A Grace Family Christmas Read online

  A Grace Family Christmas

  Tim Pratt

  My dead father came for the holidays this year.

  Clara and I had just finished breakfast and were decorating Christmas cookies when I was surprised by knocking at the front door. That was the first weird thing, because I get a tingle whenever anyone crosses the border onto our property, and nothing had tingled. My family (me, my partner Trey, and my half-sister Clara, the alarmingly precocious teen we were raising) doesn’t have many enemies anymore, but being careful is a good habit when you have things to lose.

  Clara hopped down from the chair where she’d been standing to pipe icing onto sugary angel-shapes and said, “I’ll get it!”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Better let me.” She pouted—she is a champion pouter—and crossed her arms. She was wearing a ridiculous lacy confection of a dress, total holiday-best even though Christmas was days away (and now I know why).

  My father and I never spent the holidays together when he was alive; I was adopted as an infant, and didn’t even know my biological father’s name until I got the letter notifying me of his death and my inheritance—this huge peculiar house in the mountains of North Carolina. (I also inherited the mantle of his magical power, though the letter omitted the fact that he was a formerly immortal sorcerer.) I recognized him when I opened the door, though, from pictures, and from visions he’d arranged for me to have when I first took up his legacy—Archibald Grace had control issues that didn’t stop when his breath and heart did.

  My dead father was handsome, dark-haired and dark-eyed, dressed in an old-fashioned black suit and a beaver hat: every inch the 19th-century robber baron, which he’d actually been, among other things (an 18th-century philosopher, a 16th-century poet, a 12th-century crusader, and, if the sketchiest accounts are to be believed, a giant back in the days before humans got the hang of agriculture). “Greetings.” His voice was a pleasant baritone, slightly fuzzed by uncertainty. There were no footprints in the snow leading to the front porch, so he hadn’t walked onto the property; at least my perimeter defenses weren’t broken. “I, ah... I think I’ve been invited for... some sort of holiday?” His eyes betrayed no recognition of me at all.

  I reached out and poked him, and he felt solid enough. He didn’t gasp or grab my finger or strike me, though he did look pointedly at my finger on his lapel. Archibald Grace was invulnerable until the day he decided he didn’t want to be alive anymore, and the only thing I could possibly injure was his dignity. “Huh,” I said. “Are you a time traveler?” Grace had written about traveling in time—physically, not just peeking in on the past as a pure observer, which he’d done plenty—but those sections were full of double-underlined notes reading DO NOT ATTEMPT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Maybe he’d written those notes after attempting it, though. Since he’d been basically ageless for centuries, I couldn’t tell when he might be from.

  He shuddered. “I don’t think so. What year is it?”

  I told him.

  “Oh, dear. Am I dead? I have a vague memory of intending to be dead by now.”

  I affirmed that he was, and had been for some years. “You don’t seem to be a ghost, though.” Ghosts were mostly just barely sentient residue left by strong-willed people, or those who’d died traumatically—echoes of the sound of a lost life. Such creatures weren’t usually capable of coherent conversations. Others were a sort of... holographic projection from wherever souls go when they die (a subject even Grace hadn’t known a lot about, though he’d speculated), but they didn’t tend to have physical bodies unless they possessed someone else’s, or a sorcerer built them a shell to inhabit. My senses, which extend rather beyond the classic standard allotment, told me I was looking at a human in a non-possessed body.

  He nodded, a little glumly. “I don’t feel like a ghost. I don’t remember where I was, before this, though. Hmm. What day is it today?”

  “December 21st.” And then we both said, simultaneously and in exactly the same tone, “Oh, the solstice!”

  He cocked his head at me. “Are we related, young lady?”

  I sketched a little curtsy, though I was wearing pants and a flour-stained apron. “I’m Bekah, one of your daughters.” He’d had a lot of children, not all of them entirely human. I knew some of them. Not all of them had survived meeting me.

  “Ahhh,” he said. “I remember you as a baby. I see I left you my sanctum in my will... that rings a bell. I died before we had the chance to properly meet, I assume? And you used the power of the solstice to resurrect me for a long-awaited reunion?”

  I shook my head. “Wasn’t me. I knew this kind of thing was theoretically possible, but I never looked up the details. The people I’ve lost... seeing them for a few hours on a single day would only make me miss them more, and the reading I’ve done suggests they tend to come back with chunks of their memories missing.”

  “I can confirm,” Grace said. “If you didn’t summon me back to this fleeting candle-flicker of a life, then who did?”

  I sighed. “I guess you’d better come in and meet Clara.”

  Clara gazed up at Grace adoringly. “It’s you, it’s really you, you really came!”

  “When you call spirits from the vasty deep, they generally do,” he said. “If you know how to call them properly.”

  I dropped a heavy volume on the tabletop: The Book of Grace, the compendium of my father’s esoteric knowledge. “I found this under your mattress,” I said. “What have I told you about doing magic without supervision?”

  “That my brain will be eaten by horrible monsters from beyond the back of the stars,” Clara said. “But this spell is safe. It’s only temporary.”

  “You should have asked me.”

  “Would you have said yes?”

  “I guess we’ll never know.” Of course I wouldn’t have said yes. Like I don’t have enough to deal with during the holidays without my dead (and deadbeat) sorcerer father showing up form beyond the grave.

  “Are you my granddaughter, little girl?” Grace said.

  Clara glared at me, but only because she was psychologically incapable of glaring at him. She has some pretty serious daddy issues. “No, she’s your daughter, too,” I said. “Your firstborn, actually.”

  “My... but that can’t be, she.... I don’t understand,” Grace said.

  “I am very old,” Clara said, with the exaggerated dignity of the newly teenaged. “I had a terrible life and I became a terrible person and was very cruel to everyone.” She bit the head off a snowman cookie, chewed, swallowed, and continued. “I felt bad about being bad, but I couldn’t figure out how to stop, and since I inherited shapeshifting powers from my mother, I decided I would change my shape, down to my whole brain and everything, and get a do-over. I went back to when I was seven years old, the last time I was happy. Before you left me, father, and I had to take care of myself.” She glanced at me. “Right?”

  I nodded. “She restarted her childhood, and erased most of her old memories in the process. We’re trying to raise her....” I trailed off.

  “Better than I did,” Grace said. “Yes. I... recognize you now, of course. I thought it was just family resemblance.” He reached out, tentatively, and put his hand on Clara’s knee. She beamed. “I should have been a better father to you. In those days, I was obsessed with power and empire, and raised you accordingly, at least, until I was... distracted. By the time I realized you were, ah...”

  “A monster,” Clara chimed in.

  “Troubled, perhaps,” Grace agreed. “It was too late. I am very sorry I left you. I have no excuse.” He looked at me. “A second childho
od. Really. How is it going?”

  “She’s willful, cranky, disobedient, too smart for her own good, and I lay awake at night worrying about what fresh horrors tomorrow will bring.” Clara stuck her tongue out at me. “She’s also hilarious, sweet, surprising, delightful, and owns the key to my heart. Your typical thirteen-year-old, basically. I’d say the experiment is going well.” She hadn’t murdered anyone since her regression, anyway, and had at least a theoretical grasp of why murder was bad. Her development was promising.

  “True second chances are rare and precious,” Grace said. “I’m glad I learned about this, even if, in the morning, I’ll return to a state of oblivion and not-knowing. I suppose I wasn’t a very good father, to either of you... to any of my children. Eventually I tried to do right by you all, as much as I could, but it was far too late.”

  “You’re here now,” Clara said. “I wish you could have come for actual Christmas. But the spell said it had to be the solstice.”

  “Return of the light, return of the life. It’s a potent time.” Grace looked around at the garlands hanging from the living room ceiling, and the big Christmas tree Trey had brought home (we were in the mountains of North Carolina, the land of Christmas tree farms) all gleaming with lights and ornaments in the corner, and the roaring fire (I controlled the temperature magically, but fires are pretty), and said, “It’s very festive anyway. It’s... nice, to be with family. I never did that often enough, when I was alive.”

  “Just wait until everyone else arrives!” Clara clapped her hands.

  “Wait, what?” my father and I said at the same time.

  I found Hannah upstairs in the bathtub, disoriented, with half a recently dead fish in her mouth. Hannah is my favorite half-sister (her mother was a sea-goddess, and she’s got the overlapping needle teeth of an angler fish, and mostly lives in the ocean, but otherwise we have a lot in common), and I offered her a hand so she could climb, dripping, from the tub. “Did you teleport me here?” she said, her voice emerging magically, as usual, from the general vicinity of her terrifying mouth.

  “No, Clara did. She summoned the whole family, apparently. Including the somewhat bewildered revenant of our dead father, who will dissolve in several hours, don’t worry. Clara decided the holidays aren’t the holidays without family.”

  Hannah groaned. “I thought teenagers liked to avoid their families?” Then she brightened. “Say. Do you do that thing, that some of you people up here do—the feast of the seven fishes?”

  “One side of Trey’s family is Italian, so, weirdly enough, we do, though it’s more like ten fishes. Trey says if he can eat hoppin john on New Year’s Day like my family does, I can eat sardines on New Year’s Eve like his. He’s got the better end of the deal, I think.”

  “Then you don’t have to teleport me home just yet,” Hannah said. “Let me go say hello to my sister-niece, and glare at our zombie-father. Could you move up the fishes to tonight, since Christmas came early?”

  “I can, but....” I cleared my throat.

  Hannah looked down at herself. She was naked, of course, having just come from the sea. “Ah. Of course. Could I borrow some pants?”

  The Trips—my weird psychic triplet half-siblings, who tend to speak in harmony most of the time and are so effortlessly telepathic they get themselves mixed up with each other—were floating around in some confusion by the barn, emitting a high-pitched hum. I poked them with a broom handle until I got their attention.

  “Bekah. What are we doing here?” they trilled.

  “Clara invited you for Christmas, a few days early.” I leaned on the broom as they lowered themselves almost, but not quite, to the ground. “It was one of those invitations you can’t refuse. She borrowed the Book.”

  They twittered. “We knew teaching her to read was a mistake.”

  “She knew how to read when we got her. She was already seven.”

  “Then we should have removed the knowledge from her mind,” they replied.

  “Hindsight,” I said. “Come on in. We made cookies.”

  I called Trey, who was out buying the good apple cider, and told him what was going on. He was not thrilled: he’d known my father, who had ritually bound Trey’s entire family line (lawyers going way back), to make sure they were very loyal attorneys. I’d broken that spell, but when your father-in-law had once enslaved your bloodline, it makes for awkward family dinners. “He seems like the nicest version of himself, for what it’s worth,” I said. “Contrite and polite and overwhelmed. I think Clara brought back the loving father he must have occasionally been to her—will and desire shape the spell a little, and the gaps in his memory are mostly the parts where he was a total asshole and didn’t feel bad about it.”

  “It’s amazing he remembers anything at all,” Trey said. “I think I’ll run a few more errands before I come back, if you’ve got it all under control?” I could tell from his tone that he devoutly wished I had it all under control.

  “That’s fine. Take your time—” My perimeter alarm went off, a flash of red in the corner of my third eye (metaphorically speaking), and I sighed. “Someone’s here. Talk soon.”

  I went outside, wearing a coat wrapped in thermal magics to keep me comfortable, and watched a dark blue Volvo station wagon with California plates bump toward me along the driveway. There were two people inside, and after a moment, they emerged, neither dressed properly for the cold: a woman in her mid-forties, long-haired and dressed in yoga pants, and a young man of maybe nineteen or twenty, with messy hair and striking, somehow familiar eyes—

  “Oh, crap,” I said. “You’re another one of Grace’s kids, aren’t you?” Clara had never met these people (at least not in her existing span of memories), so her spell of family gathering must have been more potent and general than I’d realized. (That should have been a warning of what was coming, but I missed it. In my defense, I had a lot going on.)

  The woman, who had definite mom energy, stepped around the car, between me and the guy, who suddenly flickered—a crown appeared on his head, vines trailing down around his face, a long slender sword in his hand—and then returned to normal. “Mom, it’s okay.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “This is my sister... Bertha?”

  I snorted. “Bekah.”

  He grinned and thumped himself on the temple. “The crown answers questions and gives me knowledge, but it gets things scrambled sometimes, and it mumbles. I’m Lee. This is my mom.”

  “Lauren,” she said, and offered her hand.

  I shook. “So you and my... our... father, you were, ah....”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh god no. I adopted Lee. Well, magically speaking, Mr. Grace made it so everyone just thought Lee was my biological son, and.... I used to work for your father. I was the executor of his will, actually. I should have recognized the house—I saw pictures.”

  I boggled. Not only did I have a little brother—and I’d thought I was the youngest of Grace’s kids—but his mom was the one who’d sent me (or hired the lawyers to send me) the letter about my inheritance that changed my life. Before I could come up with any sort of response, she quite reasonably asked, “What are we doing here?”

  “A minute ago we were on our way to the mall in Emeryville,” Lee said. “In, uh, California. The Bay Area. Mom is always late doing her Christmas shopping.”

  “It’s more fun at the last minute,” she said. “Everyone has so much energy. Makes me feel festive.”

  “I’m glad to meet you both,” I said, “and sorry you were dragged away. Someone cast a spell to gather the family, and it had unintended consequences. I can send you home now, if you want, or... you can come inside, and meet some of the rest of the family.”

  “For real?” Lee said. “I asked the crown to find you all, years ago, when I first got it, but it always gave me ridiculous answers, like, the bottom of the ocean, or the far side of the moon.”


  I shook my head. “That’s not so ridiculous, for some of the family, and as for me... I have strong privacy protections. I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know anyone was looking who I’d want to meet.”

  Lee looked at Lauren. “Can we stay, mom? Please?”

  She looked at me for a long moment. “Are you a mother?” she said.

  “I’m raising a thirteen-year-old girl,” I said.

  Her face relaxed. “Oh, god,” she said. “Thirteen. Are you ever in for it. Sure. We can stay. For a little while.”

  I led them toward the house, and said, “So, I should probably warn you about one of the guests....”

  We all sat around the fire drinking cocoa (well, the Trips hovered). Lee was asking my father’s revenant a million questions, Lauren was looking at him with a mixture of suspicion and awe and anger, Clara was kicking Lee for taking away her original daddy’s attention, Trey was texting me with his latest excuses to stay out longer, the Trips were humming something that sounded suspiciously like “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” and Hannah was stirring salt into her cocoa and grinning (she always bares all her needle teeth, of course, having no lips, but I can still tell when she’s grinning).

  I had most of the ingredients for Christmas dinner on hand already, and figured I’d just move some of it up a few days. It was a little late to start the turkey, but I could do the ham, and of course Hannah’s many fishes, and some of the sides.... Everyone seemed like they were getting along, no wizard’s duels in the offing, so I slipped into the kitchen to start cooking.

  I opened the fridge, and the defrosted ham was inside, but its wrapping was torn, and there was a bite taken out of it—a big bite, not person-sized, more bear-sized. I should have realized who’d done it immediately, but despite the arrival of my father, I still expected the dead to stay dead, as they mostly had in my experience.

  I shut the refrigerator door and scanned with all my senses to see who was here, and found: nothing. Which was terrifying, because someone who could hide form me, in the fullness of my inherited power, was formidable indeed. I tried to call Trey but my phone didn’t get any signal... which is how it used to be out here until I magically improved reception, which meant someone had undone my spell, or was blocking it. Did I have some malicious half-sibling I hadn’t met yet?