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Amelia frowns and peers through the viewfinder. She zooms in and her eyebrows shoot up as she gets a good look at the thing. Its breath steams in the frigid mountain air and its tongue hangs out of its mouth. A twig pops and it startles, turning to find the source of the sound. It looks straight at Amelia, its eyes burning yellow. With a guttural growl, it turns away, returning to its burrow underneath the bare trees. Amelia takes a few more pictures for good measure – Helen might need its tail to accurately identify the creature – and scrambles backward toward the trunk of the tree.
“Okay,” Amelia says, swinging down the last branch to land in a pile of soft snow. She brushes her gloves against her pants, leaving snow handprints on her thighs. “Two questions.”
They start to walk back to the village. They’ve known each other long enough that Helen can anticipate Amelia’s first inquiry. “Why are you always the one in the tree?”
Amelia blinks and hands the camera to Helen. “Three questions. One, since our goal is to eventually reset the timeline and fix this,” she waves her hands through the air, “nonsense, why are we spending time helping this village if it isn’t going to stick? Two, why won’t you just shoot that thing? And three, why am I always the one in the tree?”
Helen tugs her hat down further over her ears and clicks through the Amelia’s pictures as they walk. “One, because we were already here, and I can’t believe you were going to let them have Christmas without finding their missing children. Two, because I don’t shoot abnormals unless I know what they are.” She stops and squints at the display screen. She zooms in on a shot of the creature’s head, with its lolling tongue and black horns and yellow eyes. “It’s a Krampus, and it doesn’t need to be killed, it needs a reliable food source; with the villagers hunting all of its natural food sources because of the war and rationing, it doesn’t have a choice but to move on to the children.”
She turns off the camera and slides it into her bag and looks at Amelia. “And three, you’re always in the tree because you volunteered back in France and I thought you enjoyed it. Would you like me to climb the tree next time?”
“Very much so, yes.”
“Alright then.”
“Thank you.” They resume walking. The forest is silent except for the soft crunch of their boots over the snow. Moonlight reflects silver off the snow, turning bare trees into black shadows. If she weren’t with Helen, and if she weren’t armed, she’d be running like hell. Given what they’re leaving behind them, she’s not entirely convinced they shouldn’t be running anyway. “What’s a Krampus?”
A rabbit sprints across their path, startling both of them. Helen looks up ahead for the lights of the village. They’re following their own footsteps back out of the forest, but the walk back out seems to be taking much longer than the trip in. “It’s an Alpine abnormal, spotted mostly in winter because food is more scarce and it ventures farther from its nest, sometimes encountering humans. Normally it feeds on wild animals, but every few years it has trouble finding food and...changes food sources. Regional legends tell of a demonic creature covered in hair, with horns and cloven feet, that will come and steal small children who are naughty.”
Amelia knows where this is going. “Like the Big Bad Wolf. Stay on the path, you won’t get eaten.”
Helen nods. The village lights begin to sparkle through the trees. “Exactly. Only the Krampus is seen in winter, so the legend developed into something akin to the opposite of Santa Claus.”
Amelia’s eyebrows disappear underneath her hat. And she thought the revelation that Nikola Tesla is a vampire was weird. “Is this going to be a rescue mission or a retrieval?” She’s dreading the answer. It might not be too late to leave Helen here to deal with things, go visit Jules for a few days like she’d planned, and come back when it’s all over.
“Rescue,” Helen says with a smile. She tilts her head slightly. “The Krampus likes to eat his food alive.”
They leave the forest and step onto the path leading back to their cabin in the village. Amelia exhales, puffing out her cheeks. “Lovely.”
A light snow falls through the air as they follow the Krampus’ tracks. Helen’s already contacted the Vienna Sanctuary, through James, and alerted them to the situation. She and Amelia can rescue the children and return them to their parents, but unless the Krampus is moved to an area with a viable food source, he will continue sneaking into the village to steal any child that has strayed from their friends. She intends to have all four missing children safely in their beds, and to herself be out of sight, by the time a relocation team arrives.
Their guns are loaded with tranquilizers, but Helen hopes they won’t have to use them. She’s encountered Krampus before, in the 1960s, and though he hadn’t been able to speak, he seemed to understand language and reason. “You’re thinking,” she says.
Amelia opens her mouth to ask and then closes it again. “No,” she decides, “I don’t want to know.”
Helen grins. “Probably better that way.”
“Your job is very strange.” She’d known about Helen’s work with abnormals, but this adventure through time has been her first exposure to the creatures Helen cares so deeply about. They’d begun with vampires and escalated rapidly.
“You’re a time traveler,” Helen points out. They might tie on the title of strangest job.
Amelia makes a face. “Not intentionally.” She suddenly notices that they’re walking on a path that wasn’t there before. She points at the ground.
Helen follows Amelia’s finger, seeing the bundles of birch sticks that seem to outline a path through the trees. “Good, we’re getting close.”
They finish the walk in silence, not wanting to alert anything to their presence. Chains clang out, the metal echoing in the silent forest, and Amelia feels a chill crawl up her spine that doesn’t have anything to do with winter. A bonfire ignites with a crackle and a whoosh, followed by a child’s whimper, crying for his mother. They break out into a run.
Amelia turns off the path to loop around and sneak through the back of the small hut while Helen takes a direct approach to handle Krampus. She lifts a flap and ducks into the haphazard hut, and immediately places a finger over her lips when the children startle at her presence. Her German is terrible, limited to swearing and finding a bathroom, but children know when they’re being rescued. She quickly works to untie their bonds, slicing through the rough fabric with a knife. The smallest, a girl of barely five, clings to her leg. Amelia listens to Helen outside and whispers that it’s going to be okay.
“Let the child go,” Helen demands of Krampus. He’s holding one end of a chain, the other wrapped around a crying boy. She would shoot and knock the creature out, but the boy is dangling from a tree, precariously close to the fire and Krampus’ grip is the only thing keeping the boy out of the flames.
He snarls, baring his pointed teeth at her. The boy cries harder and he abruptly turns, focusing on his prey. Spittle drips from his tongue and catches in his beard. With a growl and a shake of the chain, he turns back to Helen, bucking his horns in the air.
Helen spies Amelia sneaking out of the hut with the other three children. She flicks her eyes to the boy and then back to Krampus, judging whether she could shoot and catch the chain in time. She doubts it; the tranquilizer will take a minute before it’s effective, and even if she caught the chain before the boy dropped too far, she has no delusions that Krampus won’t try to kill her before he passes out. A shadow in the tree catches her eye and she looks upward. She realizes her mistake too late.
The Krampus follows her gaze and shrieks at Amelia, her hands firmly gripped around the boy’s shoulders as she hauls him to safety. He runs at the tree, tail swinging furiously as he tries to reach Amelia and his dinner.
“Shoot it!” Amelia shouts, trying to unwrap the chain from the boy’s waist before Krampus can pull him away from her.
Helen aims and fires twice, earsplitting shots echoing in the empty forest.
“You did just fine in the tree,” Helen says, bringing Amelia a cup of tea.
Amelia thinks that someday soon she’s going to sneak out and acquire coffee from some time in the future that doesn’t have a shortage, and she’ll hoard it in a storage compartment in the time machine. But for now, tea will do. She scoots over, making room for Helen next to her on the couch. She sips at her tea and stares at the fire. “It’s not an issue of skill,” she says; she’s been climbing trees since she was a child. “It’s an issue of always being the one in the tree.”
Sensing that Amelia isn’t going to let this go, and that she probably owes her one for derailing their intended downtime with an abnormal that tried to eat Amelia, Helen nods. “The next two times we need surveillance, I will climb the tree,” she promises.
Satisfied, Amelia turns to her companion and smiles. “Merry Christmas, Helen.”
Helen clinks her mug against Amelia’s. “Merry Christmas, Amelia.”