Nicholas and the Krampus

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Michael Scott

  Cover image used under license from Shutterstock.com

  Cover design by Regina Flath

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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  Ebook ISBN 9780449819173

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Monday, 24 December 1945

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Tuesday, 25 December 1945

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  My dearest Virginia,

  Wishing you a belated Happy Christmas and the very best for the coming year.

  Apparently, the holiday of December 1945 is already being called the Greatest Christmas Celebration. And why not? The war is over, there is the promise of lasting peace, and the troops are coming home. A couple of months ago, the US military started a program called Operation Magic Carpet, designed to get as many of their eight million service men and women home in time for Christmas. Over twenty thousand now return every day, and more are on the way. Everyone wants to help the war heroes reach their homes, no matter where they are, and I have heard stories of ordinary people driving the men and women hundreds of miles just to reunite them with their families. The roads out of every port city are experiencing the worst traffic jams in living memory.

  What a time to be alive!

  I am over two hundred years older than you, and even though we have lived so long and seen so much, the last few years have been difficult. All of us—human and nonhuman alike—did our bit to bring this terrible war to a conclusion. Scathach’s stories could fill volumes, and Joan and Saint-Germain were instrumental in the liberation of Paris. We have not heard from Aoife since the Battle of Stalingrad, but Scathach assures me that her sister is alive. Will Shakespeare has promised to write about his experiences with Palamedes in MI6 during the Blitz, but I doubt he will do it. He will claim that his reticence has to do with the Official Secrets Act, but in truth, I think he has writer’s block. Palamedes tells me that Will has been working on Love Labor’s Won for centuries.

  I heard whispers about a Miss Dare in the Pacific and guessed they referred to you, and I have it on good authority that you were in Tibet during the Nazi expedition there in 1939. Next time we meet, we will share stories.

  I am sorry Nicholas and I missed you in Nevada. We had to leave in rather a hurry, as you can imagine, and I know that the army and the FBI are still looking for us. I am not too concerned; we change identities as easily as other people change clothes.

  I trust you are well and fully recovered from your adventure in the Grand Canyon. I am so glad you took my advice and brought Billy with you. All I can add is a warning to stay away from archaeologists: they are too much trouble! (Or perhaps it is just the archaeologists you associate with.)

  Since your little run-in with the Rattenfenger, I know you like to keep up with the latest mythological immigrants to your land. Toward the middle and end of the nineteenth century, the nonhumans could mingle unnoticed with the waves of immigrants and slip into the country. Now I am afraid that the war in Europe has displaced those immortals and the were-clans who chose to remain on their native soil. I understand it is the same in the Far East. With their homelands in ruins, the immortals have been forced to travel farther afield. It was inevitable that some would come to America. No doubt they believed that with so many distracted by the war, their efforts would go unnoticed.

  They were wrong, of course.

  Over the centuries, I have come to know most of the protectors of humanity, those of you who stand against the Dark. What would the humans say, do you think, if they knew that a legion of immortal humans, Next Generation, and a few Elders protected them against the ever-present danger of the return of the Dark Elders or the Earthlords?

  One of the truths Nicholas and I have discovered—and one you know all too well—is that at the heart of every legend, there is a grain of truth.

  Well, this Christmas, December 25, 1945, three legends came to New York.

  One of them was Nicholas—and for once, I am not talking about my husband. The others were Frau Perchta and her companion, the loathsome Krampus.

  Perenelle Flamel

  1 January 1946

  Hell’s Kitchen

  New York, New York

  PS: Rather than send you a Christmas card, I thought the following pages from my diary might be of interest! (Use the da Vinci cipher to decode them.)

  Monday, 24 December 1945

  Christmas Eve

  1

  And there it was again!

  An odd odor on the chilly air, something distinctly alien to New York streets. I had caught a hint of it earlier, when I had stepped off the subway train in the Herald Square station. A musky odor, completely out of place among the scents of hot metal, smoke, and a mass of heaving—and often unwashed—humanity.

  The same instinct that has kept me alive for centuries sounded an alarm in the back of my mind.

  It might have been nothing—some natural scent I’d not encountered before. Perhaps someone in the crowd was carrying a food I’d never experienced. It was Christmas Eve—the first Christmas since the end of the war—and a madness had gripped the people. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen were coming home. Everyone was out looking for whatever meat and vegetables they could find for their Christmas Day feast. Looking around, I could see a dozen nationalities in the crowd. Was one of them carrying some unusual herbs or spices?

  I allowed the crowds to push me along toward the stairs that led up to Herald Square.

  I had spent the morn
ing working with the ladies in the Salvation Army, wrapping donated presents for servicemen and servicewomen recuperating in the local hospitals who would not make it home to spend Christmas with their families. I was dressed in a plain blue two-piece utility suit with an A-line skirt, my distinctive white-steaked hair tucked up under a hat of the same color. It had been snowing on and off over the past week, and I was wearing my heavy gray wool wraparound coat, which I’d made from old blankets. As I slipped in alongside a group of similarly dressed women, I tugged the belt open and allowed the coat to hang loose, giving myself easy access to the secret pocket I’d sewn into the coat’s satin lining.

  The women pushed up the stairs and I kept pace with them, being careful not to touch anyone. Halfway up, I caught just the faintest hint of the odor again: it was definitely a musk, and it triggered a memory. I had smelled this before, and even without turning my head, I knew it was coming from behind me. I was being followed.

  At the top of the stairs, I turned left in Herald Square toward Gimbel’s, the huge department store. The streets were crowded, and Gimbel’s windows were bright with Christmas gifts, toys, and decorations. The pavement beneath the red awnings was heaving with people staring through the glass, with more queued to get into the store. I stopped before a window filled with the latest kitchen gadgets. I focused on a $2.95 Pyrex coffee percolator, which made six cups of coffee, and allowed my eyes to adjust.

  Using the glass as a mirror, I quickly scanned the crowd behind me. After half a millennia of running, I knew what to look for.

  Ah, there you are.

  I found the tail almost immediately. A surprisingly tall woman was standing on the opposite side of the street. She had a vaguely military bearing and was wearing trousers beneath a double-breasted wool trench coat. She had her hands stuffed deep in the slit pockets, and I noted that, like mine, her belt hung loose. It was hard to make out her features—she was wearing a Homburg hat with a net that came down over her eyes. While everyone else on the street was watching the crowd or staring into the windows, her eyes were fixed on me.

  I looked into Gimbel’s window again, weighing my options. I had no idea who the woman was; Nicholas and I have made many enemies over the course of our lives. We have lived long enough to see allies become enemies, and in the preceding few years, we had worked for—and then against—the British and the Americans. We had successfully prevented German scientists from developing the atomic bomb, and for the past eighteen months we had been trying to sabotage the development of the American atomic bomb. We’d failed, of course. We were there, in Alamogordo, when the first bomb was detonated. We were both terrified that the explosion would rip a hole in the fabric of space and create an opening to a Shadowrealm. Thankfully, it didn’t, but our desperation had made us sloppy, and the American military became suspicious. We managed to get out just before they came for us.

  The wartime intelligence service, the OSS, had only recently been dissolved, but I wondered if the woman was one of their agents. If she was, then it was highly unlikely that she was working alone, which probably meant that I had at least one more watcher.

  I moved on to the next window: a complete kitchen, showing all the latest mod cons and linoleum patterns.

  In the glass, I watched the woman across the street shift to keep me in sight. So she was definitely following me; it was not my imagination. The musky odor which had first alerted me was stronger now. It must be coming from the woman. That immediately suggested she was nonhuman…and that opened up a world of possibilities, none of which were pleasant.

  Closing my eyes, I focused on the scents surrounding me, identifying and then eliminating wet clothes and unwashed humani, as well as the parcels they carried: freshly baked bread and stale fish, overripe fruit and raw meat. Homemade perfumes and tobacco mingled with horse manure, hot metal, and oil from horses, cars, and belching trucks crowding the street.

  When I had put a name to all the smells, I was left with not one, not two, but three distinctive and unnatural signatures swirling on the New York air. They did not belong in the city: these were animal odors, combining to form a rich forest musk.

  I was jostled by the crowd and opened my eyes in time to notice a second woman at the end of the street. She was as tall as the first woman, and dressed in an almost identical costume. But I had smelled three odors….

  Looking up, I suddenly saw a tall, hatchet-faced women bearing down on me. For a single instant her face flickered, planes and angles shifting, revealing something bestial, a hint of fur and slablike teeth.

  I knew then that these were not humani spies—these were shapechangers.

  2

  Ignoring the lines—and the disapproving shouts—I pushed my way into Gimbel’s.

  The huge department store was heaving with people, and the noise was incredible, a cacophony of voices in a dozen languages, along with the pinging of cash registers. I knew Gimbel’s well—it was one of my favorite places, though Nicholas hated it. The store was vast, filling twenty-seven acres, and had everything—including a restaurant and a bank—and I was counting on the fact that my pursuers would not know its countless entrances and exits. I could cut straight through the store and out onto the opposite side of the square. I needed to get to Nicholas and let him know that we were being hunted by one of the Torc clans. I was unsure of which one: wolf, dog, and boar immediately came to mind. The Torc were usually neutral, but some hired themselves out as trackers and hunters. The real question was: Who was employing them?

  I deliberately did not look behind me, but I used every reflective surface I passed to see if I was being followed. I could no longer smell the creatures’ musk. The stink of massed humani, plus Gimbel’s vast array of goods, filled the cavernous interior of the store with a thick fog of odors.

  I took an elevator to the third floor, got out, and stepped into the next elevator going down. I deliberately moved through the perfume department, allowing the cloying scents to attach themselves to my clothing, disguising my own scent. In the candy department, I lingered before a display of freshly made chocolates. The air was thick with the aromas of sugar and cocoa.

  I knew I could take the elevator to the underground passageway that led to Penn Station, but I was sure this hunting pack would have someone stationed below. I wondered how long they had been following me and how they had picked up on my scent. I would worry about that later. Right now I needed to get to Nicholas. Then we’d need to make a decision. Should we stay and fight, or should we run? We still had not really unpacked since we’d escaped from Arizona, so it would only take us ten or fifteen minutes to shove everything into a bag and get on the road again. But to be honest, I was tired of running. I was going to suggest to my husband that we grab one of the were-creatures and find out who was employing them. We could make a decision then.

  I headed back downstairs, confident that the thick stew of Gimbel’s scents would completely disguise my own unique signature.

  I was guessing that my pursuers would be watching the entrances. But Gimbel’s had a vast number of doors, leading out to Herald Square and also to the subway station. They could not be watching all of them, and I had only smelled three scents.

  Doubling back the way I had come in, I pushed against the crowd and stepped out into Herald Square through the same door I’d come in thirty minutes earlier. The blast of chill December air cleared my sinuses, and in the same instant, I caught the musky odor and was aware of movement on either side of me. Iron-hard grips locked onto my elbows and practically lifted me off the ground.

  Without saying a word, the two tall women half dragged, half carried me across Broadway into the warren of side streets behind West Thirty-Fifth, before finally turning into a narrow, filth-piled alleyway, where the third were-creature was waiting for us. This was the hatchet-faced woman I had seen earlier. When she looked at me, she deliberately allowed a partial transformation to fl
icker across her face, revealing huge eyes and a soft nose, flat fur, and blunt teeth. For the briefest of moments, there were hints of antlers on either side of her skull.

  I knew what she and her companions were then: Torc Fianna. Were-deer. The rarest and most dangerous of the were clans.

  3

  “Did you think you could run from us, Madame Perenelle?”

  There was a hint of Eastern Europe to her accent, or perhaps even farther north, Sweden or Russia.

  The two creatures on either side released me, dropping me staggering to the ground. I glanced at them. I doubted they were related, but they looked alike enough to be sisters. Now that I knew what they were, I could see the inhuman look in their eyes and cheeks. The last time I had encountered the Torc Fianna, they had been in the service of the Elder Artemis, and that had not ended well.

  “Did you think you were going to lose us amongst the stench of humani in their temple to commerce?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” I answered, and moved toward the speaker, putting as much distance as I could between myself and the two figures flanking me.

  “We have your scent now, Madame Perenelle. You cannot disguise it with perfumes or chocolates. The humani possess a mere five million sense receptors; deer have two hundred ninety-seven million. We could track you across the world.”

  Now that I was close, I could tell that the woman stood at least six feet tall. Her hair was cropped close to her skull, emphasizing her huge brown eyes. Her musk was undeniable: the rich odor of a deer. She was dressed like her two companions, in trousers and a double-breasted coat, but she was leaning both hands on a thick walking stick, which I was sure she did not need.