Free Affairs of the Dead by A.J. Locke Page A

attractive if she put a little effort into it, but I guess she wasn’t getting paid to sit around and look cute. I hoped that’s not what Andrew was paying me for.
    I juggled names in my head until I got the right one: Athena. She was one of the dead witches who were always present when these procedures went down, so I’d been seeing her humorless face for a few years now. When she got to me, she didn’t waste time saying hello but immediately started fiddling with her iPad.
    “Name?” she asked. She probably recognized my face but dealt with too many of us to remember us by name.
    “Selene Vanream,” I said.
    She nodded, poked her iPad for a few more seconds, then put it down and reached into the black pouch she was also holding. The rune stone she pulled out looked similar to the binding stone I had used on myself, except it was red. I’ll admit, my trepidation was growing the closer she brought that stone to me, but I sat still and tried not to look like someone who had stripped and hidden my reanimation power. I was just your average necromancer, no ability to reanimate the dead using souls of the living here.
    Athena held the rune stone close to me, and I immediately felt the biting energy inside the stone tickle along my skin. The energy infused into this particular kind of rune stone was invasive. Its job was to search, so it did more than slide along my skin. I could feel the stone’s power sink into my body and embark on a search of every fiber of my being.
    Here was where I started praying that I had peeled every last streak of reanimation power away, because if even an atom-sized particle remained, Athena and her stone would find it, and I would be fucked. Athena’s face was extremely serious, as though doing this was the single most important thing she could do with her life. I averted my gaze and stared at the far wall as I waited for it to be over.
    After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only about ten minutes, Athena finally stood up straight, put the rune stone away, and picked up her iPad to make a few notes.
    “Clear.” She handed me a piece of green paper, then turned around and walked away.
    I released the largest breath ever and slumped back against the chair for a few moments. As I headed for the doors, I looked around the room and saw that the crowd had thinned out. The witches had gotten through about half of us, and so far no one had been tackled to the ground, screaming for his or her freedom. Micah was still here, sitting by himself, waiting his turn. As though he knew I was looking at him, he caught my eye, so I held up the green paper and waved it at him. Maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me, but I could have sworn I saw relief flash briefly across his face. Well whatever. I showed my green paper to the guards, and they let me leave the room and head back to the tenth floor.
    I wished I could run home and take my reanimation power back, because even though I wasn’t feeling sick yet, I felt hollow without it, like I was slightly off my equilibrium. Only when I’d done the ritual for the first time and felt what it was like to be without that part of my power did I understand what was really done to a reanimator when they were stripped. And when I had tried to leave my power in the binding stone, I had really, really understood.
    I was as up in arms about the stripping practice as anyone else, but I understood the fear associated with the power to reanimate a dead body. There were history books full of horror stories about reanimators who abused their power and left a high body count in their wake. If there was some way to know that modern day reanimators wouldn’t go off the deep end and slaughter people to raise corpses, maybe the stripping solution could be scrapped, but alas, there was no telling what people would do with the power they had.
    The suite was mostly empty since a lot of the people who had been cleared had plunged right back into work and were off