A Midwinter Fantasy (13 page)

Of course they can.

L. J. McDonald

To everyone who has a place in a good family, whether formed from blood ties or not, and especially for those without. And to Oliver, who’s always been my family
.

~L. J. McDonald

“I hate you! I never want to see you again!”

Mace paused on his way up the front walk as he heard the boy scream through the open front door. Lily would be very annoyed to learn it wasn’t closed. It was the start of the long Winter Festival, and though it had been a mild season, there was half an inch of snow on the ground and the bushes were frosted with a clean coating of white. That didn’t stop the humans from trudging out to visit their neighbors, though, mimicking some old legend about a strange old-time man who went door-to-door throughout the entire world, giving the people he met gifts of food and healing. Mace had never cared for it. It made the humans he was charged to protect move in patterns he wasn’t used to and distracted the hive. More, this year he resented the idea that anyone would be coming to this door. Mace didn’t feel the cold, but he knew that humans did, and Lily wasn’t as young as she used to be. Fire sylphs supplied heat to all the homes in Sylph Valley through underground vents, but the Blackwell house was far from the main furnace rooms and a sudden draft could be dangerous to an old woman.

He went up the porch stairs, careful not to stomp, though there were no babies to wake in the house and hadn’t been for years now. While the argument continued inside, he took off his boots, shaking them to rid them of snow before he set them neatly beside the others and closed the door behind him. There was no lock. No one was stupid enough to try
and break into any house in the Valley, especially not one in which a battle sylph lived.

Lily’s voice echoed down the hall toward him, almost as loud as Jayden’s had been. “Are you prepared to be on your own already?” she yelled, her famous temper at its peak. “I really don’t think so!”

“I’m going to Crem’s!” Jayden screamed, and appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. He stopped at the sight of Mace. There wasn’t any fear in him, not after having lived with the battle sylph all his life, but the boy stood for a moment, staring at him with an expression Mace couldn’t be bothered to interpret.

“I’m going away,” he said suddenly, boldly.

“And?” Mace replied. Lily should never have taken Jayden in. At fourteen, he was by far the youngest child she still fostered, and she didn’t have the energy to keep up with him. Jayden always seemed to want something, and now was apparently no different. He stared at Mace with a great hunger in his eyes, waiting.

Whatever it was that he wanted, he didn’t get it. Mace continued to stare back at him. Finally, Jayden flushed red and ran past, grabbing his coat and boots and rushing out the door, his mind nothing but anger and that stupid morass of emotions all young humans seemed to go through before they finished growing up. Mace hadn’t bothered to keep track of the number of boys he’d felt undergo this struggle while in Lily’s care. The girls he’d try to help through the changes, but the boys could take care of themselves. Jayden’s had always been an especially thick soup of feelings, but maybe that was because the boy forever seemed to be around. Anytime Mace was home, Jayden followed him.

Putting the youth out of his mind, Mace continued into the kitchen, set at the back of the house with a window
overlooking the snowy garden. The stove was currently stocked high with wood and pumped out a great deal of heat to supplement what the fire sylphs provided, even though it was nowhere near a mealtime. Nor did Lily bake. It was the Winter Festival and everyone else in the Valley seemed to be mixed up with the silliness of baking and visiting, but the Widow hadn’t bothered with that in years. Mace shot a suspicious look at her, studying the emotions she’d been able to hide from him while he was on the other side of the Valley.

She was angry at Jayden, frustrated and tired. More, she was cold, her shawl tight around her shoulders despite the heat from the stove. Lily Blackwell, still known as the Widow to almost everyone in the Valley except Mace, was eighty-two years old. Her white hair was thinning where it was gathered into a bun, her back hunched and her hands gnarled. She leaned on the cane he’d carved for her, glaring at the door through eyes that were rheumy and, he knew, not as clear as they used to be, despite the Valley’s healer’s efforts. As far as he knew, no one could cure age, and humans were short-lived creatures indeed, compared to the near-immortal sylphs.

Noting his regard, she lifted her gaze to evenly meet his. Thanks to their master/sylph bond, she could feel his worry even as he tried to suppress it. Lily didn’t like to have anyone worrying about her. For nineteen years, since the day the collective was established, she’d been caring for most of the Valley’s orphans—many of whom had lost their parents because of Mace himself, back when he’d still been a slave. He’d been frozen in the shape of a suit of armor then, forced to obey the orders of a male master he’d loathed. Jayden was decades too young to be one of the orphans Mace had created, though, and he’d arrived after Lily meant to retire. Mace’s heart ached that she was stuck with the boy now, in what should have been her quiet twilight years. He ached
even more that caring for Jayden might be shortening the time she had left.

She felt him thinking that.

“Don’t,” she said, turning and shuffling over to get a kettle of water and put it on the stove. Jayden was the most useless of her children, but he wasn’t the only one still living in the house. Mace hoped that one of the sweet adult girls still living there had been the one to fill the kettle and scour the kitchen to its current cleanliness; Lily shouldn’t have been doing that herself anymore. At least no one had needed to go to the well at the bottom of the garden in years. Now there was a barrel in the side of the kitchen with a pipe leading to it. Once a day a water sylph topped it off, and Mace had made quietly sure that Lily’s house was the first on her rounds.

“I’m going to smack that boy one of these days,” Lily said, shuffling to the cupboard to get some tea. Mace beat her there and she grudgingly allowed him to retrieve it for her and measure a few spoonfuls into her old clay pot.

“He could probably use a good smack,” Mace agreed.

Lily smiled, a touch of amusement in her emotions at the thought, though if anyone was going to do the smacking, it would be her, not him. For all that he looked like a large, heavily built man of indeterminate age, that was only illusion. Mace was actually a shape-shifter from a different plane, only able to keep his place in this human world due to the tie he had to Lily Blackwell. She kept him here, but in turn he had no choice other than to obey her slightest command. He didn’t mind. Obedience was part of what he was. He was a battle sylph, a defender of the hive and a prospective lover for the hive’s queen. Unable to accomplish that second goal in his original hive, he’d come through a mystical gate into this world instead. He’d done so in pursuit of a woman, only to
have her murdered and him bound to a man he despised. Jasar Doliard had been dead for a very long time now, though, and Mace had taken Lily to be his new master. It had been a practical decision at the time, but the arrangement had worked well for both of them for close to twenty years.

She didn’t have him do any of the disciplining of her children, though. While Lily was quick with a wooden spoon on the back of the knuckles, Mace’s instincts were more intense. She very likely didn’t want him turning Jayden into a pile of fine ash on the floor, no matter how annoyed she was with him.

Lily smiled, her thin lips twisting. She always knew his thoughts. “He’s a good boy when he isn’t being needy,” she reminded Mace. “I’ll let him stay at Crem’s until the end of the week. Horsing around some before the festival ends should calm him down.”

“Are you sure?” Mace asked. Not that he wanted the boy hanging around. In an ideal world there wouldn’t be any human men, and Mace looked forward to the day when Jayden left home—likely after the girls departed as well—which would leave just him and Lily.

She studied him again, and Mace wasn’t entirely sure what she was thinking. She was being contemplative in the way that always made him . . . he wouldn’t say nervous, but alert. Lily had a practical but devious mind, and much as he cared for her, he couldn’t always anticipate what she would do.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Good.” He went to pour her tea. “Very quiet.”

“Which means no one died.” When he quirked an eyebrow at her, she laughed. “Don’t look at me. I know how you battle sylphs are. Nothing but instinct.”

As if that weren’t a good thing. As if it didn’t keep them
all safe. He poured her tea, added a dollop of honey, and brought it to the table.

“Thank you,” she told him, and took a sip. She savored it for a moment, holding the steaming cup between her gnarled hands.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said at last. “I see everyone getting ready for the Winter Festival and this year it seems almost sad.” She set the cup down, leaning her cheek against one hand while her elbow braced on the table. It wasn’t a position that Mace had ever seen her take before. “I don’t know as many people as I used to. So many of them aren’t with us anymore, and I know I’m not going to live forever.”

He opened his mouth.

“Don’t even think about arguing with me about this.” Mace’s mouth clapped shut. Lily lifted her cup to taste her tea again and set it down with a sigh. “I think I’ve done you sweet creatures a bit of a disservice.”

Mace raised his eyebrows, not having any idea what she was referring to.

“With demanding right at the start that you be bound to women past their childbearing years,” she explained.

Ah, that was it. There were younger women with battle sylphs in the Valley now, but when Mace was first linked to Lily, when there were only a handful of battle sylphs, Lily herself had been about the average age for a master, and she’d been in her sixties. She’d been concerned at the time that the younger women would come to regret the decision, since no battle sylph could give them children and would definitely object to sharing their masters with a human husband. Not all women wanted husbands or children, but Lily hadn’t had the time then to seriously consider the ramifications. From the look on her face, she’d done so since.

“I didn’t realize back then how long you creatures live,”
Lily admitted, “and I’ve seen how you react when your masters die.”

Actually, we turn into wrecks, Mace thought, with no desire to experience it himself. Sylphs’ souls were bound to their masters, and if love was involved, they were in danger of shattering when they lost them. Many recovered and went on, of course. But others, those who’d been lucky or unlucky enough to forge a truly deep soul tie to their masters, they never got over it. Mace cared for Lily, loving her and regretting nothing about being with her, but they both knew that soul tie wasn’t there. They’d been good for each other, but he’d survive her death in the end.

Lily studied his face, nodding in satisfaction as she saw that. Still, she wasn’t done.

“I don’t want you handed off to whoever just happens to be around after I go,” she continued. She lowered her other hand and gripped her teacup with both. “I don’t care how typical a reaction that seems to be; I don’t like it. You’re not some sort of prize cow to be given to its next owner.”

“What are you suggesting?” Mace asked.

“That you be open to having a second master now,” she told him.

He blinked.

She glared at him. “You should have a choice, and so should she. Put some thought into it, instead of being stuck with someone who may be completely wrong for you.”

She had a point, he realized. Mace had seen more than one sylph with a master who was totally unsuitable, but once someone became a master, there was no changing it. Yet, while Lily’s words were true, he could only stare at her, unsure what to say.

Lily smiled. “I’m hardly planning on dropping dead tomorrow,” she reminded him. “But I don’t want to worry about
this, either, and I want to meet the woman. I want to make sure for myself that she’s good enough for you. And . . . I’m hardly able to provide for all your needs anymore.”