"Peter!" he cried. "Black Peter, you wretch, bring the book and my crozier!"
Matthias sniffed at the wailing ghost of the little boy. "What happened to you?" he asked.
The young ghost sniffled and blinked at him. "A man offered me a ride home from school, but we never went home. He hurt me and then he left me out here. I prayed and prayed for someone to come. . . . "
"Bit late . . . " Matt growled.
"Never say that, Matthias!" Saint Nick scolded. "Not on Christmas. " He held out his hands to Black Peter, who offered him the big black book and the gold shepherd's crook.
The patron saint of children looked at the sad little ghost and opened the book. "There, now, Jose, we'll make it right. "
Matt craned his neck to look over the man's shoulder at the book. He could see a creamy page that had but a single name penned on it in wet, red ink - Jose Maria Antonio Guttierez. As he looked, Santa Claus began to speak, long Latin phrases that shivered in the air and the ground shook as he raised his stick in his free hand. The words broke into sparkling shards that swirled and glittered, falling on the page and on little Jose, making the red ink run.
Still Sinterklaas intoned the strange words and the ink shimmered, turning brown, then yellow. . . . The ghost gasped and so did the boy in the saint's arms.
The glimmering words that filled the air blazed into white light and the red-coated man brought his crozier down. It touched the little boy with a sound like distant cannon and a shout of angels and the air itself was afire!
Matthias jumped back and the little boy in Santa's arms coughed and opened his eyes. Matt looked for the ghost but it was nowhere to be seen. He looked at the book and saw that the name on the page was now written in gold ink that gleamed as if it were a coin newly minted.
Jose looked up and gasped, "Papa Noel . . . "
"Merry Christmas, Jose," said Father Christmas. He glanced at Matt and Black Peter, then back to the boy. "You're a long way from home, but we'll get you back. "
The man and his shadow bundled the boy into the sleigh, and Matthias and the reindeer team hauled the conveyance into the sky once again, soaring miles to the south, over rivers and fields, over the craggy red and yellow spires of New Mexican canyons, to touch down on the grass of a playing field while Kris Kringle took the boy back to his home. He handed him back into the care of his dazed, tearstained parents, who didn't seem to realize how far their child had traveled or that they were talking to the real Santa Claus and not just some seasonal department store employee.
Black Peter grumbled, brushing at the book as he stood beside Matthias and watched from a distance - no one wanted to explain the presence of a magical sled with eight reindeer and a werewolf in its traces and certainly not a black shadow of a man with burning red eyes.
"Now, I'll never hear the end of it," Black Peter muttered.
"Huh?" Matt grunted. "End of what?"
"You'll find out. . . . " The dar
k man looked quickly around and then flipped open the book and pointed at it. "Here, take a look, but read fast, the bishop is coming back. "
Matthias glanced down and saw his own name on the page. There were three gold stars beside his name - which was a filthy brown with tiny hints of gold at the edges - and then a little red X followed by more gold stars, and then a handful of black check marks that stopped abruptly with a big black X. The werewolf could guess what the stars meant - those were the years of his youth, surely - and the black X must have marked the year he rejected Christmas.
"What's that mean?" he asked, poking his paw at the red X.
Black Peter grinned - his teeth looked like knives and Matt felt a shiver of dread at that smile. "That's when you died, little Mattie. "
"But I'm not dead! And I don't remember being dead. . . . "
"Think of what you've just seen - "
A hand in a red mitten snapped the book closed and Saint Nicholas took it away from his dark companion.
"Now, now, Peter, don't scare poor Mattie. He's done very well tonight. That name was jet-black before this night started, and you and I shall have to discuss how that blackness came about. . . . "
Matthias growled at Rider. "Tell me about the X!"
Grandfather Frost sighed. "That's a long story and the sun is catching up to us. I think it should wait for another time, so we're not stranded here on Christmas Day. "
"I won't be stranded," Matthias snapped. "I don't need a magical team of reindeer to fly me home - I am home - or close enough. " Matt hunched his shoulders, raising his hackles and bristling as he crouched close to the ground, poised to leap at the man in the red suit - completely forgetting about the harness.
Saint Nicholas glanced at the eastern sky, then back to the werewolf. Matthias couldn't see any difference in the color of the night, but he supposed that came with practice - like the trick of getting into houses.
"Very well," Santa said. "You know that I am the patron saint of children and that is because of what this evil man did. " He pointed to Black Peter, who glowered. "When I was Bishop of Myrna, three young boys from one of the villages went missing. They were all good friends and mischievous little scamps so at first no one was too worried about them, thinking they'd be back as soon as whatever adventure they had conceived was done. But they didn't come home and their families began to worry. There had been famine in other villages and many people were hungry and many more were desperate. The city was suffering the most, for there were too many mouths to feed on the food the villages and ships could supply.