Gods and Swindlers (City of Eldrich Book 3) (18 page)

He kissed her on the forehead and moved away.

With a groan, Meaghan sat up. Dustin was stirring at her side. Luka, on her other side, had pulled himself onto hands and knees and swayed unsteadily, his head hanging down.

“You okay?” Meaghan asked.

“I think,” Luka said, his voice slurred. “Give me a minute.”

Meaghan stood up and groped for the phone in her back pocket. She needed her flashlight app. But her phone was dead, the screen cracked.

She took a few tentative steps across the room in the dim firelight, and tripped over something that felt warm through her heavy wool sock. She reached down to touch it, and yelped and pulled her finger back. Whatever it was, it was sizzling hot.

Meaghan squinted at it, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. With a shock, she realized it was a charred metal folding chair.

Like the one Terry had been holding.

She saw him now, hunched on the floor in front of the sofa. Steph had her arms wrapped around him and was stroking his hair, murmuring something to him. John crouched nearby, his hand on Terry’s shoulder, speaking to him.

As she stepped closer, she could see Terry shaking.

Meaghan glanced at Owen. His face was set in grim lines. Melanie stood next to him, looking equally grim.

“Everybody okay?” Meaghan asked.

Owen nodded. “Mostly.”

“What happened?”

Before he could answer, the front door opened and Russ ran in, his hair and jacket dusted with snow. “Did you guys see that?”

Meaghan got to him before he could move further into the house and pulled him down the hallway toward the kitchen. “What did you see?”

“I didn’t see it,” Russ said. “Well, I saw a flash, but I heard it. The thunder. It sounded like it was close.”

“Yeah,” Meaghan said, now understanding the significance of the charred folding chair. “Really close. Like in the living room.”

“You guys got struck?” Russ’s eyes widened.

“Not all of us,” Meaghan said. “Only Terry.”
And he knew it was coming.

“Oh, shit, Meg, we need to call 911.”

Meaghan shook her head. “Not sure they can help us with this. Let’s find out how he is first.”

It’s like somebody changed the locks
.

Dustin’s words ran through her head. Like somebody had changed the locks after they’d used the sigils to pry open the door. The door Natalie now appeared to be locked behind.

And then Luka makes a little tweak in the dampening magic around Terry’s house and down comes a lightning bolt. A lightning bolt Terry knew was coming for him.

Terry had his eyes closed, his head in Steph’s lap. Luka sat with them, his arm around Steph’s shoulders.

“Is he okay?” Meaghan asked.

“He will be,” Luka said. “It’s time for that talk.” He glanced at Steph. “You got this?”

Steph nodded, her eyes blazing. “I wanted him to try again, but not like this. It’s the elves. They did this.”

Luka nodded, squeezed her shoulder, and stood up. He nodded to Meaghan. “Let’s go in the kitchen.” He glanced at Russ. “You’re Meaghan’s brother, right? Russ?”

Russ nodded.

“I’m Luka, Terry’s cousin. Got a few minutes?”

Russ nodded again. “Let me send a quick text and let the witches know everybody’s okay.”

Luka headed for the kitchen, with Meaghan and Russ following.

“Your phone’s working?” Meaghan asked.

“Yeah,” Russ said. “Your phone isn’t?”

“The lightning,” Luka said. “Mine is out, too. Let’s find some lights.”

Luka flicked the wall switch, but nothing happened. He rummaged through the pantry for a moment. He came back with a battery-powered camping lantern, which he set in the middle of the table, and they all sat down.

“I’d offer you a drink, but there’s nothing here,” he said. “I could really use a drink at the moment to be honest.” He stretched in his seat, rubbed his face, and—looking much older than he had when he’d greeted Meaghan at the front door—said, “I don’t know where to start.”

“Terry got some kind of lightning power that day,” Meaghan said, “the day of the explosion and he really doesn’t want to use it anymore. Is that what he’s hiding from?”

“To describe it that way implies he can control it. Which he can’t. Or at least couldn’t when he was drinking.” Luka sighed. “We—Steph and I—have wondered over the years if now that he’s sober, maybe he could learn to really control it. Then he wouldn’t need dampening spells and magic-proof rooms and lightning rods and all the rest of it.”

“So the safe rooms, the forges, aren’t to hide him from the fair folk?” Meaghan asked.

“Partly, yes, they are, but they’re also to keep the lightning away. It’s part of why we had to move around so much back then. When people—superstitious people, mind you, because this was long before anybody knew how electricity worked—when they saw a big guy with a hammer get struck by lightning and walk away unharmed, they made certain assumptions.”

Russ’s mouth dropped open. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Meaghan looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

Luka smiled. “You read much mythology?”

“Not really,” Meaghan said.

“How about comic books?”

Meaghan snorted. “Of course not.”

“Holy shit,” Russ said. He stared at Luka for a long moment. “And that means you’re—”

“Yes,” Luka said with a sigh.

The lights came back on, blindingly bright to Meaghan’s dark-adjusted eyes.

“Holy shit,” Russ said.

“Shit, yes. Holy, no.” Terry stomped into the room, Dustin on his heels. “I need some coffee.”

“Coffee?” Luka said, his eyebrow raised.

“What I want is a fucking drink,” Terry said. “More than I have in a really long time. So, yeah, coffee.”

Luka raised his hand in conciliation. “Sorry. Whatever you need.”

“I’ll make it,” Russ said, jumping to his feet, staring at Terry in awe.

“Russ,” Terry said. “I’m not him.”

“Well . . .” Luka said.

“You shut up,” Terry said, “or I’ll sew your damn lips shut like the story says.”

Meaghan looked at Russ. His hands were shaking as he tried to put the filter into the coffeemaker. On the other side of the room, Dustin stared at Terry, his eyes wide, like a small child meeting Santa Claus for the first time.

Terry sighed and moved over to the coffeemaker. “Russ, man, let me do it.”

Meaghan threw her hands in the air. “Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?”

“They’re gods, Meg, geez,” Russ said. “Figure it out.”

“We are not,” Terry said. “Not even close.” He pointed at Luka. “He’s a swindler and a thief. I’m a drunk. Luka’s father—my uncle, by the way, not my father, thank you very much—was a first-class liar and grifter who got so crazy by the end he started to believe his own bullshit. The only decent one in the bunch of us is Steph.”

Meaghan ignored Russ’s comment and Terry’s response. Her mind was not ready to go down that path. It was easier to focus on the practicalities. “I have a question.”

Terry groaned.

“Not that question,” Meaghan said.
Definitely not that question.
“How is the house not on fire? How is the house still standing? I had a law school friend whose house got struck and he said it broke all his windows and collapsed the ceiling.”

Terry turned the coffeemaker on and sat down next to Meaghan.

“The first thing I do in every house we live in is install lightning protection.”

Meaghan could see his hands were still shaking. “The doodads you put on everybody’s roofs when you moved in—those are lightning rods?”

He nodded. “But that’s only part of it. Generally, lightning follows the path of least resistance to the ground. Which means plumbing, electrical lines, that kind of stuff.”

“And you,” Meaghan said, her own hands shaking a little.

“Yeah,” Terry said. “Me.”

“Why the chair?”

“It was already coming for me and I can walk away from it unharmed. You guys can’t. I wanted to make sure I gave it a big target so you guys wouldn’t get caught in a side flash.”

“Why isn’t the floor burnt up?”

Terry shrugged. “No idea. I seem to absorb a fair amount of it. There’s a magical component to the lightning I attract that bends the usual rules a little.”

Meaghan nodded. She felt oddly calm considering the circumstances. “This happens often?”

Terry shook his head, a look of misery on his face. “Not since I quit drinking. Since AA. The two always went hand in hand. Between sobriety and dampening magic, I’ve managed to control it. But if the lightning’s back . . . oh, fuck.” He buried his face in his hands. “I don’t want to be that guy again.”

“Then don’t be,” John said as he walked into the kitchen with Owen right behind him. “It is up to you what you do with this. I have been talking with Steph. Just because the drinking and the lightning happened at the same time doesn’t mean they are the same thing.”

“I’ve been dealing with this a long time.”

John shook his head. “That’s not what Steph says. She says you are not dealing with this for a long time.”

“Johnny, I—”

“What is it you tell me when I first go to AA? You tell me if I fail at being a father when I’m drinking, it doesn’t mean I will fail when I am sober. That the only way to know if I can be a father again is to try.”

Terry didn’t say anything for a long moment, then stood up. “Smart ass. I did tell you that. The coffee’s done. Who else needs some?”

Everybody raised their hands.

Chapter Twenty-Three

M
EAGHAN GOT HER
coffee and headed out to the living room. Terry was too upset to answer questions—both from the lightning and from Russ and Dustin staring at him in awe—and Luka was too busy trying to calm Terry down to talk to Meaghan.

Steph patted the sofa next to her. “Sit down, sweetie. Ask your questions.”

Meaghan sat down. “Where’s Melanie?”

“She went back to your house to try to keep everybody calm.”

“Okay.” Meaghan nodded.
Time for the big question.
“So, are you guys really gods?”

Steph laughed. “Not even close. A case of mistaken identity that turned into a sometimes useful con.”

“Mistaken identity?”

Steph nodded. “The belief was there. The gods were there. We gave a few of them faces.”

“Did people worship you?”

“Of course not,” Steph said. “At least not us personally. The thing you need to understand is that what the modern world knows as Norse mythology comes from stories written down after Christianity had supplanted the belief system. The actual beliefs . . . well, the eddas are more accurate than the comic books, but not by much. Celtic mythology is even worse. It was written down centuries after the fact.”

“Then Terry’s not . . .” Meaghan took a deep breath, “the guy they named Thursday after?”

Steph smiled. “No. Not really. Thunder gods were very common back then. Every culture, every tribe, had one. They were as good an explanation for what was going on up in the sky as anything else. We didn’t understand how all that worked. So you had a name and a concept, and then along comes Terry and suddenly here’s this thunder god with a big red beard showing up all over Europe and Scandinavia.”

Meaghan nodded. “And Terry’s a blacksmith so he probably always had a hammer nearby.”

“Exactly. In Celtic mythology, the god was called Taranis. He got Terry’s big red beard, but Terry hadn’t started working iron yet, so Taranis was pictured with a wheel—the wheel of the sky—and a thunderbolt. When we moved east, the red beard stayed, but the wheel became a hammer.”

“Because he was working iron by then.” Meaghan sipped her coffee. “He’s always had the beard?”

Steph nodded. “He’s shaved it off from time to time, but he gets really bad razor burn and ingrown hairs—it’s kind of a mess. It’s easier to have the beard.”

“Wow.” Meaghan finished her coffee. “So, was Luka’s father. . .”
Yup, I’m really about to ask this.
“Odin?”

Steph rolled her eyes. “No. He only liked to pretend he was. Odin was an existing deity, but Cian embellished him quite a bit, mostly to mooch free drinks.”

“Key-un?” Meaghan asked.

“C-i-a-n. His Irish name. There’s a series of stories about Odin visiting the human world as a one-eyed old man, Wegtam the Wanderer, who wore a tattered gray cloak and a broad-brimmed hat. Cian seeded those stories around and then bought himself the cloak and the hat. Got a lot of drinks out of it.” She chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “Until the con went bad and he got burned at the stake for heresy.”

Meaghan grimaced.

Steph nodded. “He started to believe his own stories. He really thought he was Odin. We’re not sure if the fair folk did that or if it was simply dementia. He was pretty old by then. Either way, we couldn’t save him. Owen smuggled a potion to him that killed him right before they lit the pyre. Didn’t feel a thing. Cian could be an asshole, but nobody deserves to die that way.” She shuddered. “Nobody.”

“Who was missing the eye? Odin or Cian?”

Steph leaned back against the sofa cushions. “The written mythology says that Odin sacrificed his eye to gain wisdom. Cian got stabbed in the eye during a bar fight. I couldn’t tell you which one happened first.”