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Chapter Two

Sylvan

There’s something horribly boring about being able to raise the dead. Sure, in video games or movies it sounds cool, but in real life, not so much.

I mean… how do you toss out that icebreaker on a date? “Hey, your dimples are so cute, and I love how your laugh is loud enough to draw the attention of everyone in the restaurant, oh and I have the ability to manipulate my magic to dig deep into the earth’s surface and draw the dead out—oh, you have to get home? Right now? You sure? Ah, yeah, don’t mind me sitting here all alone growing older and saggier by the minute.”

“HANK!” I shout.

“Yes, sir?” the undead man asks as he hurries into the throne room of my castle. I’m not actually royalty, but as the story goes, my grandpa won the castle in a bet. The bet was one hundred percent in my grandfather’s favor after he rigged a boxing match by sending an undead man into the fight who he’d revived a few minutes before the match.

“I have a new plan,” I announce.

“For?”

“I’m going to be single for the rest of my life.”

“Yesterday’s date didn’t go that poorly… did it?” Hank asks with a hint of concern.

I think back to the look of absolute horror on my date’s face as one of my undead came racing out of the house because I forgot my jacket. And yeah… Fredrick might look a bit… unique but that was no reason for my date to immediately get back in his car and drive away.

“Can you even call it a date when he ran before I even got in the car?” I ask as I wallow in the chair.

My dream had been that by thirty, I would be married with adorable little children frolicking around and calling me Papa! Instead, at thirty, I’m only surrounded by dead people, and while I love them all (well, almost all of them), I still crave more. I literally have to use magic to make myself friends.

Here I am, the creepy guy who talks to dead people.

“Hank, I have decided to die as an old shriveled-up cat man. Get me some cats!”

Hank thinks about that for a moment. “Do you… want alive ones or are you looking for ones that you can bring back to life because…”

“No! I don’t want dead ones…” I stare at the dead man. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being dead… ha… ha?”

The way he stares at me makes me give him a smile… an “I think I fucked up there” smile.

“Just… get me cats. As many as you can carry. Kittens. Gobs of kittens. I want to drown in kittens.”

“Okay… and do you need anything else?”

“Ice cream.”

“Kittens and ice cream. Got it!” he says as he heads to the door just before another of my undead comes rushing up. She whispers something to Hank who then glances back at me. They continue their whispered chatter before I sigh.

“What is it?” I ask, well aware that this is likely going to squash my plans for the day.

“Umm… there’s a very handsome witch here… to vanquish you.”

“Did you tell him I was busy getting kittens?”

The newcomer, Nancy, shakes her head. “Fredrick said that he demanded vengeance or something… I don’t know. I didn’t really listen to him.”

“Why?”

“You get someone stopping by at least once a day with some grand plan of demolishing the evil that ‘roams these lands.’ It gets a bit boring after a while,” Nancy says.

“All because some stupid ‘seer’ predicted that I would be behind the destruction of the city… does it look like I’m up for mass human murder?”

“Well… the seer’s never been wrong ,” Hank reminds me, which makes me grimace.

Nancy seems excited about that for some reason. “Ooh! Remember that little boy who went missing and Danielle, you know, the seer, was able to pinpoint the exact place he’d be so a sexy hero could swoop in and save him?” she gushes. “Danielle almost made my shriveled-up heart start beating again.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter.

“Oh, and do you remember that building that collapsed? The seer could pinpoint exactly where the victims were and the police were able to bust in and use their magic to save the day,” she says. “She’s just so sexy.”

“I feel like you kind of don’t mind that she predicted my downfall because you think she’s hot.”

Nancy points at me while thinking about it. “That’s… a possibility.”

“So what did Fredrick tell the guy at the gate?”

“I have no idea,” she realizes.

There’s a loud explosion that perks my interest a bit. Mostly because my plan of being smothered by kittens seems to be getting further and further away. Walking over to the window, I realize that the hero has decided that he’s tired of waiting and has busted through the front gate.

“Hank, make him leave.”

“How?”

“Do I have to do everything?” I ask as I wander back to the middle of the room where a magic circle is drawn on the floor. It’s something I like keeping on hand for times like this where others are coming to make my life absolutely miserable.

I’m not a super fan of cutting myself, so I’m quite pleased that my magic is strong enough that all it requires of me is to simply set my hand on the circle once I have an established sigil. Since my grandfather was an… eccentric man with a lot of enemies, he made sure to bury the bodies of each of his enemies on the property to call upon at will.

That means that whenever I have problems to deal with, I have a multitude of dead people at my beck and call… the issue is that ninety percent of them absolutely despised my grandfather, so more often than not, at least one or two try to figure out a way to join the hero in murdering me.

Unlike my father and grandfather, my necromancy is unusually powerful. While they could raise the dead if they were near their graves, I can raise any dead that I’ve acquired a connection to from practically anywhere. Say if I were fifty miles away and the dead were buried in my backyard, they would still appear right before me. While I don’t exactly know how I’ve accomplished this, it was something I learned in grade school when I was horribly failing a spelling test and remembered that we had a poet buried in the backyard. My guess is that my magic somehow opens a gate underground that allows them to come to me.

“Nancy, my battle tunes.”

“Got it!” she says and then hurries off a moment before my “Please Leave Me the Fuck Alone” playlist starts playing. I decide to do some Amazon shopping for my new pile of kittens while waiting, so I whip out my phone and leave them to it.

“Sylvan? Sir? Sylvan?”

I glance up from my phone, realizing that at some point I’d wandered off Amazon and ended up on some stupid dating app with every intention of deleting it since everyone I’ve met on there got scared off the moment they got to know me. I definitely wasn’t getting suckered back into it. And I definitely didn’t immediately click the “Cupid Event” where Cupid himself promised to set me up on a blind date with “My One True Love.”

Why did I click it? I’m positive that even Cupid’s not going to want to mess with finding me love. He’s going to laugh when he gets to me and send me something like “You’re destined to die alone.”

“Sylvan?”

“Yes?”

“The witch has bypassed all of the preliminary defenses.”

“Ah.”

“And he’s going to be at the front door shortly.”

My phone chimes and I glance down at the notification from the dating app that is still open. There’s a pink banner with a “Cupid’s located your soulmate! Only one hundred feet away! Would you like to see them now?”

“Well, hello,” I say as I eagerly click on it. “I’m a bit busy, but after we vanquish the witch, I have all night!” Hold on, am I seriously lucky enough that little ol’ me gets to know who my one true love is on this fine battle-filled day?

The not-so-beaming face of my one true love fills my screen just as the front door to my throne room is savagely blasted inward and the hero steps inside. I cock my head, glance down at my phone that says, “Your blind date starts… NOW!” and then look back up.

“Fuck me. Nooooooo!” I cry, wondering why fate is so damn cruel to me. First the seer who made my life an absolute hell, and now my “one true love” is the man who is here for my head. I slump down in my chair, defeat washing over me.

“Are you done?” the man asks a moment before Nancy comes in.

She freezes, then hurries over to me to whisper in my ear. “Oh, he is fiiiine . I would definitely surrender to him.”

I proceed to pretend like she doesn’t exist as I stare at the hero who does look rather fine on this dreadful day. But “fine” isn’t enough of an excuse for me to submit to my death to save a part of mankind. “Why should I surrender? Let me know what I’ve done.”

“I’m not… I’m not asking you to surrender. I have some questions,” Mr. My-Pants-Must-Be-Tight-So-I-Can-Properly-Save-Damsels says.

Hank slowly leans over. “Sir… are we surrendering? I’m… getting conflicting signals.”

“Look at your phone, you sexy beast,” I command the hero.

The witch seems to give me a “who, me?” look like he could possibly have no idea that he’s the sexy one in the room. Does he really think my gobs of undead are who I’m talking about? I love them to absolute pieces but I really don’t want a boyfriend I have to magic life into.

The man hesitates before slowly pulling out his phone. The amount of time it takes him to stare at his screen would have been plenty of time for me to kill him ten times over. Then he slips it into his pocket and grimaces at me like he has absolutely no recollection of his phone’s declaration that we were meant to be. “I simply wanted to come in here and ask you a question. And instead, I’ve been stabbed at, chased, harassed…”

“Like… do you want to go somewhere fancy for our first date or like McDonalds? I’m pretty easy,” I inform him.

“WHAT?” he barks before quickly clearing his throat. Then he takes a deep, calming breath.

I ignore him and look at Hank. “Lovelies, get my date clothes, please.”

The undead, who were clearly caught up in their mid-battle poses, seem oddly confused by this turn of events.

“Although… I’m kind of tired after battling you all day,” I muse.

The witch gawks at me in this absolutely swoon-worthy way.

“You literally didn’t even come outside while I fought off hundreds of your undead,” he says. “All the while going, ‘Can I at least talk to the necromancer? Really, two minutes of his time is all I need.’ What were you doing while I fought them?”

I’m too embarrassed to tell him I was watching kitten videos and shopping on Amazon, so I try my hardest to think of an excuse. “I didn’t know you were planning to come make my life miserable today, you know? But what I’m saying is that maybe we could just… have our date right here?”

“The only date you have is with my magic,” he declares.

“That doesn’t sound very romantic, but I’m listening.”

He hesitates. “Just…” He takes a deep breath. “Ignore that last part. I’m… frustrated. I feel like if you don’t listen, I’m going to slay something.”

“You’re slaying this conversation.”

“I need a necromancer so I can talk to a dead man,” he says.

I hesitate as I stare at him. “So you weren’t coming in here to kill me?”

“I wasn’t, but then your… people all came running at me, forcing me to defend myself.”

“You didn’t come in with the intention of chopping my head off because some seer claimed I was evil?” I inquire.

“Not originally.”

“Oh. Now I feel a bit embarrassed. Why didn’t you just say something? I have a doorbell. You could have even knocked.”

He looks a smidge exasperated. “I tried . I was immediately dismissed and attacked .”

“Guys, why didn’t we just meet him at the gate and ask what he wanted?” I whisper.

They look at each other before shrugging, so I turn and give him a smile. “Is this a setup? Because someone already dragged me off to jail after they fooled me into thinking we were going to hang out and play Clue. Thankfully, they couldn’t hold me without proof and all that jazz, but it was dreadful being forced to sit there with nothing to do. You should have seen the fuss when I raised a dead mouse for company.”

The witch doesn’t seem to care as he watches me for a moment. “So? Will you revive the dead man?”

“I have to check my schedule. Hank, when do I have an opening?”

Hank hesitates. “Um… your next appointment is your haircut next month. Although you did talk about getting a horde of kittens to drown out your woes later this afternoon. Is that still on the schedule?”

I clear my throat and refuse to look the handsome witch in the eyes. “While I am horrifically busy, I do think that I could spare five minutes for my soulmate.”

He just grunts and nods toward the door. “Then let’s go.”

I jump up and hurry after him. “I just want you well aware that if this is all a lie and you’re doing this to stab me in the back, I will murder you and bury your body in the front yard where I will raise you up every time my toilet gets plugged.”

He grunts a reply.

My fated soulmate seems far more interested in this dead body than us going on a date together, but that’s okay. I will simply need to wow him with my necromancy to woo him with my body.