Lana grinned upon hearing the cawing of her door chimes. Her days had grown dull with regularly scheduled client meetings, so she relished the thrill of unexpected guests. She tossed aside her crystal ball and parted the satin curtains that led to the front parlor of her shop. 

A soft mid-afternoon glow framed the young woman in the doorway. The woman's eyes quivered on her round face, her long hair draped solemnly down her back, and a thin scar snaked up her left wrist. 

"Come in, don't be shy. Looking to have your fortune told?" Lana probed with her favorite sarcastic question, intended to root out casual window-shoppers.

"I want to see my dead husband," the young woman whispered. Lana pursed her lips. Straight to the point, she liked that. But she found romantic love a bit trite. Nearly every customer seemed to be looking for love, or lost their love, or sought to love better or harder. 

"What's your name, dear? You do know I only take payment in emotions?" she asked. Too many clients offered to pay in gold or diamonds, when Lana only wanted to siphon the excess emotional essences they generated in order to fuel more spells. "And necromancy is far from cheap." Profitability was the main concern, of course, but Lana also hated boredom, so she often picked clients she expected would deliver entertainment.

"It's Alisa. And I'm certain my emotional output will be worth your time." 

Lana pressed her lips together, for Alisa's thin frame seemed unable to output much of anything. Reviving the dead, even momentarily, could exhaust the sorcerer's reserve of emotional essences if she couldn't recoup her investment. Sure, customers usually exhibited strong emotional reactions to seeing the dead, but she already had cauldrons full of love and grief. She needed rarer ingredients for her more powerful spells—callous rage or repressed fear, subconscious guilt or confused joy. 

Yet a little spark of something in the back of Alisa's eyes led her to take a gamble. Maybe it was the incongruence of the woman's confidence against her wispy appearance. Maybe it was because the sorcerer detected a bit of herself in Alisa. Or maybe Lana just felt the pang of ennui—evident from the heaps of her own boredom essence languishing in the storeroom—and this was nothing but a foolish risk. 

She curled an index finger at Alisa and they retreated into her dusky workshop. "I assume you brought something of his?" 

Alisa opened her palm to reveal a lock of curly brown hair. Lana plucked it from the woman's hand and dropped it into the circle on the blackened wood floor. She used a needle-like dagger to prick her own hand, allowing blood to drip onto the sigil. Then she brought out a dozen vials of solidified emotional essences, which resembled children's toys filled with colorful sands. 

"Will he feel any pain?" Alisa asked.

Lana just smiled, hoping that would be reassurance enough. She'd practiced this gentle smile many times, enough to appear genuine and put her more skittish clients at ease.

After carefully portioning out each emotion, Lana blew on the particles until they swirled and shimmered in the center of the room. "You'll have about five minutes," she shouted over the sound of the growing vortex. The whirlwind of particles expanded upward and outward, darkening with color as it drew power from the emotional essences, until it suddenly dissipated, leaving a burly, ashen-faced man. He took a long gasp of breath, as if to make up for all the breathing he couldn't do while dead.

"Oh, darling," Alisa said. 

The sorcerer had trouble feeling the passion in Alisa's words. She must be losing her knack for detecting emotions. She retrieved her emotional energy collector, polishing the thick glass walls of this palm-sized hexagonal prism that helped her both identify and store the invisible essences released into the air.

"What happened?" The man's hands felt around his body, as reanimated humans often did. "I died, didn't I?"

"Yes, but I needed to speak to you again," Alisa said. "Where did you keep our valuables?" 

Lana cocked an eyebrow. She may have misread the woman. But plenty of clients oozed with greed. If this was all Alisa could give, the sorcerer might not even be able to cast the summoning spell for tomorrow's big client.

"What are you talking about, dear? I'd never hide anything from you." The man rubbed his beard. 

Although emotions of the reanimated couldn't be harnessed, the collector in Lana's hand still pinged with recognition, revealing a hint of self-righteousness but also smug deceit. The sorcerer could never stand deceitful men. She squeezed her other hand into a fist, and the man tensed like a vise had started to constrict his testicles, which wasn't far from the truth. 

It was Alisa's turn to raise an eyebrow, probably realizing that Lana never actually confirmed this would be a painless process.

"Okay, okay!" He blurted out. "The safe is in the bank across town. Key is under the boiler in our house."

"Thank you, dear." Alisa appeared to ponder for a moment. "Did it hurt when you died?" 

Lana expected to see a pinch of sorrow or pity, but instead her collector detected a hint of morbid curiosity.

Alisa pressed on, not waiting for a response. "It's a pity you died so quickly. The shock was only meant to incapacitate you, but I guess your heart was weak from all that booze." 

A cloud of loathing and gloating and murderous glee soared through the air into Lana's collector, heavy enough to distort the light in the workshop. 

As Alisa spoke, she pushed up her left sleeve, revealing her thin scar connected to a larger, nastier scar that she absentmindedly rubbed. "Every day, I wished you would drink yourself dead, yet you always returned and left me bloody. Perhaps I failed to deliver you a painful death, but I at least wanted you to know that I ended your life." The woman sneered. "And, well, now you know." 

As vengefulness and triumph overflowed the collector, Lana shifted to the edge of her seat, wondering where the woman had been bottling all these emotions. This was just the kind of grudge the sorcerer couldn't get enough of—righteous, and highly profitable, too. 

"You. . ." the man sputtered, nose flaring and jaw seesawing. He lunged at his partner, but she ducked aside with the fluidity of someone who clearly had practiced this movement countless times before. 

As he picked himself up for another swing, the sorcerer declared, "That's enough." Alisa's emotions had run their course, and Lana couldn't harness emotions from the reanimated regardless of their wrath and anger, so there was no more to gain. With a wave of her fingers, the man shuddered and collapsed into a pile of dark, coarse sand.

"Thank you." Alisa's voice had returned to a whisper. She hardly glanced back as she walked out, kicking over the pile of sand as she passed it.

"No, thank you." Lana swirled a finger in her overgorged collector, grinning at the memory of the woman's righteous anger and euphoric triumph. She hoped Alisa would become a repeat customer.