Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances

by Amanda DeWees

  Niki immediately knelt at his side, surprised to find the snow not soft and fluffy, but settled like concrete around him. An additional inch had fallen in the aftermath of the slide, a light dusting before the storm blew itself out. Niki swiped at it to clear it away and then hesitated, struck by something familiar.

  His jacket was a navy so dark it could be black, trimmed at the collar and emblazoned with a distinct logo, both in arctic blue. Though partly curled up, she could tell he was a tall man with a rugged body built for the outdoors. Early 30s. Her gloved fingers reached for his snow-caked hair and finger-combed away some of the clumps. Shadowy blonde.

  Confused, she leaned in as far as she could under the wall to get a look at his face. Even with the eyes closed and skin gone blue, she knew that face, the slash to the forehead.

  Her cheeks burned. Her throat constricted. It felt like someone had a rope around her neck, pulling tight, tighter.

  Niki extricated herself from under the wall and sat back slowly on her heels. Bryce stood a few feet away, an exact match to the cooling body half-submerged in snow.

  “You didn’t tell me. You have a twin?”

  He shook his head, eyes grave.

  “No.” She stood up. “No.” Backed off from the inert Bryce lookalike toward the other. “That’s not you,” she said.

  “Iris, you weren’t the first person I could find,” he said. “You were the only person I could find.”

  “That’s not you.” She repeated. She would not believe.

  “No one else could see me.”

  Niki studied the man at her side and finally noticed what she’d missed. He had no shadow. She thought back to the moment he’d appeared by her table at the café. She hadn’t heard him approach. He’d appeared. All of it added up, the security guards who didn’t see him. The reason Bryce didn’t need snowshoes. That head wound of his hadn’t frozen; it just wasn’t bleeding any longer, because…

  I promise, Iris. I won’t be telling anyone about you.

  “But you caught me,” she said, shaking her head. “When I lost my balance and almost fell backward off the mountain.”

  “Did I?”

  “I felt you.”

  “You saved yourself.”

  “No! I felt you. Your warmth. Your energy.”

  “My energy,” he said, remorse heavy in each word.

  Stretching from where she stood now, clear back to the base of ridge she’d just descended, only one set of footprints testified to their journey together. Hers. How could she not have seen he didn’t leave any? Had her mind simply opted to color in what it expected should be there?

  “Dig, Iris.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not the one you came here to save.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. Look. There’s someone else.”

  Niki returned to the plywood wall, propped at an angle against tree trunks and pushed her way further into the small space. Bryce’s arms were held out perpendicular to his body and the slight curl to his back and shoulders suggested he’d held something protectively close to him when he’d fallen.

  A child! His body sheltered a little boy around nine- or ten-years-old. Holding him fast, Bryce had gifted him the only thing he had left, his body warmth.

  “His name is Matthew,” Bryce said. “But his friends call him Matty. He came to stay up here with his maw. She works here, at the resort. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Family isn’t allowed in the employee dormitories, and she’d been warned management was cracking down on anyone who violated the rules. But she already promised Matty he could go night skiing with everybody else on Christmas Eve.”

  While Bryce talked, Niki clawed at the snow around the boy’s and Bryce’s bodies. What he’d told her was true; the boy had had access to fresh air the whole time, but who knew if he had other injuries.

  “She had to break her promise to her son in order for them to be together for the holidays. She ordered him not to go outside.”

  Matty wasn’t conscious, nor did her efforts rouse him. She thought he might still be breathing, but if so, it was so shallow as to be imperceptible. She’d heard of miracle cases where people, kids primarily, had drowned in freezing water, immersed for minutes, even as long as an hour and been revived. Matty wasn’t in water exactly, but the effect of being entombed in snow might be the same, hypothermia driving his blood away from his extremities down into his core as a survival mechanism.

  “You know kids,” Bryce said. “Once they get an idea in their heads.”

  “He figured he could go night skiing in the middle of the night,” she said. “And not get caught.”

  Bryce nodded.

  Realization clicked.

  “The boy under the giant pulley,” she whispered. She recalled the conversation she’d overheard in the coffee house earlier. Rescuers believed a little boy was dead, crushed under the “bullwheel” from the Moonfire lift.

  Bryce, not hearing her, continued. “I heard him calling. He’d gotten turned around in the storm and wandered away from the resort. Completely lost. I packed up, headed out and found him. We were on our way back.”

  “When the avalanche hit. Your avalanche.” She pulled her cell out of her pocket and activated the screen again. Again, she failed to pick up a signal.

  “Dammit.”

  She wanted to hurl the phone at a tree.

  “You’re right. We need help and he’s run out of time.”

  “My pack,” Bryce said.

  “What pack? I don’t see any.”

  “It’s still there. It came off one shoulder, but I didn’t lose it.”

  Niki got to work, excavating the snow around Bryce’s upper back and shoulders. She pried and pulled at the solid crust, scraped and scooped and then her fingers uncovered a strap. She pulled on it, but the pack wouldn’t come free. Nothing. It had to be slung around Bryce’s other shoulder, the one still buried.

  “Forget that. Unzip it,” he said.

  She yanked on the zipper and the pack’s contents, under pressure from the weight of the snow, birthed themselves into her hands. Among them was a handset unlike any cell phone she’d seen.

  “It’s a satellite messenger,” he said. “If the battery is still good, you should be able to call and get help.”

  Hands shaking, she turned the phone over and around, hunting for and finding the button to turn it on. Up popped a password screen.

  “Oh, my God. It’s password protected,” she said, holding the phone out for him to see. “Now what?”

  He chuckled under his breath and smiled. How could he find something humorous at a time like this?

  “It’s my phone,” he said. “I can give you the password.”

  She exhaled loudly.

  Idiot.

  Suddenly, tears flooded the corners of her eyes. She wiped at them with the back of one gloved hand, smearing them out of existence before they could fall.

  Pull it together.

  “Right,” she said. “What is it?”

  Bryce recited his password one letter at a time. “N-I-K-I.”

  She stopped typing before the last “I.” Her face drained of color. “Niki?” she said. “But, that’s my name. My real name. Not Iris.”

  “I know.”

  She didn’t trust herself to get the words out asking him how.

  “Why do you think I traveled here, and all those other places? I’ve heard you calling to me.”

  “Me?” Tears pushed at her again. Her voice cracked. “I don’t–”

  “Hurry, Niki,” he said, using her true name for the first time. “Make the call, or we’ve wasted our efforts.”

  “Okay.”

  She made the call.

  The woman she reached on the other end instructed her on how to set the device’s emergency beacon to guide rescuers to them, and assured her help was on its way.

  “It’s done,” she said, glancing up from the phone.

  Niki was alone.

  Chap
ter 13

  “Bryce?” She shouted, “Bryce!”

  No answer.

  The tide of adrenaline inside her crested. Her exhaustion peaked.

  He’s done what he had to do.

  Niki stared numbly at the satellite phone in her hands, and then the other items from his pack scattered at her feet, waterproof matches, space blankets, first aid kit, a kid’s head-mounted light, one designed to look like secret agent gear. He’d known and planned ahead. He’d brought that for Matty.

  She sank to her knees. Hunched over. Her shoulders shook and then soundlessly, she began to sob.

  Another Christmas death. Dante, Iris…And now Bryce.

  A man who knew her and may have accepted her without question for who she was. If only they’d had the chance.

  Stop it.

  She quit crying. Wiped her eyes and her nose. Then she picked up the small pouch with two space blankets and crawled back into the wreckage of the hut. Wanting the world to see his sacrifice when rescuers arrived, she left Matty sheltered in Bryce’s arms and spread the blankets over both of them. Carefully, she wormed her way in beside them, under the thin covers, and tucked the foil fabric as best she could around Matty. Just like the man beside her, she gave the boy all she had.

  Energy.

  Heat.

  She conjured warmth and pushed it outward toward the fragile form that so badly needed it. She drew on everything she had, left nothing for herself. Cold seeped in behind her. What an odd sensation. She’d never once been cold in her life. Able to feel what cold was, yes, but never so…

  Tired.

  Funny, too. It wasn’t Dante’s ghost she wanted to join.

  “Bryce,” she said. “Wait.”

  * * *

  Niki swam in the dark, where the whop-whop-whop of a helicopter droned on and on. She couldn’t open her eyes, which made a crazy kind of sense. No actual body in the afterlife, no eyes to open. It was an angry machine, the helicopter, like a lawnmower on crack, getting louder and louder until the darkness trembled with the noise.

  Voices invaded her cozy little piece of darkness. People pressed claustrophobically close. Shovel blades sunk into hard-packed snow over and over. Hands jostled her, prodded. Something precious and warm was stolen from her grasp, and ice took its place, cold so extreme her rib bones froze in her chest. She whimpered, but no one heard.

  “No. Not me,” a man said, groggy, disoriented. “The kid, then Niki…bad…she’s not going to make it.”

  Unceremoniously, hands as biting as metal pincers grasped her under the armpits and dragged her out of the dark.

  Light exploded in her head and her world faded to white.

  Chapter 14

  “Why did you come to Sapphire Ridge, Niki?” he asked.

  She’d felt someone nearby for a long time, patiently waiting, and silent until now.

  “Why did you come to holiday all alone?” He spoke to himself, clearly not expecting an answer.

  She knew that mysterious half-Scots, half-Kiwi accent.

  “Bryce?”

  She opened her eyes.

  Her gaze unerringly found his, and his face lit up with that inexpert, lopsided grimace he no doubt believed was a smile.

  “Niki!” he said.

  He rose from the uncomfortable chair in which he sat. One rapid stride brought him to her side. She lay propped up in a hospital bed.

  “Bryce?”

  She shifted her body, trying to get a look behind him for the telltale sign.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Making certain you don’t die on me.”

  She couldn’t tell. Was it there? She wouldn’t let herself be fooled this time.

  Bryce turned and looked behind himself, perplexed, a little irritated even. “What are you looking at?”

  No. She didn’t see one. Her relief disintegrated.

  “You don’t have a shadow.”

  He flicked a glance at the room’s fluorescent ceiling fixture. “Yes, well, the lighting in here is rather diffuse.”

  “I’ve recently discovered ghosts don’t have shadows,” she said.

  “I’m not dead.”

  He took one of her hands in both of his. Her warmth and energy joined his, joyfully melding as one.

  She talked right over his reassurances. “You had me fooled for the longest time. Right up until the end.”

  “Niki. I’m not dead.”

  His weather-roughened fingers squeezed her hand. Hard.

  “Oww!” she said. “Why’d you do that?”

  He eased his grip.

  “Niki,” he repeated. “I’m not dead.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No.”

  “Bryce? Oh, my God, Bryce. You’re real!”

  She pulled her hand from his, but only to reach out and explore as he dropped down and sat on the edge of her bed. Her fingers skimmed up his forearm to his bicep and then his chest. Warm, living, breathing. And-

  Um. Ooo.

  –rock hard.

  “You saved me, Niki.”

  “I did?”

  “You, with your gift.”

  “What about–”

  A knock at the door interrupted her. A woman with limp, brown hair poked her head into Niki’s hospital room. She was thin with years’ worth of exhaustion in her eyes.

  “How’s she do….she’s awake?” She looked to Bryce for confirmation, as if seeing wasn’t enough. Finally she retrained her eyes on Niki. “You’re awake! Thank the Lord. Miracles just keep heaping themselves on top of miracles.” She slipped into the room and stood at the foot of the bed.

  “Thank you for saving my Matty,” the woman said.

  “Niki, this is Tricia, Matty’s mother. She’s one of the lucky ones who survived the carnage at the lodge.”

  “I’m so glad to hear it,” Niki said. “How’s Matty?”

  “Awake. Blessedly awake,” she said. “Initially they were worried about brain damage, which is why they put him in a medically-induced coma for three days, but he’s okay.”

  Niki smiled at her blankly.

  Three days?

  After listening to Tricia’s litany of her son’s other injuries, a broken collar bone, broken arm, torn ACL, and so on, the woman sensed Niki could not endure much more. With a warm hug and God bless, she left.

  “How long?” Niki turned to Bryce and asked.

  “You’ve been out almost a week,” he said. “The doctors told us it was unlikely you’d ever wake.”

  “Oh...” She let that sink in. They were ready to give up on you. They expected you to be a vegetable. She’d felt understandably weak since coming to, but now she could add fragile to that. She didn’t like the sensation. Fragile was one thing she’d never considered herself.

  “But you’re here. You didn’t believe them?” she said.

  “I heard you calling.”

  “You did?”

  He nodded. “Aye.”

  “I’ve heard you calling to me for years.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” He kissed away the tear that welled up and spilled over onto her cheek. “And you didn’t stop your shouting just because you needed to rest for a little while. I knew you were in there.”

  “You said, the doctors told us. By us, you mean Tricia, right?”

  He looked down at their clasped hands, smoothing the back of hers with his thumb.

  “What is it?”

  Niki’s gut churned. He wasn’t talking about Tricia.

  “Your mother is–”

  Urgent voices and the squeak of rubber soles skidding on floor tiles signaled commotion in the hallway.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Lusk, you aren’t on the list of approved visitors,” a man outside Niki’s room said.

  “Ridiculous. I’m her mother.”

  That honey and heroin purr was distinct as always, standing out from normal voices. Niki, panicking, struggled to sit up.

  Bryce pushed her back gently against t
he pillows. He spoke in quiet, soothing tones. “Relax, Niki.”

  She fought him. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “You belong right where you are.”

  Oh, God, she’s gotten to him. He’s already under her influence.

  “Nurse, you wouldn’t want me to be denied seeing my own child, would you?” Delia asked the unseen male in the hallway.

  When the response came, it sounded drugged, as Niki knew it would.

  “No. Uh. No. Um, no, you’re right,” the man said. “A mother...a mother...should be allowed to visit with her daughter.”

  Niki was desperate. She and her mother hadn’t been in the same room together since Dante’s proposal. She didn’t want to go back to what she was. She couldn’t survive trapped within Delia Lusk’s sphere of influence. It had been hard enough to escape it the first time.

  “Bryce, please.”

  “Trust me, everything is going to be okay,” he said.

  “Tell me she doesn’t know about–”

  Bryce shook his head. “I’ve kept my promise. No one knows what you did. They think we were together, looking for Matty. That you volunteered to help me search and succumbed to the cold not long after I did. That’s all.”

  Niki’s hospital room door swung open. She turned her head away from the door, toward the room’s window, her only defense against her mother’s ability being not to look her in the eyes. The powerful voice might still capture her will, forcing eye contact, but she would hold off as long as she could.

  “Nicola, darling.”

  Niki felt the air in the room disturbed as Delia breezed in.

  “The mother of that sweet boy you rescued tells me you’re awake.”

  Bryce released Niki’s hand. She heard him rise to intercept.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Lusk, Niki’s not up to receiving visitors,” Bryce said.

  “I’m not a visitor. I’m her mother.”

  “That may be, but Niki has barely regained consciousness.”

  “All the more reason–”

  “To what, get a few words in, so you’ll have something to give the media outside?”

  “And you are who, exactly?”

  “A man grateful to your daughter for her determination, caring, and for keeping a cool head when calling for help.”