Chapter 500
For nearly a month, Milhak had watched half his body slowly wither away.
Every hour brought a new wave of physical agony, followed by the creeping psychological torment of knowing there was nothing he could do about it.
He was living in hell.
It wasn’t as though he hadn’t tried to escape.
Money had never been a problem for Milhak. He’d brought in renowned physicians from around the world. He’d consulted exorcists and spiritual practitioners from practically every major religion he could find.
Every one of them had eventually given him some variation of the same answer.
There’s nothing we can do.
Prepare for the end.
Goodbye.
Only one person had said something different.
A monk.
The monk had stared at Milhak’s bizarre body, half living flesh and half exposed skeleton, and nearly jumped out of his robes.
Then he’d cautiously murmured,
"Impermanence and permanence, the twin trees of withering and flourishing. North, south, east, and west... neither illusion nor emptiness?"
For the first time, Milhak had felt a spark of hope.
Finally!
Someone who understood what was happening!
Someone who could break the curse!
It took him several minutes to realize the monk thought he was practicing some obscure form of Buddhist meditation involving the cycles of decay and renewal.
You have got to be kidding me.
If Milhak hadn’t already been too weak to move, he would have climbed out of bed and beaten the man senseless.
At least the encounter had taught him something useful.
Whatever curse had been placed on him, no one but the caster could remove it.
Strangely enough, that realization brought him peace.
There was nothing left to search for.
No miracle doctor.
No exorcist.
No miracle cure.
He simply had to wait.
Either the black mage who had cursed him would come back...
Or Milhak would die waiting.
At present, he lay weakly on a hospital bed inside his heavily guarded villa.
An oxygen tube ran beneath his nose. An IV continuously fed glucose into both his left arm and left leg. Beside the bed, a monitor recorded his faint, uneven heartbeat.
A young woman approached the bed.
"Father, you need to go to a real hospital."
She looked at him anxiously.
"You can’t keep staying here and waiting for things to get worse."
She was Milhak’s daughter.
She still had no idea what had actually happened to him.
As far as she knew, her father had contracted some bizarre and incurable disease.
What she couldn’t understand was why he had hired so many famous doctors without ever agreeing to undergo proper hospital treatment. And now, after exhausting every conventional option, he’d apparently abandoned medicine altogether and started putting his faith in curses and sorcery.
Worse, he seemed to have given up entirely.
He was simply lying there, waiting to die.
At the sound of her voice, Milhak slowly turned his left eye toward her.
His right eye was still physically intact, but it had turned a sickly yellow and had long since lost its sight.
"No..."
His voice was barely audible.
"Science... can’t save me."
Each word seemed to cost him everything he had.
Half his face had already shriveled away, leaving his speech distorted and strangely slurred.
"But you..."
He paused to breathe.
"Why are you still here? I told you to leave."
"How could I leave you like this?"
His daughter leaned against the bed and clasped his hand, tears gathering in her eyes.
Milhak abruptly pulled his hand free.
"You have to go."
His tone was desperate.
"He’s coming. The time is almost here. You have to leave before he arrives."
He’s coming?
His daughter stared at him.
Who?
For a moment, she wondered whether her father’s condition had been caused by poison.
Was the person responsible coming here?
But that made no sense.
The doctors had tested him repeatedly. They hadn’t found a trace of poison or any other conventional toxin.
Questions piled on top of one another.
Before she could ask, the entire house gave a faint tremor.
The woman froze.
She glanced around.
A small earthquake?
That was possible.
Geological activity across Eastern Europe had been unusually strange lately. There had even been bizarre volcanic activity in Belarus and on the outskirts of Skovia.
One of the major science programs had spent an entire week covering the phenomenon before finally offering an explanation that sounded increasingly ridiculous the longer you thought about it.
The tremor stopped.
Her shoulders relaxed.
She was just about to continue the conversation when a tremendous clatter erupted from the kitchen.
Something crashed.
Then came a string of furious swearing.
"Son of a bitch! How did I end up in here?! I knew the time zone was different in Eastern Europe, but it shouldn’t be pitch-black!"
Milhak’s daughter and the two remaining bodyguards exchanged a glance.
Their expressions changed instantly.
That wasn’t an earthquake.
Earthquakes didn’t swear.
The two guards immediately raised their AK-74s and moved cautiously toward the kitchen.
Milhak’s daughter pulled a handgun from her clothing and followed.
"No!"
Milhak’s voice was barely more than a whisper.
"Don’t go!"
He recognized that voice.
He knew exactly who it belonged to.
He tried desperately to stop his daughter, but his ruined body could no longer produce enough volume.
All he could do was watch helplessly as the three of them disappeared toward the kitchen.
They reached the doorway.
And stopped dead.
The refrigerator door lay shattered on the floor.
Two legs stuck out from inside the refrigerator, kicking wildly.
Then came another explosion of breaking bottles and containers.
A moment later, someone finally slid out of the refrigerator and landed on the kitchen floor.
The figure climbed to his feet.
He looked at the three armed people pointing weapons at him.
He didn’t seem particularly concerned.
Instead, he brushed bits of debris from his clothes.
"Sorry about the entrance."
He glanced at the wrecked refrigerator.
"I was planning to teleport here directly by using the spell I placed on Milhak as a magical beacon..."
He grimaced.
"There was a slight miscalculation."
The explanation was technically true.
The spell Evenson had placed on Milhak wasn’t merely designed to drain his life force and torment him.
The stolen life energy was converted into magical power, producing a signal that only Evenson could sense.
That signal allowed him to pinpoint Milhak’s location.
And once he had a location, he could use teleportation magic to get there.
There was only one problem.
Evenson hadn’t used this particular method very often.
He didn’t want to teleport directly onto someone’s head, so he’d adjusted the destination slightly.
Unfortunately, "slightly" had turned into "inside a refrigerator."
Still, it could have been worse.
At least he hadn’t emerged from a toilet.
Evenson suddenly felt something hanging from his shoulder.
He reached up.
A blackish lump had somehow gotten stuck to him during his refrigerator excursion.
He wiped a little of it away with one finger.
Then he sniffed it.
His eyes widened.
He put the finger in his mouth.
"Caviar?"
His expression brightened.
"Wow. That’s actually pretty good."
The woman stared at him in disbelief.
"If you took that piece of lettuce off your head and dipped it in the caviar, you’d probably enjoy it even more."
She raised her pistol and aimed it directly at him.
"Who are you?"
Her voice shook slightly.
"And why did you just crawl out of my refrigerator?"
...
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/Sinmerry