“He’s the guy who sliced my arm.”
“You said it was a freak accident with your carving knife.”
I measured out the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder for the first batch of cupcakes. “I fibbed.”
Clara stopped working and looked at me. “I’m starting to get a bad feeling.”
“Steven Hatchet supposedly is an Unmentionable. And supposedly, we’re the only two people on the planet who have the ability to find certain empowered objects.”
“The SALIGIA Stones.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, Hatchet is a complete psycho nutcase who thinks he’s living in the Middle Ages. And now, his whole life is centered around impressing Wulf. He calls him his liege lord. And it gets even better, because Hatchet is an authority on toxins and torture.”
“Cripes,” Clara said.
I dumped butter, milk, the flour mixture, and vanilla into the big mixer and turned it on. “Anyway, Hatchet snatched me and brought me to Wulf’s condo.”
Clara had both hands flat on the island, leaning toward me, eyes wide. “You were in his condo? Omigosh, what was it like?”
“It was in a high-rise on the park in Boston. Beautifully decorated. Old Masters type art on the walls. They looked authentic, but what do I know.”
“What about his bedroom and his kitchen? Does he cook?”
“I only saw the living room.” Thank goodness.
I whipped up egg whites, added them to the rest of the batter, and filled the cupcake tins. I shoved the tins into the oven and started another batch of cupcakes.
A half hour later, I pulled the cupcakes out of the oven and set them on a rack at my workstation. Clara came over and looked at them with me.
“What are they?” Clara wanted to know.
“Cupcakes.”
“They don’t look like cupcakes. They’re all flat and lumpy.”
“I don’t get it. My cupcakes are always perfect. I’ve been making cupcakes for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never had this happen.”
“Maybe there’s something wrong with the oven. Maybe you forgot the baking powder.”
“I have a second batch baking in the lower oven.”
We went to the oven and looked in. Disaster. My chocolate cupcakes were oozing over their wrappers and dripping onto the oven floor.
“This is horrible,” I said. “How could this be happening?”
Clara’s face went pale. “You’ve lost it.”
“Lost what?”
“Your ability to make Unmentionably superior cupcakes.”
“That’s ridiculous. It was the flour or something.”
“It happened to me,” Clara said. “I never talk about it, but I’m going to tell you because you have to know. I used to be an Unmentionable. I come from a long line of Unmentionables.”
“Get out!”
“There was this guy I was dating after my first divorce,” Clara said. “He was really nice, and one thing led to another, and next thing, we spent the night together. And when I woke up in the morning, I was a Normal.”