Santa’s Secret

Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

brANCA

H e was the same as ever. All sugar, milk, and moral disappointment.

“I used to think we knew each other,” was all he said.

Nothing felt worse than disappointing him. I’d felt it many, many times before.

I wasn’t ready. Not to see him. Not for us to be this close again. Not to pretend it didn’t matter.

But if a century wasn’t long enough, I’d never be ready. “My business is with Noah.”

“You don’t have business with Noah. Noah, go to bed.”

“Fuck no!”

The man who had been sainted many times over turned to him with his special kind of quiet reproach. The kind that made good people behave and bad people know how bad they were. “Branca’s not here to hurt you. He won’t hurt anyone. I know you use those words to feel brave, but it’s okay. You don’t have to be scared.”

“Everyone fears Krampus!” I reared up on my bent legs and thrust out my chest, looking as large as I could, which was very.

“I don’t,” said Christophoros, deflating me.

But he didn’t laugh. I wished he would laugh.

I knew I sounded sulky. I always did when a joke fell flat. “You lack sense.”

“You lack a sense of proportion.” He was scolding me now, and I hadn’t even cursed. It was warm and familiar, the best kind of blanket in winter, and perhaps if I kept him going perhaps he would forget what had happened between us.

Or at least, forget to talk about it.

“I would tell you if he was yours,” said the old saint-man, as if we’d seen each other yesterday.

“What if I decide for myself?”

He made that little annoyed huffing noise just the way I remembered. “I have a knack.”

“Perhaps I’ve learned your knack.”

He waved a hand behind him toward the child still poised at the bottom of the stairs. “Clearly not.”

“Would you say that to learn this knack...” I bent down to come forward on the hard palms of my hands and mismatched feet, then loomed over him, fast, as best I could. He didn’t blink. “...I would have to be someone special?”

Another annoyed sigh. “I’m not special, Branca. It’s just a knack.”

I rested back on my haunches. “I think I can learn this knack. After all, I learned to build stone walls, and knitting. I think I can learn it.”

I don’t remember if I was contrary before I met Chris. I can’t remember that far back; what I can remember, I’d rather forget.

He dropped the argument before I was bored with it. It was so much fun watching the world’s most beloved man claim he was nothing special. So wise about everyone else and so blind to himself.

He must be right about the child; he always was. If the boy had been naughty, there would already have been violence, perhaps bargaining, threats, or all three.

Instead the boy just looked wary, and I did indeed feel guilty for frightening him. Though to be fair, he had locked me in a closet.

I grinned at the little boy with all my teeth. At that age they cannot tell the teeth of predators from the teeth of prey. I waggled my ears to distract him from my horns. “You’re ignoring Santa’s orders? Don’t you like presents at all?”

I made my ears flap on alternating sides, left, then right, and saw the boy almost smile. He wasn’t frightened now.

So I leaned in close, let my voice purr. “Does it feel good to push people down?”

The little boy glanced at Santa. He knew he should give the right answer. “No.” But it looked like he meant it.

“It felt good to break that window.” Without Santa’s network of informants I have to keep my ears to the ground. But they’re big. People in the neighborhood knew things, and they said them late at night while I hid in their basements, never knowing I was there.

This time the boy’s eyes stayed on me. “For a minute,” he admitted, and I duly admired his honesty. “Then I felt bad.”

And that was what I could do that Santa couldn’t. Understand feeling like that.

“So are you naughty or nice?” I didn’t blink.

“I did something wrong,” said Noah, back straight. “Do I get a second chance?”

I backed up. Children prefer I keep my distance. “You got a visit from Santa. Santa means a second chance. The only remaining question is what sort of second chance you want.”

“Noah,” said the shining light of the north, “go to bed. There’s nothing else in the closet.”

“Not so.” There was a peanut butter sandwich in the closet.

I know it makes me bad, but I can’t resist twisting him around. I never could.

“Go check.” The kid prodded Christophoros—Chris; I find it hard to shorten his name—with his plastic bat. I liked his unwillingness to back down.

Chris’ eyes turned back to me, all brown and green shot with blue and gold—my favorite kind of rainbow. “Leave,” he said with an empty, blank voice that made me feel hollow. As if he wanted me gone. As if I already were.

As, admittedly, I had been.

Perversely, it made me stay. “Will you not check the closet?”

I bounced a little on my haunches, giving him room to reach the closet door, hiding that this moment had sprung upon me, that I had no plan for it. That I’d expected never to see him again.

My imagination had never stretched as far as fate bringing him to the one house where I’d lingered. That we still did similar work and were bound to cross paths.

He smelled the same. Rich and sweet. I was almost dizzy with the scent of him. The first time I tasted a marshmallow, a pillow of sweet vanilla, I knew it would remind me of him forever.

I hadn’t eaten a marshmallow in decades.

Chris just sighed as he turned to the kid. “Branca likes to...” Santa doesn’t swear. I could practically hear him trying to think of what to say besides stir up shit. “Cause trouble,” he finally finished.

“He didn’t bring any friends, did he?” Noah spared me a glance. He might not be frightened, but he didn’t trust me. “You don’t have friends, right?”

That stung. I growled.

Chris turned to me. “Do you?” he asked with the same defeated quietude he’d had when telling me to go.

I hated this. Hated myself . “Check the closet yourself,” I growled, unwilling to help him in any way.

This couldn’t be happening. I’d been so careful for so long, slinking from shadow to shadow, never spending too long in one place. I didn’t dare hope he was looking for me; I knew he wasn’t.

I didn’t expect him to. He had his work. It had been almost a century; the world was large.

I’d forgotten how he could do miracles. Like making the world this small.

Grumbling, he leaned through the closet door into the dark. The boy and I both saw him wave his arm. “Where’s the wall?” he muttered.

“It’s bigger than it looks,” I offered, unable to hide my grin. He must be behind schedule; he always had a schedule.

But I didn’t, and the best way to convince him this moment didn’t matter as much as it did was to make fun.

“Oh for?—”

Santa doesn’t swear. Even before he became famous for the ho ho ho and the sleigh, both of which he mostly discarded, he never liked swearing.

I like to think only I annoy him enough to even consider it.

“You get in first.” He grabbed my fur and shoved.

I lurched half into the closet. My grin faded. Touching me went way too far.

I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t familiar, the gentle warmth of those fingers, even the backs of them against my skin there, right where he knew he could grab me and move me, bigger though I was.

It reminded me of how helpless he’d been when I first found him wandering in the woods. Smaller, younger, starving. Crying.

He’d given me a purpose.

Before meeting him, I’d avoided villages and hearth fires, the way animals did.

But the heartless so-called people of his town? The ones who drove him into the woods? They deserved to be haunted by an equally heartless creature they couldn’t escape. They deserved to be asked hard questions.

They deserved worse.

I had my ancestors’ teeth, wide blunt teeth good for cutting hay. But for that town I would have learned how to use them better.

Christophoros wouldn’t let me kill them.

I could have done it and kept quiet. But he’d have known. He always knew.

I did strangle the town guard, just a little. He’d followed Chris to the woods to steal the last of his clothes. I never mentioned it; Chris just knew.

I didn’t even kill the wretch, just strangled him a bit before letting him go. When I got to the cave where I’d hidden the human boy, my new charge just gave me the saddest look. He knew.

He’s the reason I didn’t burn that town to the ground. He’s the reason we went deeper into the woods. The reason I learned to cut logs for shelter instead of living wild like the animal I... still am. He’s the reason I tried to be better.

He gave that town a second chance.

Had I been prepared for this meeting, I’d have kept my distance. Resisted the urge to crowd closer when he followed me into the closet, trying to keep me in my corner with one hand.

But I wasn’t prepared and I couldn’t resist.

“You stay back,” he insisted, broad palm flat against me. So soft and hard all at once, like the rest of him. My memories whirled, rose, trapped me inside them like snow in a glass globe, blinding me.

His presence reminded me I’d once been playful. “What if I don’t?”

He sighed again. “If you can’t— oof! ”

Something shoved him from behind, launching him into my arms which closed around him. A reflex.

That was why I pulled him against my furred chest. Reflex.

I heard the snick of the lock turning again.

I roared with laughter.

“Quiet!” he hissed in the dark, and I tried, I really did. I shook with nearly silent laughter as he earnestly talked to the door. “Noah. Let us out, please.”

“No!” came the boy’s defiant shout. “You stay in there with your freak friend!”

I felt my smile fading again.

Chris made me laugh; other humans did not.

“It appears this one does belong to me,” I whispered into Chris’ ear, delighting in the little shiver I felt in his body, the way his muscles softened a little at the sound of my voice.

He hadn’t forgotten me.

I hoped he remembered the day I drove him through the forest with snowballs, trapping him against a tree. How my body had fallen against his, shaking with laughter, knowing he was strong enough to take the pressure, reveling in that strength.

He’d thrown his arms around my neck and laughed too, burying his face against my neck.

Then he’d turned and given me a kiss. His first kiss. Mine too. Ours.

He’d given me all his sweetness, all his strength.

It flowed from him, and there was nowhere else for it to go.

He didn’t sound sweet now. “This kid isn’t yours.” He sounded stubborn as ever. Immovable. We both shifted. Everything was quiet.

There was no way to know if Noah had gone. He was probably listening, right outside the door.

I settled back against the wall. The position made my knees ache, and I had no room to sit.

Chris is all sweetness and second chances; I prefer facts, however salty.

Chris never liked that.

I know the world is neither kind nor forgiving. But he was. With him so near, I felt forgotten parts of my soul lighting up as if I’d been a cold dead match awaiting his spark. As if I’d been locked in a black-and-white world that only he could paint with color.

Ignoring that just seconds ago his hand at my waist had shocked me, I did the same to him, grabbing his belt, adding new memories to the old ones of his soft-and-hard belly against the backs of my fingers and turned him to face me, half-crouched against the wall as I was. It made us almost the same height.

As if we’d seen each other yesterday, he fit right between my knees.

I couldn’t help the rumble in my chest. So familiar. So good.

So right.

And wrong.

“You look well.” I like facts, and it was just a fact. “You’ve gained some weight.”

“You look the same.”

Of course I did. “I grew older.”

“What are you doing here?”

“The old work.” I winced in the dark. “Our work.”

“In a closet?”

“It snowed this morning. I wanted a warmer place to sleep.” Like a wild animal, I thought but did not say; he already knew I was thinking it. “The door was open; I snuck in. There’s a basement. Good place to sleep the day away.”

“So how did you wind up in a closet?”

“I was cold,” I said drily, with no intention of admitting how it had happened.

With the smell of old wood around us, its dry warmth aging backward from both of us breathing in such a small space, I reached for shared memories of younger days. “Remember how you tried putting clothes on me in Istanbul?”

“You looked good in that coat.”

The silence got heavier and heavier, filling with the weight of the years apart.

“I couldn’t wear a coat without boots.” And no shoemaker had ever tried to fit me. They took one look at my feet, shouted to their gods, and shoved me out the door. “In town, everyone wears boots.”

“I didn’t like to visit towns without you.”

“We tried visiting together in Vienna,” I reminded him.

His body stayed stiff, but he brushed the tip of my ear with one hand, certain where I was even in the dark. “You left me in Vienna.”

I tried to sound careless. “You like Vienna.”

“I did before you left me there.”

This wasn’t him, this empty quiet. “Don’t you still? You loved its coffee.” I remembered the sweet taste of it on his lips and tried to crush my body’s reflexive response to that thought. “The rum-chocolate Sachertorte . Chausson aux pommes and cinnamon apples.”

In tiny, tiny increments I felt him relax a little, lean toward me. His knees bent a bit; I felt his thighs against mine.

I hoped my fur hid my shiver.

I’d always thought that if he could fit against me, he could fit anywhere.

He did remember the good parts. “Yes, in the eighteen hundreds. And the fourteen hundreds. Then back in the twelfth century. When we were poor, before we grasped banks. Remember? Back then I liked Viennese pastry.” He paused, then added reluctantly, “You stole all those florins to buy me pastry.”

Reminiscing while disapproving. My moral prince.

I wondered if the taste of those kisses was coming back to him too.

But as I said, he’s immovable. “Then you left me in Vienna without a word, without a note. Who does that?”

I couldn’t resist the scent of him. He smelled like candy and I was starving. Returning his slow, tentative gesture, I found the outer crescent of his ear in the dark, traced it with the tip of my nose. “Someone very bad. Very naughty.”

His knees got slacker but his voice stayed firm. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been?”

To the hour. Yet it was so easy to fit back together, so easy. “How have you filled the time? Or should I say, with whom?”

Yes, I’m also jealous. I never claimed to be good.

I couldn’t really place the tone of his barely breathed answer; incredulous, beyond exasperated. In nearly two thousand years, I’d heard nothing like it before. “You think I replaced you?”

“One reads many stories about Mrs. Claus.”

“From cartoonists who think I have a long beard and drive reindeer.” I could feel him wanting to swear, and honestly it felt good. It eased the ache in my knees. “You can’t believe I fell in love with someone else.”

And there he was, my Christophoros, my Sinter Claas. Mixing things he wanted to believe with facts. He could have found someone else. It wouldn’t have changed the fact that he’d loved me. He never feared possibility.

But I did.

He must know that. He knew my flaws better than he knew anyone else’s.

Surely in all this time he must have realized that forever couldn’t rest on hope.

I pretended to be better than I was. “I hoped you had. Found someone else.”

He reared back, constrained in the small space, far enough away that I could no longer touch the lobe of his ear with my tongue. Which I had been doing. Not consciously; it just happened.

He said, “I will never fall in love with someone else.” Such simple, easy words.

That he believed them cut me to the heart.

Before I recovered, I felt his arms tighten around my chest, his knee bending to dip between mine. “I was desperate to stop loving you. You crushed me. But I will never fall in love with anyone else. Some things you do only once. For me, that was falling in love with you.”

A hundred years of space threatened to disappear like smoke. I worked to stay still, not to wrap around him. Everything fought in my chest—shocked pride, tenderness, guilt, and most familiar, self-disgust. There wasn’t enough air; my eyes ached.

If I cried, if I bent, it would all be for nothing.

I knew I could not leave him twice.

I stayed silent. Moments dragged on and on. The things I wanted to say, longed to say, I kept ruthlessly locked inside. Something inside whispered hold him, never let this moment go, and I tried as hard as I could to listen, to stop time, to forget that we’d ever had a past or a future.

But he wanted something different, and he was used to getting his way.

In the dark, he reached out to lean his arm against the wall, his fist braced next to my head. I heard the creak of the wood. He is not weak.

He said, “So I’d really like an explanation.”

CHRIS

I dispense dreams. I keep some in my pocket.

So I know a dream when I see one.

This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. I’d stumbled into my own powder, or some fae realm where everything was backwards. Where snow made you warm and dark was light, and the air made bells and music. Where my dreams came true.

All the years I’d spent mourning the loss of us , the hole in my life, and now he was here, on Christmas Eve, locked with me in a closet that smelled of his fur and old wood and mouth-watering peanut butter.

I told myself I was hungry for the sweet nutty food, not for the rough-shale texture of his skin or the softness of his fur. Certainly not to revive the memory of him under my hands like he was now.

Losing him had taken away half my body. After seventeen hundred years together, it had felt like that. Like his arms, his hoof and foot, all belonged to me, were always within reach. The wound he’d made tearing us apart had only closed, not healed.

Now after so many years chopped in half he was back, all of him, all that used to belong to me—from his bristling eyebrows to his barreled chest, and especially the part I felt hardening, growing under the press of my belly.

And I’d longed for a hundred years to be whole again.

I wanted to wrap my legs around him and make him hold me up. I wanted to kiss him. That wasn’t true; I wanted to devour him. I wanted him back.

They were desperate, childish feelings. And we hadn’t been children in a long, long time.

Centuries ago our Christmas Eve had grown to swallow December. Then it crept into autumn. As my informant network grew and talk traveled faster, I’d created records, then systems of records, to keep my vast store of knowledge humming from year to year, long past the number of kids I could see in one night.

It had all been cold company when Branca had disappeared.

With him gone, my winter nights grew into forever summers; the sun never set and I wrote note after note after note, keeping more meticulous records than any medieval monk.

Occasionally I allowed myself an hour with my library card.

Libraries had always been treasure-houses of miracles. Oil lamps. Typewriters. Radios. So once they were invented, I went there to read self-help books.

I loved those books. They didn’t cure loneliness, but they explained it. I graduated to psychology textbooks, started following specific researchers’ careers. They gave me a word I’d always needed with Branca: self-loathing.

He’d never liked his body, even when we met in the forest so long ago. He’d taken my hand and shown me how to find nuts and mushrooms like I was worth the effort, yet never sought anything special for himself. He’d disliked his two kinds of feet, his fur, his horns, even his haunched legs.

I liked them from the start.

When we were very young, Branca’s tough skin and strength meant safety. Warmth and food were everything, and they became him, became friendship. Surviving in the forest takes all your time, especially if, like me, you won’t kill for food. My survival was his.

By the time we were older—which took a long, long time—all his parts became simply him. Branca. My only friend. My companion.

Eventually, my lover. He did that for me too.

When he left, it was something he did to me, and I remembered it very well.

Recalling it helped cool me, helped stop me completely giving in to the desperate need to touch him, really feel him again. I kept my fist jammed into the wood over his shoulder. There was nowhere to go, yet I couldn’t trust him to stay. “I need to know why you left.”

He said nothing. He was so good at that.

I breathed in, let it out. I kept so many notes about self-loathing, and notes about me too. About losing your home over and over, and being afraid. I knew I had scars; I didn’t know why he’d ripped them open. After a hundred years of silence. I was over it. “ Why? I’ve had that word ringing in my head way too long. I need to know when you stopped loving me. I need to know why. ”

We were both trying to stay quiet. For all we knew, Noah was just on the other side of the door, listening. I had a moment’s sympathy for every parent faced with relationship problems among their lurking children.

Branca was trying to be quiet too, so I felt rather than heard the rumble deep in his chest. Disapproving. Angry. A contradiction without words, because he found words too hard.

His arms tightened around my chest and lifted me off my feet.

That doesn’t happen to guys my size. Only with him. Branca is bigger.

I couldn’t help it; I closed my eyes and reveled in it. I had dreamed of this for so long. If this was a dream, I didn’t want to wake up. Not yet.

I felt his hot breath against the side of my neck. His big teeth grazed the skin there.

He knew I could never resist that.

“I didn’t stop loving you.” It was barely a sound. It broke me.

“Then why? ” Night after endless night of wondering what I’d done, what I’d said. Night after endless night of looking for him—in front of me, behind me, in every kind of shadow. I felt anger rising, rare, unwelcome, but undeniably mine, not borrowed from Noah or anyone else. “We went everywhere... everything you wanted. I never held back.” I wrapped anger around me to keep myself still; unfortunately, it tightened my arms around his shoulders. “You wanted to see the world. I tried. What did you need that I didn’t give? Where did I fail?”

“ I failed.” Still so soft I could barely hear him, but I knew those words by the feel. He had always been ready to say that.

“I need more. I need it to make sense.” I’d never asked him for that, never required an explanation.

For instance, in all our years together he never told me where he came from. On good days, he’d joke about being raised by wolves. “Like Romulus and Remus,” he’d say, then show me a bird’s nest. On bad days, he’d just snarl.

So I didn’t even know where he’d learned to talk. But somewhere along the way, he had learned how. He just wouldn’t.

Clearly still wouldn’t.

The situation started to feel both dangerous and familiar. Not from teeth or claws; never that. Dangerous like I was about to spend another hundred years wondering what he was thinking.

Under my breath I said, “Put me down.”

He tilted my feet back to the ground.

But kept his arms locked around me.

It fanned the flames of my frustration even as something inside melted. I’d waited for this relief for so long. He didn’t hate me. He hadn’t stopped loving me.

I hadn’t done anything wrong.

I gave in to the urge to slide one thigh outside his; it slid his core closer to mine, and I felt again his silent growl.

So I too made barely a sound, even as I confessed.

“Do you know how many Christmas Eves I waited for you to come? Waited for you to ask if I’d been naughty? Stayed in one place so you could find me? I still live in Longyearbyen.” He knew exactly where it was, so far north the winters were sunless and tourists came to see northern lights. He liked living in the dark. “It’s melting, by the way. An avalanche destroyed our—the old house. I rebuilt it. Hoping you’d find me. I waited all this time.”

His furry lips against my throat must have felt me swallow.

“You should have forgotten me,” he muttered into the skin there.

“ How? ” I grabbed both his ears. I knew exactly how rough I could be with him, just like he knew exactly how rough he could be with me.

And as ruthlessly as I tried to forget, it all came flooding back. The young years; the endless miles; new city after new city, all the wonder and surprise, the taste of his mouth, the strength of his hands, and the endless, magical way he made love to me.

I kissed him.