Page 71 of Necromancers Don't Raise

“So, what are you guys doing out in public?” Gabby asked, leaning across the table to study me.

“I’m courting Mercury,” I said, and pulled Mercury’s arm around my waist. I probably should have asked him if I could sit on him, but me, him, and public were always a disastrous combination.

“Oh.” She nodded wisely. “Do they have sushi? You should always have sushi when you’re courting.”

I raised my hand to get the waiter’s attention, and I pointed at Vincent Bellham. “Tartiflette,” then at Anna, “Escargots a la bourguignonne, and then the Steak Tartare.” I pointed at Gabby’s handsome husband who was looking at me with amusement and something like awe. “Coq au Vin, and for the lovely redhead, the same as her mother.”

I put my head back on Mercury’s shoulder, and that time gripped his lapel, like otherwise someone would force me to do something else difficult.

“You don’t have to order for others,” Mercury murmured, then pressed a kiss to my hair and wrapped his arm around me, pulling me closer. “Do you want to go?”

“No. We’re courting, and the food really is worth it.”

“But we could have it delivered. The Afghan is waiting.”

“I put on a dress.”

“You could take it off.”

Gabby gasped and her mother choked on her water and started laughing while I myself sat bolt upright to turn and stare at Mercury in his tuxedo with that gleaming hair, and gleaming eyes, raging mischief, like he lived to shock the easily appalled.

Right. He did that, particularly when it came to his friend, Vincent Bellham.

I shrugged and put my head back on his shoulder. “We’re a couple,” I said as primly as I could from that position.

“I can see that,” Gabby said, eyes dancing before she elbowed the handsome, aloof man beside her. “Aren’t they a cute couple, Apples?”

“Oh, they’re very cute. Adorable. I’ve only seen such cuteness a few times in my life. Such as that time I was being chased by a polar bear. Polar bears as so cute. They’ll hunt you for months, tracking you in all kinds of weather so that they can rip you apart and eat your steaming organs.”

The president’s son was also secretly a lunatic. That explained it. “Not to be rude, but why are you all here?” I asked.

“For the food,” Anna the Grand Sorcerer said, nodding firmly. “I’m always all about the food. But since we’re all here together, someone really should address the very public display of extremely disturbing powers that someone showed a few days ago.” Ah. Mercury raising an army of the dead hadn’t goneunnoticed. I guess she didn’t buy the ‘cleaning up Apple City’ spiel.

Gabby snorted. “Really? Who’s going to address that? They’re a cute couple. You don’t accuse cute couples of disturbing the peace.”

“Particularly when it might implicate you,” Apples said, nudging his wife.

She beamed at him. “Yes, especially then.” She turned to frown at me. “I didn’t think that you’d jump. Are you crazy?”

I just stared at her. “You told me to jump. You said that was the only way to save everyone.”

“Well, yes, but I obviously didn’t mean it. If you weren’t such an extremely competent diver, you would have smashed your skull on that water. It was no joke.”

“You told me to jump because you thought that I wouldn’t? That’s just annoying. Mercury, I shouldn’t have ordered for her.”

He raised my hand and kissed it, sending a sweet shiver through me. “She doesn’t deserve your talents.”

Gabby leaned forward to study me more closely. “Are you actually a gifted orderer? That’s the most useful thing I’ve ever heard. I just wanted you to stand there on the bridge so that the mental necromancer would see your danger and chill out with all the theatricals, but instead, you dove right in. The percent of people who wouldn’t hesitate is in the negatives.”

“You can’t have a negative percent,” Apples said, breaking a bread stick into pieces and putting them in his wife’s mouth.

“Don’t ever marry a genius,” Gabby told me, seriously, around her bite. “They’re always correcting you in public.”

“And private,” Apples corrected.

They beamed at each other. So cute. Like polar bears.

Vincent Bellham cleared his throat. “Mercury, I heard about your new and unique initiative. You raised an army of undead in order to clean up Apple City? It’s time someone did somethingabout all the littering, but that must have been slightly unnerving for all the live residents.”

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