10. Dash
DASH
The door handle comes off in my fist.
Not ideal. I toss the brass knob over my shoulder, grip the door's edge with my fingers, and rip it open so hard the top hinge separates from the frame. The door swings crookedly outward and slams against the hallway wall.
A woman stands in the corridor. Silk robe.
Hair in massive rollers. Mascara streaked down both cheeks in twin rivers of black.
She's got Magnolia's jawline but sharper, Magnolia's brown eyes but colder, and a mouth currently stretched into a shape that could only be described as structural collapse.
"Who the HELL are--" She stops. Processes. Her gaze starts at my bare feet, climbs the full six feet nine inches of shirtless, scarred Orc, and arrives at my face with the dawning horror of someone who has just opened the wrong door in a haunted house.
I grip the doorframe to keep the broken door from falling on her.
"You must be the bride."
"MAGNOLIA!"
Behind me, sheets rustle. A small warm body collides with my back, and Magnolia's face appears under my arm, sleep-creased and blinking. Her hair is a magnificent disaster. She's wearing my dress shirt and nothing else, the fabric hanging past her knees like a tent.
"Petunia. It's six in the morning."
"The cake is GONE."
Magnolia's body goes rigid against my side. "What do you mean gone?"
"GONE gone! Ashes! A fire sprite got into the kitchen through the ventilation ducts and it ATE the cake!
All five tiers! The fondant, the buttercream, the sugar flowers, the little marzipan doves--GONE.
There's nothing left but a black spot on the countertop and the cake topper, which is now MELTED.
The groom figurine looks like a SLUG." Petunia cracks on the last word.
Fresh mascara rivers carve new tributaries down her cheeks.
"The wedding is in nine hours and I don't have a CAKE, Magnolia! "
I catalog the tactical situation. Fire sprite. Kitchen breach. Structural damage to pastry assets. Timeline: nine hours.
I look down at Magnolia.
Magnolia looks up at me.
Something passes between us that doesn't require language.
Her spine straightens. Her chin lifts. The woman who spent yesterday being steamrolled by her family disappears and the woman who runs a bakery, who carries shields without dropping them, who pulls thorns from Orc skin with her bare fingers, steps forward.
"Take me to the kitchen."
"It's DESTROYED--"
"Take me to the kitchen, Petunia."
Petunia blinks. Sniffs. Grabs Magnolia's wrist and drags her down the hall. Magnolia is barefoot in my shirt, padding across cold marble tile with the focused calm of a field commander approaching the front line.
I grab my torn undershirt from the wreckage of our room. The fabric complains as I pull it across my massive shoulders. Acceptable losses.
I follow.
The country club kitchen is a crime scene.
Scorch marks climb the tile walls in jagged black fingers.
Three industrial ovens stand open and gutted.
The fire suppression runes carved into the ceiling have all activated and spent themselves, leaving a fine magical frost coating every surface.
In the main prep counter sits a perfect circle of ash roughly the diameter of a wagon wheel.
Five tiers of wedding cake, reduced to carbon.
A thin trail of tiny scorched footprints leads from the ash pile to a ventilation grate, where a maintenance dwarf is currently welding the cover shut.
"Caught the little bastard in the walk-in freezer," the dwarf grunts without looking up. "Screamed like a teakettle when it hit the cold. Already shipped it off to animal control."
Petunia collapses into a prep stool. "Nine hours."
Magnolia circles the kitchen with her arms crossed. Opens drawers. Checks the pantry. Runs her finger along the inside of a mixing bowl and sniffs the residue. Crouches below the counter and examines the lower ovens, which escaped the worst of the scorching.
"These two work," she says, rapping her knuckles on the oven doors.
"So what? The baker was a specialist from the Elven Quarter. She's already gone. She took her tools and her enchanted piping bags and her stupid little edible gold leaf and she LEFT because the kitchen is 'compromised' and she doesn't work in 'compromised environments.'"
Magnolia stands. Plants both hands flat on the top. The ash from the cake puffs gently around her fingers.
"How many guests?"
"Two hundred and twelve."
"Flavor?"
"What?"
"What flavor was the cake, Petunia?"
"Vanilla bean with elderflower buttercream and a lemon curd filling, but--"
"I need forty pounds of flour. Thirty pounds of butter.
Sugar. Eggs. Twelve lemons. Elderflower cordial.
Vanilla beans, not extract." Magnolia ticks each item off on her fingers.
"And someone needs to drive to my bakery and get my rolling pins, my offset spatulas, and the big copper bowl. The one with the dent."
Petunia stares.
"I need those things in ninety minutes, Petunia."
"You can't make a five-tier wedding cake in nine hours."
Magnolia looks at me. She doesn't ask out loud. She doesn't have to.
I roll my sleeves up past my elbows.
"Tell me what to lift."
Magnolia doesn't move.
Her shoulders lock. The brief flash of command drains from her face like water through a cracked bowl, and what's left underneath is something I recognize from a hundred battlefields. The exact moment a soldier looks at the terrain and calculates, with perfect clarity, that the odds are impossible.
"I can't. Five tiers. Nine hours. Two working ovens. Two hundred and twelve people."
Petunia makes a strangled noise that suggests she's already mentally composing her social media eulogy.
"I'm a small-batch baker. I make twelve cupcakes at a time.
I make rustic loaves. I make little cookies shaped like mushrooms for the farmer's market.
" Magnolia's fingers curl against the ash-covered counter.
"I don't make five-tier wedding cakes for two hundred people in professional kitchens because I have never been in a professional kitchen because my bakery is a converted garden shed with ONE OVEN that I bought secondhand from a retired gnome. "
Her breathing goes shallow. Quick. Her pulse hammers visibly in the hollow of her throat. I've watched soldiers hyperventilate before a charge. Same rhythm. Same wild white-rimmed eyes.
"Mom was right. She's always right. My business is a hobby. I'm not a real baker. A real baker would--"
"Magnolia."
She doesn't hear me. She's spiraling now, her gaze fixed on the ash circle, her jaw working around words that are getting smaller and faster and more poisonous.
"--a real baker would have professional training and a commercial license and she wouldn't be standing barefoot in someone else's kitchen wearing an Orc's dress shirt--"
"Magnolia."
"--and maybe Mark was right too, maybe I'm just playing pretend, maybe--"
I cross the kitchen in three strides. My hand closes around the strap of her baking supply bag, the heavy canvas satchel she brought from the van last night and left by the pantry door.
I sling it over my shoulder. The bag is dense with tools.
Metal clinks against metal inside. Rolling pins.
Whisks. The particular weight of implements that have been used ten thousand times.
Then I put my other hand on the small of her back.
Not gentle. Not rough. Firm. The exact pressure required to move a body that has decided it cannot move.
"Walk."
Her feet stay planted.
"That's the panic talking. I've seen you carry a shield you couldn't lift. I've seen you drive a van with no windshield at seventy miles an hour. You don't quit."
Her breath hitches.
"But I've never--"
"Walk, baker."
Something in the word snaps her head up. Baker. Not hobby. Not pretend. I see the impact land behind her eyes. Her throat bobs on a hard swallow.
I increase the pressure on her back by one degree.
Her feet unstick from the floor. One step.
Two. I steer her past the ash pile, past the weeping bride, past the maintenance dwarf, and through the double doors into the secondary prep kitchen that adjoins the main one.
Smaller. Cleaner. Two functional ovens. A wide stainless steel prep table. Undamaged.
I set her bag on the table. Unzip it. Pull out tools one by one and line them up with the same care I use when laying out weapons before a contract.
Offset spatula. Bench scraper. Pastry brush with a worn wooden handle.
A copper whisk with a slight bend in the neck.
The big copper bowl with the dent, which someone retrieved at speed.
Magnolia's tools appear on the steel surface. Her breathing changes. Slower. Deeper. Her hands uncurl.
I place the last item on the table. A notebook, flour-dusted, spine cracked, pages swollen with handwritten recipes and dried batter stains and margin notes in purple ink. It falls open naturally to a page near the middle.
Elderflower Vanilla Bean. Mom's original. Don't screw it up, Mags.
Her fingers land on the page. Trace the handwriting.
"That's your mother's recipe?"
"My grandmother's. Mom doesn't know I have it. She thinks Grandma's recipe box got lost in the move."
"Did it?"
A ghost of a smile. "I stole it. Age twelve. Hid it in my pillowcase for three years."
"Tactical acquisition. Respect."
The smile gains substance. She squares her shoulders. Picks up the copper whisk and turns it in her hand like a soldier reacquainting herself with her blade.
"I need those ingredients in this room in the next hour," she says. The command returning, but rooted deeper this time, growing up through something older than panic.
"Done."
"And I need you to do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, no questions."
"I am under contract."
"I'm serious, Dash. When I say fold, you fold. When I say stop mixing, you stop. If you overmix my buttercream, our deal is off and it doesn’t matter how many griffins you've killed."