26

I’m almost too late.

Usually I like to terrify my victims with the impending threat of my arrival, but this time I forgo all the lead-up to my appearance, and I smash straight through the roof of the cottage into the child’s attic bedroom.

I almost don’t recognize Perchta. She’s dressed in white garments streaked with blood, but instead of the wizened, demonic face she usually wears to frighten unruly children, she is tall and lovely, with the same elegant features she wore as a ghost—except now, she’s fully corporeal. Her nails are sharply pointed, glossy white, and nearly as long as her fingers .

At the sound of my hooves, my clanking chains, and the bells in my robes, she glances over her shoulder and smiles.

“Krampus,” she says. “I’m glad you decided to join us.”

The child on the bed is a stocky boy with a round face. His eyes bulge in terror as he screams through the sock she has jammed into his mouth. His wrists and ankles are bound to the bed with golden strands of Perchta’s hair. His nightshirt is rolled up, exposing his midriff, and as I watch, she raises a sharp nail and prepares to slice him open with it. There’s a bag of straw beside her, probably for stuffing him when she’s done extracting his guts.

“Perchta!” I growl. “What has he done to deserve this?”

“He’s been a cruel little snot,” she says lightly. “He terrorizes his younger sister. Threw her down a well once, and she walks with a limp now. Not that I care much about her, but he is a bad seed, and should be uprooted.”

“Your role is not to murder children,” I tell her. “And I’d wager some of the ones you’ve killed in the past two days did nothing to deserve such final punishment.”

“You’re one to talk,” she hisses. “When we first met, you told me what you did—your great act of mercy, ending the lives of those miserable children. What I’m doing is a mercy, too. You have no right to judge me.”

“In fact, I do,” I reply. “I am acting on the authority of the Wild Hunt and our overseer, Nocturis.”

Her eyes narrow. “I’m no longer part of the Wild Hunt. I have authority of my own now. Magic siphoned from the Nexus.” She lifts a tiny glass bottle strung around her throat, and I spot grains of shining green sand within it. “You have no power over me.”

“You are corporeal, and you are an abuser of children,” I tell her. “I can destroy you, and I will. But it gives me no joy to do it. ”

At that moment the boy’s father appears in the doorway, his face stricken with terror, holding an ax in his shaking hands. I sigh, knowing that his eyewitness report of this night will conflate me with Perchta and I’ll be blamed for yet another attack on a child. Best to get this over with quickly.

I lunge for the man, seizing his wrist and bending his arm down so the ax blade bites into the floor. My tongue lashes along his cheek and he falls to the side.

“You’ll be alright,” I growl at him. Then I whirl back to Perchta just as she makes a dive for the stairs.

“You should know better, old friend.” I send several spiked chains whipping through the air. They coil around her body, tearing through her smooth flesh. If she were still in ghost form, I’d use geistfyre to bind her, but in physical form, my usual methods will do.

She screams, emitting a pulse of green light that throws off the chains. I fling several more chains in her direction, grunting with the effort as my power clashes with hers.

Another burst of green energy jolts from her, but this time she can’t fully free herself. Most of the magic in those grains of sand is being used to keep her corporeal, and there’s not much left for self-defense. She manages to lunge toward the stairs again, but as the chains tighten, she loses her footing and tumbles headlong down the narrow steps with a scream of frustration.

“Fuck.” I clatter downstairs after her, barely managing to maintain my grip on the handfuls of chains I’m wielding.

Perchta is dragging herself across the floor of the house’s main living space, blood streaking the boards as the spiked chains tear deeper into her body.

“I just created this form,” she wails. “And you’re ruining it! Fuck you, Krampus, you selfish, wretched asshole! ”

“I was your friend,” I tell her, winding the chains around my forearm as I approach her. “Feather wanted to be your friend. And you betrayed us. You caused this, Perchta.”

“Friends would have helped me,” she spits back. “Feather promised to help, but she did nothing . She was too distracted by your filthy, lustful aura and your filthy fucking house. I waited for centuries, and I was tired of waiting. I bought my freedom, in spite of you.”

“I told you that using the Nexus could destroy the house, and it would have, if not for Feather,” I tell her. “You’ve done all this… and for what? Those grains of sand you stole won’t last long outside the Nexus, Perchta. Your recklessness will cost you everything.”

She’s moving weakly now, still trying to drag herself toward the door. I yank one of the chains, and her body flips over. As I approach, she lies on her back, seething and weeping.

“It doesn’t feel good,” she whispers. “This body doesn’t feel right unless I’m killing. I thought it would be different. I thought it would be beautiful.”

My heart aches for her… but my heart is buried beneath layers of black fabric and ruthless muscle. Right now, it isn’t guiding me. I am a slave of justice, servant of the god-stars, and I have come to right this wrong.

I slide the sack off my shoulder, and it gapes wide, ready to receive her body.

“Perchta, exile of Faerie, Lady in White,” I say in my deepest voice. “For your crimes against human children, your existence is forfeit.”

“Take off that fucking mask and look me in the eyes when you do it, Krampus,” she hisses.

Jaw clenched, I reach up, remove the mask, and set it aside. Then I lean down and grip the chains that bind her. She isn’t struggling or screaming now, but she holds my gaze as I lift her up .

With my face close to hers, I speak, low and intense. “I was told to destroy you, but I’m not going to feed you to the beasts. That would annihilate you forever. Instead, I’m giving you to the humans. You’ll confess to all the crimes for which they’re blaming me, and thereby clear my name and Feather’s. They will kill you, and if they do it before the magic in that sand fades, you’ll go back to being a ghost. You won’t have a role to play, and you’ll be trapped in the city where you die, no longer part of the Wild Hunt… but you will still exist, and you can haunt your killers to your heart’s content. This is your one chance to escape annihilation. But you have to play along. You have to confess.”

Perchta wavers on the brink of denying me—I can see it in her eyes. But after a moment, she nods. “Agreed.”

It’s a small mercy—not really a mercy so much as a convenience for Feather and me. But I knew Perchta would take the offer, because when it comes down to a choice between existing in some form or not existing at all, most living things will pick the former option.

I pick up my mask and put it over Perchta’s face. Once it magically seals to her skin, I lift her hand and lick her knuckles to immobilize her for a while. Then I toss her into my sack and cinch its mouth shut.

With the bag slung over my shoulder, I stalk out of the house and draw my geistfyre circle. Upon my return to the house, I put the bag in a cell in the room below and lock the cell door so Meerwunder can’t get to Perchta. The bars, the bag, and my chains will hold her until I settle things with Feather.

At first, I can’t find her. She’s not still crying in the library, nor is she cooking in the kitchen or scrubbing floors in the hallways. I’ve reverted to my Fae form, and I stop by our bedroom to put on pants, since I ripped through my clothes when I transformed in the library. But Feather isn’t in the bedroom, either .

Fear begins to gnaw at my heart as I stride the corridors of the house, hunting for her. Her scent lingers faintly everywhere, not strong enough for me to follow it to the source.

What if her tenuous relationship with the monsters failed, and one of them has finally eaten her? If that has happened, I’ll kill every single one of them or die trying.

At last, hot with fury and anxiety, I stop in the middle of a gloomy hallway and bellow, “Where is she?” so loudly that the smoky glass lamps tremble in their sconces.

The house rumbles with resignation, and several boards shift aside, creating a gap. Behind the wall is one of those dark, narrow passages Wolpertinger likes to use as he slinks through the house.

“Did he eat her?” I ask hoarsely. The house doesn’t respond. It doesn’t hate me as much as it used to, but it will never commune with me like it does with Feather. I sense that she’s alright, though. If she weren’t, I think the house’s grief would be nearly as wild as mine.

As I step into the blackness behind the wall, I place one hand against a board. “How are we going to survive without her?” I whisper.

The house shudders in response.

I conjure a tiny orb of light that glides in front of me as I proceed through the dusty space, tripping over slanted slats and ducking under beams.

After a few minutes of struggling through the passage, I stop short. The orb halts too, glowing on the hideous rabbit face and upright antlers of Wolpertinger. He’s lying down, his immense bony legs folded under him. The tiny raccoon limbs protruding from his chest are holding onto Feather’s arm, which, thank the god-stars, is attached to her body. She’s sitting between Wolpertinger’s bent front legs, leaning against him. His flexible neck arches over her .

As I step closer, he bares his square yellow rabbit’s teeth and screeches a threat.

Grimacing, I stop. “I’m not here to hurt her,” I tell him.

“It’s alright,” Feather says to the monster. “I’ll go with him.” She strokes the raccoon hands, and they release her arm.

I still hate seeing her in such close proximity to any of them, but she seems utterly fearless as she pats the eldritch creature’s horrible neck and then walks toward me.

I barely breathe until we’re out of the passage, back in the hallway.

“What were you thinking, going in there with him ?” I whisper harshly.

“Saying goodbye. And now it’s your turn.” She shoves me against the wall with all the force of her slender body, rises on her toes, and grabs my hair, pulling my face down to hers. Her lips catch mine with a fiery, tormented kiss that sends a glow right down to my bones, turning them incandescent.

“We don’t have much time,” I gasp against her mouth. “I have Perchta ready to give over to the Fae-hunters. She has promised to confess everything to them. She’ll be our scapegoat so you can return to your brother safely. But the chains and the cell won’t hold her forever.”

“I wish we had longer.” Her whisper is faint, agonized. “I wish we had forever. I want you to ruin me, Krael, the way you once told me you would. Fuck me like it’s the last time. Mark me so I’ll always know you weren’t a dream.”

With a groan of anguish, I rip her shirt wide open, tear off her pants and my own. We crash against the wall again, with her back to it this time, and I sink slowly down her bare body, my long tongue traveling her smooth skin, from her perfect breasts to her small navel, to the mound of her pussy. My knees hit the floor, and I hold her thighs open while every piercing of my tongue glides along her sex .

Feather grabs both my horns, a shaken moan slipping from her mouth. I gorge myself on the taste of her as if she is my last meal. I swear she will be. I want no one else who isn’t her . Fucking another woman would make me physically ill.

“My little mate,” I whisper against her quivering clit, and she whines, hauling desperately on my horns, pitifully eager for more pressure. Of course I oblige her, sucking her tiny bud, slathering her pussy with my tongue, running its full length deep inside her until she screams and comes with a violent shudder against my face.

As she’s panting through the orgasm, I sink all my fangs deep into her inner thigh.

She screams again, pain this time, but she’s gasping “yes, yes,” still gripping my horns, still fluttering through her bliss.

The mark I’ve given her is a claiming bite, a custom of trollish clans. In their society, such a mark is not always consensual—it’s brutal, vicious, and permanent.

My fangs slip out of her flesh and I drag my tongue across the wounds I’ve made. Mine forever.

“Every man you fuck will know I’ve been here first,” I tell her.

She releases my horns and runs her fingers through my hair, then along my cheek. “There won’t be any others. I couldn’t bear anyone else touching me.”

I look up from between her legs. “I feel the same way.”

“Show me.”

With a growl, I rise and spin her around, breasts to the wall. Clasping her hips, I tug her ass toward me and lower my hips so I can push my cock inside her. She’s deliciously snug and wet, her body sucking me in, sheathing my entire length perfectly.

I wrap both arms around her, one hand fondling her breasts and the other cupped between her legs. She’s small, and I have to hunch low to encompass her like this. I bend my head, my cheek alongside hers so I can observe every shift in her expression and hear every tiny gasp and shrill moan that slip from her throat.

My fingers sweep over the soft flesh of her breast, then roll her nipple between them. Her whole body gives an answering shudder, and I murmur my approval against her cheek. I lower my hips and shove upward, eliciting a helpless whimper from her parted mouth. I vanish my claws and tuck my fingers deep between her legs, adding one to her opening along with my cock. She gasps at the surprise stretch, and I grin. I thrust my cock and my finger inside her in tandem for a minute, then draw out the finger and use its wetness to massage her clit.

I’m so deeply immersed in her reactions, her pleasure, that I barely notice my own. But I’m surging toward the peak myself, gliding closer with every thrust.

“Fuck me like a monster,” she says faintly, so I grasp both her breasts in my hands and squeeze them mercilessly while I rut into her rapidly from behind. Snarling, I reach down and slather my fingers in her arousal; then I hook three of those fingers into the side of her mouth while I fuck her harder, ramming her against the wall. She makes senseless, guttural little groans in rhythm with my thrusts until I come inside her like a geyser, hot and violent. There’s so much that it drips out around my cock and runs down her legs. It’s as if my body knows I can’t have her again, and it’s determined to deposit a month’s worth of cum in her belly.

I cup my hand over her lower stomach, feeling the slight bulge of my cock in her overfilled womb. Feather is gasping, shaking, still vibrating from her second orgasm.

She comes again when I pull out of her, her small fingers flying to press against her needy little clit. I stroke her body with both hands, soothing her through it all. If we weren’t overshadowed by this necessary parting, I suspect I could come again, too, but the understanding of what I must do weighs heavy in my mind. So I ease her to the end of her bliss, and then I carry her to our chambers and wash the cum, arousal, and blood from her lovely skin.

We don’t speak as we wash and dress. Nor do we speak as we walk the halls of the house and descend the steps to the room below.

Meerwunder is lolling in the shadows, burbling hungrily, but the cell door remains locked, and Perchta is still in the sack, though she’s squirming.

“She’s in there?” Feather asks, looking up at me.

Fuck, I’m going to miss her mouth, her adorable nose, her beautiful, sweet face—

“Yes,” I manage to say.

“I can’t believe I have to go.” Tears sparkle in her brown eyes. “I hate the Wild Hunt. They’re cruel to do this.”

“They are.”

“And there’s nothing we can do? No way to… fight them?”

“There are hundreds of them, Feather. Interdimensional travelers with magic, with the power of a god-star at their back. You and I cannot hope to defy or deceive them. I won’t take you with me and risk you dying during the transference.”

“And I won’t stay and put you in danger of annihilation.”

“Then we’re agreed.”

“We are.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “But I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this, Krael.”

I don’t tell her what I’m thinking—that annihilation might be preferable to an existence without her. I need her to be strong, and I need to be strong for her.

I turn and cup her face in my hands.

“Fate has been wicked to you,” I tell her savagely. “But you’ve always been stronger than the fuckery of the gods. You’ll do this—play this role, secure your future. And I’ll do what I vowed to do when I joined the Wild Hunt. Nor will I abandon hope of seeing you again.”

Light dawns in her gaze. “You think there’s hope? ”

Not a fucking iota . “Of course. The next time I see Nocturis, I’ll explain that I believe we’re mates, and I’ll ask for a special dispensation from the god-star so I can visit you.”

“Do you think they would grant it?” she gasps.

“We can try.” I give her the flamboyant grin I use when I’m Lord Brandt, but I temper it a little. She’s as clever as they come. If I overdo this, she’ll know I’m lying.

“Very well, then.” She returns my smile. “I can endure it, if it’s not forever. Give me another kiss, Krampus, and then let’s go over the plan.”

As I kiss her, I pray to the god-stars that one day she will forgive me for this worst sin of all… giving he r hope.