Wolfsbane and Mistletoe Page 0,108

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.

Her family!

The dogs had pulled back, at first frightened by the huge new fighter who had appeared, and then nearly hysterical with excitement as they recognized her. Out of respect for her greater size and power, all of them, including the female and male heads of the family, remained standing where they were, waiting, allowing her to take the lead. Their wounded crawled toward them, bleeding into the dust, whining with the pain of their terrible injuries.

A silence descended on the strange scene.

The Old Vampire didn't move from where he stood near the sleigh, but just quietly asked her in his deep voice, "How did you know?"

He sounded genuinely curious.

He also sounded as if he were humoring her, trying to calm her down so that she wouldn't use her knife.

"Dead reindeer," Ingrid said, wryly, from high on Rudolph's back, "don't show up in Africa all that often, Santa Claus." She pronounced his name with scathing sarcasm. "And reindeer this size don't show up anywhere unless they're supernatural. Besides, I'd always suspected - "

"Don't tell me. Because I work nights and live forever?"

"That, and your red suit." Ingrid pointed to it with her knife, then quickly pointed back at Rudolph. "That was a stroke of genius."

The Old One smiled, a facial change that made the dogs quiver with the desire to lunge and kill. Ingrid looked into the eyes of the dominant male dog and then the dominant female dog to tell them to control their pack.

They understood her.

Young dogs who needed nipping got nipped.

Nobody charged anybody. They stood in a standoff while young werewolf and ancient vampire confronted each other. Slowly, he took a few steps toward her. Careful steps, barely perceptible steps that a human with normal senses and eyesight might not have noticed.

"Yes, I thought it was inspired," Nicholas agreed, with no modesty.

"But why the white beard and white trim?"

He sighed. "I know. So stupid. Easy to hide blood on red, impossible to hide - much less get out! - on white. It was all red to start with. My hair, my beard, the fur trim. All red. Then the damned illustrators got hold of the legend, and turned me into a fat, ermine-trimmed fop."

Ingrid straightened her posture, and looked at him: yellow wolf eyes staring their challenge into old, cold vampire eyes.

"I'm not going to let you kill my family," she said.

"Your family?" He laughed, sounding nothing like the merry old elf of lore. Like her, he was suddenly alert, all banter gone. "So that's it. So that's why you defend them like this. You warm-blooded monsters! You should take a hint from those of us with nothing left to lose."

"Except - "

"My life?" He laughed again. "You think I'd be sorry to lose that?"

"No." She pricked the reindeer's neck, enough to draw blood, and yet no blood ran from him. At the prick, the beast flicked his monstrous head back toward her, displaying a gleam of a tooth like a rapier. Suddenly, at the sight of it, and no sight of blood from the wound, Ingrid understood the importance of this animal. "Not your life."

"No!" Nicholas roared. "Not Rudolph!"

"You fly away," Ingrid threatened him, "or I kill him."

"I've