Secret Krampus 2014 Gift for andyousaidtruelovedidntexsist

An Angel Living In the Garden of Evil

Juliette was in her school library when it all began. It was a rainy Wednesday, nothing remarkable about that in Portland but she still remembers looking out the window at the white-gray sky, that wonderful Oregon kind where the sky is one solid mass of color and cloud. The rain was light and chilling, the rain which destroyed your curls yet did not warrant an umbrella - it just served to annoy.

7:20 am Wednesday Dec. 17th, 1954. A seemingly insignificant moment in time.

Some Tin Pan Alley tune crackled out of the radio at the counter while old Mrs. Garcia, the librarian, hummed along working on her card catalogue. Juliette turned away from the window and back to her assigned reading with a sigh. Moby Dick was not holding her interest at the moment.

The door opened letting in the ruckus of sound of the rest of the school and two men stepped inside, their eyes scanning the stacks seriously. Juliette frowned, from their dark fedoras to their large trench coats she could easily tell they were police - even if she could not see their badges. Their whole ensemble just screamed "detective". Assuming they were here for the punk loitering in the history section she went back to her book.

"Miss Silverton?" A deep voice intoned from the other side of the table.

Both men stood watching her seriously. One was tall with Romanic features and the other was a larger man with kind eyes and graying hair.

"Y-Yes?"

"Miss Silverton, you are Nicholas Burkhardt's girlfriend?" The taller detective asked. His gaze was hawk-like.

Something rather like dread pooled at the bottom of her stomach. "I was. We broke up last week."

The two men exchanged a glance.

"Please, what is going on? Is Nick alright?" Her ex-boyfriend, though being the golden boy of Jefferson High, had a tendency for trouble.

"Mr. Burkhardt hasn't been seen since last night."

At first the disappearance of star athlete Nick Burkhardt was the talk of the town. The hot gossip at every juke joint and drive-in in Portland, but as the days slipped into weeks, slipped into months, people moved on. Even the police had to. In a case with no evidence or body, just a 17 year old who left no trace behind.

Juliette did not find it so easy. Nick's face followed her into her dreams; she heard his voice in the wind that blew through the trees. He was everywhere and nowhere, her own personal ghost. And she imagined if he had anyone to haunt it would be her. He had no family beyond a dying aunt, whose attic he live in - and now she was dying all the faster for grief.

Nick's friends and Juliette were his only family outside of his aunt. He never spoke about his parents or anyone else. And now Juliette could never forgive herself if their last conversation was a breakup. She did not even want to breakup with him, they were going to get married the moment they graduated. It was all planned out, the tiny house, the dog, and someday a baby.

But something went wrong. Nick was hiding something, he became increasingly paranoid and she had no idea why. Juliette begged him to tell her what was going on, but he kept pushing her out. Finally, she realized that until he could trust her she could not marry him. And so she was forced to say goodbye. And it nearly killed her.

Detectives Renard and Franco thought this change must surely have something to do with his disappearance - to which Juliette agreed - but they could find no motive for it.

In fact, they could find nothing at all.

"Records for Marie Kessler and Nicholas Burkhardt only go back 7 years that we can trace." Renard told her one day, when she came in demanding answers.

"So everything he told me was a lie?"

Renard seemed to take pity on her. "Probably not everything, Miss Silverton."

It felt like her whole life had fallen apart. The man she loved was gone and no matter who she talked to, who she campaigned for help, she was no closer to getting him back. Juliette did everything she could think of from going over the evidence herself, bothering the police every other day, to establishing a timeline from Hank, Monroe, and Rosalee.

Finally the evidence came to her.

A girl with short dark hair, wary eyes, and boyish clothes was sitting on Juliette's front porch when she got home from school, four months and 6 days after Nick disappeared. The girl stood at her approach and Juliette froze with a sharp intake of breath. She knew that face, that half-wild look which glinted in eyes which where the wrong color.

This girl was so much like Nick that her mind swam with the implications of it. Surely this was some new apparition sent to torment her? Would Nick follow her for the rest of her life just as she now followed him? An endless circular pattern until the madness of loss finally overtook her once sensible mind?

The girl spoke, unknowingly quelling Juliette's eternal panic. "Do you love him?"

Juliette stared, sure she had misheard. "What?"

The girl looked her over seriously, dark gaze taking in her red victory curls to her yellow taffeta dress. "Nick. Do you love him?"

Somehow she knew better than to ask one of the million questions which were now screaming in her brain. Those answers depended on her answering this. "Yes." Juliette said firmly.

The girl nodded, clearly satisfied. "Then I need your help."

The club teamed with bodies and smoke, a bluish haze of dreamlike atmosphere - though no dream Juliette would ever wish for. A seedy nightroom for lost souls and folks looking for thrills in all the wrong places. She shuddered as greedy gazes scraped over her figure.

"Why would Nick come here?" She avoided looking at her companion because this whole thing was too bizarre.

Theresa Ruble Grimm, aka 'Truble', introduced herself as none other than Nick's twin sister and looking at the girl Juliette could not doubt it. She still wondered vaguely if this was all a remarkably vivid dream though. But Juliette did not think she would ever dream up a situation where she would be wearing a tight black dress in a nightclub owned by crime lords.

Because that was her current situation.

Truble's explanations thus far were brief and disjointed and beyond belief, mostly serving to get Juliette to come with her than anything else. According to her, Nick and Truble were the only children of Kelly Grimm, head of the Grimm crime family that controlled back alley deals from Portland to Singapore.

"He's here because he doesn't know not to be." Truble sipped her drink, blending into the room with practiced ease. Clearly this lifestyle was nothing new to her. "Either way he's not here exactly, this is just how we get to him."

Juliette tried to relax and follow suit. "What does that even mean?" She hissed out of the side of her mouth.

"You probably won't believe me." The other girl said with a darkly ironic smile. "That's why I had to get you here first."

"Like any of this is believable?"

"You know what two of the most common tropes in fairytales are?" Truble asked suddenly.

Juliette stared at her unsure where this was going, but the back of her mind raced through a thousand seemingly strange offhand comments Nick had made since she met him. Things like this which never quite made sense.

Truble almost seemed to know what she was thinking. "The offering of the first born son and true love's kiss." She said finally, taking another sip of gin.

The Grimm family got their power the old fashioned way - the really old fashioned way. They made a deal with Hell for it. More specifically, a Goddess of Hell called Adalind. And the price of power was simple: the first born son of every generation. As long as that continued the family's wealth would remain - fail and the consequences would be dire to say the least.

This cycle had gone unbroken for centuries until Marie Grimm decided to save her nephew. She took him in the middle of the night, changed names, and started a normal life. And she thought it would be enough.

Obviously she was wrong.

Escaping a Goddess was not so easy. Adalind took the boys on their 18th birthdays and Nick would be no exception. So the Family tracked him down and made him forget to run - they had picked up plenty of their own magic over the eons.

"There is a loophole." Truble told Juliette, who listened to this story in amazement.

"True love?" She raised a skeptical eyebrow, suddenly understanding why Truble wanted her in on this.

"If the son's heart is already bound by true love Hell cannot claim it."

"Say all of this is true - which I'm not saying … if that happens wont your family be ruined?"

The girl's face turned blank as a sheet of ice in winter, it was a look she had only seen once on Nick. It scared her then and it scared her now, but she - for some insane reason - trusted Truble like she did Nick.

"Let my family burn."

Juliette nodded slowly, her gaze lingering on a woman taking money from a man as she slid into his lap. "Alright, what do we do?"

The basement of the club connected to the Shanghi Tunnels. If there was a place Juliette could believe in magic it was down here, where every cobblestone seemed to hum, and every corner you expected to see a ghost lurking. Enough people had surely died in this place to bring boogiemen, or El Cucuy as her grandmother would say.

There were symbols painted on the walls, some she recognized as the Greek alphabet, and others she had no idea about. Juliette thanked the universe she remembered to slip her illegal switchblade into her purse before leaving. Though she wondered how much good it would do under the circumstances. This was all so far beyond her world, but there was no way Juliette was giving up. Nick needed her and she was going to do everything in her power to save him.

"Gods I hate it down here." Truble muttered, shining a flashlight down the dank corridor.

The light slipped over the dripping walls and turn of the century objects left behind by the men sold onto ships and women sold to the San Francisco sex trade. Juliette's own light stopped on a moth and mold eaten baby carriage in the dirt. She did not want to think what became of the baby and its mother.

"This way." The raven haired girl said urgently, turning into a different tunnel.

Flaming torches lit the length of the passage, like the set of some Hollywood film. More symbols were dabbed on the brick walls, while strings of herbs and bones crisscrossed the arched ceiling. The air grew colder the further they walked; it sank deep into her marrow making Juliette want to collapse onto the dirt. Her every pain and fear and anxiety came flooding back, chocking the breath in her throat and stilling the beat of her heart.

From the way Truble stumbled against the wall she could feel the power of despair too. The girl clutched at her chest and squeezed her eyes shut to regain focus. They had to keep moving. Juliette grabbed her hand and pulled her forward. The cold receded at the touch, yet she still felt shaken and sick. But she could move.

The tunnel opened into a room with a bed, a chest of drawers, and even a rug to cover the earthen floor. It was so incongruous that Juliette froze in the doorway.

"Nick?" She breathed.

He sat cross legged in the middle of the floor, thinner than usual, his dark hair a wild tangle on top his head. Nick's chest was bare, which normally would have made her blush, but Juliette was more focused on the symbols painted across his skin. They matched the walls.

Nick showed no reaction to their presence even when his twin sister dropped down and shook him by the shoulders.

"You really didn't think it would be that easy, did you?" Grinned a mocking icy voice.

Juliette and Truble turned to see a beautiful woman now sitting on the bed. Her hair was white blonde and hung down around her bare breasts. A skirt of smoke and shadow trailed from her waist to twist about her alabaster legs. Her whole porcelain body gleamed.

"Adalind I presume?" Juliette kept her voice hard and clear, despite her mounting fear. If this was truly a Goddess what chance did they have?

The woman smiled. "Oh, I like you." She was standing before Juliette before she even registered the movement.

Juliette found herself unable to move as Adalind inspected her carefully. No matter how hard she fought not even her fingers twitched.

"It seems a shame to kill something so fine." The Goddess said trailing a fingernail over Juliette's collarbone and down between her breasts. "Though I suppose I don't have to kill you, you haven't broken any deals."

Adalind flicked her hand and Truble fell to the ground beside her brother, who still did not move or blink.

"Don't worry she isn't dead. That comes later." Adalind turned her attention back to Juliette. "You do not have to take this path you know? I can give you anything, everything your heart desires."

Juliette tried to speak, to tell her to go back to Hell, but her lips could not move. Adalind smirked and the world dissolved into color and sound.

"How are we supposed to get it through the door?" Juliette looked from the Christmas tree to their house with concern.

"This was your idea." Her husband pointed out unhelpfully.

"We could put it through the window!" Their daughter cried excitedly, pointing to the large bay window looking out over their garden.

Nick laughed ruffling her hair. "That works."

"If you break anything you're dead mister." Juliette pretended to scold, hands on hips.

"Scouts honor, darling." Nick said cheekily, untying the tree from the car while little Rose ran to open the window.

Juliette went to help him, adding. "That would be far more reassuring if you were ever actually a scout."

They got the dug fur inside without losing too many needles. Nick got it set up with the help of Rose - whose "help" mostly consisted of the accompaniment of off-key carols. Juliette tiptoed to the closet and got a small gift out of the back while her family was distracted. She tried to keep the excited smile from her face.

"Merry Christmas." She slipped the small box into her husband's hands with a kiss.

"You're a little early." Nick grinned, confused.

"I couldn't wait." Juliette waved at him to open the present.

"It's an ornament!" Rose cheered, when her father pulled open the box. She was excited about everything these days.

Nick lifted up the tiny old fashioned baby carriage on a ribbon then looked at her wide eyed. "Are you?"

Juliette nodded, laughing at his expression before being pulled into a happy kiss.

"I'm going to have a little sister?" Rose tried to follow what was happening.

Nick swung her up into his lap, chuckling. "Or brother." He warned.

Rose made a face of distaste at that.

"I think this calls for a celebration." Nick took her hand and Juliette could feel her heart in her chest.

"Hot chocolate!" It was Rose's answer for everything.

"I'll go turn the stove on." She said untangling herself from the pair of them.

"I can get it." Nick volunteered.

She gave her husband The Look. "I don't want to celebrate with a call to the fire department."

Juliette started down the hall towards the kitchen when she caught sight of her reflection in a mirror. Her reflection was not smiling, there was no joy there only pity.

"This isn't real." Said the reflection seriously.

Juliette glanced back towards Nick and their daughter. She felt like crying now; she needed to get to the kitchen.

"They are not real."

"But they could be." Adalind appeared beside her reflection in the glass. "All of this could be real."

"How?" Juliette asked.

Adalind's smile widened too far and her eyes went coal black; empty, endless black. "We make a deal."

On the impulse of emotion and desperation, Juliette surged forward smashing her hands through the glass of the mirror. Every piece of the beautiful world around her shattered as well, piercing every inch of her skin and heart. She kept moving, through the pain and through the mirror, forward into reality. As memory and fantasy bled into each other Juliette flung her body free of enchantment and straight to Nick.

There was a scream and an explosion of light and sound as Juliette crushed her lips to Nick's. His lips were cold as carved marble and lifeless. Icy wind swirled violently around them cutting her skin, but Juliette did not let go. She clung to him, willing him back to life and back to her.

I love you. She kept repeating in her mind. I love you, wake up you idiot, I love you.

Finally, a pair of strong arms wrapped around her and Nick was kissing her back. The storm was gone and only silence remained around them.

She pulled back slowly, lips bruised, eyes red from crying, but she did not care. "Nick?"

"Jules?" He held her face in his hands for a moment, simply happy to see her, before glancing around in obvious confusion. "What the hell?"

"Exactly." Came Truble's garbled response as she sat up rubbing her head.

"Theresa?!" Nick stared at his twin like he had seen a ghost.

"Don't call me Theresa." She grumbled then looked to Juliette. "I take it my plan worked?"

She nodded to overwhelmed for much else.

"What plan?" Nick glanced between them. "Will someone please explain what the hell is happening?"

Juliette started laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks. She kissed him again happily. "I saved you."