Read Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara for Free Online Page A

other before, you seemed to be uncomfortable with extra-human Americans.”
    Keith shrugged. “I hadn’t been with NIAD that long. And the few experiences I’d had—especially with goblins—had been extremely negative and personally painful.”
    “I imagine they were.” Gunther poked at his salad, seeming to consider and then discard some worrying thought before saying, “So when you cooked, did you work in other people’s restaurants or did you have your own?”
    “Other people’s at first. I followed the tourists from place to place. Finally I managed to get the capital to open my own place—a former diner with twenty seats and the ugliest gray linoleum ever manufactured.”
    “I sense this is when you had your first other-realm encounter,” Gunther said.
    “It wasn’t for about a year. I busted my ass making that place. I was surprised that all my teeth didn’t fall out from grinding. I got this gray streak during the opening.” Keith touched his temple self-consciously. “I’m thinking of dyeing it. I’m only thirty-four.”
    Gunther shrugged. “Premature gray is standard in our line of work, I think.”
    Keith nodded. “Very true.”
    “You were telling me about how you joined NIAD,” Gunther prompted.
    “One day one of my customers came by with this special request. He had this family obligation. Some kind of religious feast he wanted me to cater. He’d provide the meat and all I had to do was cook it for this special summer banquet. I asked, ‘what’s the meat?’ He told me it was special pork from Sweden.”
    Gunther nodded grimly. He took a forkful of salad.
    “Right away I knew it wasn’t pork. The bones were all wrong, but I needed the money and I just didn’t think about it that hard.”
    “What did you think it was?”
    “I honestly didn’t know. Some endangered creature, I suppose. I figured if it was already dead it shouldn’t go to waste, right?” Keith shook his head. “I was an idiot.”
    “You weren’t an idiot. You just didn’t know what you were dealing with.”
    “Even without the extra-human angle I knew there was something sketchy about that meat and I went ahead and cooked it anyway. I used to try and figure out what it had been. I ran down all those endangered Chinese delicacies, trying to figure it out—looking at the bones of sun bears—seeing if they matched. And I knew for a goddamn fact it had to be illegal, but the money was too good to say no. I kept thinking, ‘At least I’m not dealing coke, right?’ It never occurred to me to look at the bones of one of the most widely dispersed animals on the planet.”
    “How did you figure it out?”
    “I got a piece of protein that had some skin attached and found a tattoo. No caribou, cow, or sun bear tattoos Mom on their arm.” Keith wiped his lips with his napkin.
    “Had you eaten the flesh?”
    “Of course I’d eaten it. How was I supposed to tell how it tasted without eating it? I’d eaten a lot of it.”
    Gunther sat in silence. An unspoken question within him. Since Keith knew exactly what the question was, he said, “It’s okay. You can ask me. Everybody asks me.”
    “How did it taste?”
    “Really delicious.” Keith pushed his soup plate away. The spinach, chard, and escarole soup had gone down easier than he expected, considering the conversation. “The best meat I ever ate. The last meat I ever ate, as it turns out.”
    Gunther, too, finished his first course and set his fork aside. “That doesn’t explain how you got involved with the Irregulars.”
    “No.” Keith waited politely for the slim, pleasant-seeming waitress to take his plate before continuing. “I reported what I’d found to the police and a couple of agents contacted me. They wanted to set up a sting operation and I agreed. That’s how I found out that my customers were goblins.”
    “That must have been a shock.”
    “Finding out that everything I’d previously believed to be a myth was a pretty big shock,