Impervious (City of Eldrich Book 1) (23 page)

Chapter 40

T
he
y went back
in the house. Russ started rounding up dinner for the troops and Meaghan went to find John.

John and Meaghan’s not-so-romantic interlude on the porch had kept her from asking the questions she had for him. Meaghan still needed the information, but first she needed to apologize. Not for her doubts about his ability to stay sober, she still had those, but for her abruptness in how she conveyed them.

If someone was driven to drink by a terrible grief, by a devastating upheaval in his life, could healing that emotional wound, could finding the forgiveness he so desperately needed, be enough to give him the strength to stop drinking? Was there a difference, she wondered, between someone who drank too much because even one drink was too many, and someone who drank too much because the pain was simply too great to bear without it?

Could she really equate John, the deposed king who’d had his family, throne, and pride all stripped from him, who’d endured days of torture, with Greg, the heavy-fisted lunkhead who drank too much because it was the most interesting thing he knew how to do?

And then there was Matthew. He drank because he thought he was losing his mind. He drank because he’d lost his family. Because his wife couldn’t accept what she saw happening to him.

Meaghan had always treated alcoholism like a one-size-fits-all malady. If Greg couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stick with sobriety, then that meant no one could. But her father had. He’d been sober for over thirty years. And who knew what had happened to Greg? Could he be sober somewhere, living his life?

The violence Greg had inflicted on her was unacceptable in any context and she knew she’d been right to leave him. And she knew that if John had shown the slightest inclination toward violence over the years, Russ wouldn’t be so glib about a potential romance. Russ was still living in Arizona when Greg assaulted her. It was Russ who took her to the hospital, Russ who wanted her to file a police report, Russ who begged her not to go back to him. And when Meaghan finally left, it was Russ who helped her pack.

If there was no physical risk to her, and John hurt only himself quelling his pain and guilt—if it was only about the drinking—maybe slamming the door and never looking back was shortsighted. Maybe she owed it not only to John but to herself to give him a chance to prove her wrong.

She found him sitting on the back porch, staring at the ground. He didn’t look up when she approached. She sat down next to him.

“Meaghan, I—”

At the same moment, she said “John, I—”

“You go,” he said.

Meaghan took a deep breath. Sitting this close to him, she could feel the warmth of his body and found it hard to maintain any kind of emotional detachment. Her physical attraction to him confused her. Usually the mere hint of a drinking problem was enough to turn off any incipient feelings. Like flicking off a light switch.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I could have handled that better. But your drinking . . . it does concern me. I have history. Bad history and as much as I . . .”
Want to tear your clothes off and have sex with you right here
, she thought, her face reddening. Instead she said “as much as I like you, I can’t be around you if you’re still drinking.”

“I know,” he said. “Your father and Russ tried to help me long ago and I know Matthew drank too much once too. But I am always too . . . too drunk,” he said, with a wry chuckle. “Too drunk to listen. I am not your best choice. I know this. You need someone you can trust. He’s not me.”

The brief flash of humor was gone, replaced by a look of such sorrow that Meaghan, without consciously realizing it, took one of his calloused hands into her own. “He might be you,” she said softly. “But we don’t know that yet. Either of us. And the only way to know is for you to get the help you need and stay sober for a while. You need to be able to trust yourself. And I don’t think you’ve trusted yourself for a very long time.”

His eyes filled with tears and one fell before he could blink it back. He wiped it away with the hand Meaghan wasn’t holding. “Huh, now it’s my time to cry, I guess.”

“I’ve been doing enough crying for everybody, but I’m happy to share,” Meaghan said. “But don’t expect to sit on my lap while you do it.”

John laughed and the tension ratcheted down a bit. “So, what do we do?” he asked.

“We go get your son back and if we don’t die doing it, then you need to get sober.”

“I’ll do it for you,” he said, squeezing her hand.

She shook her head. “No. You can’t do it for me. You have to do it for yourself. It has to be something you want, not something you think I want. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. I do. It is something I want. I have wanted it for long time now, but I was too proud, too sick to ask for help. Those witches make my head more clear than it’s been for a long time. I missed all those years with my son and his wife and the babies. I don’t want to miss any more.”

Meaghan teared up. “Oh, crap, now I’m blubbering again.” She sniffled, her nose starting to run. “I need my hand back so I can blow my nose.”

John smiled and released his grip. He groped in his shirt pocket. “You take all my tissue.”

“Don’t worry. With my nose I’ve always got one buried in a pocket somewhere.” She found a crumpled tissue and blew her nose. “I still have a lot of questions I need to ask you. That’s why I came to find you in the first place. Before I got all weepy.”

“And before I got all . . . what’s the word . . . lovey?”

It was Meaghan’s turn to laugh. “Now presenting Weepy and Lovey in the touring company production of
Surviving Fahraya
.”

“Touring company?” John asked, puzzled.

“Dumb joke, not very funny. Tell me about the giant snakes.”

Chapter 41

G
iant snakes, giant
spiders, giant things that sounded suspiciously like scorpions . . . Fahraya had a lot of giant creepy crawlies. What it didn’t have was arable land, abundant water, or natural resources in any significant amounts.

Natalie was being complimentary when she’d called it a dump.

The seasons never changed. It was always about seventy degrees during the day, about fifty at night. The weak sun rose and dropped in the same place at the same time every day. There were no oceans, no lakes, no rivers, no mountains—only low rocky hills riddled with caves and bisected by the occasional shallow ravine.

Vegetation was limited to low shrubs, sparse plants, and fungi growing among the rocks. The people survived by hunting and gathering. They made all their clothing, weapons, and tools out of stone, bone, sinew, and hide. Some of their water came from rainfall that collected in natural tanks in the rocks, but most of it sprang from magical springs that moved at whim, so the Fahrayans couldn’t even build permanent settlements. They were nomads, living in caves and following the shifting water.

“It’s just a tiny little place,” John said. “Not like this where there is always more to see. Fahraya just . . . ends.” The farther one flew from the populated area, the darker and colder it grew. The world slowly dissolved. There was a point where the magic stopped working and Fahrayans lost their ability to fly. The ground there was flat, with no distinguishing characteristics, only endless gray sand. No one traveled farther on foot because there was no point. Even the land appeared to fade into a gray void.

“It’s like that old episode of
The Twilight Zone
about the omnipotent kid who makes the entire world outside of his town disappear,” Meaghan said.

John looked at her blankly. “The twilight zone?”

“Old TV show. Sorry. Ignore me when I say stuff like that,” Meaghan said. “I can see why the human world would be scary but enticing at the same time.” She glanced around the backyard. The grass needed to be cut, at least what grass was visible between the weeds and dandelions. A few tired fold-up lawn chairs sat on the cracked concrete pad that stretched out from the porch. “Well, maybe not this particular little piece of the human world.”

John smiled, then got serious again. “My father, he saw terrible things and he didn’t know it was only a little part of this world. He was so scared for us that he didn’t look for more or let us look. Others saw only things to steal.” He shook his head. “My brother saw only a way to scare everybody to follow him and get revenge on me.”

“And what did you see?” Meaghan asked.

“I saw a better life for them. But I was wrong.”

“No, you weren’t. I think your father and your brother were wrong. Your brother’s still wrong.”

“He has to fight big snakes and fight Jhoro and I sit here with a full belly and a pretty girl next to me.” He grinned at her. “You are right. This is better.”

Meaghan blushed.
He thinks I’m pretty
, part of her mind gushed. The rest of her mind rolled its eyes. With no clear mental consensus on how to respond, Meaghan ignored John’s comment.

“So,” she asked, “what do you think your brother is up to? Why grab Jamie now? Why hasn’t he come after him sooner? And how did he get mixed up with those . . .” She was about to say “assholes” and edited herself. “Those stupid wizards in the first place?”

John shook his head. “I don’t know. In our stories, wizards are trouble. They bring evil. They are not friends to Fahraya. To work with them . . . is very bad.” He sighed. “He was jealous even when we were boys, but we were still brothers. We hated each other, but we loved each other too. You know?”

She nodded.

“But he changed when my father picked me. His mind got bad, I think. He was more than jealous. He began doing evil things, crazy things. Maybe now he’s losing the fight with Jhoro and he wants to look strong. Jamie is easier to take and kill than Jhoro. Maybe even V’hren won’t kill his own son.”

“I don’t know,” Meaghan said. “I mean I get why V’hren wants Jamie, but I’m still not seeing the need to manufacture a reason to grab him. And it’s not even a good reason. The treaty doesn’t prohibit either of you from changing between human and Fahrayan while you’re here. There’s got to be more to it.”

John nodded. “I see what you mean. Maybe he gets these wizards and Emily to make Jamie change to scare you into going away?”

“Yeah, maybe, but there are other ways they could have done that. And it doesn’t make sense strategically. I’d be even more useless right now without the heads-up. At least now, everybody doesn’t have to waste time convincing me this stuff is real.” Sitting this close to John, she could feel the warmth of his body. He smelled of laundry detergent and something clean and pungent like a freshly cut pine tree. They were as close as they could get without actually touching. “Maybe I’m over-thinking it. But I still feel like there’s a big piece here we aren’t seeing.”

John shifted position slightly so their thighs barely touched. It was such a subtle movement she wasn’t sure he was even aware of it. Meaghan felt a quiver between her legs. Down girl, she thought. No time for that. She eased a fraction of an inch away from him, breaking contact. He didn’t follow her or even seem to notice.

“You know,” he said. “Maybe these wizards give V’hren power like they do for Emily. And they lie to him. Tell him he can do things he can’t. Like they tell Emily she can make spells on you.”

“Power to do what? Fahrayans don’t practice magic, do they? Are they even capable of it?”

“Power to do nothing good, I think. Our stories tell how wizards had a great war and how they destroyed the rest of Fahraya—the gray place now—by stealing all the magic there. Fahrayans learn as babies that making spells is very evil and it can bring back the wizards to take the rest of the magic and then we’ll die.”

“So,” Meaghan said, “how’s that work with you and the witches then? You seem to get along fine with them.”

John shrugged. “Some witches in our stories but mostly wizards. And this world is so different. Humans don’t need magic to live like the Fahrayan do. The witches here heal and bring babies and only sometimes are bad. I know now that witches and wizards can be good or evil. But in our stories . . . wizards are always bad. All of them.” He sighed heavily. “To work with wizards . . . If the people knew this . . . My brother, the boy I knew, he died a long time ago and left a crazy man in his place.”

“The Order definitely take after the wizards in your stories,” Meaghan said. “So, working with the Order is a big risk for V’hren, but worth it to him to get Jamie back to Fahraya. And the wizards tell Emily they need her help to manufacture a treaty violation to bring Jamie back, but what they come up with doesn’t violate the treaty.”

Meaghan’s mind was churning. She could feel the outlines of something but could not quite see it. “There’s something Caleb keeps talking about, something he calls the Power.”

John looked at her blankly. “Caleb?”

“The wizard who broke in last night.”

“You trust him?”

“Yeah, I do. He says he doesn’t know how he ended up in my house and I believe him. The guy who broke in was scary. Caleb isn’t. Lynette said she could read different energies in the room like another wizard had been there. She thinks he got there in Caleb’s body, then abandoned him after confirming that I was impervious.”

“This is the guy you knock down with the cook pot?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy,” Meaghan answered. “Russ says he’s glad I finally found a use for cookware other than cooking. It’s a less dangerous way for me to use it, he says.”

John laughed, a full throaty sound that sent a tingle down her spine.

“Yeah. Ha ha,” she said. “As I was saying, Caleb talks about something he calls the Power. How it feeds off pain and fear. Melanie thinks whatever this thing is, it’s where the Order has gotten their magical abilities. Russ says they were a joke only ten, fifteen years ago, but now they’re major players.”

John nodded. “And you think V’hren is getting something from it too. He’s feeding it my boy, maybe, for power.” His eyes narrowed. “Last time, I walked away from my son. Not this time.”

“It’s getting close to dusk,” Meaghan said. “Only a few more hours. We need to eat before we go and sleep if we can.”

He smiled at her, but it was grim and strained. He stood up. “I’ll go see what they give me to make clothes. And shoes. This time I will need shoes in Fahraya. I never wore them before. You don’t walk when you can fly.”