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  "Your boobs are getting bigger," I said, hoping to break the ice.

  "You think so?" she asked, pulling down on her pockets to stretch the jacket over her form body.

  "Yeah, totally. I'm so jealous right now."

  Eliza's frosty demeanor cracked, and her pink lips curled into a smile. "Thanks,” she said, “I guess something has to offset the heartburn and the restless nights."

  I took Eliza by the arm and we headed into the tree yard at the side of the building together. A big sign was posted at the front of the yard which read 'ALL TREES, ONLY $69 EACH!' To the proprietor's credit, most of the trees were of a decent size and full; but if trees were horses and ponies, way too many of them were ponies. I hoped we wouldn't get ripped off.

  "So," I said as we trudged over grass and snow, "Have you picked a name yet?"

  "Not really," Eliza said, "We don't even know the sex yet."

  "Don't you want to know?"

  "I don't. Evan does. This baby was a miracle, so I want to hold on to the mystery for as long as I can."

  "That's fair. You can still think of names though, right?"

  "Yeah. I kinda like Helena for a girl and Ryan for a boy."

  "Helena and Ryan. They're nice names." Maybe Helena was a little old fashioned, but I couldn't see anything wrong with it.

  "Shame he or she won't be here this Christmas," Eliza said.

  "That's okay. He or she will be here next time and you'll get to shower him or her with all kinds of gender appropriate gifts and love."

  My insides warmed at the thought of pinching the little bean's cheeks and watching them glow. I didn't want kids yet, but I was happy whenever other people had them. And now my best friend in the world was going to have one. I couldn't wait to be Auntie Amber.

  I would be a cool aunt.

  "Baby's first Christmas," Eliza said.

  "Christmas?" I asked. It was the second time she'd mentioned it. "Won't you be celebrating Yuletide with your little one?"

  "I don't know," Eliza said, "I mean, kids love Santa and all that. I don't think I could take that away from my children. It wouldn't be fair to impose my religion on them."

  "Other people do it all the time."

  "Yeah, but I'm not other people."

  "So is this maybe your last Yuletide?"

  Eliza gave me a sidelong glance. Her eyes expressed indecision. "What would you do?"

  I thought about it for a moment. "I'd keep Yuletide, and Samhain, and all the Wiccan holidays. I'm a Witch, and I don't want to hide such a big part of my life from my kids. Then I would still have Christmas so they wouldn’t feel left out at school. Then, if they wanted to, they could celebrate my holidays with me… my way."

  "Wouldn't you be imposing on them, though?"

  "Well, not really. Like, my mom was a Witch and she never celebrated any of the Wiccan holidays around me, although we still had all of the other ones. I wish she had, though. I turned out to be a full on Witch and maybe my kids will be Witches too, so I would want them to know how to be Witches."

  "You said Witch an awful lot just then."

  "Did I?" I said, smiling.

  Eliza fell silent. I could tell this was a subject she had battled with and I didn't feel like pressing the issue. I would support her no matter what, and if this was her last Yuletide we would make it as special as possible.

  "What about this one?" I asked, stopping at the foot of a tree.

  She scanned it. "It looks good,” she said.

  "I think so too," I said, turning to her. "Listen, I just want you to know that... you're my sister, and I love you."

  Eliza narrowed her eyes. "Where'd that come from?"

  "It's just, I'm sensing this... coldness... and I just want you to know that whatever is going on in your life, I'm here for you. Always. I support you one hundred percent."

  Blood rushed to her cheeks. Her tiny pink lips turned upwards and her face brightened. She hugged me, and I felt her belly press up against my stomach. All kinds of silly, broody warmth filled me. I had to remind myself that I didn't want kids yet, although if I had to remind myself… what did that mean?

  "Thank you," she said, "I've just been so damn stressed out these days."

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  "It's mommy things. Indigestion, heartburn, hormones. I'm all over the place. I'm sorry if I'm coming off as more of a bitch than usual.

  "Hey, you're my bitch. Okay?" Eliza nodded and we hugged again. "Now let me pick out a tree to turn into a Yule log."

  The log had to be a gift. Such was the tradition. And since we were having our Yule celebration at Eliza's place, it was my turn to buy the log and offer it to her. Back in the old days someone would go out into the woods and cut the log himself, but I didn't know the first thing about chopping down a tree, so I asked the lot owner to cut it for me.

  It wasn't cheating.

  Eliza waited for me as I loaded the log into the back of my car. We made our goodbyes, made plans to meet on the weekend, and I watched her drive off before going for my door; but I didn't make it that far. There, through the snowy haze, standing beneath a street light, a man was staring right at me. I couldn't see his face, but it was clear where his eyes were going.

  I tried to get a read on him but I couldn't make out any features save for a leather jacket and a hood.

  "Hey," I yelled, but the figure darted to the right and disappeared behind a row of trees.

  What the hell?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Despite being safe in the knowledge that I had locked every single door in my house, shut every window, and erected a Magickal ward around the perimeter I still couldn’t catch a wink of sleep that night. Who would? All night I had been wracking my brain over that man I had seen in the parking lot. He was ghostly, like a specter in the snow, his features hidden by the way the light was falling on his head.

  Who was he?

  What was he doing there?

  Was he actually looking at me?

  Was he the same guy I had caught a fleeting glimpse of in my garden the other day?

  The questions wouldn’t let me rest. The only way to stop them was to feed and placate them with answers, but I was fresh out of those. So they continued to rattle at their cages and rob me of the one night of rest I thought I was entitled to. I had to find out who that guy was, but I didn’t know where to start.

  The one thing I could do, however, was get my assignment to Raven’s Hall. Sure, my priorities may have been a little messed up, but I couldn’t neglect my studies any further. So I double checked the contents of the USB stick to double check that the work was there, slipped into something low cut at the breast, and even put makeup on. Nothing fancy. A little smoky black and red around the eyes coupled with deep plum lipstick made the statement I needed to make; I wasn’t the kind of girl to spend hours on my face anyway.

  I also wasn’t about to use my womanly charms on a forty seven year old married man, but it couldn’t hurt to give him something nice to look at. So I decided to pick out a black choker with a blood red ruby hanging off it, clasped it around my pale neck, poured myself into the leather jacket, pulled my hair out of the collar—letting it fall loosely down my back—and went for my car.

  Boy was I going to make some kind of an entrance today. No one had seen me in a few days so I wanted to make sure to catch some eyes, and with the smoky vampire thing I had going on I was sure to turn some heads. Only I didn’t even make it to the first stoplight when I saw the man in the hood standing by the sidewalk.

  My heart started to race. The hooded man was out in broad daylight! What the hell was he doing just waiting at a crossing in front of a stoplight? Who was he waiting for? An angry heat began to rise into my chest. I stopped the car at the red light and got out.

  “Hey!” I said over the hood. The man turned to me. Same stance. Same jacket. Holy shit! I couldn’t move. Rooted. Trembling. Anger or nerves, now? I couldn’t tell. Who the hell are you?” I said, but he didn’t repl
y.

  He stared, motionless for a moment, like a scarecrow. But then he pulled his hood down and my heart started to beat even harder and faster than before. The hood gave way to a man with a messy mop of hair, a sunken face, and what I suspected was at least two weeks’ worth of untrimmed stubble.

  I swallowed hard at the sight and blinked away the disbelief. “Aaron?” I asked.

  He shambled up to the car and stared at me from across the roof. “I need your help,” he said.

  The last time we spoke… well, it wasn’t the best conversation we had ever shared. He had made his intentions clear; relationship or bust. But I broke his heart and said no. To think, the whole time we were involved I thought he would be the one to break mine. I thought, maybe, he would make fun of me in front of his friends one too many times, or he would hook up with another girl once he got bored of me. But he had feelings for me. Real feelings. He told me he had always had them.

  And I turned him down.

  I had always known there was goodness inside of him, and when that goodness showed itself to me I slapped it in the face and walked away. For Damien. It was laughable that I would end up being the bad guy in that relationship, but I had to think about myself for once.

  “Then we can’t be friends again,” he had said to me that day in his apartment.

  And all I said was “Alright. Keep the cupcakes.”

  I’m a bitch.

  But I had been given a chance to redeem myself, and I wasn’t about to turn it down.

  “Please,” he said.

  “Y-yeah,” I said, “Get in the car.”

  My hands were jelly on the wheel as I drove down the rest of the avenue. Aaron was quiet. It took a moment for me to register just how bad he looked up close. He had bags under his eyes, his breathing was short and his stubble was dirty. This wasn’t the Aaron I knew.

  “Aaron,” I said, “What… what the fuck happened to you?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but something isn’t right. I can feel it in my skin.” He showed me his wrists which were red raw and scabbed over.

  I swallowed and tried not to look directly at them. “Have you had a doctor look at that?”

  “No. No doctors.”

  “Listen, Aaron, I have to go hand something in at school and—”

  “I get it, you don’t have time,” he said, cutting me off.

  “No, no, it isn’t that. I just, if you don’t mind waiting for me, we can maybe go grab a coffee and some breakfast? What do you think?”

  “You… want to go get breakfast?”

  “Sure, I’m starving. My treat.”

  Aaron agreed after a moment’s hesitation, and after having had a good look at him I could see why he had hesitated. I also understood why he went everywhere with a hood over his head. He looked like some vagrant from off the street. Damaged. Helpless. The Aaron I knew was proud and stood tall, but this man was a shadow of what he had been; and I needed to know why.

  I gunned the car down the street, resisting the urge to turn every red light green as I went using Magick, and came to a halt outside of the Raven’s Hall main building in record time. I left Aaron in the car as I made the brisk walk up the campus’ stone path and stormed into the main building in search of the professor’s office.

  “Professor?” I asked when I got to his door. I knocked and tried to let myself in, but it was locked.

  “He’s out,” said his assistant, an older woman dressed in a brown cardigan with her grey hair tied up in a bun.

  Hesitating, I pulled the USB stick out of my pocket and approached the assistant at her desk. “Do you mind if I print this out and hand it to him?” I asked. “I don’t have a printer at home and—”

  “Be my guest,” she said, gesturing, disinterested, toward a free computer without removing her eyes from her crossword puzzle she was doing.

  Nine down is Melons, I thought.

  It only took me a few minutes to load the file up and print it out. I hoped I would catch the professor on his way in from wherever he had gone by the time the document had been printed and stapled together, but no. The warm paper went cool in my hands and I couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Excuse me,” I said, coming up to the assistant’s desk again.

  “Yes, miss?” This time she looked up at me, and both her eyebrows went up.

  “Okay, so, I was wondering,” I said, slipping the assignment across her table, “If you wouldn’t mind giving this to the professor when he came back from wherever he is.”

  “The dentist,” she said from behind a cold, hard stare.

  “Right, yes. So, would you mind? You’d be doing me a huge favor.”

  The woman took the document and perused the title, then gave me a sidelong glance of contempt and disapproval. A paper on demons and exorcisms handed in by a girl dressed all in black wearing dark lipstick? I didn’t need to read her mind to feel the righteous judgment coming my way in spades. If only she had a sword, I thought, I would be running for my life.

  “Of course,” she said, tucking the assignment away underneath her keyboard. “And your name is?”

  “It’s on the paper. Amber Lee.”

  “I’ll make sure he gets this, Miss Lee.”

  I smiled, gave her my thanks, and made the quick walk back to where I had parked my car, doing my best to push the woman’s judgments to the back of my mind. I had other things to worry about, like Aaron and the Professor. The words I wrote on my paper would speak for themselves. I was sure of it. He would see my brilliance and realize that I wasn’t a time waster and that I know what the heck I’m talking about. He just had to. This was my one chance at getting an extension.

  It had to work.

  Aaron was still waiting in the car when I returned, not that I thought he was going anywhere. We didn’t exchange words until we landed inside a café close to the school where we would be able to speak without distraction. I mean, I was driving; what kind of quality conversation could we have had when I needed to focus on the slippery road? He needed my full attention, and as awkward as our last tête-à-tête was, I would give him my all.

  Amidst the hiss of steamed milk and the clinking of cutlery on plates, Aaron and I had a moment to really look at each other. His lips were chapped and his eyes… like tarnished diamonds. The sparkle had gone right out of them. I didn’t know what he must have been thinking about me, though; me with my makeup and my freshness. I almost felt bad for looking good in front of him.

  “What the fuck happened to you, Aaron?” I asked, for the second time today.

  Aaron shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, seemingly too weak to even take offense to what I had said. “You look—”

  “Save it,” I said, cutting him off, “Please, just tell me what’s going on with you so that I can help, okay?”

  “Where should I start?”

  “How about you start at the beginning?”

  Aaron folded his arms at his chest and held his jacket closed tightly against his body. He was shivering. “When Kyle…” he looked up at me and paused.

  Kyle. My stomach floated high and took a sharp drop. “What about him?”

  “Before he left… he was… this was happening to him too.”

  “And what’s this, exactly?”

  Aaron paused. Hesitated. “I can’t eat… can’t sleep… I’ve had a fever for weeks that I can’t shake. And I’m always fucking angry.” He said the last part through a clenched jaw.

  “Aaron… have you gone to see a doctor?”

  “A doctor isn’t what I need.”

  “But if you’ve got a fever—”

  “I said it before, okay? No doctors.”

  Stubborn as ever. I sighed. “Fine.”

  “Did… you do something to me?” he asked.

  My muscles tightened. “Do… something? What do you mean?”

  “Like wha
t you did to Kyle.”

  “And what do you think I did to Kyle?”

  Aaron caught my eyes and held them. “You put some kind of curse on him.”

  My palms were starting to sweat, now. “That’s ridiculous,” I said, “I didn’t do anything to you, Aaron.”

  “Can you swear it?”

  “Swear that I didn’t do anything to you?”

  “Yes. Swear it. On your life.”

  A waitress dropped a tray of ceramic cups and they smashed on the floor. She threw a string of apologies at the customers and her manager, but no one seemed too impressed.

  “Aaron,” I said, taking his attention again, “I swear that I didn’t do anything to you.” I reached for his hand and squeezed. “I only want to help.”

  He glanced at our hands and then back at my eyes. His grip was weak, nothing like the strong, powerful man I used to know. Aaron had the constitution of an ox. He rarely fell sick. No. This sickly thing wasn’t the Aaron I knew. Something had happened to him; something inexplicable, and maybe even supernatural in origin.

  I may have not set a Succubus on him, but I was beginning to wonder if anyone else might have.

  “Why was it so important that I swear this for you?” I asked.

  “Because I know you’re… in to this kind of stuff.”

  “What, putting curses on people?”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t go that far, but… I just know what you’re into. I also knew you would believe me.”

  “Believe you about what?”

  Aaron paused. “When I say that I think something’s trying to get under my skin and take control of me.”

  I wasn’t sure what I believed, but I was a Witch. I could do Magick. And by the virtue of this simple fact alone, nothing was impossible. I had questions for him, of course, but he didn’t seem to be in the best of states for an interrogation. The questions would come once he was feeling better. And the first thing he needed was a good meal, a shower, and undisturbed sleep.

  “Alright,” I said, “I’ll help. You did the right thing in coming to me.”

  “But Amber,” he said, “Can we keep this quiet? I don’t want other people…”