Christmas Yet to Come by Marian Perera

only the bleakest face of winter. He could change that, at least for one night.
    All right, think . He had to be like her, innovative enough to turn a candlestick into a cutlery receptacle. What a pity about the snowfall; if not for that, he might have gone out to cut sprigs of holly and yew branches to fill vases. He could even have collected handfuls of wispy old-man’s-beard to decorate the edges of the shelves.
    Wait, there were pine cones. Mrs. Rowe used those as cheap firestarters, and he was sure she had plenty. He could scatter flour or salt to make the cones look tipped with snow or frost. That was a start. And he had plenty of leftover paper. He could do something with that, maybe make a lantern chain.
    Which might look childish and economical, to put it politely, something he wouldn’t normally have dreamed of doing. But there had been no self-pity at all in Laura’s voice when she’d spoken of what had happened to her, so he tried not to be embarrassed about his own situation either.
    Of course, she’d had years to come to terms with her life, or lack thereof. Though she didn’t look like a girl left sleeping forever beneath ice. Oh, she was young, but there was none of that girl’s innocence in the calm steady eyes that had seen too much. She hadn’t even blinked when she’d told him he would die unless she left.
    He still wasn’t sure what to make of that. If he’d been told someone had predicted his death, it would have sounded like cross-my-palm-with-silver nonsense that would only disturb the credulous. Not that it bothered him hearing it so directly, but he disliked it nonetheless. If the implication was that misfortunes up to and including murder were part of some great plan, Justin would have preferred not to believe he’d displeased any divine power to that extent.
    Of course, it could be argued that Laura had been sent to him for that very reason, to save him from an unjust death, but he didn’t like that either. It was hardly fair to her, to drop such an unasked-for responsibility in her lap. He could tell she enjoyed living again, and certainly eating again, but now she’d have to give that up, just as she’d lost everything else once. He wondered if she would keep any memories of him or if those would be gone too.
    He’d believed everything she said, he realized a moment later. Under any other circumstances, he might have thought she was either delusional or trying some confidence trick on him, and his profession had made him good at watching people’s faces and bodies for the involuntary signs they were lying or nervous.
    None of which had showed with Laura. Her crystal-grey gaze had met his directly, and she’d been more flustered at breakfast when she’d made the mistake of eating out of the sugar bowl. The truth certainly explained all those little eccentricities of hers. Not to mention how she’d ended up within locked gates wearing a shroud.
    After she’d left his bedroom, he had examined the wall carefully, running his hands over it for good measure, but it felt like solid stone. So what she’d done left him three choices. He could believe there was something wrong with his eyes and/or mind, which was why he’d just seen a woman walk through a wall, he could come up with his own explanation of how that trick had been performed, or he could accept her story.
    He was perfectly sane, he didn’t see things that weren’t there, and he couldn’t unravel the secret behind the trick. Which left only one option. Just his luck. If she was telling the truth, she’d be gone before the next morning.
    Determinedly, he turned his thoughts away from that and went back down to the kitchen for the pine cones. Finding a barrel of apples in the cellar, he carried up an armful of those as well, and as he worked to decorate the parlor he forgot everything else but the novelty of the task. He even found himself