Monster mash, p.1
Monster Mash, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by L Eveland
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Book Cover by Delaney Rain
1st edition 2024
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Contents
Also by L Eveland
Dear Monsterfuckers
Brimstone and Bolognese
Brimstone
Beefcakes
Bluz
Brewtiful's
Rebel Without A Claus
Culinary Creatures Shorts
Monsters in My Bed
Kissed by the Krampus
Scales and Song
Hearts and Halos
Lassos and Lace
Bounty and Bone
Kindred Spirits
Wayward Sons
Body Count
Skin Deep
Vicious Cycle
Flame and Shadow
A Dream of Flame and Shadow
A Glint of Steel and Roses
The Culinary Creatures series takes place in an alternate earth universe in which monsters evolved alongside humans. Humans make up only a small subset of Earth’s population and have since the beginning of time.
Other than small differences, such as the founding fathers being mostly minotaurs, werewolves, and tentacle monsters, and a brief disaster involving that time NASA experimented with sending werewolves to the moon, their world history is relatively similar to our own, albeit slightly more idealized.
Brimstone and Bolognese
L Eveland
I stared up at the Brimstone’s sign and adjusted my collar. The fire that normally engulfed the letters was absent since the restaurant was closed, but I swore I could still smell the metal burning in the morning air.
For years, I had walked by those immaculate front doors, telling myself that someday, I was going to work in that kitchen. That dream had taken me halfway across the world, to the best culinary school in Paris, and it had brought me back home to Los Angeles on the last dime to my name. For five years, I had worked in dingy kitchens, couch surfing and penny pinching, sustained by my dream. Finally, the day had come. My chance was right there, waiting for me to walk in and take it. I just had to pass one final test.
Chef Inzo Amorosi’s grueling personal challenge.
The challenge was legendary. For months, the top aspiring head chefs all around the country had filed through that kitchen to run the gauntlet, and all of them had failed. But I had one thing all the best chefs lacked: a human palate.
Most would say that being human was a hinderance in the culinary world. After all, how could I compete with monsters who had four or eight arms, superhuman speed, or who didn’t need to sleep? I might not have had a werewolf’s supernaturally good sense of smell, or a kraken’s eight arms, but I knew flavors. I had the passion and the drive, and I wasn’t letting Chef Inzo turn me away without letting me try.
I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, marched up to the front doors, and pushed. The doors didn’t budge. Heat flushed through my face. Of course they were pull doors. I glanced around to make sure no one had seen my silly mistake and yanked the door open.
Inside, Brimstone was bright and luxurious, efficient and clean. There were fifty-six seats, and I could see almost all of them from the entryway. One of the servers was making the rounds, straightening the flawless white tablecloths and adjusting the floral centerpieces. It would be hours before the restaurant opened, and I hoped to have secured my place as Brimstone’s head chef by then.
“Deliveries in the back,” came a gruff voice that startled me.
My head snapped to the right and up… and up until I was staring at the furry face of a werewolf maître d'. He was busy scanning a paper on the podium that I couldn’t see.
“And you can stop staring,” he growled.
I hadn’t realized I was staring and tore my eyes away. I’d just never seen a werewolf in a three-piece suit before. “Sorry. I’m not here with a delivery. I’m here about the job. Head chef.”
For the first time, he looked up from the page he’d been studying. Piercing eyes took me in, halting on my drab non-slip shoes. I hadn’t been able to afford replacements yet. His nostrils flared, sniffing loudly, before he flashed sharp teeth. “Inzo!” he bellowed, loud enough that I flinched. “Fresh meat.”
I stared at him, aghast. Fresh meat?
The double doors to the kitchen suddenly burst open and out strode the most delicious looking man I had ever seen. Chef Inzo had everything: the short dark hair, thick enough to run my fingers through, the tasteful yet scruffy facial hair, the sizzling hot body, and of course his incubus red eyes. Even his cocky walk was sexy. The bright red prehensile tail didn’t hurt either.
I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t have a crush on celebrity chef Inzo Amorosi. Then again, everyone probably did. He was an incubus, after all, a monster that fed on the passions of others.
Inzo approached the maître d' without even glancing at me. “Where? Where is he, Gaston?” His Italian accent literally gave me goosebumps.
I raised my hand. “Right here, Chef.”
His eyes turned to me and I immediately wanted to melt into a puddle under their scrutiny. They rolled over me, head to toe, and halted on my shoes, just as Gaston’s had. I could’ve died when his lip rolled up slightly, revealing sharp fangs.
I held out my hand. “Good morning,” I said in the same friendly tone I’d been practicing. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Chef Amorosi. My name is Adam Northstar.”
“A human,” Gaston said, sounding amused. “That’s a new one.”
“I do not care that he is human. I care if he can cook,” Inzo said, crossing his arms and looking me over again. “Well?” he said, impatient. “Can you cook?”
I lowered my hand, cleared my throat, and answered exactly as I’d practiced that morning. “I trained at Le Cordon Bleu under—”
Inzo interrupted me with a snort and crossed his arms. “I did not ask for your resume. I asked if you could cook.” He turned away with a sigh. “Very well, then. We might as well see what you can do. I was bored anyway. Come, come. Don’t just stand there.”
I almost jumped out of my worn shoes in my rush to follow him to the kitchen doors.
He pushed them open and held them for me. “Welcome to Brimstone.”
Stepping through those doors was like getting a glimpse of culinary heaven. Everything from the stove tops to the prep station was overflowing with food and the top chefs in the world were all busy preparing it. A kraken broke eggs into a flour well to make fresh pasta, passing the eggshell to another tentacle before beginning to work the dough with two more. An imposing looking minotaur was busy seasoning hunks of meat and forming them into patties. At another station, a pale looking blonde man stacked blood bags for later use while a winged mothman carefully diced onions and garlic at the station next to him. All of them moved like independent pieces of a well-oiled machine, preparing for the upcoming service.
“You are familiar with the challenge, sì?” Inzo said, jarring me from my awestruck examination of the kitchen.
I turned my head and nodded once. “I know of it.”
I knew what everyone knew: that it was impossible, that more than two hundred of the best and brightest had attempted it, and they had all failed. Everyone knew that Chef Inzo would ask them to cook something. What it was varied depending on how sadistic he was feeling at the time. I’d heard he’d asked for a boiled egg from some and some had to make a three-course meal. One particularly unlucky fellow had to make a sanguinaccio, substituting his own blood for the pork blood in the recipe at Inzo’s request. Even he had failed.
His crimson eyes flicked over me, utterly unimpressed. “And what makes you think you can succeed where so many others have failed?”
“Because I’m hungrier than them,” I said. “I want this more than anything, Chef. I’ve dreamed of this my whole life.”
“And you will do anything to get it, no?” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Tell me one I haven’t heard before. Well, there it is.” He gestured to the kitchen. “This is your dream, Adric. All you have to do is the impossible.”
“It’s Adam, Chef,” I corrected.
He narrowed his eyes, and I felt several others look up from their stations as he stepped in. All the air fled the kitchen, and I had to fight to keep my knees from knocking together. “In my kitchen, I am god. If I say your name is shit, tha
t is your name until I decide otherwise. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Chef!” came my reply in a tight, high voice.
He snorted and stood back up, folding his hands behind his back. “Not that it matters, anyway. You will be as forgettable as the rest.”
It would have been easy to be angry, even offended by the way he talked down to me, but Inzo really was a culinary god. He had been cooking since before my grandparents were born, and if there was one thing he knew, it was passion for food. I had that in droves, and I was determined to show him, no matter what he asked me to cook.
So, I swallowed the little bruise to my ego and took it on the chin.
Chef Inzo’s gaze was penetrating as he looked me up and down, the tension in the air palpable. His eyes fell again to the worn and scuffed shoes I’d worn, and he tipped his head to one side. “Why do you want to work here? There must be a dozen other establishments where a young, promising chef such as yourself could find work without such effort. Perhaps a human-led kitchen would be more your speed?”
I frowned and squared my shoulders. “Respectfully, Chef, I didn’t bust my ass to come this far only to walk away empty handed. Why should I settle for second best when I know I belong in Brimstone?”
“We shall see,” he said.
I clenched my jaw. “What will I be cooking for you today, Chef Amorosi?”
He met my eyes with a cocky smirk. “Spaghetti Bolognese.”
I stared at him, certain his answer was a joke. For weeks, I’d been practicing making Italian dishes worthy of a three Michelin Star restaurant like Brimstone. I’d perfected his recipe for squid ink risotto, slaved over cuts of lamb, spent my last dollars on a decent duck breast to make his duck tandoori. All that training, and he wanted a simple spaghetti Bolognese? Something any mother could make on a Monday night? Was he mad?
“You have one hour.” Chef Inzo lifted his fingers and snapped them.
Everyone in the kitchen immediately stopped what they were doing, cleaned up their station quickly, and filed out of the kitchen.
“Buona fortuna, signore,” said Chef Inzo, and he was gone, too.
No tour of the kitchen, no instructions on where to find what I needed or how it should be prepared.
I turned away from the swinging kitchen doors, eyeing the empty kitchen, the finest kitchen in the world, with all the finest ingredients. The only thing standing between me and all that I had worked so hard to achieve was a simple weeknight pasta dish. How could I possibly impress the best chef in the world with that?
I blew out a deep breath. You can do this, Adam. Remember, it’s not about the food. It’s about passion. You don’t need fancy food or complicated recipes to have a passion for food.
I started with the pasta. Spaghetti was something that I made several times a week, always from scratch. While I could get it store bought, it was actually cheaper to make myself, and once I had homemade noodles, store bought stuff tasted like trash.
The kitchen had the best food processor on the market where I could make my dough, but I opted to ignore it and make the pasta by hand. It would take longer, but I’d have more control over it if I made it myself. I made the flour well and broke my eggs, mixing it all together. Easy. The challenge would come only from getting it done in time.
As I worked the dough to a nice consistency, I thought of my dad and the many evenings I’d spent in the kitchen with him. He’d been an aspiring cook, but let his dream get away from him, choosing instead to work in a factory to make ends meet for us. No matter how tired he was, though, he always had time to make dinner, and I was always there to help him.
Culinary school might have taught me to grate the carrots and the onion instead of chopping them, and which wine to use to deglaze the pan, but it was my dad that taught me to love the process. Anyone could sweat vegetables and ground beef in a pan. What truly separated a chef from an average cook had nothing to do with skills or training. It was the simple joy of creating something from nothing for others to enjoy. While I had dreamed of cooking for Chef Inzo my entire life, it wasn’t him I made that Bolognese for. I made it for my dad.
I added the cream to the sauce, stirred it in, and grabbed a spoon to taste it, glancing up at the clock. Ten minutes to go. Where had the time gone? It was time to get the pasta in the water. I grabbed another tasting spoon to check the salinity of the water. It had to be salty like the sea, and it was perfect. Fresh pasta didn’t take nearly as long as the premade stuff, so I still had time. I dropped the pasta in the water with a spoonful of olive oil. Two minutes wasn’t quite enough to get the perfect al dente pasta, so I checked it again at two and a half. Perfect.
The clock was running down, and I was in the final minutes as I moved on to plating, the one area even the most seasoned chefs could get wrong. Put it together wrong, and it’d look like vomit on a plate. Go too far with the presentation and I’d come off as pretentious. Maybe that was what he was expecting. This was, after all, one of the top restaurants in the world. Had I really made a spaghetti Bolognese worthy of Brimstone? Was that even possible?
I put the question from my mind and decided to keep it simple, topping the dish with a light dusting of fresh parmesan and a few leaves of fresh oregano. My food would have to speak for itself.
I did not expect much from the little human chef. At first glance, he was like all the others who had paraded through the front door of Brimstone over the last two years: young, attractive, egotistical, hungry to make a name for himself. If he was anything like them, he was doomed to fail. They had all been missing the most essential ingredient, one that no amount of money could buy, and no amount of training could teach.
Passion.
True passion would shine through whether a chef was making duck pate or a simple spaghetti Bolognese. It was the one thing I could not get the pompous fools who came to me to understand. I did not become the greatest chef in the world through hard work, or the best training, or the best ingredients. Those helped, but I became what I was because I loved it.
For a great many years, however, that spark had been gone from my life. Where it had gone, I could not say, nor could I know how and when it would return. Yet I hoped, I prayed, that I would taste it and know it. If not, then perhaps it was time for me to leave this world.
I had been alive nearly a thousand years, after all. What was left for me to do?
It felt like all the pleasure had gone out of the world. Everything was automated, processes fine-tuned to be replicated. No one cooked with soul anymore. I was starving, and I had been for some time. Soon, I would dry up for lack of passion to feed on.
I eyed the clock, watching the minutes tick down. My staff stood around the room, ennui radiating off of them like the odor of a bad chicken. Without a passionate chef to lead them, they too were lost.
Though I had my doubts, I hoped against all odds that this human chef would prove me wrong. He had only drooled over me a little, and then even gotten angry. That was refreshing. So many chefs who came to me were full of pride disguised as anger. Perhaps there was some passion in this one after all.
With ten minutes left until the deadline, Gaston came over to my table and sat down across from me uninvited. “So,” he said, folding his furry fingers over the tabletop, “what did you have him make?”
“Spaghetti Bolognese,” I answered.
Gaston lifted an eyebrow. “Going easy on him? Suppose I don’t blame you. He was rather easy on the eyes… for a human.”
I narrowed my eyes at Gaston. “It might be a simple dish, Gaston, but food is more than the ingredients you throw together. I’m looking for flare. For authenticity. For passion. Perhaps anyone can make a Bolognese and fresh pasta, but I don’t want just any spaghetti Bolognese. I want a Bolognese that makes a statement.”
Gaston huffed and threw an arm over the back of his chair. “You know, Inzo, you could just fuck people to feed like a normal incubus.”
“How do you think I’m still alive?” I muttered. “But fucking is so… pedestrian. Even that gets boring after a while without a little passion. Besides, food was always my passion before. Just because I’ve lost the spark doesn’t mean it won’t come back. I just need to find the right person.”
