Professors Higgins and Sidhe were already seated at the High Table, along with three other students. Vickie recognized two of them, both a year ahead of her. Naomi McCoy and Ralph Emory. She and the Dean hung their cloaks—cloaks were part of the standard uniform here, which tickled her no end—on a coat-tree at the end of the buffet, and helped themselves. Either the Dean had already known the menu, or she was prescient; there were indeed apple pancakes, as well as oatmeal, bacon, fruit and cold cereal and a few other items. Pretty much what you’d find at the breakfast buffet at a motel, Vickie decided. But of course, better. She might have hesitated in picking a seat, not certain what the protocol was during vacation, but Professor Higgins looked up and grinned at her and gesticulated broadly at the chair next to him. Feeling relieved, she made her way around the table until she came to the seat next to him. Vickie was one of the very few magicians, ever, in the entire history of the school, to see magic in terms of mathematical and algebraic equations. Everyone saw magic differently, of course, but because Vickie saw it as math, she was not only able to easily learn and replicate spells, she was able to deconstruct them and derive new ones, or new applications of old ones. The more math and physics she learned, the better she was able to do that. Professor Higgins, who looked very like a hobbit but spoke like an Einstein, was the only teacher who saw and understood magic in the same way. She was his first pupil in twenty years, and he was utterly as delighted to have found her as she was to get him as her mentor.
The two of them chattered like a couple of magpies about mathemagic while the other students who were going to be here for most of the vacation and the remaining teachers came in. Unlike meals while school was in session, there didn’t seem to be any formality; students and teachers mingled at the High Table, although Vickie was the only one deeply engrossed in conversation with a teacher.
The last to come in was a very young student, much younger than the usual. She looked to be nine or ten at most, when most people came to the school in their early teens. She was very blond, wore her hair in two braids, and looked like a little Dresden doll.
She slipped up to the sideboard like a timid mouse, quickly filled her plate, and sat as far from everyone as she could. “Who’s that?” Vickie asked the Professor, who had paused in his discussion to finish his pancakes before they turned cold.
He swallowed the last bite. “Heidi Dortmund,” he said. “Sad case, that. Her parents died last year, and her grandmother has charge of her.”
Instantly, Vickie felt a surge of sympathy—and a little bit of fellow-feeling—for the little girl. Not that having your parents dead was anywhere near the same as having them gone, but … well the others were chatting to each other and Professor Sidhe, and she was sitting there all alone. Professor Higgins picked up on what she was thinking without her even needing to say anything.
“Planning on acquiring another stray already?” he asked, his eyes twinkling—since last semester she had been the one to champion her friend Paul against the popular kids in the school who were secretly bullying him. Well, they had been popular. They weren’t quite so arrogant now that they’d been caught and punished in their covert bullying, and humiliated by Vickie and Paul to boot.
“Oh, I just think she could use a friend,” Vickie demurred. “She’s kind of young to be here, isn’t she?”
Professor Higgins shrugged slightly, and ran a hand through his mop of curly, sandy hair. “There aren’t many as young as she is, but I gather circumstances were special for her.”
It looked like the little girl was almost done with her breakfast—she’d all but bolted it. Vickie finished hers before the child could escape. The Professor saw very well what she was about to do, and gave her a little wink by way of encouragement, while taking his own sweet time with his own meal. Well, he ate like a hobbit, too; she had never seen anyone who enjoyed food as much as he did, and if he hadn’t been a magician, he’d have been too round to fit in his chair. Before the girl could scuttle off, Vickie came over to her chair. To Vickie’s relief, the little girl didn’t look frightened or alarmed, just wary. Probably not used to the older kids approaching her.
“Hi, I’m Vickie,” she said, with an encouraging grin. “You want to help me build a snowman?”
The little girl just lit up. “Yes!” she said, and that was all it took. Since both of them were already dressed for the weather, and had their cloaks and mittens with them, they ran out to the courtyard together to turn words into actions.
By the time the bell for lunch sounded, both of them were snow-caked, and Vickie had a very good idea of why Heidi had been looking so cowed.
On the one hand, Vickie wished there were two of her, so she could spend time with Professor Higgins as well as with Heidi. On the other hand, at lunch, the Professor had been giving her very encouraging looks that she read as “stay with the child” over lunch. She was used to being extremely active—she not only took Staff Fighting, she was taking Folk Dance and Introduction to Free-Running—and it was pretty obvious Heidi wasn’t, so by the time supper came along, Heidi was exhausted, and said she was going to go to bed early. After watching Vickie spend all day in the company of the much younger child, the Dean was evidently curious, and intercepted her on the way back across the Courtyard to the West Building.
“You are up to something, young lady,” the Dean said, although in an amused, rather than accusatory tone. “I should like very much to know what it is.”
Vickie hunched her shoulders against the cold. “Heidi’s Grandmother hates her. Or at least, that’s what Heidi says. Heidi says her Grandmother never liked her father, and that her Grandmother thinks Heidi is the reason why her parents died.” She frowned. “I didn’t say anything, but she must be the meanest, nastiest woman ever. She treats Heidi like a failing cadet in a military school, and you wouldn’t believe what she thinks is good reading for a little kid. Brothers Grimm. The original, unedited stuff, with kids eaten by bears, and dismembered, and drowned, and left to die in the woods.”
She glanced up at the Dean, and saw that the woman had been taken entirely aback. “Well … you have been busy,” the Dean said, finally. “That’s more than any of her teachers have been able to get out of her. All we knew was that she was quiet and very unhappy, as what child wouldn’t be, who’d been orphaned?” She pondered a moment, then shook her head.
“Is there any way you can figure out how to keep her here instead of going back for Christmas?” Vickie begged, then ran forward to open the door for the Dean. “What if you said she was sick? Like, bad stomach flu? If her Grandmother dislikes her that much, wouldn’t she just hate having to take care of someone who was throwing up, or worse?”
She paused on the stair that would lead her up to her own room, as the Dean stopped at the foot of the staircase and pondered that. “It’s an option.…” the woman finally said, but with some reluctance. “But I don’t have to tell you that it is a very bad thing for a magician to lie. Words have power for a mage, and what if we made her ill?”
Vickie felt crestfallen. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted unhappily.
“The trouble is, this is very short notice, especially when we had already set a date with her Grandmother when she could be expected home,” the Dean continued. “For future breaks, we can easily contrive some sort of excuse—that she needs to catch up on some subject or other, or that there is a school trip. Something we can make happen without any unfortunate consequences for her. But … this time, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.” The Dean smiled encouragingly at Vickie. “It’s only for a few days. The Grandmother herself set the dates—we had thought that it was only that an elderly woman didn’t feel up to taking care of a young girl for very long, or that she thought Heidi would be bored and troublesome, but … well, your information certainly casts that in a new light. But it’s not as if she’s physically abusing the girl, and Heidi is sensible and knows she’ll be coming back here where she’ll be happy. I’m su
re Heidi will be fine.”
Vickie wasn’t so sure about that, but what could she say? She went up to her room in a troubled state of mind. Bad enough that she was worried about her parents, but now she was worried about Heidi, too.
The first thing she did when she got to her room—besides hang her cloak over a chair facing the ever-burning fire—was to check her message-box. It looked like a little wooden jewelry box, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. It was one of a pair, with Apport “landing pads” inscribed inside. She had one, and Hosteen had one; she and her mentor had made them together. Letters weighed almost nothing, so they weren’t hard to Apport; this was more secure than using conventional means to talk, and less taxing than every other form of magic communication.
She opened the lid, and as she had hoped, there was a folded letter inside. With a sigh of relief, she took it out, and settled down next to the fire. It was coded, of course, but it wasn’t but a moment and a relatively simple bit of magic to take care of that. She held the pages between her hands, visualized the equations of the spell, said “Fiat,” aloud, and the words were descrambled. It was Hosteen’s box that did the scrambling, a bit of techno-magic that she had created and he ruefully often wished aloud he could duplicate.
She settled down to read it carefully. They were in place, and had set up their headquarters in a rented vacation-home. He couldn’t tell her where they were, or what they were doing, of course, but he assured her that everything was routine and that so far, other than the fact that there were nine agents on the team, it was proceeding like a normal investigation. Which meant that, aside from the fact that whoever or whatever they were after was using magic or was itself a creature of magic, and they were using forensic magic to track it down, it was just like any other FBI investigation. There was a bad guy, who was doing his best to elude them, but unless they cornered him, Hosteen didn’t see him as a danger to the team.
And then … she read in between the lines, as Hosteen would have assumed she would do. They had their own little private code, the two of them, invoking things the two of them shared. It was nothing that anyone other than Mom and Dad would ever have been able to decipher. Pacific Northwest. Serial killer. Why are so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest? Now she understood why they needed a team of nine; there was a lot of territory to cover up there, and if this was a murderer who was striking often, they needed to take him down as quickly as possible. You didn’t want to split up in groups of less than three on a case like this.
Strangely, figuring that out made her less worried. On serial killer cases, the hunters rarely became the hunted. Serial killers preyed on the weak and isolated, not the strong and united.
She wrote her own quick letter to her parents, which Hosteen would pass on to them, and just as she had finished closing it in the box, she heard, faintly and muffled, a scream of absolute terror.
There were only two places on the grounds of the School where someone was likely to be screaming, the East Building and the West. And it had not sounded as if the scream came from the West Building—which left the East. The student dorms.
It was just pure good fortune that she was still fully dressed, boots and all. Vickie snatched up her cloak and ran for the door without a second thought. She raced down the stairs to the front door, and shoved it open, running straight out into the Courtyard.
Just as she left the front door of her building, the scream came again, this time definitely from East Building. As she dashed across the moon-flooded Courtyard, the door to West crashed open again behind her; it was the teachers, presumably, responding as she had—but she was too intent on her goal to look back.
She wrenched the door to East Building open; it wasn’t locked, since, after all, there really wasn’t any place for the students here to sneak off to. The School was surrounded by acres of forest, and most of the kids were city or suburb-bred. The building was lit only dimly, all the hall-lights dimmed to bedtime-mode, but it was enough to see by. She dashed up the staircase, taking the stairs two at a time, to the first floor, to find a knot of petrified students hovering uncertainly at the top of the stairs.
“Who screamed?” Vickie demanded, looking from one to another.
“I—we don’t know!” said the eldest, a seventeen-year-old girl Vickie remembered was named Pomona. “We just heard someone, and came running out into the hall and—”
“And I saw a thing!” shrilled Ralph Emory, white as the snow outside. He reached for her arm and clutched it as if it were a lifeline. Maybe because she wasn’t the only one panicking. “I think it was a demon!”
At this point, the Dean came up the last of the stairs, and grabbed Nick by the shoulder. “What do you mean, a demon?” she demanded. “The entire School and Grounds and shielded and warded against demons! It’s impossible!”
Professor Hakenon came pounding up the stairs as fast as Vickie had—he was not only the teacher of European Applied Myth, he was also Vickie’s Staff-Fighting teacher and in excellent shape. “Who’s missing?” he demanded, and scanned the little clutch of students. “Where’s Heidi?”
“I’ll check her room,” the Dean said, grimly, and strode off down the corridor. “You question Nick.”
Vickie followed on the Dean’s heels, but the answer was clear as soon as they were halfway down the hall. The door to Heidi’s room stood wide open; from the mess inside, there had clearly been a struggle. The desk had been toppled, as had the chairs, and papers and books were scattered everywhere.
And Heidi was gone.
“Dean!” came the call from back down the hall, and Professor Hakenon ran up to them as the Dean turned in his direction. His blond hair was disheveled and the expression on his handsome face was grim. “Nick is right, he saw a demon—of sorts,” the Professor said as he skidded to a halt beside them.
“What do you—” the Dean began. The Professor interrupted her.
“By ‘of sorts,’ I mean it’s something we never warded against, because we didn’t think to,” the Professor explained, running his hand through his hair in a frantic gesture. “Good gods, we were so—it can only be invoked by someone who knows it, and thinks he—or she—deserves to be punished. That’s how it got past our protections. Heidi thinks she deserves this, she must, or it never would have come for her.”
“For heaven’s sake, Nikki, get to the point!” the Dean exclaimed. “What is it?”
“It’s the Krampus,” the Professor replied bleakly. “And now it’s loose here, it could take any of the others if we don’t guard them, and if we don’t get Heidi away from it before dawn, it will carry her off.”
Vickie waited in the hall, poised on the balls of her feet, heart pounding. The other students were all in a heavily warded and sealed room, with Professor Sidhe guarding them. But one youngster had to be out for this plan to work, and she had volunteered before anyone else could speak up. This was the first time she had ever played “bait.” And her parents would never forgive her if it was her last.…
But there wasn’t a choice. They had to save Heidi, and to do that, they had to get her out of the clutches of the Krampus, and the only way to get to the Krampus was to get the Krampus to come to them—
It wouldn’t come for an adult. It wouldn’t come if there were any adults anywhere around. And it wouldn’t come for just any youngster, either. It had to be one who had been—naughty—
So she waited in the hallway, all alone, hoping that part of what the Krampus wanted was terror, and the thrill of the chase.
She heard it before she saw it; as the Professor had suggested it would, it materialized in the middle of the utterly deserted hallway, right by the door to Heidi’s room, where it had disappeared as soon as Ralph spotted it—because Ralph was old enough to count as an adult. The chains around its waist clinked and dragged on the floor; its hooves made clumping sounds on the wood. She couldn’t see it well in the dim light, but what she saw was enough. Horns. Tail. And an impossible tongue that lolled out of
its ugly mouth and dangled past its knees. But most importantly, she spotted the bulging basket on its back, the straw straining at what it contained. That was all Vickie needed to see. And she had been naughty. The Dean had ordered her to go back to her own room and not set foot in East Building until dawn.
“Hey! Ugly!” she shouted, making her tone as taunting as she could. “I’m where I’m not supposed to be! What’re you gonna do about it?”
The head came up; the thing started panting. And then it launched itself at her, moving much faster than its lumbering gait would have suggested.
She ran. She ran, and behind her, she left tangles of magic, knotty equations she made up on the fly, meant only to slow it down. Because it was darn near a primal force, and if she didn’t manage to slow it somehow, it was going to catch her, and then there would be two to rescue.
“Think of the Krampus as St. Nikolas’s evil twin.”
That was what the Professor had said, explaining just what it was that they were up against. She knew about Black Peter, of course, the creature who, in some German and English traditions was the fellow that spanked naughty children and gave them coal, but the Krampus was … a magnitude nastier than that. Really, something only a sadistic German could have thought up. A sadistic German who had been spending the early part of the winter cramped in a dark hut, hemmed in by snowdrifts, with his increasingly quarrelsome family, trying to think of a way to really make his children shut up and behave until spring.…
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