“Santa is an angel, right?” I said to Denise as I came back in.
“The Angel Nikolai,” Denise said. “He does the Santa thing the way humans do cosplay. He’s not one of Gabriel’s rebels, so he doesn’t actively intervene on Earth. He shouldn’t be down here at all, but I guess even Michael bends the rules on Christmas.”
“So, in all your adventures, have you ever met an angel who actually did his job and helped people?”
Denise said, “No.”
* * *
Cecilia and Denise were mingling with volunteers outside, leaving me to linger by myself after the party. The kids had all gone back to their rooms, and it had taken less than an hour to clean the lobby, so the volunteers were just standing around eating cookies and making small talk until they were ready to leave.
I was hanging back, not talking to anyone, but reluctant to leave, dreading another Christmas Eve back in my apartment, even if I did have Lydia waiting for me.
When Denise sent me a text and told me to meet them outside, I assumed they just needed me to lift more heavy stuff, but they met me in a cab in the parking lot and said, “Get in, you’re coming to the shop.”
Cecilia had phrased it as more of a command than an invitation, so I obeyed reflexively, sitting through a deeply awkward cab ride across town.
Denise talked like she hated her mother, but she put her head on Cecilia’s shoulder and joined her in a kind of half cuddle on the way home, a simple gesture that hit me so hard, I had to turn away.
* * *
Among the many human laws and city ordinances that did not apply to the Hardy family, the Hardy Reliable Potion Shoppe, est. 1605, had been built in a time before zoning, and had obviously been expanded many times since its founding.
The wooden rooms were small in a way that made them seem more cozy than cramped, but there were a lot of them, and that tiny hallway in the back of the main room led to a maze of little rooms and corridors, ending in a family kitchen that looked like something from the 18th century; much larger than the other rooms, with a proper dining room and a fireplace. They even had a real wood burning stove.
“We all missed Christmas dinner,” Cecilia said, “but I’ve got stuff for sandwiches.”
Watching Cecilia and Denise in the kitchen was like watching a kind of low-speed ballet, conducted by two people who had worked together in tight quarters for so long, they knew exactly how to help each other and exactly how to stay out of each other’s way as they assembled turkey sandwiches on homemade bread.
I stood there feeling like an idiot for a moment and said, “Can I help somehow?”
“You’re here to eat and make conversation until it’s time to do the dishes,” Cecilia said. “Sit.”
So, I sat on a stool at the counter and tried to look pleasant, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was in a kind of shock, rendered speechless by the overwhelming sense of woman in this place, the extreme opposite of the bland male spaces I grew up in.
Dad barely bothered to keep a kitchen after Mom died, and we certainly never had flowers or knickknacks or family photos on the walls. This room had flowers everywhere, with little bundles of poinsettias and mistletoe hanging just low enough to be in the way, if you didn’t know exactly how to duck.
The long, high mantle around the kitchen was covered in Christmas cards from four hundred years of human history. Framed antiques that looked like gifts from Victorian families, right next to animated carolers and snowmen singing in tiny voices from solar-powered smart paper, every time somebody made eye contact.
They didn’t have the central heat on, but I was caught perfectly between the kitchen stove and the dining room fire, smelling smoke from some kind of exotic wood that had come from faerie trees in Avalon for all I knew.
It should have been comforting, but the whole thing put me on edge like I didn’t belong there, like I didn’t deserve this, to be surrounded by the love of this family that wasn’t mine.
Cecilia and Denise were ignoring me, talking about a bunch of kids that they knew by name from previous visits, cooing over how much Kaitlyn and Douglas and Jayden had grown since last year.
We had this long formal dining table behind us, but we didn’t eat there. Cecilia just plopped a wooden plate down on the counter and asked me if I wanted dressing or stuffing.
I had spent my entire life thinking those were the same thing, so I just stammered, “Both?”
Then she said, “mustard or mayonnaise?” and I picked mayonnaise, trying to remember the last time I had a real turkey sandwich.
Cecilia put two scoops of dressing/stuffing beside the sandwich and started spreading out a series of serving dishes that looked like real wood - a gravy boat, with smaller bowls filled with mustard and mayonnaise, along with a small dish of pickles and a larger one filled with cranberry sauce.
I thought condiments came straight from plastic bottles, and I thought cranberry sauce was a vaguely metallic substance that should still be imprinted with ridges from the can, so it took me a minute to identify sauce made from real cranberries.
Everything was delicious and everything was real. Everything tasted so incredibly real. Lumpy and chewy and weirdly textured in spots, but real. Even the tomatoes didn’t look like tomatoes. They were so small and red, nothing like the big circular pink things that passed for tomatoes at distro. I thought I didn’t like tomatoes until I tried one of these and was astonished at how tomato it was.
Cecilia read it all on my face, and quietly handed me a second sandwich as soon as I finished the first one, encouraging me to put gravy on it.
I sipped from a comically large tankard of… something and was delighted to find it was holiday tea, like punch without the sugar, festive without being overwhelming.
I was halfway through my second sandwich when I realized the two witches were staring at me with the same kind of dazed, bittersweet expression I had been wearing a moment before.
“Are you guys not eating?”
“We’ll get ours in a minute,” Denise said, squeezing her mother’s hand. “It’s just been a while since we’ve fed a man in here.”
I gulped another mouthful of tea and wiped gravy off my chin. “Are you guys gonna fatten me up and put me in the oven?”
Cecilia cackled. “We won’t burn you if you don’t burn us. Same deal grandma made with the city council.”
* * *
Cecilia and Denise joined me at the counter and ate across from me. I was still too tired and dazed to make good conversation, too out of it to even ask my usual round of dumb questions, but they didn’t need me to talk.
They spoke to each other in a kind of shorthand, incomprehensible to outsiders, but with smiles and laughter to indicate these were inside jokes. They were also comfortable with silence in a way I never was.
My mom had a way of keeping up banter around a dining table, making small talk, because she knew any extended length of silence would encourage Dad to fill it with an insult or a snide remark.
I had been programmed to think of silence as prelude to a verbal attack, so I had a tendency to chatter and ask dumb questions to avoid it.
But Cecilia and Denise didn’t think that way. Silence was just a blanket to them, a soft surface they treaded on whenever they were together, and when they broke silence together, it was usually to gossip or tell a joke.
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Denise would not describe her childhood as “happy” but it wasn’t cruel. Cecilia Hardy may have been a hardcore narcissist, but she wasn’t verbally abusive, and I got the sense that I was seeing the end of a long process of forgiveness and reconciliation that had happened years ago.
I thought we were done when Cecilia brought out dessert, an honest-to-god pecan pie with real whipped cream. It was, again, the best thing I had ever tasted.
Cecilia finished her pie and excused herself, leaving me and Denise to clean up. Cecilia paused and said, “House rules” sternly to Denise before she disappeared down the hall.
“What does ‘house rules’ mean?” I said, smiling a little.
Denise rolled her eyes. “It means my mother thinks I’m still fifteen. And it means that she’s not coming back out, so I’ll start wrapping up stuff for the fridge while you start cleaning.”
I still didn’t know how to cook, but I knew how to wash dishes, even wooden dishes that seemed weirdly resistant to water.
I had a lot of weird triggers around domestic stuff like this, but cleaning a kitchen with Denise didn’t feel strange or awkward, even in close quarters, and there were no erotic undertones like I felt with Judy and Lydia.
We had spent so long working together and riding around in that stupid squad car, it was no big deal to be close or brush against each other, or even to have a brief water fight at the sink.
Is this how normal people have Christmas? Is this what a family feels like?
I washed and dried dishes while Denise put stuff up. There was a tiny bit of mustard left in the serving bowl, and Denise laughed at me when I tried to put it back in the bottle.
“It’s just mustard, Tim. We can afford to waste a couple ounces of mustard.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Old habits. But seriously, all the stuff we just ate. The meat, the bread - real cream, real sugar, did I just eat something crazy expensive?”
Denise looked at me like I was insane. “How much do you think it costs to have turkey leftovers and pecan pie?”
“I dunno,” I shrugged. “Dad always complained when he had to buy a holiday pack at distro.”
“A holiday—” Denise sputtered. “You mean those turkey in a box things with premade stuffing and red plastic plates?”
I nodded.
“Oh my god,” Denise said. “This stuff is a lot cheaper when you make it yourself, and Mom gets raw materials from places that are… a lot further away than the HDI distro. Nothing you ate tonight came from a corporate box, and some of it didn’t even come from Earth.”
“So you weren’t joking when you said that thing about the cookies? I just ate food from another dimension?”
“Most of it came from a farmers’ market a few thousand miles away, but yeah, it’s really hard to find good pecans on Earth now. On our Earth anyway.”
We finished the dishes and put them on a perfectly ordinary rack to dry. There were a few modern appliances scattered around the kitchen, but even those looked like antiques, like some Hardy witch had bought an electric can opener in 1964 and never bothered to upgrade. But even the old stuff looked new.
Denise strolled over to the big wooden dining table and showed me the first bit of overt magic anyone had used in the house. She waved her hand, and the long dining table shrank down to a miniature doll’s house version of itself. Denise levitated it, chairs and all, and put the whole thing on an end table by the fire, leaving us plenty of room on the rug.
She sat cross-legged in front of the fire and patted the space beside her, inviting me to sit. We sat in silence for a while, mesmerized by the combination of warmth and good food, until she made some kind of decision and put her head on my shoulder.
“Is leaning on me against the house rules?” I asked.
“Oh, you’ll know when I break house rules,” Denise said.
“How many guys have you lured to their deaths in front of this fire?”
“It’s been a while,” she said, sounding strangely sad, making me think maybe I wasn’t the only one who had trouble with Christmas.
“I really have to thank you for tonight,” I said. “Shit, I forgot to thank your mom for dinner.”
“She knows,” Denise mumbled into my shoulder. “Watching you eat was like feeding a baby ice cream for the first time.”
I don’t know which one of us fell asleep first, and I don’t remember when she left. I just remember waking up the next morning, alone on that rug in front of a smoldering fire, with a pillow under my head and a blanket tucked around me.
“Good, you’re up” Cecilia said from across the room, starting a whole new meal in the kitchen. “Bathroom’s that way. Get cleaned up and come on back. Throw your clothes in the hamper and grab a shower; should have just enough time before breakfast.”
I did as I was told, reluctantly tossing my clothes into a tall wicker basket before I jumped in the shower. The shower was an antique, a weird brass sprayer attached to an ancient porcelain tub, but the water pressure was fine, and the water was hot. No wonder Denise hated the showers at HQ.
I had to be careful with my elbows as I washed myself, struggling to avoid a hundred different vials and bottles and sponges they had covering every surface. I scrubbed myself with some kind of lumpy homemade soap and wondered if any of this stuff was magic.
I stepped out of the shower and dried myself off on a guest towel, shocked to see my clothes neatly cleaned and folded on the lid of the hamper in front of me. I hadn’t seen the door open, and I hadn’t heard anyone come in.
Were faeries watching me in the bathroom?
I figured there was nothing I could do about it in any case and put all my clothes back on, amused by the pleasant, but utterly alien floral scent that clung to me as I dressed. That unique sense of disorientation when someone washes your clothes in a different kind of detergent.
I came out clean and fresh and strangely clear-headed, like I’d had my first proper sleep in six months.
I wasn’t remotely hungry, but Cecilia had set out a steaming bowl of eggs mixed with peppers, sausage, cheese, and more of those fresh tomatoes.
I was surprised to see sausage and asked a question I had been meaning to ask the night before. “So, you guys eat meat? I thought you’d be vegan or something.”
I watched Denise smirk and look over at her mother when I said this, like she had been waiting for this question, and had heard Cecilia give this reply a hundred times.
“Have you ever met a vegan dog? Or a vegan cat? Or a vegan bear?” Cecilia said. “We don’t live in some fairy tale version of nature. Nature is ruthless and bloody and mean. Animals don’t give a fuck about your heart or your mind or your soul. Linger too long in front of a hungry animal and you are meat. Even a housecat will eat you if you let it.
“We’re not cruel to animals, but we don’t worship them, and we don’t hesitate to eat them, to get what our bodies need, any more than a bear would hesitate to eat us, if it needed to fatten up for the winter.”
I took this as permission to enjoy the sausage, so I did, enjoying two full bowls of the egg mixture, until I was absolutely stuffed.
Denise and I cleared the table and washed the dishes, then Cecilia came back and laid bright red stockings down on the counter - one for each of us.
The name stitched on the top of mine said TIM.
“You got me a…” I stammered. “When did you even have time to…?”
“We’ve been planning this for a while,” Cecilia said. “Even before Minerva called. Would have had you out for Thanksgiving if Denise hadn’t been stuck in New York.”
I just stared at her for a second, looking back and forth between her and the stocking.
“Well?” Cecilia said. “Open it!”
Most of it was fruit. A real orange and a real apple and an assortment of crude homemade candy that seemed to be lumpy chocolate and peppermints.
And at the bottom, an old plastic Bluestar badge, like something you would get out of a cereal box. I had been holding it together to that point, but before Denise could make a joke, I had to throw the badge down, mumble, “Excuse me…” and run to the bathroom.
I slammed the bathroom door behind me and started to sob, finally overwhelmed by the food and the warmth and the simple kindness of these women.
How can I explain the power of ordinary holiday traditions to people who get them every year? How can I explain the comfort of a holiday meal with no sniping or backbiting or veiled insults in the way? How can I explain what it’s like to feel love in these simple things, or the flood of memories that poured in from the last time someone had cared enough to put my name on a stocking?
I failed to pull myself together and kept sobbing, struggling to be quiet as my aura splashed weird flickering light off the fixtures and the knickknacks and the endless lotion bottles in the tub. At least there was no mirror here.
Denise was alone when I made it back to the kitchen, with everything but my stocking contents cleared away.
I mumbled an apology, and she didn’t make things worse by asking if I was okay. She just sat quietly across from me while I stared at my gifts on the counter. I couldn’t trust myself to keep a straight face if I looked at the badge, so I just stared at the orange.
“I don’t know how to eat this,” I said. “The ones Mom used to get were already cut up.”
“Do you still have our knife?” Denise asked, as if she didn’t already know the answer.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out the Hardy family heirloom, a kind of magical pocketknife that just looked like a shiny black hilt with gold runes, until a wielder called for the blade.
I had no real concept of what a faerie blade was, but I knew this thing could cut demons, and I knew you could do a surprising amount of damage with it, even if the blade was too small to look dangerous.
I called for the blade and tried to follow her instructions as Denise took me through the process, cleanly slicing off the top and bottom of the orange before carefully scoring the peel and tearing it off.
Then I cut it in pieces and shared it with Denise, surprised by the taste and feel of it; so strange, it made the “oranges” I ate as a child seem like processed candy.
We finished my orange, cleaned the counter, and put my empty stocking back over the fireplace. I put the apple in my jacket and had to struggle to keep my composure as Denise pinned the little plastic badge on my chest.
“Perfect,” she said.
“Where did you even get this?” I asked, fiddling with the weathered toy badge.
“This is the same one Mom pinned on me, on my first day of active duty. Looks better on you, though. Come see the garden.”
* * *
I walked out the back door into the garden and found Cecilia… watering a tree with a shot of whiskey?
The Hardy family garden was a kind of paradise, taking up space that should have been a whole different business behind the shop, crowding into adjoining lots that would otherwise be expensive modern storefronts, all surrounded by a tall wooden fence.
Denise showed me berry patches and rose bushes and an entire herb garden segregated from everything else by a giant planter.
Cecilia was whispering to the tree she had been “watering” when I came out, a robust-looking tree, human shaped, but with holes in it. I realized this was the Effigy Tree Denise had told me about - the tree that was bound to her soul, so it would take damage instead of her, whenever she got shot, or stabbed, or scratched by something. Some of the most recent damage was still healing.
I was expecting it to be a living wooden sculpture of Denise, but that tree looked like a man.