Yuletide (Matilda Kavanagh Novels Book 3) (19 page)

Krampus howled in frustration as I climbed and vaulted over my couch, throwing myself at the kitchen. I hit the tile floor hard, the jolt going all the way up my legs and making my teeth chatter, but I didn’t even give myself a moment to recover. I rushed forward, sure my feet were carving into the floor as I made my way into the kitchen. Slamming against the counter, I tore through my cabinets, hearing his hooves on the floor as he rushed for me, all pretenses of games completely gone.

My hands closed around a canister and a glass bottle, but it was too dark to read the labels. I didn’t know what either item was, but before I could turn and fling their contents at him, total and complete darkness enveloped me.

My world turned upside down, and I yelped in surprise as my feet left the ground. He pulled the opening of his bag closed.

Krampus had snatched me.

Chapter 21

I was trapped in a nightmare. The world was black, and I could hardly breathe. Nothing but me was inside the bag—a bag that had haunted my dreams. It was musty, the air heavy with dust and the promise of torture if I ever got out. The cloth was rough against my feet and hands. The cuts on my face and neck burned as tiny particles of I-don’t-know-what got into them, making me imagine all the different infections that could be taking root. I didn’t have even one healing potion to stop it.

My hands flexed around the two items I’d managed to steal out of my cabinets. I had no idea what either could possibly be, but they were all I had, and I would cling to them for dear life. Inside the canister, I heard powder shifting. Maybe it was my knockout powder. Maybe I had enough to do some damage. The glass vial was cool in my hand, though I know my skin was flush with heat from struggling and fighting and being bundled in that stupid bag. Maybe it was a revitalization elixir. If it was, it would boost my powers. But there was no way I would risk drinking it without being sure, and I couldn’t be sure until I could see it.

A part of me hoped it was poison that I could throw at Krampus, watch his flesh melt and burn away as he screamed in pain. It would serve him right after the generations of pain and torment he’d inflicted. What kind of god existed only to bring nightmares and pain to thousands of little children? Hell, I was an adult, and I was still scared of the monster in the dark. But of course, I knew I had every reason in the world to still be scared of him.

When he hauled me off the floor, he did so with the same effort I expended picking up Artemis, and he slung me over his shoulder. I grunted when I hit his back. I shifted and bounced as he walked, and I knew it the moment we went through the portal. I prayed that as soon as he closed the portal, whatever enchantment was keeping my familiar asleep would be broken and he would wake and go find help.

When we went through the portal, the magic and power of it slid over my body, making my skin tingle and my cuts burn. Static popped in my ears, and my fingers prickled with the promise of power coming back to me. It wasn’t much—not yet. I gripped my canister and vial. I couldn’t waste even the tiniest amount of power testing my kinetic power yet, not until I was sure I could do some damage.

Freezing air gushed around me, reminding me how little clothing I was wearing. If Krampus dumped me into the snow, I would freeze or lose a toe without the power to cast a spell to keep the cold away. Gravity pulled on me as he climbed the side of the mountain, his hooves crunching the frozen snow. He was as sure-footed as a mountain goat, never once slipping or stumbling on the rocks and snow. At least I could take comfort in knowing he wouldn’t drop me and break my bones. No, he was probably saving that for later.

I swallowed against the bile rising in my throat as I bounced against his back. I thought I felt his tail swish under me, and I shivered against the strange feeling, but there was nowhere for me to go. Despite the freezing air outside the bag, I was sweating, my breath hot inside the bag. If I ever got out of this, I would start sleeping with a weapon on my nightstand, and I would never again investigate a strange sound in the middle of the day without it.

The wind stopped, and I imagined we were inside his cavern. His cloven feet thumped along the rock floor, and I braced myself, expecting him to drop me at any moment. But he continued forward. I was still in the bag, still shifting against his back, my stomach still threatening to give up whatever it had.

Then we stopped.

My skin prickled with sensation, and he muttered something too low for me to make out. My hair swirled, but without much room to move, it stuck to the bloody cuts on my face. I’d have to let go of one of the items in my hands to brush it away, so I just cringed and tried not to think about it.

Something hit the ground with the sound of rustling and a soft thump. Krampus shifted me to the other shoulder, making me groan as my stomach rolled from the motion. The bag pulled tight above my head as he gripped it, and I knew he’d dropped his evil bundle of switches. Well, that was one less thing I had to worry about.

We started forward again, and power rushed over me like a cool waterfall. We were walking through another portal. A portal inside his cavern. Heat rushed over me, plastering my bangs to my forehead with sweat. The sour stench of burnt sulfur surrounded me, crawled into my nose, and made my eyes water.

Helheim.

The sound of water was distant, but clear under the sounds of Krampus’s footsteps. A scream fueled by fear and panic crawled up my throat, but I bit it back and thrashed inside the bag. I bucked wildly, thrusting my feet against his back, trying to lengthen my body to pull free of his grip. My head pressed at the opening of the bag, pulling at my hair but not budging his hand.

Krampus grunted as I kicked him again and again. His tail whipped at me. The lashes stung but didn’t cut through the bag, so I kept fighting. I couldn’t let him take me into Helheim. I couldn’t cross the river that was deafening when I listened for it. If I crossed it, I could never leave. I would be trapped in the Underworld forever.

Krampus roared and swung me around so suddenly that I yelped in surprise and went still. He dropped the bag, and I hit the ground hard enough to cut the inside of my cheek as I bit down. Curses flooded my mouth.

Frantic, like a bird desperate to get out of a net, I kicked and tore at the bag until my fingers found the opening. Wrenching the bag open, I gasped, sucking in a deep breath. Krampus was only a few feet away, seething as he glared at me. I kicked free of the bag, hearing my canister and bottle clatter against each other in the folds of the black fabric. I still didn’t know what they were, and I didn’t want to lose them in case I could use them.

I leaned forward to grab the bag, but the noise Krampus made stopped me. With my arm extended and hand hovering, I looked up and saw the monster coming for me with clawed hands and bared fangs. Panic slammed into me like something alive with wings, and I called on what little power I had left.

I touched the ground and screamed, “
Tutor contego
!” The spell flowed through me, burning my skin and making my stomach flip as it took what little energy I had left.

But in less than a second, a circle formed around me in a brilliant blue light. Iridescent flames surrounded me and his bag, rising up to disappear, only to start again. Still on my hands and knees, I looked past the flames of my circle and saw Krampus’s face. His look of utter disbelief didn’t last long. In another moment, he was roaring and charging for me.

I watched with my breath held. He was all teeth and claws and the promise of pain. Every little indiscretion I’d ever committed as a child built inside me, and in his red eyes, I saw my retribution finally come to get me. I screamed—I couldn’t stop the sound ripping from my throat until it burned. Krampus hit my circle, slamming into it hard enough to make my bones shake and my teeth rattle. I fell onto my back, the breath knocked out of me. But by some pure miracle, I didn’t touch the edge of the circle, even the tips of my hair just barely missed touching the blue flames. Had even the tiniest piece of my body touched the edge of the circle, it would have fallen, leaving me exposed and vulnerable.

Lying on my back, staring into the black and unable to see the top of the mountain, I didn’t see that Krampus had flown backward as well, landing on his massive back and striking his head on the stone. I was teaching myself how to breathe again when his cloven feet scraped against the ground. His shadow fell over me, massive and dark, and the light of my circle threw his face into stark relief.

Carefully, I pushed up from the floor, sitting up before getting to my feet. My baggy clothing hung from my body, the fabrics shaking as my body trembled. I didn’t have much power in me, and the pain of my fall made my back and head ache. It was a wonder I could stand without my knees buckling. But I did, and I lifted my chin, looking Krampus in the eye, and fisted my hands at my sides.

“Tricky, tricky witch,” he said in a sing-song voice that no longer matched his impressive form. “But we have patience. We have all the patience in the world even if we have nothing else left in the three worlds. We sat in a cave for generations, waiting, waiting. We can wait out the strength of one tricky, tricky witch.”

Swallowing against the bile rising in my throat, I fought to keep my face neutral. I didn’t have the power to keep the circle up forever. I had to find a way out, a way home, before my powers gave out. I laid my hands on the ground and closed my eyes. Portal magic was difficult and foreign to me. When I had made the portal at my apartment, I used a doorway because it gave Ronnie and me a focusing object with parameters, but that wasn’t necessary. If you truly understood portal magic, you could make a portal anywhere.

I’d made a portal hours ago—I could do it again.

My hands prickled with power, my nails aching as tiny bolts of light shot out of my fingers. Jaw clenched, brow pinched, and a stitch forming in my chest, I willed the floor to open beneath me and lead me home. The stone bit into my knees until pins and needles ran up my legs. My nails scraped and tore against the stone, but nothing happened. The ground beneath me remained whole.

I would have screamed in frustration if it weren’t for the laughter echoing around me. When I opened my eyes, I found the monster of the mountain watching me and laughing. The rings of blue fire flickered as they rose and died only to start again, obscuring his face.

“Not as tricky as you’d like,” he said, stepping close to the edge of my circle. The fur lining of his coat sizzled and curled into black points, making him step back from the power of my circle.

“Trickier than you.” My voice sounded strange in the echoing cavern.

His laugh stopped abruptly, and he fixed me with those cold, dead eyes. “Trickier, but we will see who has the power in the end. You cannot hold this circle forever, Matilda Kavanagh. Krampus has come for you.”

***

I lost track of time, but it had to have been hours. A cold sweat had broken out over my body as I struggled to keep my circle in place. Once already I’d had to lay my fingers close to the edge and whisper the incantation to reinforce it. Krampus had sat up, his eyes full of the light of my flames and hope clear in his face, only to slump back when the circle didn’t fall. He kept muttering softly, but as long as he wasn’t singing, I knew I was okay. I still had some time to figure something out.

A tiny part of me prayed that Ronnie would go to my apartment and find me missing, that somehow she could commune with Artie and figure out where I’d gone. But I wouldn’t just wait around hoping. All I had was myself, and I wasn’t going to die in the flames or rivers of Helheim. Not on my first good Christmas since my parents died.

Snagging the bag, I reached inside, digging around for the items I’d dropped in my struggle to get free. My hands closed on the cool metal container and glass bottle. Shaking the bag off my arms, I examined the two containers. The canister was black without a label, and I heard my mother’s voice scolding me for that. Anything could be inside. I would have to open it to find out what it was, and I prayed it didn’t blow up in my face—literally.

Setting the bottle down, I gripped the canister with both hands, held my breath, and twisted off the lid. When nothing happened, I peeled one eye open and looked inside. It was full of Black Salt. My heart leapt. Black Salt was a powerful component of binding spells. The coarse black crystals reflected the light of my blue flames, glittering like tiny black diamonds.

I replaced the lid carefully and set the canister in my lap, my legs crossed around it to keep it from tipping over. I picked up the bottle. It was squat, with a wide, round base and a long, thin neck. The glass was dark green, almost completely opaque. It was completely empty, but something about it made my fingers tingle. A power in the bottle was answering the weak power inside me. I touched the cork and found it coated in red wax so that it gripped the glass tighter than normal.

I blinked when I recognized the bottle from my mother’s spelling supplies. It was a
quintessence
bottle, a bottle meant to hold aether. How I had grabbed that item out of all of the items in my cabinets, I didn’t know, but something inside me untwisted at the sight of it. If I was careful, that might be exactly what I needed not only to get out of there, but to keep Krampus from snatching another child forever.

Hope bubbled inside me, but I tried to keep it down. I had a very difficult task ahead of me, and I couldn’t risk one little mistake. I was trying desperately to figure out how to use the salt and bottle when a noise struck my ear. It started out low, so I couldn’t quite make it out, but it became louder and louder until my ears were ringing with it.

Krampus was singing.

He got to his feet and turned slowly to face me, his red eyes alive with the light of hate and anger. His lips moved as the lyrics traveled across the distance between us. “You better watch out.” He took a step toward me. “You better not cry.” Closer still. “You better not pout.”

I closed my eyes and tried to block out his voice. My mind raced. I could attack him with the Black Salt and cast a binding spell, but I would have to drop my circle to do it.

“Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.”

His voice was terribly close. I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was standing close enough to my circle that the blue flames reflected in his eyes, making them nearly white with light.