Wizardborn (World's First Wizard Book 3) by Aaron Schneider (read me like a book txt) 📕

his eyes centered on the undulating black spheres in his hand. Milo could feel the vibrating essence of the trapped shades, their secondhand hate and hunger twisting over and around each other like so many tangled vipers. The harder the knotted shades pulled away, the tighter they were bound, which was part of the magic that Milo was secretly proud of. To unleash them, all he had to do was untie one little knot at the center of the writhing mass.

“Come out and play,” Milo whispered as he opened the end of his scarred thumb and ran the welling blood across the top of the sphere in his outstretched hand.

“Magus! It’s coming!” Ambrose shouted as something far bigger than a raven broke through the wheeling barrier of black birds.

The knot unbound, and the ebony orb stretched out exploratory tendrils as Milo drove his command home with a burning stake of intent.

KILL

Black grit erupted as a ravening dervish fit for the banks of the Styx.

“GO!” Milo screamed as the si’lat swarm spun up and over them to crash drunkenly into the rotating ravens. The terrible crowing was interspersed with death rattles and screeches as birds died in droves. The sound was so deafening that Milo could barely hear the revving of the kubelwagen engine, but he felt it buck under him as Schultz slammed down on the accelerator.

His feet came off the floorboard, and to his surprise, they never returned. The same instant this happened, Milo felt a crushing pressure in his shoulders as though a vise had clamped over them.

He saw the massive corvid digits clamped on his shoulders. Those taloned feet rose into a twisted, sharp-angled body that seemed as though man and raven had been mashed and folded into each other.

As Milo rose into the air, before he was plunged into the gouging, ripping tide, the creature carrying him jerked its head around to glare at him with a raptor’s hungry stare.

The magus screamed when he beheld the jagged, misaligned beak and mangled plumage, and the creature's talons drove down deeper, crushing the breath from his lungs as they pierced his coat to burrow into his flesh.

8

These Names

Milo emerged from the congress of ravens more or less the same way he had entered it, which could be summarized simply as not well. His shoulders ached from where the monstrous bird-thing’s claws gripped him, and he had a few other scrapes and nicks across his face and hands from birds and branches as he was dragged out of the trees and into the sky.

Done assessing his state of being, Milo decided he was also done with his sudden flight.

Focusing his mind to bring his magic with the talons digging into him proved difficult, but thankfully the grip on him did not prevent him from reaching his belt. Milo drew out his pistol and aimed straight up. The creature, the Hiisi, must have felt his movement since it had enough time to look down and see the barrel leveled at it before Milo pulled the trigger.

One, two, three, the pistol barked, but before the second muzzle flare could singe feathers, the corvid horror had exploded into icy wind, the smell of rotting meat, and dozens of black-winged shapes. Where once had been a creature large enough to carry Milo off like a rabbit in a raptor’s claws, there was now only stink, chill, and the flutter of wings.

And then Milo was falling.

A raw scream tore from his throat as the treetops seemed to lunge up from the ground, eager to impale his plummeting, pinwheeling body.

Wind ride, Imrah called, sounding almost bored.

Milo tried to orient his brain, but fear was like a weighted pendulum knocking his thoughts askew with each pass.

Quickly would be best. The fetish-bound ghul sighed with irritation.

Milo felt a wave of familiar anger at her criticism, and that more than anything else allowed him to lay hold of his will and change the world around him to make reality accept him as being buoyant even as he plunged to his death.

His falling slowed until he halted only a few feet from the top of a lightning-scarred pine. As he hung there trying to right himself, he had time to study the tree. It was old and whorled with ancient wounds, and Milo thought it almost looked disappointed that he would not be adorning its branches.

“Not today,” Milo muttered, feeling as though his internal organs had just caught up with the rest of him.

Grunting and being careful to take long, slow breaths, Milo let himself sink toward the tree. Hands outstretched, he descended until he grabbed a branch that looked like it wasn’t about to break. Steady and levitating, Milo swept his eyes across the horizon and saw the breach in the forest that was Gzhatsk to his right. It took a minute longer to find the thin gap in the trees indicative of the road, the process made slower by the nagging certainty that his pistol had only bought him a reprieve, not victory.

Despite the thought, he saw no trace of the black-feathered fiend, but he wasn’t quite ready to hope that it had been scared off. He thought he would have felt some freedom under the open sky, some safety from ambush, but Milo knew that any flying creature, much less a magical one, would be far more comfortable than he was fighting in the sky.

After another moment spent considering making his sluggish way due west, Milo shook his head and began the slow, careful process of climbing down. The relative weightlessness was a great boon, and he was on the forest floor quicker than he expected.

Standing there getting his bearings, Milo felt a tug upon his mind, and he remembered the si’lat swarm he’d unleashed before his abduction. His ability to control his creation over a distance was not unlimited, and he felt his grasp on the swirling shades slowly slipping.

Had Lokkemand’s men cleared the flock of ravens? Had Ambrose and Rihyani gone with them,