by Matt Wallace
Fortunately a young woman, around Lena and Darren’s age, comes sprinting out of the back room. She’s obviously of tribal descent, but she’s less the stereotype from the movies in her midriff top and checkered miniskirt.
Lena recognizes the boots she has on from Torrid.
“I didn’t hear you guys come in!” she says, smiling at the trio.
“Ah!” Jett is obviously relieved. “This is Little Dove . . . White Horse’s assistant. She’s also his granddaughter.”
“Just call me Lill,” she says to Darren and Lena, shaking both of their hands.
“Your mother didn’t name you ‘Lill,’ you shameful apple of a girl,” White Horse says from the sofa without turning over.
Little Dove’s smile never wavers, although they can all see that it’s an effort to maintain it.
“Thanks for that, Pop,” she says.
“Apple?” Darren asks.
“Red on the outside, white on the inside,” she explains, trying to be jovial about it. “He’s a very, very old man.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry, what is it you and your grandfather do here again?” Lena asks.
“Landscaping?” Darren offers without sarcasm, looking around at the various sand paintings.
“Mist—. . . uh . . . White Horse here is a sort of a . . . well, wizard, I suppose,” Jett explains brightly.
The old man snorts derisively at that.
“A wizard is what they were in the market for,” Little Dove corrects her. “Unfortunately ‘wizards’ aren’t much to be found in a country that’s two hundred years old and change.”
“My country is ageless,” White Horse points out.
“I know, Pop,” she placates the old man. Then, to the rest of them: “Point is, if you want a wizard you have to import one from across an ocean. They’re a Middle English concept. If you want American magic, a Hatałii is pretty much your oldest, best, and most powerful bet.”
“A hata-whatta?” Darren stammers.
On the sofa, White Horse spreads his arms ceremoniously, still never opening his eyes. “I am a medicine man, my son! Come to me and I will lay trembling hands upon you!”
“Pop, cut it out!” Little Dove snaps at him.
The old man laughs, rolling back over.
“Chef Luck likes to keep a veteran magic-user on staff,” Jett offers. “A lot of the fare you’ll work with and prepare contains . . . properties that can go a bit haywire if not treated properly. White Horse uses his skills in a preventative capacity.”
Darren nods like he understands completely.
Lena stares at him like he’s just passed gas.
“And they called my people crazy,” White Horse mutters.
Little Dove leans close. “Look, it’s not as weird as it sounds. We’re like, you know, the FDA. We make sure the food won’t kill anybody. Don’t worry.”
“Oh, I feel much better,” Lena assures her.
“Well, then,” Jett says. “Thank you for your time, folks. Darren, Lena, if you’ll follow me.”
“Hey,” Little Dove says, “come hang later when you get a break if you want. I’m stuck back here all day tending to him. It gets . . . yeah.”
“Sure,” Darren offers, warmly.
Lena only nods.
“Nice to meet you both,” she says.
Little Dove smiles at her. “You too.”
As Jett leads them down the hallway outside the suite, they can all hear Little Dove yelling at her grandfather and White Horse laughing.
Only Darren and Lena seem to acknowledge the sounds, however.
INTRODUCTIONS WITH ALL LIMBS ATTACHED
James, the Senegalese line cook who Lena remembers as the only other member of the kitchen staff besides Nikki who stood with them against Dorsky, escorts them to an immaculately clean and surprisingly homey changing room complete with lockers.
“We do not have separate space for the boys and the girls,” James apologetically explains.
“It’s fine,” Lena says, trying not to let her tone become too jagged, aware he’s being sincere.
He leads them to the last row of lockers facing the wall.
“Take two here. You will have privacy back here.”
“Thanks, man,” Darren says.
They both choose a locker and pull open their respective doors.
Inside each new chef whites embroidered with their first names are hanging neatly on miniature hangers.
“Holy crap,” Darren marvels.
Lena’s voice is suspicious. “What the hell? Are these for us? How did they get here so fast?”
James only shrugs.
“They will fit, I expect,” he says. “Change yourselves and join us on the line, okay?”
Lena just nods.
“Thanks,” Darren says again, smiling.
James smiles back at him.
Lena waits, and her waiting more than anything else is what marks the moment their exchange of smiles officially passes friendly into awkward.
Lena clears her throat.
Both Darren and James look away in a hurry.
James leaves them, whistling to himself.
“Do you think it’s, like, magic?” Darren asks when he’s gone. “The chef whites?”
“Shut up,” Lena snaps.
“What?” he asks her innocently.
Lena rips her new fitted personalized chef whites from the hanger and straddles the bench between the lockers and the wall. She removes the temporary smock Bronko gave her and slips on the embroidered uniform.
It fits perfectly.
“Son of a bitch,” she whispers.
She’s leaning over to stuff her things inside the locker when a voice that doesn’t belong to Darren speaks her name.
“It’s Lena, right?”
She didn’t hear anyone else enter the room.
Lena peers around the locker door at Ritter.
“Yeah. Hi.”
Ritter looks over at Darren. “You two are full-time now?”
He nods.
“Probationary period,” Lena says.
Ritter looks back at her. “Right. Look, I know you signed up at a weird time, even for this place, but once you get into the routine it all normalizes. It can be hard, coming from the straight world.”
“Which world do you come from?” Lena asks him, more defensively than she meant to and not caring.
“It . . . had a little less padding around it,” Ritter answers carefully.
“Dude. You don’t know where we come from,” Lena snaps at him.
“The Midwest—” Darren begins.
“Darren!” she hisses.
Ritter only nods, undisturbed. “True enough. Just so you know, it starts to feel less weird.”
“Thanks. Did you come here just to tell me that?”
“No. It occurred to me I never thanked you. I thanked your partner here, but as I recall it was him cradling my arm and you cradling everything else.”
Ritter holds up the appendage that was not attached to his body when he and Lena first met.
Lena doesn’t answer at first, only blinking rapidly in surprise. She wasn’t expecting that.
In truth, with everything that had happened since the moment she found herself holding Ritter and trying to keep him conscious she’d either lost it or blocked it out.
“I . . . I just happened to be the one standing closest to you. Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, you’re a hell of a field medic.”
“Thanks.”
“You were in the service, right?”
Lena nods. “Yeah. Army. You?”
“I served.”
She waits.
“So? Where?”
For the first time, Ritter grins. There’s something bittersweet there, perhaps mostly bitter, and clearly not intended for her.
“No outfit you’ve ever heard of,” is all he says.
Her first instinct is to say something glib, but something about the way he smiled stops he
r. It’s as if he were remembering a million troublesome moments all at once.
“Anyway. Thanks again for the assist. Hopefully I won’t have to return the solid someday.”
Ritter leaves them with that.
Darren watches him go.
Lena makes a point of not watching him go.
Darren is idly toying with one of the buttons on his new chef whites. “You don’t think he might be—”
“I honestly couldn’t tell you. I can’t read anyone in this fucking madhouse.”
“Right. Yeah. He’s got a nice cover, though.”
Lena looks up at him blankly.
“You know,” Darren mumbles. “Read. Book. Cover.” A pause. “He’s hot.”
She shifts her gaze back to her new smock.
“That permanent five o’clock shadow thing is such a cliché,” Lena grumbles.
“For a reason.”
Lena doesn’t respond to that for several moments.
Then, begrudgingly: “Point.”
Darren grins.
Lena tries to frown at him, but ends up grinning back.
“All right, nerd,” she says. “Let’s go to work.”
“Yes, Chef.”
PART II
THE SECRET INGREDIENT
WEEK-AND-A-HALF
A professional kitchen is all about routine and mechanical efficiency.
Lena and Darren are finding out this remains true even when you cook for demons and goblins.
They’re spending every hour of their probationary period on the line in Sin du Jour’s kitchen preparing hors d’oeuvres and appetizers for the royal wedding, which is scheduled to take place just after that probationary period ends. For the first few days, in fact, they weren’t even allowed to cook. They spent their hours polishing tiny, bite-sized gemstones and precious metals for the freestanding jewel stations (which Jett explained to them in what seemed like endless detail) the goblin guests will be snacking on during cocktail hour.
Now they’re replicating the starter menu for over one thousand guests, which means preparing several times that many of each dish.
The tedium and constant repetition of the line still gets to Darren. His eyes blur and his head aches and his mind screams for a break in the routine. It’s a struggle to stay focused, to make each dish a perfect mirror image of the last.
When Darren was eight years old Tio Napoleon came to live with them from Xalapa. He was a line cook, and he quickly took over the small kitchen in their home. The food he prepared for them was unlike anything Darren had ever eaten, exploding with color and spice and flavor. Napoleon always sang when he cooked; loudly and soulfully, and always in Spanish, which Darren’s mother only spoke on the phone to relatives.
It looked like the most fun Darren could imagine anyone having doing anything.
It made him want to become a chef.
Darren still loves cooking, but he has never once sung on the line.
The repetition never seems to faze Lena. She trains that laser focus of hers on each dish, replicating it meticulously and perfectly, seeming to find new challenges in the task, no matter how many times she’s performed it already that day.
Darren admires, even envies that in her.
It also annoys the piss out of him.
“You’re doing good, kid,” Dorsky informs him abruptly as Darren folds uncooked puff pastry around a lobster and mushroom filling for the three-hundred-and-fifty-first time.
Darren looks over at him, surprised, even slightly alarmed.
Dorsky and his rotund lieutenant, Rollo, who seems to have frizzy hair sprouting from every exposed patch of skin on his body, are attending to prep the wedding’s dinner menu.
“What, Chef?” Darren asks, as if he hasn’t heard correctly.
“You’re keeping those Wellington edges consistent,” Dorsky says without looking up from his station. “I like seeing that. Keep it up, Vargas.”
“Uh. Thanks, Chef.”
Lena casts a suspicious, sidelong glance Dorsky’s way, her hands never ceasing their work.
“I need more shutes for the meatball lollipops,” Darren announces a time later.
“Rollo, take him to the pantry. Make sure he stays out of the restricted section this time.”
Rollo and the rest of the kitchen laugh at that.
Darren tries to hide his embarrassment.
Poorly.
“C’mon, young’n,” the bear of a man bids him.
When Rollo escorts Darren off the line Lena and Dorsky are left alone on their side of the kitchen.
The silence, even to a deeply unobservant person, can only be classified as “oppressive.”
“You have something you want to say to me?” Dorsky asks, idly, concentrating on the several hundred gallons of Thai consommé for which he’s prepping stock.
“No, Chef,” Lena answers stiffly.
Dorsky grins. “Man, that must taste like shit in your mouth, having to call me that. C’mon, speak your mind.”
“Fine.” Lena sets her knife down and grabs a hand towel. “The way you’re kissing his ass. Darren. What is that? A divide-and-conquer thing?”
Dorsky looks over at her then, and his eyes read genuinely confused. “What the hell are you talking about, Tarr?”
“If you’re trying to get him on your side, or whatever, you should know we grew up together. We walked off our last job together when they tried to pull that kind of shit.”
“I don’t know what kind of shit you mean, and I don’t know what happened on the last line you worked, but that’s not how I do things.”
“Then why are you being so goddamn nice to him?”
“Because he needs it.”
“Then why are you still being such an ass to me? Why aren’t you giving me that ‘atta-boy’ shit?”
“Because you don’t need it.”
Those two statements, and their underlying truth, throw Lena, but only for a moment.
“All right, then why were you such a dick to us the first time we walked in here?”
“You weren’t part of my line. You were just day-players trespassing in my kitchen.”
“Uh-huh. And now?”
“You’re part of my line.”
He says it with a tone of such obviousness and finality that at first all Lena can manage to respond with is, “Oh.”
They go back to working in silence.
Until Lena slams her knife down again.
“You know, that is such bullshit!”
Dorsky is actually caught off guard by the outburst.
She turns on him. “You can play that ‘I’m just looking out for my boys’ card, that’s fine, but we both know it’s no excuse for the way you act, the shit you say. Nikki is just as important to this kitchen as you are, and you were treating her like the enemy the second I walked in here.”
Dorsky looks up from his stock, his eyes wider than she’s yet seen them.
For the first time he stammers, “Listen . . . first of all . . . you don’t know anything about me and Glowin. All right? Secondly . . .”
Lena waits, and at first she’s amused by the change in his demeanor, until it hits her how completely contrary it is to the usual bullshit bravado she’s seen him exude.
She considers the possibility she made it over the wall for the briefest of moments.
“Yeah?” she asks, waiting, actually interested in what he’s going to say next.
“Just concentrate on your prep,” Dorsky finally says.
“Yes, Chef.”
The word somehow tastes less bitter in her mouth this time.
BRIDE PROBLEMS
Lena, as she’s made a habit of doing, is hanging out in the pastry kitchen with Nikki, marveling at the process by which she turns Burmese rubies into an edible jam.
Well, edible for goblins, anyway.
“Ryland is a miserable, insufferable little man,” Nikki explains, “but he’s a brilliant alchemist. He’d probably be a gagillionaire if he co
uld lay off the booze and stop acting like such a prick for five minutes.”
Lena laughs, loudly and genuinely.
It’s the only time at work she does.
“Excuse me?” a delicate voice calls to them from the entrance to the pastry kitchen.
The turn to see Bianca, the goblin prince’s fiancée, standing there, clutching her purse string in both hands before her awkwardly.
Nikki swallows, feeling suddenly exposed. “Princess Bianca! I didn’t know you were in the building.”
She smoothes her hands hopelessly over her stained apron.
Lena watches her, frowning slightly, lacking the instilled awe of goblin culture to feel impressed by the young woman’s presence.
“Please,” Bianca begs her. “I’m not a . . . princess.”
“Not yet,” Lena points out dryly.
Bianca smiles awkwardly. “Right.”
“What’s wrong?” Nikki asks, the woman’s obvious pain overcoming Nikki’s sense of propriety. “Come in, please. Would you like a cupcake?”
Her smile becomes a little easier.
She nods. “I kinda would, yeah.”
Nikki invites the princess bride to sit at one of the kitchen’s small islands. She retrieves one of her signature spumoni cupcakes, a few of which are always stowed away in one or more freezers, and plates it quickly for the woman.
The first bite seems to instantly, if briefly, overcome the young woman’s emotional state.
“Ohmagod amazing,” she says through a mouthful of chocolate mint chip–filled cherry cake and pistachio frosting.
Nikki grins happily.
Lena joins them at the island, having retrieved three wineglasses and a bottle of dessert wine.
“How can we help you?” Nikki asks sincerely.
“It’s just . . . you were so nice at the tasting,” Bianca explains. “And you looked like . . . like you kind of understood? And I don’t really have anyone to talk to about this. My friends and my family . . . it’s just a whole other world to them.”
Lena snorts. “Tell me about it,” she says, gulping down a glass of wine before either of them have reached for theirs.
Nikki shoots her a reprimanding look.
Lena shrugs apologetically.
“What’s wrong?” Nikki asks Bianca. “Is it the wedding? The prince?”
