The Necromancer's House Read Free Page B

bifurcate.
    â€œAnd since when is an Anneke Zautke so ready to spar about names? It sounds like you should be wearing clogs.”
    Suddenly curious about what she
is
wearing on her feet, Andrew glances at her Middle-Easternish sandals, sees the slightly chipped green toenail polish. Anneke has handsomely shaped feet. She has handsomely shaped everything. And she dresses well, not just well for a lesbian.
    She hates that word.

3
    â€œI hate that word,” she had said. “It sounds like something cold-blooded.”
    â€œIt is,” he had said, and she had frog-knuckle-punched him right between the scant muscles of his arm.
    Hard.
    That had been the night they first attempted to be lovers; the movie they had watched together was over, the bruschetta she had made all gone save for the sliver of basil and crust of cheese drying to the plate. She kissed him more out of loneliness than passion, finally taking him to bed for a self-conscious romp they both mostly laughed through, especially the application of the condom.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    Now I Ranulf, king of the Britons, draw my weapon, sheathe it (lo, it droopeth) (a little help, please) (Ah! Excalibur!), and sheathe it again, as is my right.
    Shut up and do this if you’re going to.
    Verily, Lady.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    It was clear that her love for him was above the waist, and always would be, no matter how feminine his bone structure or how exotic the scents he wore in his long black hair. His deeper scent was masculine, his angles too hard, his tongue too big in her mouth.
    He knew there were spells he might use to make her burn for him, but burn she would; the further the subject was from true desire, the more damage the incantation would do. Suicide, insanity, and illness were the long-term fruits of love’s abuse, by magic or otherwise, as so many had written and so few believed.
    Andrew believed.
    He had seen what happened to those who loved him over the two decades since the witch’s raven had left its peck in him.
    Sarah.
    Anneke would be safe from the raven’s beak.
    The curse that murdered those he loved who loved him back.
    She would not love him, and if he loved her, that was his blood to bleed.
    I guess
Papillon
was the wrong movie to try to seduce you with.
    Maybe not. You fuck like you’ve got money up your ass.
    Wait a minute, I thought I was Papillon, not Dustin Hoffman.
    You were Dustin Hoffman.

4
    She had sculpted him twice.
    The first time wearing his Japanese robe and sitting with his elbows on his thighs, head slightly bent and cocked to one side like a bohemian
The Thinker
, and she had kept that one.
    It sat on the table by her smoking chair, the chair facing the lake, lording over the camel-bone ashtray her sailor father had gotten in Egypt. Sometimes she stuck incense sticks in the space between the statue’s arm and thigh and burned them so they veiled his head in smoke, but mostly she just puffed her Camel Lights and watched sunsets or storms or waves lapping at the weird ice figures framing the beach in winter. He liked it that a smaller version of himself kept her company.
    The second statue had been larger, life-sized, a nude, and it was so lifelike she sold it for four thousand dollars at an art show in Ithaca. She had barely had it a month but needed the money, and she would not sell it to Andrew because his offer felt like charity. She wanted to see what she could get from a stranger.
    And so a man from Toronto took home her best statue, a statue of one of America’s most powerful wizards buck naked in white clay, and put it in his basement near a red felt pool table.
    It was titled
Nonchalance
, and the Canadian never lost another game of pool under Andrew’s bored stone gaze, even against much better players, nor did he ever guess why.

5
    Anneke is not made for interiors; there is something smaller, something caged and wrong about her in the bar, as there is