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The sleigh touched down with a shudder that ran through Nick's bones like a shockwave--his fingers, stiff inside thick gloves, uncurled from the reins with deliberate slowness. The reindeer snorted, their breath frosting the air in ragged bursts; even they seemed drained, their usual supernatural vigor dulled by the year's brutal demands.
Nick stepped from the sleigh, and the "jolly fat man in a red suit" persona, carefully projected and maintained by the North Pole PR department, faded, leaving a tall, weary, olive-skinned man who appears to be in his early sixties but is, in reality, almost seventeen hundred years old.
Mandla, Nick's right-hand man, and Pete, one of the team's healers, materialized from the swirling snow like shadows given form. Mandla didn't speak. He didn't need to. His presence was a silent command, a gravitational pull that steadied Nick before his knees could betray him. Mandla's warrior's hands, broad, scarred, impossibly steady, and Pete's, sun-warmed leather stretched over granite, closed around Nick's biceps, hauling him upright with effortless strength. "Looks like you and the Devil went 15 rounds," Pete murmured, the words barely audible over the wind.
Nick exhaled, his breath ragged. Ukraine had been a gauntlet of frozen trenches and makeshift shelters, children with hollow eyes clutching his sleeves in bombed-out basements. Gaza's dust still clung to his boots, a phantom grit between his teeth. And Sudan, Christ, Sudan, where the sleigh's thermal signature had drawn fire from warlords who didn't care if their bullets hit reindeer or refugees. He flexed his fingers, feeling the ghost of reins burned into his palms. "NORAD scrambled jets," he muttered. "Had to divert through Hudson Bay. Lost three presents to hypersonic
Beki's arrival cut through the gloom, her team moving with the precision of battlefield medics. She went straight for Donner, pressing her forehead to his heaving flank, murmuring in that ancient Magyar dialect that calmed even panicked steeds. The reindeer shuddered, nostrils flaring as her hands found the kinked harness strap, the one that had snapped over Kyiv. Behind her, the grooms moved like a well-oiled machine, unbuckling frost-stiffened leather, their breath steaming in synchronized bursts as they worked.
Klaus's team descended on the sleigh with the reverence of priests restoring a relic. His bare hands, immune to the cold in a way that defied physics, traced the starboard runner's stress fractures. "Scheisse," he muttered, thumb catching on a hairline crack that would've shattered mid-flight had Nick not compensated with that last-minute barrel roll over the Black Sea. The mechanics didn't speak; they didn't need to. Their hands moved in silent choreography, dismantling the rig with the care of archaeologists handling a holy artifact.
Nick's boots crunched through ice-crusted snow as he crossed the hangar threshold. His joints ached with the kind of deep, marrow-level exhaustion only centuries of these missions could carve into a man. Then he saw her. Maeve lounged against the doorframe, one hip cocked in that deliberately casual slant that never fooled him. Far from the "Mrs Claus" persona so carefully developed and maintained. The torchlight played across her collarbones, highlighting the sweat-slicked hollow where her emerald silk robe, too thin for arctic decorum, gaped open. Sea-ah stood at her shoulder like a living shadow, but Nick's eyes skipped past her. Maeve's smirk was a challenge written in a language only they remembered.
"Why isn't it ole' Saint Nicholas," she drawled, rolling the syllables like overripe fruit on her tongue. The Celtic lilt she normally tempered for diplomacy dripped thick as honey now. "Back from saving the world's good little girls and boys. Did you leave any coal for the politicians, or was that too generous?" One elegant hand fluttered toward his sweat-stained flight suit, hovering just shy of contact. The scent of her hit him then: peat smoke and crushed juniper berries, the ancient musk of their bed. His pulse jumped traitorously.
Nick caught her wrist mid-air. Calloused fingers slid up under her sleeve, finding the racing flutter beneath her skin. "You're wearing Yemen's entire myrrh harvest," he murmured against the shell of her
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