Exposure risk

  Earth Sorcerer: Book Three

  Author: D. L. Harrison

  Copyright 2021. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Afterword:

  About the Author

  Other books by D. L. Harrison:

  Book Description

  Chapter One

  The clear November night sky was blanketed in stars that Thursday night. The sounds of nocturnal creatures were loud in the Nevada wilderness. I felt more nervous than when I was in a sorcerous fight as I slipped into the seat of what I’d built and tested over the last three months. It was crazier than even moving about in one of those steel deathtraps that filled the world’s roadways.

  It was about the size of a dragster, and it looked more like an airplane’s fuselage than anything else, but one without wheels. I lowered the aerodynamic canopy and took a deep breath.

  Needless to say, my shields were tightly woven around me and I had a second set around the vehicle before I even turned the crazy thing on. Perhaps an introduction was in order. My name is Tony Walker, and I’m an earth sorcerer. The earth was my domain, as was reading the history of objects and places.

  After being on the run for six years I’d finally settled down after finding allies which was rare in my world, and I was also messing around with science. I had the equivalent of double-digit degrees thanks to the ability to read the history of places and things, at least those made of the earth.

  It’d been six months since we’d taken down the spirit sorcerer brothers, and since Katy and I had taken things to the next level. The last six months I’d been working on that gravity drive idea I’d had. It worked similar to an EM drive, but using gravity against other gravity fields for propulsion. It couldn’t be classified as an impulse drive, or even an anti-gravity drive, but the functionality was similar in some ways to both. There’d been more than a few roadblocks and hiccups on the way there, but I’d gotten it to work. There were a lot of other things I’d had to figure out before this point.

  Things like keeping a constant altitude, keeping the craft positioned straight, and things like that. If the vehicle rolled over, it would be embarrassing if not deadly.

  A gravity reactant field was not easy to create, it also didn’t mean artificial gravity was possible, at least not without the insane power requirements it would need. The fields involved were very thin, and they conformed to the vehicle’s shell. The vehicle I was in ran on nothing but those high energy density quick charge supercapacitors I’d invented.

  Theoretically, a single charge would be good for about ten hours of operation, there was also no correlation between speed and that number either. The gravity field, sensors, and instruments had the same exact power drain under acceleration or not. Ten hours was quite long enough for the thing to circle the planet, more than once, but on a practical side those kinds of speeds were just asking to die given atmospheric resistance. There was a limiter in the software so it couldn’t go faster than three hundred miles an hour.

  Technically the drive could get me in space, but I hadn’t built a spaceship so that wouldn’t be happening anytime soon, or ever. Let some nut in NASA do that shit after I sold it. In fact, I wasn’t going to go over a hundred feet, even getting that far from the source of my power, the earth, gave me second thoughts. Plus, any kind of long-term ship or satellite would need alternate forms of power.

  I hit the start button, no sounds emitted from the craft at all as it rose up about two feet off the ground and hovered there, the default start point. If I couldn’t use power to transmute other matter into diamonds, I was sure my sphincter was up to the task in that moment. I also wasn’t expecting problems, for the last couple of weeks I’d been testing a much smaller remote-controlled drone, and I hadn’t had any problems.

  There were many sensors on the bottom of the craft, that would keep me at any altitude I set, be it two feet or a hundred. It’d ignore rocks, fences, trees, and the like unless I was about to hit one. The craft was capable of accelerations between a hundredth and two gravities of acceleration. It was also a constant acceleration but at a hundredth of a G taking into consideration atmospheric drag the velocity top off was quite reasonable. Two gravities would allow someone to stop rather quickly.

  Turning was a function of creating uneven acceleration on either side of the craft. In truth it drove more like a boat than an aircraft or car. Keeping it level was a matter of the fields countering the earth’s gravity to keep it still, and there were smaller fields all around the edges of the craft. There was also enough backup systems to make it safe, including a completely independent oh shit system that would get someone safely to the ground if they hit the emergency button.

  Anyway, I set the altitude to a hundred feet, and when the craft leveled off at that altitude I applied forward thrust. The computer took care of everything, speed, altitude, all I had to do was set the digital dials to the altitude and speed I wanted, and then steer the thing. The desert started to move below me, and it didn’t take all that long before I was going full speed over the desert in the middle of nowhere.

  It seemed recklessly fast, as the ground below me moved past in a blur, but in reality I knew I wasn’t going all that fast. Not in comparison to the speeds I could reach underground, about a mile a second with my three-hundred-and-fifty-foot reach. Still, humans might get their flying cars after all. Cheap access to orbit and space as well, but that was up to them. I planned to file the patent tomorrow if I could.

  Past testing, and selling the rights to it, I had no real interest in taking it further or going into space myself. That sounded crazy to me, but then on or beneath the earth is where I felt most comfortable.

  The craft slowed and started to lower to the ground at my direction. I let out a sigh of relief as it hit the ground, and I wrapped the craft in my magic and lowered into the ground where it was safe, to head home. I was fairly satisfied it worked more than well enough as a proof of concept vehicle.

  It was only about twenty minutes later when I rose up out of the ground, and into the basement.

  I wondered at times if I was pushing things, trying too hard to give back to the world, because this invention was sure to make the world sit up and notice, and put me in the public eye. The much higher capacity supercapacitors were one thing, and it would be remarked upon but not overly so. The gravity reaction drive was a whole other can of worms, it would revolutionize transportation on the ground, in the air, and in space opening up the solar system to exploration and exploitation.

  I’d spoken to a few people about it though, and we all thought we could handle the exposure risk.

  Chapter Two

  Friday morning brought the crisp and cool dawn. The weather was definitely turning as the winter approached. After a shower and a breakfast, I sipped my coffee in the office as I filled out the patent paperwork. It’d take a trip to D.C. later today to get it done. When I’d gotten the improved design supercapacitor patented, it’d become clear most of the vamp lawyers didn’t deal with patent law. There were only a couple in the country with that skillset, or at least that did it as their main job.

  Of course, I planned that trip for the afternoon, my morning was already booked. I frowned as I looked at my watch. I’d been expecting to hear the growl of a certain Mustang GT enter my driveway for the last half hour or so.

  Katy and I still got together on dates a few times a week given both our busy schedules, but Friday mornings were about business and the treaty I had with her and her mother. The list of earth components she’d requested for that week were sitting in a box near the front door, which comprised a few diamonds, rubies, a few semi-precious stones, sea salt, and a small piece of silver, all of it untouched by man since the creation of our world. Fortunately, my ability to transform matter didn’t count as processed or touched.

  I’d never use that ability to debase the economy or create wealth, but I had no compunctions about creating expensive components that would be used and exhausted in spells, potions, or enchantments.

  Point being though, Katy was over a half hour late, and she was never more than a minute or two late on a Friday morning when it came to recharging my wards, the ring I wore, and picking up their components. The last six months, twenty-eight Fridays, we’d shared a coffee, some conversation, then she’d do her work and head out.

  In short, I started to get worried, enough that I checked my cellphone for any texts I might’ve missed, but I hadn’t. I debated with myself on if I should activate the tracing spell in the ring manually, worried she was in trouble, but people did run late on occasion, didn’t they?

  I texted her instead, and I let out a deep breath before taking another sip of coffee. It was always a thin line, between being protective and being an overprotective ass. To be fair, our world could be a dangerous place. When that yielded no results in two minutes, I called the store.

  “Candle Dreams,” said a cool and crisp voice that sounded a lot like Katy’s dulcet voice, but it wasn’t. It was her mother Tina.

  “Sorry to bother you, Tina. But is Katy running late this morning?”

  There was a startled moment of silence, then Tina replied, “No. She left the store for your place over an hour ago.”

  I frowned, that sounded right, it was a thirty-minute drive from their store in the city to my house in the northern suburbs of Seattle, which would have gotten her here right on time.

  “She didn’t get here. I’ll activate the ring. Something has gone wrong.”

  When we’d allied and started dating, Katie had created a ring that could tell me if she was under duress or threat for me to wear. The only weakness inherent in that idea was she had to consciously set it off if she was ever attacked, either by her own enemy or one of mine trying to come at me sideways. The only thing that made sense to me in that moment was that it was one of my enemies, because I doubted another witch could take her down fast enough to prevent her from activating it. Even a sorcerer would take time to get through her powerful protections necklace, but a sorcerer could raise a shield around her that might defeat the magic.

  My heart lurched in my chest, when I activated the ring, and the finding spell put her somewhere around Missoula, Montana. That told me a few things. She was blocked when she tried to set it off. She was overcome and kidnapped, and she was also then unblocked so that I’d be able to find her.

  Which screamed trap.

  I said, “She’s in trouble. I’ll call you back.”

  I hung up and typed out a quick text to Melody, Ben, and Danielle on my way to the basement, then dropped into the ground as I sent it. I ran straight east underground following the finding spell, not willing to wait. It’d take me at least five minutes to get to Missoula.

  Melody could track me, because while I usually blocked leaving a memory of my passing in the stone, I was purposefully leaving a trail this time. Ben knew us well enough to track either of us through fire magic, and I’d given Danielle something I owned so she could always find me with her water magic. They were all a lot faster than me as well, it’d take Danielle ninety seconds to make it there, and Ben would arrive even faster.

  So they’d either be right on my ass by the time I got there, or they wouldn’t be coming because they had their own emergencies going on. Which all added up to me springing the trap when I got there, out of fear and worry for Katy. I focused past that anger as I pulled a diamond out of my pocket and formed a connection to it through the realm of Earth.

  I’d gotten really good at fighting and the sensations of being in two different places. Enough that I was actually considering starting to train with a second diamond, so I could be in three places at once. It didn’t give me more power, I could only connect to the earth in a three-hundred-and-fifty-foot sphere around my body, or more specifically around my soul, but using the diamond in a second place made me far more versatile.

  Not least of which was acting in an area or building that’s been locked down by wards to dampen access to the elemental earth realm. While it limited that connection to a trickle in drawing power, it wasn’t enough to cut off my connection to the diamond. But attacking from more than one direction was also very useful.

  Not to mention chasing down pesky air sorcerers high in the air. I couldn’t follow without losing my power, but my diamond could go hang out in orbit if it wanted.

  When I got close to her location, or at least, the location of her necklace, I dropped the diamond and slowed slightly, as the diamond raced around that location in an arc. By myself or not, I’d have the enemy that had done this surrounded. Based on what I felt in the small city nestled into the Rockies, my Katy was on the very edge of it, likely in a house.

  I was really close, when I felt air magic, but not the sorcerer himself. Which meant he was stronger than I was, and probably an assassin. A very expensive assassin in our world, if he was stronger than I was. Usually the assholes in my world have retired from that dangerous job, millionaires already in the hundreds of millions.

  We hadn’t had any problems, no major ones outside of normal rogues, for six months. It made me wonder who wanted me dead so badly that they’d lay out at least twenty million to get it done. I was also terrified, because an air sorcerer with no moral center whatsoever could permanently mess up my Katy, change who she was and how she thought, but I pushed that down.

  Hopefully he was a professional, and that hadn’t happened because he wanted to be ready for me and not caught with his pants down. Sorcerers that didn’t pay attention often died in their stupidity. But… Katy was, at the risk of being crude, incredibly beautiful and sexy. So much so she still awed me with her beauty after dating her for over six months.

  I was relatively safe underground, and the thought of him mind raping her and possibly her body as well, made me move forward. I’d gone another fifty feet, when I felt his shields and the center of his power, which made him about twice as powerful as I was. He was also outside, floating about twenty feet in the air, no doubt to put a gap between him and the earth. There were no active witch spells, nor any witches besides Katy, who was inside the house.

  Where the hell were my allies?

  Still, twice as powerful didn’t guarantee anything. It meant a long fight, and the one with the best and sneakiest tactics would usually win.

  Might as well say hi. I firmed up my shields with focus to make them the best I could be, and I rose up slowly out of the ground while anchoring myself to the earth so he couldn’t rip me up and away from it. A basic tactic, but still a dangerous one, thanks to Kas I knew most of the dirty tactics an air sorcerer would get up to.

  At the same time, my Diamond rose up inside the house breaking the floor. I couldn’t see Katie, but based on her necklace being totally drained, and her steady breaths, I’d say she was knocked out and fine. There was no bleeding, or broken bones, I could tell that much with the earth minerals in a human body.

  When the air sorcerer looked at me, I pulled her down into the earth and moved her away. Not too deep. You know, just in case I died I didn’t want her to suffocate under the earth.

  The air sorcerer looked amused, “Neat trick, I’ve never met an earth sorcerer that could do that, but she’s served her purpose, I have no need to harm her or abuse her further.”

  I snorted, “Coming from an assassin, that’s particularly enlightened.”

  He shrugged, “The ones that can’t control themselves die young. When you piss everyone off, it’s only a matter of time until you’re squashed.”

  Right, so he didn’t control and brainwash people, and get his rocks off, because it would lead to his death, not for any moral reason. I could buy that.

  “So, you wanted to chat?”

  He laughed, “I was curious. It’s not often anyone meets my price nowadays. Too many eager and stupid newbie sorcerers killing for cash,” I could feel his power trying to grip me, but I continued to just shield and anchor myself, “You really pissed off the wrong people.”

  “What’s to stop me from dropping into the earth and leaving at this point?”

  He shrugged, “Nothing, except next time I won’t be nearly so gentle with your lover. Your too smart to run, the cost would be too high, and though it’s doubtful, you could even beat me. I know what you’re doing, and it’s amusing. I’m an air sorcerer, you don’t think I did my research? Your allies are a little too busy right now to come to your rescue, I’m afraid.”

  Oh, right, he wasn’t as strong as Ben, but at four hundred feet my life was an open book to him. Which meant he was also very familiar with my thought process and fighting style. Which… should make things exciting.

  By then though, I’d stashed Katy in a basement on the other side of town, and my diamond was back. Overhead, over his head by about a thousand feet, releasing about a ton of dirt and small mountain boulders with a nice push to speed it all up.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13