Hades grunted and headed over to kiss her deeply. “We’ll reinstate it then.”

  “Wonderful,” Lucifer said. “That means I get to cut down the Christmas tree next year as well, doesn’t it?”

  “Mate, you’re an old cheater, and that’s not how it goes.” Hades crossed his arms and started a glaring contest with Lucifer.

  Before this could end in another naked snowball fight in the chest deep snow out there, I tugged on Lucifer’s jacket. He was still wearing the black and gold count outfit, and it made him look even more dapper than his urban chic tailored jeans and shirts did. The red crosses on everyone had almost faded completely now.

  “I love the tree you picked this year. I’ve never seen anyone carry a tree that size by themself.”

  Lucifer fixed me in a sapphire stare. “Babe, the tree really wasn’t that big,” he said.

  Did I have to rub his ego more? Better be safe. “I thought it was.”

  Metatron groaned while Persephone was whispering something to Hades, likely stuff about how he’d been so sexy, carrying the yule log home and then chopping it up all by himself.

  The dragon mother ended the banter and ego soothing by clapping her hands.

  “Someone crack a window and add a spell so the smoke doesn’t ruin the ceiling in here,” she commanded, and Metatron opened one of the top panes of the tall windows before adding a spell to the pyre I only noticed because I was expecting it.

  “Good,” the dragon mother said. “Now, young one, since you won our little game, you should get to light the bonfire.”

  Lucifer tapped the big basket of pinecones with his toe. “Use these.”

  I picked up a cone as everyone gathered around the pyre, around the Krampus of last year we were about to burn, presumably so the shorter nights could give way to brighter days.

  “Does anyone have a lighter?”

  “With your magic, lad,” Hades said.

  I eyed the cone. The only time I’d ever heated up anything was when they’d made me use a talisman back at the Collegium. I’d ruined a table, but even then, I hadn’t made a fire.

  But I had something now that I didn’t have then.

  I looked up at Lucifer. “Will you help me?”

  His nostrils flared, and while he didn’t move, something in him shifted, or at least that’s the impression I got. It made my heart speed up and the skin on the back of my neck prickled with a primal reaction to his regard.

  “Of course, my love. But just a little. You can do most of this yourself.” He closed his hand around my own and the pinecone I was holding. “Feel my magic and follow it,” he said. “You’ve done that before.”

  I had, back at a frozen pier, so I knew this would work. I knew I could trust him to show me what to do.

  This time, he didn’t help me visualize the magic like before, and the moment his magic touched me, a rush of comforting familiarity went through me. It was almost like when we made love.

  He wasn’t doing all the work for me, but he was leading me along as if making fire were a dance. I followed, and while this wasn’t the easiest thing—he made me pour a lot of magic into the heart of the pinecone while holding it there—it wasn’t as hard as figuring it out by myself would have been.

  “Good. Don’t worry about the flames, my love, I have you,” he said, and my fingers and palm tingled with whatever spell he did.

  Then he plucked the magic I kept contained in the pinecone, almost like plucking a string, and I knew what he wanted me to do. I did the same thing and released it, and the pinecone burst into bright flame in our hands.

  Lucifer did magic to the flames, and they briefly went purple, then blue, then orange and green.

  “Show-off,” I said, and together, we tossed the pinecone on the pyre.

  Well, we tossed it into Uncle Krampus’s coffin, and just like a good wicker creature, he burst into flame.

  Everyone clapped and oohed and ahhed. It really was a pretty fire.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when something licked my fingers, but Lucifer steadied me. With a hand on my ass. Seriously, did he always have to hold on to my butt?

  “Just Cerberus, babe.”

  The leftmost head had done this, judging by how he licked his jowls. All three looked at me with imploring eyes. He yowled softly from three maws.

  “Oh, you big bottomless hole,” Persephone said and walked over to Cerberus. “Nelly is immune to your puppy dog eyes.”

  “Damn hellpooch is trying to impress the necromancer’s alpha. It’s pack behavior,” Hades said.

  “You know that all these alpha and beta wolf tales have been disproven by science? They only exist and thrive in romance novels these days,” Metatron said.

  “That’s very true. But it’s really the omegas everyone wants,” the romance novel expert who still had his hand on my ass said.

  “Maybe that’s an angle for your murder mystery dinner party?” Persephone said to Metatron. “The guests have to find out who the omega is?”

  Lucifer made his growly noises, and his hold on my ass tightened.

  “Gods, can you unhand me?” I asked.

  “No. And there’s only one way to find out who the omega is.”

  “Fucking,” Metatron said.

  “Aye, fucking,” Hades added, and the dragon mother nodded sagely.

  “Well, okay, that might not work for a party setting then,” Persephone said. “But you know what? We’re burning our wishes in the bonfire.”

  She got stationery from a side table and handed out small notepads to all of us.

  “You’ll need to take your hand off me if you want to write,” I said to Lucifer, because he still had not.

  “Babe, I need to make sure there won’t be any hypothermia, just like you asked me to,” he said, holding his pad and pen on the flat of his palm, and magicked the damn pen to write by itself. “And I’m magic.”

  Smug was what he was.

  “Please just get this done so we can finally start feasting,” Metatron said.

  “Always so pushy,” Hades said but wrote.

  I stared at the blank page. Did I have a wish? For a moment, I thought I knew what to wish for: to meet my mother. To speak with her like Lucifer had. I couldn’t really help but feel a little bit jealous about that, and maybe I wanted her to tell me to my face why she’d abandoned me.

  Then again, there was also Minos. I wasn’t sure whether I’d ever have the strength to talk to him again, but I had thought about that. For a wish though, I’d want him to—for once in his long, long life—feel the terror he’d afflicted on others.

  I didn’t write down any of this though, even though this was just a ritual and probably meant nothing.

  What did I want? I glanced sideways at the Devil, his shiny kitty-cat hair bronzed in the gleam of the bonfire. All I wanted could be summed up in a single word, not Lucifer, not Devil, no.

  I spelled it out in all caps: BEELZEBUG.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We folded our wishy papers into the pinecones, then tossed them to the hungry bonfire before sitting down around the feast table.

  I could not remember a longest night that had been this short. Nelly started out by securing himself a big piece of cherry cake, but before he could quite sink his fork into the pink cream icing, Hades poured a round of Lethe.

  “The eighteen-year-old, cheers,” he said, and we all drank.

  Nelly had finished half that drink—and all his cake—when Persephone said, “I wonder whether this snow will finally kill the rhubarb.”

  I knew that my necromancer was already on his way to tipsy when he started giggling and said, “You know, if Michael’s sword didn’t kill it, I don’t think snow can.”

  Next, we moved on to the punch, a fresh batch also containing whiskey, and served once again with flames licking over its surface.

  “I hope these are magical flames, Hades,” I said and rubbed Nelly’s back. He was currently enjoying Trony’s risotto, the one with sage and pumpkin.

  “Mate, you do not tell me how I light my damn punch. Do I come into your house and tell you how to get people naked and into your pretentious Jacuzzi? No.”

  “My Jacuzzi is not pretentious.”

  “Which one isn’t, the indoor one, or the outdoor one?” my most traitorous necromancer asked without really taking his attention off the risotto.

  Well, the next time I was getting him naked in the Jacuzzi, there would be no tasting of any type of liquor happening, and he’d recant any ridicule by the time I showed him how wonderful it was to be with a god who didn’t need to breathe when he was underwater.

  “Careful, with that one, Lucy,” Hades said.

  “Don’t encourage him,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “I’m just eating rice here and having punch.”

  Cerberus whined, and so I accidentally dropped a few of the queer and rainbow sprinkled gingerbread people Nelly and Sephy had made.

  “Philistine! First, you mess with my floors, then you dis my risotto, which is not just rice,” Trony said from across the table. She had been talking about potato recipes with Sephy, and I was sure we were in for a few new variations.

  Nelly’s cheeks flushed. “What I meant was, this is the epitome of rice. It’s what rice aspires to become.”

  “Hear, hear,” the dragon mother said, and we all drank again.

  Sometime past midnight, I had to make a conscious effort to somewhat moderate Nelly’s punch intake. The last time he had fallen for overly sugary drinks, I hadn’t been there, had only come in at the end of it, and it had resulted with him cozying up to a vile thing before being violently sick, at which point I had at least been present to take care of him.

  By around one in the morning, Hades was once again recounting that first winter night we’d run into Loki in his horse form and pursued by a stallion. I’d have to get Hades to tell it again because Nelly was definitely flagging and leaning against me, his eyes falling shut on and off. I’d long since pulled his chair close to mine so he could lean against me.

  An hour later, he was in my lap and dozing, his magic’s sour vinegar and lemon scent blending with all the sweet punch and peaty whiskey he’d had. The dragon mother was talking about how she was remodeling her new house back in Brunswick, and I was reminded of my duty of building her a bird feeder come spring.

  And of the snow shoveling. Not a week went by when I wasn’t reminded of the damn snow shoveling. At least when there was yard work to do, I could let her and Nelly have tea on the patio, and then I’d pull my shirt off eventually, but Nelly wasn’t made for being in the cold for long enough to watch me take off my winter clothing and not show the telltale signs of being too cold.

  “Lucy, we are doing presents tomorrow morning, by the way,” Sephy told me a little before three o’clock, the witching hour.

  I liked the idea of that, and I nodded. The sooner the better.

  When the witching hour rang—literally, because Hades had enchanted the small clock on the mantle to echo through the house like a large bell—we all got up and gathered around our little indoor bonfire again. I scooped up Nelly in my arms, but he blinked awake from his doze.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The official part of the Midwinter Feast is done, my love.” I set him on his feet and took the basket with the pinecones the dragon mother passed to me. “Take one more.”

  He did, and so did I before passing the basket on to Trony.

  “It goes in the fire, young one. Not a wish for you, but one for those who are no longer here or for those who have no fire of their own this night,” the dragon mother said. “It might be this tradition that modernity translated into Santa’s list of naughty or nice children, but somewhere in the translation, making a selfless wish for someone else got lost.”

  I myself wouldn’t have minded another wish. I’d have wished my Nelly fully sober, because holding him so close for the last two hours just left me aching to be even closer to him all over again.

  My thoughtful necromancer rubbed his sleep-lidded eyes and stared at the pinecone in his hand. Hades and Sephy tossed theirs in as one.

  “Merry Midwinter,” they said in unison and headed for their bedroom hand in hand.

  Tiamat and Trony tossed in theirs and left for their respective rooms, but Nelly stood there, a little lost, and when the last footsteps were gone, he still hadn’t moved or said anything.

  For once, I didn’t need my wings to tell me what he was thinking.

  The corpses of three young women he had raised here in Scotland over the past week. Three young women whose names he had brought back from the silence of death so their families wouldn’t spend another Christmas with uncertainty. Nelly would not and could not see it that way. He would always see the dead he could do so little for, the dead who did not get to have another longest night with their loved ones. None of that was his fault, but Nelly, so very powerful but not powerful enough to unmake death, he blamed himself for it.

  “The wishes will find the fire, you know. That’s why we let it burn all through the night. All you have to do is toss it in,” I said and cupped his neck.

  He nodded, but still didn’t say anything.

  A friendly growl had me look down. Soul had joined us, her black eyes focused on Nelly, a string of drool connecting her jowls to the floor. Cerberus kept a respectful distance, but he was wagging his tail.

  “Hey, you shouldn’t leave the babies alone,” Nelly said and went to his knees next to Soul so he could scratch her behind her floppy ears.

  I left him to it, because he still seemed much too pensive, given the happily tipsy state he’d been in, right after he’d been so proficiently murderous.

  After a while of cuddling Soul, he turned to the flames and tossed the pinecone in. It cracked and sizzled, and maybe, that wish came true. I tossed mine in straight after so that maybe a pair of wishes could be fulfilled through these flames.

  When he stood back up, he was a little unsteady like the lightweight I knew him to be. Soul headed back off to her hellbrood, and I scooped Nelly up into my arms again.

  “I can walk,” he grumbled, although it was barely a complaint. “’S not that hard, walking.”

  “I know, babe, but don’t do magic.”

  “Won’t the castle burn down if we leave the fire going?”

  I chuckled. “The bonfire is warded, my love. A lot of everyday magic all around tonight.”

  I teleported us to our dark room. I didn’t want to turn on the lights, but I didn’t want Nelly to be fully lost and adrift either, so I brought out my wings for him.

  Like he always did, his eyes went wide, and he stared, and because he had less inhibitions given his drunken state, he reached out and didn’t pull back.

  Joy. I felt joy inside him when he touched my feathers, a bittersweet joy because there was no other kind during Midwinter but joy all the same.

  “What did you wish for? With your paper pinecone thingy,” he asked.

  I smiled at him and licked my lips. “Can’t tell you. It’s like birthday candles. You can’t say what you wished for because if you do, it might not come true. Mmm, speaking of, do you want a surprise party for your birthday, or do you want to know I’m organizing one?”

  He chuckled. “Was that why you really went to search for my birth certificate?”

  “Oh, I knew what your birthday was long before that. Who do you think left the chocolate muffins on whatever work desk you currently occupied at the time for the past four years?”

  His eyes widened, and his jaw dropped. Hmm. That one had finally paid off. I did like a slow burn that ended in a scrumptious reveal.

  “No. You did not. Are you fucking kidding me? I thought Christine had done that.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “No. I did.”

  “Son of a—motherfucker!”

  “No, I strictly fuck you, babe. Soon. When you have sobered up again. And maybe I’ll make you put on the red cape for it. Nothing but the red cape.” I was very glad I’d bought several pairs of lingerie in red for him. That too would pay off soon.

  “How did you find that out though? I mean—really? You snuck into the police station with a fucking chocolate muffin—”

  “Double chocolate muffin with a liquid chocolate core.” Which I had baked myself, along with the small spell that kept the core velvety melt-on-your-tongue soft.

  “Fine, whatever. You did that, and you didn’t just fucking run into me and toss your hair around a little and brag about putting pastry on my desk?”

  I had considered that, but my goal had been to get Nelly dreaming about a secret admirer so much so he’d end up obsessed. I’d hoped he’d try to enlist any and all supernatural help he could possibly muster in finding said admirer, meaning I’d hoped he’d come a-knocking on my door. I’d not expected him to attribute my good deeds to Christine, but that just went to show that I hadn’t really known my necromancer all that well back then. I would not make any such mistake with him again, and in the end, he hadn’t needed subtlety. All I’d had to do was inform him we were dating—combined with the magical exchange giving a favor provided—and romance had happened.

  “I can be selfless, babe,” I said because he didn’t need to know all the other stuff. “And I never brag, I only ever state facts.”

  He snorted. “Well, fuck me.”

  “I will, soon. Now let’s get you undressed and into bed.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, sleep. Fucking long night.”

  I chuckled. “The longest, babe.”

  He didn’t resist or tell me off when I undressed him, and once I had him under the covers, I was quick to get out of my own costume and join him.

  I closed my necromancer into my wings and felt him relax instantly, felt him sink into the certainty that he was safe—in my arms, in my bed, under my starlight wings.

  I reveled in his trust and listened to his thoughts as he slipped away into dreaming. This was my Midwinter wish come true, after all:

  "I wish for Lionel Ionos Hawkes, the love of my immortal life, to find nothing but happiness in the next 365 days and nights…and that I may be granted as many days of flawless kitty-cat hair so he can admire it."

 

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