by Dan Thompson
I wasn’t sure why I was dawdling so, but I suspect part of me was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Would Mother go so far as to try to pull her mother into the argument as well? Would Paul use some embarrassing secret to blackmail me into going? He worked with fae, so he’d be able dredge up something. I was certain Dad would not try to push at me again, but still, as I walked the last block to the lift station, I kept waiting for my phone to ring. It never did.
Instead, Margaret was waiting for me at the lift station.
I tried to repress my frown, but I didn’t try very hard. “Funny running into you here,” I said.
She gave a weak smile. “That’s it? After everything Paul said, I was expecting more of a ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ kind of thing.”
I shook my head. “We don’t say ‘what the hell’ down here. But as long as you brought it up, Margaret, what in all the depths do you think you’re doing?”
She shrugged. “I wanted to spend some time with my future sister-in-law.”
“You’re not going to change my mind. I’m not going back to Evanelle for Festival.”
“I know.”
I checked my watch. It was just after four, and the trains were slipping to the once-an-hour holiday schedule until six when they would stop for the night. That was less an issue for demons, because they could always fly through the Abaddon Gate on the other side of Karthai and come out on the southeast side of town to fly to whatever part of Pittsburgh they wanted to. Not so much for us. “Look, Margaret, I appreciate the gesture, but if you want to get back to see Paul, you’d better start back for the Orange Line now.”
“Thanks, but I thought I’d stick with you and see about this story you’re after.”
I had no idea if Margaret was bluffing, but I had only the slightest bit of guilt in calling her on it. “All right. It’s over in Bhatari which means”—I nodded to the lift station behind her—“we need to go on that.”
She glanced behind her, nodded, and said, “Then let’s get going.”
Checked and raised. “All right.”
There was no line. This lift never gets much traffic anyway. A bench swung through, we got on, and with a jerk, it pulled us out over the quarry. I watched Margaret as the ground dropped away beneath us, but she looked down for only a few seconds before turning her eyes back up to the chair arm going up to the cable.
This lift was not nearly as nice or safe as the one Nigel and I had crossed on earlier. For starters, there was no safety bar to swing down in front of us. Second, there were no arm rests on the side, only the central bar to hang on to. And third, the bench was really just a pair of twelve-inch planks, one to sit on and one to lean back against. To top it off, it wasn’t a detachable chair, so that meant it was moving as slow as it was when it scooped us up.
Given how rare human traffic was out to Bhatari, this was considered a luxury upgrade from the original lift, which had been little more than a zip-line from the lip of the quarry down to the floor at the far side. Still, thanks to the constant digging along the floor of the quarry, the towers for the cables did not rise from below. Instead, they hung from the cavern roof, with the space below us dropping down into darkness. But Margaret appeared unfazed.
“So, how did you find me, anyway?” I asked her.
“I asked one of Paul’s friends at work.”
“Fae?” I asked.
She nodded. “Verity Wallace.”
“And he told you I’d be at the lifts?”
“Something like that. It’s never a straight answer with him, but he said that at four o’clock you would cross from Karthai to Bhatari in search of True Christmas.”
I snorted. “True Christmas? I hope you didn’t tag along based on that.”
“No,” she said. “But what is this story?”
“I suppose there’s no point in asking you not to tell Paul.”
“Not necessarily,” she replied. “Just because we’re getting married doesn’t mean I have to give up my aura of mystery.”
Part of me still suspected that she had been sent on Paul’s instructions, but I had to admit that her answer surprised me. “All right. It’s not True Christmas or anything like that. I’m tracking down a rumor that there’s some demon who is doing the Santa thing whole hog, complete with a sled and … well, not flying reindeer, but flying petheks.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Petheks? Wow, now that would be a sight to see.”
I shook my head. “Yeah, but it’s probably a fool’s errand.”
“You don’t think he exists?”
“I think the demon exists, but from what I’ve heard, it was one pethek, no sled, and no repeat performance.”
“Oh,” she said. “Still, it sounds like fun.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her. Fun? Yes, I’ve wanted to be a journalist since I was a kid, but it was always a career to me, never fun. “You’re really interested in this?”
She shrugged. “A little. Mostly I wanted to spend the time with you.”
“All right,” I replied. “It’s your dime.”
We passed a little while in silence before she asked the same question Nigel would have asked. “You have his address?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
I waited for her to ask me how I expected to find him, but she didn’t. The truth of it was I hadn’t put a lot of thought into it. I had simply been mad enough with everyone to push myself past the point of no return. I had a name, Warrick Bint; an occupation of rancher; and a cavern. Well, ranchers did business with … meat processors? Even if I could find the right slaughterhouse, that’s not how I wanted to spend my Christmas Eve. Equipment vendors? No, most of those would have been back in Karthai, or in Pittsburgh for that matter. Feed stores? That was worth looking at.
“I figure I can ask after him at the local feed store,” I said.
“Sounds like a plan,” she replied.
The fact that she accepted it so readily sucked my confidence right out of the plan. What kind of feed store was going to be open on Christmas Eve, let alone at four-thirty in the afternoon? But that’s what I’d said, so that’s what I was going to do.
The floor of the quarry rose up to meet us, and we stepped off the chairlift. I peeked in on the operator, and he was already celebrating, shall we say. There was an empty bottle next to him on the control board, but his glassy eyes spoke more of tarro moss than liquor alone. I had intended to ask him how late the lift would be running, but the sign on the door answered my question. “Lift stops at 6 p.m.” It was already 4:47.
“So, where is this feed store?” Margaret asked.
I was about to pull out my phone and Google it, but I saw my answer down the road. There were five or six buildings in sight, but only one was lit up, and it had drawn something of a crowd. “Down there,” I said. I didn’t know if it would actually be a feed store, but it was a crowd of locals that I was after, and that certainly looked like such a crowd.
It was about four blocks, which were no shorter for being mostly empty, but we walked it with purpose. “What kind of demon is this Mr. Bint?”
“A tokkel,” I replied, and made a spiraling motion on either side of my head. “With the ram horns.”
“Cool,” she replied.
“You know many demons?”
She shrugged. “A dozen or so, mostly tokkels.”
“Really?” I was surprised. They rarely get out into the public eye.
“Sure. I spend half my time underwriting loans, and the tokkels are some of the sharpest financial minds I’ve run into.”
“Even compared to the fae?” Some fae had legitimate precognition, so I always figured they ruled the financial world.
She shot me a grin. “There’s more to business than knowing the future.”
I was going to ask what, but I was genuinely confused. What was Margaret really doing here? She had to know the time, and she would have seen the same sign I did at the lift. Did she have some backup plan for get
ting back in time? And if so, what?
A roar of laughter stirred me from my thoughts. We were getting close to the source, and I could see that it was not a feed store. It was, instead, the demon equivalent of a drive-in theater. They had no cars, of course, but there were tables scattered around in front of a wall of those big flat screens, arrayed together edge-to-edge. I couldn’t make out the sound, but I’d been to one of these before. You pay to borrow a pair of headphones, and you watch from your table. Some of the nicer ones had waiters, but this one looked like it was more self-serve, with a cook working a fry-grill behind a short counter.
The movie itself looked like last year’s remake of A Christmas Story. If you didn’t see it, they made little Ralphie a nine-year-old kagnari whose great Christmas desire was for a Kalxi Axemen double-bladed blood-steel poleaxe with a gyroscope in the handle and a strap that lets you carry it over your back! Instead of risking an eye, the feared outcome was suitably demonic: “You’ll cut your wing off!”
I took a seat by the counter, while Margaret wandered over toward the tables. They were approaching the critical scene when little Ralphie was finally going to ask Santa himself for the poleaxe. The cook nodded to me, but he was flipping a series of sausages over the grill. I glanced at the menu, but I wasn’t all that hungry. Still, it would be polite to order at least an appetizer.
I waited a few minutes before he turned around, dipped a wing in my direction, and asked, “You hungry?”
“Sure,” I replied. “I’ll take a fried dog.” Now, before you jump to conclusions about demon cuisine, it’s just their version of a corn dog. It’s made with a thicker and spicier sausage, and the breading is much more like the crunchy skin of fried chicken than the bland cornmeal of a traditional corn dog. It was more than I had room for in my stomach, but I thought Margaret might want a bite as well.
He had one already under the warming light, so he handed it over. I took a bite and was surprised at how good it was. No wonder he had such a crowd on Christmas Eve.
“So, you’re not one of my regulars. What brings you all the way out here?”
“I’m looking for a rancher by the name of Warrick Bint.”
“Are you one of those collections agents?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m from the Herald.” I fished out one of my precious business cards and slid it across the counter. “I heard he’s quite the Santa fan.”
The cook snorted. “You mean that stunt last year?”
I nodded. “Any chance of a repeat performance?”
He shrugged. “With Warrick, anything is possible.”
Another roar of laugher interrupted my thoughts, and I glanced back at the wall of screens. Little Ralphie was spiraling down away from Santa’s lofty perch, sped along by a hoof to his rump. Margaret saw me looking and wandered back.
“Any chance he’s in there?” I asked.
“Nah,” the cook replied. “I haven’t seen him in two or three days.”
“Does he live around here?”
“Sort of, but it’s a ways, down at the end of Petiko Road.”
I thanked him, took another bite of my fried dog and put a few bucks down on the table.
“Did you find him?” Margaret asked.
“I got an address.”
“How far?”
I took one last bite of the fried dog and handed it to her. I licked the juices off my fingers and pulled out my phone. Yes, Google Maps even works in Hell, but you have to turn off safe-search to get the street-level view sometimes. Petiko Road branched off the main street a few blocks from here, but then it was almost two miles to the far end. “A couple of miles,” I said.
She checked her watch. Aha! Now I knew for sure she was worried about the time. “Then let’s get moving,” she said.
I started us in the right direction, but she was setting the pace. “What’s your hurry?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? If he really is doing the full Santa thing, I want to see him before he takes off.”
So down Petiko Road we went. Margaret asked a few questions about the sights along the way. There was a herd of kaltep grazing on the purple ferns to our left. “Why do they have six legs when most things have only four?”
“No wings,” I said. “If you count them, pretty much everything has six appendages in Hell. These guys evolved from some serious diggers about half their size, but they started bulking up a few thousand generations back.”
“Did their ancestors dig out these caverns?”
I shook my head. “Not these, but some of the smaller ones, yes.”
“And the ferns? Are they good to eat?”
“Good for them, but not for us.”
We walked another few minutes in silence, but then I had to ask. “So, what are you normally doing on Christmas Eve?”
She shrugged. “Dad took off a long time back, so usually it’s been me, Mom, and my older sister. But she’s married now, and Mom went to spend Christmas with them in Denver. So I’m kind of on my own this year.”
“Except you have Paul,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, and your mom.” She gave a little snort. “And your grandmother Vanessa is a hoot.”
I had to smile. Yes, as much as I could not stand to be with Mother, her mother, Vanessa, was enough to keep me from completely writing off that side of the family. “She is at that. So, why aren’t you with them?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, really.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t?”
“I mean, I love Paul, and I’m looking forward to a lot of Christmases to come, but this is my last one, you know, to make my own.”
“But you’re here with me.”
She nodded. “I’ll admit, it’s less of an exciting adventure than I thought it might be, but I have some faith in Verity Wallace.”
“Your fae friend with the whole True Christmas thing.” The sarcasm showed in my voice more than I meant it to.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “Don’t you believe in it?”
“What? Christmas or Christ?”
“Whichever,” she replied. “Something good. Hope, joy, you know, good will towards men?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t think about that kind of stuff.”
“No?”
“Well, not when I’m on a deadline at any rate.”
She frowned at that, but she did not say anything in response.
I let the silence stretch a little longer, but it was getting awkward. “So,” I ventured, “have you and Paul set a date yet?”
I got a grin for that. “Yes, next summer, August seventeenth. I wanted June, of course.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
“But Paul said he couldn’t get the vacation in either the first or third month of a financial quarter.”
I nodded. That sounded exactly like Paul. “And the church?”
She brightened even more at that, and we dove deep into talk about the wedding. I didn’t care all that much, to be honest, but it filled the time as we walked. Still, I figured I’d be asked to be a bridesmaid or something, and I wanted to get in an early vote against anything yellow. I’m pale enough that it ends up making me look like a zombie. Well, at least like a movie zombie. Thank the fires above that those aren’t real.
Anyway, the bridal topic carried us awhile, but we had settled back into silence by the time we came to a gate blocking the road. The script on the sign was demonic, but it read the equivalent of “Bint Family Ranch.”
“This is it,” I said. It had only a simple latch, so we went through and closed it behind us. The road continued, though it was more of a dirt driveway now. There was a house and a barn another quarter mile or so along, so we headed that way.
“Should we be worried about trespassing?” Margaret asked.
I shook my head. “When your neighbors fly overhead all the time, you don’t think that way.”
We came around to the front of the house, but I didn’t see anyone. The barn looked to be closed
as well. Maybe this was a waste of time after all.
“Look,” Margaret whispered, pointing to the back of the barn.
I saw a wing jutting out from the far side. It pulled back once or twice. Whoever it belonged to was working on something. “Hark!” I called out. No, it's not a Christmas thing; it's actually a common greeting in the demon tongue. I might work for the Herald, but I'm no angel.
The wing fluttered a bit, and then a demon stepped out, a bulky tokkel in black leather pants but shirtless and with no merry red cap astride his heavily curled horns. He tilted one of those horns toward us before calling out, “What brings you?”
I headed his way. “I’m looking for Warrick Bint.”
“You don’t look like bankers. Who are you?”
“I’m Alice Koufax. I work for the Herald.”
“And your friend?”
I glanced back at Margaret. She had come all this way, after all. “This is Margaret, my sister, sort of.”
He rubbed his hands together. “So, Alice Koufax of the Herald and Margaret the sort-of sister, what do you want?”
“I heard a story that you pulled quite the Santa stunt last year.”
He shook his head. “No, I pulled no stunt.”
“No?” Had this really all been for nothing?
“No,” he said and turned back toward the barn. He walked another ten paces before he paused and looked back at us. “It was no stunt,” he said with a tooth-bared smile, and then boomed out in triumph, “It was a trial run!” He waved with one arm. “Come and see.”
My feet were tired from the long walk, but you can bet your Sexy Santa I ran the whole way to catch up with him as he rounded the corner of the barn, and what I saw took my breath away. Big Jim had been right after all.
No, it wasn’t a red sled being pulled by eight flying reindeer, but it was close enough. The sled was more of a dune buggy frame with big rubber wheels and no engine, and it was perhaps a bit more orange than red, but it was indeed hitched up to eight flying petheks. They were all on the ground at the moment, but from what I could tell of the rigging, one beast was harnessed at each corner, and then four more were harnessed together two by two further forward. They even had little silver sleigh bells hanging from the tack.