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

that as he spoke, it spattered the ash-filled hand he raised to his lips.

“You won’t have to,” Milo muttered thickly and opened his hand.

RISE

His focused mind thrumming to the tune of his blood flecking the ash, Milo felt as much as saw the bloody darts rise into the air. The red projectiles trailed streamers of ash as they hurtled toward the four soulless. Chasing each of those streamers were ripples of gloaming light, hungry shades that keened as they closed on their quarry. The gory shards struck the four soulless simultaneously with the slap of fluid striking a hard surface as the contrails of ash crumbled. The wailing lights, scenting the bait, dove in without hesitation.

All that happened so quickly that Milo’s eyes barely had time to register everything, and by the time they did, he was distracted by the eruption of essence his mind felt emanating from the soulless soldiers. Their bodies rocked and quivered, the rifles tumbling from their grasp as every joint twisted in a different direction.

Roland looked at the soldiers spasming on either side of him, then swung his gaze to Milo and raised his pistol.

OBEY

The four soulless pounced, seizing on the arm holding the weapon while the others grabbed whatever part of Roland was handy. The pistol barked twice, one shot whining off the cobbles beside Milo the other rocketing straight overhead. Roland roared and cursed, but as strong as he was, four full-grown men couldn’t be thrown off so easily.

“Petrograd is seething with unsettled shades,” Milo growled as he sat up. “That’s the thing when you hollow people out. There’s nothing to keep them from being filled with something else.”

The pistol fell from Roland’s grip, but only so that he could strain at Milo with hands intent on strangling him.

“Traitor!” he howled between a slew of blistering, venomous curses as he struggled. “Ungrateful whoreson! Liar! Traitor!”

Milo would have thought the words would slide off him, but they stung deeply as he tried to clamber to his feet. He thought to say something, to rebut or maybe even explain, but several things happened in quick succession.

The other soulless opened fire and a trio of shots sailed past Milo’s bent back, while others hammered into the flesh of the shade-possessed soulless. Milo felt a shade’s wail of frustration as its host succumbed to its injuries, but before he could redirect it to the soldiers firing on them, Roland lunged forward and grabbed him by the throat with his free hand. Milo gasped and pried at the fingers crushing his windpipe as the three remaining servitors pulled on Roland’s arms.

Then a wild, whooping cry tore through the night from the opposite end of the street.

Through his hazy, black-spotted vision, Milo saw a nightmare from the past barreling toward them. A gaunt figure riding a skeletal charger was bearing down on them, a crackling wheel of fire spinning around his head.

18

These Insanities

Milo didn’t have the breath to curse, but if he had, it would have been a good one. Something poetic, with metaphor and symbolism, but as things stood, he only managed a gargle. Roland seemed determined to keep strangling Milo singlehandedly, despite three soldiers contesting the point.

Instead, he saved his breath for a final heave at Roland’s throttling grip, and the investment paid off as the hand came free and air poured through his bruised throat.

Roland surged forward with a scream, but Milo slipped past the clawing hand and drove an elbow across his jaw. He felt the jaw crack under the blow, the reverberations traveling up his arm, and Roland collapsed to the ground under the shade-dominated assailants.

Milo looked up in time to see the rider charging at him, screaming like a burning demon, as the wheel of fire spun over his head. This close, he could see that the steed was none other than the Qareen mount he’d made in Georgia, but that was not what made the bottom drop out of Milo’s stomach. Astride the necromistry-powered horse was none other than Ezekiel Bouche, looking filthier and more ragged than Milo had ever seen him, yet smiling as wide as ever.

“YEEHAW!” he shrieked and then threw back his head to laugh with wicked mania.

Milo gaped. He was as vulnerable as he’d been that night when the city burned, but this time, the rider rode right past him without a sideways glance. Ezekiel hammered his heels into the unfeeling flanks of the unliving horse and made a beeline for a collection of soulless huddling against their truck. Round after round from their rifles sent up puffs and thin splatters of dark blood from the wild cowboy’s chest, but he rode on, laughing all the while.

A stone's throw from the truck, Ezekiel launched his wheel of flame, and Milo realized for the first time that the flame was an incendiary device spinning frantically on a length of rope.

The wheel became a crackling star that struck the truck and exploded in a shower of broken glass and burning fuel.

“Burn, haha! Warm right up, darlin’!”

As if in answer, the fire expanded with an oxygen-slurping whoosh, sending waves of flame in every direction. The truck bore the incendiary attack stoutly, the men around it less so. They might have been soulless, but their flesh still felt pain, and the lizard-brain response to the gnawing flames was as hard-wired as breathing. Screams rose in concert with the crackle of flames. A few managed to fire a handful of shots, but even with Ezekiel cackling half a dozen yards from them, their shots sailed into the night before they surrendered to the flames.

Those less fortunate were put out of their misery a second later, crumpling to smolder on the ground as the throaty call of the Gewehr sounded from the ruins.

“Let’s not linger here, if you please,” came a crisp voice in American English at Milo’s shoulders before someone began to draw him out of the street. “Mr. Bouche and your man seem to have things well in hand, but