The Magic Rain

Chapter Thirteen: Frightened Children

My father paced back and forth, along the width of the living room.

My mother sat looking like she was in shock.

Jo-Bri stood in the middle of the room, looking somehow bigger now, and older. I couldn’t think of him as a boy anymore.

Mike, Scott, Linda and Debbie sat squeezed together on the couch, with Maria sitting on the floor in front of them, hugging her knees, all of them looking like frightened children.

They were frightened children.

So was I.

"You killed him?" my mother said, sounding bewildered.

"Mom," I said, irritated, though immediately sorry for that. "The guy attacked us. Jo-Bri saved our lives."

"And he’s in our freezer downstairs," my mother went on, as if not having heard me.

Maybe she really was in shock.

"Okay," my father said, finally stopping and facing Jo-Bri. He took a deep breath. "Tell me what happened, and who this guy is."

Jo-Bri nodded once. "He’s a wizard," he began, and I couldn’t help but still be distracted by his voice – not just the amazingly sexy accent, but the deep richness of it, making him sound older than his years. "One of Hodon’s."

"A wizard?" Maria asked, completely lost, staring wide-eyed at the rest of us. "I don’t understand."

My father held up a hand to forestall Jo-Bri and turned to the five teens sitting on or in front of the couch. But then my father hesitated and I nearly laughed, because how the hell do you tell these five kids what has taken us three weeks to even begin to understand and be "okay" with?

"Jo-Bri," my father finally said, "is a wizard from another world."

The kids stared at him and my heart sank. How were we going to get through to them? They had had what amounted to shock therapy this morning, being thrown into the middle of a battle between two wizards, in a world where every law of physics told them that there couldn’t be any such thing as a wizard or magic.

"Okay," Mike finally said and I did laugh then.

Scott, seeing me laugh, joined in, then Maria and suddenly every teen in the room except Jo-Bri was laughing. My parents just stared, looking relieved but not enough to join in the laughter.

"Okay," my father said. "There’s a lot more to know, a lot of it not so good, but for now, why don’t we just let Jo-Bri explain a few things to all of us?"

"No worries," Mike said and I remembered now why I kinda' liked him – he was a cool dude who took things as they came.

"The man on the beach," Jo-Bri said, "was also a wizard. I recognized him from one of the encounters I’d had with Hodon."

"Who’s Hodon?" Linda asked, shaking her gorgeous head, still trying to wrap it around what was being said in this room and what had happened out there on the beach.

Jo-Bri stared a long moment, trying to figure out where to start, then smiled and took a deep breath.

"Another wizard" he said, and shrugged, knowing he had added nothing useful to Linda’s knowledge.

"How did he get here?" my mother asked, and I felt relieved that she had recovered enough of her senses to ask the question.

"And why was he so… deformed?" Mike asked, and again I felt relieved again because now we had a roomful of people who were at least coming to their senses instead of just staring in shock.

"He came through a portal," Jo-Bri said. "It’s the only way he could have gotten here from my world."

"Your world," Mike said, and then held up a hand. "Sorry. Just takes a bit of getting used to."

"So why did he look like Frankenstein?" I asked, trying to keep things on track. “And why didn’t going through a portal make you look like that too?”

Jo-Bri took a deep breath. "The woman who sent me through her portal knew what she was doing." I think Hodon is building a portal of his own and he doesn’t have it quite right yet.”

"You think going through the portal did that to that wizard?" I asked, shivering.

Jo-Bri nodded. "He didn’t look like that when I saw him in my world. I would not have recognized him except for the aura of power and darkness that surrounds Hodon’s wizards.”

"How could he even have any fight left in him?" Scott asked. "I mean, if something had done that to me I’d be hiding in a corner shaking and peeing myself."

Jo-Bri smiled tightly. "Hodon creates fear in his followers. The kind of fear that can drive you mad – or make you so desperate to please him that you keep on going, keep on fighting, no matter what’s happened to you."

"So if you hadn’t killed him –" my mother said.

"He would have killed us," Jo-Bri said. "All of us."

"So Hodon is coming," my father said.

Jo-Bri nodded. "I don’t know if the witch died and he’s using his own wizards to build a new portal, or if she intentionally gave him the wrong spells, but he’s obviously in the process of building a portal. He won’t come through until it’s right, but he might keep sending wizards through until it is."

"And they’ll come after us," Linda said.

Jo-Bri frowned. “They’ll come after me.”

“But?” Mike asked.

Jo-Bri glanced at him.

“I hear a but in your voice,” Mike explained. “Am I wrong?”

Jo-Bri’s frown deepened. “Hodon…”

“Destroys,” I said, feeling a rising panic, knowing that we were on the verge of something here – maybe on the edge of betraying Jo-Bri to save ourselves. And he was trying to help us with doing exactly that.

“He destroyed your village, didn’t he?” I asked Jo-Bri. He’d leave us rather than expose us to danger from Hodon.

“Yes,” Jo-Bri said. “In some ways he destroyed my world.”

“So…” said, trying to lead him to say what I wanted him to say, but he wouldn’t. “So he’s probably coming to destroy our world too, right?”

Jo-Bri stared at me. He knew what I was doing, just as I knew what he was trying to do. And I’d be damned if I would let him leave.

“So if you leave,” Mike said, “instead of saving us you might just be leaving us unprotected.”

Jo-Bri sighed, glancing at me in exasperation – and perhaps something else too.

"So what do we do?" Debbie asked, and I could see that she was seriously freaked.

"How do we fight this freak?" Mike asked, and I smiled.

"Yeah, how do we do to him what you did to that dude at the beach?" Scott asked.

Jo-Bri considered that. "I don’t know if I could beat Hodon one-on-one, but even if I could, I don’t know if I’d get the chance – he’s always surrounded by other wizards, as well as non-wizard soldiers he controls."

"And?" Mike said and I could have hugged him – he wasn’t about to fold, even in the face of things that should have sent him running for cover and a teddy bear.

Jo-Bri paused.

"And," he finally said, "there are things you need to know. About Hodon. And your world."

"Uh-oh," Scott said. "This isn’t going to be good, is it?"

Jo-Bri actually smiled at that. "No," he replied. "It isn’t."