Chapter Thirteen

The guard, Kristoff, posted on the outer curtain wall walk lining the castle’s left side, concealed a crossbow under a heavy bear-fur cloak. He strode by torches placed within holders on every other battlement. He couldn’t see the woman from his perch halfway along the walk, but he’d heard her.

He also heard faint sounds of clip-clops, the kind made by shoed horses striding along stone. He poked his head over a crenel and saw darkness below. Had there been daylight, he’d have seen a small stone perimeter lining the castle. Such little space made it difficult for invaders to scale the wall.

Otto and Franco considered Kristoff a good, mindful guard who followed the correct hunches. And now he had a hunch something was wrong.

The clip-clopping returned and he watched the blackness, imagining where the sounds had originated.

Then he heard shuffling and faint clanks of a chain, followed by a soft thump. Kristoff grabbed the nearest torch from its iron holder and dropped it over the crenel. The little fireball whipped through the wind and hit the stone perimeter, but stayed alight, enough to illuminate what appeared to be a giant barrel propped against the castle wall.

Kristoff stepped back to unveil the cocked crossbow from underneath his cloak. He again loomed over the side to see fading torchlight suddenly flicker as an immense dark shape swooped by it. The clip-clops grew in speed and intensity. It was running.

Kristoff followed the sound, picking up his pace, not realizing he was running, tailing some unseen thing. Otto, from his position atop the wall walk spanning the gatehouse, saw Kristoff and abandoned his post to join him.

Kristoff noticed a deep grunting sound, made simultaneously with the clip-clops ceasing. He overran the point where the noises changed, unable to slow his momentum.

Two giant hands, their hairy brown fingers the size of sausages tipped with yellowed talons, latched on to a crenel ledge.

It jumped. No man can leap that high, Kristoff thought, unable to process the sight of talons boring through stone to tighten the grip of the thing dangling below.

He’d heard Otto speak of a hairy, cloven-hoofed, chain-wielding devil. Then the stories his parents had told him as a child came roaring back: how Saint Nicholas’s dark other half pursued young deviants from one end of Europe to the other; how he’d swipe and stow them in his barrel to devour them alive in his cave, or tie them in an enormous weighted sack and toss them in the Rhine. The monster, the Krampus, would beat them into repentance with his ruten, and if he felt benevolent enough, allow them to live—Saint Nicholas gave Krampus considerable leeway, according to Kristoff’s parents. No matter where the brats cowered, Krampus would find them.

Strained grunting, and then two twisted horns crested the crenel edge, followed by beady black eyes reflecting hatred in the torchlight. The beast opened its mouth and disgorged a red forked tongue, flicking it in and out to scare the guards who now lingered in disbelief around Kristoff.

One muscular tree trunk of an arm reached over the crenel to hasten the creature’s crawl over the wall.

Kristoff’s ears hadn’t failed him all night—he’d been in enough battles to know the sound of a thrown knife splitting air, and the moment he saw a handle jutting from the thing’s triceps, he braced himself for the roar.

The monster howled and lurched over the crenel.

More flitting—and two successive sounds of splitting skin.

Two throwing knives poked from its back, and for the first time Kristoff saw weakness and acted. He booted the monster in the face, sending it back over the ledge, but it still kept its grip and pulled itself up to glare at Kristoff, who fired a crossbow arrow into the monster’s forehead. More roars. Then Otto, holding a torch, stood next to Kristoff.

“I’ll die before you breach this castle.” Otto jammed the torch into its face, sending aloft ember plumes. It released the crenel and roared the entire length of its fall.

Otto leaned over the edge and didn’t see it, but heard a gloppy splashdown. He spit over the side. He stood and handed the dead torch to Kristoff, who remembered the sounds of chain links clinking, and seeing the barrel. He doubled back to the spot on the wall where he had earlier removed the torch to drop it over the side.

The fire hadn’t died. Kristoff grabbed a second torch, aimed for the faint red spot, and released. The flames smacked down, and what Kristoff saw sickened him. He collapsed and sat against the wall. Otto ran to him and got on his knees.

“What was it? What’d you see?”

Kristoff, dazed, “The barrel’s gone. It’s alive.”