Demons of Christmas Past: A Hidden Novella

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “Get out of the way, you loony dame,” one of them muttered, trying to walk around me.

  And that was when I punched him in the stomach. He bent in half, gasping for breath. The other one gave me a confused look and tried to grab me. I struck out with one hand, catching him on the chin, and then with the other, crushing the hand holding the gun. He gave a shout of pain and the gun fell from his hand. The first one I’d hit was getting up by then. I didn’t want to use my powers too much — I’d already drawn enough attention brawling with them like this, no need to add on to it. I stomped the first guy’s foot with the heel of my shoe, and he gave a pained shout, then I elbowed him in the stomach. He fell just as Nain finished dealing with the second of his attackers. Both of them were unconscious, and the guy whose hand I’d crushed was on the floor crying. Of all four of them, the one I’d elbowed was in the best shape, and he was trying to pull himself up off the floor. Nain stalked over to him and grabbed him by the front of his dark brown jacket. He was a skinny, pale little man, but his eyes held nothing but pure hatred when he looked at Nain.

  “Tell your boss I said hi,” Nain said. “Tell him all he has to do is get the hell out of my city, and I’ll leave him alone.”

  “He’ll kill you first. And I’ll help,” the little man spat.

  “My man, you just got beat up by a woman. Granted, a really, really dangerous woman, but still.” Nain shrugged. “I’m not worried.”

  I watched, listened. He’d flowed into the French accent as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and I realized that for over two hundred years, it had been natural for him.

  Nain grabbed the four men and threw them off the front stoop. Two of them lay on the front lawn, in too much pain to move, while the other two tried to get them to move. Nain and I stood there and watched until, finally, they got into their car and squealed away, the little guy glaring daggers at Nain the whole time.

  “Everyone all right?” Nain called into the house. People started peeking out of the apartments, and one elderly man in particular seemed to draw Nain’s attention.

  “Mr. Zelinski,” Nain said. “I’ll pay for the damages.”

  “I think it would be better if you move out,” the old man said shakily. “You have until the end of the month, Duchonne,” he said, and then he closed his apartment door. I glanced up at Nain. He looked back down at me, then motioned for me to follow him. We went back up to his apartment, where he pried up one of the floorboards under his bed. There was a metal box beneath it, and he pulled that out. As I watched, he counted out several crisp bills from the box, then put the rest back under the floorboards.

  I followed him back downstairs, and he knocked on his landlord’s door. When the old man opened it, Nain held out the cash. “I’m sorry for the trouble,” Nain said. Mr. Zelinski looked up at him, shook his head, and took the money.

  “You’re a decent enough sort, Duchonne,” Mr. Zelinski said to Nain, “but trouble follows you, boy. This is the third time we’ve had a mess like this since you moved in here. I just can’t have it.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry for the trouble.”

  Mr. Zelinski nodded, glancing toward me. “Could be you have other things you need to be worrying about now. Don’t expose this nice girl to all that nonsense.” And then he closed the door, and I heard the chain slide on the other side, locking it. Nain took my hand and led me back up to his apartment.

  “Duchonne,” I murmured. “I like it.”

  Nain shrugged. “I saw it on a sign somewhere. I got tired of coming up with names after a while.”

  I looked around his apartment. “It’s almost Christmas. You need a tree.”

  “…What?”

  I tilted my head, envisioning where we’d put it. “You need a tree. I want to sit here with you, with a tree glittering over there,” I said, gesturing toward the small window at the side of the room. “Really, I just want to shop for Christmas decorations.”

  Nain shook his head. “If you really want to, we’ll do it.”

  “We should also mess with the Purples a little more while we’re here.”

  Nain laughed, and I shrugged.

  “I love you. You know that, right?” he said, and I went to him, stood on my tiptoes, and kissed him. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me closer.

  “You just like that I encourage you to fight,” I said when I pulled away.

  “No, baby. I love everything about you. Everything,” he said, running his hands down my sides, my hips. A little shiver ran through me at his touch, and I kissed him again.

  “Well, let’s go get a tree and you can show me later exactly what you like about me.”

  He helped me into my coat again and we went downstairs. “Whatever you want, Molls. As long as I get whatever I want later, too.”

  “Always,” I told him, and I smiled at the helpless groan he gave me.

  I could get used to flirting with my husband. We’d never really done much of that, and I never would have guessed how much I liked it.

  Chapter Eight

  We spent the afternoon exploring a city I’d always known, and yet, everything was new. Nain took me to the Fisher Building site. The outside, with its art deco marble stonework, was complete, but work was still going on inside. I knew that very soon, it would have a ceiling that visitors marveled at every time they walked into the building, arching above like something from a fairy tale. The walls inside, like outside, were solid marble and granite, and there were craftsmen at one end of the building grinding and polishing the marble floors. Everywhere I looked, there were hints, shadows of what was to come, but right now the building was raw and unadorned, and I knew I’d always remember it looking like this. It was like a gawky teenager who grows up to be jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The possibilities are there. I had always loved this building, even before I’d known Nain’s hands had helped build it. Now, I knew I’d love it even more.

  Nain pointed up, drawing my eye to the top of the scaffolding set up further down the lobby. At the top, a dark-haired man carefully set tiny tile into the arched ceiling.

  “Geza Maroti,” Nain murmured in my ear. “He’s responsible for all of the mosaics. Designed the frescoes, too.”

  I stared as Maroti worked. Soon, the ceiling of this center part of the arcade would be full of birds of paradise on branches, surrounded by a ring of eagles with their wings outstretched.

  “What’s he like?” I asked Nain.

  “Quiet guy,” he answered. “He was a carpenter before he went for training in art. Says he’d be able to retire happily on what the Fisher brothers are paying him for this job, but he doesn’t want to.”

  “This is crazy,” I whispered, still looking around.

  “Hard to believe it eventually looks like the building we know, huh?” Nain asked as he stood beside me, waiting as I took it all in. A few workers had walked by and recognized Nain, greeted him and given me curious looks. He seemed generally well-liked, but he didn’t talk much to anyone. As with the Purple Gang and his landlord, he’d slipped into his old French accent again, and I realized that there had always been hints of it, still there, just below the surface when he spoke. I’d never connected it, that he’d spent most of his existence as a Frenchman.

  “Why did you start with the American accent?” I asked him as we walked through what would one day be the lobby, heading toward where the Fisher Theater would be.

  “After the second World War, people around here started looking a little closer at anyone with an accent,” he said. “Poles, German, Irish were used to it. They’d gotten it before the war. After, just about anyone who didn’t sound ‘American’ had it harder. Southerners were coming up for the factory jobs, and it was one more accent to be suspicious of. I’d been hearing that flat American accent for so long it was easy for me to just start using it. The fewer eyes on me, the better,” he finished, and I nodded. That was one thing I’d always understood about him. People like us were never just out in the open. W
e were outnumbered by Normals, who would be afraid and suspicious of us. And they should be. Many supernaturals are assholes.

  When I was done gawking at the Fisher Building, we walked out and stepped on to one of the city’s newer streetcars.

  “Where are we going?” I asked him.

  “You’ll see,” he said. The streetcar started moving, and we rode past places that were both familiar and not, as well as places that no longer existed in our time. We passed an enormous, elaborate building, and the driver called out “Campus Martius!”

  I turned to Nain. He pointed at the building I’d been looking at. “Old City Hall.”

  “They never should have gotten rid of it,” I said, shaking my head. The new city hall was nice enough, but it was nothing like the elaborate old building with its domed tops and arched doorways.

  We stepped off the streetcar and I watched it drive off. “I wish we still had those,” I said.

  Nain nodded, and then he pulled me across the street to Campus Martius. I glanced up at him to see him watching me, tiniest of smiles on his lips. This was where it had all started for us. One night, one meeting, and my life had never been the same.

  We walked, and I realized, after a moment, that we were standing in the exact spot where we’d met, when I’d gotten out of my car and confronted him, the driver who’d been tailing me all night while I’d been trying to work.

  “Sacred ground, right here,” he said.

  “I believe I threatened your balls that night,” I said, and he laughed.

  “Like I said…”

  I laughed, and he pulled me into his arms. I forgot about the people milling around outside the office buildings and shops, the cars driving by on the street. This man, in any time, was irresistible. Even when I hated him, which I had, once upon a time.

  A gentle, yet still intense kiss, and he pulled away. I pulled him back, and he held me tightly.

  “It’s like re-learning us,” I said.

  “Yeah. How the fuck’d we lose so much of us?” he asked, his forehead pressed to mine.

  I shook my head, pressing my face to his, and he claimed my lips again. “I’m not doing that anymore,” he said against my lips. “I’m not letting all of the other bullshit take over when all I’ve ever wanted was you.”

  I kissed him again and made myself pull back. I met his eyes and took a step back. “I want to do the same thing—”

  “Yours is more complicated,” he said with a shrug.

  “But it shouldn’t be,” I said. “My dad had a life. He had time for Persephone. For my mom. Why am I like this?”

  He pulled me into his arms again. “Because you’re not your father. You’re you. You’re a hero and a badass and a friend and mother and goddess…”

  “And in all of it, two things get lost,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Me. And us.”

  “There is no losing us. We adapt, we make it work. I’m not going anywhere. We’re good, baby, and we always will be. But this thing about losing yourself?” he shook his head. “That’s gotta change.”

  We finally pulled away from one another, and he led me to the center of the park, where an enormous Christmas tree stood, festooned with strings of white lights and dripping with gold and silver ornaments.

  “These are even older than the ones you have,” Nain said, and I forced a smile. “I wonder if we swiped one, would it make it home with us.”

  I shook my head and laughed. “That seems wrong.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. The ones you have in the safe are nicer than these, though.”

  I didn’t answer. “So what’s the thing with them? All the other shit you collect, it’s just out around the house. Those are in a safe, and you don’t hang them on the tree. I always wondered about that,” he said. We sat on a bench and he looked at the tree. He seemed like he was being determinedly casual about the question.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Just wondering. They seem different to you and whenever I ask you about them, you brush it off. Every other weird thing you collect, you have a whole story about where you found it or why you like it or how many of them you’ve collected… those, you won’t talk about. So, yeah, I’m curious.”

  I shrugged. “They’re just ornaments,” I said, and he gave me a long look before turning back to the tree. We sat there for a while, and the longer we sat, the more irritated I became with myself. This was the kind of thing I kept doing, keeping parts of myself separate. I was so used to not being able to trust anyone, a lifetime spent in and out of foster homes and juvie, homeless, hiding who I was from everyone I came into contact with. Even now, when everyone who mattered at all to me knew exactly what I was, it was a habit I had a hard time breaking. It felt safer to keep myself to myself, and anything that meant anything at all to me was something I kept hidden. It was habit.

  I glanced over at Nain. Since we’d gotten back together, he’d been more open with me than he’d ever been before. And I realized I’d kept at least a little of myself away from him. I was so angry with him for so long, even after we’d re-bonded, even after we’d had a son, even after all we’d been through. I don’t handle being lied to well, and the lie he told, the one that led to his death, was one I once swore I’d never forgive him for.

  I think I haven’t completely forgiven him. Not yet. But I want to.

  I took a breath. “It’s stupid,” I finally said. He looked at me. “The ornament thing,” I clarified.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “I do,” I said. “I’m just warning you that it’s stupid.”

  “Okay.”

  “I told you before about all of the shitty foster homes I was in as a kid. How they’d get freaked out when I said the wrong thing, when I read their minds… I didn’t even know I was doing it at first.”

  He nodded. This part, he knew well.

  “I did the math once. I was in an average of four foster homes per year, sometimes with breaks to juvie when I refused to go to school. Sometimes for fighting,” I said, remembering. “Some of the people were not awful. Some were trying to do the right thing, but I seemed to rub just about everyone the wrong way, even the good ones. And the bad ones…” I shrugged. I’d had too many creepy older men trying to touch me. Usually, I knew what they intended before they had a chance to act on it. I ran away a lot.

  “When I was sixteen, I got lucky finally. These two older ladies had just decided to start taking in foster kids, and I was their first. Betsy and Charlene,” I said, and I shared the memory of what they looked like with Nain, opening my mind to his. I could still picture them: Betsy, short, round, and Irish. Bright blue eyes, a love for good whisky, and a laugh that practically rattled the windows. Charlene, tall, slim, and dark-skinned, quiet and refined where Betsy was all rough edges and clumsiness. I’d realized soon after moving in that they were a lot more than friends. They were my first experience of living with a truly happy couple. Even when they fought, they’d been loving about it.

  “So I moved in, not expecting much,” I continued once I’d shared the memory of them with Nain. “I got in a fight at school and I was pissed and stressed out and let it slip that I’d heard the other girl’s thoughts. And as soon as it came out, I thought, okay, here we go. More counseling. I’m gonna be out on my ass again and it was like two weeks in and I already recognized that it was the nicest place I’d ever lived.” I paused, looking at the tree without seeing it. “They just listened. And I could feel from them that they were surprised but not afraid or disgusted or anything like that. Not like everyone else who’d suspected that I wasn’t normal. So, I stayed. I settled in. I was with them for a year. I spent the only decent Christmas I had before you with them. We picked out a real tree, and they started taking out the ornaments and other decorations, and Betsy pulled out those boxes of old glass ornaments, and she told me about how they’d been her mom’s, and her grandmother’s before that. That they were handmade, han
d-painted Polish ornaments, and that they were probably the nicest thing her grandmother had ever owned. They weren’t fancy or expensive, really, but Betsy’s grandparents were poor immigrants. Her grandfather was Irish, her grandmother Polish,” I added, remembering. “I remember hanging those ornaments, thinking about how crazy it is to be able to tell stories about your family.”

  I thought for a few moments, and then shook my head. “I don’t know how to put this next part into words.” I opened my mind to him again, and I lived the memories with him. Me, laying on the nubby green rug in Betsy and Charlene’s living room, looking up at the tree all lit up in the dark living room, these old ornaments sparkling and shining. How strange I felt in that moment, and I realized it was because I was relaxed and, even weirder, I was happy. I was at peace for the first time in as long as I could remember. It had given me this warm feeling I barely recognized.

  I shared all of that with Nain, his mind and mine as one, and he reached over and took my hand in his. I closed my mind, feeling more than a pang of loss. I’d given them up for this trip. And it was worth it… but it was okay to mourn for them a little bit.

  I continued. “So that was great. And Betsy and Charlene were great. They helped me a lot. More than anything, they accepted me. The following spring, Betsy got in a car accident on her way home from work. Her car was hit by a semi on the freeway. So we had her funeral. And a week after that, Charlene dropped dead of a heart attack.” I paused, swallowed. “Everyone who knew them said her heart had literally broken when Betsy died. I believe it. Anyway. I ended up at another foster home. I used to ride my bike past the house, and I saw a sign for an estate sale. I went, and the first thing I saw were the three boxes of Betsy’s ornaments on the table. I bought them. I’ve never put them up, sure that I’d break them, or someone else would break them and I’d want to destroy them,” I said with a wry smile. “I know it’s dumb. They’re nothing special, and I have the memories, which are more important, I know. But those were the first things I ever had that made me remember a good time. I guess I always felt like I’d be letting Betsy down if I broke one,” I said with a small laugh. “Really, she wouldn’t have cared, but I do.”