Earthtaker Read online

  Earthtaker

  Gaia Charmer, World Warrior Book 3

  Robert Jeschonek

  Contents

  Also by Robert Jeschonek

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Special Preview: Earthshaker

  EARTHTAKER:

  GAIA CHARMER, WORLD WARRIOR BOOK 3

  Copyright © 2020 by Robert Jeschonek

  www.robertjeschonek.com

  Cover Art Copyright © 2020 by Lou Harper

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in April 2020 by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

  An IE Books book

  Published by IE Books

  411 Chancellor Street

  Johnstown, Pennsylvania 15904

  www.piepresspublishing.com

  Also by Robert Jeschonek

  Earthshaker

  Earthbreaker

  Six Fantasy Stories Volume 1

  Six Fantasy Stories Volume 2

  Six Superhero Stories

  Chapter 1

  The ground shook fiercely at my command, and a fissure opened up in the middle of my cell. I dove into it, disappearing into the ground like a swimmer leaping into the churning sea.

  This, I could have done without lifting a finger.

  Instead of an earthquake, I reached deep into the walls of the cell, using my control of all things rock and stone to blow apart the cinder blocks. Dusting myself off, I stepped through the hole in the wall and walked off into the night as if I’d never been a prisoner at all.

  This, too, I could have done with minimal effort.

  Taking another tack, I channeled ley line energy from the ground, bringing up great crackling bolts of it to fill the air and electrify the bars of my cell. When guards touched the bars, they were shocked unconscious. The charge was so strong, it sprang the lock on the door of my cell, opening it before me.

  Again, this could have been easily done.

  For I, Gaia Charmer, am the human avatar of Mother Earth herself. No cell can long resist my power…the power of a planet at my fingertips.

  So why, with all I could do, was I still sitting in the cell at the police station in Confluence, Western Pennsylvania instead of running free to track down the killer whose crimes I’d been blamed for?

  Let’s just say there’s one force that can hold even my great power in check on occasion. One force that can sometimes stop the world from spinning, can even send it turning in the opposite direction.

  And that force is love.

  “How are you doing, Gaia?” Sheriff Dale Briar walked up to the bars and gazed in at me with his bright hazel eyes. “Can I get you anything?”

  I sat on a bench along the wall of the cell, staring back at him, and shook my head slowly. It was still hard to believe that we were on opposite sides of the bars. Looking out from inside a jail cell at the man who was my boyfriend was something I’d never expected.

  I hadn’t gotten any more used to it in the hour since he’d brought me in, either. I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Sheriff Briar, who’d never seemed to doubt me for a second in all the time we’d been together, had marched me out of my offices at Cruel World Travel/Charmer Investigations and locked me in a holding cell at the local police station.

  “When can I get out of here?” I leaned forward on the bench, nervously twisting the blonde braid that lay over my right shoulder. “When can I go home?”

  “Duke and Luna just asked me the same question.” Briar hiked a thumb at the door behind him that led to the squad room. “I didn’t have any better answers than I do right now.”

  “So are you going to charge me, or what?” I asked.

  “It’s complicated.” Briar pulled out his phone. “I’m not sure what to do at this point, to be honest.”

  “You know I didn’t kill Imogene Parker.” I got up from the bench and walked over to him. “No matter what the evidence says.”

  I knew it hadn’t looked good for me from the start. The 85-year-old had suffocated after being pumped full of dirt, and a note left at the murder scene had pointed a finger in my direction.

  Mother Earth is coming for the wicked, it had said.

  Not to mention, Imogene was the second elderly woman in town to die under the same circumstances in a matter of days—stuffed with dirt, accompanied by a cryptic note that mentioned Mother Earth.

  And then there was the other old woman, the one buried under crushed cinderblocks in the basement of Imogene’s house. The one who’d personally identified me as Imogene’s murderer once I’d set her free.

  It hadn’t looked good for me from the start…so how on Earth could it possibly look any worse?

  “I need to show you something.” Briar held up the phone so I could see the video playing on its screen. From a high camera angle looking down on Imogene’s living room, I clearly saw the old lady sitting in a recliner, watching TV.

  Then, by the flickering light of the TV, I saw someone enter the room and attack. The scene was grainy and dark, but I could still see the attacker as she went to work on Imogene…especially when she glowed with radiant energy and summoned streams of dirt through the window to fill up the old lady’s throat.

  It was then, plain as day, that I could see the attacker looked just like me. She was slender and petite, in her mid-20s, with long blonde hair pleated into a ponytail draped over one shoulder. She even wore a black leather coat like mine with a black top and black jeans underneath.

  “That’s impossible,” I said in a hushed voice. “I was at the Council of Landkind meeting, and then I was at the office…”

  “According to Dr. Cox, the murder happened the night before.” Briar switched off the video and slipped the phone back in the pocket of his uniform pants. “So where were you two nights ago, Gaia?”

  The question stung. “You don’t think I did this, do you?”

  “Of course not,” said Briar. “I’m sure you didn’t…but I have to ask. If you have an alibi, I need to know what it is.”

  I scowled at him. “Either you believe me or you don’t, Briar. I don’t need to explain my whereabouts.”

  “Gaia, listen.” He leaned toward me, locking his grim gaze with mine. “I’m being straight with you here. You don’t need to convince me, but…” He drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “Between the video I just showed you, and the one from the doorbell cam, and Beatrice Brown’s ID-ing you as the killer….it looks bad. There’s so
much here, I can’t just make it go away, as much as I want to.”

  A sick feeling crawled through me as I heard those words. The way he’d said them, there hadn’t been much hope in his voice.

  “Gaia.” Briar reached between the bars, taking my hands in his, and lowered his voice. “There must be another explanation for this.”

  He was right, but I couldn’t think what it might be. I just stared down at his hands, wondering how we’d gotten to this terrible place.

  “You’ve been through some crazy stuff, just since I’ve known you,” said Briar. “Could this be part of all that? Some enemy masquerading as you? Someone with the same powers, able to make themselves look just like you?”

  I shrugged. My memories of my current and past incarnations had never been perfect—and, lately, I’d realized they were even more unreliable than I’d thought. If a likely culprit could be found somewhere in my many long lives, I couldn’t remember them…and maybe I never would.

  For now, I was just as much in the dark as Briar was and facing a challenge for what might have been the first time in my existence.

  I, the planet Earth in human form, was being framed for murder.

  “Keep thinking,” said Briar. “Because the truth is, this situation might be out of my hands.”

  I nodded, understanding what he was telling me. Completely comprehending the words he’d left unsaid.

  “I’m slow-walking the process,” he said. “I haven’t charged you yet, and I’ve filed no paperwork. But I’ll have to, sooner or later. I’ll have to take a statement from Beatrice Brown in the hospital, and I’ll have to interrogate you formally. I’ll have to do everything by the book, understand?”

  He squeezed my hands tightly, and I nodded again.

  “But I’m not stupid enough to think I can figure out this mess and deliver any kind of justice to anyone.” Briar narrowed his eyes as he kept his gaze locked with mine. “There’s only one person in the world who can do all that, I think.”

  I knew exactly who he was talking about, and it scared me. Because that person had a terrible task ahead, one that might very well lead them to some very dark places.

  And that person was me.

  “Gaia…honey…” Briar squeezed my hands even tighter. “I can see how this is going to go. I can see it a mile away. I don’t know why it’s happening, and I don’t know who’s responsible…but I can see the writing on the wall.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “And I want you to know, Gaia, whatever you end up doing, I won’t hold it against you.”

  A chill shot me through me as I realized what had just happened. As Briar released my hands and backed away, watching me with eyes glistening as if he might never see me again.

  He’d given me permission. That was what he’d done.

  He’d given me permission to do what I needed to do to save myself.

  I kept thinking there must be another way. After all, I was completely innocent; together, we had to be able to get to the truth and clear my name.

  But in my heart, I knew better. In my heart, I already knew damn well what I was going to have to do.

  “Thank you.” So that was what I told him. “Thank you for everything.”

  Briar nodded. “All in a day’s work, ma’am.” And then he smiled that wide-open smile of his, the one that had made me fall in love with him in the first place. The one that had made my love feel bigger than the world, more important than anything in it…at least for a while.

  Then he opened the door to the squad room and stepped through it, looking back over his shoulder as he went. “Duke and Luna are still out here, wanting to see you. Okay if I send them back?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But I guess we’d better keep it short, huh?”

  “Up to you.” He shrugged. “Though I must admit, it’s getting kind of late.”

  With that, he was gone, leaving me standing alone in my cell, feeling more trapped than I could ever remember feeling, even though I had the powers of a planet and my boyfriend’s permission to escape before the whole world came crashing down around me.

  Chapter 2

  My heart beat faster when my best friend and my sister entered the room—even as I tried not to think about the fact that this might be the last time I ever saw either of them.

  “Earth Angel.” Duke, who’d been my guide and satellite throughout my current incarnation, shook his head in sadness and rage. “I still can’t believe this. It simply isn’t possible.”

  “Yet here I am.” I spread my arms and smiled, trying to hide my deep sadness. “Mother Earth, in a cage.”

  “We know you don’t belong here.” Luna Neil, my sister, is the avatar of the moon. In my current incarnation, I’d only met her recently, before the war with the Allself and Terralyzers…but the bond between us was strong. “We won’t let you be punished for something you didn’t do.”

  “Tell that to my identical twin,” I said. “The one who killed Imogene Parker in the video. The one Beatrice Brown met face-to-face at the murder scene before she was buried alive.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find her.” Luna’s pale gray eyes glinted as she scowled. “We’ve already put the word out, and the search is underway.”

  Duke nodded. “The Council of Landkind has issued a warrant for her arrest. Every landform in the area and beyond is looking for this vile imposter.”

  “That’s good to know,” I told him. Landkind were the human avatars of landforms—valleys, rivers, mountains, lakes—and they could search with the senses of the land and its elements as well as with those of humans. They could cover a lot of ground, in other words.

  But I didn’t get my hopes up. My double had gone to a lot of trouble to frame me. I couldn’t imagine finding her would be all that easy.

  “Do you have any idea who she is?” asked Luna. “Some kind of a shapeshifter, maybe? An agent of the Allself, or one of the hybrids from Parapets?”

  “Someone who looks just like me and has the same power over the Earth?” I shook my head. “Not a clue.”

  “Earth Angel, I’ve been thinking.” Duke narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice. “What if she’s a golem?”

  He’d surprised me, though I was sure the notion had come naturally to him. After all, Duke was a golem himself, a creature of earth and magic animated by the spirit of the late, great jazz musician and bandleader, Duke Ellington.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess it’s possible.”

  Luna, short and squat as she was, looked moonlike as she stood there, shaking her head. “If that’s the case, this is worse than we thought. A golem can just fall apart into dirt and mud, right? There might only be one Gaia Charmer to take the rap in the end.”

  “I’ll bet I could handle it,” Duke said darkly. “One golem to another.”

  “And then what?” I asked. “Get it to confess its crimes and its nature as a golem to a judge and jury? How would that hold up in a court of law, do you think?”

  Duke thought for a moment, then grunted. “Damnit, Earth Angel. I won’t give up on you. There has to be a way to get you out of this.”

  There was, but I didn’t want either of them to know about it yet. The fewer people in the loop at that point, the better.

  When I finally did what I had to do, I didn’t want my friend and sister to pay the price for it.

  “Listen,” I told them. “The best thing you can do for me now is take care of yourselves and the businesses. Keep the town safe. Watch over things the way only you two can.”

  “We won’t stop searching for the imposter and trying to clear your good name.” Luna’s short, platinum hair swung as she gave her head an obstinate toss. “We’ll never stop.”

  I got choked up, then, and drew close to the bars. “I love you both, you know that?”

  They closed in, too, each reaching out to take one of my hands. From the looks on their faces, I could see they were both deeply upset, worried what the future would bring. But did either of them have any ide
a this might be the last time we’d see each other?

  As far as I could tell, I was the only one who had that idea.

  “We love you too, sister,” said Luna.

  “On that, we can all agree.” Duke smiled with all the charm he could muster, which was quite a bit for a golem created in the image of a 75-year-old musician. “Try not to worry, Earth Angel. This will all come out in the wash, you know.”

  “Give my best to Nephelae,” I told them, referring to a nymph who owned an herb shop in town and was once of my closest friends. She hadn’t been the same since she’d lost her lover, Minthe, in the battle with the Terralyzers. “Tell her to stay strong.”

  A single tear ran down Luna’s cheek. “Leave it to you, sis. You’re the one in trouble, and you’re worried about other people.”

  “Give my regards to Ashanti, as well,” I said. “She might be the president of the Council of Landkind, but she’ll always be a fellow warrior to me.”

  “Tell her yourself when you get out of this mess.” Duke kissed my hand. A tear was rolling down his cheek, as well.

  We all fell silent then, caught in a moment frozen in time. It was the eye of a hurricane, a calm before the storm that was to come. Soon enough, it would sweep us all away, taking us far from this simple contact, this feeling of care and belonging.