Magic & Mistletoe: 15 Paranormal Stories for the Holidays Read online

  The world had turned majorly weird, and that was saying something.

  Firstly, there had been the bird who’d somehow decided to be her portable heater, then a hunky weirdo had offered to take her who-knows-where, and she lost her mind, saying yes, but Lidia had to pinch the back of her palm to check if she was dreaming when they got to Skadia.

  The first thing she noticed was that the people there were weird. Wearing heavy clothing that seemed to have been fashioned a few centuries back; she wanted it. Not only did it look warm—although she couldn’t and wouldn’t complain about the winter clothes Quinn had purchased for her, but they also looked pretty damn cool.

  “This looks like some sort of movie I’ve seen,” she frowned.

  Since elves had come out and announced their existence a few years back, there had been a handful of movies featuring long-haired people dressed just like that; but those looked wrong. Too graceful, too beautiful.

  Lidia turned to Quinn, and gasped, because for the first time in over a week, her eyes went to the ears under his long dark hair.

  Yeah, she felt like a moron. A very, very silly one, at that.

  “Wait a minute. We’re in Skadia. As in, the super-duper secret place where no one gets in, except royalty and fays.”

  Yeah. She’d died. No other explanation. This was just some sort of weird-ass after-life fantasy.

  “Relax,” her weird-ass prince charming said, rolling his eyes. “It’s just home.”

  They’d only taken a step inside when the commotion began: everyone stopped, stared, and suddenly screamed Quinn’s name—dozens of people gathered around him, determined to shake his hand, and when they were done, another hundred had taken their place.

  The never-ending stream of elves suddenly broke into two groups, leaving a large path to let through two people Lidia recognized. She’d seen them on TV, shaking hands with the Daniel and Cinderella of Alenia, but both of them had seemed severe, majestic at the time. Now, Eira and Kai, King and Queen of the elves, greeted them with huge smiles plastered on their perfect faces.

  “Cousin!” the King greeted Quinn, grabbing him by the back of the neck and pushing his forehead against his. “Finally home. Don’t think that not announcing your return shall stop us from preparing a feast.” Then, the King turned to her, smiling broader yet. “And what do we have here?”

  Of course, the guy was an actual prince.

  “This is Lidia, my guest.”

  The King and Queen bowed before her, making her realize that she wasn’t dead, after all. There was no way her spirit could possibly imagine something half as insane.

  “And Lidia, your guest,” the Queen repeated without hiding a smile, “will be sharing your room, or shall I have another one prepared?”

  Quinn didn’t miss a beat, immediately replying, “Another one, if you wouldn’t mind, Eira.”

  Lidia bit her lips, somehow displeased—although he’d never so much as made an advance towards her. And why would he? He belonged on a cinema screen, and although she’d filled out, she was still normal, if not plain. Boring brown hair, dark eyes. He’d taken her with him because he’d pitied her, and she’d been too desperate to refuse—there was nothing else to it.

  “Not all of us have a thing about throwing ladies on our shoulders and taking them to bed.”

  “Hey!” the King protested. “I fed her first.”

  “That makes all the difference in the world. In any case, give me a few years to convince Lidia she might want me.”

  She gasped in shock; she’d expected just about anything but that.

  “You want me,” she asked, clarifying a concept her mind couldn’t really compute without a formal answer.

  This seemed to amuse him, “Why, yes. I don’t go around rescuing every witch I find in the street.”

  “Oh,” was her only reply.

  And now that that had been clarified, she thrust herself in his arms, letting him catch her midway, wrapped her legs around his waist, and brought her lips to his.

  “Dinner’s overrated. Feel free to throw me on your shoulder anytime.”

  About the Author

  May is a USA Today Bestselling Author based in the middle of nowhere, Cornwall, England.

  When she isn’t writing about sassy women and alpha males, she can generally be found playing with her cat and her puppy, eating cake, or reading about sassy women and alpha males. Yep, she’s that kinda recluse.

  Her first love is paranormal romance but she’s not that faithful, so expect to find anything from shifters, princes and kings, to aliens and billionaires in her bibliography!

  Matchstick is a little side story to the Snow Queen, Not Quite the Fairy Tale book four.

  To get the following book in the series for free, join May’s newsletter.

  Bloody Jolly Christmas

  A Tome of Bill Series Companion

  Rick Gualtieri

  Bloody Jolly Christmas

  A Tome of Bill Series Companion

  by Rick Gualtieri

  Copyright © 2016 Rick Gualtieri

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author. Your support of author’s rights is greatly appreciated.

  All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The use of any real company and/or product names is for literary effect only. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

  Bloody Jolly Christmas

  This story takes place shortly after the events chronicled in The Mourning Woods (The Tome of Bill—3).

  Returning home to a frenzied commotion coming from inside one’s own apartment is almost never a good thing.

  Unfortunately, such events had become almost commonplace ever since I died and was resurrected as a vampire. So, rather than call 911 like a sane individual, I juggled the small mountain of gifts in my arms so I could open the door...before realizing the jamb was already torn out of the wall. So much for my security deposit.

  Oh well, I figured I’d best check on my roommates. Human as they were, they tended to be a bit overly squishy when it came to things paranormal. Still, yelling meant they were alive. Glass half full and all.

  I pushed open the door and then immediately wished I hadn’t. The boxes in my hands fell to the floor, momentarily forgotten.

  “Get this fucking psycho out of here, Bill, before I blow her fucking head off!” Ed, one of my aforementioned roomies, not-so-casually remarked. He and my other friend, Tom, were backed into a corner of our living room. Ed was pointing his shotgun, a little keepsake he’d gotten shortly after my turning, at the diminutive figure sitting on our couch as if she owned the place.

  “Sorry, wrong apartment.” I spun on my heel, but didn’t get more than a step before our uninvited guest noticed me.

  “There you are, beloved!” Ugh! Her voice made my skin crawl. “I have been awaiting your return.”

  Of course she had.

  I turned back toward Gansetseg, Gan for short. She was the adopted daughter of Ogedai Khan—former elder vampire, now permanently deceased. Though her body was that of a preteen child, Gan was over three hundred years old. She was fast, powerful, and as close to batshit insane as they came. Oh, and she was also inexplicably enamored of me, much to my detriment.

  Last time she’d been in town, she’d killed several members of my coven and gotten my ass kicked up and down 7th Avenue by the assassins her father had sent to retrieve her.

  “Hi, Gan,” I said in as friendly a tone as I could muster. “Mind telling me why in fuck’s name you’re here?”

  “She’s here to get her ass blown to...”

  She silenced Ed with a look. “Kindly order your cattle to cease their prattling before I remove their tongues.”

  “Gan, we talked abou
t this,” I replied. “No killing my friends. They pay two-thirds of the rent.”

  She glanced around as if judging my living standard, before turning back toward me again. “I thought I might check on you, my love, considering what transpired up north.”

  Oh yeah, that. I’d been making a serious effort to forget the events of the past few weeks, doing my best to kill those brain cells via alcohol. Sadly, my undead constitution made that difficult. “I really don’t want to talk about it.” What I actually wanted was to kick her ass for her part in it, but I refrained. All I wanted was a quiet holiday before my world turned to shit again.

  If she noticed the resentment in my voice, she didn’t show it. “I see you are already stockpiling for the conflict ahead. Wise of you, my love.”

  “What?”

  “Those packages at your feet. I assume you were out draining the local populace for your own personal supply.”

  “These?” I asked, looking down. “They aren’t full of body parts. They’re Christmas gifts.”

  Tom, still cowering behind Ed, perked up. “Did you get me anything good?” Such an idiot.

  “Christmas?” Gan asked, ignoring him.

  “Yeah, Christmas,” I replied. “You know, a jolly old elf in a red suit, gifts for undeserving kids, shit like that.”

  “Mistletoe too,” Tom added with a smirk. “Not that you would know anything about it.”

  “I’m about two seconds away from walking out and leaving you alone with Strawberry Nutcake here.” That shut him up again.

  “I do not know.”

  “Huh?” I asked, turning my focus back to Gan.

  “I am unfamiliar with this custom about elves. Do you feed upon them?”

  “On Santa Claus? No, I think it’s more the other way around, especially the ones begging for change on every street corner.” Upon seeing Gan’s look of confusion, rare for one as arrogant as she, I added, “Hold on. Are you serious? You don’t know what Christmas is? What, don’t they have holidays in Mongolia?”

  “Ah,” she replied. “Yes, there are human celebrations in my country, but my father considered them inconsequential, unworthy of our attention.”

  “Sounds like a fun guy,” Ed commented.

  “You have no idea,” I groused before addressing Gan again. “Christmas is pretty much the biggest holiday of the year here. It’s a time of joy and goodwill toward your fellow man.” Jesus Christ, I sounded like a fucking postcard. “It’s, I don’t know. It’s supposed to be a magical time.”

  “Ah, magic. I am well versed in...”

  “Not that kind of magic,” I quickly clarified. “It’s...hard to explain.”

  Ed lowered the barrel of his gun and stepped forward. “Bill’s got a point. It is hard to explain.” He turned to Tom and winked. “That’s why he should show you what it’s all about. Right?”

  Oh no. They wouldn’t.

  “Good idea,” Tom replied, a shit-eating grin appearing on his face. “It would also give you some alone time to get to know each other better.”

  Cock suckers! In the space of two sentences they’d thrown my ass under the bus. Oh, I was so going to kill them both.

  Sadly, before I could tell them to go fuck themselves, Gan stood up, her green eyes twinkling with excitement. “An excellent suggestion. I am impressed. I did not suspect your cattle capable of anything more than pathetic mewling.”

  “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” I said, continuing to glare daggers at my so-called friends.

  Where the fuck are you?!

  I hit send on my latest text to Sally, who I’d been trying to contact ever since leaving Brooklyn. She was my silent partner in the coven I oversaw. More important, she was better at thinking on her feet than me.

  Sadly, she was also acquainted with Gan. Knew I should have made up a bullshit story about demon invasion or some such, rather than telling the truth in my first text. The bitch was purposely hanging me out to dry.

  Already, we were getting strange stares. You could march a dinosaur through the middle of Manhattan and nobody would bat an eye, but Gan somehow managed to draw eyeballs thanks to her disturbing attempts at displays of public affection. Oh yeah, I was definitely ending up on a sexual predator watch list before this night was over.

  “What did you have in mind with regards to this human celebration?” she asked, hanging off my arm like we were surgically attached. “So far, the only magic I feel is my love for you.”

  Ugh! I could so beat her to death with a yule log.

  Sadly, I couldn’t shake her off so easily. Her age afforded her speed and strength magnitudes greater than my own. Last time she was here, her father’s chief assassin, Nergui, was forced to drug her ass full of Mongolian Death Worm poison in order to get her back home. Sadly, it wasn’t something you could exactly pick up at the local Rite Aid.

  Oh well, maybe I’d get lucky and the holiday spirit would infuse her crazy self with enough good cheer for her to just leave on her own.

  Yeah, right.

  “I thought we’d start with ice skating in Central Park.”

  “Ice skating?”

  Oh yeah, she was from the fucking desert. Probably not a big activity among the Bedouins she lived with. “It’s when you strap skates...err metal blades, I guess, to your feet and use them to glide across the ice.”

  “Blades? Curious, but intriguing. Then what?”

  “Then, we can head over to Rockefeller Center and check out the big tree.” Technically we could have skated there too, but it cost like three times as much. Fuck that noise.

  “Big tree?”

  “Yeah. The giant Christmas Tree they erect every year.”

  “And what am I expected to do with this tree?”

  “Just look at it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? It’s pretty.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Does this have to do with the Christmas magic you spoke of?”

  “Exactly,” I replied. Guess the little psycho was catching on after all.

  She nodded knowingly. “Very well. Take me there so that we might judge whether it is cause for concern.”

  “Wait...what do you mean ‘cause for concern’?”

  Whatever misgivings Gan had about Christmas trees, she kept them to herself. Probably just some stupid superstition. I didn’t pretend to understand how elder vampires thought. Most of them were too big of assholes to bother.

  Regardless, Gan played along. I texted Sally again to let her know what we were doing, then we headed to the park. For the first time that evening I felt a glimmer of excitement, thanks to the anticipation of watching Gan fall on her ass over and over again as she tried to navigate the ice—an alien landscape for her if ever there was one.

  Sadly, after a few wobbly false starts, she took to it like a natural, skating past me like I was standing still. Within minutes, she was racing through the crowd like she’d been born on the ice. Little show off.

  I was barely a quarter of the way around, still hugging the sides as I tried to find my footing, when I got hit from behind and knocked into the wall. “Oof!”

  “Watch it, dipshit,” some guy said as he elbowed past. Asshole.

  I was still trying to regain my balance when Gan caught up to me. “I believe I understand, my love.”

  “You do?” That was a plus. From what I’d gleaned, Gan had led a mostly sheltered life under her father. Having been turned at such an early age, she’d apparently never grasped the finer points of anything resembling normalcy. If I could make her understand that people weren’t just cattle, that there was joy to be found in activities not involving mass murder, then maybe there was some hope for her yet.

  “Yes,” she replied, skating lazy circles around me. “We too have ceremonies like this.”

  “Really?” I asked, trying to imagine her father’s assassins pirouetting on the ice.

  “Indeed. We allow the cattle to cavort among us, then comes the bloodletting.”


  “Wait, what?”

  “I am forced to admit, though, your culture utilizes rather unique ceremonial weaponry.” She skated away from me, back toward the center of the ice.

  “Hey, hold on! What do you mean...”

  Before I could finish, she glided up to the guy who’d shoved past me, leapt off the ice, spun, and kicked out. Gan landed gracefully, while the man fell clutching his throat. Within seconds, the pristine white of the ice was stained red by his blood.

  “Holy fucking shit!”

  Needless to say, that started a bit of a panic. People began screaming. Some skated toward the man, hopefully to help. Most, however, tripped over each other, slipping and sliding to get the fuck outta there as fast as they could.

  I’m only slightly ashamed to say I was among those latter.

  I hopped the wall and kicked off my skates, all the while praying nobody noticed I’d brought the pint-sized ninja who’d just performed a flawless fatality. My plan was simple: lose myself in the crowd before the place was swarmed by cops.

  A half hour later found me deep in the park, barefoot, and freezing my toes off as I dialed Sally again. Unsurprisingly, it went to voicemail. Bitch! I could hear sirens in the distance, so I left a panicked message describing what happened.

  The vampire nation had back-alley deals with the police in all major US cities, specifically designed to make sure incidents like this were swept under the rug. Well, okay, maybe not quite like this. Most city vamps tended to hunt stealthily, not go all Jack the Ripper in front of a crowd. No matter the case, though, I didn’t want to spend my Christmas rotting in jail.

  “Ah, there you are, beloved.”

  I almost shit myself, as I turned and found Gan standing only a few feet away. Damn, she was freaky quiet when she wanted to be.

  She looked no worse for the wear. Hell, you wouldn’t have thought anything at all had just occurred. She held out my shoes to me as if she’d simply retrieved them from the counter girl.