Someone came to the door now and inched back the curtain covering the glass. A face peeked out, its features vague and shadowy in the gloom.
The door cracked open, and a frail voice said, “Goodness.”
Taking that as a cue to begin, Allen stepped off the porch, and the youth group began singing “Joy to the World.” Their voices rang out through the darkness and cold, and their breath clouded the air. The door remained cracked, but no one appeared.
They had begun the refrain, “Let heaven and nature sing,” when the door burst open with such force that it shattered the glass pane, and a huge, hulking figure stormed through the opening and down the steps. Albino white and hairless, he stood seven feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds, but he moved with such quickness that he was on top of the group almost as quickly as their singing turned to shrieks of fear and shock.
“Joy to the world! Joy to the world! Joy to the world!” the big man shouted tunelessly.
The kids were scattering in every direction as he reached Allen Kruppert, knotted one massive fist into the startled realtor’s parka, and snatched him right off his feet. Holding him aloft with one arm extended, he shook Allen like a rag doll, yelling at him in fury.
“Joy to the world! Joy to the world! Joy to the world!”
Fists pressed against her mouth, Kathy Kruppert was screaming Allen’s name. Marilyn Winthorn was herding the kids back toward the vehicles, intent on loading them in as quickly as she could manage, her face tight and bloodless.
Allen was kicking and shouting, but the big man held him firm, continuing to shake him as if he meant to loosen all his bones and empty out his skin.
“Joy to the world! Joy to the world!”
It all happened in seconds, and for the brief length of time it took, Nest Freemark was frozen with indecision. Her first impulse was to use her magic on the big man, the magic that caused people to lose control of their muscles and collapse in useless heaps, that she had used on Danny Abbott and Robert Heppler all those years ago, that she had used on her father.
But if she invoked it now, she risked setting Wraith loose. It was the reality she had lived with since she was nineteen. She could never know what might trigger his release. She had discovered that three years ago at the Olympics, and she had not used her magic since.
Now, it seemed, she had no choice.
She shouted at the big man, striding toward him, small and inconsequential in his shadow. He barely looked at her, but his shaking movement slowed, and he let Allen sag slightly. He was all misshapen, she saw, as if he had not been put together in quite the right way and his parts did not fit as they should, some too large and some too small. He had the look of something formed of castoffs and leftovers, the detritus of the human gene pool.
Nest shouted harder, and now the strange pink eyes fixed on her. Screwing up her courage and tightening her hold on Wraith, who was already awake and pressing for release inside her, she hammered at the big man with her magic, trying to make him take a sudden misstep in her direction, to lose his balance and release Allen. But it was as if she had run into a wall. He shrugged aside her magic as if it weren’t even there, and in his eyes she found only an empty, blank space in which nothing human lived.
Nothing human…
He tossed Allen aside, and the realtor collapsed in a crumpled heap, head lowered between his shoulders like a broken fighter as he struggled to his hands and knees, Kathy racing over to kneel next to him, tears streaming down her cheeks.
The big man wheeled on Nest. “Joy to the world! Joy to the world!”
He came at her, and she hit him with another jolt of magic, eyes locked on his. This time he slowed, staggered slightly by the force of her attack. The kids were still screaming in the background, some of them calling to her to run, to get away, thinking she was paralyzed with fear and indecision. She stood her ground, watching as Kathy tried in vain to pull a battered Allen to his feet.