Quantum Claus

Ava L. Bishop & J.L. Madore

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ISBN: 978-1-990853-90-6

CHAPTER ONE

Three suns burned overhead in the bronze-colored sky. Way too bright to look at, they burned blue at the edges. The radiation was intense, and I knew if I stuck around, I was going to be doing a stellar vampire impression, including exploding into a pile of ashes. I needed to haul it.

Black sand shifted underneath my feet with every step, glittering like diamonds in the pulsing light of day, reflecting the heat back at me, so there was no escape from the searing.

Percy shifted within the hood of the makeshift sun robe I tossed over my head and shoulders, her feathers rasping uncomfortably against my sweaty skin.

“This place sucks,” she cawed unhappily.

“Well, you’re not wrong.” I would have given her a conciliatory scratch, but my hands felt raw from the constant whipping wind and grit. Trekking through it felt like I was in a nightmare about being trapped inside a rock grinder, and if I didn’t get out soon, my brilliantly polished bones were all that would be spat out on the other side.

There was grit in my eyes and in my mouth. If I hadn’t needed to preserve every drop of moisture in my body, I’d have spit. I didn’t want to know what my hair was doing, but I was pretty sure there was no amount of product, TLC, or black fucking magic that would save it from being anything but a hydra-snarling mess.

I grimaced, sand drying on my teeth. “Come on. It’s not much further.”

The soft, powdery sand slid under my next step, and I windmilled my arms to keep my balance. I really did not want to faceplant and lose all my skin as I body-surfed down the dune… assuming I didn’t suffocate on the way.

Bastian’s hands wrapped around my biceps before I could take a dive, and he kept me on my feet somehow. It was almost enough for me to forgive the fact that he looked barely disheveled. His ebony hair ruffled across his brow, like someone was pointing a fan at him on a runway instead of standing out in a half-assed sandstorm from hell.

He wasn’t even squinting, for crying out loud. Meanwhile, I felt like if I stopped squinting for a second, my retinas would start going off like pop rocks.

“Are you okay, Red?”

I smiled, but he couldn’t see it through my hood, so I added what I hoped were some chipper hand movements. “Yeah. At least there isn’t anything wrong with me that wasn’t that way before we stepped into this fractal. My balance has always been crap.”

I’d always lived a bit too much inside my head, and that meant paying attention to where all my various limbs were going was a hassle. During my teen years, I went around with so many bumps and bruises that if my teachers hadn’t had a front-row seat to some of my more impressive pratfalls, they would’ve called child services on my poor parents.

Something that was very like lightning—and yet not—snaked across the sky in a brilliant violet wave. The ground trembled under my feet.

“Oh, crap.” I tugged Bastian’s hand, but he was already moving with me. “Time to go.”

I hated cardio. The entire idea of running for no reason offended me. Even running with a really good reason—which I’ve done more and more in the past four months—isn’t something I enjoy. But there, running through sand so fine it was more like talcum powder, sliding and slipping as dunes piled up like waves about to crash over our heads, I just couldn’t keep the stupidest grin in the world off my face.

The Akasha was fucking awesome.

There were whole worlds squirreled away at the edges of reality.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands.

And ever since I’d given the Council of the Seven Spheres a middle-fingered salute and my walking papers, Bastian, Percy, and I had been exploring as many of them as I could pry my way into. Some of them made absolutely no sense.

I thought I knew how badly magic spat on the idea of physics, but I’d known absolutely nothing. There were realms down there that were literally impossible to exist.

There were even a couple I was pretty sure should have the laws of thermodynamics weeping in the corner. It was fascinating… It was infuriating…

And I was having the time of my frigging life.

Look at me, doing field research. Who would have thought?

I fought the urge to laugh as the three of us made a mad dash for the looming mass of gray-black stone jutting up out of the desert’s unforgiving sands. I needed the breath for more running. Especially if I wanted to get out of there before the storm overhead broke.

Just a few more feet.

The sky overhead rang like a bronze gong, the pulsing waves of sound nearly sending me to my knees. It made my vision swim, but the rock was the only thing that wasn’t sand for miles around, so even half-blind, it was hard to miss.

The ground quaked again, but it had nothing to do with the sonic storm building overhead. Not with the way the sand collapsed behind us as something tunneled in pursuit.

Ugh, I hated those things.

“Heads up,” I wheezed, trying not to suck more sand into my throat. “We’ve got another one coming in hot.”

Percy muttered a creative curse I didn’t know she was capable of and tucked herself further into my hood. Bastian and I peeled apart, creating a bit of space between us, just as the sand erupted, and a sixty-foot monstrosity burst out of the ground like the world’s worst game of Whack-a-Mole.

We’d seen them a couple times, but I still didn’t know what the hell they were. They weren’t quite worms or snakes, even though their body was long and skinny with an enormous gaping mouth at one end filled with rows and rows of teeth, because they had… well, not limbs.

Flippers? Fins? I didn’t know—I wasn’t a biologist.

They had some kind of flap thing they used to propel themselves through the ground. The entire length of them was covered in rubbery, concentric rings of black, white, and gray glistening skin and then a half dozen bulbous, yellow eyes on the end with the mouth.

At least, I thought they were eyes.

Some kind of sensory organ, at least. The sonic storms always made the not-worms restless.

With both Bastian and me swinging clear, the not-worm missed out on an easy snatch and grab, crashing back into the sand like a fish diving beneath the waves. My throat was so dry I could barely swallow. Every breath sawed against abused tissue.

I just wanted to get in, get what I needed, and get out. There was a tall, frosty glass of something waiting with my name on it.

Oh shit. I scowled at the line of collapsing sand.

That not-worm had friends. Yippy!

“On your right,” I croaked to Bastian, already focusing on the sand still churning between us.

With a nod, Bastian stopped and pivoted.

Mortal peril aside, I would never tire of seeing Bastian doing his thing.

It was just… he was so collected most of the time. And yes, I was aware that centuries of being the living vessel to the Void—the source of all nothingness and entropy in the world—meant he would probably never be an effusive or outgoing man.

But he was easygoing, clever, curious, and possessed just enough weirdo to find the awkward and overly intense vibe I brought to the party to be charming.

Thank the universe for that.

But there was still enough of the mad scientist in me to be fascinated with things that could kill me with hilarious ease. My mother had once tackled me in the yard as a six-year-old because I ran out into the night during one of the worst lightning storms in recorded history.

Hey, I wanted to see lightning up close.

So, when Bastian braced his feet, and his eyes became globes of pure black from lid to lid, the tremble in my breath had nothing to do with us sprinting through sand.

The ground split, and a second not-worm erupted. Its mouth flared wide enough that I could see its teeth went way too far back. Bastian didn’t flinch or duck. He raised his hand, palm out, and with a flare of the Void, the worm was gone.

A wave of gray ash slapped over us in its place and a shiver went up my spine.

Of course, I didn’t get a chance to bask in it, because not-worms are rude like that. The first one had come around for another lunge at us. Just as the sand started to crack and part ways, I reached out to the potential of the world.

The Aether, always hovering close inside the folded reality of the Akasha, rushed eagerly into my hands. With a deft twist and a bit of help from the first law of thermodynamics, I dragged some of the radioactive light beating down on us and turned it to heat.

Heat in a desert. Yeah, okay, maybe I reached for the low-hanging fruit on that one, but why make things harder for myself?

The not-worm’s head emerged from the ground, its massive body propelling from below, ready to send it into the air. I slammed down with the scorching heat, blasting the area around where its body was emerging, and with a sound like someone smashing an entire van full of plates, the black sand fused into crackling black glass.

The not-worm shrieked, its hide scorched from the reflected heat, but no matter how hard it writhed, it was trapped half in the sand… at least for the moment. The air hissed, heat radiating from the ground as the beast thrashed.

I bolted around it, keeping out of reach of that terrifying maw.

I had too much to do to risk being not-worm food.

My chest heaved as I finally reached the rock pile, doubled over to rest my hands on my knees, and tried to force some air into my lungs. There was a stitch in my side, like someone was slipping a knife between my ribs.

Hot damn, that hurt.

Bastian whistled, standing there, watching the not-worm. He wasn’t even out of breath, the rat bastard.

“Remind me not to piss you off.”

He chuckled, and leaned sideways, blocking some of the howling winds to keep the grit out of my face before my teeth ended up getting sandblasted out of my skull.

The second I was sure I could stand upright without passing out, I reached for the rock pile.

It was almost a cairn, with stones stacked on top of each other into a pyramid shape. I had no idea if it was naturally made, or if someone had arranged it deliberately like that, but we’d been finding them all over the place in the desert.

And with any luck, this one would have what I needed.

I scrabbled at the stones, pulling them free to drop to the sand and be swallowed up by the desert again. With how things shifted around, we didn’t have long to search. Even Percy hopped out of my hood, carefully perching on the rough stone, her bad foot scrabbling for purchase.

I cracked away another stone, and it crumbled in my hands like grainy cheese. In the center was a long, slender crystal. About half the length of my pinky finger. Its surface was gray, but like how oil slicks were gray. A gorgeous opalescence rolled across the surface, showing different colors depending on how the light touched it. Narrower at one end, it was like a drawn-out teardrop.

My hand dipped into the bag I’d been using to carry all our finds and came out with a second crystal. They were an almost identical match, with only a half a millimeter variation in length, or they’d have looked like they came from the same mold.

I held up my find to the others, grinning widely.

They were going to make the most kick-ass pair of earrings the world had never seen.

“Let’s see Lindsey top me for Secret Santa this year.”

CHAPTER TWO

Snow spiraled down out of the pewter sky, dusting everything in quiet. It was late enough, and cold enough, that most of the foot traffic on the ironically named Winter Street had cleared up and gone home.

Being back in Boston after a few weeks of spelunking through the Akasha was weird, to say the least. The Aether felt strangely distant. I was so used to it practically hovering at my elbow that it felt a bit like being up in the mountains where the air gets thin.

Still, there were benefits to being home.

I bumped my shoulder against Bastian’s and offered him my little paper cone of warm, candied pecans I grabbed from a street vendor. Normally, they would have been halfway to frozen by that point, but a hint of potential and a little glimmer of the Aether had them still steaming almost an hour after I bought them.

Bastian—never one to turn down food, even when he should—I’m thinking about the banana and caper sandwich in a pizza bun—made a pleased little hum and popped one into his mouth.

Don’t get me wrong, the Akasha was amazing. Thrilling, terrifying, and sometimes too damn frustrating, it had me ready to bite something and howl, ‘That’s not how it works! That’s not how any of this works!’ Still, it was nice to be back home, especially for the holidays.

Tramping along the street, up to my ankles in gross gritty slush, my thighs numb as hell, didn’t annoy me as much as it would have just three weeks ago. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

Being lost in the realm between worlds would not have been a good enough excuse to miss Christmas, at least not to my parents. And I would’ve done something more impressive than parting the veil between worlds in order to get my hands on my dad’s sweet potato casserole.

I was looking forward to giving my nephew, Conner, his gift. Something told me he was going to need it sooner rather than later. It was fun, watching how excited he got about the holidays. Christmas just felt a bit more magical now that there was a kid in the family old enough to understand what was going on.

It would also be the first time for my family to meet Bastian.

I’d been not-so-subtly ordered to drag him with me. I had no idea why he agreed to subject himself to my family’s scrutiny, but it might have had something to do with the food.

Got to love a man who was a cheap bribe.

Though, the idea of him sitting at my family’s table, looking like some Renaissance sculptor carved him out of marble, was hard to grasp. He was a living ode to his creators’ love of cheekbones and anguished beauty.

I popped a nut into my mouth, chewing slowly to savor the sweetness and swallowing before asking. “Have you ever celebrated Christmas before?”

Bastian was old. Like, so old I didn’t like to think about it. The sheer weight of everything he’d seen and experienced was intimidating. But then, being a Magi, I could basically shape reality to my will, and he still liked me, so meh.

Still, he must have celebrated something at some point. A millennium or more was a long time to be dodging a Christmas party—even the watered-down secular version my family celebrated.

He nodded, taking another pecan when I rattled the cone at him. “I’ve seen them. I haven’t participated, though. People rarely invite me to things.”

How was it possible for one sentence to make me want to cry and hug him, and also fight literally everyone ever? I bumped the side of my head against his shoulder instead.

Bastian’s grin was small, but real. “I’ve seen pretty much every holiday… some that no one remembers anymore, and even some people forgot on purpose.”

Okay, that was ominous. I made a mental note to pry later, but walking there, under the garlands and the lights that the city strung up to entice more shoppers into Downtown Crossing, it didn’t seem the time.

Apparently, I was so content in my new life, I’d learned to let some things go. Neat.

“Which one is your favorite?”

He was quiet for a long moment, tipping his head back as he gave it some thought. The snow landed in his ink-dark hair, lingering for a few moments before finally starting to melt.

Finally, he hummed. “I always liked Diwali. The colors, and the spices, and the meaning behind it all. Qixi, too. That one is beautiful, the story behind it. I do like Christmas, too. The lights and the decorations, and the smell of pine. Yule logs were fun, too. There are a lot to choose from.”

There were still people out and about. Boston wasn’t the kind of place where the sidewalks rolled up as soon as the sun went down. But walking through the snow, under the garland-wrapped streetlights, it felt a bit like our own private little world. Especially since Percy had taken one look at the snow falling from the sky and absolutely refused to set one feather outside. I loved her, the absolute menace, but it was nice not to have the corvid peanut gallery at all times.

A gust of wind snaked down the back of my neck, and I hunched my shoulders to keep it out. “I think you’ll like it at my parent’s place. We mostly watch Conner lose his mind with excitement, eat too much, and watch movies. It’s pretty great. But if you ever want to leave, just tell me, and we’ll bounce.”

Bastian’s grin widened until it looked like a silent laugh, and my heart gave a little twist in my chest. Then he leaned down until he just barely brushed noses with me, somehow not head-butting me, which was the most impressive magic I’d ever seen. “I’m looking forward to every moment, Red.”

The low rumble of his voice had chills racing up my spine that had nothing to do with the fact that the snow was getting heavier. I didn’t even bitch about the nickname, when almost any other person on the planet calling me ‘Red’ would get a lot worse than coal in their stocking.

A flush burned in my cheeks, more obvious because of how cool the air was. “Be good, or I’ll put you on reindeer duty.”

His brows pulled together, head tilting to one side. “That is a fairly abstract threat.”

“On Christmas Eve.”

He didn’t look any less confused.

“When Conner stays over, we leave out milk and cookies for Santa, and carrots for the reindeer. For the past couple years, someone has taken a turn chewing on the raw carrots to make it look like a reindeer ate part of them. We usually resort to ‘Rock Paper Scissors’ to decide who does the deed.”

I loved my nephew, but chewing on a big hunk of raw carrot was gross. And no matter how much I washed it, it always tasted like dirt.

But Bastian looked absolutely fricking delighted by the idea. The weirdo. But then, raw carrot wasn’t even in the top twenty list of strange things I’d seen him eat.

We’d almost made it to where Winter met Washington, and I could already see Mulborne’s department store blazing like something that belonged in Vegas instead of Boston.

The department store was a fixture of the city and had been since the eighteen whatevers. It was Boston’s equivalent to Saks or Macy’s, and they sold everything from clothes to appliances there. I remember their toy section as legendary. Lindsey and I used to go for our yearly photos with Santa Claus in the winter wonderland they set up on their ground floor.

When we were older, we walked down as a family to see the Christmas display windows done up with flocking and lights and little scenes. They seemed to ramp it up every year, with an enormous, fully decorated Christmas tree outside.

I grabbed Bastian’s hand to tug him along. Even late into the evening, all the displays would be lit up. And, okay, he’d probably seen them before, but he’d never seen them with me.

Another block had us coming up on the four-story brownstone building that was putting off enough light pollution that astronauts could use it to land a shuttle from space.

A warm wave of nostalgia rolled through me.

Rainbow lights danced across the snow, turning everything soft and magical in a way only holidays could. I nudged Bastian toward the nearest window, and he went easily, a smile on his face.

But the window wasn’t full of some cute scene of snowmen, or elves setting out gifts, or the one year the gingerbread men were baking cakes in a pastel pink and white kitchen. No, in front of a pile of artificially perfectly wrapped presents was a man in a deep green coat.

I thought maybe he was supposed to be Santa Claus, but there was no beard, no iconic red and white. Instead, the mannequin was wearing a round, flat hat, like something someone from a barbershop quartet might think was hip. His coat wasn’t fluffy or furry… It was streamlined and form-fitting. It made me think of some fashion mogul who possessed only the barest idea of what Christmas was, creating his design for the runway.

My brows snapped down, and I took a step back from the display window, affronted.

“Who the hell is that?”

CHAPTER THREE

Aquick Google search proved that affront to the season was Mulborne’s own creation for their latest marketing campaign. “Father Holiday?” I couldn’t keep the disgust out of my voice. “What the hell kind of capitalist nightmare are we living in? They can’t just make their own Santa!”

But, as it turned out, they could.

Santa Claus was a cultural icon, and couldn’t be copyrighted or trademarked, but apparently, there wasn’t anything keeping them from making their own knockoff.

Ugh. Talk about stripping the magic out of the holidays. I wanted to spike my phone into the nearest trash can, but I didn’t. Mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to replace it, but also because it somehow got reception while traversing the worlds between worlds, and I didn’t want to risk having to run around holding it over my head to get reception while I got chased by mutant corn cobs with a new one.

Maybe it was stupid, but the whole thing ruined the mood of the night. Bastian headed off to check on his apartment, but since he didn’t even have a houseplant, I was pretty sure everything was okay on that front.

I stalked the rest of my way home alone, half hoping someone might try something, just so I could turn them into an equal volume of spiders or something.

Luckily for everyone involved, I got back to the apartment without anyone giving me as much as a dirty look.

It wasn’t until I’d already turned the key to let myself in, and a pale, ridiculously strong hand clamped down on my arm, that I realized I should have called ahead.

Things happened a little too fast for my brain to keep up. First, I got yanked through my own front door. Second, Stefan, my roommate and Aether-born vampire, shouted, “You’ll never take me alive!” Third, the whole thing scared the absolute bejeezus out of me, and I fumbled for the Aether so hard that the old wiring in the building whined and the overhead lights sparked twice before plunging the entire apartment into darkness.

I let out a furious hiss, slapping Stefan on the shoulder repeatedly. “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

Stefan, who could see way better than I could in the dark, pushed me to arm’s length. “Ash?”

“Yes, it’s me. Who the hell did you think it was? I used my key, you overgrown wood tick.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” He let go of my shoulders and crossed his arms. I assumed. It was pretty dark. “I don’t hear from you for weeks after the whole dust-up, I don’t even know if you’re alive, and suddenly, you’re breaking into the apartment in the middle of the night?”

“Again… I used my key.” I raked my hair back with a sigh. There wasn’t really any arguing with Stefan when he was feeling dramatic, but I still tried. “Didn’t Percy let you know I was on my way?”

“Your weird, flea-ridden bird? I haven’t seen her. Is she not with you?”

I didn’t buy his exaggerated nonchalance. Percy and Stefan got along better than was strictly comfortable. He seemed to love watching her tear through all my dry goods, and they both usually had something snarky to say, like the director’s commentary of my life. I regretted introducing them.

But if Percy wasn’t lounging around eating my cereal, where was she?

I crept my way through the apartment, and lucky for me, Stefan hadn’t redecorated since the turn of the millennia, so I didn’t bump into anything or trip as I made it to my bedroom door and cracked it open.

In the light of the streetlights outside, I could just make out the shadowy lump of feathers huddled on the perch I’d set up for her. Apparently, Percy had headed straight to bed, which was valid.

I shrugged as I eased the door shut, assuming he could see it even though Stefan was just a slightly darker patch of shadows in the room. “I guess she skipped the social pleasantries. Next time I’ll call first. But also, what the hell? That was jumpy, even for you.”

I heard a rustle but couldn’t make out what he’d just done.

“Look, I don’t… could you fix the lights? Watching you squint around is really annoying.”

“I’m a Magi, not an electrician,” I muttered. “Just flip the breaker, or something.”

Stefan stared at me for a beat. “You can’t fix it, can you?”

“No, I can’t,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster.

He snorted and shuffled off deeper into the apartment.

Sometimes magic was super frustrating. I didn’t exactly wave a wand and tell things how they should be. The Aether, the force of all creation, responded to a Magi’s will, their belief, but we still had to tell it what to do. For normal people, it worked slowly. Legends built up over time, culminating in Aether-born like Stefan, with all the weight of the vampire mythos behind him, chain and armor at the same time.

For Magi, we could work more directly. Like, a lot more directly. But if I started futzing with the electrical system, all we would end up with was a four-alarm fire.

Stefan did something reasonably arcane, and a few minutes later, the lights came back on. The microwave gave a petulant little beep, offended that its clock was wrong. Like it hadn’t been wrong for the three months I had lived there. Dramatic little jerk.

When he finally shuffled back out of the little storage closet, I gave Stefan an unimpressed look. “So, do you want to tell me why you freaked out like an extra in a horror movie?”

Stefan scowled and raked his hand through his hair. Usually, the copper-colored strands hit somewhere I would have called ‘artfully disheveled’, the kind of casual that took several hours and a suitcase full of product to achieve.

But then, Stefan looked stressed and rumpled… like, regular person disheveled.

Against my will, a little bit of concern weaseled through. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he grumbled. But the dark circles under his eyes, the paper pallor of his skin, none of it screamed ‘healthy vampire’ to me. Even his gums were pinkish-white when I glimpsed them.

“What the hell? I wasn’t even gone for a month and you forgot how to look after yourself?”

He heaved a huge sigh, like talking to me was just the worst, most frustrating thing in the world. “I just haven’t been going out.”

When he didn’t elaborate, I rolled my hand for him to continue.

He grumbled, sounding like the petulant teenager that the magic that made him had shaped him into. “It’s just, with all those people going missing, I haven’t wanted to go out.”

Ever since the fall, Stefan had been leery about being kidnapped. In his defense, he’d lost several friends to a cult run by a bargain-basement magi who convinced normal people to rip apart Aether-born creatures to harvest them for magic.

Stefan was captured, and my sister was involved, and it was a whole thing.

I got him out before they did any permanent damage, but it was the kind of thing that stuck with you and should probably be discussed with a professional.

So, I got it. I did.

And I felt bad that I hadn’t been around, because hiding in my ‘aura’—for lack of an even slightly more scientific term—made Stefan feel safer.

But with all… I made a T with my hands. “Hold on. Back up. All those people going missing? What people?”

Stefan’s head dropped back, and he let out a sigh that came all the way from his toenails. “Just… look it up on your phone.”

“Mine’s almost out of charge. I mean, it lasted more than three weeks, I can’t ask for more. Let me use your phone if telling me is such an enormous burden.”

“My phone doesn’t connect to the internet.” He shrugged.

I stared at him like he was speaking in tongues. “What do you mean your phone doesn’t connect to the internet?”

With an eye roll worthy of a high schooler, Stefan tugged some ridiculous ancient relic out of his too-tight jeans.

I stared. “Is that a flip phone? How old is that? What the hell, Stefan? Does it even have a clock, or is there a sundial on it?”

“Would you just use your frigging phone?” he hissed, throwing his arms out to the side. “You’ve been here for fifteen minutes, and I already want to strangle you. I wish that was a record.”

“Touchy, touchy.” I gave my phone a little pat, promising I would plug it in soon, before I typed in a quick search.

Three seconds later, my jaw dropped.

Boston was one of the oldest cities in North America, by European standards. It had its good neighborhoods and its bad, and it had places where, super magic powers or not, I probably wouldn’t go wandering alone after dark, if only to avoid the hassle.

The point was, I didn’t live in some pretend world where I thought that everything was swell all the time. Any big city had crime, ranging from the petty to front-page news. And yes, I did have the excuse of being a few steps outside of reality as we knew it, but I still wasn’t sure how almost sixty people going missing wasn’t the kind of thing I’d have heard about the instant I stepped foot into the world again.

“What the hell?” I whispered, not for the first—or last—time, as I scrolled through the news on my phone. I’d curled up on the couch, my feet up on the cushions so I could wrap my arm around my bent knees. Outside the window, it was snowing more heavily than earlier, but the magic was gone.

It was just very dark and very cold in the city.

The weirdest part of all the articles was that no one could figure out any rhyme or reason to the people who went missing. They varied in age, ethnicity, gender. Anyone from a retired man volunteering to ring a bell on a street corner in the cold for some charity to a twelve-year-old who’d been packing hampers for people in need.

A twelve-year-old kid. Shit.

What the hell was going on in my city?

Stefan hovered at the edge of the room like a creep, which was on-brand for him, but I was too horrified to comment. Almost sixty people, all within a few weeks. And no one could figure out where they were? Or even if they were still alive?

My eyes fell on the picture of a little girl, twelve and coltish with youth, smiling hugely for the camera, and my stomach twisted. I couldn’t imagine what her family must be going through.

I almost jumped out of my skin when Stefan dropped a hand onto my shoulder in an awkward pat.

“For what it’s worth,” he said as he shuffled his way toward the door to his room, “I’m glad you’re back.”

I grunted, not sure how to respond to that.

I wasn’t someone who enjoyed leaping to conclusions. Hypotheses needed evidence to back them up, after all. But sixty people, possibly more, all vanishing with no ties between them? That seemed pretty hinky to me. I doubted there was a kidnapping ring out there that wanted—I scanned through the list again—a sixty-eight-year-old man dressed in a cheap Santa suit.

Which meant there was a good chance some magical bullshit was going on in Boston. I might have mostly gotten rid of the Harrowing, or at least dulled their fangs a bit, but that didn’t mean there weren’t many other myths and legends out there that would happily eat people.

And considering the only other Magi in Boston were a guy whose greatest superpower was weaponized narcissism, and my former mentor who was probably still recovering from being held captive by the King of Night for two months and having his fear harvested to make an entire army of murderous phobophages, it would fall on me to clean things up.

I was hardcore avoiding both of them after our last meeting ended on a less than friendly note. I hoped Cornelius was okay. Even if he was a stubborn, prejudiced, canker sore of an old man, I still cared about him.

Ugh. Enough personal drama. Those people weren’t going to save themselves.

Happy Holidays, Aisling.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ispread my papers across the big kitchen table in my parents’ house and tapped my pen on my bottom lip. If I were an Aether-born on a kidnapping spree, where would I stash my victims? Unfortunately, there were way too many other questions to answer before I could make a reasonable deduction.

Aether-born were very much ruled by their mythos—look at Stefan.

Once, he’d been just slightly less off-putting than a zombie who swelled up like a tick when he fed. Then, over the centuries, as the human understanding of what a vampire was shifted, from Renaissance rogue to teenaged heartthrob, the magic altered him to match.

He was still unreasonably salty about it.

Sure, he couldn’t go out during the day anymore, but he didn’t have to sleep in a coffin or fear running water. I think taking hot showers was a fair trade for hiding from the sun.

But before I could figure out what our mystery cryptid might want all those people for, I had to figure out what the heck it was, and there were a depressing number of options. Especially considering the time of year.

It was my first holiday season as a Magi, and even I could feel the change in the air. The Aether pressed close on all sides, the weight of it being molded by human belief like cookie dough carefully shaped by hand. There was a little extra sparkle in the air that I couldn’t dismiss.

The trouble was… none of my suspects really fit the bill.

Of the many options of creatures that might’ve been behind this—and there were way too many for my comfort—the first clue was that the victims were taken and not simply eaten on the spot. Yes, it’s a horribly morbid observation, but one I needed to make if I were to form an educated guess on who was behind this.

I was side-eyeing Krampus hard, but from everything I read, he was an ‘eat the naughty’ kind of guy, and that was a lot to unpack for the human condition, so I was mostly ignoring it.

Angrily searching ‘monsters that kidnap people’ on my phone wasn’t getting me very far. I hoped I didn’t stumble across anything that would scar me for life or land me on some kind of government watch list. I was focusing so hard that the gentle click of someone setting a plate down at my elbow almost had me squirting out of my skin.

“Easy, kitten.” Dad patted my shoulder, making sure I was back with him before he set a cup of hot chocolate beside the cookies he’d just put down. “You look like you’re hard at work. Thought you might need a snack.”

Sugar and carbs. What could I say? My dad knew me well.

He also eyed the pile of papers spread across his kitchen, covered in notices for missing people and drawings of increasingly improbable monsters, some of which involved woodcuts, and just raised an eyebrow without comment.

It was nice to be home.

I still didn’t have a single answer about who or what was disappearing people. I didn’t even have more than a hunch that magic was related. My hunches were usually pretty good, though. My subconscious was good at picking up on patterns that I initially glossed over.

Frustrated, I bit into a cookie and had to close my eyes as the rich, buttery taste of shortbread melted across my tongue. I chewed slowly, savoring it. It wasn’t like my problems would not be waiting for me when the cookie was gone.

Heels clicked against the floor as my mom came into the room.

“Oh, hello, sweetheart.” She dropped a kiss on the top of my head. “I didn’t realize you’d be here. Is Bastian not with you?”

Reluctantly, I swallowed the bite of cookie. “No. He said he had some things to take care of, but he’s still coming for Christmas day.”

Dad turned, wiping his hands dry with a towel. In the light of the kitchen window, his hair glinted more silver than red. With his glasses and his dark green sweater, he looked a bit more like a jolly old elf than a professor.

His frown had his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose, and he pushed them back with an absent finger. “Bastian doesn’t have any food restrictions, does he? We’ll have vegan options, obviously, but is there anything else?”

I made a valiant effort to not make a face about the vegan options. I could respect Lindsey’s choices, but also, one year of trying to choke down the abomination that was ‘tofurky’ was more than enough.

“No, no restrictions. He likes any food.”

“Are you sure?” Dad’s look of concern deepened. “We want him to feel welcome.”

Something golden and warm sparked in my chest. My parents were good people, and honestly, I couldn’t wait to bring Bastian to the house I’d grown up in and smother him in our silly traditions. Eternity was a hell of a long time to wander alone, with not enough people who gave a damn about him. Any and all things I could do to change that would be done.

But out loud, all I said was, “Dad. He’ll eat anything and be happy. Don’t worry.”

Neither parent looked convinced.

I put down my hot chocolate with a sigh. “I once saw him not pay attention when he was eating soup, and he bit the head of his spoon off. He didn’t notice until he’d swallowed and tried to take another spoonful. He will eat whatever you put on his plate and enjoy it.”

Mom blinked. She and Dad exchanged a look and had one of those wordless conversations that long-time couples seemed to have.

“All right then,” Mom said with a shrug.

Dad nodded absently, folding the towel to hang back up. “As long as he doesn’t have Celiacs or something.”

Did Bastian even have intestines? I was basically dating an elder horror. The laugh that slipped out was more like a snort, but I managed not to choke on my drink. Luckily enough, my parents were used to ignoring me when my thoughts went spiralling off into nowhere, so other than making sure I wasn’t asphyxiating on shortbread, they went back to discussing dinner.

Oh, man, this holiday was going to be amazing.

“Aisling, you will clean up your… crime project before Conner comes over, right?”

I blinked up at Mom. “Come again?”

She raised one chestnut brow at me, and I reminded myself that I was a big tough Magi, and I would not sink back into my chair.

“Conner? You told Lindsey you’d watch him tomorrow afternoon? So, she and Scott can–”

“Play Santa, yeah, no, I remember.” I grabbed another cookie, more to have something to do with my hands. “Of course. No weird crime boards when the nibbling is around.”

I told my sister and brother-in-law I would watch the kiddo for Christmas Eve, so they could get the presents they had to hide—practically in the walls to keep him from finding them—and wrap them before the big day.

Conner was what polite people called ‘precocious’.

He was a stubborn, driven, curious menace just like his mommy. And when you added in the brief flickers of Aether I could already see hanging around him, and that he made himself a pet dinosaur to keep his nightmares at bay, you got a kid who saw too much.

Keeping anything a secret in his presence was like trying to bail a boat with a sieve.

I’m sure between me, Percy, and maybe Bastian if he was done with his mysterious errands by then, we could keep one five-year-old kid occupied for an afternoon on Christmas Eve.

How hard could it be?

CHAPTER FIVE

It was hard—really, really hard. Like winning a foot race against a hummingbird jacked on cocaine, hard.

Conner was so overstimulated when I picked him up, he was practically vibrating onto another plane of existence. He spoke so fast, all the words just ran together into one siren raid blare, and at one point, he just started running in circles.

Slowly, I turned to look at my sister. “Did you give him sugar?”

Conner didn’t eat refined sugar. While he wasn’t exactly deprived, Scott and Lindsey usually kept things like pop and chocolate to a minimum. But this was more than just excitement for a holiday, and unless my crunchy granola, yoga mom sister had encouraged her kid to mainline methamphetamines, there was only one other option.

Lindsey’s festive sweater hung off one shoulder and even with her hair in a bun that was regular messy instead of casually messy, she gave me an entirely unrepentant shrug. “It’s Christmas.”

Betrayed. Betrayed by my sister.

There was no sympathy on her face. Just a smear of glitter, and the faraway, dead-eyed stare of someone experiencing a war flashback.

“You two have fun,” she said with a desperate cheerfulness as she wrangled her squirming child into his coat and boots and shoved us out the door.

He took off like a shot and I had to twist the possibilities of the world to make the ground frictionless to keep him from bolting ahead of me toward the street.

I grabbed a discarded jump rope with the desperation of a drowning woman. “Hey, buddy, do you want to play puppy?”

That got his attention. Big brown eyes latched onto my face. “Puppy?”

“Yeah.” I held up the jump rope, praying to whatever deity handled improv and lies. “You pretend to be a puppy, and you have to hang onto this leash, because puppies don’t just run around loose, right?”

His head tilted to the side and his little face grew strangely grave as he considered. Finally, he snatched the end of the rope out of my hands, his face splitting into a wide grin. “I’m a puppy,” he caroled… and then started barking as he ran in circles around me.

I spent a long moment remembering black sand and flesh-eating giant not-worms with way more longing than was strictly healthy. Then I headed for the car, with Conner bounding in excited laps around me.

It was going to be a long afternoon.

I barely made it six blocks out of the suburbs before Conner’s head lolled to the side and he passed out in his car seat. All right—driving in circles for the win. After his nap, I figured I’d get some real food into him, and then we could do something fun and distracting.

Maybe the aquarium. Kids loved the aquarium. Or at least, I had.

All those bright, darting fish. The penguins. The harbor seals. That would help him run off some of his excitement. And, if he had burned off the rocket fuel in his bloodstream, then we could sit and watch the Main Reef Tank for a while.

By the time I found a parking spot that was still in the same postal code as where we were going, Conner was awake and rubbing his eyes with his knuckles.

“Auntie Ash, I’m hungry,” he said in a voice too drowsy to be a whine.

Right on schedule. “Of course you are.”

The bright spot was, heading for the NEA meant that we were practically on top of Faneuil Hall, and Quincy Market had just about any food a kid could imagine. I made sure to keep a good grip on Conner’s hand as we kicked through the slushy streets and through the fogged glass doors of the building.

In retrospect, going to one of the biggest shopping centers in the city on one of the busiest days for people to be out panic-buying probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done in my life. But, luckily for me, while the universe had let me down on in the height department, it had seen fit to bless me with extremely sharp little elbows, and the will to use them.

I kept Conner ahead of me, herding him with my body the best I could as we made our way through the food market. I steered him away from the most obvious sugar bombs—no waffles, or ice cream, or absolutely incredible-looking cake pops, thanks. One bout of carbohydrate-induced mania was more than enough for the day.

“Hey, look at the tree,” I said, pointing shamelessly as we shuffled past the gelato stand.

Conner craned his head to look, because he was a good boy who trusted his aunt.

I finally wrangled him into eating something that held nutritional value and it figured—despite there being eleven seafood shops in the market, the kid wanted pizza.

Whatever.

I got myself a wickedly good lobster roll, just dripping with garlic butter, and it made the fact that I had almost engaged in a fight to the death to claim our little two-person table less alarming.

Conner was like me—when we ate, we were focused on the business of getting food in our faces. He was focused on his slice of pepperoni, his little brow furrowed in concentration, and it was unfairly cute. It meant that neither of us noticed the woman coming up to us before she was already standing beside our table.

Middle-aged, dressed in a red puffy vest and a matching Santa hat, she had a basket slung over her elbow filled with candy canes, and a smile that was wide enough that it crinkled up the corners of her warm brown eyes. “Happy holidays. Would you like a candy cane, sweetheart?”

Conner finished chewing carefully before he smiled. “No, thank you.”

The woman, maybe thinking it was a case of stranger danger, glanced at me. “They’re all wrapped,” she offered, just loud enough for me to hear over the general din of so many people crammed into one building.

I grabbed a napkin, dabbing at some of the garlic butter sliding its way down my chin. “Oh, thank you. But he actually just hates peppermint.”

I mean, I got it. I wasn’t a fan of burny-cold, either.

The woman’s smile flared back to life, and she rifled around in her basket until she pulled out a candy cane that was various shades of brown and cream instead of the usual red and white. “Well, I have some that are root beer flavored instead, if you’d like.”

Conner perked up.

“Oh shit, for real?” I hadn’t seen those before. I was maybe a little jealous.

“Mommy says you’re not supposed to say that word around me,” Conner said with the prim dignity of a small child repeating the capital rules.

I hummed. “And yet, she never stops letting us hang out.”

Besides, if teaching her son a bad word was the worst she got after hyping him up and turning him loose, she was luckier than she deserved.

The woman passed Conner the root beer candy cane, and then, with a wink, passed me a second. “Happy holidays,” she said, as she moved to the next table.

“Thank you!” Conner waved so hard I thought he might fall out of his chair.

“All right, buddy. No more candy until you finish your pizza, okay?” I could fake being a responsible adult long enough to make sure he didn’t dehydrate like some fructose-desiccated mummy, at least.

With our stomachs full and both of us happily sucking on our candy canes—and yes, they tasted like root beer—we headed back outside into the overcast afternoon. The clouds were low in the sky, heavy gray, and swollen. They felt so close, I was pretty sure I could reach up and brush them with my fingers.

Conner tugged on my hand, gesturing with the sharpened point of his treat. “Look, it’s the candy lady.”

I glanced away from the intersection to see the woman in the red vest, her basket almost empty as she wandered down the road. She was smiling happily to herself, head tipped back like there was some sun for her to enjoy.

Not an employee, then. Just someone out and about, spreading a little joy.

That was nice. And the candy canes were pretty tasty.

It happened so fast that if I hadn’t already been looking, I would have missed it.

The prickle of Aether washed over me like electricity. One second, the woman was walking, fumbling in her pocket for keys or a phone. The next, there was a flash of dark green, and she was gone.

Most people don’t look up. There aren’t any predators big enough to attack us from the sky, so it’s something that was bred out of humanity a long, long time ago. But after weeks of trekking through places where physics and reality were only nodding acquaintances, I learned to keep my head on a swivel. Threats can come from three hundred and sixty degrees.

I glanced up.

Which is why I was treated to the sight of a man in a sleek green coat, with a huge sack thrown over one shoulder, making his way over the rooftop, and disappearing beyond the skyline.

I stood, staring for an embarrassingly long moment, until a little hand tugged mine.

“Auntie Ash. Did Green Santa just steal that lady?”

There were little ears listening, so I couldn’t say what I really wanted to.

I raked a hand back through my hair, grabbed a handful, and tugged. “What the fudge?”

CHAPTER SIX

Out of all the ghouls and beasties that existed, I would never have pegged knockoff Santa as the one going around stealing people. Why would a marketing gimmick steal people? How had something cooked up in a PR lab less than a month ago have enough belief for the Aether to have even manifested it? What in the world was he doing with the people he’d taken?

Unfortunately, a Google search didn’t turn up anything except for a lot of pictures of ‘Father Holiday’ in all his bland, inoffensive glory, with his stupid little boater’s hat that made me irrationally angry just to look at.

If I wanted answers, I would have to go straight to the source.

Even though I hadn’t mentioned the aquarium to Conner, I still felt vaguely guilty about the change of plans as I buckled him back into his car seat. “Sorry, buddy. Auntie Ash needs to make a stop somewhere, okay?”

He watched me fiddling with the buckles as he sucked on his candy cane, his face surprisingly solemn. “Is this a magic thing?”

“It might be,” I told him, giving his seat belt a testing yank. “So, you need to stay quiet, and keep an eye out for anything other people don’t see, okay?”

An Aether-born would have an enormous advantage for getting away with things right out in public. Normally, people didn’t believe in magic. And since finding out that old, scary, powerful things that eat people are real is unpleasant and upsetting, people’s brains did their best to shield them from the truth.

Human brains are great at not perceiving things that are stressful. That was why the first people at traffic accidents often struggle to make sense of what they were seeing. Their brains shielded them from the horrors and encouraged them to look away and save themselves the PTSD.

Aether-born and other magic things fell under that aura of general disbelief and polite ignoring. The more out there something was, the less likely a mundane person would see it.

But even as little as he was, it was clear Conner wouldn’t be mundane for long—if he ever was. Poor little guy. I would do my best to keep him from the uglier side of magic. But right then, there were a lot of people who needed help.

Which meant I had to drag my nephew along with me for a bit.

Next stop, Mulborne’s.

If I’d thought Faneuil Hall was busy, Mulborne’s Department Store was a zoo. It was a full crush in the building, people packed wall to wall, and I finally just picked Conner up rather than risk getting separated or him getting stepped on.

He took it like a trooper, looping one arm around my neck as he craned his head to see all the decorations at once.

Father Holiday was frigging everywhere. I couldn’t turn around without seeing that obnoxiously bland smile or that dark green coat. Posters, cardboard stands, mannequins. Every time I turned my head and caught sight of another beardless face in a boater hat, I jumped, thinking he was there to kidnap someone.

Green used to be my favorite color, but it was on thin ice with me now.

We slipped past the shoe department, and past housewares—and Conner lost all interest with no bright colors or twinkling lights—but the elevators were back by the washrooms, and I was in a hurry.

Partly because of the missing people.

Partly because Conner was a good fifty pounds, and my arms were trembling by the time we made it past the stacks of fluffy bath towels.

The first three floors of Mulborne’s were sales floors, with anything anyone could want. The fourth floor was where the offices were, at least according to the department map standing at the end of an aisle. If anyone knew what was up with the ad campaign from hell, they’d be upstairs in their office on the second busiest shopping day of the calendar year.

My noodle arms finally gave out once we were in the elevator, and I let Conner slip down my body to stand again. “All right, buddy.” I leaned forward to press the button for the fourth floor. “We’re going to play a game.”

“Are we going to be puppies again?” Conner popped the last of his candy cane into his mouth, crunching it obnoxiously.

“Not quite. We’re going to pretend to be invisible, okay?” I gave his hand a squeeze. “We’re going to walk past people and pretend really hard that they can’t see us. Can you do that?”

Conner grinned. “Yeah!”

The Aether hummed under my skin as I bent the light around the two of us. When I did anything with my magic, people avoided paying attention to me but it wasn’t a given.

Better safe than caught trespassing and kicked out, I always said.

It was still early enough in the day that there were people in their offices, but with carols playing, and a lot of food laid out on any surface flat enough to hold a plate, it was clear no one was getting work done. I noticed none of them were in a hurry to go downstairs and help the salespeople, though.

Naughty. Coal for them.

Conner crept along at my side, one hand pressed to his mouth to smother his giggles as we walked past the clumps of people chatting and drinking coffee. If he noticed the way the world went a little dimmer, a little cooler, he didn’t mention it.

I was just glad he was having fun.

At the far end of the hall, there was a set of polished oak doors, with an honest-to-goodness brass nameplate that read Mulborne.

Sure, I could have found some marketing person, or whoever arranged the displays. But I was annoyed and freaked out by the snatching of a nice lady right in front of me, and I wouldn’t be beating around the base of the Christmas tree, thank you.

I wanted answers, and before the new year.

I breezed past the woman sitting at a desk just outside the door, and she didn’t even look up from her magazine as I opened the door wide enough for me and Conner to slip through. He was practically dancing in place.

“Auntie Ash, we’re good at this game.”

My heart grew three sizes, and I knelt to give him a hug before steering him to the chair against the wall. “Let’s see if you can win it. Sit there, and think really, really hard that no one can see you. Okay?”

Conner scrambled up into the chair, his boots dangling a good six inches off the ground, and his face twisted in concentration.

Once he was settled, I turned my attention to the rest of the room.

The office wasn’t as big as I would have expected. It looked more like a private drawing room, with a proper window instead of the wall of glass you’d find in a modern high-rise. Thick brocade curtains hung down around it, framing a mahogany desk—big enough for a person to lie across and not hang off the edges—and behind the desk, a matching leather chair in oxblood red. There was a stained-glass lamp in the corner, and a potted plant.

It was old-world elegant, but slightly old-fashioned. Like no one had bothered to upgrade in the past few decades.

The only person in the room was a man past his middle years, his hair almost entirely silver, who looked pretty distinguished in his dark suit. He was standing in front of the ornate gilded mirror on one wall, fiddling with his obnoxiously festive red and green striped tie. He didn’t even look up at the soft sound of the office door closing.

So. That was Mr. Mulborne. The reigning king of one of Boston’s old money families.

I recognized him from various newspaper articles and a couple ad campaigns through the years. I hadn’t been sure he would be there. It was just as likely that the big boss would be off playing golf or skiing somewhere rather than hanging out on-site during the holidays.

I’d take my blessings where I found them.

Mostly, I was grateful I didn’t have to mission impossible this whole deal and break into his assistant’s desk to find his address or something.

Conner wriggled in his chair, trying not to giggle, and I held a finger up to my lips before I stepped away from the guest chair, closer to the desk. The light bending around me shivered and went still as I dropped my little invisibility trick.

It actually took Mr. Mulborne a couple of minutes to notice there was someone standing in his office with him, and I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with magic.

“Janine, where’s my other tie? I don’t think this one will show up on camera properly. I want to look festive, after all.” He smoothed a hand over the tie in question, tilting his head back and forth in the mirror.

Considering the woman at the desk outside had pin-straight brown hair, and mine was bright copper-red and somewhere between curly and crazy depending on its mood, I didn’t have a lot of faith in Mr. Mulborne’s powers of observation.

When I stayed quiet, he finally turned away from his preening, and silver brows flew up to his hairline. “Who are you?” Mulborne frowned, glancing around the rest of the room. “Where’s Janine?”

Janine was thirty pages deep into celebrity gossip, and irrelevant to the conversation, so I ignored that question and stuffed my hands into the pockets of my puffy blue coat.

“Hello, Mr. Mulborne. I’m the Ghost of Christmas Present, here to tell you, you messed up,” I said, in the bright sarcasm that almost cycles around back to sincerity. “I want to talk to you about ‘Father Holiday’.”

Mulborne scowled. “I don’t know how you got in here, but I’m calling security.”

He reached for something on his desk, and I reached for the shining edge of the Aether.

Whatever he expected to grab, it wasn’t the pile of brightly colored ribbon candy that I’d twisted his intercom into.

We both stared, nonplussed. Him because that was probably a weird thing to witness, me because I hadn’t meant to do that. I’d been going for a pile of useless plastic pellets, an easy conversion of mass. Where the hell had the candy come from?

Magic didn’t just do that.

The Aether didn’t have a will of its own. It didn’t just decide to do things. It had to be directed by human will. Shaped with deliberation, and, frankly, a bit of effort.

But… hello, candy.

Okay, whatever, I had more important things to worry about at the moment.

Mulborne blinked owlishly, red creeping up his neck. “How…?”

I spread my hands out to the sides. “We both have places we’d rather be. So, how about we skip all the ‘how did you do that?’ and ‘who are you?’ crap, and get right to the Father Holiday part of this conversation. What is the deal with that mess?”

Stronger language beat against the inside of my teeth, but there were little ears listening. If I sent Conner home knowing any more four-letter words than he already did, Lindsey would not be happy.

Considering I once watched her beat the snot out of a room full of murderous cultists, that wasn’t something I wanted to mess with, even if I yearned to shake Mr. Mulborne and tell him exactly where he could stick his stupid ad campaign.

Wonder of wonders, the man actually answered. Maybe turning his phone into candy was a decent interrogation technique.

He blinked at me, then looked down at the candy still scattered across his desk. “It’s just a marketing gimmick the ad boys came up with. Why?”

I waved my hand and flashed something that had way too many teeth to be a smile. “Yeah, no, this isn’t a two-way thing. Why did you feel the need to make your own Santa Claus? There’s already a perfectly good holiday mascot. You must’ve forked over a lot of money for that kind of material push.”

It was obvious he wasn’t used to being dismissed or cut off, if the ugly flush climbing into his forehead was any indication. Before he could get any ideas, I snapped my fingers and turned his Ficus plant into a balloon bouquet.

Or, at least, I tried to. Instead, green leaves twisted into a pot of dirt with a huge plastic candy cane sticking out of it.

All right, concern might be in order.

Mulborne blanched, sweat beading on his brow as he sputtered. “I… Santa Claus is fair use. He’s a cultural icon, he can’t be copywritten. With Father Holiday, we can keep the image as intellectual property.”

I stared.

A headache throbbed behind my eyes, and I pinched my nose, heading it off at the pass.

When I thought I could talk again without yelling, I fixed Mulborne with a glare that was a solid seven out of ten.

“Are you telling me,” I gritted out through my clenched jaw, “you did all of this so you could trademark your crap version of jolly old St. Nick? All those ads, that huge push. Are you trying to replace Santa Claus?”

A terrible thought occurred, and I almost hated following that spark to its logical conclusion. I scrubbed at my head, like that would be enough to banish the possibility.

But no. It stayed there, like vomit soaking into the carpet. There was no ignoring it, because I suddenly understood how an Aether-born had formed after just a month of ‘Father Holiday’ existing. Normally it took years, sometimes centuries, until the weight of belief built up to a peak before avalanching onto the world.

Mulborne had sped run the process. How?

“You gave it to kids.” It took everything in me not to turn and glance back at Conner. Conner, who, while not even a Magi, had made himself an invisible friend who would protect him and eat any nightmares that came creeping. Because no one, no one, believed harder than a child.

It had been a few years for me, but that didn’t mean I didn’t remember what it was like. When the whole world was new. When the idea of being able to run on air as long as you didn’t look down seemed just as plausible as electricity running through wires, and Neverland was as real as Orlando or the Grand Canyon.

“Damn you, you gave it to kids.”

Mulborne looked like he was caught somewhere between baffled and offended, still puffed up with indignation, but also not sure what to make of me.

He gave his cuffs a hard tug. “Look, I don’t know what this is all about, or how you got in here, but I have an appointment to make. We’re donating toys and gifts to the less fortunate, and the press is expecting me.”

“You love playing Santa as long as the cameras are watching, is that it?” Wow. Just talking to the douche made something sour pool in my mouth.

Mulborne took a step around his desk toward me, like he’d conveniently forgotten that I could turn him into a pile of dentures if he ticked me off. His hands curled into fists, and part of me hoped he’d take a swing so I could hit back. More than sixty people missing, maybe hurt, because someone wanted a few more dollars? So he could shill his junk?

I didn’t know how that whole situation would have shaken down. I liked to think I wouldn’t have gotten into a brawl with upper management in front of my nephew, but I didn’t get the chance to know for sure.

Because the big window in the wall of the office slid open a foot and something long, fluid, and utterly inhuman wriggled through.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bile burned in the back of my throat, and I took a fast step back before my brain kicked in. Watching whatever it was move was nauseating, wrong on a level I didn’t quite understand. As soon as it touched the carpet, it changed, and I glimpsed a green coat, that stupid boater’s hat, and the sack before it descended over Mulborne faster than I could blink.

Father Holiday didn’t even glance at me when I made an embarrassing little yip. It was already swarming out the cracked window, through a space that nothing that even vaguely resembled a human body should have been able to fit through. All those stories about Santa sliding down a chimney had taken on a new, horrifying context in my head.

It was so fast.

By the time I realized I needed to do something, my hand snapped up, sheathed in the flickering golden light of the Aether, but I was already too late.

Spitting out something rude, I ran to the window, pushing it as far open as I could. Icy wind gusted into the office, sending papers swirling through the air like a snowstorm of contracts and memos. The air outside was cold, my breath steaming around my face as I leaned out as far as I dared to, which wasn’t very far.

I would do what I could to help, but I wasn’t falling out a fourth-story window for Mr. Mulborne of all people. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t any sign of either Mr. Mulborne, or the monster he helped create.

How the heck was I going to catch that thing? It was way too quick. What had it even wanted with Mulborne? What did it want with any of the people it had taken? None of this made sense.

I jumped when little fingers curled through mine. Conner looked up at me, his big eyes wide with concern. “Auntie Ash, are you going to save him?”

I thought about it.

I thought about it some more.

Finally, my shoulders slumped. Finding where all the others ended up meant that I’d be finding Mulborne, too.

“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t pretend to be happy about it.

With a better understanding of what I was dealing with, I started to piece together a plan of action. The first thing I needed to do was take Conner back to his mom earlier than expected. No way was I dragging a five-year-old any further along into this mess.

Lindsey would have to deal with it.

“C’mon, buddy.” I led Conner by the hand toward the door, closing it carefully behind me.

It was only when Janine glanced up from her magazine to stare at me with rising alarm that I realized I’d never put my invisibility back up.

Screw it. I jerked my thumb over my shoulder toward the door at my back and gave her conspiratorially wide eyes. “Boy, he’s pissed about something. I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

And then I power walked to the elevator, as fast as Conner’s little legs could manage.

Percy was waiting for us at my sister’s place, and she let me know by plummeting down onto the roof of my car and scaring the absolute crap out of me.

“Sugar cakes,” I gasped out, clutching my chest as my heart did its level best to break free of my ribcage. “What the heck, Percy?”

Her head tilted to one side, and she fixed one beady black eye on my face. “Are you having a stroke? Is that what that is?”

I gave her the look she deserved. “I’ve already taught Conner enough words that are going to give his mother reason to shave my eyebrows off in my sleep. I’m not making it worse. What are you doing here?”

Percy flipped her wings, her version of a shrug. “Waiting for you. I was bored. It’s cold.”

She clicked her beak, and I sighed at the hint, pulling my hair out of the way so she could land on my shoulder and snuggle into my collar.

It made it difficult to wrangle Conner out of his car seat, but the warm weight and the brush of feathers was becoming pretty comforting to me.

I’d tried to call Lindsey with a heads-up that we were coming back early, but my phone had finally given up the ghost. Three weeks of being powered by diluted Aether in the space between worlds, and it had taken less than twelve hours to blow through its charge with multiple internet searches. Figured.

So, I knocked and cracked the door open, keeping myself angled between Conner and the house, not wanting for him to see anything he shouldn’t. I also made sure to stay half behind the door, making myself a smaller target. My parents didn’t raise a dummy.

“Hey, it’s me. Sorry, some weird crap popped up, and I need to…”

My voice trailed off as I got a good look at the living room.

It was a war zone.

The tree was tipped over, ornaments scattered and smashed across the ground. Wrapping paper, ribbons, and tape blew across the carpet, propelled by the freezing wind coming in through the wide-open back doors. It looked like the place had been ransacked, or like a brawl had broken out, and my heart turned to stone in my chest.

“Lindsey?” My voice sounded wrong. Too small. Too thin. Where the hell was my sister?

Oh, shit. Conner.

“Watch him,” I barked to Percy, half tossing the crow to my nephew as I stepped into the house.

My lungs felt compressed as I ran through the house, calling for Lindsey or Scott. I checked every room. I sent power ranging through the house, searching for any sign of where the hell either of them could be.

All I got back was the petrichor taste of the Aether-born on the back of my tongue.

It felt a little flat, plastic almost, nothing like Stefan’s rich, robust energy that filled the room like century-aged brandy.

After ten terrifying minutes, I had to face the facts, as much as they sucked. Scott and Lindsey weren’t there. And the chances that they’d left under their own power were slim to none.

One thing snagged against my awareness, like a pebble rippling through water. A little splash of green was caught in the cracked frame of the kitchen archway. Torn fabric, or the idea of fabric. There was no chance that it was dyed or woven by human or machine hands.

I lifted the bit of woven threads and scrunched my nose as I took a whiff. It reeked of magic. And I knew that particularly virulent shade of green.

My hand slowly curled into a fist as my inner Grinch took hold.

“Hey, wait!” Percy’s concerned croak had my head snapping back toward the door as Conner pushed through and stopped.

His eyes went wide and glassy. His lower lip trembled, and the first fat tear sliding down his cheek hit me like a car crash. “Mommy?”

I crossed the room in two strides, dropping to my knees to pull him into my shoulder. “It’s okay, buddy. It’s going to be okay.”

We were going to get them back. That wasn’t a promise. That was a threat.

That jumped-up wannabe holiday poser would regret ever laying a hand on my sister.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Why had Father Holiday targeted my family?

I didn’t think it was personal. If the Aether-born had noticed me, I would have been shocked. And Lindsey and I didn’t look anything alike. So, what made him go from a semi-famous business owner to Lindsey and Scott, of all people?

Assuming that there weren’t more disappearances between points A and B.

Conner had finally cried himself out and sat listlessly on the couch. He was wrapped in a blanket with Percy for company while I tried to figure out what the hell I could do. I heard the two of them whispering to each other but figured as long as they were okay, there wasn’t much to worry about.

I scanned the chaos and sighed. When in doubt, make notes.

I dragged some wrapping paper my way and fished a pen out of the wreckage to make a list of all the people that I could remember being taken, and what they’d been doing at the time.

Man, I wished I had my printed articles with me, but I didn’t want to bother heading back to the apartment for them.

Bell ringer. Charity volunteer. Wrapping presents for their son. Giving out candy canes.

I paused, pen tapping against the wrapping paper. What had Mulborne been doing, other than being an ass?

He’d mentioned donating toys and goods.

Playing Santa.

Oh, crap. It couldn’t be, could it?

It was so stupid, which meant it probably was… because the whole situation was nothing but stupid. All the people who had been stolen had been embracing the spirit of the season and playing Santa.

But Father Holiday—still the dumbest name ever—was meant to replace Santa.

If I hadn’t been so freaked out and furious, I would have laughed. The Aether-born was protecting his copywrite. He was doing away with the competition.

I groaned and buried my face in my hands.

Great, that sorted out the why… but what was he doing with the people he took? Where could he keep them that they couldn’t get up and walk out when he was away for another kidnapping?

The front door opening startled me so badly, I almost fell over. I would have to start taking supplements or sedatives or something, because my ticker couldn’t take the beating that my life of the past four months was giving it.

I caught sight of a flurry of dark feathers lined in Aether gold vanishing out the door before Conner closed it again. He scrubbed at the tear tracks on his little face, but the angle of his chin when he turned to face me was the most stubborn little jut I’d ever seen outside of a mirror.

“I wrote a letter,” he told me. “Percy went to get help.”

I had no idea how those two sentences were related, but if it made Conner feel better while his entire world was falling apart, then I was all for it. And Percy getting help was actually a pretty good idea, since my phone was dead and I hadn’t memorized a phone number since I was Conner’s age.

She probably went to get Bastian, I thought with a brief flutter. I would feel a lot better with him at my back, but short of a crow-a-gram, or going out and committing felony arson, I didn’t have any way to contact him.

As soon as all this was over, I promised myself to read up on radio waves, because I was making us the magical equivalent of walkie-talkies, or so help me.

I also didn’t want to wait around, hoping for the chance of an accountability buddy. My family was missing, and I needed to find them.

I wasn’t scared of knockoff Santa Claus. Body horror aside, what could he do? Put me on the naughty list? I’d been a permanent resident on that tally sheet since the day I dissected the vacuum cleaner on my dad’s freshly mopped kitchen floor.

And, okay, sure, my powers were doing some weird things, but I had a theory about that too. All the ambient beliefs floating around on Christmas Eve must be muddying the waters. I didn’t need magic to take care of ‘Father Holiday’. If I had to, I’d beat him back through the Akasha with a giant novelty candy cane.

Bastian and Percy could catch up. They were good at finding me, especially Percy.

I held my hand out to Conner, making my smile reassuring instead of grim. “Come on, buddy. Let’s go find your mom and dad.”

He didn’t hesitate, just slipped his little hand into mine. My throat felt tight as we headed back to the car. In my free hand, I had that little scrap of green thread in a death grip.

I had spent a surprising amount of time as a Magi finding people, and I’d come up with an algorithm to track them. It worked best with a bit of the person I was searching for—the more personal, the better. But that little scrap of thread wasn’t just from an ugly coat, it was a piece of the energy that made up the Father Holiday mythos itself.

Granted, that was the first time I’d worked the spell feeling that close to homicidal.

At first, I tried to drop Conner off at my parents’ place. A showdown with what was, ultimately, a dangerous magical being—no matter how lame I found him—was no place for a small child.

Except, the small child turned into a shrieking Tasmanian devil the instant he realized what I planned to do. It was only through a desperate pinky promise to bring him along that I kept him from wriggling out of his car seat and throwing himself out the car door while we were racing along on the freeway.

It was always at the weirdest moments that I was forcibly reminded that Conner shared DNA with me and Lindsey. He was normally such a sweet, well-behaved kid.

On another note, I needed to remember to send my parents a fruit basket or something. Any other parents would have left the two of us for the wolves to raise.

The spell I released drew me further into the city, toward the docks. Snow fell as we drove, big, thick, fluffy flakes like something out of a Hallmark movie. They had me white-knuckling the steering wheel. Snow might look pretty, but it wasn’t much fun to drive in.

The warehouse I pulled up next to wasn’t what I was expecting for a monster lair, that was for sure. It was a squat, three-story, gray-block building. It looked old and forgotten under its shroud of snow. But the thread clamped between my fingers wriggled and writhed, straining forward.

No doubt about it. This was the place.

I drummed my fingers against the steering wheel, figuring out what to do. It was cold out and growing colder. I couldn’t leave Conner strapped in his car seat, even if I left the engine running. That was begging for a disaster of the non-magical variety. Besides, I knew that stubborn look. It was the same one Lindsey had, right before she did something bullheaded and stupid.

It wasn’t any less dangerous just because it was on a much smaller face.

I heaved a sigh, hating my options. “Okay, here’s the deal. I’ll bring you in with me, but if I tell you to run and hide, you do it. No questions asked. And you don’t come out until your parents or I tell you to. Otherwise, I’ll have to take you to Grandma’s. Got it?”

Conner wasn’t a hard kid to read, and he clearly wasn’t happy about his options. But he nodded, and that had to be good enough.

I bent the light of the surrounding streetlamps around us, keeping Conner tucked up close to my side. The door to the building was locked, but a brush of the Aether and a whispered word convinced it that it was open.

We slipped inside, and the smell of dust and stagnant water filled my nose.

There were piles of boxes stacked up, forming a maze of walls. It muffled the sound of people moving, hammering, dragging. Something was clearly going down, but no one was talking, which was just plain unsettling.

People talked. Even I tended to chit-chat when working on something… unless I needed to really concentrate.

We slipped forward, past a section of boxes where the cardboard had moldered, spilling its contents onto the floor. Old clothes, oven mitts, and a pile of crunchy strips of nylon. After a moment of staring at the nylon, I recognized them as snap bracelets.

Huh… I hadn’t seen those since I was a kid.

Overstock, I realized. Decades out of style, it had all been piled up there and forgotten. It must be one of Mulborne’s department store storage facilities. And not one that got visited regularly, based on the cobwebs and rat droppings.

“Stick close,” I whispered to Conner. “And touch nothing.”

We crept between the stacks of boxes until I found a narrow gap we could wedge ourselves in that gave us a look at the rest of the place.

Despite how deserted it looked from the outside, there were lights on inside the warehouse. Once we made it past the insulating walls of cardboard and plastic containers, it was warm and downright cozy. Well, other than the nightmare before us.

Once upon a time, I loved the Christmas village Mulborne’s set up every year. There were columns strung with light and tinsel, a castle, a fake pond with electronic mice and penguins skating on the ice. And in the center had been a big, squishy chair for Santa to sit on to take pictures with kids. All around it was a replica of a workshop, with happy little elves making toys.

The elves were gone.

So was the cheerful Muzak version of carols.

The people working the line were silent, staring, their hands chapped and bleeding from constant work. They assembled old, water-stained and moth-eaten toys, piling them up beside a broken-down sleigh.

At least I had found the missing people.

Mr. Mulborne, glassy-eyed and vacant, handed a bicycle wheel to a familiar, chestnut-haired woman, and I scooped Conner against the front of my body to keep him from calling out. “Shh, buddy. It’s okay.”

Man, I hate this. I hated holding his thrashing little body, keeping him from running to his parents. My stomach roiled, threatening to bring up what was left of my lobster roll, and I swallowed back the nausea.

“They can’t hear you, buddy. We got to stop the bad guy first, okay?”

It took a second for my words to get through to him, but finally, with a little sniffle, he went almost limp against me.

I was going to take every one of his tears out of Father Holiday’s hide.

Boy, did I wish I had Bastian with me. I was surprised he hadn’t made his way there yet. How far had Percy gone to find him, anyway?

I should wait. That would be the smart play. The responsible thing to do.

And then Father Holiday strolled past me in his stupid shiny boots and boater’s hat. He strolled past the line of entranced slaves trapped in his nightmare, and all those reasonable thoughts faded into one furious siren blare inside my skull.

I hastily tugged a few lighter boxes over to make a cave and pushed Conner into it. “Stay here, buddy. Hide.”

He tried to argue, and really, I was probably expecting too much from such a little boy, but one glance at the people trapped in the workshop—haggard and gray, with their fingers red and raw from work—and I wasn’t sure I could have held myself back if I wanted to.

They were there because they’d been doing something good. Celebrating the holiday. Being kind to their fellow man.

I glimpsed the candy cane lady and the little girl next to her who still had pale tear lines carving through the dust and grime on her face.

I was out and moving before I decided what I should do.

First step, I thought, my lips tight. Use some kinetic force to punch that asshole across the warehouse. Next, slit a hole in the Akasha and cram him into the furthest, darkest, worst corner of the realms I could imagine. Third, get everyone home, and have hot chocolate with my family, possibly while watching The Grinch.

Invisible with the light from the industrial tracts overhead wrapped around me and hiding me from sight, I stormed toward the workshop floor. I didn’t make it ten feet. The moment I went for it, Father Holiday stopped and turned to look at me directly.

Damn… I should’ve thought more about what I was up against before I went on the offensive. He sees you when you’re sleeping, He knows when you’re awake. The lyrics in my head took on a distinctly sarcastic tone, and I said a word that I hoped Conner didn’t hear.

There was something wrong with his eyes. They were empty, no matter how pretty a blue they were painted. It was like looking into the eyes of a doll. He felt hollow in a way that I associated with the Harrowing, but not the same.

He was like a shell wrapped around nothingness.

“Aisling O’Reily,” he said, in a blandly pleasant voice usually found in telemarketers and automated messages. “You’ve been a naughty girl.”

My entire body cringed, skin crawling. Let’s hope Bastian never wanted me to touch him again, because I was pretty sure I just lost the ability to feel desire forever and ever. Ugh. He hadn’t even put any kind of tone on it, and I was so skeeved out I wanted to bathe in acid just so my skin would stop crawling.

“Never talk again, thanks.” My hand swung back, and I gathered the energy of motion around my fist, swinging it forward to deck the creep from across the room.

Glitter and tinsel erupted from my hand, accompanied by a sound like a dozen Christmas crackers going off. I stared, stunned.

What the hell was that?

Too bad knockoff Santa didn’t have the same problem. In a strangely fluid motion for anything with bones, he snatched up his stupid green bag and bound forward to swing it at me.

I didn’t know what was in that thing, but it was big, and heavy, and had an unfair number of corners in it. Not to mention it felt like getting hit by a really pointy car.

The world tumbled sideways as I flew back into a pile of boxes, too stunned to do anything to save myself. Pain screamed through my shoulders as I landed badly, my legs flying up over my head as I somersaulted through a pile of packaging.

The fun ride ended with me lain out, sprawled on the icy concrete.

Shadows crowded my vision, and shaking my head just made a red veil pulse inside my skull. I groaned as my body sent distress calls for many bruises and scrapes. “That wasn’t good.”

Obnoxiously green boots stomped my way—much faster than I was happy with—as I struggled to pull myself up off the floor.

Think, Ash. If Christmas Eve was playing hell with my magic, then I needed to lean into it.

Make it work for me.

When I first became a Magi, I messily slopped energy into things, which mostly ended up in things bursting into flames. Add energy to a system, the dance of molecules sped up, creating friction, heat, light.

But the opposite was also true.

I reached for the Aether, reached for the careful choreography of dancing molecules, the protons and electrons that made up every element, every speck of matter, and I ripped power out of them, cooling them.

Slowing them.

Father Holiday’s next step seemed to take half an eon to finish. There were moments I wasn’t sure he was moving at all. With glacial slowness, one of his gloved hands curled into a fist. Hey, how else would Santa make it around half the world in a single night if there wasn’t some time dilation happening, am I right?

I scrambled to my feet, and my knee screamed and threatened to buckle under me as I shuffled backward. Blood pooled warm and metallic in my mouth and I probed the inside of my cheek where my teeth had taken a good chunk.

I super for sure did not want to get hit again.

There were still people trapped. I was hurt. And my magic was taking on a really unfortunate holiday theme.

What the hell was I going to do?

Little hands clung to my arm, and only luck kept me from swinging my elbow into the touch.

Conner was pale, shaking. His eyes were glassy with unshed tears, and I couldn’t even snap at him for breaking cover. Something cold spasmed inside my chest at the thought of him anywhere near there. I didn’t want him to see, didn’t want to scare him. Limping heavily, I pulled him away from where the Aether-born was inching toward us.

Where the hell was Percy?

I must have muttered the last part out loud, because Conner sniffled, his grip clinging.

“I sent her to get help,” he whispered, voice trembling. “I wrote a letter.”

It hadn’t made sense the first time, and it didn’t make sense then.

It was a struggle not to snap, to keep my voice even. “To who, sweetie? Who did you write a letter to?”

He tugged on my sleeve. “Listen. He’s coming now.”

I went still, holding my breath. And I heard it, over the sound of grimly silent workers. So faint, I thought I might be imagining it.

Up on the roof, a clatter of hooves.

Sleigh bells.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. No fucking way.

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

There wasn’t a chimney in the warehouse. But there was an industrial ventilation system. It didn’t seem to make a difference.

Shiny black boots touched down on the concrete floor of the warehouse, and I dragged my eyes up over the long red coat trimmed in fur. Gently curling white hair brushed over his shoulders, and merry blue eyes peered at me through little half-moon spectacles.

My brain felt numb. Too many emotions roared through me. I couldn’t even attempt to pick out what any of them were. It made sense, I thought, dazed. Magic was built on belief. Belief shaped the world, and no one had more than children. They were entirely comprised of possibilities.

It would have made less sense if he didn’t exist, really.

That didn’t stop me from feeling like I might burst into tears at any second.

Santa Claus hooked his hands in the wide sash that held his coat closed, something very close to pity as he looked over the people in the workshop. Then he turned to look at the still crawling Father Holiday, and something much less kind slid across his expression.

“Another one,” he murmured sadly.

I had so many questions. I couldn’t have spoken if someone paid me.

Santa raised his hand and tapped the side of his nose with one finger.

The time dilation popped like a soap bubble, and Father Holiday darted forward, his face twisted into a rictus.

I stumbled back, sweeping Conner behind me. I wanted to shout a warning, to do something, but I felt slow and clumsy with shock.

Santa Claus didn’t move. He just watched as the Aether-born ran at him.

Then Father Holiday’s foot landed on Santa’s shadow. A shadow, I noticed, that pooled in front of him, even though it shouldn’t have—not with the angle of the overhead lights.

And that shadow rose from the ground, like a tide. I glimpsed bright red eyes, curling horns, and a fanged grin, before I tugged Conner’s face into my coat.

It was over in seconds. Father Holiday let out one panicked bleat of sound, and the shadow dragged him down into itself and was gone. One second, a nightmare. The next, there was nothing but concrete, dim light, and a host of people slowly sinking to the ground like puppets with their strings cut.

My mouth worked soundlessly, my tongue feeling thick and dry.

Santa Claus took his glasses off to polish the lenses, and he gave me a look and a shrug as if to say, what can you do?

The urge to laugh bubbled up my throat, and I had to clench my teeth to keep it from spilling out, because if I started, I didn’t think I’d be able to stop.

“Santa!” Conner yanked away from me and bolted across the room to throw himself into waiting arms. “You got my letter!”

There was nothing but quiet joy in the answering laugh. “Of course I did, Conner. I get all your letters.”

I staggered a step forward, and my swollen knee almost gave way. I didn’t know what to say. My chest felt too full. I couldn’t get the words out around them.

He looked up at me, his eyes too knowing, and so kind I wanted to cry. “Hello, Aisling,” he said quietly. “It’s been a long while.”

I licked my lips, working some moisture back into my mouth. “You stopped visiting.”

It wasn’t meant as an accusation, but it sounded like one.

He didn’t take it badly. He just smiled that twinkling smile, the corners of his beard curling with it. “You stopped writing to me.”

I’d never been good at keeping what I was feeling off my face, so he must have seen the devastation there, because he was quick to reassure me. “It’s all right. All children do, when they’re ready.” A shadow flickered over his face, there and gone. “Some before that.”

My laugh came out watery, and I wiped at my face. “Thank you. For coming to help. How in the world did Percy find you?”

She was a crow, not a jet plane. And she was a shit night flier at the best of times.

“Oh.” Santa chuckled and gave Conner’s head a pat. “I think she might have had a little help with that. Don’t worry, she’s resting in the sleigh.”

In the sleigh?

OMG… Santa’s sleigh was up on the roof.

I was going to pass out. How was this my life?

“Now.” One hand dropped onto Conner’s shoulder, and Santa steered him in my direction. His boots had silver bells tied to the laces, and they rang softly with every step. “How about we get these good people home? After all,” he said with a wink. “It’s almost Christmas.”

CHAPTER NINE

The stereo played gently over in the corner by the television, which someone had turned to that endless fireplace channel. Everything was soft and dark, lit by the rainbow lights strung around the tree and a few candles scattered throughout the living room.

I sank back onto the sofa, carefully adjusting my leg where it was stretched out on the hassock in front of me, wincing when my knee twinged.

“How’s your leg?” Bastian asked quietly as he sat down, bringing me another ice pack wrapped in a dish towel.

I sighed gratefully and laid it over the swollen joint. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

He pressed a kiss into the side of my head, and I leaned into it with my eyes closed, enjoying the moment.

Christmas Eve might have been a heinous shit show that ended in a burst of childlike wonder so big I felt hungover for most of the day, but that Christmas was rapidly turning into one of my favorite memories.

I hadn’t even had to explain anything, really. Conner had happily informed Lindsey and Scott what happened when they finally woke up slumped on their own sofa. Thank goodness Santa was way stronger than he looked, because even at a hundred percent, I had the upper body strength of a grapefruit, and my tumble meant I wouldn’t be hauling anything bigger than my car keys for a while.

Still, Lindsey and Scott had listened with that condescending excitement most adults had when kids started babbling, until they realized I was nodding along. That I had enough road rash from sliding on concrete to look like hamburger in a couple of places had driven the reality of his account home pretty quick.

They had insisted on giving me a ride to Mom and Dad’s and had also dug out a phone charger so I could finally call Bastian.

Conner had been happy to tell the story of our adventure again. And then again. And a couple more times. I didn’t see him getting tired of telling it anytime soon.

And then, I’d finally gotten to crash in my childhood bedroom, and was woken up to breakfast and pretty lights, and soft snow piling up outside the windows, knowing there wasn’t anywhere else I needed to be that day.

That almost made the whole thing worth it.

We unwrapped our stockings, ate way too much food, and Bastian won my sister over forever more by happily tucking into her braised eggplant and fake turkey with obvious enjoyment.

He was lucky I liked him so much.

Conner finally ran out of energy sometime after dinner and collapsed on the carpet like a puppy, still curled around the stuffed dinosaur I gave him.

No one had even batted an eye at Percy coming inside, and I’d seen more than one person sliding her food over the course of the day.

Bastian had gotten on great with my parents, which I never doubted, but he seemed pleased. Dad dragged him off at one point, up to the little observatory on the roof, and they’d talked or bonded or whatever while I kept my butt firmly planted in a chair, with a knee swollen up to twice its normal size.

It had been a pretty great day.

After a quiet moment, Bastian reached down beside the couch and set a wrapped box on my lap. It was bright red paper, with gold ribbons curling at the top, and I raised an eyebrow at him. “What’s this?”

“Open it,” was all he said.

After a suspicious look, I carefully undid the ribbons and tape before easing the paper off. Lindsey could rip and open boxes like she was some kind of berserker, but I liked to do it properly. When I’d peeled away the outside layer, I pulled it free and sucked in a breath.

It was made of metal and was a three-dimensional puzzle of the solar system. Each planet was its own spherical puzzle, and then they were set together into a rotating base.

Bastian rested his hand on my good leg, stroking his fingers over my jeans. “I thought we could work on it together.”

It was awkward to hug him, as laid up as I was, but I made it work. My grin was so wide my cheeks hurt.

“It’s amazing. I love it.” Oh man, it was going to take hours and hours to do. We could set it up in the living room at the apartment. It would drive Stefan up the wall, which was like another present all on its own.

“And that reminds me…” I fished his present out from where it was tucked beside the hassock. “Merry Christmas, Bastian.”

Bastian seemed surprised, like I’d done something unexpected. I did my best to ignore it, and the little twinge it sent through my chest, never letting my smile falter.

“Go ahead… open it.”

He did, slowly. Carefully. Like he was savoring it, which was silly. My family had given him things that day. It wasn’t the first present he’d been handed. Finally, he lifted the lid on the white box, and he pulled out the absolute ugliest Christmas sweater I’d ever laid eyes on.

It was bright red. There were snowflakes. There were bobbles. There were actual lights that could be set to flicker. It was a crime against wool. Sheep would have hung their head in shame at the sight of it. But I’d seen his home and understood his passion for color and tactile sensations.

Bastian lit up.

He immediately pulled it over his head, his hair sticking up as he tugged down the neck. His smile was absolutely dazzling, and it made something golden and glowing that had nothing to do with the Aether settle into my chest.

He leaned forward, careful of my bad leg and the scrape along the outside of my jaw, to pull me into a kiss so sweet that my breath caught in my throat.

No mistletoe required.

Thank you for reading Quantum Claus, a bonus content novella in the Boston Magi Chronicles series. We hope you enjoyed it. This story falls between books 3 and 4 in the series but is a standalone story all on its own.

If you’ve read everything to date, and you loved it, continue with book 4, Veiled Threats.

If you haven’t read the series and want to start at the beginning, you’ll want to claim a copy of Supernatural Disasters and follow Aisling’s journey of becoming a Magi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A note from Ava L. Bishop

I wanted to thank everyone for reading, and to wish you all happy holidays, whichever ones you celebrate. I wish everyone cozy nights and simple joys.

The good news is that Auburn and I have been reading the reviews and talking, and it looks like the Boston Magi Chronicles will get another three books in the series. We’re just not ready to walk away from our little slice of weird Boston, so Ash and company will come back in the New Year.

Warm wishes and regards,

Ava L. Bishop

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A note from Auburn Tempest

When Ava and I were discussing upcoming projects for 2024, I was lucky enough to talk her into extending this series. Yes, I knew the series was popular, but mostly I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Ash and her world yet.

We just got together with Bastian. They’re just realizing Conner is special. Cornelius hasn’t pulled his head out of his ass yet and realized the world isn’t as black and white as he believes. Mason hasn’t redeemed himself. And we haven’t gotten to see Will and Tessa get together.

This series was planned to end as a trilogy, but your reviews and comments encouraged us to continue to follow Aisling in the Boston Magi Chronicles. Reviews and ratings are powerful tools to draw other readers to something you enjoy, but they also tell the author ‘don’t quit’.

Thank you for the love you’ve shown toward the series. We hope you stay with us for the next trilogy.

Blessed be,

Auburn Tempest

Find Auburn Tempest (JL Madore)

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Web page – www.auburntempest.com

Email – auburntempestwrites@gmail.com

Newsletter

Boston Magi Chronicles

Book 1 - Supernatural Disasters

Book 2 - Occult Misdemeanors

Book 3 - Arcane Felonies

Christmas Novella

Book 4 - Veiled Threats

Also by Auburn Tempest

Chronicles of an Urban Druid (15 book series)

Case Files of an Urban Druid (7 book series)

Chronicles of an Urban Elemental (6 book series)