Impervious (City of Eldrich Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

your head out of your ass.”
    She laughed in spite of herself and threw a pillow at him. “Jerk face.”
    He caught the pillow, laughing too. “How’s your foot?”
    “The ice is all melted. And I have a lot of stuff I should be doing today.”
    Russ nodded. “Which you won’t be doing.”
    “But, I—”
    He cut her off. “God, you’re as stubborn as Dad. Just sit. One day. The world won’t end if you chill out for one day.” He stood up and plucked the ice bag from her foot. “I’ll get you more ice.”
    “And the tea? Anything to go with that?”
    He nodded. “Got some muffins.”
    “Would you get me some ibuprofen?”
    “Sure.” Russ walked out of the room.
    “And my cell phone and laptop?” she called after him. She could almost hear his eyes rolling in response.
    The day grew warmer and right after her tea and muffin, which Russ turned into an early lunch by adding a bowl of chicken soup, she hobbled out to the wide front porch. Matthew still napped upstairs while Russ showered. The house had no Internet connection, so her laptop was useless. She tried to access the net on her phone and it was so slow she finally gave up. No 4G service, or 3G service for that matter, on Holly Lane.
    For years, Matthew had paid a hefty fee to have the New York Times delivered. But now he didn’t care about the news and Russ had let the subscription lapse. Eldrich had a small weekly newspaper, but Russ didn’t subscribe to that either.
    Like all small towns, Eldrich ran on gossip. The important information was disseminated orally, either on the phone or in person. Russ learned all he needed to know gossiping with his organic farmers and artisan cheese makers and anyone else he encountered throughout the day. The newspaper contained sports scores and classified ads, and the community relied on it mostly for lining hamster cages and catching paint drips.
    Meaghan tried to read a couple of the mystery novels Russ brought out to her. But she almost always figured out who did it after reading the first few chapters and then ruined any hope of reading further by jumping to the final chapter to see if she was right, which she almost always was. Years spent working with politicians and the public had given her an ultra-sensitive, finely-calibrated bullshit detector. She could spot liars and schmucks, even fictional ones, from a million miles away.
    With nothing else to do, she fell asleep. And dreamed.
    Meaghan almost never remembered her dreams. What little she could recall was fuzzy and disconnected—random images with a feeble narrative imposed upon them. Her usual dreams were synaptic housecleaning, nothing more.
    But this dream—this was different. Vivid. And she knew she was dreaming, something she’d never experienced before. In her dream, she was in the same place she’d been when she fell asleep. On the porch curled up in the wicker settee with her foot propped on an ottoman. She sat up and looked around. At a glance, things looked normal. But with a longer look, things were not quite right.
    The forbidding forest she had driven through the day before now surrounded her father’s house. The front yard had become a tidy island surrounded by looming trees. She could see movement within the tree line, but couldn’t make out what was moving. The sunlight shimmered, like heat rising from a hot asphalt road. Within the shimmer she could barely make out a distant figure walking towards her.
    But the perspective was all wrong. The trees crowded around the house, but the walker appeared to be miles away, on an open plane.
    And then the shimmer evaporated and in the front yard stood her mother, real and solid.
    Meaghan felt a rush of joy and then a stab of grief, so powerful she gasped. She hadn’t felt grief like this since the day her mother died. For, even in her dream, with her mother standing before her, Meaghan knew, in her bones and in her gut, that her mother was dead.
    The mom figure smiled and waved her hand.