hadn't thought of it in years. He had willed himself not to think of it, in fact; for that was where the bad things first began to happen and that was where he'd first met Black Peter. Oh yes, now that his mind was turning over the stinking depths of his memories, he remembered the terrifying dark figure with the hooked nose and the blazing red eyes.
The dark man had come late on those childhood Christmas Eves. He'd come with switches and cudgels, towing nightmares that overwhelmed the joy of the morning's paltry gifts - hand-me-down clothes and rough toys in generic paper and ribbons. The gifts hadn't even had names on them, just green ribbons for boys and red ones for girls and cryptic marks in the paper corners, which Matthias had figured out indicated the sizes of the secondhand shirts, pants, or shoes inside. Under the hands of some of his caretakers, bruises or horror had not been new to Matthias over the years. The small daily abuses, the neglect, the cruelty of children, and the worn-down rote charity of exhausted adults had made his young life too bleak for tinsel to rectify.
As he'd grown older, the whole holiday thing - his whole life - had become terribly depressing and the Season of Light had seemed shabby and dim. He'd gotten into fights, talked back to the nuns, and cheated on his schoolwork and exams - not just at Christmas but all the time. He kept himself warm in his anger at the world that seemed to hate him - it was better than the constant chill of fear and despair.
The year he'd pushed Lindsey Strathorn down the chapel steps on the third Sunday of Advent had marked his first visit from Black Peter. He'd only been reaching for her braids to give them a yank, but it had been too tempting to give a little shove instead - just a little shove. . . . He hadn't meant to break her arm - it wasn't really his fault.
The year he'd started smoking had been the last time he saw the bleak specter of the fiery-eyed man. He'd woken to the rustle of someone's garments in the dark and the thud of a stick against the bedpost. Matthias had jumped from beneath the covers and run screaming into the chapel, turning over the ranks of burning votives and cursing God and the nuns as he bolted out into the snowy Christmas night.
Wandering in the snow-drifted streets in his pajamas, he'd fallen in among wolves of the human kind and pushed his past aside forever, burying it in the darkest part of his mind, along with the death of his parents and the sight of the burning chapel.
At first he had been just the youngest predator in the human pack, but he'd fought and bit and clawed and gouged his way up until he met a bigger, meaner wolf than he was; an inhuman beast that still walked upright like a man. Maybe, he thought, it had been inevitable that he'd end up a werewolf. He hadn't minded. Actually, he'd kind of liked it and taken to it with ferocious glee. He'd had enough of being hungry and poor and hated for no reason at all. He'd be a wolf and he'd never be hungry or cold and no dark man would beat him. And if somebody hated him, they had good reason, and if they feared him - even as a tale in the dark of night - so much the better.
He'd rejected everything he'd learned from the Sisters of Mercy so thoroughly that he hadn't believed there was a Saint Nicholas. The fellow in the sleigh didn't look that much like the jolly fat man of American soda commercials and sidewalk collection kettles - more like the European figurine his German-speaking parents had put on the mantel - so who could blame him for not recognizing the man? Well, he wouldn't make that mistake again. Yet here the fellow was and he had the power to let Matthias fly through the air - if only for one night a year and in the company of bad-tempered reindeer who held grudges. He seemed to have a great many powers and that was interesting. Very interesting indeed . . .
They paused again on a rooftop made of moss-shagged wooden shingles. From below, Matt could detect the odor of sleeping babies and Christmas cookies with hot tea. He watched Kris