Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1), Aaron Schneider [most important books to read .txt] 📗

he forcefully repressed a start. The thing had not only turned all the way around but had taken two steps forward. It stood only a few feet from the colonel, head still bowed.

Was it smiling?

“Sir, I…”

Everything in Milo told him to lie, to defy the trap yawning before him. They had asked their questions before, and he had seen the looks the interviewer had given him three weeks ago. This was the final, irreversible step into the pit, the last nail in his coffin.

He could escape the grave a little longer if he would just lie, deny, and denounce.

It would hardly be the first time he’d lied.

The thing’s soiled face tipped up incrementally, just enough that Milo could see its bloodied teeth spread in a wicked grin.

Milo swallowed and made up his mind.

“Yes, sir,” he declared, meeting the colonel’s gaze as levelly as he could. “He’s still in here.”

The colonel nodded and sank back against the chair neither had noticed he was on the edge of. Another sigh passed his lips, and this one had the sweet music of relief in it. Milo’s heart skipped in his chest.

“I’m glad you are finally being honest,” the colonel said, his voice carrying no reproach. “Very good.”

He’d passed. What he wasn’t sure, but he’d passed, and that was something.

Milo let out his own sigh and nearly choked when his gaze turned back to the thing behind the colonel.

It was glaring at Milo with periwinkle eyes that didn’t belong in such a young face. They had seen too much, borne witness too often, and looked on horrors too many times. They were Milo’s eyes, and as they bored into him, he felt the rest of the world unraveling into fractals of light and color where darkness yawned between the threads.

“Tell it to leave, Conscript Volkohne,” the colonel’s voice instructed from somewhere outside the thing’s gaze. “Tell it to leave your presence.”

Unwilling to release him, his eyes in the mock-child’s face pinned him in place as it raised small grubby hands to grip its ratty black hair by the fistful.

“Can you see it?” Milo hissed, his throat tightening it.

“I see the darkness it is composed of, just a dark blur, but that doesn’t matter,” the colonel explained, his voice patient but unyielding as stone. “Tell it, no, command it, to leave.”

Milo looked on in horror as the homunculus pulled its hair, tearing itself in half with a soft, wet rip. Behind the ragged edges that flapped and shuddered was a patch of darkness as tangible and tangled as a nest of webs.

“What is happening?” Milo whined, his chest suddenly too tight to hold his hammering heart. “What did you do to me?”

“Command it to leave, Milo.” The colonel’s words were sharper but more distant, javelins hurled from a distance shrinking toward oblivion’s horizon. “On your life, boy, tell it to leave!”

The colony of un-light shuddered once, and a flickering image with too many eyes and too many legs skittered out. The unblinking gelatinous gaze studied him hungrily before it advanced, each limb reaching out to him. Milo wanted to run, to hide, to scream in terror, but he was frozen in terror.

Then something, some deep power, maybe inside or beside where a soul might lie, awoke.

“BEGONE!” the power cried, and with a shock like ice water, Milo heard the command in his own trembling voice.

The nightmare twisted back on itself, its body rupturing with the violence of the movement.

“I said, BEGONE!”

The horror came apart into numberless fragments, each fleeing member frantically crawling away and disappearing into the voids between the lines of light and color. The emptied sack of woven shadows gave a wheeze like a deflating bladder, and a breath, cold and rancid, slapped Milo’s face.

He coughed, his nostrils and tongue revolted by the assault, but by the time he’d finished, it was all gone.

He was sitting in Room 7 in the Offices for the Branch of Unconventional Tactics, and the colonel watching him with a true smile spread across his weary face. No one else was there.

“What just happened?” Milo gasped. He swallowed hard at the colonel’s strange expression, “I mean, what just happened, sir?”

The colonel straightened in his seat, and in his deliberate manner, reached out and laid a square-fingered hand on the covered tray on the trolley. The dome rose with tantalizing slowness, revealing a steaming pile of pierogi, their sides glistening with butter.

“You, Conscript Volkohne,” he said, the slightest tremor plucking at his voice to catch Milo’s attention, “have just performed magic. Now, would you like something to eat?”

2

A Choice

Despite everything that had just taken place in Room 7, Milo’s enthusiasm for the food on the tray was undiminished.

The colonel, who had introduced himself as Colonel Heinrich Jorge after handing over the plate, was happy to explain.

“You’ve just completed a bit of ritual magic. Banishing a minor shade to be precise,” he said as Milo sank his teeth into the first pierogi within reach. “As I understand it, it is mostly a matter of will and minor magical ability. Still, you’ve shown more magic than any human ever, and I’ve been told the experience is quite...taxing. I guessed you'd be quite hungry.”

Milo was too busy with his food to note the somber shadow that flickered across the colonel’s face. For his part, the man recovered quickly, his satisfied smile refusing to remain hidden.

The dumplings, stuffed with ground pork, onion, and goat cheese, had the masterful flavor only hunger could impart to hearty food. Milo could not remember when he had eaten anything so delicious, and for the first three, he didn’t have attention to spare for anything else, including all this talk of magic. Before Jules had finally decided to put an end to the “Volkohne problem,” he and his goons had made a game of intimidating the mess staff to ensure Milo always got the leavings. They knew he couldn’t steal anything better because doing so meant a bullet in the head for a penal conscript. Magic or