by Matt Wallace
“God, no. No.” Bianca takes a sip of her wine. It seems to fortify her to go on. “Marek is amazing. Really. He’s not . . . Goblins, the ones who live in the spotlight, they have their public families and their private families, see. So he grew up away from all of that. He’s very smart and very down to earth. He’s been groomed to rule and to lead. And that’s what he is, a leader. But his family . . . and all of their friends . . .”
“Assholes?” Lena asks bluntly.
Bianca buries her face in her hands. “They hate me so much, you guys. I just can’t even.”
“Oh, honey.” Nikki immediately slips her arm around Bianca’s shoulders.
“And they’re so cold about it!” she exclaims through tears. “That’s the thing! If they’d, like, yell, or say shit to me, I could take that. But they just act so cold and formal and . . . so . . . fucking . . . tolerant! I hate it!”
Nikki progresses into full-blown hugging.
Lena responds by topping off Bianca’s glass.
“I’m just worried I’ll never feel like part of the family . . . or worse, part of their world. His world.”
She sniffs and sips and then sips some more.
“I’m sorry to dump this on you. You don’t even know me.”
“It’s cool,” Lena says. “I kinda know what you’re going through. All of this . . . other world stuff is new to me, too.”
Bianca’s eyes widen. “Really?”
Lena nods.
“But she’s coping,” Nikki points out.
Lena nods more fiercely. “I am.”
Bianca breathes a little easier, if nothing else feeling less the freak in the room.
“Listen,” Nikki says. “Your wedding is going to be amazing. The food is going to be spectacular. And that man loves you. We could both tell.”
“And he is fucking gorgeous,” Lena adds. “Like . . . ridiculous hot.”
Bianca laughs at that. “Thank you . . . thank you both. I just . . . it was suffocating me. I just needed to vent.”
“We get that,” Nikki assures her. “Believe me.”
The three of them talk and drink for another hour, but the silent member of their conversation doesn’t stay for the rest.
Boosha, listening so intently and so sympathetically at the door, has heard quite enough.
SECRET INGREDIENT
Sin du Jour is never really empty.
They regularly burn the midnight oil, sure, but it’s more than that.
For some members of the staff Sin du Jour is more than a job, it’s a home.
Bronko falls asleep at his desk so often he hasn’t changed the sheets on his bed at home in six months.
Ryland, generally passed out by dusk inside or in front of his stationary RV out back, has long supplanted the need for any night watchperson.
And then there’s Boosha, who literally has not left Sin du Jour in what seems like the span of a human lifetime.
She putters around quite happily in her apothecary/test kitchen from dawn till dusk. She tastes the food of the “children,” as she calls them. She dispenses wisdom and advice. She tells her stories.
No one ever sees her outside of her little corner of the complex.
But she does, occasionally, venture out.
It’s nearly 3:00 in the morning. Everyone who has a home to go to has left. Most of the building is dark and deathly quiet.
It’s now that Boosha traipses silently into the cold storage, where a wealth of delicious fare for the royal goblin wedding awaits delivery.
She’s carrying a large sack filled with a very rare herb ground to the finest powder.
“Poor girl,” she whispers to herself as she begins sprinkling nearly imperceptible amounts of the powder over every single dish. “Poor, poor girl.”
It takes her hours to seed the entire menu for the wedding reception.
But she doesn’t miss a single scrap.
THE ROYAL GOBLIN WEDDING
It’s your basic ridiculously opulent celebrity wedding reception.
Lena and Darren (mostly Darren) were expecting something more fantastical in a Tolkien-esque sense, but that’s what it is. There’s a red carpet, there’s the latest fashions fresh off the runways of Milan and Paris, and there are limousines filled with the most stunning celebrities Hollywood and beyond have to offer.
They’ve closed down the whole of the New York Public Library for one day, an impossible feat for both kings and CEOs, but a single phone call from the goblin royal family, known to the world as entertainment-industry legends, achieves just that. Jett and her shambling crew of the undead have erected silken banners of rich, vibrant shades and created an entire custom lighting setup that bounces rays off the fabric and bathes the entire library in striking, kaleidoscopic color.
Jett is herding them all back into a large moving truck when Lena and Darren arrive with the catering vans to unload and set up all the food for the reception.
“No stragglers, people!” she shouts cordially, waving them up the ramp, speaking into the strange biological abscess attached to her ear that allows her to control their actions.
“All the finery rocking it, Jett?” Bronko asks, climbing out from behind the wheel of his vintage GTO Judge.
The two catering vans fall in behind it.
“It’s a masterpiece, Byron. I will absolutely toot my own horn. The king and queen love it.”
“What about the bride and groom?”
“Right. Yes. Them, too.”
“Uh-huh.” Bronko offers her a tiny pastry-wrapped lobster Wellington, one of several hundred in the vans behind him. “A job well done, my dear.”
“Ooooh,” Jett swoons, popping the appetizer into her mouth. “Divine, Byron. As always.”
“Thank ya kindly.”
The entire kitchen staff of Sin du Jour begins unloading the vans, half of them setting up the food inside while the other half cart tall steel towers slotted with trays full of their hard weeks of labor.
Nikki has already set up shop in a staging area through two large closed doors just off the main reception area. It is through those doors that the mountainous five-tiered replica cake will be wheeled and presented to the assemblage at the end of dinner.
Darren does his best to ignore the flashes of celebrity he catches moving in and out of the building and passing the corridors through which they’re setting up for dinner.
He has less luck ignoring the uniformed guards stationed everywhere. They’re not prototypical police or private security; they’re all wearing ceremonial-looking uniforms with arcane symbols emblazoned on them Darren can’t read.
They also all seem very familiar.
“Am I wrong or is, like, the cast from every show on the CW working security at this wedding?”
“Goblin hierarchy,” Bronko explains. “Doesn’t matter how hot or how famous they are in the rest of the world, they have to work their way up the ladder in goblin society just like everyone else. It’s an honor to be wearing those monkey suits, serving as honor guard for a gig like this.”
“That’s crazy,” Darren says, but he’s smiling unbidden like a child.
“You’re really digging all of this, aren’t you?” Lena asks them as they wheel tray towers of appetizers inside.
“You’re not?”
“I’m digging our rent being paid for the rest of the year,” she states flatly.
When they return to the vans Bronko has Dorsky, Rollo, and James corralled around him.
“And those two,” they hear Bronko say as they approach.
“What’s up, Chef?” Darren asks.
“You’re coming with us back to the kitchen to get the rest of the food,” Dorsky informs them.
“Why do we only have two vans?” Rollo asks bluntly. “We’re government-funded on top of working for the most powerful people and nonpeople in the world. Why don’t we have, like, air ships? Like in Avengers?”
Bronko looks to his sous-chef wearily.
“Shu
t up, Rollo,” Dorsky says.
“Fine.”
“Is there a reason the busboys aren’t schlepping with us?” Lena asks.
Pacific, Mr. Mirabal, and a half-dozen other hires for the wedding are currently holding court at the bottom of the library steps, clandestinely passing a joint.
“It’s not like they’re risking life and limb for this one.”
“I like to keep anyone working front of the house as calm as possible before service,” Bronko explains. “Which we’ll start while you cart the rest of the food over here. We should be good with the first load. I just want to make sure we’re covered.”
“On it, Chef,” Dorsky assures him.
He motions to the rest and Rollo, James, Lena, and Darren all pile back into the catering vans.
THE TOAST
Bianca’s uncle Ted didn’t wait.
The steel rainfall of metal tapping glass rang out just as the immaculately plated appetizers and salads were placed in front of the first tables.
Everyone else waited.
The best man waited for the general chatter to die down.
The guests waited for him to begin his toast.
Uncle Ted, on the other hand, was drunk and hungry and simply didn’t give a fuck. He took up his fork and plowed into the food in front of him with the ferocity and efficiency of a marine in a mess hall.
The rest of his table ignored the breach of etiquette, raised their glasses in honor of the newly married royal couple, and then politely began enjoying their meal.
Uncle Ted is practically ready for dessert.
Meanwhile, Bronko has stepped outside the library to enjoy a cigar and await the arrival of his chefs and the excess plates.
He’s just lighting the stogie with an old-fashioned stick match when a rumbling draws his attention.
It’s Jett’s moving truck.
Bronko squints, waving the match to extinguish it.
He didn’t realize the truck was still parked there, expecting Jett to have returned her crew to holding at Sin du Jour.
Instead it’s rocking gently from side to side at the curb, no one behind the wheel, back closed up tight.
Bronko walks over to the truck’s rear.
“Jett?” he calls around the stogie in his mouth. “You in there?”
A gentle panic begins to fill him as he pictures the excitable woman’s undead minions somehow breaking their control and devouring her whole.
Bronko makes a grab for the truck’s latch and throws the doors open.
The undead workers aren’t rapt in a feeding frenzy.
They’re all pressed against the walls of the truck, trembling as if confused or frightened or both.
Bronko squints into the darkness.
Something is moving very fast from side to side there.
That something abruptly springs from the shadows and launches itself at him.
Stogie still clutched between his teeth, Bronko finds one hand grasping Chanel while his other grips what feels like scales.
A giant, bipedal reptile wearing Jett’s suit is attacking him, he realizes with only minor horror.
Actually, it’s not attacking him, and that second realization spikes his horror significantly higher.
It’s trying to hump him.
Is humping him, in fact.
It might be funny in the most inopportune way if it weren’t accompanied by sharp claws and sharper fangs, both of which are snapping at him while Jett growls and grinds feverishly atop him.
“What the fuck!” he hollers, rearing back and hurling the Jett-creature away from him with all his might.
The horny reptilian being skitters across the pavement, righting itself quickly.
Bronko only has time to get to his knees before she/it leaps at him anew.
Fortunately for Bronko the reptilian creature is every bit as petite as Jett. He overwhelms its size, and his strength allows him to wrestle it under control. Not wanting to toss it/her back into the moving truck with the undead, he drags the Jett-creature over to his Judge, pops the trunk with a mighty kick, and tosses her inside, closing the lid and sealing her in.
Somehow through it all he hasn’t bitten through his stogie. His ragged, elevated breathing draws in smoke, and he coughs roughly around it.
Bronko removes the cigar from his mouth and casts it into the gutter.
His mind is reeling.
“Okay,” he says to himself. “Okay . . . think now . . .”
And he does.
And the image of him handing Jett one of their wedding appetizers hit him.
And Bronko runs back into the library.
Or rather, he attempts to run back inside.
Five feet from the nearest entrance Bronko runs smack into an invisible field of energy as solid and impassable as steel.
It knocks him onto the pavement for a third time.
“Fuck me!” he yells, and it’s not in pain or confusion.
He knows exactly what’s happening.
BRICK DOORS, BRICK WINDOWS
The boys are lounging in the main kitchen, sitting among the final tray towers laughing and indulging in shots of Jameson provided by Dorsky, whose taken one of the vans down to the corner to get gas.
They’re also indulging in a few appetizers.
Lena has left them to it. On the way over she received a call from Nikki on her cell, asking Lena to grab her purse, which she left behind.
Lena is walking back from the pastry kitchen when she hears the first rumblings, the first gnashing of inhuman teeth and grotesque sounds of moist friction.
She halts, puzzling at it.
She also spots Dorsky at the other end of the hall, walking from the lobby entrance to the building.
He pauses as he hears it too.
They trade puzzled looks from afar, neither of them speaking aloud.
Eventually their feet begin carrying them forward again.
They meet at the archway leading into the main kitchen.
They both peer inside at the same time.
Processing that for which you have no frame of reference is always the most difficult thing for the human mind to do.
Neither Lena nor Dorsky has a frame of reference for watching a trio of giant lizard-men wearing Sin du Jour smocks savagely fucking each other in their kitchen.
But that’s exactly what they’re looking at.
Lena is horrified beyond responding.
Dorsky is at least able to grasp the situation at some base, instinctual level.
This is his kitchen, and these things are destroying it.
“Hey!” he yells angrily. “What the fuck is this?”
Lena shoots him an equally horrified look.
Her own instincts tell her that drawing the attention of these things is a mistake.
Her instincts are correct.
In the next moment they are both booking it for the lobby as the fornicating snake people disengage and tear after them, snarling and growling ferociously.
Lena is faster on her feet. She hits the lobby first.
Dorsky isn’t far behind, but he stops just past the entrance from the hall to the lobby and throws closed the two plywood doors that usually stand open at all times.
There’s no lock on them, but there are two vending machines in the lobby.
The reptilian creatures hit the doors from the other side a second after Dorsky topples the first steel-and-glass kiosk in front of them. It’s enough to halt them momentarily, and enough time for him to heave over the second vending machine. It lands on the first, shattering and spilling off-brand candy all over the floor.
Dorsky turns, expecting Lena to be in the street by now.
She’s not.
Instead she’s standing in front of what used to be the entrance to Sin du Jour.
Both of her hands are pushing against a solid wall of brick that has suddenly, miraculously replaced those glass doors.
“Oh, shit,” is all Dorsky manages.
&n
bsp; NO RECEPTION
Nikki is dabbing at one of several hundred plates with perfectly symmetrical cake pieces resting on them when she hears the commotion in the reception area.
She looks up, and Pacific and Mr. Mirabel are peeking through the two huge reveal doors.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“This giant lizard thing in a tux is trying to bone that dude from Grey’s Anatomy,” Pacific says, totally unfazed. “You know, the one with the hair.”
It’s so outrageous and so patently Pacific that Nikki dismisses it outright.
“I really wish you guys would wait to smoke that shit until after work,” she says, returning her attention to her plates.
“No, seriously,” Pacific says.
“For real, mami,” Mr. Mirabal adds, much more in awe of whatever he’s looking at through the door.
Brow furrowed, Nikki drops her cloth and skitters over to the doors, nudging them both aside and peering through the crack.
And sees a giant lizard thing in a tux trying to hump the guy from Grey’s Anatomy with the hair.
“Oh, my god,” she gasps.
“Yeah.”
“Sí.”
The uniformed goblin honor guard is trying to wrestle a drunk, reptilian, lust-possessed Uncle Ted off of the famous film and television actor.
They’re not doing a very good job of it, either.
Nikki, transfixed, can’t help slipping through the doors and wandering toward the epicenter of the strange atrocity.
More of the honor guard and a few NBA players are now trying to help wrangle the Uncle Ted–creature under control.
“Everyone be calm!” the goblin king booms above the frightened and shocked gasps and chatter.
Reinforced, they manage to pull the giant, sex-crazed reptile off of the actor and wrestle him/it to the floor.
The situation is finally settling down when virtually every single human guest at the reception begins to change.
Some scream, some yell, some throw themselves to the floor.
But they all begin to transform.
It is, in a word, unsettling.
Flesh stretches and mangles itself and changes into seven sickly shades of yellow and green.
