Sanctuary (Roman's Chronicles)

1

Snow crunched under his feet. It spread in front of him like a glittering blanket, a foot deep, sheathing the vast plain he was crossing, and he sank a little with every step. Above, a night sky gaped like a hole in existence, a spray of stars floating in its black depths.

He didn’t know how long he had been walking. It felt like forever. He didn’t know his destination either. He only felt it, pulling him like a magnet toward the dark wall of colossal pines at the edge of the plain.

Step. Another step.

Bitter cold bit at his face. His nose had gone numb, and he could barely feel his fingers in his thick red mittens as he clutched the rope that was pulled tight over his shoulder.

He was holding a rope. Why?

It felt strange somehow.

He stopped and looked over his shoulder. An enormous fir tree lay on the snow behind him. The rope was wrapped around its trunk. Behind it, a long trail of rough snow marked his wake and rolled off into the horizon. He had dragged the tree for miles.

The field around him tore like a paper screen.

Roman opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling of his bedroom. His back ached. Things snapped into focus. The tree, the harness, the destination, everything made sense.

Fucking hell.

He sat up slowly, fighting soreness. His whole body protested, whining against the movement. Tomorrow was December twenty-fourth. The thought turned his stomach.

Being the priest of a dark god came with certain obligations. Obligations he honored with dedication and discipline. But a man had his limits. This was his. His god knew it. Roman was available any other time of the year, but from December twenty-third to December twenty-fifth he was to be left alone. Such was their unspoken agreement for the last seven years.

Roman didn’t expect kindness. Chernobog was the God of Destruction, Darkness, and Death, the Black Flame, the Final Cold, the End of Everything. Hoping for kindness would be foolish, and he wasn’t a foolish man. No, he had expected fairness. Chernobog, for all his many faults and temper tantrums, was unfailingly fair.

Roman stared at the rumpled covers. He had this vague but disturbing anxiety, as if he’d either forgotten to do something important or something vital had gone missing and he couldn’t figure out what. It irritated him to no end.

The foul mood was nothing new. He detested the end of December. Koliada, Christmas, Saturnalia, he hated every iteration of the Winter Rites, with all of their corresponding rituals. The entire season was a wash. He didn’t decorate, he tried his damnedest not to celebrate, and the only thing he did like about it was the food.

Roman threw the covers aside, wincing against the cold air. Naked as a newborn. Ugh. His crumpled pajama pants lay on the floor. He must’ve stripped in his sleep, because why the hell not? It’s not like it was the middle of winter and his house felt like an icebox.

He growled under his breath, got up, picked up his clothes—predictably soaked in sweat—and headed to the bathroom. He tossed them into the hamper, relieved himself, and went to brush his teeth. A big red welt crossed his chest, a souvenir from the rope. Great. Just great.

His reflection was looking leaner, too. Years ago, as he’d trudged through the wilderness half-starved, with a hundred extra pounds of gear on his back, next to other young fools in the same pixelated Army camo, he promised himself that when he got out, he would eat more and move less. Old, fat, and happy. That was the goal.

He was thirty-four years old now, and if he skipped a few meals, the flesh melted off him, leaving behind muscle and gristle, as if being in service to Chernobog burned him from the inside out. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up like his father, a gaunt old man with a perpetual frown stuck on his face.

He put on sweatpants, a T-shirt, and an old sweatshirt so soft and worn, it was threadbare. It felt familiar, and right now familiar was good.

It was a bad idea for him to be alone around this time. He’d planned on spending the holiday with Ashley, a lawyer with long legs and a fondness for light spanking, but Ashley was no longer around. He couldn’t really blame her. Sooner or later, they all ran.

His only other option was family. The thought made Roman shudder. They would be celebrating Koliada, the Winter Festival. The entire clan would be at his uncle’s house right now, getting ready for the monster parade and putting the finishing touches on the tree. The tree had been borrowed from the Christians, who in turn stole it from other pagans, but nobody cared anymore where it came from. Tomorrow night a noisy, happy crowd of Slavic neopagans would pummel each other in the ritual brawl, sing songs, then eat, get roaring drunk, and exchange gifts, while he sat there like a dark icicle, alone, wrapped in a swirl of human warmth but untouched by it.

Family would only make it worse. He would have to make an appearance tomorrow, and he would need to look upbeat and unbothered, because if he let what he was feeling show on his face, they would smother him trying to make him feel better. He didn’t want the attention. He didn’t want to think about it or talk about it. No, he had to look like he had his shit together, and that meant taking care of himself now and covering his bases. He’d build a fire to get warm, make some coffee, eat some good food, and sink into a book to live in someone else’s head for a change. He still had eggnog in the fridge and the cookies he’d baked two nights ago.

Gods, eggnog sounded good right now.

Roman shoved his feet into the Eeyore slippers his eldest sister had bought him last year and headed into the living room. He’d gone to sleep with a well-stocked fire that should’ve lasted until morning. Instead, a pile of ashes greeted him. If he were lucky, there would be some coals under all that.

Had he been born several decades ago, he would’ve just turned on the central heating. He’d have lived in a subdivision, his lawn ornaments would have been ceramic gnomes or cute animals, and he’d have had a comfortable, prosaic job, something like an insurance adjuster. But the world had suffered a magic apocalypse. Now magic waves battered the planet, coming and going as they pleased, leaving the skyscrapers in ruins, and continuing his family business meant a lifetime of servitude as the priest of a dark god…

He caught himself. That way lay dragons, and not the fun kind. He needed eggnog. Eggnog would make everything better.

Roman went into the kitchen. The long window above the sink presented him with a dreary view: a chunk of gray sky above a stretch of lawn, dusted with snow and edged by dark woods. His kingdom in all of its glory.

There would be more snow before spring. The magic waves had been getting stronger lately, and this year they brought unseasonable cold. The temperature had dropped into the mid-twenties last week and stayed there. Even during the mildest Atlanta winters, his house always got a little snow—it came with the territory. But now, with the frigid temperatures, a snowpocalypse was almost guaranteed. He had no doubt about it.

Eggnog and cookies, and then he would brave the outside and bring more wood in.

Roman swung the fridge door open. An empty jug of eggnog greeted him. He was sure it had been half-full yesterday. Did he drink it all and forget? He stared at it for a hot minute, but the jug refused to refill itself.

Fine. He would have coffee with his cookies.

He shut the fridge and turned to the island. Last night he’d left a plate of cookies on it under a glass hood. The hood was still there. So was the plate. The cookies were gone. Only crumbs remained.

“What the actual fuck?”

The house didn’t answer.

He lifted the hood and stared at the crumbs. A little sparkle caught his eye. He leaned closer.

Glitter. A little smudge of silver glitter on the rim of the plate.

Magic gave thoughts power. Faith was a form of thought, so if a group of people believed in a specific being with all their heart, it could manifest into existence. The more believers there were, the higher the chances of manifestation, and the more power the being would have. Faith endowed the Pope with his miraculous healing powers and spawned region-specific monsters based on urban legends and folklore.

However, sometimes the very nature of the imagined being precluded the manifestation from occurring because fulfilling it would require infinite power. For example, it didn’t matter how many people believed that a white-bearded man in a jolly red suit delivered presents on Christmas. For that manifestation to occur, a single being would have to be aware of every single child, assess their conduct throughout an entire year, create a toy out of thin air, and then deliver it simultaneously to every household with a child. The scale was too large, and the very faith that kept the legend alive ensured it would never become reality.

This was his bread and butter. His father and uncle, in a rare feat of cooperation, had literally written a book on it and called it The Santa Claus Paradox.

The chance that Santa Claus had manifested in his kitchen and stolen his cookies was absolutely zero. Besides, it wasn’t even Christmas Eve.

Roman tilted his head to the side. A second sprinkling of glitter sparkled at him from the edge of the island. This one had a dark brown smudge near it.

He skirted the island and studied the smudge. Blood. Roman passed his hand over it. Magic nipped at his skin. Human.

A human covered in glitter had crossed the minefield of magic defenses surrounding his house, broken in without tripping any of the alarms, drank his eggnog, ate his cookies, bled on his kitchen island, and then disappeared.

Honestly, Santa Claus was more likely.

Roman squinted at the smudge and bent down, putting himself on the same level as it. Another sparkle of glitter, on the other counter. A little swipe across the gas stove, a shiny trace across the counter, and a small, shiny pawprint on the left pane of the window. The locks on the window had been disengaged.

Damn it.

He growled, stomped through the house to the back door, yanked it open, and strode out onto the back porch. It was bitterly cold. A thin layer of snow covered the lawn. He had thought it was morning, but it had to be late afternoon judging by the shadows. He must’ve lost time dragging that damn tree across the field.

Roman scanned the grounds.

Thirty yards away, a pack of small, creepy creatures crowded a tall fir tree, decorated with random ornaments, pieces of tin foil, pinecones, red berries, moss, feathers, and assorted forest trash.

Roman’s left eye twitched. For a second, he simply stared.

Slavic pagan tradition was filled with small nasties, traditionally seen as evil or, at the very least, a nuisance. Little critters that ranged from annoying to sinister. According to the folklore, they stared from the darkness with glowing eyes, made weird scuttling noises on the roof, stole things, spooked the livestock and scared the children, spread trash when it was swept into a pile, bit people’s ankles, served as sorcerers’ minions, and generally created havoc. Collectively known as nechist—“unclean things”—they loved him with undying devotion. He’d given up on shooing them ages ago and now fed them kitchen scraps and chicken feed.

All of the usual suspects were here. His tame anchutka—covered in squirrel fur, with the body of a lemur, the tail of a possum, leathery wings, and the face of a nightmarish bush baby—stood on her hind legs, trying to hang a big red ball on a branch. The melalo, a plump two-headed bird, with one head dead and drooping to the side, clutched a bright blue feather in his beak and kept shoving it at the anchutka.

An assortment of kolovershi, ranging in size from a cardinal to a barn owl, flitted from branch to branch, tucking things in. Furry, with long ears that stood straight up, scaly limbs, and dexterous paws armed with small but sharp talons, they looked like some mutated versions of the Furby toys he remembered from his childhood, equipped with shining eyes and fuzzy wings. They had just shown up on his porch one night. Kolovershi served witches, and these were clearly orphaned, so he had taken them to his mother. She’d tried to place them with other witches, but they just kept coming back.

The auka, a Russian hamster-looking mouse the size of a possum with tan fur, tiny antlers, and a skunk’s fluffy tan tail, dashed through the branches, trying to wrap a long glittering garland around the tree. Kor, the one pet nechist he did not mind, was holding the garland up in his cat paws. A korgorusha, he resembled a black cat with an abnormally long, prehensile tail and trailed smoke wherever he went.

And finally Roro. Nobody knew what the fuck Roro was. She was fourteen inches tall, weighed about twenty-five pounds and stood on four sturdy legs armed with sharp, retractable claws. Her squished face looked almost cute in an ugly but adorable way, but her wide mouth was filled with razor-sharp fangs, and her body with its bunny tail was solid muscle. When she got going, she was like a bowling ball, wrecking everything in her path. Currently, she was dashing back and forth around the tree for no apparent reason. Reason, in general, wasn’t Roro’s strong suit.

As he watched, Roro hopped over something sticking out from behind the tree. A leg. A human leg in a boot.

Roman sucked in a deep breath. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The motley crew froze. The anchutka dropped the ball in the snow. Kor vanished in a puff of dark smoke. Roro slid to a stop and backed away, tall, fluffy ears flat against her head. The auka raised a small hand-paw and waved.

He marched off the porch toward the tree. The kolovershi squeaked and hid in the fir branches. The anchutka scuttled aside.

“What the hell is going on here?”

The melalo looked left, looked right, not sure what the best route to escape was, and then stared at him, terrified. Roman gave him a look.

“How many times do I have to tell you, you’re a Romani demon. Go be with your people!”

The melalo squawked and ran across the snow, diving under the tree.

“And you!”

The auka blinked.

“You’re not even a nechist. You’re a forest spirit. Why are you here? Why are any of you here?”

The auka waved at him again.

“At least have the decency to act contrite.”

He finally rounded the tree. An unconscious teenager hugged the trunk, curled into a fetal ball. Judging by the dusting of snow on his jacket, he had been there a while. A dark red stain spread over his jeans—something had either bitten or stabbed his thigh. Someone had stuck a Christmas wreath, no doubt stolen off some door, onto his head and shoved a little artificial Christmas twig with glitter and bright plastic berries into his exposed left ear. Tinsel wrapped his jacket, binding him to the tree. A small chunk of cookie stuck out from between his lips, smudged with glitter.

“Where did you get this human?”

Nobody answered.

He slapped his hand over his twitching eye, pulled the shiny twig out of the boy’s ear, plucked the cookie out of his mouth, tossed the wreath aside, grabbed him by the shoulder, and shook him.

“Hey kid?”

The boy’s eyelashes fluttered. He uncurled a little and Roman glimpsed a small black puppy in the curve of his body.

“You can’t stay here,” Roman told him. “It’s dangerous for you here.”

The kid’s lips moved. A little blood dripped onto his chin. He struggled to say something.

Roman crouched by him.

“Sanctuary,” the kid whispered.

“What?”

“Sanctuary…”

“Where do you think you are? Does this look like a Christian church to you? Do you see a priest’s collar on my neck?”

The kid’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he went limp.

Damn it.