New Faces, Old Bones

by RLeeSmith

It's true: Freddy Lives. And Ana Stark soon realizes that she can live with knowing that. The pizzeria has become her home, and Freddy and the other animatronics have become her family. But there are still plenty of other secrets left for Ana to discover, some of them buried below the pizzeria itself…and the worst of them wants to be found.

73. Chapter 73

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

There is no time quite as difficult to kill as the few hours that stand in front of something you really want to do. Ana might never be much of a Christmas person, but getting out of the pizzeria after so long on lockdown felt like the best Christmas present ever. It felt so good in fact that she couldn't entirely trust it. She went to Freddy at three more than half-expecting him to refuse to let her go, or worse, that he would send Foxy with her again and add the complication of keeping him from seeing who was picking her up to her list of problems, but Freddy not only handed over her keys straight away, he also handed over some cash.

"What's this for?" she asked, taking it.

"I thought you might like a little spending money. I remember there being a small market of sorts attached to the event. If nothing else, perhaps you and your friend might like to go out afterwards and get something to eat."

All of this was true, but the assortment of bills he'd given her amounted to over five hundred dollars. As she stared at it with a crooked smile, he gruffly asked if it was enough—a reminder that even if he'd been selling pizza and Fazbear merch literally all his life, he was so far removed from the rest of the world that money was little more than a word to him and he had no idea what it was worth. Once she'd assured him it was enough for dinner and maybe even a soda, she went back to her room long enough to grab her fancy red dress and the ridiculous clutch purse that went with it, and then out to the big truck, where she found Freddy already waiting in the passenger seat.

"Dude," she said. "It's not a costume party, and even if it was—"

"This would be in extremely poor taste," he agreed, indicating his face. "You were planning to make a stop at the quarry first?"

"Are you kidding? It's broad daylight, Freddy!"

"Do you want to argue with me or do you want to get in and take us to the quarry?" he asked. "I'm not the one with plans tonight."

She took him to the quarry, where he did all the work and refused to let her do anything except open the door. After the last load was pitched and sinking to the bottom of the old mining pit, he came back to where she sat trying not to fume. She rolled down the window, ready for the lecture on not tiring herself or staying out too late, with maybe a 'no close-dancing and no hands below the waist' thrown in for fun. Instead, he gave her a Percocet.

"Not before six," he told her sternly.

"Not at all, if I can help it," she agreed, dropping it into the purse. "I do not need the entire town watching me pop a pill. You're not…I mean, are you coming with me to the house?"

"No. I need to get back to the restaurant and you need to be on your way. I confess I have some morbid interest in seeing the house where…" He trailed off, brooding, then flicked his ears and looked at her with the ghost of a smile. "The home you once offered me. But, if you'll forgive me, I'd rather not. I suspect it would be painful." He took a step back and gave the truck a pat, like it was a horse that could be nudged into a trot. "Go on. Have a good time. Text me when you're on your way back so I know when to expect you and then come straight home."

"You got it, big bear."

"Drive safely."

She left him in the rearview mirror to trudge back to the pizzeria without her, and she drove on up the mountain without him. The solitude she thought she was craving did not sit easy with her. She turned on the radio, fidgeting through her preferences, but none of her usual stations gave her anything good and she shut it off again, punishing herself with silence.

The house was a mess, of course. She thought she could remember cleaning up the front room on Monday, but then again, she hadn't remembered telling Foxy to switch trucks or bringing the metal detector back, so her memory could not be trusted, and anyway, the old soda bottles and chicken bones scattered literally everywhere spoke for themselves. Fortunately, she'd planned on spending a lot more time at the quarry back when she thought she'd be dumping junk on her own, so thanks to Freddy's help, she had enough extra time to at least bag up the garbage without cutting into her shower time.

She gave herself the full spa treatment with a side of wound care and when she was rubbed down, lotioned up and rebandaged, it was time for makeup. Concealing her injuries was not an option; the best she could do was cover the bruising and do what she could to make her future scars look less red and angry. With a little mascara and a lot of unconventional shading techniques, she even managed to get both eyes to look semi-symmetrical again, so that was good. Now she could focus on her hair, not to mention the huge black zipper carved into the shaved side where her hair used to be.

Even with the help of half a dozen deceptively simple-looking YouTube tutorials, it took way too long, but at last she managed a passable side braid that brought some of her hair around to completely cover the ravaged half of her head, letting the rest spill in a loose fall over her bandaged shoulder as well. It was messy and looked even messier after she put her dress on, but she'd used up her extra time and still had to raid her aunt's closet for shoes.

On the bright side, Aunt Easter was the sort of woman who believed in having a shoe for every occasion, whether you actually got around to wearing them or not. In the spacious master closet were dozens and dozens of pairs, maybe more than a hundred, with her aunt's favorites put away in the revolving tower while all the rest were stacked in their original boxes all along the back, forming a wall hip-high. There were shoes for every season, from summer sandals to fur-lined winter boots, in every possible style and color, all neatly packed away in their own boxes so they couldn't be crushed or scuffed in storage. There were wedges and sneakers, thigh-highs and booties, mules and clogs and sandals, which made it all the more surprising when Ana still couldn't find a decent pair of dress shoes. Here was a pair of strappy stilettos that would have been perfect except they were eye-fuckingly purple. There were the black T-straps with a broken buckle she didn't have time to fix. The d'Orsays were red, but way too tall and Ana was unsteady enough on three-inch heels, let alone eight on a built-up pointed toe.

This was getting ridiculous. There were Guccis, Jaggars, freaking Sergio Rossis…and nothing she could wear! In mounting frustration, Ana grabbed up the next box and nearly tossed it aside without opening it. Too light, had to be empty, but something in there rattled, so she was getting desperate, so she checked anyway, only to discover three mint-in-package Batman action figures: Bats himself, Nicholson's Joker and Pfieffer's Catwoman.

She stared at them for a moment, nonplussed, before it dawned on her that the box wasn't even for a pair of women's shoes. It was for a boy's pair of sneakers, size 6. And with that, she realized she had just discovered Aunt Easter's secret Christmas stash. The perfect hiding place. Little Ana would not have dug through a bunch of boring old grown-up shoes looking for sneak-peeks at presents and would not have noticed this particular shoebox was wildly out of place among her aunt's other shoes. But now that she was looking, she couldn't help but notice there were a bunch of other boys' shoeboxes tucked away on this side of the closet.

And a few girls' shoeboxes, too. Aunt Easter had never bought her shoes, only given her David's hand-me-downs, but she guessed there were plenty of empties to be had behind the shoe store and it made a great way to keep track of who was getting what, since her and David's interests were so similar.

She didn't have time for this, but what the hell. Ana pulled one out and opened it up to see what Aunt Easter had been planning to give her for Christmas.

A 12-inch poseable Jack Skelington figure in his own coffin-shaped box. Cool.

Okay, she really didn't have time, but she opened a few more anyway, stealing wistful peeks at Christmases That Never Were in the form of Jurassic Park velociraptors, nerf guns, the doll-headed spider-thing from Toy Story and a remote control racecar that probably had a differently-colored rival somewhere in the boy's-shoeboxes. And right as she decided she really had to get back to the actual shoe search, a box at the very bottom caught her eye—a box distinctly different from all the others. A box for men's dress shoes, size 12.

There was only one man in Aunt Easter's life.

She pulled it out, unsure if she wanted to open it or not. The box was heavy, too heavy to hold lacy lingerie or furry handcuffs, although a solid-gold dildo wasn't out of the question. Wincing, fully expecting to get an unwanted glimpse of her aunt's sex life, Ana opened the box.

A battle of Macallan single malt Scotch whiskey. Twenty-five years in the barrel, according to the label, unopened here another twenty-five, easily.

She didn't know how long she knelt there, reading the label without really seeing it, not thinking, scarcely aware of anything except how suddenly dry her mouth was. It was the kind of nightmare time that was simultaneously a blink and an hour, but it ended in the ringing of her phone, shrilling at her from inside that stupid little clutch purse which was presently in the middle of the empty room behind her.

Ana closed the lid on the bottle and shoved it back into the darkest recesses of the closet, scrambling out to answer it with her dress hiked up to her hips so she couldn't tear it. Faust.

"A courtesy call," he greeted her. "Knowing as I do the dimensions of your home, I feared the car's horn might prove an inadequate alert. We are turning in the drive as we speak."

"Shit," she said, and by providence, said it at exactly the same time as a man's voice on Faust's end said, "Holy shit!" in a much louder tone.

"Manners," said Faust, just in case the other voice hadn't been perfectly recognizable already. To Ana, apologetically, he went on, "I do beg your pardon. I'm afraid I didn't catch that."

"I said, 'Sorry,'" she lied. "I was just going to say I'm not quite ready yet. Is that Chad?"

"It is. I hope that won't be a problem."

A loud snort and some not-so-subtle muttering invited Ana to take her best shot, but she merely said, "Not unless he makes it one. I'm a bygones kind of girl. Be right down."

"In your own time, Miss Stark. They won't start without me," he assured her and politely signed off.

Ana threw some more shoes around, focusing her efforts on those boxes most likely to actually have what she needed, and ended up staring at some black silk slingbacks with the toes practically crusted over in shiny chips that were unlikely to be glass. She didn't like it. She already felt like she was flirting with the edge of throwing money in people's faces, people she knew damn well were having trouble making ends meet in a dying town, and even more than she didn't want to balance on those pencil-thin heels, she didn't want to stroll in there with half a year's worth of mortgage payments in the form of diamonds on her feet like a walking embodiment of Let Them Eat Cake tone-deaf dickitry. She wasn't worried about getting outed by the dress. After the first couple digits, you were only paying for a label and nobody would ever see that label but her. Diamonds, now. Diamonds had their own clout.

'You could walk in there in your steel-toes and piss someone off,' she told herself in Rider's no-horseshit voice. 'So go big or go home, pony, but get your thumb out and go.'

Right.

Ana tossed the empty box back in the closet and took the stilettos with her, running downstairs and out the door into a clear winter's night, bare feet flying over the stone walkway to the waiting…limousine?

The driver, a stout, stone-faced woman in her silver-haired years, was waiting at the back for her and offered a hand, which, in the kind of gleeful hindsight that would no doubt haunt her on sleepless nights for years to come, Ana belatedly realized was probably to take her shoes for her so she could catch up her dress when she got in. Stupid Ana saw an open hand, shoved her shoes and purse under one arm, and shook it.

"Mad respect," she said sincerely. "You got a limo up here?"

"Roads are pretty clear," the driver grunted, scowling in a flattered manner as she turned away to get the door.

"Yeah, but those turns can be a headache no matter what time of year it is." Ana got in, unavoidably flashing a little leg and a lot of cleavage as she bent over. Faust was already politely inspecting the trees on the other side of the far window, but Chad got a good eyeful and he probably wanted her to catch him ogling, wanting to enjoy her discomfort. She could feel his eyes like sticky little hands, but he was not the first nor the worst person to ever mentally grope her and she didn't care. It was her first night out from under Freddy's over-protective thumb and she was determined to relax and have fun, even if it was just the town Tree Lighting thing.

"Sorry about the wait," Ana said cheerily, settling into the heated leather seat beside Faust as the driver began negotiating her way out of the long driveway and back onto the narrow mountain road. "Time got away from me."

"Time always does, in that house." Faust turned away from his examination of the gloomy landscape and, after a moment, nodded awkwardly at her. "It is, as always, a pleasure. Would it be inappropriate to say that you look much improved from when last I saw you?"

His question raised no internal alarms. She'd been feeling so awful for so long that it simply did not occur to her that the last time he'd seen her, as far as she knew, had been in his house just before she left for Yoshi's, when the worst she could have possibly looked was a little stressed and short on sleep. But she didn't think of that, then or ever. Instead, she ran an approving eye over him and said, "You're looking good yourself, old man."

It was the truth. She'd never seen him in truly formal formalwear (although his day to day wear was a considerable cut above casual attire) and he wore it so naturally now that it was almost difficult to imagine him in anything else. It wasn't a tux, as she'd somehow known it wouldn't be. For a man so ahead of his time in so many respects, Fredrich Faust remained old school in the matter of his dress. Tailcoat, check. Freshly ironed slacks, check. Shoes shined to mirror-like luster, check. All black, of course. The only pop of color on him was the glimpse of his pristine white shirt with high starched collar closed by an immaculately knotted black ascot over a brocade vest in a festive shade of red almost the same color as her dress. A tasteful assortment of masculine accessories—pocketwatch, cufflinks and gold-tipped cane—rounded out his look. If he'd been riding in a horse-drawn carriage instead of the stretch limo, he might have stepped right out of a Victorian woodcutting. Tall and gaunt even when sitting, all straight lines and deep shadows, he made a picture-perfect Scrooge, but without the stamp of bitterness or disdain in his brooding features: Ebenezer after his ghostly visitation.

"No top hat?" she teased. "I'm devastated."

Expressionlessly, he dropped his hand to the seat on his other side and produced one, to her unaffected delight. It wasn't like she'd never seen a top hat before, and this one didn't appear any different whatsoever from the one Freddy wore every day, except that it had a shiny red band around the base with a sprig of something tucked inside. Pointy green leaves and bright red berries. Holly.

"Very dapper indeed," she said as he returned it to its place on the seat beside him. "How's the leg?"

"As well as can be expected, under the circumstances. My physician says I've had a miraculous recovery, so I feel as though I can't complain. I shall have to adjust my standards of what I consider to be an acceptable level of discomfort and inconvenience."

"You're supposed to say, 'fine,'" Chad drawled.

Faust looked back at him, then at Ana, frowning. "Was I?"

"No," she said firmly. "You're supposed to tell me the truth. I wouldn't ask if I didn't care about the answer."

"Nobody likes a kiss-ass," Chad remarked, affecting boredom.

"Oh, I don't know, you seem to be doing pretty well for yourself," Ana replied. "How's it going, Chad?"

His smile thinned. "Fine."

"Hi," said a soft voice and abraca-damn, there was a woman sitting next to Chad.

"Oh hi!" said Ana, startled. "Shi—uh, wow, I didn't see you there."

"Forgive me," Faust interrupted smoothly. "Miss Stark, allow me to introduce Miss Stephanie Stannick, my home nurse, conscripted into duty tonight as my grandson's companion. Miss Stannick, my…my very good friend—"

Chad snorted.

"—Miss Ana Stark."

"Call me Stevie," said the other woman, blushing as she offered an uncertain hand for Ana to shake. She tugged at the bottom of her sweater—a cream-colored thing with a rolled neck and poinsettias embroidered around the middle—worn with a cranberry colored skirt that sat two inches below the knee and some suede knee boots that had seen a lot of wear. "I like your dress."

"Thanks," said Ana, adjusting the sleeve like it itched. "It's flash as fu—uh, heck, but you throw a couple hundred dollars at a dress and you wear it anywhere you can, right?"

Faust ran his gaze impersonally along the dress's silhouette, glanced at her, and looked out the window.

"So what do you do?" Stevie asked, now covetously eyeing the shoes as Ana fought them onto her feet.

"Nothing at the moment," Ana replied wryly.

"Meaning, she got fired," Chad added.

"My boss and I had some disagreements over how much time I needed to recover from some injuries," Ana agreed, indicating her face with a dismissive wave which Stevie answered with a medical professional's polite nod of acknowledgement. "So now I have all the time."

"Sorry," said Stevie.

"It is what it is. Something else will come along. But for what it's worth, I was general labor for a contracting company here in town."

Surprise bloomed large across Stevie's face. "Chad said you were in construction! I thought he was teasing," she added with a self-conscious laugh. "You sure don't look like a construction worker!"

"I do in my work clothes," Ana said mildly. "Yeah, I'm usually in construction, but when I'm not, I take what I can get. I've done a lot of weird things for a paycheck."

"I'll bet," Chad murmured.

"Anyway, it's just as well that I'm not working right now, because I'm also grounded," Ana said lightly, ignoring him. "Which has been a fun new experience for me. Have you ever been grounded, Mr. Faust?"

"I have not. But I have worked for the military, so I feel I can sympathize to some degree. Indeed, I dare say I had a rougher go of it, not merely in terms of the duration and restrictiveness, but also for the fact that those who oversaw me did not do so out of concern for my well-being. I imagine that makes a difference. Will you introduce me to your friends tonight?" he inquired. "I am so looking forward to meeting them."

"They won't be there."

"Are they not local? I had the impression…Forgive me, I don't mean to pry."

"You're fine," Ana assured him and hoped she could leave it there. Although, she'd lied to him before and gotten away with it (maybe), she didn't trust her chances of doing it again when he wasn't on heavy opiates. But he was still watching her, puzzled and too damn perceptive, so she said, "They don't like this town very much and…the feeling is pretty mutual."

"I fail to see how that should signify," said Faust. "Other people do not wish to see me at these events. Nor you, I dare say. And that is precisely why we attend. To capitulate to the petty dictates of those who seek to close us out does not soothe their feelings, it validates them and provides an incentive to push back harder against us."

"Yeah, well, I don't think they care what people have to say about them, but they can be…oversensitive about the things people say about me. And since someone is bound to say something, them being there is just a fight waiting to happen. It doesn't even have to be something really bad! If they were here right now—" She smiled pleasantly at Chad. "—your teeth would already be on the outside of your face."

Chad tried to scoff, but she kept smiling and he found something interesting to stare at out the window.

After an awkward silence that lasted long enough for the limo to come all the way out of the mountains and pick up speed on Old Quarry Road, Stevie blurted, "It's funny, I thought I saw some driveways, but I didn't see any other houses up there."

"There aren't any," said Ana. "Those things that look like driveways are just the old roads that were part of the mining camp, but there's nothing else left of it now. They took all the old buildings down and allegedly filled in all the old shafts, but because of the danger, Coldslip can never be zoned for residential lots."

"But you live there?"

"I'm grandfathered."

"Oh. It's…your grandfather's house?"

Faust glanced at her.

"No, it's a grandfather clause." Seeing confusion on Stevie's face, Ana explained, "Most of the time, when they pass a law, it can't retroactively affect something that already exists. So, like, when they passed the law saying all cars had to have seatbelts, that meant all cars from that point on. It's still legal to drive around in a car that hadn't been built with seatbelts, as long the car existed before the law. My house was built in the 1800s, but the zoning law was passed in the 1950s, so even though the law says no houses on Coldslip, I still get to live there. The law just means that no one else can ever build a house there."

"That's so interesting," Stevie said, even though it wasn't. "I didn't know there was anything out here except the quarry. And that place," she added as they sped past the pizzeria.

Ana looked, because Stevie was looking, trying to see it the way the other woman saw it, as a derelict building with nothing inside it but graffiti and garbage, but she knew better and that knowledge felt brazen, obvious to even a casual glance. There was just enough moonlight to reflect off the glass walls of the gym, where Freddy was surely standing right now, watching them drive by, but no one else would know that and no one else would be looking at the gym. Where was the 'right' place to stare? She could see the sign over the lobby doors, blatantly unidentical to the one that had blown off. Would Faust notice Foxy's crooked eyes or the ugly brown lump that raised Freddy's hat in a jaunty wave because hands were fucking hard? He had to, he'd probably designed the original sign himself.

"But I never went there," Stevie was saying as the limo turned, leaving the Edge of Nowhere behind and rushing back to the distant glow of town. "I grew up in Hurricane, which isn't that far away, I know, but why drive even twenty minutes to get pizza when you can just get it delivered from down the block?"

"Nobody goes to Freddy's for the pizza," said Ana.

"The arcade, right," said Stevie, nodding. "Back when my cousins still lived here, we'd come to visit pretty often and they were always talking about the arcade they used to have at the old place. They were really looking forward to the new place opening."

"Were you?" Faust inquired, his head tilted to a slight angle, like a curious bird.

Stevie shrank away from his scrutiny with a strained laugh. "Not really? I wasn't that much into video games. Or pizza. I did kind of want to go, though. Any time we came to visit the cousins, I'd see the billboards and think how crazy it was, that something like that was so close, and I felt like I was the only one who never saw it. It was like…like Santa Claus," she said, glancing at a scene featuring the right jolly old elf painted in the window of the bank. "You hear all these magical stories about something that never really existed and you share in the excitement for a while, but then you outgrow it."

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Fazbear," Chad intoned. "He exists as surely as love and Christmas and blah blah blah, however that dumb speech goes. Be honest," he said, smirking at Faust. "What was the real deal with the Fazbear stuff?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I've done some digging. You've got five of those restaurants in this one-stoplight town. And I've seen pictures of what they looked like on the inside. It's like Disneyland fucked the MGM Grand and pooped out a pizza place. And that's just the décor, don't get me started on the in-house production costs. Your own merch, your own cartoon studio, plus whatever went into those freaky robots. And yet you could get a large three-topping pizza for just six bucks, plus unlimited refills on the soda. You had to have been pissing money away."

Faust's brow wrinkled ever so slightly. "Money was never the goal of that enterprise."

"So, in other words, it was a tax shelter." Chad leaned conspiratorially closer. "Did you ever even open the last one or did you just build it to nudge-nudge wink-wink away a couple million dollars?"

"It was open," said Stevie and blushed when he looked at her. "For a couple days, at least. I knew some kids in school who went. We were going to go when the crowds died down, but it closed again almost immediately. I never heard why," she added, avoiding Faust's piercing stare.

"Please," said Ana. "I've been back less than a year and even I heard why." And, because the best way to hide a bold lie was with an even bigger, bolder one, she looked Chad square in the eye and said, "Some kids broke in during the grand opening. Did the typical teenage fuckery. One of them climbed up on the playspace thing and did a gainer off onto the indoor kiddie carousel, which had a heavy metal crown with a nice pointy spire."

"Seriously?" Chad looked at Stevie, who offered the smallest of shrugs, then at his grandfather, who merely looked back at him.

"Kid's friends bolted," Ana went on. "Kid crawled off into one of the back rooms. Legend has it, nobody went into that room for a few days, so he was super-dead when they finally found him. Of course, legend also has it that the ghosts of cannibal miners are animating the bodies of the animatronic mascots, so take all local legends about dead kids in Freddy's with a boulder of salt."

Stevie tittered nervously.

"You're fucking with me," Chad said, adopting his I-can-take-a-joke grin under narrowed eyes.

"You don't have to take my word for it. Just ask around and you'll find plenty of people who'll tell you the same story."

Chad gave Stevie an accusing poke in the ribs.

"I don't think anyone actually died," she protested, blushing.

"But you heard someone did?" he pressed skeptically. "Really? Who?"

"Parker. No, Porter," Ana said, snapping her fingers on the name Jimmy Moorehead had told her before it could escape her again. "His name was Richie Porter."

Chad pulled out his phone.

"You're not going to find an obituary," Ana told him. "You're not going to find a gravestone either. You might find his yearbook photo and maybe his family, who conveniently moved away so they weren't around to confirm or deny any questions, but you'll never find him, because like dozens of other kids too big for a small town, he packed a bag, got on his bike and drove it off into the setting sun, and of course no one ever found his body at Freddy's, but one week into the Grand Opening, that was the rumor. Again."

"What do you mean, again? Someone else died there?"

"Not just there, at all of them. Every single Freddy's pizzeria is a secret slaughterhouse. Ask anyone. And none of it happened, but it's all true. And it's all true, but no one can prove it. And no one really wants to prove it anyway. What good would that do? People love to say that the animatronics roam the halls at night looking for kids to eat because the alternative is that all those kids ran away from something even worse. And if they were really runaways, then maybe they could be found, and if they were found then maybe they'd talk, and if they talked then we'd all have to listen when they say their parents beat them and their bedroom doors don't have locks and the only way to make money is to sell drugs out of your mom's garage while she's at church and the town has no future and neither did they and neither do you. And nobody wants to hear that," Ana said, watching Faust's reflection study her as she faced her window. "So they all died at Freddy's. So what if it's not true? So what if it is? It's Mammon. Truth, reputation, money—none of that matters. What matters is picking the story you can live with…and living with it."

Silence, broken only by the near-subaudible hum of the tires on the road.

"Christ, I bet you're fun at parties," Chad said and turned to Faust. "No, but seriously. Why did you close them?"

"Really, dear boy," Faust said with faint reproach. "Weren't you listening?"

"You did not seriously shut down your own restaurant because some bumpkins in a town no one has heard of said it was haunted."

Ana waited, feigning calm, while Faust gave that serious thought.

"No," he said at last. "But its purpose had been served. And I am content that the purpose it serves now is just as necessary."

"The purpose of being an empty building?"

"The purpose of being a haunted house," Faust corrected, graciously allotting credit for the idea to Ana in the form of a small nod, "in a town that desperately needs an outlet for its grief. For no matter where the missing are, they are still missed. Such pervasive hurt demands reparation."

"Since when is that your problem?!"

"Do I not have a responsibility to ease the suffering of my fellow Man, if I see the need and possess the means?"

"So, what?" Chad demanded, laughing even as he slapped the seat in frustration. "You built a restaurant just so the local yokels could break the windows and burn it down?"

"Yes."

Chad shook his head and grinned at Stevie. "You ever want to know the difference between rich and crazy stupid rich, there it is."

Stevie squirmed, her loyalties divided between her date and her employer, then became suddenly engrossed in the town's holiday decorations.

Ana appreciated a handy distraction as much as the next girl, although it was difficult to admire the oversized wreaths stapled to power poles without remembering Shelly trying to call her back from Vegas to hang them up. Fortunately, there was more than that to look at. Every tree on either side of the street was festooned with lights, their trunks wrapped in red and green with white icicles hanging from every branch. Every building had been decorated for the season, posts wrapped with garlands and lit up, and where there was an empty shop (there were many), the dark display windows were painted with cheerful winter scenes. No messy reminders of bankruptcy or foreclosures here, only laughing snowmen and cartoon kids on toboggans.

"It's so pretty, isn't it?" Stevie breathed, mistaking her for a fellow light-admirer. "We dress up Hurricane a little, but nothing…like…like…oh wow."

They were in what passed for 'downtown' Mammon, where the narrow streets had been transformed into tunnels of lights from which hung oversized baubles in white and gold, deliberately restricting visibility until the last turn where it all opened up to reveal a spectacular winter palace where the stodgy old community center ought to be. The ugly posts and scaffolds that made the illusion possible were invisible now; at night, it was all towers and turrets made of glittering white lights. The walls and windows flashed and pulsed in rhythm with the music that played through hidden speakers. Glowing reindeer played reindeer games along the rooftop, prancing and dancing and leaping into the sky to dash away behind the brilliant Happy Holidays banner.

Volunteers in reflective vests with glowing red and white batons directed traffic to the available parking lots, since the community center's own lot was roped off. There, Mammon's boy scouts sold trees and the girls hawked wreaths, but business wasn't exactly booming. The cold had chased most of the crowd inside, where they were likely to stay until the lighting. The tree itself was set well out in the flat field where countless farmer's markets, flea markets, book fairs and bake sales had been held in the past, and there were no lights on that side of the building, nothing to spoil the grand reveal. The field was empty now, apart from a scattering of camping chairs and blankets weighted by backpacks. Of course, the very best viewing spot was the grandstand with the slanted roof to protect viewers from Mammon's unpredictable weather, but there was room for only a dozen chairs there, including the one in the front row, center, with the big red button set up in front of it, set aside for Mammon's most elite citizen.

"But this is incredible!" Stevie marveled, twisting in her seat to try and see out of every window at once. "You have to pay to see stuff like this anywhere else. How have I never heard about this?"

"Maybe it's new," Chad said, distracted by a couple teens inadequately dressed against the weather as they raced to get indoors.

"Not really," said Ana. "It's grown up some, for sure, but there's always been a big light show for the Christmas Fair. They'll keep it on until New Year's, then shut it off for the fireworks show. You should come back for that, it's pretty spectacular. Or it used to be," she said, giving Faust a quizzical glance. She never doubted he would know—he was probably paying for it—and she was a little surprised to see him looking back at her with an equally puzzled expression.

"I don't recall you ever attending the Tree-Lighting," he said. "Nor the New Year's celebration."

"Down here? I didn't. But there's a place in the hills where you can see it and it's not that hard to climb up to if you know where it is."

She even thought she could still find it again, after not thinking about that place for all these years. She could remember, so vividly, biking down the mountain road with David, leaving their bikes with childish trust in the ditch across from Edge of Nowhere, long before there was a Freddy's, and climbing up into the low hills. By the time they reached their secret overlook, it would be getting dark. They'd open up their backpacks and set up the pup tent and huddle together under a blanket with their sandwiches and thermoses of cocoa, reading to pass the time—David with his comics, Ana with her books—until the fireworks. Here, the trees were thin and the ground dropped away, giving them an unimpeded view of the whole town. They could see all the fireworks, not just the ones from the big show, but every backyard spitter and fountain. They'd watch until that last big boom with the shower of sparks that wrote out the new year across the sky, and then they'd pack everything up and hike back down with their flashlights to Aunt Easter's waiting car with their bikes already loaded on the rack…

"We kind of stayed away from all the town festivals," Ana said, firmly crushing that memory small and pushing it back into her heart's shadows. "I think the last one I went to was a Fourth of July thing when I was…six?"

"Not quite," Faust said, watching a small herd of children chase each other around their slow-poking parents and up the walkway to the open doors of the main building. "You had a month yet to go before six. A month and four days."

"How the hell do you know that?" Chad asked, sparing Ana the awkwardness of asking for herself. "I thought you only met her this year."

"I know all the children of Mammon."

"And all their birthdays?" Chad asked pointedly.

Stevie, either unaware of his naked suspicion or attempting to smooth it over, piped up, "What's mine?"

"You are not a child of Mammon."

"My mother was born here."

"Leah Pearson, yes," said Faust without hesitation. "Youngest of four, the others being Adam, Noah and the eldest, Stephen, for whom I presume you are named."

Stevie reacted with the same astonished delight as a young child might when someone pulls a quarter out of their ear. He did not offer a birthdate to go with the name, but if Stevie noticed, she was too distracted to press him further. One of the traffic directors had noticed them and interrupted the usual flow of traffic to wave them out.

The limo stopped in the middle of the intersection so the driver could exchange a few words, unheard here in the back, with the man who jogged up to meet them. Ana could see some unhappy faces behind the other wheels, but no one honked. While they waited for the festively-adorned barricades to be removed, allowing access to the blocked-off street in front of the main building, a tall man bent down to whisper at one of the children clustered around him on the corner, waiting for the stoplight to change. The child listened and then came running over to the limo. When Faust rolled down the tinted window, the girl took a deep breath and rapidly chanted, "Would you like to donate to support charity for hungry children?"

"I don't carry a lot of cash," Stevie apologized, rummaging through her bag while Faust reached into his topcoat and Ana popped open her clutch.

Chad shook his head, smirking as he watched her. "Don't give them anything. Charities don't do anything but sell bumper stickers to virtue-signaling chumps."

"Speaking of charities and chumps," Ana remarked, passing over a twenty. "You pick one to inherit your trust fund yet?"

Chad's smile thinned. "Yeah, I think I'm going to go with the International Society for Shut the Fuck Up."

"Manners," said Faust.

"Yeah, yeah. Come on, Grand-Dad, they're waiting on us. We're holding up traffic."

"I've got one!" Stevie produced a crumpled dollar, tried to smooth it out and handed it over with a shaky red-faced smile. "There you are! Merry Christmas!"

Faust made his own offering out of whatever was topmost on his money-clip and the child scampered away, freeing the limo to pull forward. The barricades were replaced as soon as they passed through and traffic resumed behind them.

"Was that a hundred dollar bill?" Chad demanded and snorted. "You got scammed. Hungry kids, my ass. You notice she didn't actually say what the name of the charity was, right? That guy's just using his kid to beg for money. And you gave it to him, so now he'll be back begging for more. What are you going to do then, huh?"

"As you decided against taking the job in Seattle," replied Faust, unperturbed, "I suppose I'll offer it to him. It's a very good wage, more than enough for one person to comfortably support a family of six while allowing adequate time to enjoy their company. And it comes, as you know, with a large house and a vehicle, and considerable other amenities. I'll have McCall contact them tomorrow. If he accepts straightaway, it may be possible to have them moved and settled before Christmas, particularly with the proposal of an additional cash bonus for coming to a speedy agreement."

Chad's mouth had come slightly open during this short speech. "I never said no to any of that stuff, I just said it wasn't a good time, because of your fall and everything. I told you I was thinking about it!"

"I believe it is in the book of Proverbs, Chapter Six, Verses Ten and Eleven, that one finds a quote of particular relevance," Faust told him and solemnly intoned, "A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of thy hands to rest, and so shall thy poverty come upon you and Want like an armed man to rob thee."

Chad blinked several times and finally sputtered, "What?"

"You snooze, you lose," translated Ana and Faust nodded at her.

Stevie giggled uncertainly but shut up fast when Chad leveled a furious stare at her. Then he turned to the window, muttering, "Unbelievable," under his breath and shaking his head.

There was little interest from the few people who were outside to see them when they pulled up to the curb. Only a small group of children with a couple teens to look after them came over to touch the sleek reality of a stretch limo in this nowhere town, and even they did it with an air of expectation as much as excitement, suggesting that Faust's arrival in a limousine was a rare, yet predictable occurrence.

Chad, still fuming, was out as soon as the driver opened the door, leaving them behind like a bad smell, only to stop immediately when he caught sight of a man with a microphone and another with a camera. Representatives from the Mammon Minute were here, collecting soundbites for the weekend edition. Chad immediately shrugged off his sour mood and adopted an expression of effusive holiday cheer, pretending to observe the lights while subtly posing and coincidentally blocking anyone else from exiting the limo.

Now that she was here, Ana found that she was in no hurry to put herself in public view, so while the thought of moving Chad along with a well-placed slap on the ass was a pleasant one, she kept her hands to herself. The view from the backseat wasn't exactly scintillating, however, and the longer Chad's ridiculous posturing went on, the less patience Ana had for it. At last, she just had to vent some of it, leaning toward Faust to whisper, "Does he really think people are here to see him?"

"Some of them are, perhaps," Faust replied, not bothering to lower his voice. "He's young, handsome…and as far as anyone knows, apt to inherit an obscene amount of money fairly soon. It is only to be expected that he should attract a certain amount of attention, so let him enjoy it while he can. I needn't be over-eager to slap the boy into his proper place. The world will do that for me soon enough."

Chad finally realized that what passed for Mammon's paparazzi was more interested in interviewing seven-year-olds than him. Ana waved Stevie ahead of her, since Chad was already walking away, and stifled a sigh as she watched the other woman run to catch up, taking his hand, letting him shake her off, and still following at his heels like an adoring pup.

"It's unfortunate, of course," Faust said quietly as Ana watched her go, "but temporary. I shan't require her professional services much longer and once she's out of easy reach, the boy will pursue other amusements."

"She can't really think he loves her, does she?"

"I've no idea. But speaking as one who has been similarly deceived, I find it difficult to think of her too harshly, even if so."

"You should do something for her."

"I intend to. There's a position for her at Tranquility, if she's sensible enough to take it."

"It's not far enough away. He's a tar pit. She needs to get all the way out, clean, or he'll suck her in. Send her away. Another state. Another country! Don't let him decide when it's over. He's the kind of kid who breaks his toys when he's bored of them so no one else can play with them."

"I should like to think he isn't as bad as all that," he said, then sighed and rubbed at his knee. "But I'll trust your judgment. I'll find something for her. Come."

Right. Couldn't stay here in the car all night.

Ana got out and the wind eagerly gusted, plastering her dress to her body so that no one could miss it when the chill brought her nipples out and everyone could speculate on whether or not she was wearing underwear, and worst of all, the wind blew the careful arrangement of her hair back to expose the savagery of her scars for all to see. Ana tried to ignore it, even tried to smile as Faust extracted himself from the car and found his footing. "You're going to lose your hat."

"If I am known for anything, Miss Stark, it is my reckless disregard for personal loss." He placed his hat on his head. The wind, no fool, shrank back and muttered away into the trees. "Shall we?"

Ana rearranged her hair, then took his offered arm. They made quite a picture there, the old gentleman and the young woman in red, walking together out of the dark night toward the golden glow of celebration, so much that the photographer for the Mammon Minute here to document the festivities yet again in lieu of actual news in this sleepy little town snapped a photo. It was striking enough that he thought it might even make the front page instead of the usual Arts and Leisure insert. He was wrong about that, as things turned out, but they did make a good picture. The Puppet had an even better angle from its perch on the main building's rooftop. It filmed their approach, blind to the world outside the lens of its camera, while its companion contentedly huddled under a blanket, munching on snacks and scribbling in a coloring book.

There was a little time before the pomp and circumstance, and although Ana would have preferred to wait in the grandstand away from all the people, it was really too cold, so she resigned herself to the crowds she'd known damn well would be here and headed up toward the main building. The doors were propped open, letting the smell of gingerbread and roasted pecans waft down to them on a warm draft. There was a children's choir in there somewhere, although they weren't easily heard over the raucous chatter accompanying the traditional Christmas craft fair, which was probably for the best. Even from here, Ana could see happy faces browsing tables and booths, and everyone looked like they were having a good time, so maybe this wouldn't be so bad. They'd gawk at her when she walked in and all the expected people would make the expected snarky remarks to each other, and then, maybe, they'd just get on with their night. If she could just get through the first five or ten minutes without giving them a reaction—

And then her night-eyes adjusted and she was able to make out features on the two figures standing like nutcrackers on either side of the open doors. One of them was Sheriff Zabrinsky, of course, she'd known that by the shape of the hat. He stood beneath a large sign wishing everyone a merry Christmas and a smaller sign reminding them that cameras were in use and shoplifting was a crime, and even from here, she could feel his steely eyes on her. The second figure was shorter, rounder, fidgeting his weight from one foot to the other as he monitored the walkway, and if she'd thought anything at all on first seeing him, she'd thought he was a man stopping in straight from work, waiting for the rest of his family to show up. Now she got a better look at him—the bald head, the beard, and the belt he kept adjusting, trying to pull it up over the expanse of his belly in lieu of a waistline.

"Oh fuck me," she heard herself say, which only served to draw Faust's attention.

He followed her gaze without effort and uttered a low, Freddyish grunt of disinterest. "Surely you knew he'd be here."

"I did, yeah. I didn't think he'd be lying in wait for me, though."

"Is he? And here I presumed he was waiting for me. As instructed, I allow his numerous calls to go to voicemail and delete them unheard. He's made several attempts to see me in my home, and ultimately proved undeterred by a locked gate."

"He try to climb over?"

"Through. McCall was forced to call emergency services to extract him. And then to hire a security guard to man the gate and turn him away in person. Or woman the gate, I should say. His persistence is, I suppose, admirable, but thus far, I've managed to avoid confrontation."

"Your lucky streak is about to end, old man," she warned him. "He's coming this way."

"Yes, I see that."

"Please don't ask questions. Whatever he's about to say…just roll with it and then forget about it, I'm begging you."

"All right," he said and did one better as Shelly stepped in front of them by interrupting whatever Shelly opened his mouth to say with, "In the spirit of the season, I wish you a good evening, Mr. Shelton, and that is all I intend to say to you. You would be well-advised not to attract my attention further. The lease on your company offices is up at the end of the year."

Shelly visibly paled beneath his anxious flush, but refused to back down. "Whatever she told you, sir, she's a liar."

"I said, good evening," said Faust and walked on with Ana on his arm.

Shelly scrambled in front of them again, arms out, effectively blocking the doors while Zabrinsky stood there, just watching. "Don't you walk away from me! Don't you…Don't you let that lying little tramp walk you away!" He pointed a shaking finger at Ana, who stayed stoic while pretending not to see the doorway behind him quietly filling up with curious faces (and if she'd looked up, she might have seen one more looking down from the rooftop, ghost pale and brazenly visible in the blinking light from the star of peace, furious despite its gaping idiot smile). "Don't let her fool you. Whatever she told you, she lied! You don't know her. She was born here, that's all. She was born here and she slithered out on her belly when she was just knee-high. Knee-high and already causing trouble! You ask Mrs. Kellar what she was like back then! Smart-mouthed, dirty, trash-stealing little liar! Running around with boys and her only ten! Ten years old and getting her knees dirty with boys!"

Ana did not flinch, but she could feel her ears burning, feel the guilty pounding of her pulse, because he wasn't as wrong as he thought he was, was he? She'd done a lot worse than steal trash and smart off to her fifth-grade math teacher, and she may not have gotten her knees dirty the way he was insinuating, but there was plenty of blood on her hands. She wasn't innocent. She didn't deserve to feel offended now. She might not be everything he said she was, but she'd done worse than he ever imagined, so she didn't get to complain about it.

"She ain't even from this town!" Shelly declared, warming to his indignation as more and more ears joined the audience. "I am! You know me, sir! You gave me my first job. You gave my daddy the loan that put me through my schooling. You gave me and Trammel the start-up for T and S, and you shook my hand! Now you turn your back on me? All my life you known me and you're going to take her word over mine? Whatever she's saying to you… Whatever she's doing for you, she's nothing but a liar and a whore!"

"Are you forgetting I had the phone on speaker?" Ana interjected. "I didn't have to tell him anything. He was there. He heard everything. And who even cares anymore? It's over. It's done. It's a little too late to shake hands and walk away friends, but I'm not interested in making enemies. Let's just go inside and drink some cocoa and have a good night."

Shelly stepped back, stammering and harrumphing in panicked confusion, but again he rallied and in an almost admirable display of spiteful bravado, yelled, "You're fired!" in a voice that silenced most of the surrounding conversations, although the choir kept singing.

"Dude, I quit ten days ago," said Ana. "Get over it."

She tapped Faust's arm and went inside, hoping the old man would follow instead of continuing to stand there, studying Shelly like he was a bug and fingering the head of his cane like it was the pin he intended to use to make a trophy out of him and just hadn't decided where to stick it.

"I gave you a chance!" Shelly shouted in a high voice that had begun to crack. "I gave you a chance at decent living when no one else would, you whore-dropped piece of trash! You hear me? Your mama was a drunken slut! And your daddy was whoever bent her over the back of a dumpster for the price of a beer!"

"Yeah, yeah."

"And you! Paulie told me about you! Rubbing up on him, rubbing up on Morehead and anyone else you could get your claws into! Now you want to tell me you quit? You didn't quit, you just found someone willing to pay for the only kind of work you want to do!"

It went on like that for a while. Ana kept walking, the click of her heels painfully audible in the room where damn near the entire town was listening. She could hear Mr. Faust's shoes and the measured tap of his silver-tipped cane when he finally followed her, and Zabrinsky's low murmur trying to move Shelly along. He went, but not quietly, making sure the whole room knew how the entire Blaylock line was nothing but a curse and a blight on the town going back to the days of the mining camp, and how Ana had done nothing but suck dick and bring misery with her wherever she went and she was a piss-poor carpenter besides.

Faust clapped a restraining hand on Ana's shoulder and yeah, that was where she would have spun around and slapped the beard off Shelly's fat face while the kiddie choir sang about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, but Faust's touch made her hesitate just long enough for a new player to enter the game, rising out of a folding chair behind a festively decorated booth like a pudgy avenging angel.

"That is enough!" Mrs. Pickett declared in a voice that had shut down countless tantrums at the Duckling Daycare Center where she had helped to raise three generations of Mammon.

It shut Shelly off like a lightswitch, all his righteous fury blown out of him in an instant, leaving him grey-faced and shaking, and if the sheriff hadn't been right there to catch him, he might have stumbled over his own feet and collapsed on the ground.

Belatedly, another of Mammon's Matrons stood as well. "Mr. Shelton, there are children present!"

"Children?!" Mrs. Pickett turned on her ally with outraged disbelief. "That's what you object to? Not that he said it, but that he said it in front of children? Madelaine Allred, I am ashamed of you!"

The other woman sat down so fast, her skinny ass made an audible clapping sound on her cheap folding chair.

Mrs. Pickett returned her duckling-death-stare to Shelly, assuming the hands-on-hips stance of authority. "Lee Shelton, I have also known you all my life, but it is clear by your behavior here tonight that you are not at all the man I thought I knew. Apologize this instant."

Shelly started to point at Ana.

Mrs. Pickett was having none of it. She clapped her hands twice, and if Ana were not starring in this awful show, she might have been amused by all the people she glimpsed coming to instinctive contrite attention in the background. "This instant!" she reiterated.

Shelly's fingers groped at his belt as a child clutches a blankie for comfort on a stormy night. He cleared his throat twice, gulped once, and mumbled, "Folks, I…I'm awful sorry for disturbing—"

"Not to us," said Mrs. Pickett, speaking each word clearly, her meaning impossible to misunderstand.

Shelly looked at Ana.

"It's fine," she said quickly. "Let's just—"

"Hush," said Mrs. Pickett, and Ana unhappily hushed. "We're waiting, Lee."

They were all waiting, although an outside eye might not have known it. People carried on the way people always carried on in Mammon. The lady directing the choir was still waving her arm to the same measured tempo, so the kids were still singing about the manger where baby Jesus lay and where there was no crying, only love. Shoppers browsed the vendors, carrying on their conversations and comforting their troubled children by telling them there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing was wrong. It reminded her—

Reminded was too tame a word. For a moment, even as she stood there in her grown-up dress and too-tight shoes, watching Shelly huff and puff in her face, she was small again, knees dragging on the hot pavement in front of the Freddy's on Circle Drive. Her mother had just stopped whipping her but was still standing over her, tall as God, holding Ana by her hair in one fist, holding the car's antennae in the other. And there was a man there, the man who had stopped the whipping. Ana could hear him, sounding faint and far away through the awful haze of her pain, saying, 'You need to move your car. You're blocking mine in. Move your car or I'll call the cops.' She could remember raising her head and locking eyes with a little girl just her age, holding her own mother's hand while they waited for Daddy to sort this out, and the look on that girl's face was so strange, not sad or upset or scared, not even really curious. It was like she was watching something happen that wasn't even happening, like Ana was all made up, like she was less real than a show on TV about a bad little girl who got what she deserved for breaking the rules.

It made her wonder for the first time since returning to Mammon… How many of those people who were there back then were here right now? Was that same little girl out there in this room, holding some other little girl's hand and telling her everything was all right?

"I can't do this," Ana said. "Okay? I don't want this. Let's just forget it and—"

"You shut the hell up!" Shelly yelled. "You don't talk to me like that! You're nothing but a two-bit whore in a cheap dress!"

Laughter came bubbling up out of somewhere crazy inside her and all she could say was, "This dress is not cheap."

"I hope you burn in it! You burn in hell with your whore mother," he spat and turned on Faust with the desperate courage of a man who had nothing left to lose. "And you can burn with her! You and all your damned money! Blood money, that's all it is! Our blood and your money! You…" He took a deep shuddering breath, shouted, "Fuck you!" and reeled around, shoving off Zabrinsky's steadying hand. He staggered back out into the night, away from the bright lights and boy scouts, rushing headlong into the darkness on the unlit side of the building where a man could break down in peace.

Gradually, people started moving around, a few voices and a few more slowly knitting together into a comforting blanket of sound. The choir came to the end of their song and picked it up again with Joy to the World.

"Someone should go after him," said Ana, hardly able to believe she had to be the one saying it.

No one did.

"Someone," Ana ventured, looking at Zabrinsky, "should make sure he gets to his truck okay."

"Don't tell me how to do my job." He returned to the doorstep beneath the warning signs and no further, glaring at Ana with his thumb hooked through the part of his belt where he'd ordinarily be wearing his sidearm.

"He'll be fine, dear," sniffed Mrs. Pickett, reseating herself. "A little walk to cool off is just what the old hot-head needs. It isn't your fault."

"Yeah," said Ana uncomfortably. "It kind of is."

"No," Mrs. Pickett said firmly, glaring at her. "It is not. Whatever you've done in your past is between you and God and he had no right hanging it out on the line for everyone to see. I'm sure he'll feel just terrible about it tomorrow. He's been under a great deal of stress lately, is all. Paul's passing hit him much harder than I'm sure he wants to admit. Well, it hit all of us hard, of course."

'Especially his wife, who hit back even harder,' thought Ana out of nowhere, and slapped a horrified hand over her mouth before she could lose another insane giggle.

"Oh! Here." Mrs. Pickett pinched a napkin out of its package, but before she could pass it up, Mr. Faust was there with a clean, pressed handkerchief. "Please don't be so upset," she fretted as Ana daubed at herself, unsure what she should be doing with the damn thing. "It's really nothing to do with you. And I don't mean to make excuses for him, he shouldn't have lashed out at you like that, but you know he's lost a number of workers this year, and…well, I shouldn't say it and you never heard it from me, but the downtown projects have been put on hold." She sent a somewhat miffed glance at Faust, who gazed serenely back at her. "Indefinitely."

"You would know better than I," he said. "I have no seat on the town council and no say in how its funds are allocated."

"Yes, technically true, but—"

"I," Faust interrupted, cutting across her words like scissors before gentling his tone, "am here for the festivities tonight, Mrs. Pickett. Not to discuss the town's financial future."

Mrs. Pickett let out an incredulous puff of laughing air. "Well, it isn't just the town's, is it?"

"It is to me."

She stared at him.

Faust stood, hand on cane, patiently polite and utterly immoveable.

"Well," said Mrs. Pickett in a strangely small voice for a woman who had just filled the room with disciplinary thunder. She looked down at her table, neatened several of the children's books arranged there, then looked up again with a broad smile beneath lost eyes. "Would you like to buy a raffle ticket? All proceeds benefit the…the new library. And the grand prize is one of Mrs. Olsen's quilts. You can see it on the far wall just there, behind the wrapping station."

"Thank you," said Faust, "but not this time, I think."

"I'd love to," said Ana, seizing the chance to escape. She handed over another twenty dollar bill, wrote her name and phone number on twenty scraps of paper and put them in the tumbler with the rest. "Here's hoping. I could really use another blanket."

"Yes," said Mrs. Pickett, peering up at Faust. "It's gotten quite cold lately."

Faust tipped his hat to her blithely and offered Ana his arm again.

She took it, eager to put the ugliness of their entry behind her, but it was the bewildered hurt in Mrs. Pickett's eyes that stayed with her as they moved deeper into the bazaar and not Shelly's outburst.

"Are you all right?" Faust asked. "Shall I take you home?"

"And give him the satisfaction of running me off? Ha. Never." She glanced at the nearest table, whose vender was watching with the sort of subdued scowl that proclaimed his loyalty for Team Shelton, even if he didn't dare express it out loud. "Want to buy a hand-painted North Pole Parking Only sign?"

"I have one," he said, deadpan.

"Then let's not block the man's trade. Want to buy a triple chocolate peppermint brownie?" she asked, spying the goods at the next table.

"Oh, rather."

They moved on, and if Faust heard the mutters at their backs, he, like Ana, ignored them.

The brownies were really good, and even better, the lady offering them also sold jars filled with most of the ingredients used to make them. Only five times as expensive as an actual box of brownie mix, but whatever, 'tis the season and Chica was almost out of Easy Bake stuff anyway.

"I must confess, I always feel something of a fraud at these events. This event, in particular," Faust remarked, inspecting the ribbon attached to one of the jars of mix. "I do not celebrate the holidays, even after a secular fashion."

Ana shrugged. "Neither do I, really. When you don't have a family, holidays are just ordinary days when your favorite take-out place closes early."

Faust uttered a Freddyish grunt and after a short, brooding silence, suddenly said, "I would very much like to have you for Christmas."

The lady selling the mixes raised one penciled-on eyebrow.

"What did you have in mind?" Ana asked and, after watching him struggle with that for several more seconds, added, "Not that we have to do anything. I'm happy just hanging out and watching movies."

"Namely?"

"Oh, you know. I'm a sucker for the holiday classics. Any of the SNDNs or the original Black Christmas. If you feel like branching out a little, The Blackout's kind of fun. And I liked Elves, although I think I'm the only one on Earth who did. And if you like silly stuff like that with a marginally bigger budget, we could do something like Gingerdead Man, A Christmas Cadaver or Jack Frost—not the Keaton one. On the more cerebral side, there's also stuff like Dead End, ATM, Home for the Holidays—not the Jodie Foster one. Or I could find us a couple that I haven't seen yet, but we might have to go pretty deep into subtitle-land to do that. Or Krampus is out if you'd rather go to an actual theater, I just find it kind of hard to relax around strangers."

He considered that carefully before he nodded, but he did nod and he seemed genuinely interested in his own somber way. "I expect the boy to be obnoxiously underfoot the eve before, the day of and the weekend after, so shall we say…the 23rd?"

"Deal," said Ana, intensely aware of the hungry attention of the lady behind the table as they made this arrangement to be alone together in his house just minutes after Shelly had denounced her as a whore. Now here she was, meeting a man without a chaperone—proof positive that Shelly was right about her all along, or it would be after this lady had a chance to talk it around. Fuck her life.

She picked out an assortment of mixes anyway. Why not? She was already wearing the invisible scarlet W, might as well wear it while eating brownies. She gave the pinch-faced lady a couple twenties, then left Faust perusing a display of badly-painted shot glasses someone was trying to pass off as holiday candle holders and took her overpriced crap to the baggage check booth so she wouldn't have to lug it around all night. The booth was being run by Mammon's taxi service, temporarily rebranded Elves On Wheels, who would watch her stuff for two bucks or wrap it and deliver it out to her house on Monday for ten. Ana wrote her name and address on a tag while the Mom packed her jars into a festive bag (which apparently constituted ten bucks' worth of 'wrapping'), and turned around to discover Mr. Faust was no longer alone. Three men, delegates of Mammon's town council, had loosely surrounded him and were engaged in the kind of outward pleasantries that only thinly veiled inner urgency. Ana hung back to give them privacy, but for a change, Faust had no patience for social niceties.

"I can hardly believe our last meeting left you with any doubt as to my stance on this matter, but as you appear to be unable or unwilling to recall the sum of our many previous conversations, allow me to further clarify. This is not my problem," he told them, raising a beckoning hand to Ana as he turned his back on their little assembly. "If you insist upon pestering me further, one might show a level of professionalism as to go through the correct channels and make an appointment through Mr. McCall, during appropriate business hours. Good evening."

"Mr. Faust," one of the men laughed, scurrying around in front of him. "I apologize if you think we're overstepping ourselves. It's never our intention to pester you and you're right, of course, this isn't the time or place for a serious discussion, but that isn't our intention. We're here for the same reason you are, to enjoy the evening and celebrate with our community. No one's trying to corner you or hold you to an informal statement made here, among friends. We're just looking for some assurances."

"Indeed? In that event, I can assure you that this conversation is concluded. Good evening." Faust attempted to step around the man, who darted over to continue to block their path. "Mr. Jensen, you are becoming tiresome and tiresome behavior is hardly likely to win me around to your way of thinking, and may in fact provoke me to some retaliatory action. I said, good evening."

The man shuffled out of the way at once and Faust moved on. Ana followed, but couldn't resist a backwards glance at the three of them, now huddled up and making a lot of short, sharp hand gestures. "I don't think you're done with them," she warned.

"Oh, I think I am. Whether or not they agree is immaterial. May I treat you to a beverage, Ana?"

She recognized a subject change when she heard it, so she dropped it and let him buy her a hot cocoa. It was too watery and not very hot, but she sipped it anyway as he walked her up and down the rows of handcrafted Christmas crap. They must have talked as they strolled along, the kind of chit-chat that says nothing but only fills up the time, and although they spent a good hour perusing the vendors, when Ana attempted to recall that time later, she could remember only that the cocoa was lukewarm and bland. Whatever else there was in that space was nothing but a blurry wipe transition in her mind, an unimportant shift between two scenes, and then the community center's speaker came on to inform everyone that the tree would be lighting in ten minutes.

The milling pool of humanity at once began a gentle flow toward the front doors. By chance, Ana and Mr. Faust had been close to the doors when the call went out, but they were among the last to reach the viewing field. His limp had become noticeably more pronounced and although a casual onlooker might never have guessed anything was wrong, Ana could see the strain just under his skin. This time, she offered her arm, and he took it with a small sigh of resignation, leaning on her as much as his cane for support all the way to the grandstand, where Chad and Stevie were already waiting in their seats and where, she saw with a distinct lack of surprise, the town councilmen were also waiting, this time with reinforcements.

"Miss Blaylock," said Wendy Rutter, greeting her with a politician's smile and frost in her eye colder than Mammon's wind.

"It's Stark," said Ana and, feeling petty, offered a hand for her to shake.

Rutter ignored it.

Ana kept her hand out.

A few icy seconds passed.

"Is there a problem, Mrs. Rutter?" Faust inquired.

Rutter stabbed a glance at him, carved a smile onto her face, and took Ana's hand. It was like shaking hands with a hawk: all claws and a baleful stare. Ana kept her smile, even with Rutter's thumb pressing down deliberately over the stitches on her thumb, and when her calculated grip failed to squeeze a flinch out of the enemy, Rutter released her with an odd little flick of her wrist, like she was shaking off a booger, and turned her attention to the old man. "Mr. Faust, it's so good to see you on your feet again."

"Likewise," said Faust in a dry tone that made it clear he had not forgotten that the last time the three of them had been together, Mrs. Rutter had been face-down on his floor having an adult-sized toddler tantrum.

Mrs. Rutter managed a thin approximation of a polite laugh and then got down to business. "If you can spare a moment for us after the ceremony, I'd like a word with you."

"You have my assistant's number. Feel free to arrange an appointment. I'll make room for you, if possible, next week," Mr. Faust told her, tipping his hat to Ana as a signal to ascend the grandstand ahead of him. "If you would be so kind as to step aside, gentlemen? You're rather blocking the way."

The councilmen shuffled, but none of them moved.

Faust gazed at them impassively, then turned a cool eye on Rutter. "If it is your intention to force an encounter here tonight, Mrs. Rutter, I must warn you that it will not at all prove to be to your advantage."

"You tell her, Grand-Dad," said Chad, clearly enjoying this unexpected show far more than any of the night's other entertainments.

"Mind your manners," Faust told him, still staring at Rutter. "Incivility has a way of bringing out incivility in others."

"Well, that's my cue," Ana said cheerfully and stepped right up into the nearest councilman's flustered face. "What the hell is wrong with you? Let the man sit down. He's had knee surgery, you insensitive dimwit. Do you need to know what it's like to recover from a shattered knee before you show some common fucking courtesy?"

They scattered like pigeons, only to reassemble around Rutter in front of the grandstand as Faust laboriously climbed the two short steps and settled into his chair. Ana sat beside him, politely watching the councilmen whisper at each other and pretending she didn't see the old man's hand tremble as he rubbed his knee. The walk around the community center had taken a lot out of him and it didn't look like he was going to shake off the council crows anytime soon. Oh well. She'd done what she came to do. Once the stupid tree was lit, she'd ask him to take her home, give him a good reason to excuse himself as well.

"Hey," she began, and as if all he were waiting for was a conversation to interrupt, one of the councilmen stepped up into a challenger's position and boldly said, "Mr. Faust, we're only trying to help you appreciate the severity of our present circumstances so that you can come to the right decision."

One thin brow swept up. "My good man, the severity of your present circumstances does not escape me. However, I question your insinuation that the right decision would be my helping you conceal your administration's gross mismanagement of town funds by once again covering your insufficiencies."

"Now, I never said that!" the man blustered. "No one said that!"

"Perhaps I misunderstood," Faust said. "I'm pleased that we've come to some sort of understanding. After all, if you weren't expecting me to do it, you can't be too upset to learn that I won't."

"I…" The man looked to his companions for help, but no one had any to give him. "But you've always—"

"Yes," Faust interrupted. "I always have. For all the years of my majority, I have subsidized income, provided opportunities, waived fees and donated generously to every charitable cause presented to me without questioning its legitimacy, all for the sake of a community that has—and I think you'll agree—resoundingly rejected me."

It was difficult to be sure, since the winter wind brought out the color in everyone's face, but the other man might have flushed. "Mr. Faust, the personal feeling of a few…a few… Mr. Faust, Mammon depends on you!"

"Yes, it does," he replied with placid disapproval. "And you made a very serious mistake allowing that to happen. After all, man is mortal. My years are numbered and even if I should continue to feed the tumorous lump of insatiable suckling mouths that is this town, my teat will dry up eventually. You can court the boy's favor all you like," he added, waving at Chad as if he were across the field and not sitting right beside him, watching with undisguised delight. "But I assure you, he won't take you to his bosom. He has plans, I am sure, for such hedonistic excesses as would strain the imaginations of the Caesars, and nowhere in said plans will you find the slightest concern for Mammon, which is the first of his life's decisions of which I wholeheartedly approve."

Chad laughed and slung an arm around Stevie's shoulders. "God, I love the way he says 'fuck you,'" he marveled.

"You don't know what you're saying," one of the other councilmen sputtered. "Do you have any idea what will happen to us? To the town!"

A crease of impatience deepened the wrinkles of Faust's brow. "I suspect I'm being baited, but very well, Mr. Gardner, I'll play along. The facts are these: Mammon cannot maintain itself without my support. I have withdrawn said support. Very shortly, you will come to a real crisis. Your initial solution, I believe, will be to adhere to municipal protocol and apply to a higher administration for emergency aid. They will want to know the nature of the emergency. You will have to admit that the only emergency is Mammon's own failure to thrive under its power and I daresay the Great Eagle will be disinclined to provide the financial security to allow you to continue to fail to thrive for an indefinite period of time. They will demand some kind of plan of action that will produce a return, should they agree to invest and there you will have to face some uncomfortable truths. Mammon's mineral deposits are long depleted, the land can neither be tilled nor grazed, and everything necessary to support human life must be imported, which is to say, it must be purchased. So you see, Mammon operates at a considerable deficit, which demands a greater surplus in some other area—industrial, agricultural or technological—to sustain itself. Mammon has nothing, does nothing. The only resource Mammon produces to any degree is a taxable population and not to put too fine a point on it, but you hardly produce it in surplus."

The men exchanged glances, but only Rutter had the balls to say, "We have you."

Faust nodded as if this was expected. "Allow me to give you a brief and much simplified lesson on sociopolitical economics," he sighed. "It is true that a town's worth in the eyes of the federal government is largely determined by the average income of its residents. However, here I shall pause to remind you that there is more than one way to determine the average in any set of numbers. One might add all the values together and then divide them by the number of values, in which case, an outlier such as myself would rather throw off the curve in a town like Mammon. Therefore, our government determines this particular average as the most commonly appearing range of values, precisely so that eccentric billionaires such as I cannot inflate a small town's value merely by owning property there."

"What?" one of the men stammered.

"It rather helps my case that so many of those in Washington are also billionaires who write tax laws from the perspective of one with a vested interest in not paying their fair share," Faust told him with a faint air of apology. "Also, as you may recall, I am married. That residence I share with my wife is the primary address associated with my various corporate entities, so California may have a proprietary interest in my taxable income, but Utah does not. All my interests here are managed as out-of-state lease holdings, rental properties, and of course, the vacation home where I live—a comparable pittance. Expect no consideration from the federal government simply on my account," he said with brutal calm. "But I digress. When you petition for aid, as inevitably you must, they will deny you, for the reasons I have listed. You will go back and forth for a time, and when you have exhausted your legal appeals, they will foist you off on the state. The state will make you the responsibility of the county and when the county treasurer gets tired of flushing money forever down this toilet, a memo will be sent back up the channels suggesting that Mammon discorporate. You—"

"Never!" vowed Mrs. Rutter, loudly enough to attract some startled attention from the nearest spectators.

"—will refuse," Faust agreed, extending a hand toward her in thanks for proving his point. "And you will go back and forth for a while, and when you have exhausted those legal appeals, they will discorporate without your concession."

"They can't do that!" one of the men insisted and a few more heads turned.

"But of course they can, Mr. Gardner. You will receive advance notice, perhaps ninety days, perhaps only thirty, and you will be allowed to present one final impassioned speech on the floor of some other municipality and then a vote will be called and promptly decided against you. Unanimously, I should think. And then what, you ask? Not much, not at first. There will be a number of painful losses…police and fire services, the post office, schools…but they won't evict anyone or send a convoy of demolition equipment to flatten homes and crush dissenters, not yet. They will simply cease all support. All of it. And at that point, the responsibility of maintaining this town will be entirely on your shoulders, gentlemen, madam. Energy needs, internet and phone service, road maintenance, clean water and waste removal—all gone, unless you yourself find the means to keep it going. And you may, for a while. You're a resourceful woman, Mrs. Rutter—"

"Don't patronize me!"

"An observation, nothing more. You have demonstrated an admirable devotion to this town…and an unfortunate blindness to the greed of those you employ. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you deliberately ignored the rampant corruption and misallocation of funds because you believed it to be in some way 'sticking it' to me when you then had to ask for more and more to maintain the status quo. And now here we are, and I shan't give another penny to your coffers, Mrs. Rutter, not one red cent."

Chad hooted appreciatively and leaned back, laughing at the expressions on the commissioners' faces when they all turned on him. "What?" he said, grinning. "You got something to say to me? Go ahead, say something. Because I'll remember it, you bet I will."

"Manners," said Faust, holding Rutter's gaze without concern. "I trust I've convinced you that I do indeed have a firm grasp of the situation here. By my calculations, it may be possible to maintain the façade of solvency another three months. It will mean replacing a number of paid positions with unpaid internships, selling off some unnecessary or seasonal assets and relying heavily on volunteer work and fundraising efforts, but you should be able to manage without attracting too much attention. After that, mere prudence will not be enough."

Ana's eye was distracted by a shuffling in the crowd beyond the councilmen. This conversation had only drawn more and more attention, from a few bored glances to a dozen rapt listeners and now Ana could see phones coming out, urgent texts being sent.

"You will call in whatever favors you are owed and borrow wherever you can," Faust continued relentlessly, by all appearances unaware of his growing audience, except that he raised his voice ever so slightly to reach all their listening ears. "There are funds tucked away, I'm sure, earmarked for extracurricular scholastic programs, town restoration and beautification, and so forth that will have to be reallocated, and that cannot go unnoticed. Fees have been paid for field trips, sports equipment and dramatic productions that won't materialize. Parents of disappointed children will demand refunds and you won't have it to give them. Not without stealing it from some other department. You'll find yourself seriously considering rationing public access to power and water, but that is the sort of thing that one's constituents complain about to governors and congressmen, and once you have attracted the Eagle's eye, the wheels will be set in motion that will lead to Mammon's dissolution. However, you must not delude yourself. You can delay the inevitable, but you cannot escape it. Sooner or later, you will have to put your hand out."

"You can't be serious," one of the men blurted, spitting out a laugh like a mouthful of poison. "You…You've got the new hobby shop opening soon. You hired my niece to work there! What are you talking about, discorporation? If you thought there was no hope, why would you start a new business?"

"For the children," Faust explained. "The children will need somewhere to go and something to do to escape the high tensions at home as their parents come to terms with their new reality. And for some of them, it will be a very harsh reality indeed, particularly if they wait too long."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Once this town has been legally unmade, I shall purchase no more properties. Whosoever may remain in the remains of what was once Mammon after that fateful day will have to find another buyer for their home and be content with what that buyer considers fair value for a home that will soon be without electricity, plumbing, sanitation service, etcetera."

"What do you want?" one of the men interrupted. "You've made your point, all right? Just tell us what you want!"

Faust frowned. "My good man, I still don't appear to be getting through to you. This is what I want. That should be obvious. How could any of this happen, save by my deliberate design?"

They stared at him while the restless crowd chattered, and finally one of them whispered, "You're going to ruin us."

"Oh no," Faust assured him at once. "No. I will not allow ruins. I will erase it all, to the last brick of the last foundation. I will scatter your children with scholarships and risk-free career opportunities. The memory of Mammon will fade like a bruise, and if, in some unlikely fit of nostalgia, one of them should endeavor to return, they will find nothing here, not even a name on a map."

"But why?" the other man asked. "Why are you doing this?"

Faust's brows furrowed. "Because you're all horrible people," he said, without doubt but a faint uplilt, as if he were asking if this was even a serious question.

Chad erupted into laughter, attracting more stares, more listeners.

"I don't blame you, entirely," Faust told them. "I blame Mammon. I blame the invisible machinery of this terrible place that has stamped you out, badly made and badly bent, and yes, I blame myself. I made everything so much worse. I readily admit that. It was not my intention, for all that intent matters. I see now that I should have left when the base closed and let nature take its course, if anything can be said to be natural about this town, but I had the means to sustain you all and I had my…youthful ambitions. I stayed. I knew the machinery here was bad, but I thought I could fix it. I wasn't quite fool enough to think I could save the world, but I did truly believe I could save Mammon with enough money and what was money to me? So I took this town. I took it and you gave it," he said, pointing the head of his cane at them. "You and all of you, without one word of protest until now. I did not have to steal anything, you offered it up to me, not passively but with approval and applause. And not even you can say I did not hold up my end of the bargain. I bore the cost of your living. I slowed the wheels of progress. I provided all that was necessary to ensure that no one ever had less than they needed—"

"Or more," Mrs. Rutter said in a hoarse, furious whisper. "Never enough to get away from you! You turned the town where I was born—where my sister was born! My parents! Their parents! You turned it all into your dollhouse. God forbid we should want lives of our own!"

"God did not and neither did I," Faust returned. "All you ever had to do was leave and dare to make your own way in the world. The choice was always yours and you chose to stay."

"And you chose to lord it over us! As part of some sick game!"

"A game, no. An experiment?" he asked himself and thought about it before slowly saying, "Perhaps. I will not deny my motives were deeply personal. All the more reason to include a killswitch of sorts in my plans. I had learned by then that every machine possesses the potential for destruction. If my machine, my Mammon, failed to operate as intended, I would shut it down. It did and so I am."

"Just like that?"

"If by that you mean after pouring money into the machine for twenty years, another twenty to observe the cycles of abuse and neglect continue unabated, and a further twelve years ensuring Mammon's irreparable collapse, then yes, just like that."

Rutter's wind-chapped lips thinned and trembled. "You're a monster!"

"I understand why you would think so," Faust told her, not without sympathy. "From your perspective, my actions must seem terribly cruel, and by your own reasoning, you were perfectly justified to work against me as you did. If it's any consolation, and I don't imagine that it is, we would have come to this point eventually, even if you had never abused your present position of power. However, I cannot deny your petty revenges sped up the timeline considerably and for that, I am indebted to you. If you should decide to sell your home or if you would like my help in finding employment elsewhere, you know how to reach me."

"I don't want your pity!"

"Then you will be pleased to hear that I do not intend to demonstrate any. If you would rather remain in the post-apocalyptic wasteland Mammon is shortly to become and shout curses into an uncaring sky, that is, of course, your choice. I will not force you to deal with me. I have never forced any of them to deal with me," he remarked, looking out across the field, which had filled up with restless people. "They come to me of their own free will and I make it very clear to them what they are signing away before I put the pen in their hand."

"I think they would feel differently if they knew what you were planning."

"By all means, tell them," Faust invited, extending one hand toward the crowd. "I'm curious to see how you will spin my refusal to single-handedly bankroll the town after the rampant mismanagement of its resources without raising the question of how you, as town treasurer, either failed to notice or actively encouraged it for twelve years, but I have complete faith in you, Mrs. Rutter. Have at me. Lay my nefarious schemes before all of Mammon. You cannot turn them any more against me than they already are, you can only awaken them to the realization that Mammon's clock is ticking down. And of course, the sooner they sell out to me and escape, the less time there is for the rest of you. So tell them. Or perhaps I should," he offered, reaching for the microphone.

Wendy Rutter snatched it from the stand and clutched it to her chest in trembling white-knuckled hands. "This isn't over!" she hissed. "I'll fight you every step of the way!"

"How exhausting that will be and how futile. My sympathies." He adjusted his relaxed grip on the head of his cane and looked out over the field again. "As we've nothing else to discuss, shall we get on with it?"

The council members exchanged glances, but didn't move, waiting for Rutter's response, and after a tense couple of seconds, she switched on the microphone and turned to face the crowd wearing a smile like a cheap rubber mask.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" she began in a voice that only slightly shook. "Friends! Neighbors! It's so good to see you all here today for…for the 42nd Annual Tree-Lighting Ceremony."

Applause. Chad enthusiastically joined in, laughing at all the smiling people who didn't know they were part of the joke he was laughing at. Ana watched him as she listened with half an ear to Rutter's speech, thinking about evil. What was worse, anyway? To have the idea to ruin lives, to dedicate yourself to it, to work at it for decades, to break an entire town and unhome its people…or to laugh at it?

At last Rutter's speech ran down. She stood for a moment too long, just looking at all the people gathered before her as they bounced restless babies and shared hot drinks and cast hungry looks back at the open doors of the heated community center. Then she raised the microphone again to speak. Ana expected a repeat of Shelly's last word, a bold fuck-you to bow out on, and maybe one last slap for Ana, since she was sitting right there, but Rutter surprised her. She put her chin up and kept her smile on and did her job with what could easily be mistaken for dignity if you weren't close enough to see the hate.

"And without further ado," Rutter said, waving at the presentation button, "it's time to officially open the holiday season with the lighting of the town tree! Mr. Faust?"

Mr. Faust adjusted his cane and carefully rose. Another round of applause hailed him, shorter than Rutter's, but louder. More kids. He tipped his hat, like Freddy at the start of his act, then raised his hand over the button. He paused. "I've been doing this a long time," he mused, lowering his hand so that his fingers just brushed the flat red top of the button without pushing it. "A very long time. Pressing buttons, cutting ribbons, opening doors…and closing them. It is an honor. Always. Regardless of certain sentiments no doubt at play in the offering, I have always received it as an honor to be included in such traditional celebrations. And I must confess, it is the tradition more than the celebration that I appreciate. What is a holiday but an arbitrarily-chosen date artificially infused with sentiment we are all expected to share, regardless of personal experience? Whereas a tradition is a shared experience, one that creates personal memories and therefore, genuine sentiment. I have great respect for this town's traditions and it has always been an honor to share in them."

As a polite smattering of applause answered him, the kind that said, 'Enough with the speeches, old man. Get on with it, it's cold out here,' Faust turned and looked at Ana. "And yet, what separates a tradition from a mere celebration is that traditions must be passed on, from one generation to the next. And so it is my honor, my dear child, to extend this honor to you."

Eesh. So she could be the one everyone remembered as the last one to light the tree before the town died. He meant well, she knew that, but she did not need that kind of infamy, even if it would only follow her for another year or two.

As she hesitated, Chad leaned in and gave the button a smack. "You snooze, you lose," he smirked as the tree lit up.

Ana didn't even get the chance to tell him she didn't care before Faust rounded on his grandson with what was for him a furious expression, but he was distracted before he could speak by a gasp from the crowd.

They were outside, where the wind was always blowing. It took a hell of a loud gasp to make itself heard under those conditions, but a couple hundred people gasping all together could do it, and no one, no matter how many lights were on it or how festive they were feeling, no one gasped like that for a pretty Christmas tree.

And as Ana looked warily around to see what they were gasping at, the screaming started.