CHAPTER 10

FROM HIS DROPPED hands there arose such a clatter, I brace to be disemboweled and splattered.

His eyes blaze red, steam puncturing through the air. The tips of his horns glow like blazing coals. I dig my fingers into the wall, prepared to launch myself back for his attack. His head drops. Shoulders slump.

Wiping the red juice off of his fingers, he walks toward me. The brazen fool who challenged him is gone, leaving me in a panic. I flatten to the wall, twisting my cheek to the side, and he breezes on past. “Follow me,” are his only rumbling words.

I look up to the knife block hanging a good ten feet in the air. There’s no hope I can grab one to protect myself.

“Well?” His voice booms down the hallway.

I skitter on my feet, giving chase like I want an answer. I do, I just…also want to go back to before I found out he keeps children in death tunnels below his castle. Krampus leads us back into the room with the doors—one to a human popsicle death, the other to freedom. He’s blocking both by standing dead center.

Knowing he’ll be heading to the throne room, I ease my way to the other arch, but he’s still standing there. Frozen. As still as the morning’s dawn after a blizzard.

“You know the tale of Santa Claus? He rewards the good children with toys and candy?” A red eye catches me, slamming my feet to the floor. I gulp and nod. Everyone knows that.

Krampus parts his hands and a gnarled stick grows between them. The wood is blackened from fire and words or runes carved all across it reveal white bark below. As he holds the seven-foot-tall branch, he pulls up his hood, his features vanishing into the darkness. I reach up to do the same with my robe when he smashes the end of his stick to the ground.

The words light up fire red. Texts form in the air from right to left before leaping down to the ground under the staff. When they land, they embed into the stone itself. As the final words hit, a grinding noise echoes from below and the floor opens. I yelp, the bottom of the robe sucking under the sliding floor. Holding it tight, I rush away from the rising hole just as a staircase forms below my feet. It goes so fast, I don’t have a chance to balance myself.

My foot slips below me and I pitch forward into darkness. An arm curls under my stomach, catching me. It doesn’t stop, carrying me up to stand beside him. He pulls the staff from the ground, then descends down the staircase.

Hooves echo on the black marble as he calls out, “And the Krampus punishes the wicked.”

“Wicked what?” I chase after him. As we go down, a halo of light rises around us like invisible candles. “Children? Children can’t be wicked. They’re…” I can’t think. The air grows heavy the deeper we descend the twisting stairs. There’s this thing where people aren’t born bad. It’s fancy, like a spell. “Tabula rosa!” I cry out.

“What?” His determined wizard walk freezes, and he looks over his shoulder. The twin red flames flickering under the hood do not calm my nerves.

“It means blank slate.”

“Yes, I understand that part. What does that have to do with children?”

“It means we’re all nothing when we start. Good, bad. Children can’t be wicked just…naughty.”

He stands away from me, his staff high. “Is that so?”

A handful of jobs where I’d vowed to knot my ovaries around a cannonball and shoot them out of my vagina come back to bite me in the ass. “Very naughty, sure. Very, very naughty, but wicked?” That sounded too far for a bunch of grade schoolers.

The air heats up as we go, boiling me under his robe. I fan my hands in front of my face but the pitiful breeze doesn’t help, so I reach to pull off the hood. He catches my wrist, stopping me.

With a slow shake of his head, he raises his staff and points. Small orbs of light come to life. They bob as if they’re hanging off of the ceiling, but I can’t see any wires. One by one, they lead toward a cave of the same black rock, but this isn’t finished and polished to a shine. It’s jagged and ashen.

The lights stop on a wall of sheer black. Still holding my hand, Krampus walks us toward the wall. My reflection stares back at me, bags under my eyes, bruises and claw marks rising across my chest and up my throat. I look like death warmed over. Getting nervous, I reach up to try and smooth back my eyebrows.

The lights drop behind us, and the glass wall vanishes.

“Oh my god,” I gasp.

Children, with their tiny heads bent, scoop up armfuls of coal to deposit into buckets. Dangerous dust smears over their TMNT pajamas, their Christmas socks black with filth. They don’t say a word, their eyes dead as they dump the coal into a cart then return to gather up more.

“How…how could you?” I gasp, slapping a hand over my mouth to stop a scream.

“You ask me that after spending a night with the youngest DeVere?”

“That’s different.”

Krampus twists his head. “How so?”

“He’s a spoiled rich brat and they’re…” I blink and stare harder. Where I once saw gaunt faces desiccated from hunger they shift into a smear of coal on rather robust cheeks. Despite the hard labor, their pajamas are holding up well with nary a tear in a hem. No tissue-thin knockoff could survive more than fifteen minutes down here. Is that seven-year-old wearing makeup and a tennis bracelet?

“So they’re well off, too. That doesn’t give you the right to abduct children, to force them to mine your coal for you just because they’re naughty. What’s the worst they could do? Pull their sister’s hair? Put a bug in a teacher’s desk?”

A long claw slips out of the Krampus’ sleeve. “That boy killed a stray cat.”

“What?”

“And that one pushed his grandmother down the stairs.” He points to another child who’s refused to work, his lip jutted out in a pout.

“That’s…that’s a lot but— Is she alive?”

“I don’t know.”

Okay, killing animals is the number one sign of becoming a serial killer. And the grandma thing, I don’t even know where to start with that. But they’re still kids. “Just because they’re a danger to pets and…people.” I gulp again at the grandma-murderer. “Doesn’t mean you can kidnap them. What about their families? They have to be traumatized.” To wake up on Christmas morning without their kids…even if one did try to off Granny.

A whistle breaks out like it’s break time. Two children covered in soot drop their buckets. They’re all smiles as they turn expectantly toward a door I hadn’t seen before. Leaping over the others still trudging on without end, they tug on the knob. White light pours from the door. They don’t even blink as they leap through it.

“What was that?” I gasp.

As soon as it happened, it didn’t. The door closes and fades to nothing. Strangest of all, the other children don’t even look up as two of them leave. All they do is work, their heads heavy with exhaustion… Or is it shame? Regret? Guilt?

“Once their penance is paid, they return through the same door as yours, back to their Christmas beds, forgetting every second they were here.”

“But why? If they’re just going to forget everything they did here, what’s the point?”

He leans on his staff as if he’s carrying the whole world on his shoulders. “They may forget their time here, but they’ll forever remember the punishment in the back of their minds. Of paying their penance for a crime no one else noticed. No one but the Krampus.” His chest puffs up, his head rising until the horns brush against the ceiling under the hood. A chill warps around him despite the boiling heat of the cavern. I shiver, my skin prickling as my brain realizes a wild animal stands beside me.

A single laugh rips off the fur, raising the man to the surface. “And I leave a little reminder on their mantle every year after to make sure they’re staying on the straight and narrow.”

That doesn’t sound so bad. Far too many parents are willing to look the other way when little Susie bullies another kid to the point of night terrors. Or Randy…murders his grandmother? I am never getting over that. In a world where justice is only awarded to the wealthy and never their victims, does an eight-foot-tall kidnapping goat-man seem like such a bad thing?

“How long are they here?” Even if they forget, they still have to suffer the aches of moving coal, of stale water and moldy bread. That isn’t fair.

“A day,” Krampus says and I wheel back on him.

“A day?”

“More or less. It depends upon the severity of their crime and…” He points to the grandma pusher. “…if they’re willing to do the work.”

The others are at least trying, while he stubbornly refuses to move. When one girl places his bucket close, he kicks it over.

“Sometimes they add time to their sentence as well. I have no control over it. I’m merely the vessel for collecting the lost lambs. They decide their fate.” He turns to me, his chin jutting out of the shadows of his hood. “They write their tabula, as it were.”

Funny.

“May we leave? I do not enjoy—” Krampus stares through the glass at all the children he pulled from their beds “—lingering here.”

Another whistle blows. The girl stuffing her kicked coal into the bucket leaps to her feet. Giddy, she races for the door. But just before leaping through, she stops and gazes around. Her face crumples, as if she wants to help the others around her. It’s only for a moment, but maybe that’s all compassion needs for the flicker to become a flame.

Krampus has already started trudging back up the stairs. I didn’t think how much harder it would be going up. Running my hand along the wall, I focus on not tripping and braining myself on the steps as I trail behind.

So he kidnaps children… Bad. In order to teach them to be kind. Good? I can’t wrap my mind around this, a part of me wanting to break through that glass and show the door to all of them. But then I think about that old lady and how terrified she must have been to feel a shove at her back. Did she roll down those steps and see her grandson standing there, smiling down at her as she fell?

Shivering, I bundle deeper into his cloak. “That’s what you were doing.”

“Hmm?”

“When you found me. Saved me. You were there to abduct Damien.”

“Yes.” Krampus reaches the top and extends a hand down to help me up. I miss the last twenty or so steps as he whisks me through the air. Instead of pulling me into his arms, he sets me on my feet. The staff slots into place, and the stairs pull back in, vanishing for another year. “He always finds a way to wiggle out of his punishment.”

“I was drugged, assaulted, and strung up half-naked all so his little brat wouldn’t have to get a time out?” I thought I was mad before, but this is a whole other level of rage. It’s like kidnapping a meter maid to get out of a parking ticket. His precious demon spawn wouldn’t even realize he was gone, but no, he has to keep kidnapping girls and terrorizing us on Christmas just so his brat never feels an ounce of punishment.

“Now you know the truth of the Krampus. There is your door.” He points with the staff then collapses it back into nothing. “Feel free to use it at your convenience.”

He used me. That rich asshole used me, and he’ll never see a day of punishment for it. Even the kids have to do hard labor, but not him. No. He’s rich and powerful so he can commit murder and people call it an oopsie.

“Though, could you leave the cloak behind? It has sentimental value.”

How many women did he tie up before me? How many will he after?

Krampus brushes his finger down the fur lining and my head jerks up. “How long?” I snarl.

The scary goatman flinches. “I forget. This coat has served me for seasons uncounting.”

“No. How long have you tried to get that little shit?”

His jaw drops. “Far too long.”

“If I go back, then he’ll do it again. He’ll hire someone else, you’ll have to rescue her, and he’ll get off scot-free.”

“I’m afraid so,” Krampus says.

“Why waste your time saving me? Us? Why not just take the kid instead?”

His eyes narrow, his jaw skittered like he doesn’t want to answer. “Because, if I left you, Damien the second would kill you.”

I laugh at his macabre humor. “That’s not… You can’t know that for certain. Right?”

Krampus only stares at me, and I start to shake. If he didn’t stop to save me, cut me from my chains, and bring me here, that monster would have fed my body to pigs. “Right and wrong concern Mr. DeVere little in comparison to his reputation.”

My heart sets. My chin rises. “Then it’s settled.”

He cocks his head. “What is?”

“I’m not leaving until we figure out how you can get that sonofabitch.”