Redemption, p.1
Redemption, page 1
part #1 of Earth Sorcerer Series
Redemption
Earth Sorcerer: Book One
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
Chapter Eighteen
Afterword:
About the Author
Other books by D. L. Harrison:
Book Description
Chapter One
The night air was quiet and still, and the grass springy and comfortably soft under my back as I gazed up into the dark sky. The moon was a bare sliver in the sky, and the starlight dim from the thin cloud cover. My heart hammered in my chest, and it was both bitter and sweet to be alive. I almost wasn’t. The only sounds were from my increased respiration, and the pounding of my heart. It’d only been a few seconds since the earth had split open and spit me out.
I was pretty sure I was in Seattle, but sometimes it was hard to be sure when travelling under the surface of the planet. Although I was a lot better at finding my way than when I’d started.
Minutes passed, and I started to believe I’d lost them back in Vancouver. Damned earth sorcerers were a pain in the ass, except me of course, but I rather thought I might be biased in that opinion.
Nope, they were all assholes, except me.
A startled laugh broke the silence, mine, and I wondered if I might be going crazy. If I’d been alone for too long. I was starting to laugh at my own jokes. The last six years hadn’t been easy, since I’d found my power, and then I’d pissed a lot of sorcerers off, on accident.
It’d seemed like a good idea at the time. An earth sorcerer could travel through the depths of the earth like a normal person walks down the sidewalk. Why not pull precious gems, gold, and other rare metals out of the earth and sell them, what harm could that cause? I’d been sixteen, without a lick of sense, and it’d never occurred to me those places were already claimed.
It never occurred to me, that the older earth sorcerers had pretty much cornered the mining market years ago, and they were the invisible hands behind it all. They also weren’t kind.
Think like a normal person accidentally stepping on the mob’s toes. They weren’t forgiving, nor did they have a sense of humor.
I hadn’t yet learned at that time to read the history of the very stone. To read the claim I’d violated. It wasn’t a well-known thing, not even to the other sorcerers or supernatural races, but vast areas below the ground were already claimed by my kind, and they protected those claims jealousy for future mining for themselves and their children. Earth sorcerers couldn’t just read the history of a place, they could also insert messages. In other words, magical claims and warnings easily read by another earth sorcerer.
If they knew how that is, but the earth sorcerers hounding me, and who’d put out contracts to every sorcerous assassin of the four elements, didn’t accept ignorance as an excuse. I was a dead man walking. It was just a matter of time before one of them prevented me from fleeing, or just caught me by surprise. I wasn’t a coward, but I wasn’t stupid or suicidal either.
Of course, I’d found other ways to make money over the last six years, though I wasn’t rich I was hardly destitute. The others just never forgot, and it was a pain in the ass. Every time I got settled in a new area, one of the bastards would find me. I was strong, quite powerful. The strength of the Earth ran through my veins, but at twenty-four I was still relatively weak for my kind, if strong enough to face just about any other supernatural on the planet.
My source of income also wasn’t exactly legal, but it was hard to get a job when you were always on the run. I didn’t like to steal, but there it was. I owned no bank accounts, and I had no identification. The less I had to deal with others to get that kind of stuff the better, and just having an ID would only give my enemy another path to locate me. Most of my money was in visa gift cards, which pretty much worked like a credit card and was accepted anywhere. I also didn’t put more than five hundred bucks on one of them, and used cash to do so, and never twice at the same store. I had several hundred of the things buried all over the country in places that were unlikely for one of my kind to go, and ten of them in my pocket at the moment adding up to fifty K. More than I’d ever need at one time.
“Hey, asshole. You’re in my park,” a voice with attitude yelled out.
I shut my eyes in annoyed frustration, my luck was shit. Really? I’d been in the new city for a whole five minutes, and I was already being targeted. Such was my life, and my luck, or rather, my bad luck.
I sat up slowly, and saw a gang approaching me. Once they got within three hundred feet of me in the park, I could feel all their guns, knives, and even their bodies. Various metals and minerals were in a human body after all, and earth sorcerers could feel all that, even control it to a certain extent. They were all human. Some gang that probably used the park to sell drugs, and mug anyone stupid enough to be there after dark.
Such as me, except I wasn’t a helpless human.
I stood up slowly, and brushed off my jeans, “I’ll just be going then. I don’t want any trouble.”
The leader sneered, “Too late. Give me all your shit, now, and I might not kill your ass.”
I sighed. I hated coverups. Earth sorcerers had no way to control people, or to make them forget. I did have an alternative that way, but if it went wrong, then I’d have to hunt down a vampire for help. Still, chances were this wouldn’t be a problem.
Earth sorcery was generally known to control earth as the obvious thing. Killing them, jamming their guns, and destroying their knives wouldn’t be a problem, but I wasn’t a killer. The second thing most knew about earth sorcerers were that they could read the history of any place or object. Buildings, rings, anything with earth in it, every event left a mark on it. Let’s just say my college level education happened in a library, in a single afternoon, once I’d learned what I could do.
The amount of information that my mind could absorb in mere seconds was staggering.
There were subtleties when it came to earth magic, however. A lot more than someone would think, for earth sorcery. Especially since all earth sorcerers were rather well learned, given our talents. Copper could conduct electricity for instance, and glass made a terrific insulator. My earth magic could mimic those properties, the properties of any earth element. I also may have known the best frequency and amperage of electricity to not only act as a kind of taser, but to sufficiently scramble the short-term memory of a human so that I wouldn’t need a coverup. They’d never remember what the hell happened to them. My magic could do all that, with a little geeky knowledge, and a whole lot of focus.
It wasn’t something I’d ever use fighting a supernatural, since it was only effective against humans, but it came in handy as a non-deadly solution for situations such as these. All so I didn’t have to worry about a coverup or cleaning up dead bodies.
Not that burying bodies was hard for an Earth sorcerer, so I supposed it was my conscience in truth.
I was done talking to the idiots already. The preliminary exchange had told me all I needed to know. The idiot was spoiling for a fight, and he wasn’t interested in peaceful solutions.
My magic raced from my body to the nearest source of electricity, which was about a hundred feet down, in the service tunnels beneath Seattle. It conducted the electricity to me, and then left me in a series of what looked like lightning strikes. It wasn’t really lightning of course. There was no need for the electricity to break the insulation threshold of air, it followed the conduits of magic I created to the group of hoodlums. Just as if I’d handed them all a power cable that’d been hooked up to a generator.
All nine of the bastards started to shake and flop on the ground like they’d been Tasered, and I knew in a few moments they’d come out of it with no idea what happened, or why they’d crapped and pissed their pants. A little blind justice, assholes.
I started to walk away, with no real destination in mind. I had no home, no job, and I was pretty much just a wanderer, going from city to city and trying to stay alive. I decided on a late-night snack. I was sure there was a diner somewhere around, when I heard a yell.
“What the hell was that!”
Oh, hell. Damn it, so much for not needing a coverup.
I turned, and I could barely make out the silhouettes of two more gang members by the trees. Apparently, they’d stayed back for some reason I couldn’t discern. Maybe lookouts, in case a beat cop came by while they were beating up one of their victims? I could zap them too, but it was too late, it only erased the last few seconds from their minds, which really only amounted to forgetting the attack itself, which was good enough to coverup the magic use.
I was pissed, now I’d have to find a damned vampire. I hated dealing with other supernaturals, it raised the risk that the ones hunting me would get wind of it. Or even worse, Seattle could be a home base for one of those assassins I’d mentioned. I’d never spent any time in this city before, which made me wary at best. But… the secret wasn’t something to screw with, even I knew better than that.
I sunk like a stick into mud, as the ground swallowed me, and less than a second later I was across the field and the two humans joined me below the Earth. They got shocked too, but I varied the amperage and frequency to knock them out completely.
Travelling under the ground felt very safe and secure to me as an earth sorcerer, but I knew they’d be screaming bloody murder the whole time if they were conscious, and quite likely be scared out of their minds. I supposed I couldn’t blame them, finding out magic existed and being sucked underneath the ground couldn’t have been a calming event from their point of view.
The best way I could think to describe it was I was in a small bubble of space, like a moving cave, that the earth rolled around. The ground directly underneath my feet was part of that, and I could move very quickly without a large sense of motion, even when reaching speeds that rivalled jet aircraft.
I wandered the city below the ground, and I rolled my eyes when I felt a vampire above me. Couldn’t miss one of the bastards, they were full of air magic. Vampires were very much alive despite popular fiction. They were just permanently spelled with magic. Some might call it a curse, to constantly regenerate their bodies preventing aging. It also made them stronger, faster, and enhanced their auditory and olfactory senses.
Their vision was enhanced as well, which is where the whole night thing came from in the human myths. The sun didn’t burn them, it’s just their eyes were far too sensitive to go out into daylight. Enter the modern age, the invention of sunglasses, and the vamps were now night owls only if they wanted to be. They did drink blood, it was the fuel for the magic, but they also needed to eat and drink water, like anyone else.
If you’ve ever seen a poser wearing sunglasses on a cloudy and stormy day, then you’ve probably seen a vamp.
The reason I’d rolled my eyes, is because I should’ve known they’d be in a club. Most of them ran clubs, in the various cities they were in, though not all. That wasn’t all they did. They usually had twenty to fifty vampires in a coven, on rare occasions a larger population, and that led to diversity in income for the coven, but clubs were usually one of the things they did. Dim lighting, music too loud to hear anything else, and buzzed minds on alcohol made for an easy and convenient feeding ground.
I dumped my two humans in the back alley, then rounded the place. I used a tiny bit of magic to clean my clothes, although blue jeans, black boots, and a pullover collared gray shirt wasn’t exactly what most wore for clubbing. I didn’t have a choice, since none of my other clothes in the backpack were club worthy either.
I suppressed a second eyeroll, when I saw the name of the club was Pulse. Really? I snorted.
I hesitated for a second when I got to the front door. There was a type of magic inside that I’d never felt before. I also felt several vampires, along with a witch and a shifter, and about fifty humans. Not a bad crowd for a Sunday night. It was that shifter that was truly strange, since vampires and shifters hated each other as a rule. Their opposing elements of air and earth set off all their fight or flight instincts, and vampires and shifters almost never chose flight. They could fight it of course, but they usually didn’t bother. By not bothering, I didn’t mean they fought each other at every opportunity, I meant they avoided each other like the plague. They usually had separate territories within the cities with borders they wouldn’t cross. It was hard to get past instincts, even if they knew the source of it, it wasn’t easy to ignore.
Except, that strange magic I’d never felt before was around the shifter, as well as in a separate spot which was the source. The source of that power was also a bloodsucker. It was odd, to say the least. Maybe that magic was preventing their opposing magics from rubbing together? Still, it was an odd thing, why would they bother? It set off alarms in my head. I liked predictable and normal, being on the run almost constantly had perhaps given me an overdeveloped sense of danger. Anything that didn’t fit what I knew, was considered dangerous and a risk.
So, I did what any self-respecting earth sorcerer would do in an unknown city, with an unknown quantity in the mix. I read the history of the building, excluding the bathrooms. I really didn’t need the history of two club bathrooms stuck in my head for the next four hundred years. I made that mistake once, never again.
I learned a few alarming facts. The first was that Seattle was the seat of power for the vampires, worldwide. The council was made up of Ceara, Barbara, and Sherry, all three of them over a thousand years old, and the first was almost two thousand. They’d combined their covens, and there were just under a hundred vamps in Seattle.
The second was the vampire with the weird powers was something called a spirit sorceress, and her name was Miku. There wasn’t much information there, because no one had ever talked about it in the club, but apparently, she wasn’t even human. Her human female aspect was her second form.
I also relaxed a little, because I was stronger than she was. Weirder yet, the spirit sorceress vampire was the Luna of the local pack, mated to the pack alpha. Which probably explained why the shifter was here, who was both her niece in law, and also the pack mystic. Shifter mystics were like witches, but instead of having access to all four elements through spells and devices, they only had access to earth and fire, which is the magic that made them shifters in the first place.
Her name was Reah, and I actually felt a lot calmer with that weird mystery explained. I’d also been right about the magic. The spirit magic shield contained Reah’s earth and fire shifter magic, and also blocked the vampires’ air magic from getting to her. No tickles to the hind brain to deal with.
The witch and vamp at the table with them were Katy and Lisa. Katy was just eighteen, but her family had a long alliance going with the vamps, and she was there to trade lore with the mystic, along with no doubt getting her dance on. It was hard to quantify, but I got the sense it was a wary friendship at best that had her there that night. The supernatural world could be an untrusting place, and solitary witch families weren’t very trusting of others for the most part.
Lisa was one of Ceara’s personal daytime guards, part of the coven enforcers, and best friends with Miku, and strangely enough she seemed to get along with Reah just fine.
All that was interesting, but the most alarming fact was an earth sorceress by the name of Melody was allied to the vampire council and called Seattle home. She was also the oldest earth sorceress I’d ever run across, and quite possibly the most powerful I’d ever heard of. It seemed like a very good idea to be done and gone before she decided to show up at the club and squash me like a bug.
She was one person I really didn’t want to meet, ever.
In fact, she’d left a message in the foundation. Screw with her people at my own risk kind of thing. A warning to any other Earth sorcerer that may show up in her town. I blew out a breath, and then stepped inside. The sooner I got this done, then the sooner I could take off. Maybe I’d give Portland a try.
Chapter Two
The club was a typical night club save the vampire bouncers, and other supernatural elements. The lights were dimmed except for the pools of light around the bars, front door, and back hallway that led to the rest rooms. Flashing lights over the dance floor, and music so loud I could barely hear myself think. Not that there was anything wrong with that, it’s just the last place I wanted to let my guard down even a little bit.
I weaved a secondary shield around me that really did nothing except add sound dampening properties. That kind of thing was easier for an air mage, sound was vibrations in the air after all, but I could mimic my earth magic to take on the properties to deflect and even absorb sound waves.
I couldn’t fail to notice almost every vampire in the place looked my way, which would’ve spooked me before I’d read the place. Vampires, witches, and shifters couldn’t feel magic directly, that was something only sorcerers could do, though witches could also if they had an active spell running.
