Page 27 of Orc'd & Loaded
Ice water drips down my wrists. The stockpot is half full of rapidly melting cubes. "And you just destroyed my doorframe, which I'll be adding to your tab alongside the dry cleaning for my chef coat."
He steps inside. Water pools around his boots instantly, spreading across my immaculate tile floor in a dark, expanding lake. He tracks mud. Of course he tracks mud. The man is constitutionally incapable of entering a space without leaving physical evidence of his passage.
"I have a generator." He drops the extension cord off his shoulder. It hits the floor with a heavy, wet thud. "Diesel. Runs my whole tavern. I can split the line, run this cable across the street, power your walk-in and your fermentation station."
"Absolutely not."
"You have twenty minutes before your cold chain breaks."
"I have ice."
He looks at the stockpot in my hands. Looks at the walk-in. Looks back at the stockpot. One heavy green-gray eyebrow climbs his forehead with the slow, devastating patience of a man who has done the math and is waiting for me to catch up.
"That is forty pounds of ice."
"Thirty-seven."
"Your walk-in is two hundred cubic feet."
"I know the dimensions of my own equipment."
"Then you are also aware that thirty-seven pounds of ice in two hundred cubic feet of insulated space will buy you eleven minutes." He sets the tongs on my prep counter. They hiss against the wet steel. "Maybe twelve, if you keep the door shut, which you are not doing."
The walk-in breathes its thinning cold against my back.
He's right. He kicked my door down to be right. He's standing in my kitchen, soaking wet, dripping on my floor, and offering me exactly the thing I need with those enormous hands and that infuriating calm certainty.
"What do you want in exchange?"
His mouth splits into a grin. Wide. Devastating. Every tusk on full display.
"Nothing."
"Liar."
"Fine." He picks the tongs back up, flips them in his hand with a dexterity that has no business belonging to fingers that thick. "I want you to stop pretending you are not terrified right now. Your hands are shaking."
I look down. They are. I shove them into my coat pockets.
"I have a second option," he says, and the grin fades into something more serious, more grounded. "My cellar. Under the tavern. Stone walls, twelve feet below grade. There is an icebox down there. Orcish make. Runework carved into the iron. It holds temperature without power, without ice, without anything except the enchantment my grandmother hammered into the metal sixty years ago."
"How cold?"
"Thirty-four degrees. Constant."
Thirty-four. Two degrees above freezing. Perfect for every single item in my walk-in. My koji cultures would survive. My beets would hold their texture. The fennel wouldn't oxidize.
"How big?"
"Big enough to hang a whole elk."
I pull my hands out of my pockets. They've stopped shaking.
"Show me."
The streetbetween our buildings is a river.
Not metaphorically. The storm drains have backed up, and six inches of black water rushes down the road, carrying leaves, bottle caps, a single bobbing takeout container from the Thai place on the corner. Rain comes down in sheets so thick the streetlights on the far side dissolve into smeared orange halos. Lightning cracks somewhere to the south, and the thunder arrives two seconds later, vibrating my teeth.
