I Applied for a Delivery Job and Got Turned Into a Flying Reindeer?!

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Hundreds of miles from Pleasant Ridge, and an incomprehensible distance from where Justin currently lay unconscious, the sun was setting on a small town called Dennisville, finally bringing an end to the calamity that was Black Friday. The people were slowly returning to their senses, the shopping madness fading, leaving them with vague feelings of guilt for the half-remembered atrocities they had committed in the name of Bonnie Blah Blah and Major Monkeytron. Thanksgiving leftovers were being microwaved, smiling children were trying to cajole their parents into revealing what they had bought for them, while greasy-faced CEOs added up the day's profits, cackling at the very idea of putting any of it into a holiday bonus.

But not every face in Dennisville was smiling tonight.

"I hate Christmas!" growled Collin Foster. He paused to kick snow at a passing cat. It ran away with a hiss, and the surly eight year old stood there alone for a few minutes, face red, tears streaming down his cheeks, silently fuming at the injustice of the whole Christmas season, before continuing his aimless wandering.

He had been good this year! Well, better than he had been the year before. Sure, he had been sent to the principal's office back in March when Miss Ketzel had caught him trying to steal stupid Alex Sherman's bike. And there was that time in June when he'd eaten his sister's entire birthday cake and then blamed it on the dog. And just a couple weeks ago, he'd stolen a pack of his dad's cigarettes and left them under his friend Shane's pillow where he knew his parents would find them. It was all he deserved for refusing to let Collin copy his homework, after all.

The point was, he may have been bad, but the number of times he'd been caught being bad had gone down significantly from last year. And yet his parents still had the nerve to sit him and Gracie down and tell them that Dad hadn't made as much money at work as he'd hoped, so Santa probably wasn't going to bring them any presents for Christmas this year.

What kind of sense did that make? Everyone knew that Santa didn't sell his toys. He gave them away for free as long as you wrote him a letter! For his parents to so confidently say that Santa wasn't going to bring him anything...well, that could only mean one thing: that they had written to Santa and told him not to bring Collin any presents!

The injustice of it all made him want to track down that cat and give it a real kick.

"Stupid Mom," he grumbled, hands stuffed in his pockets and eyes fixed angrily on the ground in front of him. He'd left his neighborhood behind and was now trudging down the cold, empty sidewalks of town. "Stupid Dad! Stupid Christmas! Stupid, dumb Santa—"

"You'd better be careful, saying stuff like that around this time of year."

Collin stopped short, gasping in surprise. The voice had come from a nearby alleyway. It was dark, like a solid wall of shadow that the streetlights couldn't pierce. An icy wind blew out of that darkness, as if the night itself were laughing at him.

"Who's there?" Collin demanded, trying to sound brave. "You'd better come out before I—"

A pair of bright golden eyes appeared just in front of him, and Collin recoiled with a yelp.

"Sorry, didn't mean to scare you," it said in a raspy hiss. "Couldn't help but overhear you just now."

Collin watched those eyes warily. Whoever they belonged to, he doubted very much that they were human. They looked like a cross between a cat's and a lizard's eyes, and they glittered with an emotion he wasn't sure he wanted to identify.

"I- I'm not afraid of you!" Collin said, balling his fists.

"Well, of course you're not!" the voice said with a snicker. "Why would anyone be afraid of one of Santa's elves?"