“Oh yes they do,” the werewolf said, remembering. “Hope smells like despair before it goes sour. Belief smells like candle wax and incense. And I smell that right now.” He also smelled the odors of sleeping children and gingerbread and fir boughs near a wood fire. He was sure that only a house full of Christmas could smell like that—all the others had—but he didn’t say so. Rider had his tricks, but so did Matthias and he wasn’t going to let on that the Christmas Cheer had made his nose as magical as his flying paws.
“Indeed?” asked Sinterklaas. “Then lead on!”
Putting his nose to the scent, the werewolf snuffled and trotted through the air, following the smell down and around, skirting through ranks of tall buildings, over the tops of trees, and finally to a rooftop where the team paused for Santa Claus to run his errand.
As they waited, the reindeer looked at Matthias out of the corners of their eyes and muttered among themselves. They still didn’t like him, but at least they weren’t trying to bite him anymore.
When the man in red returned, he walked right up to the deer team and began distributing cookies from his pockets. “There you go, my good friends. You’ve worked very hard, so it’s time for a treat—there’s still much yet to do, though, so eat up!” He walked up to Matt and held out a gingerbread man. “That was excellent work, Mattie. I saved the best one for you.”
The werewolf sniffed at the cookie and sneezed. “I’d rather have the children—they’re tastier. If you can go in all these houses and do all of this, why do you settle for cookies and milk? You could have anything. If I could do that, I’d definitely eat the brats in their cribs.”
The Bishop of Myrna frowned, saying, “I couldn’t do that. I’m the patron saint of children—I could never hurt them.”
“But you let Black Peter punish them. Just like you did me.”
“You were awfully naughty, Mattie. Children need correction once in a while—to learn what is right and what is not. All parents know this. You had no parents and no one to help you know when you’d done wrong.”
“I had foster parents and a schoolful of nuns to correct me.”
“Apparently not enough—considering. And after all I’d done for you . . . Well, water under the bridge now. We’d best be going.”
Saint Nicholas scratched him behind the ears and walked back to the driver’s seat with the shadow of Black Peter slinking along behind. For just a moment, the dark man showed his face and winked at Matthias and gave an evil grin.
Annoyed and a little afraid, but feeling a post-Rudolph emptiness, the werewolf gobbled down the gingerbread man in two bites—it certainly wasn’t as good as reindeer, but it would do. Then the sleigh was on its way again, with Matthias still sniffing and leading them through the fog.
They’d visited several more fog-bound buildings and were just emerging from the mist above a frozen lake when a mournful sound drifted up to the sleigh from the ice below.
“Whoa, Mattie!” called the man in red. “Find that noise!”
Cocking his ears, the werewolf listened for the thin cry. There it was . . . the chilled voice of someone alone on the ice, freezing and crying. Matthias plunged toward the sound of the weakling, thinking of the times he’d hunted to similar cries of distress, cutting the weak and injured from herds of animals—and men.
The reindeer pulled with all their strength to match the powerful leaps of their leader and they dashed down to the ice-bound lake, circling lower and lower until they touched as lightly as eiderdown onto the cracked surface of the ice. A small figure lay on the ice beside a fissure in the surface. Next to the still body, a wavering form wailed its distress.
Matthias wouldn’t have imagined the red-clad saint could move so fast, but Saint Nicholas bailed out of the sleigh when it was barely stopped and ran across the treacherous ice to the child lying beside the hole. He knelt down and scooped up the dead child, cradling its blue face against his red woolen shoulder.
“Peter!” he cried. “Black Peter, you wretch, bring the book and my crozier!”
Matthias sniffed at the wailing ghost of the little boy. “What happened to you?” he asked.
The young ghost sniffled and blinked at him. “A man offered me a ride home from school, but we never went home. He hurt me and then he left me out here. I prayed and prayed for someone to come. . . .”
“Bit late . . .” Matt growled.
“Never say that, Matthias!” Saint Nick scolded. “Not on Christmas.” He held out his hands to Black Peter, who offered him the big black book and the gold shepherd’s crook.
The patron saint of children looked at the sad little ghost and opened the book. “There, now, José, we’ll make it right.”
Matt craned his neck to look over the man’s shoulder at the book. He could see a creamy page that had but a single name penned on it in wet, red ink—José Maria Antonio Guttierez. As he looked, Santa Claus began to speak, long Latin phrases that shivered in the air and the ground shook as he raised his stick in his free hand. The words broke into sparkling shards that swirled and glittered, falling on the page and on little José, making the red ink run.
Still Sinterklaas intoned the strange words and the ink shimmered, turning brown, then yellow. . . . The ghost gasped and so did the boy in the saint’s arms.
The glimmering words that filled the air blazed into white light and the red-coated man brought his crozier down. It touched the little boy with a sound like distant cannon and a shout of angels and the air itself was afire!
Matthias jumped back and the little boy in Santa’s arms coughed and opened his eyes. Matt looked for the ghost but it was nowhere to be seen. He looked at the book and saw that the name on the page was now written in gold ink that gleamed as if it were a coin newly minted.
José looked up and gasped, “Papa Noel . . .”
“Merry Christmas, José,” said Father Christmas. He glanced at Matt and Black Peter, then back to the boy. “You’re a long way from home, but we’ll get you back.”
The man and his shadow bundled the boy into the sleigh, and Matthias and the reindeer team hauled the conveyance into the sky once again, soaring miles to the south, over rivers and fields, over the craggy red and yellow spires of New Mexican canyons, to touch down on the grass of a playing field while Kris Kringle took the boy back to his home. He handed him back into the care of his dazed, tearstained parents, who didn’t seem to realize how far their child had traveled or that they were talking to the real Santa Claus and not just some seasonal department store employee.
Black Peter grumbled, brushing at the book as he stood beside Matthias and watched from a distance—no one wanted to explain the presence of a magical sled with eight reindeer and a werewolf in its traces and certainly not a black shadow of a man with burning red eyes.
“Now, I’ll never hear the end of it,” Black Peter muttered.
“Huh?” Matt grunted. “End of what?”
“You’ll find out. . . .” The dark man looked quickly around and then flipped open the book and pointed at it. “Here, take a look, but read fast, the bishop is coming back.”
Matthias glanced down and saw his own name on the page. There were three gold stars beside his name—which was a filthy brown with tiny hints of gold at the edges—and then a little red X followed by more gold stars, and then a handful of black check marks that stopped abruptly with a big black X. The werewolf could guess what the stars meant—those were the years of his youth, surely—and the black X must have marked the year he rejected Christmas.
“What’s that mean?” he asked, poking his paw at the red X.
Black Peter grinned—his teeth looked like knives and Matt felt a shiver of dread at that smile. “That’s when you died, little Mattie.”
“But I’m not dead! And I don’t remember being dead. . . .”
“Think of what you’ve just seen—”
A hand in a red mitten snapped the book closed and Saint Nicholas took it away from his dark companion.