Christmas in the Valley: A Jinx Hamilton / Shevington Novella

by Juliette Harper

  Christmas in the Valley

  A Jinx Hamilton / Shevington Novella

  Juliette Harper

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About the Author

  Also by Juliette

  Believe in what your heart is saying,

  Hear the melody that's playing.

  There's no time to waste.

  There's so much to celebrate.

  Believe in what you feel inside,

  And give your dreams the wings to fly.

  You have everything you need,

  If you just believe

  from The Polar Express

  1

  “Rodney, hold this ribbon down for me, will you? I need more tape.”

  The black-and-white rat obligingly put his front paws on the length of red satin while I reached for the dispenser. I tore off a length of sticky stuff and secured the ribbon, being careful not to catch any rodent toes in the process.

  “Are you excited about spending Christmas in the Valley?” I asked as Rodney smoothed the tape down for me.

  Nodding happily, he mimicked the action of skiing.

  “You’re planning to go skiing?” I asked. “How are you going to do that?”

  From beside me, a disembodied voice said, “Mistress Glory ordered Barbie skis from the Amazon River.” Darby materialized and offered me a tray of hot chocolate and cookies.

  Having a brownie around the house who likes to cook and clean is a good thing. Trust me.

  “Thank you, Darby,” I said, taking the cup and blowing carefully on the hot liquid, “and it’s not the Amazon River. It’s a store on the Internet called Amazon. How are Barbie skis going to do Rodney any good?”

  “Mistress Glory showed the skis to your father,” Darby said, “and Master Jeff is making a special pair just for Rodney.” As the brownie set the platter on the work table, he added helpfully, “His will require a place for four feet.”

  Refraining from making some wisecrack about the obviousness of that statement, I said, “Where will this skiing take place?”

  “On the snow drifts in Master Barnaby’s garden,” Darby said. “Mistress Glory feels a mountain might be too scary.”

  Good decision.

  We might not have any official “children” around for the holidays, but Glory — a Barbie-doll-sized green witch, Rodney, and Darby can get in every bit as much trouble with their bright ideas.

  Completely as an afterthought, I asked, “Darby, are you going to ski, too?”

  “No, Mistress,” the brownie said as he winked out of sight again. “I do not enjoy broken bones.”

  Chuckling, I went back to my wrapping. I was down in the lair early on Christmas Eve morning trying to get my chores finished before the store opened for the day. We planned to close the shop around 3 o’clock and head out as a group, for the Valley of Shevington.

  There would be ten of us: me, Mom, Dad, Tori, Gemma, Beau, Duke, Darby, Glory, and Rodney. That breaks down to me, two alchemists, a mostly corporeal ghost, a spectral coonhound, a pint-sized witch, a rat, and a guy who just found out he has magic.

  Yeah, as it turns out, Dad is Fae after all. For his safety — and ours — he takes a suppression potion daily. Moira, the resident alchemist in the Valley, stirred the stuff up for him to keep his erratic powers in check. As soon as the holidays are over, we’ll start training him to control his magic. Until then, we can’t afford to keep replacing the lightbulbs every time his energy spikes.

  These are the folks I call family, and I love them more than I know how to say. In fact, the six months or so leading up to the holidays was, for me, all about redefining and expanding that family.

  First Aunt Fiona died — and then we found out she didn’t.

  Tori and I discovered we’re cousins because we’re both descended from the same Cherokee witch, Knasgowa — which means my mother, and Tori’s mom, Gemma, are also cousins.

  We all share a common great grandfather, several generations removed — Barnaby Shevington, the founder and Lord High Mayor of the Fae city in the Otherworld that bears his name.

  Those things are all positive and exciting, but we’ve coped with some negatives and disappointments as well. The complications of the Fae world cost me what I think could have been a good relationship with my neighbor and friend, Chase MacGregor. He’s a werecat, sworn to defend me, but as a couple, we’re “off.”

  Even though I have a new guy interested in me, DGI Agent Lucas Grayson, there’s lingering hurt over Chase, especially during what would have been our first Christmas together.

  But the biggest, and most shocking revelation was also the newest. Tori’s father, Scrap Andrews, has been seeing a younger woman. He had Gemma served with divorce papers early in November, and then, just for added flavor, threatened to expose all of us as witches.

  Thanks to a nice little cooperation spell, nothing will be coming of that threat, and the divorce is going smoothly and quickly. Still, Gemma and Tori are struggling with the holidays. I’m struggling to be a supportive friend when I’m so over-the-moon happy these days my face actually hurts from smiling all the time.

  What’s that all about? My brother, Connor, is in my life for the first time.

  Because our mother was cursed, Connor was given up as a baby and raised in the Valley by his “grandmother” Endora Endicott, an old friend of Aunt Fiona’s. I never knew he existed until a few weeks ago. Then, through a series of misadventures, Connor fell into the hands of our arch enemy, the Creavit wizard, Irenaeus Chesterfield.

  I’d like to tell you that we pulled off a dramatic rescue, vanquishing the wizard in the process, but Connor and his new friend, an alchemist named Gareth, did that all by themselves.

  The three of us met for the first time in Miss Shania Moonbeam’s Divinatory Emporium in Raleigh. Connor and Gareth stumbled into the establishment looking for magical help not realizing Miss Shania is nothing more than a well-meaning fraud. Chase had interviewed her recently because she knew Chesterfield in his guise as a “man of letters” and gentleman antique dealer.

  As luck would have it, she kept Chase’s card and called us when Connor and Gareth showed up.

  “I put them in the sitting room in the back with milk and cookies,” Miss Shania whispered to me when we arrived. “I don’t think those boys are quite right in the head.”

  Leaving Chase to keep her occupied, I went into the back of the shop. Both men looked up when I stepped through the curtains, but it was Connor who asked curiously, “Do I know you?”

  We’ve talked about the question since. Maybe Connor recognized some of himself in my features. We both have Dad’s jaw and Mom’s eyes, but whatever it was, Connor knew instantly that we share a connection, and so did I.

  “You don’t know me yet,” I said, “but you will. Ailish wanted me to tell you that she’ll eat green broccoli yuck if you’ll just come home.”

  Ailish is Connor’s Elven Gray Loris. The mention of her name made him smile indulgently. “No, she won’t,” he said, “but I must have really worried her if she promised that.”

  “You scared us all to death,” I admitted, tears filling my eyes.

  Still staring at me, Connor said, “You’re Jinx Hamilton, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Mr. Chesterfield said you’re my sister, is that true? I always wanted
a sister.”

  Great. Not the way I wanted Connor to find out about me — about us.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Connor swallowed hard. “He said our parents gave me up because I can’t work magic.”

  If I could have gotten my hands on Irenaeus Chesterfield at that moment, I wouldn’t have needed magic to rip his head off.

  “That,” I said emphatically, “is a lie, and you do have magic. We awakened it to find you, but our parents don’t care about that, they — I — we — just care about you. Mom and Dad need to tell you themselves what happened when you were a baby, but I promise you, Connor, they didn’t want to give you up. They had to do it to save your life.”

  The short, round man beside him wearing a brown monk’s habit said, “See? I told you Chesterfield was lying. I felt a change in you, Connor. I knew your magic awakened. That’s why the bilocation spell worked.”

  Seeming to remember his manners, Connor said, “This is my friend, Gareth. He was trapped in a chess piece in the cavern where Chesterfield held us prisoner. I would never have escaped without his help.”

  Chess piece? You have got to be kidding me.

  “You’re the one who’s been spying on us for months?” I asked Gareth, trying not to sound accusatory.

  Coloring slightly, Gareth said, “No, I’m not the one, but I was aware of being in your store. Not always, but sometimes. There was something or someone much darker in that board. Most of the time I hid from him.”

  “In the cells?” I asked, remembering the interior of the chessboard from one of my psychometric visions.

  Gareth’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “You know about the cells?” When I nodded, he said, “I tried to stay all the way down at the bottom, as far from the screaming as I could get.”

  “How did you get out?” I asked. “We locked the chessboard inside a crypt.”

  “There was some kind of storm,” he replied. “A lightning bolt came down through the board and gave me a way to move up into the White King. Chesterfield came to the crypt and took the board to his cavern. He discovered me and held me over the fire pit. He told me if I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d burn me alive.

  That sounded like Chesterfield. He’s a real warm and fuzzy kind of guy.

  Fate threw Connor and Gareth together in that cavern. My brother was sucked through a portal in the Valley into the human realm — smack in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina. He wound up on the Outer Banks where Chesterfield found him.

  In the cavern, the chess piece and the castaway formed an alliance and engineered their escape by hitching a ride out via Chesterfield’s fountain pen.

  “I felt like Jonah in the belly of the whale,” Gareth said, his eyes round in his face. “Every time Mr. Chesterfield moved, a great wave of black ink shifted in the bladder of the pen and threatened to crush us.”

  Connor looked at me and grinned. “It wasn’t that bad,” he said. “Just a little cramped.”

  In the weeks since our first meeting, I’ve come to love that capacity in my brother. He has a calm, quiet way about him. Connor can make disaster seem like a manageable inconvenience. I’ve spent time with him in the Shevington stables. Working with animals is his calling in life. My four cats instantly fell in love with him, as did Dad’s six dogs.

  When Dad asked Connor to go fishing with him, Connor’s first question was, “Okay, but we’re not going to hurt the fish, right?” And just like that, Dad turned into a catch-and-release fly fisherman. Father and son are learning together. It’s much more about the bonding than the sport.

  Our mother walks around with an expression of complete euphoria on her face every day. She and Connor are effortless together, almost as if they’d never been apart.

  Frankly, I would have expected some awkwardness in our reunion, but there has been surprisingly little of that. About a week after we brought Connor back from Raleigh, the whole family sat down together in Shevington, including Aunt Fiona and Barnaby, and told my brother everything that happened when he was a baby. He asked a few questions, assured us that his adopted “grandmother” was a wonderful caregiver and that he’s had a happy life.

  And then he said something that made us all cry. “And now it will just be happier.”

  We haven’t figured out how to explain him to the rest of the family since the cover story at the time was that Baby Connor died. All of my mother’s siblings are aware of the Otherworld, although none of the brothers have abilities. With us, the magic runs matrilineally.

  Only Mom and Aunt Fiona actually entered into the affairs of the Fae world. They describe their sisters as “kitchen witches” at best. But even with an understanding of the reality of magic, the story of what happened to Connor is a lot to take in. Connor doesn’t seem upset about that, and he immediately understood that we’d already planned to spend Thanksgiving at Uncle Raymond’s.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “The stable hands always have a big Thanksgiving meal together.” Then, with a little hesitation, he said, “But we’ll celebrate Christmas won’t we?”

  Since his birthday is December 3, mine is the 6th, and Tori’s is the 9th, we started the festivities early with a big celebration in the lair complete with three cakes, presents, and lots of laughter. That was also the occasion for planning Christmas in detail.

  Looking back now, I can tell you that before I spent my first Christmas in the Valley of Shevington, most of my ideas about the holidays came from old movies. When Tori and I were little, she worried obsessively about Frosty the Snowman.

  “How can he be ‘back again someday’ if he melts?” she asked with obstinate six-year-old logic.

  The moms patiently explained about the return of winter and fresh batches of snow, to which Tori responded, “That won’t be the same Frosty. That will be Fake Frosty. Do you think we’re dumb enough to fall for that?”

  My concerns ran more toward Rudolph and the reindeer liberation movement. Those people had some nerve expecting a guy to wear mud on his nose and exactly what made the reindeer games so great anyway? Were there medals? No, there were not.

  When we got older, the moms introduced us to the classics. Tori fell in love with It’s A Wonderful Life and rang bells like crazy to dispense angel wings. I watched White Christmas over and over again thinking surely Bing Crosby would clue in and not make Rosemary Clooney mad before the big show again. Never happened.

  Of course, we also had plenty of family traditions. We opened our gifts on Christmas Eve; Tori and her folks waited for Christmas morning. We favored gelatinous cranberry sauce packed so tight in the can you could see the rings and hear the vacuum break when Mom knocked it out in one piece on a serving dish. Tori’s Dad wanted whole berries, which is just weird — but then here lately we’ve all agreed Scrap is a little off his rocker.

  But a perfect, enchanted Yule season with actual magic? Only Shevington gave us that — and now I’d like to give at least an impression of that experience to you.

  2

  Tori came out of her micro apartment just as I stepped through the basement door. After sharing the tiny accommodations with Gemma for several weeks, Tori’s back to living alone. Gemma has been cleaning out the family home in Cotterville to get it ready to put on the market.

  Things are moving pretty fast in our world. My folks have decided to buy the corner building next to Chase’s cobbler shop here in Briar Hollow. Dad wants to put in a sporting goods store. He suggested the move so we could all be closer.

  It didn’t take Gemma long to decide to relocate as well. She has no interest in watching Scrap and his 28-year-old girlfriend set up house in Cotterville, so she put in an offer on the old hardware store, which she’ll turn into an apothecary.

  Normally legal proceedings take months and months, but magic is driving the pace of the Andrews’ divorce. Gemma wants the whole thing over and done with so she can make a fresh start, but that desire doesn’t leave a lot of room for her daughter to pro
cess all the changes. Make no mistake. Tori is furious with her father, but she’s still heartsick over the disintegration of her family.

  The night before our planned departure for the Valley, Tori met Scrap for a “holiday” dinner. He asked if he could bring his girlfriend, an idea Tori shot down fast. Mary Ann was two years behind us in high school. If you think that would be hard for a daughter to stomach, you’re right.

  When I heard Tori’s car drive up in the alley a little after 10 p.m., I started to go downstairs, but then she slammed the back door so hard the windows in my apartment rattled. That changed my mind; I decided to give her some space.

  Judging from the look on her face the next morning, Tori needed even more space — at least until she’d had a cup of coffee, which I promptly made for her. Thankfully our non-magical barista, Mindy, and her ghost-hunting buddies, Nick and Kyle, went home for the holidays. We could speak freely.

  After a few silent sips, I saw the caffeine start to kick in and ventured a greeting. “Good morning.”

  “Morning.”

  “Are you ready to tell me about it?” I asked.

  We were sitting at one of the tables in the espresso bar. The “Closed” sign was still turned around on the front door, and we had at least half an hour before the first customers showed up — assuming the regulars didn’t care that it was Christmas Eve, which they wouldn’t.

  “You are not going to believe this,” Tori said tightly, “but he actually told me Mary Ann hopes we can be friends because she remembers me ‘fondly’ from school.”

  Wincing, I said, “What did you say to that?”

  “I told him I had enough friends,” she grumbled, “and that I have no intention of spending time with him and his slut.”

  Ouch.

  “How did that go over?”

  “Like the proverbial ton of lead bricks,” Tori said. “I told him I would be happy to see him anytime, but not to bring that woman up again. Then he got mad and told me I’m just like Mom. To which I said, ‘Thank God for small favors.’”