Page 6 of Zero Happily Ever Afters (Branches of Past and Future #4)

Ignoring the stress of expectation, Milo sank into a feeling of pure awe. Boyish excitement blossomed from his heart in waves, blurring his vision and clouding his mind as he tried to absorb who stood before him. Every part of Milo wanted to break out into a giggle fit, smile bright and big with admiration, or ask a thousand questions he’d always pondered. He’d rarely met witches, enchanters, or industry professionals who left him speechless, but here he was, standing before two legends.

Gladiatrix was one of the top thirty under thirty enchanters and had struck industry success at roughly the same age as Milo, yet she’d soared so much further and faster in her career, in her journey to protect the lives of others, to save the world. And the old man was Enchanter Wadsworth, someone I knew nearly as much about as Milo. Especially since this witch had been an idol of Milo’s all the way back to his childhood, before he knew how to cast his roots, before he’d unlocked his branch, and before he even dreamed about wanting to be an enchanter when he grew up.

Milo’s mind buzzed with admiration at how Enchanter Wadsworth maintained his position as one of the highest-ranked witches in the world—well, in America. Global Guild in name and presence only since their members stemmed from American guild witches exclusively. I rolled my eyes at how Milo fawned over this old man who maintained his ranking as the eighth most powerful witch in the world in name only. Seriously, he held onto his ranking because he also happened to be a founding member of the Global Guild. He literally had almost three decades on the fifty-year-old organization.

There was no way this wheezing man in his seventies, who trembled from the chill of the outdoors, still had skills equal to other members in the top ten, let alone members of any ranking. The thought wasn’t mine alone. Gladiatrix shared the same sentiment; in fact, we held nearly identical emotional wavelengths on the subject, and that helped meld our minds, even if only briefly. A few seconds tied to her thoughts, and it unraveled quite the insight. Milo was in good hands with her, at the very least.

A cigarette dangled from Wadsworth’s dry lips—so dry, in fact, the filter hung to the peeling skin like he’d have to tear the cigarette away when he’d finally smoked it to the butt. If the pack of littered cigarette butts on the ground around him were any indication, he didn’t need another smoke. Ugh. The nausea his chain smoking caused almost made me gag at the thought of my next cigarette.

If Enchanter Wadsworth’s smoking habit wasn’t bad enough, the man could barely stand in his constant state of exhaustion. He kept himself propped with the portable oxygen tank that he treated like the walker he desperately needed as the pain surging through his body came off him in waves. Every thought was occupied by muscle aches, bones crackling, insides twisted into knots, and a thousand other chronic pains I couldn’t identify between the sharp, stabby, burning agony that came and went like a short, shallow breath. Inhale horror, exhale relief, but the inhale would return, it had to, and this pain continued in its brutality.

“You aware of the case details?” Enchanter Wadsworth asked, turning to walk back inside.

“Yes,” Milo said, rushing to walk beside his idol. Details on the town’s massacre, names and faces from the files he read through, stuck to Milo’s surface thoughts as he rooted through what he understood about this attack. “I’m not sure I understand how this branch works or who The True Witch is. Usually, my clairvoyance is fixed when I know the person of the future I’m glimpsing.”

I scoffed, recalling the lack of insight his void vision on Caleb came with and how fickle Milo’s clairvoyance could be when it chose. Actually, his branch was sort of a bigger dickhead than my telepathy and just as unpredictable.

“The True Witch possesses a powerful arcane branch that allowed her to slaughter this entire town without breaking a sweat or triggering any of the defensive wards lining every home here.” Enchanter Wadsworth pointed to the sigils designed into the paint of the living room they stepped through, and suddenly, I realized the building we walked through was a massive home. Well, home and office? It seemed very techie, like everything here came from new money.

Milo had already gathered that, though. His mind processed things so quickly, so compartmentalized, that unless I was looking for it, I often missed a lot of the surface thoughts he shuffled through. Hell, he wasn’t even aware of my presence and had no reason to playfully tuck his surface thoughts away behind music lyrics. It turned out the town of Harmony Valley was one of those tech giant suburban paradises where everyone worked to control magic by streamlining it with the future of science.

That made targeting them a big risk, Milo surmised from the few corporations and government holdings listed in the case file he barely had time to read through. Already, Milo’s mind tried to put together a motive, tying to it the intel Enchanter Wadsworth shared on this so-called True Witch.

“More than twelve hundred residents killed in a single day,” Wadsworth said with a sternness in his voice. “And I do mean day. She’s not some simple demon or pathetic warlock skulking in the dead of night to target her prey from the shadows with a blitz attack. Oh no, she’s bold and deadly when she wakes.”

Milo had theorized as much considering her target, her victims, but he didn’t grasp that last comment. “Wakes?”

“I haven’t seen her in nearly fifty years—tends to go underground then make a grand entrance all over again—but it appears she hits as hard as once before.”

If she was as old as Enchanter Wadsworth, then she certainly maintained herself. Not that old age hindered casting capability, but much of our channeling drew on the strength of the body and willpower of the mind, and as I got older, I began to realize that each of those slowed down. What I didn’t understand was how many grand entrances this witch had made. If her last attack was more than fifty years ago, how old was she exactly?

“That’s all right.” Enchanter Wadsworth sucked in a deep inhale of smoke and exhaled with a laugh. “I’m looking forward to showing her what I’ve learned since the last time our paths crossed.”

“How does her branch work?” Milo asked, wondering why or how there’d been a survivor against someone whose magic sounded as if she’d dropped a huge body of water onto her victims.

“Oceanic Collapse is an arcane magic, and as you may be aware, the arcane branch twists and merges the magics from other branches into something new, and in her case, something quite perverse,” Enchanter Wadsworth explained, twirling the smoke of his cigarette with a precise touch of telekinesis into the form of a feminine silhouette. “Her branch allows her to cast the illusion and reality of an ocean in the mind of her victims.”

The shape of the silhouette exploded into a tidal wave that crashed onto the floor.

“It mixes primal magic in the form of water creation and control, cosmic magic with her ability to slip elements between various layers of reality, and psychic magic as she can delve into the deepest recesses of one’s mind.”

“Wait.” Milo pieced together the explanation along with the crude show Enchanter Wadsworth had conjured as smokey men flailed on the floor before dissipating to nothingness. “She makes people think they’re drowning, and they do?”

“Exactly. Her illusion can’t be broken because it isn’t an illusion. She is actually drawing in an ocean’s worth of water hidden in the cosmic realm, dancing between stars or some bullshit.” Wadsworth sucked a deep inhale of his cigarette, burning the last third down to the filter before he flicked the butt from his lips with his tongue. “The point is, there’s no way around the threat she brings, which is why we need to find and neutralize her immediately.”

“Agreed.” Milo nodded.

“So, let’s get you started on tracking her trail so I can kill the bitch.” Enchanter Wadsworth patted Milo’s back, ushering him to a room.

“Detain her,” Gladiatrix said with crossed arms.

“Fucking witches of this generation.” Wadsworth groaned and grumbled, muttering profanities under his breath. “So soft, all of ‘em. You’re not like that, are you, Enchanter Evergrand?”

“Evergreen,” Milo corrected, utterly baffled to hear his name mispronounced.

“That’s what I said.” Wadsworth shook his head, legitimately offended at the correction when, in his old, ragged head, he knew he was right.

I huffed but released the annoyance because Milo had the cutest, most ridiculous, embarrassed expression, honestly believing he’d misheard Wadsworth. He hadn’t. But I wasn’t sure Milo, the great Enchanter Evergreen, had ever experienced being a nobody among celebrities.

Enchanter Wadsworth led them through the house to a bedroom where a home nurse stayed on standby with a group of medical staff all stationed, remaining vigilant if their services were necessary. I didn’t require Wadsworth’s quick explanation to piece together that they were Global Guild officials since the organization obviously wanted to remain in full control of the situation, including how it unfolded publicly. Plus, each medic had the fancy golden GG emblems embroidered on their uniform.

“How’d he survive?” Milo asked; the nagging question lingered in my head, too.

“His branch,” Gladiatrix said. “He possesses some type of warding magic. When Oceanic Collapse activated, he triggered a seal or barrier to stop the water from reaching him. That’s the most our psychics have been able to discern.”

I saw it unfold in her mind, the explanation from the guild psychics who’d recently checked over the town. Everyone had water raging through their inner cores, minds shattered to nothingness, but somehow Benjamin’s magic protected him from drowning, but it also kept him from waking. A team of telepaths had delved into Benjamin’s mind, yet here he still lay locked in his own head, shielded and trapped by his own magic. How horrible.

“Why not bring him to a hospital?” Milo asked.

“We have the best of the best,” Wadsworth said, visibly annoyed. “Hell, I’m one of them. Kid’s got all he needs. Relocating him might impact the magic, and we wouldn’t want to hinder our clairvoyant’s chances of pinpointing our target.”

Milo approached Benjamin Oxland, who lay in his bed attached to several monitors, all reading stable vital signs. There was nothing stable about him, though. Even with most of my psychic energy directed toward Milo, attached to his mind, I could feel those around me, and a war raged inside this boy’s head. His fair complexion had gone ghostly in comparison to the file photo Milo had seen.

“All right.” Milo cleared his throat, taking a seat on the bed next to Benjamin and searching through the child’s potential futures while searching for threads of people he’d interacted with.

There’d be dozens, hundreds possibly, but Milo knew how to differentiate between familiar threads of fate and those wedged in momentarily. If The True Witch had any trace of her presence lingering in the magic of her victim that’d survived, Enchanter Evergreen would notice.

Unfortunately, before he saw anything tied to The True Witch, Milo grimaced at the futures lain ahead for the young boy. Pathways broke off, potentials fizzled away, and in every direction Milo stared, all he saw were the white walls of a barren hospital room. Milo searched through the decaying threads surrounding Benjamin’s future. They weren’t withered pathways like those that belonged to people with no future, but rather, the shimmer and light didn’t radiate as brightly as once before. Well, as brightly as Milo had imagined those futures must’ve lit up before being attacked. Now, the potential possibilities were like wet concrete thrown carelessly, splattering and seeping into everything. Potential fates that soaked into every other possibility, futures that led nowhere except to a single, silent white room where the boy’s thoughts no longer stirred.

Milo saw the dying embers of other futures, but the gravel bled over them, hardening until only one fate became prophesized for this kid.

“He’s gonna stay trapped like this?” Milo stepped back, quelling his clairvoyance because the endless loop of life lost in a hospital bed after the horrors this kid survived seemed the cruelest twist of the blade from the universe.

“We’ve got some psychics on it.” Enchanter Wadsworth waved a hand, blowing smoke at Milo from his newly lit cigarette. “Focus less on him and more on the witch that struck him down.”

Milo bit back a comment because he was a psychic, the one they had on it. And he didn’t need to be a telepath to grasp Enchanter Wadsworth only had one priority. The rogue witch he hunted.

“Are you gonna find her fate still looped around his?” he asked, already too impatient to pretend he cared about the kid locked inside his own head.

For a healer, Milo expected Enchanter Wadsworth to show more compassion. He expected someone with the rejuvenation branch to aim for saving a life, finding any means to heal, to help. But that wasn’t Enchanter Wadsworth. Sure, Carter had stretched the limits of his vitality magic, even circumventing its ability to save my life, but if it had been a psychic injury versus a slashed throat… Well, there were many ailments even the best healers couldn’t fix.

Milo’s expression soured. Every nice thought he held for Enchanter Wadsworth crumbled to ashes, and suddenly, the idolizing transformed into a beast of unspoken words Milo wanted to hurl at the son of a bitch who hadn’t even remotely lived up to his expectations.

“I know it’s cruel,” Gladiatrix said, a calm evenness to her tone. “It seems heartless. But the trail won’t last. You can only glimpse potential futures connected by separated layers of interaction for so long, right?”

Yes. Milo nodded, unable to form the word to answer. Already, he tugged at the black thread weaved around the boy’s mind. It shimmered and sparkled. And unlike every other thread surrounding the boy, it remained intact. All the other future threads had withered and turned a sour gray. They weren’t lost entirely to Milo’s sight, but he couldn’t glean the potential futures from those gray strings since the lives they were once connected to had died. Every single person in Benjamin’s life had died.

“We need your help, your expertise, to find The True Witch,” Gladiatrix said with deep kindness and compassion. “She’s never made an error such as this. There’s never been a survivor to question, to observe. We need your branch to track her down.”

“I understand.” But Milo didn’t see the boy as a survivor. He saw him as the victim who suffered the most, left trapped inside his own head with warding walls to keep him safe from drowning in his thoughts but unable to ever leave the deep recesses of his inner core.

“Good,” Enchanter Wadsworth muttered. “We don’t have time to cry over one victim when we’re trying to prevent thousands more.”

Milo began to dig through future threads, pulling at the black string that belonged to The True Witch. His eyes fluttered, searching, searching, searching, and when the light of possibility sprang forward, I caught glimpses. Fractured, shadowed, and veiled between countless layers of psychic energy between us, yet Milo’s frequency had never beamed so vibrantly. I felt completely synchronized with him. We moved as one entity despite being thousands of miles apart.

I couldn’t look at the futures Milo rooted through. They were grainy and dark, like staring at shadows in the night. But they were also impossibly bright, like the white dots that lined your vision while staring at the sun for too long. Milo made sense of it; he always made sense of the possibilities looped before him. Still, his mind stirred with pain, with sorrow, with a somber guilt that his mission had only just begun, and somehow, he’d already failed.

Clenching my teeth, I fought back the sensation. As a manifestation of myself, I had to steel my emotions, or they’d stretch and spread and reach out to my other half residing in Chicago, awaiting a proper report. We would link again, fuse as one entity, but I needed to do that on my other half’s schedule, not because Milo’s sadness cut deep into my heart and threatened to break me.

I worried what horrible futures he’d glimpsed to feel as if he’d already failed. There must be something awful wrapped in those bright shadows of infinitely dark sunlight. With so much pain in Milo’s heart, I reached out to alleviate it, to take on the burden of such weight the grim futures must’ve painted. When my phantom touch reached Milo, I didn’t see trembling thoughts on the visions he absorbed, the potentials he sorted, the threads he chased on leads of this supposed True Witch. No. The twisting knife came from guilt sparked on the child Milo couldn’t help. On the young boy who sat trapped in his own mind. And Milo couldn’t fathom walking away, ignoring this kid’s fate as acceptable collateral to the greater good.

There was nothing Milo could do. Not one damn thing for this boy. He knew the Global Guild wouldn’t have left this child in such a state with their resources at hand. They had the strongest psychics in the world in their coven. Three of the greatest telepaths sat in their ranks, other psychics with capabilities that far outmatched anything Milo had dreamed possible, but none that could chase the future like Enchanter Evergreen. That was why he was here. He could track an enemy, a threat, a looming danger with just the faintest glimmer of possibility. But he couldn’t break the psychic damage that held this young boy captive.

He also knew the Global Guild didn’t possess a psychic strong enough to shatter The True Witch’s grip, her unyielding magic, her arcane branch that shattered minds, drowning them in their thoughts.

There was nothing Milo could do. It pained him that there was nothing anyone could do to free this child’s mind. His sorrow ate away at me. I grasped my control was nothing compared to the psychics ranked among the Global Guild. My branch magic paled in comparison. My psychic energy couldn’t compete, not with the help of manifestations or personas or a million years of training. I simply lacked the resolve for precision. Still, as Milo wept silently inside the confines of his inner core, I sought to free him and free this child.

I reached out to touch the mind of the imprisoned survivor. In order to delve into this boy’s mind, I had to loosen the strings that kept me latched to Milo’s being. I expected more pushback from my magic, considering how reluctantly it disobeyed me when searching for Milo in the city when my branch defied the laws of space and time to reach Milo. But my telepathy knew the suffering Milo endured, and as foolishly as me, my magic believed we could lessen that burden.

The second my psychic projection reached the boy’s spirit, we collided, and I found myself heaved into an ocean storm so powerful that the currents nearly dragged me to the undertow of the subconscious. I gasped and choked and fought against the frigid tidal waves that rocked me from one end of this kid’s mind to the other.

It was horrible, painful, but reminiscent of a mind I’d delved into once before. Tara’s mind held an ocean of sorrow, which left her battling inner demons every single day of her life. When I had dived into her mind, her memories, I learned how to navigate the storms that brewed inside the minds of others. When I watched her fight against her depression each and every day, I learned how to handle the weight of the sea crashing down.

This ocean wasn’t the same as Tara’s, though. The ebb and flow were dreadfully similar, so I stopped resisting and allowed the current to drag me where it sought. But this horrible sea held a bitter taste of magic. Each drop of water burned with venomous hatred. I couldn’t grasp how someone could despise a child they didn’t even know. It wasn’t that. No. It was disgust. Pity for those beneath her heel. Her shadow glowed in the dark corners of the ocean, too far to see but vibrant all the same. This came from Milo and me working in tandem to unravel her identity and location. Well, he worked toward that while I attempted to grasp how this godlike level of magic remained fully intact despite her being halfway across the world.

I gasped, taking a startling breath. Had I seen that because our magics collided with each other? Had it been from Milo using his clairvoyance to search and seek out the elusive witch? Or had she sensed my interference? Milo’s attempt to see behind the curtain? There was an omnipotence to The True Witch’s magic. It burned or froze and offered a gentle hug all at once. The kindness was a lie, though, meant to deceive and take poor, unfortunate souls to the depths of their deaths.

I shook my head, raging against the ocean that spun me round and round, closer and closer to the seafloor where it’d pin me and drown me and destroy me as it’d done to countless others in this town.

A shiver of icy water traveled up my spine, sending a surge of every death this ocean had caused. The magic of The True Witch held a life of its own, much like my telepathy. Not sentient but primordial. When I dove into these waters, this fabricated illusion of drowning, the ocean magic sought to share some of its prized deaths, displaying atrocities soaked into each droplet.

This ocean wasn’t like Tara’s. It wasn’t a construct of depression. It wasn’t a coping mechanism for the horrors she’d endured in a family of monsters who painted themselves as idols.

“This is nothing more than a magical illusion,” I called out, taking a deep breath of the bitter water meant to poison my lungs and harden my insides to stone. “You can’t harm me. You can’t harm anyone anymore.”

I exhaled, releasing smoke and fire with each breath. As a projection, I didn’t need the air, didn’t need the cigarette either, yet I craved both. More than anything, I craved an end to this ocean of horrors. The fire I manifested burned away the water. Exhaling like a dragon, I cast enough fire to burn down every forest in the world.

“In the mind, a psychic reigns supreme.” My flames manifested into a fiery giant of how I perceived myself as I strangled water between my hands. “Leave. Leave. Leave.”

A gasp caught my attention. Above me, a glowing blue cube held the mind of Benjamin Oxland as he watched me wreak havoc on the ocean that threatened to drown him. He kept a fixed gaze on the fiery beast of a man I summoned to eradicate the water.

“Fire beats water?” He tilted his head, completely perplexed, and something about the shock made me smile.

I didn’t understand why I picked fire. Perhaps it’d been the recent development of Melanie and Yaritza’s branch magics. Maybe I missed the smell of smoke and craved the fire of nicotine in my lungs. Maybe I simply liked the irony of stomping out the water with flames.

“A true fuck you to the so-called True Witch,” I whispered, but Benjamin heard.

His jaw had fallen slack, awed by the wonder unraveling in his mind.

“You’re safe now,” I said, resisting the smile and frowning at him.

The reverence he held collided against me, making me happy, making me proud of my actions, making me smile because he believed heroes should smile.

“I’m not a…” I turned away. I didn’t have time to explain it to the kid. Chances were he wouldn’t recall this anyway. The way his inner core had been slapped around by the ocean, my bet was he’d be struggling to recall his most concrete memories after such an ordeal, let alone the interaction he had with an annoyed telepath who really only did this to help ease the pain that ate away at his boyfriend.

Speaking of boyfriends… I disconnected from Benjamin’s mind and went to return to Milo.

Electric blue ignited around the boy’s body, sparking countless threads of potential futures that had returned now that the ocean meant to drown him had fizzled away. Milo’s face lit up, smile wide and overjoyed, eyes darting about to study the possibilities, and thoughts absorbing what could’ve possibly happened to set this in motion.

“ Dorian? ” He tilted his head, truly believing this had been my doing, believing no one else could’ve possibly played a role or had the ability. “ How did you manage that? ”

I wanted to tell him, to reach out and tell him everything that I’d learned about my magic, about my manifestations, about my personas, and everything else. But my other half had a plan. I didn’t know it. I couldn’t fully comprehend what the sensation was or how to explain it. Even though we were split, with our consciousness divided and dwelling in separate parts of the country, I had this synchronized sensation for my other half. He—no, we—had a plan.

I’d share my truth with Milo soon, so for now, I would observe him silently and help where I could. Let him speculate. Let him wonder. Milo was always happiest when he could do both. He had a mission, a goal, and I wouldn’t interfere.

“I love you,” I whispered so silently I couldn’t be sure my voice even formed sound.

“ I love you, too. ” Milo spun around to address Enchanter Wadsworth and Gladiatrix. “I’ve traced her threads, but her future’s still pretty murky. It’ll take time to unravel the potential outcomes, but hopefully, I’ll have a location or potential location soon.”

Enchanter Wadsworth tsked. “Useless. Told you there was no point in adding more damn psychics to our guild. Never understood why the Global Guild insisted on adding such magics to our ranks. In my day, we kept them on retainers.” He ranted loudly, not talking to Gladiatrix or the medical staff nearby, but merely himself and every unsaid argument he’d never finished with fallen friends—hard to believe he ever had any. This was his way, bitching about the next generation of guild witches to the ghosts of former guild members. “Occasionally, they had useful leads. The psychics. Most of the time, it was ‘maybe’ and ‘we’ll see,’ which is just a psychic way of saying they—”

Benjamin coughed and gasped, spurting out the water buried in his chest. He fell forward, gasping, choking, and unable to breathe out the last drops of the ocean embedded in his chest because the water was a lie. It was never there, and it wasn’t there now.

“You…” Gladiatrix rushed to the kid’s side, helping to steady his shaky body that quivered and shook as the reality of what had happened sank in. “Enchanter Evergreen, how’d you do that?”

“Just useless psychic nonsense.” Milo smirked.

Enchanter Wadsworth crossed his arms, hiding his shame for not removing the damage done by Oceanic Collapse, unable to fathom how such a thing was possible. He’d studied the way the arcane magic had attached itself to the nervous system, the psyche, and threatened to implode if deactivated.

Well, goddamn. I stared with wide eyes. I wouldn’t have dived in if I knew that.

This was why I needed to think before I acted. I sighed while Enchanter Wadsworth continued his rant on how useless psychic witches were, but not nearly as useless as some branches. Then he went on a tangent of listing and explaining how much each branch sucked while Milo read through the illuminated potential futures of The True Witch. He was determined to find her fates, track her locations, and prevent her from ever locking another soul in their mind to drown in a death of isolation.

I was also determined to stop this witch, maybe only as a phantom at Milo’s side, but I’d use my understanding to help him and the Global Guild unravel her magic once and for all.