Christmas Carol & the Defenders of Claus Read online

  I had begun shaking, and not from the cold. Would I really be in danger? Would I vanish like my father? A girl may be a powerful thing, but this girl was scared out of her mind. Yet here was Santa Claus, the man who reigned over the season I loved, the guy I had fifty-nine versions of surrounding me in my room, here he was, asking for my help. How could I possibly say no?

  I stood up a little taller, trying to look brave, but terrified at what I was about to do. “Yes,” I said quietly. “I will join you.”

  Santa nodded solemnly. He didn’t smile. He reached out and touched my cheek with his fingertips. A warmth flooded through my body, like eating chicken noodle soup when you’re shivering from the flu. My fears vanished. I felt as alive as I had on the rink below. I wondered if this was how that sweet, old reindeer felt when I touched him.

  Mr. Winters put his hand on my shoulder. “We must go, dear heart.”

  Santa pulled his hand from my cheek and smiled. It was one of those sad smiles, the kind you see at a funeral where people are remembering something wonderful about the person no longer with them.

  “Take good care of her, Winters,” Santa said. There was a sternness to his voice, a general addressing one of his troops. “Start her training. When the time is right, we will bring her to the North Pole.” My heart thumped at the thought of that. What did he mean? Would I live at the North Pole?

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Winters answered briskly, and I almost expected him to salute. But he tugged gently on my shoulder. Santa gave me a quick wave, snapped the reins to his reindeer team and yelled, “Haaaa!” Off he flew, into the snowy night.

  Before we exited Rockefeller Center, through the glass doors looking out on the street, I caught a glimpse of movement, a passing shadow. Or I thought I did. It looked like the figure of a man, slinking in the night, trying not to be seen. “Impossible, dear heart,” Mr. Winters said when I told him. “No one can move.” I nodded, not putting up an argument. I no longer trusted what my eyes saw, not after the craziness I’d just witnessed. I was still dazed by what had happened. I had just had a conversation with Santa Claus! We made our way through the human statues on the sidewalk, back toward the ice rink. I glanced at my frozen uncle.

  “Why didn’t Santa just come to Florida to tell me all this?”

  “He wanted me to monitor you, to see if you had the proper amount of Christmas spirit,” Mr. Winters said. “The homework assignment was a small test of that.” He laughed. “Safe to say you passed. Then when you mentioned your uncle’s trip, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. And when I saw what you did on the ice, and how the Christmas spirit filled you …” He shook his head in awe. “Come, m’lady.”

  We hurried to the ice, putting on the skates we left behind. We skated past Amelia, back to where I’d fallen. Mr. Winters positioned me on my butt, just as I’d been before he’d stopped time. He stepped back, studying his work, and gave a nod of approval. He glanced at the hovering little girl I’d tripped. He lowered her out of midair until she lay on the ice. “This way she’ll slide, not fall,” he said.

  Mr. Winters put on his hat, pulling it low so his red-and-white hair was concealed. “Farewell, m’lady. I shall see you at Broward. We have much to do.” He turned quickly and skated off before I could ask what he meant. He waved his hand ever so slightly as he left the rink. The world exploded back to life. The girl slid past me. Skaters whizzed by. The snow fell. Horns and music blared. Amelia struggled to stay on her feet. I glanced up at my uncle, who pointed at his watch and waved me toward him. I looked at my own watch. It had been only five minutes since Amelia and I had taken to the ice. My uncle wasn’t keeping his promise. But I wouldn’t argue for more time. Little did he know, time was now on my side.

  CHAPTER 4

  Trained in a Freezer

  When time started again and Mr. Winters disappeared into the crowd, Amelia carefully skated over to where I’d fallen. I sat, trying to digest everything that had just happened.

  “Are you hurt?” Amelia asked.

  “No,” I answered. She helped me up.

  “How did … ?” she started to ask. “I mean, where did you … ?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Maybe I skated with my parents when I was little. And it’s like our gym teacher says, muscle memory.”

  “Your muscles must be geniuses.”

  I laughed. “Come on. My uncle’s waving for us to go.”

  When we got up to where he waited, he was strangely silent. He took us both by the hand and led us quickly through the crowd. As we rounded the corner away from the tree, I turned to give it one final look. Who would have guessed that the beautiful Norway spruce would be the least exciting part of my trip to Rockefeller Center?

  You’d think two days of walking around a toy convention with your best friend would be the coolest thing ever. But it got real old real quick. For one thing, we were the only kids there. And second, you couldn’t really play with the toys, and most weren’t even on sale yet so you couldn’t go buy them. And last, compared with flying on a reindeer and meeting Santa himself, the convention was a letdown. My mind was elsewhere—on Mr. Winters and my training, on possibly moving to the North Pole, on whether I was truly cut out to be a Defender—so the convention was ho-hum. But I didn’t dare tell my uncle we were bored. I just kept my mouth shut and tried to remember that we were in the greatest city in the world when we should have been sitting in class.

  On Monday, the final day of the convention, Amelia and I sat at the International Toy booth, bored beyond words. I was ready to go home. We had nearly finished our project, using pine needles, posters, photos, even buying souvenir props of the tree and Rockefeller Center to illustrate the whole experience. We planned on finishing during the plane ride home, and both of us felt certain Mr. Winters would be impressed with the “passion” in our work.

  My uncle was chatting with one of his suppliers when a small red-faced man came charging up to them. Had Gus not stepped in, the guy might very well have bopped Uncle Christopher on the nose. As it was, the man began screaming at my uncle, drawing stares from the dwindling convention crowd.

  “What gives you the right?” he yelled. “I built that company from the ground up.”

  Gus wedged himself between his boss and the screamer. My uncle stared at the tiny man with a blank expression. “It’s just business, Milton.”

  “It’s not business,” he screamed. “It’s my life!”

  “You’re a wealthy man now. We paid market value.”

  “I don’t care about the money, you jerk,” the man cried and lunged at my uncle. But Gus was a huge, burly guy whose muscles bulged through his tight shirts, and he held the man back as easily as he might a child. Two security guards pulled the man away. “I loved that company,” he screamed. “You’re heartless.”

  “It’s business,” Uncle Christopher repeated and turned away as the man’s screams faded in the distance. If any of this bothered my uncle, he certainly didn’t show it.

  Amelia and I watched in silence, looking at each other uncomfortably. I felt sorry for the man but knew better than to say anything. My uncle didn’t like to talk about his company with me. “Maybe when you’re older,” the Voice of Reason would say.

  But I thought about the man all day and continued to that evening on the plane ride home, as Amelia and I put the finishing touches on our project and my uncle worked at his desk. He would type for a while on his laptop, then lean back in his chair, picking up something I was surprised to see: a black rock, polished to a shine, with the International Toy logo—a capital “I” inside a circle—carved into it. He usually kept the rock in his office at International Toy, perched atop a tiny pedestal, like some sort of trophy. I picked it up once while I was waiting for him to finish work, and he nearly blew a gasket. “Put that down this instant!” he snapped. I hastily dropped the rock back on the pedestal, too hard, and the glass stand cracked. “Blast it, Carol! Must you destroy everything?” He took a deep breath, trying t
o regain his composure. He checked the rock for damage.

  “What is it?” I asked tentatively.

  He looked at me, his face as hard as the stone he held in his hands. “It was a gift. A long time ago.” And he would say no more about it. He had a new pedestal by the next day, and I never dared to touch the rock again. So it was surprising to see him holding the black stone on the plane, rubbing its smooth surface as he sat there lost in thought.

  Still thinking about the little man at the convention, I gathered my courage. “Uncle Christopher,” I said. He looked up from polishing the stone. “Thank you for taking us to New York. We had a great time.”

  “Yes, thank you, sir,” Amelia said. “It was an amazing experience.”

  My uncle nodded. “You’re welcome, girls. I hope you found it educational.” He carefully set the stone on the desk and turned back to his laptop.

  “We did,” I said, trying not to lose my nerve. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

  My uncle let out his patented give-me-strength-Lord sigh. “What is it, Carol?”

  I glanced at Amelia, who looked nervous. “Why was that man so mad at you today? Why did he say those things?”

  My uncle studied me and finally said, “Carol, dear, I really don’t like to talk about my business.” He picked up the stone once again, rubbing the “I” with his thumb. “But I suppose this can be a lesson in economics. The man owned a small toy company, which International Toy purchased.”

  “But it sounded like he didn’t want to sell,” I said.

  “He didn’t, but his shareholders did, and we forced the issue. They sometimes call it a hostile takeover.”

  “Hostile?” Amelia said, and I was surprised she spoke up. From the terrified look on her face, she was just as surprised. But Amelia was the most curious kid I knew, the kind teachers love. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a financial term,” my uncle explained. Despite his reluctance to talk business with us, I got the sense that he enjoyed recounting his triumph. He leaned forward and set the stone on the desk. “My company is in the business of making toys and beating our competitors. And to do that, we have to stay strong. Sometimes that means absorbing smaller companies.”

  “But doesn’t it bother you to see him so upset over losing his company?” I asked.

  My uncle showed just a hint of a smile. “That’s sweet of you, Carol, but you need a thick skin to run a company. Like I told Mr. Hoffman, it’s just business.”

  “But he said it was his life,” I argued.

  “Then he should have made his company stronger. You’ve studied Darwin in school? Survival of the fittest?” We nodded. “That’s the business world. Only the strong survive. It’s a cold hard fact, but that’s reality. Now, girls, I really must get back to work.”

  “OK,” we both said. I understood what my uncle was saying and how society was based on competition and all that, but I still felt sad for the little man and his lost, little company. “Can I ask one more thing?”

  “Goodness, Carol. What is it?” Impatience dripped from his voice.

  “What does his company make?”

  My uncle paused, and then his granite face hardened into a smirk. “You mean my company.” A chill crept up my spine. “Baby dolls,” he said and turned back to his laptop.

  Million-dollar companies, hostile takeovers, angry business owners, ruthless negotiations, all over baby dolls. My uncle, it was safe to say, was no Santa Claus.

  Mr. Winters and I stood inside the giant freezer in the school kitchen, our breath puffing out like smoke from a steam engine. I shivered, though that was mostly in my mind. I actually wasn’t cold, just freaked out that my training involved standing in a freezer, closing my eyes and “powering up,” as Mr. Winters called it.

  It had been only a day since we returned from New York (Amelia and I got an A+ on our project!), and my training had already begun. Mr. Winters hadn’t wasted any time, calling my uncle Monday evening and talking him into allowing me to start staying after school for forty-five minutes of “tutoring,” supposedly with two other kids. “OK, I fibbed about the other kids,” Mr. Winters said, “but not about tutoring. It’s just not math like I told him.” Uncle Christopher agreed to Mondays through Thursdays, when Gus picked me up, but not Friday, when he did. “Carol, dear, my schedule is very strict.” So there we were Tuesday, in the freezer, “powering up.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “You and I are made for the cold. We draw power from it.”

  “So I can just stick my head in a fridge and become all powerful and stuff?”

  Mr. Winters laughed. “Not exactly, dear heart. In fact, this isn’t ideal. Artificial cold is not pure. But it’s all we have, so we’ll make do.”

  “So if we were in snow and ice and cold, we’d get stronger?”

  “Exactly. Why do you think Santa lives at the North Pole? His power is strongest there, as is ours. We don’t live there all year round like he does—just for a couple of weeks before Christmas to power up so we can do our jobs.” I thought back to my father. I was too young then to really remember, but I felt pretty certain I’d never been to the North Pole. So had he gone up there by himself every year? I remembered him being home on Christmas morning, especially the year my parents gave me the carved Santa, so he must have finished his duties in time to get back. Now that I was training to be a Defender, did that mean I’d be at the North Pole every Christmas? For the rest of my life? And what would I do up there? It was all so weird to think about.

  “What’s the power for?” I asked.

  “Goodness, m’lady. I thought you would have figured that out by now. We help Santa slow time to be able to make all his deliveries in one night. But with fewer Defenders and more and more children, it’s getting tougher to complete his mission.”

  “How are you so sure I have this power?”

  “First off, it tends to run in families. And think about it, m’lady. The day you touched the reindeer, it was probably eighty-five degrees. So with no cold, no training, and no knowledge of your ability, you sent that animal skyward. You filled it with the Christmas magic that lives inside you. It was miraculous.”

  I sure hadn’t felt miraculous that day. I felt more like the idiot who destroyed the holiday festival and sent a hot-air balloon on a fifty-mile journey that ended with it landing on someone’s house and making the local news. “So what do we do?” I asked.

  Mr. Winters took my hands. His hair was black again, instead of red with the white stripe. (“A little magical dye,” he explained.) “Close your eyes,” he said. I did, feeling unbelievably stupid. “Do you sense the power?”

  I concentrated, trying to feel what Mr. Winters wanted me to feel. “Um, sort of,” I lied. Other than the warmth from his fingers, I sensed nothing.

  “Now open yourself up. Let that power flow into every pore. You did it in New York. When the snow started falling, I saw you transform. Your body knew you were in your element, even if your mind didn’t.”

  “OK,” I said, thinking back to the moment when those beautiful flakes touched my tongue and how alive that made me feel.

  “Open every pore to the power of the cold,” Mr. Winters continued. I closed my eyes and scrunched my face in concentration. But nothing happened. I don’t know about you, but I can’t control my pores. Not a single one. They seem to handle themselves fine on their own without me meddling in their affairs. I opened my eyes to see Mr. Winters just inches from my face, his eyes wide and staring. I screamed and jumped back. “Good gravy, Mr. Winters! Don’t do that!”

  “I was watching you.”

  “Two inches from my face?”

  “I’m sorry, m’lady.” He glanced at his watch. “Looks like we have to go.”

  “Just stop time.”

  “Our powers are not to be wielded unless absolutely necessary.”

  “Oh,” I answered, a little disappointed. Seeing everything come to a halt was pretty darn cool. “I’m
sorry I couldn’t open my pores, Mr. Winters. I tried.”

  He laughed. “That’s OK, m’lady. It will come. You just need to trust what’s within you.”

  He opened the freezer door, peeked to make sure no one was around, and hurried out. Gus would be waiting.

  Two more days of training and nothing. Zilch. No power, not even a hint of stopping time or the Christmas magic I supposedly had in me. “You’re trying too hard, m’lady,” Mr. Winters said.

  “How can a person try too hard?”

  “You’re tense. You need to just let go and trust what’s within you.”

  “Maybe it’s not within me,” I responded, feeling more and more depressed. “Maybe the reindeer was just a fluke.”

  I could see sympathy in Mr. Winters’s eyes, and I didn’t like it one bit. I wanted to be strong, to be a Defender. When they had first asked, I wasn’t so sure. But the more we trained and the more I thought about the person I would eventually become, the more it mattered that Mr. Winters and Santa thought I was special. I didn’t want to let them down. But here I was, not opening my pores, not stopping time, not finding the power I supposedly had so much of. Here I was just being plain old ordinary Carol Glover. “Maybe we’ve asked too much of you, dear heart,” Mr. Winters said. “Take the weekend and recharge.” I nodded, afraid I’d cry if I spoke. Mr. Winters gave my shoulder a squeeze. He opened the freezer door and ushered me out. “We’ll try again Monday.”

  On the way home, in the back of the limo, I’ll admit it, I moped, feeling sorry for myself. Gus looked at me in the rearview mirror. “What’s wrong, squirt?” He had called me that for as long as I could remember. I liked it, though I pretended not to, being almost a grown woman and all.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled. Gus is a great guy. He’s huge, as a bodyguard/chauffeur for a powerful businessman should be, but he’s really just a big, cuddly teddy bear. He always asks how my day went. He likes to tease me about boys, which, considering the fact that I find most boys totally gross, gives him a lot of material. He’s always there to listen. And on days when I’m “in a mood,” as he puts it, he’ll stop for something he knows I love but the Voice of Reason never lets me have. (“Carol, dear, it’s not healthy.”) Ice cream. I love ice cream. Maybe it’s the cold thing and my secret powers and all that, but I suspect it’s mostly because ICE CREAM TASTES AMAZ-A-LICIOUS! So when it was clear I was “in a mood” after my failed training, Gus said, “I know what you need.”