by Laura Kirwan
Kady took a breath, then continued, the words coming out in rush. “So, this is the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. Jeff and I are the youngest in large families and our parents’ names are already taken and so we were thinking . . . well, I was thinking and I haven’t told Jeff this yet, so it’s just an idea and we can change it, but I was thinking Matthew.” She took another breath, and finally looked up at Meaghan, a cautious look on her face. “Matthew James O’Connell. That’s Jeff’s last name.”
The tears Meaghan had tried to push down now welled up and ran down her cheeks.
A look of horror on her face, Kady said, “Oh, God. I’m sorry. It’s too soon. I never—”
Meaghan began laughing through her tears. “No, no. It’s okay. It’s perfect. Thank you.” She groped for the box of tissues on her desk and blew her nose. “Ignore me. I’m such a crybaby these days. I’m blubbering over everything. I spent so many years not feeling anything and now it’s all catching up with me.”
Unshed tears, Meaghan had begun to realize, were like unpaid bills. They didn’t simply go away. They got bigger, as the interest and late fees stacked up. She’d spent years trying not to feel her pain and it was time to pay her tab.
But did she have to pay it all at once? Something innocuous would make her cry, which would be followed quickly by a wave of disgust at what a weepy idiot she had become, which would make her cry even more. It was like being on an emotional hamster wheel.
Maybe you should talk to somebody about that, whispered the treacherous, sensible voice in the back of her head. She ignored it, the same way she had ignored her earlier attack of denial. She didn’t need therapeutic handholding. She needed to pull her head out of her ass. People were counting on her.
Kady sighed and relaxed back in her chair. “I’m so glad you like it. There’s been so much lost lately, I thought it was time to start . . . I don’t know . . . honoring the people we love and moving forward again.”
“Good call,” Meaghan said. She blew her nose again. “I know wherever Dad is, he’ll be pleased.”
“Have you seen him since the thing in Fahraya?”
Meaghan shook her head. The last time she’d spoken with her father, he’d been already dead. He’d called in a lot of favors to get to Fahraya to save her, he said, and wouldn’t be able to appear to her again for some time, even in her dreams. What those favors were, he hadn’t said.
Nobody from the other side had communicated with her since. The dead were cryptic, to say the least. And she still hadn’t encountered one of the ghosts that haunted city hall. Even this morning’s spooky shenanigans had merely been Jamie working out his issues.
Kady wore a concerned look. “So, you’re okay with this?
Meaghan smiled at her. “Absolutely. I think it’s a wonderful name and your timing couldn’t be better. We need something to look forward to around here.”
Soon after Meaghan’s chat with Kady, Natalie and Jamie returned. They walked in together, Jamie with a dark expression and Natalie with tear-swollen eyes. Without a word, they parted and Jamie headed back to his office. Natalie cleared the mess covering her desk and Jamie resumed his post staring blankly out the window.
For the rest of the day, nothing levitated or burst into flames. After lunch, Meb, the security guard, dropped by with four new fire extinguishers. He teased Meaghan about too much emergency planning and she merely smiled.
“Safety first,” she said.
Meb laughed and went back downstairs. He betrayed no sign that he’d gleaned anything from Annie beyond the agreed-upon explanation.
Meaghan left two extinguishers up front and stowed the other two in the copy room across from her office. Just in case, she told herself. Just in case.
CHAPTER SIX
Meaghan plowed through the few things cluttering her in-box and left at three to hit the pool. It was the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, so no one would miss her. The council took the entire month of August off and things slowed down considerably. Even Emily Proctor, the council director and Meaghan’s somewhat hapless nemesis, had slacked off.
For such a tiny town, the Eldrich recreation center was a nice facility, with a good-sized lap pool, basketball and tennis courts, and a well-equipped weight room. It stayed open to the public all day during the summer, but doubled as the high school and middle school gymnasium, and students got first priority during the school year.
Tiny Sylvan County steadfastly bucked the nationwide trend of opening school during August. School started on the Tuesday after Labor Day, so this might be the last peaceful swim Meaghan would get for a while. And she’d have no pool access at all once the swim team began training. She’d need to find something else to do to stay fit.
In Arizona, she’d spent her winters hiking, but she couldn’t do that in Eldrich. Not in the forest. Meaghan could be torn apart by teeth and claws like anybody else, and stumbling through the wrong dimensional gateway could land her in one of the many worlds where she wasn’t very popular at the moment.
The news of Fahraya’s destruction had swept through the magical realms, with Meaghan shouldering most of the blame. But, on the upside, while nobody wanted her negotiating services, her gatekeeper credentials were now well established. If they don’t respect you, she thought, better make sure they fear you.
She tugged at her chlorine-faded swimsuit and plopped down on the edge of the pool to put in her earplugs before slipping into the water. She wrestled on the silicon swim cap, adjusted her goggles, and pushed off from the wall into the lap lane.
The water, cool and soothing, enveloped her and she settled into her routine. Up and back she swam, in alternating strokes, letting her mind wander. But, as usual these days, her thoughts soon settled on the events of ten weeks before.
It still didn’t make sense. The accepted reason for Jamie’s abduction—the power struggle between Jamie’s father, John, and V’hren—had never convinced her.
Why now, after all these years, had V’hren tried to kill Jamie? Meaghan couldn’t believe it was merely to consolidate power. V’hren had controlled Fahraya for eighteen years, despite efforts by his son, Jhoro, to mount a resistance. But Jhoro, a fugitive with a handful of ragtag followers scratching out a living in the barren hills, had been no threat.
John, the former king and V’hren’s exiled brother, posed no threat either. V’hren had cut John’s wings from his back before allowing him to escape Fahraya, and for the next eighteen years, John had lived in a gin bottle, too ashamed to raise his own son. Wings were a big deal to Fahrayans.
Or, at least they had been. Before everyone became human. Now, nobody had wings. John was king again. Sort of. He really didn’t want the job, but Jhoro, the logical choice, was as lost in the human world as the rest of the Fahrayans.
Meaghan stopped to catch her breath, her arm aching in the spot where the giant scorpion had stung her. She tried a few careful stretches, but she knew it wasn’t a cramp. It was a deep ache that never quite went away.
So she ignored it and went back to worrying about Jamie.
While technically the rightful heir, Jamie hated Fahraya. Five minutes of intelligence gathering would have made clear to V’hren that Jamie had no intention of returning and claiming his lost birthright. Better an average guy in paradise than king of a pre-literate Stone Age dump like Fahraya.
Her heart no longer pounding like a conga drum, Meaghan grabbed her kickboard. She thought about putting on her training fins, but she’d also banged up one of her knees in Fahraya, and using the fins made it hurt again.
I’m too old to be an action hero. With a sigh, she pushed off from the wall and began her leg work.
What bothered her most was that the accepted narrative assumed that V’hren acted out of self-interest, to protect his position and further his ambition. But V’hren was no longer V’hren. Something had consumed him from the inside out, a malevolent force that wore his body like clothing.
The Power. According to N
atalie, the Power was a new player, at least in Eldrich. A non-corporeal entity that lived on fear, pain, and despair—negative emotions—it required a host. Bitter by nature and jealous of his brother, V’hren had fit the bill.
But why did this thing want Jamie? If not to protect V’hren’s throne, then why?
And even if the Power was simply trying to eliminate V’hren’s competition, that still didn’t explain why V’hren’s hired muscle manufactured an excuse to drag Jamie back. V’hren had so thoroughly terrified his subjects that he didn’t need an excuse and the offense—Jamie changing into his Fahrayan form—by itself didn’t violate the treaty.
Meaghan’s knee was starting to hurt now, even without the training fins. She considered dumping the kickboard for a leg float so she could concentrate on her arms, but using the leg float made her back hurt.
She abandoned the kickboard at the end of the pool. Screw it. Back to freestyle. At least the pain would be evenly distributed throughout her body.
Wizards who called themselves the Order—or as Russ called them, “those gray-robed assholes”—had convinced Emily Proctor, a witch almost as powerful as Natalie, that Jamie was a threat. They juiced her with extra magic and sent her to tear off Jamie’s amulet. A week later, three wizards kidnapped Jamie and sent him back to Fahraya.
But why did the Order go to all the trouble? Why not grab Jamie on his way to work or when he was out for a run?
They’d set it up so Emily would force Jamie to change in city hall, the worst place for her stunt because of how city hall magnified the effect, making Jamie stronger and wilder than he would otherwise have been.
And city hall was supposedly a big magic ray gun to the other side, wherever that might be. A big magic ray gun also believed to have opened the gateways between Fahraya and the human world not long after it was built.
Even more sinister, the Order hadn’t merely taken Jamie. They’d carved strange symbols—sigils—into his back and chest, symbols that no one in Eldrich could decipher.
Some kind of spell, perhaps? Natalie didn’t want to talk about it, but Meaghan could tell the sigils worried her. Jamie’s other wounds were healing, and—with the exception of the two lines along his spine where his wings had been cut from his back—would disappear or leave only minor scars.
But the sigils—the skin had closed over them rapidly, leaving raised, ropey lines. Bright red against his skin, each sigil was clearly delineated. Someone who knew the language could read Jamie like a book.
Only no one knew the language. And now Jamie was manifesting poltergeist activity, which city hall amplified into a powerful threat to those around him.
They had to move him out of that office. Meaghan considered cooking up some excuse to get funding to build out more of the attic. But considering that the council approved all funding requests and all funding requests had to be filtered first through Emily Proctor—who would love to see Jamie set Meaghan on fire—that was probably not a viable solution.
Moving him somewhere else in the building might work or it might merely spread the poltergeist activity, albeit a milder form, to the other floors. It was already happening at home when he wasn’t anywhere near his office.
There was a third possibility. Maybe Jamie needed more time away. Poltergeists, magic sigils, and paranormally enhanced office space aside, he was barely functional. He stared out the window all day. He rarely spoke. Hallam and Associates wouldn’t be handing his cases back anytime soon.
With his short-term disability leave benefits exhausted and no vacation or sick days left, Jamie’s only option was the Family Medical Leave Act. But FMLA leave would be unpaid. His wife, Patrice, worked as a nurse at the local clinic, but without Jamie’s salary, they’d run into financial trouble before long. The one advantage to FMLA, one that maybe had to be considered, was that Jamie couldn’t be fired while taking it.
Meaghan stopped again to catch her breath and decided she was done for the day. She’d do a few easy cool-down laps and head home.
Patrice claimed everything was fine, but the harried shadows under her eyes said otherwise. The kids seemed sad and withdrawn, and Liddy, Jamie’s four-year-old daughter, refused to go near him, insisting he wasn’t her father.
Not that Jamie noticed. He merely sat, staring out the window.
And now doors were slamming, dishes were flying, and, in city hall at least, things were bursting into flames.
Meaghan finished her final cool-down lap and climbed out of the pool. At least dinner would be waiting when she got home. And Jamie wasn’t the only quasi-son she had to worry about. Time to see what sort of trouble Jhoro had gotten into today.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When Meaghan got home, Russ’s car wasn’t in the garage and she couldn’t smell anything cooking. Since he’d started planning his food truck business, Russ had gotten sloppy about regular mealtimes.
In the kitchen, a woman she knew to be a witch, and her two teenage apprentices, sat at the table watching the open refrigerator, smiles on their faces.
“Hi, I’m home,” Meaghan said.
Nobody noticed. She looked around the fridge door.
Shirtless, shoeless, and wearing a pair of tight, low-slung jeans, Jhoro bent, peering into the depths of the refrigerator. He had the kind of body that made even plumber’s crack look good. Not the excessive definition favored by Hollywood, but the lean wiry strength of a man who’d spent his life hunting for his food with a bone spear and a stone knife.
He stood up, a covered bowl in one hand while the other hand flipped silky, blond hair out of his face. Another witch, Marnie, who was a hair stylist, had spent days patiently picking and combing out the mane of matted dreadlocks Jhoro had worn in Fahraya. He shook his head and the golden, newly unsnarled hair spilled to the middle of his back.
The witches sighed in unison.
Meaghan laughed out loud, but still no one noticed her. She appeared to be the only woman in Eldrich immune to Jhoro’s sexual charisma. Objectively, she understood his appeal. He was flat-out, drop-dead gorgeous. But when Meaghan had first met him, he’d been grimy with dirt and blood and soot and had body odor that made her eyes water. One of the first things she’d had to do when he moved in with her and Russ was give him a good scrubbing.
And apparently she was the only woman in town who believed he was gay. Finn, his mate, had been killed in the rush to escape the destruction of Fahraya. Despite the megawatt smile and come-hither looks he gave everyone he met, male and female, Meaghan knew he was grieving for Finn and would be for a long time.
But even if she didn’t want to drag him into her bed, Jhoro still affected her in a way she found horribly disconcerting. Not ten years ago, she would have been lusting with everyone else. Now she wanted to make him a cup of cocoa and tell him to clean his room.
Meaghan had a mommy crush.
Her newly awakened maternal instincts had been rebuffed by Jamie, so Meaghan threw it all at Jhoro and he sucked it up like a dry sponge. His own mother had died giving birth to him, and V’hren had never really believed Jhoro was his. John had loved him like a son, but Zhara, John’s wife and Jamie’s mother, while kind, had never warmed to Jhoro the same way. Jamie, his cousin, had never let him forget it.
He called Meaghan “Mama,” and every time she felt her heart swell even as she rolled her eyes and told him not to call her that.
Marnie strolled into the kitchen, wearing a sheer tank top and cutoffs short enough to qualify as panties. Slender with a pierced nose and black hair in a sharp bob, she normally favored ironic T-shirts and baggy cargo shorts. She had cut Meaghan’s short silvering hair about a month earlier and done such a good job that Meaghan had scheduled a standing monthly appointment.
Marnie walked up to Jhoro and reached her arm around him. She grabbed his bottom, pulling him against her. He wrapped his hand gently in her hair, pulled her head back, and bent to kiss her.
Meaghan felt the weather change in the kitchen. The trio seated at
the table glared. One of the apprentices looked like she was trying not to cry.
Okay, Meaghan thought. Not gay. Clearly, he was comfortable playing for either team. Although not for long, because he and Marnie were about to be blasted into grease spots.
Then—and Meaghan wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it—he lifted his head and gave the fuming witches his movie-star smile. They sighed and smiled back.
So, now, the two men she lived with—her brother and this wild-man surrogate son—were each only one wayward glance, one missed birthday, one wrong word away from pissing off two women critical to Meaghan’s well-being.
I’m getting padlocks for their zippers, she thought. Bastards. Why do they have to sleep with women I depend on?
Jhoro, at least, had an excuse. Grief made people do stupid things and he’d only been human for ten weeks. A certain allowance had to be made for bad behavior.
But Russ? He knew how much Meaghan relied on Natalie and he knew his own history with relationships. And he’d known Natalie since she was a young teenager, barely out of childhood, which made the whole thing extra creepy.
At least they weren’t flaunting it under her nose like Jhoro and Marnie.
Jhoro finally noticed Meaghan. His face lit up. “Mama!” He shoved Marnie aside and wrapped Meaghan in a hug. Marnie and the witches now glared at Meaghan, making her grateful she was impervious.
She patted him in a motherly way and stepped back. “Where’s Russ?”
“Roos?” he answered in a deep rich voice.
Meaghan nodded.
Jhoro pantomimed driving a truck, then patted his belly with a smile.
“He’s working on his food truck,” Marnie said, putting a proprietary hand in Jhoro’s back pocket while the other witches seethed.
Meaghan turned to them. “Ladies, I’m sorry, I know we’ve met, but I forget your names. Are you waiting for me or Russ?” Or for Marnie to drop her guard?