Page 2 of Sanctuary

Eggnog and cookies, and then he would brave the outside and bring more wood in.

Roman swung the fridge door open. An empty jug of eggnog greeted him. He was sure it had been half-full yesterday. Did he drink it all and forget? He stared at it for a hot minute, but the jug refused to refill itself.

Fine. He would have coffee with his cookies.

He shut the fridge and turned to the island. Last night he’d left a plate of cookies on it under a glass hood. The hood was still there. So was the plate. The cookies were gone. Only crumbs remained.

“What the actual fuck?”

The house didn’t answer.

He lifted the hood and stared at the crumbs. A little sparkle caught his eye. He leaned closer.

Glitter. A little smudge of silver glitter on the rim of the plate.

Magic gave thoughts power. Faith was a form of thought, so if a group of people believed in a specific being with all their heart, it could manifest into existence. The more believers there were, the higher the chances of manifestation, and the more power the being would have. Faith endowed the Pope with his miraculous healing powers and spawned region-specific monsters based on urban legends and folklore.

However, sometimes the very nature of the imagined being precluded the manifestation from occurring because fulfilling it would require infinite power. For example, it didn’t matter how many people believed that a white-bearded man in a jolly red suit delivered presents on Christmas. For that manifestation to occur, a single being would have to be aware of every single child, assess their conduct throughout an entire year, create a toy out of thin air, and then deliver it simultaneously to every household with a child. The scale was too large, and the very faith that kept the legend alive ensured it would never become reality.

This was his bread and butter. His father and uncle, in a rare feat of cooperation, had literally written a book on it and called it The Santa Claus Paradox.

The chance that Santa Claus had manifested in his kitchen and stolen his cookies was absolutely zero. Besides, it wasn’t even Christmas Eve.

Roman tilted his head to the side. A second sprinkling of glitter sparkled at him from the edge of the island. This one had a dark brown smudge near it.

He skirted the island and studied the smudge. Blood. Roman passed his hand over it. Magic nipped at his skin. Human.

A human covered in glitter had crossed the minefield of magic defenses surrounding his house, broken in without tripping any of the alarms, drank his eggnog, ate his cookies, bled on his kitchen island, and then disappeared.

Honestly, Santa Claus was more likely.

Roman squinted at the smudge and bent down, putting himself on the same level as it. Another sparkle of glitter, on the other counter. A little swipe across the gas stove, a shiny trace across the counter, and a small, shiny pawprint on the left pane of the window. The locks on the window had been disengaged.

Damn it.

He growled, stomped through the house to the back door, yanked it open, and strode out onto the back porch. It was bitterly cold. A thin layer of snow covered the lawn. He had thought it was morning, but it had to be late afternoon judging by the shadows. He must’ve lost time dragging that damn tree across the field.

Roman scanned the grounds.

Thirty yards away, a pack of small, creepy creatures crowded a tall fir tree, decorated with random ornaments, pieces of tin foil, pinecones, red berries, moss, feathers, and assorted forest trash.

Roman’s left eye twitched. For a second, he simply stared.

Slavic pagan tradition was filled with small nasties, traditionally seen as evil or, at the very least, a nuisance. Little critters that ranged from annoying to sinister. According to the folklore, they stared from the darkness with glowing eyes, made weird scuttling noises on the roof, stole things, spooked the livestock and scared the children, spread trash when it was swept into a pile, bit people’s ankles, served as sorcerers’ minions, and generally created havoc. Collectively known as nechist—“unclean things”—they loved him with undying devotion. He’d given up on shooing them ages ago and now fed them kitchen scraps and chicken feed.

All of the usual suspects were here. His tame anchutka—covered in squirrel fur, with the body of a lemur, the tail of a possum, leathery wings, and the face of a nightmarish bush baby—stood on her hind legs, trying to hang a big red ball on a branch. The melalo, a plump two-headed bird, with one head dead and drooping to the side, clutched a bright blue feather in his beak and kept shoving it at the anchutka.

An assortment of kolovershi, ranging in size from a cardinal to a barn owl, flitted from branch to branch, tucking things in. Furry, with long ears that stood straight up, scaly limbs, and dexterous paws armed with small but sharp talons, they looked like some mutated versions of the Furby toys he remembered from his childhood, equipped with shining eyes and fuzzy wings. They had just shown up on his porch one night. Kolovershi served witches, and these were clearly orphaned, so he had taken them to his mother. She’d tried to place them with other witches, but they just kept coming back.

The auka, a Russian hamster-looking mouse the size of a possum with tan fur, tiny antlers, and a skunk’s fluffy tan tail, dashed through the branches, trying to wrap a long glittering garland around the tree. Kor, the one pet nechist he did not mind, was holding the garland up in his cat paws. A korgorusha, he resembled a black cat with an abnormally long, prehensile tail and trailed smoke wherever he went.

And finally Roro. Nobody knew what the fuck Roro was. She was fourteen inches tall, weighed about twenty-five pounds and stood on four sturdy legs armed with sharp, retractable claws. Her squished face looked almost cute in an ugly but adorable way, but her wide mouth was filled with razor-sharp fangs, and her body with its bunny tail was solid muscle. When she got going, she was like a bowling ball, wrecking everything in her path. Currently, she was dashing back and forth around the tree for no apparent reason. Reason, in general, wasn’t Roro’s strong suit.

As he watched, Roro hopped over something sticking out from behind the tree. A leg. A human leg in a boot.

Roman sucked in a deep breath. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The motley crew froze. The anchutka dropped the ball in the snow. Kor vanished in a puff of dark smoke. Roro slid to a stop and backed away, tall, fluffy ears flat against her head. The auka raised a small hand-paw and waved.

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