Merry and Bright: A Shifter Agents Christmas Story

by Lauren Esker

  ***

  Through a soft mist of falling rain, the Leungs' Christmas lights were mantled with blue and white haloes as Nicole and Avery came up the walk on Christmas Eve, laden with grocery bags—one-handed in Avery's case, since he had a cane in the other. He didn't normally use the cane to get around indoors, but for any kind of long-distance walking, it was a necessity unless he wanted to spend the whole evening paying for it.

  The Leung house wasn't the most vividly decorated residence on the block—in particular, one neighbor had synced their extensive lights to music; they were currently rocking and rolling to the strains of Mannheim Steamroller. But there was a herd of light-up reindeer on the lawn, strands of lights draped around the porch, and a giant wreath on the front door. The Leungs had two children, ages nine and twelve, and therefore the house had achieved what Nicole jokingly called "peak Christmas": Forrest and Hannah were old enough to help out with the decorations, but not too old to have lost interest in Christmas yet.

  "I shouldn't have waited so long to ask," Avery lamented while Nicole fumbled in her purse for her key. "I just couldn't think of what to say, and time got away from me; now I feel like an idiot. What if they're angry about changing plans at the last minute? What if they say no?"

  "They're not going to say no. Erin and Tim love to adopt strays who don't have anywhere to go for the holidays. Last year, Tim brought home two of his fellow faculty from the U-Dub campus. And your friends are great, Avery, I promise. Tim and Erin will like them."

  "Yeah, but—"

  She silenced him with a kiss. "No buts. If you don't ask them, I'll do it for you."

  The door opened to fragrant smells of cinnamon, brown sugar, and baking bread. Laughter and high-pitched children's voices came from the living room, along with Christmas music playing softly. Garlands sparkled on the walls of the front hallway.

  It was still disconcerting for Avery to contrast this warm, cheery, festively decorated house with the one-bedroom apartment, sparsely furnished with thrift-store furniture, in which he'd woken up on Christmas morning last year.

  "You know, I can't get over how weird it is for Christmas to be cold," Nicole said as she folded her umbrella and hung it up in the hall. Her soft Australian accent was still noticeable despite nearly a decade in the U.S. "Back home, of course, it's the middle of summer. Christmas for me, growing up in Brisbane, meant beaches and barbecues. I wish we lived somewhere that gets snow at Christmastime. I'd love to see a white Christmas, just once."

  "It's not impossible. I've seen it snow in Seattle in December."

  "I know, but I mean a real blanket of snow, like you see in Christmas cards. I've never seen anything like that. I heard there's a big snowstorm sweeping the East Coast right now. I wish we could get some of that here."

  Avery had a sudden, vivid image of Nicole in the snow, her cheeks pink with cold, wearing a fluffy knit hat in her favorite sunshine yellow. Nicole laughing as she ducked a snowball ...

  He'd never realized how much he wanted to show Nicole snow. The words tumbled out: "We should go up to the mountains next year."

  Nicole raised her eyebrows. "With four toddlers?"

  Avery winced. "Okay, one of these years. When the kids are older."

  "Ha. It's a date." Nicole grinned. Her chestnut curls were jeweled with raindrops, and Avery was unable to resist reaching out to stroke them. Nicole leaned into his hand.

  "No PDAs in the hallway!" Hannah, the Leungs' nine-year-old, shrilled down the hall at them.

  "Nicky, Avery! Wonderful!" Erin Leung, Nicole's pretty and stylish big sister, hurried down the hallway, wiping her floury hands on her apron, to give them both a quick hug. "Did you get the eggnog? We're all out."

  "Regular and non-dairy, yep." Nicole and her sister were biracial, of Asian-Australian and European heritage, and Tim was Asian-American, so the majority of the household were lactose intolerant.

  "What's cooking?" Avery asked. "It smells great."

  They followed Nicole into the cheerful chaos of the living room. The Leung house had an open plan layout with a combined kitchen/living room, high ceilings with skylights, and three steps down to a sunken indoor patio and attached greenhouse. In addition to a variety of subtropical flowers, the greenhouse contained potted eucalyptus trees rising nearly all the way to the high glass ceiling. Nicole, Erin, and Hannah were koala shifters, so the eucalyptus trees made them feel more at home in the damp, gray Pacific Northwest. In the spirit of the holiday, the trees were draped in gold and silver fairy lights, sparkling off the glass enclosure as night fell outside.

  The house had been babyproofed with the addition of a baby gate across the steps leading down to the indoor patio, keeping Nicole and Avery's foster children away from the moderately toxic tropical foliage in the greenhouse. Since Tim and Erin had raised their children in this house, it was a solution they'd employed themselves with Forrest and Hannah were very small. The rest of the railing along the raised part of the carpeted living-room floor was baby-safe. The Christmas tree, with its shiny, tempting ornaments, had been set up down on the patio to make sure the kids couldn't get to it.

  Right now the quadruplets, all four of them, were in the living room, sprawled around with blankets and toys. Forrest, the Leungs' twelve-year-old son, was down on the floor in the middle of their active little playgroup. At the moment, two of them were wolf cubs and the other two were human toddlers. The little werewolves had spent most of their infancy as puppies, and still shifted freely back and forth, which made it challenging to keep clothes and diapers on them.

  Catching Nicole and Avery's scents, especially Avery's werewolf smell, the puppies produced a chorus of happy squeals and eager little whines. Avery laughed, leaned his cane against the wall, and scooped up Gael, a fat brown and gray puppy who wriggled with delight and licked his chin.

  Nicole picked up little Ginger, who was girl-shaped and miraculously still wearing both her clothes and her diaper, and carried her into the kitchen, where she and Avery dutifully oohed and ahhed over the pies cooling on the kitchen island. Tim, Erin's quiet, bespectacled husband, had moved the pies aside to make room for a laptop, where he was working on some emails; he gave them a distracted smile.

  Nicole deftly pulled Ginger away when the child tried to stick her hands into the nearest pie, and nudged Avery pointedly. "Ask them," she whispered. "They're not going to bite."

  "Ask us what?" Erin wanted to know. "Forrest, pass me the eggs, please."

  Avery was distracted by Gael shifting suddenly from a wolf cub to a plump, naked, brown-haired toddler, infinitely squirmier and harder to hold. "Wolf," Avery told him sternly, and Gael stared into his eyes for a stubborn minute before dutifully shifting back.

  All of them seemed to have accepted Avery as their pack leader. They adored Nicole, but Avery they actually obeyed. It was an odd feeling, a sort of power he wasn't used to having.

  "Do you mind if I invite a couple of friends for Christmas dinner?" he asked, adjusting Gael so that he was holding him one-armed like a furry football. "I'm sorry to drop this on you last-minute. I've been, you know ..." He waved his free hand. "Putting it off. I felt like, as a guest in your house, I shouldn't be inviting more people ..."

  Erin reached over to pat his arm, leaving a light dusting of flour behind. Gael gave her a quick puppy-lick with his small pink tongue. "You're not a guest, you're family. And of course we don't mind. Do we, hon? We'd love to meet your friends."

  Avery turned away to hide his blush. Nicole's hand slipped into his free one, lightly squeezing.

  "I don't want to cause more work for you," he said. "Just tell me what you want me to do to help out."

  Tim looked up from his laptop screen. "Tell you what, why not make it a potluck? That glazed ham in the 'fridge is big enough to feed an army, and if everyone brings a dish, food will be absolutely no problem. We're going to be eating leftovers for a week anyway."

  "I think that's a wonderful idea," Nicole said. "Oh, hold on ...
" Her phone was vibrating in her pocket. She set down Ginger by Avery's feet and stepped away to take the call.

  "What is it?" Avery asked, seeing her serious expression as she listened to whoever was talking on the other end.

  Nicole held up a finger, signaling Just a minute. "Yes, I can hear you. Just a minute, there's a lot of noise in here ..."

  She stepped further away, out of range of even Avery's sharp werewolf hearing.

  "So, the family tradition is, on Christmas Eve we don't really have dinner as such," Erin told Avery, and he wrenched his worried attention away from Nicole. "We just snack and eat pie, and the kids get to open one present apiece later on. If you want something healthier than pie, I was going to throw together a salad."

  "Sounds great. You want me to chop something?"

  He was cutting up carrots, with Gael and Ginger wrestling around his feet, when Nicole came back to the kitchen, frowning.

  "Are things okay?" Avery asked her.

  "Oh yes. Basically. That was Ashley—remember her?"

  "Dr. Evans' daughter?" He recalled the thin, haunted young woman who had first helped capture them and then helped them escape when they were imprisoned for experimentation. He hadn't seen much of Ashley Evans-Lopez since they'd gotten out of the lab, but he knew that Nicole, a social worker by both inclination and occupation, had been trying to help Ashley adjust to life on the outside of the lab. While not a lab experiment herself in the same way as the puppies, Ashley had been under the thumb of her domineering mother for her entire life; she'd never been out on her own before.

  "Yes, that Ashley. She's been evicted. She doesn't have anyone to stay with, so she's at a women's shelter right now." Nicole pressed her lips together, her wide brown eyes soft with sympathetic concern. "She's technically an adult, but she's just not good at navigating the adult world. Her mother never let her make any decisions on her own, and now she's lost everything and has been thrown into the deep end. She can't find a job, and she feels as if she's barely managing to keep her head above water. And now this." She kissed Avery lightly on the cheek. "I'm sorry. I have to go talk to her. She could use the emotional support."

  Tim raised his mild gaze from his laptop. "Bring her over here."

  "He's right," Erin chimed in. "No one should be alone on Christmas if they have anywhere to go."

  "Erin, Tim, you guys are wonderful, but the house is already about as full as it can get," Nicole protested.

  "Don't be ridiculous. I can make up the couch for her, as long as she doesn't mind waking up at the crack of dawn to a houseful of Christmas-crazy kids."

  Avery's eyes met Nicole's, and he saw the suppressed smile dancing in them.

  "You want to drive?" he asked. "Or should I?"