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

typing pool in Luxembourg. A good woman by all accounts, widowed with two children, a boy, and a girl. You see, once I had a method of testing, I was perhaps overzealous, and, well, honestly, things were just sloppy. That was nearly two years ago. I had been given clearance to pursue this fully, so I was dividing my time between this and other Nicht-KAT duties.”

Milo drew in another lungful of smoke and sent it out in a single rippling ring. The colonel was stalling.

“What happened to the good woman?”

“She died.” Jorge sighed into a cloud of smoke.

Milo waited, and to his surprise, the colonel succumbed.

“Seems her encounter apparition was an amalgam of her children. Unlike you and others, she acknowledged what she had subconsciously conjured. We wrote down the details, and we were pleased to see the apparition was bound to where it had been summoned. She seemed a little shaken but stable enough that we escorted her home with plans to have her try to interact with the apparition the next day. Once home, she locked the doors, shuttered the windows, and promptly killed and dissected her children and the young lady who lived with them and watched the children, an orphaned cousin, I think. She said she was looking for the stitches when we came to collect her the next morning, before turning the knife on herself.”

Milo had subconsciously begun drawing deeper on his cigarette until it bit his finger. He dropped it with a quiet curse. The glowing stub smoldered at his feet, forgotten before it landed on the stone tiles.

“We’ve learned since then,” Jorge said flatly, then more solemnly, “I’ve learned.”

“How many others?” Milo asked, his mouth tasting more acrid and bitter than even the tobacco could manage.

“Five more, all dead within a week,” Jorge said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Making you lucky number seven.”

Milo didn’t bother to turn his head to spit over the rail.

Jorge tensed a little, the first signs of a temper. Despite a lifetime of belligerence, Milo couldn’t hide the thrill of fear that ran through him. Wizard or not, he was a colonial penal conscript speaking to a federated officer. One word and the colonel could have him shot, and no one would bat an eye. Some might even thank the officer for it.

Colonel Jorge spoke slowly, his voice perfectly, frighteningly even.

“This is all very disruptive and even terrifying, I understand, but I think we need to make it clear that there are only two options here.”

Gripping the arms of his seat, he rose unsteadily to his feet. There was the slightest sway for an instant, as though his own two feet were untrustworthy, and some of the dust from the chair tumbled off his uniform. He righted himself and somehow looked Milo squarely in the eye despite the older man being several inches shorter.

“Your choices are darkness or dissection,” he said simply. “You either cooperate with my investigations and meet with the monsters in the dark, or I comply with a directive from the General Staff to have you sent back to Berlin for exhaustive and ultimately fatal testing.”

Milo’s eyes widened, and his crossed arms gripped his coat to hide the shaking in his hands. Visions of men in white coats with black gloves and long, long needles filled his mind.

“Y-you would defy an order from the General Staff?” Milo pushed the words out on an unsteady tongue.

“General Staff doesn’t need to know about our successful trial just yet,” Jorge said, another smile creeping under his mustache. “By the time the information has time to trickle back to them, you and an attaché will be thousands of kilometers away, and in contested territory, no less.”

Milo frowned and looked at the park.

“But the Mud-Snakes are heading west to reinforce the garrison at Metz.”

“You’re not a Mud-Snake anymore, Milo.”

Milo swallowed, and for the first time in a very long time, a genuine smile spread over his face.

“All right,” he breathed, thinking that such a monumental decision should have been made with a poetic flourish. “There’s one thing I need to do first.”

3

A Bonus

Milo felt a kind of nervous energy crackling through him as he stood waiting in the depot down the street from the Nicht-KAT offices. Somewhere between agreeing to be Jorge’s operative and coming back down to the typing pool, he’d shed the horror and disconnection that had threatened to swallow him.

He was a witch, a magus, a wizard, or whatever other name could be conjured up. That was something he would have to get used to. It also meant there was a new mystery and a new world. A tingling, almost painful yearning to learn and explore danced along his nerves.

For the first time in his life, there was more.

Since his earliest memories back at the Waisenhaus, he’d found the world to be dreadfully disappointing. The world was an ugly, flat, miserable place, filled almost exclusively by small, shallow, and ultimately petty people. His education had taught him that the universe hated life, and his experience among callous and cruel people reminded him of that daily. Even in the days when he ran with Roland in their little gang of rebels and would-be gangsters, he couldn’t shake that for all their bluster, they were just more cogs finding their own grinding path in the brutal and blind machine that was existence.

This disaffection, as far as Milo could tell, was not born out of some innate superiority. After all, he felt his own cowardice and lust and stupidity keenest of all, but that did not change that he saw the world for what it was: a prison too solid, too inescapable. Roland, the brother and mentor he’d longed for, had fostered hope for something else, a borrowed dream. When that dream had come crashing down and Milo had found himself with either the prison laborers’ or penal regiment as his only option, it had seemed that the crushing reality had won. Milo was biding time, fighting