Page 2 of Orc'd & Loaded
"Because everyone else is too afraid to cross the street!"
His mouth twitches. The corner pulls up around the right tusk. Not quite a smile. More like the expression a cat makes before it knocks a glass off a table.
"Small chef is not afraid."
"Small chef isfurious. There's a difference."
He looks down at me. I look up at him. The fire crackles and pops between us. Somewhere on Rue des Martyrs, the taxi driver is still honking.
The orc reaches into the pit and pulls out a chunk of smoldering wood, holding it in his palm like an apple. Smoke curls from between his fingers.
"You want to smell?"
I do not want to smell.
I want to call the fire brigade, the health inspector, and possibly the military. What I do instead is lean back, because the chunk of smoldering applewood he extends toward my face radiates enough heat to curl the baby hairs at my temples.
"Put that away."
He shrugs. One-shouldered. The gesture moves more mass than I carry on my entire frame. The wood chunk goes back into the pit with a shower of sparks that dance across the morning air like malicious fireflies.
"Suit yourself, small chef."
"Stop calling me that."
But he's already turning away, ducking through the doorway of his establishment with the practiced hunch of someone who has never once encountered architecture built to his specifications. The doorframe groans as his shoulder clips it. He doesn't notice. Or doesn't care. Probably both.
I follow him.
I don't know why I follow him. My prep list is seventeen items long, my sous chef is late again, and I have two cases of high-end micro greens arriving in forty minutes that need to be inspected leaf by individual leaf. Instead, I step through the doorway ofBorog's. Meat. Fire.and into what can only be described as a culinary war zone.
The interior is raw. Unfinished. Exposed brick, exposed beams, exposed everything. Three massive wooden tables run the length of the room, rough-cut and scarred, the kind of furniture you'd build with an axe rather than a saw. Iron hooks line the far wall, and from them hang carcasses. Whole ones. A pig, split down the center. Something with horns, it might be a large goat.
In the midst of it all, a second fire pit. Indoors. An open, stone-lined fire pit built directly into the floor, vented by a chimney that appears to have been punched through the ceiling with brute force rather than engineered. Rebar pokes from the edges of the hole.
The air is thick. Smoke and rendered fat and something herbal, something I can't quite place. My lungs protest. My brain, the traitorous part that has spent two decades training itself to deconstruct flavor profiles, catalogs it automatically. Juniper. Black pepper. Some kind of wild thyme variety I've never encountered.
It smells incredible.
Boris Cleaver stands at the indoor pit. Because of course there are two pits. Of course this operation requirestwo separate fires. He grips a heavy iron pitchfork, a real one, not a kitchen tool but an actual agricultural implement with four tines, and jams it into a gigantic slab of meat.
The slab sizzles. Fat renders in rivulets that hiss and pop in the coals. He flips it with one arm.One arm.It would require my entire line to lift, and he rotates it like a crêpe. The underside is lacquered with a bark so dark and glistening it looks like volcanic glass. It's beautiful.
"You!" I snap. "We need to talk about the smoke situation."
He turns. And his face does something I am not prepared for.
It splits open.
Not violently. Joyfully. The broadest, most unguarded grin I have ever seen stretches across that massive green face, rearranging the scar tissue, pushing the tusks apart, crinkling the corners of those wet-clay eyes into deep folds. His entire body orients toward me with the enthusiasm of a Labrador spotting its owner after a ten-minute absence.
"NEIGHBOR!"
The word hits me like a physical force. The walls vibrate. A hook on the far wall rattles, and the goat-pony carcass swings gently.
"You come to Borog's! This is good! This is VERY good!"
He is already moving. The pitchfork gets planted in the dirt floor like a flag, and his free hand seizes a cleaver from the table beside him. Not a chef's knife. A cleaver the length of my forearm. He brings it down on the slab in one stroke, severing a rib section with surgical precision that momentarily short-circuits my fury. The cut is perfect. Clean through the bone.
