Chapter Text
The ticket printer had been jamming all night, which meant I'd spent the last six hours hunched over my station at an angle that made my lower back scream. Not ideal when you're plating delicate pasta that costs seventy dollars and needs to look like edible art. But this was Barone Cucina, and we didn't send out anything that wasn't perfect, even if the printer was possessed and my sciatic nerve was staging a revolt.
"Picking up two agnolotti, one rabbit!" Marco called from expo.
"Yes, chef!" I grabbed my tweezers for the microgreens, my hands moving through the familiar choreography. Sauce, pasta, garnish, wipe the rim. The rhythm of service was the only thing keeping me upright at this point.
The last table finally left around eleven. I'd been on my feet since noon, prepping and then cooking through a fully booked Saturday night. My chef's coat had more stains than a Jackson Pollock, and I was pretty sure I'd sweated through every layer of clothing I owned.
"Nice work tonight, Magda," Chef said as he passed my station. High praise from him—usually you only heard from Chef if something was wrong.
"Thanks, Chef." I was already breaking down, wiping surfaces and organizing my mise for tomorrow's prep. Well, today's prep, technically. It was past midnight.
The kitchen hummed with the sounds of cleanup—the dish pit running, someone hosing down rubber mats, the clatter of hotel pans being stacked. Normal sounds. Comforting sounds. The kind of sounds that told me I was almost done and could go home to my studio apartment and sleep for six hours before doing this all over again. Finally, we finished and I headed
I had just walked into my apartment when the world went sideways.
That's not a metaphor. The actual world lurched like someone had grabbed reality by the edges and yanked hard. My stomach dropped the way it does when you miss a step going downstairs, except I was standing still. There was a sensation of falling and stretching and being turned inside out, all at once, and then—
Trees.
I was standing in a forest, stumbling forward from momentum I didn't have a second ago. My kitchen clogs skidded on dirt and leaves instead of non-slip mats. The air smelled wrong—no garlic, no meat, no grease trap. Just earth and green things and something metallic.
There was someone right in front of me. Something. Gray-skinned and massive, holding a bow with an arrow nocked. The arrow was pointing past me, at something behind me, but the creature was right there, less than a foot away, close enough that I could see the texture of its skin and smell something rancid and wrong.
I shoved it.
I didn't think about it. My hands just came up and I shoved as hard as I could, the same way you'd shove someone who'd gotten too close to a hot pan. Pure panic reflex.
The creature staggered. Its weight had been committed forward, bow drawn, and my shove caught it off-balance. The bowstring released with a sharp twang, and I heard the arrow hit something—wood, probably a tree, but I wasn't looking because I was too busy scrambling backward and trying not to fall to the ground.
Someone extremely tall with blond hair appeared from the underbrush with a bow in his hands. Behind him, someone much shorter and stockier, all beard and armor, was bellowing something that might have been words or might have been just noise. Hard to tell over the sound of my own pulse hammering in my ears.
The creature I'd shoved didn't get a chance to recover.
A sword went through its back.
I watched it happen. I was right there, close enough to see the blade punch through and emerge from the creature's chest, close enough to hear the wet sound it made and the thing's choked gasp. Blood sprayed—dark, almost black—and some of it hit my chef's coat.
The sword pulled out. The creature fell.
I couldn't breathe properly. My vision had that weird tunnel thing happening, and my hands were tingling, and I was making these embarrassing hiccupping sounds like I was trying not to throw up or cry or both. I was wearing my chef's coat. I was wearing my kitchen clogs. There was blood on the ground and the thing that had been pointing an arrow at—
I turned, trying to find literally anything else to look at. There was a man on his knees about ten feet away, wearing clothing that looked like something from a museum. He had an arrow in his chest and one in his side and blood running down his chin, and he was staring at me with an expression of absolute shock.
I turned back, and nearly fell over.
There was another man standing where the creature had been.
He was staring at me.
Tall—everyone here was tall, apparently—with dark hair and light eyes and blood on his sword. He wore some sort of leather vest and a cloak, and his brow was furrowed as he stared at me, like he was trying to figure out what he was looking at.
His gaze traveled down my chef's coat to my kitchen pants to my clogs, which were now covered in forest debris and possibly blood.
"What—" he started, his voice deep with an accent I couldn't place.
I didn't hear the rest of his question.
The world lurched again.
This time I felt it coming, just a split second of warning before reality did its inside-out trick. My stomach flipped. I was going to be sick, I was definitely going to be sick—
I landed hard.
I knew this floor. I knew the scuffed laminate and the gouge near the corner where I'd dropped a cast iron pan two months ago. This was home. This was real. The forest had been a hallucination brought on by exhaustion and possibly a gas leak at the restaurant. I should probably call someone about the gas leak.
“Oh thank God,” I muttered, pushing myself up. That was insane. Riley would never believe it
A crash came from my right. The man with the arrows—he'd appeared with me, momentum carrying him forward into my bistro table. The table I'd found on the street, repainted carefully, now clattering sideways across the floor. He caught himself on one knee. His hand went to his sword. The blade came free as he spun, and then he was up, facing—
Me. He was facing me.