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

Ambrose and Milo both winced as Brodden tightened the tourniquet, drawing a soft but distinct moan of pain from Rihyani.

“One of you with a strong stomach, get over here,” the medic directed as he held Rihyani’s arm up in the air.

Ambrose was quicker to step forward and was soon holding the contessa’s arm aloft while Brodden worked some sterile packing into the wounds. Milo moved closer to watch, though his mind was preoccupied with possible adjustments he could make to the formula so he could try his healing unguents again.

“She seems close enough to human,” the medic said as he worked. “So I’m assuming that the amount of blood she’s lost is as dangerous to her as it would be to a human.”

Ambrose nodded with a sigh as Brodden reached out and grabbed Milo, who started but didn’t resist as his hands were led to press against the packing.

“What does that mean?” Milo asked, staring into Rihyani’s face. Her eyes were shut and seemed sunken into her face, which they had not previously been.

Milo felt an icy talon of fear digging through his guts, searching for his heart.

Was it already too late?

“Means she needs blood,” Brodden said, wiping sweat from his forehead with a forearm while his other hand plunged into his bag. “Plenty of blood if she’s going to last much longer.”

“Take mine,” Milo said without pause as the medic dragged out a series of tubes and an arcane set of steel devices. “Take however much you need.”

“It’s not like books and radio programs,” Brodden growled as he set about assembling and checking the equipment for the transfusion. “If I give her the wrong type of blood, it could kill her as surely as not giving her any, and seeing as she’s not human, I doubt we’re going to be able to hook you up and hope for the best.”

Milo’s fear kindled to a frustration that sharpened his tongue into a flailing weapon.

“Then why are you wasting time getting that wretched thing out?” he demanded with a snarl.

“Because I’m a medic, damn it!” Brodden shot back. “I’m doing what I know how to and hoping someone’s going to tell me they’ve got a stash of faerie blood in this weird workshop of yours.”

Ambrose raised a hand to give Milo’s trembling shoulder a steadying squeeze.

“Got anything like that, Magus?” he asked, his voice steady and soothing like a man seeking to calm a skittish horse. “Anything that could help?”

Milo almost threw off the hand and screamed in the big man’s face for the stupid temerity of the question. He almost raved at the idiocy of thinking he kept bottles of fey blood for just such an occasion.

But he stood there silently, mouth moving in a string of unvoiced half-formed words as his mind hit upon something that could help. The healing unguents had sought to regenerate and bind flesh, and to his mind, they had been violently rejected by either fey physiology or something in the wound created by Ezekiel Boucher, but what if it was something where the magical process had ceased and was just, from all points of view, blood? It wouldn’t heal Rihyani like his unguents, but it might give them time.

“I don’t have fey blood on hand,” Milo said, his eyes searching the shelf behind his desk for his copy of Transitional States: Transmogrified Truths of Matter Living or Otherwise. “But I might have a way to make some.”

Not for the first time, Milo wondered if the dreaded ghul scholars who’d penned the works he studied ever thought a human would come along and break what constituted the few taboos of their kind.

For reasons both practical and similar, the ghuls had strict injunctions against using the blood of the living in their magics, especially a necromist performing alchemy. The fact that Milo, in refusing to use human remains, used his own blood to power his works was a smack in the face of everything the ghuls held sacred. Using his blood magic to pervert an alchemical formula into making blood now seemed comically transgressive.

He hoped he was going to live long enough to be able to gloat the next time he met one of those depraved troglodytes.

“You sure this won’t kill you?” Ambrose asked for the third time since Milo had rushed through the rough outline of what he was going to do.

“No,” Milo repeated, also for the third time as he ground a pungent mixture of herbs, preserved amphibian extracts, and his own blood. “I’m not, but we don’t have time for me to be sure.”

“You really don’t,” Brodden said as he hovered over Rihyani, his face a grim mask. “She’s hanging on by sheer willpower at this point.”

“You’re saying this might not even save her?” the big man asked, his eyes working a jagged triangle between the medic, the fey, and the magus.

“I’m saying we do this,” Milo cut in before Brodden could answer. “And that’s the final word.”

Ambrose opened his mouth to argue, but his jaws clamped shut with a snap.

Milo checked the consistency of the contents of the bowl, not only physically but through his probing magical senses, then checked his text.

It was two parts daring and one part foolishness, bending the theory the way he was, and it involved more than a few intuitive leaps, but one look at Rihyani’s listless body on his workbench told him all he needed to know. He was going to make her blood or die trying. Everything from here on out was a consequence playing out.

“Are you ready with that thing?” Milo asked as he approached with his elixir.

“I suppose.” The medic shrugged and held up a long needle connected to a strand of tubing that wound back to the bizarre arrangement of metal that Milo had a hard time believing was not magical. “Are you?”

“Almost,” Milo said, and he stepped over to Rihyani.

Her wounds had slowed to a trickle, but that trickle still stained the packed bandages. With a muttered apology, Milo