She had a curvy figure appropriate to her small size, and golden blond hair that he hadn’t seen outside of shampoo commercials. He couldn’t quite see her face, but her body language wasn’t twelve either. It was exasperated adult—or it had been, until she gave the chimney in front of her one frustrated kick.
He frowned at her. He had no idea why a woman dressed like she was heading for a Macy’s Christmas photo shoot would travel from rooftop to rooftop in a MacMansion-filled Connecticut neighborhood. Nor did he know exactly how she was doing it. Or what angered her about it so much.
He did know that he found her fascinating, from the tip of her golden hair to her impractical boots. He wondered if he should yell up at her and warn her that too many sudden movements would cause the snow to slide off the roof—and her with it.
Then she stomped away from him, toward the back of the house. She reached the peak of the roof, stepped up some kind of ladder that he couldn’t see—and vanished.
And not a wink-out disappear complete with little sparklies. Nor was it like a transporter vanish in
Star Trek
where the entire body fuzzed into a multicolored light show. It was as if she got swallowed by something. First her head and shoulders disappeared, along with one of her feet and an arm, then her torso, and finally the remaining foot. All that remained was a disturbance in the Force (as Obi-Wan would have said), which looked rather like a heat mirage, floating briefly next to that chimney.
Then nothing. Nothing at all. Not even the house next door. At least, not for a few seconds, anyway. It was as if someone had set up an opaque wall, designed to match the snow and the gray cloud cover (which was threatening even more ugliness).
He blinked and the neighbor’s rooftop reappeared. And so did a few more rooftops he hadn’t known were missing.
Okay, that was it. Six hours of physical labor in the cold, moving tractors and snow blowers and piles of snow, subsisting on stale (lukewarm) coffee, breakfast bars, and one apple, had not done him any good.
It was time to take a break. It was past time to take a break.
He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and headed to lunch.
3
IT HAD TAKEN JULKA fifteen minutes to convince Delbert that she needed to stop at the Burger King two miles away. He just wanted to go to the next rooftop. He had some vision of getting done before nightfall. Like that was going to happen. They wouldn’t be done until the morning of December 23
rd
. Although to be fair, he was only referring to this town, and in this town they only had 35 houses left to go.
Besides, they had already earned hotel money. Julka liked that best of all. The teams that couldn’t get their quotas done in the time allotted had to sleep in their sleighs. But Julka and Delbert were one day ahead of schedule, partly because of the blizzard. They’d worked around it, using the North Pole Navigator to let them know when and where the worst of the weather would be. Then they would go to the safest part of their region, get the work done, and move onto another area, avoiding most of the snow the entire time.
The Burger King’s roof had been shoveled off. It had a single pipe that spewed smoke that smelled of frying beef. A gigantic Halloween pumpkin balloon had been shredded by the blizzard’s middle-of-the-night winds and hung off the roof like orange streamers. Since reddish orange was one of Burger King’s primary colors, the streamers looked planned.
Nothing else did. The parking lot was jammed. Julka had to convince Delbert to land on the nearby health club’s roof. She had hoped to land in the parking lot.
But the parking lot—which was huge—was also full.
She sat on the roof’s edge, feet crossed, watching as locals streamed into that Burger King. Rules dictated that she wait until no one was around, so that she wouldn’t be seen, which was one reason why she chose the health club’s roof. But if she waited much longer, she’d eat shingles.
A guy with a huge rig filled with all kinds of snow-moving equipment parked in the auxiliary parking lot, as far from anyone as he could get. He climbed out of his four-by-four, pushed the hood of a parka off his head, and wiped his face.
He had beautiful black hair in need of a trim. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and moved with the ease of an athlete. He didn’t look up as he walked, and she felt oddly disappointed. She wanted to see his face.
She had a feeling she’d seen him before, but she had no idea where.
She lost sight of him in the scrum of vehicles in the main parking lot. He had been the last non-magical person in her line of vision. She grinned, then launched herself off the roof.
Jumping from rooftops had not been one of her magical skills until she took this job. Then she got an augmentation just so she was protected from accidental slippage or falls of more than three feet. This was the best perk of all—that feeling of floating through a cushion of air. It made her feel like she could fly if she would only put her mind to it.
She landed on the sidewalk outside the health club. She adjusted her hair and her ear muffs, hoping she looked enough like a regular person—a regular American person—to get by.
This was the one thing she had little experience with, the one thing she valued the most: the opportunity to mingle with regular people, the kind the Pole was designed to help. She knew she could never quite blend in, but she could at least experience everything like the tourist she was, making memories, snatching moments out of other people’s every day lives and wondering what she would have been like if she had been born in New England instead of the North Pole.
She squared her shoulders, adjusted her cape, and headed for the front door.
4
NORMALLY, MARSHALL WAS A “my-body-is-my-temple” kinda guy. He watched what he ate, exercised regularly, and got enough sleep. After six hours of intensive labor in the frigid cold, he figured it wasn’t going to hurt him to eat poorly.
And he was planning to eat very poorly.
He pulled into Burger King like it was the holy of holies. He looked at that cheesy sign he usually drove past (with his head down so he didn’t have to contemplate all that burgery goodness) and reveled in the idea of a Whopper or a bacon-double cheeseburger or maybe both, along with fifteen sides of fries, and eighteen regular Cokes.
He’d spend his afternoon in the plastic seats, leaning against a faux marble table, and watching the neighborhood go by. His neighbors would shun him and treat him badly and he would have to hide behind the pieces of
The New York Times
someone had carelessly left lying about.
That thought—and not the fifteen orders of fries—nearly had him swerving for the drive-through.
But he hadn’t. He had forced himself to go inside.
He had never seen the Burger King so busy. People lined up five deep. Entire families huddled together, looking miserable. It wasn’t until he eavesdropped that he understood why.
Many houses in the neighborhood had no power. Burger King was the closest fast-food restaurant—any restaurant, really—with electricity. A woman behind the counter grinned tiredly at one customer, and said, “We’ve been like this all morning.”
Startled, Marshall looked at the clock. It
was
morning to most people. His day was half done. More than half done, really. And now that he had stopped moving, he was done in.
No wonder he’d been seeing pretty girl elves on rooftops. He was half asleep on his feet.
He ordered a Double Whopper with large fries and both Coke and coffee—the coffee for warmth.
Lucky him, he found an open table that fit two, so he didn’t feel like he was taking spots away from cold families. Everyone sounded miserable. Kids asking if they could trick or treat when the power was out; parents giving the time-honored “we’ll see” response that probably meant no. If power lines were still down, then no one was wandering neighborhoods in costume any time soon, and he doubted that anyone would have the time or the ability to set up a one-stop trick-or-treat place.
He’d never seen anything quite like it: this full blizzard so early in the season, wrecking so many plans.
“I’d blame you for this, except I, at least, know you’re not God,” said one of his neighbors, Hester Bain, as she walked by Marshall with her ten-year-old son, Nigel.
Nigel gave Marshall an apologetic glance. Marshall shrugged. Hester Bain (“That’s Mrs. Bain to you”) had been vicious to him from the moment she found out who he had been, at a neighborhood meeting from late 2008 that he still regretted—not that he went to the meeting, but that he had said, “I know a lot of those guys—I used to work in the industry—and believe me, most of them don’t have souls.”
Apparently “most of them” had applied to him too. He tried to shrug moments like this off—after all, the Bains had lost all of their life savings with one of the scam investment houses, and they had barely managed to hang onto their house—but the words still hurt.
He made himself look away from her. He didn’t want to meet anyone’s gaze. He didn’t want to provoke more comments.
Then a flash of red caught his eye. He turned toward the door, and his breath caught.
There she was: taller than he had initially thought, older too—maybe 30—with a face as stunning as her wheat-blond hair. High cheekbones, blue eyes, delicate lips—she looked like a Russian supermodel.
She also looked stunningly out of place. It wasn’t just her red cape with the fur trim and matching red pants tucked into those black leather boots. It was the happy expression on her face.
Everyone else was miserable, a bit frightened, worried about the weather and the future, and she smiled like she had entered the happiest place on Earth.
Plus it was the day before Halloween, and she looked like Santa’s Naughty Helper before the half-naked photo shoot started.
His cheeks warmed, and he forced himself to look away. He normally didn’t think of women like that, not even exceedingly pretty women. Not even exceedingly pretty women whom he found exceedingly attractive.
He could feel her nearby. He wondered if she was staring at him, then decided that he was just being silly. She hadn’t noticed him at all. In fact, if she was from the neighborhood, she probably knew what an awful person he was supposed to be and would most certainly avoid him.
At least she hadn’t been a figment of his imagination. Although that begged the question—what had she been doing on that rooftop?
Those rooftops, if he really wanted to be accurate.
He wanted to get up and ask her. He wondered how creepy that would be. Would she think he was spying on her or something?
“Pardon me,” a low female voice with an odd accent asked him.
He lifted his head, and there she was, large as life and much more fragrant. She smelled peppermint, which somehow didn’t surprise him one bit.
“Is this seat taken?” she asked softly. “It seems to be the only one available.”
“Um, sure,” he said. “I mean, no. I mean, please, sit down.”
When was the last time a woman had him tongue-tied? When was the last time he had spoken to an attractive woman? He broke up with his most recent girlfriend a year ago, he didn’t go to bars to meet women, and no one in town wanted anything to do with him. He would have had to take a train into New York City just to find a woman who didn’t mind his background.
The pretty woman smiled at him, and the entire room brightened. He was surprised that no one else seemed to notice.
“Thank you,” she said and slipped into the hard plastic chair, setting her tray down as she did. “I have wanted to come here for a long time.”
To Connecticut? To Burger King? To
this
Burger King? He knew she hadn’t meant the table or the spot near the window.
“I take it you’re not local,” he said, and silently cursed himself for being idiotic.
“Sadly, no,” she said. “I am only in your fair city for a few days for work. Then I move south.”
“Move south?” he asked.
She shrugged one shoulder. “My work requires that I go from place to place.”
“And your work is on…rooftops?” he asked.
She looked at him, surprised. “How do you know that?”
“I saw you today,” he said. “It’s hard to miss you in that red cape.”
She looked down at herself as if she just realized what she was wearing. “Is it inappropriate?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It is the day before Halloween. But usually people reserve their elf costumes for Christmas.”
“Elf costume?” she said in a decidedly frigid tone.
“Well, you know,” Marshall said, his cheeks getting even warmer. “The red cape, the fur, the boots…”
God, he almost blurted that she looked like Santa’s Naughty Helper, but he somehow managed to censor that statement. Still, she looked offended.
“I am
not
an elf,” she said.
“I-I-I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s a very fetching costume.”