Merry and Bright

by Lauren Esker

  He'd never realized how much he wanted to show Nicole snow. The words tumbled out: "We should go up to the mountains next year."

  Nicole raised her eyebrows. "With four toddlers?"

  Avery winced. "Okay, one of these years. When the kids are older."

  "Ha. It's a date." Nicole grinned. Her chestnut curls were jeweled with raindrops, and Avery was unable to resist reaching out to stroke them. Nicole leaned into his hand.

  "No PDAs in the hallway!" Hannah, the Leungs' nine-year-old, shrilled down the hall at them.

  "Nicky, Avery! Wonderful!" Erin Leung, Nicole's pretty and stylish big sister, hurried down the hallway, wiping her floury hands on her apron, to give them both a quick hug. "Did you get the eggnog? We're all out."

  "Regular and non-dairy, yep." Nicole and her sister were biracial, of Asian-Australian and European heritage, and Tim was Asian-American, so the majority of the household were lactose intolerant.

  "What's cooking?" Avery asked. "It smells great."

  They followed Nicole into the cheerful chaos of the living room. The Leung house had an open plan layout with a combined kitchen/living room, high ceilings with skylights, and three steps down to a sunken indoor patio and attached greenhouse. In addition to a variety of subtropical flowers, the greenhouse contained potted eucalyptus trees rising nearly all the way to the high glass ceiling. Nicole, Erin, and Hannah were koala shifters, so the eucalyptus trees made them feel more at home in the damp, gray Pacific Northwest. In the spirit of the holiday, the trees were draped in gold and silver fairy lights, sparkling off the glass enclosure as night fell outside.

  The house had been babyproofed with the addition of a baby gate across the steps leading down to the indoor patio, keeping Nicole and Avery's foster children away from the moderately toxic tropical foliage in the greenhouse. Since Tim and Erin had raised their children in this house, it was a solution they'd employed themselves with Forrest and Hannah were very small. The rest of the railing along the raised part of the carpeted living-room floor was baby-safe. The Christmas tree, with its shiny, tempting ornaments, had been set up down on the patio to make sure the kids couldn't get to it.

  Right now the quadruplets, all four of them, were in the living room, sprawled around with blankets and toys. Forrest, the Leungs' twelve-year-old son, was down on the floor in the middle of their active little playgroup. At the moment, two of them were wolf cubs and the other two were human toddlers. The little werewolves had spent most of their infancy as puppies, and still shifted freely back and forth, which made it challenging to keep clothes and diapers on them.

  Catching Nicole and Avery's scents, especially Avery's werewolf smell, the puppies produced a chorus of happy squeals and eager little whines. Avery laughed, leaned his cane against the wall, and scooped up Gael, a fat brown and gray puppy who wriggled with delight and licked his chin.

  Nicole picked up little Ginger, who was girl-shaped and miraculously still wearing both her clothes and her diaper, and carried her into the kitchen, where she and Avery dutifully oohed and ahhed over the pies cooling on the kitchen island. Tim, Erin's quiet, bespectacled husband, had moved the pies aside to make room for a laptop, where he was working on some emails; he gave them a distracted smile.

  Nicole deftly pulled Ginger away when the child tried to stick her hands into the nearest pie, and nudged Avery pointedly. "Ask them," she whispered. "They're not going to bite."

  "Ask us what?" Erin wanted to know. "Forrest, pass me the eggs, please."

  Avery was distracted by Gael shifting suddenly from a wolf cub to a plump, naked, brown-haired toddler, infinitely squirmier and harder to hold. "Wolf," Avery told him sternly, and Gael stared into his eyes for a stubborn minute before dutifully shifting back.

  All of them seemed to have accepted Avery as their pack leader. They adored Nicole, but Avery they actually obeyed. It was an odd feeling, a sort of power he wasn't used to having.

  "Do you mind if I invite a couple of friends for Christmas dinner?" he asked, adjusting Gael so that he was holding him one-armed like a furry football. "I'm sorry to drop this on you last-minute. I've been, you know ..." He waved his free hand. "Putting it off. I felt like, as a guest in your house, I shouldn't be inviting more people ..."

  Erin reached over to pat his arm, leaving a light dusting of flour behind. Gael gave her a quick puppy-lick with his small pink tongue. "You're not a guest, you're family. And of course we don't mind. Do we, hon? We'd love to meet your friends."

  Avery turned away to hide his blush. Nicole's hand slipped into his free one, lightly squeezing.

  "I don't want to cause more work for you," he said. "Just tell me what you want me to do to help out."

  Tim looked up from his laptop screen. "Tell you what, why not make it a potluck? That glazed ham in the 'fridge is big enough to feed an army, and if everyone brings a dish, food will be absolutely no problem. We're going to be eating leftovers for a week anyway."

  "I think that's a wonderful idea," Nicole said. "Oh, hold on ..." Her phone was vibrating in her pocket. She set down Ginger by Avery's feet and stepped away to take the call.

  "What is it?" Avery asked, seeing her serious expression as she listened to whoever was talking on the other end.

  Nicole held up a finger, signaling Just a minute. "Yes, I can hear you. Just a minute, there's a lot of noise in here ..."

  She stepped further away, out of range of even Avery's sharp werewolf hearing.

  "So, the family tradition is, on Christmas Eve we don't really have dinner as such," Erin told Avery, and he wrenched his worried attention away from Nicole. "We just snack and eat pie, and the kids get to open one present apiece later on. If you want something healthier than pie, I was going to throw together a salad."

  "Sounds great. You want me to chop something?"

  He was cutting up carrots, with Gael and Ginger wrestling around his feet, when Nicole came back to the kitchen, frowning.

  "Are things okay?" Avery asked her.

  "Oh yes. Basically. That was Ashley—remember her?"

  "Dr. Evans' daughter?" He recalled the thin, haunted young woman who had first helped capture them and then helped them escape when they were imprisoned for experimentation. He hadn't seen much of Ashley Evans-Lopez since they'd gotten out of the lab, but he knew that Nicole, a social worker by both inclination and occupation, had been trying to help Ashley adjust to life on the outside of the lab. While not a lab experiment herself in the same way as the puppies, Ashley had been under the thumb of her domineering mother for her entire life; she'd never been out on her own before.

  "Yes, that Ashley. She's been evicted. She doesn't have anyone to stay with, so she's at a women's shelter right now." Nicole pressed her lips together, her wide brown eyes soft with sympathetic concern. "She's technically an adult, but she's just not good at navigating the adult world. Her mother never let her make any decisions on her own, and now she's lost everything and has been thrown into the deep end. She can't find a job, and she feels as if she's barely managing to keep her head above water. And now this." She kissed Avery lightly on the cheek. "I'm sorry. I have to go talk to her. She could use the emotional support."

  Tim raised his mild gaze from his laptop. "Bring her over here."

  "He's right," Erin chimed in. "No one should be alone on Christmas if they have anywhere to go."

  "Erin, Tim, you guys are wonderful, but the house is already about as full as it can get," Nicole protested.

  "Don't be ridiculous. I can make up the couch for her, as long as she doesn't mind waking up at the crack of dawn to a houseful of Christmas-crazy kids."

  Avery's eyes met Nicole's, and he saw the suppressed smile dancing in them.

  "You want to drive?" he asked. "Or should I?"

  ***

  The shelter's small waiting area was decorated brightly with wreaths and bows. "Visitors aren't allowed in the residential area," the shelter staffer at the front desk told them, "but I can go back and ask her if she'd
like to come out and see you."

  While they waited, holding hands, a woman came out of the back with two small children. She pinged Avery's shifter senses, which wasn't that unusual. Shifters often had trouble integrating into regular human society; most of them had to cope with heightened senses, difficulty with strong smells and crowds, animal instincts, and often the unique requirements of their individual shifter-type subcultures, such as werewolves' strong pack urges and xenophobia. All of this made it hard for them to find and hold jobs, which meant they were disproportionately represented among the homeless population.

  The woman looked away without meeting Avery's eyes.

  "Excuse me, ma'am?" He reached in his wallet and pulled out all the cash inside. The kids stared at him silently with wide eyes. It could sometimes be hard to tell with small children whose shifts might not have fully kicked in yet, but he was fairly sure that one of them was a shifter and one wasn't. They must have had a human father, or maybe different fathers.

  "I don't want your charity, sir," the woman said tightly. "Or your pity."

  "That's not what this is, and it isn't for you. It's for them." Avery held out his hand, offering the crumpled bills. "I grew up in the foster system. Buy something nice for your kids. They could use it."

  She gazed at him for a moment longer, then took the money quietly and left without speaking, children in tow.

  Nicole's hand traced a gentle path down his arm.

  "What's it like back there?" he asked her quietly, sitting down again, with a nod toward the door where the shelter worker had vanished. He'd never been inside a place like this, except in the lobby when it was necessary to deal with a disturbance in the course of his duties. But as a social worker, Nicole probably spent a lot of time in this kind of place.

  "It's not a bad place," she said, just as softly. "It's clean and quiet, and they supply basic toiletries and meals. It's infinitely better than where most of these women started out."

  Before he could ask anything else, Ashley came out, toting a backpack. She stopped short and stood looking at them nervously, fidgeting as if she wasn't sure what to do with her hands.

  The last time Avery had seen her, she'd had her hair chopped off just below her ears; it had looked as if she'd cut it herself with a pair of kitchen scissors. Now it had grown out somewhat and had been dyed a dark auburn instead of her usual mousy hue, but that only drew attention to the unhealthy pallor of her face. She was wearing an oversized University of Washington sweatshirt, draped on her thin body, with a winter coat over the top.

  Nicole greeted her with a hug, and Avery offered her a smile. Nicole had warmed to her much more quickly than Avery had been able to. He couldn't quite forget that she'd abetted in the experiments that had claimed the lives of the quadruplets' parents, and had come very near to helping her mother conduct similar experiments on Avery and Nicole.

  But she was little more than a kid herself, and she'd done the right thing in the end. Also, the puppies adored her, which Avery supposed was worth something.

  "Come on," Nicole told her, giving her a gentle push toward the door.

  Ashley's hesitant smile dropped away, replaced by a baffled expression. "Where are we going?"

  "My sister's place. You can crash on our couch tonight."

  "But ..."

  "Don't argue with her when she's made up her mind," Avery told her. "There's no use."

  "Miss," the shelter worker said, "if you don't want to go with these people, you don't have to."

  Ashley smiled shyly, not quite meeting their eyes. "I—I think I want to."

  She was very quiet in the car, huddling in the back with her backpack on the seat beside her. She perked up visibly when Nicole pulled into the driveway outside the Leung house, with its dazzling lights glowing through the darkness and the rain.

  "This is pretty," Ashley said quietly. "We used to have family Christmases like this a long time ago, before I got sick."

  Which was what had originally set into motion a chain of events that led to werewolves being kidnapped and used as part of Dr. Evans' experiments to unlock the secrets of their healing abilities and save her daughter's life. Avery realized for the first time that Ashley Evans-Lopez must be carrying a tremendous burden of guilt about the whole thing. It had not only been done in her name, but she'd had to watch while it happened.

  With that thought, he managed to let go of most of his lingering resentment against her. He wished that she'd had her crisis of conscience earlier, in time to save the lives of the children's parents—but she had, in the end, saved the children's lives by smuggling them out of the lab. And while Dr. Evans was recovering in the hospital from injuries sustained during her standoff with the SCB, Ashley had been cooperating fully, helping the SCB put together a solid case against her own family.

  When it came down to it, she did the right thing. How many people can really say that?

  "How is your health right now?" Nicole asked as they got out of the car.

  "It's okay. I'm on a new treatment Dr. Lafitte is working on, and it seems to be helping with the rejection issues a little. I have more energy now." She smiled slightly. "Not that it seems to be able to help me find a job."

  "We'll work on that," Nicole told her. "One thing at a time, okay?"

  Ashley nodded solemnly and shouldered her backpack.

  The cheerful hubbub in the house seemed to have calmed considerably when they came in. The living room was dark except for the gleaming, shifting lights of the Christmas tree and the flickering of the big-screen TV against the far wall, on which a children's Christmas movie was playing. The kids were all sprawled on the floor, the older ones clutching pillows, the younger turned puppy-shaped and lying in sleepy heaps. As soon as Ashley came in, four tiny tails began to wag, and they scrambled to their paws and came to greet her with little yelping cries of delight.

  At the lab, Ashley had taken care of them after the death of their mother Helena, and they remembered her. In some ways she was a second mother to them, and it was clear from the delight in her thin face as she knelt to hold out her arms to them that they still had a place in her heart, too.

  With Ashley distracted, Nicole crooked a finger at Avery and hustled him off to the room they shared, which was off the hallway just inside the door. It had been Nicole's room before he'd moved in with her, and still reflected her sunshine-bright personality, although now it was strewn with toys and so crowded with newly added shelves, to accommodate Avery's things along with Nicole's, that it was barely possible to move around without knocking something off.

  It didn't help that the closet was no longer available for closet purposes, having been converted into a sort of combination mini-bedroom and playpen with the addition of a child gate and heaps of blankets and pillows inside. It would never have passed muster as a bedroom for human children, especially for four of them, but the children generally slept in their puppy shapes and they liked to be piled together. What even the other adults in the house didn't know was that Avery usually shifted into his wolf shape and joined them there.

  "Did you lose something?" Avery asked, as Nicole closed the bedroom door and then began hunting through drawers in the bureau.

  "No; I've realized we don't have any gifts for Ashley. If she spends Christmas with us, I have to find something to give her. She can't sit there and watch us open our gifts while receiving nothing."

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say "We don't have to," but Nicole, he knew, was right. If they were going to have Ashley with them for Christmas, it wasn't fair to exclude her from the present-opening.

  Nicole came up with a bracelet, and Avery donated a book of Sherlock Holmes stories from the clutter of paperbacks on "his" section of the shelves. Nicole also took down a framed photo of the children from the mess on top of the bureau. It was a simple cell-phone snap they'd had printed at Walmart; Erin had put it in a puppy-themed frame for them. "She probably doesn't have any," Nicole pointed out, "and we can always print off
some more."

  Avery left her wrapping the gifts with odds and ends of wrapping paper on the bed—which she assured him was a one-person job—and went out to the light-spangled dimness of the living room. Ashley was down on the floor with the puppies and the kids, lying stretched full-length to watch the stop-motion antics on the screen. Erin was moving quietly around in the kitchen, putting things away. She smiled at Avery. "I left out a slice of pie for you. I'm hoping pecan is all right, but if you don't like it, there's also pumpkin and apple."

  "Pecan is just fine." She'd left him an enormous slice, with a can of non-dairy spray topping beside it. Avery took it into the living room and accepted the spot on the end of the couch that Tim offered him.

  So this is what a family Christmas Eve is like, he thought, and he knew that he'd hold this moment in his heart forever: the lights of the tree winking and dancing, reflected in the glass behind them; the movie playing on the screen, with the kids sprawled in front of it; the sweet richness of the pie on his tongue. There was only one thing missing, and this deficiency soon resolved itself when Nicole arrived to slide onto the couch next to him with a pie slice of her own. Her warm body curled against his as if she had been made for it, and every once in awhile, with everyone else's attention fixed on the screen, she turned her head to press a sweet pie-flavored kiss against his lips.

  He'd never imagined life could be this good.

  ***

  Jack and Casey rang the doorbell in early afternoon on Christmas Day.

  By that point, the pile of gifts under the tree had been turned into drifts of wrapping paper scattered across the patio in front of the rain-streaked windows. The older children were off in their rooms to enjoy their fresh spoils, and the younger kids were asleep in a literal puppy-pile on the couch, worn out by the morning's flurry of activity. Ashley was upstairs in Erin and Tim's bedroom taking a nap. Nicole curled on the end of the couch, half-napping with a book on her chest, and Avery sat on the floor with his back to the couch, resting against her, where she could play sleepily with his hair. A brand new murder mystery was in his hands; both of them had been given books for Christmas.