“Okay, medieval food fans,” she said to her camera, dancing to the music. “It’s almost midnight, I’ve had a spectacularly boring date with a man who thinks salt is spicy, and we’re going to cook something from this definitely cursed cookbook I bought from someone who probably lives in their mom’s basement.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Summer storms in Kansas were as predictable as disappointing dates—they showed up uninvited, made a lot of noise, and left everything a mess.
She started pulling ingredients, reading the recipe out loud in what she thought was a medieval accent but probably sounded more like someone having a stroke. “’Take verjuice and draw it through a strainer.’ Sure, let me just grab my verjuice from the verjuice aisle at Whole Foods.”
The cookbook’s pages felt strange under her fingers, almost warm. When she turned them, scents rose that shouldn’t have been there. Saffron, though there was no saffron in her kitchen. The salt-sweet smell of the sea, even though she was about as landlocked as humanly possible. Rosemary growing wild on hills she’d never seen.
“That’s... weird.” She sniffed the pages directly, and the smell intensified. Cinnamon bark. Crushed roses. Something metallic and dark, like old blood or ancient iron.
Pour some sugar on me, in the name of love...
The music seemed to fade slightly, even though she hadn’t touched the volume. The cookbook’s pages fluttered despite the absence of any breeze.
“Okay, focusing,” Rachel muttered, grabbing her knife. The expensive Japanese one, because if she was going to die alone surrounded by cats, at least she’d have good knives. Well, not that she had any cats, or any pets for that matter, but if she did… “The recipe calls for ‘diverse precious spices,’ which I’m interpreting as a personal challenge to my spice rack.”
She chopped shallots, the rhythm matching the beat of “Rock of Ages” now playing. The storm was getting closer, the wind rattling her windows. The lights flickered once, twice.
“Should probably stop cooking,” she told her phone camera, a bit tipsy. “But that would be the responsible thing to do, and we don’t do that here atBites & Brutality.”
Lightning flashed, illuminating her kitchen in stark white. In that moment, she could have sworn the cookbook’s pages glowed, just for a second. The writing seemed to shift, rearrange itself into something almost readable, almost?—
The knife slipped.
“Son of a—” Blood welled from the cut across her left index finger, bright and shocking. She instinctively jerked her hand back, sending droplets spattering across the open cookbook.
The blood hit the parchment.
Lightning struck. Inside her apartment. She was never going to drink again.
The world exploded into sensation—blinding white light that seemed to pour through her eyeballs directly into her brain. The taste of copper and electricity and something ancient beyond words. A sound like the universe tearing, like reality admitting it had made a mistake. The smell of ozone and roses and the sea, so strong she could taste it.
The last coherent thought she had was that she’d left the stove on.
Then she was falling up, into light that burned and froze simultaneously, through space that wasn’t space, through time that ran backward and forward and sideways all at once.
Rachel woketo the taste of mud and the absolute certainty that St. Germain and bubbly were never, ever mixing in her stomach again.
She pushed herself up, spitting dirt, and what she desperately hoped was just grass. Everything hurt in new and innovative ways, like she’d been through a blender set to pulverize.
“What the hell?—”
The words died in her throat.
This was not Mulvane, Kansas. “Where’s my apartment?” One of her friends, Sara Jenkins, had a problem with sleepwalking, but her? Never. And even if she had, wherever she was, wasn’t anywhere she could have feasibly walked.
She lay in a muddy field beneath an early morning sky that was all wrong. Too many stars, like someone had turned off all the light pollution in the world. Rolling hills stretched in every direction, not a power line or cell tower in sight. The air smelled of rain and earth and growing things, and not a hint of exhaust fumes or that weird chemical smell that haunted every American city.
Her phone was dead. Of course. Because the universe had a sense of humor, and it was mean.
Thunder rumbled overhead, not the familiar thunder that preceded tornadoes and insurance claims, but something older, more personal, like the sky was expressing opinions about her presence.
“Okay,” she said to no one, to the universe, to her three thousand blog followers who would never believe this. “Okay. This is fine. I’m having a stroke. Or Brad slipped something in my drink. That boring bastard finally got interesting.”
In the distance, through the pre-dawn gloom and drizzling rain, she could make out walls. A ruined castle. An actual, honest-to-God castle, like something from every BBC adaptation she’d ever binge-watched while eating ice cream and mourning her love life.
She started walking, her Docs making obscene sounds in the mud. Her “I Like My Coffee Like I Like My Books” shirt was soaked through, clinging in ways that would have been embarrassing if anyone had been around to see. As she got closer to the castle, she could smell woodsmoke and something cooking—meat and herbs and bread that would definitely violate several modern dietary restrictions.
She found a garden, or what had probably been a garden before it went feral. Stone walls enclosed beds that had clearly given up on formal and gone straight to jungle. Herbs released their scent as she pushed through—rosemary, lavender, something medicinal and bitter. Roses climbed what remained of the trellis, heavy with rain and neglect.
