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“I’ve never even been to Tokyo,” Bailey muttered. “And roses are the fast food of flowers.”
Zane remained cheerfully oblivious to her existential horror. “The
A thousand books can tell you how to mix a drink, but only one will teach you how to do it right.
“But,” Zane said with gravitas, “there’s one big missing piece that no one’s been able to crack in more than three hundred years: the secret of the Long Island Iced Tea.”
“Basically, the philosopher’s stone,” Bucket said. “With a lemon twist.”
“Zane’s like Nicolas Flamel,” Bucket said, “if Nicolas Flamel dressed like a Beatle, had a girlfriend, and also had a really sexy Canadian sidekick no one ever wrote about. Oh, and, um, a Bailey.”
“You know, in the rest of the world, bacon means Canadian bacon. It’s like the metric system of pork products.”
He was a grown-up, and Bailey was just a teenager who’d gotten old.
The legendary Hortense LaRue, then merely an amateur bartender who had bluffed her way inside, bested all comers by presenting an old fashioned garnished with an orange peel. When the proponents of the lemon and the cherry protested that she must have cheated, and that as a woman she had no place at the court anyway, LaRue responded by mentally seizing the two objectors and juggling them for nearly a quarter of an hour.
“I can’t think of a socially acceptable way to disagree.”
“I was fresh out of the jungle,” he said. “I was done taking things at face value. Done with governments. Done ignoring my gut. But when I went around and talked to everyone, everyone who survived that night, no one wanted to talk back. Never wanted to mention it again. Someone shut them up.”
“Nothing,” Bailey said with a shrug. “I just get good ideas when I’m drinking, I guess.”
The task ahead was so much bigger than she was, it threatened to swallow her whole. She had a good education and some youthful idealism, but what good was that in the face of a broken system and the hundreds of people who’d fight like hell to keep it broken?
“So, listen up. First things first: there’s a reason our job description is bartending first, demon slaying second. It’s service, Bailey. Whether it’s an old fashioned or an ass-kicking, you’re serving it up.
And if you’re gonna color outside the lines again, make sure you pick the lines that’re really fucking asking for it.”
But you know what, kiddo? The grown-up who says they know what they’re doing is a grown-up who’s lying.
Everyone you meet on your way up in life, you’re gonna meet again on your way back down.
Getting it together could wait, Bailey thought. Right now she needed to get it right.
She couldn’t help laughing, too, though less from amusement and more from mounting hysteria.
Shoot for the moon, she thought, dazed. Even if you miss, you’ll land on concrete and smash into a bunch of bloody, dead bits.
“Coffee,” Trent said. “It’ll cure what ails ya. Unless what ails ya is insomnia.”
