Page 18 of Zero Happily Ever Afters

They flew toward the building where Milo’s clairvoyance glimpsed people. One fate a fading ember of reds and yellows, the other a gnarled purplish blue that almost faded to a deep gray. Not quite, though.

Hmmm. I’d never noticed how the threads of potential futures weaved around people, around the area they stood, and interacted with other threads. As Milo approached, his silver thread spun around the fading ember-colored future, accompanied by a bright pink thread that came from Gladiatrix. Already, the brief interaction had created potential shifts in the futures Milo had long since foretold. I couldn’t see them. Well, perhaps if I delved deeper into his mind as our bond had grown and I’d seen many of the potentials he’d predicted, but I didn’twant to see all these maybe fates. I barely had the energy to contend with the thousands of visions neatly stacked and stuck in my head.

“So, this is the clairvoyant?” a gruff, wheezing voice asked, and an old man stepped from the building.

Milo’s eyes widened as he realized another top-ranked enchanter from the Global Guild stood before him.

“You think you can predict The True Witch’s next target before she slaughters another town in one fell swoop?”

Milo’s pulse thrummed against the back of his ear, and he swallowed the lump of insecurity in his throat. Here stood another legendary enchanter who expected The Inevitable Future’s help in stopping a threat before she struck again. A witch who already skirted the Global Guild. A witch who killed an entire town without fear of repercussion. A witch who held a frightening moniker.

The True Witch.

Chapter Six

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 forwardto 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?”

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