Page 174 of Caelum

Instead, he grumbled, “You’re making a mess.”

“You won’t know we were here when we’re done,” I countered, not bothering to argue with him. There was no point.

Some creatures were born to be warriors, and some were born to support the warriors. We all started off as soldiers, though, until Nicholas or someone else on the faculty decided we had better uses.

Brendan was exactly that.

He could feed an army, but he wasn’t built to be on the battlefield, and his attitude stank to high heaven because of it.

“See that you do,” he ground out, shooting Eve a nasty look before he flounced out of the kitchen.

“Who was he?” Eve asked when he disappeared, her eyes wide with surprise at the other man’s antagonism.

“He runs this place,” I explained, adding, “It’s only quiet at the minute because the evening service begins in a few hours.”

“I’m surprised it’s not more chaotic.”

I shrugged. “They have their schedules, and I wanted to fit this in beforehand.”

Her lips curved. “Before we were interrupted you were saying this is called baklava?”

Grinning at her curiosity, I murmured, “It’s a traditional pastry. Lots of Mediterranean countries have it, but this is my mother’s recipe.”

“You made it from scratch?”

I lifted my arm, flexed my bicep, then with a grin, kissed it. “All with these muscles.”

“You’re too kind,” she retorted.

“A fish by any other name…”

Her nose crinkled. “A fish? Don’t you mean a rose?”

Laughing, I told her, “I meant something, that’s for sure. Didn’t realize you’d delved into Shakespeare by now…”

What the hell was the faculty thinking? They’d thrown her into Shakespeare but hadn’t loaded her up on Ghoul Theory? The most basic tenet of life at Caelum?

I wanted to ask when knowing Shakespeare had become an integral part to living in the twenty-first century, but instead, I just murmured, “I need to grab some sugar and pistachios from the pantry.”

She blinked at me. “Okay.”

Baklava was a pastry that consisted of fine layers of filo dough baked together with a stuffing of nuts. It was then loaded with sugar syrup tinged with rosewater and would blow any diet out of the water in one fell swoop. But it was her birthday, and I knew Eve liked tasting new foods. She was a bit like a toddler when it came to food. Hadn’t tried all that much but was willing to dive headfirst into anything that wasn’t green and came from the earth.

Having rolled the sheets of homemade dough into fine layers and placed half of them in a baking tray, I was ready to chop up the nuts and make the syrup. It would have been easier to grab everything and prep like my mom would have, but I’d had to make do in this kitchen.

When I’d been making the dough, I’d had to work hard not to get under the staff’s feet, so I’d used one of the tiniest countertops and tried to contain the madness when making baklava from scratch was a time-costly and effort-heavy feat.

Trudging over to the pantry that stored enough food to feed us for weeks at a time—Nicholas was a doomsdayer and had been before it was even a thing—I opened the door and glowered at the darkness beyond.

There was a master switch at the back of the room, the height of inefficiency, but Caelum was old, and inefficient was how it rolled. That was why my bedroom had one single plug point and about a thousand extension cords.

Only trouble was, this wasn’t my bedroom, and my phone was back on the counter with Eve.

Walking into the pantry shouldn’t have presented a problem. The lightwas on all day because staff trudged in and out… That dick Brendan, even knowing my issues, had turned the fucking thing off.

My neck popped as I jerked it to the side. Fisting my hands, I moved them to the doorjamb and gripped the wood. Feeling like the Hulk, I wanted to tear it off, rip into the wood and smash it to smithereens—better that than Brendan’s face.

Why the fuck had he switched off the light?

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