And there, above it all, still continuing its evil shenanigans, was the other elf.
“Little devil,” muttered Taylor.
His hands itched for his gun, wanting to riddle the wretched creature with a multitude of bullets and then with a multitude more. The ice melted in his hand, dripping down against the reindeer’s fur where it warmed and almost steamed. He squeezed the icicle tighter.
If there was no chance at drawing the elves away, then they would have to die. One way or another. No matter how fucking stupid his plan.
Behind him, his pursuer remained right on his tail—right on the reindeer’s tail. Before him, the green-glowing elf lifted her head, her expression too distant to read, but the body language obvious as she reached for some weapon. A flash of flickering light, a tiny, sparking flame in the dark. Then a rounded object came flinging through the air.
His reindeer lurched to the right, obviously wanting to dodge, but Taylor gripped the reins and dragged them back, back, until the reindeer’s head was forced up, its path going perpendicular to the ground. Then Taylor twisted sideways in his seat, lifting one foot to the reindeer’s back for leverage, and then he yanked the reindeer further over, so that he felt the drag of gravity on his body striving to pull him off, down into the swirling snow below. The reindeer made an awful, almost bleating noise as they fell backward, but they’d been high enough, close enough, that their pursuer had drawn incredibly near in those few seconds.
Now passing just below Taylor, his pursuing elf looked up, one hand drawing an icy blade from thin air and sending it out in a blast of chilly, arctic wind. Taylor sucked in a breath, pushed off with his foot and flipped across the gap—right over the icy blade—letting gravity drag him down onto the other elf and its reindeer.
He slid against the elf’s side, smacking the peppermint gun hard with his forearm. The icicle in his other hand embedded into the elf’s thigh. The elf made a shocked, pained noise and kicked out, catching Taylor in the stomach. But Taylor’s weight on the elf dragged them both sideways, slipping off the reindeer, yanking them earthward.
Then an explosion went off below them. Whatever bomb the other elf had thrown spat snow upward, the reindeer and them thrown skyward by the blast. Taylor snagged the harness, dangling precariously and using his grip on the elf for as much leverage as possible to yank himself up. The elf brought his hand out, palm up, a cold front forming in the space between those fingers and Taylor’s face.
Without thinking, Taylor jerked forward and bit the elf hard in his outstretched hand, tasting freezing cold caramelized sugar crystals pop into his mouth rather than blood. The reindeer leaned, the weight tugging at its harness making it turn. The elf kicked out, catching Taylor in the stomach again and again, but Taylor flexed his core tight, spat out the elf’s hand, and, with a violent yank, hauled the elf off the reindeer and up over his head.
The elf scrabbled for Taylor’s body, little hands grabbing at his clothes. His jeans wrenched with the elf’s weight. Taylor lifted one foot and kicked the blighter right in the head, sending him spinning free into the air, red stocking cap popping free and spinning in a different direction.
Something hit Taylor’s hand where he gripped the reindeer’s furry back. A rounded object similar to the one thrown before. An ornament, decorated with stripes of blue and gold, a fuse sizzling along its peak quickly, efficiently.
Taylor jerked away, which, when dangling from a reindeer meant that reindeer rolled somewhat onto its side, sending the ornament bomb falling between them. Taylor flexed his arm, lifting himself by the harness until he could catch hold of the flopping reins with his other hand. Then he yanked as hard as he could.
The reindeer veered off, attempting to climb higher into the dark sky, reaching for the stars, its bulbs and icicles chiming discordantly. Taylor’s bottom half sloped, only his locked grip on the harness keeping him from falling, following the ornament bomb to earth. He swung in the air, legs dangling, the reindeer’s muscles bunching and flexing against him.
The reindeer leveled out, turning over Greg’s rooftop at Taylor’s mismanaged guidance. He needed to get away from the house, away from the garage if those ornament bombs were going to fall beneath him.
He attempted to turn the reindeer away, but failed, as it required him to lose what gain he’d achieved in climbing to the reindeer’s back.
“You are fighting a losing battle!” called the last elf. Her voice near. Behind him. “We shall never stop coming for you! Not until Santa has licked your bones clean!”
A distant explosion down below accentuated her words.
Taylor gritted his teeth, matted fur catching in his eyes as he strained to climb onto the reindeer. He’d just gotten his torso up, pulled across the reindeer’s back when the creature gave a full-body shake, almost upsetting him. When he reached for the halter in order to pull himself into a better seat, he startled to a sudden stop.
An ornament bomb sat caught in the crux of one antler.
Its fuse hissed, spitting sparks that glittered against the drooping icicles. The reindeer shook its head again, this time more viciously in an obvious attempt to unseat the bomb.
“Oh shit—”
Taylor snatched his arm back as the bomb exploded.
A large piece of antler smacked him near his temple. The reindeer’s legs kicked and stuttered. The harness chimed and slipped.
Then they were sinking through the air. Taylor’s stomach dropped and he instinctively grabbed at the reindeer despite knowing it was futile, that the reindeer was falling too. The wind welcomed them down, the snow whirling up, up about them, enveloping them in a frosty embrace.
While above him, fading fast, came the elf’s distant, evil laughter.
Dazed, Taylor had a snippet of a thought, a memory of the children who had fallen in that break-neck escape all those years ago. Their reindeer canting downward; their little bodies flailing; their last screams swallowed by the spearmint conifers and the bountiful angels awaiting them.
He’d gotten so close. Just one snow shaper left to terrorize Greg and Mandy. Just one—
With a burst of energy, Taylor yanked himself completely across the reindeer’s furry back and curled within its fur. They hit together, at an angle, the reindeer crunching and collapsing against the roof. Snow spilled across Taylor’s back, breaking through the dredges of the reindeer’s warming aura.
He lay within the reindeer’s fur for a few moments and just breathed. All around him, the storm surged again, the darkness replacing the soft red glow he’d become accustomed to up there in the sky. Then the reindeer began to slide, slowly at first, but then picking up speed as its weight dragged it down the roof.
Taylor rolled free, into the snow, and scrambled for some purchase at the ridge of the garage rooftop. The cold ate into his fingers once more, nipping through his still-damp clothes as if ecstatic to see him, feel him once more.
As he dragged himself up, his aching head heavy, his body demanding rest he couldn’t give it, the wind calmed, the snow ceased its churning. With dread in his heart, he looked across the rooftop where the glitter of a rainbow whip dragged against the snow.
“You and me, Taylor Yeristan!”
The elf’s reindeer hovered over the roof’s ridge, hooves floating in midair. Those green bulbs sat steady within its antlers, a threatening glow as the creature bowed its head. The light whip snapped, sending snowflakes scurrying. A cradling wind soared down both sides of the garage’s portion of the roof, lifting trailing snow in curlicues off the gutters.
Off the gutters.
“What about you and me?” he called, and though he’d steeled his insides, his lungs betrayed him with a wobble to his voice. He nudged backward, along the length of the roof, his jeans already stiffening with ice. Behind him, where the eaves of the house hung over the lowered garage section of the roof, there’d be a portion of the gutter.
The elf circled the whip so that it melted a hole in the snow below her st
eed. “You have murdered enough of us!”
“It’s not murder if it’s self-defense!”
“Self-defense? You hunt us!”
“And you hunt us!”
“We must eat, just as you do! You are nothing but a hypocrite!”
Taylor resisted the urge to snarl at the elf as he reached the edge of the roof. A quick glance sideways showed just enough to see the wind continuing its strange dance outward from the roof, the snow too thick to see the gutter beneath him. With his foot, he sought the space where shingles ended and gutter began. Kicking off snow wasn’t surreptitious though, not with the snow shaper’s gusts pouring off the roof and curling in decorative loops that swooped and swirled like snowflake décor come to life.
“So breed more reindeer and have Santa eat them!” he shouted belatedly, hoping to stall the elf just a little longer.
In the darker shadows where the eaves of the house overhung the ridge of the garage roof, Taylor felt the toe of his sneaker sink into the curve of the gutter. He reached down through the icy layers with fingers already numb once more, gripped the metal, and began to shake it.
“Why?” demanded the elf. Her voice had lowered, barely reaching Taylor at all. “Why shouldn’t we partake in naughty, naughty children…?”
The reindeer stamped a hoof in the air, sending a patter of heat vibrating across the snow beneath it. The pulse stretched across the roof, shuddering the shingles beneath such that Taylor felt them reverberate. Then the reindeer rose its head, the elf lowered herself across its neck, that whip flew into the air in a curling circle, lights flashing so fast they twinkled.
And they charged.
Taylor shoved his other hand through the snow, gripped the gutter, and heaved with all his might. The metal resisted, bending, misshaping.
Behind him, the reindeer’s pace rumbled through the air, reverberating in the wind, in the snow, against the roof without its hooves even trampling against the shingles. Like some children’s carol, softly singing of tapping on rooftops, of a sleigh ghosting across the snow on its runners.
The seconds slowed. Taylor’s breath released in a puff of whitened steam. His knees slid further apart. His thighs tensed. The muscles of his arms strained, pain lancing across his chest where the snowman had smashed into him. And then…
The gutter popped free with an angry screech. The reindeer came barreling those last few leaps, the elf’s Christmas light whip snapping out. Taylor ducked and dodged. Heaved the gutter up to catch the whip, its sizzling enough to melt the snow still clinging to the thin metal, sending it pouring down Taylor’s arms in freezing cold paths. The individual lights burned indents and crevices in the metal where the whip caught and couldn’t free itself.
Dragging the broken gutter section backward as the reindeer passed—the light whip stretching between them, rainbows glittering in his eyes—Taylor then swung with everything he had. He smashed the elf in the side, part of the blow glancing off her outstretched arm, but the hit was strong enough to toss her, send her flying from the reindeer’s back and to the rooftop.
The light whip went taut—still strung about the gutter as it burnt further into the thin metal—and yanked Taylor forward. He fell heavily, face first at a downward angle and received a mouthful of snow.
“We will come in legions for you,” rasped the elf.
She climbed to her feet nimbly, her lighter weight a distinct advantage on the slippery terrain. He clawed for purchase, twisting so he wouldn’t pitch off the roof head first. The gutter slipped from his hand, the edge of the metal scraping across his palm, jerking him closer to the elf.
“And I’ll kill every one of you,” he gasped out. He scrambled to his feet, the snow shifting under him, sliding over the shingles. “Over and over, until there’s not a single last one of you left.”
Nearby, the reindeer came swinging back around, the hanging décor on its antlers chiming a warning as it touched down, hooves against the ridge on the house proper just above their heads. The snow reacted, almost instantly, melting in a warm deluge that flowed across the eaves to pour icy channels into the snow on the garage section of the roof.
Taylor threw an unbalanced punch as they began sliding on the incline. The elf ducked, Taylor’s fist merely glancing off the elf’s pointed ear. The elf clambered away, whipping her peppermint gun from off her back and shooting haphazardly in his direction, one of the wheels grazing across his shirt.
The snow gave way, skidding under his sneakers, layers of ice across smooth shingles providing no purchase. He scrambled, peppermint melting down his shirt, staining the snow as he slid, the snow cracking in sheets that barreled him down along with it.
With a cry, he threw himself upward, just managing to grasp the elf’s foot, knocking her off balance, the peppermint gun swinging around and smacking Taylor in the head, right where the explosion had knocked that giant antler piece into his temple.
He let go, dizzy and sick. Felt himself sliding even as his hand went to his head, stars joining the snow in his eyes. But now the elf scrambled next to him, that Christmas light whip snapping out in a flurry of rainbow and sizzle in a last ditch effort to snag the escaping reindeer, allow her to fly free from the roof, back to the sky where she could finish everything the snow shapers had started.
The whip caught the reindeer about the leg, eliciting a cry of pain and a grunting whoof from the beast. Then Taylor rolled, using some of the momentum from their fall to latch onto the elf’s middle.
The added weight pulled the elf’s grasp from the Christmas light whip. The reindeer lifted into the air, the whip peeling off with bevy of burnt fur and rainbow sparks to fall back toward the roof.
And then Taylor and elf went spinning over the edge with a string of mimicked, echoing curses.
Chapter Twelve
The last of the brake cleaner hissed empty. The flame, that had been roaring mere moments before, fell in on itself, becoming a frail echo of the singeing heat that had melted enough snowmen that a watery slush slicked the garage floor.
Behind Greg, the wet vac purred near the generator, sucking up water that came too close to the electrical. On the other side of the garage, the stream of water had cut off the hard candy so it’d ceased its forward sluggish movement and instead buried the melting elf and locked the broom into an even more brittle position.
Mandy had fallen asleep, curled under the SUV, the wheel blocking the frosty air that occasionally sucked inside from the storm. Greg had positioned the heater close enough it blew warmth across her tiny body. She’d gone from blinking at him with too-wide eyes to gnashing her teeth in a ghoulish mimicry of the snowmen’s clattering mouths as they fell within themselves. Somehow the terror had been replaced with pure confidence. In him.
The generator sputtered.
Greg tried to ignore it. He’d already refilled the tank with the last of the lawn mower gas he’d had from summer grass-cutting. The only other option would be to siphon off the gas from the SUV. But that would mean admitting how stuck they were. Admitting they couldn’t leave.
He tossed the brake cleaner into the pile of used cans and reached for another. But the gray spray paint ran empty. The air freshener made a horrid, dying sound. The rest of them spit like the pathetic last rumblings of a whip cream canister, paint dribbling across his fingers as he tried one after the other.
Behind him the garage door remained quiet in an ominous aura that drew anticipation in the air. Half-burnt twigs and barkless branches riddled the packed ice, sticking up, reaching like some macabre comic twisted from the surreal. A partially eaten carrot lay near the heater, Mandy’s small teeth marks in its side; he’d given it to her when she’d begun clutching her belly dramatically and moaning for breakfast.
The generator sputtered again, puttering, hopping, skipping, popping, before finally dying. The wet vac ceased its purring; it gargled and hiccupped then fell silent. The heater stopped mid-revolution.
An unsettling silence crept in. Then the
light he’d rigged began to fade.
“Fuck,” he whispered, dropping the empty aerosol can.
He felt among the cans for the gun Taylor had left him, a cold snap already seeping into the enclosed space. The wind howled outside the window, making the metal exhaust sing a single hollow, ringing note. Then he crawled across the floor blindly, waving his hand and nearly knocking the heater over at one swing.
“Mandy? Sweetie?”
He groped by the wheel, finding her hair and working his way down from there to her shoulders and back. Dragged her into his arms, where she mumbled something incoherent about bloody elves and icy cars.
The world felt like a waiting game, an eerie sense soaring in through the singing of the hollow exhaust. No more pounding outside the garage. No more rumbling of the electric. No more distant explosions that had sounded like backfiring cars. No more hissing, throwing flames of the aerosol cans or blowtorch.
And no Taylor.
Greg shivered. The thought had buzzed under all the noise, there, but distant, overwhelmed by the continuous danger. He hadn’t let himself think it. Hadn’t let himself consider what he would do. What he might feel.
He squeezed Mandy just a little tighter and closed his eyes against a sudden onslaught of emotion. Taylor hadn’t come back. Taylor hadn’t come back.
And the storm still raged. The singing of the exhaust proved that beyond any doubt.
Rocking now, as he had with Mandy when she’d been an infant, when he’d thought Christmas just another holiday, one with cheer and cider and cookies. When snowmen hadn’t come beating at his door or angels settling in his daughter’s bed.
Before he’d had Taylor—his pragmatic, graceful chameleon, who looked damn fine in his jeans and leather jacket, who spooked at dates and ran toward danger because he didn’t have a Santa-damned selfish bone in his body no matter what he might think of himself.
Rise of the Snowmen Page 13
