World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set

by Schneider, Aaron D.

  “Where the hell is it?” he growled as his eyes swept over his desk and the shelves behind his desk and his thoughts raced. “I know I made more than this!”

  “Which is exactly the problem.” growled a gruff voice from across the room.

  Milo’s eyes shot up. Reclining on a couch near the door to his study was the thick, lumpy frame of Simon Ambrose.

  Milo felt a rush of several feelings at once, not the least of which were confusion and anger at being so startled by his bodyguard and friend. Swearing fiercely, he threw the empty bottle at the big man, the thick glass bouncing off the couch and then rolling across the floor.

  “What did you do with it?” Milo snarled, savoring the anger whose presence he didn’t quite understand.

  “I should have pitched it all into the river.” Ambrose sniffed, casting a baleful eye at the failed missile before glaring at Milo. “But I didn’t know how much you would need to get things in order after not sleeping for so long.”

  “It hasn’t been that long,” Milo lied, the anger falling out of his voice with chilling ease. “Don’t be dramatic. Just tell me where it is.”

  Ambrose eyed his ward with a frown and then rose into a sitting position on the couch.

  “Do you know how long it’s been since you slept, Magus?”

  The words were measured and precise, like someone talking to an ill-tempered child. This, of course, awoke Milo’s anger instantly.

  “I do, do you?” he asked in the most accusatory tone he could muster. “Do you, O dear nanny?”

  Ambrose let the words slide off him with contemptuous ease.

  “How long has it been?” he asked with infuriating steadiness.

  Milo stared back, his jaw working as his lips twitched and curled.

  “Five maybe six days,” he said, and then, seeing Ambrose’s expression, quickly added. “No, no, eight. Yes, eight days.”

  Ambrose stared at Milo for a few hammering heartbeats and shook his head ruefully.

  “Fifteen,” Ambrose said softly as he rose to his feet. “Fifteen days straight, and that’s after only catching up for two days after eleven days without sleep.”

  “It… I mean, no, it can’t… You forgot about…”

  The excuses died even as he tried to force them off his shuddering tongue.

  “This has got to stop,” the big man declared in a voice that would brook no argument. “Bad enough you’re running yourself down like this, but now your judgment is so impaired that you’re running about the countryside like some witch in a fairy tale.”

  Milo felt part of him nodding along in acknowledgment, but he stuffed that part down deep and nursed his indignation.

  “Do you even understand the pressure I’m under?” Milo asked, stalking around the desk to level a finger at Ambrose. “What they are asking me to do?”

  “Only in the vaguest sense.” Ambrose shrugged. “But considering Lokkemand doesn’t say anything to me, whose fault is that?”

  Milo snarled, throwing his hands into the air.

  “One more screwup then!” he railed, pacing around the room as he began to mutter. “First, the elixirs don’t activate, then fetishes don’t work, and nobody takes the time to think that I’m learning this all on my own and there might be a reason no human has ever done magic before this. Now it’s my fault I don’t burden you with the unreasonable expectations I’m under.”

  Milo spun and fixed Ambrose with his most malevolent glare before speaking in an acid tone. “So terribly sorry to have inconvenienced you.”

  “I forgive you,” Ambrose replied in placid defiance of Milo's vitriol. “We can talk about how things are going to change after you wake up, but right now, you need to take the last sleepbalm I put in your left-hand drawer.”

  Milo’s gaze followed the big man’s nod to the desk before swiveling to fix him with a furious but unsteady scowl.

  “I c-can make more on my own,” Milo said, his tongue suddenly feeling thick in his mouth. “Who d-do you think is in ch-char…aggh!”

  A warning stab of agony in his brain rocked Milo, and he choked on his tongue as Ambrose shook his head ruefully.

  “Take the elixir, Milo,” the bodyguard pressed.

  Milo spat out a curse between groans of pain as he staggered over to the desk and yanked out the drawer. He snatched up the balm, still spitting invectives, blind rage swirling through his tortured mind. Whirling around, he raised the bottle threateningly over his throbbing head. He wasn’t sure what he was about to do in a fit of drug-addled temper, but the look in Simon Ambrose’s eyes stopped him dead in his tracks.

  “Take it,” the Nephilim commanded, the crimson flare in his eyes pairing with a thickening pressure in the air. “Take it, or I will give it to you in a way you will not appreciate.”

  Hands trembling with what he told himself was withdrawal and encroaching fatigue, Milo obeyed.

  2

  The One

  Milo awoke nearly two weeks later, and for the first time since coming to Georgia, his pale skin was free of a gray tint. His veins still stood out darker than was natural, but they were not the tendrils of black that had twitched and writhed under his skin. Looking at himself in the mirror above his washbasin, he imagined he looked almost human again.

  His body was recovering, but for all that, it was hard to feel truly rested.

  His memory of the recovery process was a fractured series of twisted dreams where he stretched and disjointed specters circled. He recalled that they gripped his face in cold, hard hands, forced his jaws open, and poured gall down his throat. He would awaken choking and wheezing, just able to clear his raw throat before collapsing into sleep, where more wraiths crawled out of the dark to look him over before forcing more of their foul effluence upon him.

  Sometimes they wore uniforms, sometimes medical lab coats, sometimes stern priestly vestments. One had even come wearing Roland’s tattoos on its wrist, a skull on an orthodox cross.

  Milo had wanted to run from them, but even in his dreams, he was too tired. Limbs heavy as leaden weights, he lay and watched them come, knowing what they intended every time but always knowing he would do nothing, perhaps could do nothing to stop them.

  The final time of this liquid violation, something sparked in him, and his limbs responded with the shuddering speed of a dream. He knocked their hands away and, grabbing one by the neck, hauled himself up to his knees. His voice roared in that dark emptiness, battering the specters into motes of unlight.

  “учи учёного!”

  That was when he awoke, truly awoke, and found himself naked and kneeling in his bed. The springtime sunshine filled the room, and in that fair light, he saw Ambrose staring at him, wide-eyed, from a chair at the foot of the bed.

  “What was that?” the bodyguard asked, wiggling a thick finger in his ear. “Not sure I caught it.”

  Milo had collapsed back onto the bed, drawing the sheets across his bare form, but for the first time in a long time, he did not immediately slip back into sleep. He’d lain there for some time, wondering at how loose his skin felt on his bones before he realized that he was desperately hungry and thirsty.

  Before he could finish forming a request, which was harder than he would have imagined with his neglected vocal cords, Ambrose produced a beaten copper mug full of warm, creamy broth. As Milo greedily slurped it down, the big man filled him in on the events of the last two weeks, which mostly included Ambrose keeping Lokkemand from Milo and Lokkemand keeping the locals from Shatili.

  “Had a whole witch-hunting mob trudge right up the Argun,” Ambrose said, a bemused smile spreading across his face. “Farmers and foresters all coming to lay their claim against the night witch, meaning you, for everything from animals miscarrying to marital disputes. I might’ve been tempted to see if their nerve lasted past a few warning salvos, but I’ll hand it to Lokkemand; he knew exactly what to do.”

  Money, it turned out, was an incredible curative for all things witch-related. Lokkem
and’s attempt to buy off the disgruntled locals seemed to have worked a miracle.

  “And after that, he stopped trying to get you up and about,” the big man explained, chuckling. “I think if nothing else, he wanted to buy himself a little more time to gather funds from Command before you woke up and start making your rounds again.”

  More funds had come four days ago, along with an interesting announcement.

  “Jorge’s coming,” Ambrose said simply, studying Milo. “Seems he wants to have another sit-down with you. Of course, we thought he was coming to talk to sleeping beauty, but the message he sent didn’t leave room for conversation on his arrival date.”

  Milo stood in front of the mirror a day later, still a little unsteady on his feet, but determined to make himself presentable before the colonel arrived.

  Aside from the effects of the nightwatch fading, the time off had not done much to improve his looks. His eyes were dark and contracted over his grotesquely sharp cheekbones, all riding over a collection of black facial hair made of wild wire and juvenile fuzz. As Milo reached over to start washing his face, he noted how shriveled his hands looked.

  “Vulture claws,” Milo muttered as his dark-veined, long-nailed hands took soap and towel in hand.

  “You strike me as more of a crow,” Ambrose commented from the doorway.

  “No one asked,” Milo croaked with more venom than he felt.

  Ambrose shrugged and leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed.

  Milo had tried to dismiss his bodyguard more than once, but the indefatigable Nephilim would not be deterred. He knew the big man’s supervision was more out of concern than anything else, but every time he saw Ambrose, it reminded him of how bad things had gotten. Milo hadn’t only let himself go in trying to prove himself, but he’d also let Ambrose down.

  The fact that this was the first time he cared about this since Roland’s band only made the sting strike deeper.

  “So, why is Jorge coming?” Milo asked as he plunged the towel into the warm water. “Did the message say anything about that?”

  Ambrose shook his head, his eyes fixed on the dust motes dancing in a shaft of light from a hallway window.

  “No, or at least Lokkemand didn’t tell me,” the big man said, then a lopsided grin spread across his features. “Not that he and I have chatted much.”

  Milo took a moment to digest the response as he washed his face. It felt like stripping off a mask, clearing away the residue of so many days of unconsciousness. When he looked up from the mirror, his flushed skin made the dark veins in his temples and forehead stand out more, but somehow, he seemed more human.

  “You mentioned before that you and he exchanged words,” he said as he gathered the shaving lather and brush Ambrose had brought him. “Anything I should know?”

  Ambrose let out a long, lilting curse that turned into a whistle.

  “He might try to tell you that I was rude to him,” the bodyguard explained matter-of-factly. “Which simply isn’t true.”

  Milo paused the lather brush centimeters from his bristly face.

  “And?” Milo prompted with a cocked eyebrow.

  “And he might also say I told him if he came into your room again, I’d peel him like an apple,” Ambrose said before muttering quickly. “Which is the truth.”

  Milo snorted and began to apply the lather.

  “You do know that he outranks both of us,” Milo said as he turned back to the mirror. “And the one thing any army loves more than victory is the hierarchy.”

  “As I’ve said before,” Ambrose declared, raising a finger to emphasize the point, “I’m not a soldier in the German Army. I am an unwilling—”

  “—Conscript forced to serve under duress,” Milo finished for him, rolling his eyes as he put down the lather brush and picked up the razor. “I know, you might have made mention of the fact before.”

  “Once or twice.” Ambrose chuckled. “You sure you know how to use that thing?”

  Milo, his scraggly face covered in lather, looked down at the folded straight razor and then back at the mirror to see Ambrose watching him. Without bothering to look back down, Milo flicked it open, then rolled it down his extended fingers before flipping it up to balance it on his lower two fingers. Eyes still locked on Ambrose, he walked the open razor up his hand with little flexes of his knuckles before spinning it around his index finger. The spin terminated in the razor leaping into the air and landing in his other hand.

  The little display done, he began to employ the blade across his face.

  “You could have just said yes.” Ambrose huffed, failing to conceal how impressed he was. “What were you, apprenticed to a barber at the orphanage or something?”

  Milo paused with the keen blade resting against his cheek.

  “Something like that,” Milo replied coolly, his eyes becoming cold and distant.

  Ambrose took note of the change, and for some time, neither of them spoke.

  Milo had nearly finished clearing his jawline after tending to his cheeks when Ambrose finally spoke up, his expression pensive.

  “I was in a sort of gang once,” he said, arms crossed over his massive chest. “Good boys, most of them, at the start. More scared than evil if you understand what I mean.”

  Milo flicked the blade in the water a few times before scowling incredulously through the mirror.

  “How is one sort of in a gang?”

  Ambrose’s lips worked beneath his mustache, making it twitch and wriggle like a woolly caterpillar trying to escape from under his nose.

  “July 1830. France was having another revolution, and my mother wanted none of it, so we went to Saarbrücken, where she had a cousin,” Ambrose said, heaving a sigh as he settled into his tale. “First taste of a real, modern city, and didn’t take long before I fell in with some other French lads whose families had also fled the turmoil in France. Told ourselves we were going to be the neighborhood protectors, keep those Prussians from mistreating us proud French.”

  “How noble,” Milo muttered as he considered whether to apply the razor to his mustache in full or just enough to tame the growth.

  “Soon enough, we found a group of hardy young men who weren’t afraid of throwing their weight around and didn’t have to do tedious things like work,” Ambrose remarked dryly. “We set off planning to protect ourselves and our people from brutal Prussian constables, but before long, someone called those constables to protect our people from us.”

  It was Ambrose’s turn to stare off into distant times.

  “Stupid as we were, when two constables showed up to have a word with us, we attacked them,” Ambrose said, a note of sad resignation in his voice. “It was a short fight and eight against two after all. Arnald Toulouse, our capitaine, knocked out a tooth from each man’s mouth and stuck it in their pockets as a reminder. Unfortunately for us, they remembered all our faces, and with a bunch more friends, they rounded us up the next day in the street.”

  Ambrose shook his head.

  “They beat us until we could hardly stand,” Ambrose muttered, his voice softer. “And then they beat Arnald to death in front of us and made us carry him to an unmarked pauper’s grave in a nearby churchyard.”

  Ambrose stroked his mustache pensively.

  “First time I ever saw a man die, and he was my friend. I was seventeen.”

  Milo put the razor down, his freshly trimmed mustache and goatee shining and glossy.

  “I killed my first man when I was twelve,” Milo said, his tone too flat to be conversational. “Can’t remember the first time I saw a man die.”

  Ambrose broke free from his reverie to stare at Milo.

  “I can think of only a few reasons for a twelve-year-old to want to kill a man,” Ambrose said, his tone level but cautious. “I’m hoping I’m wrong.”

  “We needed a little more money to buy a case of schnapps from a smuggler that worked the Elbe,” Milo said after toweling his face off. “We were going to drink half the
schnapps and sell the rest to the other children in the Krieg-Waisenhaus. We robbed a small old man in a top hat one evening. He fought back with his cane, knocked Roland to the ground. I stabbed the man under the arm seven times for that.”

  Ambrose’s eyes narrowed, studying Milo’s reflection.

  “We ended up drinking all of the schnapps,” Milo said, putting the towel down to inspect himself one last time in the mirror.

  Ambrose frowned, nodding as he turned back toward the dust motes.

  “And now here we are.” He grunted. “Working for the Germans. Funny how life works out.”

  “That’s a word for it.” Milo sighed.

  * * *

  Jorge arrived in the late afternoon via auto caravan.

  Milo and Ambrose heard the sentry call out that Jorge was inbound and moved quickly down to the courtyard, where they encountered Captain Lokkemand.

  The towering officer glared down his nose at both of them but said nothing for a moment. Behind him, the platoon of soldiers they’d acquired before leaving Afghanistan, excluding those on sentry duty, of course, were arrayed behind him in immaculate parade-ground formation. To a man, the platoon stood with perfect discipline and composure, something Milo knew was the fruit of Lokkemand’s efforts.

  “Good to see you up and about, Volkohne,” Lokkemand managed stiffly as the seconds dragged on.

  “Thank you, sir,” Milo said, throwing up a salute as he suddenly realized his breach of military protocol.

  The captain nodded, returning the salute with a muttered “at ease” before turning back to watch the line of trucks come roll across the bridge.

  Milo dropped the salute, keenly aware, not for the first time, of what a poor soldier he made. Staring at Lokkemand, with his ramrod posture, crisp movements, and towering presence, he knew the officer was in so many ways the perfect soldier that Milo never would be. The magus knew down to the bottom of his soul that he couldn’t be like Lokkemand, and even if he could, he never would be. The realization of the difference between the unwilling penal conscript and the proud career officer had never been cast in sharper relief.