30

30
ALEXANDER'S POV

Darius looked at me as if I’d suggested we resolve our dispute with interpretive dance, and Kayla let out a noise that was half-laugh, half-snort.

“I’m sorry,” Darius said, “baking?”

"Competitive baking," I corrected. “It’s an old vampire custom, harkening back to the grand kitchen wars of the fourteenth century.”

This was, of course, total bullshit, but I roared it back with the same kind of bald conviction that got me out of trouble for most my life. That was the secret to a good bluff: never, ever doubting yourself — even when you were inventing vampire history on the fly.

“I don’t know anything about such a custom,” Darius said suspiciously.

“It’s because it was lost during the great recipe purge of 1847,” I replied, effortlessly. “Your average vampire of your generation wouldn’t know about it.”

There was the wounded pride I’d been waiting for, burning in Darius’s eyes. Vampire aristocrats loathed it, being told there was some aspect of their own culture they didn’t know about and by a half-breed like me.

"Very well," he said stiffly. "If you want to make a fool of yourself by fighting with food, I will indulge your ridiculous choice of armaments."

Kayla, still woozily wobbly from her wine-tasting excursion, put up her hand as if she were a pupil. "Can I be the judge?"

“No way in hell,” Darius and I chuckled together.

"Why not? I have a refined taste. I know good chocolate vs. great chocolate.”

"You're intoxicated," I pointed out.

"Only slightly. And anyway, who’s going to tell? Tessa?"

Tessa, who’d been silently wiping wine off her hair, seemed startled. “I’m not a baker, of anything. I was a pre-med before I got turned.”

"See? I’m the best thing going,” Kayla pronounced, with all the unassailable logic of someone who’d drunk too much ancient wine. "Plus, I'm impartial. I think you're both ridiculous."
And now here I was in the massive kitchen of a vampire palace—because, sure, there's a huge kitchen in a vampire palace even though they didn't really eat all that much regular food—about to bake-off against my half-brother in order to save my friend.

The kitchen was a triumph of Gothic architecture meets modern convenience, with stone arches and copper pots that likely had hung there since the Renaissance. Darius was wearing yet another ridiculous outfit, this one looking like what someone would wear if they were about to hit the town in the clutches of a sudden baking obsession—a black apron with silver embroidery so fancy I was pretty sure it cost more than most people’s cars.

"What are you making?" Kayla asked, sitting perched on a stool to watch the action.

“Chocolate soufflé,” I said, plucking ingredients with more surety than I possessed. “Classic French technique, but with a little twist.”

"And you, Prince Drama?" Kayla turned to Darius.

"Blood pudding," he announced solemnly. “An old family recipe, handed down for seventeen generations."

“That sounds very vampire-y and like a little horrifying,” Kayla said. “I do like the theme running through them all.”

As we cooked I realized how much I loved just how ridiculous it all was. After weeks of political drama and supernatural threats, there was something refreshingly normal about measuring flour and whipping egg whites, even if I was doing so in a vampire palace while my half-brother mumbled incantations over what looked like real blood sausage.

“So,” Kayla said, kicking her legs hanging from her stool, “it’s really happening. Vampire princes competing in a bake-off to win my theoretical hand in marriage.”

“I’m not about to marry you,” I corrected while gently folding chocolate in the base of my soufflé. “I’m attempting to save you from being wed against your will to my melodramatically inclined cousin!”

“Yeah, because that’s so much less weird.”

She had a point. “When you put it that way, yes, this is surreal in a deep sense. But my speciality lately is strange.”

"What about Laura?" It was a casual question, but I picked up on the undercurrent of real curiosity.

I stopped stirring, considering my response. "What about her?"
“Are you still mooning over the Alpha King while baking vampires through politics?”

Her bluntness shocked me, but by now the wine must have made her unusually honest. "It's complicated."

"It's always complicated with you. That's kind of your thing."

"Laura is...” I fumbled for the right words. "Laura is extraordinary. Strong, smart, tough enough to earn loyalty from individuals who ought to know better. But she is also totally unavailable, emotionally and practically.”

"And I'm your consolation prize?"

The pain in her voice had me ditching the cooking altogether. "No. God, no, Kayla. You are not someone’s consolation prize.”

"Then what am I?"

I studied her, sitting there in the stained designer dress she was wearing, her auburn hair falling from whichever complicated style the vampires had put it into, her hazel eyes serious through the booze. Absolutely she was beautiful, but that's not why I'd liked her. It was her cheek, and the way she wouldn’t be overawed by paradigm supernaturals or millennia of blood. Her capacity to laugh in the face of things that should be terrifying.

“You’re the one who makes me laugh when the rest of it is crumbling down,” I murmured. “You’ve the courage to review vampire manners in a hostage situation. You’re actual in a way that most people in our world aren’t.”

“That’s a good answer,” she said, but her voice still betrayed some doubt.

"It's the true answer."

Before she could answer, there was a loud explosion from Darius’s station. He was hovering over what looked like a cryptically exploded pudding, his baking whites spattered with substances I didn’t want to know about.

"The ancient spirits find my offering unworthy," he declared with exaggerated despair only truly available to vampire nobility.

“Or you simply blanked that blood congeals if you heat them up too fast,” I added helpfully.

"Silence! I don't need cooking advice from a mutt.”

“You might want to reconsider,” said Kayla, pointing towards the soufflé in the oven that was rising nicely. “Alexander’s actually looks like he knows what he’s doing.”

"Impossible. Artistic endeavors come naturally to vampires; they’re good at everything."

“Baking is science, not art,” I reminded you. "Chemistry, temperature control, precise timing. Those are kind of things that require flexibility and not an adamant commitment to tools and traditions barely older than the steam engine.”

Which was exactly the wrong thing to tell a vampire prince who had been having a really bad day. Darius restored himself to his magnificent height and commenced what sounded like a speech about had spoke bad of her honor.

"So you dare to imply that the ways of our people are now inferior to your mongrel adaptations?”

“I’m going to float the idea perhaps that insisting on doing everything precisely how your great-great-grandfather did it isn’t always going to get you the best result.”

While we’d been fighting, my soufflé had come out of the ovens and Darius’s pudding had further established itself as something akin to a crime scene. The kitchen was a Gothic cookbook explosion, and Kayla was barely suppressing her laughter at what the vampire had done there.

”I think we have a winner,” she said looking at the two final results. “Alexander’s chocolate soufflé is stunning, perfectly risen and smells like heaven. It's like Darius's blood pudding has come alive and is attempting to flee its plate."

"The contest is rigged!" Darius protested. "She obviously favours the half-breed!"

“I play favorites when it comes to desserts that aren’t sufficiently nightmarish,” Kayla corrected. "Alexander wins."

\\par I experienced a small victory and also for the first time truly realize that there was so much more winning entailed with vampire politics and palace protocol. It turned out that worry had been justified when Queen Morvana stormed into the kitchen, her expression informing me she’d heard all about our ludicrous competition and was none too pleased.

“What,” she said icily, “is the purpose of this ridiculous charade?”

The kitchen grew quiet but for Darius's defeated pudding which continued to ominously bubble away in its bowl.

“Your Majesty,” I was now the one to start but it was Kayla who stopped me.

“I feel like it was a really big test of creativity and adaptation,” she declared, with one of those pronouncements that suggest the wine has provided her with diplomatic immunity. ''Alexander proved how to think on the fly and come up with new ideas at crunch time.”

I studied her face, deciding whether she was drunk enough to believe this explanation or crafty enough to know that the explanation was exactly what the queen wanted to hear.

“Made formal combat to be a cooking lesson,” Morvana echoed, pensively.

"I made formal battle a demonstration of practical wits," I corrected after Kayla's example. “You would want that kind of strategic thinking to work with, not against.”

For a long moment the queen scrutinized me with her unreadable ancient eyes. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled.

"Clever. Unorthodox, but clever." She leaned in a little closer and eyed my soufflé with curiosity. "You may go, both of you. But I have a condition."

And there it was—the hitch that would seal our fate.

"You will tell me about Laura's weaknesses, her strategies, her emotional prey. Take it as payment for my magnanimity in permitting this joke to suffice in place of a true battle."

I felt Kayla stiffen beside me but before I could find an answer that wasn’t going to end up getting us both killed, she beat me to it.

"He accepts," she said firmly. “But I’m sitting here as security for his cooperation.

“Kayla, don’t,” I began to say, but she interrupted me.

"It's the smart play, Alexander. You return, assist with the rescue effort and submit whatever you decide will not actually cause any harm. I’ll be okay here—I’ve got Tessa to entertain me, and what with Prince Darius adding me to his personal poetry collection of dumb things I have for eyelashes."

The queen nodded approvingly. "Acceptable. You have forty-eight hours to cough up your initial intelligence report. Do not disappoint me."

I was going to go never to return, and yet I had to leave Kayla in the middle of this nest of vampires but she grabbed hold of my arm.

“Alexander,” she murmured softly, “for the record — I really don’t think you’re anyone’s consolation prize either.”

The warmth in her words caused something in my chest to constrict, and I wasn’t sure when the hell that had happened, but somewhere between vampire wine tastings and competitive baking I’d crossed a line with Kayla without even being aware of it.