Christmas Yet to Come Read Free Page A

years any more than she speculated how many stretched before her. Occasionally she’d wondered if her family knew what had happened to her, because the river might well have carried her body far out of reach.
    But her parents would have found her skates missing and seen a gaping hole in the rotten ice. She finished her cocoa, willing it to warm and fill her even if she could no longer taste it.
    Once both their cups were empty, Justin stacked the plates on the tray. “You must be tired,” he said. “I’ll show you to the spare room.”
    â€œThank you,” Laura said, mentally reminding herself not to try to walk through the door as he let her precede him out. Even if she had once been insubstantial, the meal felt decidedly less so, and she would have been content to curl up catlike on the parlor rug before the flames. The spare room certainly wasn’t as warm, and she shivered after Justin showed her in and left, shutting the door behind him. He’d given her a candle, but the hearth was cold and empty.
    Wrapping her arms around herself, she wished for nothing more than to slip beneath the quilt on the bed and close her eyes. But she couldn’t afford to do that yet. She had to think. If the constables took her away tomorrow, she had no idea what would happen. She could keep claiming she didn’t remember a thing, but thanks to one of her targets, she knew about hospitals that confined and dealt with people who had mental problems. No, she’d jump out of the window first.
    Or better yet, save herself. Except she didn’t think she had any powers any longer.
    She had to sit down, though not in the bed, because she might drift off before she found an answer. There was a chair, but when she lowered herself into that, it jerked back and forth rhythmically, startling her. The dresser drawers were empty, but there were a few little pillows on the bed, so she slid those under the curved legs of the chair. It stopped jolting, and she could think without being distracted.
    When she’d been a spirit, her powers had been limited to walking through walls and creating visions of the future. Even assuming she still had those, which was by no means a given, she couldn’t see how they might stave off her eviction from Justin’s house. If she showed him an image of some future winter where a blizzard raged outside, he might mistake it for a snowstorm in the here-and-now, which would buy her a little more time. But the illusion would fall apart the moment some neighbor knocked on the door to wish him a merry Christmas, or the carolers began warbling “Silent Night” outside.
    She bent her head, her hair tumbling around her face as she did so, and covered her eyes with her hands.
    After she’d fallen through the ice, after the short but endless moments of struggling for air, she’d sunk down until the glimpse of sunlight through the ice had grown pale and distant. It drew farther away, until it was tiny as a star, and when it blinked out, she was left in a great void.
    She’d been twelve at the time, old enough to know better than to go skating alone without her parents’ permission, young enough to be reckless. Old enough, certainly, to know she had died, yet she didn’t feel afraid. The darkness around her was still and warm, which was an improvement on the river in two ways. And she had a growing, steady conviction she wasn’t alone.
    So when the voice spoke out of the void, it didn’t scare her. Besides, she’d already faced the most frightening thing most people ever experienced. She’d been offered a choice. Her life had been intended to be a good and productive one where she changed the world for the better—except she’d thrown all that away for an hour of fun.
    But she could make up for it by becoming the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, by guiding others away from the rotten ice of their lives, and the long dark fall waiting