Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Both Crinkshaw and Ronan insist on coming with us, and although I’ll never reveal any sort of weakness to the coven, I’m glad to have them by my side.
I debated bringing more with me, but the Hollow of Mischief can react poorly to undead energy, and this might be one of those cases where less is more.
Against my wishes, Ronan insists on strapping his enormous battle axe to his back. Its name is Sally.
“Why not simply announce to the entire town that we’re striding into a mystery dimension?” I huff, folding my arms in irritation.
“Why, Mr. Draven,” Holly purrs, looking every inch the satisfied cat. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you flustered before.”
“I’m not flustered. This isn’t decorous.”
Ronan scoffs. “Decorum when we’re marching into a maze of mischief packed with elves?
” His voice goes to a mocking falsetto. “Should we make tea, or bring a bottle of red? Crinkshaw, do you have any biscuits we could bring? Someone look up what Miss Manners says is an appropriate cadeau d’h?te for entering a dimension of pure evil. Nuts?”
“Alright, alright.” I shush him and glance at Crinkshaw. “What do you have ready for us?”
Crinkshaw lifts a tin. “Shortbread, mince pies, and a thermos. Also, hand warmers.”
“I meant for Holly.”
“Oh. That.” Crinkshaw produces a bracelet and locks it around her wrist. “This will protect the young lady from any of the dimension’s more aggressive effects on humans.”
“Perfect. We’ll head to where the Hollow of Mischief should appear. Then we’ll capture it and answer the riddle. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Wait,” Holly holds up her hand. “Riddle? There’s a riddle?”
“There’s almost always a riddle when dealing with elves. They’re obsessed with them.” Ronan tests the blade of his axe with his thumb.
“What happens if we get the riddle wrong?” she asks.
“Don’t worry about that,” he shrugs.
“Ronan,” she repeats firmly. “What happens if we get the riddle wrong?”
“Tinsel tendrils of unspeakable festive malice will—” Crinkshaw starts, but I interrupt him with a clap of my hands.
“Great talk, everyone. Let’s get going.”
Unsatisfied, Holly pesters me about the riddle as we walk to the garage, but it’s honestly for the best that she doesn’t learn any more.
It’s not like we can do anything if we get it wrong.
We’ll be almost immediately destroyed, our very molecules being tossed to the cosmic winds like confetti. At least it will be quick.
We make our way through the grounds, and it affords Holly a new opportunity to tease me. That, more than anything else, distracts her from her questions. Lucky me.
“What kind of cars do vampires drive?” she asks playfully. “A hearse seems too on the nose. A stagecoach of some kind? Or, I know, some deathly sleek sports car?”
“Not quite,” I say.
The garage is home to a fleet of cars, each acquired by different members of my coven.
I throw open the broad, double doors and flick on the overhead lights.
They click on one at a time, chasing away the cavernous darkness.
The garage is the size of a small soccer field and full of all sorts of cars.
I click the fob in my pocket, and we all hear the cheerful chirp-chirp.
“Please be a Porsche. Please be a Porsche.” Holly is crossing her fingers and bouncing on her toes like a toddler who’s had too many candy canes. We walk past a row of Mercedes before coming to a stop in front of my car.
“Here we are.”
“This is a Toyota Camry.” Holly’s voice is flat and unimpressed.
“It’s economical,” I shrug.
“You are the most complicated vampire ever. I’ve met very few vampires and yet I feel very comfortable in saying that.”
We pile into the car. Or at least, we attempt to. Ronan loads his giant, preposterous axe in the trunk. Holly’s disapproval lingers, and, annoyingly, it matters to me more than it should.
“No offense,” Holly says as we try to configure ourselves, “but why is Crinkshaw coming?”
“What is the inoffensive version of that sentence?” Crinkshaw asks.
“We’ll need him.”
Everyone seems to be entertaining themselves by second-guessing me, and my patience is beginning to wear thin.
After some grunts and seat shifting, we manage to get everyone situated, and I warily pull out and take us to the road that leads to the outskirts of town.
Blinkers on. Complete stops. Not risky maneuvers.
Holly taps her fingers impatiently as we drive.
“If we went any slower, we’d be walking,” Holly notes.
“No one wins when you play games with traffic safety.”
I lean forward, making sure no cars are coming before inching out onto the road from the last intersection. Technically, sweating isn’t an option, but this is close enough. So I rub my hands on the steering wheel.
“This is absurd. At least go the speed limit.”
“Your odds of survival improve ten percent for every ten miles per hour you do not go.”
No one verifies this statistic.
“You’re immortal,” she huffs. “I’m the only one who might die if we crash, and I’m completely fine with going faster.”
I check my blind spot for the third time. There are no cars on the road, but you never know. The odometer shows we’re doing a dangerous, reckless speed. A frantic forty miles an hour. I pump the brakes a little.
“Oh my god,” Holly says. Her eyes are sparkling with humor, and even though it’s me she’s targeting, I like the way she teases me. “You’re afraid of driving, aren’t you?”
There’s no point saying anything. Besides, I don’t like to talk and drive. Concentration is important. Particularly when Holly’s sitting next to me.
“You are.” She laughs and claps her hands. “You’re afraid of driving.”
“Don’t be preposterous.”
“Crinkshaw?” Holly turns around to look. “Is he afraid of driving?”
“Oh, now you’re happy to have me on the trip?”
“It’s more accurate to say he’s afraid of cars,” Ronan interjects.
“They just don’t make any sense,” I huff. “Things the size of wagons shouldn’t move without horses. It’s indecent.”
“Every immortal has some modern invention that unsettles them,” Ronan says. “It’s a consequence of living across the ages.”
“What’s yours?” Holly asks.
“Bread makers,” he says without pause. “The machine accepts flour and eggs, hums ominously, and manifests bread. There is no difference between what they do and a warlock summoning a demon.”
Holly laughs, light and musical. “And you, Crinkshaw?”
“Postage stamps,” he says. “Miniaturized paintings with adhesive backs that enslave men to carry paper. Civilization shouldn’t hinge on glue and faith.”
Holly pokes me in the chest. “You’re an undead creature of the dark who drinks blood to live and hangs out with ghouls and monsters, and you think a car is unnatural?”
“It’s complicated.” I adjust the rearview mirror, feigning indignation.
“You’re inside and outside at the same time, moving while staying still, trapped in this metal rolling box powered by explosions and dinosaur blood.
Somehow, a free-floating steering rudder gives you control.
It’s nonsense. With horses, you point them and they mostly go. ”
“Steering rudder?”
“That’s not at all true,” Ronan pipes in from the back, presumably in an effort to be as unhelpful as possible. “Steering a horse-drawn wagon is impossibly complicated. He just hates cars.”
“Moving boxes of madness,” I mutter.
Holly is laughing so hard she can hardly breathe, and she’s lucky I find it so enchanting. If she were any of my coven, I’d be tempted to turn her into a bat.
It’s strange and a little wonderful how perfectly she fits in with our dynamic.
Crinkshaw and Ronan can be a bit much for outsiders, but Holly is giving it back as good as she’s getting it.
And I know my coven; they’re both enjoying themselves enormously.
I don’t adore being the topic of the jokes, but she’s having such a good time that it doesn’t seem to bother me very much at all.
We approach a windswept field, and I cautiously pull the car over. A quick check of the GPS confirms it. This is the place. It’s the definition of nowhere: an open, grassy plain broken only by the occasional pile of rocks and boulders. I get out, happy to stretch my legs.
“Are we lost?” Holly asks. “Did we run out of gas?”
Everyone else piles out of the car, and Ronan retrieves his axe from the trunk.
“Nope.”
Gracefully, I leap over the low wooden fence that marks the edge of the field and move through the snow-covered grass. The portal is close. I can practically taste the magic. Burnt syrup and peppermint. It has to be here. Where—
“Here, Sire.” Crinkshaw points like he’s rising from a crypt.
“I don’t see anything.” Holly hugs herself and hops from one foot to the other. Right. Humans feel the cold. Best to hurry.
Now that Crinkshaw has me facing the right direction, the outline of the portal comes into view.
“Exactly where I’d predicted it would be, give or take a few feet,” I say over my shoulder, giving her a winning grin. Four out of ten.
She blows into her hands.
My grin falters. I release a whisper of vampire power.
The portal to the Hollow of Mischief appears.
Holly screams.
It’s not the reaction I was hoping for.
To be fair, the portal is horrifying. It’s several stories tall, slick with rime and shadow, and emanates waves of monstrous evil.
Twenty-four shuttered windows line its height, each marked with a number, like a row of dark, watchful eyes glaring down at us.
With malevolence. One hangs half-open, and something red flutters from its edge—velvet, trimmed with pale fur, snapping softly in the wind like a warning.
It’s also quite an unflattering shade of peppermint green.
“It’s the world’s worst advent calendar,” she gasps, craning her head to peer at the monstrosity before us.
“It’s not great,” I agree. “But if we solve the riddle, we can get inside.”
“What happens if we don’t solve the riddle correctly?” Holly asks.
“Garden gnomes will materialize to pelt you with hard candy and—” Crinkshaw starts to say, but a hand over his mouth cuts him off. I beam maniacally at Holly.
“Nothing!” Slowly, carefully, I remove my hand from his mouth, ready to clap it back down if needed. “It doesn’t matter because we’ll get the riddle right. We always get the riddle right. Or at least he does. That’s why we brought him. Crinkshaw is fiendishly clever at riddles.”
“And decorating and cooking,” Holly says flatly.
“Yes. Those too.”
“I’m a Renaissance zombie,” Crinkshaw deadpans.
He steps forward and squints at some markings on the side of the structure. He reads aloud:
Think on the Holly’s Eve of cheer,
Two digits open, drawing mayhem near.
“What does that mean?” Holly whispers. “Why does this door know my name? I don’t want a giant nightmare calendar to know my name. This is worse than when an ex likes your posts.”
I shrug. “It’s how magic works. Crinkshaw, you have the answer?”
“Twenty-four. Christmas Eve. Eve of cheer.”
“There was an S,” Holly says, backing away from the calendar. “Digits. More than one.”
“Two and four, that’s two digits,” Ronan says triumphantly.
Holly frowns. “No, it isn’t. Do you know how numbers work?”
“It will be fine,” I soothe, certain that it will be anything but.
I wave a thread of magic toward the window marked twenty-four.
The structure flares to life, glowing white, and Holly immediately buries her face in the back of my coat.
I lift a hand to shield my eyes against the brightness, which rather unfortunately prevents me from properly appreciating this moment.
When the light finally fades and the air clears, the calendar is gone. In its place stands a frost-covered archway, filled with a glimmering nimbus of multicolored light. Bells tinkle softly in the background. Something dangles from the entranceway, and I reach forward to cup it in my hand.
“Look,” I say. “Mistletoe.”
I waggle my eyebrows at Holly and deploy every last ounce of charm I possess, letting the silver of my eyes catch the light reflecting off the snow as I lean in. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly. At a pace that makes women swoon.
It hardly registers. She’s too busy clutching her chest and breathing deeply.
“I hate magic so much,” she says. “So very, very much. None of this was covered in Event Planning School.”
“There’s an entire school for that?”
“It’s a series of online courses.”
I laugh and rub her arm because there’s nothing else to be done.
“We’ll be in and out before anyone notices. Ronan, be so kind as to lead the way. Let us enter the Hollow of Mischief.”