'Why not him?' I had suggested, flicking my knife at the black one.

As always, Hogge had skulked deeper into the shadows of his pen, eyes flashing yellow above gleaming tusks. His piggish face had somehow seemed to be grinning mockingly.

"Look at me, how scared I'm pretending to be."

Pops had shaken his head. 'There are others, David.'

'That one is unnatural. Hell, he's been around since my childhood. What the hell kind of pig lives that long? Besides the magical ones you insist he's not.'

'I do that because Hogge is not a magical pig.'

I had sighed. One day, we were going to address the swine in the yard.

But, clearly, not today. Tempted as I was to just look at him with Mimir's sight, and see whatever pops was being oblique about.

Maybe I'd finally find out my father's dark secret. All weirdos needed a good parent with a dark secret, right? The town librarian had said so while we were discussing novels, and dammit, she might have been a crazy cat lady(as in, a werecat who believed she was human), but she was trustworthy.

No mud touched pops' faintly-glowing rubbers boots as he paced through the muck, orange flames streaming from his open palm and turning the slaughtered pig's skin a rich brown. Mihai had offered to do it himself, but pops had declined, claiming the aetherically-sensitive would taste his magic's residue while we were eating, and faithcraft was faster than a burner. The old man wore a pair of thick grey pants-a gift from a retired friend, who'd worked at the car factory in Mioveni-and a black jacket he didn't need to protect him from the cold. On the back, a golden image of Christ wept red tears, smiling plaintively with his arms outstretched. "DO NOT" was written above the Redeemer, and "CROSS ME AGAIN" beneath.

A tasteless joke, in my opinion. But then, pops often received dubious 'gifts' from his parishioners who wanted to see if they could rattle old Father Silva, or shake his faith. He kept them to prove they did not.

I leaned against the wall next to the cellar door, one hand toying with my new cross. Pops had forged it after Chernobog had turned the last one to dust during the Headhunt. In truth, I wasn't wearing it, because it would have made me sink through the concrete. Instead, I was shaping the air around it, creating a supernaturally-strong current, that, while small, could still keep it floating a few millimetres above my skin, preventing the thousand-ton cross from cratering the ground. The weight had been a suggestion of Rivka Peretz during a particularly frustrating sparring session. The ghoul had kept coming at me, however many times I'd reduced her to stray atoms, after running out of curses and taunts, we'd started talking.

'God,' I had sighed, holding her above the ring in a sphere of spinning air. 'I wish I had something to just...pin down angry, unstoppable midgets like you with.'

'Watch the low blows, Silva!' Rivka had said, before performing a gesture that I was sure wasn't encouraged by the Tanakh, or even common manners. 'Why don't you just ask your daddy to make you another eyesore paperweight, if you want to pin me down so much?'

A comment I hadn't replied to, not even jokingly. I had a girlfriend now, for the first time in over a decade.

And so, the second cross. Still made of iron and silver, though I wasn't sure if pops had simply made a shitton of the materials and compressed it, or just made the cross heavy despite it not physically massing much. It also had bladed edges, just like the first one.

Mia squatted next to me, or maybe she was kneeling. With zmeu legs jointing backwards, they were pretty much the same thing. Even like this, her head was still above my waist, but I'd gotten used to the height difference, while she was using the height difference.

'Sure you don't want me to lend a breath, Costi?' my girlfriend asked, arms folded across her thighs as her tails fiddled with the strings on her red hoodie.

'Thank you, my dear,' Pops waved her off. 'But your flame's power would linger on the meat, just like Mihai's magic. It's...almost done, anyway...'

Mia had grown close enough to my father since the beginning of our relationship that she refrained from cracking a joke about the meat, just smiling. She knew he found her humour "quite energetic", but not really his type. In turn, she held her tongue around him, and opened up around me.

She didn't refrain from jokes, either.

When pops was done, Andrei approached the pig, boots making the tarp it was on creak. The were was wearing a thick black long coat over a dark green shirt and blue pants; the coat was a holdover from his Securist days, proof against silver blades and so heavy it would have broken a human's spine. His calloused hands became the paws of his beast form, fur running up to his elbows and filling his sleeves. He drew a claw the size of my index finger across the pig's back, opening it up like an envelope. Then, he wisely jumped back, clearing over a dozen metres and landing in the back of the garden, and I joined him an instant later. Petru and Pavel were tied to one of the apple trees, just a few metres away from him, and both dogs growled as he touched down. Being moved from their usual places was usually great, especially when pops took their leashes off, but the presence of strangers annoyed them.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Andrei, like my other friends, came by when pops and I were away, to feed the dogs, the "neighbours' cats" that seemed to live with pops, and water the plants. This didn't stop the dogs from barking their lungs out whenever they smelled the werebear. Maybe they just sensed the animal in him, and couldn't stand it. He loved them, and, since most of his work consisted of working as security for bored rich people or tearing up people in the supernatural fighting circuit, sometimes along Lucian, he had a lot of free time. So, he had spent a lot of time with the dogs. They just didn't like him.

Mia stood up, dusting off her tights as Lucian and his brothers dropped out off the sky, making us jump into the air. Both Lucas and Aaron flipped before landing, shrinking in size until they were hardly bigger than their younger brother. We didn't really have enough space for Aaron, so...

'I wanted to help with the guts.' Andrei wasn't pouting. He just sounded like it.

'Don't woooory,' Mihai smirked, slouching against the fence. 'If you want to gut a pig so much, just get in trouble with a cop.'

'Ha, ha,' Bianca smiled sarcastically, then quickly covered it with one hand in mock-embarrassment.

'That was pretty bad, man,' Alex said quietly, rubbing his hands together out of reflex. He hadn't felt anything since his death, but he still acted human, even shaping his ectoplasm into winter clothes. In fact, the ghost's bluish-white face was barely visible-only his eyes were, really-under his thick "woolen" hat and scarf.

'Agreed,' Andrei replied. 'Even by my standards. And I love making bad jokes-just look at David.'

'Hey!' I spread my arms in disbelief.

'Do accidental jokes count?' Alex adjusted his scarf, sounding thoughtful.

'I'm a rapper, I swear,' I turned away dramatically, fist clenched. 'Catching strays for no reason...'

'What'd your name be, Lil' Moody?' Bianca raised her eyebrows, giggling.

'Stick around until the evening, and maybe you'll find out. Mia and I are going caroling.' Pops couldn't come. He was looking for a new verger, wanting the church to be fully-staffed until Christmas, for reasons he hadn't shared. Over the decades, pops had sometimes had helped, but they either died or quit, and he could handle almost all duties himself, between his enthusiasm and faithcraft.

'Ah...' the iela twirled a blonde curl around her index finger, smiling sheepishly. 'Can't. I'm singing at several senior centres in Bucharest tonight. Next week, too...well, until after New Year's Eve, really.'

'If you have to sing for old people, you'd rather be paid, eh?' I asked, nodding sagely. Understandable, understandable.

'Gotta stay on my grind.' She flexed a slim arm that could have flattened a tank, grinning.

'And she's not singing for them!' Lucian called out to us, turning to look over his shoulder, mouth and moustache red and dripping. 'She's singing at them. Bia only sings for me.'

Well, it was really nice that their tempers had aligned enough for them to be together for the holidays.

'He hasn't looked like that since my last period,' the iela whispered theatrically, leaning towards me.

'Oi, don't eat while you're working, you arse!' Andrei yelled. 'If you can't be serious, get over here and I'll take your place.'

'Let me show you where to shove that suggestion-' Lucas smacked his brother upside the head before he could demonstrate.

'Sooo...' Mihai stuck his hands into the pockets of his green tracksuit. 'Caroling? I'd come too, but the girls are coming back tonight from Adi's mom, and I wanna greet them.'

'Making sure your mother-in-law hasn't opened their eyes about you?' Alex rasped, eyes glinting.

'What's that supposed to mean, Gasper the Unfriendly Ghost?'

'Hey,' Bianca turned to me. 'Heard there'll be a lots of bears and goats this year.'

'Bah! Those are for young men. Besides, only the two of them?' Andrei said, waving a hand dismissively.

'Oh, I don't know,' I said, looking him up and down. 'If you come with us, I think we'll be able to go with the bear...'

'Hilarious.' Mr. "I love bad jokes" bared teeth that had become fangs in dry amusement. 'You need a costume for that, smartarse.'

'But if you go hybrid, you'll be so ugly people will be convinced you're costumed!' I insisted. 'I know it's unusual, but bear with me...'

We bantered for a bit more, as the morning sun rose higher, and Mia and the zmeu brothers finished their agreed-upon part, the former gathering the guts and jerking her head at Bianca for the iela to come help clean them.

The rest of the day was so blissfully normal, I should have known something bad was coming. After the pig's alms, the zmei brothers hung around a bit more, to help make the sausages (Aaron insisted it helped with his blood pressure, which I think was a first time for pork), then left for their country. Their parents had reunited for the first time in decades-not for Christmas, as their father didn't celebrate it, and their mother didn't understand most aspects of our reality, but through sheer coincidence-and, going by their excited apprehension, they really wanted to capitalise on this.

This was the beginning of what should have been a time of joy and charity.

Let me tell you, instead, of the Fright Before Christmas.