Read Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel for Free Online Page B

subway?”
    I swallowed, hard, and with an effort set aside the argument. There was absolutely no winning it. “Um…it depends.”
    “On what?”
    I don’t want to say this. Don’t make me say this.
    “On what?” asked Chet again, slowly, in case I’d missed something the first time.
    “On whether Anatole’s out there tonight.” Anatole Sevarin was another vampire, one whom I’d met at pretty much the exact same time I’d met Brendan Maddox, and like Brendan, he’d kind of not gone away.
    “Sevarin?” As Chet said the name, he proved he had a frowny face of his very own. “I thought you were dating Brendan.”
    “I am. Mostly. But Anatole stops by some nights.”
    Chet looked down his nose at me, and I felt the beginnings of a long, slow blush. “I don’t ask him to,” I said, even though part of my brain was yelling at me,
Just
keep quiet!
“He just stops by.”
    “Anatole Sevarin does not ‘just’”—Chet paused to make the air quotes—“do anything.”
    “You barely know the man.”
    “I’ve been asking around.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he wants to date my sister!”
    A shiny new penny dropped, and I glowered at my brother. “So, what? You think I need a chaperone now?”
    “Between Sevarin and the Maddoxes, I’m starting to think you need a keeper!” I watched while those words replayed themselves inside Chet’s head. It must have sounded just as good the second time around, because he backed away one step. “I didn’t mean that.”
    “Yes, you did.” Anger has always brought out the honesty in our family. “And you can go now.”
    Chet closed his mouth and turned around, heading out the way he’d come in. I tried not to wince as the door thumped shut, and I failed at that too.
    I turned away and headed for the lockers. Now I really needed that beer.

5

    It takes a special kind of place to become a hangout for professional chefs. First, it’s got to be open between three and six a.m., which is when most of us are out on the town, if we’re out at all. Second, it’s got to look so scary that tourists and reviewers will give it a wide berth. We don’t want their kind hanging around when we’re off shift. Finally, it’s got to serve food so scary nobody in their right minds would eat it.
    Charlie’s Blue Plate meets or exceeds all the above criteria. Stuffed with scarred wooden tables and creaky bent-back chairs, it’s a pocket-sized bar that reeks of old beer and hot grease. Once upon a time it would have been filled with smoke. The streaks of ash and soot are still visible on the ceiling. In summer, the patrons take their plates outside and stand around on the sidewalk, in violation of a whole bunch of municipal codes we could recite in four-part harmony, and probably would after enough beer.
    When I walked in, Charlie’s brimmed with off-duty chefs and cooks, crammed knee to knee around those little tables. They were drinking hard and chowing down on plates of the house specialty: deviled kidneys with a blow-the-top-of-your-head-off dipping mustard. Mama Charliepresided over the front of the house, wedged behind the tiny bar in the corner. She was a big, gray, placid woman with a nose so crooked it must have been broken at least once. Charlie himself was a fireplug of a man with a bald head and hairy arms; he never wore anything but a white undershirt and jeans. Not that we usually saw any more of him than his beefy hands as he shoved fresh plates of kidneys or similar delicacies through the pass and bellowed, “Order up!”
    It was not the kind of place an outsider would have expected to find the latest darling of the celebrity chef circuit, but there he was. Oscar Simmons sat as far in the back as the pint-sized dining room would allow, surrounded by a gaggle of would-bes and wannabes. The all-male crowd laughed at something I didn’t hear and picked up hot kidneys in their fingers to dunk in the mustard before tossing them in their mouths like popcorn. This is