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Puberty hit Peter McGuire with the force of a powerful thunderstorm. It began with an awareness that he was attracted to other boys rather than to girls—but then it became bigger, and weirder. He had strange dreams in which he flew over snowcapped mountains, part of a team of other guys like him.
Then one day, his dream came to life. He was fourteen, home alone after school, with his iPad in front of him, surfing the internet for porn to jerk off to. He found a story about two football players getting it on in the locker room of the high school, closed his eyes, and started to rub one out.
His orgasm was amazing, the best he’d ever had, starting from his nuts and radiating out from his head to his toes. He came in a big spray that reached up to his wispy chest hairs.
It didn’t stop like other orgasms had, though, just kept going and going until he felt his body changing. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was that his hands and feet had turned to hooves.
His Honors English class had read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and at first, he thought this was some weird dream brought on by the book. Only instead of turning into a cockroach, he’d become some a deer or horse.
He rolled off the bed onto all fours and looked at himself in the mirror. Tiny antlers had sprung out of his head, and his body was covered with a sleek dark brown fur. Holy shit. He was a reindeer?
And then, all at once, he collapsed to the floor and zonked out. When he woke up, he was human again, naked as he had been when he was jerking off, curled in a fetal position, with a massive headache.
The experience tormented him for weeks afterward. It wasn’t the kind of thing he could tell anyone about, and he worried that he had a mental disorder, that he was becoming schizophrenic or manic depressive or something.
But he had no other symptoms, and gradually, he began to believe it had just been a very weird dream, perhaps induced by the wild orgasm he’d had.
Then it happened again, in his junior year in high school, only this time he was outside, enjoying January’s first snowfall. He was on his own in a big park near his house, and he flopped down on the freshly fallen snow and flapped his arms, creating a snow angel.
His body started twisting and turning out of control, and suddenly, he was a reindeer again. At least he thought he was—the hooves and legs were back, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw that silky brown hair. He stood up, stretched, began to paw the ground.
And then, without thinking, he was flying. Up in the air, his legs working back and forth, his head down. Only for a moment or two, then he was coming in for a landing in a place he didn’t recognize, a long low building like an airplane hangar, with a peaked roof.
A tall, broad-shouldered guy stepped out of the front door as he crashed to the ground. Then he was out.
He woke up to the big guy leaning over him. He was gorgeous, Peter thought—square-jawed, with a wide smile and big brown eyes. “You must be new,” the guy said. “Here, let me help you up.”
Peter realized he was back as a human again, wearing the same jeans and parka he’d put on before going out to play in the snow. His head ached, and he rubbed it, feeling a couple of small bumps up there that quickly dissolved.
“I’m Dasher,” the guy said as he took Peter’s arm and pulled him to his feet. “AKA Daniel Forrest. You know what your name is?”
Was this some kind of quiz you gave people recovering from a concussion? “Peter,” he said. “Peter McGuire.”
“So you’re probably a Prancer,” he said. “You’ve got the build for it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Peter looked around. “Where am I?”
“I guess you need an orientation,” Dasher said. “Come on inside.”
It looked like an army barracks inside, a series of single beds with lockers, lamps hanging above each. “We don’t live here year round,” Dasher said. “Only during training sessions, and then, of course right before Christmas.”
“Christmas?” Peter asked.
“Watch the video,” Dasher said. “You’ll understand.”
He led Peter past the row of beds and into the back room of the building, fitted out as a lounge with a big-screen TV. “Have a seat,” Dasher said as he fiddled with a couple of buttons on the TV. “I’ll be back when this is over.”
Peter sat obediently, and a moment later, a movie began to play on the big screen.
“Saint Nicholas was born in the year of our Lord 270 in Greece,” the voice-over began as a series of photographs of the Middle East scrolled across the screen. “Also called Nikolaos of Myra, he was a historic fourth-century Christian Bishop of Myra, in the area known today as Demre, Turkey.”
The screen resolved into a picture Peter recognized as the St. Nick of the Clement Clark Moore poem “The Night Before Christmas,” and the voice-over continued, “Because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he was sainted, and his legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional model of Santa Claus.”
Peter settled back in the comfortable chair. He still didn’t understand what was going on, but he figured he was along for the ride.
“What most do not know is that Nikolaos of Myra was a wizard, one in a long line stretching from the creation of the world to the present.”
Okay, this was a fantasy movie, Peter thought. He liked that kind of thing.
An elderly man appeared on the screen. He wasn’t as portly as the picture of Santa, nor did he have a bushy white beard, though he did have a full head of neatly combed white hair and a matching goatee. “Welcome to this reindeer outpost,” he said, and Peter had the strangest sensation that the man was speaking directly to him. “You’re probably wondering how you got here, and what role you will play in the grand story of Christmas.”
He sat in a huge wicker peacock chair, almost a throne. “As you’ve already guessed, I am Nikolaos of Myra, though you’re probably more comfortable thinking of me as Santa. When I was younger and the world was smaller, I handled all my gift-giving myself. I still have a few powers left to me.”
He waved a wand in the air, and an old-fashioned sleigh appeared beside him. “But as the world got bigger, I knew I needed assistance for my yearly task. Many creatures came to me and offered their help. The elves you know about, of course. With their ability to work light magic through their nimble fingers, they became essential to the production of the gifts requested by children all over the world.”
A new window opened over Santa’s shoulder, and Peter saw dozens of elves hard at work, knitting, sewing, cutting wood, and manufacturing electronics. One whole assembly line appeared to be dedicated to making cell phones.
“The other allies I chose were the reindeer shifters, because they were my neighbors in my new home at the North Pole, and because their shifting abilities allow them to move rapidly, even teleport when necessary. I couldn’t handle the millions of deliveries I make each year without their help.”
Then he leaned forward toward Peter. “That’s where you come in, my boy. You are about to join a legion of your ancestors in helping ensure that every child celebrates a happy Christmas.”
“But...” Peter began as the narration continued.
“You may already be familiar with your shifting abilities, but if you aren’t, your herd mentors will teach you. The most important thing is that you accept this sacred mission, and devote a small portion of the rest of your life to training and then delivering gifts on Christmas Eve. Without you, and the hundreds like you, there would be no Christmas at all.”
The screen went dark. What kind of nutty movie was that?
Dasher came back into the room then and sat across from me. “So, how many times have you shifted so far?” he asked.
Peter didn’t know what else to say but the truth, so he answered, “This was the second time. Is that what I am—a shape-shifter?”
He nodded. “Specifically, a reindeer shifter. You’ll find there are other animal shifters around but we don’t associate with them for the most part.”
Peter’s mouth was dry.
“You’re probably wondering how this happened to you. Why you?”
Peter nodded.
“Nobody knows for sure. Santa says that there have always been reindeer shifters in the world, so it must be some kind of recessive gene, but it’s not the kind of thing you can go to a doctor to examine. You know your adrenal glands control your fight-or-flight response, right? The production of adrenaline?”
His high school biology class had covered that, though Peter had never thought about it in great detail.
“The best guess is that there’s a mutation that occurs naturally in the adrenal glands, that a special kind of adrenaline floods your body and controls the shift. And it’s possible, more likely probable, that no one in your family or your family history has had the mutation—at least no one I’ve ever spoken to had a relative who could shift too.”
“Are there... Santa said...”
“Compared to the total population of the world, we’re a pretty small group. No more than a thousand of us between all the outposts. And no, we’re not immortal. The change seems to begin with everyone around puberty. We put in thirty, maybe forty years of service and then we retire. There are always at least a couple of dozen of us in each outpost.”
“And we all have those...reindeer names?” Peter asked.
“Yup. We fall into certain archetypes. A Prancer, like you, is generally slimmer, light on your feet. Prancers are almost always gay.”
Peter stiffened. “Does that...matter?”
“Not at all. Santa’s workshop has always been an equal opportunity employer when it comes to sexual orientation. You’ll find that a lot of the Vixens are gay too, though some of them profess to be bisexual. There’s no need to worry about harassment here. And generally speaking, we keep our rutting away from the outpost. Very little fraternization, if you know what I mean.”
“Rutting?”
“Sorry, I get carried away with the animal metaphors sometimes. What I mean is that it’s very rare for one shifter to date, or mate with, another. Mostly we’re attracted to humans, either men or women, or in the case of the Vixens, whoever’s handy.”
“And you can tell just by looking at me that I’m a Prancer?”
Dasher nodded. “It’s all about the body type. I have more than my share of fast-twitch muscles, which means I can move faster than any of the others, albeit for a short time. A Blitzen, for example, looks like a football linebacker—bulky and strong as hell.”
Peter looked around him. The room looked nice enough—but was this it for the rest of his life? What about his family, his friends? He started to cry.
Dasher shot around to stand beside him. “Hey, it’s okay, buddy,” he said. “We’re a great group of guys here. You’ll really like it.”
“Bbbbut, my parents,” Peter said.
“Oh, they don’t have to know unless you want them to,” Dasher said. “One of Santa’s daughters is a whiz at creating context-specific reasons why you might have to get away for a few days now and then for training, and even on Christmas Eve, you can usually be out of the house when your family is asleep, and back before they wake up.”
“So I’m not stuck here?” Peter asked through his sniffles.
“Not at all. Any time you’re ready to go, you can head home.”
“But I don’t know how to do that,” Peter moaned. “I don’t even know how I got here. Or even where here is.”
Dasher stood up. “No worries. I can give you some basic training, and then you’ll be on your way.”
Dasher was the one who taught Peter to close his eyes and will the transformation. How if he could get a good vision in his head of where he wanted to go, he could teleport, even if it was halfway around the world. “That kind of thing takes a lot out of you, though,” Dasher said. “So save it for emergencies, or those once-in-a-lifetime trips.”
Eventually, he led Peter back outside to the snow. “Close your eyes and think reindeer,” Dasher said.
Peter was too embarrassed. Even after all he’d seen that day, he still thought maybe he was hallucinating.
“Concentrate, buddy,” Dasher said. “Imagine yourself flying. It’s the coolest feeling in the world.”
Peter closed his eyes, concentrated, thought of flying, thought of home. And then, a moment later, he was airborne, and soon after that, he was landing in his own backyard.
