Fire Sorcerer (The Sentinels Book 1)
Page 1
Table of Contents
Fire Sorcerer
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
Further Information
Author’s Note
COPYRIGHT
Fire Sorcerer
The Sentinels Book 1
Copyright © 2016 by David J. Normoyle
My name is Rune, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s not to play with fire. Magical or otherwise.
The first time I used my power, I wound up burning down a mansion. The second time, an inter-dimensional elemental possessed my friend Jo. Now, with a sorcerer and a gang of werebeasts helping the elemental which is consuming Jo’s soul, I’ll have to use my magic once more.
Third time’s the charm, right?
~
Sign up to the author’s mailing list to get a prequel to Fire Sorcerer, plus prequels to two other series: http://davidjnormoyle.com/sent-readers-list/
Chapter 1
Monday 20:35
The unasked questions hung over our dinner like a bad smell.
We hadn’t bothered to pull out the table, instead spreading two pizza boxes between us. I lay sprawled across the floor, and Alex sat cross-legged opposite, shooting me occasional glares. Jo sat perched on the corner of her bed a few yards away. We took turns selecting cold pizza slices. The Texas barbecue pizza was warmer than the pepperoni one, and the smell of barbecue sauce wafted through the room.
“How about a board game after dinner?” Jo suggested. Fourteen, with perpetually tangled gray-brown hair, she disliked conflict, and the tension between Alex and me had made her noticeably uncomfortable.
Alex was a year older than his sister and had recently started overusing hair gel. He snorted. “So you can beat us again?”
I smiled at that. She did beat us embarrassingly often. We didn’t have a full set of any one game, forcing us to mix and match and improvise. Alex and I would argue over the rules, and Jo would just figure out strategies to take advantage of whichever rules we finally decided on.
“What about if we play some soccer?” I nodded toward the yellow indoor soccer ball in the corner. “Just the three of us. Jo in goals, and Alex and I can go one on one.”
“Great idea, Rune.” Jo stood and moved toward the window. “I’ll close the shutters.”
The single large attic room was our living room, kitchen, indoor soccer arena, bedroom, games room, and artist studio—a non-adult zone where fun always took priority over worry about breakages.
“It’s too late.” Alex chewed on a mouthful of pizza, his shoulders hunched over. “There’ll be complaints.”
I knew that Alex couldn’t give a fig about complaints. He clearly didn’t want the atmosphere to thaw, preferring to stay angry.
Jo’s hand paused at the window shutter, then she sighed and went to her bed and threw herself on it. She clicked open her laptop.
I went over to my side of the room. “I’ve got some improvements on my motherboards to do.”
“Yeah, go work on your art.” Alex put as much derision into the word art as he could.
I ignored his attempt to start a fight and plugged in the soldering iron. We lived on the attic floor of an old building, number 102 Fenster Street, affectionately known as Ten-two. The ownership of the building was unclear, and enterprising squatters had taken over the running of it. Alex, Jo and I had lived there for ten months, good months—the best of my short life, at least. I was the breadwinner and technically the parent, but decisions usually evolved out of arguments between Alex and me.
When we’d first moved in, the place had barely been habitable. The roof needed to be fixed. Then we’d battled quarrelsome rodents who felt they’d resided long enough to earn squatter’s rights. Eventually, we turned the space into something uniquely our own. In the process we’d created one of the strangest rooms one could imagine.
Alex, Jo and I had wildly different tastes, and we’d quickly given up on the idea of comprise regarding decoration, instead dividing the room into sections.
The front of the room was dominated by two large sloped windows, and below them we’d built small shelving for food and other common items.
The back was given to me. A small desk sat at the foot of my bed, and on the walls hung a jigsaw of modified computer motherboards.
A peek into the artwork of our future robot overlords, Jo had once declared. Alex called it trash glued to a wall, but he couldn’t talk. His wall, on the opposite side of the door, was decorated with neon slogans and bar names, clearly all stolen. I insisted that the signs be switched off.
Jo’s bed was to the left of the door. Above her bed hung posters of inspirational figures from history along with some of their quotations, which had been lovingly formed out of letters cut out of old magazines. It was impossible not to love a teen girl whose idols were Mahatma Gandhi, Theodore Roosevelt, and Steve Jobs rather than the latest pop boy band.
I took an old motherboard from under my bed, put it on the desk, sat down and got to work. I blew the dust off, then touched the nib of the soldering iron to the bottom of the uglier components and pulled them off. In their place I added a few resistors and capacitors. I held it up to the light, then studied the other motherboards above my desk before deciding I needed to cut off the top left corner.
A yawn struggled its way up my throat, telling me to save that work for another night. “Ready for lights out?” I asked.
Alex’s reply was to switch on his bedside lamp. He was reading Atlas Shrugged. More evidence, if any was needed, that there was something wrong with the boy. I didn’t read much, but if I did, it would be proper books like Harry Potter or Hunger Games, not philosophical garbage.
“Go ahead.” Jo put her laptop aside.
I clicked off the lights, undressed and climbed under the covers.
“Fat tights, Rune,” Jo said.
Jo came up with a new phrase each night, never failing to put a smile on my lips with her choice. “Fat tights, Jo.”
“Fat tights, Alex,” Jo said.
Silence.
“Fat tights, Alex,” Jo repeated, a pleading note in her voice.
Alex sighed. “Fat tights, Jo.”
I expelled a breath. I wasn’t sure why it should be so important for Alex to reply, but it was. Alex and I made most of the noise around the place, but Jo was the glue that kept us together.
I turned onto my side toward the wall, tucked the blanket under my arm and closed my eyes.
Usually once a yawn tells me I’m tired, I can nod off the moment my head hits the pillow, but this time sleep wouldn’t come. I tossed back and forth, grumbling to myself. Even now, with Alex reading quietly on the other side of the room, I could feel the t
ension between us. Beelzebub.
I threw off my blanket, put my pants back on and got up. “Ask your damn questions.” I clicked the main lights back on.
“Huh?” Alex placed his book face down on the bed.
“Come on. You want to ask me something. I can feel it.” I suspected I knew what it would be about, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to lie too much.
Alex rolled off his bed and into a standing position. “What’s the point if you won’t ever tell us anything new?”
“How many times do I have to say it? I don’t know anything.”
Alex snorted. “Right.”
“Hear him out, Alex,” Jo said. “Rune said he’d answer questions.”
“Fine,” Alex said. “Let’s start out by talking about what Red White and True has been saying.”
“Red White and Who?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“Come on, everyone’s talking about it,” Alex said. “Don’t pretend you haven’t heard anything.”
“I haven’t. Is it to do with something supernatural?” I made a point of tuning out anything to do with magic. I knew enough to stay away from that.
“It’s a Twitter handle,” Jo said. “At RedWhiteandTrue55.”
“And?”
“Whoever is behind the account has made allegations that both the Whites and Reds are run by supernaturals, by shades,” Alex said.
The Whites and the Reds were the two big criminal gangs in Lusteer, and I could see why the reveals of that Twitter handle would get Alex riled up. Ten months ago, Alex and Jo’s father, John Collier, had written an article called “Crime Gangs Making Use of Supernatural Enforcers”. John and his wife had died in a fire just before the article was published.
“People on Twitter are usually full of it, what’s the big deal?” I asked.
“He knows things that make people think he’s an insider in one of the gangs. Probably the Reds.”
“Sounds like whoever owns that Twitter handle is opening himself up for a world of danger.”
“He’s anonymous,” Alex said. “Not even Jo could hack the account to figure out who he is.”
Jo was tucked against the corner of her bed with her pillow behind her back.
“If Jo can’t, then no one can.” I smiled across at her, and got a weak smile in return. I worked with computers for my job, and I was better than 99.9% of the population, yet compared to her, I was still learning chopsticks and she was Mozart. “Wait a minute, why was Jo trying to hack this account? I thought we agreed to be sensible.”
Alex strode across the room to stand in front of me. “We agreed to delete our father’s article about shades. Do you think I can just forget? Forgive the person who caused Dad and Mom to burn alive?” He clenched his fists by his sides.
I should have stayed tossing and turning in my bed. Better to endure the tension than having to look at Alex’s pain-filled face and hear Jo’s muttering as she rocked gently back and forth.
“We know who did it and he’s in jail,” I said. “Sammy Williams was sent to your parents’ house that night. He was arrested.”
“Yeah. What happened to his trial?”
I shrugged. “I’m sure it will happen.”
“Do you know what RedWhiteandTrue said about him?”
The note of accusation in his voice made me feel defensive. “How would I know? I never heard of that Twitter handle until you mentioned it a few moments ago.”
“So you would be surprised to hear he was a shade?”
I opened my mouth to reply, and nothing came out. I realized I should act surprised, but the moment’s hesitation meant it wouldn’t be believable. So I said nothing.
Alex was watching me closely. “I knew it.” He glared at Jo. “Didn’t I tell you he knew more than he was telling us?” He walked closer and pounded a fist down on my desk. The motherboard I had been working on hopped, and several components rolled onto the floor.
“Hey!” I shouted.
“Do you know how frustrating it is to be trying to investigate your parents’ murder, hit brick wall after brick wall and know that there’s an eye witness living with you who is hiding information?” Alex shouted. “Do you?”
Normally when Alex and I argued, I shouted back as loud as him. This time I replied softly, “I don’t know what that’s like.” I had my own pain but it couldn’t match Alex’s and Jo’s. They had seen their house burn down in front of their eyes with their parents inside.
“Then why don’t you tell the truth?”
That I couldn’t do. I had to tell him something though. “I saw a beast that night. I wasn’t sure it was Williams.” I shrugged. “How do you reveal something like that without seeming crazy?”
The night of the fire had been just before I’d found out about Ten-two. At the time, I’d been homeless and using a treehouse on the Collier grounds for shelter.
“So you told no one?” Alex asked. “Not the cop who was first on the scene? What was his name again?”
Clearly Alex knew the cop’s name and was fishing, trying to catch me out again. “Duffy,” I said. “Connor Duffy. Why?”
“The Twitter handle has something to say about him too.”
“He’s well known to be bent as a pile of right angles. What does this RedWhiteandTrue have to say about him?”
“Just that,” Alex said. “He’s apparently on the payroll of the gangs and has been for years.”
Duffy was one of the few who knew what really happened that night. I didn’t want Alex asking him too many questions. “He’s a dangerous man, I’ve been told.”
“What did it look like?” Jo asked.
“What did what look like?” I asked.
“The beast?” she asked.
“It was dark.”
“Can’t you answer anything straight?” Alex’s voice rose.
“I’m getting to it, give me a second. It’s a memory I usually shy away from. The beast had a large snout, thick chest and long arms and legs. Hair and torn scraps of clothing covered its body. It could move fast. Too fast.”
Jo shivered. “What are we dealing with?”
“According to the Twitter handle, shades are coming more into the open,” Alex said. “Most people want to pretend they don’t exist, but that will soon be impossible. Some shades are shifters, others can do magic.”
Magic. It was my turn to shiver. “I don’t want anything to do with all that. If you were wise, you two would do the same.”
“I don’t want your damn wisdom,” Alex said. “I want to know what happened that night. A wolf shifter, a bent cop, the fire. There’s more to the story, I know it. And you were up in the treehouse, watching it all.”
“I told you what I know. Fat tights.” I went to the door, threw it open and stormed out. In the hallway, I paused to calm down, then descended the two flights of stairs to ground level.
Ten months of happiness was about to be blown by that Twitter handle, whoever owned it. But more than that, Alex’s investigations could put us all in serious danger. And I had no idea how to convince him to stop.
If it had been my parents, would I stop searching for the truth?
Chapter 2
Monday 22:50
I walked into the living room where half a dozen pizza boxes were strewn about, most of them with several slices left uneaten. Pete was watching the first Harry Potter movie.
He turned when I entered, then returned his attention to the big screen TV. “Dude. Is this not the best movie ever?”
“That or Citizen Kane.” I hadn’t watched Citizen Kane, but knew it was a movie that old fogies thought was good.
“Haven’t seen it. That’s the movie where Hugh Jackman slays zillions of demons, right?”
“Something like that.” The star of Solomon Kane wasn’t even Jackman. I glanced around the room, noticing that someone I didn’t recognize was asleep in an armchair. I took a seat on the couch. “Where’s Tyler?”
Tyler and Pete were the ones who ran Ten-two, which in
their case meant they smoked pot and watched movies while the place disintegrated around them.
“Tyler?” Pete looked around and seemed surprised Tyler wasn’t there. “He’s around somewhere.”
Some people had trouble telling Pete and Tyler apart as they both had long brown hair and straggly beards, continually smoked pot and loved conspiracy theories. But after several months living in Ten-two, I had stopped having that problem. Tyler was the one who always wore purple crocs, and Pete was the one who had whole conversations in movie quotations.
“Someone was looking for you.” Pete didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
“Who?” I had few friends, and even fewer people knew where I lived.
“Some guy on a motorcycle. Actually, it might have been a woman. He didn’t take off his helmet, and he had a soft voice.”
“When was this? What did you tell them?”
“Last week. You were at work so I told him you weren’t here.”
“So by telling them I wasn’t here, you confirmed that I live here?”
Pete shrugged. “You never said you were in hiding.”
“You don’t have to be in hiding not to want to be found.” I didn’t have any clue who it could be, but, to my mind, the less attention the better.
We lapsed into silence for a few moments. I wasn’t ready to go to bed yet. On screen, Hogwarts letters were flying around the living room at Number Four, Privet Drive. “The Dursleys get an undeserved rap,” I said. “They weren’t so bad.” The best way to have a conversation with Pete was to talk about a movie.
“Dude,” he said.
I wasn’t fluent in dude, but had learned to speak it a bit. This particular “dude” meant “don’t be ridiculous”.
“Putting him in the closet wasn’t the best parenting, I’ll admit,” I said. “But trying to keep him out of Hogwarts had merit. Think about it, an old dude wants to take eleven year olds to a creepy dangerous castle so he can make them try to defeat a monstrous villain. Surely the Dursleys aren’t the only parents who wouldn’t want that.”
“They weren’t Harry’s parents,” Pete said.
“It was up to them to take care of Harry. Mr. Dursley rowed his whole family to an island to try and save Harry from going to a school where Harry nearly gets killed a bajillion times. That’s dedicated parenting if you ask me.”