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  Fangs in Fondant

  Priscilla Pratt Mystery #1

  Melissa Monroe

  Copyright © 2018 by Cinnamon Cozies

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Stunning Book Covers

  Recipes by Jennifer Weiss

  For information and rights inquiries contact:

  www.cinnamoncozies.com

  [email protected]

  About the Author

  Melissa Monroe grew up in a small Missouri town where dogs outnumbered people, and the biggest monument it had to boast was a four-way stop. Melissa’s highest aspiration as a child was to become a vampire. Despite the fact she crisps in the sun, it wasn’t to be. In college she came to be something close, staying up all hours and consuming an unholy amount of warm caffeinated beverages to attain a journalism degree at Missouri Western.

  A habitual insomniac and coffee addict, Melissa spends her days penning works of fantasy, romance and mystery, occasionally emerging from her office to feast on the snacks of the living. She currently lives in Saint Joseph, Missouri, with her husband Matthew.

  Contents

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  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Red Velvet Cake

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Easy Homemade Fondant

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Tobias Kennedy’s Pumpkin Cider

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

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  1. Catnip & Culprits: A Pets Reporter Mystery

  A small-town pets journalist gets her first taste of amateur sleuthing — and a taste of just how pets-crazed her hometown has become.

  2. Fangs & Fairy Dust: Priscilla Pratt Mystery #0

  A vampire baker —before she opened shop — sinks her teeth into a local mystery.

  3. The Case of the Disappearing Dame: A Ruby Martin Mystery

  A 1920s historical cozy in which the heroine must prove her mystery-solving skills when a young girl disappears at the fair.

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  Prologue

  Another day, another order. That was the way that Priscilla Pratt’s life worked.

  Really, it was the life of any thriving business owner. She’d been able to count herself among the ranks of such for a few years, after her bakery had taken off. The first order of business after waking at five thirty was always to retrieve the cupcake batter out of her industrial-sized fridge. So, still-pajama clad and barefoot, she proceeded downstairs to do just that.

  The stairs deposited her by the emergency exit at the back of her shop. She tied her long black hair up one-handed and snatched a hairnet from the counter, capturing the snarled ponytail at the base of her neck. She was sure she’d be quite a sight in her red and green flannel pajamas. Silk would undoubtedly be better for business, if anyone was peeping in, but it was just too cold these days.

  The light outside of her wide shop window cast shadows over the buildings, making her hometown, Bellmare, Massachusetts, look more sinister than it really was. It didn’t need the help, in her opinion.

  Strange and sinister things had always happened in Bellmare as far back as its founding. Ritual murders took place in the Findlay house every century or so. Branigan’s Tavern was the site of a massacre during the Revolutionary War. The less said about the Riverty Sanitarium, the better. No, Bellmare was no stranger to murder and mayhem, but in the last few decades, things had finally seemed to settle. No one had gotten mysteriously ill, gone missing, or been horribly murdered in Bellmare since 1989.

  Priscilla shuffled over to her fridge, retrieving the large metal mixing bowl she’d stuffed in between the cartons of milk, whipping cream, cream cheese, and tubs of butter. The vanilla cupcakes with pink buttercream frosting were a standard every October, when breast cancer awareness month rolled around.

  She set the oven to preheat, retrieved four muffin trays from one of the cabinets, then lined each muffin tray with foil wrappers before doling out the batter. She filled each about three-fourths of the way full, and then set each tray aside as the task was completed. In the end, she had 37 cupcakes—three dozen for Mrs. Camden, and one for Anna, Priscilla’s assistant, when she finally arrived.

  When the timer beeped, she transferred the trays into the waiting oven, set the egg timer once more, this time for twenty minutes, and stepped away, satisfied. Next on the agenda, set up for the meeting with Miss Cunningham at eight.

  Priscilla had kept Anna late the night before, preparing a range of cakes for the bride and groom-to-be to choose from. At the moment there were eight four-inch personal cakes for the couple to try, two to a cake stand. She lifted the first from the counter and made her way slowly toward the front.

  Bumping the divider with her hip when she reached it, she wound her way through the maze of tables that made up her lobby. The corner table was her largest and most secluded, boxed in as it was by the shop window and the display refrigerators. She set the cake stand down and pulled the top away to reveal pink champagne cake, layered with raspberry mousse, frosted with vanilla icing. Beside it was a simpler lemon cake, with an equally tangy frosting—or so she’d been told. She couldn’t actually tell anymore. She’d take everyone’s word for it.

  She went back to retrieve the devil’s food and red velvet cakes, and finally rounded out the batch by retrieving ginger spice and Peanut Butter Explosion. The latter was a plain chocolate cake topped with chocolate and peanut butter ganache, liberally sprinkled with chunks of chocolate candy. It was a personal favorite of Tobias Kennedy’s, the apothecary owner.

  Satisfied with the progress, and with ten minutes left to spare on her timer, Priscilla trooped back upstairs to change and arrange her hair into some kind of order. The small attic apartment that came with the building wasn’t much, but it was home. Priscilla’s mind was still miles away as she changed into a pair of denim jeans and a blue blouse. She removed the hairnet and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans as she made her way sluggishly to the bathroom. She didn’t need the full works as far as indoor plumbing, but kept it around for her assistant’s sake.

  It had been hard to find a mirror to suit her needs. Most of the inexpensive ones still were manufactured with silver in the glass to make it reflective. This one had been done with aluminum, which would corrode more quickly, but at least suited her needs. She ran a brush through her hair, examining her reflection critically. She wasn’t sure what she expected. Her appearance hadn’t changed in a long time.

  A pale, sober young woman stared back at her. She loo
ked a little tired, she supposed. A bit peaky. She’d need to eat soon, lest the neighbors get nervous. She pinched her cheeks and sighed when it was no use. There was really only one way to get color back into the waxy skin, wasn’t there?

  The mini-fridge she kept by her bed had been a gift from a friend. Priscilla pulled a bag out and sank her fangs into it without prelude. The plastic put up pitiful resistance. It felt wrong every time. Where was the feel of muscle? The thick sheath of a vein? The gush of blood was also wrong, cold, and laced with chemicals to keep it from clotting. She’d tried warming it in the past, but it just made the chemical taste linger in her mouth. She sealed her mouth over the punctures and drank.

  It didn’t take long for the bag to run dry. It was always finished before she was, and her mouth worked uselessly for a few minutes, trying to siphon off anything that was left. After a moment, she drew back, wiping her mouth with the heel of her hand. Her expression in the mirror looked vaguely disgusted as she washed her hands, face, and the bag of any traces of blood. She tossed the bag into the trash, along with an empty bottle of perfume and a shattered lightbulb.

  There. The Landrys and the Rhodes could now rest easy that their undead neighbor wouldn’t come over for a snack.

  Carpe Noctem.

  Time to get down to business.

  “Are you really a vampire?”

  Priscilla applied the thick pink frosting onto the vanilla cupcake in a practiced motion. She’d just begun her signature swirl on the first when her eight o’clock clients had stridden in her door.

  The man who’d spoken had introduced himself as Matthew. It was a nice Christian name. There was a reason that it remained in the top ten to twenty names for boys in any given generation. One of the four gospels, it was ingrained in the public consciousness. Given the country’s history, it wasn’t any wonder that it had stayed popular even when other, more traditional names like Abraham, Enoch, or Jude had fallen out of favor.

  Matthew Porter and his fiancée, Kierra Cunningham, had stepped into her shop an hour or so ago, accompanied by a few members of the bridal party. Matthew, like most grooms Priscilla encountered, seemed rather bemused by the whole affair.

  As she met his eyes, he seemed to realize how rude the question actually sounded.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “Forget I asked.”

  “It’s okay. I am,” she said, setting the twelfth cupcake in a shiny red box bearing her company logo, Fangs in Fondant. Mrs. Camden should be by to pick it up in an hour. “Why do you want to know?”

  Matthew’s eyes lit up and he leaned his elbows on the counter, barely missing a jar of hard candy Priscilla had set out for the early trick-or-treaters. It was only the first week of October, but the children were persistent.

  “I don’t know. I think it’s kind of cool.”

  “Vampires came out to the American government twenty years ago,” she pointed out. “I can’t be the first one you’ve met.”

  In 1990, the political climate had been smooth enough that Parliament, the governing body that had ruled over vampires since the Crusades, had thought it a good idea to reveal their existence. It had caused public outrage, including violence, and some very unethical goings on in Washington, DC, but in the end vampires had won the right to citizenship under U.S. law.

  Priscilla had been very unhappy when the edict had been handed down and she’d been thrust involuntarily into the public eye, prepared for a severe backlash. She needn’t have worried. She’d been living in Bellmare, or one of the surrounding towns, since the witch panic of 1690, and hadn’t felt the need to move far from her original home. When she’d made the public announcement at the annual parade, most of Bellmare’s residents had shrugged and gotten on with their lives. Even Pastor Jameson, the Southern Baptist minister, had extended his hand in friendship. He slipped a recording of the Sunday service into her mailbox every week. After so many centuries avoiding holy ground and holy objects, it was nice to be able to listen to the Word again.

  Matthew shrugged. “You’re not. I just never expected to find one out here. You know, in the boonies. Most of the ones I know are big party types. Drama queens, all of them. I didn’t know vampires could be so … understated.”

  Vampires had been out most of the time that Matthew had been alive. Bigger cities like New York, and of course, LA, drew vampires in by the thousands. They were a minority in comparison to the human population, but you usually found a greater concentration of undead in big cities. The people were more inclusive, and feeding was easier when restaurants catered to you. It made sense that a huge city like New York would have a thriving vampire subculture.

  “I went to high school with a few. Poor saps, repeating high school over and over. Just about every foster family insists they go, no matter how recently they finished a degree. That sounds like the very definition of hell to me.”

  “I agree,” Priscilla said.

  Orphaned vampires were a growing problem in the United States. After the public emergence of vampires there had been a rash of teenage turnings. Children as young as thirteen were being brought over by lonely vampires seeking companionship. Priscilla was fortunate that she’d been turned in her twenties. If she’d met her sire earlier, she might have consented to the change at sixteen or seventeen. She shuddered to think where she’d be now.

  Legislation had eventually put a stop to it. In the U.S., the legal age of consent was eighteen for any person wanting to turn or be turned. If you couldn’t vote, smoke, or sign a lease, you weren’t old enough to become one of the undead. Additionally, makers who had transformed children were supposed to pay a fine and register themselves with the government for careful monitoring. Instead, most abandoned their children and fled. There was nothing to be done for the poor souls who had already been turned. The law recognized them as sentient beings, and Parliament’s usual method for getting rid of child vampires—namely execution—was not an option.

  An agreement was eventually reached. Vampire children under the legal age for emancipation were funneled into the foster care system.

  “Are you fostering anyone?” Matthew asked.

  “No,” Priscilla said, slapping a label on the box and licking a bit of frosting off her thumb. Yuck! She had to stop the human habit. As far as her taste buds were concerned, the frosting was as tasteless as the Crisco from whence it had come.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t qualify,” she said in a tone that clearly terminated any further line of questioning. Matthew looked away from her, embarrassed.

  The bell above her front door tinkled and Anna Sharp, a sporty blonde who was only a few years younger than the bride-to-be, swept into the room. Anna never seemed to walk anywhere. She bounced, imbuing every action she took with seemingly boundless energy.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said breezily. “Daddy was having a rough morning. I had to help him with his physical therapy again.”

  “Why?” Matthew asked. Priscilla wondered silently to herself if this sort of intrusiveness was common, or if it was her presence that made him so nosy.

  Anna gave him a sidelong glance that had him shrinking back against the wall and avoiding eye contact again.

  “My dad’s the police chief in Bellmare,” she informed him. “And he was injured in a drug bust recently. A tweaker took a sledgehammer to his knee.”

  Matthew grimaced. “Sorry. Can’t your mom help?”

  “My mother is dead,” Anna said frostily, and swept behind the counter without looking at him.

  Priscilla winced, feeling bad for the boy despite the fact that he probably deserved the poor reaction. She held out a pink cupcake to Anna, half in apology.

  “Can you test this? I need to send out the two dozen I’ve got, pronto. This is a vanilla cupcake with pink buttercream frosting. What do you think?”

  Anna peeled the wrapping paper away from the cupcake with exaggerated slowness. She always did this, just to tease. After the first few uneasy samplings, Anna hadn’t voic
ed any further doubt about Priscilla’s skill in the kitchen.

  She took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Moist. And the frosting is very sweet. Maybe a little less powdered sugar in the next batch?”

  Priscilla wrote the note down on the legal pad she kept by her register. No critique was too small.

  “What was that?” Matthew asked, glancing between them as Anna happily demolished the rest of the cupcake. Even Kierra, preoccupied as she was, stopped nibbling on her samples to watch the exchange.

  “That,” Priscilla said, giving her employee a fond smile, “is Anna’s job. I can’t taste anything I make. I trust Anna. She has an excellent palate.”

  As she should. Anna’s mother, Emily, had garnered minor fame by appearing on a hit cooking show before her untimely death. She’d placed third, and had won a decent amount of money, all of it placed in Anna’s college fund.

  Kierra’s brows disappeared into her hairline. She was beautiful, Priscilla had to admit, with the carefully constructed face of a supermodel. Too carefully constructed. Priscilla would have bet money that Kierra’s father had paid for a rhinoplasty, at the very least. Her dark curls were the result of a salon, and her perfectly straight teeth were the result of a dentist’s intervention.

  “She eats food, and you pay her for it?”

  “I don’t want to poison my clients,” Priscilla replied. She didn’t like the insinuation in Kierra’s voice. “I have perfect recall, but I can only follow a recipe. Anna can tell me if it’s any good or not. While we’re on the subject, have you chosen between devil’s food or red velvet?”