“I’ll send our hovercraft right away,” Jaspar said to them. “It won’t be more than fifteen minutes.”
Liza and Jaspar climbed out, and the door sealed shut.
Jaspar stripped off his clothes. Liza quickly looked away, her cheeks burning, but not before she saw that everything was in proportion to his size.Everything. She stared ferociously at the floor. Even his feet were sexy. How was that fair?
She couldn’t help looking back as silver scales shaded with black cascaded upwards over his legs. He shifted smoothly, wings tearing from his back with the sound of ripping silk, form twisting and changing in strange ways that hurt her eyes until he stood in front of her looking like a dragon from an old book of Terran children’s stories.
His neck was long and serpentine, his head diamond-shaped. She was frightened for a moment, just because of the sheer, imposing size of him, but then he turned his head and she saw that his eyes, that eerie, icy blue, were just the same as always.
She scrambled onto his back and wrapped her arms around his neck. His body radiated heat, and she snuggled against it, hugging his neck hard.
As she basked in his warmth, it occurred to her that he had never answered her question about whether he had his communicator with him. She’d just bet he did. Sneaky damn aliens.
He beat his mighty wings and they rose into the air.
The landscape dropped away beneath them, the hovercraft dwindling in size until it looked like one of the painted models at the Toy Emporium on Main Street. As they rose, Liza could look out over the acres and acres of pine forest…and see the swathes of black where the fungus had blighted the trees. But she found it impossible to be sad right then. Jaspar’s wingbeats thrummed through her body and adrenaline sang in her veins.
They flew back to the bed and breakfast, where he landed in the parking lot. She reluctantly slid off his neck, immediately missing his warmth and the sensation of closeness.
His brothers and clan members came out to greet him as he quickly shifted back into humanoid form and explained to Loren about the hovercraft.
“I’ll go right now!” Loren said, perhaps a little too eagerly, and set off for the Balthazar Clan’s hovercraft at a dead run.
His mother had stepped outside too. She gave the Santabot a brief glance and then hurried back inside, with the tiniest of smiles tugging at her lips.
Liza looked over at the Santabot. It was sitting on its chair in the little Santa’s Workshop area they had set up to the left of the bed and breakfast. It was set on a big concrete square, with a painted backdrop of Santa’s workshop, and piles of weather-proof wrapped presents artfully arranged around the throne.
A family was standing near the Santabot, and the looks on their faces made Liza uneasy. The family, clearly wealthy off-worlders, were gathered around the Santabot, staring at it with looks of bafflement. The mother and father were accompanied by two grade-school-aged children and a pre-teen.
“And what do you want for Christmas?” Santa was asking the mother. “No, no, don’t tell me – a fashion sense!”
Her husband and children howled with laughter.
“I see,” the woman said, looking highly annoyed.
“And what are you laughing about?” Santabot asked the father. “Your breath is so bad, the dentist has to givehimself gas.”
“Children, with me!” the mother said in an imperious tone, and she turned and stalked off. The children followed her, still laughing. The father trailed along, looking disgruntled.
Liza stormed over to Jaspar, who had wandered up and was looking askance at the Santabot. “Jaspar, can we talk?” she said, with murder in her eyes.
“Certainly, heart-mate,” Jaspar said.
They walked back towards the house.
“Don’t you heart-mate me, you big scaly bastard. What the actual hell?” she demanded. “Why would your brother do that? That’s not a glitch, damn it – that was deliberate.”
“Well, he is up and functioning,” Jaspar said defensively. She gave him a look. He sighed. “I will talk to Loren and have him tinker with him some more,” he said.
“Forget it,” she said furiously. “You think I’d trust him to touch the Santabot after this? He’d probably make it even worse. That family is going to go back to their hotel and tell everybody what happened here, and word is going to spread through town like wildfire. First our Santabot was malfunctioning, now he’s Insult Santa. There are other Santabot rides offered by other businesses in town, you know. I doubt we’ll get any guests at all here. This was our last season, damn it!” She was near tears.
Jaspar felt a sharp stab of pain lancing through him at the sight of her unhappiness. “I am very sorry. My brother and mother will be dealt with appropriately.”
“Don’t bother. It’s too late now. I’m not really in the mood to go flying anymore tonight,” she said. “We can do it tomorrow, but only since I promised you. And now I’m going to go to the guest cottage and wait for my family.”
Jaspar stomped inside, and found his mother sipping a hot steaming mug of some mysterious human drink called “coffee”. “I see that you sabotaged the Santabot,” he said.
“What?” she said, giving him her innocent look. “How was that sabotage? We value honesty in all things, so I simply had the robot programmed for honesty.”
