Pride's Spell

by Matt Wallace

  Her frightened eyes find his.

  Ritter reaches out and pinches the flesh of her arm.

  Hard.

  “Owwwwwww!” she wails. “What the hell, man?”

  Cindy shoves an arm between him and the girl.

  “Ritt! Damn!”

  “There y’are,” he says to Little Dove. “Hi. Look, I don’t know what happened to you, and if it sucked I’m sorry, but we don’t have time for it right now. Snap out of it and go over to your grandfather. Keep him still and keep him awake. Okay?”

  Little Dove stares up at him angrily, rubbing the reddened patch of skin on her arm.

  She looks to Cindy, who can only shrug.

  “Fine,” she says hoarsely. “Yeah. Okay. I’ve got it.”

  Ritter nods. “Thank you.”

  She pries herself away from Cindy and crawls across the floor to where her White Horse is lying.

  Cindy stands up, looking at Ritter with obvious displeasure.

  “You’re a shitty trauma counselor,” she says.

  “I’ll send her a card,” he says, his mind already moving on. “Come on.”

  He strikes off down the hall.

  Cindy follows, still frowning.

  None of the lights are working in the corridor, either.

  It’s totally silent.

  The space just feels abandoned.

  Ritter’s gut sinks with every step.

  They come across the first one several yards before the entrance to the main kitchen. It’s a small body lying on its back, even smaller than Cupid. Its face is all sharp, elongated angles like a horrific wooden puppet. It is alive, however, or was, and it has a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. It’s clad in a green tunic, a breadcrumb hat, and pointed shoes.

  The shoes and hat both have bells on them.

  There’s a high-end paring knife sticking out of its right eye.

  “That’s not—”

  “An elf,” Ritter confirms. “It’s a helper elf.”

  Cindy stares down at the little monster’s corpse darkly.

  “So, that means . . .”

  PAPERWEIGHTS

  “San Nioclás!” Ryland informs them irately. “Daidí na Nollag. Father Christmas. Whatever you want to call the fat bastard, it’s him!”

  Hara and Moon found Sin du Jour’s resident alchemist not far from his perpetually parked RV home, on his hands and knees throwing up liquid the color of blood, but which smelled like sour grapes.

  Half a dozen stone statues of demonic Christmas elves in various menacing poses surrounded him.

  Now he’s sitting on the steps of his booted RV, chain-smoking a cigarette every thirty seconds with vomited wine drying on the same powder-blue dress shirt he always wears.

  “Where did all the lawn gnomes come from?” Moon asks, staring at the grotesque miniature statues.

  “The North Pole. Obviously.”

  “Oh, they’re elves?”

  “They’re hellions bereft of any semblance of manners or etiquette!” Ryland all but shrieks, nearly falling from the steps of the RV.

  Hara reaches out a hand and encompasses Ryland’s entire right shoulder, steadying him.

  The drunken alchemist tries to shake him off, but it’s a futile attempt.

  “So, wait. These things . . . like, they were real? And you turned them into stone?”

  “I had little choice in the matter,” Ryland says defensively.

  “So . . . okay, run it back for us, bro. What all happened?”

  Ryland sighs animatedly, dropping the stub of his fifth cigarette on the pavement and lighting a sixth.

  “I was enjoying a late supper of gourmet fermented grapes and decidedly nongourmet fermented grapes when I heard a terrible commotion inside. Disturbed, and frankly pained in the head, I sought to investigate. As soon as I opened the door I was set upon by these—”

  He waves both arms wildly at the stone elves.

  “It was an ambush, I tell you!”

  Moon is genuinely impressed.

  “How’d you turn them all to stone like that?”

  “I don’t recall. Quite impressively and expertly, I imagine.”

  “Okay, wicked, but where does Santa Claus fit into—”

  “I saw him! I glimpsed his bright red posterior inside wreaking havoc on the interior! A great, corpulent fellow. Clearly an anglophile’s representation of the beloved seasonal icon. I blame America, frankly.”

  He’s poised to say more, but Ryland’s tirade is interrupted by a sudden cacophony from high above them.

  They all look up as a large fiery object flies over the side of Sin du Jour’s roof three stories above and plunges down to the concrete in front of them.

  It hits the pavement with a wet, sickening thud.

  “Holy shit!”

  “What now?” Ryland whines, leaning back into his RV.

  Hara approaches it, examining what appears to be the charred corpse of an animal, one with horns sharpened into scythes and patchy, burnt fur decorated with bones and small skulls.

  It’s a reindeer, or was.

  Hara looks back at Moon and points up, his expression harder than usual.

  Moon nods. “Right. Yeah. The roof. Okay.” He looks back at Ryland. “Let’s go.”

  “I don’t wish to go,” Ryland protests. “I’m unwell. I’ve had a terrible fright and require tea and a brief nap, and also—”

  Hara has grabbed him by the shirt before he can finish, hauling him off the RV steps and dragging him along as the three walk to the service entrance.

  “Unhand me, you great brute!” Ryland screeches as he’s pulled inside the building. “At least allow me to bring my smoking materials, ya bastard!”

  THE AFTER-PARTY

  It’s almost two hours later when Lena and the others have the penthouse party wrapped. They’ve returned the serving and prep equipment to the hotel’s kitchen, vacuum-sealed all the perishable leftovers, and returned everything they brought to their rented vans in the subterranean parking structure.

  They cut the temp servers loose for the night and she, Darren, Pacific, and Mr. Mirabel make their way to the ground floor of the hotel. VIP signs direct them to a long, empty corridor with high vaulted ceilings like something from an ancient church.

  The heavy security at the far end lets them pass.

  The other end is marked by a towering set of closed double doors.

  More security guards it.

  They also grant the foursome entrance based on the cartoon chocolate cake Sin du Jour logos embroidered on the breasts of their smocks.

  But first one of the severe-looking two-piece guards asks them, “Y’all have cell phones?”

  Lena just stares at him in surprise and confusion at first.

  “No,” Darren answers for her. “They haven’t worked all day.”

  “Recording devices of any kind?” the guard presses them.

  The four of them exchange looks.

  “Uh, no, nothing,” Lena assures him.

  One of the double doors is opened just enough to allow them each to pass through individually.

  They’re immediately blasted with a sonic lashing of bass-heavy techno music from within.

  Lena enters first, followed by the rest. The space is massive, with Italian marble floors and a ceiling forty feet high and dominated by an artisanal stained-glass skylight. Jett has bathed it in constantly shifting lights of deep reds and violets.

  But it’s not the lighting design or the music that has stricken the two line cooks and two servers dumb with awe.

  What they’re witnessing is a carnival of culinary sin in full swing and beyond anything Lena could’ve imagined.

  Jett and Nikki have both outdone themselves in their separate areas of expertise.

  Not only that, they’ve married them together to create something of which Lena wouldn’t have thought them capable, especially Nikki, who she’s come to know as the reserved, cheerful baker making cupcakes in her little kitchen at Sin
du Jour.

  There’s a kaleidoscopic tug-of-war for Lena’s attention. Her eyes fall briefly on what look like oversized rubber children’s pools filled with melted chocolate. Svelte, gorgeous twentysomething men and women clad in Speedo bikinis are frolicking and play-wrestling in it. Stations are set up around the paddling pools, piled high with skewers of dusted marshmallows, fresh strawberries, and other delicacies guests are picking up and brushing on the chocolate-covered models.

  Lena’s attention immediately shifts to another station, an arrangement of ornate gurneys upon which more of the beautiful twentysomethings are laid out, covered in succulent pieces of sashimi and sushi rolls.

  There’s a giant freestanding lobster tank, but the lobsters at the bottom are only two- to three-pound tails that have already been cooked. Instead of water the tank is filled with melted butter being kept at temperature by motorized heaters. At the top of the tank there are literally divers in full-body wet suits emblazoned with the studio logo waiting to dive in the tank and retrieve the meaty, butter saturated tails upon request.

  There’s an entire installation designed to look like an old, rustic mine cart sitting on a short length of track. A mound of multicolored gems is piled high inside it. A large spiral drill is erected over the top of the cart. It constantly bathes the gems in an iridescent sauce made of jade that can only be a creation of Ryland’s. Famous goblin actors and singers pick at the jewel mountain and pop them in their mouths, crunching up the stones easily and swallowing them.

  An entire three-hundred-pound whole hog bathed in a barbeque chocolate sauce is roasting over a mobile fire pit. There are ribbon dancers in elaborate costumes whose ribbons seem to be made of edible licorice.

  It’s too much for the human mind to process.

  “This is fucking insane!” Lena yells over the blaring music.

  Darren’s smile is half a foot wide across his face with the openness of a child. “This is awesome!”

  Behind them, Pacific lights one of his ready-made, expertly rolled joints, takes a puff and passes it to Mr. Mirabel.

  “At least we’re finally on a gig where we can burn one without getting hassled,” Pacific says dreamily.

  The very center of the space is quartered off with classic Hollywood theater red velvet ropes and gold-plated posts.

  They’re protecting what looks to Lena like the world’s largest chafing dish, the kind of novelty item roadtrippers cruising through the South would pull over to admire.

  The dish is filled with a gleaming red cherries jubilee, the dessert traditionally paired with ice cream and served flambéed.

  Except this one is the size of a Scottish hilltop.

  It’s only awaiting cream and fire.

  That must be the evening’s grand finale Jett mentioned.

  Very few guests from the premiere party upstairs have been allowed access to the after-party, and most of the people here didn’t even bother to attend the penthouse affair at all.

  This is the VIP crowd.

  Most of them Lena doesn’t know on sight. The new faces Lena spots that she recognizes don’t belong to celebrities, they belong to bona fide legends.

  She even thinks she sees a Beatle.

  “Yo!”

  It’s Bronko.

  He makes his way to them through the sea of jubilant bodies.

  “All good?” he asks Lena.

  “Yes, Chef.”

  “All right, then. Y’all are off the clock.”

  “Should we go back to the hotel?” Darren asks.

  Bronko. “Hell, no! Mix it up a little. Have a good time. These folks won’t notice the difference, not at this point.”

  He claps Darren on the shoulder and throws Lena a wink before turning and leaving them on their own.

  But before he does he snatches the joint from Pacific’s lips.

  “Party foul!” Pac complains.

  Lena eventually finds Nikki staffing a station where guests recline in a massage chair while she creates miniature gourmet ice cream sundaes in their open mouths.

  “Hey!” Lena shouts out of necessity, tapping her on the shoulder.

  Nikki looks back, sees her, and smiles.

  “Oh, hey!”

  “How could you not tell me about any of this?” Lena asks, head still spinning.

  “I wanted it to be a surprise!” Nikki yells as she drizzles pistachio syrup into the waiting mouth of the star of that big male stripper movie franchise.

  “It is,” Lena says at a normal volume and in deadpan fashion.

  “How’d you do all this?” she asks.

  Nikki is now spooning maple walnut ice cream past the lips of the main villain from those blockbuster superhero team movies, who, while not being the traditional definition of movie star sex appeal, she’d personally straddle in that chair and allow to eat the ice cream off of her.

  “Uh . . .” She fumbles to respond to Lena, distracted. “Jett’s zomb—. . . workers. They helped.”

  Jett’s politically correct views of the undead preclude anyone she works with from referring to her crew as “zombies,” even though that’s exactly what they fucking are.

  “You let them do food prep?” Lena demands, shocked.

  Nikki waves away her concerns with her free hand. “We put them in hazmat suits. It’s fine. How else were we supposed to get this all set up in three days?”

  Three hours go by in a blinding haze.

  At one point Lena watches as the stripper movie guy has to be carried out of the after-party.

  He’s not drunk.

  In fact, he didn’t have a drop to drink.

  He simply ate until he became violently ill and could no longer stand or form cogent sentences.

  UP TO THE HOUSETOP THE COURSERS THEY FLEW

  It’s a war of blood and fire between Santa Claus, his reindeer and elves, and half a dozen Manhattan-trained chefs on a rooftop in Long Island City.

  Only in New York.

  Ritter and Cindy burst through the access door to the rooftop, coming upon the scene in full throes.

  Dorsky and the line cooks have formed a haphazard skirmish line behind a makeshift barricade of upturned buffet tables on wheels and piles of stainless-steel chafing dishes. They’re all armed with the largest kitchen cutlery they could grab; Rollo, the great bear of a man ever by Dorsky’s side, is holding the haft of a giant meat cleaver that looks like it came out of the Middle Ages. They’ve also got chafing dishes full of smaller knives that they’re hurling like artillery over the barricade.

  Santa Claus is an eight-foot-tall mass of flesh that’s more like rawhide and hair that’s more like steel wool armor. His beard is as long as an average-sized person all by itself and wide enough to consume several of those. It’s decorated with dozens of disturbingly small skulls and likewise bones. He holds a bullwhip as thick as anchor chain in one claw-gauntleted hand, swinging his signature toy sack in the other, though this sack is spiked like the bulbous head of a mace and shoots fireballs out of its bottom.

  The Santa from Hell (literally) stands behind the pulpitlike rise of a bone-armored sled. A mammoth’s skull with one side caved in adorns the mast. Santa cracks his whip and slings orbs of flame at the chefs’ skirmish line, blazing up the cloths still half-covering several of the tables and denting their surfaces.

  All the while jolly laughter’s psychotic, cocaine-addicted cousin pours from a dark and murky hollow in the top of that macabre beard.

  “Ritter!” Dorsky yells as he spots them emerging from the doors. “Hit the deck!”

  Ritter wants to yell back at the asshole that he just exposed their position to the enemy, but that would be counterproductive.

  Also, he doesn’t have time, as that enemy is now charging them.

  Several elves armed with tiny yet wickedly curved blades scurry toward Ritter and Cindy.

  One of the colossal, monstrous reindeer trudges behind the creatures.

  Cindy unleashes a one-armed golf swing with her tomahawk th
at takes most of the head off the first elf to come at her. She brings that same arm back down on the next elf, chopping him in half like a block of firewood.

  Meanwhile, the reindeer picks up speed and lowers its horns, aiming for them both.

  Ritter drops the heavy duffel bag slung over his shoulder and reaches inside his coat with deadly purpose.

  He pulls out a baseball.

  Cindy glances from the charging reindeer to Ritter, looking at him as if he’s lost his mind.

  Ritter winds up like Nolan Ryan and sends one straight down the pike at a good seventy-five miles an hour.

  Three feet in front of the barreling creature the baseball splits open all on its own, its stringy guts falling out.

  Instead of hitting the rooftop in a bundled mass, those guts magically uncoil and expand.

  They become a net.

  The reindeer hits it full force, the impossibly expansive web of string constricted around it and bundling the animal, taking its legs away and sending it sprawling in a heap on its side.

  Its momentum sends that heap sliding across the rooftop.

  Ritter and Cindy have to dive from its path in opposite directions to avoid being steamrolled.

  The bound reindeer crashes against the wall beside the access door.

  Ritter ends up rolling onto his stomach. He’s feeling pretty satisfied with himself until he looks up and sees another one of the reindeer staring down its steaming, dripping nose at him.

  The reindeer bares impossibly sharp teeth at him in a ferocious snarl. “Shit,” is all Ritter can come up with.

  Fortunately Cindy is more eloquent.

  She lets her tomahawk do the talking, burying its blade in the reindeer’s neck.

  It lets out a thunderous bellow and swings its massive head at her. Cindy leans in, mostly avoiding the sharp prongs of its horns, but its cranium is enough to knock her off her feet.

  It gives Ritter time to roll out from under the animal’s mercy and rebound to his feet, but not enough to get clear of it before the reindeer turns its agonized, infuriated attention back to him.

  Ritter thinks about the small hideaway magicks he has left on his person, wondering if they’ll be enough to subdue a pissed-off Santa’s reindeer from Hell.