Unholy Nights: A Twisted Christmas Anthology (15 page)

Her hands are on his thighs, and they tense and tighten.

His chuckle rumbles through her body. “Do not be afraid,” he murmurs. “I have done it before.”

“You have?”

“Of course. Who would bring the sun back from the dead, if not me?”

She feels dizzy. “No one,” she tells him. “It’s just...it’s physics. The earth tilts and goes around the sun and it just...it comes back when it comes back. The sun doesn’t
die.”

He shrugs. “Perhaps,” he says, “but someone must bring it back, or it will not come at all.”

Then he picks her up, and she is as light as eiderdown. He turns her in his arms until she straddles his hips, and suddenly he is so close to her she is intoxicated with him, with the feel of his skin, the heat of his body, the smell of his hair. She shudders, wavers, and he steadies her with huge strong hands on her shoulders, so big they seem to swallow her up. She blinks, focuses.

He watches her, his face creasing in a smile that makes him look suddenly very old. “It has been a long time since I have wanted to bring the sun back for someone. Now, I wish do it for you.” His voice is soft, sweet. “I wish to bring you into the light again.”

He only speaks in riddles, but if he spoke plainly she wouldn’t believe him. There are some truths that cannot be spoken, and she wants to feel the sun again.

“And how will you bring the sun back?” she whispers.

“With these.”

His hands slide down her arms, sending shivers out across her body and when his fingers reach hers, he lifts them up, guiding them up to his face.

The heated skin of his temples meets her fingertips, and then he slides her hands up into his hair. It is curiously coarse and harsh, like the mane of a horse, and then, just above his brow, she feels something smooth and hard protruding from his skull, like bones.

He releases her hands, and she realizes that she may reclaim them, if she wishes. She need not discover these things. She need not learn the secrets that change everything. She may suspect them, but she need not confirm.

She doesn’t need to
know.

But she wants to.

Her fingers linger on bone, follows it, up and out, until the bones begin to branch, narrow into sharp points, stretching far wider than their bodies, far wider than her arms can reach.

But of course her hands are empty. There is nothing there.

She reclaims them. “Will it hurt?” she asks.

“It will burn me to ash,” he whispers, “but I could do it for you.”

Tears prick her eyes, and he smiles and bends down. The tip of his tongue trails over her cheek, tracing her sadness, tasting it.

“Will I see you again?” she begs him, turning her face to his, but his lips elude hers. He is far better at being hunted than she ever was.

“That all depends on you,” he tells her, and then he wraps her up and holds her close, warming her with each stroke of his hands, until the cold of the night recedes and between them there is only fire.

*

T
ime passes, in fits and starts, until at last one gray day he says to her:

“Tonight.”

She doesn’t have to ask to know what he is talking about. She waits patiently.

His glittering green eyes study her face. “There is only one thing left to do,” he says.

“And what is that?” she asks him.

“For you to give to me your heart,” he replies, and his eyes are sad, sad, sad.

*

S
he thinks about this for a long, long while, and as she does, the snow begins to fall outside their tree once more.

“Why my heart?” she asks after a while.

“It is a gift,” he tells her. “An offering, in exchange for the life I will give to you. The final step in the ritual.”

She frowns.

“Your prayers,” he says. “You prayed to me, with stones and tears, with tiny treasures of the forest. I found your sister, and kept her safe for those little sacrifices. Now I can fulfill your most painful prayers, if you will offer this one last thing to me.”

Long claws caress her cheek. “Give to me the gift of your heart.”

She smiles, pale and shallow. “But why would you want something that’s broken?” she asks him.

His hands are on her, and he is large and wild, smells like snow and blood, and to her shock he chuckles. “Does it matter?” he says. “It is all I ask. That should be enough.”

She’s read enough stories, heard enough tales to know there is a hidden consequence. There always is.“And what’s the catch?” she asks.

He shrugs. “No catch. Give your heart to me, and it will be mine until you pass into the world of the dead.” His eyes are aglow in the dark of the tree, though the setting sun is hidden behind the clouds. “Never will you love another. Only me.”

She doesn’t even have to think about it. “Done,” she tells him, and then he is on her.

*

I
n the bleak midwinter, she gives her heart to be consumed.

*

H
e pierces her as the darkness creeps in and the moon rises. He splits her open, and she bleeds out as he moves inside her, and when he swallows her beating heart whole she shudders with ecstasy and agony.

“Come with me in the moonlight,” he breathes, his teeth stained black with blood, and she does.

*

I
n the bleak midwinter, her weapons are her wounds.

*

H
e is still inside her when he says: "And now tell me your greatest wish."

Sweat-slick, she pants against him, unable to think straight, her body still trembling in the aftermath. "I... I can't,” she manages finally. “Saying it out loud..."

"Might make it come true?"

That
brings her around, back down to earth just a bit, and she gives a weak laugh and shakes her head. "No. Might jinx it so that it never comes true."

Their brows are pressed together, and she feels the weight of his head, far heavier than it has any right to be, ponderous with the burden of an invisible crown, sagging against her own. In the dim light she sees his bloodstained lips curve into a smile, and one hand abandons her hip and reaches up. Fingers brush against her mouth. "You are right," he says. "There is power in silence as well as sound."

“No,” she tells him. “Not when you’re too scared to speak.”

He laughs at that, light and soft, as though she has made a clever joke. “The silence of suffering has power of a different kind,” he says, “but your griefs have been well-kept and aged to perfection. It is time to let them out. You have a voice. You must use it, if you are to be free.”

There is a lump in her throat, so thick, so heavy. “How do you know all these things, Hunter?” she says at last, her voice painful with perverse amusement. The smell of sex clings to her hair. “Silent suffering doesn’t really seem like something you would know about.”

He inhales slow and deep. “I don’t know these things really,” he says at last. “You are right. The power of silence and sacrifice and protection, the mysteries of children and love so fierce it kills the lover...that is not my magic. My magic is different.”

“Then whose magic is it?” she asks.

He smiles. “Yours,” he says. “That is the magic I learned from women.” His hands are on her face, hot and rough and not quite human.

“But I can still help you,” he whispers. “Your heart is mine, a worthy offering, and my magic is yours for the taking. The magic of wild things, of shifting shapes and primal instincts. Battle, and victory, and prophecy, and death. The magic of the hunt.”

He holds her fast. He won’t let her escape from this. “Now,” he murmurs, low and fierce, “tell me your deepest desire.”

The words are in her throat, an almost physical thing.

She closes her eyes. “I want to kill him,” she says, and then there is something on her tongue, something small and hard. It drops from her lips like a pearl and into her hands, which are lying between them, careless and loose against his abdomen, as though waiting for it.

She opens her eyes and looks down.

It is a bean. A small, white bean, almost perfectly round.

“An answered prayer,” he says, and his lips are on hers, and she feels him shift inside her.

A new life,
she thinks, and her fingers close in a fist, keeping it safe.

He has her again, this time up against the tree, and she holds her answered prayers close in the dark.

*

T
he house is small in the dark when she approaches it, and the smell of it is sour when she opens the door.

“Where the
fuck
have you been?”

She blinks and looks at the man standing in the middle of the living room.

Her father, full of rage, full of hate and lust and a thousand failures. She barely recognizes him.

At any point, she thinks, he could have turned around and told her he was sorry, could have repented. But his first reaction, when she crosses the threshold, is one of anger.

She is not surprised. She doesn’t even care.

“I’m sorry,” she says sweetly. “I was staying with a friend.”

“And did you think to tell me?”

She looks at him, and she sees him, with perfect clarity.

“It won’t happen again,” she says, and that is a promise. “Let me make you some dinner.”

He glowers, glares. His huge arms, strong from his years working on roads, clench with barely suppressed rage. She knows he could break her, shatter her easily, but he likes her better whole, and that is to her advantage.

A hunter,
she thinks. She can become a hunter. After all, she has known her prey all her life.

With a smile, she turns away from him and goes to the pantry and retrieves some beans and some rice. With care and precision, she measures out the rice, pours the beans into a pot, and begins to heat them both. In her pocket she feels the little bean burning against her thigh.

“Where is Julia?” she asks, mild.

“Where do you think she is?” he snaps. “Staying with that slutty friend of hers. She doesn’t even bother to come home now. You should be looking after her, you’re her big sister!”

He’s so
angry,
and, she sees now, afraid. His life is not his own, is out of his control.

She smiles at him as she slips her hand into her pocket. The little white bean comes to her fingers easily. “I do look out for her,” she says.

“The fuck you do,” he mutters, then turns and stalks into the bedroom. He’s going to fetch his whiskey.

She pulls the bean out of her pocket. There is no time to cook it properly. She’ll just have to hope it works just as well if it is smashed.

She puts it on the counter, then drags the step stool to the refrigerator. She climbs up and grabs the little tool box that sits there. Opening it, she takes out the claw hammer, and with it she smashes the little bean, her little answered prayer.

The
bang
booms through the house, and back in the bedroom there is the clatter of smashing glass and her father cursing. She smiles and stuffs the hammer into the pouch of her hoodie before sweeping the little powdered bits into her hand and dropping them into the bean pot.

The beans have swallowed the shattered legume along with a few spices by the time her father comes back out of the bedroom.

“What the fuck was that noise?” he demands.

“The hammer,” she says. She pulls it out of her hoodie pocket and shows him, as though this is any sort of explanation.

The glare on his face deepens. “And what the
fuck
did you have the hammer out for?”

“There was a roach on the counter,” she tells him. “I killed it.”

He stares at her, disbelieving, for a long moment. Then he turns away, shaking his head.

“Junkie bitch,” she hears him mutter.

She wants to scream at him, but she knows how to be quiet.

She has
learned.

Mouth pressed into a firm line lest she burst out laughing, she cooks his dinner. He doesn’t say thank you when she puts it in front of him.

She does not make up a dish for herself. Instead she pours herself a glass of water and sits down to wait.

She watches as, spoonful by spoonful, he pushes beans and rice into his mouth. His lips work as he chews, pale and fleshy like a pair of worms, bloated and drowned in a puddle after a rainstorm. His eyes catch hers, though he is so drunk they try to cross every now and then.

“Stop staring at me,” he orders.

She smiles and complies.

Fixes her eyes on the table in front of her. Waits for a miracle.

He finishes his meal and wipes his mouth with a paper towel. They are out of napkins. “Not bad,” he tells her, grudging. “Not good, but not bad.”

She doesn’t answer. There is cold sweat on her brow, trickling down her back. She can’t help but stare now. Can’t help but search, desperately, for a sign that it wasn’t all a dream, that she hadn’t somehow imagined it all...

He scowls. “I said stop staring at me.” He bangs the table with his fist, and she jumps, her heart racing, despair rising. She cannot tear her eyes away.

“I said
stop!”
A bellow.

Then a cough.

And another. And another.

Then he is doubled up and she is stiff and terrified as he coughs so hard he gags and nearly pukes, and then begins to turn purple.

His eyes go to hers, and for a moment she is truly frightened.

“You
bitch,”
he says. “What did you put in my dinner?
What did you do to my food?”
Then his throat closes and his words are garbled.

He stands up and takes one lurching step toward her. She is up and backing away immediately. She collides with the far wall. Her fingers curl, grasping at the impassive wood behind her, as though she could pull it out and wrap it around herself, hide herself inside it.

Then he staggers, falls to the side, and his body heaves and
changes.

It happens slowly, as though they have stepped outside of time. Fur sprouts up and down his arms, over his face, his chest. His torso thickens, grows round and fat as his limbs break and remold themselves, becoming stubby and short. She hears the crunch of bones shattering and mending, the wet, sloppy sound of muscle and sinew sliding together.