Kiss of Christmas Magic: 20 Paranormal Holiday Tales of Werewolves, Shifters, Vampires, Elves, Witches, Dragons, Fey, Ghosts, and More

by Eve Langlais

  He made as if to brush her cheek, and she flinched though his fingers touched only air, her skin prickling with the nearness of him.

  “What do you imagine that I want of you?” he asked.

  She imagined a great deal–wild thoughts, mad thoughts, thoughts she never would have entertained before he had first stepped into her chamber.

  “Where is my husband?” she asked. “What have you done to John?”

  Don Argemirus made an irritated sound and dropped his hand. “Your husband, my lady, awaits below. I forbade him from your chambers as you healed.”

  Sarah remembered fevered dreams, a cool hand at her brow, a touch that chased away the pain that wracked her body, and another body next to hers. “Then who–?” She broke off as the obvious answer struck her. “You! Sirrah, you swore you would offer me no insult.”

  “Nor did I, my lady,” he said mildly. “I did naught but what you wished me to do.”

  Sarah shook her head. She could never wish to be unfaithful to John. He was the only reason she had agreed to the doctor’s scheme.

  Except that she had. In the heat and the madness of the moment, she had not cared about anything but this man and what he was doing to her. Not her oaths. Not her honor. Not her children.

  Not even John.

  Sarah raised a hand to her neck reflexively, touching where Don Argemirus’ teeth had cut into her flesh to spill her blood. The skin was smooth and unbroken. Had it been a dream, then? Was this a dream? But it felt more real than anything ever had. Perhaps John and her children were the dream….

  She broke off that line of thought.

  “I wish you to depart from here,” she said. “Leave and never return.”

  “I fear you demand the impossible.” Don Argemirus smiled. “If I rode out of your husband’s gates without you, the pain should drive you mad.”

  “Pain?” Sarah scoffed. “If I am healed, what pain should I feel?”

  This time when he reached out, he did touch her, taking her chin in his hand. Her body crackled with awareness, the need for him that had lain half–somnolent roaring to attention.

  “Tell me you do not desire my kisses as your every breath,” he murmured, his heavy lashes veiling his bright blue eyes.

  Sarah opened her mouth to deny him, but she discovered that she could speak only the truth. “I do,” she breathed. “Saints preserve me, but I do.”

  His mouth quirked–and then it met hers, and she was lost again, her body giving to his instantly as her mind caught on fire.

  When they separated, it was because he pulled back–he pulled back because she never could.

  And as he smiled down at her again, she realized with despair that she could never deny him anything at all.

  “You are mine now,” he said. “The blood that healed you also sealed your life to mine. You shall forsake your former oaths and bonds and leave with me. Do not look sad, my lady, for their lives are naught more than the length of a swallow’s flight to you now.”

  “What are you saying?” Sarah demanded, her head still spinning.

  Don Argemirus stepped back. “I did not merely heal you for the nonce but forever–both from human ailments and the ravages of time himself.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Immortality?” she asked.

  His eyes danced with amusement, scarcely suppressed. “Not the immortality of Tithonus, who shriveled with the centuries into a mouse, no. Eternal youth.”

  Eternal youth. Eternal health. Never again would she sit at death’s door as her lungs filled up and drowned her. Never again would she fear sleep because she might not see the next dawn.

  John would age and die, and so would her children and her children’s children. But she would be young. Sarah felt the strength in her leg that had once been crippled. She would be beautiful and strong.

  And she could not doubt that Don Argemirus could give her all that.

  “What do you want from me in return?” she asked. “My soul?”

  He laughed, playing with a length of hair that had fallen over her shoulder to lie across her breast. “All this talk of demon, devils, and souls. This has naught to do with such things. You shall be my lady and I your lord. For all time. Verily, there are worse fates than that!”

  “Your lady,” she repeated. “I already have a husband.”

  “Marriage to a mortal is scarcely mete for an immortal,” he shot back. “Do gods marry men? No, though they might dally with them for a time.”

  “You speak blasphemy,” she protested, but she couldn’t step away.

  “Ah, perhaps I do.” His shrug was negligent. “We are not gods, in truth, but ethereal beings–myself, one step down from the angels, and you, one more step below that.”

  He dropped his hand away from her and stepped back farther, and Sarah felt a part of herself seem to go thin and stretched with the distance. She could very well imagine that if he left the manor now, she might go mad in truth.

  “Is there no escape?” she whispered.

  “Break the seal between us?” Don Argemirus asked. “If you did that, then you should become a moral. You should not die instantly, but you might catch the flux in summer or the grippe in winter and perish as all mortals do. You should grow old, perhaps crippled again.”

  Each of his words pierced Sarah’s heart like a sword. She had just been freed from imminent death. To have its shadow over her again when she had been so nearly doomed froze the marrow in her bones.

  But Don Argemirus wasn’t finished. He smiled a soft, indulgent smile. “And, most of all, I would never touch you again, and you would never feel the way that only I can make you feel. Is that the fate that you would return to?”

  Yes. Sarah wished she could say the word. But even now her body thrilled with his presence, and the memory of his last kiss surged over her–that touch alone had been more thrilling and intense than even the highs of young love with John.

  She couldn’t make herself say the word. She couldn’t say anything at all. Instead, she stood swaying in the force of his regard, struck dumb by everything that he did to her.

  “As I thought,” Don Argemirus said. “I shall let you say our farewell to your husband and kin. Then we shall leave.”

  “John would never let me go!” Sarah protested.

  “Would he not?” Don Argemirus looked amused. “Sit down, my lady. You look weary.”

  The words cracked like a whip through the air. Instantly, Sarah’s legs buckled, and it was only by lunging at the closest chair that she kept herself from collapsing onto the floor.

  “How?” she sputtered, her heart sinking–because she did not merely sit; she wanted to sit. She wanted to do anything he told her to. And she knew in her heart that no man could resist his will any more than he could.

  “I am the lord of all men,” he said simply, turning away from her to open the door to the chamber. “My will is theirs.”

  He stood in the doorway and spoke to someone in a low tone. As he shifted to shut the door, Sarah caught a glimpse of Bess’ retreating back.

  Silently, Don Argemirus retired to the shadowy corner where he had placed the other chair. Sarah could do nothing but watch him, suspended between longing and hopelessness. John. How could she face John? Half of her wanted to cry out that she never wanted to see him again–and the rest wanted to bury her face in his chest forever.

  But she said nothing, and a short moment later, there was a burst of noise at the door. Ann and Mary tumbled through the door first, Richard behind with Henry in his arms.

  “You are well!” Ann explained. “Oh, Mama, I knew it would work! It’s the best Christmas ever!”

  Sarah found that she was able to want to stand again, and she did, rocking back as her children piled into her. She laughed, her heart suddenly taking flight as she showered them with kisses.

  “My poppets, my lovely poppets,” Sarah said, and even Richard condescended in his thirteen–year–old dignity to be embraced by her.

  “Merry Chr
istmas, my lady mother,” he said with great dignity.

  “Is it Christmas indeed? Why, merry Christmas, then, my angel!”

  Henry crowed with delight, understanding nothing but that everyone else was happy, and she took him into her arms and kissed him into a fit of giggles.

  “Yes, I am hale and hearty, my darlings, and I have never in my life been happier to see you four!” she told them, blinking quickly to chase away the tears that pricked her eyes.

  “Does your bounteous impulse include me as well?”

  Chapter Seven

  Sarah’s eyes snapped up, and her breath caught at the sign of John in the doorway. Though he was a handsome man by all accounts, compared to Don Argemirus, he was practically homely, every imperfection magnified through the comparison to the doctor’s inhuman flawlessness.

  But even as the part of her that Don Argemirus had changed recoiled from him, the truest depths of her heart still yearned for her imperfect husband–because he was perfect for her. And that part of her felt suddenly afraid, as if it were being wrung between two hands until it was in danger of coming apart.

  “Dearest children, please let your lord father speak privily to his wife,” she said, kissing them each one last time.

  Mary and Ann began a storm of protests, but Richard took Henry back in his arms and coaxed his younger sisters from the room with the authority of the Baron Marston’s heir as John stepped fully inside.

  When they had left, Sarah raised her chin and with great difficulty, dragged her eyes over to where Don Argemirus sat waiting in the shadows. “Privily, sir, if you please.”

  The man stood, gathering his cloak about him, and sketched an ironic bow before retiring, closing the door behind him. Sarah could feel him growing farther away from her as if a part of her was being stretched. The terror that it struck in her heart was almost as bad as the pain that it caused behind her eyes.

  “My lord husband,” Sarah to John, the words a confirmation of what she knew was between them.

  His face was pale, drawn in lines more dire than she’d ever seen before. “The doctor’s cure was successful.”

  “It was,” she agreed. She walked up to John, but he kept his arms at his sides, and she couldn’t make herself reach for him.

  “He says that you are to be his lady now,” he said.

  “He’s said as much to me,” she said. “It means nothing, John. It can’t mean anything.”

  “But he cured you, Sarah,” John said.

  Sarah could not remember the last time her name had passed his lips. Always, it was “my love,” “my dove,” “my lady wife.” What did it mean, that he should use her Christian name again?

  “He did, and now I am yours again,” she said. “Forever. As I swore to you.”

  She touched his hand with her own, and instantly, he twisted his wrist to seize her hand in his own, holding it so tight that she thought he would never let go.

  “He says that without him, you will die now, Sarah,” John said. “He says that you must come with him. Is that true?”

  Sarah felt the pain behind her eyes more sharply now, and she knew she did not have much time away from the doctor before it grew unbearable. “I fear it may be. He’s done something to me, John. My life is bound to his.”

  “I forced you into this,” John said. “To submit yourself to his care. And he did cure you, as he said he could.”

  “But at what cost?” Sarah cried out.

  “I do not care. As long as you live, even if you can be mine no longer, I will rejoice for your good fortune.” He stepped back slightly, putting some distance between them so that he could look her up and down even as he kept his hand joined to hers. “Only look! Look at what he has wrought. I swore to God that I would give anything in this world to see you well again, and my prayers were answered. How could I regret the cost?”

  “But I do,” Sarah burst out. “John, I wanted to live for you. For our children. Without those things, my life is no life at all. I would rather be moldering in a crypt than be taken from you.”

  “Do you speak in troth?” John’s dark eyes were wells of grief. “Don Argemirus said that your affections, too, would be turned from me. That your heart and your body would be sealed to him. Can you swear that he has not touched you?”

  That was a question that she never could have imagined her husband asking her–John, so confident in his wife’s love and fidelity, not like some husbands who were forever checking behind arras and under beds.

  She closed her eyes against the tears that threatened to spill. “I cannot swear to that, my love. He made me–when he bled me and healed me, he worked his dark magic, and–”

  John dropped her hand and spit out a long string of oaths–cursing not her but the doctor and himself in loud and colorful terms.

  “John!” she cried out, trying to stop him. “My husband!”

  And at that, he did stop, and he looked at her with dead eyes. “No. Not your husband. I destroyed that. With my arrogance and my certainties, I invited that snake in–I forced you to accept him. I have none but myself to blame.”

  “Please do not despise me,” Sarah whispered, her tears falling freely now. “And do not tell my children that I was aught but faithful to you.”

  John took her in his embrace, and she sagged against his strength, against the touch she had been afraid she would never feel again. Her body did not thrill for him as it did for Don Argemirus–as a mere mortal, that was beyond his power and skill. “Of all the things in this world I might doubt, you are not one of them, my love. Whatever has happened has been through my own hubris. You shall be happy again in time, if the doctor’s dark arts can make you love him. And I must rejoice for you, even if you should never be mine again.”

  Sarah stopped his words with a kiss, and he kissed her back more fiercely than he had ever kissed her before, driving her back against the table. It was truly nothing like what Don Argemirus could do to her–and it was even far less than what she usually felt with her husband, as if the doctor’s powers had stolen that part of her for himself alone. But she didn’t care. She loved John and only John, and all the doctor’s promises only confirmed how much more John was worth to her than anything else the world might offer.

  When he finally broke away, Sarah said, “No. I gave no oath to him. What he has of me, he took–perhaps not by force, but he stole it from me, nevertheless. I shall–no, I will always be your lady, John. No matter what witchcraft or devil’s debts.”

  “But you must go with him to live,” John protested.

  She tightened her arms around him. “Then let me die here, with you, as I was going to do.”

  At that, John yanked the shift from her body and boosted her up onto the edge of the table. The headache was worse now, pounding behind her eyes, but Sarah put it out of her mind, catching at the laces to his hose and braies even as he kissed her again and again, her mouth and her neck and her shoulders. He kissed her breasts fervently, suckled them until her back arched against his body. She could only feel a shadow of what he was doing to her past the throbbing in her head, but she did not care–she would not care, even if this killed her.

  John straightened to take her mouth again as he drove into her with a force that made her gasp. She broke off their kiss and hooked her legs around him, clasping him to her as he thrust into her slickness over and over again. She tried to climb for the peak, but she couldn’t, the pain in her head driving her back down again. But John’s breath came faster and faster, and she ducked her head against his shoulder. Feeling the pleasure mount in him that was being kept from her.

  Without warning, he released his seed. She felt the difference in his body as his buttocks tightened under her legs and his whole body went rigid. And as that happened, something within her shattered, and she came, too, with the force of a fall from a parapet. The pain behind her eyes was burned away in it, and suddenly the part of her that had been numbed by Don Argemirus came roaring back to life even as she was left
with an enormous sense of loss.

  She wept as she came, the shuddering waves of it going through her body–nothing like the insane intensity that the doctor had stirred in her but with all the human intensity that she had ever felt before.

  And as she slid back down from the peak, her breath steadying gradually, she recognized that it was absolutely everything that she had ever wanted, despite the new emptiness that throbbed inside her.

  A scream came from the next room–agony or despair, Sarah couldn’t recognize which. The door was flung open, and in its opening stood Don Argemirus, looking twice as large as any human should, darkness seething around his body.

  “You fool!” he roared, his beautiful face twisted in emotions that she could not name. He stormed into the room, his casual slap hitting John with a force that sent him spinning away and crashing into the wall.

  “John!” Heedless of her nakedness, Sarah ran after him–but Don Argemirus’ hand around her arm caught her up short. He held her as effortlessly as he might a small child, not even seeming to notice as she threw her weight back against him to escape him.

  “Do you not know what you have done?” the doctor continued. “What you have thrown away?”

  “Let me go!” Sarah shouted. “Let me go to him!”

  Instead, the sorcerer pulled her so close that she was dizzy with the power of him, the scent of him. Her body still sang to his presence, even with the merciless grip he had around her arm.

  “I ought to kill you both for this.” Every word spat between gritted teeth.

  “Kill me,” Sarah said recklessly. “Only spare him. If I cannot be with my husband, I do not care to live.”

  With a noise of disgust, Don Argemirus dropped her arm. “Thank the pitiful saints of your choice that I am not one to seek revenge.”

  He spun and stalked out of the room, slamming the door closed in his wake. Sarah knew with a certainty that took her breath away that this was the last time she would ever see him, and the depth of the thing that he had forged between them almost caused her to call out, to beg him to stay.