A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories (12 page)

Vickie felt crestfallen. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted unhappily.

“The trouble is, this is very short notice, especially when we had already set a date with her Grandmother when she could be expected home,” the Dean continued. “For future breaks, we can easily contrive some sort of excuse—that she needs to catch up on some subject or other, or that there is a school trip. Something we can make happen without any unfortunate consequences for her. But … this time, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.” The Dean smiled encouragingly at Vickie. “It’s only for a few days. The Grandmother herself set the dates—we had thought that it was only that an elderly woman didn’t feel up to taking care of a young girl for very long, or that she thought Heidi would be bored and troublesome, but … well, your information certainly casts
that
in a new light. But it’s not as if she’s physically abusing the girl, and Heidi is sensible and knows she’ll be coming back here where she’ll be happy. I’m sure Heidi will be fine.”

Vickie wasn’t so sure about that, but what could she say? She went up to her room in a troubled state of mind. Bad enough that she was worried about her parents, but now she was worried about Heidi, too.

The first thing she did when she got to her room—besides hang her cloak over a chair facing the ever-burning fire—was to check her message-box. It looked like a little wooden jewelry box, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. It was one of a pair, with Apport “landing pads” inscribed inside. She had one, and Hosteen had one; she and her mentor had made them together. Letters weighed almost nothing, so they weren’t hard to Apport; this was more secure than using conventional means to talk, and less taxing than every other form of magic communication.

She opened the lid, and as she had hoped, there was a folded letter inside. With a sigh of relief, she took it out, and settled down next to the fire. It was coded, of course, but it wasn’t but a moment and a relatively simple bit of magic to take care of that. She held the pages between her hands, visualized the equations of the spell, said
“Fiat,”
aloud, and the words were descrambled. It was Hosteen’s box that did the scrambling, a bit of techno-magic that she had created and he ruefully often wished aloud he could duplicate.

She settled down to read it carefully. They were in place, and had set up their headquarters in a rented vacation-home. He couldn’t tell her where they were, or what they were doing, of course, but he assured her that everything was routine and that so far, other than the fact that there were nine agents on the team, it was proceeding like a normal investigation. Which meant that, aside from the fact that whoever or whatever they were after was using magic or was itself a creature of magic, and they were using forensic magic to track it down, it was just like any other FBI investigation. There was a bad guy, who was doing his best to elude them, but unless they cornered him, Hosteen didn’t see him as a danger to the team.

And then … she read in between the lines, as Hosteen would have assumed she would do. They had their own little private code, the two of them, invoking things the two of them shared. It was nothing that anyone other than Mom and Dad would ever have been able to decipher.
Pacific Northwest. Serial killer. Why are so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest?
Now she understood why they needed a team of nine; there was a lot of territory to cover up there, and if this was a murderer who was striking often, they needed to take him down as quickly as possible. You didn’t want to split up in groups of less than three on a case like this.

Strangely, figuring that out made her
less
worried. On serial killer cases, the hunters rarely became the hunted. Serial killers preyed on the weak and isolated, not the strong and united.

She wrote her own quick letter to her parents, which Hosteen would pass on to them, and just as she had finished closing it in the box, she heard, faintly and muffled, a scream of absolute terror.

There were only two places on the grounds of the School where someone was likely to be screaming, the East Building and the West. And it had
not
sounded as if the scream came from the West Building—which left the East. The student dorms.

It was just pure good fortune that she was still fully dressed, boots and all. Vickie snatched up her cloak and ran for the door without a second thought. She raced down the stairs to the front door, and shoved it open, running straight out into the Courtyard.

Just as she left the front door of her building, the scream came again, this time definitely from East Building. As she dashed across the moon-flooded Courtyard, the door to West crashed open again behind her; it was the teachers, presumably, responding as she had—but she was too intent on her goal to look back.

She wrenched the door to East Building open; it wasn’t locked, since, after all, there really wasn’t any place for the students here to sneak off to. The School was surrounded by acres of forest, and most of the kids were city or suburb-bred. The building was lit only dimly, all the hall-lights dimmed to bedtime-mode, but it was enough to see by. She dashed up the staircase, taking the stairs two at a time, to the first floor, to find a knot of petrified students hovering uncertainly at the top of the stairs.

“Who screamed?” Vickie demanded, looking from one to another.

“I—we don’t know!” said the eldest, a seventeen-year-old girl Vickie remembered was named Pomona. “We just heard someone, and came running out into the hall and—”

“And I saw a
thing!”
shrilled Ralph Emory, white as the snow outside. He reached for her arm and clutched it as if it were a lifeline. Maybe because she wasn’t the only one panicking. “I think it was a demon!”

At this point, the Dean came up the last of the stairs, and grabbed Nick by the shoulder. “What do you mean, a demon?” she demanded. “The entire School and Grounds and shielded and warded against demons! It’s impossible!”

Professor Hakenon came pounding up the stairs as fast as Vickie had—he was not only the teacher of European Applied Myth, he was also Vickie’s Staff-Fighting teacher and in excellent shape. “Who’s missing?” he demanded, and scanned the little clutch of students. “Where’s Heidi?”

“I’ll check her room,” the Dean said, grimly, and strode off down the corridor. “You question Nick.”

Vickie followed on the Dean’s heels, but the answer was clear as soon as they were halfway down the hall. The door to Heidi’s room stood wide open; from the mess inside, there had clearly been a struggle. The desk had been toppled, as had the chairs, and papers and books were scattered everywhere.

And Heidi was gone.

“Dean!” came the call from back down the hall, and Professor Hakenon ran up to them as the Dean turned in his direction. His blond hair was disheveled and the expression on his handsome face was grim. “Nick is right, he saw a demon—of sorts,” the Professor said as he skidded to a halt beside them.

“What do you—” the Dean began. The Professor interrupted her.

“By ‘of sorts,’ I mean it’s something we never warded against, because we didn’t think to,” the Professor explained, running his hand through his hair in a frantic gesture. “Good gods, we were so—it can only be invoked by someone who knows it, and thinks he—or she—deserves to be punished. That’s how it got past our protections. Heidi thinks she
deserves
this, she must, or it never would have come for her.”

“For heaven’s sake, Nikki, get to the
point!”
the Dean exclaimed. “What
is
it?”

“It’s the Krampus,” the Professor replied bleakly. “And now it’s loose here, it could take
any
of the others if we don’t guard them, and if we don’t get Heidi away from it before dawn, it will carry her off.”

Vickie waited in the hall, poised on the balls of her feet, heart pounding. The other students were all in a heavily warded and sealed room, with Professor Sidhe guarding them. But
one
youngster had to be out for this plan to work, and she had volunteered before anyone else could speak up. This was the first time she had ever played “bait.” And her parents would never forgive her if it was her last.…

But there wasn’t a choice. They had to save Heidi, and to do that, they had to get her out of the clutches of the Krampus, and the only way to get to the Krampus was to get the Krampus to come to them—

It wouldn’t come for an adult. It wouldn’t come if there were any adults anywhere around. And it wouldn’t come for just any youngster, either. It had to be one who had been—naughty—

So she waited in the hallway, all alone, hoping that part of what the Krampus wanted was terror, and the thrill of the chase.

She heard it before she saw it; as the Professor had suggested it would, it materialized in the middle of the utterly deserted hallway, right by the door to Heidi’s room, where it had disappeared as soon as Ralph spotted it—because Ralph was old enough to count as an adult. The chains around its waist clinked and dragged on the floor; its hooves made clumping sounds on the wood. She couldn’t see it
well
in the dim light, but what she saw was enough. Horns. Tail. And an impossible tongue that lolled out of its ugly mouth and dangled past its knees. But most importantly, she spotted the bulging basket on its back, the straw straining at what it contained. That was all Vickie needed to see. And she had been
naughty.
The Dean had ordered her to go back to her own room and not set foot in East Building until dawn.

“Hey! Ugly!”
she shouted, making her tone as taunting as she could. “I’m where I’m not supposed to be! What’re you gonna do about it?”

The head came up; the thing started panting. And then it launched itself at her, moving much faster than its lumbering gait would have suggested.

She ran. She ran, and behind her, she left tangles of magic, knotty equations she made up on the fly, meant only to slow it down. Because
it
was darn near a primal force, and if she didn’t manage to slow it somehow, it
was
going to catch her, and then there would be two to rescue.

“Think of the Krampus as St. Nikolas’s evil twin.”

That was what the Professor had said, explaining just what it was that they were up against. She knew about Black Peter, of course, the creature who, in some German and English traditions was the fellow that spanked naughty children and gave them coal, but the Krampus was … a magnitude nastier than that. Really, something only a sadistic German could have thought up. A sadistic German who had been spending the early part of the winter cramped in a dark hut, hemmed in by snowdrifts, with his increasingly quarrelsome family, trying to think of a way to really
make
his children shut up and behave until spring.…

St. Nikolas rewarded good behavior. But … that wasn’t enough. Not for
some
people. And it wasn’t enough for bad children to be pleasurably scared, and deprived (at least a little) of presents. No, for some people, bad children had to be terrified into utter submission, under threats that if they didn’t behave, something
horrible
would happen to them.

She sensed, rather than saw, something happening behind her. The Krampus was about to attack! She dodged to the side and went into a martial-arts shoulder-roll, narrowly missing being hit by that … tongue.

Ew! Ew! Ew!

Professor Hakenon had warned her about that, and a good thing, too. That tongue wasn’t just obscene, it was a weapon. She got a lot more proactive with her magical tangles as she hit the stairs and jumped down them three at a time as she headed for the basement. The basement, that held the only room big enough for their purposes.

The Krampus was St. Nikolas’s hit-man. Disobedient children didn’t just get lumps of coal, according to the legend. They got a visit from … the Krampus, who had carte blanche to do whatever he liked depending on how naughty you had been. And he wasn’t content just to warn like Black Peter, or give you a little switching, oh no. If you were
lucky,
he whipped you around the room until you bled from a dozen or more cuts. If you weren’t?

You ended up in that basket on his back. And he carried you off, and you were never seen again. The Professor wasn’t certain what happened to you when he carried off the naughty children at dawn. Some versions of the legend said they were taken to Hell. Some, that they were found later, dismembered, as a warning to other children. Some, that the Krampus ate them.

That was why the Dean had expressly forbidden Vickie to be here, and left. And Professor Hakonen had given her explicit instructions that the Dean was not to know about. And why Vickie was running for her life now, with a demon on her heels. Because when she got to the basement …

She hit the basement door running, slammed into it, ran down the hallway to the rec area, and slammed through another door, and bolted across the room until she literally hit the back wall of the handball court. Then she turned, back to the wall, just in time to see the Krampus in all its ugly glory come barreling through the door behind her. It was grinning. It was an expression that made her whimper with horror and fear. Then her throat was too paralyzed with terror to do anything; in fact, she was having trouble breathing.

The Krampus reached the middle of the room.

“Now!”
the Dean shouted. And that was when the lights went
out,
and the black lights came
on,
and the intricate demon-catcher that she and Professor Higgins had crafted in otherwise-transparent fluorescent paint—the same stuff the kids were allowed to use to paint star-fields in their room with—lit up bright enough to make her wince.

It did more than make the Krampus wince. The hideous thing howled, then screamed, then was held rigid in the grip of the spells of five of the best magicians on the continent.

As for the sixth—and Vickie—she and Professor Higgins were unraveling the magic that created the basket on the thing’s back. It was very primitive, almost like knitting, and it was Vickie who realized that first, found the loose end, and “yanked” on it. The spell came apart, and with it, the basket. Heidi tumbled to the floor of the basement.