by Matt Wallace
Bronko ends the call and stashes his phone, a swarm of bees seeming to be buzzing between his ears. The rest of his body feels numb.
He disembarks from the cab in the middle of the afternoon. The street is quiet and his door appears undisturbed as Bronko approaches the stoop. Halfway up the steps, however, Bronko pauses, at first confused, and then concerned.
There’s a giant present awaiting him on his doorstep.
“Hard to believe this ends well,” he mutters.
The box is large enough to hold two Crock-Pots and is elaborately gift-wrapped with gold paper and silver ribbons. The embossed tag has the word “Byron” etched in elegant lettering with nothing else written on it.
Bronko walks slowly up the remaining steps and kneels down slowly while cursing the unnatural symphony of creaks and pops issuing from his knees. He scrutinizes the box without touching it, the old bomb cliché running through his mind, followed by a montage of far more gruesome, inhuman possibilities for what might await him inside the box should the sender be less than an admirer of his.
He realizes he’s only postponing the inevitable and leans over the box. Shaking the lid free, he sets it aside and peers within.
Bronko immediately looks away, shutting his eyes tight as he coughs several times. The smell is already firmly ensconced in both of his nostrils, however. He’s uncertain whether it’s that olfactory assault causing his guts to churn, or whether the sight of what’s inside the box that’s causing that particular sensation. He’s less confused about the source of the sheer dread that is slowly spreading through his entire body.
He doesn’t have to look inside the box to examine its contents; a split-second viewing of them has burned the image in graphic detail into his brain. Bronko looks again anyway, if for no other reason than to verify his tired, frightened mind isn’t lying to him.
Two heads, human heads, have been carefully placed inside the large box. There’s no blood; the stumps of their surgically severed necks have been carefully cauterized.
One of the heads belongs to the new Allensworth.
The other head belongs to Enzo Consoné, newly elected President of the Sceadu, the shadow government of the supernatural world.
The dread completely takes hold of Bronko. The implications of these savage tokens are enough to spin the world around him until he’s afraid he’ll vomit into the box.
Not only is Allensworth, his Allensworth, alive and well, he’s forgone the clandestine usurping for which he attempted to subvert Sin du Jour time and time again. These severed heads must be the result of a full-on palace coup. He’s assassinated Consoné and gone so far as to attack his own former allies in the shadowy, nameless agency that oversees human-supernatural diplomatic relations. He’s taken out anyone who would oppose him.
Bronko can scarcely breathe as he notices an object has been carefully wedged between the cold blue lips of Enzo Consoné’s decapitated head. With trembling fingers, Bronko gently pries what turns out to be a folded piece of paper from the dead man’s mouth. The tremors only intensify as he hastily unwraps its edges.
It’s a simple note, unsigned, short and to the point.
I’ll see you all soon, Byron.
Bronko lets the slip of paper flit from his fingertips and back into the box. He stands, very slowly, not trusting his legs. Once he has his feet back underneath him, Bronko stares out over the serenity of the leaf-littered street in front of his brownstone. There are no dark vans or suspicious cars with tinted windows parked at the curb. There are no errant dog-walkers who might be spying on him from afar. It’s the same street it’s always been.
Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be? Allensworth wouldn’t leave a package like this on his doorstep just to murder him a moment later. He wants Bronko to live with the anticipation for at least a little while.
For some reason, it’s that thought which sobers him, reconnecting Bronko with the head chef who gives the orders and has for as long as he can remember.
Bronko draws in a slow, deep, cleansing breath, flexing his fingers and balling them into fists several times to bring his trembling under control.
“Here we go, then,” he says. “War it is.”
PART II
WAR IN THREE COURSES:SERVED COLD
MORE GOOD THAN HARM
James fills a Dixie cup with a finger of Swedish brandy and raises the paper rim to Darren’s lips, cooing to him gently as he drinks.
“There you are, mon amour. This is, how they say, good for what ails you. You will be right in no time.”
Darren swallows hard, the alcohol warming his ragged throat in a soothing way rather than stinging, as he would’ve expected.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
They’re sitting on the worn leather sofa in Bronko’s office, a plush blanket wrapped around Darren’s shoulders. James has prepared a bowl of stew for him that Darren has yet to touch.
“I wish that we could go home,” James laments. “I would like to be in our own bed tonight. Chef says it is too dangerous now.”
“I believe it.”
James places his hand behind Darren’s head gently and kisses his temple.
“We will find our way through this,” he whispers. “I promise you, mon amour.”
Darren closes his eyes and rests his forehead against James’s bald scalp.
“You’re too good for this world,” he says. “I used to think of myself that way, but I wasn’t good; I was just . . . naive. I know you’ve seen bad shit, but you’re still good.”
“It is because of the things I have seen that I know how important it is to be your best self.”
Darren smiles, almost ruefully. “See? Only a ridiculously good person would say crap like that.”
“Is this a bad time?”
Ritter is standing in the open doorway, watching them without expression.
James and Darren look up at him, James quickly turning his gaze to Darren in concern.
Darren, however, appears undisturbed by Ritter’s presence.
“Do we have any other kinds of times lately?”
Ritter nods. “Fair. I want to ask you how you’re feeling, but I want to make it clear I just mean physically. I know how stupid a question that is to apply to any other part of you right now.”
“Physically? I feel like I have the worst hangover ever.”
“Good. That’ll pass.”
“What do you need, Ritter?” James asks hastily, seeming less upset with Ritter and more worried about how he might upset Darren.
Ritter hangs his head, silent at first. When he looks back at Darren, his expression is strained, as if he’s barely containing the emotion he feels.
“Look, you trusted me and I fucked you. There’s no other way to say it.”
Darren nods. “Lena told me what happened. She told me about your brother. She didn’t say it like she’s forgiven you, though.”
“I don’t expect her to. I don’t expect you to, either.”
“But you’re sorry?” Darren asks.
“I am. More than I can ever say, and more than I can ever make up for.”
“Well.” Darren looks at James, who looks back. They both smile. “I’m alive and I didn’t kill anybody. In the long run, I’m going to choose to believe you did me more good than harm.”
Ritter swallows. “I wish I could believe that, kid.”
Darren stares up at him intently. He suddenly looks far older.
“You did a shitty thing, but you didn’t make me do anything, okay? I gave in to . . . whatever that was. I know that now. I could’ve told it to fuck off. It was a choice. It just played on everything I always hated about myself, and everything I was afraid of. And I couldn’t see it. I do now. That part is on me.”
“Well, you were strong enough to break free,” Ritter says.
“Barely.”
Ritter fixes him with hard, knowing eyes. “Barely is enough.”
Darren almost seems comforted by that, but the pai
n and the memories are still too fresh.
“What about you and Lena?” he asks, intentionally changing the subject.
Ritter shrugs. “We’re treating it like the end of the world, I guess. Because it just might be. And if the world’s ending, a lot of the petty shit just isn’t important any more.”
Darren nods. “Okay. Well, if it’s the end of the world, let’s have a drink. James has this kick-ass brandy.”
James raises the bottle helpfully, smiling.
For the first time, Ritter looks something close to relieved.
“A drink sounds like a good idea,” he says.
SHORTHANDED
Thoughts of revenge are the only thing currently distracting Allensworth from the agony of half his body parts slowly becoming new body parts.
Watching Sircus, the warrior-chieftain of the Vig’nerash demon clan, preen in front of several mirrors while harpy attendants affix armor composed of the bones of his enemies to his leathery hide does little to salve the pain or block out the crackling sound of Allensworth’s skin hardening and his bones reshaping. Even the otherworldly herbs Sircus’s surgeon gave him to ingest seem to barely dull the sensation of knives piercing half his nerve endings.
They are dozens of yards beneath Wall Street, where the Vig’nerash warriors are massing around several open hellmouths that serve as portals to the underworld (90 percent of New York City hellmouths are located under Wall Street, for obvious reasons). They’re preparing for the second phase of Allensworth’s plan, the full-scale assault on Hell itself.
Allensworth finds he couldn’t care less about this part. There’s only one thing on his mind, the desire that’s been steadily gnawing his innards with greater and greater ferocity since Gluttony Bay.
“I can almost feel your impatience,” Sircus idly remarks. “And I have always known you to be such a calm and calculating being.”
“I’ve undergone some drastic changes as of late.”
“Necessary changes,” Sircus reminds him.
“I am aware,” Allensworth says through tense lips. “It’s the cause of those necessary changes that requires my immediate attention.”
“If slaughtering those cooks was such a priority, you should have done it before you staged your little coup and committed us to open conflict.”
“I had to escalate the timetable after they violated my private home and that bastard Astaroth told them everything! Besides, I wanted them to know what’s coming.”
“And now?”
“I want what’s coming to arrive.”
“It will. After my warriors crush the Oexial clan here and in Hell, and I sit atop the Throne of the Fallen, as you promised.”
“I’ve fulfilled my commitments. I’ve isolated the Oexial for you. They have no support, no allies, above or below. The Dark Lord Himself couldn’t get a phone call returned from Los Angeles to New York right now. They will never be more vulnerable.”
“Then you have only to wait until we sweep them all into the abyss.”
“I am sick of waiting!” Allensworth says frothily.
“My legions aren’t your private army, Allensworth! The Vig’nerash have waited ages to unseat the Oexial, and those old fossils will fight to the last demon.”
“One battalion for two hours is all I would require,” Allensworth insists. “We’d crush Sin du Jour and your warriors would be back in time to taste fresh Oexial entrails.”
Sircus sighs, and it sounds more like a snake hissing. “I will spare what warriors I can, when I can. If you wish to exact your vengeance sooner, then you will simply have to use your own forces.”
“What forces are those? The Sceadu is headless and decimated. Regular government resources are scattered. Most of them don’t know who is in charge right now. It will take weeks to consolidate them, at least.”
Sircus dismisses his attendants with a wave of his talons and turns to regard Allensworth.
“Are you telling me a human of your associations and influence cannot summon enough favors to create a makeshift force sufficient to lay siege to a catering company?”
The question seems to sober Allensworth. He stares up at the demon clan leader with a renewed energy in his mismatched expression.
Slowly, a sinister grin spreads through the still-human half of his mouth.
“I suppose I can make a few calls,” he says.
FAMILY MEAL
Usually, it’s a single-dish affair, Bronko cooking up a huge pot of paella on Monday with Friday’s seafood or smoking a batch of pulled pork and tossing it in a tangy house-made barbeque sauce highlighted by a reduction of Mexican Coca-Cola (all the while loudly and virulently cursing the high-fructose corn syrup industry). Sometimes, he’ll serve the succulent shredded pork on Hawaiian roll sliders topped by scorching-hot pickles brined by Bronko himself in a sixty-year-old barrel into which he tosses flayed habaneros and ghost peppers, seeds and all, and drips the extract of Carolina Reapers imported directly from Rock Hill.
When Dorsky cooks for family meal, he always tries to elevate the spread (including wanting to sous-vide everything after watching Bradley Cooper in the movie Burnt, or more precisely wanting to be Bradley Cooper in the movie Burnt), but the practical demands of feeding an entire kitchen staff on a busy workday usually reins in his perpetually overachieving, ceaselessly - trying - to - be - Bronko nature. Still, his five-cheese raviolis in brown butter with jalapeño and mint pesto have been a longtime favorite of the line.
The family meals prepared by Lena usually see her resurrect the Hungarian comfort dishes of her childhood, stuffing cabbage with a peppery mix of beef and pork and onions and bacon, simmering a hot and spicy fisherman’s soup, or stewing a meat-and-vegetable goulash. In a way, these dishes exemplify Lena’s cooking far more than the fine-dining fare she prepares for Sin du Jour’s clients: simple, clean, flawlessly executed, and not meant to prove anything to anyone except herself.
Tonight is a different affair. Tonight’s family meal at Sin du Jour is a potlatch spectacle stamped with every staff member’s fingerprint, attending by everyone save Boosha, forever tethered to her tiny ramshackle apothecary. They’ve all prepared their best dishes, or rather the dishes they’d most want to share with the people closest to them. For the line cooks, it’s a showcase, an inverse last meal, one dish by which to be remembered and leave their mark on the kitchen.
James has re-created the cheeseburger that was his first meal in America, from a stand near Grand Central Station, overloaded with caramelized onions and butter pickles. Chevet spent three days marinating chicken in wine from his family’s vineyard for a timeless coq au vin. Tenryu has transformed the aborted cheese that is tofu into something sumptuous and texturally pleasing using crab sauce and real wasabi (it’s highly likely all the wasabi you’ve ever eaten is dyed horseradish). Rollo’s scratch-made miniature cheese blintzes are exquisitely delicate and surprisingly light, everything the gruff Eastern European bear of a man is not.
Lena has crafted a perfectly clear consommé of such deep and evolving flavor, it’s like tasting some sort of magic trick. None of them, including Bronko, are able to deduce how she developed that kind of flavor in such a simple and transparent dish.
“I’ll tell ya, Tarr,” the executive chef says after letting his last spoonful of the consommé slide down his throat. “You could give me this alongside a plate of Kobe beef and million-dollar truffles stacked into a perfect tower, and this here soup is what I’d remember.”
It’s the most meaningful compliment Lena has ever received.
Sin du Jour’s non-kitchen staff has gotten in on the act as well. Cindy offers up a rendition of her favorite Mediterranean dish from her favorite Mediterranean restaurant, bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with chorizo and served with a piquillo pepper sauce. Even White Horse managed a Crock-Pot full of tough, chewy goat (he claims his people prefer the consistency of the meat that way and always have).
After an hour of passing every dish around the table seve
ral times and sharing the kind of talk that isn’t small yet intentionally avoids the larger issues at hand in favor of frivolity and mostly bad jokes, Bronko stands at the head of the long buffet table around which they’re all seated.
The chatter quiets. The rattling of glasses and silverware dies down.
“It’s not my aim to stand up here and make a speech,” he begins.
“Sure it is, Chef.”
“Shut up, Tag,” Bronko instructs his sous chef, eliciting laughter from the rest of them, even Nikki, who swats Dorsky as a form of reprimand.
Bronko takes a deep breath. “I just wanted to cook. Y’know? I wasn’t more’n a li’l ol’ hick from Beeville, Texas, just another meathead who washed out as a pro football player. I didn’t have shit else. But my mama taught me how to cook, and I was good at it. People liked my food. They liked me in the kitchen. I could make myself heard through my cooking. At the start, that was all I wanted. It purely was. Then came the money and the agents and managers and producers and . . . I just let myself get swallowed up by all of it. I stopped paying the right kind of attention to my life. I ignored my way through two busted marriages. Got to the point I didn’t have a ‘friend’ didn’t work for me or make money off me some way. And when I hit the skids, there wasn’t a soul among them stuck around to see the crash. I did every damn thing wrong a body could do in my position, and it landed me in the worst spot. . . .”
Bronko’s words fade into memories only he can see. He shakes them away like errant water drops from his temples.
“I ended up here. It was my last-chance saloon, that’s all. I hated it at first. I purely did. It felt like a jail. I didn’t wanna end up here, ya understand. But I surely am glad I did. Because y’all are the only—”
He breaks then, his voice gone hoarse and tears prickling the corners of his eyes.
“Y’all are the only family I ever had, and I wish like hell I’d been smart enough to lead you somewhere better, anywhere but here. I’m so sorry, y’all.”
