Page 50 of Baking and Angels

Battle

Commenced

“How are you doing?” Helena asked, thirty minutes later. Her presence wasn’t forbidden by the officials apparently, but Rafferty wished she would go sit down and let him concentrate.

“Fine,” heanswered.

“So it’s a pot pie?” she asked, not getting any of the hints, leaning on the other side of the table and watching as he laid the crust he had made over the top of one of the provided ramekins. It was large enough to make one serving per person.

“It was something I could make with the time available and the ingredients that remained.” He glanced back at the ingredients table at the far end. “There is even more of a strategy to this thing. You have to make food out of what is provided, and while they have provided quite a lot, there is still something you are going to want that isn’t here. It forces youto think.”

Helena noted what he referred to. “Why didn’t you use the pre-made crusts? I see someone else doing that,”she asked.

“Pre-made… crust?” he asked, his lip curling in contempt at the concept. “How… how is itpre-made?”

Helena laughed merrily. “I know you’ve been to hell and back, but you have been cooking up here over the last few decades right?” She then boldly leaned over to the other competitor next to them, laying a hand on a thin, red, opened box. “Are you done with this? Can I borrow it?”she asked.

“Uh, sure,” she said, then went back to working on her owncreation.

Leaning back, Helena held out the box to him as he set the last cutout of a leaf in dough on his decorated savory pie and wiped his hands beforetaking it.

What little surface of the box there was showed an image of a pie and declared exactly what she said, two pre-made pie doughs. “Huh” was all he couldsay to it.

“You’ve seriously never used anything pre-made? It’s always been from scratch?” she asked, and again, he struggled to understand thequestion.

“Everything I’ve ever made has been with my own two hands,” he said, turning thebox over.

“And a little personal magic?” Helena quipped, giving him a cheeky wink when he looked at her, alarmed.

“Very little,” he said dryly. “Only what I absolutely needed. Or what my master—”

“Client,” shecorrected.

He blinked, realizing her word coding was safer in this time period. “Client required.” He regarded the red box again, before dropping it into the shared trash bin between him and the table behind him. “While I can recognize the convenience of such… pre-made fare, I don’t see how one could use something like this and not be considered cheating? It is the work of someone else, not themselves?”

“Time constraints,” Eleanor said, coming up beside him, wiping her hands on a towel. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disagreeing with you, but this challenge is using toaster ovens and so many people have done really clever things with pre-made stuff that it was decided not to handicap them.”

“I could see how this would have a public appeal, too, showing that good food can be made out of anything,” Helena added.

Eleanor nodded at her, then nodded at Rafferty’s potpie. “You better get that in, you only got thirty minutes left. That’s cutting it really close, don’t you think?”

Rafferty slid in his own pie into the heated oven and shut the door firmly. “I didn’t realize that I could have used pre-made,” he said.

“Don’t worry. Yours will still taste better,” Helena assured him, giving him an encouraging smile.

“Rafferty Lares, you are going on to the next round,” one of the officials stated, matter-of-factly. The cook he had been competing with swiped the beanie off her head with a curse. She spun once in a circle, then thrust her hand out to him to shake. It was clearly a formality. He could tell her anger was directed at herself, not him. There was a time he had done that dance himself. As soon as they performed the two-second ritual, she was already off.

“You have fifteen minutes to go to the bathroom and prepare anything you need to for the final challenge. I would go claim your table, too, and let the official know so they don’t break it down on you,” the official advised, and Rafferty took itto heart.

More than half the room was already in a state of “breakdown” as they kept calling it. Much of the audience had left, too, as their favored participant failed to advance, leaving half the bleachers empty. He moved back to reclaim his station, only to stop in his tracks as he spied a familiar pair of humans talking to an official near the end of thebleachers.

“Agents Sophia and Archon are here,” Helena said softly, coming up beside him with worry paintingher face.

“Yeah,” he acknowledged as he kept his gaze on them.

“Who?” Cindy asked, joining them, following his directed gaze.

“The agents there,” Helena answered. “They are looking for the demon that… ate Yosef.”

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