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would sooner die than buy a bag of Doritos—and poured herself a glass of wine. She wondered whether she should cut back. She wasn’t a big drinker, but Matthew had been an alcoholic.
    And then there was John. After eighteen years of being the town drunk, he was going to AA and by all accounts was doing well. She felt her face flush and warmth spread through her body at the thought of him. They’d both agreed they weren’t ready for a relationship until John’s sobriety was stronger and until the post-Fahraya chaos had calmed down a bit.
    Which she was beginning to think might never happen. Every day it was something else to deal with. It was bad enough trying to feed, clothe, and shelter the Fahrayans, but John also had to protect them from the outside world and from themselves.
    First came the leprechauns—not the whimsical little men at the end of the rainbow guarding their pots of gold. No, these leprechauns were foul-mouthed loan sharks, collecting the vig on usurious loans made to the naïve or desperate. They lent out their pots of gold at crippling interest rates—literally. Miss a payment, lose a finger. Or an arm or eye or leg . . . whatever was handy.
    They proved no match for the Fahrayans once John explained to his people what they were up to. The leprechauns had been expecting eight-inch-tall fairies. What they got were six-foot-tall humans with lightning reflexes and Stone Age sensibilities. Fahraya had been a brutal place and it had bred brutal people. For people accustomed to hunting enormous snakes and giant scorpions for food, leprechauns—no matter how dirty they fought—were no threat.
    But the biggest threat to the Fahrayans were the Fahrayans themselves. They had come from an extremely primitive hunter-gatherer society and had been dumped, without any warning or preparation, into the modern world. They’d lost everything, including their wings and the extra set of vocal cords required to properly speak their language. They hadn’t arrived with even the clothes on their backs because of the size difference.
    Everything about the human world was alien to them, including their own bodies. It helped that John, once again their king, had suffered a similar dislocation and had lived in the human world for so long. But the transition had nearly destroyed him. The same thing was now happening to his people and John was determined to keep them from making the same mistakes he had.
    He turned his property into a refugee camp until permanent housing was found. He helped them quickly learn a pidgin form of their language that allowed them to communicate with human vocal cords. He set up English classes and tried to teach them the basics of life in modern human society.
    And in an attempt to save his people from his biggest mistake, John banned alcohol from the Fahrayan camp. But he had no control over the Fahrayans who had been relocated to private homes, and alcohol found its way in. Complicating matters, John had his own daily battle staying sober. He had a hard enough time keeping himself from drinking let alone five hundred grieving Fahrayans.
    Even with tight controls and cooperation, it would be a daunting struggle, but not all Fahrayans were inclined to comply with John’s directives. Even though everyone called him a king, that wasn’t exactly what he was.
    “It’s not quite a king like humans think,” John had told her once, during one of their evening phone calls. “There is not exactly a word in English. The word in Fahrayan means something like ‘leader of the hunt who says the last word on stuff.’ But that’s only so long as there is no . . . what’s the word? Complainer?”
    “Challenger?” Meaghan asked.
    “Challenger,” John repeated. “Yeah.”
    “How’s that work?”
    “The people decide if they want the challenger to go ahead.”
    “And then?”
    “Fight to the death.”
    Meaghan gasped.
    John chuckled. “Don’t worry. I don’t have to fight. I can just