“Hurry up, he’s almost here.” Nadiya hissed, fear adding a sharp quaver to her voice. It was her first time on a cooking expedition with me.

“You can’t rush perfection,” I countered. It didn’t work unless I did my best. It had to be perfect. The skillet sizzled over the camp stove as I hunted through my portable herb bag for the paprika. It needed to be smoky.

As I sprinkled the seasoning on my protein, the sifter cap popped off and a mountain of paprika fell into the protein.

“You fucking donkey, you’re going to get us all killed.” My mentor groused, though it had a rote quality. He seemed to take a perverse pleasure in watching me work.

“Relax, Gordon, you can’t have too much paprika.” I brushed off what I could and added some salt and cayenne to try and balance it out.

“What am I even doing here?” Nadiya seemed on the edge of a meltdown.

It would be okay. It would work. It had always worked before. It had to work. “If we’d needed to bake, you’d have been invaluable. Still might.”

Something was burning. I shook all the pots and skillets, trying to buy myself some time to figure out what the problem was.

“Bloody hell, it’s your garlic,” Gordon pointed out, bouncing on his toes. “You started it way to soon.”

“Always the critic,” I groused but appreciated the input. Good advice somehow always made the outcome more dramatic. Which was usually what we wanted.

In my rush to remove the pot with the garlic, I accidentally gripped too high up the handle and yelped as I dropped it, spilling the contents on the forest floor.

“Quiet!” Nadiya snapped like an anxious librarian.

“Five second rule, right?” I do my best to gather what garlic I can see in the light of the full moon through the bare forest branches.

“This is an absolute shit show,” Gordon laughed quietly. “That’s gravel not garlic.”

He might be right, I was in a bit more of a hurry than usual. “Tomato tomahto, it’ll all saute together.”

Nadiya danced away from the bush to the far side of our campsite. “He’s here!” She wailed softly.

“Hurry up and plate,” Gordon urged, nerves starting to show for the first time.

The figure that slipped into our campsite managed to to somehow avoid any of the light from the cook fires. Even the moonlight did it’s best to avoid him.

“Well well, what have we here?” His voice was like an oil spill, slick and suffocating, with a vaguely eastern European accent. “Dinner and a show?”

There was a distinct clink of rocks as I began to plate, hopefully some of the garlic had made it to the plate.

“Be with you in just a moment, Vlad.” I did my best to sound calm. No matter how many times I did this, I was never entirely sure it would work.

The shadowy form hesitated and shivered slightly, “You’re from Administration?”

“Admina-what?” Gordon bluffed as Nadiya began to weep.

The moonlight seemed to reach Vlad’s face for the first time and ancient eyes narrowed in confusion, “Wait, I know you-”

The plate broke as I artfully drizzled watery sauce across it.

I stepped back as reality twisted up on itself and a gnarled fist emerged from my ruined meal. It pulled itself up, the contents of my meal become something stony and squat, but increasingly humanoid.

“What is this?” Vlad asked, his confusion growing into consternation, his cape and formal attire now clearly visible in the silver light.

The meal was gone and its place, a stony figure that seemed to continually unfold itself in halting stop-motion. “Vladislav the Shadow,” it’s voice was like two boulders being ground together.

“Baalthazar,” Vlad spat and turned to flee. The hulking behomoth was on top of him in an instant, my makeshift kitchen exploding into detritus as Baalthazar passed through it.

Nothing that big should move that fast. It gave me a strange sense of vertigo.

There was no dust, no disinteresting skeleton, just a profoundly uncomfortable squelching sound as Baalthazar embraced the shadow. To my surprise, that was it. The stony beast just settled in place and turned in on itself.

In the shifting moonlight, there was just a huge boulder resting on the forest floor.

“You summoned Baalthazar of the Spires?” Nadiya asked incredulously.

“I genuinely have no idea who that is,” I shrugged. “Bastard ruined my kitchen.”

Gordon clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Administration is good for it. Whatever you need.”

“What about a restaurant of my own?” I ask, hope stirring in my heart.

Gordon laughed, “Anything’s possible, but for now, let’s get out of this bloody forest. I’m starving and I think it’s my turn to cook.”

First stop, French tacos

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