Milo sank back into his chair, running his fingers over the contours of the eagle skull as the devout elder waited patiently.
“You ever get him to answer?” Milo finally asked, not caring how sharply the question came out. “To answer for the ways he’s wronged you?”
She nodded, another knowing smile, reflective, not mocking, danced across her face.
“Sometimes, but not always.” She sighed, the breath carrying ages with it. “Sometimes I learn about hidden gifts, sometimes I see the bigger picture, and sometimes I know him better for it.”
Her fingers toyed clumsily with the locket as she turned to look at the crucifix again.
“Sometimes I have my Gethsemanes and my wildernesses.”
A tremor began in her shoulders. She stilled it with obvious effort and gestured with her free hand.
“But then, so did he.”
Milo blinked, his mind struggling to recall what she referenced. He remembered there was something about a garden, not that first one with snakes and nudity, but one about sweating blood and unwanted cups before an arrest. In the wilds, hadn’t there been a devil?
They were the pieces picked up from the times he was forced to attend services by the orphanage and the prattling of some self-important priest who harried the unwary in the streets of Dresden.
The fullness of the reference was lost on him, but he felt he understood enough, and it galled him.
“That’s not answering, that’s rationalizing.” Milo snorted. “He leaves us to suffer and squirm in the mud and then expects us to find excuses for him amidst the torments. That’s why I am not just angry at him. That’s why I hate him.”
He expected righteous indignation at his proclamation, flared nostrils and curled lips. Instead, her hand let go of the locket, and she turned back to look at him, her wrinkles deepening with concern.
“How has His creation tormented you?” she asked, her tone curious and without accusation. “What has hurt you?”
Milo’s awakening antagonism once again found itself thwarted. He wanted to lash the woman with the accumulated horrors and tragedies of his life, but he could already tell she would bear it all with sorrowful nods and caring gazes. She would not refute his accusing proclamations or battle with him. He could try to craft a barb to scourge her faith, but the thought of it sickened him with its hateful pettiness.
“Many have hurt me, so many,” the magus said, his voice flat. “But those people are not why I hate him, not now, at least.”
She frowned curiously.
“If it isn’t the suffering, it is the squirming?”
A loud, long snarl of laughter tore from Milo’s throat.
“Fair enough,” he said and gave an approving nod before leaning forward. “It is the squirming. Bad enough He put us here, but then He puts us in a world where even our best intentions, our best efforts even, can make nothing but death and filth and suffering and failure. How dare He put us in such a world?”
The old woman’s gaze lowered in thought, and she seemed to notice Milo’s uniform for the first time.
“Did you ever think there might be something to learn from that?” she asked, somehow managing to keep the question from seeming coy or condescending. Perhaps it was how earnest her expression was.
“If He wanted to teach us something, He could have told us.” Milo shrugged. “This shadow play disguised as life seems a rather poor form of pedagogy.”
“Oh, I think He did tell us,” she said. “But if you are like me, and I find most people are in this respect, there is a lifetime's distance between my ears and my heart.
“I can hear something and know it up here,” she continued, tapping her temple with one yellowed fingernail before tapping her chest. “But it takes a long time to get it here.”
Milo shook his head as the light coming through the windows purpled and the light from the votive candles seemed to swell.
“So, what’s the lesson then?” He sneered. “I hope you know because if it hasn’t reached your heart, what hope is there for us non-fossils?”
The toxic barb flew off his tongue before he could snap it back down his throat, but once again, his words found no purchase. This fragile creature was proving to be harder to pierce than anyone he’d ever met. That only made his faltering attempts all the more pathetic and reproachable, but his guilt was pebbles compared to the Sisyphean stone resting between his shoulders.
“The lesson may be that we never can, never will succeed,” she said, her voice tender. “We weren’t meant to.”
Milo sniffed, his face curdling as though he smelled something rancid.
“Don’t you call him Father?” Milo asked. “What sort of man would you call a father who intentionally makes his children cripples? Who keeps them dependent?”
To his utter frustration, she again paused to consider the question. With flawless, despicable humility, she’d thwarted him from considering her response as some trite quip she’d memorized.
“We’d call such a man a monster because we’d say he was keeping so many good things from his children,” she acknowledged, but he saw her green eyes flash in the deepening shadows of her face. “But now imagine that all those good things, the best things, can only be had by being with the Father. Then we would call it compassion, not cruelty, wouldn’t we?”
Milo’s lips curled back from his teeth, and he twisted his head to the side to hide his snarl. A deep well of resentment threatened to gush forth, and in the wake of that torrent, he wasn’t certain what he might say or do.
“If He is so good, then why all this suffering?” he hissed between gritted teeth. “If He is such a good father, why put his children through so much?”
The old woman’s eyes narrowed, and she spent some time searching Milo’s face before answering.
“I suppose I could give you answers to that old question,” she said slowly, her gaze seeming to explore every contour of his face. “But I think the real question is why you have been allowed to suffer, and given what you said earlier, I imagine it has to do with something you did. Something that did not end as you’d hoped.”
She nodded meaningfully at his black coat.
“I…” Milo began hotly, but what almost came out would have been a confession, not a rebuttal. He forced back the outburst with a hard swallow and stared at the old woman. How had she managed to bring him here? Why was he now almost pouring his sorrow out rather than destroying her infantile beliefs?
He tried to speak, but again the words caught in his throat with a click. His mouth, his lips, and his tongue all seemed determined to betray him.
“War can be a heavy burden,” she said, her hand straying to her locket once more. “Intentions are cold comfort when lives are lost and the dead are counted.”
Milo felt the tightness in his throat harden into a lump. In his mind, he wanted to resume the fight, to find his rhetorical footing and engage her arguments, but something deeper refused. Batting aside his counter-arguments and protests, the thing he feared was his soul forced his body to nod slowly as something wet prickled in the corner of his eyes.
Thankful for the shadows of the twilit hall, Milo hung his head and fought to keep his breathing even. So intent was he on not sobbing that he didn’t hear the creak of venerable wood and older bones.
For the second time that day, he nearly fell out of his chair at the nearness of the old woman when one knotted hand rested lightly on his shoulder. He looked up and saw the elder standing over him, her eyes deep and glimmering wells of green.
“He knows our hearts,” she whispered. “And in His frightening mercy, He judges those before our actions or their consequences.”
Something hard and clotted in Milo’s heart cried for him to lash out and cast off the old woman, but a far stronger part of him savored the gentle touch. He bowed his head lest she see his tears, but he didn’t pull away.
The other hand rested softly upon his head, and he heard the woman’s voice as she bowed her
head over him.
“Heavenly Father, show mercy to this young man,” she prayed, the words agony and light in the wizard’s mind. “In seeking healing for his pain, let him find you. In Christ Jesus, may he find that peace that passes all understanding.”
Milo’s soul was torn between wanting to curse her for a fool and collapse before her. As a compromise, he stayed where he was, his head still hanging.
“May he find that peace in You, for he has so much more to do.”
The fingers, twisted and stiff with age, squeezed with surprising yet sure strength.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
Her hands rose from him, but he still felt her presence. Tears rolled freely down his cheeks, landing upon the stone floor with the faintest patter. He still kept from sobbing, forcing his breath in and out in measured intervals, but by then, it was to anchor his reeling mind rather than any attempt at dignity.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out...
Slowly, but growing with each inhalation and exhalation, Milo came back together. There was still a wound in his soul, and he would most certainly lose sleep over it in the days to come, but the overwhelming, crippling horror was gone. The trauma joined a host of others scarring his psyche, though it cut a bit deeper than most.
Your momma was a witch, Volkohne.
Your momma danced naked with the Devil, and out you came.
As his mind and body steadied, his tear-blurred eyes opened to a world lit by scarlet light.
Milo blinked and dragged a hand across his eyes as he looked around in utter confusion. Hadn’t the sun gone down already?
As he cast his gaze to the windows, he found Ambrose ambling toward him, a sheepish look stamped on his features.
“Sorry about that,” he mumbled softly, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Took a bit longer than I expected. A lot to pray for with the world we live in, eh?”
Milo lowered his gaze from the befuddling windows and suddenly realized the old woman was gone. He swept the sanctuary and even squinted into the foyer they had first entered through, but there was no sign of her.
“Everything all right, Magus?” Ambrose asked, his muscles rippling with tension as he began to probe the area with his peripheral vision.
“I…” Milo began as he continued to stare around him, but he stopped suddenly. He’d seen how the old woman had moved when she sat next to him and knew she didn’t possess the nimbleness to vanish as suddenly as she seemed to have.
He swung his gaze back to his bodyguard, still frowning.
“Did you see me talk to anyone?” Milo asked and instantly regretted it as he saw the concern sharpen on Ambrose’s face.
“What happened?”
Milo ran a hand over his mouth, unsure of what to say. He’d been so sure he hadn’t felt magic, but how could all this have happened without it?
“I’m not sure?” he confessed, staring up at Ambrose.
The bodyguard’s gaze swept the church, then he cocked his head to one side. A few heartbeats later, he shrugged his massive shoulders and cracked a smile beneath his auburn mustache.
“Entertaining angels without me, eh?”
3
These Signs
“It was a joke,” Ambrose grumbled as they made their way back to the general staff office under a bruise-colored sky.
The sense of déjà vu Milo felt at walking under his second dusk of the day was disorienting, to say the least. Despite this, though, he hadn’t let up on interrogating and theorizing at Ambrose since they’d left the church.
“I’m asking you to consider if maybe it was,” Milo pressed, his gaze darting between watching where he was walking and staring intently at Ambrose. “I mean, it's not like we are uncertain angels exist.”
Ambrose shook his head as his mustache twitched.
“Fine,” he muttered as he bristled. “It is a possibility, I suppose, but I don’t think it was.”
Milo was frowning so hard he nearly walked off a curb and into the path of a rumbling trolley. Ambrose’s meaty hand snatched him back from certain mangling, but the magus only managed a nod as his mind raced behind his squinting gaze.
“What makes you think that?”
“You almost died, Magus,” Ambrose snapped. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
The wizard flapped his hand dismissively at the trolley as though shooing away a retreating insect.
“Yes, yes, thank you,” Milo muttered before leaning toward Ambrose’s face. “Why don’t you think she was an angel? Really?”
Ambrose frowned and gnawed his lip before heaving a sigh. His breath formed an anemic plume in the chill air.
“Two words: ‘fear not.’”
Milo scowled, sure he was supposed to make a connection, but if it was a matter of religious esoterica, he was lost. The silence stretched between them as the sounds of the city began their shuffle between the daytime bustle and the nightly susurration.
“Whenever you’re ready, maestro,” Milo grumbled as he came to a dead stop at a street corner. The lamp overhead was broken, leaving the spot in deep gloom, which somehow seemed appropriate.
Ambrose shrugged and looked around. Milo found the little display comical since, given the number of supernatural subjects they could have been discussing, the matter of the angelic was one of the few that wouldn’t raise eyebrows.
Satisfied that no one was close enough to overhear them, Ambrose leaned forward and began in an almost conspiratorial whisper.
“In almost every story about angels, they have to tell people not to be afraid,” Ambrose began. “Almost every time the angelic gets involved, people are scared, and I think we know why. Remember that moment I was unveiled in the tunnel?”
Milo did.
In the past year of violence, horror, and wonder, that moment in the tunnel still was one of the most terrifying. With a shiver, he remembered the words of living flame, the crimson light of alien stars, and a voice that shook his very soul with a few words. That moment, those few linear seconds of time, had nearly broken him when he saw Simon Ambrose the Nephilim, son of Oro’zion’Nrzim, He of the Flaming Sword.
“I see your point,” Milo said, a little deflated and more than a little shaken by the recollection. “Yeah, there was nothing like that going on.”
Ambrose nodded, shifting his weight as he noticed the pronounced effect of the memory on Milo. He was silent, allowing the moment to pass as pedestrians skirted around where they stood in the little patch of murk.
“There are some bits in the Scriptures where they didn’t scare the pants off everyone,” Ambrose said slowly, choosing his words with obvious care. “But I think in each of those, they end up revealing themselves anyway at some point, and it is usually in the scary, smite-y sort of way.”
Milo cocked an eyebrow, one side of his mouth hitching up in a grin.
“Smite-y, eh?”
Ambrose chuckled and shook his head.
“Technical term for the biblically literate,” he announced archly before cutting a little bow. “We can start reading together if you’d like, and I can teach you all the necessary jargon.”
Milo laughed, shaking his head with one hand raised in warning.
“It took the threat of war crimes to get me into a church.” He snorted. “I don’t want to know what it would take to get me to pick up that book.”
Ambrose’s smile vanished, and he took the wizard by the arm.
“War crimes?” he growled, a primal noise of alarm. “What war crimes?”
Milo opened his mouth to answer but paused, his tongue still as his throat threatened to betray him with a little quiver of tension. He swallowed and cleared his throat before trying again.
“My little misdirection for Stalin’s army at Shatili sort of misfired,” Milo said, forcing a smile that was as false as it was uncomfortable. “I’m not absolutely sure, but I think I know what happened.”
He hated the lie even a
s it passed his teeth. Though he couldn’t provide more evidence than what he’d said to the general staff, he knew what had happened without a single doubt. Magic, which inherently defied science and other such shackles, was based on intuition and instinct. Those were as solid and real in such matters as any smoking gun or spoken confession.
The wizard knew what had happened in Shatili, and that was what made it so awful.
Ambrose waited, concern and dreadful anticipation etched into the scarred seams of his face.
“The Soviets were left psychically and spiritually vulnerable by Zlydzen’s magic,” Milo said, forcing his voice to remain level as his vision blurred at the edges. “The shades I’d prepared didn’t disrupt and frighten the soldiers, they possessed them and turned them against each other. It seems they killed each other to a man.”
Ambrose’s eyes widened, his whole body straightening as he drew in a sharp breath.
“How many?” he asked. His voice was gentle, but the look in his eyes burned into Milo like a condemning brand.
“Not exactly sure,” Milo admitted, unable to bear the look. He turned away. “Thousands, though the precise number is hard to tell because of the state of the bodies. It would take time to sort out which pieces belonged to who.”
“Mon Dieu,” Ambrose swore, then bowed his head.
Neither could find the heart to say anything for some time. Young, raucous voices sounded down the street. Milo couldn’t make out what they were being so rambunctious about, but he envied the abandon they possessed. He should still have such freeness of spirit, being hardly out of his teens as he was, but life and its horrors, both mundane and eldritch, had ground it out of him.
Instead, he stood in the dark with blood on his hands.
His morose reflections were interrupted by a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned at the familiar grip and stared into Ambrose’s face.
“Listen to me,” the bodyguard said in a thick voice, his other hand clasping Milo’s other shoulder as they stood square with each other.
World's First Wizard Complete Series Boxed Set Page 68
