Have Yourself a Faerie Little Christmas Read online

  "Well, you've learned something new before breakfast, just like me." Harry grinned when Hera-Jane strolled out of the laboratory, muffling giggles that sounded like nightingales.

  The communications sphere shimmered into being while Harry relaxed in the hot tub--another wonderful invention of Humans. Fortunately for him, and whoever might be calling at this time of the morning, the sphere remained opaque.

  "I gave at the office," Harry said, before his caller could identify himself.

  Alexi's rich, rolling laughter made him grin. Nothing like a call from his favorite rebellious cousin to take a morning from interesting and frustrating to fun.

  "How's that non-magical betting system working out for you?" Harry asked, as he snapped his fingers to bring a towel over and got out of the hot tub. He tapped the communications sphere, activating it so it shimmered into transparency. Alexi and Megan's faces appeared before him. He was glad he had opted for the towel.

  Harry wasn't a skinny geek by any means, but Alexi had inherited the family build and good looks, along with the family curse. Harry was white-blond and buff, but Alexi had it squared. No, make that cubed. Harry wouldn't have minded if Megan, who he really liked, saw him in the altogether--if he just didn't have the awful suspicion she would have been comparing him to Alexi and feeling sorry for him.

  Still, despite all the advantages Alexi had in looks and freedom and a real job in the Human world, along with a knock-out wife who hadn't needed to trap him by going into Need, Harry preferred his smaller troubles. Alexi had nearly been doomed to spending eternity without magic. Sure, Megan had rescued him from that, and Harry wouldn't have minded being rescued by someone as smart and gorgeous and fun as Megan, but he was aware enough to know it would have rankled. He had a ridiculous, immature longing to be the White Knight, rescuing damsels in distress.

  "What's up, Cuz?" He gave an extra yank to his towel, just in case.

  "We have a job for you," Megan said.

  "You and your invisibility spell," Alexi added with that grin that had always meant really cool, really loud, really messy adventures when they were boys.

  "I'm there." Harry snapped clothes onto himself. "Just tell me where and when."

  Tuesday, December 4

  Angeloria had a highly inconvenient allergy to mistletoe and holly.

  Usually, that wouldn't be much of a problem. How many months of the year did mistletoe flourish, after all?

  Unfortunately, Lori's need to run away from the Fae Enclaves coincided with Christmas. The last thing she wanted was to retreat back into the shelter of the Enclave where she had grown up, because that would leave her prey to her matchmaking great-aunts and their odious choices of the perfect husband for her. Lori didn't want to get married to an Enclave wimp--someone who would keep her anchored in the Enclaves for the rest of her life. She wanted an adventurer who explored the Human world on a regular basis. Someone who thought satellite feed and a DVD collection to rival all the major studios were basic necessities of life.

  If she went back to the Fae Enclaves any time in the next two months, her great-aunts would force her into dreary formal wear. Then they would drag her through a long chain of visits and teas and social functions that made Socrates' public execution sound like a jolly good time by comparison.

  Besides, regular contact with the Human world provided her with a fresh, ongoing supply of dark chocolate and diet cherry cola.

  If she could get out of the hotel where she had retreated to hide from the mad proliferation of holiday decorations before she sneezed herself to death, while changing colors and creating rainbow-streaked light shows for a two-yard radius.

  "It's not even something a doctor could help me with," Lori explained, when her two best friends snapped their fingers and conjured up boxes of allergy medicine and calamine lotion, and settled down in her favorite suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. "It's psychosomatic. I was traumatized as a child, when Dickens had Scrooge talk about a stake of holly through the heart. I mean, I was there when he wrote it down and read it aloud and laughed at what a clever line it was." She shuddered. "You can't imagine the mental image."

  "So it's all in your head," Willfred murmured. He glanced at Phillomena.

  Lori certainly envied them when they grinned and slapped hands in congratulations before turning to her with their idea. When was she ever going to find someone who knew what she was thinking almost before she did?

  Then again, she didn't completely envy them. After all, how dense could anyone be, not to realize that they had already found their soul mate and didn't need to hunt? The two of them were arrested adolescents in some ways, but she needed the cleverness of adolescents to help her hide from the grouchy-greats, as she referred to her matchmaking aunts, and stay itch-free.

  "Distraction," Will said, with a nod for punctuation.

  "We'll just keep you busy to keep your mind off it," Phill added.

  "How?" Lori demanded, and reached for water to wash down the first allergy pill.

  "That's gonna take some thinking. Just say here, have fun with room service, sleep late, and catch up on Stargate episodes. Eat lots of chocolate and drink lots of diet cherry cola." She shrugged. "And give us a few days."

  "Days?" she nearly shrieked.

  "We have to throw your family off your trail. They're going to watch us, because if you can't be found, people will expect you to be with us," Will said, getting up and pacing a little. "So we go home, go to our separate homes--and do some heavy-duty thinking--and then in a few days we'll come back for you when the heat is off."

  "And we'll have some fun, whatever we do, wherever we go," Phill added, nodding for emphasis.

  Wednesday, December 5

  Willfred worried about Phillomena. His aunties and uncles and matchmaking cousins all worried about him. The pressure was incredible.

  Not the pressure to get out of the Enclaves and adventure in the Human realms. Admittedly, that was pretty strong, but not at the point of discomfort. In fact, the other pressures and strains Will felt made the wanderlust itch well nigh pleasantly ticklish.

  "Willfred, it is your duty to talk Phillomena into going in for a thorough examination," his Aunt Gustaphina said as she sailed into Will's library that afternoon.

  It took a massive outlay of magic to shut down the TV and DVD player so Aunt Gustaphina wouldn't see the latest season of Chuck playing. Will wasn't ashamed of his addiction to Human television series. Rather, he was terrified she would be thoroughly charmed by good-hearted Chuck, his geeky misfit friends and the federal agents sent to protect him, and she would invade and insist on watching the entire season with him.

  Will needed his alone time. Mostly because he was worried about Phill as well. She was his best friend in both the Human realms and the Fae Enclaves. They had known each other since their nannies met in the park and parked their perambulators next to each other. Will couldn't think straight when Phill was around--but when she wasn't around, he didn't have much success either. It was like the current powering his brain changed whenever she entered or left the room, and it took him a day or two to adjust. Which meant his life was a mess.

  The only solution he could see right now was to either never go near Phill again, or never let her out of his sight.

  "Examination, Aunt Gusty?" he said, dragging his mind away from the addictive subject of Phill. "What kind of examination?"

  Actually, Will would be delighted to spend the rest of his existence, every day and night in Phill's company. But he lived in dread of the day Need grabbed hold of her by the brains and by the hormones and she targeted some lucky young Fae male to bond with him, body and soul and mind. Will couldn't stand the thought of a third member of their team.

  What he couldn't stand even more intensely was the idea of Phill choosing anyone but him, when the day came for her to take a mate. The problem was that sometimes a Fae woman had total control over the targeting mechanism of Need--and other times, she had no control, and it dragged her wherev
er the unseen forces of the universe chose to take her. When that happened, she might just leave her intended sweetheart in the dust, wondering if he really was nothing but week-old chopped liver.

  "A physical examination, and a charting of her currents." Aunt Gustaphina settled her ethereal, four-century-old, doesn't-look-a-decade-over-two-fifty figure into a chair usually reserved for one of Will's many nieces and nephews. It didn't matter that most of them were well into their twenties and thirties--they were still little ones, barely past the toddler stage, in Will's eyes.

  "Her currents?" Will sank down into his favorite overstuffed leather recliner.

  "Men." Mischief sparkled in her eyes. "I will never understand how a man who so thoroughly enjoys being bonded to your mother could raise all his sons to be terrified of Need."

  "It's not Need in general, Aunt Gusty." He shook his head, fighting off the image of Phillomena tackling some idiot who had never been outside the Enclaves in his entire existence. How could they go on their adventures if she shackled herself to an Enclave-bound weakling? How could Will get Phill to go on any more year-long anthropological studies all over the constantly changing Human world?

  "Ah ha! Just as I thought." She slapped her knee with enough force to break it in anyone else as delicate-looking. Aunt Gustaphina made the Man of Steel look like he was made of wet tissue paper.

  "What did you thought--think?"

  "You're stuck on Phillomena, aren't you?"

  "She's my best friend and I don't want her to get shackled to someone who isn't good enough for her."

  "You don't want to be left behind. I have a theory, my dear Willfred." She stood up with enough force to topple the chair. "I think Phillomena is unconsciously holding back the final stage of her maturity because she doesn't want to hurt you."

  Will swallowed hard and took a few deep breaths to fight the surges of nausea that rolled up through him, large enough to dwarf the waves in A Perfect Storm. He had been skirting that idea for years now, approaching the mere idea of taking his deepest darkest fear and putting it into words.

  If Phill was holding back her maturity for his sake, that meant she was an uncommonly strong Fae, with subconscious control over not only her magic, but her physical calendar. And it also meant she had recognized, even if only subconsciously, that she and Will weren't meant for each other.

  "So what am I gonna do, Aunt Gusty?" He stood up as well, fighting the urge to hide his face in his hands and wail--and maybe slide down to the floor and kick and wriggle in a temper tantrum he hadn't indulged in for nearly two centuries.

  "Let her go. If you have to, get the girl so angry with you that she vows she never wants to see you again. That might just do the trick, dislodge whatever roadblock her mind has created, and get the natural processes rolling again." She nodded and looked him over, head to foot and foot to head. "And it wouldn't do you any harm to get out there and throw yourself into the path of a couple girls on the verge of Need. If someone's radar latches onto you, that might jolt Phillomena enough to do the trick." She patted Will's arm, then floated up high enough--nearly two feet--to pat his cheek. "It's for your own good, lovey. You need to settle down. Put down roots. Get yourself bonded to a nice girl and find something useful to do with your life. Studying Humans and bringing back interesting artifacts from their world is fine and dandy when you're only a dozen or so decades old, but you have to grow up. Put away that hobby and do something useful. Your cousin Kevyn was a scatterbrain for the longest time, pretending to be a Human actor. Then he found a nice girl and settled down, and now he's on his way to becoming a fine advocate."

  "I hate paperwork and legal briefs and--"

  "Yes, I know. Agriculture is a respectable occupation for a Fae, my dear. Consider that." She patted his cheek again, floated down to the floor, and bustled out of the room.

  Will sank down into his recliner and sighed. "Anthropology is a respectable career, too. And hunting-and-gathering makes a whole lot more money than any other job I can name." He looked around his comfortable library. Bringing back artifacts for scholars and scientists to study, and bringing back all sorts of supplies to feed the Fae addiction to Human-made toys, had made him richer than all the rest of his family put together. Not that he had ever flaunted his wealth. Will lived for the adventure, not the rewards. He didn't want to tell his interfering, matchmaking relatives that he was set for the rest of his long life. It wouldn't do him any good. They would still nag him about settling down, getting a job that would keep him in the Enclaves, and finding a wife.

  Someone who wasn't Phill.

  What Will wanted more than anything else was to just run away. Back to the Human realms.

  If he and Phill escorted Angeloria into the Human realms to get her away from her family problems, that would give him lots of time in Phill's company, away from his relatives. And that equaled lots of time to think and get his head on straight.

  That was it. Will felt as if several hundred pounds of weight had slid off his shoulders. He would get away, to a place where the air was clearer and there wasn't as much magical static buzzing and ringing through the atmosphere. He loved the rarified air of the Human realms, where a Fae could hear another Fae work magic and actually pinpoint where it took place. He would get time away, time alone with Phill, and they would figure out this problem together.

  How did an adult Fae male approach an adult Fae female and bring up that subject without shocking and horrifying her, and maybe embarrassing her?

  Will wasn't an old-fashioned prude, but some things just weren't done. Discussing Need and why a Fae woman hadn't gone into Need phase yet, at the mature age of two hundred and forty-three, was one of them.

  * * * *

  "If you ask me," Great-great-uncle Throckmorton wheezed, "it's all that time spent away from the Enclaves. It can't be good for you. It puts a strain on your whole system. Maybe even shuts down essential functions." He stepped away from the scrying globe that currently displayed a slowly rotating image of Phillomena's body, with all sorts of writhing, swirling, intertwining colors displaying her various physical and magical functions and statistics.

  "So I'm doomed?" Phill sighed, sitting on the edge of the examination table, and kicked her legs.

  Thank goodness she didn't have to put on a ridiculous never-meets-in-the-back Human examination gown. Sitting on the examination table in her great-great-uncle's medical office simply meant putting herself into the reading field.

  "Hardly." He squinted once more at the globe, then took off his spectacles--an affectation, because as one of the premier healers in the ten surrounding Enclaves, he could fix his eyes or any other ailment with little more than a thought. He turned to face her. "My dear girl, when are you going to take the plunge? I never thought I'd see the day when someone of my bloodline displays such cowardice."

  "But I don't want to ruin things." Phill blushed as soon as those words left her lips. It sounded just as lame an excuse coming from her as it did in every single movie and book where the hero or heroine refused to take the crucial step to move best friend into true love.

  "Uh huh. And what happens when some desperate idiot steps over the line and invades your territory to snatch up Willfred and steals him out of your life forever?" He sank down in his old-fashioned wooden swivel chair, supposedly a gift from Doc Holiday. "It's been my opinion for the last six hundred years that the happiest, most stable marriage bondings are the ones where the man and woman choose each other before Need strikes. I can't imagine anyone better suited for each other than you and Willfred."

  "Me, neither. But he certainly doesn't show any signs that he sees me as a girl, and you know how the men in his family are mortally terrified of even the mention of Need. His brother nearly had a heart attack when Sephrinia appeared out of nowhere and nearly dragged him off and seduced him."

  "Good thing she knew mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," he muttered, holding an antique Meerschaum pipe tight in his teeth while he poured spearmint-scented bubb
le solution into the bowl. He winked.

  "You're a dirty old...dear." Phill ended on a sigh, and managed a crooked smile. "The thing is, I don't want to kill my best friend with terror if I just come out and say I want to try bonding before Need hits." She sighed again. "If it ever hits. Is something wrong with me?"

  "Nothing a good strong dose of romance won't cure. Or a good kick in the pants, whichever is easier to procure."

  Phill's pager chimed, making her leap off the examination table. A rosy haze surrounded her as she read Will's number and his message on her screen. When it grew thick enough to impede half the message, she impatiently waved the tinted air away.

  Found a solution for Lori and whatever ails us. Meet me at the doorway into Neighborlee, one hour.

  "Gotta run. Thanks!" She brushed a kiss across Uncle Throckmorton's shiny bald head and dashed from the room.

  "My pleasure, kitten." He settled back, making his chair creak and groan. He blew a long streamer of spearmint-scented bubbles that spun around the room, forming dragons that frolicked like puppies. "There is none so blind as she who will not see."

  * * * *

  Will loved the town of Neighborlee, and not just because the closest exit from the space-time continuum that enclosed the Enclaves was in the Metroparks on the edge of town. Magic created a lovely tingling, energizing and yet paradoxically soothing background atmosphere for the town. He had been using Neighborlee as a doorway into the Human realms for nearly seventy years before he realized that someone here in this quiet little college town was the source of the magic that had seeped into the air and soil. It had taken him another ten years of haphazard investigation before he tracked down the magic streamers to their source.

  Divine's Emporium sat like a lynchpin holding the controlling knot of the magical net that protected Neighborlee--or in another metaphor, sat at the headwaters of the streams of power that spread through the town. He had been delighted to bring Phill here and share his discovery with her. They had spent many happy weeks here, getting to know Angela.