13:120 Gifted by Kelley Armstrong

Gabriel's Gargoyles - set in the Cainsville universe but back when Gabriel was young.  Every year in Cainsville the children hunt around to find as many of the gargoyles hidden around the town as they can.  The child who finds the most gets a prize and the one who finds them all will get a gargoyle made in their image put up somewhere in the town.  Gabriel doesn't care about having a gargoyle made in his image but he is determined to find them all simply because he knows he can so every time he is allowed to visit his Aunt Rose, he spends part of his time wandering the town in search of them.  When he isn't doing that, he is working to try and get his Aunt the perfect Solstice present.  Gabriel has plans and he will make sure they all come to fruition.

I really enjoyed seeing Gabriel as a young boy but it's not a happy home life and definitely explains a lot of his attitudes when we finally meet him.  I also found the interactions between him, Patrick, and the Elders to be an interesting bit of backstory.  Definitely not a necessary read to understand anything in the series but still nice backstory.

The Puppy Plan - Elena and Clay have Kate out on a shopping trip and Logan is out wandering when he discovers a half-dead puppy.  Knowing that this is what Kate wants more than anything, he resolves to nurse it back to health and try to convince his parents to allow him to give it to her as a Christmas present.  Things don't go quite as planned when a mutt shows up on the property and the surprise ends up being blown before he can come clean to them.

Ok, Elena and Clay were always my favorite characters in the Women of the Otherworld series and I'm so thrilled that so many of the novellas and short stories coming out since the end of the series have focused on them (and even more thrilled that it's now a TV show!).  Getting to see their interactions with their kids is fabulous and this was wonderful getting to be inside Logan's head and hearing his internal debates and dilemmas.  I'm glad I waited until now to read it though because they reference something that happened in the new novel "Forsaken" that I just received and talked about how traumatic it had been for Kate but without ever mentioning what had happened.  Needless to say, that moved quickly up my "to read" list.  

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