Magical Influence Book One (4 page)

At that exact point the door opened
and I heard someone clear their throat.

Though I had only just met the
man, I knew instinctively it was Fairweather. It were as if a giant
or a troll had taught him how to speak. The exact rumble, the
baritone, how it resonated through his powerful chest
– it felt like
listening to lightning.

I winked one eye open to stare at
him.

He didn't have a kind expression. But
neither was it completely accusatory like it had been that morning.
One of his eyebrows was more depressed than the other, his lips
were crinkled, and he looked overall confused. Clearing his throat
again, patting down his tie, he walked around me and sat at his
desk.

“She is crazy,” I started off, spreading
my fingers wide in a stopping motion. “It's not been diagnosed, but
it's pretty darned close to dementia. Look up her file, this isn't
the first time she has... ordered weird things off the
Internet.”

Weird things? Cocaine wasn't a weird
thing; it was just a very illegal thing.

I couldn't help it though, I was
stressed, and whenever I got stressed, I started to babble and
speak nonsense.

He leaned back in his chair,
the damn thing creaking in an effectively ominous
way
. “She
ordered a kilogram of cocaine,” he pointed out plainly.

Yes, I knew that fact. Glancing
up at his expression, not liking it, and staring straight at the
floor, I shrugged my shoulders
. “What's going to happen to her?”

He leaned onto his desk slowly,
planting his elbows over the neat paperwork, and then drumming his
fingers close to his phone
. “Charges,” his baritone bottomed out to a level
that sounded lower than anything I had ever heard.

I winced
. “Right.”

“As for you,” he began.

I flicked up my hand, a little
too quickly, splashing some of my tea onto my blouse. I was in no
mood to care though
. “I have no idea what she does on the Internet,
none.”

“Well then you should. Your grandmother
appears to have had an illustrious career of ordering restricted
goods into the country. If you knew she was...” he shrugged his
shoulders, “experiencing dementia-like symptoms, you should have
kept an eye on her.”

It was a fair point. But there
was a mitigating factor here, a really strong one. She was a witch.
And while I told everyone she had dementia, it wasn't exactly true.
She was experiencing what all witches did as they aged. A loosening
of boundaries, a natural desire to break the rules that had once
kept them in place. Cognitively she was actually still the same.
She had a memory, she knew your name, she could function in her
day-to-day tasks.
Behaviorally, she was just a lot freer than she had once
been. Yes, that meant she would dance around in mud pies in the
yard, but it unfortunately also meant that she couldn’t see the
problem in ordering large quantities of very illegal drugs into the
country. To her, the rules of law simply didn't mean much anymore.
That didn't mean she would run out and murder the first person that
angered her; she still had morals and a sense of ethics. She just
wanted those drugs for a spell, not to sell to kids on the street
or pregnant women. No one would get high off them; she’d probably
just incorporate them into her next dream spell, or her next love
potion, or her next weather enchantment.

I really couldn't explain that to the
man with the laser-like gaze. Instead I flopped my hands onto my
lap and looked glumly at my tea.

“You have the right to call a lawyer,” he
pointed out again.

Yes I did. But I really didn't want
to. And it was because I couldn't afford one. There was a lawyer in
my family, and his rates were free.

I just didn't want to call Uncle Fred.
Because if Mary was going batty, it was nothing compared to the
depths of crazy Fred could plunge into.

Though often not spoken of,
male witches exist. A male witch is not a wizard, and neither are
they a warlock. As the times have changed, so have our
understandings of magic. Being a witch is not a feminine thing, it
is just a specific method of
practicing magic. And men are more than welcome to
practice that way without feeling emasculated. So it was very PC
these days to call your uncle and father a crone and to invite them
into your coven.

But Uncle
Fred
... I
would have to call him, I did know that, I just didn't relish what
would happen next.

Likely he would get us off with no
charges, but it would be an entirely unpleasant experience to
watch. If Mary could be embarrassing, Fred would earn you a
reputation that would haunt you for life.

I swallowed hard, stared down
at my tea, and nodded my head
. “I guess I had better.”

“As for your yard,” his chair creaked as
he leaned back further.

“There is nobody buried there,” I said
excitedly, realizing a little too late that I'd definitely chosen
the wrong words. “Look, I mean, she is crazy. I get home from work,
and she digs holes in the yard to make mud pies. Not to... you
know.”

He still looked
stony
. “We
are having Agents search your house and garden.”

I closed my eyes again, trying not to
give a defeated, pathetic laugh lest the Agent think I was a crazy,
drug-loving murderer.

This was just so fantastic.
Agents searching the yard? Well good luck to them, because they
would have to get through all the weeds first. Neither would they
would find anything
... much. No dead bodies, of course, they would however
discover a lot of weird, truly bizarre junk. Glass jars full of
decrepit buttons, heads pulled off dolls – that kind of crap. The
stuff any functioning witch would always have on hand, but the kind
of things that would lead any good policeman to become truly
suspicious.

And that was just the yard; the house
was a whole other beast. Hopefully they wouldn't go through it too
carefully, because I really didn't relish the idea of what they
would find.

I didn't need stress like this. I had
enough going on in my life without adding all of this into the
mix.

“If there's anything you would like to
tell me,” he nodded towards me.

Oh there were a lot of things I
would like to tell him. Like the fact that his jacket didn't fit
right, that his blue tie was a little too dull, and that if he
chose another
color it would match his eyes. I also wouldn't mind telling
him that my grandmother was completely innocent, that we were just
a bunch of city witches, and that this whole thing was a
misunderstanding.

I wasn't going to do that
course.

“I think I need to call my lawyer,” I
conceded.

He nodded his head.

I also needed to start taking
charge.

Yes, I was currently a woman
under a great deal of stress, but I was also a witch. And sitting
there huddled into my jacket on that chair, staring into my crap
tea was not
utilizing the full range of my abilities.

My grandmother had always told me that
the greatest magic of all can be produced when we are at our most
anxious, fearful, and desperate. When the energies in a life come
together with such tension is when we can pull them back to reveal
the secrets within.

Taking in a deep breath,
pushing it into my cheeks and puffing it out slowly, I
realized I had to
do something. Other than call my uncle, that was.

“How long exactly have you been living
with your grandmother?”

I almost didn't hear his question; I
was too busy wrapping myself up in my self-loathing, frustration,
and general anger.

He repeated his question, and I
looked up quickly
. “Five years or so. I moved in after it became clear...
she couldn't look after herself,” I quickly added. Because that was
not why I had moved in. I had moved in after it had become clear
that I could no longer live on my own. That didn't mean I was
having trouble paying the bills or I needed some company around to
stop me from getting lonely.

Unfortunately it meant something a
little bit more nefarious.

Magic is a very complicated thing.
There are good sides and there are bad sides; two heads to the same
coin.

The practice of magic is not without
its risk. Even when it is done right, and for the best intensions,
it can still attract things. Dark things, terrible things, the kind
of things that go bump in the night, but don't leave it there. The
kind of things that crawl up from underneath your bed, wrap their
tentacles around you, and drag you down to hell before they roast
you and eat you alive.

The kind of magic I practiced was not
the glitzy, powerful, sparkly kind. I never produced lightning from
my fingers, and I hadn’t once parted the sea or used my wand to
make objects fly towards me.

That being said, my magic happened to
be one of the most powerful kinds out there. It was what you used
if you needed to shift big things. Fireballs were great for small
fights or if you wanted to impress somebody. They took a lot of
energy over a short period, and what you got in the end was a
fantastically bright ball of flame that could dent a car or burn
through a pile of leaves. What you couldn't do with a fireball,
however, was change governments. Shift hearts and minds, take a
broken life and mend it.

Those with the big things. And
for the big things you needed an entirely different type of magic.
Zipping around on brooms, making candles burst into flame of their
own accord, using your mind to make an apple appear before you
could not heal a
traumatized soul. It could not take someone who had been
broken down by the hardships of life and give them hope.

For that you required influence.
Context. Change context, change everything.

It was the most complex form of magic,
but that answer alone could not satisfy Agent Fairweather's
question.

The reason I had moved in with
my grandmother, was that I was no longer safe on my own. Neither
was she. Because we both
practiced influence magic, the most powerful kind
of magic out there, we were targets. Not just for the things that
go bump in the night, but for our competitors.

Nasty competitors.

Because changing hearts and minds,
shifting the values of a country, altering the course of history
was a profoundly personal thing. Not everybody wanted the broken
man down the street to get better. Not everybody wanted the woman
with low self-esteem to finally find her true self and to blossom.
Not everybody wanted a country to start accepting its minorities, a
world to stop going to war.

Different people, different desires.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.

I was under no illusion that I was a
particularly powerful witch. While I talked of influence magic
being able to alter the course of a country, I was nowhere near
that level of power. I was the kind of girl you went to if you’d
just fallen out of a bad relationship and needed to build yourself
a new identity. People called me if they couldn't understand what
was going wrong with their life, and needed to find a new source of
meaning. I was a little bit more like a personal coach, a little
bit less like a powerful sorceress shepherding the course of
humanity.

That didn't mean that I hadn't made my
enemies though. For every good witch out there that wanted to help
you grow, there was somebody that wanted to use your weakness to
feed their own power.

I'd made enemies. In my short career
as a witch on my own, I had turned certain heads.

I'd received threats in the mail,
spells in the postbox, I would come home at night to see my house
ransacked, but not by your ordinary robber, by the kind that would
leave enchantments painted across your walls in freshly dried
chicken blood.

Not pleasant.

By moving in with my grandmother that
had all stopped. There is safety in numbers, especially where
witches are concerned. The magic number, that everyone knows, is
three. You get three witches together, and you have safety, you
have a coven, you have a place of purpose and meaning and
growth.

There was only myself and my
grandmother, but it had proved to be enough. In our enormous old,
decrepit mansion, the threats had stopped, the bullying had ceased,
and my life had settled down.

I pushed my teeth into my
bottom lip, darted my gaze up to the man, and suddenly
realized that I had
just dwindled into the world’s longest and most awkward
pause.

What should have been a fairly
innocent comment, was quickly turning into something ridiculously
suspicious
.
“I... guess I needed to look after her,” I added.

“What do you do?”

“I am... a secretary,” I said, my voice
going up like a kazoo at the end as if it were a
question.

Technically that was correct. I was a
lot more however. I was a secretary during the day, but a witch at
night.