Chapter One

December 20

It was five days before Christmas, and all through the Honey Brook Outdoor Mall, every creature was stirring—and Wade Moore was listening to his brother try to weasel out of playing Santa.

“It’s your job ,” Wade said.

“It’s only my job until I quit it,” Petey said. “And I can quit it, no problem, the second I find a replacement Honey Brook HR has already approved. That means you!”

“Why can’t it just mean you?”

Petey grinned. It was the same exuberant, aw-shucks grin that had been getting him out of trouble for years. After all these years of covering for his good-hearted but feckless little brother, Wade should have been able to resist it. But practice didn’t always make perfect.

“Because I’m the one who won the holiday raffle,” Pete said. “Two tickets to Hawaii! A luxury suite for the whole week of Christmas! I’m going to take Anne.”

Anne worked at the mall’s priciest and most exclusive designer store. Wade had never been in it—he wasn’t sure he could afford to cross the threshold—but its luxury was the stuff of legends. So was Anne’s elegant, model-like beauty and hauteur.

Wade couldn’t imagine her with his cheerful, rubbery-faced younger brother, who was always barreling headfirst into fresh new trouble.

“Do you know Anne?”

Petey was undaunted: “I will after a whole week in a luxury suite.”

“I mean, I wish you luck. I do. But you have to find someone else.”

Petey groaned. “There is no one else. No one wants to take over as Santa in the last few days before Christmas. This is our busiest time of the year, and everything’s going wrong this year anyway. It’s a mess down there.”

“You’re not making this sound any better.”

“I’m not trying to. I’m trying to tell you why you, my loyal and heroic older brother, are my only option. No one else would drop everything to do this.”

“Unfortunately for you, I won’t either.”

But as much as he hated to admit it, he could see that Petey really was in a fix. It wasn’t like playing Santa at the Honey Brook Christmas Village was the kind of job most people were lining up to get: it meant an itchy fake beard, a swelteringly hot suit, long hours, and nonstop noise. The parents could be pushy. The kids could be bratty. When you were stuck in the mall’s Christmas fantasyland for days, all the holiday cheer quickly became a holiday headache.

What the job needed was someone like Petey, who was used to it and could let any annoyances roll right off him. But Peteys were hard to come by.

Wade was hard-pressed to think of anyone at Honey Brook who would be willing to step in. Even if they were, they might not be able to take the time off from their real job.

But he worked at Wade’s Workshop. And he was Wade. He could do whatever he wanted, especially if his part-time workers could be coaxed into taking a few extra shifts this week—for double the pay, he decided—so they could still stay open for any last-minute Christmas shoppers.

Petey could sense Wade was caving, and it made his infectious grin get even wider.

“Come on, Wade. Do it for the kids.”

“How about you just stay for the kids?” Wade retorted. “They like you. You’re the most popular Santa Honey Brook’s ever had.”

“I know. It’s great. But I mean think of my kids.”

“You don’t have any.”

“My future kids! My hypothetical kids! What if one day they ask me if I ever got to live my dream of spending Christmas in Hawaii, and I have to tell them no? Do you know what they’ll learn from that, Wade?”

“The value of responsibility?”

“That dreams don’t come true,” Petey said sadly. “Don’t kill their dreams.”

Sell the raffle tickets and use the money to live your dreams next year , Wade almost said.

But Petey was his little brother, and Wade loved the hell out of him. And these raffle tickets were a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one that probably wouldn’t feel the same next year even if Petey could make enough off them to pay for a nearly identical trip.

Wade sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it. But this is your Christmas present for the next three years at least.”

“Oh, you’re going to amend that to the next five,” Petey said, pressing Wade into the kind of bone-breaking bear hug that no non-shifter could have ever lived through. “The Christmas Village this year is a nightmare , buddy. You don’t even know what you’ve gotten yourself into. But no take-backs!”

With no further ado, he flipped the OPEN sign on Wade’s Workshop to CLOSED and hustled Wade over to the Honey Brook Staff Outpost.

Since it was an outdoor mall, none of the stores backed up on to staff-only areas. All the locker rooms, break rooms, time clocks, and management offices were housed in the Outpost instead. The building offered a lot of intra-mall camaraderie but not a lot of space or privacy.

As soon as Petey steered Wade inside, the locker room area erupted into laughter, cheers, wolf-whistles, and one very off-key rendition of “Santa Baby.”

Wade gave the crowd a resigned, disapproving look that clearly didn’t affect them in the slightest.

“You all knew this was coming,” he said.

“Of course we did,” the guy from the Pretzel Shack said.

The lady from the stationery kiosk nodded. “Who else was he going to get?”

“We had bets on how long it would take you to say yes,” the pink-haired kid from the games store added. “I won.”

“Oh, good for you, man,” Petey said.

Wade refused to second the congratulations, just on general principle.

The last thing he expected was for his polar bear to stir inside him, opening its dark amber eyes to fix him with an unimpressed gaze.

Don’t sulk , it said. This will be good for us. I like Christmas. I like Santa.

I like Christmas too, Wade protested, and—wait, you like Santa? How do you even have an opinion about Santa?

He has a proper layer of insulating fat, his polar bear said. It’s very smart to cultivate that in a subzero environment. I should know.

It was true that his polar bear was huge , as most polar bears tended to be, so Wade guessed it made sense that it would admire another North Pole denizen who had the sense to bulk up for long, cold winters. (Admittedly, they didn’t have too many of those in southern California, but his polar bear was ruled by nature, not nurture.)

Of course, if Santa were real, there was also every chance a wild polar bear would eat him if it got hungry enough, so his bear also probably thought Santa looked tasty, but Wade was going to concentrate on the mutual respect angle instead.

Got it. And how do you have an opinion about Christmas?

Coca-Cola ads, his polar bear said succinctly.

Well, that checked out. Coca-Cola’s holiday branding almost always featured polar bears, and everyone liked to feel important.

Huh, Wade said. Good to know. Okay, out of respect for your favorite holiday, I’ll do my best not to sulk.

He brought his attention back to the locker room, where—it turned out—he hadn’t missed anything except more gentle ribbing about his big-brother tendency to swoop in to rescue Petey from his troubles. Wade tuned most of it out as he concentrated on getting into the Santa suit.

Luckily, he and Petey were more or less the same height. Wade was a lot broader through the shoulders, but since the Santa coat needed to make room for the famous belly that shook like a bowlful of jelly, it had roomy lines and he could fit into it without too much effort ... as long as he left the fake belly off.

Petey examine the fit and clicked his tongue. “Mr. Marsh isn’t going to like that.”

“It can’t be that big of a deal. I’ve seen skinny Santas.” Maybe they weren’t ideal, but they were still an option. And he wasn’t even skinny. Like his bear, he was big and solid, built for power and endurance. He just wasn’t round .

“You haven’t seen skinny Santas at any Christmas Village Marsh has ever run,” Petey said. “He’s a real stickler about it.”

Wade doubted a Honey Brook newcomer like Marsh—who had only turned up in November—had any fanatical followers in the Outpost who would report back to him if they heard any criticism, but just to be on the safe side, he kept his voice low before he opened the door to any shit-talking.

“I thought you said the village this year was a total mess. If he’s such a stickler, why can’t he keep it together?”

Petey rolled his eyes. “He’s a stickler about all the wrong things. He’ll ride everyone’s asses about whatever doesn’t matter, like a replacement Santa’s fake belly or his weird one-off ideas, but meanwhile, we’re short on elf costumes, the carol-oke machine doesn’t have enough songs, we run out of giveaway toys... and don’t even get me started on—” He must have seen the dawning alarm in Wade’s face, because he hastily cut himself off. “But you’ll figure all that out! Half the fun of the Christmas Village is learning the lay of the land on your own.”

“That can’t possibly be true.”

“No, it’s not, but you’ve already agreed, and I already said no take-backs.” He handed Wade the fluffy white beard and a bottle of spirit gum.

Don’t sulk , Wade reminded himself. No matter how wild a situation you’ve gotten yourself into. You didn’t have any holiday plans anyway.

Lately, he almost never had any plans at all. He liked a quiet life, but he’d started to wonder if he was pushing that to an unnatural extreme. He would never want to bounce around from place to place, hobby to hobby, and girlfriend to girlfriend the way Petey did, but there was a difference between living in a full-on riot and living in, well, a rut. Maybe shaking up his routine would be good for him.

Petey said, “Now, things to know in advance. At some point, one of the littler kids might pee on your lap—”

Then again, maybe not.