Christmas Lights

by Yolanda Sfetsos

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  Cobblestone Press

  www.cobblestone-press.com

  Copyright ©2007 by Yolanda Sfetsos

  First published in 2007

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  Author Bio

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Christmas Lights

  Copyright© 2007 Yolanda Sfetsos

  ISBN: 978-1-60088-202-9

  Cover Artist: Melissa Findley

  Editor: Devin Govaere

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  Cobblestone Press, LLC

  www.cobblestone-press.com

  Dedication

  This one's for Eugene and Cassie.

  It's also dedicated to the true spirit of Christmas magic. The type we all felt when we were kids...

  I think it's never too late to recapture it.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter One

  Christmas depressed the hell out of Noel Harris. As if every other day of the year was any easier to take without her. The Christmas season in particular added salt to the very slow-healing wound. It didn't last one day, like her birthday or their wedding anniversary. This went on for a whole month.

  He sighed and released a heavy breath that caused his chest to tighten with the pain of losing what they'd had. He wished he could release the strain associated with this holiday as easily as releasing a breath. But he'd been through enough in his life to know better than that.

  The Christmas carols in the background didn't help. After so many years of avoiding the Yuletide holiday, he should've known the music would be everywhere—in the overcrowded shopping centers, on TV and even the radio he had on in the kitchen.

  This year he was determined to ignore the stab in his heart. Cancer finally claimed his wife one Christmas Eve, and she had been gone for five years now. It was time to move on. Life had cursed this season for him from the beginning. The first Christmas Noel could remember had been when he was five. That was the year his father walked out on the family. When he was ten, his mother died shortly after the same holiday. He could count off every event inside his head, and it amounted to the same thing. Bad luck would haunt him during Christmas for the rest of his life.

  "Not this year,” he whispered to himself. This year was going to be the first time he broke the curse. He took a sip of the eggnog from the small glass sitting on the coffee table, and followed it with a bite of fruit cake. He swallowed the lump and chased it down with some more liquid. A bitter taste lingered inside his mouth. Somehow, it never tasted sweet to him.

  He hunched down and opened the end of the tattered box of lights on the floor below the tree. He'd purchased a big tree, but instead of decorating it with tinsel, he'd purchased a long string of lights the store owner told him “would last for the rest of his life.” The box was a little worse for wear but the man behind the counter claimed it had been in storage for years, and was the only set of its kind.

  Noel had shrugged and bought it at a bargain price. Now as he started to pull the green tangled cord out of the box, he noticed it did look as good as new. Actually there was a shiny quality to it that made him feel, for the first time in a long while, some real Christmas cheer.

  It took him longer than he expected to wrap the lights around the wide tree. By the end of it he'd worked up a sweat. The air conditioning inside the house cooled the sweat beads as they dripped down the side of his hairline. He took another sip of the eggnog. It didn't satisfy his thirst, but right now he didn't care.

  Noel was jumping over a huge hurdle in his life and was determined to see it through to the end.

  "Here we go. It's show time.” He couldn't help but chuckle at his own lame joke. It was times like these he wished he had someone to share his life with again. He wiped the thought out of his mind instantly. Being with someone meant he would eventually forget Nancy. Even if putting up a Christmas tree was no fun without someone to share it with, Noel had to keep her memory alive.

  Sometimes he wished they'd had enough time to have children before cancer gripped its claws around Nancy. When he thought of all the chemotherapy and alternate treatments they'd tried, a sharp pain stabbed at his heart.

  He would've given his own life to save hers. Nancy had been a ray of sunshine in his otherwise bleak existence. The day she died, the light of his life had shut off forever.

  It took him a while to hunch over and plug in the lights, but when he managed it, the lightshow didn't disappoint. There were red, green, blue and white lights—each alternated with the corresponding colors so that the pattern was always different.

  Noel stared in awe as the lights captivated his eyes. He took several steps back until he lowered himself onto the armchair. “Jingle Bells” suddenly seemed like the perfect background music, much better than all those depressing hard rock songs he always chose as the soundtrack of his life.

  A crackling hum caught his attention seconds before the first light zapped off. A line of black smoke rose up toward the ceiling. He jumped out of the armchair to check the wall plug before the whole thing caught on fire. One by one, each of the lights zapped off with the same buzz. If he focused on the noise, he realized each sounded more like a small squeal than anything else.

  He scratched his head and switched off the power on the wall, as well as pulled the plug out. The last thing he needed was to add another chapter of misery to the mix by losing the house. This house was the only thing he had left that could bring any—no matter how small—joy into his life. Life insurance protection had paid off the balance, and allowed him to live a more comfortable life with his hardware store clerk position.

  Nancy had been the career woman. All he'd ever wanted was a job to pay the bills.

  He made his way around to the front of the tree, to make sure nothing was on fire. The stench of burnt plastic made him cough. Still, there were no flames and the smoke he had spotted when the first light blew had dissipated.

  What Noel did notice made his heart speed up. There was a single light still blinking. A white one situated at the very center of the tree.

  He double checked the plug. It was switched off.

  It didn't make any sense.

  Was the bitterness that clouded his life making him delusional as well? It was possible, he supposed. There was only so much a person could take before the mind decides to shut down and offer another perspective.

  There was an ambience that radiated off that one single blinking light and it made him feel oddly calm. Before Noel realized what he was doing, his right hand captured the small globe in his palm.

  He heard a small sigh and looked over h
is shoulder. He kept his hand around the small light. There was no one there; he was still alone. When he turned his attention back to the small globe, it was blinking faster.

  What I wouldn't give for some company right now, he thought to himself. Someone to see the bizarre thing he held in his hand so he could confirm his sanity.

  The light's flicker slowed down. He moved closer and noticed a small face inside it.

  "What the hell?” Noel dropped the bulb and lurched backwards. The lights, the loneliness and endless thoughts were playing tricks with his eyes.

  Instinct made him duck just in time. The one small light exploded into a thousand tiny pieces that fell around him, but disappeared in a flash of white particles before they reached the floor.

  He fought hard to control the nervous tension flooding his body. The sense of a presence hovered around him. When he lifted his face to look in front of him, there was a pair of small bare feet on the floor only a few steps in front of him. He slowly followed the feet up towards the small ankles and up the slim short legs that became equally slim thighs.

  "Where am I?” a small female voice asked.

  He couldn't answer yet, not while his eyes slowly crept higher along her petite body. He paused at the small swell of her hips. She was wearing a white outfit, unlike any he'd ever seen before. Noel wasn't much for fashion but knew that what this female was wearing wasn't exactly this summer's style. It looked more like a piece of material thrown over her body enough to hide the bits that needed to be concealed.

  Her breasts were small and perky. Noel couldn't help but notice the outline of her tight nipples pressed against the top that modestly covered her chest, but not her small sculptured arms.

  "Do you mind, human?” She put her hands on her hips, glaring at him with the darkest, most beautiful eyes he'd ever seen. “Get up, and stop staring at me as if I'm to be your next meal!"

  Noel swallowed the nervous lump in his throat before he managed to stand up and focus on her fragile face. She was shorter than him, barely reaching his shoulder. Her face was a milky white with small pouty pink lips and a button nose. A handful of small freckles were scattered over the bridge of her nose and her black eyebrows arched under his scrutiny.

  Her black hair was cut short, in a choppy uneven way, and the few white strands on top stood out in sharp contrast to all that black. She couldn't be older than mid-twenties, he decided. So the sudden fascination didn't seem so obscene. He'd become a widower too young and was still months away from his thirtieth birthday.

  "Stop staring at me like you've never seen a woman before and announce who you are,” she said with an impatient tap of her foot.

  "Um...” His voice trailed off as he looked curiously at the Christmas tree to his left. The other lights were out, but when he turned back toward the small woman, he thought he noticed something fly off the top of the tree. When he turned back quickly, there was nothing there. His eyes were playing tricks on him today. “My name's Noel and this is my home."

  She scrunched up her face in obvious confusion and looked around. “And what am I doing here?"

  "I was hoping you could tell me that. I was setting up my Christmas tree and—"

  "What is a Christmas tree?” she asked as she flopped both arms to her sides.

  Her nipples were still tight and posed a distraction for him. Actually, Noel couldn't even think straight now that this very cute woman was with him. Who was she? Could what he'd seen really have happened? Surely he hadn't just wished for some company and a woman had been delivered to him. What was she? Some type of faerie? He'd heard that some people referred to Christmas lights as faerie lights, but this was beyond the joke.

  "This is a Christmas tree.” He motioned with his hand.

  "Why is there a tree inside your house?"

  He'd also briefly read on the Internet that faeries sometimes lived inside trees. Then again, the Web site he'd read it on also claimed to have found a real faerie fossil that was later revealed to be a fake.

  He tried to concentrate on her question and muttered, “Ah, it's a tradition."

  "I think it's cruel to take a tree from its home just so one can place it indoors and claim it's some sort of tradition. Where I'm from it's tradition to kill the young ones before they get a chance to do it to their parents. Yet most families end up being large and harmonious.” Her face was serious as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Why is it so cold in here?"

  Surely she was kidding, wasn't she? What kind of civilization would kill their young? Then again, there were probably monsters in every breed. Wait a minute! he snapped to himself, what are you thinking?

  He was losing his mind.

  "Please keep your thoughts at a safe volume. It's going to give me a headache otherwise."

  "You can ... you can hear my thoughts?"

  She shook her head and the mop of black hair bounced around her small face. The tips of her ears were elongated upwards and for a second he truly believed he knew she was a faerie.

  "I can't read thoughts.” She rolled her eyes. “But I hear how loud your murmur is. If you have any questions, just ask them and in return I ask that you answer my own."

  "Are you a faerie?” Noel felt like a fool as soon as the words had left his mouth, but he just had to know.

  She stuck her tongue out. “No, I am most certainly not a faerie. Those creatures are hussies that'll do anything in order to take back their own. I am Natala from the Sulus Clan."

  "I'm not familiar with the Sulus Clan.” It sounded like some sort of rap artist to him. He sure wouldn't object to getting familiar with the Natala bit though...

  As Noel thought of it, a wave of shock stabbed his system. Had he just said that to himself? His brother tried to continually set him up with one woman after another and he hadn't found any of them remotely interesting. Not even for a meaningless encounter. Yet this fragile little female was pressing all the right buttons of attraction. His mind was already fantasizing about her before he had a chance to quiet the erection.

  Stop it, he told himself, and remember Nancy.

  "I'm an imp."

  That was another term he wasn't familiar with. But then, Noel knew that for a woman that had magically appeared inside his living room, from inside a small light, there had to be plenty he wouldn't understand. Or be able to wrap his mind around.

  "You look confused again,” Natala said with a sigh. “You must be a human that knows nothing about otherworldly people."

  He nodded. “I'm just a simple man trying to survive another Christmas."

  "What is this Christmas you keep mentioning? I have never visited among the humans before so I don't know anything about your crazy existence. Tell me.” She made her way to the couch and sat down. As one dainty leg crossed over the other, it tugged at the short skirt that reached mid-thigh and it rose even higher.

  Noel caught a glimpse of matching underwear and he had to take a calming breath. The air conditioning didn't help relieve the type of heat rising along his fevered skin. All those years of being alone had pushed him into a self-inflicted state of celibacy. The tension that wound around his heart and midsection like a corset was finally snapping. And it felt good.

  That was a miracle in itself.

  He sat down in his armchair and pressed both hands against the armrests. “Ah, Christmas is a Christian religion that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. There are other religions that celebrate around this time of the year too, but for different reasons.” Noel really wasn't the best person to be explaining this to her. His streak of bad luck and dark moments made him doubt the existence of a higher being who, for some reason, loved to ruin his life every step of the way. He'd turned his back on religion and all that it represented. “It's a time of joy and giving. Family and sharing are also important parts of this tradition. Even miracles happen sometimes."

  The last bit made his pulse quicken.

  "It still doesn't explain the tree.” Natala peered past him to gaze at it with
narrowed eyes. “Or the lights,” she added in a hushed tone.

  "That's something else entirely. But I'm sorry to say I have no idea where that tradition originated, though gifts are placed around the tree for loved ones."

  "I find it curious that you would celebrate something you don't understand. And there are no presents beneath your tree. Does that mean you have no loved ones?” Her dark eyes returned to gaze into his. She shrugged. “But since you released me from the prison Carabia trapped me in for I don't know how long, I must at least show you some courtesy. And I do find you strangely peculiar."

  He felt his pulse race even further at the words and the intensity of her gaze. Even if he had absolutely no idea what Carabia was, and how he or she could've trapped Natala inside a light globe.

  "The feeling's mutual,” he said with a small smile teasing the edges of his mouth. It felt so strange and foreign to actually smile, and not just do it to be polite. This strange woman sparked actual cheer inside him, like a light igniting ever so slowly.

  She smiled too. “That's good. Now, why don't you be a good host and offer me something to eat? I don't know how long I've been in there. It could've been a year, or even a hundred."

  The seriousness on her face confirmed she wasn't joking. And even though he didn't know what an imp was or what they ate, Noel stood up and nodded. “Sure, I've got plenty of food."

  She leaned back against the couch and nodded back. “I'll be right here. Hopefully, together, we can figure out how I ended up in your home."

  Noel headed for the kitchen. His mind raced, wondering what to offer this delicious woman.

  * * * *

  Natala sighed as soon as the tall stranger disappeared into the corridor behind the couch. She looked over her shoulder to make sure he was gone before she released a longer, heavier sigh. Her heart was beating so fast she was positive the peculiar man had noticed, though he hadn't shown any indication that he had. After all, he was just a human. Not even fellow imps could hear the heartbeat of another from a distance. That was the specialty of the demons. Maybe she'd spent too many years in their servitude.