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It wasn’t dessert. I wasn’t sure what it was. But my stomach suddenly woke up to express vigorous approval.
“Huh? Huh?” Fred asked. “What about that?”
I swallowed. “What was it?”
“S’mores!”
“We’re stretching the term,” Pritkin informed me, green eyes amused, as he steadied the marshmallow on a stick that the little girl was holding.
It went over the fire, and I watched it slowly brown. There were other sticks with other offerings already there: cubes of cheese getting goopy and melty, cherry tomatoes with their little bottoms turning fatter and redder, pieces of bread getting toasty, tiny party sausages bursting with juices that sizzled and popped over the open flames, and chunks of blackened red pepper starting to smoke. And laid out on the tables was an amazing assortment of other ingredients for the truly crazy concoctions that I guessed were passing for dinner.
There were a lot of them.
“Are you in on this?” I asked Tami, who’d just come out of the suite with a platter of gingerbread, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and graham crackers.
She rolled her eyes. “I was outvoted.”
I know the feeling, I thought, when I suddenly found myself plopped down onto a hassock with a stick and a plate and told to get creative. So I did. Hot honey, brie, thin-cut figs, and prosciutto on a toasted baguette was nice. Salami, tapenade, mozzarella, and roasted tomato on an herbed cracker was better. And mushroom, blue cheese, and bacon in a potato skin was to die for.
Of course, things got a little crazy when the guys got involved, with Marco pretending to be mortally afraid of the fire, which resulted in him lounging on a chaise and being fed a steady stream of marshmallows by concerned little girls. Roy was trying to mix the adults cocktails to go with their crazy creations, and doing surprisingly well at it. Ophélie and Anaïs, the two French girls, were wafting around looking very sophisticated with the Shirley Temples he’d concocted for them. While Tami’s son, Jesse, and Jiao—one of the kids who had come with Tami’s group—were attempting to outdo each other with the weirdest combinations possible: chicken, dark chocolate, and hot sauce on a waffle, anyone?
And then came the guess-the-recipe game.
Fred was obviously going to win. Fred always won any game that involved food. But tonight, he had some competition.
The setting sun had been turning the balcony orange and gilding the undersides of the clouds when I’d first come out, but it was full-on dark now, and the vamps were feeling frisky. The flames of the firepit were splashing everyone’s faces with light, from the excited, overly stuffed children still staring at the barely diminished treasure trove on the tables—because when Fred put out a spread, he did it right—to the indulgent faces of my guards. Which was why I wasn’t too surprised when Rico plopped down on one of the straight-backed chairs being dragged into a line for the game.
And so did Saffy, who ended up being paired with Roy. And then another witch joined in, who went by Vi—probably because her given name was Violet and I’d never seen anyone who looked less like a Violet. I was starting to wonder if witches deliberately chose baby n
ames that played against type, or if kids saddled with girlie monikers just tended to rebel. But Vi was . . . not exactly a shrinking violet.
Covered in tats and piercings, she was taller than some of the guys and looked like she ate nails for breakfast. Of course, she also had beautiful olive skin, big, warm brown eyes, and a booming laugh that tended to be infectious. But it usually took people a while to notice the latter, considering that, like most witches I’d met, she also had an in-your-face attitude on first acquaintance.
And second acquaintance.
And very often third.
She was paired with Reggie. He was a skinny, jug-eared, sandy blond with a buzz cut who looked perpetually startled and unsure of himself. But he’d nonetheless ended up the lone Circle mage assigned to my court, since the others had been dicks.
He was currently looking less than enthusiastic about all this, maybe because Vi had just grabbed his shirt in a fist and jerked him up from the chair. “We’re gonna win. Right, war mage?”
He nodded, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing worriedly. “S-sure.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“I’m positive!”
“Make me believe it.”
“We’re going to win, sir! I mean, ma’am. I mean Vi!”
She grinned, showing a lot of large, healthy teeth, and let him go.
Then Pritkin sat down next to Fred, who’d claimed the fourth seat, prompting me to do a double take. And to wonder if he was feeling all right after all. Joining in wasn’t really his thing. He gave me inscrutable-war-mage face back. And then me, Rhea, and Tami were volunteered to be the remaining chefs.
“Okay, okay. This is sudden death, all right? You guess wrong, you’re out,” Fred said, tying on a flimsy blindfold. It looked like he’d borrowed a scarf from one of the girls—a suspiciously see-through one.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Marco, who was somehow still mobile after eating maybe fifty marshmallows, draped a thick woolen number over top of that one, and handed me a second. I guessed for Pritkin, since he was closest.
