Tales of the Otherworld (24 page)

“But—”

“I need to have that paper done by the end of the year, remember? So I’ll stay here, have Christmas with you, and go home for the first week of the new year.”

“You’re almost done with the paper. You should spend Christmas with—”

“They’ll wait. Everyone usually comes down for a couple of weeks anyway, and they don’t care exactly when we celebrate it. If someone can’t make it, everyone else waits.”

Her smile turned wistful. “That must be nice.” She looked at me. “If it’s really okay—”

“It is.”

I put my arm around her waist and we started walking again.

I’d call Jeremy tomorrow. We’d rescheduled Christmas for others before, and the holidays weren’t really a big deal for the Pack, just another excuse to get together. For Elena, though, Christmas obviously
was
a big deal. Or it would be this year. I’d make sure of that.

W
HAT I KNEW ABOUT CHRISTMAS COULD BE
summed up in three words: holiday, presents, and food. For the Pack, that’s what it was—an excuse to take two weeks off work, hang out together, and eat. The gift exchange was the only thing that differentiated it from an extended summer Meet.

As for the customs, traditions, and spiritual significance of Christmas, I understood the last best, having studied the religious aspects of Christmas in relation to non-Christian midwinter celebrations. Yet I doubted that Elena’s idea of a perfect Christmas meant listening to me expound on Christianity’s adaptations of Mithraic and winter solstice celebrations…though I could always fall back on that if things went wrong.

What Elena wanted was something closer to the Pack’s interpretation of the holiday: a celebration of family. To her, though, that meant more than food and gifts and time together. As I’d seen in her face when she’d looked at that tree, she wanted trappings, all the things that meant Christmas. And I’d give them to her. As soon as I figured out what they all were.

“First we need a tree,” I said.

Elena stopped drying a plate and looked at me, nose scrunching. We were in my tiny apartment kitchen, doing the dinner dishes.

“A tree …” she said slowly.

“That’s where I thought we’d start.”

“With a…tree…?”

“Right. Or should we buy the decorations first?”

“Decor—” She laughed. “Oh, you mean a
Christmas
tree. Context, Clay. You must learn the fine art of conversational context.” She slid the plate onto the shelf. “A tree would be nice. Is it too soon?” She leaned over the counter to squint at the dining room calendar. Her lips moved as she counted. “Just over three weeks—it should last that long. When do you want to get it?”

“Tomorrow. We’ll stop by the hardware store for an axe, then head out to the ravines.”

“The ravines?”

“Right. That’s where the trees are.”

“So we’ll just go chop one down.” Her cheeks twitched as she bit back a laugh. “Highly illegal, but perfectly sensible, and that’s what matters in Clay’s world.”

Before I could answer, she leaned toward me, chest brushing mine, thumbs hooking my belt loops. Her lips moved to my ear.

“Did you notice the trees in the grocery store lot? Hint: They didn’t grow there overnight. That’s where we get Christmas trees from in our world.”

“Yeah, half-dead ones, cut down in October. Damn things would be naked by Christmas.”

“True.”

She started to move away, but I put my hand against the small of her back, keeping her close.

“I suppose that’s what you do at home, isn’t it?” she said. “Grab an axe, walk out to the back forty, and chop down a tree. That’d be nice.”

A wistful look, then she brightened. “Oh, wait a sec. There are tree farms, outside the city, where you can cut your own—”

She stopped, gaze skipping to the side. “On second thought, maybe not. They’ll be packed with people—crying kids, crowded wagons—definitely not your idea of a good time.”

“I’d survive.”

“No, we can—”

“Find a place and we’ll go tomorrow.”

The tree-cutting trip did hit an obstacle, but it wasn’t the one Elena had anticipated. Yes, the farm was packed, and the hay wagon trip from the parking lot to the bush was hellish—crammed onto a trailer full of grumpy adults, overtired kids, straw that smelled like it’d been recycled from a horse barn, and two lapdogs dressed in knitted pink sweaters, which spent the whole trip yapping at me.

But I survived. Better than that—aside from the wagon ride—I had a great time. We stayed on the trailer until the last stop, when everyone else had impatiently tumbled out right at the start. So we found ourselves alone in the bush, tramping along the rows of trees as dusk turned to moonlight, our footsteps crackling across the frozen ground, the silence broken only by the distant shouts and laughs of children and Elena’s equally excited chirps of “Oh, this one…No, wait, there’s one over there.”

We were in no rush, so we wandered, bickered, and teased, all the while pretending to search for the perfect tree, but really just enjoying the clear winter night. When we did choose one, I chopped it down. Then we celebrated the victorious hunt with powdered doughnuts and a thermos of hot chocolate, and when that didn’t warm Elena up enough, I moved on to other heat-producing activities.

We caught the last wagon back, paid for our tree…and hit the roadblock. You can’t strap a Christmas tree to a motorcycle. We had debated taking the bike, but only because we knew how cold it would get when we left the insulation of the city. We’d decided that with no fresh snow on the road in days, riding the motorcycle would be cold, but better than the hassle of taking a cab. The motorcycle’s limitations as a method of tree transport had somehow failed to occur to either of us.

So we had to arrange delivery after explaining our oversight to the tree farmer who, on hearing my accent, took twenty minutes to kindly explain to the young southerner that Canada really didn’t have a winter climate suitable for motorcycles, and to recommend places where I could pick up a cheap winter beater. Then Elena’s stifled wheezes of laughter got the farmer’s wife scrambling for cough drops and we spent another ten minutes waiting while Elena dutifully copied down her herbal cold remedy recipes. Finally, we escaped, and headed home, with our tree to follow.

The next day we put up the tree and decorated it. Only one thing was missing: the presents to go underneath. At home, I did most of my shopping by catalogue, as did Jeremy. We suffered through an annual New York gift-buying excursion with Nick and Antonio, but always scheduled it for early November, to beat that Thanksgiving-to-Christmas rush.

Just picking out decorations at the department store had been enough seasonal shopping for me, but it was getting late for catalogue ordering, so I resigned myself to a Saturday in shopping mall hell. And if I was going to put myself through that torture, I might as well get a second duty over with, and please Elena by inviting Logan to join us.

For a few weeks now, Logan had been making noises about paying a visit. Had it been just me, I’d have welcomed the company. But I knew I wasn’t the one he wanted to see.

His growing friendship with Elena baffled me. It worried me, too. I couldn’t help but think he had an ulterior motive. The most obvious answer was that he didn’t want me to forget that he knew my secret. A blackmail card he could use against me at any time. Yet I didn’t get the impression that’s what he was doing.

Logan’s interest in Elena seemed genuine. Too genuine for my liking. I pictured him circling over our relationship like a vulture, waiting for it to die so he could swoop in and take my leavings.

Only Elena, and my concern for her happiness, kept me from thwarting their relationship. That and the knowledge that she saw him only as a friend. So, as much as his attentions rankled, I bit my tongue and invited him up for a Christmas shopping weekend.

I stood in a store corner, wedged behind a rack of clothes, the only place I could stand without being jostled and bumped. I breathed through my mouth. I could still smell the mall, though, and my brain spun, trying to sort out and categorize all the scents despite my best efforts to ignore them.

My breath came in short, shallow gasps, almost hyperventilating. My heart raced, gaze darting about the store, trying to map escape routes as my brain kept trying to organize the scents, sorting them into predator and prey, threats and food.

I squeezed my eyes shut and choked back a growl of frustration.
I should be able to control my instincts better than this. Most times I could, but when the stimuli became overwhelming, my brain dropped into survival mode, knowing only that I was trapped in an enclosed space with potential enemies at every turn.

Logan shifted the rack to slide in beside me. “Really don’t like humans, do you?”

I said nothing. My feelings about humans, like my feelings about other werewolves, could never be summed up under the simplistic umbrella emotion of like versus dislike. Yet I’d rather my Pack brothers interpreted my hatred of crowds as a dislike of humans than as the panicked fear of a trapped animal.

Elena walked around a corner. My gaze followed her, grateful for something to cling to, something comforting and distracting.

“Have you asked her what she wants?” Logan asked.

“Don’t need to.”

She caught my eye, smiled, and started searching for an open path through the crowd. Partway to me, she stopped, gaze snagged on a rack of sweaters.

“Word of advice, Clayton,” Logan murmured. “Save yourself a world of grief and ask for a list.”

Elena’s fingers flipped through the jewel-bright colors, frown deepening, then lightening. She paused on a dark burgundy, then shook her head. As she looked away, she stopped, and tugged out the arm of a deep royal-blue sweater. A smile. A glance at the price tag. The smile faded and she dropped it fast then resumed her course to me. I glanced around at the store, committing it and the location of the sweater rack to memory, along with the other items that had caught her eye.

“You want me to ask her what she wants?” Logan said. “Then at least she won’t be expecting them from you. I’ll make up a list—”

“Don’t need it.”

He sighed. “You’ll pay the price, my friend. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He turned to Elena as she approached. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for lunch. How about that food court we passed on the first level?”

Elena’s gaze darted my way, then back again too fast for Logan to follow.

“One more stop and my list is done,” she said. “Maybe we can grab a
muffin or something, finish up, then swing through Chinatown on the way back, find someplace less crowded. And more appetizing.”

“Works for me,” Logan said.

“So who do you guys have left?” she asked.

“Jeremy.” Logan looked at me. “And, I’m guessing, Jeremy.”

I nodded.

Elena laughed. “There’s always one, isn’t there?”

“Is there an art store here?” Logan said. “That’s the usual standby for Jeremy.”

Elena pulled a face. “And I’m sure when he picks up a gift from his pile, he’s going, ‘Hmm, paintbrush or paper?’ Let’s show some originality this year, guys. There’s a huge sports store in here. We’ll head there.”

Logan looked my way. “Uh, Jeremy’s not really the sports type …”

“Clay said he likes marksmanship, right?”

“Uh, sure. But—”

“Come on, then.”

On the way to the sports store, Logan kept shooting looks my way, clearly worried about what Elena had in mind, but not wanting to denigrate her efforts. I was trying just as hard to think up a way out of this potential minefield. Jeremy…well, it was tough enough for us to pick something for him. I couldn’t imagine someone who had never met him being able to do it.

Elena led us to a row of locked glass cabinets near the back of the sports store. Inside were tournament bows, BB guns, camping knives, and all the other sports paraphernalia that couldn’t be put out on the shelves.

Logan pretended to survey the cabinets. “Umm, you know, this would be a great idea…if Clay or I knew a damned thing about what kind of equipment Jeremy uses. I know, we should pay attention, but, well, it’s Jeremy’s thing.” He shrugged. “Bullets, sights, arrows, they all look the same to me.”