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  The Oldest Elf

  Copyright © 2008 Viola Grace

  ISBN: 978-1-55487-211-4

  Cover art by Martine Jardin

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by eXtasy Books

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  The Oldest Elf

  Viola Grace

  Chapter One

  “Stupid freaking Christmas, stupid freaking holidays!” Therefore, there was no one to hear her as she steered her car through the ice and snow of a blizzard on her way home from the seventieth holiday party she had been forced to attend, big deal. Venting to her own ears had always been soothing for Anora Snow, it was a way of keeping her body calm while her mind was racing.

  Only her best friend’s Christmas party could have gotten her out on such a miserable night, and only the wandering hands of one of the other guests could have sent her home in a blizzard. Realistically, she only lived two towns over, the drive should have only taken her half an hour, so why was she still on the road two hours later and what was that flash of light two miles back? Anora had never heard of lightning in a snowstorm, but there was a first for everything.

  Why did people insist on getting together at the holidays to strictly make others miserable? Cynthia had been so proud of her new home, her new husband and had totally ignored the little matter of him groping his new secretary. The eggnog was flowing a little too freely when the fight broke out and the new secretary had a jealous husband. Accusations flowed and punches were exchanged. The blizzard raging outside kept other partygoers watching the merriment, but Anora had enough. She was out of there.

  Now, she didn’t know where she was. There were no road signs, no landmarks and nothing visible through the blinding sleet except reindeer and a sleigh.

  “What the hell?” She tried to avoid the impact, but the collision was unavoidable. The last thing she remembered was, “Shit, my seatbelt works.”

  —

  Sahn-Tah Kelas dismounted from the sleigh in seconds and was cursing under his breath as he had been from the moment that he let the reindeer have their heads. So, they had been trying for their own personal land speed record when they ran over the hood of a bright blue sedan. What the car was doing this close to the workshop was beyond him. There were no roads here, no settlements, no one for hundreds of miles. So, how could this woman be bleeding in her vehicle in what amounted to a large field?

  He lifted his head in the blinding snow and tasted the air. Magic. Strong magic, portal magic. Someone sent her here, and he could only imagine that it was for her to die. She would never survive in the storm, let alone be able to find any help out here. There was simply no one to help her.

  “Come on, strange lady. Time to get out of your death trap.” The reindeer were standing by, nothing short of a nuclear blast could damage them in anyway. The shape-shifters loved their duties, even if it was a penal sentence for misuse of magic in Underhill.

  He unclipped her seatbelt and scooped her away from the remnants of her airbag. They had really collided with some force. He was amazed that she had survived it. Her chestnut hair was stained with blood as was her nose and forehead. Sahn couldn’t see the color of her eyes, but he would bet that they matched her hair.

  She was limp in his arms as he carried her to the sleigh. Her car would have to wait for after the storm. Some of his indentured elves would attend to it. He settled her into the sleigh, covering her with his coat and then a soft blanket of fur. It would still be close to an hour to the workshop and he didn’t want her freezing, his own body was immune to the cold. The soft feel of her in his arms had heated his blood. He wouldn’t be needing any covering for quite a long time. The cold would do him some good. It might even help his cock to relax again.

  The blizzard parted for him as storms always did when the reindeer took flight. They churned against the winds and energies of the earth as they worked their way back home. He didn’t need to tell them where they were going, they knew the instant that he brought her back to the sleigh that they were heading home.

  When the snowflake loomed on the horizon, he breathed a sigh of relief. His stranger had been muttering under her breath and had started to flail in the confines of the coat and furs. She wasn’t awake, but she wasn’t happy.

  He couldn’t open the portal for landing and keep her confined, so he stopped trying to hold her down and simply let the magic melt a hole in the ice of the giant snowflake that marked the workshop. They set down with a slight thump and she landed an instant later, crying out as her hand broke her fall.

  When an elf rushed up to assist him, he snapped, “Get Galmor over here. He’s a healer, isn’t he? Have him meet me in my quarters.” Once again he picked up his strange burden, this time he could feel her body more fully as his own body was now nude from the waist up. She moaned as he moved her and his lower body clenched at imagining her moaning under different circumstances.

  “Get a grip you idiot! You don’t even know if she is married.” He often muttered to himself, it helped him think. He had been sent here initially because of his penchant for indulging with women, now there was a woman with him, broken and bleeding, and all he could think about was how she would look naked. He was a pig.

  Galmor was one of his newest recruits, sent to the workshop for insulting a member of the elven royal family. He was also a healer of the highest calibre, and was waiting in Sahn’s chambers.

  “What the hell did you do to her?” Galmor reached for her.

  Sahn-Tah tried to keep him from her. “Her car hit the sleigh. I don’t know how she got here, but there was portal magic in the air.” He set her carefully on the bed and, with Galmor’s help, cut her clothing from her, down to her underwear. Blood and scratches marred her ivory skin, but of greatest concern was the broken arm.

  “Hold her while I do this. She isn’t going to like it.” Galmor waited until Sahn was holding her down and then he straightened her arm.

  Sahn would never forget her scream. Her body arched against his hands and he held her down. Held her until Galmor’s magic had begun to knit her bones, held her while her body slumped onto the bedding and held her while tears leaked from her unconscious eyes.

  He splinted and wrapped her arm while Galmor worked on the more superficial damage, then took her hand in his own. He pressed the back of her knuckles to his forehead and sighed. She would be healed. She would completely recover and then he would discuss her selection of red and white satin underwear. He particularly liked the gingerbread man on her panties.

  Chapter Two

  She was hung over and had been playing tennis with a cannonball. It was the only explanation for the throbbing in her head and arm. The air smelled spicy, crisp and, when she opened her eyes, she knew that she was in a coma and hallucinating. The bed she was in was covered in red and black velvet,
and the walls were lit from within. Jewels within glass. It looked like sculpted ice. That was not the most vivid of her dreams however. There was a beautiful man with snow-white hair and bright blue eyes staring at her, wearing only a red pair of trousers and a wide black belt.

  “Whatever I had to drink, I should cut back on the dosage.” She shook her head and blinked several times, but her vision remained sitting there, smiling at her.

  “You were not drinking at all. There was no trace of alcohol in your system.”

  She shook her head gingerly. Nope. He was still devastating. “I was driving, right? No I don’t drink and drive. Never have. What hit me?”

  Her mystery man took a deep breath. “My sleigh. I am Santa Claus.”

  She lay back and absorbed that, then pulled the coverlet over her head. She had brain damage. That had to be it. The tugging on her covers made her look at her hallucination once again. He gathered the covers at her waist and helped her to sit up.

  “You were driving in a blizzard, not the brightest of moves, and you travelled through a portal that brought you near my workshop. That is where your car was struck. The elves have brought your sedan here for repairs, but some of the newer ones are begging to learn to drive it. Do they have your permission?”

  “Can they fix anything that they do to it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell them to go nuts then.” She thought about what she was agreeing to. “Okay, if what you are saying is real, and I personally think that this is a hallucination, then can the elves reach the pedals?”

  His amazing blue eyes blinked at her for a moment and then he broke into laughter. He howled with mirth, his hair sliding forward to expose very pointy ears. Now she had to be delusional, he seemed to be an elf.

  Oh. My. God. Her face burned with embarrassment. If he was an elf, he could definitely reach the pedals. He was six feet tall if he was an inch, and very fully grown.

  “You said your name was Santa?”

  “Sahn-Tah Kelas, you may call me Sahn.”

  “Anora Snow.”

  His lips twitched again. “Snow?”

  “No jokes, Snow.” She crossed her arms over her chest and that is when she noted two things. One, her right arm was in a splint, and two she was down to her holiday underwear. “What the hell happened? Did I hurt my arm in the crash?”

  “No. That happened when you fell out of the sleigh upon landing. It was healed for you, but will still be tender for a few days to a week. The splint is the reminder for you to take it easy.”

  “What about my clothes?”

  “We had to cut them off. They were covered with blood and hampered our getting to your arm.” He seemed most reasonable, but he moved to the other side of the room and opened a large wardrobe. “The elves were fighting over who got to make clothing for you. Women’s clothes are not often seen around here.”

  He pulled out a gown and brought it over to the bed. She admired the fabric for an instant before yanking it over her head to keep her skin from his view. The neckline was a little tight and she flailed about a bit before hands helped her straighten the fabric and smooth it over her body.

  “Your eyes are black.”

  She blinked. He was very close and he smelled like peppermint, cool and spicy at the same time. “Yeah, it is a weird thing, and it really throws people off.”

  “I thought they would be brown.”

  “So do most people.” She shrugged at him. The dress was snug and suddenly she was filled with a restless energy. “Can I go for a walk somewhere?”

  “Certainly, but some of the elves here have gone a while without female companionship, so it would be best if I escorted you.”

  “It sounds like a prison.”

  “It is. This workshop is a penal facility used by the royal family of Underhill for those who have committed real or perceived crimes against the Fairy.” He tugged a dark green tunic into place and buckled his belt on top of it. “Shall we?”

  “Can I get some shoes?”

  He blushed. His face coloured brightly. He quickly moved back to the wardrobe and returned with soft suede boots and a pair of socks. Socks were not sexy, but they did make the boots fit better. Properly attired, she nodded, “Let’s go. I need to walk.”

  The gown fell to her ankles and Sahn held her hand as she stabilized after lying in bed for an unknown period. When she looked up at him and smiled, “Ready and stable,” they were on their way.

  The doors to the bedroom swung open and the hallway took her breath away. It was carved of glass or ice, the floor a reassuring white while the walls were transparent. Sahn kept a slow pace as she took a look at everything. They were walking on a gallery, which overlooked the workshop. Over a hundred elves were visible, each forming something with their hands and then dropping it onto a conveyor belt. The elves that she saw were not the cute cherubs of modern tales, but tall strapping examples of masculinity with pointed ears and the flowing hair of other centuries. Wow.

  “You should see the men in the wrapping department.” The hot breath was in her ear and she blushed as she realized that she had been caught staring. She couldn’t help it, one of the elves had bent over as she looked and fired her a wink that melted her heart. Well, if her heart was located between her thighs.

  “I don’t think I have the strength.” Her lips twisted in a smile. Anora always had been good at laughing at herself. Being the only woman in a complex full of male elves may tingle certain women’s fantasies, but she was not a group activities kind of gal. That much attention might kill her.

  “Shall we visit the dragon’s cave?” He began to lead her down another hall, away from the gallery.

  “You have a real dragon?”

  “Of course he is real, but he is currently with his new wife in Silverwood. They have a rather lovely house there, or so I am told.” He smiled down at her. “With a few business exceptions, I don’t get out much.”

  “Oh, right. Christmas. When is that by the way?” She didn’t know how long she had been out or even if she was still in a place affected by time.

  “Three days from now the reindeer and I will fly to grant wishes to boys and girls around the globe.”

  “Don’t you deliver toys?”

  “Sometimes, and sometimes I fulfil a Christmas wish. That was my sentence originally, to fulfil one wish per child every year.”

  They were travelling down at an angle now. “Your sentence? You are part of the penal colony?” That was news. Sahn-Tah was a prisoner.

  “Do you want the whole story?”

  “Do we have time?”

  “Certainly. I was a rake, a bounder and a cad. I enjoyed women, dozens of women, and they enjoyed me. But my activities created ill-feeling toward fairy folk in the region and soon we were being persecuted, especially by jealous husbands. As the Councils and Courts examined my activities, they found that I had sired a large amount of offspring, some of whom were rejected by their mothers and communities.”

  “They rejected babies?” The shock reverberating through her surprised her, but no one should reject a baby.

  “Half-elf babies. Yes, they did. But the deaths were on my head. If I had not simply loved and left the human mothers, those children would not have been. So the punishment for my behaviour was to be confined here at the Snowflake Complex and to grant wishes for unwanted children and children who needed one piece of hope in their lives.”

  Part of her was cold inside. He had abandoned his own offspring, probably didn’t know that they existed. “Christmas wishes.”

  “Not at first. I have been at this for centuries. At first I answered the most basic of wishes, food and shelter. But eventually the Christian movement solidified the holiday season and I do most of my work now in December.” He paused and looked at her. “I don’t normally let people see it, but would you like to see my private study?”

  “Sure, as long as you don’t ask me to see your etchings.” She giggled and the noise echoed in the suddenly
larger chamber. “Wow.”

  It was the opening to the dragon’s lair and it was huge.

  “How big is this dragon exactly?”

  “Over fifty feet from nose to tail.”

  “How big is his wife?”

  “Five foot five inches.” He snickered at the mental image that she must have been having. Her face puckered in surprise and her eyes narrowed.

  “So how do they?”

  “He is a shape shifter. His shifted form is around seven feet tall or so.”

  “Still, ouch.”

  He snorted. His laugh echoed in the large chamber. “We don’t need to invade his domain, come with me.”

  “Where?”

  His snow-white eyebrows waggled suggestively, “I want to show you my etchings.”

  Chapter Three

  She giggled the whole way through the complex, each elf that she met bowed deeply to her and nodded to Sahn. He really seemed to be in charge, in some capacity. His study was beautiful when they finally arrived, navy blue walls covered with snowflakes. She reached out to touch one and he pulled her back by the hand he still had possession of. “No. You should not touch those until I explain what they are.”

  He offered her tea from a steaming pot on the small table in the centre of the room, after he had seated her on one of the couches that lined the area. Apparently a lot of lying down went on in here. The splint on her arm was a little awkward, but she managed the teacup with a minimum of fuss.

  “Anora, each of those snowflakes is a child’s wish. If you touch it, without a crystal globe in hour hand, the wish will imbed itself in your mind and you will not be able to remove it. This does not sound very threatening, I know, but these children are often abused, abandoned and confused. Their wishes are not for the shiniest new toy on the market. Those requests go to another portion of the facility closer to the workshop, the Naughty and Nice room. These wishes cannot all be answered as the child wishes, but fate can be nudged on occasion to help out.” He handed her the tea and urged her to drink.