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

response, but the results were far less impressive with his targets hunkering down and the vehicle plummeting downhill. A second later, the copse came between him and the attackers.

Milo swung his eyes back to the front with no obvious targets and realized there was no way they were going to get the Rollsy between the close-growing trunks. Ambrose, apparently coming to the same conclusion, swung the vehicle to the left and went thumping along the tree line.

“Do you see them?” Ambrose bellowed over the roar of the engine.

Milo squinted between the trees, searching for the radiant creatures or maybe the dark blotches of their heavy traveling cloaks. Fallen limbs and underbrush whipped by, and they were nearly halfway around the copse and heading toward the enemy when Milo began to wonder if they’d misjudged the situation and the fey weren’t here. It still raised the question of why well-armed Georgians were assaulting a patch of trees, but Milo felt the tension mounting in the back of his neck.

Ambrose was going to have to swing them around soon, or they’d plow right under the enemy’s sights, and scattered or not, they would be in a much better position to fire down on the open-topped car.

“I can’t see ‘em,” Ambrose shouted, doing his best to alternate between keeping the Rollsy under control and searching the trees.

“Maybe they need a sign,” Milo shouted back, letting go of the MG 08 and scooping up his skull-topped cane.

“What?” Ambrose replied, stealing a glance over his shoulder.

“BURN!” he said in reply, and two darts of green witchfire lanced skyward and detonated in twin bursts of stinging light above the treetops.

“Magus, down!” Ambrose roared as he swung the car around in a chugging uphill U-turn.

The ambushers’ flankers sent a flurry of shots at the Rollsy as Milo did his best to flatten himself inside the gunner’s nest. Two rounds clanged off the boot, while the rest buried themselves in the churned earth behind the roaring automobile.

Milo thought about hopping up and swinging the machine gun around, but as he was working himself up to it, he spied something amidst the trees—a shimmer, then a flash of silver light between the blackening trunks in the decaying sunset.

“Milo!” a clear voice rang out, and she strode toward him like an elfin queen in an enchanted wood. The bullets hissing through the air and the roar of Rollsy’s laboring engine only made the scene all the more surreal.

“There they are!” Milo shouted, reaching over in his crouch to slap Ambrose’s blocky shoulder while the other hand pointed into the wood. “Right there!”

Ambrose twisted to follow Milo’s finger, then a terrible humorless smile split his broad face.

“Hold on!” he howled as he whipped the wheel over and they darted between two trees with scant centimeters to spare.

Milo let out a wild whoop of excitement that transformed into a wail of terror as tree after tree leaped into their path and Ambrose yanked the Rollsy over to avoid impact by a hairsbreadth. In some mad see-sawing path, the bodyguard threaded the three-ton vehicle through the needle’s eye over and over.

When they finally pulled level with Rihyani in the heart of the copse, Milo felt like his whole body was a series of jellied lumps held together by rubber bands. Limp and nearly boneless, he tumbled free of the vehicle to smack into the loamy ground.

“Somebody call for a rescue?” he groaned, his head lolling upward as Rihyani came toward him.

Her fingers were thin and as strong as tines of steel as she gripped him by his coat and hauled him to his feet.

“My hero!” She laughed and lunged forward to plant a fierce kiss upon his lips.

Milo’s body recovered from its flaccid state with remarkable alacrity, and when she finally pulled away her dark lips, he found his feet under him and one arm around her waist.

“That was unexpected,” he muttered, wishing he could make a wittier riposte. He felt saying nothing would be worse.

“Quite.” The fey contessa grinned ferociously before shoving away from him easily. “Now come on, we’re not out of this yet.”

Still a little staggered he spun around to see if Ambrose had seen what happened. Unfortunately, Ambrose seemed more concerned about the oncoming soldiers and survival and seemed to decide that such a situation required more than his Gewehr 98 rifle. Half the mountings that bound the machine gun to the Rollsy had been unfastened, but the big man seemed to have run out of patience.

Muscles bunched in like a nest knotted ropes across his shoulders and arms, and then with a metallic plink, the gun came free. A second later, the ammo hopper was ripped free in a similar fashion. Milo gawked at the display of power but was still unsure how he could wield the cumbersome weapon.

“Ambrose?” Milo called tentatively.

“Half a moment,” he muttered. More quickly than seemed reasonable, he looped some cabling from the gunner’s nest around his neck and the barrel of the gun, then held the MG 08 in his right hand with a belt of brass-cased rounds coiling into the hopper in his left hand.

Ambrose turned to the magus, his face set in a grim frown, not a sign of strain across his frame.

“Yes?”

Milo gaped and then heard Rihyani shouting behind him.

“Just be careful!” Milo shouted and turned back to follow the fey.

“You do the same,” the big man growled, then set off in a heavy-footed lope.

Milo would never have called himself an empathetic man, but by God, he felt bad for whoever ran into the Nephilim first.

6

The Monsters

Milo rushed to follow Rihyani but found himself nearly running past where she knelt next to the large trunk of a lightning-split tree.

Next to her, nearly at Milo’s eye level even on his knees was the Bronze Colossus, his hands pressing down on the belly of the Green Lady. His fingers were dark with emerald blood, and the air was thick with the scent of crushed lavender.

“She’s bleeding,” the giant gasped, his herculean