The Necromancer's House

Coda

St. Petersburg, Russia.

November.

The Singer Café on the second floor of the Dom Knigi bookstore on Nevsky Prospect.

A troika of women sits jet-lagged in the warm, green room while outside the sky threatens to spit snow again, as it did all the rough ride down to the Pulkovo airport this morning.

“We’re not here for magic,” Marina Yaganishna says.

“I know. But, what, are we just going to leave it here?” Anneke says, tucking the last corner of her tuna sandwich in her mouth.

The red-haired girl with the scarred nose and cheeks looks out the window, looks at the Kazan cathedral down below. She has spoken rarely since they got on the plane at JFK; she stirred from her heavy-lidded Xanax-and-vodka-induced stupor only long enough to change planes in Moscow; she hated the plane, hated everything about it, made it clear that she would rather overdose than be awake knowing she was over the ocean.

She doesn’t like water now.

Or seafood.

She nearly vomited the first time she saw a mussel.

“I have been to this church, I think,” she says in Russian, pointing down at the cathedral, which bears more than a passing resemblance to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

“Speak English, please,” Marina says to her.

“Why? You claim to speak Russian.”

“I do.”

“Like an Ohio housewife,” she manages in English.

“And when you speak Russian you sound like a spoiled tsarina who needs a whipping.”

Nadia smiles at that.

She looks at Anneke now, stirring her hot chocolate with chili. The chocolate is so thick it barely runs off the spoon.

“I have been to this church,” she says in English. “There are statues of generals from Napoleon’s inversion.”

“Invasion is what I think you want to say,” Anneke says.

“It was a bit of an inversion,” Marina says.

“Thank you for including me,” Anneke says to Nadia, trying not to sound like a smartass—it isn’t lost on her that she may be speaking to the last living person who saw prerevolution St. Petersburg, but she needs to make her point to Andrew (she has trouble calling him Marina). She swivels her gaze to Marina Yaganishna. “But the book. Really, are we just going to leave it here?”

All three of them look at the book now.

It appears to be a Soviet-era book on trees, complete with greasy plastic cover and line drawings of leaves and happy Soviet children playing in the woods, although their playing always looks like building or marching. Andrew sees past the book’s disguise immediately. Anneke takes a few blinks. Nadia can’t see what it really is. Not yet.

Andrew reads the actual title again.

“Magical Gardens: How to Make Anything Grow Anywhere. With a Discussion of Healing Herbs and Poisons. 1913.”

This is a handwritten book bound in brown leather with yellow stitching.

“I just don’t see the harm in buying this and bringing it back.”

Marina looks at Anneke over her glasses.

“You don’t see the harm because you didn’t have to get out of the Soviet Union with magical books after being brutalized by a witch.”

“I have been brutalized by a witch.”

“You have been gently brutalized by a witch for a very short period of time. And it had nothing to do with books.”

“Menopause isn’t going easy on you, Mr. Blankenship.”

Marina laughs despite herself.

“Just get the damned book if you want it. You’re a grown-up.”

“I was going to. How’s the chocolate?”

“Spicy deliciousness. Try it.”

Anneke’s spoon floats down.

Nadia dips into it, too, her expensive perfume filling Anneke’s nose.

Can’t call her fish-cunt anymore. She smells better than I do.

Marina looks at the cathedral now, too.

“When I was here, that was a museum of atheism.”

“You’re shitting me,” Anneke says.

“Nope. They had a big statue of Lenin, monk’s penance chains, lots of anti-religious quotes. One of the guides told me they toned it down. Used to have a painting called Christ the Oppressor. Thumbscrews and all that, too, but it didn’t play well with visitors.”

“Lenin was a pig. I can’t believe they named my city after him,” Nadia says. Her voice is different now. Softer, even when she says harsh things. She has lived with Anneke and Marina for two months now as they figure out what they all are to each other. Anneke and Marina are lovers, more frequently than they were when Andrew was Andrew, but there is still something cautious, reserved about it. It took them more than a month even to kiss.

Nadia has a boyfriend, Chancho’s handsome, beard-rubber-banding employee, Gonzo. Not as smart as Nadia, but really handsome.

Voice like molasses.

She met him while bartending at the Raven on Bridge Street in Oswego.

She is not luminous, but Anneke is teaching her magic anyway, hoping she’s got the brains and persistence to plod her way into magic.

It is slow, slow going.

“Anyway, maybe herbs and shit are this one’s bag. She’s not getting the stone and rock thing at all.”

“I hate the rock spells. I feel like a rooster pecking at a pearl,” Nadia says.

Then she brightens, sits upright.

“We have to go to the summer gardens!” she says, wide-eyed. “There is a statue there. Krylov, the writer for children. My father used to read me fables under his statue, using animals’ voices! ‘The Cat and the Cook’!”

This is the most animated either of them has seen her in Russia.

This is why they came.

“I remember,” she says.

Then she takes both of their hands, looks at each of them in turn.

Although she occupies the same shell, she is unrecognizable as the monster that drowned Mikhail Dragomirov and so many others.

She’s a warm-blooded young woman, little more than a girl.

When she speaks they don’t know if she means them or St. Petersburg.

It could be them.

They have become an odd sort of family.

An odd sort of coven.

Nadia cries when she says it.

“I’m home.”