Blood in the Batter Read online

  Blood in the Batter

  Priscilla Pratt Mystery #3

  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

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  Contents

  Prologue

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  Chapter 1

  Double Chocolate Chunk Cookies

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Frosted Ghost Sugar Cookies

  Chapter 7

  Perfect Chocolate Chunk Cookie

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

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  About the Author

  Prologue

  “How do I get rid of her?” Arthur demanded, leaning halfway across the counter to speak to her. He looked about ready to tear his hair out, which would be a shame, because it was thinning dramatically as he approached fifty.

  “Who do you mean?” Priscilla asked, though she had a feeling she knew.

  “Your faerie godmother,” he hissed, keeping his voice low. She shushed him. Today, of all days, the shop was packed, and she didn’t know who might be listening in or be inclined to believe them.

  While other towns had chocolates and saccharine couples to contend with every February 14th, Bellmare, Massachusetts had another tradition entirely.

  Reality television had gained explosive popularity in the early 2000s. With a deluge of shows featuring spooky content like America’s Haunted Hollows, Skeleton Key, Kerrian Covington: Ghost Hunter, and Monster Mayhem, Bellmare’s struggling economy had gotten a huge boost. Within three years, the tourist trade, which had been merely a trickle of historical fanatics before, had bolstered every business in town and had even made it possible to start new ones.

  Among them was Priscilla’s own brainchild, Fangs in Fondant, a bakery like any other. Except for one thing. As a vampire, she couldn’t taste anything she made, and had to rely on human helpers to do the tasting for her. Tonight was an especially busy night, because of the Dead Man’s March.

  The Dead Man’s March was something close to a second Halloween, with children and adults dressing up, getting their faces painted, and putting their names into raffles to win prizes. Priscilla was due to meet the auctioneer, Desmond Chase, in the next fifteen minutes with the special dessert she’d offered up as a prize. With the march being a celebration of the town’s spooky history and the tourist trade it drew in, her human helpers were doing overtime.

  One such human was Anna Sharp, the chief’s daughter and one of Priscilla’s biggest supporters. She was looking a bit green around the gills today. Priscilla could understand why. Since arriving at 6:30 for her shift, Anna had eaten three cupcakes, two large cookies, a scone, and three brownies. Even Anna, with her notorious sweet tooth, could only stand so much sugar in a day. Turning away from Arthur, Priscilla handed her a snickerdoodle with a short apology.

  Anna took only a small bite of the cookie before she nodded, handed it back, and muttered, “Good enough.”

  Priscilla sighed. It was the standard answer she’d gotten for the last hour. She couldn’t blame Anna for her lack of enthusiasm though. She stuffed the barely eaten confection into a gallon Ziploc bag that was already halfway full. She’d send it home with Anna or Arthur at the end of the day, confident the treats would be eaten in the next few days, even if they were a little stale before anyone felt like touching them.

  “Priscilla.” Arthur snapped his fingers in front of her face. She started. She’d lost track of the conversation in the short period of time she’d looked away from him. There was so much bustle in her shop tonight, she hardly knew what to do with herself. The last time Fangs in Fondant had been at capacity like this, her friend, and sometimes competitor, Olivia Baker had been serving a substantial meal inside of her shop in her absence.

  At the time, Pricilla hadn’t been any fit state to argue with her about it. She’d been experiencing a bad case of sun sickness after being up all morning helping Arthur with a case. Vampires were not allergic to sunlight as some lore held. They didn’t crisp in daylight. They were very photosensitive, because their eyes were designed to see at night. Too much sunlight could cause a vampire to be sick. For younger vampires, any sunlight was enough to trigger nausea.

  “What?” she asked, finally looking up at him.

  “How do I get rid of her?” he asked again. “She won’t stop calling.”

  “Have you tried changing your number?” she asked distractedly as another beaming couple approached the counter. She couldn’t tell who they might be, beneath all the makeup.

  This pair was obviously planning to run in the annual 5k zombie marathon that chased after the parade floats to the delight of onlooking tourists. These two had invested in latex that hung grotesquely from their cheeks. She hastily handed the man a paper bag containing his desserts before any of his makeup had a chance to peel off onto her counter.

  “If you’re looking to get rid of …” she trailed off as another couple, dressed as two different halves of a horse, took the place of the first. Her shop was filled with people dressed as outlandishly as possible. Some of the makeup was quite good. A man with a fake knife lodged in his skull waved at her.

  She wasn’t sure if she ought to talk about Avalon in mixed company. After all, the fae had always been a secretive bunch. If they weren’t ready to come out to the world, she wasn’t the one to push them into an unwanted spotlight. She knew all too well how uncomfortable that could be.

  “Pests,” Arthur finished for her. “How do I get rid of this pest?”

  “Cold iron is your best bet. You can also ward them off by wearing your clothing inside out or carrying oatmeal around in your pocket.”

  “Really? That works?”

  Priscilla let out an exasperated sound. “Arthur, I haven’t tried all of the tricks. I can just tell you what popular opinion has to say on the matter. And other than moving to another state, I don’t know what will ever possess her to stop calling. Just stop answering her. Now please, shoo.”

  She didn’t wait for his reply. She didn’t have time for it, if she was being completely honest. Becca Peckman, the daytime manager of Fangs in Fondant, had been forced to call in help when she’d opened at eight in the morning. After the sun had gone down, the traffic had increased exponentially. Priscilla hadn’t had a moment to breathe since waking for the morning. Her bakery was short-staffed today, and was about to be one member less because she had to leave to give the deserts to Desmond Chase.

  “Anna, take over the cash register,” she directed. “I have to get the jumbo chocolate cookies out of the oven. While I’m gone, I’ll need Maddison to take over the baking. Can you pry
her loose from Olivia before I leave?”

  Anna rattled off the amount of change due to a talkative customer before turning back to her with a grimace. “Do you want me to die? If I ask for Maddison, Olivia will kill me.”

  It was a little hyperbolic perhaps, but probably not too far off the mark on a night like this. Every family in Bellmare came out to watch the parade floats being chased by zombies. Olivia’s dinner crowd was probably enormous, and Olivia kept about as many people on staff as Priscilla did. Taking Maddison away, even for twenty minutes, would probably hurt Olivia’s productivity.

  But who else could she ask? Becca had already worked straight through her lunchbreak to accommodate the flow of customers besieging the humble bakery. Anna was good at Priscilla’s standard recipes, the ones that she’d seen performed so often it would be impossible not to have mastered them, but there was no way she’d be able to keep up with the demands of the crowd.

  With no other option in sight, Priscilla raised her voice to speak to the assembled crowd.

  “I will give a free cookie to the next twenty people who vacate and wait to return until after the parade.”

  People jostled to get in line. The next ten minutes were a logistic nightmare as people lined up, putting in requests for their favorite cookies. Priscilla distributed them as quickly as she could, but even with vampire speed, it was hard to deal with the volume of customers. By the time she was through, she was running dangerously low on chocolate chip cookies, and the sugar cookies were not far behind.

  When she’d finally shooed the last customer out, she flipped her sign to closed. Arthur was nowhere in sight. He must have shuffled off with the rest of the crowd. She turned back to Anna.

  “Tell Olivia you’ll be her waitress for the next twenty minutes. I need to go speak to the auctioneer. I’d normally send you, but he insisted I pen a short message to go with the cookies.”

  “Can’t you call him?”

  She sighed. She’d asked Chase this question already. “No. He said he wants to meet in person.”

  “But, Priscilla—”

  “Go. I need Maddison in the shop as soon as possible. I want at least five batters ready to go into the oven by the time I get back, and she’s able to work faster than you on a good day. Today you’re tired and overworked. No buts, Anna.”

  Anna’s shoulders sagged. “All right, Priscilla. Whatever you say.”

  Priscilla’s stomach twisted with guilt. She didn’t like ordering Anna around. She’d worked under her fair share of tyrants over the centuries, and had always aspired to make Fangs in Fondant a pleasant place to be for both customers and her workers.

  “You can take tomorrow off,” she added gently. “Get some rest and catch up on Kerian Covington. You’ve earned it.”

  Anna smiled wearily at the mention of her favorite TV personality. “Okay. I guess that’ll be all right. What could go wrong in the next twenty minutes? The store is closed.”

  “Exactly the right attitude,” she said, leaning over to give her assistant a gentle squeeze around the middle.

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  Chapter One

  Olivia’s restaurant, The Big Bowl, was positioned at the back of Priscilla’s building. Within six months of its installation last October, it had already paid for itself, and Priscilla couldn’t exactly complain about her presence. While the restaurant could sometimes smell unpleasant to her keen vampire senses, especially on Thursday evenings when the soup special was heavy on garlic, she couldn’t complain too much. Even though it was hell on her nose, garlic was not actually fatal to her, it brought in a wave of after-dinner customers that would frequent her shop at a later hour than they usually would have. Her profit margins had gone up, so she could put up with odor one night a week.

  The door that had once led to the back lot of Priscilla’s building now led into Olivia’s breakroom. It could be inconvenient, especially when she needed to take out the trash. But at times like this, she was nothing but grateful for Olivia’s presence. It made contacting Maddison so much easier, since she worked a four-hour shift for her mother every other day. And since Maddison had recently graduated high school again, she was being allowed to work more frequently.

  Priscilla scrawled a list of instructions for Maddison as Anna disappeared into the back. She told Maddison which items she’d need to restock, and where she could find the extra flour if it was necessary. On a normal day, she would have brought up the hundred-pound bags herself. Anna was fit for a girl of twenty-one, but Priscilla still didn’t want her beleaguered assistant trying to haul them up alone.

  Besides, Maddison was very capable of doing the job, even if she was physically younger than Anna. Olivia’s daughter had been born in 1940 and turned into a vampire by a despicable individual when she was only fifteen years old. Now she was eternally caught as a teen, even though she was physically older than her adoptive parents. She could lift a full grown man off his feet and throw him yards away so Priscilla was confident she could carry a hundred-pound bag up one flight of stairs.

  Olivia and her husband Tim had adopted Maddison a little over five years ago now, saving her from a life in the foster system. Underage vampires like Maddison were becoming depressingly common these days and were shunted into foster care by government officials who preferred an easy solution to the problem, rather than doing something to combat it.

  She grabbed a pen and began to write on the legal pad that she kept near the register.

  Maddison,

  There is a limited amount of flour left in the jars upstairs. I’m afraid I will need you to haul up a bag from the basement. I need a batch of sugar, red velvet, chocolate chunk, peanut butter, and macadamia nut cookies going by the time I get back.

  Thank you so much for your help.

  Love,

  Priscilla

  She tucked the note under a cutting board that Anna had left out. Her assistant should really be more careful about leaving knives in the open, Priscilla thought. It would be too easy for someone to bump the counter and send the knife tumbling end over end, ultimately plunging into someone’s foot. It wasn’t a life-ending scenario for her or Maddison, who’d be able to regenerate any lost blood or limbs. But at least half of Priscilla’s employees were human, and an incident like that could definitely ruin someone’s day.

  She scooted the whole thing off the edge of the counter. She’d make sure the knife was washed and put away as soon as she returned. She needed to meet with Desmond Chase before the auction started at 7:30, and she was already running close to time. So she scooped up the Frisbee-sized double chocolate chip cookies she’d prepared, put them in a covered dish, and raced out her front door.

  The snow that had been plaguing Bellmare since late October had finally ceased, leaving the land looking rather bare. It was still too cold for the trees or grass to have recovered. The evergreens were the only spot of color in the otherwise bleak landscape. In the night sky, the limbs of a nearby oak looked like the twisting fingers of a giant, reaching for the sky.

  Prisc
illa wrapped her scarf still more firmly around her neck. While scarves and hats weren’t strictly necessary in the winter months, it was still advisable to wear them. Vampires adapted to the ambient temperature around them, which meant that in the colder months, she would fit the stereotype of an icy-cold corpse that was so often applied to her species. Hats and scarves could help trap in the warmth longer, so it would take longer for her body to cool. She’d even made use of a pair of mittens, given to her by Olivia. She didn’t want to scare the auctioneer before he had a chance to take her cookies.

  On a normal night, there might have been a few tourists milling about on the streets of Bellmare, waiting for a ghost tour to start. But tonight, the streets were packed with people of all different stripes. She recognized some, mostly members of the police department, who were having their faces painted an unconvincing mottled green to blend in with the other runners. Priscilla waved briefly to Arthur, who was currently having his cheeks slathered in acrylic paint.

  “Get over here, Pratt!” he called to her. “Don’t make me do this alone.”

  “Sorry, Chief,” she said with a half-laugh. “No time. Raincheck.”

  Most of the booths were settled outside the courthouse so customers could watch the parade. A line of lawn chairs crowded the sidewalks, making it even harder to navigate. A few of the people Priscilla knew well called out greetings to her. She waved and called back, but kept up a steady pace.