Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

Six months was not a long time in which to say so many goodbyes.

  My dog leaned against me and I stared at the fire and wept for a time. But I was tired of tears. I was so damned tired of them.

  I picked up the piece of paper. If you left off the decimal points, it was a prime number. It represented the costs of medical care for tens of thousands, and funerals for thousands more. On a rational level, I knew Molly was right. It could have been worse. Much worse.

  But in my heart, all I could see was blood on asphalt, and all I could feel were empty places inside me where people should have been.

  I got up and walked quietly to the den, where my daughter, Maggie, was asleep with the other kids, her cheeks pink. She was a tiny girl, the lowest percentile for height and weight in her class, and she’d come back from her first semester of school with a GPA higher than 4.0. All I had was a GED. I didn’t even know how to calculate GPA. But I think I had a good idea of what the letters stood for.

  I watched her chest rise and fall for a little while, and the pain receded. I took a deep breath.

  I’ve fallen apart before. I’ve let the madness have me.

  But I was a father now.

  I no longer had that luxury. Thank God.

  Nothing you ever do can change the past. Can’t live your life looking backwards or you’ll spend it walking in circles.

  That little girl was the future.

  I nodded. And then I went back to the bicycle.

  Mouse was fluffy and faithful, but he was also pretty much just a kid himself. He helped out valiantly for another half hour or so and then just sort of fell over sideways and started snoring. I smiled at him. He’d done enough. I could muddle through the rest on my own.

  I cleared my mind of everything except solving the problem in front of me and anticipating Maggie’s happiness. The fire crackled. I added more wood. A deep and peaceful warmth settled somewhere between my chest and my stomach.

  And then I understood why Michael hadn’t helped.

  I was just putting the extra bullet-hole stickers I’d picked up onto the bike when the fire crackled and popped and flared up.

  “Merciful Heaven, what is this?” I mused aloud.

  There was a sound that can only be described as a foomph, and a sudden flood of soot from the fireplace and then . . .

  Well. Then.

  He had a round face. And a little round belly. That shook when he laughed. Underneath all the chain mail.

  Kringle was a tall, burly man with long silvery white hair and a magnificent snowy beard. He wore hunting leathers under a mail shirt, and over that was a heavy, magnificent crimson hooded robe trimmed in white fur. He carried an enormous sack over one shoulder—and there was no sword at his hip.

  He looked at me and let out a low, rumbling laugh.

  “Hey,” I said quietly.

  Kringle looked down at the bike I’d put together. He knelt by it, examining it closely.

  “This was done properly,” he said, a calm note of approval in his voice.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m not your vassal. We’ve worked together on some things, but I’m not even your friend. So if you’re here to give me a gift, I’m not sure why.”

  “Because tonight,” Kringle said, “that is what I do.” His blue eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled. “And because you’re on my list, lad.”

  I snorted. “Please.”

  Kringle eyed me for a moment. Then he winked and said, “Call Kris Kringle a liar on Christmas Eve one more time.”

  “L—” I began.

  But something made me think better of it. I went back to putting stickers on the bike instead.

  “Good,” Kringle said. “And, yes. I’ve brought you a gift.”

  “Tell me it’s not a pony for Maggie,” I said. “I’ll be housebreaking it for years.”

  Kringle tilted his head back and chortled again. It was impossible not to smile when he did. But I could cover it up with a scowl as soon as he stopped, so I did.

  “No. It’s not for Maggie.” And he put down his sack and started rummaging inside, muttering cheerfully to himself.

  In a twinkling, he’d come up with a small cubic package wrapped in green-and-red patterned paper that—I’ll be damned—had an image of Mouse’s grinning face as part of the pattern. There was a tag on it. TO: HARRY. FROM: SANTA CLAUS.

  And the package was warm.

  I eyed it and then looked up at Kringle.

  “Well, lad,” Kringle said, chortling again, and gestured at the package.

  I opened it.

  Inside was . . .

  Was . . .

  A plain white coffee mug. The kind you buy at a craft store.

  Painted on it in a kindergartner’s attempt at writing, the scarlet letters drawn like pictograms by someone too little to understand them, were the words: NUMB3R ON3 DAD.

  The handwriting was mine.

  The cup was full of a light brown liquid.

  Something happened to my eyes and I couldn’t see the cup anymore. Just a blur of firelight. But I picked it up and sipped milk and sugar with a little splash of coffee in it.

  For just a second, I smelled my dad’s old aftershave. For just a second, I heard him laughing, laughing so hard that tears had to have been rolling from his eyes. For just a second, I felt a hand, his hand, on my shoulder.

  I drank from the cup I’d given my father on our last Christmas together, and the entire time I did, the memories of those Christmas mornings, of the laughter and hugs and the play, ran through my mind in IMAX, so vivid that I felt myself losing my breath at the memories of chasing my father around the yard with my new plastic lightsaber.

  I left the last sip in the bottom of the cup, kept my eyes closed, and said, “I love you, Dad.”

  When I looked up at him, Kringle was smiling down at me. He winked. Then he picked up his sack, slung it over his shoulder, and turned to the fireplace.

  “Oh,” he murmured, laughter in the back of his throat. “One more thing.”

  I heard a thump behind me.

  I turned.

  My daughter, Maggie, stood in the doorway from the den. She’d dropped a pillow that she’d evidently been carrying. She was staring, slack-jawed, at Kringle.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” he chortled quietly. He nodded politely toward Maggie, laid a finger aside of his nose, and . . . just vanished up the chimney.

  “Oh wow,” Maggie breathed. She met my gaze and her eyes were wide. “Oh wow!”

  As if the sound of her voice had been a starting pistol, Mouse bounced to his feet, suddenly awake and looking around excitedly.

  “What are you waiting for?” I demanded of my daughter. I rose and rushed toward the front door. “Come on!”

  Her little face with her big dark eyes went incandescent with joy and she sprinted after me, Mouse hard on her heels.

  We all ran to the front door and I flung it open to the night air.

  We saw the snow cascade off the roof. We saw the sleigh leap into the air, reindeer and all.

  “Oh wow!” Maggie exclaimed. “Santa’s real! And he left me a bike!”

  I looked down at her, and then back up at the departing sleigh, smiling hard enough to break my face.

  “Yep,” I said. “He sure did.”

  And we heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight:

  “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This one is for the inmates of the Beta Readers’ Asylum, who had to go round and round with this one. Thank you for all your help and insight, guys.

  ABOUT THE Author

  Jim Butcher is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Dresden Files, the Codex Alera, and the Cinder Spires novels. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

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