Wanderers 3: Garden of The Gods (The Wanderers) Read online

  WANDERERS 3:

  GARDEN OF THE GODS

  RICHARD A BAMBERG

  Text Copyright © 2016 Richard A Bamberg

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States of America

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover art by RAVVEN (www.ravven.com)

  ISBN-13: 978-1540302243 (Verðandi Press)

  ISBN-10: 1540302245

  9876543210:

  DEDICATION

  This novel is dedicated to source of my love of reading: The Hale County Library, Greensboro, Alabama.

  CONTENTS

  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

  The End

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Rene’ and Robert, for their encouragement and their patience.

  Chapter 1

  Therese

  A hand clamped over my mouth rudely shattering my peaceful sleep. I sucked air in through my nose and simultaneously grabbed for the Colt .45 in my saddlebags. I seized the offending hand with my left and tried to push it away. Before my fingers could reach the comforting metal of the pistol, another hand clutched my wrist with an iron grip.

  My fingers felt thick cord wrapped around the wrist at my face. I recognized it immediately as the sling Rafe kept on his left wrist. That was when I noticed that I could no longer feel Rafe lying beside me. All this took but a second, and as my eyes opened, I could see a dark shape bending over me.

  “Shhh,” Rafe whispered. “Something’s coming, get ready.”

  Rafe’s hand moved from my mouth, and he released my wrist.

  I finished grabbing the Colt and then threw off the light blanket that had covered us. An overcast blotted out most of the stars. Our fire had gone out, but a few faint embers still glowed in the small fire pit.

  I rolled into a squatting position on Rafe’s right and moved my left hand until I felt the material of his leather jacket. A moment later, his right hand found mine. His mind knocked, and I opened mine to his quest. We meshed minds, auras, and emotions in less than a minute. With the meshing, I could see what he saw and hear what he heard. Rafe already had his enhanced senses spell active for immediately the copse we were camping in became nearly as bright as day.

  I listened with Rafe’s ears. Except for a distant truck on Highway 287 and the trickle of water in the Canadian River, the night was still.

  *What is it?* I asked through our mutual link.

  *My ward woke me. Someone is using offensive magic nearby.*

  Rafe had already generated a shield around us. It was invisible to normal sight, but through his enhanced senses, I could see the slight shimmer of power that surrounded us.

  Rafe was already wearing his leathers; jacket, pants, gloves, and of course boots.

  *Where’s Beast?* I asked. *I don’t see him.*

  *Still hunting,* Rafe said. *Holster the Colt and get into your leathers, you’ll need them. Then get your crossbow, you may get a chance to try it out.*

  He referred to the crossbow he’d taken off the Amazons who had tried to kill us a few days ago. The crossbow was a work of art with decorative scrollwork along its walnut stock, but the bolts made it special. The business ends of the bolts were some kind of magic metal that could penetrate a shield, even Rafe’s shield.

  Since our meshing was complete, I was able to release Rafe’s hand without losing our connection. I set Rafe’s Colt on the blanket and quickly slipped into my own boots, jacket, and gloves. We had slept clothed, wearing leather pants and flannel shirts. It was the first time since Rafe took me from the military hospital in San Antonio that we hadn’t been practically nude. We’d needed as much body contact as possible while he used a healing spell to regrow my amputated limbs. Rafe hadn’t kidnapped me, but he did convince me to leave in the middle of the night–wearing nothing but a hospital robe–on the back of his Harley-Davidson. Since then, my life had gone way past bizarre.

  I finished pulling my bootlaces tight just below my knees. Dressed for combat in my magically shielded leathers, I transferred the Colt–I didn’t really have a holster for it–to a back pocket. I picked up the elaborate crossbow. While meshed with Rafe I could see a shimmer around the crossbow. He’d put a glamour on it to make it look like a guitar (something a little less likely to draw curious eyes), but when we weren’t meshed to my eyes it still looked like a crossbow since we’d been meshed when he cast the spell. I put my boot (the one with the spectral foot) into the stirrup and pulled the cocking lever back until the string locked into place. Slinging the quiver over my shoulders, I notched a bolt, and waited.

  I didn’t have long to wait.

  A whooshing noise–it sounded something like a giant potato cannon–came from the direction Rafe was facing. The sky began to brighten. Three glowing red spheres of something arced up from the sparse trees on the south side of the Canadian River.

  Rafe raised his right arm, and a light glowed beneath his jacket cuff. I recognized the blue glow as being from his wind tattoo. He stood and pointed toward the spheres that were now falling toward us. Behind his shield, I couldn’t feel the wind, but suddenly the trees near us leaned as if a mighty gale was flowing down the river valley. The spheres began to move off target. They were going to miss us.

  The spheres hit about thirty feet to our left, and the earth erupted in a cacophony of noise and light. I flinched at the explosion. Earth and fire fountained into the sky, blotting out the stars until Rafe’s wind blew it clear of our position.

  “What was that?” I asked, speaking aloud since our attackers obviously knew our position.

  “I’m not sure, some kind of fireballs, but explosive. It’s not a spell I’m familiar with,” Rafe responded.

  “What now?”

  Rafe half turned and grinned at me. “We give them a chance to back off.”

  “You think they might?”

  “If they have any sense. They were hoping for surprise, but now they know we’re awake,” he shrugged. “We’ll find out in a minute.”

  It didn’t take a minute. There came more whooshes and a half dozen of the glowing spheres arced across the wide riverbed. This volley was more dispersed than the first three. Even I could see that Rafe’s wind trick wasn’t going to work like last time. If the wind blew from the west again, half of the spheres would move off target, but the other half would be blown toward us.

  Rafe raised his arm, and his j
acket cuff emitted a blue glow again. The trees began to bow, but this time, they bent toward the oncoming threat. At first, I didn’t get Rafe’s tactic, but then I saw that he had the wind flowing upward in a spiral at the center of the orbs path. The mini-cyclone pushed outward, and the explosive spheres began to move off target as they fell. I mentally calculated their trajectory and decided that some were going to hit a lot closer than last time. Another glow came from beneath Rafe’s jacket’s waistline. This glow was violet.

  Rafe pointed at the nearest of orbs, and it exploded in a flash of brilliance and a concussive wave that bent the nearby trees toward us.

  Before Rafe could fire another blast, the spheres impacted.

  I cringed, squinting my eyes closed against the blast, and half expected the shield to fail as our world became bright and oh so loud. I shouldn’t have worried, but I could feel the strain on Rafe as he poured energy into his shield. The ground quaked beneath us, and the shield lit up like the Fourth of July. Once again, I found myself at the center of an explosion. Having been maimed, disfigured, and–by the way–killed by in IED blast a few weeks earlier in Kandahar province; this was not something I wanted to experience again.

  My vision cleared, and we were still standing. My jaw muscles were so tight that I couldn’t talk. I looked at Rafe. My vision had narrowed down until it seemed like I was looking through a cardboard tube with Rafe at the center of a long tunnel.

  I had turned to Rafe expecting his normal flippant self, but his emotions were troubled, and I could tell the attacks had strained him.

  He started unwinding the cord from his left wrist.

  *Are you all right?* I asked. I had tried to ask it aloud but had to settle for thinking it across our meshing. Why was my jaw so tight? It was freaking me out. I’d never experienced anything like it before.

  *So far,* Rafe responded in like manner. *But I’m not up to par. It’s Loki’s talisman.*

  *What do you mean?* I asked, confused because the only function the talisman had was to augment a healing spell. That’s why my left hand had been regrown, and my right leg was complete nearly to my toes, not a bad recovery in barely a week.

  Rafe took an iron ball from his jacket and put it on the leather pad at the center of his sling. Immediately, he began to spin it vertically. Our protective shield winked out.

  “I made a mistake when I chose our camping site,” Rafe said as he released one end of the sling. The iron ball shot into the sky and an instant later, our shield snapped back into place. “The lack of a nearby ley line meant that the amulet’s effect on the healing spell drained me faster than I could recharge. I’m not up to full strength.”

  “Can I help?” I asked. I doubted there was much I could do. I’d learned a little magic in the last week since becoming Raphael Semmes’s apprentice, but not near enough to help him.

  Rafe raised his left hand and formed a Cub Scout salute. Through his enhanced sight, I saw bolts of magical energy shoot from the ground and strike the iron ball. It glowed as it rose into the sky. The missile moved off toward our left as Rafe’s wind continued to blow. Then I saw the missile changing direction to be more vertical.

  “Give me your hand,” Rafe ordered.

  I stepped closer and took his right hand in my left. I felt the energy flowing toward him from the earth and then I felt my own stored energy start to flow through our joined hands. The pull was shocking, like someone had sucked all the strength from my muscles. I gripped his hand tightly as my knees momentarily weakened. Then I began pulling energy into myself from our surroundings. One of the first things Rafe taught me was that the ley lines could restore a Wanderer’s magical energy almost as fast as one of us could expend it, but without one, the available energy was only a trickle of what you could draw from a ley line. He explained it as the difference in a 12-volt car battery and a high voltage line.

  I could feel myself getting weaker. Not physically, nothing so mundane as that, but Wanderers store great quantities of energy in their life force, and Rafe was draining mine faster than I could restore it.

  “That’s better,” Rafe said after a minute. “Here they come. When they reach the center of the riverbed, let go of my hand and pick out whatever targets you choose.

  *Got it, Boss,* I responded. I still couldn’t get my jaw muscles to relax.

  I took a deep breath and wondered just what those targets would look like. Rafe had shown me some strange things in the short time we had been together.

  The rough growth of shrubbery and stunted trees on the south side of the river parted in a dozen places. A group of what looked like horses leapt from the bank to the riverbed. As they neared, I realized what I had assumed were horses were six-legged, green, and resembled praying mantises, except they were at least eight feet tall and had ape-like creatures riding them.

  Frak!

  Rafe released my hand. His shield morphed from a hemisphere above us to a wall between our attackers and us. The wall was just low enough for me to fire over. I raised the crossbow to my shoulder and sighted in on the right-most ape thingy. As the line of attackers reached the center of the riverbed some thirty yards from us, they hit the shallow river, and their charge slowed.

  I fired.

  My bolt flew almost straight, but I had undercompensated for the downhill drop, and the bolt struck the mantis creature in the throat. The creature crashed head first into the water, spilling its rider. I dropped the front of the crossbow to the ground, braced my right foot in the stirrup, and pulled hard on the cocking lever.

  Lightning tore from the sky and highlighted the two left-most attackers. As I slipped another bolt from the quiver and notched it, I saw Rafe still holding his left fist overhead. For a moment, his lightning tattoo faded, then it glowed golden again, and another lightning bolt tore into two more of the creatures in the water.

  Raising my crossbow, I sighted on another target and allowed a little more adjustment for drop. My second target was just reaching dry ground when my bolt smacked into the center of its chest. Crossbow bolts normally don’t have the knockdown power of a rifle bullet, but that creature fell back off his ride as if it had taken a fifty cal to the chest.

  Bolts of energy lanced out from four of the apes and struck Rafe’s shield. I felt him strain as he pushed more power into it. There were at least five of the creatures still riding up the riverbank toward us, and all five were casting some kind of magic our way.

  I cocked the crossbow again and loaded another bolt. I wondered if Rafe was using this as another training exercise for me or if he were really trying his best. I’d learned that he’s not the type to–in military jargon–go nuke early. If he can best a foe with a baton, he won’t use a grenade. Not me, given everything I’d been through, I’m more likely to use the grenade first.

  The sky brightened as Rafe’s meteor flashed down to impact in the midst of the riders, now not twenty yards from us.

  The earth heaved beneath us, and I almost lost my balance. The explosion threw dirt, body parts, gore, and ichor over the top of Rafe’s shield. I felt myself trembling. It was too many explosions. I dropped the crossbow and sat down hard. My hands shook too badly to hold onto anything. I told myself to get up and fight, but my limbs refused to respond.

  Chapter 2

  Raphael

  My jim-dandy little meteor did the trick at taking out most of our remaining attackers. A few of the creatures, I’ve never encountered anything quite like either the four-armed apes or their praying mantis mounts, still moved, but none were rising. I bent and drew my knife from its boot sheath. I focused a little energy, and it flashed from a tantō shape into its original katana form. I started down the riverbank to put the surviving creatures out of their misery.

  I’d taken about a dozen steps when one of the apes leapt from the brush on my right with some kind of blunt weapon raised over its head. In my enhanced vision, the weapon glowed with a strong red light. Whatever it was, it held powerful magic. I moved my shield to in
tercept its swing and pulled the shield’s shape into a tight circle to concentrate its energy. At the same time, I triggered an energy blast at the ape’s legs.

  Its weapon rang my shield like a giant bell, but my shield held. My energy blast cut the creature’s legs out from under it. Before it could rise, I closed the distance and drove my sword through its chest. It screeched in pain and released its own weapon to grip my sword’s blade in two of its hands. At the same time, its other pair of hands reached for me. I triggered my chiller tat and then focused on the amplification spell etched into the sword’s tang. In an instant, frost formed along the blade and spread down the ape’s arms and chest. I held my focus on the tat until the creature was frozen solid.

  When I tried to pull my sword free, I found I couldn’t break the creature’s frozen grip.

  Frowning, I triggered my energy blast tat again. The ape’s body shattered into shards, and the blade came free in my hands.

  Turning from the rather gross remains, I made quick work of dispatching the few apes that still survived.

  I was wiping my blade clean on the last of the apes when I stopped.

  Something was wrong with my apprentice. She had dropped out of our meshing. I glanced up the riverbank toward our campsite and saw Tess sitting on the ground. I put my sword back into tantō shape and sheathed it. I applied energy to my levitation tat and to my muscles and leapt up the bank. Landing beside her, I knelt. Tess’s eyes were wild, and her body shook as if someone had hit her with a Taser.

  “Tess?” I asked, hesitantly.

  She didn’t reply or even acknowledge my presence.

  Ah, hell. It must be a reaction to the explosions. Her first death on the battlefields of Afghanistan a few weeks ago was due to an explosive device. I knew little about PTSD and nothing about how to treat it.