by Ellen Mint
And he thought her the reasonable one, perhaps even approachable. No. She was raving as much as her egomaniacal father. They believed themselves the only arbiters of peace, joy, goodwill, and any way to fight back the darkness of winter.
They were wrong.
“Then leave. Nothing is impeding you,” Emeric said, his voice cold, his eyes snarling.
“Fine,” she spat back, once again not taking a step toward him or the door.
“But, I expect to have all those documents in my secretary’s hand within thirty days or your father will be brought before a judge.”
A snarl knotted up her ruby lips, Nadire spitting, “You will have it, and then I will never have to think upon you ever again.” She took a step forward and a swirl of white enveloped her form. It rose from the floor, Nadire’s body vanishing into thin air in the sweep. Only a handful of snowflakes gently tumbling in the air hinted at her ever having been there.
Without her glaring at him, without her tongue whipping curses at him, Emeric’s detached stance faded. The Myras had millions at their disposal. It’d take her little more than a minute to find someone else to deal with him. The chances of him ever seeing the daughter of Saint Nicholas again just dropped to absolute zero.
He should be elated by the thought. She was a cruel, callow person, incapable of listening, always quick to rush to judgment and fiercely protective of her rotten family from all outside sources.
She was as lonely as him.
Feeling a pinch in his hand, Emeric glanced down to the fist. Instead of the cut of his nails, he spotted red satin shimmering in his grip.
He forgot to give her panties back. They wouldn’t be much good to him now. With a flick of his wrist, Emeric tossed them to the dresser and yanked up his file bag. Dressed in nothing but a robe, he bent his head down into the ancient contract that would hang around Nicholas’ neck like an albatross. What did it matter if she’d hate him for it? She already did.
What did she do?
With a petulant stomp of her heel, Nadire windstrode from the rented house of Emeric Hellswarth straight to her bedroom. Cold winds whipped at her exposed arms, heat incapable of traveling at such speeds beside her, but she didn’t feel it.
As her foot struck the old bearskin rug by the door, Nadire stumbled deeper in as if she was punch drunk. It wasn’t supposed to go that way. None of it.
Landing at her vanity, the pearl cosmetics pot of her mother still sitting out, Nadire stared into a broken face. All that primping, curling, blushing, and powdering amounted to little. Every delicate touch was smeared over her face, from fingers, lips, and the sweat of exertion.
Damn it.
“So?” A voice rolled beside her head, causing Nadire to leap into the air. The elf took no offense, Tin—whose damn idea this was in the first place—twisted through the air without a care in the world. “How did it go?”
“Look at me,” Nadire sputtered, her heart heavy with the mass of sins this one night cost her. There weren’t enough rosaries to recite to cover ‘A never-ending night of mind-blowing sex with the man trying to destroy my father.’
“Hm.” Tin drifted into view, her wide eyes opening so great they filled her face. “Oh no, were you attacked by bears?”
“What? No,” Nadire grumbled, yanking wet-wipes out of a box to try and scrub her face clean. “There are very few bears in a city. Unless you know the right clubs.”
“Wolves then? Were you mugged? You were mugged! And they attempted to take your makeup from your face in order to cast a spell of…”
“Jesus Christ, Tin,” the blaspheme slipped free out of exhaustion. Not only from her body being strained to its limits but her soul.
I slept with him. I slept with him because I cannot be in the same room with that man without my loins aching clear down to my toes. We got nowhere, he wouldn’t listen to me, I wouldn’t listen to him. All we did was rut around like two yaks in heat until his father…
It was good Mirek appeared when he did. The doubt, the conscience that was helpless in the face of that man’s powerful form, could finally puncture through her fog and yank her out. While the sex was beyond anything the devil himself could dream up, it was when they finally spoke beyond the occasional ‘please’ and ‘yes!’ that Nadire grew uncomfortably comfortable. Opening up to the man trying to destroy her family, finding a shared bond within him was not going to help.
All it did was make her soul feel empty for once again walking away.
“You’re dealing with this from now on,” Nadire summarized, back to wiping the mascara and eyeshadow off with a vengeance. The elf drifted over her shoulder, occasionally falling into view through the mirror. “I can’t be around him, I can’t stand to…”
To breathe the same air without plunging my lips to his.
To feel the heat off his hand and cup it to my breast.
To…
“I have far more important matters to deal with. It is nearly July, the toy rush is beginning. I need to remain here at the main factory focused on production.”
“Okay…?” the elf muttered, her eyes darting around.
“Wasting my time on some frivolous lawsuit at the detriment of a child’s happy Christmas is just…it’s…you know!” Nadire waved her hand through the air, spinning to try and dig any word out of Tin.
Wincing, the elf suggested, “Frivolous?”
“Precisely.” Nadire nodded vehemently, not really listening. She had to talk to keep from thinking and her heart from feeling. A chill crept along the floorboards of her room, one she’d never noticed. Shivering, she dashed to her dresser to pull out an old pair of fleece pajama bottoms. With the dress still on, she yanked them up, certain that would keep the emptiness at bay.
From the edge of her sight, Nadire caught the envelope floating into Tin’s hands. The elf inspected it a moment, before saying, “Just, you know I can’t go into the mortal realm. I get a bit transparent when they look at me.” She giggled, her form phasing through reality before mostly snapping back with a small ping of glitter.
Shaking her head and trying to rake her fingers through the knotted curls, Nadire said, “All you need do is find those letters and send them to our lawyers. They will handle it all from there.”
“Okay.” Tin smacked her lips, the elf already yanking Emeric’s letter into her dimension. Nadire stared where it had been, where she could have felt its weight in her fingers, but she shook the loss off.
She needed to be out of this dress, rid of it. Maybe burn it or donate it. Have it turned into red satin teddybears? An ache for her mother opened in her heart, one she hadn’t felt in years. She was a grown woman, had been a grown woman for longer than most great-grandmothers were alive.
But this pain, this gravel in her heart, it almost felt of…
“Welp, I’ll be off,” jolly Tin said. “We’re breaking in the new barrel of whiskey. See you later, boss.”
“Yes, you too.” Nadire nodded to the otherworldly being that in some ways was her closest friend, and in others was as distant as any employee. They’d never invite her or her father to their elven keggers, it would be unseemly.
Tumbling to her bed, Nadire’s hands picking at the embroidered bodice as if she intended to unravel every thread herself, she tried to close her heart off. To not remember the thrill of his hot lips pressed to her spine. To not revel in the power she held as she climbed atop him.
Her weary eyes drifted over to an ancient painting of a woman decorated in blues and greens set against the summer mountains of Ararat. There was no Nicholas, no sacks, no Christmas of any kind, only a lone woman forgotten by the world. Wadding her hand over her heart, for the first time in hundreds of years, Nadire felt the cold grip of the north rolling through her home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
STICKY LYCRA, PITCHERS of iced tea, and bearded irises gave way to pencil cases, light sweaters, and golden treetops. Nadire kept her head down for nearly all of it, her summers spent traveling from one worksh
op to the other. True to her word, she let Tinsel deal with the lawsuit and her father. Three months in and she hadn’t seen even a glimmer of Emeric.
Work did keep her busy. She rarely stayed in one place long, globe-hopping with her trusty red leather suitcase and only darting back home to check in with the North Pole and her father once a week at best. Talk of the lawsuit faded fast, Nicholas not wishing to speak of it, and Nadire not wanting to think about it.
The hope that her foolish attraction to a callow man would fade with time didn’t seem to be holding water. During the daylight hours, she could keep busy putting out hundreds of metaphorical fires, but in the end, all that awaited her was an empty bed. That’s where he lingered, when her thoughts softened and the chill swept up the floorboards. Standing in the shower, the water’s kiss became his lips parting down her back. Laying in bed while failing to read a book, she wondered for a brief moment what Emeric was doing in his bed.
She hadn’t felt this addicted to something since quitting tobacco in the nineties. On occasion, she thought that contacting him and cementing that he cared nothing for her would help. But cold turkey always served her best, so she stayed the course.
On an early September morn, Nadire was camped at the North Pole. Her travels always slowed the nearer they drew to C-time, all of December and most of November dedicated to prepping for the takeoff. Down south, people were preparing for fall. Mugs of apple cider passed around, children in their new school clothes, rakes piled along the sidewalks. Here it was the same; cold and snow.
Might be nice to stop down for a bit, take a walk around as October pressed in. Ireland was always beautiful this time of year. Foolish thought. There were far too many problems for her to handle. Today it was the sleigh. They finally yanked it out of mothballs and attempted to get her airborne after its winter slumber. Which lasted for about five minutes before an engine blew and it crashed to the ground.
That startled the damn reindeer who, after so many generations of breeding, were as flighty as the elves. She left Hobson to pull the damn deer out of the trees before they hurt themselves. Flying reindeer, out of all the stupid things for people to come up with. Why couldn’t it be moose? Lots of those around, and they were much larger so less would be needed. Or wolves? They could work with wolves. Probably.
Shaking off the image of her father attempting to corral a pack of wolves to his whims, and the beautiful Christmas cards that scene would make, Nadire dashed up the steps to his office. She didn’t bother knocking, the bell-shaped knob twisting in her hand as she stepped inside.
Blinding sunlight struck the stained glass windows, causing a spray of the northern lights to color her father’s rugs. She glanced away from the beautiful but familiar sight to dig through her work. “Surprise surprise, the sleigh is being temperamental again. I’ve got the flight crew looking into it, but it might be a smart idea to contact a real service before one of them gets sucked up a tailpipe.”
Nadire flipped to the next in a stack of never-ending work. “Ah, we did hear from the Queen again. Seems that…” Her words trailed off as a wisp of smoke bathed in the pungent scent of patchouli wafted under her nose.
Forgetting her letters and forms, she glared up at her father’s chair. He’d turned it so only the back was presented to her, but she could see more of the tobacco smoke curling from inside. “Father,” Nadire muttered, walking up the dais steps carved to look like gingerbread houses. Upon reaching his crushed velvet chair, she tugged until he spun around.
Instead of a carved wooden pipe, a hand-rolled cigarette hung in her father’s lips. “You promised,” she said, reaching for the damn thing.
Nicholas took another deep puff, ruminating in his brand of cloves, patchouli, and nicotine. People’d probably be surprised at how Santa’s blend was more in line with a fifty-something man who couldn’t make tenure. Before he could release another puff down his lungs, Nadire yanked it out and snuffed it on his desk.
“It was just one.” Her father sighed, watching the last of the ash float away into the air. “Besides, it’s not like it can hurt me.”
“We don’t know that,” Nadire said, though it was a challenge to convince a man over sixteen hundred years old that he needed to watch his red meat intake and exercise daily.
Her father rolled his eyes at her henpecking. Not wanting to get on his bad side, she said, “What about the vape?”
Nicholas snorted at her insinuation. “Can you see the great Santa Claus himself with that light-up space pen perched between his lips?”
“No,” Nadire had to admit. It was hard to get her father to adopt new technology, his stubbornness disguised as ‘that isn’t what Father Christmas would do.’ At least he acquiesced on computerizing their system, and wi-fi. It took Nadire ages to get him to rubber-stamp their private satellite that quite a few government officials had to agree to ignore.
Nodding his head at winning the fight, Nicholas moved to yank another rollup out of his golden box. Nadire glared at him. “Dad. The vape’s healthier for you, at least.”
“Sure, and way I remember it these were healthy too. Kept you warm and gave you a distinguished air.” He spun the small cancer stick in his fingers while a smile twinkled on his lips. “Then one day, poof, they’re bad. Same as everything else fun in this world.”
So he was in that mood. Great. “Dad, about the sleigh.” Nadire tried to get his attention before he slipped down memory lane, but she wasn’t fast enough.
“I’m tired of the snow,” Nicholas mused. “I miss the sea, salt spraying on my face. Running along the beach digging up shells, hiding in the tombs to scare my older…” His reminiscing smile faded as did the ghosts of the very long dead.
“We could always take a trip after Christmas. We haven’t been back to Demre in years.”
“Bah, it’s Myra not Demre, or whatever other name they invented for the land. All this change, it’s not good for the humors.”
Her father was trying to rile her up, playing the feeble old man for sympathy. Nadire’s eyes narrowed at that. Why was he acting that way?
“Dad?”
His recently shaved and trimmed head hung down, Nicholas of Myra muttering to his chest, “I stopped by the Church.”
While there were plenty of options across the globe when her father said ‘the church’ it could only mean one. His church. “Why? It’s morbid, to walk around in there. It’s like wearing your death shroud to a baptism.”
A shrine dedicated to her father, complete with a tomb that never held a body. It’d crumbled over the years, forgotten, rotted, buried. She wondered if it wasn’t her father whispering into the right ear that led to its rediscovery, a touchstone of a youth that felt so far removed it might as well be fantasy. Nadire wouldn’t know, she didn’t exist when it was above ground. She was young even when it was being restored.
But every once in a while her father and mother would visit the Church, both taking in the old mosaics and reminders of their long lost world that buried under silt and time.
“It’s good for me, Naddie. To remind myself why, to walk those old steps, see those old catacombs that I helped entomb others inside. Friends. Family. Forever carved into the mountains and not forgotten. People, God save them all, but they don’t stop, do they?”
“No dad, they don’t.”
Nicholas patted her hand, the sticky tar of his poorly formed cigarette tacking to her skin. “Be good,” he sighed wistfully, “do what you think is best, work your fingers to the bone, and it can all be for nothing. Who knows why? I can’t, because even I don’t know His plans.”
A sharp pain jabbed behind Nadire’s eyes, her heart thudding at this talk from her father. As she looked closer she found the man, instead of in his preferred green silk dalmatica, dressed in a boxy grey suit. He owned exactly one, which was used when Nicholas had to make important appointments in the west.
And he despised the thing.
“Dad, why are you wearing that?”
&n
bsp; Rather than answer her, he rose from his chair. His fingers drifted over the solid gold box with paint chipping off from use. After closing it to hide away his stash, he sighed. “Because I’ve been called.”
“Called to what?” Her father didn’t deal with meetings, not unless he was needed to make an appearance. Even then, being the CEO he was allowed to act as eccentric in his ‘priest-like’ robes as he wanted.
“Things sort of…slipped through the cracks. You know how it is. What’s a month when you’ve seen five hundred and eighty thousand sunsets?”
“What did you do?” A brick fell in Nadire’s gut. She sized up her father who moved as if he was broken. She whipped her head to the top of the dais, but the staff rested upon its altar. “Dad?”
Her father paused in walking to the middle of the room, his hands nestled behind his back. “It’s funny, I never thought Mirek had it in him. That the Krampus wouldn’t overreact and needlessly punish people. Mores the fool, I.”
“You told me everything with the lawsuit was fine.” Nadire took a step closer, the blues and reds of the windows washing over her face. “Father, you said that you had things under control.”
“I will, once I make this appointment.” He gazed above her head, his face softening. As he took a step forward, Nicholas whispered, “With the court.” Before the words could reach Nadire’s ears, he windstrode leaving only a sparkle of blue in his wake.
“Court? What do you mean in court?!” She flailed her arms around, spinning in a circle as if he could hear her anger. “Father! What did you do?”
No answer would come save the snow dancing on the frostbitten breeze.
“I swear to Christ, when I find him I am going to…” Nadire paused outside the closed doors to a municipal courtroom in Boulder, her shoulders shaking, her hands wringing the air because it was better than her father’s throat. It took her a bit of time to both figure out where he was heading and get properly dressed. Fuzzy slippers, fleece pajama pants with kittens holding mugs, and a tattered henley wasn’t exactly a court worthy outfit.