The Dragon's Christmas Wish

by Georgette St. Clair

  “That will be us,” he whispered to her.

  Liza deliberately ignored the statement, and pointed out the different types of trees. “These are Douglas firs, and those are balsam firs,” she said. “Which one would you like?”

  He surveyed the choices carefully and pointed at one of the balsam firs, about eight human feet high.

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” her grandfather said. “Nice and tall, very healthy, and very symmetrical. Also very fragrant.”

  Jaspar knew that her grandfather was a salesman, but somehow he couldn’t help but feel proud that he had made such a good choice. Liza seemed pleased as well, which meant everything.

  One of the elves glided up with an axe.

  Jaspar took the axe and cut down the tree with several mighty thwacks, which actually felt quite satisfying.

  “Ah, the smell of pine sap,” Liza said, inhaling deeply. “I love it.”

  Jaspar felt a warm glow spread inside him at the thought that he had made her happy.

  Her grandparents picked up the tree and carried it off, heading towards their hovercraft. Liza lingered behind, looking around.

  “I’m just drinking in every last moment,” she said.

  “You’re under the mistletoe!” one of the elves cried.

  Liza cursed and looked up. They were standing under an archway with mistletoe attached to the top.

  Jaspar looked at her. “I know the significance of mistletoe in Earth lore.” He very much approved of this particular Earth tradition.

  “We should just move,” she said, trying to step back, but the elves gathered around and blocked her, chanting, “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”

  “It appears we must do as they say,” Jaspar said gravely.

  “You’re afraid of the elves?” she said with disbelief. “They’re three feet high, and mechanical.”

  “It is entirely possible that they could run amok and cause havoc,” he said, while dodging the question of whether he was actually afraid of them.

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that,” she said, and a small smile tugged at her mouth.

  He leaned in and kissed the smile away. With it he took her breath. His mouth moved softly over hers, exploring the contours of her lips, and he brought up his hands to frame her face. His touch was gentle but sure, and she was reminded of his size and strength as he drew her against him and let her feel the heat of his body.

  Her hands came up of their own accord and she curled her fingers into the soft, worn leather of his tunic. When he drew back from the kiss, she clung to him, heart battering her ribcage. She looked up searchingly into his inhumanly blue eyes.

  It was his turn to smile.

  Chapter Five

  “Liza?” Mawmaw’s voice rang through the air, and Liza was reluctantly pulled back to reality.

  She quickly stepped away from Jaspar, right before her grandmother appeared between two massive balsam firs.

  “Are you ready to go back now?” Mawmaw asked.

  “Absolutely. And quickly,” Liza said. At her grandmother’s puzzled look, she added, “It’s getting cold.” She glanced at Jaspar and shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold.

  They all piled into the hovercraft and headed back. Liza glanced over at Jaspar, half expecting to see him curling his lip at the shoddiness of her family’s craft. It was scarred and scratched and dented, and plastifoam oozed from cracks in the seats. The model was at least fifty years old. His clan’s hovercraft was gleaming and shiny and at least five times the size of hers.

  Jaspar didn’t seem to notice, however; he was looking out the viewscreen at the surrounding landscape with appreciation.

  “Your world is very beautiful,” he said as they glided over the sparkling, snow-blanketed highway.

  “Yes, it was,” Liza said with a hint of sadness in her voice.

  There was a loud humming sound. The hovercraft vibrated, then sank to the ground. Liza’s grandfather reached forward and pressed the communicator button. Nothing happened. The craft was completely dead.

  Liza groaned. They were still a couple of miles away from the bed and breakfast. Her grandparents were in their seventies. They were still in great shape, but she didn’t want them trudging two miles through the snow in this weather.

  She glanced over at Jaspar with a sigh.

  “Do you have your communicator with you?”

  “Do not worry,” Jaspar said. “I have wings, after all. I will give you a ride back to the bed and breakfast, and we will send my mechanic to fix your hovercraft and get your family.”

  Liza shook her head. “No, I think it would be better if I stayed with my family and you flew back to get help.”

  “It will count as one of our times of knowing.” She stared at him. “One of our dates,” Jaspar explained. “That is, if you let me fly you some more after we get help for your family.”

  “Oh, are you two going on a date?” her grandmother said, perking up. “Christmas is a very romantic time of year. That’s when I met Liza’s grandfather.” She looked at Liza more closely. “Were you two standing under the mistletoe earlier?”

  “No!” Liza said sharply, at the same time Jaspar said, “Yes.”

  Liza glared at him.

  “We kissed,” he added helpfully. “She is definitely my heart-mate.”

  Liza shook her head. “I can’t believe this,” she groaned.

  “Tell me about this heart-mate business,” her grandfather said, looking way too interested.

  “Doesn’t it sound romantic?” Mawmaw gushed.

  “Okay, fine, you can fly me back to the bed and breakfast,” Liza said quickly. “But will it be safe? I thought that your species couldn’t fly in the cold.”

  “I can fly as long as it’s above thirty degrees,” he said. “I read the weather plans for today and the temperature will not fall below thirty-five.”

  She glanced at her grandparents.

  “We’ll be fine,” her grandfather assured her. “We’ll stay inside the hovercraft. You two lovebirds go fly now.”

  Liza glared at him, but he just smiled back, looking innocent. Her grandmother patted him on the hand approvingly.

  Great. Her grandparents were now conspiring to marry her off to a giant sexy alien who had destroyed their entire planet.

  “Christmas madness!” she muttered under her breath. It was the only explanation.

  “I’ll send our hovercraft right away,” Jaspar said to them. “It won’t be more than fifteen minutes.”

  Liza and Jaspar climbed out, and the door sealed shut.

  Jaspar stripped off his clothes. Liza quickly looked away, her cheeks burning, but not before she saw that everything was in proportion to his size. Everything. She stared ferociously at the floor. Even his feet were sexy. How was that fair?

  She couldn’t help looking back as silver scales shaded with black cascaded upwards over his legs. He shifted smoothly, wings tearing from his back with the sound of ripping silk, form twisting and changing in strange ways that hurt her eyes until he stood in front of her looking like a dragon from an old book of Terran children’s stories.

  His neck was long and serpentine, his head diamond-shaped. She was frightened for a moment, just because of the sheer, imposing size of him, but then he turned his head and she saw that his eyes, that eerie, icy blue, were just the same as always.

  She scrambled onto his back and wrapped her arms around his neck. His body radiated heat, and she snuggled against it, hugging his neck hard.

  As she basked in his warmth, it occurred to her that he had never answered her question about whether he had his communicator with him. She’d just bet he did. Sneaky damn aliens.

  He beat his mighty wings and they rose into the air.

  The landscape dropped away beneath them, the hovercraft dwindling in size until it looked like one of the painted models at the Toy Emporium on Main Street. As they rose, Liza could look out over the acres and acres of pine forest…and see the swathes of black where the fungus ha
d blighted the trees. But she found it impossible to be sad right then. Jaspar’s wingbeats thrummed through her body and adrenaline sang in her veins.

  They flew back to the bed and breakfast, where he landed in the parking lot. She reluctantly slid off his neck, immediately missing his warmth and the sensation of closeness.

  His brothers and clan members came out to greet him as he quickly shifted back into humanoid form and explained to Loren about the hovercraft.

  “I’ll go right now!” Loren said, perhaps a little too eagerly, and set off for the Balthazar Clan’s hovercraft at a dead run.

  His mother had stepped outside too. She gave the Santabot a brief glance and then hurried back inside, with the tiniest of smiles tugging at her lips.

  Liza looked over at the Santabot. It was sitting on its chair in the little Santa’s Workshop area they had set up to the left of the bed and breakfast. It was set on a big concrete square, with a painted backdrop of Santa’s workshop, and piles of weather-proof wrapped presents artfully arranged around the throne.

  A family was standing near the Santabot, and the looks on their faces made Liza uneasy. The family, clearly wealthy off-worlders, were gathered around the Santabot, staring at it with looks of bafflement. The mother and father were accompanied by two grade-school-aged children and a pre-teen.

  “And what do you want for Christmas?” Santa was asking the mother. “No, no, don’t tell me – a fashion sense!”

  Her husband and children howled with laughter.

  “I see,” the woman said, looking highly annoyed.

  “And what are you laughing about?” Santabot asked the father. “Your breath is so bad, the dentist has to give himself gas.”

  “Children, with me!” the mother said in an imperious tone, and she turned and stalked off. The children followed her, still laughing. The father trailed along, looking disgruntled.

  Liza stormed over to Jaspar, who had wandered up and was looking askance at the Santabot. “Jaspar, can we talk?” she said, with murder in her eyes.

  “Certainly, heart-mate,” Jaspar said.

  They walked back towards the house.

  “Don’t you heart-mate me, you big scaly bastard. What the actual hell?” she demanded. “Why would your brother do that? That’s not a glitch, damn it – that was deliberate.”

  “Well, he is up and functioning,” Jaspar said defensively. She gave him a look. He sighed. “I will talk to Loren and have him tinker with him some more,” he said.

  “Forget it,” she said furiously. “You think I’d trust him to touch the Santabot after this? He’d probably make it even worse. That family is going to go back to their hotel and tell everybody what happened here, and word is going to spread through town like wildfire. First our Santabot was malfunctioning, now he’s Insult Santa. There are other Santabot rides offered by other businesses in town, you know. I doubt we’ll get any guests at all here. This was our last season, damn it!” She was near tears.

  Jaspar felt a sharp stab of pain lancing through him at the sight of her unhappiness. “I am very sorry. My brother and mother will be dealt with appropriately.”

  “Don’t bother. It’s too late now. I’m not really in the mood to go flying anymore tonight,” she said. “We can do it tomorrow, but only since I promised you. And now I’m going to go to the guest cottage and wait for my family.”

  Jaspar stomped inside, and found his mother sipping a hot steaming mug of some mysterious human drink called “coffee”. “I see that you sabotaged the Santabot,” he said.

  “What?” she said, giving him her innocent look. “How was that sabotage? We value honesty in all things, so I simply had the robot programmed for honesty.”

  “Mother, return to our ship at once,” he told her coldly. “You will remain there until we leave orbit.”

  “Very well,” she said – far too readily, which meant that she was up to something. He didn’t care. There wasn’t much harm that she could do to him and Liza from the ship.

  When he saw his hovercraft returning, accompanied by Liza’s, he went over to help her grandparents carry the tree into the house.

  His brother Korl hurried over to join him, and together they hoisted the enormous tree and carried it into the little cottage.

  Liza stood there, arms folded, scowling, as her grandfather showed them how to set the tree in the metal holder so it would remain upright.

  Her saber-tooth friend Marjan stood with her, watching them suspiciously.

  “I do not trust you people,” she informed Korl, eyes narrowed.

  “Trust is for fools,” Korl retorted. “And those who enjoy the adornment of a knife protruding from their vertebrae.”

  “Now, now, children, no intergalactic battles while decorating the tree,” Mawmaw chided.

  “They’re staying to help decorate?” Liza asked in dismay.

  “Liza,” her grandfather said reprovingly. “Of course they are. We share the Christmas traditions with everyone. It is our purpose.”

  “I will call you the G-word, Liza. I certainly will,” her grandmother threatened her. “Don’t make me swear so close to Christmas. Now, you girls go get the boxes of decorations.”

  Liza and Marjan went to a side room, muttering rebelliously, and brought back boxes of decorations while Liza’s grandparents served hot chocolate and cookies.

  “These beverages are most excellent,” Korl said. “They taste even better than the blood of my enemies.”

  “That is high praise, coming from him,” Jaspar said, nodding and sipping the chocolate.

  “You see, dear? One of the many wonderful things about Christmas.” Liza’s grandmother beamed at him.

  As they pulled out the decorations and hung them on the tree, Liza’s grandparents told them the history of each one.

  Many of them were hundreds of years old.

  “Now, this little gingerbread man actually came from Terra 1,” Liza’s grandmother said.

  “No, Mawmaw, your great-great-grandfather carved that one from one of the first trees planted on Far North,” Liza corrected her.

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely,” Liza insisted.

  She pulled out another one. “My mother and I painted this one together,” she told Jaspar, holding up a little reindeer. “She and my father died in an accident when I was five,” she added, her eyes misting over.

  Then she pulled out a little snow globe and handed it to him. “Shake it,” she said, and when he did, it filled up with sparkles that looked like snow falling on a tiny village.

  She took over the job of telling the history of each little ornament, and as she did, she started to relax a little bit, and smile.

  Jaspar glanced over at Liza’s grandmother, who was watching with approval.

  The old one is wise, he thought.

  When the tree was decorated, she walked him and his brother to the door. Her tone was cool. “Thank you for decorating the tree with us. It means a lot to my grandparents to share our traditions. However, I still know that you were the ones who fungused our trees, and I will not forgive you for that.”

  He snorted. “Foolish woman. When will you research what I said about the Drakken telling the truth?”

  “Some time after the twelfth of never.”

  Ah! That was good news. She would do the research after all. “I am not familiar with the human calendar. When is that? Before Christmas, I hope?”

  Instead of answering, she shut the door in their faces.

  Chapter Six

  Liza was in the middle of a very inappropriate dream involving herself and Jaspar, naked and lying on a pile of furs, when she was rudely interrupted. Somebody was calling her name – somebody with a terrible sense of timing.

  “Go’way,” she mumbled, and pulled her pillow over her head. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember where she’d left off. Jaspar was licking his way up her inner thigh…

  Somebody snatched the pillow off her head.

&nb
sp; “Liza, wake up.” Marjan was standing next to her bed. La La was by her side, holding an armful of peppermint sticks.

  Liza sat bolt upright and squinted at them. “It’s seven a.m.,” she groaned. “Is everything all right? La La, where did you get all those peppermint sticks? Save some for later, for heaven’s sake!”

  In response, La La stuck all of them in her mouth – wrappers and all.

  “Do you just like to deliberately annoy me?” she said. La La made a happy squealing noise, and Marjan looked down at her, nodded, and laughed.

  “Do you actually speak Srilaa?” Liza climbed out of bed, yawning and rubbing her eyes.

  “I understand it. Nobody can speak Srilaa but the Srilaa.”

  “Interesting. What did she just say to me?”

  “She said yes, of course, because it is funny when your face turns red.” Marjan grinned. “But that’s actually the highest form of compliment, coming from a Srilaa. They only annoy those they truly love.”

  “Urgh. And she’s decided she loves me? Why am I so lucky?” She scowled down at La La. “You should be out playing with your friends and entertaining customers.”

  La La shook her head and hugged Liza’s leg.

  Liza plopped back down on the bed. “Why are you guys even here so early?”

  “There’s a long line of people waiting for sleigh rides, and your grandparents are getting ready to open up early. They sent me in to get you.”

  Marjan left, and she lured La La into following her by waving a peppermint stick at her and leading her out.

  Liza dressed quickly and hurried outside. To her surprise, the line of families waiting to ride Santa’s sleigh snaked all the way to their front gate.

  Her grandparents were doing a brisk business at their outdoor booth, selling roast chestnuts, apple cider, and hot buttered rum to the grown-ups. The peppermint sticks were going fast, too, as the delighted children fed them to the equally delighted Srilaa. The Srilaa did handsprings and backflips to show their appreciation. Handsprings? Pawsprings? Liza thought, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  She hurried over to her grandparents.

  “Pawpaw, what’s going on?” she asked as the Santabot landed his sleigh and a laughing family climbed out. Another family quickly climbed in.