Nicholas and the Krampus, Page 2

  “You are Torc Fianna,” I said.

  “You know us.”

  “I have encountered your race before,” I answered. “I am not your enemy.”

  “We have heard of you, Perenelle Flamel, and of your husband, the Alchemyst, Nicholas.”

  I took another step forward. It was clear that the creature was struggling to hold her human shape. Fur was appearing and disappearing on her cheeks, and I watched the bones in her hands thicken, welding her fingers into a hoof as she tried to clutch the walking stick. She had clearly spent a long time in this human form. Most of the were can transform only for short periods, the timing usually triggered by phases of the moon. The last full moon had been on the eighteenth, and the next would not occur until the seventeenth of January; the fact that the Torc Fianna were holding their human forms between full-moon phases was testament to their incredible strength of will.

  “Well, you have found me. What do you want?” I moved slightly to one side, allowing my coat to gape open. In the secret pocket sewn into the lining, I carried a silver-handled whip. The thong was woven together from snakes pulled from the Medusa’s hair.

  “You will come with us,” the Torc Fianna leader said.

  “I do not think so,” I said.

  “This is not a request.” The were-deer bared her teeth in what she probably thought was a human smile. She raised her stick and pointed behind me. “And if you touch the whip in your pocket, my sisters will drive arrows into your thighs. Not fatal, but very painful, I can assure you.”

  I glanced at the two Torc Fianna behind me. They were both holding elegant crossbow pistols, aimed at my legs.

  “Do you think you can get to your whip before my sisters dart you?”

  None of the Torc clans I had encountered used modern firearms. Most preferred the traditional weapons of swords and spears. The Torc Arzh Gell, the were-bears, used axes and war hammers. The Torc Fianna, however, were archers, and their skill with bow and crossbow was legendary. I raised my hands, signaling a truce.

  The senior were-deer stepped closer, enveloping me in her rich odor. “We know you are a skilled sorceress, Madame Flamel. I am sure you could unleash myriad spells, but you should know that we already have your husband, and if you wish to see him again, you will come with us.”

  I worked hard to keep my face expressionless, but something must have shown in my eyes, because the Torc Fianna took a step back. “He is unharmed,” she said hastily.

  “He had better be. If you are lying to me, there is no place in this world, or on any Shadowrealm, where you can hide,” I promised her. “Now. Take me to Nicholas.”

  4

  Not another word was spoken as we moved across New York City.

  The short-haired woman walked on my right side, while her two companions took up the rear. My mind was whirling in confusion, but I was not fearful. I was born in the year 1320, and one of the lessons I learned early is that humans spent a lot of time worrying about things that might never happen. I was confident that I could escape these three easily enough. I was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and my natural powers had been honed by centuries of training and study with some of the most powerful immortals and Elders, including Circe and Medea. I knew some Babylonian spells that could turn these creatures to grains of sand, and a particularly nasty Nubian incantation designed to reduce them to assorted liquids. I had my whip in my coat pocket, and I was confident I could pull it out and strike all three were-deer before they could react. A single touch would turn them to stone. All that prevented me from acting was knowing that they had snatched Nicholas. Once I knew he was safe and unharmed, I would allow them to experience the powers of the Sorceress. What really troubled me was the question of who had employed the Torc Fianna to track and find us, and then go to the trouble of kidnapping us in broad daylight. We had enemies aplenty, but most of them would have been happy to see us dead. I briefly wondered if it might be John Dee again. The English Magician was still in search of the Codex, the extraordinary compendium of knowledge that included the spell that kept us alive. But Dee was not subtle; he had burned cities to the ground, unleashed powers that caused earthquakes and set volcanoes to erupt. I doubted he would come after us with Torc Fianna; he’d use something cruder, like golems.

  We kept away from busy thoroughfares, moving northward, heading toward the docks. Streets started to get narrower, buildings poorer, cobbles and pavement more broken. New York was a relatively new city that, like most cities, had its share of slums. Slowly but surely, they were being cleared, but I knew where we were going: the area known as Hell’s Kitchen, one of the poorest and roughest parts of the metropolis.

  There were no brightly lit shops, and the people had no time to linger. Half a dozen blocks away, the streets were bright with Christmas, but here, there were few signs that the holiday was upon us. Most of the people hurrying past were wearing mismatched bundles of clothes. The accents had changed also: outside Gimbel’s, they’d been mostly English, but now they were Irish, German, and Italian, and while the Irish spoke accented English, the Germans and Italians used their native tongues.

  We turned down an alleyway that looked like it had not changed in two hundred years. Slimy walls speckled with tattered flyers pressed close together, and gutters were heaped with stinking rubbish. Rats, some as big as cats, perched on discarded boxes and watched us.

  We must have made for a strange sight as we moved through the alleys and crossed open courtyards: four well-dressed women, walking in grim silence. I was sure we were being watched; no doubt people took us for members of the Salvation Army or one of the hundreds other church groups who worked in the tenements.

  What little daylight remained quickly faded to gray gloom. Huge snowflakes spiraled down, but rather than disguising the dirt and squalor, the soft whiteness only served to emphasize it. I resolved that when—no, if—Nicholas and I concluded this adventure, we would return to Hell’s Kitchen and use some of our vast wealth to improve conditions here.

  We turned into an alley so narrow we were forced to march in single file. I caught a peculiar mixture of scents—unwashed humani, tobacco, oil, boiled cabbage—just before two men stepped into the alley’s opening. Wearing ill-fitting bowler hats, stained overalls, jeans, jackets, and battered army boots, they looked like they worked the docks. And they were carrying chopped-down baseball bats.

  They were both big men, but it was the smaller of the two who stepped forward and stretched out his right hand, holding his bat. “Ladies, ladies, ladies. This is a dangerous part of the city for those like yourselves to be wandering so late in the day….”

  The Torc Fianna in front of me did not even slow down. The walking stick she carried flashed out, catching the bat and snapping it in two. Both pieces ricocheted off a wall and bounced back onto the startled man. Then she jabbed with the blunt end of the stick. It caught the man in the center of the chest, propelling him back into his companion. They both went down in an untidy tangle of limbs. The Torc Fianna simply walked right over them. The big one reached out to catch my leg as I passed, but one of the were-deer behind me stomped on his wrist. I might have heard bone snap.

  Another alleyway brought us to a dead end. A mountain of filth was piled high against the rear wall, and I could see strands of barbed wire and sparkling shards of glass set on the top. Looking over my shoulder, I realized that the two Torc Fianna who had been following me had retreated to the mouth of the alleyway and taken up position on either side. As I watched, one flickered in and out of her human-deer aspect.

  I turned back just as the senior Torc Fianna tapped on the wall with her metal-tipped stick. The movements were lightning quick, the musical plinking clearly a code. And even though I’d been expecting it, I was startled when the outline of an arched doorway appeared in the wall.

  The moment the door solidified into metal-riveted decorated wood, it
was opened by an elderly woman dressed in the black bonnet and long black dress of the previous century. Her face had collapsed in on itself and was such a mass of wrinkles that it was impossible to discern an expression. It took me a moment before I realized that her dramatically hooked nose was made of metal. Her eyes were a vivid sky-blue. They stared at me with such intensity that I actually felt my aura flare, and wisps of white smoke curled off my fingertips.

  I looked over the woman’s shoulder and saw there was a second door behind her. Carved from a rich golden wood, it was arched and decorated with incredibly detailed twisting holly and mistletoe.

  “You are the Sorceress, Perenelle Delamere.”

  It was a statement rather than a question, and the voice did not match the body; it belonged to a young girl. She spoke the ancient Breton dialect of my youth. I did not bother to answer. Clearly this was no human, and I did not think she was an immortal, either. Who, then? An Elder, probably, and one I had not encountered before.

  In my experience, the reclusive ones are those you definitely do not wish to meet.

  The woman stood back. “Enter freely and of your own will.”

  I did not cross the threshold. “You know me, you know my name.” I started in Breton, slipped into French, and finished in English. “There is power in knowing a person’s name. Will you share yours with me?”

  “You will not know me by my original name.”

  “I might.” I thought I detected something like amusement in the woman’s childlike voice.

  “I have many names. Once, when the humani were young and I had power and worshipers, I was called Berchta.”

  I shook my head. She was right: I had no idea who she was.

  The old woman giggled in her little-girl voice. “Now, I am known as Frau Perchta.”

  I knew who she was then, and felt the cold wash of fear slide into the pit of my stomach. I was in serious trouble! The old woman looked at me with her bright blue eyes, and then, from deep within her long black dress, she produced a thick scroll of paper and allowed it to unfurl. “Are you on my naughty list, I wonder…?”

  5

  “Will you bring Madame Perenelle in? Don’t leave her freezing on the doorstep.” A deep male voice came from behind the second door. “And stop teasing her, Holle.”

  The old woman grimaced—or it might have been a smile—and respooled her paper. It was covered in what looked like runes. “I will check this later.”

  I bowed to the old woman and stepped over the threshold. Immediately, the three Torc Fianna darted into the hallway, and Frau Perchta closed the door, leaving us in a thick darkness.

  Then the ornate second door opened, flooding the small dark hall with bright light. I squeezed my eyes shut, but too late: tears flowed down my face, and I was momentarily blind.

  Feather-soft fingers closed around my left hand, tugging me forward, and I moved from cold to warmth.

  I blinked and blinked again, but the world ahead of me was a shimmering mess of liquid colors. I heard the muted crackle of fire and smelled the rich pine of logs. The comforting aroma of freshly baked bread made my stomach rumble.

  I knew what had happened: we’d stepped through a leygate into a Shadowrealm. But I knew the location of all the North American leygates. And the nearest New York gate was on Bedloe’s Island, which held the Statue of Liberty; certainly not here, deep in Hell’s Kitchen. Yet over the centuries, Nicholas and I had encountered a handful of Elders—and Marethyu—who had the ability to create their own gates.

  A shadow moved before my watering eyes, and I smelled that rich mint I had first breathed nearly six hundred years ago: my husband, Nicholas. And then his arms were around me, his breath soft against my ear. “I’m fine,” he said, answering the question I was about to ask. “But I’m not sure we’re safe. Something is off here.” He dabbed at my eyelids with a handkerchief that smelled of motor oil.

  My vision cleared.

  I have lived a long time, and have traveled the length and breadth of this world. I have walked some of the myriad Otherworlds that border our Earth and have seen wonders and terrors in equal measure. So since I had encountered Torc Fianna and Frau Perchta in this one day, I’d been expecting something spectacular.

  I was disappointed. The place was surprisingly ordinary.

  I had stepped through from New York’s bitterly cold Hell’s Kitchen into a brightly lit, almost uncomfortably warm log cabin. The place was huge. The wooden floor was stained and warped with age, and there was a high arched ceiling, spanned by exposed beams. Directly ahead of me, a log fire blazed in an enormous grate. The wall to my left was filled with leather-bound books of all sizes, while the mismatched shelves covering the right-hand wall were filled to overflowing with snow globes.

  A fir tree grew directly out of the floor in one corner of the room. The tip of every outstretched branch held a thin, lighted candle. I wondered if it was an illusion, because I could see no strands of dripping wax

  Standing in front of the fire was a small dark-skinned man, wearing what looked like a monk’s brown robe, belted with a white cord.

  Nicholas caught my hand and led me forward. “Come and meet our host,” he said in archaic French. He always slipped into that dialect when he was nervous or excited.

  I was aware of movement beside me and turned in time to see Frau Perchta shimmer into black smoke, which swirled into grayness before finally coalescing into a gaseous egg shape. A slender, pale-skinned, white-haired girl stepped out of the smoke. When she turned to look at me, I saw that her eyes were still bright blue. Whereas before, she had been dressed all in black, now she was in a short white shift dress, which revealed that her left thigh was thickly covered in white feathers and the leg below was coal-black and stick-thin, with webbed feet, like a swan’s.

  While I had been looking at Frau Perchta, the three Torc Fianna had shrugged off their human form and taken on their magnificent deer aspects, complete with branching antlers.

  “Come, Madame Perenelle. Stand here and warm yourself.” The dark-skinned man darted forward and ushered us toward the blazing fire. “You must be freezing. New York is so cold at this time of year.” I caught the hint of an accent—Greek, perhaps?

  Nicholas helped me out of my coat, and I saw his hand feel the coil of the whip in the inner pocket. He draped the coat over the back of a chair and came to stand beside me, in front of the fire.

  The small man shifted nervously from foot to foot as he looked at each of us in turn. “I know your husband will have nothing—I have already asked—but surely you, madame, will have something warming to drink after your long walk. Hot chocolate, perhaps? Mulled wine? I have the most delicious cinnamon, and my cloves are fresh from the Maluku Islands this very morning.”

  “Hot chocolate would be lovely,” I responded.

  “Oh, an excellent choice. I had some Criollo delivered only yesterday. It is the rarest of all the chocolate varieties, and my personal favorite. Though I have cut down of late.” He patted a flat stomach and hurried off.

  I watched him as he moved away. There was an almost childlike nervous energy about him. He was constantly moving, adding wood to the fire—even though it didn’t need any—adjusting random books on one side of the room and then darting over to run short, stubby fingers over the snow globes. As he touched them, the snowflakes within came to swirling life. The door at the far end of the room opened as he approached, and where there had been a dark corridor I could now see a vast workspace, bright with copper piping and metal vats.

  I glanced sidelong at Nicholas, but he shook his head almost imperceptibly. We had been together long enough that I knew to ask no questions.

  “I saw a wonderful coffee maker in a window at Gimbel’s today,” I said, making casual conversation as we took in our surroundings. “Makes six cups at one time.”

  “How much was it?” N
icholas asked.

  “Two ninety-five.”

  “So expensive! I can buy a cup of coffee for twenty cents,” he said.

  “You don’t drink coffee anymore,” I reminded him.

  The small man reappeared with a carved wooden goblet filled to the brim with luscious chocolate, and I got my first real look at him. He was a little shorter than me, with the deep olive skin of one from the Mediterranean countries. His thin hair was twisted in a mess of tight curls, and his eyes were the same color as the chocolate. His nose had been broken at least once, so it bent to one side.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said as he unwrapped a cinnamon stick from a twist of paper and allowed it to sink into the thick chocolate.

  “And what is that?” I asked, wrapping both hands around the goblet and breathing deeply. The scent of chocolate and cinnamon—and was that a hint of chili?—was mouthwatering.

  “You are wondering if I am who you think I am?”

  “I do wonder. But you do not look like”—I paused, unwilling to insult him—“what I imagined you might look like.”

  He grinned, revealing a mouthful of perfectly white teeth. “Well, it’s complicated. I was born in the year 270 in the town of Patara in what is now known as Turkey but was then part of the sprawling Roman Empire. I became a priest and then a bishop and finally a saint. By then, of course, I had also become immortal. You know what that’s like. Stories spring up around you. Sadly, you’ve no control over them—even when they ruin your reputation and are completely untrue.”

  Frau Perchta slid up beside the small man and gently kicked him with her swan’s leg. “Ignore him,” she said, her girl’s voice no longer eerie, as it matched her appearance. “He loves celebrity. Besides, he’s created most of the stories himself.”

  “Well, not the new ones,” he said indignantly. “They’ve got nothing to do with me.”