Silent Nights Excerpt

***Silent Nights takes place between The Shattered Ones (Book 1) and In the Unbreaking (Book 2). Mild spoilers for Book 1 contained herein!***

Lemons weren’t hard to come by. Neither were oranges. In this climate and urban setting, I could be certain of finding both in almost any back yard or roadside planting.

Sugar, on the other hand, was more difficult to find. I’d had to go three different places, call in two favors, and trade one extremely valuable piece of technology for one pound of powdered sugar and another of regular.

And time? Impossible. Between Blood Angels, civilian needs, and a fledgling city government, my days were fully packed from sun-up to sun-down—and never mind the things I wanted to be doing. Which was why I was awake at 1am, scraping pulp and membranes, slicing peels, and boiling water.

The kitchen was filling with steam and I was quoting Macbeth—act four, scene one, to be precise—over the third batch of candied peel when a sleepy voice came from behind me.

“Why are you still up?”

By the accent, the somewhat shy timbre of the voice, and the lateness of the hour, it could only be one person.

“I could say the same to you.” I turned to face Gabriel, hiding a smile at how messy his curly hair was. Alertness sparked through his cyan eyes, and there was a tension to his shoulders that suggested he’d been surprised awake. Given how our last month had gone, I had a good guess as to how. I sighed and set aside the stirring spoon, angling to face him while still keeping an eye on the simmering peels. “What woke you this time? Nightmare?”

He frowned and tucked his arms tight to his torso. “Yeah. Not mine, though. Caleb’s.”

“Oh.” Just like that, there went my peace for the evening. I always felt better during these types of season when I could control something—hence my decision to candy citrus peels at 1am—but that wasn’t the case for everyone. Caleb, in particular, seemed unaffected by the darkness we regularly encountered, but then it’d come out in nightmares later. I hadn’t realized how frequent they were until Gabriel had begun waking to them…and lately it’d been at least once a week.

I reached behind me to shut off the stove. “He’s okay? You okay?”

“I’m fine,” he reassured me. “He’ll be fine too. I was able to get him out before he woke up all the way, so hopefully tomorrow he won’t remember it.” Gabriel rounded the end of the counter, tipping his head and staring at the sugar-dusted citrus peels mounded on cutting boards. “…What are you doing?”

“Alchemy.” I plucked a strip of lemon peel from the pile and handed it to him. “Behold how with only three ingredients, I can save what might’ve otherwise been thrown into the compost. And it’s tasty,too.”

Gabriel took a tentative nibble, then his expression brightened and he put the whole piece in his mouth. “It’s good!” he said with his mouth full. “I don’t think I’d ever heard of doing something like this. What are you going to use them for?”

I pulled a slotted spoon from the holder beside the stove and began scooping peels from the pot of syrup. “Something for Christmas.”

His expression went blank for a moment. “That’s…right…” he said after a few seconds. “I forgot it was next month. What calls for orange and lemon peels?”

“Something called ‘stollen’; it’s a sweet bread with stuff in it. Here…” I set down the spoon and reached to lay a hand against his forearm, focusing hard on the memory and trusting that his power would let him see it.

“Egg yolks now.” Mama’s hands went over mine, guiding my fingers to separate yolks from whites. “Two. Bloop! Bloop!”

The machine whirred, hook spinning to knead the dough until it became smooth and pliable, fragrant with yeast and warm with spices.

“Last bit,” Mama said, scraping the dough from the bowl and turning it onto the countertop. “I like to finish kneading on my own. It makes the dough happy.”

I sank my hands into the dough beside her, patting and punching and squeezing until my hands were sticky and Mama said it was time for both the dough any myself to take a nap. Together we put the dough to bed beneath a damp towel, and I—after receiving a thorough scrub with a washcloth—departed to take my own rest.

“I like that,” Gabriel said as I pulled my hand away. His face had gone contemplative. “Does it really make the dough happy when you knead it yourself?”

A scoff rattled in my throat. “I don’t think so, but that’s what my mother always said.” I looked around the kitchen. “Here we don’t have a choice but to do it by hand.”

Gabriel shrugged and snuck another piece of lemon peel. “So that’s what you’re making?” At my nod, he asked, “Are you going to bake it tonight?”

“Not tonight,” I yawned. “It takes hours. I was just going to make the peels tonight. Tomorrow, though, assuming it stays quiet—”

Both Gabriel and I jumped as the lights in the living room clicked on with a ka-chunk of relays connecting.

“Not again,” he groaned, his voice almost lost in the garbled electronic voice of our station’s broadcast system. “You had to say it?”

“Sorry!”

We both started running, him to his room for his uniform, me to the bay to start the truck and get my armor on. As the others joined us and we screeched out of the station toward yet another inevitable fight, some kind of warmth lingered in my chest.

Maybe this really was the right idea.

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