Earthbreaker
Gaia Charmer, World Warrior Book 2
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
Epilogue
About the Author
Special Preview: Earthtaker
EARTHBREAKER:
GAIA CHARMER, WORLD WARRIOR BOOK 2
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
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Earthtaker
Six Fantasy Stories Volume 1
Six Fantasy Stories Volume 2
Six Superhero Stories
1
You might not believe this, but I was running away. It was pouring down rain, I was soaked to the skin, and the woman chasing me through the night was cranking off shots with a semi-automatic assault rifle.
And I, Gaia Charmer, was running away. Which meant Mother Earth herself was running away.
Because, in case you didn't know, Gaia Charmer is Mother Earth in human form. For real.
Not that Crystal Ruby Hayes, the numbnuts with the rifle, knew all that. All she knew was that some petite blonde in her twenties with a pleated braid slung over one shoulder had just torn up the road in front of her SUV and taken off with the bundle that Crystal had stolen days ago from a rest stop along the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
A bundle that needed its diaper changed immediately.
"Easy, kid," I said as the child bawled its lungs out. "I'll take care of you."
It was true. Even as Crystal fired round after round, I deflected them with a shower of rocks cast up from the ground behind me. Earth avatar that I am, I could sense every bullet's approach and fling up any part of the ground to make it ricochet harmlessly away. Not a single shell came anywhere near brushing my brown leather jacket.
But baby Mary Lou Robbins still wasn't in the clear, which was why I was running. Sprinting into the woods off the side of the road, I turned a portion of my senses forward, searching for the perfect deposit of local granite. It wasn't far, and I picked up my pace, even as Crystal kept shooting and running faster in my wake, gaining on me.
I reached out with my mind, drawing on the vast well of power within me. The granite responded, wrenching itself from under the surface to hang in the air ahead of us.
The baby shrieked in my arms as I ran even faster, calling the granite to me. The chunks and slabs swam up and swirled around me, shaping themselves into a protective shell.
When they were done, Mary Lou and I were encased in rubble, the only opening a narrow slit at eye level.
Bullets peppered our stone armor, pinging and zinging in all directions. Nothing could penetrate that granite hide, though.
"What the hell is that?" snapped Crystal, continuing to shoot. "Get outta there!"
My answer was to extend my mind beyond the shell, scoop up a pile of mud, and heave it at Crystal. She howled with rage as the mud splattered all over her, knocking her back a step and stopping the gunfire at least for a moment.
It was enough time for me to gather more mud and rocks and fling them at Crystal in another barrage. She fought to keep her feet and advanced through sheer force of will, bucking the tide of mud and stone.
Lightning flared and thunder boomed as I put the stone suit in motion. The legs of fused rubble bent at my command, marching me toward Crystal even as I pelted her with the hardest pebbles and shards of rock I could find.
"Give me the baby!" she shouted, cranking off a few last rounds as the storm of earth became too much for her. "She's mine!"
Not a chance. Lightning flashed as I hurled the biggest mass yet of stone and soil, this time blowing the rifle from Crystal's grip and driving her to her knees.
Stomping over, I pulled back one powerful arm of the stone suit and lashed out, splaying Crystal unconscious in the mud. Her still form was blasted by the rain, illuminated by the flickering glow of lightning.
Soon enough, red and blue lights flashed over her, too, coming from the direction of the road beyond the woods. I knew it meant a police cruiser had arrived, and I smiled.
My partner was about to join us.
2
I released the granite shell, letting it fall to pieces around me. By the time Sheriff Dale Briar appeared through the trees, I was standing amid the rubble with no protection from the pouring rain, cradling little Mary Lou in my arms.
"Look who I found." I smiled down at the wailing baby. "She's had quite an adventure."
"Great work, Gaia." Briar wasn't surprised that I took care of this single-handedly. As my boyfriend, he knows quite well what I can do when I put my Mother Earth mind to it. "What about the abductor?" He waved his rifle at Crystal, who was half-buried under mud and rock between us.
"She's fine." I reached out with one hand and channeled power through my fingers, moving the worst of the debris off Crystal's body.
Briar spotted her rifle a few yards away, sticking out of a big clump of muck, and grabbed it. "Charmer Investigations does it again. The bad guys can't win as long as we've got the world on our side."
Just then, cop car sirens screamed in the distance, racing nearer.
"The Staties are coming, and the F.B.I. won’t be far behind." Briar leaned the rifles against a tree and proceeded to cuff Crystal, who was lying on her stomach. "You want to get your story straight with the baby?"
"She won't rat me out, will you, sweetie?" I tickled Mary Lou's chin, and she stopped crying. "You won't tell the State Police about the suit made of stone, will you?"
Briar grinned at me. "You're great with kids, Gaia. Maybe because you're Mother Earth and all that."
"Maybe so, but this one stinks right now." I held her out as if I wanted him to take her. "Seriously! Try being stuck in a stone shell with limited ventilation and that toxic diaper sometime."
The sirens closed in, and multiple flashing lights splashed the woods where we stood. Briar tromped through the muck to give me a quick kiss, his nose wrinkling at the stench of the loaded diaper.
"You weren't kidding!" He waved at the fumes but took the child from me anyway.
Car doors opened, and cop boots scuffed on gravel. The Staties would be here at any moment.
Heart pounding, I stole a kiss from him anyway. There was no denying we made a great team.
So what if one of us is the human avatar of an entire planet, equipped with powers beyond those of any normal mortal woman or man? At least he could say I was his whole world and totally mean it, right?
"Are you sure you don't want me to make myself scarce?" I asked. "This is the third time in a month I've helped with a case. What if they start saying you can't solve a crime without your girlfriend?"
"They already say that." Briar grinned and rocked the baby in his arms. "And guess how many shits I give?"
"None?"
He laughed. "As long as the bad guys get caught, I'm happy. I couldn't be prouder that it's you doing the catching."
"Thanks, honey." I smiled and straightened as the Staties pushed closer through the brush. "The feeling's mutual."
"I love you, Gaia Charmer." Briar winked and walked with the baby toward the onrushing Staties.
Watching him go, I experienced a rush of strong emotion. We’d been seeing each other for six months, ever since we’d worked together to defeat the Groundswell organization and the dark force behind it, Atlantis (the guiding force of the ancient sunken continent).
My relationship with Briar had kept me balanced in the wake of Groundswell, which had been a difficult time for me. It isn’t every day you find out you’re not just a private eye with the power to control rock and stone—you’re the personification of Mother Earth herself.
Being with Briar had kept me happy all those months, had enabled me to keep on living a normal life in spite of the revelations about my true nature. He was my first real love, and being with him fulfilled me—though it was true, I sometimes felt guilty for not exploring my Mother Earth heritage more. As the walking heart and soul of the world, I probably should have been fighting climate change or something...but there would be time for that later, I kept telling myself.
Never mind that one friend in particular—Phaola, a nymph who’d helped me fight Groundswell and gone on to become the Landkind known as the Lady of the Alleghenies—had called bullshit on my attitude. More than once, she’d pushed me to step up and make more of an effort to fulfill my duties as Mother Earth. They’re killing you, she’d said. Stop pretending you’re one of them.
Phaola’s words went in one ear and out the other. Whatever my connection to the Earth, I felt totally human and driven by my heart.
"Hold your fire," Briar told the Staties. "The hostage is safe, and the suspect is secure."
The rain was finally slowing as Briar and the three Staties talked. It had mostly let up by the time the two F.B.I. agents got there.
“Gaia, this is Agent Frank Wagner.” Briar gestured at the shorter of the two, a dark-haired man in his forties or so with a grim smile on his hollow-cheeked face. “I’ve known him a long time.”
“Good to meet you, Gaia.” Frank’s handshake was firm and steady. “Dale’s told me a lot about you.”
His partner, a fit young woman with long, blonde hair, stepped in with a handshake of her own. “Agent Judy Lewis,” she said. “And you’re some kind of law enforcement, I take it?”
“Consulting detective,” I told her.
“Gaia should be on the force,” said Briar. “She’s that good. She’s the one who brought down the abductor and saved the child.”
“In that case, well done.” Frank gave her a little bow. “If you’re good enough to save a life and stop a menace to society, you’re good enough for me.”
Judy frowned. “You did all that yourself?” She looked around at the rubble and disrupted muck with Crystal’s inert form in the middle of it.
“I had a little help, actually,” I told her. “Crystal kept making stupid-ass mistakes.”
Frank chuckled. “Well, Briar here better watch out. Judy and I might just have to recruit you ourselves! We’re always looking for people like you.”
“I might just consider an offer like that,” I said. “Unless a certain sheriff I know finally gives me a pay raise.”
“God knows you deserve it.” Briar smiled. “But your hourly rate is already higher than what they pay me!”
Everyone laughed. Mary Lou wailed as if she had something of her own to say, and they all laughed harder.
That was pretty much the end of the fun. As the laughter faded, paramedics raced to the scene in an ambulance and whisked away Mary Lou to give her a thorough exam. That left me to move on to the next phase of the evening’s entertainment—telling the F.B.I. and Staties my version of the facts.
It felt like I did it at least a dozen times, going over everything that had happened—leaving out the dirt and rock manipulation, of course. I didn’t talk about the stone suit, either, or anything else that might have given away my secrets. To hear me tell it, my apprehension of Crystal had been strictly a manual takedown, a triumph of physical strength and endurance on my part.
I spun a good yarn, I thought, and got through it without arousing suspicion about my extra earthiness...but the questioning still took a toll on my mood. By the time we were done, I was no longer the chipper self who’d joked around mere moments ago. My mood had taken a decidedly dark turn.
Not that such a turn was at all uncommon for me. Have I mentioned I'm bipolar? I know, it figures. And I try to take away the moods' power over me by giving them silly nicknames.
Let's just say the mood I was in just then was more like "Sinking Fast" than "Smooth Sailing."
3
The next morning was sunny and warm in downtown Confluence, Pennsylvania as I entered the office where I ran my two businesses—Charmer Investigations and Cruel World Travel. As I walked in, the chime on the door played a few bars of the classic song "Caravan," just like always, though it wasn't a song I'd picked out.
The blame for that belonged to my partner, Duke, who looked back at me over the local newspaper from one of the three desks occupying the front room. Duke's the one who wrote that song, in a way, since he's a golem, a creature of the Earth possessed by the spirit of a certain famous bandleader with the last name Ellington.
I don't keep him around for his musical skills, though. He’s my moon—a helper who keeps me from spinning out of control. There's nobody in the world who knows me better, not even Briar—nobody who can manage me better.
Not to mention, he makes the best coffee anywhere...though for once, he didn't have a cup waiting when I strolled in.
That instantly put me on edge. "What's wrong with this picture?" Scowling, I marched over to my desk, picked up the empty mug there (the one with a cartoon image of the Earth on its face, grinning and giving a thumbs-up sign) and turned it upside-down. Nothing came out.
Duke shrugged. "You'll have to talk to the new girl about that, Earth Angel." He turned a page of the newspaper and continued reading through his gold-rimmed spectacles. "Coffee-making is no longer my bag."
"New girl?" He and I were alone in the room. "What new girl?"
"Hello."
At the sound of the stranger's voice, I whirled to see a young woman emerge from the doorway leading to the back room. She was short and stocky, with pale gray eyes and platinum hair that fell in a springy bob to her shoulders. Even dressed casually in a gray-and-white sweater and black jeans, she had a striking look.
"What's going on here?" For the moment, I ignored the girl and spoke only to Duke. "What exactly is this all about?"
Duke pointed at the side of his head. "My sanity, that's what. And our success."
"Very good to meet you, Ms. Charmer." The new girl extended a hand.
I stuck out a single upraised index finger, putting her off. "Duke, I am not in a great mood this morning..."
Duke smirked. "Now there's a surprise."
"...so how about cutting the crap? What's the story?"
"You've been making headlines." Duke held up the newspaper, which had a photo of me with the rescued baby on the front page. "As a result of the positive publicity, people want to do busines
s with you more than ever. That's wonderful, yes? But not so much for your poor partner, good Sir Duke...especially since you've been out running around getting that fine publicity all the time."
"It's paid work," I said. "Would you rather I didn't take cases and just focused on the travel agency?"
"That's not what I said or meant, my dear," said Duke. "The simple fact is, while you've been taking care of the field work, I've been left to handle everything else—and it has gotten the better of me. I know I look young..." He didn't, really; he looked like he was 75, which had been his age on the day he died. "...but I am no longer in my prime in some ways. Realizing I desperately needed help, I prepared to run an ad in the local paper—but before I could place the order, this flower of efficiency walked through the door, looking for work."
When I glanced back at the new girl, she nodded enthusiastically.
"I daresay, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Duke chuckled. "And now, if you'll allow me to make the introductions? Gaia, meet Luna. Luna, meet Gaia."
"Great to meet you, Gaia," she said, again sticking out her hand.
Instead of shaking it, I turned my full attention on Duke. "As partners, I thought we had to agree on all major decisions, including hires."
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