Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

“And then?”

“Something came and killed them.”

“A demon?”

“Sort of. Hitler.”

She furrows her brow.

“Couldn’t they fight, or hide?”

“Can’t fight an army. And it’s hard to hide from other users.”

“Hitler had users?”

He looks at her.

She remembers a picture she saw of Adolf Hitler, surrounded by wide-eyed adorers, all of them half mad. Hitler calm in the middle of the storm of madness. They were looking at him like they were starving for something, something in his words and eyes, something only he could give them. They were addicted to him.

“Oh my God,” she says. “He was one.”

Michael nods.

“Only the very luminous can make it out, but those tapes of him ranting in German? I’ve listened to them. It’s not German. It’s not a human language at all. Something taught him those words. Something he conjured. And you can only hear it for a moment. Because it starts to work on you, starts to sound like German. And if you speak German, it starts to sound like the truth.”

She goes pale.

Wonders what she’s gotten herself into.

Wonders if she wants to know these things.

Thinks it’s too late .

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s not all rotten. Now fix the tree.”

She looks at one stone leaf.

She plucks the leaf. Holds it by the stem, holds it up to the sun. So thin opaque light filters through it, lights up its veins and capillaries. You could almost shave with its edges.

She’ll need a word.

Ancient Greek is best for stone.

“ Pneuma ,” she says.

“ Ezasa ,” she says.

It liked pneuma better.

It tingled.

She concentrates on the part that glows with the sun behind it, sees the glow turning maple-green.

“ Pneuma ,” she says again, and breathes on it, as if kindling fire.

Green glows where her breath touched the leaf, starts to creep out toward the edges as fire would creep on paper.

“Ah! Ah!”

The leaf is almost a leaf again.

“Hurry,” he says.

She understands.

She touches the leaf to the rest of the tree, watches the green catch, spread. She blows on it as one would blow kindling, watches it move from leaf to leaf, revivifying the sapling until at last it trembles in the breeze again, at last the sapling winks back into life. Exists again. It wasn’t there, and then it was. As her father had been there, and then gone, in the length of a breath.

The beautiful girl furrows her brow, looking at her phone. The handsome man sitting across from her at the hip Lincoln Square sushi restaurant says, “Everything okay?” She nods, still looking into her palm, but the furrow remains. She pockets the phone.

“Sorry. I know that’s rude,” she says, still not looking at him, but she’s said it before, and still keeps checking her phone. When she does this, he doesn’t know where to rest his own eyes. Sometimes on her cleavage, sometimes on the restaurant’s expensive-looking water feature. He knew she would be high maintenance; she looked high maintenance strolling down Clark Street with a bag full of shoe boxes and mustard-yellow pumps, but he took a sheet from his sketch pad, drew a flower on it, wrote down his information, and left it under her windshield wiper anyway because she also looked smart. Girls who aren’t that smart can be fun, but they’re not impressive. This might be the most impressive girl he’s ever brought to Fugu Sushi.

He’s brought seventeen girls to Fugu Sushi.

He calls ahead to get the window seat. Figures everybody wins because he gets a nice view, the restaurant looks hip because he looks hip, and the server always gets twenty-five percent. Twenty percent makes a server happy, twenty-five gets you remembered. The staff remembers him.

Not the way he thinks, though.

They call him manwhore, as in “I’m cut for the night, you’ve got manwhore.”

Always a two-top.

Always by the window.

Staff sympathies turned decidedly against him when, on companion number eight, he left his website and e-mail address for the waitress, along with a pen-and-ink sketch of an octopus (he had dined on tako that night), which he had prepared in advance. He managed to do it while helping that evening’s date put her coat on, did it with the skill of a cardsharp.

The waitress showed everyone the octopus, and now an octopus-like wave of the fingers means manwhore . Thus, pointing at oneself and waving the fingers, with a gently repulsed lip curl, means “I’ll take manwhore.” The bartender’s in on it, too. Finger wave followed by cup-to-lips uptilt gesture means, “What are manwhore and the young lady drinking?”

The exotic-looking number seventeen, sipping Bride of the Fox sake, would have already figured out manwhore’s deal except that she has been too distracted by computer problems to vet him pre-date, and, tonight, so distracted by her phone that she’s not plumbing his charmingly self-deprecating monologues for sincerity or spontaneity.

“If there’s a problem and you need to call it an early night, I understand,” he says. He knows that’s what he’s supposed to say, but he doesn’t want an early night—he wants to get her back to his loft, put on Portishead and send a finger up under that orange suede skirt to test his theory that small-boned women are tighter and full-lipped women are wetter.

The phone hasn’t been in her pocket a minute when it buzzes again.

She decides to let him in on the problem.

“Somebody’s sending me odd texts.”

“Why don’t you turn it off?”

“Good idea,” she says, and starts to, then doesn’t. “Only I’m intrigued.”

“By what?”

She considers him; he only just clears her threshold for minor confidences.

“What do you see?” she says, showing him her phone.

“A horse.”

“Yeah. A horse.”

She scrolls down.

“More horses,” he says. “Are you an equestrian?”

She shakes her head no.

He sees them.

That’s something.

Now she knows the texted photos are not themselves magical, though she’s picking up magic around them, and the sender’s number is blocked. She’s sure that if she saw it, it would be international, originating in Ukraine. It’s the middle of the night over there. She turns the phone back to herself, scrolls down the photos, all twenty-something of them showing different horses: bays, roans, and blacks; Arabs, quarter horses, and Belgians.

This is an attack.

This is how wizards fight; they begin by psyching out their opponent.

It’s not going to work on me.

Horses?

My hacker must be a man, and a very silly man.

“May I try your sake?” her date says.

She looks at him as if only just realizing he’s there.

She gets a tickle in her ear, telling her there’s a conversation she may wish to eavesdrop on. She swivels a sort of invisible cat’s ear toward the kitchen.

… way too hot for that creeper, I don’t know how he even gets them here.

Well he’s hot, hot’s not his problem. Kinda looks like a watered-down Johnny Depp. He’s just clueless. Wonder what he drew for this one.

Do you think they sleep with him?

Some, I’m sure, or he wouldn’t keep dropping Benjamins. Must be a trust fund kid. Told me once he’s an actor, his Visa has three first names like an actor, Michael Oliver Scott or something, but they don’t make that kind of money, not in Chicago. Unless it’s commercials.

She listens for another moment, making eye contact with Michael Anthony Scott.