Page 53 of Scary & Bright

Dammit. Mister. He was standing on the balcony, trying his best to direct traffic and being largely ignored by the panicked masses. I was absolutely not going to waste precious time to stop and explain my actions to the teddy bear, so I just kept running as fast as I could without risking taking a tumble on the carpet.

“I seem to remember very specifically Krampus asking you to stay put!” he hollered after me in a voice barely loud enough to cut through the commotion.

“And I seem to remember not having to listen to him!” I called back.

Getting down to the main floor was like a super-fast game of Frogger. There were toys everywhere, all running in different directions, like chickens with their heads cut off. They truly must have come out of the woodwork because I’d never seen so many all gathered together. Some were grouped under the huge Christmas Tree and some larger ones were carrying smaller ones into different rooms to hide, slamming the heavy wood doors behind them. The G.I. Joes and tin soldiers were readying their weapons and marching in unison toward the same direction I was going, and I had to leap recklessly over more than one toy stroller, rolling on its own like a power chair toting a baby doll toward safety.

As soon as I reached the bottom, I wrapped one hand around the baluster to turn myself rapidly toward the foyer, my socked feet sliding along the floor like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. Still no sign of Krampus. More than anything, I just needed to move faster. Get boots on. Fast. Pull a coat on. Fast. And make sure I could reach him before Santa Claus did his worst.

I burst into the foyer as my heart threatened to beat out of my chest, my vision tunneling on the rack near the front door. My mind was so hyper-focused on my target that I hadn’t even noticed that I’d nearly tripped over a small group of toys huddled near the front door.

“Oh, sorry!” I apologized, my words purely on autopilot as I ripped my coat off the rack and jammed my fingers through it.

“I know you’re not about to go outside with all this drama!” another familiar voice rang out.

Of course. It honestly felt like a joke that my rocking horse friend happened to be right where I needed to be, the final, unlikely voice of reason before I did something reckless.

“You going out there is practically suicide, Holly!” Starlight chirped, her voice several octaves higher than usual with panic. She almost sounded like someone tape recorded her voice and was playing it back in fast-forward.

“Unless anyone has a better idea for how I can prevent Krampus from facing his brother’s wrath all by himself, I’m one-hundred percent getting through that door before anything terrible happens to him,” I insisted as I crouched to tie up my boots.

“False,” another voice said in a monotonous tone that could only come from a robot.

My gaze, as well as Starlight’s, shot to the corner of the foyer, where a toy alien-robot was sitting. His head, blinking with LED lights, had been entirely detached from his body and was being held by Tuff’s hand, who had stretched his arm high enough to hold the robot’s head near a cracked window.

“They will be coming in before you have the chance to get out,” the robotic voice explained. “It is time to back away from the door, friends.”

Before anyone even had the chance to ask why, the door blew open with a force so great that I swore it was a bomb going off. I covered my head with my hands, fell to my knees, and pressed myself against the wall, trying to use the fallen coats off the rack as some sort of cover. I had no idea what was going on, but the militant cries of war clued me in. All around me voices bellowed, Find her! Tear the place apart if you must! Find her and bring her to me! The girl!

I covered myself in as many coats as I could as the sight of the Christmas Tree battering ram moved backward, away from the doorway. The castle was suddenly flooded with elves and their various weaponry. One after the other, elves filed in, running further into the house with their instructions to find me. It was incredibly lucky that they charged so far forward that they ran right past me in my pile of coats behind the busted door.

Things outside, though, were clearly not going well. My Krampus had not found the same luck that I had.

23

HOLLY

“I’ve told you she is already dead!”

Krampus’s voice was like birdsong, pure music in my ears. He was okay! At least okay enough to be speaking. He was okay, and he was lying to his brother—or his brother’s army. There was no way for me to tell who exactly he was talking to. As the first wave of elves finished funneling into the castle through the front door—I had a feeling there were more forcing their way in elsewhere—I began to move ever so slowly to the broken-in doorway. Like a slug, I crept closer and closer, trying to get a look first-hand at what was going on outside. Finally, I was able to manage peeking one eye between the door frame and the broken door without uncovering myself from my coat-pile disguise.

There was Krampus, his hands chained behind his back with handcuffs that appeared to be made of ice, kneeling before Santa’s sleigh, which had been ridden much closer to the castle than I had seen from upstairs. The vicious dire-bear was standing at perfect attention, like a creature that had been born and bred for war. The North Pole’s bear cavalry were still lined up with militant perfection further back, ready to strike should they need. The other arctic woodland creatures appeared to be circling the perimeter of the castle, and I hoped they wouldn’t be able to identify my scent. Santa Claus himself sat in the center of the sleigh’s front seat with dark red leathers on, the Christmas Spirit at his side in the same odd nightclothes I’d seen for just a split-second back at the mall.

“You’re not going to find her, Nik. I don’t know what to tell you,” Krampus said again, his head hung low. He had put a lot of faith in my ability to hide, or he had put a lot of faith in his ability to lie. Neither of which had paid off, and I was remarkably thankful I had decided to leave the safety of his bedroom because now I was certain that room was likely the least safe place in the castle.

The sounds of things breaking, the stomps of heavy boots, and the occasional stubborn cry of a toy could be heard coming from everywhere in the castle. I prayed that Starlight and the rest of my friends were okay.

“Oh! So, you’re a liar as well as a traitor!?” Santa Claus responded, his voice much less kind and jolly than my younger self always imagined.

“Call me what you will,” Krampus responded, doing a marvelous job of not letting any of his emotions show, “but you won’t find what you’re looking for.”

I gulped, really hoping Krampus was right. The noises of the North Pole elves hunting for me raged on like a steady reminder of what one false move would cost me. Smashed between the broken door and the stone wall of the castle, buried in coats, I felt like the sound of my own breath was louder even than the shouts and slams of Santa’s search for me.

“LIAR!” Santa snapped, rising to his feet. The dire-bear roared in protest as the great man yanked on the reins. “You think I would call my elves to assemble and travel all the way here, to your pisspot of a homestead, just to learn you had already taken care of things? No.” A great, echoing ho ho ho erupted from Santa’s belly, carrying itself across the frozen landscape like a ship at sea. There was something so intimidating about Krampus’s brother, so eerily terrifying that I had to see it to believe it.

Beside him in the sleigh was the Christmas Spirit, looking far less mischievous than when I’d met him against my will at Peace Lily Soap Company. His ghostly form was nearly transparent against the white-on-white backdrop of the South Pole.

“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, brother,” Santa continued as he stepped to the side of the sleigh and hopped out with a heavy, crunching noise into the snow. “But if I need to check up on you, I have ways to check on you thanks to our good friend, the Christmas Spirit.”

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