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

A voice that even with the distortion, Milo couldn’t help but recognize.

14

These Echoes

Milo was dragged from the muck beneath the trees by grim figures in trench coats and elephantine gas masks.

As one, they’d advanced on Milo as silhouettes beneath the glaring lights. Their rasping breathing in time with their synchronized movements was a nightmarish spectacle.

Was his exhausted mind playing tricks on him, or was there something unnaturally sinister about them?

He could feel dozens of gunsights trained on him, but he dared a look around him. Rihyani was gone, as was Ambrose’s body. There was hope in that, at least.

Looking down into the glassy-eyed masks, the magus felt something seethe uneasily in his chest. This wasn’t his weary imagination acting up. Something was wrong with these creatures.

Milo pressed out with the Art as they reached for him with gloved hands and felt nothing—no will, no mind. They might as well have been filled with straw and stone for all he felt.

That wasn’t good.

Milo reached out to find the essence of a shade to animate a corpse or perhaps some simulacrum of a man, but he still sensed nothing.

That was worse.

As they grabbed and twisted his arms behind his back, Milo realized with a horrible lurching in his stomach what they were—living, breathing beings with no will of their own. They were hollow creatures like the ones he’d accidentally slaughtered in Georgia with his loose shades. Men and possibly women—it was hard to tell beneath the heavy garments and concealing respirators—who’d been emptied by Zlydzen’s magic and bound to a will not their own.

As they dragged him before a growling line of trucks bearing the spotlights, Milo saw the will they must have been bound to.

He was standing in the open cab of an armored truck, a microphone dangling from his tattooed fingers as he watched Milo being hauled before him. Unlike the dehumanizing garb of his minions, he was dressed to impress in a pinstriped suit of gray silk over his heroic physique, every line of him clean, powerful, and cruel. Dark, smoldering eyes watched Milo, taking in every detail but revealing nothing.

The magus, gripped between the soulless, watched a smile as cold and sharp as a blade creep across half of Roland’s face.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Roland said in a voice even more resonant and smooth than Milo remembered. “I’m still not sure I do.”

Milo wanted to say something witty or brash, but a strange and inexorable transformation had occurred. He wasn’t the furious, double-fisted warlock who crushed monsters and vanquished demons, not anymore. Now he was a teenager, barely more than a child, looking up at his big brother after another escapade. He felt the corners of his mouth betraying him as a matching smile started to creep across his face. The gravity of years threatened to drag him back to old habits, old feelings of deference.

“Oh, Milo, what am I going to do with you?” Roland chuckled as he ran his fingers through his hair.

Just as the memories made him forget who he was, they sharpened his mind to recall inconsequential ingrained details. When Roland raked his fingers through his hair, he was nervous.

The spell was broken as Milo remembered.

He remembered the same motion, those same ink-marked fingers combing through his hair as the rest of the crew staggered into the room and saw the whole take laid out on the bed. He remembered how those fingers had pointed at him as that voice had heaped on accusations before Milo could say a thing.

Milo remembered it all and his rage at the memories burned away the soporific fog of nostalgia. Roland saw it happen.

For a time, neither of them said anything as the trucks idled and rumbled and the soulless wheezed through ventilated hoses. Then Roland nodded and motioned to the back of the truck.

“Load our guest in and tie him down,” Roland commanded flatly as he began to climb out of the cab. “I’ll square up with our friends.”

For one instant, as Milo was herded to the back of the truck, he and Roland were level. Roland didn’t return his gaze, but the wizard stared at his former protector and friend. Roland was still taller than he, though not by as much as before, and he was certainly stronger, but the magic Milo could wield made mere muscles almost inconsequential. Even in his weakened state, Milo could speak a word and set the man ablaze, one of many to fall before his sorcery.

I’m more than your equal now, Milo thought, nailing the words to the mast of his soul. Even in chains, I’ll be more than you. Always.

As Milo was taken around the truck, he spied Roland stepping to the tree line and giving a sharp whistle that drew heavy wingbeats.

Then he was at the tailgate and was half-dragged, half-carried to where shackles were bolted to the bed. The ragged streaks of dried blood told him that he was not the first to be afforded those accommodations.

Milo let himself be stripped down to his shirt and trousers and then bound. He was going to bide his time.

Rihyani and Ambrose were still out there, and perhaps as Roland’s prisoner, he could gain a view of the operation in Petrograd. Or perhaps they would throw him into a cell, and he would have time to recover himself enough that he could tear everything down on top of Roland’s and Zlydzen’s heads.

For now, his head held high, he could wait because even with iron around his wrists, he knew he was freer than he’d ever been.

They brought Milo to the edge of the city, past an old church, and then down cracked streets that ran between the husks of buildings. Some were only a few walls leaning drunkenly upon each other, while others were desolate hulks with broken-out windows like the eye sockets of a skull. As they wound their way around rubble and over refuse, Milo thought he spotted