Page 16 of Some Swans Don't Swim
Eddie nodded. “Only once he has a seventh child. There’s a spell, probably about as old as Krampus himself, where if you take the blood of seven children and drink it, you’ll become...pleasant to look at.”
“Krampus wants to be hot?” I asked.
“That seems so vain,” Jacek said. “He probably thinks this whole holiday is about him.”
I laughed. “Hot for who, though? Vampires? Maybe he could try not eating us.”
Sawyer jerked as if he’d just been shocked. “The swans. They captured him the first time. Maybe he fell in love with them.”
“I mean...” Jacek started, “it makes sense. Look at us. We fell in love with the slayer who was hunting us.”
“Supposed to be anyway.” I winked. “But then you guys fed me pie.”
“But they’re swans,” Eddie said. “Overgrown stone swans.”
I shrugged. “You can’t help who you fall in love with.”
Jacek grinned. “True enough.”
“Leave it to a goat demon, though, to be a creeper in order to woo the swans. Drinking the blood of seven children to make yourself hot?” I shook my head, unimpressed. “That just proves how shallow he thinks the swans are.”
“How should he have gone about it, Belle?” Sawyer asked with a little smile.
“Pie. Obviously.” I grinned at their laughter. “But also unflinching support ant trust when life steamrolls over you. You three are hot, don’t get me wrong, but if you’d turned your backs on me when I needed you the most, you would’ve morphed into a pile of warts in my mind.”
Jacek squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “That’s a horrible visual.”
Eddie nodded. “So that could explain the ‘why’ behind the seven swans and seven children. But not the ‘what now?’”
“We wait for the sun to go down.” I strode through the arched doorway, my bare ass getting chilly. “And then we get Krampus right where it hurts—his heart.”
