Free The Wizard of Time (Book 1) by G.L. Breedon Page A

image of where and when you want to go.”
    Blackness descended, and then blinding white light seared through his brain. When it ceased, Gabriel opened his eyes to see that he stood on a beach several hundred feet away from the water, near an overhanging bank of long grass. A woman sat near the water reading a book under an umbrella. She wore a full bathing suit of black with a bit of skirt around the waist. He thought he might have seen something like it in an old movie that took place in the 1920s. Ohin laughed. Gabriel looked up to see a wide, white-toothed smile spread across his mentor’s face.
    “What’d I do wrong?” Gabriel asked, trying to figure out what the source of Ohin’s amusement might be.
    “Wrong!” Ohin said. “Who said anything about wrong? That was brilliant.” He slapped Gabriel on the back. Ohin’s clothes shimmered and he suddenly wore loose cotton pants, a white cotton shirt, and suspenders.
    “Really?” Gabriel asked. He focused on the amulet at his neck for a moment and his appearance changed, as well.
    “Yes,” Ohin said. “I didn’t bring us here, you did. One second I’m talking to you, sensing how you’re manipulating the energy, and the next thing we’re standing here.”
    “So I did it right?” Gabriel asked.
    “Not just right,” Ohin said. “Perfect. You even moved us away from the book so we wouldn’t pop into someone’s view.” That was true now that Gabriel thought back. He had sensed the presence of the woman and willed himself to move away from it. “I’ve never heard of something like it before,” Ohin said.
    “What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.
    “No one has ever made a second jump all on their own,” Ohin said. “It usually takes weeks for an apprentice to learn how to jump under their own power. Sometimes months. You must be a prodigy.”
    Gabriel didn’t know what to say. All he could think to do was smile back at Ohin and laugh along. Him. A prodigy. Of Time Magic. That was too crazy to think about. And wonderful. He couldn’t wait to tell...Well, the people he really wanted to tell he couldn’t. Even if he could find them in time, he couldn’t talk to them. But he could tell Teresa. And Sema and Ling. And Marcus and Rajan. He could tell them.
     “Well,” Ohin said, “Now that you’ve done it once, let’s see if it was a fluke. This time, I want to see if you can take us to a particular moment in time. I happen to know that on August 7th in 1960, this book was in the satchel of a young man watching the movie version of the novel at his local theater. See if you can take us there.”
    Gabriel nodded and brought his attention back to the book and the necklace of seashells. He could not sense a distinct day or year, but the image of a movie theater flashed through his mind. Moments later, at least moments from their perspective, Gabriel and Ohin stood at the back of the balcony of a large movie theater. He recognized the movie projected on the screen immediately. Director and producer, George Pal’s adaptation of The Time Machine . He had stayed up late one Saturday night a year ago and watched it with his father. His father was an even bigger fan of science fiction than he was. It made him smile to remember it. He also smiled because he had just made his second jump through time alone and gotten it right. He grinned up at Ohin, who grinned back.
    They jumped back and forth along the Continuum three more times. First to 1968 in San Francisco when the book was in the pocket of a young hippie dancing in Golden Gate Park. Then back to 1943 when it was in the knapsack of a pilot getting ready to take off for a bombing run across the English Channel. And finally to a bookstore shelf in Manhattan in 2006. The last thing Ohin showed Gabriel was how to move through space, jumping from one end of an empty aisle of books to the other. A Time Mage, Ohin explained, could move through any distance of space as long as they could see where they were going