Black Spark (Dark Magic Enforcer Book 1)

by Al K. Line

  "Sorry, I'm being silly. See you soon?"

  "Sure. Be safe."

  Kate got out and closed the door gently behind her. I watched as she wrapped her coat around herself tightly, then trudged across the field toward the slow moving tractor and the man driving it.

  I got out of the car and fumbled around on the back seat, opened up the bag I'd grabbed from Kate's, as she never remembered, and got things ready.

  Am I a bad man for doing this? Who decides? I'll tell you what a bad man is, then maybe I will leave it to you. I am at peace with who I am, most of the time, but it still leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, the death. Even when the death is of a Mr. Ronald Dickinson; farmer, loner, and murderer of young children.

  Ronald is on the list, but there are names above his, and they are all crossed out. It's grim, it's nasty, it's the life I know, and many would thank me and Kate for what we do. Others would lock us up, Kate especially, as she does the killing, and throw away the key.

  I'm confident we are doing the right thing, usually.

  This man, this farmer, killed two children one night in a rage of epic proportions and it had nothing to do with being drunk, being off his meds, or anything else that could go a little way to downgrading his actions from despicable to excusable in even a minor degree by way of diminished responsibility.

  He is, was, bad to the core. Something could be done about him. Yes, there are countless vampires just as nasty, but even they self-police, and although not averse to killing anyone they please, they draw the line at children—you do not want to know what they do to their kind that take the life of what they hold in the highest regard, and see as the only pure thing on the planet. Innocent children are untouchable, even to the oldest, nastiest vampires still alive.

  I won't go into the details of what this "man" did, but our world is a small world and we hear things. We hear, and know, more than you can imagine. When Regulars slip through the cracks of what is right and decent, yes, even to us, then don't be surprised if they get what is due somewhere down the line.

  I have contacts. I know people, and they know people, and some of us are even living lives in normal professions in the Regular world and like that kind of life. But some things nobody can stomach, be they on one side of the law or the other, and that is the harming, or worse, of animals and children. The vampires regard them as the only pure things on the planet.

  He got what he deserved, but nobody will ever know what happened, and the only people that will remember his name are me, Kate, and the parents of the children they will never get to see grow up.

  Kate came back to the car ten minutes later, looking vibrant but with the weight of the world on her shoulders at the same time. She was still feeling the sickness after feeding, that was clear, but it would pass soon enough. The blood magic that coursed through her veins, and would keep her strong and in superhuman condition for months on end, battled the sickness. It was clear which was winning.

  She had a vitality to her now that was unmistakable to the likes of me. Kate practically glowed with inner happiness and contentment, and I could see the guilt and shame wash away as the effects of the blood took over.

  This is the true horror of what she is, and what I know she will become as the years pass. She had her fix and she was happy, for now, and the blood magic wrapped her in its cold and numbing embrace.

  Escape was impossible now. She was vampire and always would be, and the guilt over what she did would lessen each time she took a life, until it meant nothing at all and then she would be lost. Her humanity stripped away and her attitude to human beings nothing more than ours toward the meat we consume without a thought for the animal it came from.

  Depressing stuff, but she looked hot, even covered in blood and gristly bits.

  "Here, I got your change of clothes ready. Have some wipes." I couldn't take my eyes off her as she cleaned her face free of another human being while looking in the side mirror, fangs stained red, lips too full, eyes dancing with merriment and vigor, her entire body somehow screaming more sexiness than was decent. Then she stripped off her coat and blouse. I nearly fainted.

  The draw of a freshly fed vampire is too much for the human mind and loins to stand, and it doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman, young or old. It's the magic, the blood magic that draws you in and awakens your own body in ways impossible to describe.

  I can't imagine what sex must be like at a moment like that, and I was having a hard time stopping myself jumping on her right there and then as her breasts seemed to have grown a few sizes and pushed at her bra like... You get the idea.

  She was feeling it too, I knew, but it wasn't what I wanted although I wanted it more than anything. So I turned away, handed her a clean blouse, and rummaged round in the bag for her even though there was nothing else to get.

  "Sorry," said Kate as she appeared beside me, dressed and clean.

  "Don't be."

  "I just wish..."

  "So do I, Kate, so do I. Let's go visit Grandma, have a cup of tea."

  "Thanks, Faz. I mean it."

  "I know you do. I know."

  We drove off in silence. Someone would be along to clean up the mess. It's a vampire thing, they have "people" for it, some kind of vampire communication so they always know when someone has fed. Vampires are never alone, they all belong to a House, and Kate belongs to House Taavi, who also happens to be Head of the UK Vampire Council.

  Why? Because I'd killed her maker and he belonged to House Taavi, that's why. The maker had been under Taavi's control so he inherited her, and you don't get to have a say in such things.

  She is his. Forever.

  A Visit to Grandma's

  "Grandma? Are you home?"

  "What have you done to your hair!? Change it back, right this minute." Grandma stood in the hallway, wearing her perpetually clean pinafore, her pink house slippers—although I've never heard of "outside the house" slippers—with her hands on her hips. She inspected me like she would a selection of dubious meat at a butcher's closing down sale then wagged her finger at me.

  "You look like a pop star." She didn't mean it in a good way.

  I can never win with Grandma. When I let my hair grow she said I looked like a hippie and told me to get it cut. Now that I had she wanted it back to being long, and dark, even though I distinctly remember years ago her telling me I should dye it light as I looked too depressing and like a funeral director. That's Grandma for you, and I love her more than life itself.

  "Aw, Grandma, why—" My only living flesh and blood held up a hand and stopped me mid-sentence. She'd said her piece, now it was done—Grandma doesn't dwell on the past, she is a forward thinker, a positive and strong woman.

  Kate smirked beside me.

  "Ooh, hello dear. How are you? Are you two an item yet, eh?" Grandma wiggled her eyebrows, then her ears. I swear she would have gone, "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink," if I hadn't interrupted. Kate was loving every minute of it. The pair of them had hit it off the instant they met.

  "I can't change it back. I cut it." I complained like a grumpy teenager.

  "Hi, Grandma Pound, you look well," said Kate, playing the perfect future granddaughter-in-law. I wish!

  "Don't be daft," scolded Grandma, giving me a final dressing down with a glance before dismissing me. "And you look as pretty as always, Kate." She turned and walked back to the kitchen at the rear of the house, calling over her shoulder, "If you can grow back heads you can grow back hair."

  "Heads? Who can grow back heads? If you lose your head you won't have a brain so how could you grow it back? And I know I can grow back hair, but I'm not going to force it. It does it on its own."

  "Does it? Does it really?" Grandma said cryptically.

  "Um, I think so." Grandma can do that to you. She confuses you, gets you in a muddle, and you walk away not sure if you have to use a little magic to make your hair and fingernails grow or if it just, you know, happens. It does, right? See what I mean?

&nb
sp; "She's so sweet," said Kate, smiling at me like I'd brought her to pick a puppy.

  "You always say that." I put a hand through my hair and tried to think about how keratin synthesis worked.

  "Because she is." Kate left me to my musings and followed Grandma into the kitchen.

  I can't tell you how pleased I am that the two favorite women in my life hit it off so well. When I brought Kate to Grandma's that very first time, Kate was in a terrible way, almost dead.

  Her maker had been a bad character, and the last thing on his mind had been another vampire to add to his Ward. So Kate was either lucky or unlucky that we brought her back from the brink, depending on your outlook on such things.

  I'd found her, dealt with the maker as I'd been sent to do, and rushed Kate to Grandma's as I lost the plot a little and didn't know what else to do.

  As Kate recovered, the two women bonded in a way I know I will never understand, and I'm sure that whatever happens with me and Kate—if we stay friends, or more, or not—Kate and Grandma will always be part of each other's lives.

  Kate has no family, so maybe that explains the relationship, or maybe it's just because they like each other and see a little of themselves in the other woman. Don't ask me, I'm a man and apparently we aren't built to understand these types of relationships, or so they keep telling me at any rate. I don't argue—I'd lose.

  My promise to Stanley tapped at my mind like a goblin playing ping pong against the wall of my skull with a blowfish, so I took a deep breath and stepped into the lion's den, otherwise known as the kitchen.

  The two women were deep in conversation over by the stove, and I wondered for the millionth time how Grandma could stand the heat and the smell. The room was like the devil's sauna and the smell was worse than the time I had to dig up the body of Franco the Toe Eater and he fell apart in my hands.

  An ancient extractor fan clattered and sucked, but it was no match for what it faced. It did what it could but it never seems to make any difference. Grandma never notices anyway.

  Hoping there would be tea—Grandma makes the best tea in the world—I removed my jacket and hung it over the back of a chair older than most vampires. The rest of the furniture in the house is the same. Not exactly antique in the "This is old and expensive" way, just old and familiar. Like the baby blanket you still clutch at night now and then when you are feeling extra sad and alone. Yeah, I know, that's just me again, isn't it?

  "Have you fixed it?" asked Grandma, turning from her bubbling pots and smiling the smile of a woman that knows all and there is no place to hide.

  "I think so. Kate saved me with some seriously cool editing, and, er, Dancer helped me with a slight issue at the morgue. He says hi, by the way." Don't ask how she knew, she always does.

  "You were a very silly boy, Faz. What were you thinking? That poor man. You shouldn't take games so seriously."

  "Me! He was the one that went off on one. But anyway, it was an accident. I didn't know what I was doing."

  "Of course. You wouldn't have done such a silly thing otherwise. But Kate stopped you getting into any more trouble, didn't you, Kate?" Grandma gave her a kiss and Kate beamed at me, loving being given all the credit.

  "Hey, I've been busy as hell, um, very busy this morning, and it isn't over yet."

  "You be careful with her. The Armenian is trouble."

  "How do you know about..." There was no point in asking. Grandma always knows. "I'll be careful. Tea?"

  "Coming right up. It's brewing. I put it on five minutes before you came, so it will be nice and strong now."

  Again, no point asking how she knew we were coming. It would be like interrogating a bird to find out how it knew how to fly.

  Kate joined me at the table after putting coasters out for each of us. Grandma graciously opened the large window above the sink that overlooks a garden that always brings a smile to my face no matter my mood.

  The cool, sweetly scented air invaded the kitchen like it had an important job to do, which it did, and soon the cloying atmosphere was replaced with the freshness of semi-rural suburban Cardiff and the aromas of untold herbs and all manner of exotic medicinal plants. Not to mention a few that, if mixed in the right combination, could do anything from turn you into a frog to make you irresistible to the opposite, or same, sex.

  Grandma had explained her potions to me long ago, and often over the years, so it was pretty much second nature now when it came to understanding exactly what she did, and it isn't what you think.

  As I sucked in the sweet smell of a thousand plant species, I thought about how the human mind works and the connection between us and the Empty. It's more bizarre than you could imagine.

  People like Grandma, I guess you'd call them witches—although that means about as much as calling me a wizard—understand the human mind like nobody else can. She's more a psychologist than anything else, able to peel back the layers of protection human beings and other species hide behind and get to the truth of the problem.

  When people come to see Grandma for her services—and you would not believe how much she charges without batting a wrinkly eyelid—she doesn't sit them in a chair, ask them what potion they want and then cook it up and it's job done. It goes further than that, much further, and the potion is the last piece of a complex jigsaw puzzle.

  My Grandma, perfect, lovely, kind-hearted and adorable old lady that she is, brings her clients to tears, to rage, to ranting and raving, to breaking down and spilling their deepest and darkest secrets with her gentle words, and her insistence on getting to the truth of the matter. Her clients pay her handsomely for the privilege.

  She listens, she asks the right questions, and what none of them realize—Regulars, or Hidden—is that she is manipulating their body chemistry through her words and priming them for what is to come. It's a subtle art, and nearly every witch you could ever hope to meet is a charlatan. But not Grandma.

  Hormones are adjusted, mental states are aroused, and emotions are directed with her subtle, and not-so-subtle, manipulations. States of being are altered and neural pathways are opened, or closed on a door to a room full of the baggage of a lifetime since it isn't important at that moment. And over the course of sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, sometimes days or weeks, she puts you into a place where she knows you are as receptive to her own version of the Empty and her potions as you could possible be.

  It's a mental game, and so complex I still have no clue how it works, but it's all to do with the power of emotion and the control it can have over our own minds and bodies.

  When her clients finally drink the potion prepared for them, the myriad ingredients she has chosen carefully, and mixed in the exact right way, act like an explosive awakening and anything, and I mean anything, is then possible.

  Something is awoken inside. Your mind, already primed, is extremely receptive to the liquid gold that slides down your throat sending signals that alter you either forever or for a fleeting moment, depending on what you have asked for, but usually what she decides is best for you whether you know it or not.

  People leave not feeling like they could rule the world, but with the ability to do so. Suicidal teenagers leave understanding that death comes to us all and is never to be hurried. They are given not only the knowledge of what lies beyond, and the realization that they can overcome any obstacle, but the actual proof. This is not just belief, but something as real as Grandma's power itself.

  Poor people leave with a blueprint for success that many never implement as they also know that money seldom equals happiness. And rich people depart knowing their money is genuinely what makes them happy, and they no longer spend sleepless nights worrying about the unjust distribution of wealth.

  She never gives people what they think they want, she gives them what they need—her counsel and her potions unlock the reality of what it is to be a human being or one of the true Hidden—and reconfigures the self into what it has always wanted to be deep down, even if you didn't
know it or even imagined it was who you really were.

  But above all, she makes the best cup of tea in the world.

  This is what it means to be a witch, what it really means. It's about understanding people, being kind and considerate, and a hard-headed woman who knows best and will never take no for an answer.

  Grandma has also been known to kill clients within moments of meeting them. Like I said, she knows what's best for you, and for the world.

  So if you ever pay her a visit, be damn sure you deserve this life you've been granted before you accept a cup of tea and sip it while she smiles at you with that twinkle in her eye, then calls Rikka for a Cleaner as she picks up the pieces of the shattered china, and puts a tea towel over your head so she doesn't have to look at your contorted face as rigor mortis sets in.

  Man, I love this woman. She's the nicest lady you could ever hope to meet.

  Did I mention she is almost as old as Taavi, the vampire? No? Well, she is, and one of her looks is a lot scarier than anything you could imagine him doing to you.

  I love her more than anything, and she truly is the kindest and sweetest person I have ever met. There is no falseness; she is an elemental force of nature. You could no more call her impure than you could a lion cruel for hunting to feed itself, or to accuse the wind of being mean for rippling through the grass gently on a perfect summer's day.

  She just is. Like nature, only without the volcanoes and the disease and the mass destruction.

  This is why some call real witches Mother—it's a long tradition and goes back to when they were called Mother Nature's Helpers. And it's apt.

  She is her.

  Perfect.

  Grandma.

  Thick liquid poured from the teapot into three cups and I swallowed nervously.

  "Um, Grandma, you like Italian, right?"

  Her eyes lit up and she licked her lips. "Ooh, yes. You know me and meatballs, it's my favorite."