A Bite of Blueberry Read online

  “And what do you want me to do?” Ava shouted after her.

  “Leave.”

  Olson’s Pet Store was a modest establishment that had once been a dry cleaner. It always smelled faintly of starch, no matter how much time had passed since the previous owners had closed shop.

  Priscilla hadn’t had much occasion to visit the establishment since it had changed hands. Vampires generally didn’t keep pets. It was uncomfortable to look at your animal companion, even once, as a source of potential food. So she usually steered clear. She’d been in the shop occasionally with Emily, Anna’s late mother, to purchase the little girl a puppy and related supplies. The miniature schnauzer was still alive, as far as she knew, though he was getting up there in years now.

  The bell above the door tinkled merrily. The cheerful sound clashed violently with Priscilla’s current mood. When she entered, Anna was trying to talk to a bleary-eyed teen, behind the counter, about the frog. The poor teen had been assigned the late shift, and clearly hated it. Her assistant cringed away from the frog, who insisted on poking his head out of the bundle of fabric as Priscilla approached.

  “He says it’s not theirs, Priscilla,” Anna said, inching away from her. “They don’t have bullfrogs. Just Pacman frogs.”

  She pointed a shaking finger at a large glass container which housed three frogs. They were bright green and spotted with patches of brown all over her body. As Priscilla watched, one of them opened its mouth to a truly impressive width and attempted to swallow a dead mouse whole.

  “Ceratophrys ornata is a good choice for beginning frog owners,” the teen droned, as if he’d memorized this spiel. “American bullfrogs tend to be cannibalistic, so we don’t keep them.”

  Priscilla glanced down at the frog in her arms, suddenly grateful that Joseph Reed had chosen to come alone this time. If Ava’s botched spell had forced him to eat his companion, she’d have been on the receiving end of a lawsuit for emotional distress.

  “I figured out where he came from,” Priscilla said. “I just need to know how to care for him. What do I need to buy?”

  The teen rounded the corner and began to lead her around the pet shop, pointing out the terrariums. For a frog of Joseph’s size, she’d need at least a twenty-gallon tank. That alone was pricey. She was going to take every penny of this from Ava if she got the chance.

  The teen informed her she could fill the tank with rocks, plants, and pond water from the frog’s natural habitat, so at least she was saved that expense. She had to purchase a sunlamp for the frog, since there was no place in her shop with good access to natural light except her lobby. Finally, she purchased two containers of live bait. Since bullfrogs only ate moving prey, and she wasn’t comfortable feeding it small snakes or fish, she decided worms were her best option.

  Anna carried her purchase next door, keeping a good distance away from the frog. “Why are we keeping it?” she asked, voice quivering. “I hate those things. And isn’t it a health code violation?”

  “It is,” Priscilla sighed. “But there’s nothing for it. I’ll have to keep him upstairs for now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this frog is Joseph Reed.”

  There was a beat of silence before Anna began to laugh. “Okay, okay. You got me, Priscilla. I’ve been successfully pranked. Can we let the frog go now?”

  “No. I’m serious. My faerie godmother turned him into a frog.”

  “Your what?” Anna asked.

  “Faerie godmother. And I’ll warn you now. Don’t spell it f-a-i-r-y, if you write it down. They hate that. The ones who hail from Europe will play tricks on you if you spell it the wrong way.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Please tell me this is a joke, Priscilla.”

  “I wish it was,” Priscilla said with a frown. “I haven’t seen her in nearly a century, and now she’s back. This can’t be a sign of good things to come.”

  “You mean that frog is really—”

  “Joseph Reed,” she said grimly. “And what’s worse, she doesn’t know how to turn him back. So I’m going to have to care for him until she reverses the curse or the magic wears off. Probably the latter. Ava is showy, but you’ll find that her magic is not particularly potent, compared to other fae.”

  Anna seemed too dazed to do anything but nod. “So what do you need me to do?”

  “Take him upstairs,” Priscilla said as they approached her front step. “I need to get Joseph out of the way. I’ll try to throw Ava out. Then I’ll need your help mixing up the remainder of the muffins. Also, could you ask Olivia if she can loan me Maddison for the evening? This is going to be a rush order.”

  While she and Olivia were still prone to sniping at each other over minor annoyances, things were better than they had been in years. For a while, Olivia had blamed her failure to build a successful catering business on Priscilla, and they hadn’t spoken regularly for some time. Now they could almost be friendly to one another, as long as they were both in a good mood.

  “Can do, boss.”

  Priscilla’s own door chimed as she stepped through. Ava hadn’t moved from her perch on top of the register, and was still scowling at her. “You walked out in the middle of my lecture.”

  “So I did,” Priscilla said, setting the frog down in the terrarium before putting a lid on the whole thing. Anna squealed and rushed away with the frog, apparently eager to get rid of it as soon as possible. It was impressive that her fear of frogs apparently had blinded her to the faerie hovering a few inches above the ground. At least now there was a barrier between Joseph and her assistant, in case he decided to jump.

  Priscilla proceeded to dump the prepared mixes she had stored in the fridge into the trash can. She judged the freezer safe enough for now and didn’t clear it out. If Joseph Reed had been put in the freezer, he’d have died.

  She then turned her attention to sanitizing the restaurant, scouring the whole place with disinfectant. It didn’t improve her mood to be undertaking this task twice in a row when she already closed out each night with a ritual cleaning of the store. But she wasn’t sure exactly what surfaces Joseph the frog had touched, so everything had to be scoured. And to add to her irritation, Ava followed her the whole way through, dispensing not-so-helpful advice.

  “You need a change of clothes,” Ava said. “You’re so frumpy. It’s a shame you’re so tall and oafish, even for a human. My clothing would never fit. But I do know a tailor in the arts district who does marvelous work. I could give him a call for you.”

  “Go away, Ava.”

  “Not until you’ve taken some of my advice. You’re never going to get a man at this rate. How about I fly you out to my home in Los Angeles? You’d like the man I’m seeing now. He’s human, at least. He takes me to the salon every month to get my nails done. You could do with a trip yourself, it seems. Do you still bite them? Dear, the only reason they’re not stubs by now is the fact that you heal so fast.”

  Priscilla tried to tune out the well-meaning but ultimately inconsequential speech. No amount of proposed self-improvement was going to help her get this order done on time. She’d need extra hands for that, and Avalon was not volunteering.

  She didn’t have to wait long for Maddison to arrive. She’d been seeing more of Olivia’s vampire child of late, since she worked alternating days at the restaurant. Olivia didn’t like loaning Maddison to Priscilla. There was still a bit of the old rivalry left between them. It was fading, but Priscilla thought it would take at least a year to die out completely. She’d send Maddison home with blood in the morning to compensate. Blood was still not easy to come by, even if she’d pointed the Baker family toward a more consistent avenue for purchasing it. Blood bags were expensive, and Maddison’s parents couldn’t give blood more than once a month.

  Maddison looked a little peaked when she entered, which was quite a feat. She favored Olivia, though the two were not related. She had auburn hair and the pale complexion of a natural redhead, so to look sick and pale m
eant she was hungry. Priscilla was suddenly glad she’d be trading blood to the young lady for her help. She clearly needed it.

  “Priscilla, who is this?” Maddison asked, staring, nonplussed, at Avalon. Avalon, meanwhile, continued to drone on about the merits of different sorts of shampoos while hovering a foot off the ground.

  “This is Avalon, my faerie godmother. Don’t engage her. Just help me bake.”

  Maddison nodded slowly. “All right then. I trust you’ll explain this to me later.”

  “I promise I’ll explain everything tomorrow. Once the debutante society has been pacified.”

  At the word “debutante,” Ava went into rhapsodies about her time as one in the early twentieth century. Priscilla tried her best to ignore it.

  Her blueberries had been a casualty of Ava’s interference, so Priscilla was forced to send Anna next door to buy the ingredients she’d need for the muffins all over again. She needed two pounds of blueberries, a pound of raspberries, and another bunch of bananas. Her nuts and chocolate chips were, thankfully, stored elsewhere and thus survived the purge.

  By eight that evening, she was back on track, only having lost three hours to Avalon’s mishaps. It was a record recovery, as far as she was concerned. Usually Ava’s screw-ups set her back days, if not more. Priscilla thought she might pull the event off after all.

  She put the first round of muffins in to bake at 8:15 and turned to Maddison.

  “Watch them for the next twenty-five minutes and do not let Avalon touch anything.”

  “Where are you going?” Maddison asked.

  “Next door,” Priscilla said.

  Priscilla had never thought she’d see the day when socializing casually with Olivia during business hours would be the preferable option. Of course, Avalon tried to follow her when she made a beeline for the corridor that connected the two stores.

  “I wasn’t done talking to you,” Avalon said. “There’s still so much left to improve, Priscilla. At least take off that awful hairnet.”

  Priscilla gave her godmother a very rude hand gesture before departing. Maddison giggled. Priscilla felt momentarily guilty for doing something like that in front of a child, until she remembered once more that Maddison was anything but.

  Maddison was physically fifteen, but in actuality had been living for about sixty years. Before Parliament had come out to the public, child vampires like Maddison had been killed. The young woman had only survived their justice by staying on the run constantly. After vampire children became an epidemic in the early 2000s, something had to be done. Because the US and other countries protected vampires as naturalized citizens, with all the rights thereof, Parliament had been forced to come up with an alternate solution.

  The compromise was that any vampire turned in adolescence, who could not pass as adult, would be funneled into the foster care system or its equivalent. That was how Maddison had come to live with Olivia. Because she could not conceive naturally, Olivia had opted to adopt a child in need. It had worked out to the benefit of both parties involved, especially after the Baker family had moved to Bellmare, five years ago.

  Priscilla marched down the corridor, trying to clear her mind of any distractions. She had a little downtime while the muffins baked. After the hectic morning, she needed to calm down before she bit someone’s head off—literally.

  Olivia barely looked up from the counter as Priscilla entered.

  “Did you need something, Priscilla?”

  “A break,” she said, plopping down in a chair next to the register. There was only one occupant in the store at present. The dinner rush had largely cleared out. “Do I need to purchase something to sit here?”

  Olivia pretended to consider it. “Well, since you are generously hosting me in the back of your building, I’d say you have license to sit anywhere you like. What’s going on? I thought you said you didn’t need Maddison this week?”

  Priscilla couldn’t help herself. She divulged the whole sordid tale to Olivia up to, and including, the hasty exit.

  To her surprise, Olivia laughed at her. “And here I thought being a single immortal vampire would spare you monster-in-law problems.”

  “Huh?”

  Olivia filled two glasses, one with blood and another with herbal tea. She leaned over the counter to offer the former to Priscilla. She took it and sniffed the beverage. It was animal blood, but certainly better than the smelly green tea that Olivia was drinking.

  “A monster-in-law. The evil version of your in-laws.”

  “I’m not related to Ava,” Priscilla said.

  “No, but the point still stands. She’s still your mother, in a sense. So she’s going to give you advice, whether you want it or not.”

  “What can I do?” Priscilla groaned. “It isn’t as if I have a spouse to buffer me from her attention.”

  “Maybe you should think about dating,” Olivia suggested.

  Priscilla choked midway through a slurp of blood. “What? No! I’m not going to do that.”

  “Why not?” Olivia asked, taking a sip of her own beverage. “I’ve known you for five years, Priscilla, and I’ve never seen you date. Not once. Don’t you get lonely?”

  Sometimes, in her weaker moments, Priscilla remembered what it had been like to have a live-in partner and she’d throw a small pity party. They were few and far between, however. These days she was too busy to think about men or settling down.

  “Not often. I have friends and a life, Olivia. It’s so old-fashioned to expect a woman’s primary goal in life to be marriage.”

  “It sounds like that isn’t her main motive. Isn’t it true that she’s tied to your family line until your name changes?”

  “Yes,” Priscilla grumbled. “But that’s not my fault. She’s the one who got herself cursed.”

  “Cursed?”

  “She always squirms out of giving me the details, but the short version is that she screwed up badly enough five hundred years ago that she was tied to my family by a curse. She’s not supposed to leave us until the line dies out, because there are no living descendants, or the last woman has married into a new family. It’s just my specific branch of the Pratt family she has to serve, and I’m the last one left. I’m not going to attach myself to someone just to appease her. She tried making me do that in the seventeenth century, and it didn’t work.”

  Olivia shrugged. “Just think about going on a blind date. Maybe she’ll calm down if she thinks she’s making progress.”

  Priscilla was almost certain calm wasn’t in Avalon’s vocabulary but she nodded anyway. It was worth a try. At the very least she could ask Tobias Kennedy to coffee. The apothecary owner and town recluse had warmed up to her in the months after she’d saved his life from a slavering mob. And if she played her cards right, he’d be the sort of man who’d utterly repulse her godmother, so she might get some silence on the subject of men.

  She finished off the animal blood and offered the cup to Olivia. “Thank you for the advice. I just needed to get away for a minute.”

  “Any time, dear. When you’re through, can you drive Maddison home? I think I’m going to have a late night.”

  “Of course.”

  By the time she returned to the shop, Anna was talking animatedly to her faerie godmother, unintentionally providing the distraction that Priscilla had been hoping for. The current topic, from what she could gather, was about Anna’s current boyfriend, Jamie Emmerson, a young police officer.

  “He’s taking me out to dinner in Westwend tomorrow night,” Anna enthused.

  “He’s a little old for you, Anna,” Priscilla reminded her. “And is your father aware you’ll be spending the evening in the company of one of his employees?”

  The last Priscilla had heard, Police Chief Sharp, Anna’s father, had been sending the poor young man on every menial task imaginable.

  Anna made a face at her. “Does he really need to know?”

  “I’m not covering for you. Your father and I still aren’t fr
iendly,” Priscilla said.

  Though the situation was improving, after she’d helped Bellmare PD solve a murder six months ago, Arthur still regarded her with a level of wariness that most others didn’t. The twin punctures she’d left in his neck might have something to do with it. He’d volunteered to be bitten to save her from a potentially lethal poisoning, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been an ordeal.

  “Don’t tell him, Priscilla, please,” Anna begged. “I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Don’t punish the girl,” Avalon huffed. “Just because some of us have fulfilling love lives—”

  “Would you look at that!” Priscilla exclaimed. “The muffins are done. Could you clear out, Avalon? I’ve still got a lot of work to do. And I’d rather eat every muffin in this tin than continue listening to your advice on men.”

  “Hear, hear,” Maddison mumbled.

  “You’ll be married by the end of the year, if I have anything to say about it, Priscilla Pratt,” Avalon warned, turning to the door.

  “When pigs fly,” she retorted. Then she paused as Avalon’s face lit up.

  “Don’t get any ideas.”

  “Too late,” Avalon sing-songed. Then she waltzed right out the door.

  Priscilla groaned. “She’ll do it, too.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Anna said. “If you’re right, they’ll only lightly hover.”

  Priscilla set the tin on the counter with a sigh, making a mental note to check the newspaper the next day for reports of hovering livestock. At least she could console herself that it was the worst thing she was likely to face this week.

  All she had to do now was make sure that the Debutante Society’s Saturday morning meeting went as smoothly as possible. After all, what else could go wrong?

  Death by Blueberry

  Blueberry Muffins are among my most requested items for breakfast parties. Thankfully, most people are content just to take them the night before, so I don’t have to serve them in daylight. If you’d like yours fresh and hot from the oven, here is the recipe I rely upon most for my muffins. Please bake responsibly, and always leave an extra for your resident recipe sampler.