Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2), Aaron Schneider [accelerated reader books .txt] 📗

Milo’s eyes shot up. Reclining on a couch near the door to his study was the thick, lumpy frame of Simon Ambrose.

Milo felt a rush of several feelings at once, not the least of which were confusion and anger at being so startled by his bodyguard and friend. Swearing fiercely, he threw the empty bottle at the big man, the thick glass bouncing off the couch and then rolling across the floor.

“What did you do with it?” Milo snarled, savoring the anger whose presence he didn’t quite understand.

“I should have pitched it all into the river.” Ambrose sniffed, casting a baleful eye at the failed missile before glaring at Milo. “But I didn’t know how much you would need to get things in order after not sleeping for so long.”

“It hasn’t been that long,” Milo lied, the anger falling out of his voice with chilling ease. “Don’t be dramatic. Just tell me where it is.”

Ambrose eyed his ward with a frown and then rose into a sitting position on the couch.

“Do you know how long it’s been since you slept, Magus?”

The words were measured and precise, like someone talking to an ill-tempered child. This, of course, awoke Milo’s anger instantly.

“I do, do you?” he asked in the most accusatory tone he could muster. “Do you, O dear nanny?”

Ambrose let the words slide off him with contemptuous ease.

“How long has it been?” he asked with infuriating steadiness.

Milo stared back, his jaw working as his lips twitched and curled.

“Five maybe six days,” he said, and then, seeing Ambrose’s expression, quickly added. “No, no, eight. Yes, eight days.”

Ambrose stared at Milo for a few hammering heartbeats and shook his head ruefully.

“Fifteen,” Ambrose said softly as he rose to his feet. “Fifteen days straight, and that’s after only catching up for two days after eleven days without sleep.”

“It… I mean, no, it can’t… You forgot about…”

The excuses died even as he tried to force them off his shuddering tongue.

“This has got to stop,” the big man declared in a voice that would brook no argument. “Bad enough you’re running yourself down like this, but now your judgment is so impaired that you’re running about the countryside like some witch in a fairy tale.”

Milo felt part of him nodding along in acknowledgment, but he stuffed that part down deep and nursed his indignation.

“Do you even understand the pressure I’m under?” Milo asked, stalking around the desk to level a finger at Ambrose. “What they are asking me to do?”

“Only in the vaguest sense.” Ambrose shrugged. “But considering Lokkemand doesn’t say anything to me, whose fault is that?”

Milo snarled, throwing his hands into the air.

“One more screwup then!” he railed, pacing around the room as he began to mutter. “First, the elixirs don’t activate, then fetishes don’t work, and nobody takes the time to think that I’m learning this all on my own and there might be a reason no human has ever done magic before this. Now it’s my fault I don’t burden you with the unreasonable expectations I’m under.”

Milo spun and fixed Ambrose with his most malevolent glare before speaking in an acid tone. “So terribly sorry to have inconvenienced you.”

“I forgive you,” Ambrose replied in placid defiance of Milo's vitriol. “We can talk about how things are going to change after you wake up, but right now, you need to take the last sleepbalm I put in your left-hand drawer.”

Milo’s gaze followed the big man’s nod to the desk before swiveling to fix him with a furious but unsteady scowl.

“I c-can make more on my own,” Milo said, his tongue suddenly feeling thick in his mouth. “Who d-do you think is in ch-char…aggh!”

A warning stab of agony in his brain rocked Milo, and he choked on his tongue as Ambrose shook his head ruefully.

“Take the elixir, Milo,” the bodyguard pressed.

Milo spat out a curse between groans of pain as he staggered over to the desk and yanked out the drawer. He snatched up the balm, still spitting invectives, blind rage swirling through his tortured mind. Whirling around, he raised the bottle threateningly over his throbbing head. He wasn’t sure what he was about to do in a fit of drug-addled temper, but the look in Simon Ambrose’s eyes stopped him dead in his tracks.

“Take it,” the Nephilim commanded, the crimson flare in his eyes pairing with a thickening pressure in the air. “Take it, or I will give it to you in a way you will not appreciate.”

Hands trembling with what he told himself was withdrawal and encroaching fatigue, Milo obeyed.

2

The One

Milo awoke nearly two weeks later, and for the first time since coming to Georgia, his pale skin was free of a gray tint. His veins still stood out darker than was natural, but they were not the tendrils of black that had twitched and writhed under his skin. Looking at himself in the mirror above his washbasin, he imagined he looked almost human again.

His body was recovering, but for all that, it was hard to feel truly rested.

His memory of the recovery process was a fractured series of twisted dreams where he stretched and disjointed specters circled. He recalled that they gripped his face in cold, hard hands, forced his jaws open, and poured gall down his throat. He would awaken choking and wheezing, just able to clear his raw throat before collapsing into sleep, where more wraiths crawled out of the dark to look him over before forcing more of their foul effluence upon him.

Sometimes they wore uniforms, sometimes medical lab coats, sometimes stern priestly vestments. One had even come wearing Roland’s tattoos on its wrist, a skull on an orthodox cross.

Milo had wanted to run from them, but even in his dreams, he was too tired. Limbs heavy as leaden weights, he lay and watched them come, knowing what they intended every time but always knowing he would do nothing, perhaps could do nothing to stop them.

The final time of this liquid violation,