by Mina Carter
Bad Santa
Mina Carter
New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Author
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
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About the Author
Copyright © 2016 by Mina Carter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real in any way. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Author's note: All sexually active characters depicted in this work of fiction are 18 years of age or older.
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1
He was in a brothel, with a beautiful woman, and he was wearing leather pants. Could life get any better?
Nicolas Claus balanced his chair on its back two legs and stretched his six-foot-four frame out to its max. He groaned with pleasure and then dropped his chair back to all fours, only to find his companion watching him with a keen gaze.
“What?” His voice was deep and rough, as always, but he did his best to soften the surly note. Not only was the woman watching him pregnant, but she was also his boss and he really didn’t want to get fired. Not today.
“I’ll never get used to seeing you like that.” Iliona waved a hand in his general direction. “I’m so used to seeing Santa—”
“As a big, fat, jolly man with flowing white hair and a beard dressed in a red suit?” This time Nick could barely contain his snarl. He hated that fucking red suit, but every year since it had entered public consciousness, the Christmas magic had dressed all Santas in the damn thing. They didn’t get a choice. Not even him, Big Nick, the original Santa Claus himself.
“Yeah,” she admitted with a little flush on her cheeks. Iliona was the most together woman he knew, so even a hint like that was telling. “I mean… look at you. The skinhead and the tats? Not exactly a cutesy, chocolate box image, is it? The others, Rhod and Coal, hell… even your grandson, I can see it…”
“Like to see one of them pose as a pixie.” Nick snorted as she mentioned three of the other Claus elves on the Paranormal Protection Agency’s books. They were main bloodline Clauses, all related to him, and none of them had strayed too far from the straight and narrow…all were clean-cut, handsome goody two-shoes. Put them in a suit and the agency could send them out to do PR… or rescue grannies stuck up trees.
Nick, though, was cut from a different cloth. He’d give the grannies nightmares instead. His hair was shaved close to the scalp, and tattoos scrawled across the skin there to trail down his neck and then his arms. They were old tattoos from the time before he’d been forced into the red suit, and even he’d forgotten most of what they meant. For years they’d stayed hidden, not needed while everything was hunky-dory up at the pole, until it had all changed…
Iliona inclined her head. “You have a point. A pixie is what we need on this job. Even a pseudo one.”
He nodded. Pixie clans were tight-knit communities and difficult as fuck to infiltrate. They were also violent, brutal psychopaths who believed “might made right,” which meant they normally formed part of the criminal underground in any city.
However, over the last twenty years or so, a new clan had moved into the city, one worse than all the others put together. Eastern European in origin, the Krasniqis were infamous even in pixie circles for their ruthlessness. The authorities had been trying for years to crack them with no success. Humans just couldn’t get in, or survive, and any agents they’d sent in had been mailed back.
In many pieces.
Who knew mailing bags held blood quite so well?
But all things changed over time. Andri Krasniqi, head bastard in charge, had been assassinated just weeks ago. Rather than appoint a successor, his widow, Joy, had announced her intention to control the clan.
He had to give it to her. For any pixie woman to do that? She had to have balls of steel. Probably one of those women who looked like a shot-putter, with an attitude to match… not that it was his problem. What was his problem was that she’d contacted the PPA for help. Apparently she wanted to dismantle her dead husband’s empire from the inside.
“Sure you’re up to this?” Iliona asked quietly. “You know what happened to the other operatives…”
It was as near to “this could get you killed” as she could get without actually saying the words.
“Oh, don’t worry.” He gave her a small grin. “I can be just as nasty, if not worse, than any of those little bastards. Failing that, I’ll just mention toadstools. That always sets them off, big time.”
She laughed and then tried to cut it off, resulting in a kind of snargle that made her sound like a pig, or maybe a dragonet. “You’d dare as well, wouldn’t you?”
“Too fucking right if it gets the result I need.” His cell rang, so he reached in his pocket for it. A quick glance at the screen made him frown. “Sorry, I just need to take this.”
Swiping the screen with his thumb, he lifted it to his ear. “Ris, my man, what’s happening?”
“Heeeeey, Santa baby!”
Nick sighed at the greeting caroled down the line. Ris was… well, just Ris. One of the seer team attached to the agency, he was a good laugh. With Nick anyway. Most of the other operatives found him difficult to deal with given his habit of answering questions from next week, but Nick never had that problem. Might have been that there was something about the seer that was as old as Nick himself.
“So, whatcha got for me?” he asked. As well as dabbling in the future, Ris was also excellent at intelligence gathering, working threads on many cases at once.
“That… little issue you wanted me to look into?”
At the words, Nick sat up a little straighter in his seat. “Oh?”
Another thing about Ris was he was discreet. If someone wanted a person tracked down without anyone knowing about it, the seer was your man. In exchange for a favor, of course. But for this, Nick didn’t mind being in his debt.
Not when it meant catching the guy who had killed his wife.
“I didn’t find Frost himself, but then I didn’t expect to… he’s been eluding a lot of people for many years.”
“Yeah, nearly thirty and we know why.” Nick snorted, his grief over losing his wife long since transformed into rage at Jack Frost.
He closed his eyes and was transported back to that awful night. It had been Christmas Eve and they’d been so short-staffed it was all hands on deck. Even Mrs. Claus, his Eva, had put away her apron and left her kitchen.
But she’d never made it out of the pole. Her sleigh had broken down in the middle of nowhere, right at the beginning of her run, and in the chaos no one had noticed. By the time the elves pointed out some deliveries hadn’t been made, the sun had started to come up. He and his team didn’t stop, barely touching down at the pole before they were airborne again looking for h
er.
He’d known as soon as he’d spotted her little sleigh, smaller than any of the others, that it was too late. Her deer had tried to help, huddling around Eva to keep her warm, but it hadn’t made any difference… They’d died as well, the frost reaching in to freeze the blood in their veins.
Standing there with his dead wife in his arms, as his deer team wept over their fallen comrades, he hadn’t shed a tear.
Instead, he’d sworn vengeance on Jack Frost. No matter how long it took, he would track that bastard down and make him pay for killing Eva.
“So, what did you find?”
“Well…” For the first time, Ris sounded hesitant. “I was looking into something else and… it seems that Frost had a daughter.”
Nick blinked, surprise flowing through him. Frost had a kid? Given the foul creature tended to freeze everything he touched, how was that even possible?
“What? Who?”
There was a silence. Then, “You’re not going to like this.”
“Just give me a name, Ris.”
“Your new case…Joy Krasniqi? She’s Frost’s daughter.”
She was free.
Joy leaned her head back against the subway window and closed her eyes in sheer relief. After years of obedience to the various men in her life, through childhood and marriage, death had finally set her free. She allowed herself only a moment to savor the feeling though before she opened her eyes again and scanned the carriage.
It was crowded, which was to be expected at this time of day. Shoppers were packed in like sardines, the weariness of trudging around shops showing on some faces while animated excitement shone on others. Christmas jingles played over the radio, rendered tinny and flat by the audio system in the panels above the passengers’ heads, and she allowed herself a small smile as she watched a child opposite.
He was young, probably not more than six years old, human and obviously excited for the Christmas season. A thick winter coat swaddled his little body, a hat and gloves protecting his head and hands. But his eyes… they shone with the magic of the season.
Even if she hadn’t known it was December from the onslaught of Christmas ads on the television and the shops each claiming to have “your Christmas covered,” she’d have known just from the look in that little boy’s eyes.
Magic was a tricky thing. Not visible to humans, most wasn’t even visible to creatures of magic like Joy, but Christmas magic? That was different. Even humans could see that. Sure, they might not see it exactly the same way she did—the glint of light off tinsel and the brightness of wrapping paper reflecting in the little boy’s eyes—but they saw something. A brightness, a happiness that infected most everyone this time of year.
He caught her looking and smiled a gap-toothed smile. She couldn’t help grinning back, sharing in his excitement for a few moments before the train pulled up to her station.
Waiting for it to pull completely to a stop, she stayed in her seat as the doors opened. Hood up, she had her cell in her hand, flicking it idly. To anyone looking, it would appear she was engrossed in checking social media or such, but the reality was very much different. She had no clue and didn’t really care what was on the screen.
Instead, her attention was all on the carriage around her. She watched for anything out of place—the slightest hint of brightly colored hair, tattoos, or anything that would indicate her dead husband’s warriors had followed her.
There was nothing, not that she could see anyway, but better safe than sorry. She waited until the doors pinged a warning that they were about to slide closed and then moved. Out of her seat in a heartbeat, she crossed the carriage and slipped out between the doors just before they slid closed. So close in fact, she felt the movement of air against her thick coat where the metal almost closed on it.
The train began to move but she was already walking across the platform. Keeping her hood up, she merged with the crowd. Unseen and unnoticed. She felt like a fugitive, and well she should. Her hand tightened on the spelled blade in her pocket just in case she’d been wrong and they’d managed to follow her after all.
All the normal people crowded around her had no clue of the dangerous creature in their midst. They were all human, but not like that would have made any difference since hardly anyone could tell she wasn’t anyway. Pixie women had none of the flamboyant coloring of their male counterparts, and she was only half pixie anyway.
What the other half was, she had no clue. Her bio-dad had done a runner before she’d been born, leaving her mother to throw herself and her baby daughter on her own father’s mercy, and no strange or unusual abilities had manifested themselves over the years. Which meant that, even armed, she wasn’t the most dangerous thing out here in the dark.
Moving through the crowds, she reached the surface and turned left down the street. This far out of the city center the crowds had thinned somewhat. There still wasn’t a flash of brightly colored hair or ink in sight but she didn’t allow herself to relax. There were too many people around, and if her late husband’s warriors knew what she was up to, they wouldn’t care how many humans they had to go through to get to her.
Just to be safe, she took a roundabout route to her destination in case anyone was following her. This far into the bitterness of winter, most people went from A to B in the most direct route, staying out of the cold as much as possible, so it would be easy to pick up anyone on her tail. The cold didn’t bother her, never had, and neither did the walk.
Half an hour later and sure no one had followed her, she turned and headed up a side street toward an unobtrusive building. At the sight of it, her lips compressed with anger. The sigils painted on the brick, invisible to human eyes, didn’t help. She didn’t read them, didn’t need to. The place was a brothel and they advertised the services available within.
Ignoring the front entrance, she slipped down a small alley to the side of the building and paused to knock on a door near the back. Her heart pounded as she waited, eyes wide as she watched the alleyway. Any moment now she expected it to be filled with pixies and for a blade to end her mad plan before it had even started.
The alley remained empty. The sound of bolts being drawn back on the other side of the door announced its opening a moment later. A middle-aged pixie woman looked out, her hard expression softening into a smile as she recognized Joy under her hood.
“My lady, welcome.” She ushered Joy within and closed the door behind her quickly. “Your guests are already here. I’ve put them in the back room.”
2
Joy’s heart was still pounding when she pushed open the door to the back room and stepped inside. Unlike the lushly decorated bedrooms upstairs where the girls met their clients, the back rooms were sparse and furnished more for comfort than appearance. The room was dominated by a scratched but well-scrubbed wooden table surrounded by chairs. Comfortable couches were usually filled with girls taking a break between appointments but were now empty in honor of their two guests.
“Thank you for meeting me, Iliona,” Joy said quietly, looking from one to the other in greeting. Iliona, her contact at the PPA, was petite and pretty with a softly rounded belly that announced she was early in pregnancy. The automatic impulse to congratulate her hovered on the tip of Joy’s tongue, but died unuttered as she looked at the woman’s companion.
Tall, shaven-headed and heavily muscled with tattoos crawling up his bare arms, he rose to his feet in a movement filled with lethal grace. Joy’s eyes widened, all the blood draining from her face in a nanosecond as fear exploded through her body.
A pixie. They’d found her. Her husband’s men, or one of his many enemies. Hand over her mouth, she took half a step back. The knife concealed in her pocket would be useless against a man like that—
“Ms. Krasniqi?” The woman’s voice broke through Joy’s fear. “Joy? Are you okay?”
Reality and logic reasserted themselves as the two looked at her, concern written on both their faces. Of course, he wasn’t here to
hurt her. He was with the agency, had to be if he was here with Iliona.
She laughed a little self-consciously. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting you to bring a pixie. It took me by surprise.”
“I’m not a pixie.”
The man’s deep voice rolled around the room, the harsh rasp doing things deep inside Joy’s body that definitely had to be either illegal or the work of dark magic.
“You’re not?”
Surprised, she looked at him again. Now the first rush of fear at seeing a strange warrior had faded, she noticed more about him.
He was dressed like most pixie males she knew. Leather pants shoved into heavy boots were paired with a black wife-beater vest that left his arms bare. Ink covered the skin from the shoulder all the way down to his hands. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at them.
Most people didn’t look too closely at pixie tats, assuming they were random ink chosen by the wearer. They couldn’t have been further from the truth. Each symbol, band or mark was significant, as was its placement. They told anyone who could read the ink everything they needed to know about the owner.
The story this man’s tattoos told was a brutal one, filled with many battles spanning years. Some symbols she didn’t recognize other than to know they were ancient. Far older than any she’d seen even on elderly relatives of her husband when they’d visited from Europe.
But there was something else. Now that she looked closely, she could see that he didn’t quite fit the pixie mold. Sure, he was as big, possibly bigger, and looked as lethal as any pixie she’d ever met, but there was something odd about him.
It was his eyes, she decided. For a moment she’d glimpsed something in them that was ancient, but then he blinked and offered her a small quirk of his lips. Sexy as hell, it covered anything odd about him and rendered him the cock-sure image of a bad boy pixie.
