Nick had said Clay expected me back. I'd half expected to come back last Christmas myself, not through my own volition, but magically, as if I could fall asleep in Toronto on Christmas Eve and wake up in Stonehaven the next morning. Easter, Thanksgiving, birthdays, they'd all passed unnoticed, untainted by the urge of return. Christmas was different.

Growing up, I'd hated Christmas. Of all the holidays, it was the one that most glorified the family, all those movies and TV specials and advertisements and magazine covers showing happy families going through the rites of the season. That's not to say I was deprived of the normal trappings of Christmas. My foster families weren't complete ogres. I got presents and turkey dinners. I went to parties and midnight mass. I sat on Santa's knee and learned to sing "Up on the Rooftop" for the school concert. But without real family bonds, all the rituals of the season were as phony as sprayed-on snow. So when I moved out on my own at eighteen, I stopped celebrating. Then I met Clay. That first year together, I finally felt that a true Christmas was possible. Sure, I wasn't surrounded by parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, but I had someone. I had the first link to everything else I wanted so bad.

I should say that Clay had no idea how to celebrate Christmas. It wasn't an official werewolf holiday. Okay, there were no official werewolf holidays, but that wasn't the point. The Pack recognized Christmas only as a time to get together as they did umpteen other times a year. They exchanged presents, the same as they did on birthdays, but that was the extent of the celebration. So what did Clay do when I hinted that I wanted a full-blown Christmas? He gave me one.

Although I didn't know it at the time, Clay spent weeks researching the holiday. Then he gave me Christmas with all the trimmings. We went out and cut down a tree-then realized the impossibility of getting it back to his apartment on his motorcycle. We had the tree delivered and decorated it. We made shortbread, gingerbread, and sugar cookies, and discovered how hard it is to form gingerbread men without a cookie cutter. We made a fruitcake, which was probably still on the balcony of his old apartment, where we'd eventually used it to hold open the door. We bought lights for the balcony, then had to go back to the hardware store for an extension cord, then had to go back for wire cutters to snip a hole in the screen to slip the cord through. We listened to Christmas music, watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and rented It's a Wonderful Life, though Clay fell asleep during the latter-okay, we both fell asleep during the latter. We drank eggnog by the fire, or by a magazine photo of a fire that Clay stuck on the wall. No tradition went unobserved. It was the perfect Christmas. We didn't make it to Easter.

There was no Christmas the next year. I assume Christmas still occurred in the outside world, but at Stonehaven, it passed unnoticed. I'd barely got out of the cage by winter. Clay was still banished. Logan came to see me, but I drove him away, as I'd driven him away the half-dozen other times he tried to visit. Nick sent a gift. I threw it out unopened. Before Clay bit me, I'd met both Logan and Nick, had even started considering them friends. Afterward, I blamed them for not warning me. So, Christmas came and went and I barely realized it.

The next year, Clay was still banished. I was well on the road to recovery by then. I'd forgiven Logan and Nick and even Jeremy. I'd started getting to know Antonio and Peter. I was coming to accept life as a werewolf. Then came Christmas. I expected it would pass again with little fanfare, like the year before. Instead, we had a full-blown Christmas, complete with presents under the tree, colored lights sparkling against the snow, and a turkey on the table. The whole Pack came to Stonehaven for a week, and for the first time, I knew how hectic, stressful, loud, and wonderful a family Christinas could be. I thought this was how the Pack normally celebrated Christmas, when they didn't have an angry new female werewolf to contend with. It wasn't until January that I learned the truth. Clay had contacted Jeremy and asked him to do this for me. That was his gift to me. My gift to him was to ask Jeremy to repeal his banishment.

For every year after that, we had a full Christmas at Stonehaven. The Pack indulged my fantasy completely, without ever making me feel that they were only doing it to humor me. I can't say that every Christmas was a good one. Sometimes Clay and I were getting along, more often we weren't, but we were always together. If this last Christmas away from Clay had been hard, one thing had made it bearable: knowing he was out there, somewhere. As I stared at the pile of presents in his closet, I realized this applied to my life every day of the year, not just at Christmas. Somehow, knowing Clay was there, waiting for me should I ever return, gave me a cushion of comfort in my life. In a perverse way, he was the most stable thing in my life. No matter what I did, he'd be there. What if he wasn't? The thought filled me with something so icy cold that my breath seemed to freeze in my lungs and I had to gasp for air. I hadn't lied to Jeremy the night before. This wasn't one of those fairy-tale romances where the heroine realizes her undying love for the hero after he's placed in mortal danger. There were no heroes or heroines in this story and there would be no happily ever after ending, even if we got Clay back. I still couldn't imagine living with him, nor could I envision my world without him. I needed him. Maybe that was unspeakably selfish. It almost certainly was. But it was honest. I needed Clay and I had to get him back. I looked at the gifts again and I knew I wasn't doing enough.

***

"I'm going to Bear Valley," I said.

It was the next day. Nick and I were on the back patio, lying on lounge chairs, luncheon plates on our laps. Jeremy and Antonio had left an hour ago. Since then, I'd been trying to figure out how to tell Nick what I'd planned. After a half-dozen false starts, I went with the blurt-it-out approach.

"I told Daniel I wanted to see him," I said.

"Is that what was in the note?"

When Antonio and Nick had gone to deliver Jeremy's latest missive to Daniel's post office box, I'd slipped Nick a note to add to Jeremy's. Nick hadn't asked what the note said, probably because he didn't want to know.

"Yes," I said. "I'm meeting him at two o'clock."

"How'd he get back to you?"

"He didn't. I said I was meeting him at two. He'll be there."

"And Jeremy's okay with this?"

I could tell by Nick's tone that he knew perfectly well I hadn't mentioned it to Jeremy. The question was his way of prudently broaching the topic. Or maybe he was just hoping against hope that this was something I'd already planned with Jeremy and we'd both somehow forgotten to mention it to him.