With a fitful cough that spattered a fresh layer of crimson across the stone floor, the scalp hunter began to laugh.
Milo’s head lolled back, and he stared through the open portal in the ceiling. The moon of the Lost Vale had shrunk back to a reasonable size, and Milo could see the sky. Were the first traces of a sunrise beginning to filter through depths of night? Was it his imagination, or did he see some strands of blue and gray?
“You can feel it, can’t you, boy?” Ezekiel chuckled thickly through crimson-streaked lips. “Dawn’s comin’, and you’ve got nothin’. Plumbed the depths of that nasty mind o’ yours, and you still haven’t shaken ol’ Zeke.”
The cowboy threw back his head and let out a hacking, raucous laugh along with a spume of red.
“HAHA! Guess your fey bitch bet on the wrong horse, huh? HAHAHA!”
For the first time that night, Milo’s temper snapped, and he descended on the scalp hunter in a terrible fury. The raptor cane, wreathed in snapping emerald flames, rose and fell over and over. Supernaturally powered blows tore through flesh and snapped bone as witchfire scorched and scoured flesh. Within moments, Ezekiel was a seared, broken thing, barely recognizable as human.
Milo stood over him, chest heaving, burning with despair and frustration, and watched as the curse worked its terrible will. He’d witnessed Ambrose’s regeneration, with bones snapping back into place and flesh regrowing, but this was different. Watching it was like watching wounds reverse themselves, split and blackened flesh slithering back into place as it shrank and the scorching faded.
In less time than it had taken to inflict the incredible damage, it had been undone, and Milo was eye to eye with the same maddening grin.
“When are you going to understand?” He laughed, shaking his head with enraging slowness. “You can’t win.”
Animal instinct released the cane in Milo’s hand so he could form a scarred fist to drive into Ezekiel’s face. The blow split the cowboy’s lip, but the grin only widened.
“Hit me again if you like.” He giggled, and Milo did, knocking his nose of kilter by a few degrees as blood gushed from the nostrils.
“Oh, come on, you can do better.”
Milo slammed two hard hooks into one side of Ezekiel's face. The eye started to swell shut.
“That’s more like it.”
Another strike across the engorging hematoma, then the other hand knocked a tooth free.
“Don’t stop now.”
Three more hammering fists split the unswollen eyebrow and knocked the nose even farther the other way before Milo grabbed two handfuls of lank, sweat-slimed hair.
“Come on, you said you were gonna die tryin’!”
His repetitively rising knee mashed the nose, collapsed the cheekbones, and snapped his jaw. Finally Milo staggered backward and collapsed when his throbbing leg gave out. Breath came in despairing rasps as he watched things slide back into place and out of mangled flesh. Ezekiel’s voice rose like the inevitable verses of a prophecy.
“Nothin’. There’s nothin’ you can do. Not with your pixie tricks, not with your bone stick, not with your little fists. You’ve got nothin’, boy.”
Milo stared back, trying to regain that icy calm he’d felt at the outset, but it had vanished. What he found instead was the flagging energy to kick up and clack the broken brown teeth together in Ezekiel’s jaw.
“Nothin’ you have can hurt me,” the scalp hunter murmured. “Keep tryin’. Keep tryin’ to get lower, meaner, nastier, whatever. It doesn’t matter because you’ve got nothin’. Nothin’ you can do, nothin’ you’ve ever known, nothin’ you can imagine.”
Scooting backward on his hands, Milo admitted to himself that was why he was so angry. Yes, he was terrified of failing Rihyani, but sitting there with a man’s crusted blood on his hands and smeared across his pant leg, he knew that fear wasn’t the root of his anger.
He was mad because of how quickly and how low he’d been willing to stoop with his new gift of the Art. Killing a man in the heat of battle was one thing, but here he’d let the ugliest parts of his will, his very identity, have free rein to work horrors upon Ezekiel, and nothing had come of it. It wasn’t that the monstrous man didn’t deserve it, but rather that Milo letting himself generate in the fabricated horrors had sullied himself as surely as blood now clogged his nails and clung to his knuckles. There was a stain upon him, and there was nothing to show for it.
“Nothin’,” Milo repeated quietly to himself, then Ezekiel’s words returned to him.
Nothin’ you can do, nothin’ you’ve ever known, nothin’ you can imagine.
What made the declaration so awful and enervating was that it was not a statement of bravado or challenge. No, seeing past the grin and the perverse laughter, it was a certainty rooted in something.
Nothin’ you can do, nothin’ you’ve ever known, nothin’ you can imagine. Nothin’ can ever be as bad as that.
It was a declaration rooted in despair.
“You finally givin’ up the ghost, boy?” Ezekiel asked with a smirk, and Milo stared deep into his eyes. Past the practiced leer, Milo looked hard, and to his dwindling shock, saw disappointment and sadness. How could anyone, even an immortal, be sad to be free of torment?
Milo kept staring, and a thought bubbled to the surface of his mind.
He wants to keep hurting because he hates his life, yet even as he gets what he wants, he knows it will never be enough. Why? Because it will never hurt as much as something else did.
Milo suddenly knew what he had to do.
“I’ve got one more spirit to conjure,” the magus murmured as he shifted into a cross-legged position on the stone floor. There was a decent chance this wouldn’t work, but Milo knew without looking up that sky was lightening. Time was slipping through his fingers, and this was all he had left.
He scooted closer until he and Ezekiel were eye to eye.
“You gonna braid my hair and tell me I’m pretty?” the scalp hunter asked with a sneer.
Milo shook his head and straightened his back as he kept staring into the man’s eyes.
“Not quite,” he said as his will remembered the night the wind was on fire.
* * *
Milo couldn’t have said why he chose to conjure that night using the Art, but as he drew Ezekiel into those moments seared into his soul and thus his will, Milo felt a familiar tremble inside. He pushed it aside as he and the captive scalp hunter moved together down the kindling streets and then turned to see the many-legged things with stars in their hands.
Milo let the fear he’d felt flow around Ezekiel, an experience shared, given as a gift, not an intrusion perpetrated.
At first there was nothing, the cowboy’s will like a stone in the midst of the stream. Then, little by little, as the pure, unguarded, unsullied fear of an innocent child saturated that stone, cracks began to form. Out of those cracks wept a truth that not even Ezekiel's despairing mania could contain for long.
“Run,” Ezekiel whispered, the words spilling from his lips. “Run, girl. Run, baby.”
Girl? Baby?
Feeling a ripple of Ezekiel’s will, Milo shaped the Art around it, forming it around the part of the scalp hunter that had been shaken loose.
The illusory scene bled into itself, and they stood in a field with a bloody sky glowering over red wildflowers. A little girl in a white cotton dress raced between the flowers, her hair whipping behind her like a banner of cornsilk, familiar dark eyes huge with terror. There was the sound of thunder, and Milo saw painted horses and painted men bearing down upon the child, bows drawn, lances leveled, pistols aimed.
From within Ezekiel’s skin, Milo felt his heart pounding in a heavy, sickened beat as more words tumbled from numb lips.
Thump-thump—the first pistol barks, and the little girl screams as the bullet hisses past her.
“Thought I got them all.”
Thump-thump—an arrow cuts her shoulder and the little dress sports a red bloom.
/>
“Didn’t think they’d track me down.”
Thump-thump—the lance lunges forward, not slowing in its passage through the child until its point snaps on the dirt under her feet.
“Couldn’t imagine they’d find me with her.”
Thump-thump—her feet tangle and she falls, but the haft of the lance props her up, a broken doll with cornsilk hair amongst a field of red flowers.
The stone of Ezekiel’s will weeps once more, and Milo again gathers his Art around the wounded tears.
The blue sky is stained black with greasy smoke as wails and screams create a strange chorus amidst the thrumming crackle of flames.
Through Ezekiel’s eyes, Milo looks down from a saddled horse at a pile of blackening bodies. The pyre has been going for some time, but the features of the corpses are still discernible even as the flames lick higher, polluting the sky with more smoke. Tiny faces and little hands are among the mounded flesh, burning, splitting, and bursting like the rest.
Thump-thump—amongst the cacophony of despair and violation could be heard the laughing of men.
“It didn’t take much to rile ‘em up.”
Thump-thump—in one bloody, sooty hand, a torn and bloody white dress was held.
“The dress was a banner and an excuse for most.”
Thump-thump—with a single flick of the wrist, the dress rippled through the air to settle on the pyre.
“It wasn’t even the same tribe of savages.”
There was a howl of wind, keening and pained, and it slashed through the smoke and snaked down next to the pyre. Standing now before the fire, eye to eye with Ezekiel, was a gaunt and beautiful creature, her dark hair heavy with blades of flint hanging between the locks. Her golden eyes sparkled with tears as her lips spat words that stung and gnawed. A pistol was drawn, but not before a feather-thin dart of flint sailed through the air.
Milo’s perspective through Ezekiel’s eyes changed. He was staring up at the desecrated sky, feeling the stony blade scrape between his ribs as it sought a heart to nestle in. The beautiful creature’s golden eyes loomed overhead, hair and dangling flints prepared to descend.
Ezekiel’s horse had lost its nerve and bolted, hooves trampling and toppling one section of the bonfire. Bodies, fat running and bones cracking, tumbled free. Ezekiel’s gaze saw them flop awkwardly upon the ground a few feet from where he lay dying, and their marionette’s collapse struck upon a final ugly chord inside him. A laugh, long and broken and bitter, tore from his lips.
The beautiful creature narrowed her eyes, then with obvious disgust, reached down and pulled the flint blade from between the ribs. A few whispered words later, Milo knew the wound had closed as the curse was sealed.
Thump-thump—the beautiful creature laughed with him as he rose to his feet.
“She made me like her.”
Thump-thump—Ezekiel’s hand closed around the fingers that held the gory blade of flint.
“She said I could live as I willed now.”
Thump-thump—He drove the blade into her chest, laughing into her teary face as the flint bit into her heart.
“Or I could end it like her.”
The beautiful creature fell back into the pyre, and as the flames kindled her hair and caressed her body, the vision melted away.
Milo and Ezekiel were in the dovecote once more, and for the first time, the silence was absolute. No laughter or muttering emerged from the scalp hunter as he knelt upon the floor, arms stretched wide.
The first rays of dawn, golden-pink and cleansing, danced through the aperture in the ceiling.
Milo slowly wiped away the tears that rested on his cheeks before stiffly sinking down to one knee. His eyes sought to make contact with Ezekiel’s, but the manic grin and defiant stare were nowhere to be seen.
“You could be done,” Milo said softly, still searching for the broken man’s eyes. “You could end the pain and hurt, couldn’t you?”
Ezekiel shook his head.
“Can’t,” he murmured.
“Why not?”
The cowboy’s eyes rose, and Milo saw what had been buried under the wild smiles and incessant laughter: hatred. Except this weaponized emotion was pointed utterly and entirely inward.
“Because I don’t deserve an end,” he hissed as his teeth clenched.
Milo was amazed to find that he understood, though there was a bewildering ache in his heart all the same.
“But the longer you go on, the more you hurt others,” he pointed out in a slow, sad voice. “You said it yourself; you are what you are. That means the longer you live, the more you—”
“The more I don’t deserve an end,” Ezekiel growled. “Not the first time I thought of it. I even thought going to Hell might balance things out, but I can’t take the chance that there is no Hell. So, I’m stuck.”
Milo nodded.
“And forgiveness?”
“I ain’t no quitter.” Ezekiel laughed, and the sound chilled Milo to the bone. “I’m goin’ to Hell, come what may.”
The silence lengthened between them in the echo of that laugh, and Milo stayed there thinking until his knees ached and his back began to cramp. It might have been a few minutes before either of them spoke.
“So, forgiveness undoes the curse,” Milo whispered, then looked at Ezekiel, who watched him with hollow eyes. “That’s it, isn’t it? If you can forgive yourself, the curse is broken, and your life could—should—end. So, if Rihyani forgives you, the hex on her is lifted?”
To Milo’s incredible relief, Ezekiel nodded.
A distant thought came to him that the cowboy might be lying, but at some level that was deeper than intellect, deeper even than magic, Milo didn’t believe he was. The magus believed he’d found the answer.
That only left one loose end, and looking down on him, something like a grim pity settled across Milo.
“What if,” he began as he rose to his feet and stretched, “I told you there is some sort of Hell? That I know someone who’s seen it, seen what lives there because he’s been there. Would that be enough?”
It seemed Ezekiel might laugh again, but as Milo braced himself, the cowboy’s face contorted with thought.
“Who?”
Milo smiled.
“You’ve met him.”
Ezekiel’s eyes narrowed.
“Fat boy?”
Milo nodded.
“Really?”
Milo nodded again.
Silence reigned once more, though in the stillness, Milo felt the presence of the marquis and Ambrose outside the door. Milo mentally whispered something like a prayer for a few seconds more.
“I want to look into his eyes,” Ezekiel said slowly. “I want to see Hell there, and then maybe I’ll believe you.”
As though they’d waited for their cue, the door opened behind Milo. Nephilim and fey entered quietly, both eyeing the bloody gouges on the floor.
Milo turned back to Ambrose and motioned him forward.
The big man approached slowly.
Ambrose obviously sensed a difference in the cowboy. His eyes narrowed suspiciously at the subdued creature kneeling where the defiant Ezekiel Boucher had once been.
“We’ve reached a sort of understanding,” Milo said, turning to Ezekiel, who nodded stiffly. “He’s going to ask you some questions.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Ambrose asked, giving the scalp hunter a sidelong glare.
“Be honest,” Milo said simply. When Ambrose looked at him with deep concern, he nodded. “Yes, all of it.”
Ambrose sucked his teeth and his mustache twitched.
Milo feared for a second that Ezekiel would capitalize on the hesitation and mock his bodyguard, but the cowboy was silent.
“This will save Rihyani?”
Milo looked at Ezekiel, who hung there with his eyes downcast.
“I’ve already got what I need,” Milo said quietly. “This is about something else.”
Ambrose looked at the two and
shook his head wearily.
“All right.” He grunted, crossing his arms. “What do you want to know?”
18
The Return
“This has been a most enlightening experience,” the marquis said with a spritely grin.
Milo and Ambrose didn’t respond. Both of them were weary but eager to return to Shatili. Ambrose had his head under the Rollsy’s hood while Milo busied himself loading and securing the food and drink the marquis had insisted they take. The magus had asked if they had any fuel or the equivalent since he’d had detonated their reserves, but as expected, the fey did not have any stores of petrol lying around.
Milo wondered how far they’d go before the Rollsy died, assuming Ambrose said she was capable of making the journey.
“I understand that for the two of you, this was a desperate and serious situation,” the fey said, his tone gentle only long enough to say the word before rising again with amusement. “But I think this is the first time I’ve cared about anything outside of my vale since going to visit my cousin in Brittany.”
Ambrose, who’d been silent since his conversation with Ezekiel, looked up with a scowl. His jaw worked to grind up the rebuke he decided to swallow.
For his part, Milo knew he shouldn’t argue with the potent ally he’d won, but he almost snapped. Then exhaustion quenched the defiant fire. Though the gears of his mind were gummed with fatigue, they slowly wound, and he remembered Percy’s conversation with Bakbak-Devi about the manor and the mention of Brittany. They’d left Ezekiel bound in the dovecote, but there had been no sign of the other American.
He saw the marquis studying him, his expression almost hopeful.
“What happened to Ezekiel’s partner?” Milo asked with a surrendering sigh. He didn’t believe for a second that the comment concerning Brittany had been offered by coincidence.
World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set Page 54
