7

I wake up on the floor in a hallway of Krampus’s house. He’s standing in front of me, legs braced and claws out, snarling at the monster I saw behind the walls—the one with the stretched-out legs. When I sit up and lean to the side for a peek at the creature, I wish I was still asleep. It’s so much more horrifying than the glimpses I caught before.

I crouch, both hands pressed to the floor, ready to spring away and run.

But Krampus thunders, “She isn’t yours. I’ll bring you something later, but this one is not to be touched, do you hear me? She’s mine. ”

Despite the bold words, there’s a tension in his voice that I know far too well. I’m intimately familiar with the way a person’s voice sounds when they’re trying to act normal or cheerful, while they’re actually terrified beyond reason.

Palms to the floor, I close my eyes, debating what to do.

And suddenly the house is there in my mind, a monumental presence, yet shockingly intimate. I could always sense the cabin somewhat, but this is a far stronger connection to a much more powerful consciousness.

The house is pleased with me. It approves of my work in the kitchen, and it wants me to stay here, to free more rooms of grime and clutter, to bring it back to health. It doesn’t speak—no definite words, only an impulse, a voiceless bargain that I will relieve its pain, and in return it will help me.

An image flickers through my mind—walls detaching and shifting, boards slamming into place between us and the monster.

“Yes,” I whisper. “Yes, do it. Please.”

The long-legged monster yowls, shrill and mindless and ravenous. My eyes flash open in time to see it charging Krampus.

But a piece of the wall detaches with a grinding crunch, swivels, and slams across the hallway, like a door. Krampus and I are now facing a dead-end. At the same time, boards shift and creak as another corridor opens up on my right.

“Come on,” I call to Krampus. I scramble up and race down the new corridor. More boards swivel and shift as whole sections of the walls fold back or slam shut. Floors move and slant, stairways adjust themselves to new angles to accommodate us. We’re being guided through the house, by the house itself.

“What the fuck?” exclaims Krampus. He sounds shaken. But my whole body feels wonderfully alive, thrilling with a strange excitement, a sense of power and connection I’ve never experienced before. When the house deposits us at the door to Krampus’s bedroom, I burst in without waiting for him.

It’s been years since I entered a room first when in the company of a man. He —my captor—always told me I should follow him, not precede him, even when we were entering my tiny closet of a room so he could put me to bed.

The thought of him drains my energy and quells the power racing through my veins. I feel the house withdraw slightly from me, returning to its usual state, its walls and passages assuming the same positions as before.

Krampus darts inside and slams the bedroom door. Through its thick oak, we both hear the monster howling in the distance.

“That’s Wolpertinger,” Krampus says breathlessly. “He can’t come in here. My chambers are off limits.”

When Krampus turns to me, I shrink, certain he’ll rebuke me for entering the room first. If not, there will be something else to punish me for. There always is.

Sometimes big brothers have to punish their little sisters…

I crumple to the floor, holding my head in both hands, driving my nails into my skull as if I could claw my captor’s voice from my mind.

“Feather.” Krampus crouches at my side. In his Fae form, his voice is younger and smoother, like liquid gold. It’s the complete opposite of the grim, raspy voice in my head, so I cling to it, to him . I reach out and clutch his wrist.

“He can’t get us in here,” repeats Krampus, and I know he means Wolpertinger but I’m still thinking of the man from the cabin. The one whose true name I never knew.

What if I imagined the sound of those bones cracking inside Krampus’s bag? What if my captor isn’t dead? What if he comes back? What if…

“What did you do with him?” I whisper, my lips trembling as I look up and meet Krampus’s eyes. “The man from the cabin—what did you do? ”

“I killed him,” he answers quietly. “And I fed him to the Meerwunder.”

“That’s another monster?”

He nods. “The Meerwunder lives below.”

“And there’s no chance—” I swallow, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “No chance that he’ll come back?”

“None.”

“Good.” I release his wrist and press my hand to my chest. My heartbeat is slowly returning to normal. “That’s good.”

Krampus gazes at me with a blend of suspicion and wonder. “Can you tell me how you did it?”

“Did what?”

“You spoke to the house. It shielded you. Helped us.”

“Hasn’t it done that before?”

He scoffs lightly. “No. This house hates me. But apparently it likes you.”

I chew my lip thoughtfully for a moment. “I think it’s grateful that someone is cleaning it, after so long. It just wants to be able to breathe. To have a caretaker.”

A sneer twists Krampus’s beautiful mouth. Right now he has two little fangs that overlap his lower lip, and two small tusks that jut upward, denting his top lip.

“The way you look… it changes,” I say. “Why?”

“I used to be skilled with glamours and with shifting my appearance,” he replies. “I’ve lost much of that ability. But my eye color still alters with my mood unless I consciously control it. For example, my eyes glow green when I’m happy, excited, or lustful. They’re red when I’m angry or vengeful. And I can conceal or reveal other aspects of myself, like my fangs, claws, tail, horns—”

“And your pointed ears.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have wings? I’ve heard that some Fae have wings. ”

For some reason, the question seems to irk him. “No.” He pushes himself up, off the floor. “Fae with wings are annoying bastards who think they’re better than everyone else. Enough of this. You should sleep. I was bringing you here so you could rest after your labors.”

“Rest where?”

“Where do you think?” he says sharply. “The only safe bed in the house. Get in it, and go to sleep.”

I stand up, eyeing the mussed sheets and the slight indentation where he was obviously lying not long ago. The thought of my body nestling in the same spot makes me feel odd and jittery.

Almost every night since I was six years old, I’ve been put to bed in exactly the same way, by the same man. Sometimes he would let Mother do it, if he was eager to begin his time with Wife. I came to understand that the hard roll in his pants, like a stick of wood, meant he was ready to be with Wife.

My favorite Mother used to sit with me while he went to Wife’s bedroom. Mother would cover my ears if Wife sobbed or screamed. Each new Wife quickly learned not to make such sounds. It only angered him, and made everything worse.

“Why are you staring?” asks Krampus. “It’s a bed. Surely you know what it’s for.”

“It’s your bed,” I murmur. “And I’m not used to simply… going to sleep. Someone always put me to bed.”

He tosses a clawed hand through his long red hair. “Right, the sick game of ‘Little Sister.’ That asshole put you to bed at night?”

I nod.

“Did he…” Krampus grimaces. “Did he hurt you in such a way—I mean, did he put himself in—shit… how do I say this?”

“He didn’t have sex with me. He made Wife do that.”

Krampus looks somewhat relieved. “Do you know how many he killed? ”

I count on my fingers. I don’t have enough fingers for all of the deaths I remember. “Many.”

“Fuck.” He strides away, his shoulders and back tight with anger. He’s not angry with me, though, which is a relief. “Why didn’t they send me after him sooner?” He slams the side of his fist against the mantel.

“Who?”

“The god-stars. Fate. The fucking leaders of the Wild Hunt. I swear, sometimes they make no sense.”

Suddenly, I understand him. The realization is like a brilliant flash of light in my mind. “This house is your cabin, and the leaders of the Wild Hunt are your captors. You are playing a role for them. Acting out the part they set for you.”

He wheels around and looks at me, his eyes wide and stricken. My stomach flutters with triumph at that look, at the tension thrumming in the air between us. It’s as if our souls have suddenly been bared to each other.

“We are not the same,” he says through gritted teeth.

“No. You are Fae. You have magic, and you are beautiful.”

A quiver of emotion crosses his face. “That’s not what I meant. We are different because you did nothing to deserve your fate. You were innocent. I was not.”

“What did you do?”

His long red tongue skates out and he growls through his fangs.

“You don’t have to answer,” I say.

He turns away and stares down at the flickering fire. He’s quiet for so long that I’m convinced he isn’t going to tell me.

At last he says slowly, “You’re living here. You deserve to know what you’re living with.”

Wildly curious, but feigning composure, I seat myself on the edge of the bed and wait.

“I was three years old when my mother sold me to the trolls,” he says, low. “The troll female who bought me decided I was too pretty to be cut up and used in her spells, so she raised me as a pet instead. It was a brutal life. No sunlight, no trees, only rocks and slimy subterranean creatures. The other trolls despised me, so to escape their fists and teeth, I used to wander deep into the cave system. One day, when I was around ten, I found a long-forgotten notch between worlds, just big enough for a Fae child to slip through. I emerged in the hills of the mortal world, near a home for orphaned children—an isolated place full of miserable little creatures who had been abandoned by human society.”

His claws are driving deeper into the wood of the mantel with every sentence he speaks. I’m not sure he realizes it.

“I was lonely,” he continues. “I became friends with one of the children. He told me all the terrible things that went on in the orphanage, and I told him all the terrible things the trolls did to me. We were both nearly starved, but I learned how to hunt rabbits and find quail eggs in the nearby forest, so we both grew healthier.”

“Did you try to escape?” I ask.

“I couldn’t bring him back to Faerie. We could never have made it out of the trolls’ tunnels alive. And in his realm, the orphanage was far from any city or town—too far to walk. There were wolves in those woods at night. I couldn’t have protected him from them, any more than I could protect him from the wolves inside the orphanage.”

I stare at his broad back, transfixed and on the brink of tears. His voice is so hard, so steady, and yet I can sense pain, waves of it, oceans of it, surging through his body.

“What happened?” I whisper.

“They killed him,” Krampus says simply. “By accident, I think, while they were punishing him. Someone took it too far. Lost their head. I’m still not sure who it was. I was thirteen by then. He hadn’t come to meet me in weeks, so I ventured closer to the building where he and the other children lived, and I found his remains in the rubbish heap, where they had tossed him. Like a piece of garbage.”

“Oh gods.” I press my fingers over my mouth.

“I lost my mind. All I could think of was destroying the humans responsible. I went into the orphanage that night, and I slit the throats of every adult in the place. Some of them were doing wretched things to the children in the dark. I cut them open where they stood.”

He takes a deep breath. “But I didn’t stop there. I saw how miserable the children were. Most of them were starving, many were deathly ill, and they had all been abused. Several were sick in their minds—they had learned cruelty from the adults who cared for them, and they would grow up to be just as wicked.”

Slowly he turns around and faces me for the final words, as if he’s pronouncing his own judgment. “I thought, if I couldn’t set them free in this world, I could release them to the next. So I killed them all. It felt like mercy at first, then desperation. Once I had begun, I couldn’t stop until it was finished. I hunted them all down, every last child. Even the ones who hid from me. I told myself I was ending their pain, doing them a kindness. Stop crying, Feather. You didn’t know any of the children. Why should you weep for them?”

“I’m not crying for them,” I gasp out. “I’m crying for you . You were just a child yourself. You were hurting—”

“No excuse.” His eyes turn wicked, and his tongue lashes out again, firelight glinting on the piercings. “There’s no excuse for my actions. I killed thirteen adults and one hundred and twenty children that night. Then I went back to the trolls, covered in human blood and gore. My troll guardian never asked what happened; she just beat me senseless. That only made me hate her more.”

“Of course it did.” Memories surface in my mind… scrubbing copious amounts of blood from the cabin floors, so aping up the boards, wringing out the gore, watching the water in the bucket turn from clear to pink to red…

“Once I had a taste for killing the wicked, I couldn’t stop,” Krampus continues. “I began to murder the trolls, one by one. I started with those at the fringes of the clan—the old, the young, and the weak. When I went out killing in the tunnels, I’d wear a mask of bone and a cloak of furs. Sometimes I was spotted, and they would chase me, but I was smaller than them, and I could hide in narrow cracks which they overlooked completely. They begin to say the cave system was haunted by a ‘Krampus,’ an eldritch demon cobbled together from earth and bone.”

“They didn’t suspect you?” I ask.

“No. They thought of me as a Fae weakling. They suspected nothing, not even when I killed five of them in one night, including my guardian. I unmasked myself just for her, so she could look into my eyes as she died. After that, the troll clan decided to leave the caves altogether.”

“You didn’t go with them?”

“Fuck no. With my guardian dead, I would have been dinner. No, I hid until they left. Then I followed their reek out of the cave system and saw the sunlight of Faerie for the first time in years. I thought I was free, that I’d escaped retribution for the human lives I’d taken. I lived in the northern forests for a while, and then I killed a Seelie peddler and took his gold. With that, I went south and became a civilized member of the Seelie kingdom. But on my thirty-third birthday, twenty years after the massacre at the orphanage, the Wild Hunt came for me. They gave me a choice—utter annihilation, or an endless existence of wreaking vengeance upon the abusers of human children.”

“It seems overly cruel.” I rub tears from my cheeks.

“They were merciful. They gave me this house, and they let me retain my life and my physical form. Between tasks, I have the freedom to pursue pleasure, which is a mercy. As I said—I’m not innocent. I deserve this. ”

I’m not sure he does, but I’m not prideful enough to argue aloud that the god-stars were wrong. After all, he did slaughter over a hundred human children. The most frightening part is, I understand why he did it, what led him to that breaking point. I’ve been in that place, too. A place where I made cruel choices and did unspeakable things.

“Your wounds need cleaning,” says Krampus abruptly, fumbling in his pockets. “I brought soap and cloths.”

“No water?”

He points to a shadowed corner. “There’s a bathroom. The sink works.”

I squint. Past a mountain range of chests, boxes, jumbled furniture, dirty clothes, and unidentifiable trinkets, I can make out the door he’s pointing to. Without his help, I would never have known it was there.

“You climb over all that whenever you have to relieve yourself?” I ask.

He glares, and I suppose I should be frightened. He’s a fearsome figure, with the black horns and the fangs, not to mention the tongue and the claws. Besides which, he’s twice my size.

But I’m picturing him clambering across the clutter to reach the bathroom, and the image is too much to resist, especially with my emotional control so thin. I choke on a tiny laugh.

He hooks an eyebrow and tilts his horned head, the ring between his nostrils gleaming briefly in the light. He eyes me cautiously, as if he thinks I’ve gone mad.

“I need to use the bathroom,” I say. “If you’ll give me the cloths and soap, I can also wash and bandage my foot.”

“No. You did a poor job of it the first time. I’ll do it.”

At his commanding tone, I recoil slightly, with a deferential nod and a soft “Yes, sir. ”

My tone seems to displease him, though I can’t figure out why. He heads for the bathroom, navigating the clutter with a practiced grace that astounds me.

The bathroom door can’t open all the way, and he has to hold it ajar while I enter. I thought the kitchen was dirty, but the bathroom is ten times worse. Unspeakably filthy. Grime coats the enormous bathtub, and mold creeps between the tiles.

“Did you kill someone in here?” I gape at the dark streaks up and down the walls.

He gives a noncommittal grunt in reply.

“What are these whitish splatters?” I point to one, and he says hastily, “Don’t touch that. Do your business, and I’ll clean your foot afterward.”

“Could you perhaps clean it in the bedroom?” I ask tentatively.

He scowls again, but when I’m done in the bathroom, he directs me to sit on the bed while he fetches a bowl of water and soap. I unwrap the makeshift bandages on my fingers, and when he brings me the washbowl, I clean my hands thoroughly. The cuts and broken blisters start to bleed again, and I notice his nostrils twitching. But he says nothing, only kneels before me, sets the bowl down, and picks up my foot.

His claws have vanished, leaving rounded fingernails. He’s gentle as he unwraps the bandage, which is stiff with dried blood.

No man has ever knelt in front of me or tended to my needs. Back in the cabin, my captor was always the one being tended. We knelt before him , not the other way around.

I like the way Krampus’s warm, strong fingers wrap around my ankle, holding it still as he squeezes out a cloth with his other hand and daubs away the blood.

“So you can clean things,” I say softly.

He glances up, humor creasing the corners of his eyes. But he catches himself and glares at me again. “Silence. ”

I pin my lips shut and watch him bow his horned head over my foot, intent on cleaning it thoroughly. Even once the blood is gone, his fingertips trace the arch of my foot, the shape of my toes. Every brush of his skin against mine makes me tremble inside—not the frightened kind of tremor, but something altogether new, a sensation both warm and dizzying.

He dries my foot and slides out a single claw so he can cut a fresh strip of cloth for a bandage. Once my foot is taken care of, he rises up on his knees and takes my hand, inspecting each cut and wiping it carefully. He slices smaller ribbons of cloth to bandage my fingers.

During the process, he pauses once, his hand upturned under mine. We’re palm to palm, skimming the heat of each other’s skin. The size difference between our hands is striking.

The tip of his tongue glides out and traces his lips. He finishes tying the last bandage.

And then, still on his knees, he looks up at me.

His green eyes are so beautiful I can’t breathe. I can barely think—except for some reason, my mind leaps back to the memory of the woman in the red-lantern house, with the man’s face between her legs. I can’t forget her expression, the sounds she made…

I scuttle backward on the bed as fast as I can, my heart racing, heat pulsing between my thighs.

Krampus looks startled, but he covers it quickly with one of his stern frowns. “Sleep,” he orders. Then he storms out of the room, knocking over the washbowl on the way and not pausing to mop up the spilled water.

I try to sleep, because he’s my new master, and he told me to. But I can’t stop thinking about the spilled water and the soiled bathroom.

Finally, with a resigned sigh, I get up. And I go to work.