her without so much as a smile. She stared at the back of his duster for a moment, dumbstruck. Tobias was almost always brusque and didn’t speak to many people that he didn’t have to, but she’d never heard him be outright rude to anyone. Not since the incident three years ago.

  After a moment or so she gathered herself, shut her mouth, and started walking again. She only got a vague impression of Tobias’ companion, lurking in deep shadow, out of the range of the lamplight. He had black hair, slicked back with copious amounts of styling gel that reflected the light. His chin was pointed and his beard curled like a villain in a bad movie.

  “Have a nice evening,” she tossed over her shoulder as she passed. Tobias didn’t even grunt in acknowledgement. Stung slightly by the brush-off, Priscilla trudged on.

  Priscilla could tell exactly when the shoveler had given up and gone home. A few blocks away from Larsonburg, the drifts got worse, and the snow began to envelop her feet. She was grateful that she’d chosen boots before going out, because if Priscilla had been wearing the pair of sneakers that Anna had given her on her 353rd birthday, her socks would have been swimming in powdery, half-melted snow.

  She lengthened her stride, using the height that had always been the bane of her existence to her advantage. In warmer weather she might have applied vampire speed as well, but she was afraid hitting a patch of ice at above-human speed would result in an unfortunate incident involving a wildly out-of-control vampire and an unlucky van on a collision course for one another. The van would win, but it would not come away unscathed.

  Her feet felt like blocks of ice strapped to her ankles by the time she reached the Baker’s front door. She took a deep breath to steel herself and then knocked on the plain white front door. If she strained her ears, she could hear the sound of activity inside. The television set was either muted or turned off and then heavy footfalls came toward her.

  Timothy Baker answered the door a few moments later, still in the dress shirt he’d worn to work. A few buttons had been undone at the throat, and he’d lost his tie somewhere in the innards of the house. His spectacles had been pushed into his hairline, and he seemed to have forgotten they were there. His hazel eyes narrowed to slits as he tried to make out her identity without them.

  She could have walked away with
out him being the wiser. If she were less of an idiot, she might have. Instead, she decided to take pity on the poor man and spoke up before he could ask who’d knocked on his door at the late hour.

  “Hello, Mr. Baker,” Priscilla began. “I was wondering if your wife was home? I need to speak to her.”

  “Ah, Priscilla,” Timothy said, his broad face breaking into a smile that shaved years off his appearance so she could almost ignore the gray threading through his brown hair. “I’m afraid my wife isn’t in right now. You’re welcome to come in, if you want to wait up for her.”

  Priscilla had gotten the impression that the whole Baker family had come to despise her since Olivia’s catering business had failed to become an overwhelming success. Apparently, though, someone had kept Timothy out of the loop, because he seemed as happy to see her now as he had years ago.

  “I appreciate the invitation. I really do, but right now I need to talk to your wife. Do you have any idea where she might be?”

  Frown lines creased Timothy’s forehead, and the motion was enough to send his glasses sliding forward through the thick locks of hair. He caught the movement and seized them, ramming the thick-rimmed spectacles back onto his face. “I know she’s teaching a night class, but I’ll be darned if I know where. The location changes every time she does it. Maddison might know.”

  Timothy craned his neck and shouted back into the house, “Maddison!”

  Priscilla jumped a little. The volume wasn’t really necessary, unless Maddison was doing something that required all her concentration. If she was in the other room watching the television with the volume down—Priscilla could make out the hushed voices on the set now that the door was open—she’d hear just fine.

  Sure enough, Maddison came padding into the hall a few minutes later. She blanched when she caught sight of Priscilla standing in the door. It was an impressive feat for a vampire already paler than most. Timothy turned to regard his daughter with a fond smile.