Page 20 of Matches and Mistletoe
He’s watching me with burning silver eyes. “Loneliness—it’s a deathly thing. Especially this time of the year.”
An understanding snaps into place between us.
This is not love. It isn’t affection or a bond of any kind. It’s pure need, and weariness, and hunger, and loneliness. A mutual mourning of what is gone, and a taking of what is real.
I’ll have to say a lot of prayers to atone for what I’m about to do. But right now, I don’t give a damn.
Carefully, slowly, I pick up the teacups and take them to the kitchen table, unbuttoning a few buttons of my dress while my back is turned. When I return, I seat myself astride him, and I push his wavy hair away from his forehead with my fingers.
“I don’t stick around,” he says softly. “I don’t get attached.”
“I know,” I say.
I don’t need him in my world, with his strange ways and his dangerous eyes and his talk of magic. I just need him right now.
I need him to bring me to life.
When I wake up, I can still feel the warmth of the space where his body was, next to mine under the blankets on the floor.
I have the distinct impression that I just heard the back door close. And his red coat is gone.
Quickly I run to the kitchen window. He’s striding across the snow-covered yard, red coat billowing behind him. In a minute, he disappears into the dark trees.
He’s up to something, and I’m going to find out what.
I’m wearing nothing but my skin, so I pull on underwear and a long black coat of my own, and I shove my feet into boots. Quickly I lock the back door, pocketing the key, and then I’m running into the woods, following his tracks. After a while I slow my pace, taking care to step where he stepped so I won’t crunch a snow-covered branch and alert him. Moonlight gleams on white up ahead; I’m approaching a snowy clearing.
Still hidden behind dark trunks and branches, I pause near the edge of the clearing.
Against the black web of the forest trees, my dark-haired angel stands in the pale, shimmering snow, his footprints deep and shadowed behind him. His long coat trails red, like a bloodstain against the white ground.
My heart nearly stops, because all around him cluster demonic creatures, with knobby knees and crooked claws, pointed teeth and gnarled, hideous faces. They’re growling and grumbling in a strange language, and he answers them in soothing tones.
And suddenly I remember one of the old pagan stories my Irish great-grandmother used to tell me, about a man dressed in red from top to toe—a trickster, a Fae being, a dark creature of myth—master of leprechauns and changelings.
The Far Darrig.
Fear Dearg,the Red One, in the Old Tongue.
I curse myself for my foolishness. For thinking that he could have been an angel.
He isn’t. He’s a pagan monster, a demon of the Old World—and those baby-stealing freaks are his servants.
I’m so angry I can’t keep still, though I know I should.
“Liar.” The word leaves my lips, the harsh sound of it softened by the blanket of snow on the forest floor.
But he hears. And he turns, eyes widening at the sight of me.
“Making plans to roast us all for Christmas dinner, Far Darrig?” I ask.
He flinches at the name, but the next second he rallies and grins at me. “You know me, then?”
“Yes.”
“I told you I was no angel. Though apparently I make love like one.” He winks at me.
“Shut your unholy mouth,” I say, grasping my crucifix. “You stay away from me and mine. Go dine on someone else’s children. Or better yet, crawl back into hell, where you belong.”
