The Necromancer's House (33 page)

“Jesus Christ,” Andrew says, the headlamps level with the attic, sweeping the attic with light. “It's fucking Buttercup.”

“Yep,” Michael Rudnick says, grinning.

He stops grinning as they watch the Soviet soldier fall from the bull's mouth, his neck on wrong.

I drove that car into a tree with Sarah in it.

Drunk I'm worthless I should die.

Stop it!

Focus!

You're a warlock now.

Look what you made!

You have to stop the witch.

Save Anneke.

Andrew says, “Buttercup.”

It looks at him, robes him in light.

“Kill the soldiers. Break the hut's legs.”

The lights sweep off, illuminating snowflakes as the minotaur heads for the tree line, the ground shaking at its steps.

Vanya shoots it, shoots one of its headlamps out, but it keeps coming. It bends for a log. It sees Kolya frozen in fear, quite near it. Squashes him with the log as easily as a man would kill a toad, squashes him down into the soil. Kolya is gone entirely. Vanya runs into thick forest, away from the giant.

Something trips him.

The tail of a dragon?

Attached to a vacuum cleaner?

Now a brass-and-metal beaked head turns to look at him, great black wings spreading.

He tries to point his rifle, but its eyes flash.

I'm burning!

The pain is immeasurable.

Then he isn't burning.

He's running through a field of sunflowers, running at a German artillery position.

A cacophony of noise around him, but he feels great relief.

It's so good not to be burning that he laughs, still running.

Then he hears the whine.

An eighty-eight-millimeter shell drawing nearer.

It's coming for me, right at me!

He flings himself to the ground.

Still the whine grows louder.

He knows it will land almost on him, seems to see the shadow of it growing on the spot exactly near his head where it will punch into soil and sunflowers and explode.

He will be mixed with sunflowers.

Time for one last thought.

Sunflowers. This isn't so bad.

 • • • 

Kolya huddles, mad with fear, when the giant bull comes for him.

It raises its huge tree trunk.

It's going to crush me! Help! Help!

But then he isn't in a snowy yard outside a rich man's house getting crushed by a giant bull-man.

Now he is standing, wiener in hand, urinating on a low stone wall near a collapsed farmhouse.

“Ah,” he says, relieved to feel his bladder emptying.

Relaxed.

Suddenly Kolya feels pressure in his head, massive pressure.

Can't see anymore.

Hears the rifle's crack.

Ow!

Sniper!

Kolya feels himself falling in a muted way, as if someone else is falling.

He hears his friends returning fire into the tree line.

A mile away and receding.

He manages to say one last sentence.

“This bitch lies.”

Andrew scoots to the other end of the attic, risks a peek.

The minotaur has crossed behind the house, drawing rifle fire from the soldiers on the west side. A grenade lands near it and goes off, blowing off part of one greave, causing it to bleed oil and limp. But it knocks down trees and bellows, flushing the soldier who threw the grenade so the vacuum-cockatrice flies down on him. Its fire magic is exhausted, but it grabs him with its chimp arms and flies him into a tree until his head caves in and he, too, reverts into a lifeless burlap doll.

Exhausted, Electra collapses next to the doll and lies still.

Now Buttercup sweeps its remaining headlight over the backyard again, letting its light fall on a tractor.

As soon as the beam hits it, the tractor changes into the hut on chicken legs.

The minotaur gives chase.

Back around to the front yard.

Andrew follows the action, peeking out the front window now, Michael Rudnick next to him, drawing one missed shot from the sniper's roost at the Dawes house.

This starts Shakedown barking again.

“We need to take care of that,” Andrew says.

Michael nods.

“You have something?”

“I was saving it,” Andrew says, “but, yeah.”

He puts a finger down his throat.

Regurgitates a golf-ball-sized chicken's eye onto the oak floorboards.

It floats up, hovers, blinks at Andrew.

Heads across the lawn toward the Dawes house.

Anneke wakes up from an awful dream about a snake on her mouth into an equally disturbing dream in which a teetering hut is being knocked down by a giant.

She is in the hut.

Hanging suspended, upside down.

Things slide across the floor, fly up, banging into her.

A bucket busts her lip.

Pain in her shoulder.

The hut has lurched, fallen sideways; she has careened with it, her cuffed arms and feet jerking her short.

The beardy man has fallen, too, yelping as coals from the stove scatter around the hut.

He grunts and puts these out with his hands.

Andrew sees Buttercup intercept the hut; the chase was almost comical.

But now he concentrates on the eye.

Eagle's eye could have done it from here.

He guides it near, nearer.

Puts his own vision into it.

Sees them.

Two Russians, two rifles.

One in some kind of steel breast-gear.

Big mustache.

They lie side to side.

Close enough.

This spell is old Slavic forest magic.

He says “Strike!” in medieval Russian.

The men both look up at the eye, more in wonder than fear.

They have their helmets off, so he gets to see their hair stand up on end.

Bright flash!

Now his sight switches dizzyingly back into his own head; he sees the lightning bolt originate from the chicken's eye, incinerating it, leaping down into the two soldiers, lighting Dawes's curtains on fire.

Thunder cracks and booms.

He knows both men are dead.

He is blind in his right eye, as if it has stared at the sun.

Believes his sight will return, but isn't sure.

In the yard, the hut has fallen.

The chicken's legs scrabble ineffectually at the minotaur.

It grabs one, breaks it over its knee.

“Buttercup,” Andrew says.

It stops with the broken leg in its hands, like a woman interrupted in the business of dressing a hen for the oven.

“Get Anneke out safely. Bring her here.”

Now it peels part of the roof back.

Peers in.

Another flash.

Starting in the woods.

BANG!

The minotaur's right shoulder explodes, the arm turning back into tree, rocks, car parts, raining down the steep driveway.

Buttercup falls on its huge ass, its weight causing the house to shudder.

It struggles to get to its feet, wanting to use the missing arm, falling heavily, getting back up to its knees.

The hut, too, tries to stand.

It manages.

Holds its broken leg up, hops to the tree line.

The minotaur is almost up.

BANG!

The shell catches it in the throat, blowing its head up and off.

The whole monstrosity turns back into cars and boulders, some of this airborne.

“Oh shit,” Andrew says.

He and Rudnick both drop, cover their heads with their hands.

The old Mustang, on fire, flips end over end, clips the top of the house off, exposing stars and sky and letting in cold air.

Debris rains down on them.

And snow.

Andrew looks back into the yard.

The T-34 tank grumbles out from behind a stand of maples, exhaust farting behind it.

“You okay?” Andrew says.

“Think so. You?”

“Yeah.”

Andrew finds the night-vision binoculars, looks at the tank.

Two figures ride its turret, shielded behind its round hatches.

A very dead man, grinning a skeletal smile.

And a woman wearing a Soviet general's cap and wool coat.

His long-ago lover, Marina Yaganishna.

From that awful season in Russia.

From the witch's hut.

Her smallest, most traumatized daughter.

The one who freed him.

She's not here to help you now.

The turret swivels.

Michael Rudnick looks up into the sky through the new hole in the roof.

Parts of the roof burn, but these snuff themselves out quickly thanks to the fireproofing spells Andrew cornered the house with.

Michael has a very powerful spell bottled up, and thinks it's time.

He fingers an oddly shaped piece of iron hanging around his neck by a leather thong.

He scans the sky, trying both to see and feel.

Feels several, mostly too small, one too big.

This has to be Goldilocks.

And he has to be fast.

And lucky.

Hears the tank fire again.

BAM!

Feels the house rock, start to sag, knows the living room was blown in, one load-bearing wall.

Interrupts the spell he was working on, now feels where the shell hit; he can't help the lost furniture and electronics, but he opens his palms like a conductor, causes the blown-out bricks and wood to re-adhere—the house jolts and rights itself.

He sees a stuffed owl animate and fly out the window.

Good—Andrew's up to something.

He glances at the other wizard, sees him fish a pill out of his shirt pocket, dry-swallow it.

He's holding together.

Andrew has stronger magic than Michael—the minotaur was mostly him, mostly car-magic.

But weaker character.

They might win if Andrew doesn't lose his shit.

The tank fires again, but Michael is ready for it: The house shudders, but the fragments from the shell don't blow out two yards before the structure seems to inhale it all back in. Like an incendiary rose blooming and unblooming in the blink of an eye with an echo like rolling thunder. The fires started by the blast wink out in less than two seconds.

A woman swears viciously in Russian.

They know they can't knock the house down.

Now they'll shoot high.

At us.

If it hits the attic, we're hamburger.

He looks at the sky again.

Snow falling, but no clouds.

Feels what he wants.

Exactly the one he wants, just the right size, as near as he can tell.

Oh, this will be dangerous.

This will be the hardest thing he's ever done.

He did it once in the Arizona desert, but there weren't houses nearby, precision wasn't the issue.

He calls it.

 • • • 

Andrew sends the owl and pops a Klonopin.

Where is Sal? Is Sal okay?

The shelling is getting to him.

Two direct hits on the house.

They won't survive a third.

Killing the tank is on Andrew.

His nerves are frazzled.

Everything is happening at once.

Marina is atop the tank, pointing at the attic.

The gun elevates.

Andrew says “Get down!” to Michael, who appears to be stargazing.

Michael keeps looking up, his mouth moving.

What the fuck is he doing?

Hurry, owl.

Andrew drops to the floor, covers his head, puts his eyesight in the owl.

 • • • 

Now he sees the yard, the tank.

The bird flies toward it, slowly, struggling to carry the vase.

The tank is going to fire.

I could look at the attic, watch myself die.

No, fly faster, fucking owl.

FASTER!

 • • • 

Then he sees it.

With his owl eyes.

It comes from the constellation of Cassiopeia. It tumbles slowly at first, seems to turn, then hurtles at great speed, fiery, smoking, almost too fast to see.

Throwing mad shadows.

It's big, big enough to make it through the atmosphere.

Because it's real, many see it.

It gets wished on by no less than four thousand people.

Let my mother's surgery go well.

Let me get into Yale.

Keep my love safe in Kabul.

Please please please let Stargate listen to my demo.

Make him ask me to marry him.

Please don't let this be malignant.

I wish for Stephanie Daley to kiss me back with tongue.

OH PLEASE CRUSH THE FUCK OUT OF THAT TANK!

(that one's Andrew)

The witch atop the tank turns, sees the meteor coming, spreads a hand at it. Manages to split it so it falls not in one television-sized hunk, but in several the size of footballs and baseballs. Manages to slow them so they don't vaporize the tank.

She's awfully strong.

But she can't stop it.

Them.

One piece hits the turret, stuns the dead gunner, the Soviet driver made from a plastic model-man.

Knocks the witch off.

Another piece knocks the left track and two roller wheels off the T-34.

One misses, fells a small tree.

The noise is ungodly.

The meteor doesn't destroy the tank, but it does beat the holy hell out of it.

It does buy some time.

For the owl.

 • • • 

The huge horned owl wings toward the tank, clutching the vase in its talons. It barely makes it there; the vase is heavy and its talons aren't made for carrying such things. It drops the vase whole, hears it pop, turns so Andrew can use its eyes to see the yellow glass stones the vase held glittering all over the hull.

Up in the attic, Andrew shouts the word.

“Bhastrika!”

WHUMP!

A fireball the size of a pasha's tent mushrooms up over the tank, lighting parts of the woods on fire, lighting the owl on fire, illuminating the snow that has begun to collect in the yard.

Andrew comes back to himself, shakes the arm he thought was a wing on fire, collects himself, looks out the window with Michael.

The fire's glow on the snow makes him think of Christmas lights, and then the thought goes as quickly as it came.

This is one fucked-up Christmas.

A blackened skeleton is crawling out of a burning tank in his front yard.

A blackened skeleton on fire.

Coming toward the house.

The remaining three Soviet soldiers forming up behind it.

Rushing the house!

Michael, still stunned from calling the meteor, braces himself against the wall, points down the attic ladder.

Andrew goes down to meet the attack.