A SHIFTER’S CHRISTMAS
Emilia Hartley
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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.
A DRAGON’S CHRISTMAS
Emilia Hartley
Chapter One
Frankie Peters didn’t want to drive eight hours from Maryland to Upstate New York, but she hadn’t visited her family in over a year. She’d used all sorts of excuses to escape family functions. She told her family that her volunteer work at shelters ate up a lot of her time even though she’d had to quit working at the dog shelters. Volunteering at the homeless shelters was just as time consuming, she reasoned.
She kicked her Volkswagen Beetle into gear and sped past an SUV with a reindeer nose on the grill and felt antlers on the roof. Rolling her eyes, she sighed and leaned forward. The sign above the highway pointed to Binghamton, letting her know she was going in the right direction.
Dread soured her stomach. She should have eaten by now, but anxiety had stolen her appetite, which wasn’t good for someone like her. She could already feel the restlessness shifting under her skin. The inside of her car was too small. The air outside was too cold for her to open a window. Her insides felt like they’d gone through a blender.
Making this drive was a bad idea, but guilt propelled her forward. Every time her mother called over the last few weeks, the woman implanted subtle guilt hurdles for Frankie to jump over. At this point, her mother had even resorted to calling her by her full name.
Francine.
She hated that name. Her mother could have chosen anything else in the world but chose to name her daughter after a great grandmother that died before Frankie had even been conceived. Frankie knew her family loved her, but their tactics were sometimes crude.
A black car sped up behind Frankie. It came dangerously close to her rear bumper before slamming on the brakes at the last second. The driver revved the engine once, twice, three times before Frankie groaned and found an opening to pull back into the right-hand lane.
The driver of the black car rolled down his window and flipped her the bird as he passed. A growl rumbled up her throat. She clamped her teeth together in an effort to keep it contained. This battle was constant. She and the new thing inside her clashed heads constantly. Frankie only wanted her normal life back.
She didn’t want the intense hunger, the immense irritability, or the loss of her sense of self. Tightening her hands on the steering wheel, she tempered her anger and calculated how many more hours the drive would take.
Once she hit New York, it was almost halfway over. She could almost smell the cold earth and icy river. The thing inside her leapt with excitement. This was her first trip since…
Well, it was her first trip home in a year. She couldn’t believe it’d been a year already. How many hours had she lost to this thing? Too many. Her body wasn’t her own, and she didn’t know how to take it back. If she could take it back at all.
Time slipped away while she drove, her thoughts running in circles. Her foot pressed harder on the pedal, and everyone else fell away. Frankie drove until a white wall appeared before her. She snapped back to the present, heart lurching as her little car pierced the veil of snow.
Immediately, her tires slipped. She tugged the wheel in the opposite direction to get traction. Her skills were a little rusty since Maryland didn’t get the kind of snow Central New York saw. It was early this year, though. The lake effect normally didn’t hit until after the new year. Holiday driving was usually safe, but this year Frankie watched the snow pile up on the road before her.
She eased off the gas, fighting her urge to slam on the brakes altogether. That would just make her lose control. She was tired of losing control. She was just tired.
The steering wheel trembled in her hands like even the Volkswagen was cowed by the storm. Frankie kept her eyes on the road, what she could see of it, and only later noticed that she was alone. There were no lights ahead to follow, no tracks in the snow she could rely on.
A groove in the earth appeared ahead, a chunk of the ground carved away to make way for the highway. The great stone walls on either side always made her nervous. If she swerved, she might crash into one of the immovable walls. Her little car would become a flattened tin can. All she had to do was keep her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road.
As if in opposition to her plans, the ground rumbled. The stone walls, black crags dusted with white snow, shook. A sheaf of snow fell from the wall and slapped the road ahead of her. Unprepared for the thick layer of snow, she found herself sliding along with it.
Frankie let out a scream. Claws raked her from the inside. The world outside the windshield turned white, and then everything came to a halt. She jerked forward before slamming back into her seat.
Her breath fogged the windows while her heart pattered. The thing inside her kicked. It scrabbled to escape, making her skull ache. She winced and pushed back. This wasn’t the time. She couldn’t let it out now.
As if it were an anchor, Frankie tightened her hand on the gear shift. She shoved it into reverse and tapped the gas, only the thing inside her kicked, and she ended up putting the pedal to the floor. The engine groaned. Tires spun uselessly on slick snow.
As the creature inside her was starting to calm, Frankie peered over her shoulder. Just as she looked back, a snow plow came hurtling by. It grabbed the rest of the fallen snow from the road and threw it atop her stuck car.
The scream that left her lips turned into a roar. Once again, the creature inside her thrashed. It scrabbled for control, for freedom. This constant fight made her tired. Oh, so tired. She was losing the fight. What was the point in even trying anymore? Maybe if she gave in to it and let it take over, she would never have to bother with human worries again.
She could run through the woods like the animal she’d become.
Her phone screen flashed. She picked it up with a shaking hand and found a photo of a pumpkin marshmallow pie waiting for her at home. Her mother’s message helped Frankie hold back her beast. The phone buzzed in her hand. Her father’s number lit up the top of the screen until she tapped the notification. Like always, he was tracking the weather along her route and noticed the storm hovering over I80. Frankie texted back that the skies were clear where she was and assured him she was using hands-off technology to respond. It might have been a lie, but it would keep him from coming out to find her.
She wasn’t quite ready to see her family. Not when her head was throbbing from the recent battle with her beast.
***
Atticus VanTassel could feel it above, a blanket of snow starting to fall over the earth. He was a part of it, a stone just like any other, unchanging and eternal. Once he’d tried to be a part of the world above. It hadn’t welcomed him and his beast. No one wanted him, and so his beast had retreated.
Why was it awake now, though?
He shook, trying to stretch, but the cavern was too small. He hit the walls and the ground rumbled. Cold, damp air suddenly wasn’t enough. He ached to see the sky outside, to breathe fresh air. Another need hit him in the chest, the need to find out why he was awake.
The beast slammed its horned head into the ceiling above. Stone and snow rained down, slowly falling away to make the hole bigger and bigger. He climbed out. The cold couldn’t sting him through his thick scales, and humanity couldn’t see his white form through the blizzard. Not when he stretched his wings wide and reveled in the feeling of air caressing the thin skin.
He tossed his head to clear the snow and debris. The world was swathed in a haze from the storm and still his eyes narrowed on a small form below. The familiar rumble of engines sped down the highway, so the rational half of his mind figured he had not slept nearly as long as he thought. That, or humanity had failed to let go of fossil fuels.
A few more cars chugged past before Atticus stepped forward. He slowly climbed down the cliff face and over the highway where cars would run over the dragon tracks he left behind. Beneath a thick layer of snow was a small car, its domed roof nearly consumed by the heavy snowfall.
He glanced back at the cliff and the lack of snow at the top, and a small amount of shame prickled his conscience. The pile of snow mounded on the road was his fault. From inside the car came a roar of frustration and a small thud. The voice inside the car muttered something reproachful, but all Atticus could hear was the siren call of it. This was the reason he’d woken.
Her presence was like an alarm clock, shaking him free of the shackles of sleep. He should have slept forever. That was the fate of a slumbering beast that could not fit into the world it had claimed.
He should clear off her car and send her on her way so he could climb back into his cavern. This world didn’t want him. He didn’t know how to work with it and the people that lived around him. His beast was too dominant. He butted heads more often than not, resulting in chaos and destruction. The world would be better off if he lay down to sleep.
Atticus dragged his wing over the car and brushed away the snow holding it down. Then he used the flat plane of his head to push the bank of snow away from the back of the car. The woman’s voice grew confused. Light must have pierced the inside of her vehicle for the first time. He heard the mechanical creak of her door opening.
He should leave. A tow truck would come along and drag her free of the ditch. There was no way humanity had left cell phones behind in the time he slept. Yet, Atticus didn’t leave. Instead, he folded his massive beast form back inside himself for the first time in years. When the woman opened the door, she found a naked man standing in the snow.
Her jaw dropped. He felt her gaze travel down his body and back up again. Atticus gave her a solemn nod then gestured to the front of her car.
“I can help push your car back onto the road,” he said, the first words to leave his mouth since he slept. They felt awkward, his throat hoarse from disuse. Surely, she would run away from him, this towering man that had approached her out of nowhere.
She held up a hand and looked away. “Hold up. You’re naked! I think I have something you can wear in the trunk.”
As she pressed a button on her key fob, her nose twitched. Atticus, too, scented the air. She smelled of spice and fur. There was a creature inside her, but he couldn’t tell which kind from scent alone. That was why she didn’t ask what he was doing out here, naked as the day he was born.
She dug through the small trunk of the car, rifling through trash bags for something that might fit him. In the end, she came up with a pair of heavily patched jeans, a blue flannel shirt, and boots with no socks. The cold didn’t bother him the way it did others. His beast burned too hot for the snow to gather on him. It melted inches above his skin.
If she noticed, she said nothing. She shoved the clothes into his hands and turned, her eyes scanning the nearby highway. He didn’t hear any engines, so they were good for now. No one would see her standing in a ditch with a naked man.
“How did you clear my car off so quickly?” she asked without looking at him.
Atticus grinned, the sight of her pink cheeks making him mischievous. He slowly buttoned his new jeans “That’s a secret.”
She turned to him, eyes narrowed now, but her lips parted at the sight of his bare chest. Pride and hunger swelled inside him. He liked the effect he had on her. He wanted to strut around without a shirt for a while longer just to see what other faces she would make, but once he was done, he walked around to the front of her car.
They bent and pushed. His tired body did most of the work, like she was hiding her strength. Maybe he had assumed she was a shifter when she wasn’t. His nose could be wrong, especially considering how he’d only just awakened from a very long nap. His shoulders burned, but it was a reminder that he was still alive.
Atticus wasn’t a Christmas ghost. He was a man, recently roused from slumber by this woman. Once the car was back on the side of the road, he stole a moment to study her. She had curly hair piled high on her head. When she turned, he caught a slight mark on her nose, like she might have had it pierced at one time, but the hole had closed. She turned honey-colored eyes on him as she opened her door.
This was it.
They would part ways.
All during Atticus’s waking life, people avoided him. Shifters, humans, everyone. The only person who had ever approached him had been his cousin, Devin. Atticus’s beast was too large for his skin. Power radiated from him, bleeding out his pores to form an ominous aura around him.
The beast had liked it that way until it realized no mate would go near him either. Women scurried away, their heads down.
He was a stranger and she a solitary woman. It wouldn’t be smart for her to invite him along for a ride, and it would be creepy of him to insist on one just for a chance to be with her a while longer. He still didn’t know what it was his beast wanted him to see in her. She was cute, he could admit that much.
Atticus liked the way she blushed when she looked at him, how she diverted her gaze even though he could see she wanted more. A spark flared between them. It drew his attention to the hollows of her collarbone, revealed by her t-shirt as it hung lazily from her frame. She wasn’t wearing a coat either.
This woman had to be a shifter.
Chapter Two
Frankie couldn’t believe she was about to do this. She let her head fall against the roof of the car. This man had been naked and alone in the middle of nowhere. He was either out of his mind or like her. She lifted her head to steal a glance at him.
She’d seen something out her windshield. It’d been a shape, not human but much larger. Wings and horns and teeth. And, for a moment, her heart fumbled in disbelief. Fear turned her blood cold until she realized the monster outside was helping her. Then everything started to make sense.
Ever since her life changed, she’d been alone. No one told her what she was or how she was supposed to deal with it. It felt like she was PMSing all the time. Her emotions were sharper, her drives were so much more insistent. If he was like her, then maybe he could answer a few questions. There were holes in her life that needed to be filled.
But if he wasn’t like her and she started spewing nonsense about shape changing and monsters, she might freak him out. Either way, she was stronger than she used to be. The thing inside her had teeth and wasn’t afraid to use them. There was little risk in asking if he needed a ride.
When she finally spat it out, the look of relief on his face was unmistakable. His lips split into the kind of grin that could charm any woman out of her panties. He even had a dimple on his left cheek, right above the line of scruff growing along his chin. Her heart stuttered at the sight. Frankie cursed her energized libido and got into the car.
Watching him fold himself into her small car was comical. It was even funnier when
he sat on a sleeve of spiced cookies and the crunch echoed through the car. He apologized and handed them back, but Frankie was still laughing.
When was the last time she laughed this freely? She should have been wound tight, worrying about making it to her parents through this snowstorm. They were still approximately a hundred miles away, and the storm didn’t seem to be letting up any time soon. It was still so thick she could barely see a few feet in front of her.
She turned the key and held her breath, but the engine turned over without a problem.
“It’s shaped like a ladybug, but it keeps kicking like a cockroach,” the man said.
Again, Frankie couldn’t hold back her laughter. “Maybe I should name it after myself then.”
He scowled. “You don’t look anything like a bug to me. You’re a whole, fine-ass woman.”
When was the last time anyone said anything like that to her? She didn’t feel very fine with her curls in a wild mess on the top of her head and a moth-eaten shirt hanging from her shoulders because she was too hot to wear a coat.
“Where do you need to go?” she asked to change the subject. Her cheeks were hot enough as it was.
The image of him naked was seared into her mind. He had perfect abs that teetered into a delicious looking V, and quite the package at the end of it. So big it made her mouth water and her mind fill with visions of what she would do with it. As hard as she tried to shake free from the images—he was a complete stranger!—she couldn’t escape them. Certainly not this close where his scent permeated every inch of her car.
“I’m not entirely sure,” he confessed. “I wasn’t really heading anywhere in particular.”
Her brow furrowed. “Are you saying you don’t have anywhere to go?”
Her question seemed to catch him off guard. He opened his mouth and then shut it before going silent. It was a long, quiet moment before he mumbled, “I guess you’re right.”
A Shifter's Christmas Box Set Page 1
