The Saint (10 page)

Adora nodded. “What happens to those on the naughty list?” she asked, morbid curiosity getting the better of her. “Do they get coal in their stockings?”

“That depends. Often I am especially kind to the errant person's spouse and children.” Kris grinned. “Winning their kids' love and devotion usually pisses them off.”

“Hm. Devious, but I like it.” Adora scribbled down notes. She could use this. It made Kris seem clever and clearly nonviolent. That was good in a kook. “So, going back the capitalistic beat of Christmas in modern America. You said in your notes that you encouraged Washington Irving and Dickens to write about the giving of earthly things—of commerce, really. Isn't some of this your fault?”

Kris gave her a piercing look. “I will assume you are playing devil's advocate and aren't really blind to the difference between charitable giving and conspicuous consumption that does nothing but fatten the body and deplete one's coffers. Speaking of the Devil, have I told you how I won the services of Black Peter in Holland?” His conversation, which reminded Adora of a hard-thrown Superball, bounced on to the next topic. He needed Ritalin. “No? Well, another day. But as for the misguided people trying to find Christmas at the mall—don't blame that on me. At no point did I tell the masses to go and worship at the House of Nike or the Gap—though I like their clothes well enough. Damn, I don't want to sound like I'm condemning them.”

Adora leaned over and wrote down both names and then:
possible endorsements?

“And I have never said: Have a merry Christmas, and now go forth and buy presents you can't afford for people you secretly despise—though giving to our enemies can be a valuable lesson.” Kris shook his head. “And Goddess be my witness—I never told anyone to make fruitcake, let alone inflict it on their family and friends annually.”

Adora bit back a smile. Kris saw—he always saw—and his face relaxed. His eerie blue eyes began to twinkle. Adora sat down again. She turned the page in her notebook.

“I'll tell you something that sounds funny after that speech,” Kris confided. “You actually
can
find Christmas at the mall. You can find it anywhere if you look with the heart. It's just that you can't
buy
it. Some things, like love, are not for sale.”

“Any other dark confessions or trade secrets?” Adora asked, leaning forward. She looked intently at his shadowed face. The sun was nearly gone, but Kris hadn't turned on any lights. Perhaps it was easier to share secrets—and believe them—if the room wasn't too brightly lit.

“Just one.” He also leaned forward. There came the spark of electricity that only happened when two people recognized the potential attraction between them. Kris blinked once, then said in a hushed voice, “Please don't tell a soul, but I like some fruitcake. Missus Etta Dixon used to bake one for me when I came through Savannah. It was stupendous. But I can't encourage consumption by the masses. Like fireworks, fruitcakes should be left in the hands of those who are trained to make them.”

Adora became aware that she was watching Kris smile with a little too much fascination, and she forced herself to lean back, providing a professional distance.

“I'll never tell a soul—cross my heart and hope to die. What happened to the reindeer, anyway?” she asked, changing the subject, half-hoping to trip him up or find a hole in his story. But she was only half-hoping; she didn't really want to find out that he was a con man looking for some way to make a buck or influence the more gullible segments of the population. Of course, that left insanity as his motivator, didn't it? Which wasn't a great option either. Adora sighed. She had to hope for some acceptable undiscovered motivation to surface. “There
were
flying reindeer, weren't there? That wasn't all made up?”

“Yes. I had to give up the horses when I moved to Finland. That was after my gig in Asia Minor. Sadly, some of these reindeer became venison steaks.”

Adora was shocked at his words, and also annoyed with herself for feeling shock. After all, none of this was real.

“You ate Vixen?” she couldn't help asking.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Kris replied. “The
goblins
ate them, after they fed me their filthy drug and left me to die. They didn't get Vixen, though. Clever girl, she got away.”

Adora hurriedly changed the subject. She still wasn't ready to hear about bad goblins. The good ones running naked through the street were weird enough.

“Was the now-lamented red suit your idea?” she asked.

Kris shook his head.

“Not entirely. Clement Moore advised it. It was a nice blend of the red of Saint Nicholas and the fur robe of the pagan shaman. A bit flashy for my tastes, but even then I understood the power of the right icon when it came to capturing human imagination. And we needed a powerful icon.” Kris shook his head. “Since Cromwell and his Puritans had done such an excellent job of wiping out the few Celebrants who survived the Inquisition—he killed some thirty thousand ‘witches' and drove the rest into deep hiding—it was necessary to revive the old symbols here in the New World. Thankfully, ancestral memory supplied a spiritual understanding for those who were descended of the Celebrants. I could sense the reawakening in the land, and it encouraged me when the task of reinventing Christmas looked too daunting.”

“Celebrants? You've used that word twice. What does it mean? The Puritans weren't Celebrants?”

“No, poor creatures. They couldn't celebrate. They didn't know it, but they were terribly impover-ished, spiritually speaking. As for understanding what a Celebrant is, I'll give you some of the fey holy texts—the Fey Bioball Na Sidhe—to read. Basically, Celebrants were those humans—mainly what you would call pagans, though some Christians were also of this ilk—who saw Divinity in the natural world all around them, who knew joy every day, with or without prayer. Celebrants don't have a coherent religion really. For them, God is everything. This tends to annoy more organized religions.”

“God is everywhere,” she said, recalling her brief Sunday school teachings.

“Precisely. Now, Worshippers are men and women who strayed from the old relationship with Nature, and who now require enforced worship— what we might term the magical ceremony of a church, and the prayers of a middleman, a priest, to get outside of themselves long enough to connect with their Creator. It's sad that it happened, but not unexpected. Worshippers have always been organized souls, and it was natural that they should evolve their religion indoors and make it tidy and clean.” Kris spread his hands. “The trouble really began when they locked their idea of God into a house of prayer, as though fearing that thieves might steal their Deity when their backs were turned. But out of sight, out of mind—and they often forgot him anytime they weren't inside their portals. I say
Him
because the Worshippers also forgot that Divinity is both male and female. They created idols too, and some arrogantly gave Divinity human shape—male human shape. Frankly, I found the Worshippers' insistence on a human-looking male god annoying, because it is so exclusionary of other races. I nearly gave up on them more than once. But that estrangement ended with the coming of the Son.”

“The Son? You mean Jesus?” Adora gulped. “You personally knew the Christ? The Messiah—the Lamb of God?” This was much, much worse than saying he wasn't Christian. This was out and out blasphemy. You weren't supposed to lie about Jesus, even if you were nuts.

Kris's face softened and his eyes lost their intense inner focus.

“Yes. The Son changed my mind. I learned from Him that pure Divinity
can
be made human. It's a pity that humans have managed to muck His message up in the intervening years.” Kris leaned forward, his eyes focusing again. His gaze could be felt as clearly as a touch. “But, again, the story of our meeting is a tale for another day. There's no point in telling you about it when you don't yet accept my story as truth.”

Adora tried to regroup, but she was shaken by his sincerity. A part of her was even beginning to believe Kris's yarn, in spite of her inner warnings that it couldn't in any way, shape or form be true. It just couldn't.

But what if it was?

“Talk of religion makes you uncomfortable, doesn't it? And magic as well?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “Both seem like a lot of hocus pocus: Let's fool the people while we rob them blind.”

He nodded, but in understanding, not agreement.

“How old are you?” she asked suddenly.

Kris tilted his head, considering. “I'm not certain. In the beginning, we did not reckon time as we do now. I think, in human years, I first came into the world about ten thousand winters ago.”

“T-ten thousand winters?” Her brain stuttered too. This was too much of a fantasy, even for a craz—eccentric—man. She fiopped back hard in her chair and scrubbed her face. Kris wanted her to believe, and she wanted to believe. But she couldn't. And now her headache was getting worse. Her thoughts were too large and crammed into too small a space.

“Yes, that would be about right. Of course, my presence in human affairs was not documented until the Christians decided that I should be made a saint. Then I started turning up regularly in religious art. It was rather nice. In those paintings—unlike the ones in the caves—I always had clothes on. They occasionally even painted me with women. It was a pleasant change to have a feminine presence for company.”

Adora shook her head. This was impossible. Just . . . impossible. She could never put this stuff in a book. What the hell was she going to do?

“Are you all right?” Kris asked. “You look very tense. Would you like to try a Goblintini? Pennywyse says they're very good. They're made with vodka and strawberry juice.”

“No, thank you. Vodka and I don't get along. I'm not much of a drinker, really. No one in my family was. None of us could hold our liquor.” There she went again—telling Kris things he didn't need to know. What was wrong with her? She was such a mess! What had made her think that she could do this job?

Kris stared, as though her statement were somehow significant. Another time she might have asked what he was thinking, but she was determined in that moment to follow at least one thread of Kris's story all the way to the end. It was annoying that she was getting tired and her brain had all but locked up.

“Uh, where were we? Feminine presence . . . Okay, let's talk about women. In all your wandering, through all these years, you never met Miss Right?” Adora was trying for something light and normal to talk about, since the subject of his nudity was almost as disturbing as his proclaimed age, or his assertion that he had known Jesus. “I mean, I always heard there was a Mrs. Claus in the background, baking cookies.”

Kris shook his head. “Actually, I met a few candidates, but it would have been wrong to ask any woman—human or fey—to share my vagabond existence. It was a form of exile, you see. And I never stayed in one place for very long; there was always some new fire that needed putting out, some new outbreak of despair, or an attempt to crush the human spirit. And then there was the whole sacrifice thing.” Kris's silvered eyes focused on her, first her lips and then her eyes. Adora's pulse began to hammer. The scrutiny was both thrilling and scary. “Sacrifice thing?” she managed to say. “How much sacrifice?”

“As much as anyone can give,” he said. “But things are different now. That era is done. The fey are at the very edge of extinction. We must all do what we can to ensure survival. When the spirit next lists in a lady's direction, I shall follow—if I am able.”

“So . . . you see marriage in your future?” Adora asked. Her voice nearly squeaked, and she noticed her heart was beating heavily.

Kris smiled, his eyes dancing merrily in the gloom. She could almost swear they glowed.

“How very alarmed you look at the idea, my dear. I assure you, I am not all that frightening. Indeed, many people have no fear of me at all. In fact, in the under-six crowd, I am still very much beloved and known for benevolence.”

“More fools, they. You're about as harmless as a heart attack,” Adora muttered, ducking her head to escape his scrutiny. Scribbling nonsense in her notebook, she said, “This would be a big change for you, becoming a family man.”

“Yes, but change is good. Stubbornly continuing in your daily rut is like digging your own grave. I mean that metaphorically, of course,” Kris added in what should have been a soothing voice but that stroked her nerves and made them tingle. And: “Don't let that death fey stuff you've read about bother you. I turned from that path long ago. Anyway, the whole wife matter is one for the future. I don't propose to worry about it now. Worry is negative meditation, you see. Concentrate on the bad long enough, and you can make every dark concern come true.”

Death fey stuff? She must have missed that. She couldn't be certain, but she was willing to bet that anything that had the word “death” in it wasn't something she—or readers—wanted to know about Santa. He was clearly a kook. And that was a damn shame, because this was the best-looking man she had ever seen. She was really attracted to him.

What?

Where the hell were these thoughts coming from? Adora rubbed her forehead. She was definitely getting one of her bad headaches, and it served her right. She could not—
could not
—be attracted to Kris Kringle. Because that would lead nowhere. And even if she was attracted, she could never let him know that. No way, no how.

Maybe she had jet lag.

“Kris? You call yourself ‘fey.' But you mean that in the sense of being an elf or a pixie, not in being precognizant or psychic.” Abandoning subtlety, she added desperately, “No bullshit now. Tell the truth. You really and truly believe that you are . . . ?”