father christmas, give us your money

in which Klaus & Damon save Christmas.


The compact car rolls out clouds of soft blue smoke, quiet rabbit-like formations which disperse into the violet-tipped night. The street is a muddled watercolor of sweet evening color.

They're parked outside of the Chestnut Street Antebellum, Caroline's two-story safe haven held aloft by four svelte pillars. They seem to personify her maxim: if you can't yet make it, reach. That is how you build a house, that is how you build a soul, that is how you build a life.

The six windows on the second floor porch bend like white-gated church archways, two by two, floor to ceiling in a neat row of welcoming white. The veil of night has settled over the clean prettiness, the prim glass and the even paint.

Each window is alight, gauzy peach with dim shadows moving behind long caped curtains.

"I can't believe you run this place by yourself," says Kyle, muted voice encapsulated in the pod of the car. He gazes over Caroline's shoulder, eyes tracing the fragile curve of the pillars.

Caroline smiles, eyes merry chips of colored glass, one cheek-length curl in a wide corkscrew from her bangs over her eye. "I don't know," the answer unfolds like the pink heart of a sulphur rose. "It makes me happy. I like the work, I like helping these girls."

"You're unreal Caroline Forbes," he says, looking back to her, the blue winter light and the lampposts, the soft hum of the Christmas lights strung around the delicate iron flowers on the gate. She is glowing, and he can't quite tell what it is, if it's the soft hint of sugared cheer in her eyes, the quivering vintage notes of Judy Garland warbling over the blushing radio, or the mint blue of her eyes through the dark. But something is there. Something drawing his heart to the rim of his chest, pulling a string on the sweater of his undoing.

She shifts, throwing her gaze out the windshield and back with a corseted laugh, bright like water over pebbles in a stream. And it's a warm hand on her cheek that she feels next, soft reverence in the cupped palm, like someone shielding a flame from the wind. "Caroline," he breathes, leaning closer.

Her breath warms at the edge of her lips, the soft dove sigh gathering wingspan behind them.

The moment is slaughtered.

A subzero scream, the sound cracking through the humbled night like lightning tattooing over skin, like splinters aching over a frozen lake. She can hear it ricochet through her mind like coins dropped into copper. The shock of it burns through her nervous system, taking root in her feet and singing loud enough to stir her stilled blood. Her entire body burns for one unclean second.

"Oh my god," divines Kyle, pupils dilated and swimmer's shoulders taut. His hand is on the seatbelt, ready to pull it aside, but Caroline snaps her white fingers over his wrist like a shell over a pearl.

"No, Kyle," she orders. "You go home. Don't come back unless I call you."

She is out of the car a second later.

Maybe once she would have mingled for that second in regret, wishing she could have finished the conversation another way, spending the moment otherwise, telling him just please remember what a good night I had tonight, tacking it onto the edge of everything she never got.

But instead she is speeding around the gate. She leaves herself behind like a person leaves a coat on hook by the door, and right now, her dead heart is saying nothing but go—

Her hair is a haloed mess of wide bending curls, her white sweater jumping above her knees like waves do, sparkles sewn into the fabric and winking at the silvered moon above.

"Girls!" she shouts, senses like a weathervane to all that may be amiss. Her vampiric gifts press her bones into strips of argentine speed. The hammering in her head is wide and loud, fear under her fingernails, snap dragons and primrose pulverized into bled dye as she whirs over the garden and around the side of the house.

For a split moment she gathers the scene before her, a woman pinned into the frame of the house, a man's fingers forked around her throat and the stench of bright metal, an outpouring of it which seizes her like an officer, confines her senses to a cell of iron and spidering rust. They spin into a kaleidoscope of thick delirious sanguine.

Caroline breathes. Her eyes close, and through one concentrated moment she makes herself a path. The temptation is a Dead Sea tidal wave, crashing in slow motion, curling like a beauty queen's before a mirror. She visualizes herself walking through its parted form, blood and salt forgotten, dark water falling at her feet like vines to a machete.

She recognizes the power of the craving, respects it. She kneels under the weight of it, penitent but perseverant, and roots her mind to the physical, planting it with sharp pine she can smell through the house vent, anchors her senses on the scent of violas and Iceland poppies in the windowbox.

She tears the man to the ground, Caroline's eyes are as furiously red as the poinsettia which blooms violently in large bundles on the porch. Her fangs hang like sabre teeth out from her bleeding gums and there is a written rage in the delicate pink manicured thumbs, a tiny rhinestone imbedded inside the polish, hooked firmly around the veined neck of the aggressor.

"Oh god," she laments as the adrenaline is cured by her metabolic physiology. The light clears and the anger fizzles at the edges like snapped wire. The set to her jaw softens and the bone structure of the man beneath her leaves its indelible imprint. "Stefan, what is wrong with you."

"It's not Stefan," he growls, fighting against her with a rude jerk.

"Yes," she steadies. "It is."

"Get off of me," he snarls, unrefined edges in his words like someone using a knife to cut through things as delicate as paper. The rectangular angle to his jaw is hard like a skyline, so much different than the Southern Baptist soul within. His eyes are piqued with black and his fangs are tearing into his bottom lip as his spits through the words.

Caroline sighs.

She snaps his neck.


Caroline is leaning in the doorway of the restored kitchen, off-white granite counters and beautiful wooden hutches holding crystalline glassware. Her back is to the great room, with his yawning fireplace and salmon pink rug, beige Queen Anne settee and long birch waiting table. "Alright ladies," she announces to the girls sitting around the table. "Curfew," she sings the word out calmly, gesturing with one quiet finger to the clock above the far door.

Her announcement garners a few tolerant sighs, but the young vampire women file in a neat line out of the kitchen.

"Did Stefan kill that girl?" asks Amy, her eyes are surrounded by the smoky char, red hair as straight as the path to hell. Amy is Caroline's favorite student.

"Is she going to be alright?" questions another, Sasha with the mocha heat of her gaze, fingers curled into a scarf set with soft white snowflakes.

"No one is dead and yes, everyone is going to be alright," Caroline answers pointedly, shepherding the girls into the foyer and up to the boarding rooms. Her voice is clear, like crystal chimed together at a toast. "Speaking of which! I think this is the opportune moment to revisit our lesson on crisis Bloodlust Control. We'll discuss our opinions at First Meeting during breakfast tomorrow. I want bullet points—"

"Good work, Amy," comes the derisive comment from another student as they round the curved staircase.

"I'd love to snap someone's neck," she responds.

"Hi Stefan!" calls the smallest of the girls, the flock is peering from the stairway, seeing his exhausted form rising on the settee.

Caroline flutters her hands like a butterfly, ushering them into their ascent with lifted brows that breach no argument. Turning back into the sitting room, she approaches the weary body of her friend.

The warmth of the Christmas tree, trimmed in white and red ribbon, beats in the in the corner of the room like a heart. Firelight coruscates against his back, lean torso like a stack of bricks for all the weight it carries. The glow settles over his skin in warm plates of armored orange and tawny maroon, a breastplate for Apollo who has stumbled into night. His headache is burning straight through the muted quiet in his ears, like someone lighting a match over invisible fumes.

"Thank you," he exhales tiredly, taking the hot mug from Caroline's hands as she folds into the chair across from him. He is all right angles, thin hard lines, unforgiving ninety-degrees. Every corner scoffs at the possibility of softness, not built for relief, not destined for gentle curves or mistakes never to be made again. The guilt on his face could start a religion.

Caroline has known Stefan too long, has loved him too right, a friendship comprised of the same twine used to hook vessels to the docks on the eve of storms, so she waits. She doesn't press or read into the shadows which linger, that lay flat like large leaves over his eyes. Caroline lets people speak for themselves nowadays.

Her eyes wander to the girl Stefan had brought to the property. She lays on the other couch pressed across the line of windows. The woman is sleeping soundlessly, a warm wool blanket pulled over her to protect from shock as she heals. Stefan thinks the warm blanket looks like a sheet pulled over a dying patient stuffed into a tent during war.

"I have no idea what came over me," Stefan expresses, looking up, mug framed in the star points of his fingers. His eyes are wide like chestnuts, green like the grass over Lafayette, grown over something dead and so all the more bright. "God, I am –" he glances over to the woman lying beneath the wool, enshrouded by the light from pinked tree light, and back to the floor. "I am so sorry I brought this here, I thought I was over these… episodes."

"Stefan," Caroline swoops, palm cupped over his knee like a starfish. "First of all, you've been under an absurd amount of stress lately. Secondly, the girls love you and you make a hell of an Exhibit A for a moral lesson plan, and third, I said come to me, didn't I?" Caroline shakes her head as if the answer couldn't be more obvious. "Not – run screaming murderously into the hills so I can watch Love Actually for the thousandth time in peace."

Stefan cracks half of a smile – but it's the good half, the cup half-full kind of smile. "It's a good movie, though," he admits tiredly, nodding as if he wore the shame like blanket, but it was a blanket nonetheless.

Caroline pulls a lace smile in return, delicate, but intricate. The fondness in her gaze is inexpressible but bold, sharp and black like the wings out from her neat eyeliner.

"Do you want to talk about how it happened?" she asks.

"How it happened?" Stefan postulates. He shakes his head briefly, gazing to a middle distance on the far wall. "All I remember is that I was drinking outside at Sadie's, you know how they have that veranda? And there was this – really nice waitress— and then the band starting playing Run Run Rudolph by Richards and before I knew it I totally blacked."

Caroline stifles a grin.

"I am a terrible person, aren't I," he decides, falling back into the couch, looking to her for confirmation.

"Maybe a little," she jokes, warmth and honesty in the undertone.

Stefan closes his eyes.

"Hey," she interjects before his thoughts can swallow him like the streets of the quarter to a tourist's dollar bill.

He opens his eyes, brows popping tiredly.

"You look so much like Lexi right now," he observes, before she can say anything of her own.

The image of her standing with her date-night curls, wide rings of gold expanding like wide dandelion past her shoulders, the set of her shoulders and the outline of her body in the eggshell white doorframe. It's like a picture to match the one hanging on the walls of his memory. There is a reverence in his tone, an appreciation for people like her. Like Caroline. "She used to own a place like this, you know."

Caroline's brows come up, "Love, Stefan. That's the point."

She mimics the words Stefan told her ages ago and it brings a smile to the eyes which are ringed with fatigued black. His mind smokes, warm and certain like a locomotive at the start of a track.

"When I first turned— I came with Damon from Mystic Falls. We were more or less run out with torches. I'll take the credit for that one," he huffs humorlessly, clothespin pinch on his nose and voice. "It was our first train ride. We ended up in New Orleans and Damon ditched me at the platform after I ate about five women in coach." The memory colors in shades of red. "Lexi took me in, made me promise to behave myself," he smiles a bit. "Except her tenants were half as polite as yours. And I hope, for your sake, you don't have any uh, blood –"

"Bloodoholics?" Caroline pipes with a small smile. "No I don't think, for my sake, that I do."

Stefan nods, the gratefulness for that fact alone readable in the thin bend of his body around the warm cup, vampiric frost kicking as he curls himself around it like a body over a fire in a barrel.

"Are you staying the night?" asks Caroline as she stands, the tassels of the blanket clinging to her pant leg.

"If you charge, I'm flat broke," says Stefan amicably. There is still a hopeful note to the unyielding seriousness of his expression.

"Consider it an early Christmas gift," she answers. "You can cap me on New Year's Eve."

"Now I'm really in trouble," she hears his answer fading behind her as she walks into the foyer, turning the sitting room light off, leaving the breathing bloodshot glow of the tree on the walls. "—are you really sure you want to leave her here."

Stefan's fingers are paused over his shoelaces, his eyes strung to the woman under the wool like a lasso, his would-have-been victim. He looks like one of the stained glass windows at St Anne's, Caroline thinks, skin transformed in cardinal red and white, dark shadows like slices of onyx.

"You're not gonna eat her, Stefan," says Caroline.

The vertebrae of his neck fold, and the straight shadow lines show him staring at the floor.

"I'm sure because you are," she answers, and she sees him blink at the words against the dark.


TEMPTATION

It's an assault to his senses, the sound a stupendous crack against his tympanic membrane like the rolling throes of war rhythms struck out by the Confederate drummers in the 1860s. Stefan remembers hearing the marching drills from his second floor window at Veritas, his childhood estate which was once lauded the Belle of the Countryside by the Richmond Enquirer. The windows where shoved open to their gums, yawning wide into the summer wind, applegreen grass as far as the eye could see and forest, he could only imagine, down into the very heart of the south without the sweetest interruption.

Stefan remembers the feeling of sun through the glass, clean warmth like water that came from a well. He remembers the high-pitched notes of war flutes hopping on the wind, tunes he hasn't quite forgotten, like they have always been playing since.

Stefan had leaned in the window, boyish body in the crook of the white walls, hair falling over one eye like a lick of caramel straight from the pot, and the breeze was virgin, all of it new, filling his lungs like God did in church.

He saw the tiny figures of blue confederates lined up like berries on a branch, the riot of smoke bursting from the rifles in a straight and serious line.

That is how a gentlemen fights, his father had said over dinner, explaining the nuances of civil battle without any of the irony. There were shadows on the walls, candles burning oil marks onto the paper borders come in from France, fig pudding in silver casserole dishes. Damon had been rolling his blue eyes.

The phrase had been stuck in his head for a century and a half.

It had made him smile then, watching the soldiers mark their drills from the estate, imaging Damon down there, Damon somewhere in that row of boys. Back when he didn't know what war was and he didn't know what Damon was. Back when Damon had been fast and sure as an arrow, permanent as ink. Back when only a medicine man could read his older brother, he was like smoke from the fire, you burn, and he'd follow.

Damon had joined the army on a whim, left on principle. Father had scoffed his son had gone in a loyalist, came out a deserter – that war shows a man's stripes, and Damon's were nothing but circles.

Stefan had caught the frozen cold in his brother's eyes, the stilled breath behind the navy silk vest, had for that reason joked across the long mahogany leaves of the table, That was Salvatore legend, not fact.

The guests had smiled appeasing and beet-faced, drunk off champagne, cheeks like apples that had rotted at the trunks of orchards, makeup like slime in the candlelight. Their sons fell on the frontlines, but they were thankful for Stefan babyfaced Salvatore and his lighthearted jokes, an upstanding boy, and father's glower had softened at the quip. Stefan remembered smiling too big for his face. He had drunk far too much.

But Damon was already gone when he looked over to see if he'd melted the frost.

TEMPTATION

The beat rings out in his head again, the same violent crash from before.

This time it is all too real, the drum-smacked warsongs are bleeding into his closer consciousness, the image of his brother fades into splintered photograph yet again, and the sound remains like dropping steak knives into a room full of balloons. It is the fireworks over Mystic Falls and the boisterous boys who ransacked the streets, parading with loud boots and cheering with grapefruit mouths, singing on the war to end all wars on the day it was announced that they would fight their bastard brothers to the North

Stefan didn't have a bastard brother that year.

He couldn't relate.

He gasps— choking on lack of air as if he needed to breathe, choking on air itself as if he didn't, startling into wakefulness, eyes adjusting to the room bloodied by the rubicund Christmas tree, the embers in the fireplace, the sleeping woman on the far couch.

The blanket is pulled over his chest, his heart slowing like it contracts through molasses. He hears the sleeping breath of Caroline above, smells the lavender on the sitting room pillows, senses the girls in their rooms, shuttered behind the dim night.

His presses bare feet to the wood.

There is another sound. Woven like a thread into the tapestry of silence, a noise on the edge of hearing, some grating note that leads him to the front door. It's a grand fixture, heavy off-white wood looking grey in the dark, ruby light from the tree spilled into the hall behind him like gallons of party punch.

Approaching the door, the scratching gets louder, more defined. More present.

He opens it with a harsh pull on the hinge, eyes widening to huge discuses at the sight before him.

"Noel?"

It's a cat-like creature, person-sized, black as if etched from coal and indeterminable in shape as if it were smudged through blackened ash. It's bent in deformed ways with tarantula spread limbs, searching yellow eyes that fixate on him immediately. It opens its mouth, and screams a hiss into the doorway, saliva bursting through what seems like dozens of teeth bent in every direction. The monster vanishes almost as soon as it's seen, as if repelled from sight itself.

There is an X scraped into the porch the size of a body.


"What the hell is a Pear No L?" asks Damon, winding around a frantic mother holding the gloved hands of two screeching children.

He walks through the chapped winter chill and enters the clear doors to the Rink, a mall neighboring the shopping district of Carrolton. His voice is cocooned by the wide walls, the tiled corridor leading to a stupendously extravagant gold-laden tree that touches the heights of the ceiling at the central artery of the mall. The walls are draped across with huge swaths of red velvet, unforgiving white lights manufacturing the highest degree of genetically-modified Christmas cheer, the speakers snowing Nat King Cole's White Christmas through the crowded delirium. Along with the echoing screams of children fighting for dominance over registers ringing themselves into an early mechanical grave, it's a regular sugarplum overdose.

"Père Noel," Klaus corrects viciously. "Have you no capacity for worldly understanding at all or are you just willfully ignorant?"

Klaus is licked in black, the heavy coat coming to mid-thigh, black fur surrounding the collar and nuzzling into his bones. Damon has yet to find a sufficient reason to change out of his leather jacket.

"I lived in Montmartre for a pinch at the turn of the century but I can tell you right now I didn't do much talking," he grins smarmily at Klaus' back, walking past several lighted rows of holiday advertisements, coughing unhappily at a perfume kiosk, swiping a blue scarf from another. Tucking it around his neck he elaborates, "It was more .. je ne sais crois, ménage-a-trois, voulez-vous couche avec moi? Ecetera…"

Klaus growls, overlooking the crowd and walks onward, going pointedly for the Mall Directory.

"Okay, okay," Damon says, catching up behind him. "Look, I'm sorry I offended your delicate sensibilities. I know you're saving yourself for marriage."

He stops, watching Klaus move a hand wordlessly through the crowd of huddled shoppers. Their eyes are darting across the map, entirely unknowing to the fact that death mingles among them, more concerned with the 25% off sale or the hand-wringing stress of the gift for the impossible to please mother (he can relate). He traces the departments and finds one option in the lighted text that pleases him. Matching its location onto the adjoined diagram, Klaus leaves the lambs to wordlessly search out their own financial poisons.

Damon opens his mouth to make a comment to that effect.

"Do you like pretzels?" Klaus asks.

His mouth closes.

Klaus turns to the right, walking without further comment and Damon jumps two steps in his boots to fall into stride. The pretzel stand is at the far corner of the hallway. Damon looks askance, catching the sight of merchandise flying off the shelves, literally in the case of one child whipping a boxed toy at his mother's head in the Discovery Store, women in bright lipstick selling fuchsia-colored blush to cracked faces that dream of youth, the all-too-expensive looking mattresses made from Tempurpedic Foam.

Looking up seriously at the menu, Klaus' skin reflects the fire hydrant red of the font. Damon's brows bend perplexedly, watching the hybrid, and then he does the same, eyes skimming the selection.

"What," demands Klaus with a flat tone, hands in his pockets, brows sunk unamusedly.

"It's just weird as shit seeing you do normal things. Hasn't anyone ever told you that?"

"No."

Damon makes a delayed laugh, smile spreading out like frosting from a knife. He smacks Klaus' shoulder with a wide appealing arm. "That was funny, Klaus."

"Never touch me again."

Damon's hand pointedly finds his jean pocket.

Sitting on the edge of the corridor median, Damon violently assaults a faux poinsettia which insists on jutting one insistently pleasant sparkled leaf over his coke. Klaus is next to him, knees wide and both forearms heavy over the dark jeans. He is chewing quietly, ancient eyes half present and half dismissive of the twenty-first century carnival playing out in the mall before him.

It has always been like this, whether in the raucous outdoor markets of Jerusalem, the claustrophobic crowds and vendors of West Africa, the violent docks of the West Indies, the suffocated neediness of the shoppes of Piccadilly, the filthy material districts of Mumbai – people consumed. They celebrated and they consumed. They celebrated to forget they ate themselves from the inside out. It was a type of delirium. They lived so fast and ate to bursting. They wanted to consume and he wanted to consume them.

Crimson holly berry entrails, gold screams and the pleading oils of fear and excrement, that was his Frankincense and Myrrh, blood and sorrow, and oh how he loved to kill.

"Visions of sugarplums dancing in your head?" asks Damon, staring at Klaus' grim profile.

Klaus' eyes are dark, like a wolf in grass. He doesn't move.

"Look, I would have paid for the pretzels if you're gonna be all weird about it."

Klaus looks over to Damon, "Sometimes it occurs to me that you are alive only for the saving grace of being the last person anyone on this extensive planet would want to keep company with."

Damon's grin is taut and resilient like a tent that bears the wind, "I'm going to put that one in the win column."

Klaus wordlessly takes Damon's coke, bites through the straw at the first inkling of protestation and drains the cup, pulverizing it to sunken paper as he sucks every ounce of it through the rim. "Get up," Klaus demands, standing up and hauling his counterpart to his feet with a violent fist in his leather jacket.

Damon is dragged for about four feet, but then falls into step with Klaus as they continue to the West wing of the mall. Klaus heartlessly smacks a peppermint-scented lotion out of a saleswoman's hands when she tries to offer them a tester. Damon turns with an inkling of empathy but his eyes get caught on the woman's stockings before his heart can go anywhere else, and they stay momentarily on the black seams which run up the back of her legs when she bends down to pick up the fallen item.

"Okay, Jolly Saint Nik, gimme the lowdown, clearly we're not here for the bargain hunting," Damon interjects on their military march.

"Père Noël," Klaus begins, gesticulating with his arm as he walks straight into a child that is spinning aimlessly in the middle of the hallway. "Is, as many may think, a legend, a bedtime story used to mollify petulant children – like Rebekah – into good behavior in exchange for material gifts. I think Elijah and I came up with the concept around the cusp of the seventeenth century."

"You and Elijah made up Santa Claus?" Damon's face screws up enough to be Picasso.

"No, no," Klaus clarifies, the wire-thin humor in his voice tinny and bright. He is taking wide, striding steps through the corridor. "We merely gave a name to a supernatural creature that already existed within the confines of our new homeland of early colonial Louisiana," he rasps with dramatic arches.

Damon's brows sink into one another like quicksand.

"Of course, over the centuries, our story was expanded upon, elaborated into an innocent fairytale, propagated under the guise of a grotesquely obese cane sugar addict with magical powers that would serve the greater purposes of Industrial America and divide the family unit at the seams all the while perpetuating the false notion of familial bond itself," Klaus raises his brows, frankly impressed. "Almost offended I didn't think of it."

"Okay," Damon drawls, eyes squinting discerningly over at the crowd of impatient parents who are waiting in front of an elaborate theatre set for their children, who never once look up from their iPads, to take a picture with the down-on-his-luck mall Santa. The one Damon just saw scratch his balls behind the velvet curtain. At this point in his eternal existence he is set to believe anything – especially while drunk. "What's the real story?"

Klaus stops, looks over to him, his grins unfolding like sand falling away from a tomb. "Père Noël is a cursed creature, hexed by a Voodoo Queen to an eternity of servitude and slavery. So it's been said, the damned Caliban was once a selfish and parsimonious land owner who was drowned, salted, dehydrated and resurrected after denying the Queen's son a promised halfpenny for the honest services of carrying his wife's cumbersome, and extravagant, holiday packages from town to his plantation."

Damon's lip curls.

"Henceforth he was cursed to emerge from the grave on the Eve of the Christian savior's birth, a legend famed for his holy charity, and thus tasked to seek out the doorsteps of good children – forced to leave coins from his hoarded fortune, toys, or sweets in return for their praiseworthy behavior."

They near the end of the corridor, the department store at the end screams an open mouth of sterile white boxed with a menagerie of colors. It's a nauseating carousel of decorations, bells, boxes, clothes and the front lines –the ladies' made up counters – grinning like the maw of some new hell in the sparkling holiday distance.

Damon leans closer, acid in the cut of his jaw. "You're saying some anti Joy to the World jerky-dried freak broke into my brother's five-and-dime? What, is he addicted to the mistletoe?" Damon asks, the prospect sounding more ridiculous the further his sentence goes on. "I thought he was cursed to be nice?"

Klaus stands under the single flickering fluorescent light in the overhanging panels of the corridor, putting a hand over Damon's shoulder, a weight which could buckle him if he let it. "That my friend was not the creature Noel."

"Then who was it," Damon demands, bright eyes slimming under the pitch black thorns of his lashes.

"Père Fouettard," Klaus responds simply. "His sinister counterpart burdened with chains, destined to accompany him, a blackened hideous creature as if it were boiled in flame and spared death only to live on in the eternal agony of the scorched aftermath."

"How positively merry," sneers Damon.

"Père Fouettard marks the houses and shops of those to be gutted with X's scraped into floorboards with its bloodied claws, coal marks left in the places where it dragged its charred body. Legend has it the same Voodoo Queen cursed the landowner's better brother, generous and true-hearted though he was, to enact her eternal murderous vengeance against those who she saw fit to eliminate from her realm. All to spite the rich and selfish man who showed his callousness towards life in one off-handed gesture."

Damon squints.

"Quite a beautiful symmetry, actually," says Klaus. "It's my favorite time of year."

"So there is a psychotic, supernatural, cursed Slim Jim trying to take out Stefan for some old crooked Voodoo nutjob?"

"Christmas in New Orleans, mate," Klaus smiles his innumerable teeth, fangs glinting for split moment.

Damon's brows crash like a head-on car accident. "What do we even do about that?"

"We go and talk to her!" Klaus exclaims cheerily. He puts the knowing hand back on Damon's shoulder. Damon gives it a skeptical leer. The hybrid is looking up through his brows in the most appeasing way, his head tilted down in generously nonthreatening belittlement. "You forget, mate. I know everybody who's anybody in this town."

"Fine," Damon spits impatiently. "Where do we find this weirdo?"

Klaus drops his grip on Damon's shoulder, cupping his hands behind his back. He grins a little, looking over to the horrid open chasm of the huge Macy's, every overdressed window glaring blinding white light through to the onlookers of the mall, hypnotizing with violent reds and Midas gold, lines from every cash register zig-zagging mindlessly through every artery of the store.

"At the Lancome counter," he answers cooperatively, brows peaking.

Damon squints, turning towards the store. "You have got to be kidding me."