Falling for Kindred Claus Read online

  “Very good—sending coordinates now. May the Goddess be with you, Brother,” Dru said seriously.

  “And with you,” Asher replied in the same tone. “Give your new bride my regards.”

  “I certainly will.” A warm smile spread over Dru’s face so naturally that Asher was certain he didn’t even know it was there. Clearly having a female in his life had made all the difference for him.

  He suppressed another pang of jealousy as his old friend signed off and a long list of coordinates began to scroll across the screen. It was foolish to wish for something he could never have.

  As the viewscreen finally went dark, Asher looked at his reflected image and considered if he looked sufficiently human to land on Earth with no problems.

  He had fangs like a Blood Kindred—though they would only sharpen enough to be noticeable if he met a female he wished to bond with—which was to say never. But instead of blond hair and pale blue eyes like the Blood Kindred, he had black hair and deep green eyes that showed his Tangala heritage. And though he was, like all Kindred males, around 30% larger and more muscular than an Earth male, he should still be able to pass for one of them.

  Yes, he decided, he was ready to go down and find out the details of his mission. Perhaps it would help him to stop feeling the strange longing that had begun when he heard Dru talking about his new bride.

  Two

  Lisa James was having a shitty life. Not just a rotten day or a bad week or even a terrible month. No, her whole entire life was awful and shitty, she decided as she looked out at the long, long line of restless kids and impatient adults waiting in line in front of Santa’s workshop. It was only a week before Christmas—peak season—which meant more and more parents had decided it was a good time to get a picture with Santa at the mall.

  Only there was no Santa to take a picture with. Not at the moment, anyway.

  “Where is he?” Lisa muttered to herself for the thousandth time, as she peered out the back of Santa’s Workshop—which was really just a prop building where the Santa suit was kept. The mall was coordinating with a local charity that had ties to the Kindred Mother Ship and they had promised that one of the big, alien warriors would come and play Santa that afternoon. But so far the big idiot—whoever he was—was a no-show and the kids were getting restless.

  I’m going to have to go out and make another announcement soon, Lisa thought, dreading the idea. Something about how Santa’s reindeer were hungry and he had to stop and feed them or some Christmassy crap like that.

  The crowd was not going to be happy. The line snaked away from the front of the cute little picket fence that surrounded Santa’s Village all the way down past Bath and Body Works, which was near the other end of the mall. The kids at the front had been waiting for over an hour already and they kept wanting to play in the fake snow, which got all over their cute little Christmas outfits and into their hair and made the tired, irritated parents even more pissed off than they already were. Toddlers squirmed and babies cried and the moms’ and dads’ voices could be heard cajoling, pleading, and even sometimes threatening. Everyone was tired of waiting.

  Oh yeah, if that stupid Kindred didn’t get here soon, there was going to be a riot, Lisa thought grimly.

  She straightened her cute green elf costume—which consisted of a short green dress cut in a leaf-like pattern, stripy red and white candy cane tights, and black curly shoes that had bells jingling on their ends of their pointy toes—and got ready to go out and make the announcement.

  “Oh no, Mrs. Claus forgot to wash Santa’s suit and it made him late but he’s coming soon, I promise!”

  Ugh—what a load of crap!

  Once again, Lisa asked herself how she’d gotten into this situation. How had she gotten to the place where the best job she could land was as a Christmas elf—a rather plump Christmas elf, her employer had pointed out critically when she had first put on the outfit—waiting for a stupid Santa who didn’t show? Just how had she gotten here?

  Oh, that’s right—I married Cameron, Lisa reminded herself sourly.

  It was the worst mistake she’d ever made in her life—even worse than majoring in Creative Writing instead of something practical like Nursing in college.

  Marriage had seemed like a good idea at the time. Cameron had been charming and sensitive and he came from money—a lot of money. Which was a novelty to Lisa, who was only one step up from poor white trash, as her mom liked to point out when she got “drunk and disorderly.”

  Lisa had wanted to lift herself out of poverty—she was the first person in her family ever to go to college—a big deal in her hometown of Palatka, a little town in the Florida Panhandle. But all she’d managed to do was land herself in debt—heaps of student loans there was no way to pay off.

  Until Cameron came along, that was. He had promised to help her pay it all off and even to send her to grad school. Then, before having kids, they would travel the world and Lisa could be a travel writer while she picked up ideas for the novel she wanted to write someday.

  It had all seemed like a beautiful dream from the fairytale wedding to the honeymoon in Hawaii—until the first time he hit her, that was.

  That first slap—on their honeymoon night after Cameron had had too much to drink—was so completely unexpected Lisa had been too surprised to cry. Her new husband had seemed so kind and generous and altogether perfect—finding out he had a darker side was shocking.

  Unfortunately shocking gave way to routine over the next few months. It turned out that Cameron—like her mom and her stepfather, for that matter—had a penchant for getting “drunk and disorderly” on a regular basis. Only instead of passing out like her stepfather, Gil, or having the giggle fits like her mom, Cameron was a mean drunk. A mean, abusive drunk.

  Lisa had read the statistics about abused women during a Sociology of Women class she’d taken in college. She knew that many of the women wound up dead and that most of them went back to their abusers time and again before they finally made the break, because it was so hard to get away. Restraining orders were flimsy and often didn’t work and you couldn’t live at a shelter forever. At the same time, it was hard to hold down a steady job when you were constantly looking over your shoulder, afraid that the abusive asshole you’d left might find you at any minute.

  She had taken it for as long as she could—over a year—before Lisa determined her husband wasn’t going to change. When he broke her wrist, she’d had enough. She decided she wasn’t going to be a statistic.

  That night in the hospital where Cameron had made her say she had “fallen down the stairs” she started planning her escape.

  Saving money out of the household expenses wasn’t easy but she’d finally managed to get enough for a bus ticket out of town. It would be better, she’d decided, to try and lose herself in a big city with a large and shifting population. So she had taken a Greyhound to Tampa and that was where she had been for the past six months.

  Living in a rundown apartment with roaches almost as big as her new neighbors, Lisa was barely scraping by. But her bruises had faded and at least she didn’t have to be afraid anymore every time Cameron decided he just wanted a “little nip after dinner.” Which invariably turned into his downing most of a bottle of expensive single malt Scotch and then beating her for imagined offenses.

  Crappy as it was, her life was her own again, and she had gradually stopped looking over her shoulder. Cameron must have given her up as a bad deal and decided to let her go, she thought. Hadn’t he already told her she was too fat when he got drunk? Even though he called it “pleasingly plump” and swore that her long brown hair and big blue eyes more than made up for her overly-generous curves when he was sober. He had probably found a skinny woman who was more to his taste and was wooing her even now—giving her the same charming act he’d used on Lisa to put her off her guard.

  She barely made enough to keep body and soul together, as her granny used to say, and her current job wasn’t great. But