“Mmm, bacon.” Lizzie rolled over and inhaled, eyes still closed. She had a sense of déjà vu, but in the very best of ways. She must have slept late. But then an odd feeling crept up on her—as if she’d forgotten something, maybe something important. That sense of unease was quickly followed by a wash of panic. She sat up in bed, her heart racing. Then she remembered. “John!”
John popped his head into their bedroom. “I’m fine. Five more minutes, and I’ll even have breakfast.”
Lizzie scowled at him.
“With bacon,” he added, a hint of apology in his tone.
Lizzie fell back into bed, pulled the pillow over her head, and screamed.
Several seconds of silence passed, then she heard a muffled “Feel better?” from the general direction of the kitchen.
Lifting the pillow off her face, she contemplated chucking it across the room, but finally opted against it. “Yes, thank you.”
She rolled out of bed, but then immediately sank back down. “Ow.”
Her feet hurt. Her arms hurt. Her knees hurt. Her back hurt. Hell—everything hurt. She rubbed her itchy eyes, but the gritty feel just made the itch worse. Shower. She desperately needed a shower.
Twenty minutes later, she emerged into the kitchen feeling almost human again. Glancing at the clock, she did a double take. One p.m.? What about the truck? And this was their last day; they had to check out tomorrow by noon. And not to mention their still-at-large vicious rat-bastard Krampus attacker. Lizzie covered her face with both hands. Their one shot at a vacation, and this, all of this, happened.
John hugged her from behind. “It’s all going to be fine, and I’m okay.”
Lizzie tipped her head back against his shoulder. “I just can’t believe this is our vacation. And we’re not speaking about last night. Blood is one thing. But your blood… And poison? And then you couldn’t shift.” A shiver ran down her spine.
He hugged her tighter.
Lizzie ran her hand across his healed forearm.
“I changed this morning,” John whispered in her ear.
“Thank goodness. Wait a second.” She turned and backed up a step. “You cruised the condo community as a wolf, didn’t you?” She laughed at his unrepentant expression. “You’re terrible. We’re never going to be able to come back here again.”
“I’ll give the HOA a nice thank-you gift. It’s fine. By the way, the truck’s back. And not a single comment about us missing the pickup time, I might add. Nothing wrong that they can find beyond the tires, which are now replaced. And I’ve got a ride for us across the river.”
Lizzie chewed on the corner of her lip and tried not stamp her foot like the recalcitrant five-year-old she was currently channeling. “Yeah. I guess we have to do that. Can we please figure out some way to not get bit? I’m pretty sure it would send me to the hospital, and Lord knows what they’d think about Krampus venom.”
“About that.” John crossed his arms and rested a hip against the kitchen counter. “I called your buddy Harry to say thanks, and he gave me a little more information on Krampuses. His buddy Marin didn’t know much, but she has run into them before—in Germany.”
Lizzie’s nose lifted a little as she caught the smell of bacon again.
John grinned at her. “We can talk and eat.”
“Sweet.” Lizzie made a beeline for the kitchen table. After she’d plopped down in her chair and shoved almost an entire piece of bacon in her mouth, she covered her mouth and mumbled around the bacon bits, “And?”
John poured them both cups of coffee. “And not a good plan to pick up one of them. She implied I got what I deserved. Shame on me, and maybe I should learn to use my words.”
Lizzie suffered a coughing fit for several seconds before she took a drink of water. “Ohmygosh, I have to meet this woman. I can’t believe she said that to you.”
“Yeah. Hilarious. Point is, they can definitely speak. They may not speak English—a small segregated community that emigrated from Germany—but hopefully someone in the group has picked up some English and will be willing to talk.”
Lizzie chewed on her biscuit, considering the possibilities for reaching out. This time, she actually swallowed before she spoke. “I just don’t see how we can make any type of diplomatic overture if they run away every time we approach them, and bite with their nasty razor-venom teeth if we—you—try to catch them.”
“That is the dilemma.” John picked up the gravy and passed it to Lizzie. “So, I still say we approach them. Maybe just a little more cautiously this time. Don’t you speak a little German? If we get in a bind, you can shout something about peace, love, and understanding.”
Lizzie snorted. “Yeah—my German’s not that good. Definitely not gonna function under pressure.”
Her eyes started to burn, and she thought she might cry. The images from last night were so vivid and disturbing in her memory, but they were difficult to reconcile with the vibrant man sitting at the kitchen table now.
But he was just fine. Better than her, with her aching feet and sore, over-used muscles. Lizzie wrinkled her nose up. “Hell. We have to go.”
One boat ride, three miles of hiking, and two hours later, John declared: “We’re close.”
Lizzie took that to mean he thought they were close. They’d definitely hit the spot Earl had described, and John had discovered something he called layered scent—when someone travelled the same path repeatedly, putting more and more scent on the track each time.
Close or not, Lizzie was ready for a margarita or five. Or maybe a hot whiskey—not her usual thing, but the damp was sinking into her many layers, her waterproof boots were leaking and making her feet feel like frozen stubs, and she didn’t actually want to meet the tiny little bastards who were making her life miserable. But duty, responsibility, blah, blah… She blew a stray clump of hair out of her face. She really needed to reconsider her priorities.
“This way.” John pointed to a small side path that looked more like a deer track than an actual path. “Have you been casting sensing wards for magic the last few minutes?”
“Um, oops. What? It’s cold.” Lizzie rubbed her numb, dripping nose, maybe with just a touch of resentment. Her vacation. Their holiday. She was allowed a little resentment. When John waited on the path without moving forward, she nodded. “Doing that now.”
Once she agreed, he moved forward but slowly. They didn’t go far before he stopped again, and she almost ran into him as she was casting the ward. She stopped with her hand touching his back and looked around. “Oh.”
“Yeah—that sensing ward might have been helpful.” John stood tall, alert but relaxed. It was deceptively casual looking, unless you knew what to look for.
They were surrounded. She and John had walked right into the Krampuses’ camp. And it was a camp: a village of portable tents, small economy cars, and unattached trailers.
“Don’t touch anyone,” John reminded her. “Remember, not aggressive—except in large numbers, when cornered, or captured.”
Lizzie backed up to John so that they could have a 360-degree view of the rapidly swarming horned beasties. “Riiight. Uh, bad news, we have large numbers.”
“You’ve been practicing that defensive shield ward, right?” John reached behind him to touch her, to see how far she was from his back.
The group was only growing larger as more Krampuses appeared from various hidey-holes around the camp. Lizzie’s heart thudded. Only moments before she’d been cold, now she was sweating. She could almost taste her pulse, the thud was so strong in her neck. “Shit. John. There are a lot of them.”
They’d approached in zigzagging patterns initially, but some braver souls had come to almost touching distance. Lizzie remembered the sliced flesh of John’s arm. They were small, but those teeth were like razors. What had they been thinking?
She must have asked the question aloud, because John said, “We had no way to know there were this many.”
Suddenly the circle around them closed and began to tighten. A small female touched the edge of the thick scarf Lizzie had wrapped around her neck. Lizzie couldn’t help but flinch. The female Krampus lurched back in response. It caused a wave of movement in the crowd.
“John,” Lizzie whispered through clenched teeth.
“Who is your leader?” John asked in an even tone that carried.
Lizzie had to choke back a hysterical giggle. The inappropriate urge to laugh faded quickly. John’s question had a surprising result. Tiny whispery voices spoke all at once, on top of each other, creating an indecipherable murmur. It was an eerie sound and it made Lizzie’s scalp crawl. She took a step back and bumped into John.
A mistake. As she retreated, the Krampuses nearest stepped forward. She had the fleeting thought: was this what it felt like to be targeted by a mob? Your fate hanging on the whim of the unthinking crowd?
She grabbed for her magic and began to cast a ward. The chatter grew and the mass of bodies, of horns and fangs, undulated. Could they sense her magic? She wasn’t stopping. And she was going to do her damnedest to get John under the protective umbrella with her.
“Your leader? Who is your chief?” John asked again, but his question was drowned out by the competing crowd noise. “Silence! Your chief—now!”
The roar of John’s voice was unrecognizable and bone-chilling.
But it was him. She knew it was him. She lifted her chin, and stood up taller. Dammit. Her concentration blown, she’d forgotten the shield. Once her eyes began to focus on the details in front of her again, she saw a stillness she could never have imagined with such a large crowd. She started to cast the ward. She had no idea which way the mass would swing. She found that brilliant, shining place that always waited inside her. Envisioning the components of the shield that would completely encapsulate her and John, she created an image in her mind. Then, panicked by the continued silence, she shoved her magic at that image. She willed it into being. Maybe with a little more force than necessary.
John stumbled back, bumping her back with some force.
“Sorry,” she said softly.
“No, good choice. Keep it up.”
Well, shit. If John was worried… Before Lizzie could let that thought come to its natural conclusion, a figure in the back lifted a wooden stick high.
“I am chief.” The voice wasn’t particularly loud, but the accented tones of the chief carried through the crowd.
A path opened up within the mass of Krampuses, and it didn’t take long before a Krampus—much like the others, with the exception of a dense, greying beard—approached. He carried a stout walking stick, but he certainly wasn’t leaning on it.
Lizzie grabbed at John’s hand and pulled. He got the message and pivoted to stand next to her. Backs now exposed, Lizzie felt compelled to reinforce the invisible barrier between them and the mass of horns and fangs surrounding them.
Why had they thought this would be a good idea? Right—not aggressive. Her nostrils flared as she looked at the tightly packed bodies in front of her. She sure as heck hoped Marin and Harrington knew what they were talking about, because right now she was having serious doubts.
Ohmygod. The fangs on the chief were huge. Nothing like their prankster’s.
If it hadn’t been clear before, there was no doubt now that the Krampus they’d been dealing with—the one who peered through their window, been caught by John, and sliced John’s arm—was a juvenile. Maybe an adolescent. The tiny fangs their culprit had displayed were immature stubs compared to the chief’s.
The chief who was now standing less than four feet away. Yeah, she had serious doubts about the supposed non-aggressive nature of the Krampuses.
The chief planted his stick in the ground and watched them. He didn’t move or speak. Lizzie certainly wasn’t going to break the silence. She tried to sneak a glance at John out of the corner of her eye; John usually had a plan. And he was great at reading body language. But the moment her eyes moved, the chief’s intent gaze fixed on her.
Shit, shit, shit.
Minutes ticked by. Lizzie was sure of it. Even with the cold, she could feel herself sweat. The silence felt heavy and awkward. Scary. Why didn’t one of them speak?
The chief lifted his stick, and Lizzie thought her muscles would cramp from the effort not to flinch. But he merely shifted the stick from his right hand to his left.
Then he extended his right hand. Lizzie blinked at the thick claws.
“Lizzie.” John poked her hard enough in the ribs that her eyes watered.
Oops. She must have missed the first nudge…or three. She immediately lowered the shield separating them from the chief…and his fangs and his claws.
John and the chief shook hands. John with that same deceptive casualness that he’d assumed when they first entered the clearing. The chief with a small smile tugging at his lips. Lizzie thought he might just be laughing at her.
That was good, right? Laughing and smiling were usually good. But she had no time to consider the existence or not of the chief’s sense of humor, because suddenly everyone was moving again. This time, however, the crowd dispersed.
Lizzie hadn’t realized how rigid her shoulders and neck had been till now. She could suddenly feel a deep ache in the middle of her back and the point where her shoulders and neck met.
As she pulled her gaze away from the bobbing horns of the retreating crowd, she had to hold back an audible sigh of relief.
It took her a second to find John, and when she did she had to hide her surprise. John and the chief were already deep in conversation. John had settled on a much-too-small stump, and the chief sat on an upturned bucket. There appeared to be a lot of hand motions—but also plenty of words.
Which left John as the negotiator and her as enforcer, the Pack equivalent of a bodyguard. That was a new experience for her. She grimaced. Enforcer was hardly a job in which she expected to excel, especially considering that John had wandered off with the head honcho and she hadn’t even noticed until well after the fact.
She loosened the scarf around her now very warm neck and tried to stay alert.
Only a few minutes went by before the chief stood and motioned to a small trailer on the edge of the camp. He gave a short, sharp whistle—how did he do that with those fangs?—and one of his minions appeared from a nearby tent.
Lizzie wrinkled her nose. Maybe she shouldn’t think of them as minions? That reinforced the demon imagery that Earl had clung to. The Krampus were hardly evil. And using words that invoked demons probably wasn’t a great idea given today was an attempt to establish diplomatic relations—of a sort.
As the two men consulted, Lizzie caught a few words in German and a few in English: boy, wolf, forgiveness, now, punish. She only heard snippets, but it sounded like they were speaking in a mishmash of both languages.
The chief’s minion—ugh, his subordinate left, and the chief continued to speak with John using the same animated, hand-gesture-filled methods she’d seen earlier.
A twinge of guilt poked at her. This camp was a community of people. People with horns and fangs and claws—but people. If Earl could have seen that, maybe he’d have thought twice before picking up his gun. And maybe she’d have thought twice about considering them some kind of pest.
Less than a minute had passed when the chief’s minion-assistant returned with a small Krampus. Lizzie’s eyes narrowed. That was the rat bastard.
“Lizzie.” John motioned her closer, but she was already moving toward him.
She didn’t want that vicious little bastard anywhere near her man, negotiations and diplomacy be damned.
John gave her a warning look. Which she ignored.
“Keep that little shit away from my…” Her mouth stumbled over the right word. Mate? Fiancé? She glared at the thrashing and kicking adolescent and pointed at John. “That one is mine. You make me sew him up again, and that’ll be the last bite you take.”
The kid stopped thrashing around and stood still. He even looked a little droopy. But then he glared at her.
The chief’s assistant still had a firm hold of the young Krampus’s upper arm and he wasn’t letting go.
Lizzie edged closer to John.
“Apologize.” The chief poked the young Krampus with his stick. “Ernst, say it.”
The boy named Ernst squirmed and shot the chief a defiant look. He made a grumbly, annoyed sound but nothing more.
Raising her voice, Lizzie said, “You ripped his arm open. You poisoned him.”
“Looks fine to me.” The kid had no accent at all.
Lizzie’s heart hammered a frantic beat in her chest. She wanted to beat the little shit to a pulp. But she wasn’t really a violent person. She wasn’t. So she’d go with suffocating him. That ward had worked pretty well last time she’d used it.
She didn’t realize she’d taken a step toward him with raised hands, until John put a hand on her shoulder.
He whispered close to her ear, “Calm down, killer. Give him a second.”
Obviously, the mini-monster could hear John, because he glanced up with an embarrassed look. “I am sorry about the bite.” He kicked the dirt and mumbled, “You scared me.”
“I’m fine,” John said. “But my mate—” He waited for the kid to look at him before he continued. “She had to patch me up, and that was very upsetting for her.”
His chubby pink cheeks turned a red color and he looked back down at the dirt again. “That’s just stupid. Wouldn’t have killed him. Don’t think.”
Lizzie could feel John tugging her arm, but she ignored him until he was practically lifting her. She followed him, but she shot nasty looks at the vile shit as she went.
John stopped several feet away.
“He almost killed you,” Lizzie said, finally turning to look at him. All that blood, all over her hands, caked into the corners of her nails. She’d scrubbed and cried and worried he wouldn’t wake up. Lizzie could hear the small growl building in her throat, and she swallowed. “I’m not accepting an apology from that little shit. Especially when he’s obviously not sorry.”
John waited.
“You can’t tell me I’m wrong.”
John put his arm around her and leaned close. Quietly, he said, “His dad died in a hunting accident a few years ago. Shot.”
Lizzie closed her eyes and shook her head. “Shit. Earl.”
“Yeah,” John said. “You can see from the conditions they’re living in, this camp is much too small for their numbers. The chief is having a hard time keeping the older boys under control, because he’s busy trying to feed, clothe, and house his people.” John bumped her hip gently. “Accept the kid’s apology. No permanent harm was done; I’m fine.” John tipped her chin up so she was looking at him. “The chief won’t accept help from IPPC with relocation unless you’re satisfied with Ernst’s apology. It’s a question of honor.”
“Ugh. You’re kidding me. Of course. The chief would be responsible and honorable and awesome. All the better to make me feel like an ass.” Lizzie frowned. “Wait. How do we know Harrington will help them relocate?”
“Seriously? We’re inches away from a massive exposure scandal here. Harrington will help. And I think the chief’s a good guy; I’ll give him my full endorsement. So?”
Lizzie snorted. “Like there’s a choice.” She rubbed her forehead. “It was really bad. You have no idea.”
John laced his fingers with hers. “I know.”
When they returned, the chief poked the kid with his stick again.
The boy’s lips twisted, flashing tiny fangs. “Sorry. About the bite, about worrying your woman.”
Lizzie bit back the nasty retort that was burbling on the tip of her tongue. These people needed help. It was the right thing to do. The chief seemed a decent guy. Dammit.
“Apology accepted,” Lizzie said. And weirdly, she felt a little better. Not so much better that she couldn’t remember the terror of imminent loss she’d felt the previous night. But just a tiny bit less angry.
The chief’s assistant let go of the boy’s arm, and he immediately scampered off into a trailer.
The chief reached out his hand for the second time that evening. “Deal.”
John shook his hand firmly. “Deal.”
The chief looked at Lizzie, that subtle smile again tugging at his lips. “Ollie will deliver you to the river.”
The minion-assistant, apparently named Ollie, nodded eagerly, clearly pleased at the prospect. “I have a car.”
“Oh, thank God.” The words fell from her lips before Lizzie could self-edit. She could feel the tips of her ears burning. “Uh, thank you.”
The chief chuckled. “You’re welcome.”