Nick laughed at the looks of outraged pride on their faces.
"Fancy yourself too good for this job, eh?"
When neither dared give him a truthful answer - Yes! Duh! - he leaned close enough for them to learn that yellowed teeth didn't smell good. "Any one of my reindeer is worth a thousand of your sorry dead carcasses." Then, laying a finger upside of his nose again, he pushed into the front door of the first hut, and said over his shoulder, "Watch out for the wild dogs. They'll disembowel you faster than my sled can fly." And with that he was gone . . . only to pop his head back out again. "You do see the problem, don't you? These huts don't have what you could call a proper roof, so I can't land up there. I have to park in the street. Which leaves my reindeer vulnerable to attack. That's why you're here. It's the only reason you're here. It's the only reason you're still alive. Protect them." He didn't mention they were there to be convenient scapegoats if killing the dogs got any werewolves riled up. "I had nothing to do with it!" he could claim. "It was those damned heartless young ones."
Then he was gone into the hut again.
"Why do I ever listen to you?" Serge wailed.
"Shyut up. At least it's warmer here."
They took up positions at either end of the sleigh with its huge harnessed animals: Serge took the Rudolph end, because the red nose gave off a rosy glow that he could read by - he was on War and Peace, in the original Russian, for the eighth time. Pasha hopped up to sit on the back of the sleigh while they waited for Nick to pop in and out of the huts that had put refreshments out for him.
Rudolph heard it first: the howling.
The big beast's ears perked up.
His red nose quivered. He snorted. He stamped the ground. Behind him, the other reindeer moved restlessly in their bridles and harnesses.
Serge stepped back and called quietly to his cousin, "What in the name of all that's holy was that?"
She was triangulating: her howl, their howls and barking, and the village where she knew it was all converging. If she hadn't been so frightened for them, she'd have been excited beyond words. Beyond words. That had been her life with them. Feeling loved, taken care of, taught, trained, encouraged, protected . . . and then nudged out on her own. She had to leave, because she was a female. In a wild dog family, only the dominant pair mated - the Alpha male and Alpha female - so the other females had to go off in search of their own new band, which would be made up of brothers who had broken away from a different parent pack.
That wasn't possible for her, of course.
She wasn't dog, she wasn't wolf, she wasn't human.
She was mutant, hybrid, half-breed, monster.
She'd been unbearably lonely without them.
Slowly, over the years, she'd grown accustomed to living as a human who rarely shape-shifted, and then only to protect the endangered. Now they were endangered. Beyond words. That was also why she couldn't have warned them ahead of time. In their brains, there was memory and there was now, but there was no future. There was no way for her to say, Don't go there.
North of the village the dogs came . . . running, running, howling . . .
Close enough to see their quarry - the huge succulent beasts so conveniently tethered and tied down - the dogs slowed, scattered, circling the village, surrounding it, crouching low as they secured their positions, hair rising on their necks, primed for attack, listening for signals, for danger, for the moment when they would all rush forward . . .
Silently, they moved, and then, muscles bunched, they waited until . . .
As one, as if the pack were one body with one brain, the dogs attacked from every direction, muzzles back, teeth bared, lunging toward their kill.
The reindeer, restrained by forces stronger than leather, shuddered in their halters and yokes, but they were not helpless. They were enormous, with murderous hooves and teeth, and jaws that could grab a dog and crack its head even as it was flung to the side. Between them and the dogs, on either side, Pasha and Serge were the ones who looked helpless, until their eyes glittered and their teeth showed. They, too, could grab and tear; they, too, had superhuman strength beyond anything the wild dogs possessed, the two vampires making up in strength and viciousness what they lacked in numbers.
The townspeople slumbered under the spell of Christmas Eve.
"No!" Ingrid cried, as she raced toward the village.
Massacre seemed laid out in front of her. Her family wouldn't stand a chance, mere natural predators against unnatural ones. Long, thick white wolf fur streaming behind her, she thundered into the midst of them, snarling, growling, pushing her own family out of the way so she could protect them from this force they could never understand.
She hurled herself toward the vampires at the heart of the fight.
Blood and fur flew all around her.
There were cries of pain, roars of fury.
And then a space cleared, and two bloodied but unbeaten vampires stared at this new attacker who was like none of the pack they had seen yet.
"What the . . ." exclaimed Pasha.
"Werewolf!" screamed Serge.
She pulled back into her haunches, primed herself to launch at them, pushed off with her great strength, and was airborne when the door of the nearest village hut flew open and the Old One stepped outside. He yelled at Serge and Pasha in a voice that quaked the ground around them, "Forget the dogs, you idiots! Don't let the werewolf get Rudolph!"
Ingrid shape-shifted while in mid-lunge.
Before their eyes, the white wolf changed into a nude and shapely young woman with red hair instead of white fur. The shift altered her speed, allowing her to hit the ground with her bare feet, right in front of the astonished vampires. As they lunged toward her throat, she crouched to pick up her knapsack that had fallen. With it in hand, she shoved between them, and then ran alongside the reindeer before the vampires could recover in time to keep her from going where she was aiming. The Unsaint figured it out first and screamed at Pasha and Serge to catch her, but they were all too late. Ingrid grabbed the reindeer halter she was seeking and with one great burst of strictly human power hauled herself up and astride of . . . Rudolph.
"Get off of him!" she heard the Old One yell.
Her answer was to pull her silver hunting dagger from her knapsack and to point it toward the jugular vein in the reindeer's neck. Rudolph, raised with vampires, barely registered the light weight of the woman on his back, and merely shook his reins a bit. Ingrid did not know why her foe was so determined to protect this particular reindeer out of all of them; she just knew that whatever the reason, it might be the leverage to rescue her family from him.