by Laura Kirwan
I’m sorry, so sorry, that I couldn’t be a better father to you. The distance between us breaks my heart, but I made it, I know that, and now I fear it’s too late to fix it. But please know how much I love your mother and you and Russ. I made so many mistakes, but the greatest sin of my life was pride. I believed myself alone with this burden, that I somehow stood above everyone, and had to bear it on my own. Meg, you aren’t alone. You are surrounded by people who will love you and help you if you let them. Don’t make the same blunder I did and try to lone wolf it.
I suppose the best thing I can do now is shut up and let you wade through these boxes. There’s more stuff in my office—ask Russ—but these journals and files are enough to get you started. I kept a regular journal and hung onto every photo, article, book, whatever. It’s all out in the garage. You’ll need to do the same thing for whomever succeeds you. People like us are out there. Do yourself a favor and start looking now for your replacement. Don’t make this job a life sentence like I did.
Don’t ever doubt your abilities, Meg. Always trust your gut. And don’t let the crazy magical bastards grind you down, because they will certainly try. Russ knows all about this stuff. Let him handle the hospitality duties. You concentrate on kicking tail and taking names. They won’t know what hit ‘em.
All my love,
Dad
Meaghan felt her eyes fill again with tears. She sniffed them back. Enough with the crying for one day. She had work to do. She set the letter aside, not sure whether to go through the boxes chronologically or dig in and look for stuff about Jamie and John.
Curiosity overcame organization and she tipped the box on its side and pulled the folders and notebooks onto the carpet.
Good old Matthew. Every folder was labeled, every notebook dated. She fanned the folders across the floor looking for references to Fahraya.
Nothing.
“Duh, dumbass,” she mumbled to herself. She did some mental math. John and Jamie hadn’t gotten here until at least 1995.
She shoved the files and journals from the seventies aside. Jamie first. Then she’d go back and figure out how Matthew got involved in the first place. She suspected there would be some painful memories in that box and she decided she wasn’t ready.
Mid nineties . . . the box right in the middle. She pulled it open. Bingo. There were several accordion files with “FAHRAYA” scrawled across the front in black marker.
Meaghan soon discovered that while Matthew had been good at dating his journals and getting stuff from the same general time grouped together, inside the individual manila folders, chaos reigned. Matthew’s meticulous record keeping had slipped over time. Some files were labeled, some weren’t. None had dates.
She grabbed an accordion file and pulled the folders out. She fanned them across the carpet. She spotted one labeled “Photos” and opened it.
Twelve-year-old Jamie scowled at her, standing on the back porch of the house in which she sat. He was wrapped in a blanket, but his hands were visible. The nails and fingertips were black with grime. Ugly red welts marked his wrists. His face was bruised and his upper lip swollen.
She could see the amulet around his neck, and wondered where his clothes were. This must have been taken right after he arrived. He said they got here with nothing. The size difference, she realized—his clothes wouldn’t have survived the change and any objects would be Barbie-doll sized.
There were several more photos of Jamie. His hair hung in matted dingy blond dreadlocks halfway down his back. More bruises covered his back, legs, and arms. He hadn’t come through his parents’ ordeal unscathed. He’d been restrained and beaten.
The only clean spots on his body were two strips of skin, each about an inch wide, running down his back next to his spine and along his shoulder blades. The wings, she thought. That’s where the wings would be attached if he still had them.
She pulled out another envelope of photos. These were Jamie, still young. The top one showed him clean, hair short, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, smiling shyly at the camera. Matthew, a broad grin on his face, stood next to Jamie, an arm draped across his shoulder.
Meaghan felt a stab of . . . grief? Jealousy? When she’d been that age, Matthew had been spiraling out of control, alternately terrifying his family and avoiding them.
Every photo in the folder included Jamie. Russ and teenaged Jamie showing off the fish they’d caught. Jamie playing with a dog she didn’t recognize. Jamie graduating from high school. Jamie living his life with Russ and Matthew, growing happier in each photo.
This wasn’t an historical record. It was a family photo album. Her father had no photos like this of her. She hated herself for being jealous of Jamie, and tried to remember the traumatized child in the earliest photos and how lucky he had been to find a loving family.
John wasn’t anywhere. He didn’t appear in any of these photos. He was as absent from Jamie’s life as Matthew had been from Meaghan’s.
At the bottom of the file, she found an envelope labeled “Fahraya—J’han.” With trembling hands she opened it.
The first photo showed a bleak, stony, utterly foreign landscape. And underneath that one, there was a photo of John. Pre-exile.
Matthew had called Jamie a prince. So, John must have been the king. Despite the grime, the skins he wore, and the matted dreadlocks, John looked like a king. He smiled regally, his wings extended to their full span. He stared into the camera looking strong and confident.
She felt a tingle in her gut and her face grew hot.
In the second photo, John, wings pulled in, stood with a protective arm draped over a young Jamie, who stood in front of him and wore a shy smile. Another young boy, a few years older, crouched next to them, looking up at John with a broad grin. She turned the photo over. On the back, she recognized Matthew’s uneven scrawl. “J’han with son (center) and nephew.”
In both photos, John looked a lot more like grown-up Jamie than he looked like the man she had met. Whatever they’d done to him must have been horrific to degrade this magnificent man into a sad, defeated wreck.
The next few photos confirmed it. John was still in Fahrayan form, but must have been in the human world. He was tiny, lying on a towel over someone’s knees. There was no part of him not cut or bruised or lashed. His wings were gone and in their place ran two ragged mounds of bloody flesh, following the same general line of the clean skin she’d seen in that first photo of Jamie.
They’d cut—hacked—his wings off.
The last photos showed him cleaned up, his hair cropped, wearing an amulet similar to Jamie’s. Matthew must have taken them soon after John’s arrival. The photos documenting his injuries showed barely faded bruises and stark red scars running along his spine where his wings had been. Unlike the photos taken in Fahraya, where he’d looked confidently into the camera, now he stared at the ground. The power he exuded in the earlier photos was gone.
No happy family pictures of John. He had slunk away into a bottle and let Matthew and Russ raise his traumatized son.
It was the wings, she thought. When they took away his ability to fly, they took away from him what made him a Fahrayan man. It wasn’t only his throne and his queen they’d stolen from him.
Meaghan’s brief jealousy over Jamie was long gone. Sad and exhausted, she left the files strewn across the floor and crawled into bed. She still had a day job and it was getting late.
Chapter 20
The remainder of the work week passed in a blur. Under the guise of reaching out and introducing herself, Meaghan got the scoop on the city’s stalled projects and did what she could to push them along. As the city solicitor, she wasn’t supposed to involve herself in policy decisions or administration of city business. Her job was to advise her clients how to do things within the parameters of the law and to defend the city when they failed to do so. But the story of her confrontation with Emily had swept like a tornado through city hall, and everybody was happy to let Meaghan intervene, even those st
affers who weren’t aware of the magical details.
Nobody liked Emily, it seemed.
Emily took the rest of the week off. There was no council meeting scheduled and she may have been planning to take the time anyway. But her absence allowed everyone in the solicitor’s office to breathe a little easier.
Jamie took Tuesday off but was back Wednesday. Other than a black eye, he appeared unscathed. Meaghan asked how he was, he said he was fine, and then he briefed her on his cases and a couple of small things being handled by Hallam and Associates, the city’s outside counsel. No mention was made of the events of Monday beyond a quick mention that Buzz Hallam, the firm’s founder, had grown up in Eldrich, was an old friend of Matthew’s, and understood how things worked.
Natalie and Kady didn’t push either. On Tuesday they told her who was “clued in,” Eldrich code for being aware of the supernatural and otherworldly. Most of the support staff were clued in, but many of the higher level officials were not. Mayor Diebler didn’t “have a clue about anything,” Kady added when Natalie mentioned him. Likewise, none of the council members were aware of Eldrich’s paranormal elements. In Meaghan’s experience, the ability to function in a constant state of denial was something many politicians excelled at, so it didn’t surprise her.
Jamie, Natalie, and Kady all told her they’d be happy to answer any questions she had and then left her alone. Focusing on her legal job, Meaghan let the week slip by without a single question or comment about her strange new world. After that first day of weirdness, work was . . . work. It was normal municipal law. Jamie went to court. Natalie and Kady kept things humming along. Meaghan reviewed contracts and attended meetings.
Bob’s hasty departure had created a backlog that kept her busy enough during each work day that she could almost forget the other part of the job. On Tuesday morning, she thought she would spend the day anxious to get home and dive into Matthew’s files. But by the end of the work day, she couldn’t face them. Instead she watched TV with Russ. She told herself she’d return to Matthew’s files on Saturday. One job at a time.
After one of her usual disjointed dreams—Matthew’s file boxes had grown feet and were chasing her up and down the stairs in city hall—she woke Saturday morning to the sound of voices and laughter in the kitchen. It sounded like several people, not only Russ and Matthew. More of Russ’s food people? John?
Hating herself for the swoop of giddy excitement she felt at the thought, she climbed out of bed. Go and see, she told herself. If it’s him, then deal with it. Instead of throwing a bathrobe over her pajamas, she pulled on her usual jeans and T-shirt, but not wrinkled ones from the foot of the bed or the top of the hamper. These were clean, from the dresser.
“Oh, girl, you got it bad,” she mumbled. She spritzed some water on her sleep-twisted hair, combed it back into place and resisted the urge to put on makeup—what was she, sixteen? She forced herself to take a measured pace down the stairs. If it was John, he’d likely flee as soon as she got there. Besides, it wasn’t like she wanted to impress him, she tried to convince herself, so no need to make a fuss.
It wasn’t John.
Russ and Matthew sat at the kitchen table with three . . . she hadn’t a clue. They were blue, like Smurfs. Only taller, the size of ten-year-olds maybe. With piggy looking faces and small tusks. And wearing a weird mix of trendy children’s clothes. Gender was indeterminate.
Everyone stopped eating and talking and turned to stare at her.
She stared back. And stared some more.
“I’m going back to bed,” she announced, then turned and walked down the hall and back up the stairs.
About ten minutes later, Russ came up with a mug of coffee and a plate of toast.
On the unmade bed, Meaghan lay curled in a ball, her pillow wrapped around her head. “Friends of yours?” she asked, her voice muffled.
“Yeah, they are friends. Once you get used to the blue skin and the tusks and their unique fashion sense, they’re a lot of fun. I’d have introduced you if you hadn’t run away.”
Meaghan threw the pillow onto the bed and sat up. “Sorry. I . . . it’s . . . sorry,” she stammered. “They’re blue,” she added.
“Yeah,” Russ answered. “We’ve already established that.” He handed her the coffee and set the plate on the table. “Come eat your toast.”
With a sigh, she took the mug and moved to the table. She had to shove aside a pile of files to sit down.
Russ picked his way through the papers and folders covering the floor, stepped over a box, and sat down on the window seat. He surveyed the mess in silence, letting Meaghan drink her coffee and eat a slice of toast.
This was their mother’s old trick, Meaghan realized. Sit quietly, look sad, and wait for somebody to crack.
Not me, she thought, and held firm in her resolve for a good ten seconds before she folded.
“Fine,” she snapped. “It’s a big mess, I know.”
“That’s not the problem,” Russ said, still gazing at the floor. He looked up at her. “The problem is your utter refusal to deal with this. I’ve been talking to Natalie. And Jamie.”
Meaghan felt her face grow hot. “Checking up on me? Enlisting the employees to spy?”
Russ refused to take the bait. “Nope. They called me. They’re concerned. The world blows up on Monday. And then nothing.”
“What were they expecting?” she shot back. “A big show?”
He still refused to react. “No. Questions. We all expected a lot more questions. Any questions at all, in fact, would be an improvement.”
“I’ve been waiting until today. I do have another job you know.” Her face grew hotter. “The one I thought the city hired me to do, remember?”
“Which,” Russ countered, “you can do with your hands tied behind your back and hopping on one foot. Leaving plenty of time to deal with this.” He waved his hand at the scattered files.
“You don’t understand,” she whined. “It’s —”
Russ cut her off. “I don’t understand? I’ve been dealing with this shit for nearly thirty years.”
“But you don’t have . . . the Destiny,” she said. “It’s not all riding on your shoulders.”
“It’s not all riding on yours, either. I may not have the special family mojo, but I’m the one who stuck around, who gave Dad a chance,” Russ said, his voice growing louder with each word. “I’m the one who moved back to Eldrich to help with Jamie. I’m the one who’s down there cooking breakfast. Where the hell have you been? Not here. As usual. Dad knew you’d get like this. That you’d pull the all-by-myself martyr routine.”
“Oh, nice,” she shot back. “Nice to know what you both really think of me.”
“Here we go. Poor little Meaghan, all by herself ‘cause Daddy doesn’t love her.” He rose to his feet. “I’ll go tell everybody her Highness can’t deal so the whole universe will have to piss off.”
He tried to storm out of the room while picking his way with care through the strewn files. His feet, not sensing the contradiction, tried to do both at the same time. Russ tripped, did a graceful spin, and then sat down hard on the floor.
The tension broke. Meaghan hopped out of her chair and knelt beside him. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. So much for my grand exit.” He didn’t try to get up. “Seriously, Meg. I shouldn’t have dumped on you like that, but you gotta get your shit together. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.”
“I know,” she said as she stood up. “And I know that you’ve been doing way more than your share when it comes to Dad.” She held out a hand to him but couldn’t meet his eyes as she helped pull him to his feet. “Are the blue guys still downstairs?”
“Yeah, I’m sure they are,” Russ said. “They’re rotten little gossips, so I can’t imagine they’d want to miss a good fight.”
Meaghan rolled her eyes. “Oh. Wonderful. So everybody’s going to be buzzing about this?”
Russ smiled. “Oh, yeah. Whi
ch is why you need to get down there and give them a better story.”
“Is this the hospitality stuff Matthew mentioned in his letter?”
Russ nodded. “The Troon are important. You want them to like you.”
“So the gossip is positive?”
“Yeah. They also serve as translators. Between the worlds. You need them.”
Meaghan pondered this a moment. “Translators? Isn’t there some magical thingy that takes care of it?”
Russ snorted. “Like the Tardis? The babel fish? Space aliens and magical creatures who conveniently speak English?”
Meaghan smiled. “Well, yeah.”
“So, how would that work out for you, Miss Impervious -to-Magic?”
“I didn’t think of that,” she answered. “So, what’s the deal with the . . . what are they called again?”
“Troon.”
“There’s a fancy-pants golf resort in Scottsdale called Troon North,” Meaghan said. “They don’t golf, do they?”
Russ stared at her a moment. Meaghan knew that look. It was the save-me-from-idiots look. “No,” he answered. “They don’t golf.” He thought a moment. “At least as far as I know.”
“So, how did they get the translator job? Some magical ability?”
Russ shook his head. “No. You know how Fahrayans have an extra set of vocal cords?”
Meaghan nodded.
“Well the Troon have like three extra sets. Their language is crazy complex. Everything else is easy for them to learn.” Russ smiled. “And they’re nosy little shits. Like to know everything that’s going on.”
“Nosy?” Meaghan asked. “There are nosy aliens?”
Russ made a face. “Don’t call any of these folks aliens. Major faux pas.”
“So, what do I call them?”
“Call them Troon. That’s what they are. And sure, other species can be nosy. People are people, you know? Even when they’re not.”