Tinsel and Temptation

by Eileen Rendahl

  “I need to keep moving,” I said to the air. “Otherwise she won’t go down for her nap.”

  Even though I was braced for something, the chittering noise down by my ankles made me jump. I looked down. A humongous squirrel leapt along the side of the path. Ratatoskr. What the hell was he doing here?

  “Good morning, Messenger.”

  I was surprised at his snotty tone. After all, he was a messenger, too. He wasn’t even a messenger with a capitol M. He spent all his time running up and down the world tree, otherwise known as Yggdrasil, carrying messages to and from the eagle that lived at the top of the tree and the worm that lived beneath it. “Good morning to you, too, Ratatoskr.” I sounded downright pleasant in comparison to him, which said something about how rude his tone was.

  “I have a message.” He started to pick up his pace.

  I broke into a jog. “For whom?”

  “We’re not sure.” He leapt up onto a bench and ran along its back.

  “We?” I panted. “Who’s we?”

  “Me. My friends at the top and bottom of Yggdrasil and the Kallikantzeroi.” He kept leaping along, bushy tail straight up behind him.

  “So your World Tree is the same as the Greek World Tree?” I gasped out.

  He stopped and sat down, bright little black eyes looking at me. “How many freaking World Trees do you think there are?”

  Frankly it wasn’t a question I’d pondered in the past, although in my experience sharing wasn’t exactly the strongpoint of anyone in the supernatural world. That was part of the reason I was even needed. If everyone could make nice with each other, there’d be nothing for me to do. They could carry their own damn messages. “Okay, then. You share. Gold stars all around.”

  “So here’s the thing. The Kallikantzeroi are talking about going home early since it’s not safe for them here.” He sat down on his haunches.

  Seemed like a reasonable solution. “And that’s a problem why?”

  “If they go back early, the World Tree won’t have had time to heal properly. They might be able to saw through it if they started early and it was still damaged.” He shook his furry head. “Duh.”

  That was a problem.

  At that moment, Clara clapped her hands, pointed at a Ratatoskr’s tail and it burst into flames.

  That was a problem, too.

  Ted went on duty at three. At four, he called me. “The car Alex saw is registered to a Kappas Construction.”

  A construction company truck at a construction site? Not exactly fishy. “Could it be somebody checking on the site? Have there been any other crimes in the area?”

  “The timing seem suspicious and then there’s all that fruitcake …” I heard Ted tapping at his keyboard. “A lot of vandalism complaints. Mainly of holiday decorations.”

  “That has to be the Kallikantzeroi. Ripping apart holiday décor is one of their specialties. But why would this Kappas fellow want to bring the whole world down? What purpose could that possibly serve?” I never understood why villains wanted to destroy the whole world. I mean, didn’t they have to live in it, too? It seemed way too much like a cartoon character taking a saw to a limb he was sitting on.

  “I don’t think he wants to bring the whole world down. He’s not messing with Kallikantzeroi anywhere else except right around Golden 1.”

  “So he hates basketball? He’s a Warriors fan? What?” It still didn’t compute as far as I was concerned.

  “No. Think about it, Melina. He’s in construction. What if he wants to destabilize the area a little. Maybe cause a few cracks in the roads or shake the bridges a bit. Who gets hired to fix those things? I think he’s guaranteeing himself work for the next decade.”

  Would someone be that venal? That greedy that they would risk other people’s safety for their own profit? That they would actually kill other beings to set up a ploy like that? Who was I kidding? Of course someone could be exactly like that. The kind of someone who would use a bunch of stupid ‘Canes to do his dirty work would totally be like that.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “I think we have to keep the Kallikantzeroi safe until it’s time for them to go home.” The answer was so Ted. Protect and serve and all that.

  “That’s over a week! How are we going to do that?” I am so not Ted. Or even Tedly for that matter. It was part of the Yin Yang glory of our relationship.

  He hummed while he thought. “Isn’t the dojo closed for the week? They could stay there.”

  I didn’t like the direction this was going. “We’re supposed to open up again right after New Years Day. That leaves us with five more days to cover.”

  “Send out an email. Tell everyone you found mold under the mats and need extra time to get rid of it. Everyone hates mold.”

  And so Operation Kalli-Capture began. First we needed bait. I called my mother.

  “Mom, do you have any fruitcake?”

  “I have the two loaves cousin Lynn sent to us and to your grandmother this year. Why?”

  “Can I have them?”

  “For what? Some kind of gag present?” She snorted. “And I mean gag literally.”

  “No. For, uh, something else.”

  “Something … Messenger-y?” She paused. “Do I want to know?”

  Mom knew about me being a Messenger, but there were some things she seemed not to want to know about. I didn’t blame her. Most of the time I didn’t want to know about them either. Case in point? Stinky little Greek demons whose whole goal in life was to destroy the world who now somehow needed my protection so that the world didn’t get destroyed. I considered. “Maybe after it’s all over. Until then, I think you probably want to stay out of it.”

  “Are you in danger? Will Clara be okay? What about Ted?” Wow. I was at the top of that priority list. I’d sort of assumed Clara would come first.

  I got a little misty thinking about the fact that my Mommy loved me. Would those pregnancy hormones never fully leave me? “We’ll all be fine.”

  “Then you’re welcome to the fruitcake. You know, it’s possible that last year’s are down there as well.”

  “Fabulous.”

  I gathered up Clara and headed over to Mom’s.

  In the chest freezer in the garage, there were two loaf-shaped foil-wrapped items in the corner. I pulled those out and dug a little farther and came upon two more. I kept digging. And digging. And digging. By the time I got to the bottom of the old chest freezer I had ten frozen fruitcakes. Figure half a loaf to lure a Kallikantzeroi into the van. I had enough to lure and trap twenty of them. How many could there be coming up through that particular pathway?

  I came back into the kitchen. “Mom? Can I borrow one of your colanders, too?”

  “Same reason?”

  “Yep.”

  She sighed and pointed to the cabinet. “Be my guest.”

  I took two.

  We reconnoitered that night at the dojo.

  “Okay.” I looked around at the assembled faces. “What do we have?”

  “I have four fruitcakes I gathered up from my mom and cousins, but I really hit the jackpot at the after Christmas sales. I picked up sixty of them for about a hundred and eighty dollars.” Norah gestured out at her car. “I’ll need some help carrying them in. Those suckers are heavy.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” I said. Norah had a good job, but nobody wants to throw around nearly two hundred bucks.

  “From what? Your special Messenger Reimbursement Fund?” She snorted. “Like that exists.”

  It didn’t. I’d still have to find a way to pay her back.

  “I have ten,” Paul said.

  “I have eight.” Ted dumped his on the table.

  “My grandma had three.” Sophie set hers next to Ted’s.

  Alex said nothing. We all turned to look at him. “Fine. I didn’t get any. I was busy and I don’t eat so nobody gives me food. I’m the one who got the license plate. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  He had a
point. “Fabulous. That should be plenty to lure them and still some to feed them with once we get the to the dojo. Are we ready?” Everyone nodded. “Then let’s go.”

  I scooped up Clara and started toward the door. No one followed.

  “Uh, Melina?” Ted said.

  “What?” I asked. “We’ve got the van, the fruitcake, the colanders. What else do we need?”

  “Do you really think we should take Clara?”

  I froze. I’d gotten so used to doing everything with a baby on my hip, I hadn’t even considered it. “I’m not sure we have a choice.”

  “How about we drop her at your mother’s on our way downtown?”

  I hung my head and texted my mom. She was waiting on the doorstep when we pulled up. She scanned over the group. “Does this have to do with all that fruitcake?”

  “Yes.”

  She held out her arms. “Come to Grandma, Clara. We’ll have a grandma/baby sleep over. Pick her up in the morning.” With that she turned and shut the door in my face. Maybe I wasn’t at the top of that list.

  Downtown was as deserted as it had been the first time we’d visited the site. Still, we made sure to park the van on one of the side streets. Paul used a bolt cutter to cut through a chunk of the fence and remove it while I shimmied up the streetlight pole to break the bulb. We didn’t need or want light for what we were about to do.

  Ted and Alex stayed at the van while Paul and Sophie and I made our way to the pit, leaving crumbled pieces of fruitcake behind us like some sort of bizarre Hansel and Gretl gone wrong. We were about halfway there when I sensed something. I turned to Sophie. “You feel anything?”

  She lifted her head and shut her eyes. “Not really. Why?”

  “You?” I asked Paul.

  He stopped and sniffed. “Humans. Let’s hurry.”

  We broke into a run. There were three men at the edge of the pit, each one had a fruitcake and were laying a trail like we had. “I’ll take care of them,” Paul said, already stripping off his clothes.

  If you had never seen a werewolf change, it was impossible to take your eyes off it. If you had seen a werewolf change a dozen times or more, it was still pretty difficult to not stare. It was fascinating. The way their faces elongated and their limbs shortened. The way their backs bent and haunches formed. There really wasn’t time to stand around and appreciate Paul at the moment, though. I nudged Sophie. “Let’s go.”

  We ran toward the pit while Paul – or the werewolf that used to be Paul – loped off toward the men. If they were smart, they’d be gone before he got there. Turned out they were plenty smart. They scattered and ran with Paul at their heels. He was showing a lot of self-control. He could have probably taken down all three of them and snapped their necks. Instead, he stayed a length or so behind them, herding them like a border collie. Norah and I crumbled the rest of the fruitcake we’d brought with us and waited.

  It didn’t take long. Within a few minutes, the first Kallikantzeroi poked its head up from the pit. “This way,” I called. “Lots of fruitcake this way.”

  He snuffled the air and then began loping along the path we’d made, picking up chunks of cake and shoving them into his mouth. Another one followed him. And then it seemed like a flood of nasty-smelling, horned creatures were whipping their tails, shoving cake into their mouths all while heading toward Paul’s van.

  Just as abruptly, the flood went back to a trickle and then was over. “How many do you think that was?” I asked Sophie as I gathered up Paul’s clothes. He’d want them later.

  “No idea. I lost count at ten.”

  “I made it to twelve. I think less than twenty, though, right?” I wasn’t sure how we’d keep more than twenty at the dojo for another eleven days.

  “Sure,” Sophie said, clearly thinking the same thing I was. “Less than twenty. Definitely.”

  Turned out there were twenty-four.

  Paul met us at River City still in werewolf form. I’d grabbed his clothes from the construction site on our way to the van. I held them up and dropped them behind a hedge in the parking lot and returned to helping Sophie herd the Kallikantzeroi into the studio. In a matter of minutes, fully-clothed, mainly human Paul was back.

  “So who were they?” I asked.

  Paul shook his head. “They were mainly in pick-up trucks. A few SUVs. Nothing with a logo. I’m not sure it matters, at this point. Are they all in?” He pointed to the studio.

  I nodded. “Let’s go take a look.”

  Once we got in the door, I wished we hadn’t. The scene was total chaos. Plus the smell was incredible, like a wall that I physically slammed into. “In the name of all that’s holy, how do they stand themselves?”

  Sophie leaned against the wall in the entryway. A row of colanders kept the Kallikantzeroi contained to the mat area. A few of them sat and counted holes in the colanders, muttering over and over to themselves, “one … two … one … two.”

  Sophie shrugged. “You get used to it.”

  I stared at her. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Plus we have bigger problems.” She pointed out into the mat area.

  Three Kallikantzeroi were using their taloned fingers to rip up shreds of the mats. “Why are they doing that?”

  “They’re bored. They don’t have anything to do in here,” Paul said in a muffled voice. He’d wrapped a bandana around the lower part of his face.

  I turned to Norah. “Well, what do they like to do?”

  “Rip apart holiday decorations, according to the grimoire,” she said.

  I sighed. “Let’s go get us some trees.”

  Ted checked the Internet for which neighborhoods had green pick-up the following morning and we cruised through those, picking up discarded Christmas trees and wreaths and garlands. “Do you think we need to put ornaments on them?” I asked. “What if they don’t want to rip apart bare trees?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “There are limits, Melina.”

  I wished he was right.

  It was starting to get light by the time we were finished gathering up trees. Clara would be up and we weren’t far from my parents’ house. “Do you think we could swing by and pick her up on our way back to River City?” I asked.

  Ted chuckled. “You miss her, don’t you?”

  I squirmed a little. “No. I just want to be considerate of my mother.”

  “Your mother loves taking care of her. Admit it. You miss your baby.” He drove past the turn that would have taken us to my parents’ house.

  “You missed the turn.” I looked over my shoulder and where we should have been.

  “And I’ll keep missing them until you admit it. You like being a mom.”

  He was right. I did like it. Everything about it had been unexpected from the pregnancy to the in utero zapping to the instant and immediate connection I’d felt to my daughter the second I first held her. She’d looked at me with those weird gray-blue newborn eyes and I’d been instantly shot through the heart.

  “I miss Clara,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, but he did pull a Uey and head back toward my parents’ house.

  We pulled up in front of the karate studio armed with trees, coffee, and doughnuts. We’d left Norah, Alex, and Sophie on guard at the studio. Alex had already left – that whole rising sun thing really didn’t agree with him – but Norah and Sophie were still there. “It’s a good thing you finally got here,” Norah said, grabbing a doughnut from the box and helping herself to coffee. “I’m not sure how much longer the building would stand. Those little suckers are destructive.”

  It must have really been bad for her to eat refined sugar and drink caffeine all at the same time. I peeked inside and almost howled. Mats had been ripped into shreds. Mirrors had been cracked. Ceiling tiles hung loose. “Let’s get those trees in there.”

  I handed Clara to Norah. Ted, Sophie, and I started hauling in the trees and wreaths and lobbing them into the seething mass of Kallikantzeroi. The first few were ripped into
dust before they could hit the ground. Once we’d lobbed them all in, I took Clara back from Norah and stood in the lobby watching the wild destruction.

  One of the Kallikantzeroi ripped a branch off one of the trees and began running around in circles with it hooting.

  Clara chuckled.

  “You think that’s funny, baby?” I asked. I loved her chuckles. They were so adorable.

  Then she pointed her finger at the branch he was holding and the top of it burst into flame. She threw back her head and laughed. The Kallikantzeroi used that branch to light two more on fire. Clara laughed even harder. Her whole body shook. Ted grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and sprayed foam out into the room. The blaze went out. Clara looked at him with a frown and said, “Dadadadada.”

  Ted lifted the fire extinguisher. “I’ll pick up a few more of these on the way home.”

  The next ten days were a blur of stealing discarded Christmas trees and wreaths, begging for fruitcake, and putting out fires Clara started. There were a few times where I honestly did not think I would make it, but then one miraculous morning I woke up and it was the sixth of January, Epiphany, the last surface day for the Kallikantzeroi. The world tree should have healed itself. They could go home without causing any kind of destruction.

  I kissed its little square on the calendar. “I didn’t think we’d see you, sweet Epiphany. I didn’t think we’d make it.”

  “Anybody ever mention that you can be a little dramatic?” Ted came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. “We’ve survived another crisis.”

  “Do you think they’ll ever stop?” I asked.

  “No.” He turned me around to face him and kissed my forehead. “You don’t want them to anyway. You’d get bored.”

  “I’d like to try it. Just to see, you know.” I rested my forehead against his chest.