Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2) by Aaron Schneider (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📕

Ezekiel’s laughter rose to a shrill cadence that was indistinguishable from a scream.

“You are going to tell me what I want to know, Ezekiel,” Milo said softly. “One way or another.”

Ezekiel knelt, head hanging, mangy strands of his stringy hair dangling over his face. He might have collapsed forward, but the chains that bound him would not allow him to do more than hang his head, shoulders taut. His breath sawed in and out between brown teeth as a string of crimson drool trickled from his mouth.

The last illusion had been a living strand of barbed wire that slithered down the cowboy’s raw, cackling throat to twist and gyrate as it worked its way through him and back. The curse had mended the worst of the experience as Milo’s will flagged, but there were enough lacerations in Ezekiel’s throat that blood welled up with every breath for some time. Milo, sweating and trembling with exhaustion and frustration, stared in disbelief as the trickle of blood lessened with each wheezing gasp.

With a fitful cough that spattered a fresh layer of crimson across the stone floor, the scalp hunter began to laugh.

Milo’s head lolled back, and he stared through the open portal in the ceiling. The moon of the Lost Vale had shrunk back to a reasonable size, and Milo could see the sky. Were the first traces of a sunrise beginning to filter through depths of night? Was it his imagination, or did he see some strands of blue and gray?

“You can feel it, can’t you, boy?” Ezekiel chuckled thickly through crimson-streaked lips. “Dawn’s comin’, and you’ve got nothin’. Plumbed the depths of that nasty mind o’ yours, and you still haven’t shaken ol’ Zeke.”

The cowboy threw back his head and let out a hacking, raucous laugh along with a spume of red.

“HAHA! Guess your fey bitch bet on the wrong horse, huh? HAHAHA!”

For the first time that night, Milo’s temper snapped, and he descended on the scalp hunter in a terrible fury. The raptor cane, wreathed in snapping emerald flames, rose and fell over and over. Supernaturally powered blows tore through flesh and snapped bone as witchfire scorched and scoured flesh. Within moments, Ezekiel was a seared, broken thing, barely recognizable as human.

Milo stood over him, chest heaving, burning with despair and frustration, and watched as the curse worked its terrible will. He’d witnessed Ambrose’s regeneration, with bones snapping back into place and flesh regrowing, but this was different. Watching it was like watching wounds reverse themselves, split and blackened flesh slithering back into place as it shrank and the scorching faded.

In less time than it had taken to inflict the incredible damage, it had been undone, and Milo was eye to eye with the same maddening grin.

“When are you going to understand?” He laughed, shaking his head with enraging slowness. “You can’t win.”

Animal instinct released the cane in Milo’s hand so he could form a scarred fist to drive into Ezekiel’s face. The blow split the cowboy’s lip, but the grin only widened.

“Hit me again if you like.” He giggled, and Milo did, knocking his nose of kilter by a few degrees as blood gushed from the nostrils.

“Oh, come on, you can do better.”

Milo slammed two hard hooks into one side of Ezekiel's face. The eye started to swell shut.

“That’s more like it.”

Another strike across the engorging hematoma, then the other hand knocked a tooth free.

“Don’t stop now.”

Three more hammering fists split the unswollen eyebrow and knocked the nose even farther the other way before Milo grabbed two handfuls of lank, sweat-slimed hair.

“Come on, you said you were gonna die tryin’!”

His repetitively rising knee mashed the nose, collapsed the cheekbones, and snapped his jaw. Finally Milo staggered backward and collapsed when his throbbing leg gave out. Breath came in despairing rasps as he watched things slide back into place and out of mangled flesh. Ezekiel’s voice rose like the inevitable verses of a prophecy.

“Nothin’. There’s nothin’ you can do. Not with your pixie tricks, not with your bone stick, not with your little fists. You’ve got nothin’, boy.”

Milo stared back, trying to regain that icy calm he’d felt at the outset, but it had vanished. What he found instead was the flagging energy to kick up and clack the broken brown teeth together in Ezekiel’s jaw.

“Nothin’ you have can hurt me,” the scalp hunter murmured. “Keep tryin’. Keep tryin’ to get lower, meaner, nastier, whatever. It doesn’t matter because you’ve got nothin’. Nothin’ you can do, nothin’ you’ve ever known, nothin’ you can imagine.”

Scooting backward on his hands, Milo admitted to himself that was why he was so angry. Yes, he was terrified of failing Rihyani, but sitting there with a man’s crusted blood on his hands and smeared across his pant leg, he knew that fear wasn’t the root of his anger.

He was mad because of how quickly and how low he’d been willing to stoop with his new gift of the Art. Killing a man in the heat of battle was one thing, but here he’d let the ugliest parts of his will, his very identity, have free rein to work horrors upon Ezekiel, and nothing had come of it. It wasn’t that the monstrous man didn’t deserve it, but rather that Milo letting himself generate in the fabricated horrors had sullied himself as surely as blood now clogged his nails and clung to his knuckles. There was a stain upon him, and there was nothing to show for it.

“Nothin’,” Milo repeated quietly to himself, then Ezekiel’s words returned to him.

Nothin’ you can do, nothin’ you’ve ever known, nothin’ you can imagine.

What made the declaration so awful and enervating was that it was not a statement of bravado or challenge. No, seeing past the grin and the perverse laughter, it was a certainty rooted in something.

Nothin’ you can do, nothin’ you’ve ever known, nothin’ you can imagine. Nothin’ can ever be as bad as that.

It was a declaration