Gifted: A Holiday Anthology Read Free

she could see them. He’d even brought a banana to eat on the drive to Cainsville. See, everything is fine. Not ideal—you know what she is, and there’s no hiding that— but she’s doing a perfectly adequate job of raising me.
    Rose had noticed the bruise on his face, but when he said he’d made twenty-three dollars off the skirmish, she’d laughed and said as soon as the relationship no longer proved profitable, he needed to show Jay why picking on him was a very bad idea. Which he would, of course.
    The mark/client departed, and Rose walked into the kitchen. Gabriel didn’t need to look up from the recipe cards to hear her enter. Walshes didn’t come in “small.” His aunt still towered over him, nearly six feet tall, with the Walshes’ usual jet-black hair, light-blue eyes and pale skin. “Black Irish,” Rose called it. Or “Gypsy,” if she was playing Rosalyn Razvan, as her business card proclaimed her. In build, like him, his aunt was, again, not small. In a novel, she’d be called sturdy, implying she was not thin, but not fat either. Solidly built. Big boned. Whatever adjective worked.
    “Picked one?” she asked as she started the kettle for tea.
    He handed her a card.
    She sighed. “There is nothing festive about chocolate chip cookies, Gabriel.”
    “You asked what I wanted. There were no restrictions placed on the choice.”
    “All right, then. I’ll decorate them with—”
    “No.”
    “I’ll cut them into reindeers and—”
    “No.”
    A quirk of a smile. Year after year, the dialogue never changed. By now, it bordered on absurd. Yet it was tradition, so they stuck to their lines.
    “What if I colored the dough green and red and—?”
    He handed her a second card. “Sugar cookies. You may make these as well.”
    Her brows lifted. “May I?”
    “If you must.”
    She laughed and headed for the fridge to take out the eggs and butter. “That bag on the table is for you. A gift for your mother for Christmas. One’s from you and the other’s from me. I know you never know what to give her.”
    This too was tradition. He suspected Rose knew perfectly well that, without her contribution, he would buy Seanna nothing. He used to, when he was little. When she still played Santa for him. Then, one year, his gifts mysteriously went missing a week later and turned up at the pawn shop, and he went home and told Seanna he didn’t believe in Santa, and there was no need to continue the charade. So she stopped. And so did he. Yet Rose wouldn’t let him pass a holiday without a gift for his mother.
    There was only a ten-year age difference between Seanna and Rose. His mother had been like a little sister to his great-aunt. An adored little sister. While it was difficult for Gabriel to put himself in the shoes of others, he made the effort with Rose. He had come to understand that, no matter how far Seanna fell, part of her was always that little girl to Rose, who still hoped Seanna could be that again. A vain hope, but Gabriel let her have it.
    “How much do I owe you?” he asked.
    “An afternoon’s work making cookies.”
    He slid off the stool to fetch the flour.
    While the cookies baked and Rose cleaned, Gabriel wandered into the parlor. There wasn’t far to wander in the tiny Victorian house. The parlor took up half the main floor space. It was like walking into the antique shop—if the shop specialized in the occult. Rose called it her collection of “old junk,” but she was proud of that junk, and for good reason. The pieces were valuable relics from the history of her craft. All the ways people had sought to peer into whatever mysteries lay beyond the everyday, whether it was reading tea leaves or communicating with spirits or catching a glimpse of invisible fae.
    Gabriel took down a book on Cornish folktales and laid it on the desk, as if to read, but it was only an excuse for sitting at the desk and poking through the drawer. Getting a look at Rose’s cards and making sure she