At the Behest of the Dead by Timothy W. Long Read Free Book Online

no idea how long I might be gone.
    If Thora’s story was a bunch of bullshit then who had the dog even belonged too? The best lies were always grounded in some sort of reality, so maybe her husband had been involved after all. Either way I couldn’t just let the dog tear my place to shreds while I was out and about.
    Thora would have to wait. Right now I had a good paying job.
    The tools of my trade are unique. Each witch or warlock has a particular set but I consider mine to be the most varied. Perhaps not the strongest in each discipline, but I had my moments. When I’d picked necromancy, my guardian, Salazar, told me it was just as good as any other as far as he was concerned. Since the league didn’t like necros, it was my petty way of sticking it to them. I was only nineteen at the time and didn’t know a damn thing. Had I to do it all over again, I probably would have picked something that relied on less digging around in the dirt. You can’t imagine how bad a human corpse can smell after a few days of rotting.
    I ran my hand over a hidden glyph on an ornate door in the hallway. It responded by warming to my touch and pulsing, wood expanding, as the passageway became corporeal. The door swung open to reveal my stash.
    The closet didn’t exactly exist in this world. It expanded to something like a walk-in closet, with a workstation for quick potions and a grounding stone so I didn’t fry my ass to a crisp when dealing with elementals.
    Shelves lined the walls , and on those shelves existed a collection that had taken me over a hundred years to put together. Books, scrolls, vials, wands (don’t laugh, they were in fashion a few centuries ago), stones, and more than a few scarred bones. It was a curio shop for the damned.
    I took an etching stone and placed it in a pouch. Charcoal sticks went alongside them and then a large leather worked chest piece with a pair of straps that went over my shoulder and one that wrapped around my waist. I concentrated and imbued it with a heavy spell of shielding. It was no coincidence that the middle plate covered my heart. It was an old and cruel piece of metal that had demons claws etched for each point. No matter how loose I wore it, part of the talons always bit into my flesh and that’s how it became stronger, at my expense.
    There is always a price for playing with the best toys.
    I took potions from my work shelf, noting each on a slip of paper so I could bill the cute detective an exorbitant fee later on. I took two vials of brimstone. A special blend that I imbued with a little acetyl because it could incinerate just about anything that got in my path.
    Moonwater was next. A small dose in case I ended up in the dark. I could rely on my eye salve but this was a tried and true formula that would last for hours. A concoction of virgin blood and soft clay for animal control. Other things, probably unnecessary, joined the vials on my bandolier. I took some lead chunks in case I needed ammo. I wouldn’t be caught dead with a gun, but you never know when a few peppers of hot lead could turn the tide in a battle. Yeah, yeah. I hear the irony in that statement.
    I pulled out a vial from the night before and remembered that’d I’d trapped a demon in it. I stared into the depths of the murky fog that occupied the glass container and nearly dropped it when a few eyeballs focused on me. Maybe later I’d take hi m to my workstation in the backyard and drop him on a binding stone and send him back home. Or maybe I’d leave him there as the world’s greatest watch dog.
    I put him on the dining room table so I didn’t forget about his damned soul when I was done.
    I was going in ready for a fight because that little voice in the back of my head (you know the one) was babbling quite excitedly.
    Armed and armored, I strode to the shed and drug out my giant pitchfork. It wasn’t the tines that made it look old. The wood had been bound by brass straps a couple hundred years ago so it