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

squeezed the bandage to get a few drops of blood from the fabric that he flicked into the bowl. Though not apparent to anyone else in the room, Milo felt the ingredients align metaphysically, almost snapping into place with a ripple of magical pressure.

“That’s got to be a good sign,” he told himself before tilting back his head and downing the mixture.

Milo felt the magical matrix bound up in the ingredients slide down his gullet and diffuse as it went. Magic was not science, though necromantic alchemy came the closest in comparison, and gestures meant things. The act of ingestion wasn’t about digestion so much as reception, willingly partaking so that the power imbibed could work itself into a welcoming host.

And work it did.

Milo’s body spasmed as the power poured through his veins and arteries.

“Now!” Milo gasped as he sank into a chair next to the workbench. “Quickly.”

Brodden slid the needle in and then activated a pump, and within seconds, a stream of living fluid was spiraling through the tubes and headed to the needle already buried in Rihyani’s arm. The vitae was a pale shade of pink.

“It worked,” Ambrose murmured, then frowned as he stared at Milo’s face. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m trying to control it,” Milo growled, sweat running from his brow as he wrestled with the catalyzing forces inside of him. “Changing what’s going out without changing all of it and killing me.”

Ambrose swore, a long and potent assemblage of profanity in a particularly florid French dialect.

“How much does she need?” the big man asked Brodden, who was busy overseeing the technical aspects of the transfusion.

“As much, ugh, as much as I can give her,” Milo hissed between gritted teeth, which became a strained, defiant smile as Ambrose glared down at him.

“Don’t be stupid,” the bodyguard spat even as his eyes softened at the sight of his ward’s pained expression.

“Too late to turn back now.” Milo laughed and held onto the arms of his chair in a knuckle-popping grip. “Now, if you w-will excuse me, I need…oh, God…to manage a complex alchemical reaction while not dying.”

8

The Wound

Milo awoke with a start on his bed, clawing at his arm frantically. He stopped when he realized the vampiric eel, a resurrected casualty from a bygone alchemical project, was not in fact affixed to his arm as he’d just been dreaming.

“You’ll make a mess of your bandage,” Ambrose growled around the pipe between his teeth from the spot near the balcony where he slouched.

Milo had indeed made a mess of the bandages around his arm, so much so that he found his fingers entangled in the wrappings he’d wrenched free. As he tugged his fingers loose from the snaring fabric, he saw the puckered mouth of the puncture marking where the transfusion needle had been sunk into his arm.

“How long was I out?” he asked in a numb mutter as he decided to unravel the linen on his arm. The wound seemed sound and unlikely to reopen.

“For the past twelve hours.” The big man puffed with a gust of pipe smoke. “Brodden demanded you stop after giving what he guessed was three pints, and forcibly cut you off after nearly four. I gave you a double dose of the restorative and brought you here. They’ve moved her to a separate room that’s become a makeshift infirmary.”

Milo stared at the scabbed-over red wound as he recollected the events of the night and early morning at Ambrose’s prompting. It had been like holding onto a cliff’s edge by his fingernails the whole time, but as the blood flowed from his veins into Rihyani, he’d drawn strength from knowing that he was doing everything in his power to save her. When the needle had come out and he’d released the energies of the spell into the ether, it was an almost pleasurable feeling, followed by utter exhaustion.

Milo’s stomach rumbled grumpily at the debt he’d run up with all his heroics.

“Is she showing signs of recovery?” Milo asked, unwilling to hope that she was on the mend.

Ambrose frowned and then reached over the balcony to tap out his pipe. The stretching silence made Milo shudder, and he reflexively pulled the covers up, performing the necessary mental gymnastics to convince himself it was the blood loss that was making him act this way.

“She’s not dying.” Ambrose sighed as he pocketed his pipe. “But all the same, her wounds aren’t healing.”

“What does that mean?” Milo asked, willing his teeth not to chatter as he shivered.

Ambrose rose to his feet and shrugged.

“Exactly what I said; her wounds aren’t healing,” he said, not sounding angry so much as frustrated. “We’ve got the bleeding down to barely a trickle, through pressure and some clever needlework by Brodden. After twelve hours, her body should be showing some signs of clotting, but as far as we can tell, it isn’t.”

Milo started, trying not to let an overarching wave of despair spread over him.

“The truth is that she shouldn’t have lost as much blood as she did from those wounds.” Ambrose’s gaze slid to the floor, and he brushed the fingers of one hand over the knuckles of the other hand. “The cuts were thin and pretty shallow, and they don’t seem to have hit any major arteries. It doesn’t make sense.”

At those words, Milo felt a prickling along the skin of his arms and the back of his neck.

“Magic,” he breathed. “The Americans—that maniac Ezekiel. He must have had something or known some way.”

Ambrose froze, his eyes narrowing as he stared at Milo.

“You mean, you aren’t the only wizard?”

The question struck Milo harder and deeper than he would have imagined.

He knew that it was entirely possible, even probable that there would be others, but recognizing that he might have met another human who could perform magic shook him all the same. His unique and even privileged, though weighty, position suddenly felt precarious in a way he wasn’t prepared for. Milo had only been a wizard, the world’s first, for a short time,