Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel (30 page)

Reese folded his arms and looked to Zoe. Zoe responded by rolling her eyes. “Told you, didn’t I? Control-freak meltdown.”

“This is not a meltdown.” Zoe had seen me melt down, and I would have expected her to be able to tell the difference.

“Of course it is not,” said Marie. “You only melt down when you cannot be the martyr.”

I stared. I couldn’t help it. Marie waved my stare away. “
Madre de Dios.
You think none of us know you by now? You believe you have an answer you do not in fact have,
and you are answering to nothing but your imagination. Again.” She added that last word, looking at me over the rims of her glasses. “No one is leaving. Nightlife is going to be reviewed by the
New York Times
.”

Those words sank in and set off a very strange reaction in my brain. A sort of
whump
sound, like when you turn a gas burner on high.

“The
New York Times
?” I said, just to make sure I’d heard properly. Because there now seemed to be a ringing in my ears. Zoe was trying to stare daggers at Marie, but she was hopelessly outclassed. No one was answering me. “Nightlife is going to be reviewed by the
New York Times
?” I said, louder this time.

“Probably not for a month or so,” said Reese. “Zoe’s contact’s not completely sure…but we’re on the critic’s target list.”

Zoe sighed and shrugged in surrender. “That’s what we haven’t been telling you. I got a call from a friend after you took the wedding on. I didn’t want to tell you because you would have…”

“Had a total control-freak blowout?”

“She said meltdown,” Reese jerked his thumb at Zoe. “Now, I personally, think a blowout is much more your style.”

They were all looking at me, waiting to find out which noun was going to show up. Pride elbowed anger, and both turned around to face my staff. I could let them have it. I should let them have it. This was not a small secret, or the discovery somebody had described me as having a frowny face. This was massive. The
Times
was the gold standard. There were thousands of restaurants in New York, and the
Times
chose only a handful each year to visit. Even with the proliferation of online review sites, the opinion of their dining critic could still completely make a restaurant. Or completely break it. This could be the most important thing to happen to Nightlife to date, and my staff had kept it from me,
because they thought I couldn’t handle myself. They thought I was as bad as Oscar and had to be
managed
…

But Marie’s words loomed up in my brain.
You are answering to nothing but your imagination
.

I stomped hard on the brakes of my runaway thoughts, because if I didn’t, I was just proving all three of them right, and not in a good way.

“Okay.” I made my shoulders square themselves. These were my people. I owed them my best. What was happening with the Aldens was not their fault. “I was serious about the wedding being off. Before the end of the week, our bacon will officially need saving, and a good
NYT
review could at least help. Is there a current picture of the critic up in the kitchen?” The
Times
critic was supposed to visit restaurants anonymously. Maybe that happened the first time or two. After that, everybody had the picture posted.

Zoe nodded. “And Robert and Suchai are on red alert.”

“They’ll spot him. Thanks for handling this, Zoe.”

She blinked. “You’re welcome, Chef.”

Reese was controlling himself, manfully, but it wasn’t going to last much longer. I clenched my jaw and crossed my arms to conceal that I was also clenching my fists. There was something else that needed to be taken care of right now.

“Zoe? Marie?” I said.

“Yes, Chef?” replied Zoe. Marie just waited with exaggerated patience to hear what I had to say, but she clearly did not hold out great hopes for it.

“As you may know, Reese has been thinking we should consider a food truck…”

Zoe didn’t let me get any further. “Now’s a bad time to launch a truck. The trend’s already peaking.” She said this directly to Reese. Clearly, there’d been more than one conversation going on behind my back. “But if we were going to think about expanding, we should consider a café.”

“Café?”

“Quick
and casual after-sunset dining,” said Zoe. “No one’s really going after the nighttime equivalent of the lunch crowd. We could have a take-out counter with Marie’s milkshakes leading the list. It’ll have to be fast, smooth service, very tight logistics. Reese would be just the one to run it.”

I felt my eyebrows rise. “You don’t want the job?”

Zoe shook her head and said matter-of-factly, “I want your job.”

“It’s a nice idea,” cut in Reese. “And I do like being Just the One. But start-up costs would be a mint and a half. That’s the whole point of getting a truck. Start-up’s nothing, even with the permits. We’ll be turning a profit at the end of the first month. And,” he added as Zoe drew a deep breath, “it won’t matter if the ‘trend’s already peaking.’” I never met anybody who could pack more attitude into a pair of air quotes than Reese. “It’s not peaking for haute noir food. That trend’s barely even started.”

Marie threw up her hands. “Children. I am surrounded by children. I am going back to my cakes.”

“Um, about the cake, Marie…”

She waved me off without even bothering to turn back around. “I already knew this was not happening. Those cakes are for my niece’s
quinciñera
.”

I was surprised, and aware I should not have been. This was Marie. She was different from the rest of us. Witness how I wasn’t chewing her out for using the restaurant kitchen for personal business. “How’d you know?”

“No one who would choose raspberry and vanilla over my apricot walnut is in her right mind.”

Marie vanished into the kitchen, leaving me with Zoe and Reese and the grand schemes they still hoped could rise from the ashes of this latest disaster. They were talented, and impatient, and, whether I wanted them to be or not, they were right. Yes, money was an issue—a hulking
eight-hundred-pound gorilla of an issue. But I knew this much—if Nightlife stood still, it would die. We had to grow. The only question was how.

Now was a chance to show what I was really made of. I needed to make a decision, and for a change, I knew just what it should be.

“I want business plans on my desk,” I said. “For the café and the truck. Cost projections, revenue projections, menu outlines—the works. We get a good review from the
Times
, and we’ll implement the best proposal.”

At this, my sous didn’t just look at each other; they sized each other up, gleefully.

“So, get on it,” I told them both. “We’re on the clock.”

“Yes, Chef,” said Zoe calmly.

Reese’s eyes gleamed. “Oh yeah. I can work with this.”

I watched them as they headed for the kitchen, ornery pride and ornery affection jockeying for position inside me. Then, a thought smacked me in the back of my head, reminding me what was going on outside, and that I’d better fight my way out of the current mess before diving headfirst into the next one.

“Reese? One sec.”

“Yes, Chef?” Reese tried to turn toward me while still keeping a wary eye on Zoe as she vanished into the kitchen.

“You said there’re only a couple trucks out there doing haute noir? Are any of them actually operated by vampires?”

“Don’t know offhand, but I can find out.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

He paused. “Why am I finding this out?”

“Because I think one of those vampires might be Jacques Renault, and I want a little word with him about the behavior of his relatives.”

“Just you, or you and Chet?” Reese slowly rubbed his hands together. Translation: You’d better have backup on this or I’m not moving off this spot.

But
for once, having it hinted that I might possibly need help for any given enterprise failed to raise my hackles. “Chet, and a certain vampire journalist who both just happen to be due to come around here tonight.” Or they would be as soon as I made a couple of phone calls.

Reese thoughtfully cracked the knuckles of his tattooed hands. “I’ll see what I can find out, Chef.”

He also headed into the dining room. I slumped onto one of the bar stools and tried to suppress the urge to pour myself a scotch. Alcohol was not the answer. It was never going to be. I hopped off the stool and circled round the bar. The fridge back there held bottled water, like just about every fridge in the place did. I cracked one open and chugged down a healthy portion.

Slowly, I set the bottle down on the bar. Alcohol was not the answer. You could overdo it on alcohol. It could even kill you.

It was also, in its pure form, a colorless liquid. I looked at the water bottle; I looked at the rows of liquor bottles on the shelf behind the bar. I thought about that scrap of a clue from Oscar’s office, and the second line, the one that looked like “CH” and a squiggle that I’d thought looked like a numeral three. CH3 couldn’t be a word, but it could be a chemical.

I yanked my smartphone out of my pocket and fired up Google. I entered CH3 into the little white oval, and hit Search. I waited. I drank more water. I listened to the voices drifting from the kitchen. I didn’t want to be right. I didn’t want to be right.

The little Search window cleared, and I got my list of answers. The first was an online encyclopedia article about methane. The second was a Web page for Channel 3. But the third was an entry for methyl alcohol.

Methyl alcohol, also called methanol, or wood alcohol, was colorless and when ingested, could produce dizziness,
blindness, and death. These sounded a lot like the symptoms of a stroke.

It was easy to get, and widely traded. You could dissolve all kinds of things in it, I read, which was why it was used as a base for everything, such as paint thinner, and even perfume—or maybe even antivampire potions.

I closed the Search window, and hit
REDIAL
on O’Grady’s number.

“Chef Caine,” he answered immediately. “What is it this time?”

“Oscar was poisoned,” I said, looking at my water bottle, which was just like the one I had at my station, and just like the one I left open on my desk almost every night. I thought about how I could easily knock back half a bottle before I noticed something smelled funny, because at this point I was never paying attention. I pictured Oscar realizing he’d stepped over the line in his dealings with the Aldens and staggering around his office as he tried to stuff incriminating evidence into the shredder before calling 911, and not quite making it. “And I know how they did it.”

Of course, O’Grady did not rush off with the crime scene tape. He made me repeat everything I suspected, and I knew he was writing it all down. He thanked me and hung up. Now, it was a waiting game, yet again.

Fortunately, the sun was setting and Nightlife was gearing up, so I had plenty to keep me busy. I also had one or two little agenda items of my own I fully intended to complete before the night was over.

I left messages for Anatole and for Chet to meet me at the restaurant at closing time. Neither one would be thrilled to see the other, but I’d deal with that later. I also geared up my most carefully neutral voice and called the Aldens, saying that I was needed in Manhattan to continue to work on event coordination and that I would be calling them with updates in the morning.

The real problem was Brendan still wasn’t answering his phone, and for the first time in my adult life, I felt almost too keyed up to cook. Fortunately, word had spread among my staff that I was in on the news about the
Times
. So, instead of a jumpy, worried line crew looking over their shoulders at me, I had a bunch of pros intent on testing themselves. Zoe and Reese cracked the whip for me in the kitchen. Suchai
was on the case in the front of the house, and the dining room was full to the brim. No matter what happened tomorrow, today we were doing great.

Despite all this, I couldn’t relax into my work. I’d slipped my phone in my pocket next to my spray bottle, and I couldn’t ignore its weight jiggling around in there as I moved from the pass to the hot line and back again. I also couldn’t ignore the way it wasn’t ringing, and wasn’t ringing. For the first nonringing hour, I silently cursed warlocks and not-quite-boyfriends in my head. Then, I started praying to whoever looked after warlocks and chefs that Brendan was okay wherever he’d gotten to. Then I swore I was going to kick his ass up and down Tenth Avenue, and then break up with him. Oscar was dead, and Adrienne Alden was maybe a poisoner who was framing her daughter, or maybe Scott Alden was doing the framing, or maybe Karina was the poisoner and was getting help covering up from her father. Gabriel had maybe murdered his sire, and how
dare
Brendan not call me with all these maybe’s going on?

Then I started promising that I’d never, ever, forget to call him again, if he’d just call me now. Just one little call.

But that wasn’t the real agony. The real agony came at ten twenty when I felt my phone buzz against my hip, and I didn’t have hands free to answer it. It was a full ten minutes before I could snatch it out of my pocket and read the text message.