Sorcerybound (World's First Wizard Book 2) by Aaron Schneider (best color ereader .TXT) 📗

Milo warned himself not to get cocky even as he raised his chin to glare imperiously at the shade.

“You are the shade of Imrah Marid of Ifreedahm, daughter of Bashlek Ifreedahm,” Milo declared, his eye contact not flinching for a second. “I command you to remember what you once were. REMEMBER.”

The shade clearly did not appreciate the instruction, flailing at itself with its too numerous limbs with a sob, pinching and clawing in a fit of masochistic defiance before surrendering. Like water taking the form of a vessel, it poured its umbral flesh into the shape of Milo’s former teacher.

Only this time, instead of donning Imrah’s ghulish form, it emerged from its roiling coils as she had appeared when wearing her human guise.

A small, shapely woman with dark hair and flashing black eyes had replaced the grotesque creature, but her midsection was painfully pinched in the box, flesh compressed beyond mortal endurance. An ephemeral gown of black gossamer lay lightly over her body, the spectral cloth rippling in an ethereal wind.

“I think you are happy to see me, Milo,” she cooed in a voice that was Imrah’s yet wasn’t, lacking her typical scorn and impatience. “Or perhaps it’s the form I’ve taken.”

Milo’s gaze remained icy as he reminded himself of what he was looking at and what it wanted. Shades were not souls, only the fractured echoes left by the violent dislocation of death. It was devious, hungry, and desperate, but it was not a true living thing or even an unliving thing. Rather, it was something longing for unlife.

“Shade,” Milo said, sending a twitch of irritation across the Imrah-esque face, “I need to know what memories you have that might tell me about Guardians operating in Russia.”

“Why should I?” it asked, lip thrusting forward in a pout Imrah would have never deigned to wear. “Come on, Milo, you can’t drag me out just to start making demands. Don’t I deserve at least some consideration?”

A ticklish feeling in Milo’s mind pressured him to give a little, offer a word or two of simple greeting maybe, but he squashed it. The shade was playing on his ingrained interactions, hoping to have him consider it a living thing, a person. That could be fatally dangerous; Spectral Ruminations had explained that manifested shades, especially potent ones like Imrah’s, could form bonds with the unwary. Those connections resulted in living things wasting away, their vitality drained by an ever-hungry parasite, or perhaps worse, their lives co-opted by an unliving will that took hold when the host was weakest.

The reminders sharpened Milo’s focus, and the sigils glittering in the witchlight flared with power.

“Answer the question,” he said, his voice low and unyielding. “Or you go back in the box, and who knows when you’ll come back out again?”

He pressed his will on the thing, the blast furnace of his determination washing across it. He was the magus and it was a parasitic memory.

There would be no contest.

The human Imrah disguise ran like wax from a lit candle for a moment, exposing the shriveled ghulish body beneath, all rubbery skin and jagged teeth. Milo glared into the dark eyes that melted into a ghul’s bulging orbs and through them to the greedy points of light deep within, which belonged to the shade alone.

REMEMBER

The command was not spoken, but the shade flinched as though struck. Hands that were human except where the flesh had crumbled away to reveal ghul talons flew to its face. Eyes glinting weakly between the shivering claws, it nodded jerkily.

“Yes, yes, YES!” it whined. “There was a Guardian! Many of them! The old forests teamed with Hiisi, who hate men! I knew many who still savored the wild hunts, who still decorated groves with the skins of men and hung the shoes of children above their caves. They were monsters of the oldest order, savages who—”

“No,” Milo interjected, cutting off the shuddering recitation. “This would be one who could stand to work with humans, or at least use them.”

The shade’s sunken gaze lifted above its jagged fingers, wild and terrified.

“They were so awful, taking twisted shapes as they chased the little ones between the trees,” it sobbed. “I was so scared when I met them, the air full of blood and howling. And the screaming—always the screaming.”

Milo felt a flicker of empathy for the pitiful figure trembling before him, but then his eyes flickered to the sigils shining on the floor.

“Enough of that,” he snarled, throwing off the subtle glamour as he bared his teeth in fury. “Tell me something useful, or the box is closed, and I start thinking about which ocean to send you to the bottom of.”

To punctuate the point, Milo bent and scooped up the lock from the floor in one fluid motion.

The trembling display held for a second longer, then the shade collapsed on itself to hang limply. Even its eyes fell to the floor in defeat.

“Fine,” it croaked in the cold, wicked tongue of the ghuls. “There was one that I knew who won me over to their cause. He understood the truth of what we face. He came down from the north in secret, and when I’d sworn myself to the Guardians, he took me back with him to meet others, including the Hiisi of the First Wood. Last I knew, he was still there doing his work.”

Milo heard Ambrose shuffle a step forward in interest, and the magus couldn’t deny he felt the same. This was the most coherent the shade had ever been, and it was revealing the most it ever had about Imrah’s descent into the fanatical group.

Still eyeing the warding sigils as a reminder to himself, Milo asked his next question in a carefully measured tone.

“How did he know to reach out to you?”

“Rumors and whispers,” it replied. “I can’t remember if I contacted him or he me, but either way, once it began, I became his pupil, almost his acolyte. He understood