Free New Spark (Dark Magic Enforcer Book 3) by Al K. Line

end.
    I stood on the edge of a huge pit, steeply sloping sides leading down to a nightmare scenario, the soil piled around the edge randomly. The stench was awful now the rain had stopped. A slight breeze, as if sent to sear the defilement into my bones, blew putrid gas and the stench of decay into the otherwise uncontaminated air.
    Inside the pit, strewn like discarded toy soldiers, were hundreds of bodies. The zombies.
    Each one had its head crushed, body parts mangled, arms and legs at strange angles as they had been thrown into the grave on top of their brothers and sisters. A mass killing. Genocide. The trolls would have seen it as a mercy killing, which it was, in a way.
    Zombies live the most awful lives you can possibly imagine, but they are Hidden, part of our world, and they choose to stay that way. Just like vampires, they decide whether to remain what they are once infected. There is always a choice, and they had made theirs, so we protected them, let them have their chosen future. But it was still unthinkable for me—I would gladly take true death rather than be an undead creature that slowly rotted away and lost my mind.
    The poor souls in the pit had finally been freed from such a life, but against their will. The trolls had made the choice for them, taken away what little freedom they had left. They had no right to do so. It wasn't their place; it wasn't their decision; it wasn't their life, such as it was.
    I turned at the sound of footsteps, wiping my eyes on my ruined shirt.
    "Hey, Spark," said Rikka gently, face neutral as he stared at the bodies.
    "Hey, Boss. Hey, Dancer." Dancer's cheek twitched, unable to tear his eyes from the brutality. "Well, I know for a fact you didn't find Paul." I nodded at one of the last bodies to be added to the pile. So much for the trolls giving mercy killings.
    Paul was entirely aware of what, and who, he was, so would have witnessed all the trolls did. It would have torn his mind to shreds, seeing everything he had fought to keep together for so many years suddenly being ripped apart like it meant nothing, as though his people meant nothing.
    "Sorry, Paul, it shouldn't have ended like this," said Rikka from beside me.
    "They're out of control," said Dancer, looking a little green. You know it's bad when he looks like that. He digs up bodies for a living and brings them back to life.
    "Let's go have a chat with a troll," I said as I turned my back on the zombies, dead for the final time, and trudged back through the mud and the grass, hefting the ball I still held into the air.
    This was the answer, what was making them act the way they were. Hopefully, the dude under the house would have more information. He better had, or I'd grind him to dust and to hell with the consequences. I'd scatter his body across the globe and it would take millennia for it all to come back together to make it whole again You may not be able to kill a troll, but I'd certainly make it unpleasant as hell for as long as I could unless it told me what I wanted to hear.
    Maybe I'd do it anyway. I was in that kind of mood.

 
     
     
     
    A Troll Interrogation
    Rikka, for all his faults—mostly of the emotional kind—is a very intelligent man. Beyond merely clever, he has an innate ability to understand a situation faster than anyone else I have ever met. It often makes me wonder why he sends me chasing around the city dealing with problems when I'm sure he already knows a hell of a lot of what needs to be done.
    At that moment I was in no mood for anything cryptic, so after filling him in on what I discovered in the house, and the meeting with the troll and subsequent bit of bother, I got straight to the point. We stood staring at a faltering tower of rubble as the troll beneath struggled to free itself, while Dancer reluctantly went inside to finish the search and sort out what to do with the undead I'd found on the high street.
    "You know what this is?" I held out the ball of magic-infused rock,