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

by Eve Langlais

  “You can do it, too. She’s still there inside you. Still hot and excited from the run. Just feel her. Let her lend you that heat.” I spoke right in her ear, my voice low, almost growling. The way she liked it.

  “Well, maybe I could try if you weren’t being all… all wolfy. And squeezing my ass. It’s distracting!”

  “You’re telling me.”

  I cut it out. Even though I screwed around a lot, stuff like this was important. I’d mastered these skills as a cub. Skills that, in some situations, could save your life.

  Nat had grown up outside of shifter society. Living with humans and never shifting. She was part of a pack now, my pack, and she had a lot of catching up to do.

  As her brow furrowed with concentration, I felt a flash of warmth. Her body was heating up just enough to protect her from the elements. But not for long. The heat of the run would fade and we’d have to keep moving or find shelter. The sun wasn’t going to last much longer and…

  “Snow! Hutch, it’s snowing!”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s perfect. Don’t you think it’s perfect?”

  She leaned in, her lips parting as they met mine. The little snowflakes turned to water when they hit our faces.

  I returned her kiss with a growing passion. I’d never tire of this. Of her. We’d been through so much together, and I never would have made it without her.

  “So, are you feeling Christmassy yet?” she asked.

  “I’m feeling something, that’s for sure.” I pulled her closer. I wanted her. I wanted to take her then and there. But… I had one eye on the darkening sky behind her.

  The light dusting of snow she was so excited about was just the beginning. The weather was turning, and out here it could turn fast.

  I let her slide back down to the ground. “We need to get going.”

  She pouted, clearly disappointed by my lack of festive cheer. This meant a lot to her, but it really wasn’t the sort of thing I could fake enthusiasm about.

  “I’m sorry Nat, I’m just not that into Christmas. I’m into you though. I’m into this. I love that we’re out here and I’m sure I’m going to love what you’ve got planned… where the hell are we heading anyway?”

  “It’s a secret.” The pout faded instantly from her face. Whatever this secret was, she was obviously excited about it. “It’s…” She looked around for a moment, almost as if she was sniffing the air. “It’s just over that big hill… cliff… thing, I think. A few more miles, maybe five or six. You know what’s crazy?”

  I spread my hands. Go on. She was going to tell me any way.

  “Back in the world, before I joined the pack, I mean, I was hopeless at finding my way around. Even GPS was a mystery to me… and maps? Forget about it. But now I’m out here, it’s like I can feel the contours of the land. Like I know exactly where I am and where I’m going.”

  “Yeah, we’ve kind of got a built in navigation system. We’ve got more senses than the average person could dream about,” I said.

  One of those senses was an awareness of incoming changes in air pressure, and right now, around us, it was about to drop. The snow was getting thicker too, the wind a little stronger. We weren’t going to make it five or six miles.

  “Nat, listen to me.”

  “Sure, but check out this snow. You wanna build a––”

  “Nat! Listen.” I didn’t like using that particular tone with her. But mate or not, she was still part of my pack and when the alpha speaks, he needs to be able to make sure the pack pays attention.

  Her eyes went wide, but she stayed silent.

  “We need to move. We need to move now and we need to move fast.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly shivering again. The temperature was plummeting and whatever heat was left over from the run was fading fast.

  “Stay on me. Stay close. If I get too far ahead, let me know. Howl and let me know, okay?”

  She nodded and suddenly looked very scared.

  “It’s okay sweetheart. We’re fine, we just have to find some shelter until it blows over. Just stay on me. Don’t fall behind.”

  “Okay, Hutch.”

  I shifted and headed for the hill in front of us. It was a rough and ugly thing, with enough exposed stone to suggest there might be some kind of overhang, or if we were lucky, a cave.

  I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Nat was on my tail. She was close, head down trying to match my pace. I slowed a little, but we didn’t have the luxury of taking it easy. I could barely see ten yards in front of my face anymore. It was going to make finding shelter difficult.

  I thought I heard Nat howl, but when I glanced back she was still there. It was just the wind. We had to be close to the jagged rocks that ringed the base of the hill now. Not much further.

  The next time I turned back, she was gone.

  My blood turned to ice as I squinted into the swirling snow. My eyes darting back and forth, straining for any hint of movement.

  Shit. I had to find her.

  I heard her before I saw her. A long howl, but she wasn’t in distress. She was calling me. Telling me to come to her. It was followed by some excited barks.

  Come here. I’ve found something. Come and see.

  ***

  It was… well, it was pretty much the sort of cave you dream about finding if you get caught in the middle of a blizzard. A low, angled entrance protected us from the wind. But inside it was palatial. Big enough to stand, and move around in.

  It was warm too, as if the rock itself was leaking energy. Warm. But, not that warm. We still needed some clothes.

  And then it hit me.

  “Nat?”

  “Yeah, Hutch.”

  “Where’s your pack?”

  “My? Oh, crap. Oh, oh, no. We have to go back.”

  I gave her a second to let that sink in.

  “Right. Of course. We can’t go back. But… oh, oh crap. It had our clothes. And other stuff. It had survival stuff. We need survival stuff Hutch. We need it to survive.”

  I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing.

  Nat looked like she was about to explode. “What’s so damn funny?”

  “Nat. Honey. We’re fine. We’re safe here. We’ve got shelter, that’s the most important thing. The storm is already starting to pass. We can wait it out and then.” I pointed the way we were heading. “Civilization. Shops, bars, cheap motels…”

  “Cheap motels?”

  “Cheap motels… with beds. Look, I know it’s not what you wanted. But, you got me. And I got you. And…”

  When she hugged me it was like her body melted into mine. Her flesh so perfectly soft. Every touch reminding me that there was good in the world, and I had to be a good man to get my share. For her, I needed to be the best man, the best wolf, the best everything.

  “I love you, Hutch.”

  “Yeah. I love you too.”

  “I’m still going to need you to go and get my pack though. It had stuff in it,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Sex stuff. I don’t want anyone else to find it.”

  I chuckled and squeezed her tight. “When it dies down a bit, I’ll see what I can do okay?”

  “Thanks babe. While we wait, let’s see what supplies we do have.” She reached for my pack and rifled through it. “Are you serious?”

  “What?”

  “I told you to pack for a weekend away.”

  “I did.”

  She pulled out the contents of my pack one by one, offering a running commentary as if I was a prisoner being paroled.

  “One pair of boots. Scuffed. One t–shirt. Black. One pair of jeans. Tight and torn. One toothbrush that’s seen better days and a six pack of beer! Hutch, what were you thinking?”

  “Hey look little miss secret plans, I didn’t actually have a lot to go on. And I like to travel light, okay?”

  She held out the beer as if accusing me of something.

  “What? At least we’ll die happy if
we don’t survive!”

  “I can’t believe it. I can not believe it.”

  “Believe it, sweetie.” I grinned. “Hey, pass me a cold one, would you?”

  Chapter Three

  Natalie

  Everything was screwed up, and it was all my fault.

  I had no idea where the cabin was anymore. With the flurries of snow whirlwinding in the air, all of my senses were messed up. And now we were stuck in a damn cave for the night!

  I’d been to the cabin once before. With Tommy and his family, when I was just a kid. When the economy went south and the factories closed down, they’d struggled to maintain it. But Tommy was all about developing property now and it wasn’t in his nature to let an opportunity go to waste. So he’d done it up again and started renting it out as a romantic getaway.

  He and Hutch were never going to be best friends, but he still carried a torch for me and I managed to get him to discount it all the way down to free for us. Which was fortunate, because Hutch and I were pretty much broke.

  In my head I imagined curling up to Hutch in front of the cabin fireplace, blankets covering us, marshmallows in our hot cocoa. Now here, I was shivering so much my teeth seemed like they would chatter out of my head. My butt had turned numb from where it was sitting on the large boulder and the snow would not stop falling outside. I was cold, almost naked and everything was horrible.

  I liked wearing Hutch’s t–shirts around the trailer. I’m not exactly petite, but they’re still big on me. He thinks I look sexy in them and I have to admit I felt sexy, with the fabric stretched tight across my substantial breasts and the hem of the shirt only reaching half way down my ass.

  Before Hutch, I struggled to believe that any man could think I was sexy, but now? The way he looked at me on those lazy mornings when we could barely be bothered to get out of bed? It wasn’t such a struggle any more.

  Unfortunately, looking sexy wasn’t exactly a priority right now. I wanted to keep warm and although his shirt was better than nothing, it wasn’t much better.

  Hutch tramped back in through the cave entrance. He dumped an armful of branches in front of me.

  “Voila!” he said, making a grand bow.

  “That’s not my backpack,” I grumped.

  “It’s better. It’s fire. Well, it’s all the makings of a fire.” Hutch knelt down and began to pile the branches up into a kind of pyramid.

  “You’re making a fire?”

  “Sure. Otherwise we’ll freeze to death out here.”

  I frowned. It was my stupid fault if we froze to death.

  “Hey, don’t worry, Nat,” Hutch said. He let go of the top of the bonfire stack, and the pile of branches slumped over to one side.

  “If we don’t freeze to death, we’ll starve to death,” I said. “All of the food supplies were in my pack.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Hutch said. “Can you work on this bonfire while I go back out?”

  “You’re going to get more wood?”

  “That too. I just can’t–” his huge hands tried to pull together the twigs into a nice stack, and the pyramid of branches slumped back over the other way.

  “Sure,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “Don’t go too far, okay?”

  “Don’t you worry. I’ll be back before you can shake a pig’s tail.”

  “Why would I want to shake a pig’s tail?” I asked, but he was already gone.

  “Stupid snow. Stupid blizzard.” I mumbled to myself, trying to form a pyramid of twigs from the wood he had gathered. My fingers were numb, and I grumbled all the while, even as the branches came together to form a respectable bonfire pyramid. “Not a single darn marshmallow.”

  My stomach grumbled along with me, as though commiserating over the lack of marshmallows. Finally I had a huge pyramid built up, and I sat back and waited for Hutch.

  Why had I thought this was a good idea? We could have been cozy at home in our trailer in Scraptown. Sure, it wasn’t a cabin getaway in the middle of the woods like I had planned, but at least we wouldn’t be on the verge of death. Tears filled my eyes. I’d messed everything up, and ruined Hutch’s weekend, and put us in terrible danger.

  Before my pity party could get any further underway, Hutch bounded in through the cave entrance in wolf form. He had something in his mouth, something furry that he put down to the side before curling himself up around me. I buried my face in his fur and hugged him tightly, the tears sliding down my cheeks. He was warm and snuggly and everything good. I heard his throat rumble, and I felt a wave of comfort wash through me.

  My mate. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us.

  I wiped the last tears from my face as Hutch changed back into human form.

  “Why are you crying, Nat? Look at how awesome your bonfire setup is!”

  “It’s okay?”

  “It’s more than okay,” he said, grinning. “Let me get the matches and we’ll see just how okay it is.”

  The fire sparked up at the bottom of the pile and soon blazed through the branches. The cave warmed up almost instantly, and the sloped ceiling let the smoke escape without making my eyes water. Not that it would have mattered – my eyes were rimmed red with tears anyway.

  “Let me get dinner set up and I’ll go back out for more wood,” Hutch said.

  “Dinner?”

  But before I could say anything else, Hutch had grabbed up the furry things from the cave floor.

  “Rabbit,” he said triumphantly. “Pretty fancy pants, huh?”

  I couldn’t help but grin, although I had to turn my eyes away when he went just outside the cave to skin the rabbits. When I’d opened my eyes again, he had them skewered up on a big stick, with some greenery stuck in. Using the extra branches, he fashioned a contraption to hold up the skewer. One end of the stick stuck out sideways.

  “You hold it there to turn it,” Hutch explained to me. “Rabbit rotisserie!”

  “What’s the green stuff?” I asked, wary.

  “Rosemary sprigs! I thought it would give it some flavor.”

  “Oh,” I said, my shoulders settling back, relaxed.

  I started turning the stick slowly, the meaty smell making my stomach growl even louder. Hutch grinned.

  “One more trip for some extra firewood,” he said. “Then we can eat and snuggle up for the night.”

  He bounded out of the cave with so much energy I didn’t know what had gotten into him. Maybe he was covering up the fact that he was mad at me. Or maybe we were in more danger than I knew, and this was his way of hiding it. Maybe he needed to distract himself from being angry that I had messed up his weekend.

  With a huge pile of firewood leaned up on the side of the cave, Hutch finally wiped his hands and sighed.

  “Done,” he said. “Now to eat.”

  We sat shoulder to shoulder as we ate. The rabbit meat was scorching hot, but Hutch pulled off little scraps of meat with his fingers and fed them to me bit by bit.

  “This is delicious,” I said. The rosemary had smoked right into the rabbit, and even without any other spices it was savory enough that I could have eaten another whole one. Hutch melted some snow in his metal thermos so that we could drink it as water, and by the time I was done eating I felt utterly satisfied. I gave a small sigh and leaned into Hutch.

  “See?” he said. “This isn’t so bad.”

  “Hutch, why do you hate Christmas?”

  He laughed, a short laugh that was more of a snort.

  “Why do you think I hate Christmas?”

  “For one, you don’t want to be Santa.”

  “I would be a terrible Santa. I don’t have a beard. Or a big belly. Or–”

  “And you don’t want to decorate. Or give presents.”

  Hutch bit his lip. I could tell that there was something working around itself in his mind. He took a while to speak, but I let him think. There was something else in here, something that I needed to know.

  “Nat,” he started. “Your dad was a
wesome. Seriously awesome. I miss him a lot, and I only got to spend a few months with him. He probably did all these wonderful Christmassy things for you, and I totally get that.”

  My lips parted. Was this what all the grinchiness was all about?

  “But I didn’t get any of that. You want to know what I did on Christmas most years when I was a kid?”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “My dad would stake out the rich neighborhoods and find out the ones where the family was on vacation. Then he would make me break in if they had a dog door. Make me steal all the presents. Steal their jewelry. Steal anything.”

  “Oh, Hutch.”

  “He wouldn’t even give me the presents. I got to play with them if they were already opened, but if not, I had to keep them in the package. We pawned everything afterwards for cash.”

  I hugged Hutch tightly. After the trip to Vegas, I had learned about how horrible his dad had been. But I had never heard him talk about this before.

  “It’s not like I hate Christmas, Nat. I just don’t have a lot of good memories around it. I never knew what a nice Christmas was like, and so… ”

  He trailed off.

  “Hutch, I’m sorry,” I said. I could hear my voice trembling, and it wasn’t the chill in the air that had done it. “I only wanted to make things nice for you. I thought Christmas was supposed to be about family, and I thought the pack would like it. I’m sorry about all this.”

  “Nat, I love you. Heck, this isn’t bad at all. I’ve lived in worse places than this cave, even if it does smell like bear!”

  He laughed, and I laughed with him. My hand crept across his bare chest. The light from the flames danced yellow and orange on his skin. He kissed the top of my head, burying his face in my hair.

  “And I’m sure the pack will love the tree we pick out, if we ever get out of this forest alive.”

  He grinned, and I looked up into his face. He was so sweet. My mate. My love.

  “Well,” I said, my hand moving lower on his chest, “just in case we don’t get out of this forest alive, maybe we should make this night a memorable one.”

  Hutch’s eyes widened, and I could see the amber glow in his irises firing up.