A Klaus Encounter (Horned Holidays #5)

Chapter 1

"You're not my mother!"

The door slammed behind Theo as he raced out of the house with all the outrage a ten-year-old boy could muster.

Talia's mouth trembled as she stared after him, but she was determined not to cry.

There had been too many tears over the past six months.

Her sister and brother-in-law had died at the beginning of the summer but it had taken two months for the message to reach her, and for her to pack up her things and make the long wagon trip north to this tiny village and the homestead Sarah and Willem owned.

She’d thought she was doing the right thing, that Theo would be better off in his own home, and that she could preserve the legacy his parents had wanted to hand down to him.

She hadn't counted on the fact that they were virtual strangers.

She'd only seen him twice in his life, and one of those times had been when he was a newborn and she'd made the trip to stay with Sarah for the first few months after she gave birth. She’d always sent him presents for his birthday and for the Longest Night, and she’d felt she knew him from Sarah's letters. He clearly didn't feel the same way.

It probably didn't help that although she and her sister shared the same dark hair and dark eyes, they were complete opposites in almost every way. Sarah had been small, curvy, and charming. She had a natural warmth that attracted people, and everyone who had met her had loved her.

Talia was tall, thin, and reserved. Their parents had died when she was fifteen, leaving her with a twelve-year-old sister to take care of, and she'd been forced to grow up hard and fast. She'd done the best she could, taking a job in a local tavern to make ends meet.

The two of them had always been close, even if their relationship had become a little strained when an eighteen-year-old Sarah had announced that she was going to marry a man ten years older than her and move to a remote village in the mountains.

They'd met when Willem had been on a trading trip to the city.

It had been a whirlwind romance, and when he left six weeks later, Sarah had gone with him, leaving Talia alone and lonely.

Her life had been devoted to caring for her sister for so long that she didn't know what to do with herself. She was still trying to figure that out when Sarah had written to say that she was pregnant and asking if Talia could come and stay with her to help out since Willem’s parents were both dead.

Of course, she had gone. She hadn't regretted the decision, and by the time she left, they were once more on good terms. She was convinced that her sister was happy and very much in love. Sarah had even asked her to remain, but although she could appreciate the cozy homestead and the small charming village of Whitmere, she’d known she didn't fit in and she decided to return to the city.

I still don't fit in, she thought sadly.

Her only real friend was Martha, their closest neighbor, and the one who had looked after Theo until she could arrive.

Most of the other villagers regarded her suspiciously.

She didn't dress like they did or talk like they did, and perhaps most of all, she was thirty-two and still unmarried in a place where an unmarried woman over the age of twenty was considered "on the shelf.

" But she'd never had the time or the inclination for a husband.

Working in the tavern had not given her a particularly high opinion of the opposite sex.

When she'd returned to the city and started working for Jeremiah, first in his shop and then as his apprentice, she'd been too busy to seek out male company.

Having a husband might have made her more acceptable to the villagers, but then again, a husband might not have been quite so willing to leave the city behind to care for an orphaned nephew.

Even Jeremiah had tried to convince her not to go.

"Bring the boy here," he suggested, peering at her from under bushy grey brows.

"Whitmere is his home. That's all he's ever known. I don't want to rip him away from that."

"He's young; he'll adapt.”

“He has a nice house and lots of land to roam around. All I have is two rooms above the shop. My sister and her husband spent a lot of time building up that homestead for him, and I don't want to be the reason he loses it."

Unfortunately, she hadn't realized the amount of work required in running a homestead.

She'd been a hard worker all her life, but hard work didn't make up for her lack of knowledge.

If she'd had the funds, she would have hired someone to help her, but she didn't have the funds.

Like many farmers, much of her sister and brother-in-law's finances had been tied up in the next harvest—a harvest that had never happened.

She had only managed to survive so far thanks to Martha.

Martha had shown her how to take care of the kitchen garden and preserve the produce, how to harvest the remaining wheat, and had encouraged her to pick the apples from the small orchard and use them to barter with in the village market.

Despite that they were barely scraping by.

Now winter had set in, and she wasn't sure how they were going to make it through the cold months to come.

But right now, the most immediate problem was Theo.

She sighed and rose to her feet, pulling on her boots and hesitating between her impractical city cloak or her sister's shorter but much warmer garment.

Knowing that Theo wouldn't react well to seeing her in his mother's clothes, she chose her own cloak, grabbed his jacket, then set out after the boy. At least the morning’s snowfall had made him easy to track, and she followed his footprints into the forest, far apart at first where he'd been running and closer together where he'd slowed.

She could picture him so easily, head bowed, thin shoulders hunched, kicking disconsolately at the snow as he walked.

She knew his prickliness and anger came from pain, and she wished there was something she could do to help him.

She grieved for her sister just as much as he grieved for his mother.

The tracks led deeper into the woods, beyond the boundaries of the farmstead to where the mountain began to rise behind them.

He'd come a long way in such a short time, and it was going to be dark soon.

She briefly considered returning to the house for a lantern, but that would put her even further behind him, and he was not dressed for the cold.

As much as she wanted to believe that the cold would send him home, she also knew how stubborn he could be—a trait he shared more with her than her gentler sister. She kept going.

A few moments later, she spotted him through the trees and gave a sigh of relief. She didn't call to him in case he was still mad enough to take off running, and the snow muffled her footsteps as she approached. She was almost at his side before she realized he was staring at something in the snow.

No, not something. Someone. Someone unlike anyone she had ever seen before.

A huge male in dark, form-fitting clothing.

His skin was as white as the surrounding snow.

His long hair was equally white, as was the short beard, cut with a precision no male in the village had ever achieved.

But it wasn't the clothing or his skin or his hair that truly identified him as different.

It was the horns. Dark horns that curved up from his head and somehow managed to be both elegant and intimidating.

"Who is he?" Theo whispered.

"I don't know, sweetheart." He was so preoccupied he didn't even scowl at the endearment and shrugged into his coat without arguing.

"He's so white. Is he... is he dead?"

God, I hope not, she thought as his voice shook.

"I think that's his natural coloring," she said as calmly as possible, "but I guess I'd better check."

Very cautiously, she knelt down next to the stranger and put her hand over his heart, or at least where his heart would be if he were human.

The material of his clothing was like nothing she'd ever felt before—as thick as wool, but smoother than the finest silk—and it clung tightly to a firm, muscled chest. She sighed with relief when she felt a slow, steady heartbeat beneath her hand.

His heartbeat was slower than a human heartbeat, but perhaps that was normal for his kind.

What is his kind? As far as she knew, the only people on the planet were the descendants of the colony ship that had crashed there many generations ago—so many generations ago that people in the smaller villages couldn't even conceive of life beyond their planet. The knowledge was more common in the city, but even there, it made little difference to most people. They were more concerned with their day-to-day lives than something that sounded increasingly like a fairy tale. But unless there was another species living on the planet that they’d never encountered, the male in front of her had also come from space.

But why? And what did he want? Looking at him again, she decided that the dark clothing he was wearing was some kind of uniform, marked with insignia on his left shoulder.

He had a belt around his waist, and she cleared away the snow to reveal a weapon holstered at his side, also unlike anything she'd seen before.

Some kind of military officer? That still didn't explain why he was here.

"Are you going to help him?" Theo demanded. She looked up to find his freckled face set in his usual scowl, but she could also see the worry in his eyes.

"I'm not sure if I can," she said honestly. She also didn't like the fact that he was armed, although given his size he could easily overpower her even without a weapon.

Perhaps it would be better to disarm him before she tried to wake him up. She gingerly reached for his belt, but just as she touched the fastening, a hand closed over hers. Long, strong fingers gripped her hand, not painfully, but completely inescapably.

She gasped, and looked up to find his eyes had opened. Blue eyes, startlingly bright, were focused on her face.

"I'm just trying to help you," she said quickly. "I'm Talia. What's your name?"

He frowned and opened his mouth as if about to speak, but then his lids fluttered closed again and his hand went limp.

"Don't you die on me," she muttered, putting her hand over his chest again. To her relief, his heart was still beating as steadily as before, and she gave Theo a relieved look. "He's alive, but we need to get him inside as soon as possible."

The bigger question was how. She removed the belt as she thought about it.

"I saw Papa make a sled once," Theo said hesitantly, "using a blanket tied to two long branches."

Her chest ached—he so rarely mentioned either one of his parents—but she nodded calmly. "That's a good idea. We could use my cloak instead of a blanket. We just need to find two long branches, as straight as possible.”

She looked around and spotted a couple of fallen trees through a gap in the surrounding woods. To her surprise, Theo joined her when she went to investigate.

"Better make sure you do it right," he muttered, but without his usual level of animosity. Who would have thought that a wounded alien might actually break through some of his walls?

They moved through the gap in the trees, and both of them came to a halt at the same moment as the reason for the downed trees became apparent.

A spaceship was half-buried in the side of the mountain.

The snow it must have melted when it crashed was already turning to ice again, and broken trees were scattered like kindling all around it.

"I guess that explains where he came from.” Even though she’d read about such things, she’d never expected to actually see one.

“Is that a spaceship?" Theo asked, his voice awed. "Mama told me about them, but I thought they were just fairy tales."

"It looks pretty real to me," she said. She hesitated, then added, "But I think maybe we should keep it a secret."

Sarah might have told Theo about spaceships, but she doubted that anyone else in the village talked about them. And the last thing they needed was to be the focus of their fears.

Thankfully, Theo nodded immediately. "Yeah. It's our secret."

"Right. Then, let's see if we can find some branches."

They managed to find two relatively straight branches and used Theo's pocket knife to trim off the smaller branches. Then they tied her cloak to the branches and somehow managed to roll the huge male onto the makeshift sled. As they did, she saw a patch of blood in the snow beneath him and found the corresponding gash in his side. At least the snow seemed to have stopped most of the bleeding. He was much taller than her cloak which meant that the lower part of his legs would drag through the snow, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

She picked up the end of the sled, careful to avoid those wicked-looking horns. Theo surprised her once again by coming to stand next to her, grabbing one of the branches.

"He's going to be heavy," she warned.

"I'm strong enough." His chin was jutting out pugnaciously, and she decided not to argue.

Although the way home was downhill, it was going to be a long, hard trip, especially in the gathering dusk. But as she looked over at Theo standing at her side, she found she didn't mind. For the first time they were working together, just like a family.