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

pans as Milo sought to move clear of the windows and looked for a back door.

The formula excites particles to make them ignite and burn, Imrah began with frustrating calm given the situation. It stands to reason the opposite could be achieved by simply reversing the process.

Milo heard orders being shouted and knew that in minutes, they’d be sweeping in to surround the house.

“Are you saying I can make things cold?” Milo asked. “What good is ice going to do right now?”

A boot thudded against the bullet-pocked house’s door, and there was a splintering crash. Milo spotted a window big enough to climb out at the back of the house as he heard several pairs of feet thumping across the wood floor.

I thought humans loved their science? Ice is crystallized water, and what floods your fleshy bodies?

Milo was halfway through the window to the backlot when two soldiers rounded the corner of the house. Without time to think, Milo leveled the cane and launched a spike focus.

FREEZE

Faster than the eye could follow, something darted from the skull’s sockets into the chest of the leading soldier. He had enough time to stare bewildered at twin shards of black ice in his chest before his body erupted in all directions in red shards. Two of these gory icicles pierced the shoulder of the man beside him, and he managed to scream in horror before he burst into a frigid imitation of a porcupine.

Both men collapsed to the dirt, accompanied by the musical tinkling of shattering icicles.

Ice has a greater volume than water, Imrah informed him smugly. All that excess has to go somewhere.

“Dear God!” Milo gaped as he stumbled the rest of the way out of the window.

I recommend relocating.

There was a shout inside the house, and a rifle roared as the window frame splintered behind him.

With nothing but an open stretch for several strides, Milo’s options were bleak until he spied the roof and had an idea. Gathering himself physically and mentally, he leaped into the air.

Borrowing both the Art to make himself lighter and his necromist’s work on his coat to form wings, he soared through the air. Black wings flapping, he rose level with the house, his feet stretching out to go skipping across the rustling thatch.

He spun back as three more soldiers clambered out into the back lot, casting glances upward in obvious confusion. Milo downed each of them with frigid darts before they could draw a bead on him, then he scrambled up the roof as he heard shouting from the rest of the squad in front of the house.

Two three-man teams were watching the house for targets, one batch hunkered behind a wagon and the other huddling inside a dry, dilapidated fountain. Their sergeant was bellowing for the other teams to sound off but was only greeted by the sounds of burning buildings and fighting somewhere in the distance

“Not quite the night you planned for, was it, boys?” Milo chuckled to himself darkly as he gathered for another leap.

With a huge beat of ensorcelled black wings, Milo flew into the air, and with an inverted incantation of the flaming lash, he sent out a wave of icy black javelins to scythe down on the cowering soldiers. Preternaturally hardened ice bit through flesh and fabric with ease, and whatever flesh it touched knew the ruin of utter cold in a single labored heartbeat.

Only the sergeant, his head raised to look for his missing men, had spied Milo and managed to flatten himself behind the lip of the fountain in time. The shard shattered on the stone above him and he sprang up, service pistol sweeping skyward. He chased Milo with a flurry of hasty shots, but the pistol clicked empty before the magus touched at the back of the fountain basin, faceless stone statuary rising between the two.

Drawing on the cane’s physical enhancements, Milo spun with inhuman speed and shoved a lance of focus hastily through the end of the cane. The beak yawned, and a blade of ice three meters long and as thin as a sheet of glass flew under the statues’ outstretched arms and pierced the sergeant through the shoulder.

The man screamed as the rifle he’d scooped up tumbled from his limp fingers.

Milo met the man’s eyes, and behind the pain and hatred, he saw something move. For a single instant, something besides the dying man dangling from an icy lance stared at Milo, and Milo stared back at it.

Zlydzen has seen us, Imrah whispered, and Milo thought he heard a tremor of fear.

The presence vanished as the ice claimed him and life slipped from the man’s eyes.

Milo stood for a moment, wrestling with looking in the eyes of a dying man and seeing his enemy watching him. Part of him, still warmed by the heat of his fury, gloried in the observation, confident in his display of prowess. A quieter, deeper voice was not so certain it was a good thing.

Milo shook off the thoughts, then realized the sounds of battle had passed, and only the crackle of flames broke the silence of the night.

From somewhere among the burning trucks, Milo heard Ambrose shouting and Rihyani’s musical call.

“Milo! Milo, where are you!”

“Magus! Magus! You better have not gone and died on me!”

Despite the clinging sense of foreboding, Milo’s mouth hitched up in a smile.

“Not as lucky as that,” he shouted back.

22

The Burden

“Mercy, please!” came the desperate plea, tears and snot smearing the commissar’s face. “Please, just let me go!”

“You’re not helping your cause with that bleating, comrade,” Ambrose growled at the kneeling man. “If it weren’t for the magus here, I’d have shot you on principle.”

To punctuate, Ambrose tapped the man’s forehead sharply with one blunt finger.

Milo wasn’t certain if Ambrose was saying that to frighten the man into silence or not, but either way, the wretch recoiled and quieted some, his wailed pleas becoming sniffled mutterings.

“What do we plan to do with him?” Ambrose asked as he stepped back to