“Well, that’s disappointing,” Noelle said, patting the still-hissing Johannes on his head. “Still, the day hasn’t been a total loss. I’ve had the experience of being shot and fainting, which I’ve never done before, and Gray has his soul back, thanks to you, Miles, and of course, the vitiation is gone, so we won’t have to move every couple of weeks and can live here instead. Nosty will be thrilled with the company. I’ll have to find someone to take over my portal in England, but I think that can be arranged. And now, I believe that a celebration is in order.”

Gray smiled at her, his lovely eyes shining with so much love it took her breath away. “I couldn’t agree more. Let me first lock this monster up in the priest’s hole, and we can retire to my room, where I will celebrate you until your eyes roll back in your head and you can’t do any more than lift a wan hand in praise of my manly prowess.”

Noelle giggled. “I have a better idea of where we can leave Johannes so he won’t get into any trouble.”

“I swear by all that is holy that I will have my vengeance—you’re leaving? You can’t just leave me here like this! I demand that you untie me!”

As they strolled out the front door, Teresa ran up to Noelle. “Oh, there you are. I was just coming to get you. The fire trucks are at the gate, but we don’t have the key to open the lock.”

“The fire turned out to be nothing but Miles trying to get everyone out of the house so he could search the priest’s hole for nonexistent treasure,” Noelle told her as Gray dug into his pocket and handed Teresa a set of keys.

“Really?” Teresa frowned. “That’s an underhanded thing to do. Although… I wonder if we could get a few shots of the halls filled with smoke. That would be very atmospheric. Where is Miles, speaking of him?”

“Inside,” Gray answered, and reached into his pocket again, extracting his pocket knife and handing it to Raleigh.

“Er…” the cameraman said, gingerly taking it.

“It’s a long story. Right now, we have to rehome Gray’s cat. See you later,” Noelle told them, taking Gray’s hand.

“If you’re going where I think you’re going—” Gray started to say.

“It’s the perfect answer, really, don’t you think? Who better to watch over your father than your mother? Plus, she’s lonely, Gray. Not that she’ll continue to be now that we are going to move in, but still, having Johannes there will give her a reason to live. So to speak. And just think of what a fine sense of justice this is going to give her! He’ll be dependent on her for everything.”

Johannes howled, an unearthly, tormented howl that wasn’t in the least bit feline.

Noelle watched with pleasure some ten minutes later, as Gray, for the first time since the vitiation had been bound upon him during that fateful night several hundred years before, was able to see his mother. She swallowed back a painful lump of tears as the two of them stared at each other for a few seconds, before Joan opened her arms and Gray clasped her to his chest.

“It really is the most touching scene,” Noelle told Johannes, who continued to yowl and attempt to escape but was powerless to do so wrapped up in Gray’s jacket. “You’re very lucky. We both are, really. You get to be with your son and the woman who gave up her life for you, and I finally get to be a Beloved to someone who honestly wants me in his life.”

I don’t just want you, my love, I need you. You brought me more than just my soul—you brought me my mother’s forgiveness, and salvation, and most of all, you gave me happiness in the form of a feisty, red-haired little nun.

Noelle smiled as Gray turned, his arm around the semitranslucent form of his mother. “Yes, indeed, we are lucky,” she said softly, rubbing her chin on Johannes’s head as she gazed with love at the man who gave her everything she wanted. “Now, about that visit to the vet—”

The birds, which had now returned to the trees around the derelict cottage after several hundred years, squawked in protest at the feline screech that filled the air.

Undead Sublet

Molly Harper

Beware of Jesting Vegetables

1

In retrospect, I should have known something was wrong when the arugula started telling knock-knock jokes.

Leafy greens rarely had a sense of humor. And yet there I was, standing in the bustling kitchen of my busy Chicago restaurant, watching the vegetables on the prep table perform their own vaudeville act.

When confronted by the comedic stylings of salad ingredients, most people would have maybe called it a night, taken a sick day. A normal person would have done exactly that. I was willing to admit that now, exiled from my kitchen and the city that I loved to the wilds of western Kentucky.

My only excuse was sheer exhaustion. The restaurant, Coda, had been overbooked since it opened four years before, far beyond even the wildest expectations of the owners. Six months in, the executive chef quit in a very loud, very public snit over farm-grown oysters, which I still didn’t understand, so I’d been promoted to the head position on the fly. Changes I’d made to the menu caught the attention of some reviewers, which brought even more people through the door. The owners offered me a 5 percent share of the business because I’d been working eighteen-hour days for nearly three years and hadn’t yet called the labor board. Even when I did manage to get a night off, some crisis would call me back into the kitchen, and before I knew it, I’d worked twenty-one days without a break.

I started making stupid mistakes, confusing sea bass with turbot and mistiming pasta. It was all fixable, but in my head, the mistakes compounded and made me a nervous, double-checking wreck. And yet I still kept up the schedule, only coming home to collapse for a few hours before rising again to scour the supplier markets for ingredients. Chefs who slept in missed the freshest produce and the choicest cuts of meat.

I ignored the signs that I was overworked every time I looked in the mirror. My hair was dark and thick but hung in a limp cloud around my face. It had no luster, no life. My skin was pale, pasty, and drawn. While I had a passably pert nose, my lips were far too wide and my blue eyes too large for my face, which was emphasized as my cheekbones became more prominent and the dark undereye circles spread.

I lost weight that I couldn’t really afford to lose. I was short and small-boned but what one briefly employed busboy charmingly referred to as “stacked like hell.” As if I needed another reason for men not to take me seriously in the kitchen, the distraction of an above-average rack meant I had to work that much harder, which led to more hours, which led to my interactions with giggling vegetables.

On top of the sleep deprivation, my vacation to London had been canceled because the restaurant’s business manager, Phillip, booked a high-profile vintner’s dinner for that week, deciding that I “wouldn’t mind” putting off my trip for another year. That same manager, who also happened to be my ex-boyfriend, had asked me for “space” three months earlier and then had gotten engaged to the woman who cleaned his teeth. Who also happened to be his ex-girlfriend, something I didn’t find out until after their engagement. No wonder he spent all that time flossing. And because I worked such insane hours, the chances of meeting a new man I was attracted to and didn’t work with—trust me, I’d learned my lesson there—were practically nil. My rent was going up again, just as I was getting close to saving enough for a down payment on a townhouse. So if I wanted to buy my own home anytime soon, I was going to have to work more hours.

More. Hours.

I was contemplating how to bend the space-time continuum to make this possible, when the arugula shouted, “Knock knock!” When I answered, “Who’s there?” that seemed to upset my coworkers. Joining the veggies in a full-on George Burns soft-shoe ensured Tess Maitland’s place in the chronicles of “chefs who publicly flipped their shit.”

The room tilted under my feet like a ship’s deck, leaving me seasick and dizzy. I heard the disembodied voice of my mentor, Chef John Gamling, telling me that my hollandaise was gelatinous swill not fit to dress a McMuffin, which was weird, because I hadn’t made hollandaise sauce that night. I tried to argue that I had people to do that for me, but then I collapsed on the floor in a heap.

And that’s when the paramedics showed up.

Phillip, the ex-slash-manager, “strongly encouraged” me to take some time off. I said, fine, I would take the weekend. And then he made a noise in his throat that made it clear that two days was not what he had in mind. And then he used the word “sabbatical,” which was international culinary code for “lost her fricking mind.”

We cooks liked to pretend that our exiled brethren were touring northern Italy or southern France, collecting recipes and refining pastry techniques. But “on sabbatical” usually meant they were drying out in a facility called Promises or Sunrises or some such thing.

I responded by inviting Phillip to commit indecent acts upon himself with a lemon zester. Phillip suspended me without pay for six weeks, which was, I felt, an overreaction. By the time a dishwasher drove me home, the urge to sing and dance with garnishes had worn off. I sat in my living room, staring at the blank beige walls, and I got pissed.

“Coda” meant a satisfying conclusion—the slow build of a good meal brought to a delicious climax. Phillip had come up with the name. He could be a pretentious prick, but he knew about branding. Where was my coda? I loved my work. That kitchen was my life. But was I supposed to work myself into delirious zombiehood and then collapse dead on my stove?

The fact was, I needed a break. I needed to rest, to sleep, to have conversations with people that did not involve butter-fat ratios. I needed to get as far from Coda as possible so I wouldn’t get sucked back into the kitchen and into that compulsive vortex of crazy. I made some arrangements online, packed a few essentials, and drove to Half-Moon Hollow, Kentucky, the only place I thought I’d get a welcome. Also, I may or may not have driven to Phillip’s apartment and thrown a honey ricotta cheesecake at his front door.