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

dragging her leash in her mouth.
    While she ate, I’d changed clothes, thankful beyond all belief to get out of those pumps. Then I took her for a longer walk than usual to make up for being so late. Poor Luna had to deal with a scatterbrained, slightly neglectful owner like me, but hey, I had managed to keep her alive for over six years. Even though I’d kept her little bladder waiting numerous times, she’d been broken out of doing her business in the house. She was so good to me, and I didn’t deserve it.
    Once we got back inside, Luna was pacified and curled up on her doggy bed to nap. I could now take a shower and grab something to eat, but there’d be no curling up and sleeping for me just yet. I had to wait for Ethan to return, and before he came, I had to do something about the fact that the reanimation check was tomorrow.
    First, I retrieved a bag of supplies I kept hidden under a floorboard in my bedroom closet. I then rummaged around in my handbag until I pulled out a flat, circular, dark-blue rune stone that I had stolen from Trevor. My visit hadn’t been only to antagonize him, and when I’d been rifling through the rune stones on his table, I had really been looking for this particular stone.
    It was a binding rune, and not only was it extremely rare, it was also illegal. Thus, the Underground was the perfect place to sniff one out, and I was glad when I’d spotted several in Trevor’s possession. It would have been great if I only ever needed one of these, but for some reason, they became inactive after one use. I had a stash of defunct binding runes under the floorboard because I couldn’t risk throwing them away and having them found and traced back to me.
    I moved aside my coffee table and the rug under it, then emptied the contents of the bag and picked up a vial of white powder. After carefully drawing a circle on the floor with the powder, I sat back on my heels for a moment so I could focus. I was confident in my ability to do this, but I always felt nervous when it actually came down to doing it.
    Long ago, my grandmother had been the one who taught me how to hide my reanimation power. She was also a reanimator and had lived her entire life without being found out.
    My grandmother had her own secret supply of binding runes, but after she died, all I had was what she’d left behind. When they’d been used up, I had to find more on my own. That’s where the Underground came in handy.
    The process of binding my power was exhausting, and the reason I was nervous was because even though I knew it worked, I still didn’t know much about the powers of the binding stone. My grandmother’s knowledge was all I had: it was used to bind. I had studied and researched rune stones a lot while I was in training school, but there was decidedly less to find about obscure and illegal runes. That meant that even though the stone helped me hide a part of my power, that didn’t mean that was all it was capable of doing. I always felt like I was taking a dangerous risk whenever I used it.
    But when my options were using an illegal rune to protect myself versus having my reanimation power removed and possibly going insane from it, I was gonna go with door number one.
    I opened several other vials of powder and spent the next twenty minutes using the powders to draw runes inside the circle I’d made. The powders were made up of finely ground rune stones. They were different colors, and each had a different role to play in the ritual I had to perform.
    After the runes were drawn, I placed the binding stone in the middle of the circle. Keeping my hand on the stone, I channeled energy into it. After a few moments, it started to glow, and as I filled it with energy, the stone’s power activated the runes I had drawn until they were all glowing, including the circle that encompassed them.
    Now came the part where I concentrated like a motherfucker, because I had to give the binding stone only my reanimation power.