SOLENE
The enchanted mushrooms. Every last one.
I drop to my knees beside the shattered pine crate where sixty pounds of Bellwether Farm marrow squash should be sitting. The wood is scorched black from the inside. Tiny claw marks gouge the grain in frantic patterns, and a fine layer of ash coats the burlap lining like dirty snow.
A soot sprite perches on the rim. It blinks at me. Burps a tiny ember.
"Get. Off. My. Crate."
It doesn't move. It tilts its coal-black head and makes that crackling giggle again, and a shower of sparks drifts down onto the ruined burlap.
Boris's hand closes over the sprite like a man catching a fly. He lifts it to eye level. The thing squirms between his massive fingers, its orange eyes blazing with indignation.
"Who sent you?"
The sprite spits a chunk of burning ash at his nose. He doesn't flinch.
"Boris." I stand, brushing soot from my knees. "These don't occur naturally indoors. Someone brought a nest."
"I know."
"Someone broke that door, destroyed our station, released a swarm of magical vermin onto our ingredients twelve hours before we cook for Reginald Vance, and vanished."
"I know."
"I'm going to find them and feed them their own kneecaps."
Boris sets the sprite down. It immediately starts chewing a hole through our parchment paper. He flicks it off with one finger and it tumbles, bouncing twice before righting itself and scurrying under the overturned shelving unit to join its friends.
Three more sprites emerge from our dry goods cabinet. They've shredded the smoked paprika packets. Red powder covers their tiny bodies, making them look like furious little devils dragging their bellies across the white tile.
"The nest." Boris drops to the floor, his massive frame hitting the stone with a thud that rattles the remaining intact dishware. He army-crawls toward the industrial oven and peers underneath. "Here. Packed into the gas line housing. Someone wedged a clay pot behind the burner assembly."
"Can you pull it out?"
A grunt. The sound of something ceramic scraping against metal. Then Boris slides backward on his stomach, holding a cracked terracotta pot. Black residue cakes the rim. Inside, a writhing mass of tiny infant sprites, pulse with dull orange light.
My stomach turns. Not from disgust. From recognition.
"That's a Marchetti pot."
Boris looks up from the floor. "What?"
"Marchetti. The terracotta is stamped on the bottom. Flip it."
He turns the pot. The maker's mark is pressed into the clay in neat serif letters. MARCHETTI CERAMICA, FIRENZE.
"Chef Dante Marchetti placed third in last year's festival." I grab my phone from my coat and scroll through the festival's registered competitor list. My hand aches as I grip the screen. "He's registered again this year. So is his sous chef, Leah Park."
"The one with the tattoo sleeves?"
"The one who just posted an Instagram story forty minutes ago from outside the town hall with the caption 'early morning prep vibes' and a fire emoji."
Boris's jaw tightens. The muscles in his neck cord like bridge cables. He sets the nest pot with exaggerated care, the kind of deliberate gentleness that means he wants to throw it through a wall.
"Later," I say. "We deal with them later. Right now we have a swarm eating through every ingredient we have left and eleven hours until service."
He nods. Once.
We move.
Boris rips the broken door completely off its remaining hinge and props it against the hallway wall. Fresh morning air floods the kitchen, and the sprites nearest the doorway hiss, skittering back from the sunlight streaming across the threshold.
"They hate direct light."
"Obviously." I'm already shoving open every window.
The casement handles are stiff with age and I have to use my hip against the frames, slamming each one wide until the kitchen blazes with September sun.
Sprites scatter from the counter like roaches, pouring off the edges and pooling in the shadows beneath the cabinets.
Boris grabs the overturned shelving unit and heaves it upright with one arm.
A cascade of sprites tumbles from behind it, squealing.
He stomps his boot against the tile. The percussion sends them fleeing toward the darkest corner of the room, where they cluster behind the mop bucket in a furious, chittering pile.
"Canvas sack," he barks.
I toss him the heavy flour sack from our ruined supply. He shakes the remaining flour out, drops to his knees, and sweeps the entire huddled colony into the bag with both hands. The sack writhes and glows from within, pinpricks of orange light dotting the canvas like angry stars.
He ties the top in a triple knot and holds it at arm's length.
"Forty-six," he says.
"You counted?"
"Orcish military training. You count hostiles."
I peer at the writhing sack. Then at the destroyed kitchen around us. Cracked marble. Shredded ingredients. Ash on every surface.
Eleven hours.
"Boris, we've lost the squash. We've lost the grain flour. The fire spice is contaminated."
He sets the sack of sprites by the door and turns to face me. Rolls his massive shoulders back.
"So we start over."
"Start over," I repeat. The words taste like ash. Like the ash currently coating every horizontal surface in this kitchen.
Boris is already moving. He grabs two cast iron skillets from the wall rack, one in each hand, twelve inches across and black as sin. He spins them once, testing the weight, and his grip shifts to choke up near the pan heads.
A sprite launches itself from the exhaust hood.
Boris swings.
The left skillet connects with a dull clang. The sprite rockets sideways, trailing sparks, and smacks into the far wall where it slides down the tile in a smear of soot. It wobbles upright, dazed, and stumbles toward the canvas sack by the door like a drunk finding its way home.
"Five more up here." He points a skillet at the hood vent. Through the grease-blackened grating, ten tiny orange eyes blink down at us. "They have nested in the filtration system."
"Of course they have."
He climbs onto the prep counter. His boots leave massive prints on the stainless steel. He unscrews the vent grating with his bare fingers, the sheet metal groaning as it bends, and a fresh wave of sprites pours out like water from a broken pipe.
They scatter across the ceiling. Tiny claws find purchase on the acoustic tiles, and they skitter in all directions, trailing thin lines of soot behind them like a child's drawing of fireworks.
Boris swings.
Right pan. Left pan. Right.
Each connection sends a sprite spinning. They bounce off the ceiling tiles, off the wall-mounted fire extinguisher, off the stainless steel backsplash behind the stove. One spirals into the open flour sack by the door and doesn't come back out. The canvas glows a little brighter.
He moves with a grace that has no business belonging to an extra large orc. His feet find the gaps between burners. His shoulders roll with each swing. The twin skillets cut dark arcs through the sunlit air, and every time iron meets sprite, that hollow bell-tone rings out.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
It sounds like a blacksmith's shop in here.
I lift the industrial sink hose. The nozzle is heavy chrome, the kind with a trigger grip that can strip paint if you crank the pressure high enough. I twist the valve to maximum. Water hammers through the line and the hose kicks in my hands like something alive.
I pull the trigger.
A jet of water hits the nearest counter at full blast. Soot explodes off the stainless steel in a gray wave, washing across the surface and sluicing over the edge onto the floor. Underneath the grime, the metal gleams.
I sweep left. The stream catches two sprites mid-scurry across the prep station.
They tumble end over end, squealing, their orange glow sputtering as the water drenches them.
Wet sprites, it turns out, move about as well as wet cats.
They slide, clawing uselessly at the slick surface, and drop off the far side into a bus tub with a satisfying splash.
"Keep them wet!" Boris shouts from the counter. He brings both pans down simultaneously on a sprite that's been trying to gnaw through the gas line. "They cannot spark if they are soaked!"
I aim at the ceiling. The pressurized stream punches through the acoustic tiles and a shower of gray water pours down, taking four sprites with it. They hit the floor with wet slaps and lie there, hissing and steaming, their tiny bodies sputtering like doused campfires.
Boris jumps down from the counter. The floor shakes. He lands in a puddle of sooty water and immediately swats a dazed, waterlogged sprite toward the door with the flat of his pan. It skips across the wet tile like a hockey puck.
I work the hose in systematic passes. Left to right across the counters.
Top to bottom on the walls. The water runs black at first, then gray, then clear.
Grease traps overflow. The floor drain gurgles.
Steam rises from the sprites I've hit directly, and they crawl toward the shadows with the slow, miserable determination of creatures that have had a very bad morning.
Boris sweeps through behind me. Where I blast, he collects. His massive boots push the stunned sprites into a pile near the door, and he scoops them into the canvas sack in handfuls, water dripping between his fingers.
We work the kitchen in sections. Methodical. Me with the hose, him with the pans. The rhythm builds without discussion. I clear a surface. He checks for stragglers. I move to the next. He secures the last.
Seven minutes. The kitchen goes from disaster zone to dripping, soaked, but clean.
I release the trigger. The hose dies with a shudder. Water pools in wide, reflective sheets. My chef coat is drenched from the spray. My hand throbs where the trigger bit into the burn.
Boris is in the kitchen. A skillet in each hand. Sooty water drips from his leather apron. A single sprite clings to his topknot, blinking up at me with enormous, terrified eyes.