Page 1 of Guarded By the Krampus

CHAPTER ONE

When you look like the devil, people tend to treat you like one.

Especially over the holidays.

I had my phone out, and was thumbing through profile responses on a monster dating site—it was bad enough on a day to day basis, me being a satyr, and us having a rep, but Christmastime made it twenty times more dire.

I’ve been a bad girl, Krampus! Come and whip me!popped up in my notifications, from a woman who had snakes in her hair, and I groaned.

“Everything all right over there, Ace?” Royce asked, from where he was putting the final few ornaments on the Monster Security Agency’s lobby tree.

“Just the usual,” I said, closing out my screen with a thick thumb, and tucking it into a pocket on my black leather kilt. “You missed a spot,” I said, jerking my chin at a blank space on the tree.

He grinned. “I know. Mostly so you could help,” he said, offering over an ornament box. He took pride in buying little blown glass ornaments that represented the locations of other MSA branches—Tokyo, Los Angeles, London and more—andused little blown glass knives and guns and grenades that looked like pinecones to fill in the extra space.

It was ridiculous, but it was also fitting.

“You can’t make me be festive, Royce,” I said, pushing the ornament box back in his direction. “And technically I’m off for the holidays in about thirty minutes.”

I was on walk-in duty, which, I hated. I much preferred taking well-organized, well-planned out missions—but sometimes the MSA needed someone to fill in for emergencies, and Royce made sure our branch always had someone waiting in the wings on staff. But in half an hour Sylas was taking over for me and then I was…free.

So to speak.

A mother was pulling a little boy along outside, through a fresh flurry of small drifting flakes, and he saw me through the window. I watched him gasp, and then hold his hands up to his ears to fan his fingers at me, as he stuck his tongue out—and then his mom spotted him, and me, practically grabbing him to haul him bodily along.

Summers were better than winters.

Mostly.

“Don’t let it get to you,” Royce said, coming up beside me.

“Easy for you to say. You can make it down a grocery aisle without people making the signs of the cross in your wake.”

And I didn’t want to get started on what it was like to date—or try to date, as the case may be. The last relationship I’d had had gone down in flames six months ago, when I caught my supposed girlfriend trying to film me coming out of the shower.

I knew I was well-endowed of course, but I didn’t want that shit on the internet.

“Do you have somewhere to go for the week?”

His voice brought me back to the present. “Yeah. Upstate. With my mom,” I lied—the same as I lied every winter, so peoplewouldn’t think I was spending the holidays alone. My mother had died a few years ago and ever since then, no one else needed to know I spent Christmas Eve playing Call of Duty or working out.

“That looks great, Dad!” Serena said, coming down the stairs, with two coats under one arm and a satchel beneath the other. She was wearing business casual in black, matching her old man, and she smiled warmly when she spotted me. “Are we going to see you at Ellum’s party this weekend, Ace?”

Ellum was a minotaur, who’d cut off his horns for reasons I couldn’t possibly understand, but he was kind enough—there was something about his short red fur and easy-going attitude that humans found charming.

Possibly because he didn’t have square pupils, like I did.

“No,” I said, running a hand through the shaggy black fur behind my head. “I’ll be out of town at my mom’s,” I lied again, then followed up quickly with,I’m not big into holidays,in my mind, since I knew she could read it. But I had to give her grudging respect—she was solid, for a telepath—she never told anyone else a thing.

She snorted and nodded, coming up beside me, the both of us watching her dad put the final touches on the tree. “We don’t celebrate it underwater, so I feel you. It’s as weird as having legs,” she said quietly.

“I don’t know if it’sthatweird,” I muttered back. She elbowed me in the side, and then grunted.

“You’re like a fucking brick wall,” she complained, rubbing on her elbow.

“Language,” Royce said, stepping off the ladder, finally through. “An MSA agent only curses in appropriate combat situations.”

Serena looked up at me, and I looked down at her.I don’t know about that,I thought at her, and she laughed.

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