Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1) by Aaron Schneider (my reading book .txt) 📕

strange for so jauntily inspecting the item earlier. He told himself ghuls must think differently about such things because Imrah didn’t seem any more sour than usual, but he was still eager to change the subject.

“So, this would be classified as a fetish, correct?” Milo asked.

“Are you asking me or trying to show me that you did the reading?” Imrah replied as she led him toward the center of the platform they’d used the day before. The stone tables had been rearranged and the assembly of items on them had been reduced to a few orderly collections of containers.

“More of the last, I guess,” Milo admitted. “But I suppose it never hurts to ask.”

“If only that were true,” Imrah said, and Milo noted the tremor as she laid her hand on the table in front of her.

“Is everything all right?” Milo inquired, shuffling up next to her right-hand side but not looking directly at her.

Imrah frowned, and her lower fangs slid free of her thin lips with the gesture, but then an angry light sprang into her eyes, and she turned to him with a scowl.

“No, it’s not,” she answered tartly. “My pupil was attacked yesterday by regressive reprobates, and when he was assaulted, rather than using magic to defend himself, he fired a gun like an ignorant human.”

What had first seemed like an expression of affectionate anger on his behalf had transformed so quickly into a rebuke that Milo felt his head might start spinning.

“How was I supposed to use magic?” he replied, doing his level best to sound curious and not irritated. “I had nothing to do it with. The only magic I’ve ever consciously done has been with the skull lamp, and that was spent from that Contest thing.”

Milo near cried out when Imrah snatched his arm and raised it in front of his face. One barbed nail plucked at a vein, causing a tiny red jewel to bloom on his skin.

“As long as you have this,” she hissed, dabbing the end of her claw in the blood, “you have something to do magic with.”

Milo twisted his arm away, but Imrah had already let him go and turned back to the table.

“You wanted me to bleed on the thing?” he asked, incredulity curdling his tone.

“A few drops of blood on the Si’lat would have catalyzed it,” Imrah growled impatiently. “A creation as simple as the one that attacked you might have been disapparated like a minor shade or even usurped so we could learn who sent it.”

Milo stood, trying to master his anger, but also, as much he hated it, seeing her frustration. Besides any embarrassment Milo had caused her by emptying a clip into a Si’lat, she’d missed out on the chance to discover who was trying to kill Milo.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the words coming out limp and hollow, but not angry. “I didn’t know or at least didn’t think about it that way.”

“Of course you didn’t!” Imrah snarled, and Milo braced himself for more of her spleen. “How could you? You are the first of your kind, and I didn’t teach you that.”

Stunned by what sounded like a confession, Milo missed a beat before recovering enough to speak.

“Wait, you aren’t mad at me?”

Imrah looked at him and made a disgusted noise.

“Did I say I was?” she asked, scornful of the suggestion.

Milo let out a bemused, spluttering breath.

“I just thought,” he began as he crossed his arms, and then stopped as he fought for words. “I mean, you seemed, uh...angry about um...something.”

Imrah nodded and reached over to a small chest in the left-hand table.

“I am angry,” she said, flipping open the chest to draw out a fistful of gray sand. “But not at you. Your ignorance of life among our people is excusable, but mine is not.”

“What do you mean?” Milo asked as she let the powder spill into a small stone mortar, beside which lay a bone-handled pestle. Though this was far finer and lighter-colored stuff than the black grit from last night, Milo couldn’t pretend he wasn’t anxious at the sight.

“I mean, for a long time, too long, Ifreedahm and all the other outlying ghul communities of the Underworld have been embroiled in petty rivalries and wasteful acts of assassination and sabotage. My father set me to this task, and I should have expected this and planned accordingly.”

The she-ghul selected a few delicate bones and deposited them in the mortar. She began grinding the brown remains with one hand while with the other, she drew a thin dried plant stem from an open jar.

“So, what can we do now?” Milo asked, feeling a strange sense of responsibility to shake Imrah out of her melancholic self-deprecation. He told himself it was because she needed to stop moping and teach him, but as he stood watching her prepare this new formula, he admitted he was beginning to like her.

“Prepare you,” she replied staunchly before holding up the bowl of crushed amalgam in front of him. Milo could feel the barest tingle of magical potential coming from the bowl.

“Spit,” Imrah instructed, and after inspecting Milo’s reluctant offering, raised the bowl again. “More.”

After providing enough saliva to make his mouth feel dry, Milo watched her mix the spittle and ground dust into a grainy paste.

After that, she dabbed a claw in the mixture and turned toward Milo.

“Where is that going?” he asked, leaning back as her hand strayed toward his face.

“On the lids of your eyes,” she muttered distractedly as she strained upward. “Now, bend your head down and hold still.”

Milo took a deep breath and forced himself to hunch forward and hold very still. Willing himself not to even breathe as it was applied, he waited as she dabbed a thin layer of the gunk across his eyelid. Then, with her cold carrion breath sliding across his face, she intoned something in magically charged Ghulish. A prickling sensation spread across his eyelids and then his eyes, making him wince, but he kept his hands from pawing