Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight: The Derby Cavendish Stories

by Don Bassingthwaite

  Bethany popped her shamrock sucker into her mouth and spoke around it. “Maybe I’m just out enjoying the sunshine and the Irish boys with my girls.”

  “Hermione is well past qualifying as a girl.”

  The burlesque star made a sound like a high-pressure air leak. Bethany fluttered her fingers and Hermione’s outrage settled back into a seething huff. “What can I say?” said Bethany. “It’s spring and I’m feeling social.”

  “You’re social the same way syphilis is social,” I said. “If you’re enjoying the sunshine, it’s because someone else is getting a blistering sunburn. You’re never ‘just out’—you’re always up to something. So what is it this time, Bethany? Why are you here?”

  I tried to keep my voice cool. I didn’t want to let Bethany—or Tarik—see my pain. I know I didn’t succeed. My words came out as bitter and angry as a boy band break-up. Matt looked at me in surprise. Bethany’s eyebrows rose and she popped the sucker out of her mouth. Her pink lips curled into a vicious smile. “Why, Derby, you’re quite worked up. Is it something I said? Or have you got a hate on about something else?” She batted her eyelashes at me.

  She knew. The bitch knew. I pushed my emotions down deep. “What do you want, Bethany?”

  Her smile grew wider and even more cruel. “I want to see you squirm. I want to see you twisting in the wind, strung up by your own love and good intentions.”

  “Full points for mean,” I said, “but I think you’ve over-estimated yourself. Setting me up with a fake boyfriend is pretty high-school petty, even for you.”

  The shocked gasps from Matt, Aidan, and Aaron at this revelation were clearly audible. They all looked to Tarik, who still sat as stiff and expressionless as one of his satyr ancestors on a Greek urn.

  Bethany, however, only laughed with delight. “You are so narrow-minded, Derby. This may be all about you, but you’re missing the big picture.” She leaned over the fence, kicking one foot up behind her. “I want you to know what’s coming,” she said sweetly. “Because there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  She smiled right in my face, then stood straight and took a step back. “Show him,” she said.

  Hermione raised a hand full of fairy dust—and blew.

  A shimmering green cloud billowed up, spreading farther and faster than anything natural should have. All of us reacted instantly. I threw myself back. Matt grabbed Aidan and pulled him under the table. Aaron jumped so fast he fell over and went sprawling against the couple munching on Blarney Omelettes and Shamrock Pancakes beside us. Even Tarik, his face finally registering a measure of alarm, flung up an arm to cover his mouth and nose, as if that would stop Hermione’s magic.

  But nothing happened.

  I whirled around, scanning the patio. All I saw were faces staring as if we’d suddenly broken into a bad flash mob dance routine. Our server glared at us and rolled her eyes as she gathered napkins to mop up our spilled drinks. The cloud of fairy dust was gone, faded away into nothingness. Matt peeked up over the edge of the table. “What just happened?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” I looked over my shoulder, but Bethany and her evil little crew were gone as well—naturally.

  Tarik, much to my surprise, was still there, however. I turned to face him. “Derby—” he started.

  I held up my hand to stop him. “Don’t. I’ve known for the last month. You think you’re the only one who can play pretend? I don’t care what Bethany offered you or why you did it. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  The other diners were still staring. I could hear some of them giggling and gossiping. To them it was just drama: two queens having it out in public, a little show to go with their brunch. I ignored them. Tarik’s face remained blank. My guts clenched again. “Coming out today wasn’t even your idea, was it? She wanted you to bring me here so she’d know where to find us.”

  “Yes,” said Tarik. His voice was odd. Tight. Maybe even conflicted. Beneath the glamour of the otherworldly, his long ears drooped.

  I found that I couldn’t stand the sight of him anymore. “Go away, Tarik,” I said. “Whatever this was, it’s over. Bethany’s not getting anything else from me and you certainly aren’t.”

  To his credit, Tarik didn’t put up a fight. He turned away and, under the judging gazes of the patio patrons, walked through the gate in the fence and away up the street. As the diners’ attention slowly returned to their plates, Matt stepped in beside me. “It was really all a fake?” he asked quietly. “The whole thing was something Bethany set up?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve spent the last month trying to find out.” I resisted looking after Tarik. “Maybe I shouldn’t have sent him away so quickly.”

  “Oh, no!” said Matt. “You absolutely should have! You gave him a month longer than he deserved—even with that humongous donkey dick.” Matt took my hand. “You don’t need him. You’re Derby fucking Cavendish. You will figure out what Bethany and Hermione are up to.”

  “Uh—guys?” Aaron said in a strangled tone. “We might have a clue already.”

  I turned to see him taking a step back from the table he’d crashed into. In my confrontation with Tarik, I’d only vaguely registered him trying to calm the couple whose brunch he’d destroyed. It didn’t look like it had gone so well. One woman had her head down on the table. The other was rising, her face twisted with anger.

  No, not anger. Her face was savage. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth and she was snarling like an animal. There was a strange, mottled flush to the skin around her eyes and mouth, almost like bruising—except that it was as green as fairy dust.

  “Oh, shit,” said Matt.

  Then the woman’s partner lifted her head. Her face, smeared with whipped cream and squished bits of Shamrock Pancakes, was even more deeply mottled. The bright afternoon sun fell across eyes that had shrunk to tiny green points. She screeched and lashed out at it with gnarled fingers.

  “Oh, shit!” Matt screamed—then he screamed again as she turned at the sound and launched herself at him.

  Aidan seemed to come out of nowhere, grabbing her in mid-air and heaving her around to slam hard against the ground. Meanwhile, the first woman had charged Aaron. He redirected her with a sidestep and a hip bump, sending her sprawling into another table. She bounded up and came at him like a pro wrestler bouncing back from a sex scandal.

  Once again, we had the attention of the patio, but this time people weren’t just watching—they were shrieking and yelling and jumping up from their tables. Our two lady friends weren’t the only ones affected by Hermione’s strangely delayed magic, either. Wherever the glittering fairy dust had spread around the patio, people writhed in their chairs or on the ground as the green stain spread across their skin. In a matter of moments, more than half of Cockles and Mussels’ customers were snarling, spitting, and cringing in the sun.

  But I’d dealt with Hermione’s transformations before. I grabbed the salt shaker off the nearest table, spilled half the contents into my palm, and flung it over the woman wrestling with Aidan. “Be undone!” I commanded.

  She turned around and snapped her teeth at my fingers. Startled, I barely snatched them away in time. This was more than Hermione’s usual magic!

  “Derby, quit fooling around!” wailed Matt as he fended off our server, now transformed like her customers.

  Something strange was going on and I felt a tremor of unease as I remembered Bethany’s parting words, “I want you to know what’s coming. Because there’s nothing you can do about it.” I fought back the unease. I just needed something stronger.

  “Mitzy!” I called. “Break me off a piece of the fence!”

  Aaron, still struggling with the woman who had attacked him, nodded. With a mighty heave, he sent his adversary flying all the way across the patio—it’s a good thing Aaron has tight
control over his inner wolf, because he is one freakishly strong queen when he gets riled up. He wrapped his hands around one of the vertical rods and wrenched hard on it. The rod snapped right off the fence. “Catch,” he said and tossed it to me.

  I snatched it out of the air like a majorette’s baton and spun back to Aidan just as another of Hermione’s victims jumped on him from behind. Holding the iron rod high, I dashed salt over both of Aidan’s attackers and proclaimed in ringing tones, “By iron and salt and the power of Patrick whose day this is—be undone!”

  The rod shivered in my hand, the salt burst into a shower of tiny sparks, and I could swear I heard church bells ring. Hermione’s victims collapsed across Aidan, their bodies limp but all traces of green vanished from their faces. “Okay?” I asked Aidan.

  He gave me a weak thumbs-up. I seized another salt shaker and turned to face the rest of the patio. “Alright,” I said, “which of you bitches is next?”

  ※

  It took half a dozen shakers of salt to break the spell on the rest of those affected. By the time I was done, my left hand was tingling from the shivering of the iron rod and my right was itchy from salt. The patrons of the pub who had fallen under Hermione’s magic didn’t remember anything. Those who hadn’t were, thanks to the glamour of the otherworldly, already coming up with ways to explain away what they’d seen. The majority opinion was that a gang of drunks had descended on the patio and messed the place up. I encouraged that belief and went to so far as to suggest that the ringleader was a teenage girl in a shiny green jacket.

  Aside from bruises and scrapes, my friends had escaped the fight unharmed. As we sat recovering with liberal applications of cold cocktails, however, I couldn’t shake a harsh misgiving. “That was too easy,” I said finally.

  “Oh, it was, was it?” asked Matt. He’d probably come off the worst of us: the chair he’d been using as a shield had caught on the edge of a table and flipped up under his chin. With a wet towel pressed to his jaw, he could only drink through a straw.

  “Bethany said there was nothing I could do about what was coming,” I told him. “That magic was stronger than what Hermione has used before, but I could still break it. I think it was just a sample of something bigger she has planned.”

  “Fucking shit,” said Matt.

  “Exactly.” I turned to Aidan and Aaron. Aidan just held his hands up in baffled surrender, but Aaron was looking across the patio at Hermione’s victims.

  “Why were some of them affected and not others?” he said. “Why weren’t we affected? She practically blew her dust right on us. I know she can’t transform me because I’m a werewolf, but what about the rest of you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it was a transformation exactly. It was more like a curse, and a fairy curse would have affected you just as much as any of us. But you’re right—why some and not others?” I closed my eyes and tapped my nose as I tried to reason out what might have kept some of us from succumbing to the magic.

  “Green,” said Aidan.

  My eyes popped open. “What?”

  “Green food and drinks,” he said. “That’s what made the difference. Our food hadn’t come yet and we didn’t have any green drinks, but the couple next to us were both eating food from the special brunch menu. Those guys—” He pointed across the patio. “—were drinking green beer. At that table, one of them had green eggs, but the other didn’t, and only the one who did changed.” He looked around at us. “Don’t you pay any attention to food at all?”

  “Hey, I have a wardrobe to fit into,” said Aaron.

  “But he’s right.” I scanned the patio, remembering what I’d seen when we were ordering. Not everyone had ordered from the special menu. “And it makes sense. Green food. Green magic.”

  “Green mottling,” added Matt.

  I shot to my feet. “Follow me.”

  Inside the pub, the manager, a marvellous dyke of my acquaintance named Moe, was on the phone. “Fucking police are taking forever to answer,” she said when she saw us. “Call them back,” I said. I took the phone out of her hand and hung it up. Fortunately, we’re on good terms or she might have laid me out without waiting for an explanation. “Moe, what are you using to colour the food today?”

  Maybe she heard the urgency in my voice because she didn’t argue with this apparently random question. “Something new,” she said. “All natural, totally organic food dye. No calories, no flavour, just pure concentrated colour. It’s incredible.” She reached behind the bar and produced a squeeze bottle.

  It was still three-quarters full of a bright green liquid the exact colour of fairy dust.

  I restrained myself from snatching it away from her. “Where did you get it?”

  “A sales rep came in a few weeks ago. A new start-up is trying to break into the market. St. Patrick’s Day was the perfect chance to prove their product so they made a super sweet deal: all the dye I needed for cost.” Moe chuckled like an evil billionaire. “I don’t think she knew how much green food colouring we can go through today.”

  “She?” I said. “Let me guess: tall and gorgeous with a French accent?”

  “That’s her.”

  Hermione. “How much do you go through?”

  Moe went behind the bar and heaved up a case that was still more than half-full of green bottles. Aidan whistled in amazement. Moe laughed again. “That’s just the first case. I’ve got two more down here.”

  Aidan groaned.

  “Moe, you can’t keep using that stuff,” I said. “It’s not safe.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s as safe as water. I’ve got a lab report from the rep right here.” She pulled a piece of paper out of the box and held it up. It was completely blank, though Moe didn’t seem to see that—another of Hermione’s charms at work. “Besides, I’d be crazy to give it up. I’m going to sell more green beer than ever this year. Check out what it does when you mix it with alcohol.”

  A pint of freshly poured beer stood on the bar, ready to go out to a customer. Moe took the bottle of dye and squeezed a healthy squirt into the glass. An intense cloud of green swirled like a storm through the beer. A moment later, it started to shimmer and sparkle as if she’d dumped in a handful of glitter.

  Moe chortled with delight. “This is going to be huge. I don’t know chemistry, but I know what people like. I’m not giving up a bonanza and I’m definitely not putting myself at a disadvantage.”

  “Disadvantage?” I asked.

  “A rep never hits just one bar. Every bar in the village bought into this stuff. Tonight the street is going to turn green!”

  My abused guts, already aching with tension after the confrontation with Tarik, dropped. Every bar in the gay village would be using the magical dye and every customer would be clamouring to drink it. And that would leave every single one of them vulnerable to Hermione’s curse. In a flash of foresight, I saw Hermione and Bethany strolling through the village, fairy dust billowing in their wake while their crazed victims turned on each other. There would be too many of them. I’d never be able to break the curse on each one. There would never be enough salt. There would never be enough time.

  The streets would run green—and red.

  I want you to know what’s coming. Because there’s nothing you can do about it.

  I swear I heard Bethany’s silvery, tinkling laugh of triumph.

  4. The End of the Rainbow

  I must have fainted a little bit, because the next thing I knew I was sitting in one of the pub’s chairs with my head between my knees. Someone was draping something cold and wet across the back of my neck. I sucked in air and sat upright. Aaron, Aiden, and Matt—still clutching a dripping napkin—stood or squatted around me. “I’ve never seen you pass out before,” said Matt. “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

  “It doesn’t look good,” I said, massaging my temples. I w
as intensely aware of the sounds of merriment drifting in from the patio and the street. They reminded me too much of both the danger we faced and the screaming dirt bike of a headache racing around inside my skull. I hate visions of the future. Moe had left us alone so I told the others what I’d realized and what I’d seen.

  Aaron turned pale. Aidan reached for Matt’s hand and squeezed it tight. “So Bethany was right,” Matt said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Fuck Bethany,” I said. Bracing myself against my headache, I stood up. “Just because she says there’s nothing we can do doesn’t mean there isn’t. You told me yourself, Matthew: I’m Derby fucking Cavendish. I’m not going to give up.” The squirt bottle of cursed green dye was still sitting on the bar. I picked it up. “There’s got to be something we’re missing.”

  “We could destroy all the dye,” suggested Aidan.

  “Find all the dye in all the bars in the village and get it out past security? Even if we could, people have been drinking and eating it all day. I’ll bet Hermione made sure every brunch spot on the street got a few bottles, too.”

  “Then what about Hermione? We find her and stop her from throwing her dust around.”

  “‘Stop’ her?” asked Aaron. “You mean . . .”

  Aidan flushed. “Maybe. If we had to.”

  “No,” Aaron said flatly. “I’ve worked too hard to stay human to even think about killing someone. I’m sorry, Derby, I won’t do that. Even if it puts other people at risk.”

  I’ve seldom been more proud of my friends. “You’re absolutely right, Mitz. It’s not an option. I don’t think just taking her prisoner is, either. As long as she could get free to work her curse for Bethany, she’s a danger.”

  That thought, however, prodded suspicion in me like a poker stirring coals. “Bethany needs Hermione to complete the curse,” I said. “Why?”

  “The curse is fairy magic,” said Matt. “That’s Hermione’s thing.”