by Ellen Mint
“Trevor.” Mr. Weir shattered the air, yanking Emeric away from his fixation. “You’ll assist Ms. Myra.”
“Of course.” The oily man rose from his chair. He didn’t extend a hand to the woman, but his head leered closer as she remained sequestered by her father. “Always happy to oblige.” He couldn’t make his intentions more obvious if he pissed on her leg.
Snarling to hide his disgust, Emeric focused on the real leader of this operation. Or tried to. In aiming his eyes, he caught a flicker of hers beckoning him closer. Sizing him up. Waiting for a question. “What do you wish of me?” Emeric asked, before blanching at his foolish tongue. “Of my client.”
Damn it. The old man caught it, his shrewd eyes darting between the children. Emeric had no idea about Nicholas catching on, but his father’s fidgeting paused at the slip. Nadire’s cheeks lit up red, her gaze burrowed into his paper.
“We…” Weir walked closer to the man, the shit-eating grin locked to his lips. “Will let you know.”
“I shall remain at this address for a week, but then must return home.” Emeric passed over his business card to Weir, having enough sense to not include Nadire in such a transaction. God, for the first time he wished he had his own underling to act as a go-between.
“Why?” Mr. Myra piped up, “You got a couple kids you’re fattening up that are ready for the oven?”
A coughing fit broke from his father so believable everyone turned to the man. Even Mr. Weir fished out a handkerchief, when Mirek spat out, “Slave labor.”
“Those were fraudulent…!” Nicholas raged when the younger adults tried to resume control.
“Mr. Myra,” Emeric groaned, wishing to be free of this. His sharp tone faded to cold indifference as he turned to the arbiter. “Ms. Myra. I expect all the documents asked for in two weeks' time. Any later, without prior explanation, will require me appealing to a judge.”
While Nicholas maintained a glare at both the secrets he had to give up and at Mirek, it was Nadire who wouldn’t lift her eyes. Emeric copied her idea, raising his head so high all he could see of her was the forehead and the tuft of glistening black hair. Wonderful, even her hair glowed. Focusing on his father, Emeric jerked his chin to the door trying to tell the old goat to get going.
With a smile at his son, Mirek finally rose to his feet. He stepped to the threshold, Emeric circling around, pleased that his father finally managed to contain himself. Suddenly, Mirek spun and placed a ruten into Trevor’s confused hands.
“You need a bigger one for your misdeeds,” were his parting words to the lost American as Emeric manhandled his father out the door.
Before walking away, Emeric reminded them, “Two weeks. You have my information.”
He didn’t glance at her, or Saint Nicholas, but watched as Trevor fidgeted with the ruten. Twigs scattered onto the table like a ripped up bird’s nest. With a groan, Emeric abandoned the mess to find his father at the mercy of yet another suited woman.
“May I show you out?” she asked, no doubt sent by Mr. Weir to make certain the two foreigners didn’t poke about. His father could spend all day taunting the level of sin in this building, but they had much bigger fish to fry.
Putting on a smile, Emeric said, “Thank you.” He fell in behind the woman guiding them to the exit, his head high even while he wanted to rap his knuckles against it until common sense poured out.
“That went well,” Mirek muttered, forgetting eyes were upon them. “Better than I expected. I really thought he’d bean me with his cane. Though, he didn’t have it this time. Huh.”
“Yes, father.” Emeric groaned, shuffling into the elevator and turning to watch the doors slide closed. The incense of myrrh twirled through his nose and a glistening smile flanked by succulent lips stampeded over the memory of her berating him. In a dead voice, he finished, “It went exactly as planned.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“DAD?”
When her father didn’t even bother to walk out of the room before wind striding, Nadire followed his path. The slow, methodical clonk of a mechanical arm waving through the air greeted her as she stepped into the North Pole division. They had five different workshops scattered across the globe, some in the middle of larger cities, others in remote corners of the barely explored planet. It depended upon what they produced and where.
But this was the grandest of them all. Three stories tall, a massive glass dome encircled the great hall. The bluest skies one could find on Earth cast warming sunbeams down, assisting in heating a building that shouldn’t even exist. Nadire gazed up a moment, smiling to herself at the familiar hue that made up much of her childhood.
She used to rush about the encircling balconies, gazing down into the factory pits and waving at the elves working the line. Now, they were mostly inspecting the machines and doing QA work. A twinge of nostalgia caused Nadire to grip to the solid gold banister and peer down the spiraling ramp. Two elves were guiding a load under a tarp up the incline, the workhorse cart embossed with gold leaf and bright holly leaves.
“Dad…” she began again, turning to ask him what was on the docket, when she spotted him dashing up the mahogany stairs. His feet stayed on the red carpet, as much to preserve the ancient wood as because he was the star of the show here.
Shaking off her growing anger at his insolence, Nadire gave chase. “We need to make a plan of action,” she huffed, taking the stairs two and three at a time to meet her father at the top of the entrance to his office. The great doors were thrown open, giving a view of the single room that could house a family. A massive fireplace crafted from flat river rock blazed on the far right wall as if they anticipated her father dropping by.
“Hm?” Her dad fiddled with one of the dozens of old clocks on the wall. She tried to explain to him how he could use his phone to adjust for time zones, but he preferred his old solution of having the entire wall covered in clocks that constantly needed new batteries and adjusting.
“Look, I need to see the contract, your version of it. I can’t make out that old German but your Latin…” Nadire sneered to herself, angry that none of the men would show her precisely what was going on. And angry at herself that she didn’t demand it.
“Naddie,” her dad sighed, “that was a long time ago. Ancient. Before I had you or Aaron.” He cupped a hand to her cheek as if he too wanted to reminisce in nostalgia. “I doubt if I did make one that it’d be around.”
“Bull,” Nadire spat, watching her father’s lips twitch to condemn her for partially cursing. She was in no mood for his patronizing. “You keep everything. There are scrolls, and parchments, and books that could fill a mountain.” All written in Latin too as her father thought it the enlightened tongue. If, God protect them, any normal person ever stumbled across Santa Claus’ great library they’d probably take him for some necromancer magi that conjured up snake people.
“It’s nothing to concern yourself over.” Nicholas smiled, his hand wafting off her cheek through the air like a dying butterfly. “This’ll blow over. Mirek doesn’t have a goat leg to stand on. Never did.” Before she could object and demand he show her the old archives, her father slipped into his office.
The great mahogany carvings of the life of Saint Nicholas slammed in his daughter’s face. She stared at the etching of one of the women nearly sold into prostitution. In this motif, she was clutching her money-filled stocking to her breast, a sense of relief over her face.
False. It didn’t happen that way, or so her mother told her, but her father preferred the lie. Or, maybe after all these centuries, he believed it.
Mary, Mother of God, what do I do?
Nadire pinched into her forehead, trying to will blood flow to wrench away her headache and bring clarity to a muddy situation. “Dad. Father!” He wouldn’t answer her. No doubt he was in commune with the list, or his globe, or he had his earphones in and was lost to his music collection. He’d dropped this ancient problem in her lap and washed his hands of it in a single snap
.
Damn it!
Fumbling into her pocket, Nadire excised the list the Hellswarths wanted. Some she recognized, being related to the monetary side. That didn’t surprise her. If they were trying to sue under lost wages or whatever foolish wedge they invented. But other titles were scrolls she’d never heard of. Recordings of meetings between Mirek and Nicholas from the middle ages. Where would her father even keep those?
This problem wasn’t going to go away, no matter what her father wanted to play at. As she moved to fold the letter up, a scent wafted off the page. Dark woods, licorice, and musk. It rolled through her senses, Nadire nearly tasting the blend and finding it intoxicating.
Shuddering at the thought, she glanced down at her arm to find all the hairs raised from goosebumps. Damn it. Pocketing the letter while doing her best to forget who wrote it, who smelled of it, she set off on her search of the North Pole archives.
It was not going well. Nadire pulled all of the business requests, tax documents and the like, and placed them onto a thumb drive for Trevor to look over. Mr. Weir insisted he give everything the once over before handing them to Emeric. Mr. Hellswarth. To make certain that there were no surprises hidden inside that their enemy could use against them. Nadire rather doubted they’d find much in the books. She kept meticulous care of them, and the last thing Santa Claus or his holdings needed was an audit from any country in the world.
No, her problem was these ancient letters. It seemed as if her father and Mr. Hellswarth maintained a correspondence and a rather involved one at that. But, her father did the same with many other important people over the eras. And he sure liked to write about himself.
“I can’t find it. I can’t find bloody anything,” she cursed, slamming another box of dusty vellum closed and kicking it to the back of the basement.
“What was it called again?” Tin’s melodic voice called from deeper into the stacks of plastic bins. Some part of Nadire thought that her father’s ancient letters should be preserved in museum quality drawers. Another found the idea of him keeping his old musings on Charlemagne the Not-So-Great kept in what most others stored their Christmas decorations rather apropos.
Fishing out the letter for the fifth time, Nadire shouted, “It’s just called ‘Letter to Nicholas — November 1573.’”
“Do they mean our November or theirs?” Tin’s head poked not from the side of the shelves but through it. Her features shimmered at the expelling of magic, glitter dancing off her beak-like nose and wide eyes. It was hard to pin down the color as they shifted like a lava lamp.
“There are other kinds of Novembers?” Nadire asked.
“Of course, calendars are such tricky things. Before the Gregorian…”
“I…I don’t care,” Nadire answered truthfully, her knees creaking as she rose to stand. “It doesn’t matter whose November, or July, or Smarch it is. Nothing is here. I have every damn letter father ever wrote to kings, dukes, priests, the Easter bunny, that weird hobgoblin who tried to take over Halloween for a decade. But nothing from the Krampus.”
After slapping the dust from her pants, she turned to Tin’s sharp face. “Doesn’t that seem off?”
“Your father can forget things, and there was that fire.”
“In the barn, nowhere near the archives. And Dad replaced everything,” Nadire voiced the question she’d already pondered and answered.
Tin shrugged, her head pulling back through to the other side. Floating around the shelf this time, she paused beside Nadire and sighed. “Your father’s ways are mysterious. Often we cannot understand why he does them.”
“Don’t do that,” Nadire said.
“What?”
“Make him sound like a god. His head’s large enough already. I…” Nadire tugged out the request letter, her eyes watering as she tried to make sense of those handfuls of simple sentences that proved a man she’d never met knew more of her father than she did. “I need a break. This is going nowhere.”
Taking the long route, because wind striding inside of the factory wasn’t wise unless one wanted to accidentally knock gears off, Nadire trudged from the archives that could double as catacombs. She brushed her fingers over the gilded banister, keeping far to the right to allow the hustling elves passage. At the main junction, she turned to the family quarters.
Elves had their own homes, if one wanted to call it that, on the other side of the complex. This was where the family of once mortals lived. Nothing save the creak of floorboards met her, the silence thundering as it reminded Nadire that two of the four rooms were claimed only by dust.
Even hers was used part of the year. She kept saying that one day she’d finally move out too, get out from under her father’s thumb and find her own place. But then yet another crisis would arise, she’d have to be there babysitting a line for weeks on end, the Christmas season started earlier and earlier each year, and it didn’t make sense for her to live anywhere else.
Plus, here was home. She knew every brick, every chill spot, every trick to starting the ancient fireplaces, every friendly face that floated through walls. Striding into her bedroom, Nadire placed the letter on her old vanity. Where once there’d been kohl pots and powder puffs now were BB-cream tubes and lip stains. Her desk sat beside the window overlooking a snowy mountain in the far distance. The laptop charging light turned the downy edges of her old quill a radioactive green, another reminder that Nadire didn’t have a time she belonged to. Or a place. She was a pebble in the river of humanity. Unchanging, struggling to react to the ever-flowing ebb of time and trends.
Did he suffer the same?
“You sure do stare at that paper a lot,” Tin’s voice warbled through the air before she phased out of a wall.
“God’s nails, do you ever knock?” Nadire gasped, wincing at being caught even thinking about him.
Tin blinked her wide eyes, her sheer cheekbones — as gaunt as a fleshless skull’s — sliding in contemplation. “No. Why would I?”
Throwing her hands in the air at the lack of privacy a magical race of beings had, Nadire stumbled to her bed and collapsed into the comforting down. At least it was a refuge from the world’s ills. “How come you’re not in a tizzy?” Nadire first mouthed into her quilt before turning to face the elf. “A man is suing us, trying to take our company down. I mean, you fly into a panic attack if one of the reindeer catches a cold.”
“Is one of them sick?!” Tin focused on the wrong part of that sentence, her arms flailing as she peered out the window. “I know that Donner fifteen’s been…”
“Not the damn point, Tin.” Nadire tried to get her to focus.
“I suppose, I have faith in your father. He always solves these outside problems. It’s the ones inside the factory that weighs upon my heart.”
“Sensible,” Nadire admitted as she slid back onto her bed and put her feet up. “Wish I could do the same. Wash my hands of the whole thing, walk away like Aaron or…Mom.”
Throwing herself back into her pillows, she stared at the ceiling. A winter night’s sky of blues, blacks, and purples swirled across it. Stars glittered from above, each forming a familiar constellation. Though, it was painted so long ago, some of the real stars in the night had moved, or gone out entirely.
“But if I do, I know he’ll get himself in trouble. Gah!” Nadire slammed a fist into her childhood bed. “He’s hiding something.”
“Whatever would our Lord be hiding?” Tin chuckled, her hovering body sweeping closer to the vanity where Nadire left her metallic eye shadows. That drew the elf like a moth to a flame.
Trying to ignore the always unsettling deification the elves had for her father, Nadire said, “I expected him to be curt to a man trying to sue us, but Dad took it beyond that. He seems to hate this Mirek.” Which in itself was odd. Her father may not be the jolly fool of the legends, but he didn’t hate either. “And yet, for all his vitriol, he won’t even talk to me about this. Or help build a battle plan. Just shuts himself up in his office!”
It’d been two days since their hair-pulling meeting in the Boulder, Colorado law office. Somehow, whenever Nadire went to ask her father a question he was always incredibly busy and unable to speak to her. Even his phone went straight to voice mail. She’d blame it on a secretary, but her father didn’t have one. He was screening his damn calls from his daughter.
A fluttering sound drew Nadire’s attention to Tin lifting up the letter in her fingers. “Ah,” she shouted, leaping to her feet, “be careful with that.”
“Why?” the elf laughed.
“Because it’s…I need it to find the right papers or else we’re in even hotter water than before.”
Tin gazed down the list Nadire should have memorized by now. But that wasn’t her response. Instead, she giggled and asked, “Can’t you ask for another one?”
“I…yes, I could.” Crap. So maybe she’d cling to it on occasion and let her mind wander. Just for a second to the image of the hand that typed it up, that signed his name at the bottom. While she was trapped translating dusty Latin beside a lantern it seemed innocent enough.
Dashing to Tin’s side, Nadire excised the letter as if it was a fragile egg. “It would look weak if we asked. Don’t want to give them an edge.”
“Uh-huh.” Tin’s voice wafted on the sticky air, the fireplaces working overtime for summer. Nadire picked at the ivory sweater she slipped on, the cashmere from a breed of goats that died out a century back. Sweat slicked down the top of her chest from the tight wool. As she moved to wick it away with her palm, a memory of lips lapping up her exertions popped into her head. Infant Jesu, she had to stop doing that. Even if the sex was…phenomenal, he was suing her father. He was the son of the Krampus. He…