6. Chapter 6
The Fine Print of Being a Reindeer
Dasher
Iwoke to the smell of the wood I now knew as pine blended with the stinging tinge of antiseptic.
My head throbbed with a headache that sat behind my eyes like a prize fighter punching me with a closed fist at full strength.
If I didn’t know better I would swear that my brain could feel every crevice inside my skull.
“Shit,” I groaned, rubbing my eyes. Though my touch was light, I saw stars. “That hurts.” I blinked, opening my eyes bit by bit as I counted to ten.
The ceiling above me was made of wood, the beams thick and ancient.
For one disoriented breath I thought I might be home, back in my own bed with the fields waiting outside my window.
Then the tranquilizer haze cleared another degree, and I remembered the invisible wall and the sickening impact.
Maybe it was all a dream? But what… My headache subsided a hair’s breadth and a half-formed image, of brilliant white lights and the small, sharp-featured shapes closing in through the trees formed in my mind. Or was it a memory?
Meredith.
I sat up much too fast for my swimming head, and the room spun.
Bile threatened to rise in my throat. Somehow, I managed to keep it down.
A voice near the door said, “Easy, easy. Calm down.” The voice turned and I picked up, “He’s up,” called to some unseen entity in the hallway in a practiced tone that I assumed had been used on a great many panicking creatures before me.
“Where is she?” My voice came out rough, heavy with the tranquilizer’s effects.
Despite my better judgment, I swung my legs off the table or bed or whatever I was on, before whoever had spoken could stop me.
Unfortunately, I stopped myself, because standing turned out to be a project.
Shit. I had human legs again. I leaned over.
A table. Great. Had I been probed by aliens?
I was on a strange planet after all. Just because Meredith hadn’t probed me, didn’t mean someone else wouldn’t.
My human hands gripped the table edge, the knuckles white. I loosened my grip with one hand and felt my ass. It wasn’t sore. That had to be a good sign, right?
“She’s safe,” said a second voice, this one older, more authoritative. Heavy footsteps stopped outside the room of my captivity. I turned to find the source of the new voice filling the doorway. The male seemed to take up more room than his actual physical size accounted for.
He was not what I expected, though I couldn’t have told you what I had expected, given that two days ago the whole concept of him had existed only as an out-of-focus shape on a sled coming down out of a wrong-bright sky.
The male was broad through the middle in a way that spoke of comfort rather than strength.
He dressed plain without the red coat, no bells in sight, just a heavy plaid flannel and suspenders, a neatly kept beard gone white long ago, and eyes that looked, more than anything, tired; not cruel.
I stared into them, noting the bone-weariness as if he had whatever conversation was coming more times than he could stomach.
“You,” I said, and felt the animal thing in my chest come up fast, teeth bared even in this shape. “You’re the asshole who took me off my planet and dropped me here.”
“I did.” To his credit, he didn’t flinch, which somehow made it worse.
“I go by many names, but most call me Santa.” He stuck out his hand.
“It’s Dash, isn’t it? That’s the name you gave us, or the closest translation of it.
You’ll want to sit back down, there’s a great deal to explain and you’re not steady on your feet yet. ”
I spat on the ground, ignoring his proffered arm. Dash sounded wrong coming from his lips. “You can call me Dasher. You don’t get the right to my short name, and I don’t want to sit down. I want to know where she is.”
“The girl.” He said it, tone heavy with unspoken words, yet kind, which told me he understood what she was to me, which was more than I understood myself.
“She’s here, in the compound, resting. She’s unharmed.
You, on the other hand, ran headfirst into the containment barrier at a dead sprint.
Which is why you’re sitting in my infirmary instead of a snowbank. ”
“Who cares about me? Take me to her.”
“In a moment. First you’re going to let me explain what’s happened to you, because you deserve that much before anything else.”
“Meredith.”
“In a moment. I’d rather you hear the truth from me than piece an incorrect version together in panic, and put someone through a wall.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I liked less that some part of me, animal and simmering under the surface, was already circling the idea of walls and what stood on the other side of them.
Before he mentioned putting someone through a wall, I wouldn’t have thought of it.
But now… it sounded like a good idea. I could put the fat, kidnapping bastard through a wall and relish the sound and impact.
“Start talking,” I said.
He pulled a stool over, lowered himself onto it with a grunt that seemed genuine, an old man’s grunt, and folded his hands over his knee.
“You’re not the first of your kind I’ve brought here.
You’re the nineteenth, in fact. There have always been nine of you, one bloodline, taken generation after generation to serve the run. ”
“So the legend is true.”
“Legend?”
“Forget it. What is the run?”
“Christmas Eve and the sleigh. I assume you’ve gathered by now that the stories your world has of me aren’t entirely accurate, but they’re not entirely wrong either.
" He said it plain, no flourish, a man reciting a fact he’d recited a hundred times before.
“Nine reindeer, off-world, bound to the sled for the length of one working life. When one’s time runs its course, another is brought in to take his place.
It’s been done this way longer than either of us have been alive. ”
Something cold moved through me, colder than the snow, colder than the shot that had opened my shoulder two days back. “You’re saying you stole me because of my bloodline?”
“Not quite. I’m saying you were selected. There’s a difference, however slight, though I understand it may not feel like one from where you’re sitting.”
“No. It doesn’t.” My hands had curled into fists on my knees without my noticing. “You took me off my own land, out of my own life, and you didn’t even have the decency to ask.”
“No,” he said, and had the grace, at least, not to dress that up. “We don’t ask. If we asked, no one would come, and the run doesn’t stop because a man wants his old life back.”
“Wait. You said when the time runs its course… so that means I’m taking over for someone else.”
“Correct.”
“Whose place am I taking?”
Something shifted in his face then, the tired growing deeper, closer to grief. “The current Dasher. His years are nearly spent. He’s earned his rest, more than earned it in fact, and the line doesn’t hold a place open. When one steps down, the next steps in. That’s you.”
“I have a name.”
“You have his name because you come from the same ancient, powerful bloodline,” Santa said, gentle in a way that somehow landed worse than if he’d been cruel about it.
“It’s not a coincidence, and it’s not an accident.
The bloodline coursing through your veins carries more than blood.
It carries the role as one of Santa’s reindeer.
You were harvested off your planet because you were the next in that line, ready or not, whether you’d have chosen it or not. ”
“What the…” I stopped, sitting with his words for a long moment.
A feeling of fate forcing itself upon me settled into my chest like a stone dropped into still water, ripples going out in every direction I didn’t want to look.
My fields. My fence line. The quiet, ordinary life I wanted and built with my own two hands, gone, traded out from under me for a role I’d never asked for, and a name that belonged to someone else before it belonged to me. Was anything I ever had my own?
"You had no right,” I said.
“I had a run to fill, and a line running out of time. What is right or just doesn’t enter into it, son; not from where I sit. I wish it did. I’ve wished for that a great many years running.”
“Don’t call me son. I had a father.” My voice had gone low, rough, closer to a growl than I meant it, and some part of me registered that as strange.
I didn’t know a human throat could carry that note, and I didn’t care.
“You don’t get to sit there looking sorry about it.
You stole my whole life and you’re explaining it to me like it's a job offer I forgot I applied for.”
“I know it’s a great deal to…”
“You’re an asshole. A kidnapping asshole,” I said it flat, no heat wasted on volume, because it was simply true, the truest thing I had to hand him.
“You understand that, don't you? Whatever tired, sorry look you’re fake wearing to get me to believe you, whatever line you’ve fed the last however many of us you’ve taken, you’re an asshole.
I don’t care how many centuries you’ve been doing this, that doesn’t buy you out of it. ”
He didn’t argue. That might have been the worst part in making me feel a twinge of guilt. He just nodded, one slow inclination of his head, as if he’d heard the word from multiple other mouths and made his peace with wearing it. “I’ve been called worse. Usually deserved it.”
“I want to see Meredith. And I want for someone to please explain what the fuck ‘Christmas’ is!”
“You will, once you’re steady.”
“Now.”
“Once we’ve had the chance to…”
That was when a hint of her scent hit me. Faint at first, then rolling in stronger, the way it had that first night in the trees, warm and certain under all the pine and antiseptic and old wood, threading in from somewhere beyond these walls. Her. Meredith.
Every other thought in my skull fell quiet at once.
“She’s close,” I said. I was off the security of the table and moved past him. Faster than a blink of an eye, he was on his feet, hand out, grabbing at me.
“Dasher. Wait, you’re not steady. You need to -”
I didn’t hear the rest of it. Meredith’s scent had a pull to it that made words sound like static, and my body answered before my mind had finished catching up.
The shift tore through my spine hard and fast, bones sliding, skin tearing into something else.
I heard shouting behind me, Santa’s voice mixing with others, sharper, alarmed.
None of it mattered against the pull of the one clean thread - Meredith’s scent - running through the compound like a rope pulled taut.
I went through the first wall without slowing.
Wood splintered, plaster came down in a white cloud, and on the other side a room full of startled faces in matching tactical gear scattered as I came through.
My hooves found purchase on a floor never built to hold something my size.
I didn’t stop to apologize for the wreckage.
Her scent was stronger now, closer, and every part of the animal I now knew as ‘reindeer’ running my blood had one destination in mind, and no patience left for doors.
From somewhere behind me, I heard Santa’s voice no longer explaining anything, just shouting my name, and I heard smaller voices, sharp with alarm. None of the chaos slowed me down, not the shouting, not the second wall I put myself through, not the wreckage I left scattered in my wake.
Somewhere ahead of me, close now, closer with every stride, was Meredith; the one thing in this entire cold, wrong world that still felt like it belonged to me.
I was not stopping until I found her.