by Anthology
“Like so many other times before, to how many women?” she asked, sprawled atop him.
He gave her a droll look and squeezed her tighter. “Cynic.”
“Realist.”
“Well, when I met you, it was different.”
“Different?”
He nodded. “I talked to you. Realized there was still simple magic in this world.”
“Really? Like what?” she asked.
“Christmas time, kindness, giving.”
“Mmm. You realized those things and then made me a conquest.”
“I never claimed to be a saint.” He trailed a finger down her back. “And what a glorious conquest it still is.”
She laughed and propped her chin in her hands, on his chest, meeting his gaze. “I can’t complain.”
“Of course not.”
“About your love making. Your communication afterwards though...”
“I’m not the smart arse. I’m attempting something here.”
She grinned at him. “Don’t let me stop you.”
He rolled them so she lay beneath him again and peered down into her face. “You might have stolen my heart at a glance. But my soul…” He leaned down and lightly grazed her lips with his own. “I’d quite forgotten I’d even had one until you. And then,” he kissed her again. “Well, it was yours.”
For a minute she didn’t say anything. “I had forgotten.”
“Forgotten?”
“You could say something that stole my breath.”
“I steal your breath and you take my soul.” He shrugged. “We’re both thieves.”
She laughed and he kissed her again.
“I have an idea for our next Christmas,” he said.
“We’re going to spend next Christmas together as well? Being presumptuous aren’t you?” she asked, though there was laughter in her voice.
“We should spend every Christmas together.”
“If we survive the holidays.” She shifted against him, her skin warm against his. “We liked to have killed us and probably some of your neighbors this year.”
He nipped her lips. “Hush. I realized we’ll have to replace all the Christmas decorations.”
“And?”
“We can pick out new ones every year.”
“Eventually, we’ll need more trees.”
“Probably,” he agreed.
He shifted so that he lay again beside her and she curved into his side, her head on his shoulder.
She rubbed her cheek against the hollow of his shoulder. “I think you should save something from the trashed out house and use it to commemorate this year.”
“Oh?”
“A burned piece of railing…” She shook her head. “No, maybe we can use the silver chain as tinsel and—“
He sighed. “I don’t think so.”
“Spoilsport.”
At least they wouldn’t be bored.
The End
About Jaycee Clark
Jaycee is a New York Times & USA Today Best-Selling author of romantic suspense. When she's not writing, she spends time with her family, enjoys snow skiing and just getting outside. You can find her on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter @JayceeClark. www.jayceeclark.com
A Glint of Light by JC Andrijeski
An Allie’s War Christmas
For Christmas can Balidor, leader of the seer military, save the imprisoned woman he loves from her own darkness?
Everyone told him Cassandra couldn’t be saved. All of them––even Allie and Jon, her childhood friends––believe she’s too far gone, that she would never come back. After Cass betrayed them by joining the dark being called Shadow, the rest of his team mostly wants her dead, but Balidor can’t bring himself to let her go. Using his psychic training, he leads her through the darkness of her past, trying desperately to bring back the woman he loved before Shadow broke her mind. With months gone and Christmas here, he decides to go for broke, hoping desperately it might be the thing to finally break through.
1
Why Are You Here?
She looked up when he walked in, exhaling in a near-anger as soon as she saw his face.
Not the most auspicious of beginnings.
Then again, he’d expected the reaction, more or less. He’d been getting a similar reaction from her for weeks now...months. Frustration with him for being there at all, even as a part of her seemed almost happy to see him, if only to break the monotony of her captivity.
He knew that flicker of being glad to see him likely had zero to do with him, personally.
He knew that...he knew all of that. Even so, he still had to fight not to let a reaction hit his light or his facial expression. He questioned why he continued to take such things personally when he knew they might even be calculated to jab at him.
Still, he knew the truth of things.
He knew she did, too.
If he didn’t come here, no one would.
So he had to ask himself, yet again...if not him, who?
No one else would come in here with any real desire to help her, not even Alyson. Maybe some day Alyson would want to help her childhood friend, but not now. Not with everything else going on...and not with the betrayal by that friend so fresh. Not with how angry Alyson’s husband, Revik, remained. For even more than Alyson herself, Revik was angry with the woman in this cell––murderously angry. Angry to the point of sheer irrationality.
Revik would have killed her by now, if his wife hadn’t already stood in the way of his attempts.
“Hey boss-man,” the prisoner intoned lazily as she looked up at him.
“Hello Cass,” he said, keeping his expression neutral.
“Here to fuck with my brain some more, brother Balidor?” she said, her voice bored.
He found it ironic she would use the affectionate seer-to-seer term of “brother” with him, given everything. He supposed she meant it sarcastically. Or maybe not––she had been raised human after all. Being a seer likely remained a novelty for her still. He’d wondered about that, in idle moments. He’d wondered how that must be, to go from one race to another, to think one is one thing, only to find out you are something else.
Her seer abilities had been hidden from her all those years. Her light, that thing which defined most everything for seers. Light was how they felt, touched, tasted, experienced the world. Light was how they shared feelings, from one to the other. Moreover, looking at one another’s light was how they understood one another, how they categorized one another...how they recognized one another, even more than their physical bodies.
Light was everything to a seer.
It was the sixth sense that dwarfed all the rest.
She would have been denied access to the Barrier too, that space from which all seer abilities came. Sex pain...
She wouldn’t have known about sex pain.
Even if she had experienced the sex-pain that seers suffered when they went too long without contact––light-to-light, body-to-body––Cass would not have known what that pain was. She would not have known what it meant, even if she’d been instinctively driven to have sex to relieve it. He wondered if she had noticed it.
He wondered if she had acted on it, without being able to explain it.
He pushed the question from his mind, refocusing on her face.
Even so, she might have heard some glimmer of his thoughts, or their flavor at least. She heard too much. Particularly given the sight-restraint collar she wore.
As he thought it, she leaned against the wall, exhaling another plume of contempt. Opening her legs in the dark pants she wore, her bare feet pressed to the green metal floor, she winked.
“I can think of much more interesting parts of me to fuck, ‘Dori...or are your holy vows not so into that?”
“Not so much,” Balidor said, sighing a bit in spite of himself. “No.”
“You managed to get it up for Allie,” she retorted. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, actually. How was she? Was
she as good as Revik seems to think?”
Balidor ignored that, too.
He could feel her trying to worm her way into his brain, even now. Even collared, she had an uncanny ability to get under his defenses, to find ways to jab at him that actually hurt. She was better at it than Allie’s husband had been––with Balidor himself, at least.
He could admit that to himself and still not want to look at the reasons why. He knew his most recent girlfriend, Yarli, had theories. They’d fought about those theories until deep into the night, and more than a few times. Ugly things had been said during some of those fights, things that had been difficult to come back from.
Things they never would come back from.
Even as he thought it, Cass seemed to hear it.
“How’s the girlfriend?” she said, winking up at him.
Wincing a little, Balidor realized he still stood by the opening of Cass’s cell. If only to give himself time to think, he forced himself to move...to walk. He crossed the floor of the high-ceilinged room––a room big enough for a dozen prisoners, if not more––and stopped when he got close enough.
Without waiting, he lowered his weight to a cross-legged position on the floor, sitting just outside a circle that he himself had painted on the organic metal. The circle was meant to denote the minimum safe distance to Cass’s physical person.
Cass herself was shackled to the wall.
He’d had her ankle restraints removed, once he’d decided they weren’t necessary, but the wrist cuffs remained, giving her enough walking access that she could reach a bathroom stall to her right, and a cot that stood across from that.
Usually, she sat on the floor.
Unlike some of the prisoners they’d held in these cells, Balidor knew he could overpower her physically. She’d had little training as a fighter before she came to live among seers and probably weighed a third of him.
On the other hand, she was telekinetic.
It paid to exercise caution with telekinetics, even those shackled to walls and wearing sight-restraint collars calibrated to block the telekinesis.
But ankle cuffs wouldn’t help him, not if she ever did find some way to access the telekinesis in here.
“Well?” Cass said, flipping her silky black hair over one shoulder. Balidor’s eyes followed the motion. “Are you going to tell me? About Yarli?”
“We broke up,” Balidor said, blunt.
He wondered why he would tell her such a thing, even as he said it.
Cass looked briefly surprised too.
Then she smiled at him, her eyes knowing.
“Ah,” Cass said. “Is that the real reason you’re down here so much? Distracting yourself from yet another failed relationship? From the lonely drudgery that is your life––?”
“Aren’t you bored of this, Cassandra?” he cut in, his own voice weary.
“Not really, no,” she said, smiling.
But he went on as if she hadn’t spoken.
“...Doesn’t this tire you?” he continued. “You are an intelligent person. You had...” He hesitated, then shifted the direction of his words. “...Things you cared about once. Before, I mean. When I first knew you.” Seeing the frown lines start to harden her mouth, he went on before she could interrupt. “...You cannot possibly be lying to yourself to the extent that you don’t know I’m here to help you. Why do you spend this time with me like this?”
Her eyes flat, she rattled the chain holding her to the wall. “I don’t have a lot of options for entertainment, brother Balidor.”
“Bullshit,” he growled. “You are not so indifferent. You know I’m the only one here who would even take this job, to try and speak with you...to try and reach you in any way. You must know what they think of me for trying...”
“Now who’s bullshitting who, brother Balidor?” Her voice sounded angry for real that time. Giving him a hard look, she rested her forearms on her knees, her lips curling back into that colder smile. “No one else knows about these little sessions of ours. Do you think I’m stupid? You sure as fuck haven’t told your precious Allie. I’d bet good money you haven’t told Revik, either...or Jon.” She nodded towards the portion of the wall that housed the surveillance capture. “You come only in the dead of night. You turn off the cameras.”
He felt his face warm, even as he clicked at her in irritation. “How could you possibly know that?”
“I feel it,” she said, her voice a touch harder.
He nodded, conceding her point with a seer’s hand gesture. “Still,” he said, his voice more subdued. “You know why I am here. There are other ways we could pass this time together. Apart from you trying to find weaknesses that will win you shallow points...”
She cracked a sideways smile.
Balidor found himself watching her face more closely than usual. As always, he looked for some sign of her there, of the woman he had known before Shadow got ahold of her.
He’d liked her back then.
He’d liked her a lot, truthfully.
Of course, Cass always had a bit of an edge, even then. But the vulnerability beneath that edge had appealed to him. The honesty he sensed in her...and yes, maybe the hurt, too. He didn’t often think to question why that was. He supposed it might be partly because he’d often been in a position of having to act like he wasn’t affected by such things.
Being a leader, that was part of the job.
“Are you ready to begin?” he asked, politely that time.
“Is he back?” she said. “Revik. His....uh...wife. Are they back?”
Balidor gave her a faintly amused look.
Even so, he found himself staring at her more closely, feeling as much as hearing emotion lying behind her avoidance of saying Alyson’s name. Interesting that she had no such compunction with Allie’s husband.
After all, Revik had been the one to point a gun at her head most recently.
“Are you asking if he is alive?” Balidor said drily.
Cass shrugged. Again, he felt more behind her feigned indifference.
Sighing a bit, he clicked at her, letting her see he wasn’t fooled. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, he is alive. Both of them are. He was injured. He woke up yesterday.”
She looked up, biting her lip.
It was the only sign to Balidor that he was making any progress in these sessions with her at all. There was a time, not so long ago really, where he would not have seen so much feeling in her expression. There was a time when she did nothing but make cynical wisecracks.
Still, she was smart enough that this could be more manipulation too.
“Did he hurt her?” There was a faint thread of gloating in the question.
Balidor felt the posturing behind that, too.
Even so, his voice turned harder when he answered.
“Yes,” he said. “Does this make you happy?”
She smiled, quirking an eyebrow in an unspoken answer.
Clicking softer than before, Balidor shook his head.
She stared at him for a moment longer. When he didn’t speak, she exhaled.
“Where are they now?”
“They are here,” Balidor said. “On this ship.”
Cass stiffened. “Here?”
Balidor nodded. “Yes.”
He waited, feeling currents stutter around her light as she reacted to the news that her best friend from childhood was onboard this same aircraft carrier with her husband...who had also been her friend, once upon a time.
Of course, that was before Cass tried to kill the two of them.
He felt her trying to feel them through the collar. She would have no luck with that, he knew. Not only did the tank cut her off from any seer’s light outside of the tank itself, the aircraft carrier was large, and Revik and Allie had their own shields.
“Is she coming down here?” Cass said, abrupt. “Queen Allie, I mean. Is she going to deign to come down here and ‘interrogate’ me any more?”
Balidor shook his head. Feeling
her react, he shrugged with one hand, seer-fashion, softening his answer. “It is likely they will not have time.” Thinking about this, remembering his conversation with Alyson earlier that day, he let out an amused snort. “You might find one reason for this somewhat amusing, Cassandra...”
She flinched when he said her name, then rolled her eyes to cover it.
“And what reason is that?” she said.
“They are helping Jon set up a Christmas party.”
Cass stared at him, blinking in disbelief. She shook her head, her eyes briefly confused, as if she couldn’t decide how to react.
Once more, Balidor saw the woman he remembered in there.
The one he’d almost known.
“Are you ready to begin, Cassandra?” he asked again, softer.
That time, when she looked at him, he saw a thread of vulnerability in her expression.
It caught him off guard.
Then pain rose in his own light––a line of fire that snaked through the middle of his chest. The corresponding pain he saw in her shocked him, blanking his mind even as his light reached for hers. He felt loneliness in her pain, a desire for contact...grief. He’d known, of course, that not all of her light-pain pertained to sex.
With seers, it was rarely about only one thing.
He pulled back a second later, but not before he questioned––again––what the hell he was doing with her here. Looking at her, Balidor also wondered why he hadn’t told Allie or Revik.
As Cass accused, he’d told no one of these visits.
And yes, he’d shut the cameras off to aid with his deceit. He’d also arranged for gaps in the security teams watching over her cell, to ensure they would not be observed.
He would have to tell them, of course.
Eventually, he knew...he would have to.
But he felt the reluctance in his own light at the thought.
Remembering Revik standing over her, a gun pointed at her head as he threatened to end her life, that reluctance intensified.
