Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
CHRIS
“ I ’m glad I met you, Noah.” I do have a great memory, and I made a note to send him a helper quick.
Someone connected to social services, or at least able to look in occasionally. I worried whether Noah had ever seen a doctor; he certainly didn’t eat three meals a day.
“Yeah?” He squinted, clearly doubting everything out of my mouth. “Meeting you hasn’t been that great.”
I smiled. Yeah, he deserved more than I had in the bag. But I could make sure he had a present, and maybe a decent night’s sleep.
Conscious of how many more kids I’d planned to visit, I dropped to my knees. In my bag, the little pouch of dream powder was between my fingers. I could do so little, and there was so much need. What Noah needed was someone’s time. He could really use a bedtime story and a hug.
Maybe I could too.
Some things are impossible, even for me. Especially for me. I shook off the wish.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “Tomorrow this will all be a dream.”
Noah backed away, wiffle bat braced in both hands. “But I am gonna wake up tomorrow, right?”
He wasn’t just staying awake with late night TV. Something had scared him.
Maybe I could fix that. The clock was ticking, and time is one thing no one can buy or make.
But I had a deep urge—no, a deep need —to give Noah a little time. The one thing I didn’t have wrapped in my bag, because I didn’t have enough myself.
I stood, wiping my frown away with one hand so Noah wouldn’t see it.
“You’ll wake up tomorrow.” I dropped the dream powder into the depths of my bag; I’d have to get it in him later. Maybe in cocoa.
Making cocoa is another thing I’m good at.
“I’ll get out,” I assured him, “once you say what you saw.”
“I don’t have to say nothin’.”
“You don’t have to stay up all night, Noah.” I tried to sound calm, hoping he’d get quiet and sleepy. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
“No, it ain’t. I locked it in the closet.”
No wonder Noah drove grownups crazy. He did not lack determination.
The world isn’t kind to little boys smart enough to be scared yet brave enough—or foolish enough—to trap their fears and hold on to them.
My list of waiting children unrolled in my head like a red carpet, beckoning me on. I can’t do everything, but I’d made it my mission a long, long time ago for every kid, naughty and nice, to get what they deserve, even only once in their life, on Christmas Eve.
That mission was all I had left.
Mentally I apologized to a few hundred more and moved their names to the list for next year.
Of course I had time. Endless time, really. I could choose how to spend it.
I didn’t like that I had to choose by myself, but doing something, anything, was better than crying alone in Norway. That was how I spent the late 1930s and look how those turned out.
Not that they were all my fault, but dang, they hadn’t been good.
At that moment my heart was set on Noah going to sleep, and my heart is my least sensible part. “Show me the closet.”
I followed him down the hall, mentally ticking through my bag. It was full of stuff for kids, not monsters. Or whatever Noah had seen.
I had a small hope that it would be something really new. It had been a long time since anything surprised me, on Christmas or any other day.
I once spent a night in a hut outside Addis Ababa—which had another name then—learning farming from a wise animal, a donkey who could talk. Once I met the Immortal; she was a woman at the time, teaching blacksmithing in El Salvador. Once I accidentally interrupted a fae lord’s Christmas in Japan. He was pissed. It was my fault his fried chicken got cold.
I hoped this surprise would be something new, and not just a sluagh. If Noah had caught one of the shadowy creatures that feed on despair, he was in real danger, and so was I.
I reassured myself that sluagh can’t enter locked homes. It had to be some unseemly brand of kobold—a troll, or even a pixie. They all prefer to be called kobolds now, but they come in a lot of different flavors. Anything big and brutish, or small yet not-quite-human, could scare a kid. It probably just wanted out of the closet.
I wished for someone at my back. The extra hands. The boost in confidence.
But those days were long gone and Christmas Eve isn’t about my wishes.
Noah stopped at a door, barely taller than he was, in the vintage wood-paneled wall under the stairs.
I pointed. “This closet?”
A growl curled out under the door, a sound as deep and direful as the depths of hell itself.
The hair on my arms stood up.
Noah could’ve run. Should have. Instead, he raised his bat.
Yeah, brave, determined. And angry, and needing a little more help with handling it.
I studied the door. “How do you unlock it?”
The end of his bat nearly touched the little switch under the knob. “Just flip the lock.”
“Does it unlock from inside?”
“No.”
The tightness in Noah’s voice told me not to ask how he knew.
I upgraded my mental note on help for Noah from soon to immediately . Social services weren’t always great but they were better than being locked in a closet.
Mom might be trying, or she might not, and if she had a temper or bad taste in boyfriends...
I was grown. I could be alone. But I couldn’t stay forever, and Noah still needed someone at his back.
It was surprisingly hard to think, not about the next door to open, but what to do here, now, about this. It was tougher than it should’ve been to understand what to do next.
Which was to figure out if he’d locked up something feral or something clever enough for conversation.
“Anybody in there?”
Silently, Noah’s wide, wild eyes questioned my sanity.
Inside the closet swirled another slow, deep, hair-raising growl.
Okay, talking hadn’t helped.
I tried again. “I’m going to open the door, all right?”
Only Noah answered. “ Not all right! Are you nuts?” He threw his little body across the door, warning me off with the wiffle bat.
I needed more information some how. “How did you get it into the closet?”
The bat drooped. “Lured it with my peanut butter sandwich.”
Oh my lucky stars. That was the delicious smell. “And what kind of monster do you think wants your peanut butter sandwich?”
“A mean one. I wanted that sandwich.” Confirming this protest, the boy’s stomach growled nearly as loud as the thing behind the door.
“Okay.” I wanted to do something about that growl too, but first things first. “I’m going to open the door. You stand behind me.”
“No fucking way!”
“You’re going to have to trust me.”
“I don’t even know you!”
“Sure you do.” I said, calmly I could. “You know me. I’m Santa Claus.”
His thin shoulders slumped a little.
Gently, I managed to touch him, pushed between his sharp shoulder blades to guide him away from the door and behind me.
I did long for a weapon. Something daunting but less... catastrophic than the few things I had for emergencies. They don’t look gentle and I didn’t want to ruin Noah’s image of me forever; dream powder only goes so far. “Loan me your bat?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Expressive little fellow.
“Then go upstairs.” I didn’t want him near whatever-it-was while I figured out if it was harmless.
“No way. If you get eaten or something, I want to know.” His was the voice of a child whose worst nightmare was not knowing what would happen.
The way he didn’t know where his mother was.
I happen to know that no one forgets that nightmare, not even after a thousand years.
Suddenly the centuries collapsed and I was just a boy, older than Noah but still young, with people shouting at me, throwing stones, making me stumble and crawl out of town, past the farms, into the woods. Crying the whole way.
I know what it’s like not to understand what happened to you.
“Noah. Does your bedroom door lock?”
He nodded.
“Fine, then give me your bat. You go halfway up the staircase, ready to run. If anything looks scary, run to your room and lock the door.”
Reluctantly, slowly, Noah did.
We took our positions.
It was closer than I’d been to anyone in a hundred years. Not physically, but the mental connection of being in a tough spot with someone else.
He knew I was there, and I knew he was there, and it made a big difference for both of us.
“All right now. You in the closet.”
Another growl, softer this time.
“I’m going to open the door. Are you going to be good?”
“No,” came the answer, crystal clear, in a voice made of thorns and gravel and the points of teeth.
My heart beat faster. I’d lived a long, long time. That voice sounded familiar.
But it couldn’t be.
I leaned closer to the wood. “Shall I leave you in there?” Surely whatever-it-was wasn’t happy, faced with spending eternity in a closet with a peanut butter sandwich.
A low, wordless growl was my only answer.
“Then when I open this door, you better be good. And by that I mean you won’t hurt Noah or me.” Whatever this creature was, it didn’t sound human, and it helps to be precise with those from other realms.
The lack of answer encouraged me. Whatever lay behind that door wasn’t just an animal; it understood me. And it could talk.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad.
Heart climbing up into my throat, I reached out and flipped the lock.
Nothing happened.
After a second, I turned the doorknob. Perhaps whatever-it-was could talk but not turn knobs.
Or perhaps it didn’t realize that the snick of the lock meant freedom.
The door opened silently; it surprised me how dark the space was inside. Where I stood was dim with moonlight and distant TV glow, but that closet was dark.
And deep.
It held eyes. Eyes that flashed light like a cat’s, but green. Tilted spindle-shaped eyes that tapered to points.
They drew closer.
Then lowered . Whatever-it-was stooped, and stooped farther.
Finally it emerged, on all fours, a slinking, lolloping motion.
This is my fault. Somehow it was my fault. In a long life of opening doors, that one gave me the worst shock.
Its dark, furred shape slipped around me, ignored me, and slunk to the base of the stairs. There it stood, growing high, high over Noah who clung to the railing post, from creepily short to eerily tall in an instant. Its bristling fur roughened its outline in the half-dark, and I saw floppy cone-shaped ears quirking down under the spiral rise of horns.
“So,” said that voice like a tumble of uncut diamonds at the bottom of a mine shaft, and I realized I hadn’t been afraid of the right things at all. “Have you been a good little boy this year, Noah? Or have you been bad?”
I felt myself choke. Forced myself to breathe again.
All to say, “Stop it. You’re scaring him.”
The thick neck never turned, its muscular hump melding down into wide furry shoulders the color of shadows. A wide stripe of longer fur narrowed a trail down its powerful back, then spread at the waist to completely cover the hips and legs. Legs that curved, like a rabbit’s. Like a goat standing upright.
One leg ending in a long human foot, the other a hoof.
He wouldn’t look at me. But it didn’t matter.
It’s a big world, but only holds one of him.
He folded his arms, bunching the muscles under his chest fringe of long fur. He didn’t turn my way, only talked to Noah.
“Such is my task,” he said, and in the half-light I saw the flicker of a too-long, pointed tongue. “I frighten people. Have you been a good boy, Noah?”
Noah stood frozen.
“Yes. He has.” I spoke for him.
This couldn’t be happening. Of all the things I’d imagined year after long, lonely year alone, this was none of them.
In the bare trickle of light, his eyes were actually dark and looked quite human. I willed them to turn to me, to release the little boy whose Christmas had become one of the most important nights of my long, long life.
One eye did flash my way, moonlight reflecting green from the retina inside. “I didn’t ask you. ”
I’m not that special. I didn’t have the power to force him into anything.
But I wouldn’t abandon Noah. We’d been through something together, and that mattered. I tried not to shout. “I’m telling you. Noah’s a good kid. He looks out for his mom. Got her a Christmas present. Get down, you’re scaring him.”
Noah looked scared, eyes huge, one arm wrapped around the stair post. Maybe too scared to run.
The creature showed his pointed teeth. “The Krampus scares everyone.”
“Not me. Branca, stop. ”
Shoving between him and the kid, I put a hand on his chest. Furred. Warm. Hard. Strong.
He backed away like my hand was fire.
I half-turned, not taking my eyes off the fur-covered visitor. “Noah, go to bed. I’ll take him outside.”
“ Hell no.” I could practically hear Noah trembling behind me.
In front of me, that magnificently arched nose. The soft pink inside his ears. Those shoulders. All within reach. Again. Finally.
My chest felt like a thousand Christmas candles lit all at once.
But Branca sounded cold. “Step aside.”
All those inner flames extinguished together. The sudden void took out my breath, almost took out my knees.
“Fuck you,” said Noah, and for once I let a kid give me something.
I needed a little righteous anger, so I took some.
“You do this now?” If my touch burned Branca, so be it. He still loomed, but when I poked his furred chest, he stepped back. “Frighten children?”
“People use me to frighten their children with stories. In person, I am charming.” He rolled his eyes so hard they must hurt, and his rough voice turned low, persuasive, like the tongue of a cat. I felt my bones shiver. “Come, Noah. Tell me. Do you enjoy pushing other kids down? That feeling of power? Aren’t you angry? Shouldn’t they pay for what they did? That teacher, that shopkeeper? Shouldn’t they pay?” He looked down over my shoulder and I knew his green-fire eyes glared into Noah’s. “Shouldn’t they all pay?”
“ No! ” In a burst of energy Noah ran up four steps, then stopped and leaned back down to shake his fist. “You get out of my house! You stay away from me! Mister, get rid of him!”
Finally those eyes looked down at me .
The same dark, sparkling eyes I remembered. Forest and fire. Warmth. Heat. He sounded amused. “You promised to get rid of me?”
“Branca, leave him alone. He’s mine. I’ve already decided.”
Overwhelmed by curiosity, Noah forgot to be scared. He looked at me, then his erstwhile intruder, then me again. “You know each other?”
Branca’s woods-and-fire eyes burned right into me. The way I remembered. The way I missed. “Well, Santa? What do you say? Do we know each other?”