Hayden Blake was not a man whom one would expect to run a kitchen.  In fact, he was not a man at all, except in the vaguest sense that he was male; Hayden Blake was a vampire.

Once, Hayden had been the heir to his family’s empire, or what was as close as any family could get to having an empire in those days.  However, the years of his life were long past, and those who knew him then would have been stunned speechless to see him working at anything other than the business he had been brought up to inherit. Crème brûlée had nothing to do with managing finances, but the point was moot seeing as anyone who would have known him then was dead.

It was something of a mystery just why Hayden was a chef; he could eat, but everything that passed his lips tasted like ash to him.  Or perhaps cardboard, though it was hard to say since he’d never tasted either when alive.  It was safe to say, however, that food was not appealing to him in the least.  He was good at cooking; excellent, in fact, but careful to stay out of the spotlight since that had landed him in this fix to begin with—being a vampire, that is.

As the eldest son he’d been the apple of his father’s eye, excelling at every task he was given, his younger brother lost in his shadow.  Hayden hadn’t quite realized how much his brother had hated that fact until it was too late and he’d been smothered with his own pillow.  More shocking was waking up after he’d clearly remembered dying; heart still in his chest, his once blue eyes now an acid green and his auburn hair turned ebony black with death.

The bedsheets hadn’t even lost the heat of his body when he’d taken flight in terror of himself and whatever change had come over him that night.  His brother had likely intended to have his body found that morning, cold and stiff in his bed, but he’d ruined those plans when he fled—they’d searched for him for months, but it’s easy to stay under the radar when sunlight is deadly and the person being hunted looks nothing like he should.

Luck had been with him that first night, or rather, that first day, though not many would think so.  With no idea of what he’d become farther than knowing he was no longer human, Hayden had been caught out in sunrise that morning, on the edge of the forest adjacent to his father’s land.  A small beam of sunlight had broken through the canopy of leaves and struck him in the face, shining directly into his left eye.  Or so it had seemed at the time.

Shrieking, he’d raised his hand to block the offending light and had felt the skin of his hand melt from his bones.  It was the first and last time he’d been caught in the sun.  He’d stumbled into a lake, clothes seeming fiery hot in the dawn light, sinking down to the lowest depths, where the water was icy cold and inky black.

When Hayden had emerged from the lake at nightfall the skin of his hand had grown back, but it was puckered and mottled with scar tissue and he’d been blind in his left eye ever since.  The experience, while painful, had grounded him somewhat.  He was no longer quite as panicked about what he had become; dying and then starting to melt in the sunlight had made it fairly obvious and so from that night forward he’d gone about being undead.

His eyesight had been a sizable sacrifice, but even a half-blind vampire sees better than a human with twenty-twenty vision and his sense of smell had grown even keener in the face of that loss, compensating the way it might have if he’d gone blind as a human.  The fact that he could smell so well was both a bane and a blessing.  A blessing because it helped him cook, he could mix things perfectly thanks to his nose—he knew when something was too done or too raw, what spices naturally complimented each other, and when ingredients were beginning to spoil and more.  It reminded him of a movie he’d seen as a child—something about a rat who wanted to cook and used his nose to help, except that Hayden’s olfactory senses were far better than any rat’s.

 Being able to smell so well wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, however.  It was a torment in and of itself, to be able to smell lasagna, cheeses perfectly melted, cooked through, garlic and onion blended ideally, but to taste bland, sticky, slimy…something.  Food was all texture and no taste.  And that wasn’t even going into the issues he had when simply being in the vicinity of people and things that smelled unpleasantly.

It might have been worse than that, but for an odd twist of genetics—something else that had gotten him into the fix of being a vampire.  Patrick had found him shortly after the change; it might have been three months or three years, Hayden had already lost track of time by that point.  He’d been spending his days in a deserted warehouse at the docks, Patrick said that he’d been found at all was pure chance.

Most newly turned vampires would have left a trail of incriminating bodies that lead to their day-dwelling, the only reason Hayden had been found was because Patrick had caught his scent; irony at its best.  Patrick had cornered him with all the glory of a tom cat defending its territory, green eyes practically glowing in anger and looking much taller than his actual five foot, six inches.

Hayden hadn’t done much more than stare, apathy even then beginning to consume him, but he’d been intelligent enough to answer when the much older vampire had questioned him.  Patrick had been as confused as he’d been when he found out that Hayden didn’t crave blood. 

A fledgling that wasn’t consumed by the thirst was an unthinkable concept.  The idea that a newly turned vampire could decimate an entire town was more realistic, though much less pleasant, than the being of one who didn’t need to feed.

Once he’d managed to convince Patrick that he wasn’t leaving a trail of bodies that could expose their existence, he and the older vampire had settled into something of a friendship.  As a catholic priest, Patrick didn’t particularly fit any of the stereotypes that were expected of a vampire (or as a vampire, any of the stereotypes expected of a priest), so he was something of an oddity himself.  He’d set to researching Hayden the very next night, questioning and prodding the newborn vampire until he’d found a clue in the back of a book that was older than he was (which had to have been positively ancient, since Hayden heard him muttering about the Dark Ages every so often).

Hayden was a Higher Vampyr.  While most vampires were turned or sired, Hayden had been born what he was; some vampire, with a very lucky shot, had become one of his forefathers years and years ago.  It was something like a recessive gene, activating in the case of life being unnaturally and violently shortened; a contract clause his brother had managed to fulfill to the letter.

It wasn’t that he didn’t thirst for blood, it was that he would only rarely, rarely find the blood he wanted.  Apparently it was something like the human idea of soul mates and until some unlucky idiot crossed his path Hayden had all of the perks of being a vampire and very few of the drawbacks—according to Patrick, at least, though Hayden wasn’t certain he agreed.

Yes, the lack of bloodlust kept him from going insane with hunger when confronted with the tantalizing scent of humans on a daily—or nightly, as it were—basis,  but what did he have to live for?  Even Patrick had to hunt or go hungry and least it was living, though he did not like to hunt humans.  There was fulfillment even in such a small, admittedly rather heinous act.

All Hayden had was cooking, a torment as close to living as come since that first morning in the sun.  He’d thought of ending it every now and again, but the only way to do that was to meet the sun face on and he still remembered the agony of the flesh burning from his hand.  He wasn’t particularly into masochism, though he had once cut off his thumb to see what would happen.  It had been a particularly ignorant thing to do and he’d spent the rest of the night sewing the digit back on rather clumsily, faintly distressed by the complete lack of blood.

So he cooked, he cooked and was careful to keep a low profile in his tiny little restaurant by the bay, careful not to cook too well, but well enough to keep his books in the black, his business sense not eluding him even after all these years.  He enjoyed it, as much as he could, the torment of want keeping him on his toes with the scent of food all around him, and the satisfaction of seeing enjoyment on his customer’s faces.

Patrick thought he was lonely and kept trying to foist a menagerie of pets onto him; recently it had been a series of ravens, starting with Poe the first.  He was now on Poe the third.  Poe the first had been amusing in the beginning, someone had taught him to speak a few words here and there and it had given Hayden something to do in the early hours of the morning when he returned from the restaurant.  Unfortunately Poe the first had decided he liked saying ‘mine’ more than any thing else and Hayden had broken his neck in a fit of annoyance.

He’d almost felt bad that he’d done it, but he’d gotten over it quickly enough and had spent most of the next night coming up with a recipe centered around raven.  It had tasted like ash, of course, but when Poe the second had been dished up with a cranberry sauce to an unsuspecting customer the recipe seemed to have been a hit.

It seemed Poe the third would be around for a while yet.  It was cute, sort of, how this raven perched on his shoulder and crooned into his ear when it was hungry.  It was also more than amusing how the bird reacted to his food being stolen.  He fed it spiders—he’d fed all of them spiders—and Poe greedily snapped them off of his fingertips, squawking and ruffling its feathers indignantly when Hayden sucked them into his own mouth before the bird could get to them.  They tasted like ash as much as anything else did, but there was something about the way that skittered around his mouth in a panic, then twitched all the way down that appealed to him.

The pets were a diversion, he had to admit, but no matter what Patrick thought, loneliness wasn’t what was slowly consuming him.  The fact was that he was stuck in a limbo, something like the cursed pirates he’s seen in another movie long ago.  He could not die, but he couldn’t truly live, either.  Even his body had mixed up its signals, his skin pale and bloodless, his hair and eyes turned from their natural color to symbolize the decay that would never take place, no heartbeat, and yet he still had to shave every other day or so, his hair and his fingernails still grew, he still scarred, even while he didn’t bleed.

With a sigh Hayden turned off the last light and stepped out into the alleyway behind Hell’s Kitchen, his restaurant and home away from the grotty, windowless apartment he kept about mile away in the worst part of town.  Cooking kept him sane, but it was like walking a wire and he wasn’t certain how long it would be until he fell off that wire.  The scents of the kitchen reminded him that he was always just on the outside of this world.  It was looking without being able to touch.  He enjoyed it, in a masochistic way that was quite unlike walking into the sun or cutting off his thumb, but he would have to find some new torment soon.

Wind blew into his face, and the scar on the back of his hand tingled very faintly, as he began to walk down the alley, urging him to hurry home and hide from the coming dawn, though the sun was still at least four hours away from showing the first of its rays.  The breeze shifted and Hayden paused, blinking at the warm scent on the air.  It was unlike anything he’d ever smelled, he couldn’t even say what it reminded him of—it was lasagna and spaghetti and stuffed bell pepper all rolled up into one and more.

Shifting, Hayden raised his head and tried to locate the source of the delicious scent, stiffening when he heard a rustle to his left—where he couldn’t see.  Turning slowly, the vampire spotted both the source of the sound and the smell; a boy who couldn’t have been more than fourteen curled up against the alley wall next to the dumpster, sleeping.

Carefully Hayden moved closer, reaching out and touching the boy’s shoulder.  Surprised blue eyes, almost the color his own had once been, snapped open, fear so thick in his expression that Hayden could almost taste it, though it had been an eternity since he had tasted anything.

“Hullo,” he murmured softly.  “Who are you?  This is my restaurant you’re sleeping behind, you know.”

“I…I’m sorry,” the boy whispered, shrinking slightly back from his touch.

Hayden smiled.  “What’s your name?”

The boy shifted, standing up against the wall and pressing himself back against it as hard as he could in an attempt to keep away from Hayden.  “I’m Jean,” he said after several long moments, gold hair glinting as a beam of moonlight washed over it.  “I’ll move, so you don’t have to call the cops or nuthin’.”

The vampire’s smile widened.  “I had no intention of calling anyone, don’t be frightened.”  He could hear the boy’s heartbeat thundering in his own ears, could feel his pupils dilate, even the blind eye, in response to the heavenly scent rolling off of the teen in waves.  Even his unwashed state didn’t deter Hayden and the vampire had to cut off the soft gasp of pleasure that threatened to escape him.

The boy relaxed marginally, eyeing him with suspicion.  “You don’t?” he asked a bit sullenly, crossing his arms over his chest.

Hayden shook his head.  “No.”  He took another step forward and the boy’s expression changed again, turning thoughtful.

“What do you want with me, then?” he asked, softly, voice carefully devoid of emotion.  He’d been on the streets for more than half of his life and he hadn’t eaten a warm meal in three days.  He knew what it sometimes took to survive.

Hayden’s smile melted into a grin, eyeteeth glinting dangerously in the moonlight.  The scent was now perfumed equally with the boy’s fear and his defiance, edged with that certain something else, pulse still thrumming in the vampire’s ears.  He felt dazed, more than a little overwhelmed by the boy.

“Jean, you said?”  The boy nodded and Hayden reached up to stroke a finger lightly down his cheek.  “How would you like to meet my bird?”

The boy looked puzzled for a moment, then annoyed.  “Bird?  I’ve never heard it called…oh, you mean cock, right?  That’s a roun’bout way of saying it.  If you just want to screw me you ought to say so!  Though I’m warning you, I don’t take any less than—.”

Hayden held up a finger to silence the boy.  “I have a pet raven.  His name is Poe.  My apartment is close to here, if you’d like to…,” he paused, a tiny voice in the back of his consciousness wondering what he was going to say, what he was going to do when he got the boy to his apartment.  “If you’d like to spend the day indoors, perhaps have a hot meal.”

The boy looked more than a little uncertain.  “Yeah?  Food?”

Hayden nodded, still smiling, and led the boy from the alleyway.

Hours later, Hayden felt the sun come up fully over the horizon though he couldn’t see it, feeling dazed and content for the first time that he could clearly remember since his death.  There was so much blood…

He licked a droplet off the floor, body trembling as he did so.  Something was changing, it started at his toes, tingling painfully and traveled up his legs.  His mind screamed at him.  He’d cursed himself to another thousand lifetimes of death and at the price of an innocent child!  Hayden grasped at his chest as something inside began to thump weakly.

For the first time since he’d died, an eternity ago, his heart began to beat.