Son of Krampus (Holidays of Love)

by Ellen Mint

  The familiar arguments picked up, both children groaning, when Nadire suddenly leaned closer. Ignoring her father calling his father a ‘demon worshipper’ she asked the elf to rewind a screen. Just as she was zooming in on something, red lights lit up across the room and an alarm began to blare.

  “Damn it, that’s a person right there!” She pointed at a shadow looming achingly closer. Pressing open her channel, Nadire said, “Nicholas, Krampus, you have to get out of there. The time bubble is about to be breached.”

  “You started this, all of this! Naughty, Nice. Good, Bad. Sinner, Saint. And here you stand now preaching that everyone should be forgiven all the time for everything!”

  “I learned to grow, a trick I never should have expected from you!”

  The two men were facing off, neither listening to the woman who’d been keeping them safe and alive this whole night. Nadire tried again, pacing as she ordered them, “There’s someone in the room with you! He’s moving closer and will be there soon. Get out of the house.”

  With a gulp, she gazed up at a new countdown displayed above their heads. It was falling quickly with only a minute to start with. Sneering, Nadire listened to the two men bickering as if there was no one else on the planet.

  “Nicholas! Krampus!”

  “The fool I am for thinking that you’d changed. You’re as cruel as ever, Mirek!” Nicholas thundered, a finger about to jab into his father’s chest.

  The Krampus laughed. “No, the fool I am for thinking you hadn’t changed. I should have known after the letter…”

  A fist came swinging out of nowhere, Santa Claus decking the Krampus across the jaw.

  “For fuck’s sake, Dad!” Nadire screamed so loud the mike squealed in Emeric’s ear. Her eyes darted to the countdown, twenty seconds until some poor bystander, drawn by unexplained blurs in his living room, had his head explode.

  Mirek spat, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “Who’s got blood on his hands now, Nick?” the man taunted.

  “Everyone get ready!” Nadire shouted rushing for the big white button. Her eyes darted to the countdown, then to the screen. “For the love of Christ, Father. Act your age and get out of there!” she screamed one last time, but the man was winding his fist back for another blow.

  Just as the numbers slipped to zero, Emeric spotted a face appearing on the shadow drifting closer. Nadire slammed her palm on the white button. A force like an elephant kick slammed into the back of Emeric’s head. He tried to throw his hands out to keep from bashing his forehead on the console, but they were frozen in place. The stench of burning hair filled his nose as he felt his heartbeat picking up speed. It rattled about like rocks in a dryer, then a tumbler, and finally as fast as a lighting bug trapped in a baby food jar.

  A shadow uncoiled from thin air, Death’s head rising from the darkness given substance. A long black cloak trailed from the epicenter of the universe and down the stairs of Santa Claus. He wanted to laugh at the absurd thought, as if the Grim Reaper were real, but his mind couldn’t escape the terror shattering his control. The cowl turned its abyss of a face staring directly at Emeric. Was that how his mother felt when she saw the specter?

  “Fuuuck!” Nadire’s scream punctuated the rushing of blood in his ears. The ocean ebbed away and with it the darkness owning the room. Emeric turned his head to find her buckling to the floor. He tried to leap to his feet to catch her, but found his body transformed to rubber. All he could do was flop to the ground himself.

  “What,” he gulped, inching across the marble he splattered onto, “happened?” Emeric reached his fingers over the cold ground trying to envelop them around Nadire but she was messing with her headset.

  “We’re back in real-time, fast,” she said to Emeric, before shouting at the two men who caused it, “Will you two god damn assholes listen?”

  “Language…” Nicholas tried to maintain any moral platform he had but Nadire sneered through it.

  “Stop behaving like spoiled brats and get out of there!”

  Neither old man answered, no doubt both struggling from the same time yank, but a new sound cut across the line. A man, his voice trembling, shouted in Dutch, “What do you want?!”

  “Please don’t have a gun. Please don’t have a gun,” Nadire muttered, finally rising off the floor. Emeric followed, taking longer to get control of his spine. As he rose he watched both Krampus and Santa Claus vanish from the man’s home, leaving him very confused about the invisible invaders he caught leaving gifts.

  The feed appeared with a view right beside Holly, who seemed to sense either the blood or the bad air as she whinnied and stomped her feet. Nadire dusted the floor off her chest and clapped her hands to try and revive the fallen spirit. “All right, we still have a few houses left. Let’s reset the time bubble and…”

  “No.”

  She blinked in confusion. “What do you mean, no? Dad, there’s a good ten percent left. No, thirteen at least. You have to…”

  “I refuse to spend another moment with this barbarian!”

  Mirek snorted, but Emeric could hear a grunt of pain in the laugh. “Barbarian? Who pulled out his fists first?”

  “You’ve deserved worse for far longer and you know it,” Nicholas swore.

  “Father, you can…” A flash of light overwhelmed the screen and both video feeds went dead. “Dad? Dad, what the fuck did you do?” Nadire sneered while tugging the headset off. She fiddled with the earpiece, but no doubt it sounded the same as it did to Emeric. It felt as if someone shut them all off with a snap of his fingers.

  “Uh, my Lady,” an elf’s voice cut over the speakers, causing Nadire to stop jabbing at the console.

  “What, Tin?”

  “His Lordship just arrived in the docking area. And his knuckles are bleeding.”

  Emeric felt a curse rise from Nadire’s toes up to her bulging eyes, but she managed to swallow it. Yanking the headset off and hurling it at the console didn’t banish her anger. As if Emeric was in a better mood.

  Stomping with resolve, she made it to the door out of the command center before turning to face him. “Come on already,” she said, her fingers biting into the ancient wood and leaving dents.

  While darting over to her side, Emeric realized that none of the elves were looking up or meeting his eye. Some even had their fingers crossed as if he was the one to impart death upon them. Trying to shake it off even as goosebumps rose over his skin, he dashed to follow Nadire already reaching the open elevator.

  She waited until the doors closed, the lift whooshing them to their fathers, before folding her fist and smashing it for the wall. Emeric lashed out and caught it. Mother of God did it sting! But he gritted down his curse and the pain while catching Nadire’s confused and vengeful eye. “We don’t need two sets of bleeding knuckles,” he said.

  Yanking her fist free and shaking it off, she rubbed over the nearly splintered skin while sighing. “That…I can’t believe he did that.”

  “Really? Thought it was a bit of a pattern with him.” Emeric tipped his head to the side watching her pace about the small rattling elevator.

  “I told him to be on his best. He was supposed to try instead of…” Nadire threw her head back and growled, Emeric wondering who was actually the child of the Krampus there.

  Her muttering fell to under her breath, leaving him growing more curious. “How exactly did you get your father to agree to this?”

  “It wasn’t easy. And no, I didn’t lie or cut him some deal. Just pointed out that if he worked with Mirek, perhaps the two could either discover this was a good idea to resume their partnership or abandon it.”

  Emeric turned cold at that last part, his spine raising as he said, “So you gave him an out to be rid of my father.”

  “I didn’t think he’d take it!” Nadire shouted so quickly it wiped away some of his concerns. Not all, not with both their parents potentially bleeding. But Nadire seemed as upset as him about this alliance failing, about the two of them…
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  “Look.” She gripped his arm with the hand she’d nearly plowed into the elevator. “We’ll find a solution.” Soft, pleading eyes stared into his and he gave in without thought. “To make it work.”

  Emeric cupped his hand over the back of hers, finally realizing that she didn’t work over her father for Mirek’s sake. She didn’t arrive on his doorstep with her proverbial hat in her hands to please the Krampus. She wanted…

  The ding of the elevator door caused both to turn just as a barrel flew across the room. “You’ll have to try better than that, you son of a milk-drenched tit!”

  Nicholas roared back. “As if you’re one to talk you lice-infested, cloven-hoofed demon!”

  “There’s a dip for the lice problem, but naught to fix that patchy beard you can’t get to grow. Are you still a prepubescent boy even after sixteen hundred years?”

  “For the love of Christ!” Nadire ran into the middle of what became an all-out war. Nicholas and Mirek stood on opposite sides of the echoing cement runway. Huddled around their Saint were the elves who offered up things to throw but little else, while his father…

  Oh god, he found chains. As they dangled off the Krampus’ arm, blood dribbled down the loops in macabre rivulets. Emeric prayed it was all part of the glimmer or they were never fixing this.

  “Naddie.” Nicholas whipped his head at his daughter as if about to chastise her, but she was beyond reproach now.

  “Hold your tongue,” she snarled, “and show me your damn hand. What are you doing throwing punches around?” The battle paused as a woman tried to nurse her father’s wounds.

  While the fire drained from Nicholas, his acerbic tongue did not. “Sometimes you can only stop a tongue by knocking out a few teeth.”

  “Ha!” Mirek laughed back. “As if you could pop out a milk tooth with your weak firsts.”

  “Vati,” Emeric tried to get his father’s attention, “how bad?”

  “Don’t fuss over me, boy. I’ve taken harder punches when going to get the mail. Believe me, Nick’s always been nothing but bark like those wee little dogs fancy ladies shove in their purses.”

  “And you’re a cruel sadist who delights in the pain of others!” Nicholas wouldn’t let it go, arguing himself right into his father’s trap.

  “Says the man who punched his partner.”

  The war was back on in an instant, both old men moving to hurl their children to the side to try and bring this to another head. But Nadire shouted at the elves in a language Emeric didn’t speak. In a flash, ropes of light enveloped not only Mirek but Nicholas as well. Their bodies froze, both fists about to smash apart noses trapped while they sneered across the void.

  “Let me go!” Nicholas shouted, his blazing eyes turning on the elves.

  “Yes, let us finally see who is the stronger man,” Mirek taunted.

  “If you do that, I will reduce your whiskey rations to naught but a shot for a month!” Nadire hissed at the elves. They all glanced from their Lord to his daughter, but the threat of cutting off their liquor supply was enough and the light ropes remained.

  “This is over, dead. Done!” Nicholas shouted, not about to give up his ground. “You’re the same heartless monster who judges as if he’s never so much as stepped in shit that I knew all those years ago.”

  “And you’re a feckless walking advert. A man who’d rather have everyone worship and adore him than do what’s right for the world.” His father wasn’t helping, not that he seemed to be in the mind to. Despite his insistence, he was fine, Emeric caught the signs of a bruise even under the brown fur sprouting across his Krampus chin.

  “You…you have no right to this holiday. To me. To my family!” Nicholas screamed, and whipped his arm forward. The light ropes tried to keep him pinned but he overpowered them and the magic splintered away. So too did Mirek fall, landing on his hooves as Nicholas approached. It wasn’t a fist that came for him but a finger, one that prodded into his chest.

  “You were the one to walk away. You refused even after…you made your choice and you don’t deserve another chance.” With that final threat, he turned and walked back to both his daughter and the contingent of elves. To the lead one, that Tin women of before, he spat, “Get them the hell out of here.”

  Tin gulped, her eyes wide as she glanced towards Nadire. His daughter was trying to stop whatever was about to happen, grabbing onto her father’s blood-stained sleeve and pleading for him to listen. The elf raised her fist, glitter sparkling to trace her movements.

  “Nick,” Mirek taunted, “this ain’t over. The lawsuit is back on!”

  Before Nicholas or anyone else could respond, the world of Santa Claus faded. So quickly a blink could have obscured the transition, Emeric found himself standing in an inch of snow surrounding their forest. The woods wafted into view and he whipped his head to find their house a stone’s throw to the East.

  It was no windstride, which often sucked the breath from him. More a gentle shift from one place in reality to another. Craning his head, he spotted that the elf Tin came with. She was hard to make out, only the edge of her body, face, and a few features visible while the rest of her skin faded into the background.

  “Fantastic!” his father cursed, kicking a foot through a tuft of snow. The Krampus glimmer faded away leaving him as normal as other mortals and cursing up a storm. “I knew that bastard wouldn’t listen. We’re heading back, Emeric.”

  “Back where?” he shouted, watching his father stomp towards their home.

  “To the States! I’m getting every last drachma from that greedy flachwichser and watching him bawl into his bloody palms as he does so!”

  Rather than open their front door, his father hauled his foot out and kicked it down. Even at the distance, Emeric heard the hinges rip from the wall, the wood cracking in the fall. Not caring, Mirek stomped over it and inside. What the…

  “Sorry about that,” the nearly invisible elf whispered near him. Emeric spun his head to watch Tin’s translucent form fading even more on the wind. “For what it’s worth, she really liked you.”

  Even as his brain tried to register which she the elf talked about, the creature faded to nothing leaving Emeric alone in the black forest. He’d started the day hoping to share a long hot shower and endless nap with Nadire, and now he was trapped back at the beginning.

  “What the fuck just happened?”

  “…The lawsuit is back on!”

  As Mirek’s parting words vanished on the wind, Nadire whipped her head over at her father who was suddenly the picture of calm. “What did you do?!”

  Ignoring her, Nicholas took the measured steps not to the elevator but the winding stairs. Nadire glared at the pack of elves who refused to make eye contact.

  “Um, Mistress,” the bravest one squeaked up, earning all of Nadire’s ire. Flinching deep into her leaf coat, the elf shot out fast, “Do we bed the horse and tear down for Christmas? My Lady?”

  Damn it. She couldn’t believe he did that. Arguing with Mirek, yes. Even trading punches, God save her that wasn’t surprising. But to abandon the children, to forgo his duties because he couldn’t control his temper? Something else was going on. Nadire had tried to be polite and leave her father’s issues to his own personal grumblings, but now it was infesting the family business and that was her problem.

  “I’ll…figure it out,” she told the elf, leaving them literally holding the reins as she stomped off after her father.

  He was making measured and fast time toward the grand ramp, every other step answered by the whack of his staff. The sound sent the other elves peeking around corners and doors, each well aware that the morning hadn’t even arrived yet. “What are you doing?” Nadire shouted, rushing after her father who wasn’t running but wasn’t going slow either. “Knock that God-cursed chip off your shoulder and get back out there. We still have time to…”

  The staff smashed into the ground sending out reverberations not of happy Christmases tucked by the fireplace while
grandparents read stories, but the other ones. For every smiling child with a full belly, a matchstick girl was freezing on the snowy steps of a church. The staff didn’t know the difference, perhaps it didn’t care, and those were what swarmed over every wall. The Christmases of war, of plague, of famine, of death. The horsemen didn’t stop for a holiday, no matter how hard her father tried to expunge them.

  Spinning on his heel, the end of his green and gold robe fluttering from the turn, her father resumed his ascension. Nadire struggled to breathe, misery clinging to her brain like damp mold to an old shower. “You can’t just…” she gulped, having trouble shaking off the memories of pain, “run like this. It’s unprofessional.”

  “Says who?” Nicholas sneered. “I’m Santa Claus. Father Christmas. Papa Noel. The fucking Saint Nicholas himself. I get to say what is and isn’t professional!” In his fury, he waved the staff around but didn’t smash it to the floor. Still, his eyes caught hers, the color shifting from the warm brown of her fathers to the indifferent blue of the stranger whose mask he wore because the people demanded it. Both glared at her impudence for daring to interfere in his affairs.

  If she was younger, not even twenty and cutting her teeth in the control room with her mother, Nadire would have scampered back. Whispered a, “Yes Father” and hid in her room while writing cruel things in her diary. But she wasn’t just a grown woman, she was one ten times over, and she’d had enough.

  “You know what you did. You’ve damned yourself back to that courtroom, to answer to a judge who cannot stand you.”

  “Then so be it!” He spun fully around, glaring death at his only daughter. “This is my problem, not yours, Nadire. Keep your nose out of my business. Your little plan to get Mirek to work with me, as if that’d fix anything, as if he could behave for a minute.”

  Far as she saw, the Krampus was on his best behavior. Her father on the other hand…