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“I brought a gift, too,” said the girl, and drew a curved knife out of her bodice. She took two steps. Before the rest of us even reacted, she had it pressed against Roth’s throat. His eyes went wide. I was pretty sure no one had ever had a knife on him before, especially not a girl. “I understand this boy was causing some trouble.”
“Are you robbing us?” the dark-haired Mossley girl asked. “Seriously? In those outfits?”
The boy with the goat legs laughed.
The blond boy with the elf ears looked from me to Penelope to Silke and then to Roth. “What ought his fate be?”
I let go of the broom and took a step toward Roth and the girl in white. “Don’t hurt him. I get the impulse, but he’ll sue.”
“Who are you?” Pe
“Joachim,” the Krampus boy said. “And my companions, Griselda and Isidore.”
Wren’s eyebrows went so high it was like they were trying to climb off her face. “I thought he was…”
Pe
But of course, he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Joachim wasn’t anyone. He didn’t exist.
“So what would you have me do with him?” Griselda asked. “I’d like my gift to be well received.”
Silke stepped out of the kitchen, moving as though drawn against her better judgment. “I want him punished.” At that, Silke turned to Pe
Penelope walked up to Roth. His eyes widened the closer she got. And in that moment, I could see her dilemma. She could save him and indebt him to her. She could prove that she was better than his other girlfriend—better than him. But he might leave her anyway—and then she’d feel like an even bigger fool.
But she’d still be a better person.
“I don’t want him hurt,” Pe
Christmas is supposed to be this time when everyone is nice to one another and forgives one another and all that, but the true meaning of Christmas is presents. And in the real world, Santa’s not fair. Rich kids get everything and poor kids get secondhand crap their parents bust their asses to afford. It costs money just to sit on Santa’s lap.
But Krampus, he brings justice. If you’re bad, you get served up a big plate of steaming hot coals. You get whipped with birch rods until you bleed. You get put in shackles and fished out of pools of ink with pitchforks. That’s the spirit of Krampus. It might look like it’s all hipsters and charity, but underneath it’s justice, and I get the appeal.
“Easily done,” Griselda said. “Boy, you’ve been an ass—and so, until you’re forgiven by these two ladies, that’s exactly what seeming you’ll take.”
Her lips went to his cheek, pressing a kiss to his skin as her blade kept him in place. As she withdrew, he began to change. Gray whiskers sprouted over his face. His neck elongated and nose flared. He was changing shape. His head was becoming the head of an animal.
I’d wished for magic, for reality to bend, but watching this, I wondered if it was possible for reality to bend so far it broke.
Roth’s two friends looked at one another, then at us and at Griselda, like they were trying to figure out who dosed them. We were all watching in gluttonous wonderment.
Roth brayed from his donkey head as Griselda put away her knife. He stumbled toward his friends. They screamed and ran for the door of the trailer. Silke edged closer to Pe
Joachim threw an arm over Roth’s neck, eyes dancing with mirth. “Oh, come now, it’s not so bad. You have very fine fur and a magnificent nose—a much better nose than your last one. And I’d wager you’ll like your fate betimes.”
Oscar reached out wonderingly to touch one of Roth’s twitching ears. Roth shied back, and Oscar snorted with amazed laughter. “That is some Harry Potter shit.”
“This ca
But it was happening. And we were drunk enough to go along with it. Even with the implications of Roth having an ass head buzzing in the back of my mind, like how if magic was real, then Joachim’s goat legs were probably not part of any costume, and when I’d left out milk for the faeries, I probably should have made sure to wash the bowl every time, I was focused on propping up the broken table. I couldn’t stand around freaking out forever. Some people helped me mop the spilled punch. I rinsed off the cheese and scraped off the top layer of hummus. It turned out I still had some chips left in the bags out in the kitchen, so I refilled the bowls. Most bottles of booze hadn’t gotten broken. Some of the food couldn’t be salvaged, but in the face of magic being real and magical creatures in attendance, I was ready to declare the party a success anyway.
Isidore poured shots from his bottle into aperitif glasses set up on Grandma’s kitchen counter. The liquor tasted like thyme and caraway seeds and burned all the way down my throat. Griselda taught us a drinking song. We screamed the words as we danced around the room, spi
Someone found an apple for Roth to eat.
Near midnight, we turned the television to MTV, where they showed the ball dropping in Times Square. We counted down with everyone else.
Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
We went crazy shrieking and blowing paper horns and kissing one another. People yelled out the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne,” Isidore singing lines I didn’t know. We two have run about the slopes and picked the daisies fine. And we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne. And then I found myself in the hall, kissing Joachim, a boy I barely knew, a boy with a pretend name and who might be a demon or a faerie or a disturbing hallucination.
My head was swimming. My hands were tangled in his hair, and I pushed him against the wall. His breath caught as I tugged his mouth to mine. I had no idea what I was doing.
Then Ahmet changed playlists to some louder, madder, midnight stuff, and we were dancing again. We danced and drank, drank and danced until the mix ran out and Ahmet fell asleep under the table, his arm thrown over Griselda.
At five in the morning, I found myself bundled up in a moth-eaten fur coat from Grandma’s closet, slumped in a chair at the plastic table as the sun began to burn the frozen horizon. I had a coupe glass full of ci
Joachim was smoking a cigarette of meadow grass and comfrey. He’d found a bottle of bubble solution and held up the wand, exhaling smoke into each delicate shimmering globe, gri
He was the kind of beautiful that got under your skin. Before, my crushes had been on normal-looking boys—pudgy boys and beanpole ski
I remembered the warm slide of his lips.
“Why Joachim?” I asked him.
He looked over at me, a little bit drunk and clearly baffled. It made me happy to know that whatever he was, however he looked, he still could get wasted on New Year’s.
“The name,” I said.
He laughed, throwing his head back and glancing up at the stars. “You bargained with the universe, remember?”
The words sent a shiver down my spine. I didn’t even remember exactly what I’d said or promised, but I knew I’d done it. “And the universe heard me?”