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# The Yeti Uprising

# An IPMA Adventure for Christmas 2013

By P. Edward Auman

Copyright 2013 P. Edward Auman

Smashwords Edition

Cover Art Image by Albert Ziganshin \- Fotolia.com

Internal Art Image by Melanie Auman - 2014

ISBN: 9781310926273

Discover other titles by P. Edward Auman at online e-book retailers, in print, and www.PEdwardAuman.com.

Learn more about stories featuring the IPMA (The Institute for the Preservation of Magical Artifacts) at www.TrollBrother.com.

Follow the creative media company founded upon Eddie's works: www.IPMACreative.com in 2014

# Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

# Dedicated to those would-be authors who braved the 2013 National Novel Writing Month event with me, and for kids of all ages that remember the magic in Christmas. See NaNoWriMo.org or more information.

# MEMORANDUM

December, 27th

To: Board of Directors, Institution for the Preservation of Magical Artifacts

CC: Dr. Wilhelmina Rheinhart, President

From: P. Edward Auman, Historian

IPMA, Eastern U.S. Regional Offices

Subject: Yeti Infestation of Known North Pole Facilities, December 21, 2013, Event # 2013-W-768

Dear Madam President and Members of the Board:

As you were initially alerted by internal Command Center alerts, we experienced an event at the North pole at one, Belschnickel, aka: Saint Nicholaas' facilities involving an uprising and attempted coup de'tat by the Yeti clan thought to normally occupy northern Manitoba, Canada. Many agents, too many to be identified in this memorandum, were involved in the dispatching of this infestation and gratitude will be expressed to each via our normal IPMA channels for employee recognition. Please anticipate full details, including the names of all participating agents in our full briefing scheduled for the regular quarter review the first week in January.

For now, per your request, I am providing a detailed narrative of the event according to the witnesses at the North Pole and those agents who have so far been debriefed. Please note Agent Peter Samuel's significant commitment and attentiveness to resolving this issue in time for said Belshnickel delivery of holiday artifacts.

Thank you.

# Chapter 1

# December 17

# Wentworth Tree House Club, Rouge River, Troy, MI

Joshua knew his friends wouldn't be by the tree house on this day. Much too cold for them. The last week and a half had seen temperatures in the twenties overnight so much of the shoreline of the little portion of the Rouge River that flowed by his neighborhood had frozen along the edges. It had climbed to about forty degrees for high temps but still snow had fallen at times and it lay in a thin mat, crusted on the top by the melting days and re-freezing nights. The day before he'd even charged up his little RC kit car and ran it across the top of the ice just to see what would happen. It slid around and presented an altogether new sport to conduct with it, trying to avoid sliding right off the patch of lawn in front of his house and onto the dry driveway, only breaking through the crust here and there on occasion, usually along the edges near the brush and trees.

Nope. This particular Tuesday afternoon after one of the last few days of school before holiday break was going to be left to him. So he enjoyed it. He whipped out the parody magazine his mother bought and started in the middle with the bit about spies hunting each other down in silly ways. Then he started one of the comics stories.

With the sun settling at right around 5:00PM Josh enjoyed the last few minutes and then used his cell phone to light the page he was finishing. Then it was time to get home for supper. His mom wouldn't mind him out by the river on his own. She'd always told Dad, boys will be boys after all. But Dad really didn't want him there, and had a way of teasing him a bit about disappointing him that dug at his emotions with a little guilt. He'd once tried complaining to his mother that his father was bullying him, but he didn't seem to get much sympathy there. Apparently her feeling was if he didn't want to get in trouble with Dad then he should obey Dad's rules.

So, it was on that late December Tuesday before Christmas that Josh happened to be sitting in a grove of trees along the upper, smaller portion of the Rouge River, nestled between grassy fields just beginning to bend with the weight of snowfalls for the winter that were about to be claimed by housing sub-divisions, when a suspicious faerie folk moved by his position. The little Yeti was humming and chirruping to himself. Not that Josh recognized the fuzzy little ball of white hair that stood only ten or twelve inches tall as an actual Yeti. He'd always heard that a Yeti was basically a snow-bound version of Sasquatch and should likely be six, eight or even twelve feet tall. So of course calling out to the creature, or possibly trying to capture it much like he had several dozens of turtles along the riverside during summer, was an entirely natural reaction.

"Hey!" Josh said, swinging his legs and watching the thing move quickly past thorny, bare shrubs. "What are you doing little fuzzball?"

The hairy little thing halted immediately mid-stride and haunched up its shoulders. Hands were seemingly frozen in position as well. Josh wondered if the thing thought it was hiding like a baby might simply by closing its eyes. Finally its hairy head craned slowly around. Large, glossy blue eyes blinked at the human boy a couple times and took in the scene. Clearly, the little Yeti hadn't counted on a human being suspended from a rickety collection of wood twenty-five feet above him.

Before Josh could jump down the combination of branches and nailed-in ladder steps he and his friends had used as their entrance and exit to the tree house and chase down the latest prized animal find, the fuzzball hopped around to face the human, raising its arms and arranging its stubby pink fingers like clawed hooks and growled. Before Joshua's eyes the beast seemed to grow in stature until he was almost big enough to place his hands upon Josh's feet and pull him down. A tremendous howl emanated from the monster and it bared large pointed teeth.

"Oh, crap!" the human boy screamed. He clattered back onto the tree house platform and towards the back as far as he could yet leave the monster in view.

And then it was gone. The huge monster had disappeared and in the distance along the river, up by the next grove of tall slender trees Josh could just make out a tiny fuzzy, white fur ball with pink hands and nose rushing through the brush to its destination.

It was several minutes before Josh's breath seemed to rejoin his body. His head ached from the rapid flow of blood and he was nervous about trying to climb down while he was feeling light-headed. What was that thing? he pondered.

But it wasn't long before he had a plan for finding out. It wasn't worth doing a search on his smart phone, he needed multiple screens up and figured it would take a while to get the right answer, as he'd never even heard of such a creature as the one he'd seen...either small or ginormous sized.

Quickly he packed his bags, climbed down the tree and made a bee-line for home.

~~~

It seemed all through dinner Joshua's knee bounced up and down uncontrollably. His mother had him talk to the doctors more than once but even though he thought Josh might have a bit of ADHD he didn't need any medicine for it. That's good! Josh's mother had said at the time because she'd heard from a friend that their child got headaches all the time with the medicine he'd been prescribed. But the excitement of the little fuzzy thing was too much to keep in.

Josh couldn't tell his mother, nor his father. It just didn't feel right. No, this was something he thought he'd need a professional's help with. Perhaps a teacher, but no, he didn't want to wait until the next day in Mr. Faber's science class and be made a laughing stock if his teacher didn't believe a word he said. So the cube steak and mac n' cheese was shoveled in at an alarming rate, causing his father to scold him and remind him to chew one-hundred times for each bite.

Finally supper out of the way, Josh dashed upstairs to the den and booted up his mother's computer on which she did her book keeping. While it booted over what seemed like an eternity, the little boy couldn't help but peek out the window repeatedly just to make sure he wasn't missing something extraordinary like he nearly might have early that afternoon if he hadn't been attentive to the slight movements and rustling noises.

The glass was frigid cold and his breath fogged quickly and then started to freeze near the old seals on the pane. He wiped absent-mindedly at the opaque covering and stared into the cul-de-sac and beyond the houses across the way into the small line of trees that grew along where Rouge had narrowed to almost stream status.

Where was that thing going? He wondered. Then finally the operating system on the computer had booted and played its little jingle that indicated it was now awake and ready to grant all the answers to the universe. Quickly he opened three separate windows and began a search in each one. On one he started a search based on descriptive words: hairy, small, white. And then as he thought for a moment he added the word, magic. In the second search engine he started a search for mysterious creatures of lower Michigan. And on the third he had to consider for a moment. As thoughts played across his mind various cartoons and television shows he'd seen flashed across his quickly moving memories and thoughts. Among all the inputs a word crept to the forefront. It was a word he knew he'd heard in a cartoon but couldn't quite place a finger one which on. It was cryptid. What he wanted to know about was a cryptid: an animal that has been generally considered real or possible but not by any scientific community.

The little fuzzball must be a cryptid. Joshua was one-hundred percent sure the thing was real, even if it's explosion in size meant something fishy was going on. So he figured that meant others must have seen it too. Maybe, if he were lucky, most people just hadn't spoken up about it, afraid of being embarrassed. But he knew that on the internet, there's always someone to be found who is willing to talk about the unbelievable. So for search number three he entered the following: cryptid, small, white, big foot.

He wasn't sure why he threw in the words big foot but he was beginning to formulate in his mind as he glanced through page link after page link on each of the searches an idea that maybe the reason sasquatch were so hard to find proof of them was that they weren't really what they seemed. Could it be that there really are sasquatch, but that they were magic? The whole giant-sized version seemed to fit his developing theory perfectly. After all, he knew real creatures like the cobra, the frilled lizard and even various birds and rodents would puff themselves up to look bigger.

Josh considered the puffer fish and decided to start a fourth tab on his browser to search for: cryptid animals that grow in size as a defense. If he'd never seen a puffer fish before in an aquarium he'd visited on the west coast once, he never would have believed someone trying to explain just how big they got. Of course, the change in features and jump from a foot in height to tall enough to make a grab at Josh's feet on a platform twenty-five feet up had him convinced that his little miniature sasquatch must indeed be magical.

Continuing to switch between searches and check each page Josh hardly recognized that he was getting past his bedtime. Mom would be in soon to cut the power and send him to his room. He tried his hand at speed-reading as best he could to get through as many pages as possible before that happened. He found a wiki about Yeti and realized if his theory was correct he should probably start referring to his find as one instead of a Sasquatch. It was white and found in a snowy environment, so even though tiny, he was sure that's what it was.

He'd also found some oddball references to the use of magic in faerie creatures to disguise themselves and hence the reason they were so difficult to "see the unseen". As the page counts racked up, the majority of individual cryptid investigators in fact seem to reference the main contributor to the idea of faeries, a man who claimed to be part of some secret global organization whose primary objective was to collect magical artifacts but who on occasion got involved in faerie-human relations. He went by the call name of Special Agent D and had claimed most recently that a pack of goblins had force fed him something that gave him special ability to see faeries. Most of the blog followers at that point from a month or so earlier started berating him as a fake, even some of the most ardent supporters in previous posts. One previous fan had written on just about any of his posts within the last couple weeks retorts such as, Seen any imps lately? And then Special Agent D had gone silent for several days.

But the thing he found most interesting in the posts is the mention of various magical defenses and disguises. Josh learned about a sort of invisibility or cloaking called shimmer that supposedly many faeries used. He also read suggestions from the fan boy investigators that said sprites and other faeries might be able to disguise themselves as humans. There were so many references in fact, that Joshua couldn't ignore the track he was following.

Then, Bingo! He found his evidence for which he was looking. There was a fairly irregular blog from a girl who lived in East Selkirk, Manitoba, Canada who had written a description two years earlier of precisely what he had seen. It was from a girl who went by the name Hattie Me. He copied the text and pasted it into a document to print. For some reason he felt a compulsion to keep it with him, like a security blanket.

When I saw my first Yeti that I can remember I was only seven years old. But now my little brother and I watch for them every December. He doesn't see them as good as I can. But he has seen a couple. Sometimes I wonder if they're actually migrating or something. They're always moving northward through Bird's Hill Provincial and then past our home. I've seen tracks but when I try to show other people, even my little brother they say they don't notice anything. One time when we actually went to the campgrounds in the park I saw several of them all together and they seemed to be building something from branches and loose scrap and stuff. It was dark and nose-freezing cold so I couldn't stay, but whatever it was they were building was gone the next morning.

I've only ever gotten too close to a Yeti twice. Both times they puffed up in size and threatened me. They've never hurt me though. I don't think they like to hurt people. And I know it sounds crazy, but I think they might actually be using a type of magic or something to get so big. Thank goodness both times I got too close there was only one of them! It was by accident the first time and just about made me wet myself. The second time I was trying to sneak up on one and take a picture. I did snap the shot but the only thing in my camera is snow and a little fluff of fuzz in the lower right corner.

One time I tried to get the police to look at the picture and do a digital analysis of what it might be—I KNOW they can do that sort of stuff. But they just laughed at me. So I've decided this year to start recording everything I see and find and then when I have enough proof I'll turn it over to the authorities.

Until next year then, Bonne journée!

There was no next year. Nor was there any entry from this year. Only a brief blog entry in the spring of last school year that mentioned winning a school essay contest. Josh wondered briefly if Canadians went to school year round. But returning to his task he determined he would reach out to Special Agent D and see what he could find out.

Joshua registered an account on the forum where D had mostly posted as _Junior Yeti_ and then sent a private message to Agent D. As he heard his mother's footsteps coming up the stairs he stared at the screen for a bit, as though hoping D would immediately return a message and there it would be, popping up in his inbox.

But no such luck. Mom entered the room and chewed Josh out a bit and sent him off to brush his teeth and climb into bed. She made some comment about eleven-year-olds being able to manage that sort of personal hygiene on their own normally, and when he was ready she gave him a kiss on the forehead and started turning off the hall lights. Josh could hear his father doing the nightly check of the garage door, the bolts on the front and back doors, and double checking the latches on windows. There were times that Josh was pretty sure he got his supposed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from him. He wondered if maybe his mild ADHD came from Dad's side too?

And then, despite his assumption it would be hard for him to sleep that night, Joshua immediately dreamed of little white fuzz balls leading him by the hand to something exciting.

# Chapter 2

# December 18

# Boulan Middle School, Troy, MI

The first class of the day, Art with Mr. Striders, went well enough. They were supposed to be working on their clay figures to be fired during the holidays while the kids were out of school, but Josh had spent more than half of the forty-five minutes doodling variations of the two sizes of Yeti as he could remember them. The large version was chilling enough it gave him shivers. Suzanna had leaned over at one point, setting aside her letter 'S' she was making for her figurine and commented, "What is that? Something from one of your video games?"

Josh thought he was being mocked, even if Suzanna was the only girl in school that ever talked to him, but then realized she was just being conversational. He toyed with the idea of telling her what it really was. And then he thought of it again.

"Uh...No," he replied, bashfully. "It's actually an abominable snowman. You know? Like, for Christmas and stuff?"

Suzanna smiled awkwardly. "Oh. I'm not sure abominable snowmen are part of Christmas, Josh."

"I thought your family didn't celebrate Christmas, Suz," he said and started shuffling his doodles around and placing them back into his writing pad.

"We don't. Chanukah is already done this year actually. But I know what Christmas is, and I'm pretty sure there's no abominable snowmen," she retorted with a more comfortable smile. "Maybe a magic flying deer or fat guy in a red suit or something, but no abominable snowman, as far as I've ever heard of."

"Well, yeah," Josh answered unhappily. He always seemed to say the wrong thing to the one girl who might actually be willing to "go" with him some day. But at least he managed to get her off the Yeti topic. Or at least he thought.

"Well, anyway," she said sticking her fingers back into the clay, "I think the little ones are cute. You should draw more of those."

"Mmmm. Yeah, I guess so. They are more cute aren't they?"

"Are they baby abominable snowmen? Or something else?" She asked, half paying attention, half focusing on her letter "S".

Josh considered the question for a moment. "I don't know. I...think they're the same thing."

Suzanna just nodded, but Josh had a hard time focusing on starting his clay project while toying with a variety of theories on how the little fuzz ball he'd seen made itself so big.

~~~

Second period English class did not go quite as well. Twenty minutes into class while the teacher was finishing up a comparison of the "West Side Story" movie they'd watched over last week and "Romeo and Juliet" that they had spent the semester reading, a TA from the main office entered the room and cleared her throat. Josh recognized her as Tara, an eighth grader from his neighborhood that could hardly be bothered to give him the time of day, let alone look at him on the bus. But as she walked to the front of the room to hand Mrs. Everstein the slip of paper she made a point of catching his eye and scowling.

"Oh!" Mrs. E said. "Josh? You're wanted at the office...urgently. Better take your coat and backpack just in case."

It took a second for Joshua to realize it was he to whom Mrs. E was speaking. But he slid his book into his bag and got up to go, all while Tara stood at the classroom door tapping her feet. Josh barely noticed his teacher seemed to be at a loss for words and the students all eying him sourly, not sure whether they should despise him for making trouble or envy him for getting out of the lecture by Mrs. Everstein.

Once inside the hallway, Tara walked quickly, making it difficult for Josh to keep pace.

"Wait," Josh asked, "I've got to grab my coat in my locker."

"No you don't, squirt!" She hissed at him.

"Yes I do! You heard Mrs. Everstein!"

"You need to get to the front office right now!" she growled, grabbing his upper arm tightly and attempting to drag him along. "I don't know if they caught you building a nuclear reactor or what, but you've got some weirdo secret government agent here looking for you. You're in big trouble now, freshman!"

Joshua never did understand how a sixth grader could be a "freshman" when high school didn't even start until ninth grade. Still, that was the lowest form of addressing a sixth grader from an eighth-grade perspective in Boulan Middle, and Tara was definitely one to use it freely.

They hustled to the main office. The door and reception area were encased with glass windows and the back side of the office too, such that they could look right through where the receptionist sat and see inside the administrative courtyard where snow was falling heavily. Boulan Middle School had been arranged entirely indoors in three by three blocks of rooms so that hallways ran all the way around each block set, making a sort of tic tac toe pattern if viewed from above. The Administration office was the center block and three sides of it had a glass wall into a section that had no roof. A tree and some plants grew in there along a little walkway between the reception area and the principal's office and it was a very pretty effect in an otherwise prison-feeling environment. However, it also allowed a handsome, young man wearing dark glasses and black suit to see Josh coming alongside Tara and he rose to meet them long before they came in the glass door.

As they entered, the man in black quickly snatched Josh's right hand from his side and shook it two times briefly. "Joshua Manders? I'm very pleased to meet you. My name is Peter Samuel. I am an agent..."

But he was cut off. Mrs. Belfaust, the receptionist for the school, cleared her throat and announced, "Mr. Fisker will see both of you in his office now. And please remember Mr. Samuel, you have no permission to interview Joshua until his parents arrive."

"My parents are coming?" Josh asked looking at Mrs. Belfaust, but it was Mr. Samuel who answered.

"Yes. They won't let me talk to you until your parents grant permission. I've told them you aren't in any trouble, and I'm _not_ with the government..."

"All the more reason for restricting you until he has his parents' permission, Mr. Samuel," the receptionist got in edge-wise one last time before the pair was making their way through the hallway to the principal's office.

Tara had been left standing at the reception desk, looking perplexed and somewhat miffed that she didn't get to hear what all the hub-bub was about.

Mr. Samuel leaned over and quietly said to Josh before opening Mr. F's door, "They've already confirmed my position, but... everyone's suspicious when you show up unannounced, aren't they?"

Startled, Josh looked quickly to the man in black's face. His dark glasses were tipped down to his nose and Josh just caught him giving a wink.

"Who are you?" Josh mumbled breathlessly, but then they were being welcomed by Mr. Fisker.

"Come in, both of you!" Mr. F said warmly as he gestured to a couple chairs around his desk.

Josh always like Mr. F since he and his parents first met him on the school tour before the year started. He was balding, but had huge round glasses and a smile that made him seem like a friendly uncle or grandfather. Joshua had never heard him get really angry and usually when he was chewing out someone in trouble he'd say something funny to ease the tension. Like the time when several eighth graders were riding skateboards outside the front of the school and harassing Josh while he waited for his Mom to pick him up. Mr. Fisker had come outside and stood atop one of the planters. He said to the eighth-graders, "You know the rules!" and then with a huge wave of both hands as though he were parting the red sea or performing a grand magical act he yelled, "Boys, DISPERSE!" When the eighth-graders went riding away from the school on the boards chuckling a bit, Mr. F turned to Josh, smiling, and said, "See, you've just got to be super authoritative with hooligans. Good day, Master Manders." And then he went back inside. Josh's mother had tried to ask what it was he was smiling so much about that day when she drove him home, but every time he tried to explain it in a way that didn't seem an embarrassment to Mr. F he would start giggling and couldn't get the explanation out.

"Well then," Mr. Fisker started out once they had all sat down. "I want you to understand, Joshua that you aren't in any trouble. Is that correct, Mr. Samuel?"

"Yes, quite correct." The young man removed his dark glasses and gave Josh a pleasant smile that didn't seem entirely sincere.

"Ah! But I should have thought of it already! Would either of you two like some hot cocoa? It _is_ snowing outside and it's almost Christmas."

Mr. Samuel nodded enthusiastically and by way of catching Josh's eye encouraged the boy to do the same.

"Alright then. Just give me two minutes and we'll have something tasty while we wait for your mother, Joshua," Mr. F said leaving the room.

Then Mr. Samuel moved. He leaned in very close, so close that Josh felt awkward and tried to lean away from him to get a little personal space. He placed his left arm around the back of Josh's chair and the palm of his hand on the principal's desk in front of them, and then looked into Josh's eyes with intensity.

"Josh. We have two minutes. I've got to make this quick. I need you to trust me so if you have any questions ask them quickly too."

"Uh...okay..." Josh stammered.

"Listen. I am an agent from an organization that tracks and collects artifacts that are...well, for lack of a better understanding behind the science of them, magical."

Instantly Josh was uncomfortable. This man was crazy.

"No, it's true," Mr. Samuel said, hurt by the distrust showing in the young boy's face. "But never mind that now. Did you or did you not contact Special Agent Davison about seeing what you believe to be a yeti?"

"Davison?" Josh thought out loud. "Do you mean that Special Agent D on the forums?"

"Forums?" Now it was Agent Samuel's turn to be perplexed. He sat back in his chair looking somewhat thwarted. "Agent Davison didn't mention any forum. I might have to check that with him. But he said he got a message from you about yeti. Is that correct or not?"

"Well," Josh tried to stall for time but had a tough time doing it. Wasn't he supposed to wait for his mother? "Yeah. I guess I did. But...it was just a joke."

Samuel tapped his lip with one arm of his dark glasses. "Hmmm. Clever boy. I don't think you thought it was a joke."

"No?" Josh was still stalling for time.

"No, and here's why. You said the yeti were small. Maybe even kind of "cute" in your words. But when you surprised it, the yeti grew many times in size. Is that not what you said in your message?"

"Well. Maybe." Josh didn't quite know what to think about this intense guy in a plain black suit. It was all just a little too weird, like something out of a movie.

Samuel leaned in close again. "Let me tell you something. Most people would not suggest a Yeti, or a Sasquatch were only one foot tall beings unless they'd actually seen one. You've actually seen one, haven't you?"

Josh wasn't sure how to respond. He was really feeling like his mother should be there before he got himself dug into something he couldn't get back out of. But Samuel was grinning, apparently very pleased to have made the confirmation.

"Alright, then. We have to have a plan. If you don't trust me right now, that's fine. We'll work on it. But I need your help to track down those Yeti. We think something big is going on with their migration this year and we can't afford to let something bad happen without planning for it."

Josh nodded, but not really in agreement. He just did it because Samuel seemed to be expecting it.

"Right. So what I've done is had our offices prepare a communication from the Michigan State Board of Education. Basically, I'm here to present it to you in person. It's also going to be an invitation to attend a little student summit on education. I need you to go along with everything I say. Can you do that?"

Josh didn't respond, other than to give Mr. Samuel a cock-eyed look.

"Did I mention this may get you out of the last few days of school before the holiday break?"

Josh whispered to Mr. Samuel, "Who the heck are you?"

But then Mr. Fisker was at the door awkwardly trying to open it while holding three mugs full of very hot cocoa.

"Well, why don't we get to know each other just a bit, before Mom arrives?" Mr. F started as the three sipped their cups.

"Sure," Mr. Samuel said with a cheerful smile. "Why don't I start since I'm the visitor here."

"Sounds like a good plan," the principal responded with a sip of his cocoa. "But...perhaps not too much detail until Joshua's mother arrives?"

"Of course," the man in black said. "Well, I want to let you know first of all that the only reason I have been sent from the State Board of Education is because we've had a tough time getting ahold of you at home, Joshua. Perhaps we had a bad address on your essay submission? Is it possible you may have reversed a number or something?

When Josh looked at Mr. Samuel curiously, he saw a nearly imperceptible nod on the part of the odd man. That must have been the playing-along that he expected from Joshua. So Josh agreed.

As the conversation continued it became clear to Josh that Mr. Fisker was actually just stalling for his mother's arrival. But on the other hand, it appeared Mr. Samuel was just as willing to play the game. And since Joshua was both curious and confused about why this man had come for him he decided to play it out. Josh didn't think he could be dangerous because he had arrived through the school office, had been checked out, and was happy to await his parents. But he wondered why it was he felt he was going to have to deceive his parents to find out the answers.

Soon, Mr. F's desk phone made a peculiar buzz and the receptionist's voice came through, "Mr. Fisker, Josh's mother is here. Shall I send her in?"

"Please do," the principal replied pleasantly, and then sat back in his chair and took a sip.

It was only a few seconds before Mom opened the door and stepped in with curiosity splattered across her confused face. Neither Mr. Samuel nor Mr. Fisker seemed uncomfortable with the pause or her awkward entrance but Josh sure did.

As she sat down, Joshua's mother asked, "So...who can tell me what's going on here the most quickly? Did I understand Josh has won an award that means a trip up north?"

Principal Fisker cleared his throat, but Samuel answered first. "I think I can answer all your questions best Mrs. Anderson," he offered, while pulling something from his suit coat inner pocket.

In a slow motion second Mr. Samuel had caught Josh's eye and tightly closed both of his eyes only briefly and then stared at the young boy. Josh took that as a cue and closed both of his eyes, while Samuel raised something up in the air. With a quick swish downwards and a little breeze washing over him Josh realized Mr. Samuel had just done something to both of the other occupants of the office. He could not hear them talking, moving or even breathing.

"You can open your eyes now, Josh," the man in black said.

When Joshua did, he noted that whatever Mr. Samuel had used was quickly being stored back in his pocket. Looking about the office, Mr. Fisker seemed to be frozen looking cross-eyed into his hot cocoa cup and Josh's mother was staring directly at Mr. Samuel with one eyebrow raised and her mouth crooked as though she were about to say something.

"Wow!" Josh breathed out quietly. "What did you do, Mr. Samuel?"

"Actually," the man said, tugging his cuffs straight and smiling at the boy pleasantly, "I'm an agent of the Institute for the Preservation of Magical Artifacts. So I suppose you should actually call me..."

"You're not with the school board then?" Josh interrupted.

"... _Agent_ Samuel. And no, I'm not."

"So, what happened to my mom and Mr. F?"

"If I told you, I'm not entirely sure you're ready to hear," the agent replied, scowling a bit.

"Oh, I am! I'm ready!...They're going to be okay aren't they?"

"Yes, they'll be fine in a few more minutes. But did you understand me when I said I'm from IPMA? Do you know what that means?"

Josh thought for a moment pondering. "That...you study magic?"

The agent laughed a little genuinely. "I supposed you could say that. But it means I also _use_ a little bit of magic when necessary."

Looking thoughtfully around the room, Josh came to the right conclusion. "So...you magicked them?"

"I don't think that's really a word, Joshua. But yes. I magicked them."

Josh's response was a muted "Wow!"

Then Agent Samuel explained that he had used a magical device which consisted of the components of two different roots that only certain faeries had access to and which he used to both freeze them and to change their memories a bit. Both adults were still stuck in their position and he had to reassure Joshua that they'd be fine.

"They will awake thinking your mother is here to sign the final authorizations for you to attend a student summit up in Lansing. She, and by her knowledge your dad too, will think that you've been selected for a state competition on creative writing."

Agent Samuel flopped a manila folder on Mr. F's desk as he got up from his chair.

"It's time for us to go. Before they wake up."

"But..." Josh hesitated. "I can't just go with you."

"Sure you can. I need your help tracking down that Yeti you saw, and we have everything you will need for the trip. I've arranged for your parents to be comfortable with your absence, and...I'll even have you back on time for your holiday break."

_Track down that Yeti I saw_ , he thought. At least now he knew both what brought Agent Samuel to him as well as what it was he was looking at with some level of assurance...if he could trust that Agent Samuel was telling him the truth. This might be a chance to have a real adventure and satisfy his curiosity at the same time. But if Mom and Dad ever found out what he was really doing they'd have a flippin' flyin' fit, he realized.

Josh stood up, but before he followed he asked, "How do I know I can even trust you? How do I know you're not here to abduct me?"

Agent Samuel put his hands on his hips and thought about the question for a half a second. Then he gestured to the two other adults in the office with his right hand. "Shouldn't they convince you that I'm using magic? If so, you'd think you could probably trust my story."

"I don't even believe in magic, really!" Josh said a little bit loudly and his voice cracked a bit.

"Oh? Really?" Agent S. grimaced. "I supposed next you're going to tell me there's no Santa Claus either? C'mon, we need to hurry."

Apparently _Agent_ Samuel had made the assumption Josh was in for the investigation regardless. And he was, truthfully. But he got in one more quip before he reluctantly followed the agent out the door. "No...And I don't believe in aliens either."

He heard Agent Samuel grumble under his breath. "That's fine. That's another agency altogether anyway."

~~~

On their way out of the school, Agent Samuel quickly flicked whatever it was he used to magic his mother at the receptionist and she froze as well. They bustled through the glass wall door and Josh had just enough time to notice the snow had really begun piling up inside the glass-walled courtyard of the school office. He wondered exactly how they were supposed to be tracking a little furball through the snow, but didn't ask. For the moment anyway, he thought he'd just see what Agent Samuel was up to.

Outside, in the teacher's lot there was a black, sporty mid-sized sedan with very dark-tinted windows. Having toyed a bit with car and motorcycle magazines as he started being interested in more grown up things Josh recognized it was not a cheapy foreign thing. Agent Samuel cruised in something classy...a Chrylser, Lincoln or maybe a Mercedes. The trunk had something that looked vaguely like the airplane wings pin he'd gotten on a trip he had taken on a plane several years earlier, but he didn't recognize it immediately. The wheels were large and the tires wide...probably not the best thing for driving around in fresh slushy snow. Stepping into the passenger seat the boy was pleased to find the seat was heated and the car had indeed been running. Samuel had flicked the keyfob a couple times as they had hurried through the other cars and Josh figured he must have a remote start or something. Leather and suede enveloped him and as the wipers flicked the couple inches of snow that had built up in the short time Samuel had been inside the building and Joshua found he was relaxed and comfortable already. Christmas music was playing on the radio as they pulled away, but it must have been a satellite station as there was no announcer in between the songs.

_Maybe it's custom?_ Josh pondered as the car slipped onto the first main road. It had been plowed and was relatively safe while Agent Samuel goosed the throttle and quiet but excited-sounding little rumble growled from the back of the car. For sure it had a V8 or at least a good-sized V6 moving the MIB-style luxury sedan quickly onto the road. Josh secretly hoped he could afford a cool car like the one Samuel was driving before they were all replaced with self-driving whimpering, battery-driven cars. He also secretly changed his mind about what he might want to do when he grew up. Being an Agent for, _what was it?_ the Institute of Preserved Magical Arts or something or other, was beginning to seem pretty enticing.

The ride to Josh's home was only seven minutes. But he'd seen three snow plows out and about and had heard two and half songs on the radio. As they pulled up, Samuel went straight into their driveway and hopped out of the car. Josh followed reluctantly.

"What are we doing here?" the boy asked.

Halfway to the front door, Agent S turned and blurted the obvious to his mind, "You need to get some warm clothes. And make sure you dress in layers."

Josh stopped on the walk from the driveway to the front door. "How'd you know where I live exactly anyway?"

Reaching around the boy's shoulder and scooting him indoors as quickly as he could, Samuel answered, "I've read through all your files before coming to get you. There's a reason I'm trusting you to help me out, by the way. I figured you'd want to be part of this, don't you?"

Nodding slightly as he turned the key on the front door and stepping inside Josh murmured, "What files?"

"Never mind that. You need to get several layers of very warm clothing. I'm not sure how long this will take."

Josh went to his room and started rummaging around. When he'd collected an armful of various clothing items, such as his thermals, a spare pair of pants, shirt and winter coat along with headgear and gloves he asked the strange agent one more question. "Where's all your warm clothes?"

"Oh don't worry about that. I'm wearing most of what I need, and if I need anything else I can get it from the car."

Josh's eyebrow cocked to one side and tilted his head to the other as if he were trying to look up Agent Samuel's sleeves. As far as he could tell he was wearing just a plain old business suit with a shirt. How was this guy supposed to keep warm in the storm?

At the front door Samuel pulled out a thin, back-pack looking bag that he seemed to have had tucked up under the suit coat. He began taking things from Josh's hands and stuffing them into the backpack. "We'll keep everything safe and dry in here."

"Uh...Okay," was the only response Josh could muster.

With the front door locked and the two seated back in Agent Samuel's black sedan the man pushed a button on the steering wheel somewhere and within a few seconds a pleasant female voice responded. It didn't sound like a bot voice Josh had heard on various smart phones but like it was actually a human responding.

"Agent Samuel. How may we help you?"

"I think we're going to need one of the cross-country cold-climate vehicles."

"Very likely, Agent. How would you like to receive?" the voice responded briefly but with a kind tone.

"Have one of the interns drive it to this address." Agent Samuels quickly repeated Josh's home address to the microphone wherever it was in the car. He seemed to be looking most frequently at the rear view mirror so Josh assumed that's where it was. Or maybe there was a camera there too?

"Confirmed. That is where your vehicle is parked now. Shall I have the driver pick up your vehicle?"

"Yes. But it might not be here when the intern arrives. Tell them to wait for us if we haven't returned."

"Will do, Agent Samuel. Is there anything else I may help you with?"

"Yes..." Agent S looked at the boy beside him briefly as though making up his mind about something. "Are you receiving at the Detroit office? Or is this East Coast Home?"

"Michigan, Detroit office, sir," the voice responded casually.

"Uh...Home?"

"Yes Agent Samuel?"

"You'd better make it a human intern, not one of those local interns. Right?"

"Will the agent be exposed, sir?"

Agent Samuel fussed a bit, still with a watchful eye on Josh, whose mouth had difficulty closing at that point. "No, Home. But we need to be cautious on this one just the same."

"Confirmed. Anything else Agent Samuel?" the lady's voice asked with what might have been the most minute hint of impatience growing.

"No Home. That will do. But please SMS me if Agent Jackson Davison calls in at all. I'm running under his authority on this one, after all." Samuel looked Josh straight in the eye and gave him a forced smile. It wasn't unpleasant but it didn't come naturally it seemed.

"Yes, Agent Samuel. Call terminated."

There was a soft click to disconnect the woman on the other end, only noticeable because Samuel had not yet started the car. But he did so immediately after hanging up and the softly grumbling engine came to life again. If nothing else, Josh was at least glad his report of the little fuzzball earned him the chance to ride around in the awesome car, and, apparently, to meet some sort of secret agent. The day was turning into one he figured he'd never forget, no matter how it turned out.

~~~

They didn't travel far. Samuel backed the black car out of Josh's driveway and then rolled slowly up the half-mile length of Wentworth Drive until it met with 17-mile road. He signaled left and turned on to the busy cross street, and then almost immediately signaled left again and entered the next subdivision. It was a much larger subdivision than Josh's own area. Many locals felt it was basically the same neighborhood even though they didn't have direct access to one another. But the new section was a much longer nearly two mile loop with cul-de-sac's and short branches here and there all the way around to pack in nearly five times as many houses as on Josh's street. It was beautiful in the spring because the trees made a full canopy covering most of the looping main road. But now, though it had slowed significantly since they'd left Josh's school, the road was quickly beginning to get covered by snowfall, even after at least one plow had obviously gone through.

"So, tell me if I'm wrong, Josh. If I go all the way to the west end of this loop and then park on that last little branch of road there, we can cross the old hay field and get straight to the Rouge that way. I'm thinking that's probably where you built your tree house you mentioned in your email?"

"Yeah?" Josh looked at him incredulously. "How did you know that?"

Samuel smiled a much more natural smile this time as he toddled around the neighborhood at twenty-two miles per hour, crunching the fresh snow. "Looking at the map there's a small dam and a wide spot in the river....It's where I would have built one."

"Yeah," Josh nodded. "It's in one clump of trees, with a gap through a field before the forest. In between is a really big spot in the river where the..."

"Turtles live?" Agent S concluded for him.

Both smiled at each other and Josh nodded.

Once at the small branch of road off the main loop, Agent Samuel parked the car and got out. Josh followed suit. They went around to the back where Samuel pulled out another back-pack sort of bag. It was not nearly as full as the one holding Josh's clothes. The man held both out and asked Josh which he'd like to carry.

"I probably should carry my own," he answered.

"Very good. Probably for the best I suppose, but let me know if it gets too heavy."

In fact, the bag felt so light on Josh's shoulders he wasn't even sure there was anything in it once it was in place. It seemed curious but he didn't think on it long. The agent was instructing him secretively again.

"I'm trusting you, mostly because I think you're a smart kid. I don't think you necessarily came to Agent Davison or the IPMA with your information because you knew what you were doing. But the fact that you haven't just brushed off what you saw and that so far you're willing to work with me says something about your character?"

"It does?" Josh cocked an eyebrow.

"So, I'm going to do something just now that might seem a bit...strange to you. Just know that it's not really all that surprising. You know...if you think about all the secret tech our government must have and stuff now-a-days."

"Oh?" Josh was intrigued but perplexed.

Then Agent Samuel pulled out a stone from his backpack. It seemed to be mostly a glossy black, like the obsidian his science teacher had once shown him, only it was rounded like a river rock and for a moment he thought he saw a flash of movement in it. Something amber swirled about as Samuel moved it about in his fingers a bit and then cupped it.

Extending his arm towards the car, Agent S seemed to transfix it with his eyes and after a few seconds the sedan seemed to waver out of existence. Then the man puffed out a breath of air. Apparently he'd been holding it while he did whatever he was doing with the stone.

"Whoa!" Josh said in a low tone. "That _is_ awesome tech!"

"Yeah..." Samuel said, stowing the stone back in the backpack. "I guess you could say its tech."

"Is it gone?" Josh turned again to the adult. "Or has it just disappeared?"

Agent S waved his hand at the space previously occupied by the car, as though a disappearing act were an every-day thing for him. Josh stepped towards the car with his hands outreached. When he bumped his knee solidly but still didn't feel anything before his hands he figured he must have run into the trunk area instead of one of the doors. Sure enough as he planted his palms downwards he felt a flat piece of sheet metal beneath them.

"Wow! That is so cool! It's like the paint must be re... Refracting? Is that what it's doing? The paint is refracting the light around it? 'Cuz that's sure no video screen or anything. It's solid car."

"Well...Josh. I wouldn't focus too much on how it's done," the agent was shouldering his backpack and turning towards the field just beyond the permanent metal barrier at the end of the short stab of street on which they'd parked. "It's a fairly complicated thing to understand."

"Uh-huh. Sure," Josh replied, still trying to steal glimpses of empty space over his shoulder as he caught up with the grown-up.

~~~

Soon the pair had arrived at the river's edge and stalled looking up and down the bank. The flow was slow and it was narrow immediately in front of them, particularly in Winter with a lot of the water at the edge beginning to freeze. But just up from them to their right the river took a bend further up its source and through the trees approximately a hundred yards away was a dam formed in front of a broad, nearly lake-sized swell of water.

"So this tree house of yours?" Agent Samuel started to inquire.

Josh merely pointed up. Looking they saw the wooden platform and the beginning of walls that Josh and his friends had started putting up about fifteen to twenty feet above them and a few trees back from the riverside. It wasn't really much to look at, now that Josh really looked at it. The wood they had used was cast-offs and residual from other, more legitimate projects in the neighborhood and so it had aged and grayed and nearly fit in the trees like a giant bird's nest.

After a moment of staring, the agent took out his smart phone and snapped a couple shots. "So, you said that after the Yeti grew in size it put its hands on the edge of that platform?"

"Yes," answered Joshua quietly.

"So his head was maybe a few feet below you?"

He had to think about it, because the sudden appearance of the ginormous beast in place of the little white fuzzball he'd been watching had in fact scared the bejeebers out of him, and his memory did get a little foggy at that point. But he again, quietly replied, "Yes."

"Hmmm," Samuel said and then started kicking around at the fresh snow below their feet. "Typical great lakes Squatch then."

As the agent continued to paw around the ground, apparently trying to separate the fresh snow from the older, crunchier and more solid snow, Josh puzzled over the peculiar and very forward Agent with whom he found himself. He didn't feel any particular concern for his safety, but it certainly was not where he imagined himself being when the day started.

"I thought you said it was a Yeti?"

As Samuel pulled out some sort of tablet-looking device and started sweeping it over the ground here and there he mumbled, "Mmm, hmmm. That's right."

"Well," Josh said, somewhat irritated, "Which is it? A Yeti, or a Sasquatch?"

The agent stood for a moment, still apparently not chilled at all by the falling temperatures in his black suit and looked a little befuddled himself. He realized he needed to catch Josh up a bit if he was going to maintain the trust he developed with the little boy. _Spent so long training inside, I forgot not everyone's going to believe you right off the bat_ , he thought to himself.

"Well, the Yeti and the Sasquatch are really all the same thing. They have a tendency to grow out brownish fur when they live in warmer areas and the ones that live further north or high up in the mountains tend to grow white. But it can change. In fact, a lot of the ones that live around the Great Lakes, like in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and such will turn mostly brown in the summer and white from about November or December to sometimes as late as April or May. Pretty impressive they can change color so easily, really. But maybe not so much when you consider."

As Samuel went back to sweeping his tablet low around the ground again, Josh had to ask to get the rest of the explanation. "When you consider what?"

Standing upright again, Samuel replied, "Well...when you consider they're actually faerie."

"Faerie?" Josh asked incredulously.

"Well yeah..." The agent stared for a moment. "Well, why else would you be talking to someone from the Institute for the Preservation of _Magical_ Artifacts instead of some grumpy old scientist from the natural history museum or something?"

While Josh nodded, still fairly unconfident in the conversation, Agent Samuel returned once more to his scan. On screen, from where he was standing, it looked like the tablet was actually just replaying a stream from a camera on the other side of the tablet, showing the snow and the objects that the agent was pointing it at. But there were a few colors, graphs and words he couldn't make out at a distance flashing on screen too.

Then, finally, something green swirled into view. Josh stepped closer, as Samuel stood up and said, "Ah ha!"

"You found something?" Josh asked, wrapping his arms around each other in an effort to get a little warmer.

The agent was grinning, full bloom at that point. "Oh yes. Look!"

As the tablet was slowly tilted upwards the little green splosh of color appear to look like a tiny little foot print. And as the tablet tipped there were more indicated on the ground ahead. It was a trail! Agent Samuel had found a trail of Yeti footprints.

"But, hang on," Josh said. Something wasn't quite right. "They look too far apart for the little one."

Agent Samuel grinned a sideways grin. "You were right in your email, the big one and the little one are the same thing. And you're good to notice these footsteps too. We've waited long enough the glimmer has worn off, if the little booger even applied one."

"What's a glimmer?"

Samuel rubbed a finger under his nose taking a minute to think. "Well, all faeries use a bit of magic to remain unseen by humans. They've evolved as humans spread throughout the world to hide because generally, mankind isn't."

"Isn't what?"

"Isn't very kind. At least not to faeries," Agent Samuel grimaced. "But what these little guys do is use a bit of magic to actually scare off or misdirect humans."

Josh was nodding his head again, still unconvincingly.

"See, if they think someone's seen them, they might make themselves look really gigantic. Put a scare into you."

"Yeah. That's what it did to me," Josh agreed quietly looking at the ground.

"Well. They do the same with their tracks. They make them appear huge. And typically they make them appear to wander off in some other direction than where they've gone. For some reason they can't totally hide their tracks. They can't exactly disappear. You know...like the car did. We got that from some other types of faeries. But they _can_ confuse or distract the human mind."

"Oh! So a faerie taught you how to make your car invisible?"

"Sort of," Samuel brushed the idea aside. "But never mind that. What we see here on this screen is a trail of the Yeti's _actual_ footsteps. See how they're glowing slightly greenish?"

"Yeah," Josh leaned in close to get a really good look at the tablet.

"Well, that's the Yeti's magical aura. And...it will lead us right to him!"

Samuel raised the tablet high enough following the tracks alongside the river, up the side of the dam and across the field to the forest that they could see nearly a half mile away where the creature had gone.

"Why such big steps though?" Josh revisited.

"Oh! Yes. Well," Agent S replied, "Yeti also have huge strides. It's how they can cover such great distances in a hurry. I suppose that's really why no one's ever caught a Sasquatch before, isn't it?"

"Hmmm," agreed Josh, whole-heartedly not agreeing. How a tiny ten-inch tall creature could take a five-foot stride was beyond him, but he supposed the agent's explanation would likely include some talk of magic again. And truthfully, even though Agent Samuel came at the direction of an agency he had contacted himself, he still wasn't quite sure he believed everything he was being told.

For good measure, Agent Samuel swept across the expanse of the field. Then the little tablet brought to life more tracks. Coming in from all directions were at least another dozen sets of trails. It must have taken a moment for the tablet to sense and display the trails of creatures other than the one it was already tracking, but they're they were. Samuel pursed his lips and whistled.

"There's more of them?" Josh whispered.

"Oh yeah," Agent Samuel said with awe in his voice. "There's a lot of them here in lower Michigan. I knew that. In fact, the only place where there's more of these Squatch is in the Appalachians. Those mountains are practically swarming with them in several states. But I've not really seen them converge like this before. It's all starting to add up."

"What?" Josh asked, but Agent Samuel had quickly turned and started marching back the way they'd come from the parked black, stealth sedan. "What's all starting to add up?!"

Agent Samuel spoke into his inner wrist. "Did you bring the cross-country yet?"

The familiar voice replied back, quietly, but loudly enough Josh heard it as he caught up jogging briskly to keep with the taller man. "Affirmative. Delivered, and your standard issue has been retrieved. Awaiting you now."

"Dang," Samuel mumbled. "I need to exchange again. I'm going to need a helicopter, home."

"Helicopter?" Josh marveled. This guy can make his car disappear, supposedly with faerie magic, and he can order up a _helicopter_ any old time he needs one?

"Negative, sir. Availability presently limited with events in Ohio. Also, the CCV we supplied is AWOL flight capable."

"Oh?" Agent Samuel sounded surprised for once. "It is?"

"Yes sir. Agent Davison thought you might be needing one...considering past indications with the Yeti subjects."

Samuel's stride slowed and he turned his head just enough to catch Josh's eye again. He seemed to be marveled at the offering. "Are you telling me I have the historian's own CCV?"

There was a lengthy pause on the other end of the line, as though the pleasant but official voice was pondering how exactly to respond to the question. When it came Josh thought he sensed a bit of a smile, or perhaps a smug attitude. "Yes, Agent Samuel. Your investigation has been given priorities....Do I need remind you not to put a single dent in it?"

"N-n-no, home. I understand completely. And...thank you."

"Keep reports regularly. Out."

"Out." Samuel stopped and stood near the barrier and the beginning of the street on which they had parked the black sedan. He placed his hands akimbo and looked at Josh for a moment, mouth agape, as if Josh himself had been the one to do something truly amazing. "I'll be."

"What's the big deal?" asked Josh.

"I think I've just been given a promotion, so to speak," Agent Samuel said. But then he was back to business. They hurried to the place where the sedan had been, finding instead a very large indent in the snow, much larger than the car would have made.

Samuel drew out the same curious stone as he had before the pair entered the meadow and headed to the river. This time he simply tapped it on the invisible shape sitting in the street. What appeared was a dark charcoal gray and black object that had a monstrous cab above tires which stood nearly up to Joshua's chest. The thing, whatever it was, reminded Josh of the tracked snow vehicles he'd seen on shows about Alaska, but it had only four giant tires rather than tracks. And the rear of it seemed to house a shed-sized engine with bulges and apparent cabinets and other items seemingly designed to provide in extremely hostile environments. The windows appeared dark, probably to prevent anyone from seeing inside the vehicle.

"Uh...Mr. Samuel?"

"Yes?" the agent asked casually as he stepped up a small ladder on the side of cab and tossed in their two bags.

"Where exactly are you planning on taking me?"

Samuel hopped down and laughed lightly, then shook Joshua's hair a bit. "Well...I don't really know. But if we're going to track those little bugger's aura trail through snow we're going to need to go off road. CCV Auto on and warm."

With the agent's last comment a relatively quiet engine in the back purred to life. It was well muffled and could have been the family car, although it had the distinctive rumble of eight cylinders firing. It surprised Josh a little. He was expecting to hear a gigantic diesel roar to life and bring out the whole neighborhood. And then he started smelling something sweet, clearly not straight gasoline exhaust.

"Agent Samuel? Just what does this thing run on?" Josh asked as the agent made a quick check up and down the sides of the vehicle. It seemed a fairly thinly disguised admiring look, but Samuel was intent upon it and kept a straight face.

"Oh!" He replied as he stepped back towards Josh. "It really kind of depends on what mode it's in. Right now it's running on nearly pure ethanol."

He offered his hand to help Josh climb into the passenger side of the cab. As he climbed Josh wondered how many different modes there could be. He'd heard of cars switching between Natural Gas and gasoline on demand. And he thought that if he was remembering correctly about Ethanol being the fuel used in the E85 flex-fuel car his dad had, then that too can be switched on demand. But he couldn't imagine what variety of "modes" of driving a behemoth like this would be capable of.

The agent ran around the front and climbed up the other side into the driver's position, but it wouldn't have been necessary there was so much room inside the cab. If the seats had been a bench seat Josh figured they could probably sit about five or six across. But as it was there were actually three bucket seats arranged about a foot apart from one another and then another row of three buckets behind them, ample legroom between. The steering wheel it turned out was mounted smack dab in the center, so Samuel sat in the middle chair and left one more open to his left. _Who the heck builds this thing?_ Josh puzzled.

And then they were on their way. The vehicle plowed through the barrier to the meadow and then made a bee line to wide spot in the river behind the dam. It didn't slow at all as Agent Samuel approached the bank and instead plowed right through it to the other side.

"Engage Heads Up Display," Samuel said calmly. A few gauges and things shown on the windows before them, the largest being a compass just ahead of Samuel's left hand. "Enhanced exterior feed and filter with Aura trail detected on my mobile."

Sure enough as they approached the opposite bank and plowed up it, there were green giant-stride footprints they'd found when Josh and the agent were outside on foot. They followed them north and more and more of them joined the trail to the point where the prints were so many it no longer appeared to consist of long bounding prints, but rather short little baby steps all muddled together. The overall glow of the aura tracker was creating one great green line to trace in the snow ahead of them for miles.

Opening the throttle up a bit their speed increased impressively in the thickening snow and with every mile they passed the falling snow increased. Occasionally, particularly as they first started out, they had to drive across a couple roads to continue on into the next field, and though there were few cars out in the storm, Josh had to ask, "How come I've never seen one of these before? Even on TV?"

"Oh, yes." Agent Samuel bent down and placed his palm on a pad to his right, next to Josh's knee. It seemed to perform a scan, lighting up much like a copier machine if you leave the lid up.

"Active Camouflage engaged," a male electronic-sounding voice confirmed.

"There," Samuel smiled at Josh. "All taken care of."

~~~

For the first twenty minutes or so, Josh realized the Yeti's seemed to be taking the path of least resistance to get as far north as possible. The green trail weaved around most of the subdivisions by a wide birth as it went, occasionally crossing a road or even a state route. But for the most part they seemed to have avoided even going through any of the groves of trees or forests clustered around the occasional stream or small river that they would find. It permitted the truck to increase to a very high rate of speed. Glancing over nervously from time to time Josh noted that the speedometer seemed to vary between 85 miles per hour and as much as 130 on occasion during very long flat runs. He did a nervous double check and realized he hadn't buckled up when he got in. He fiddled around until he'd discovered the seat belt was a four-point harness system with a peculiar, but beefy latch system. It took him a few minutes to figure it out, although it was all held by one metal clasp that would come apart in a second should he need to get out in a hurry.

Before forty-five minutes had passed, he'd fallen asleep.

~~~

Josh had a tough time coming out of his dream. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of little white fur balls huddling in around him from all sides during the middle of a snow storm, each of them gnashing teeth and raising claws at him as though they were trying to scare him. He wasn't entirely afraid but he was frustrated that he couldn't move in any direction. And if he tried to step over one to move forward several of them instantly grew to fifteen feet tall and towered over him.

At first one of the large ones seemed to be shaking him by his shoulder. But then he heard Agent Samuel's voice calling his name and sleep started melting from his eyes. He was back in the darkened cab of the monster truck, displays and lights all across the window panels in front of him.

"Are you ready to wake up, Josh? I might need you here again."

Suddenly Josh sat bolt upright. "Holy Crap!"

He paused and looked around at the scene in front of him, some of it flying past him at speeds on the HUD shown as 93MPH. It took a second and then he formulated a question.

"How far have we come? This looks almost like Bay City!" Josh turned to Samuel flabbergasted and blurted, "Did you take me all the way to Bay City? My Mom's gonna kill me!"

Samuel, glancing at the boy, cleared his throat. "Eh-hmmm. No. Er. We're actually twice that far. You've been asleep for a little more than an hour."

"So..." Josh said still puzzling. "Where are we?"

"This is actually Mackinaw City. We're getting close to crossing where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet and take the bridge to the northern peninsula."

"WHAT!??!" Josh yelled. He gripped the sides of his seat and looked around the window screens. "I can't be here. If my mom knew how far away from home I was she'd ground me for...well... probably the rest of my life!"

Agent Samuel sounded truly sympathetic and apologetic, but it didn't seem to change his reply any. "I'm sorry, Josh, but you've got to calm down. Remember, the agency has got your parents taken care of. They won't even really realize where you've been. Just that you had a district competition you were participating in."

Josh pressed himself into the back of his bucket seat tightly. He swallowed hard and tried not to vomit. He'd never been so far from home without his parents and it dawned on him maybe he wasn't so worried about Mom as he was for himself. He grabbed the agent's forearm tightly.

"Agent Samuel," he began reluctantly, finding he had to force his jaw to move so his teeth weren't grinding. "I don't know if you really have magic, or where you got this car, or...if you really even work for this PMIA..."

"IPMA," Samuel corrected.

"Or what the heck is even going on. I don't even care anymore what those little fuzzballs are. But I _can't_ be this far away from home."

"You're perfectly safe, Josh," Samuel tried to calm the boy, but his brow was furled and his concern for the pre-teen was showing.

"No! No, I'm not safe!" Josh gripped the man's arm even tighter. "I mean, I don't have a clue what I'm doing here! I showed you what I know. I'm not even any use to you anymore. What if... I mean, this kind of seems like..., I dunno. What if..."

"What is it, Josh?"

"Well, what if you're just trying to abduct me or something?" Josh blurted out.

The engine continued mildly purring, revs quietly slowing down as the speed on the HUD dropped a couple miles-per-hour at a time down to about 50. Agent Samuel needed a moment to contemplate how to reassure the boy.

"Well...for starters, have you ever known someone to have a multi-million dollar truck like this just to abduct a smart young lad like you?"

Josh stared at the console and the screen for a moment. Then he shook his head.

"So, I think we've got that concern taken care of, right?"

It took another moment before Josh was willing to respond. It looked like he was still trying to stifle a barfing fit to the agent.

"And, don't forget: you contacted us first."

_Good point,_ Josh relented in his mind.

"Now, as to why I'm taking you with me..."

Agent Samuel puckered his lips and moved his jaw about. He seemed to want to blurt something out but either his common sense or his training with the IPMA was successfully holding it in.

"See...It's nearly Christmas, right?"

"Yeah," Josh affirmed, somewhat sarcastically in tone.

"Well, there's not a whole lot of investigations done during the Christmas season. Most of us tend to take some vacation time. So, when something does come up...we might be a little short-handed on agents."

"Mmm," Josh pondered. A snarky thought occurred to him that he couldn't control as well as Agent Samuel seemed to. "Is that why they sent you instead of agent Davis?"

Samuel sharply cleared his throat, attempting a little drama in his reply, "I'm hurt, Joshua."

The two caught each other's eyes and smiled naturally. "I mean I'm really hurt. You think I'm not good enough to perform this investigation?"

"No," Josh said quietly and shook his head, though his smile was still there, difficult to hide.

"Well," Agent Samuel continued. "You might be right. I'm kind of new at field work."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I suppose you might as well call me a rookie. But! It's not like this is my very _first_ mission either!"

Joshua stared at him for a moment, waiting to see if the man would give away any more information. Then he asked slyly, "Is it your secon..."

"Alright, yes, it's my second mission! There! You happy?" but the agent was still smiling at Josh as he said it.

"Tell you what. I brought you along because I thought you might have fun, and I thought you might want to find out what these Yeti are all about. Also...I kind of need a partner. You know...just in case."

"In case of what?" Josh asked cynically.

"I don't know," Samuel shrugged sincerely. "That's the problem when you're dealing with faerie folk. You never really know what to expect. Personally, I'd rather have all the human-magic investigations myself."

"Really? There's humans with magic too?" Josh asked, trying to keep the conversation light.

"Oh yes. Not usually nearly as interesting. Or as powerful. But we find ways to use magic sometimes."

"I see," but Josh wasn't sure he did exactly. "And faeries are...more dangerous then?"

"Well...yes. They can be."

"Great," Josh huffed quietly.

"Look, we're in no real danger...I don't think. Yeti are pretty mellow fellows usually. But I just want to have someone with me in case, you know. I need a call to back up or something."

They sat quietly as the small city before them rose ever closer into view.

"Tell you what. Why don't you just call me by my first name, Peter. That's how partners should talk to each other anyway. No sense in you calling me 'mister' all the time."

"Alright," Josh agreed. He found he was much more calm about the situation at that point, but he wasn't quite sure why.

"Let me tell you where we are with this investigation, alright?" Peter asked.

"Sure."

"I've been following the trail for over an hour and it just keeps getting bigger. I mean, look at the screen. You can't really even distinguish tracks anymore, but the aura given off is like, fifty-feet wide and must have hundreds of Yeti using the exact same trail."

"Yeah. So what does that mean?" Josh asked confused.

Peter shook his head and tutted a bit. "I'm not entirely sure. But it's not normal. Usually the most you see together is half a dozen at most."

"Hmmm."

"And, really I first followed the trail right up to the north eastern shore near Robert's Landing. I thought maybe they were swimming to Bois Blanc or even Mackinac Island or something. See, there's a state park there. Pretty secluded too."

"So..." Josh was again accessing the deeper reaches of his mind and memory trying to understand what the Yeti could be up to. "They were like, migrating or something? Like Salmon?"

"Nope. That's what I thought too. But instead, they went along the shoreline near route 23 for several miles. Then I found a spot near the shore that it looked like they'd all huddled down and camped for a while."

"Why do you say that?" Joshua asked.

"Well...the aura was spread out over a couple acres and the snow was all depressed and moved around, even with all this snowfall. You could see mounds and things that looked like they had built dens."

"That...doesn't seem too strange...you know. If they're just migrating," Josh suggested.

"Yeah. But to have so many?" Peter was shaking his head. "In the past two centuries, no one has ever found that kind of evidence."

"Not only that, but I found something. I would have missed it if we weren't using this special CCV. But the aura scanner showed a sort of pattern in one part of the snow, right in the middle of the camp. At first, I might have guessed they built a fire or something. The Doppler scans showed some logs or something. But no."

"No?" Josh asked.

"No. The logs and some stones and things had been laid out in a certain pattern. If you were to look at it you'd say it almost looked like blue prints or something. Here, let me pull it up for you. _Home? Display thermal, Doppler, aura overlay image I took from the suspected Yeti encampment._ "

"Right away, sir," replied the pleasant voice he'd heard on the phone at the beginning of their adventure.

"Uh..." Josh whispered, "has she been listening to us the whole time?"

"Not exactly," Peter replied in a quiet voice. "But she's been on hand. You have to initiate communication."

"By saying _Home_." It wasn't a question. Josh was just stating for himself so he'd understand, but Peter nodded in agreement all the same.

An image came up on the screen just to Peter's left so as to not directly block his view straight ahead. He lifted his left hand and closed the fingers slightly, then swiped to the right. The image flipped over to Josh's side of the screen.

"Put your two fingers up and spread them apart, like you're zooming in on a tablet or something," he ordered.

Josh did what he was asked. There in the middle of the image, which was mostly lumps of white snow, with overlays of thousands of tracks and prints of green aura, was an outline of shapes that, sure enough, seemed to be logs buried under the snow. They seemed to be gray shaded. About it where aural patterns that looked a little like drawings too.

"What does that look like to you, Josh?" the agent asked, official-like.

"Well...it does kind of look like they were laying out buildings. Like my friends and I do when we're playing paintball, for example."

Agent Samuel chimed in excited. "Exactly! Like they were identifying landmarks on a make-shift map."

"Yeah," Josh agreed, extending a finger and moving it around experimentally seeing what the display could do. The image moved about in conjunction with his finger. "That's what it looks like anyway."

"Mmm-hmm. _And_ ," Peter continued, "you know what those landmarks look like?"

Josh shook his head.

"No, I suppose you don't. But there's one place in this world that all agents are familiarized with. One site where we would recognize the layout of the buildings and landmarks."

Josh waited, somewhat nervously, but excited to hear where.

"See it's supposed to be this big secret in the world, but...it's like the world's greatest non-secret actually. It's like...twenty agents go up there every year for a party, sort of non-secret practically."

"Well...okay...maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. But sheesh there's something like a hundred different movies that try to show it, for Pete's sake!"

"Huhn. Pete's sake? I've never thought of that before. In this case, it really is for Pete's sake," the agent said, smiling and poking his thumb back at himself.

"Oh my gosh! Just tell me where!" Josh lost his patience.

"Oh, right! Those markings look very much like the North Pole site."

Josh squirmed a bit. He was a little uncomfortable, as though perhaps he had been right earlier to question Peter's motives. Or at least his sanity.

"Whaddya mean, 'North Pole'?"

"You know...Santa's Workshop?" Peter said with a prideful grin.

"No," Josh replied simply. "No such thing."

"No, really!" the agent continued to press. "Here, check this out. _Home_? Send us the images from the field agent's training documentation regarding North Pole inhabitants."

"Please confirm, Agent Samuel. You are requesting trainee details on Belschnickel operations? You have a non-agency passenger. May I remind you those documents are classified?" the familiar friendly voice replied.

"Yes, yes, I know. Just, uh...give me the images from that section then," Peter asked.

"Agent Samuel, you know we cannot do that. May I inquire as to the purpose of those documents at this time? Having a friendly conversation with your guest about sworn secrets are we?"

"No. No, Home. It's part of this investigation. I need it to compare to the prior image."

Josh sniggered a bit in his seat. Peter turned to him and made a very quiet shushing sound.

"Transferring images from source library, Agent Samuel. NOT the official training documentation."

"That will do just fine, Home."

"Yes. I'm sure it will." The voice had turned somewhat less friendly.

But there on the left was a set of images, six all together. Agent Samuel grabbed and flicked them over to Josh's side again and they bumped the scanning image he had been looking at upwards and out of their way.

Sure enough, a couple of them seemed to show aerial shots of some buildings and what looked like a small airport that very closely matched the way the Yeti had laid out their little map. In place of the one large spire or tower in the photos, the Yeti had apparently utilized a small stump or trunk broken off and standing straight upwards, then laid the other shapes around it to provide a pretty close facsimile of the shots of the North Pole, or whatever it was Agent Samuel had managed to produce on the screen from his conversation.

"So..." Josh looked from the screen to the agent and paused.

"So...?" Peter repeated and grinned. He was letting it all sink in and providing time for Josh's thought processes to reason it all out.

"You're saying this is Santa's workshop that we're looking at?" the boy continued with the motherly tone he usually got at home whenever she'd caught him in a bit of a mis-truth.

"You could call it that." Peter was grinning even more uncontrollably.

"For real?!"

"What? I'm making this stuff up?" Peter returned to focusing on the approaching city limits.

"Well...yeah...I uh," Josh stumbled having a tough time committing agreement to something so lunatic. "I think you are, actually."

The man beside him, steering the gigantic beast of a machine with loads of technology before him at his command and apparently, even some magic, just grinned and said, "I suppose we'll find out in the next day or two, won't we."

Josh swallowed hard. "Are you saying we're going to the North Pole?"

Peter nodded, still smiling, though less enthusiastically. "Yeah, I think so. I believe these Yeti may be up to something big. Here, let me get through Mackinaw City and I think we'd probably better make camp for the night."

Peter Samuel communicated briefly with _Home_ again, apparently to make sure he understood how the cloak or magic or whatever it was worked on the giant CCV. Once he'd confirmed they were fully undetectable he accelerated again and plowed through town towards a bridge to the northern peninsula. The green trail veered off around the city to the east and they lost track of it on screen, but even Josh figured it was such a huge trail now that it would be easy to pick it up again.

With the snow the town was mostly devoid of any cars driving around but there were a few parked here or there, and some people still manning the shops. Christmas was only days away and certainly folks were still trying to stock up for the holiday. Twilight seemed to be approaching quickly so far north and with the clouded skies and Josh found himself getting sleepy again, despite the worry.

"Hey, sleepy head," Peter nudged the boy. "When we get setup tonight I'm going to have you call your Mom and Dad. Then I've got to see if we can meet up with someone in East Selkirk, Manitoba tomorrow."

"Where's that?"

"Where's that?" Peter chuckled. "Canada of course. The IPMA has a friend there. And I don't know if we'll be going south around Lake Superior, or north, but I'm pretty sure we're going to be pretty close to East Selkirk."

"Hmmm," Josh nodded in agreement, though he had no idea what Peter was really talking about. Right then the snowfall and the small city lights passing by were more powerful than a lullaby. But a thought occurred to him before dozing off: "How do you suppose the Yeti would have crossed the bridge without being seen?"

Agent Samuel went on for a few minutes about his assumptions, but Josh either didn't hear any of them, or he'd forgotten them all by the following morning because he dozed off without an answer to his question.

# Chapter 3

# December 19

# Izaak Walton Bay, Near Sault Saint Marie, Upper Michigan

"Wake up, Josh," he heard a strange man's voice near his ear. Then Joshua remembered where he was. It was a bit startling to find himself reclined in the passenger seat in the giant CCV. Considering the warmth and comfort he was experiencing in his last dream of the night about Christmas morning the environments suddenly seemed unfriendly.

"Where the heck are we?" Josh asked.

Peter was moving about the cab in the second row. There was plenty of room. He'd apparently been cooking something. Tucked to the side was a small, two-burner electric smooth-top stove and a smallish microwave. From a pan on the stove he slid two pancakes onto a disposable plate and handed them to Josh as the boy figured out how to sit the chair back upright.

"We're still in Michigan...but only barely. I camped along the shores between Michigan and Canada just outside of Sault Saint Marie. You were so cozy I figured we could probably make up time today on the flatlands after we pick up the trail again."

Josh nodded as he turned about in his seat and stuck his legs into the wide open space between his and the center position driver's seat. "My Mom?!" he asked suddenly.

"Got it covered. I called for you last night. I made those with chocolate chips in them. So do you want some jam, or syrup to go with them?"

"Huh? Oh," Josh was still shaking off the sleep. "Syrup I guess."

"Do you like eggs?"

"No," the boy replied distastefully.

"Oh good. We have something in common. I can't stand eggs...well...unless they're in a breakfast burrito...or maybe a skillet mix," Peter said. Then he shrugged at himself. "I guess I do like them. I just don't like them scrambled or flat on their own."

From a second, smaller pan Peter slid the boy two pieces of bacon on the plate. "You gotta love bacon though, right?"

"Mmm, hmm," Josh agreed more positively, mumbling around his bite of pancake. The food was just the right thing for the moment. Especially since he realized they never really ate dinner.

"So...wait," Josh asked after swallowing the latest bite. "You talked to my Mom?"

"Yes. And your Dad too. Everything's okay. There still a bit under the influence, you know. We'll probably have to tidy it all up with another bit of magic once this is all done too. But for now they're happy to hear how excited you are."

"Waddaya mean?"

The agent finished making himself a plate and then tossed the two pans into a small hidden cupboard behind the second row of seats. It was apparently some sort of dishwasher because all of a sudden Josh heard water flowing inside of it quietly. "Wash and sterilize, please," he added before sitting down in the middle, back seat to talk with Josh.

"Well..." he took a bite of his pancakes and then had trouble speaking around them as he ate. "I talked to them first and let them know how happy we were to be hosting you at the regional school offices and that we had high hopes for you winning the writing event for your age group. Then..."

Agent Samuel reached forward and pushed two buttons in a row on the console near the steering wheel. Then plopped down in the back row seat again and stuffed another bite before continuing.

"Then I said hello to them," he added. But echoing through the speakers in the cabin came Josh's own voice, speaking the words Peter had just said. When Peter giggled a bit the speakers played Josh's own voice again laughing at him.

"What the heck?!" Josh said. "You faked my voice?"

The speakers played back a half second later the same words, and again in Joshua's own voice.

"Yep!" Peter said. Then the speakers repeated in the boy's voice again. He reached forward and shut off the device, then plopped back one more time into his chair and stuffed a whole piece of bacon in his mouth.

"Wow! That's amazing!" Josh stared at the electronics while he too nibbled at his bacon. "This is really good, by the way. Thank you."

"No problem," Peter smiled. "You know, it's really true. I think I may need your help on this mission. But more than that, if you think about it, how do you suppose a top-secret institution recruits new agents? This might be a good experience for you. And I'm hoping you might enjoy being part of it."

Josh smiled at the younger man, still in his black suit and thought about what it must be like to work as a spy...or whatever the heck the agents thought of themselves as.

"Would I get a cool truck like this?" Josh asked.

Peter laughed loudly, and then scrubbed Josh's hair as he had before. "I don't know. Probably not. This one is pretty special. But you never know what you might be asked to do. It's different almost every day. Heck, you might be asked to gather Chupacabra teeth in Central America one day, and the next you just might be on a boat headed to Siberia to see if you can collect some Gnome dust samples. Sometimes we just spend days at a time interviewing people and then find out whatever it is you were researching was all just a wild goose chase. Or a hoax."

Josh was listening intently. "Still, that does sound pretty interesting."

"Oh it is," Peter acknowledged. He chewed a few more bites and then said, "Hurry and finish though. When we're ready we've got to pick up the trail and get moving. I have someone expecting us by mid-day."

"In East...Sell....?" Josh added.

"Selkirk. Yep."

The two quickly shoveled the remains of their breakfast in their mouth and then Peter stepped outside for a moment. As the cab door opened again he said to the CCV, "Incinerate" and the noise of what seemed like a small explosion could be heard muffled through the heavy vehicle. As the agent prepped the vehicle Josh noticed the faint smell of bacon burning. Then the windscreen and side windows came alive again with the exterior and overlays of several instrumentations and they pulled away from a grove of bare trees and a field of snow.

~~~

After they'd driven a good half an hour, at about 150 miles-per-hour or more according to the gauge on the screen, Peter contacted Home again. Josh sat quietly but wondered if he should ask Peter to slow down. They were in wide snowy fields the whole way, with just a few hills and rifts that the big CCV's suspension just soaked up and seemed to float across. But the scenery was moving past much more quickly than he was used to and it unsettled Josh a bit.

"Any word on that aural scan outside of Duluth then?" Peter asked.

"Affirmative, sir. Agent Bartholomew has found it. He indicates that he had to backtrack along route 35 to find where the yeti had crossed, but he picked it up and traced it to the river's edge near Oliver where it narrows significantly. He will meet you along route 35 at the Tri State Fairgrounds. Marking his receiver on your maps now."

Peter brought the small map indicator that had previously been set off to his left side closer to him with a swipe of his hand, and then he made a pinching motion with his fingers in the air. The map image zoomed out and there, near a city marked Duluth, WI a little blue light blipped slowly off and on. An amber dot passing Wetmore, Michigan on the map moved rapidly and must have indicated the CCV.

"Excellent, Home. And did you confirm agent Bartholomew is available to join in this investigation."

"Yes, sir. He is available. He wanted you to know two things though, sir," the female voice from Home urged. "He asked you to be aware that he's too old for adventure, and also that even though he's not technically on holiday leave he is in fact celebrating with family at his home in Duluth. I believe his closing words were, 'Tell Peter I'm not as interested in the pursuit as a young whipper-snapper as he would be, and that I want to be drinking hot cocoa by the fire tomorrow morning.'"

Both Joshua and Agent Samuel snickered. "Understood Home. We'll do our best to have agent Bartholomew home for milk and cookies and a tuck-in."

"Acknowledged. Out," came the reply from the voice at _Home_.

"Out," Josh interjected quickly.

Peter looked at him surprised at first and then smiled as he nodded. His hunch about the boy's potential was beginning to show through.

~~~

Another forty-five minutes later and their amber dot on the map was very close indeed to the blue pulsating blip. It seemed as they neared Wisconsin the snow storm had mostly passed by, though it was still very cloudy and occasionally sputtering flurries outside. Finally the agent was allowing the giant CCV to slow down to reasonable speeds. Josh continued to wonder how such a beast could manage such incredible speeds. He stopped watching the gauges after about 140 or 150mph but he could tell by the slightly harder hits to the suspension and the views on the screen that they continued to get faster and faster on their trip. He wondered if they managed to top maybe even 200 miles-per-hour on their cross-country fly and determined that if ever there came a time that he had to tell his parents where he'd really gone that he would not bring up the high rates of speed at which they traveled.

As they neared a river the edges of it had several heavy patches of trees, mostly bare deciduous, and a picnic or park area, barely recognizable by the picnic tables sticking up above ground, their horizontal surfaces covered by twelve inches of snow but their vertical legs showing through. In the lot as the CCV came to a slowing roll up to it Josh noticed another blacked-out sedan much like the one Agent Samuel had driven him in from school to home. It had a thin layer of snow upon it and the wipers were going. Suddenly a large video of a balding man with an angry look upon his face appeared just to Peter's right and in front of Josh on the front screens.

"Well, you finally made it, then?" the man groused.

"Finally? We've been moving pretty fast across land. Nice to see you again Bartholomew," Peter replied.

"Sure," grumbled the old man again. "And who's that you've got there?"

Only the "there" sounded much more like "thar" to Josh's ears. This old man may mumble a lot but he definitely had the Wisconsin, Minnesotan or Canadian accent Josh had heard on TV. It seemed strange to him that people so relatively close in the world had such a different way of pronouncing the same words. It got him wondering if there were IPMA agents in other countries, perhaps some that spoke different languages. He thought it might be pretty interesting to talk to some of them and see what sort of creatures they have to go on hunts to find.

"Probably could lose the _shimmer_ on your vehicle, Samuel."

"Oh," Peter seemed to ponder for half a second. "I think we're going to keep moving. I should probably let it stay for now."

"Suit yourself," grumbled the visage of the old agent sitting in the car before them.

"How'd you get here in your standard issue anyway," asked Peter, trying to be friendly.

"Well," answered the sour face. "It's mostly standard. But look where I live. I've used old Agent Johnson's trick for retractable studs, ha'n't I then."

The last was a statement more than a question that much Josh could tell.

"Alright then. The trail picks up just south east of where we are now and it heads west to that thinner spot in the river. You got it on your track yet?"

Peter dragged the aura sensing map overlay back from the left to in front of him and made a gesture that popped it back up on the live view ahead of them. There was a huge green trail, nearly sixty feet across, before them. It wrapped around from out of sight to the southeast as Bartholomew had said in a great arc around the parking lot and headed straight to the river where the older agent had indicated.

"Yes. We've got it, Bartholomew." Peter pondered the trail for a moment.

After a few seconds' pause Agent Bartholomew cleared his throat and then said a little more happily than the rest of the conversation had gone, "Well, I suppose I'll head home and finish trimming up the tree then, eh?"

"Ehm, Agent Bartholomew?" Peter started.

Agent B had just been turning to switch off the car-to-car conference and had to stop, giving the camera at first a raised eyebrow and look of curiosity, and then, seeing what he didn't want to on Agent Samuel's face, changed to a scowl again.

"Yes, Agent Samuel?"

"I hate to say this, but..." Peter began as mildly in tone as he could.

"You want me to go with you, don't you." This too was a statement more than a question.

"Yes, sir. I do." Peter tried to continue showing as much respect and delicate etiquette as possible. Joshua thought it was funny to see him switch from his semi-cool state he'd display the last two days to this one.

Bartholomew sat back in his comfy black leather seat in the sedan and blew out a slow breath. "Why is that, Agent Samuel?"

"I've been suspicious of their motive for mass migration this year and I suspect this is an attempt at a category 1 occupation of the North Pole facility. Here. I'm sending over imagery from one of their nesting sites we came across on the way here."

Agent Bartholomew was shaking his head and grousing a bit, but he could be seen on the video feed manipulating something near the camera and then taking a close look. He sat for nearly one whole minute, expression changeless. Then finally he spoke, still with the same sadness in his brow and eyes. "Give me a moment. I've got to call my wife and let her know."

The video feed went dark and Peter looked at Joshua, who in turn just stared back. After a moment of awkward silence the agent said to the boy, "Well...I guess we're getting another agent on our team for this investigation after all."

Josh thought for a moment and then asked, "Is that a good thing?"

Peter nodded solemnly. "Oh yes. If they're really planning what I think they're planning then we're going to need all the help we can get. And we're going to have to move fast."

~~~

Bartholomew didn't knock or make any sort of announcement and it startled Josh a bit when the door on the other side of Peter opened up quickly and the agent climbed inside, tossing a bag in the seat behind the front row left into which he plopped unceremoniously. A small huff of air, as though it had been knocked out of the older agent, seemed to be the only sound to break the silence. Peter waited, looking at the screens as though he needed instruction from the older man next to him.

"So?" Bartholomew slapped his hands on his legs and rubbed as though he were warming them. "Who's this you've brung with ya?"

"Oh!" Peter responded nervously. "This is Joshua Manders. He's one of our newest field volunteers."

Bartholomew turned and smiled, somewhat sarcastically at the young boy, corner of his gray moustache twitching a bit. "Uh huh. And I suppose he's been all cleared for this little...adventure then?"

"Yes. We took care of it."

The exchange was a little awkward and Josh wasn't sure Bartholomew was actually getting the answers he wanted, or some slight-of-hand misdirection on the part of Peter.

"We'll also probably pick up Hattie in East Selkirk too, so there will be four of us." It seemed another attempt to misdirect Bartholomew before he could ask too many questions about Josh.

"Oh..." Agent B responded, somewhat more pleasantly. "Well, that might be good. At least until we get there. Then what good will these two do us?"

"I don't know about you, Agent Bartholomew," Peter said, a little more relaxed, but more forcefully too, "but I think we'd be better off with greater numbers. And there really aren't a lot of agents even in communication to ask at this point."

"Probably true," Bartholomew grumped and then crossed his arms.

Peter started rolling the CCV towards the river and the spot where the aural trail seemed to cross it.

"Best, get going Samuel. I think we need to be done before Christmas Eve for more than just one reason," Bartholomew barked again.

With that Agent Samuel floored it and the vehicle nearly jumped across the river when it reached the shoreline, continuing to accelerate. Before Josh knew it the speedometer display up on the screen had crossed 150mph again and was still climbing. Just when he Josh was marveling at how the gigantic vehicle seemed to soak up all the bumps and irregularities of the off road at such high speeds, Peter rotated his hand around another virtual knob up on the screen and their acceleration increased tremendously. The boy was pressed deeply into his chair and the speedo flicked past 200 so quickly Josh could barely differentiate numbers anymore and gave up trying to keep track.

~~~

It was late afternoon by the time Agent Samuel seemed to be slowing down for good and Josh got a chance to really look around him. The past few hours had been mostly long large fields of snow punctuated here and there with a road to practically jump across in the agile monster of a truck. He had drifted in and out of a snooze a few times.

"Coming up on Winnipeg, eh?" Bartholomew grumbled. "I think we probably should stop and get this youngster a bite to eat, don'tcha think?"

"Just what I was thinking!" Peter responded jovially. But it was obvious the last two days were beginning to wear on him too.

It seemed to be getting dark already, over-emphasized by the clouds and threatening snow storms. Winnipeg seemed like a pretty large town to Josh's eye and the lights of various road signs and the buildings in the distance seemed to be very welcoming. He hoped they chose something good but didn't want to be impolite and press his own idea. He would probably have chosen pizza or some chicken nuggets with fries at that point, wanting some comfort food. Perhaps it was the distance from home that was making not only Josh, but Peter and Bartholomew too just a little down.

Bartholomew suggested with one hand loosed from his arms folded before him, "I know this great Thai and Pizza place just outside of town in Ile-Des-Chenes."

He leaned over to catch Josh's face around Peter's arms on the wheel, "I'm guessing you like pizza, right, young one."

The thought made Josh's stomach grumble loudly, enough so that even at their still fast speed and electronics in the CCV humming Peter heard it and raise one eyebrow to him. He nodded vigorously in reply to Bartholomew.

"Joshua," Peter said.

After a moment's pause Bartholomew looked to Agent Samuel and said, "I beg your pardon?"

"The boy's name is Joshua. You know," Peter shrugged, "since it might be a couple days together."

"Right," Bartholomew answered, seemingly more relaxed. There was a small sense in Joshua's mind that Agent Bartholomew acted smug, like perhaps he succeeded in getting under Peter's skin a little for making him go on the trip.

Never the less, he directed Peter towards an apparent province route and on to the road. Peter disengaged the cloak or whatever it was hiding them from view when they were traveling at higher speeds. And before long they were in a small suburban town outside Winnipeg having a delicious bar-b-que chicken pizza with occasional sharing of Agent Bartholomew's red curry thai chicken dish. Josh was starting to enjoy this little trip more and more, despite the dark winter skies and frequent clouds and snow. It seemed like the right sort of warm-up to Christmas morning for him somehow, like the trip over the mountains and through the woods to Grandmother's house he'd go. Although, he'd never really made that kind of a trip for the holidays. Maybe this could be a new tradition, Josh thought, and then laughed a little at himself for the thought of it. It wasn't likely he'd see these agents again. In fact, he started worrying a little that they might blank his mind like they seemed to have done to his parents and the principle at school. He hoped not. He wanted to remember this little adventure.

~~~

While the two agents talked and briefly planned for a drive out to East Selkirk to apparently speak to this "friend" of Peter's, Josh took a few quarters offered him by Agent Bartholomew and played the old classic Galaga video arcade game. Just as the last of his ships was destroyed on his third-to-last quarter something out across the parking lot and the province route beyond that caught his eye. It hadn't been snowing, although the clouds bubbled and coiled above as if they'd like to for some time. So it was some other movement along the little river that ran along the other side of the road that pulled him to the window. He pocketed his remaining two quarters and watched.

Soon, Peter had gotten up from their dining table and stood quietly beside him. Josh didn't move, he was just watching the trees there growing out of the gulley.

"What is it you see," the agent asked quietly.

Without turning his head, Josh replied, "Yeti."

There was a moment's silence while Peter scanned the tree line and tried to take it in. Agent Bartholomew finished laying out his payment and a tip and then also quietly stepped to the window on Josh's other side.

"See something, young one?" Bartholomew asked in the same reverent tone as Peter.

"Yes," Josh answered, then he slowly raised his hand and pointed a finger a little off to the right, up the road leading out of town. "Two. There's a third."

"Yeti?" Bartholomew kept his tone low.

"Yes. See? Now there's two more making their way alongside the river there. They almost look like they're sneaking."

Bartholomew nodded. "You're getting good, Joshua. They have their magic up. Most people wouldn't be able to notice them. A Yeti's shimmer isn't all that strong. Not like the one we use on the CCV. But still...most people wouldn't have caught that movement."

"I see them!" Peter suddenly said, triumphantly, though still in a low voice. "Those little twerps are intentionally masking their movements more than usual."

"Yep," Bartholomew nodded again and lifted his coffee cup he had with him to his lips to take a sip before continuing. "Looks like you definitely found out a problem here, Agent Samuel. Good call."

As Bartholomew stepped away and collected his receipt for payment and started heading out to the car, Peter watched him somewhat dumbfounded, while still trying to follow the little Yeti moving nearly a couple hundred yards away. "What was that?" the agent said breathlessly.

Josh cleared his throat. "Uh, I think it might have been a compliment, Agent Samuel."

"Yeah..." the younger agent pondered in a drawn out breath. "Probably not going to get one of those again, are we?"

Josh smiled at him and shook his head.

"Hey, and do me a favor?"

"Sure," Josh replied, finding himself very glad he was with these two men on this adventure.

"Just call me Peter. I'm like what?... nine years older than you? We're practically brothers. Especially if you end up working for us some day, right?"

Giggling a little from the compliment, Josh answered in the affirmative.

~~~

Inside the CCV Bartholomew was bringing up maps on the front LCD screens. He had marked a location north east of Winnipeg with a glowing green dot. Then he selected a soft tool from the digital sidebars he had swiped in for the map and drawn a line through some streets in Winnipeg and up Route 59, then making a little jog towards the blue dot on the outskirts of East Selkirk. It was all very near to a gigantic looking lake that ran off the edge of the map and was labeled Lake Winnipeg.

"I think for visiting Hattie we'd be fine to leave the truck uncloaked and just use route 59. Not sense in mucking about in the fields leaving tracks when we don't have to, right?"

"Yeah, I suppose you're right," Peter said. As he thought about it, that did make sense. He'd been trained that there are few undesirable contacts that might be inclined to try to follow the IPMA vehicle in order to expose their existence, or at least their mission. It would be good to drive through plowed city streets for a ways just to lose anyone that might have picked up on their trail.

Within about ten minutes, Peter was pulling up to a small farmhouse in the middle of a snow covered field on a gravely road. The agent directed the other two to exit with him, and as they opened the doors and climbed down to the ground, a middle-aged woman with red hair and lines on her face like she'd seen a long time of braving cold winds and hot summer suns was standing with the screen door propped open before her on the porch. Though her hair was red, her skin was rather dark and pretty. She was scowling but she was a friendly enough looking person to Josh's eye and her anticipation made him feel warm, like he'd just arrived at Grandma's house.

"Salut, Peter," the woman said as they approached and stuck out her hand.

The agent smiled at her and grasped her hand, replying, "Comment allez-vous?"

"Oh, tut, Peter," she answered with a slight accent. "Not so formal. We are friends now, are we not?"

"Of course," the agent replied. He introduced Agent Bartholomew and Joshua quickly as she brought them inside from the cold.

"Your agents are so young now, Peter."

Peter laughed a little, respectfully, and then used a little more serious tone as he explained. "Actually, Josh has recently had similar experiences as Hattie has had when we first contacted her. You might say, he's joined us as our only available expert on the matter. Well...until we arrived here anyway. He saw them in Michigan and we've been following a growing trail ever since."

She swept her hand at the table in the kitchen as a gesture to be seated, and then stuck her head through an archway and called up the stairs, "Hattie? They're here. You'd better come down quickly."

Turning back to the group of three at the table Hattie's mother added, "I suppose you're here to take her with you then, aren't you?"

The two agents looked at each other briefly. Josh turned his head from one to the other and wondered if that's what they were really here for, to pick up a fourth team member.

"Oui, ma'am," Bartholomew eventually answered. "We think there's something pretty major going on and we'd really like to have her help on this one. If that's okay with you?"

"Oh," the woman patted her hands heavily on her thighs once in a show of drama. "When has it ever not been okay?"

Josh found himself liking the lady more and more. She was a bit flamboyant, kind of like his grandmother, and had a fun way of emphasizing her words with her slight French Canadian accent. Then Hattie came in the room, bounding down the stairs.

Hattie, looked much like a younger version of her mother, tall, darker skin, and deep red hair, cut relatively short and mop-headed like. And she seemed to be about his age. Josh's heart actually skipped a beat and he felt his hands getting a little sweaty in the nervous anticipation of having to shake her hand.

Peter and Agent Bartholomew stood from the table again. "Ah, Hattie!" Peter replied joyfully, and the pair exchanged kisses on the cheeks.

Turning to the older agent, Hattie put out her hand as Peter introduced him. Then she gestured with her right palm towards Josh and asked in French, "Et qui est ce petit garçon?"

"Well," Peter stammered at first. "He's a student from the Detroit suburban area who happened to see a Yeti too. He contacted Agent Davison through some non-official forums and evidently, has put us on the trail of something pretty major. Joshua Manders is his name."

"Is that right?" she said, strutting around the table a little bit. She was likely a good six inches taller than Josh, but beautiful all the same in her tomboy attire and attitude. She stuck out her hand straight-armed and asked, "Howdy do, Mister Manders?"

Her bite of sarcasm wasn't lost on Josh. But he did his best to take her hand and shake it.

Hattie's mother interjected with her French accent, "Hattie, he's from Detroit, not Dallas. They don't speak like cowboys everywhere in the US, you know."

"Ah, right!" Hattie said and then bounced and bounded around the table again and to get a piece of bread from the counter.

Agent Bartholomew interjected to take the reins of the situation. He'd had a couple children and now grandchildren in their teens and figured it was best if he put Peter and Josh out of their misery. "Hattie, we think the Yeti are making a run on the North Pole this year. As you know from past contacts, we're running a little short on staff during the holidays..."

Hattie's attention was full bore at that point. Her mouth had dropped and she fiddled with the bread between her two hands. "North Pole?" she repeated in an almost whisper.

"...and so we're looking for some helping hands. Josh has joined us. Now we'd like you to come along."

"But why?" Hattie swallowed hard and struggled to get her comments out above a whisper.

Peter spoke up then, "Because, Hattie, believe it or not, you're actually the leading expert on Yeti at this point. We need you to help us understand them a bit, or at the very least be able to help us out when they use their glimmer to try and scare us off. You've been in that sort of situation before."

"Whadda 'bout this boy?" Hattie said and gestured mildly with her hand again. The rivalry she seemed to be feeling was palpable.

"No, no. Josh has really only had contact with one," Peter explained. "Although he's getting very good about spotting them, I have to admit."

"Oh," Hattie replied, and folder her arms one upon the other. She smirked and was feeling empowered again. "So, you say we're going to the North Pole then? Why would they be going up there?"

Peter and Agent Bartholomew explained the aural scans they'd seen and why it was the concentrated magic at the North Pole might have an appeal to them. Josh wasn't sure he understood it all. It sounded somewhat like it was one of the few places in the world that magic hadn't been drained out of the earth by both humans and faeries over the centuries and that the Yeti likely had intentions of mining, or...some other way of collecting the magic for themselves. If he hadn't just spent the last couple days in a super powered monster truck that could cloak and tracking little magical fuzzballs that could grow in height ten times he would find the whole thing ludicrous. But as it was, he was beginning to get a sense of excitement about the whole trip, like perhaps they were about to save the world and needed him to do it.

Then Josh's nerves got the best of him and he had to run to the restroom at the back of the house to vomit.

~~~

About ten minutes later, all four of the CCV's doors had been opened, an agent entering each of the front doors and Josh and Hattie entering opposing rear doors. Even despite the nervous sick event Josh had had, and several concerned comments from Hattie's mother and both agents had been squelched and chalked up to something he ate on his pizza earlier, it was quite apparent that Hattie wasn't warming up to Josh as much as he might be to her. She wanted to sit in the seats as far from him as possible.

In the front, Bartholomew and Samuel were bringing up their maps and mumbling about routes to take. Bartholomew mentioned something about not really needing to track the aural trail much anymore if the Yeti were really heading where they thought they were. But Josh couldn't catch much of it, because as the CCV backed out of Hattie's drive and then on to the state route heading north again, Hattie herself slapped her hands down on her lap and turned violently to Josh to interrogate.

"So!" she started. "Tell me what you know about these critters."

Hattie's accent was funny and interesting at the same time. Josh found himself dazed slightly by her tone and her question before he could respond. But eventually he got out what little he felt he had learned so far, including some of the things he'd been able to glean off of Peter during their conversations on the way up to East Selkirk so far. Hattie was apparently unimpressed.

"Weeeelll..." She began with her own story. And then she proceeded to detail her past six years of Yeti observation and discoveries she had made. Most of them didn't seem like a whole lot more interesting or informational than his own single experience. But she did seem to be able to see through their _glimmer_ , whatever it really was, like he could. And, since being contacted by Agent Jackson Davison and Peter Samuel as his assistant last year, she's been filing reports of any Yeti evidence she's encountered or tracking she had performed. Apparently about two weeks earlier she'd seen an increase in the number of Yeti passing by their farm house on their way north. She'd enrolled her mother and convinced the IPMA that Mom could be trusted with more information. So, her mother's apparent casualness at Peter's arrival on their door step was based on packet of information she'd only just received not that long ago. Hattie implied, though she didn't confirm, that she and/or her family were being paid a small stipend for assisting in the Yeti watch. At that, Josh wondered if he and his family might be offered the same deal eventually and he redoubled his resolve to do a good job for Peter.

"But how do you think we're supposed to help if the Yeti are taking over the North Pole?" Josh asked towards the end.

The two agents in the front seat had stopped talking and planning and were listening in. Josh had a moment to notice their little amber dot was chasing up the side of Lake Winnipeg at a fairly high rate of speed. Checking the other gauges, indeed the big CCV was rolling along around 200 miles per hour again, the last couple digits flicking up and down too rapidly to read well, with the first and second digits occasionally dipping into the 190's. The nervous feeling returned slightly to Josh's belly.

"Well, like we said, we may just need the extra hands to be real honest," Bartholomew responded. He seemed to be perking up a bit, perhaps even becoming a little excited. "But there is one more person we're going to pick up before we get there.

Conversation died down. Hattie had pulled out a tablet of some kind and had at first tapped into the CCV's wireless network and pretended to do a little research on Yeti. But eventually she just relaxed, leaning back into the big leather seat and read an ebook she'd downloaded. Peter turned on a little music to keep Josh satisfied. And Bartholomew grumped and sighed heavily at his assessment of something or other on the horizon every few minutes.

The horizon itself was becoming extremely monotonous. It was no wonder they were able to move so quickly. It seemed like nothing but miles of snow and frozen-over lakes for most of the trip. The sun settled pretty quickly and Josh enjoyed the pink and orange reflections both on the parting clouds and on the ice and snow.

Eventually, it seemed there was barely a soul to be found in all directions. Hattie caught him looking and asked about it.

"This is basically First Nations' land," she replied.

"First Nations?" Josh asked a little confused.

"Oui! You know...like...'Indians' I think you call them in the US, don't you? Only, they don't like that here."

"Well, we mostly call them Native Americans now. But why don't they like being called Indians?" Josh asked innocently.

"Think about it," Hattie said knowingly. "This isn't India, now is it?"

Josh sat back in his seat and pondered it a bit. He had in his mind a picture of a stereotypical Eskimo dress on a Native American and wondered if that image was really truly representative. He wondered what they did out in the open land for survival and guessed they probably did have some small towns and such, but Peter was just driving through vacant lands to avoid being noticed, even in the _shimmered_ cloak on the CCV.

"Hey Peter, have we crossed into Nunavut territory yet?" Hattie asked loudly.

"Just barely. We're making good time but we're going to have to camp tonight again," the agent replied.

Hattie nodded and turned back to Josh, "Most of the people in this territory are Inuit and First Nations. There's a couple different bands I think."

"Bands?"

"You know...like tribes. Only don't say that either if we meet any of them. It's kind of considered rude. They speak Inuktitut a lot of them. But most also speak either French or English I think," Hattie lectured.

"I doubt we're going to meet any of them, Hattie. We've got to get to the North Pole ASAP," Bartholomew interjected. "Do either of you two realize what happens if the Yeti have really pulled of a coup at the North Pole?"

The two teens looked at each other and then shook their heads in silence as Bartholomew turned back to look at them.

"Well...let's just say there will be a _lot_ of kids dissatisfied with Santa Claus this year."

Josh hadn't thought of that. Apparently, neither had Hattie. They sat quietly, being rocked slightly by the big CCV as it sometimes rolled over larger bumps or took minor jumps at high speed. But it wasn't long before Hattie picked up her tablet and became immersed again.

Josh drifted off to sleep.

# Chapter 4

# December 20

# Northwestern Passages, King William Island

Waking from a dream of snow and a giant castle rising out of it, Josh tried hard to shake off the fright of thousands of miniature Yeti pouring over the walls of the castle rushing at him. Hattie was beside him, shaking him roughly and repeating his name with a slight accent that he found appealing.

"Joshua! You must wake up!"

"What's going on?" Josh mumbled.

He had to try hard to remember what had happened as they raced across the expanse of snow and permafrost northward. They came to an area where they had to slow down, he remembered that. There was a quick discussion between the two agents on how to cross a river or lake or something. Somewhere between drifting in and out of sleep on the long and boring drive he recalled they had stopped and prepared a dinner. It was pretty good, hamburgers and French fries with something Peter said he'd learned about in the west called a pink fry sauce. But none of it was tied together in a very cohesive memory.

By the looks of the surroundings it was already morning again. Probably late morning since it seemed the sun barely shone at all this time of year the further north they went. Hattie was excitedly trying to tell him something when Josh realized the two agents were not actually in the car with them anymore.

"They're waiting for it!" the girl said excitedly and smiling. Then she crinkled up her brow and her lips. "Well, I thought you might not want to be asleep when it shows up and have you be embarrassed when you realized you were drooling in your sleep!"

"I wasn't drooling!" Josh got defensive.

Hattie giggled and slugged him on the shoulder as he tried to sit more upright.

"What's coming, anyway?"

Hattie flapped her hands again, much like her mother. "Oh! I've told you twice already. A sprite! They're picking up a water sprite to help us on the ice at the North Pole!"

Josh was dumbfounded. He was sure he must still be asleep. A soda sounded good right now, but he didn't think it was all that exciting to have one just at that moment. And to wake him for it, no less. "What do you mean, a 'sprite'?"

"You know! A _sprite_!" Hattie had both palms turned upwards in a what-am-I-to-do-with-you expression. "Haven't you boys talked about any other faerie folk besides Yetis this whole trip? Well...of course there's actually still some question as to whether Yeti and Sasquatch are actual faerie folk. But they're magic just the same."

Josh was shaking his head. "Okay. Slow down. My head is still groggy. What the heck is a sprite, and why is it coming with us."

"OH!" Hattie gave up. "You'll see soon enough! Just watch!"

Josh looked at the LCD screens in place of the windows all about him and took in a filtered feed of the surroundings that had a couple lines marked trailing off in the distance in two directions, one solid and one dotted. He guessed that might be where they'd come from and where they were heading. The view was of a narrow run of water between where they were near a cliff and the shore opposite. To his right and slanted as though it were supposed to be "painted" on the ground itself were the words "Northwest Territories". The water before them were labeled "Northwest Passages". It seemed like the entire surroundings were barely lit by a soft glow, perhaps even just moonlight and the snowy ground that seemed to blend into cloudy skies were both calming and mesmerizing.

Ahead of the vehicle by several paces were the two agents and they seemed to be just watching the straight between where they were parked and the island or land across from them. From inside the cab of the CCV Hattie stared intently as though the arrival of the so-called Sprite was imminent. But the waiting continued. And continued. Josh felt like an hour had passed, although it had really only been about twelve minutes on the dash clock.

Finally, a loan figure came upon the scene, dressed much like Josh imagined an Eskimo would, or perhaps he was supposed to say Inuit if he understood Hattie's clarification of terms early correctly. There was a heavy animal hide coat with fur along the face and wrists and hem. The pant legs were terribly thick and looked to be quite warm. And the feet and hands were covered by thick wrappings. He or she approached from the southeast along the edge of the cliff and could be seen in the left display screens of the faux side windows.

The figure was nearly upon Agents Samuel and Bartholomew when finally it came to Peter's attention. Agent Bartholomew turned with a start, and then pulled his hand out of his pocket to greet the figure. It was then that Josh realized the two agents were still wearing only their black suits and ties, and yet didn't seem cold in the least. Well...perhaps their heads as their hair had begun collecting a bit of snow. He figured something magical must be going on with their attire too, but was too intent on what was to happen with the First Nation person before him showing up instead of a sprite.

After all three greeted they turned towards the CCV and walked towards it, splitting to go around to either side and enter.

"Move over! Make some room." Hattie said, trying to make room for the visitor who she must have thought was likely to get into back seat.

Instead, as the cold blast from the doors being opened on both sides in the front row of the CCV, Josh was distracted and could not get a good look at the visitor until Peter was seated in the middle, driving position again, Agent Bartholomew in the right seat, just ahead of Josh, and the visitor in the left. As the doors were shut, Josh could see that the world outside the cab of the truck was indeed much darker than it seemed on the display screens inside where they sat. Perhaps that's part of why the agents had not noticed the person walking up to them until the last few steps.

Whomever it was bundled up in the cold climate gear slowly removed gloves and then some googles and a face mask, and then turned to face the children. Josh noted her skin seemed oddly blue. _Is she really_ that _cold?_ Josh wondered, because it was more than just a slight tinge of color. The person's hands were truly blue toned.

When her eyes met Josh's he suddenly realized the visitor must not be entirely human. The woman had a blue-tinted face as well, smooth and pretty. But her eyebrows, upwardly pointed as they were, and her small amount of exposed hair were all white. With her hand extended she spoke in clear English but with a vibration in her voice, like she was echoing, or perhaps shivering from cold.

"It is nice to meet you, Joshua Manders," she nodded and smiled politely as she shook hands. Then she turned to greet Hattie as well, "And Ms. Hattie Mejaki as well. I look forward to assisting you with your errand."

"You're..." Hattie stumbled as she shook the creature's hand. "You're the sprite?!"

The woman smiled and nodded again. "Of course. You would not expect to find many others here would you?"

"Yes, but..." Hattie was obviously a little flabbergasted despite her apparent disappointment. "You...don't really look like a sprite."

Peter snickered a little, even while the creature's face returned to solemnity.

Bartholomew spoke up, "What exactly do you suppose a sprite looks like? Especially a water sprite that lives in this frozen waste land."

The sprite smiled politely again with her head turned to Agent Bartholomew's attention. "Well, Agent Bartholomew. I will concede that it is quite a bit colder here than most of you humans like. And also that it is indeed sparsely populated. But I wouldn't really call these islands a wasteland. There's quite unique environment here for those who would brave it. Especially for ocean-dwelling animals."

Bartholomew back-peddled. "Oh! Of course. I didn't mean it the way that sounded."

"Naturally," said the sprite. She caught the children's eyes momentarily as Bartholomew looked to do a little recovery and gave them a small wink and smile.

"Her name is Qanik," Peter mentioned quietly.

Qanik nodded her head in agreement. "I took the name when I first moved to this location about one-hundred and fifty years ago. It means 'falling snow'. I think that is when snow is the prettiest. Don't you?"

Hattie and Josh both nodded vigorously to agree. Something about the sprite and her smile were mesmerizing. It was as if she were hypnotizing them but they both wanted to let go and let her be in charge anyway.

"Qanik is here to help us on this mission. And, Hattie. It's true a sprite can take many different forms. In fact, I was told...er hem," Peter cleared his throat a little uncomfortably, "that you'd be coming from the passage, to tell you the truth."

"Yes. I do normally stay in the waters," Qanik replied and then turned to the children again smiling. "But when I heard you had two young assistants coming with you I thought perhaps I'd better look...more human."

"Oh!" Hattie practically whimpered, "And you look so beautiful too!"

"Thank you," Qanik acknowledged with a nod. "I do like this form. There's something unique to creatures who can work the world around them in so many ways with only muscle and bone as you humans do, isn't there?"

She had addressed Josh at the end. He nodded and replied nervously, "Yes...like building a tree fort or something. You just keep working at it with your hands until you get it right."

Qanik giggled a little in her echo-y voice and was even more endearing to the children because of it. "Exactly. Just imagine what a human could do with some real magic!"

The sprite's eyes seemed to flash just momentarily as she said it, as though a miniature streak of lightning had raced around the iris of each eye. It too was intoxicating from Josh's perspective. Sprites, he decided that afternoon, were awesome. He considered he just might need to specialize in them if he ever did have an opportunity to work with the IPMA. Hattie could have her old fuzzball Yeti and Sasquatch to herself.

~~~

Rolling again, the CCV had started heading north and westward up as close as it could get to the shore and still maintain speeds along the edge of what was labeled on the screens around him as King William Island. After a short while Peter pulled to a stop at the edge of a cliff overlooking an extensive, and very cold looking mess of ocean and ice.

"Well, crew..." Peter hesitated. He looked around at the two kids in the backseat and Hattie sat forward anticipating something exciting. "It's time we take this crawler up in the air."

The agent turned and started throwing a couple switches and then tapped in a very quick set of commands on the touch screens. Hattie turned at the same moment Josh did to look at each other in amazement. The very low rumble of the CCV's engine came to a halt for once in a very long couple of days. Then half a second later the beginnings of a giant fan noise started roaring to life. A couple clunks, like the final parts of a commercial plane were being sealed up and secured for travel beneath waiting nervous passengers resounded through the cabin. _Chunk!_ A grind, and then: _Ker-clunk!_ The fan noise was turning more into the chassis-shaking rumble of a jet engine like a plane as well.

Josh leaned forward and raised his voice some against the growing noise of the engine. "Are you saying we're going to _fly_?!"

Agent Bartholomew turned around and got his eye and flashed a grin. "Yes, sir! This is my favorite part!"

He'd turned around smiling ear to ear and folded his arms before him, apparently in an effort to relax and enjoy the sensation, before Josh could get any more questions in. The young boy turned with wide-eyed amazement to Hattie as he felt the vehicle wobble a bit as it lifted off the ground. She did not look well.

"I _hate_ flying," Hattie grumbled and folder her arms, attempting to squeeze as far into her large seat as possible. "They made me go in a helicopter one time when they first contacted me about the Yeti....I threw up."

Josh slid towards his side of the vehicle as far as he could, not wanting to be in splatter range in case the urge returned to the girl beside him. The CCV displayed the hills and snow around them dropping below their view on the LCD screens and slowly turned such that the truck faced northward, according to the over-lay compass. Then it pitched slightly forward and began to move.

The vehicle never did rise far off the ground, perhaps only a couple or a few thousand feet but from that elevation the displays showed a beautiful display of ocean, ice and snow-covered islands ahead of them. As they moved the view accelerated and did so quickly. Josh looked for a speed on the screens in front of Peter but the closest thing he could find to numbers like miles-per-hour was one that flickered between the upper 600's and lower 700's and had lettering below it that said "knots". Another smaller display just below that had numbers that would swing up and down a little more aggressively and it said "calculated knots" under it. Ultimately, Joshua gave up trying to figure out how fast they were going compared to a car but he knew it was very, very fast based on how quickly islands were floating past them outside the displays. He decided to not interfere with questions to relax and enjoy the scenery, though he did wonder if his mother would ever forgive him for agreeing to the trip if she were ever to find out.

# Chapter 5

# December 21

# World Headquarters of Belschnikel International

# 5 miles south of the Geographic North Pole along longitude 110.8°

As luck would have it, by the time the vehicle had progressed over a gigantic field of snow lit apparently by star and moonlight, Hattie had managed to keep all her stomach contents inside. Josh was beginning to suspect the LCD views in place of the windows were amplifying the light outside to make the scenery visible, and he was correct. Still, the scenery had been absolutely amazing. Once they'd traveled for a couple hours or more at breakneck speeds, Peter had slowed the truck and lowered its elevation even more until they came upon a facility rising out of the snow and nestled in some surrounding hills.

The buildings featured all the wondrous shapes and colors that Josh had come to expect from what could only be called Santa's Workshop in his earlier youth. A spire rose out of quaint Scandinavian style buildings, lights warming windows, shapes bustling about in the narrow alleys and walkways between. But upon closer inspection as they approached Josh noticed rubbish strewn about around the outskirts of the diminutive community and the shadows themselves all appeared to be the little bodies of the Yeti. Peter had cloaked the CCV just in time, but it may have gone un-noticed in all the commotion below.

Pulling away somewhat from the village Josh noticed another, extremely large construction beginning just a couple hundred yards away, and mostly buried by snow. It looked like a giant industrial building or airplane hangar, but it seemed to stretch on for a mile. Its breadth was not nearly that of its length but it was wide. On the end facing Santa's village there were multiple doors leading into the structure, guarded by hundreds of little Yeti moving back and forth from the building to the village and back. But along the side there did not appear to be any other access, nor windows, or any means of access, except for one impressive method. At three points, spaced evenly along the run of the building stretching out into the distance, there were gigantic steel doors atop the arched metal roof. The middle one was opening, swinging two doors outwards, opposed to each other and spreading apart down the length-wise of the building.

Peter guided the ship slowly and lowered it still until they were likely only a couple hundred feet above the building. The doors had reached their apparent maximum opening and then began closing again. The crew held the CCV in a slow pass by the central doors and each occupant waited, watching what would happen next. Within two seconds of closing the doors opened again. Josh muttered under his breath, but Qanik simply watched, patiently.

"What on Earth are those little twerps doing down there?" Bartholomew said with a gesture of his right hand. He started bringing up some tools on the display screens, some of which seemed to produce false colors as well as an odd fuzzy nearly see-through view of the building.

The CCV bobbled a bit mid-air with Peter's surprise when _Home_ came online on the speaker. "Agent Samuel? We have a priority one patch from the North Pole for you."

Clearing his throat, Peter quickly replied, "Put it through."

Immediately a gruff voice with a slightly Germanic accent shouted, "Halo? Is this the IPMA ship to the south of my facility?"

Agents Samuel and Bartholomew looked at each other with a quick flash of surprise. Qanik simply caught Peter's eye after the look and gave a knowing nod.

"Yes, sir. Is this Mr. Belschnikel?" Peter said nervously.

"Bah!" the voice responded. "Of course it is! You don't think anyone else up here speaks English do you?"

"Pleasure to me..." he began, but Peter was cut off again.

"Enough of that!" The gruff voice replied. "And just call me Santa, while you're at it. Now, here! Follow my tag and get down here. I'm sending you the RF code now. We've got to stop these little devils before they break my hangar doors!"

With a couple switches flipped and some things moved on the touch display screen an overlay dot appeared on the screens just below where they were hovering. Peter lowered the giant CCV to the beacon and the jet engines started calming down.

"Why didn't we just fly here the whole time?" Joshua asked.

Bartholomew answered first, "Well, it takes a lot of fuel to fly and we've probably only got just enough to get back to the northern points of Canada."

Josh nodded an understanding and Hattie flapped her hands into a folded rest before her impatiently as though the boy should have known. The CCV descended the last few feet quite slowly until finally it tapped the ground with a small thud, probably softened somewhat by the snow and ice. The chassis reverberated with the odd clicks and hollow sounds like a jet airplane again and then the engine wound down to a stop and the regular land motor started up.

Qanik was the first to exit, though she did so much more gracefully than either of the children or the agents. Ahead of them was a barely detectable doorway made white like the snow on the hill all around it. A strange, round looking man wrapped in red winter clothing and with nothing exposed to the weather but a long flowing white beard gestured to them to hurry.

"Keep that thing cloaked, Agent, and get in here," he gruffed once they were close enough to hear.

Stepping inside the doorway was significantly more comfortable than outside, but it was still rather cold. Hattie and Joshua bundled up in their warmer coats, but the two agents didn't seem phased at all in their black suits. Qanik stood, ever quiet and calm, hands at her sides.

"Well then," Santa greeted them. "I understand you're here to help me get rid of this stupid little fuzzballs, eh?"

Bartholomew and Peter looked at each other, cocking eyebrows almost simultaneously. Peter was the one to reply.

"Well, we can certainly do that, if that's what needs to be done. But I'm not sure the six of us are enough resources, considering..."

"Bah!" Santa replied again. "We just need a little different magic, like what you've brought. Thank goodness you've got a Sprite!"

The round man in front of them bounded through a corridor ahead of them that featured a grated steel mesh floor and fluorescent lights frequent enough the hall was rather bright.

"Qanik!" the female sprite said loudly as she too stepped quickly to keep up.

Josh and the others chased after them after they realized the party was moving on, and listened to the conversation.

Peter hollered as loudly as he could, "She's a water sprite, from the Northwest Passages area."

"Yes, I can see that!" Santa yelled back. "Only question is why she chose to look like a human Inuit! Complete waste of energy, in my book."

Josh was getting the distinct impression that Santa Claus was not entirely the jovial figure he was made out to be in film and songs. It seemed the round man before him, despite being surprisingly athletic for his build, was all around cynical and negative.

"The children," Qanik answered.

"Oh, right!" Santa replied, as though he'd forgotten himself a bit. "Well, I have the feeling we're going to need you to change your look a bit here in a minute."

Finally, the man in the red suit stopped at small door, not much bigger around or taller than he was. Josh thought perhaps Peter would have to duck to get into it. He turned and looked at the group bunched up behind him in the corridor.

"Here's the situation," he took a second to catch his breath. "These little twits have decided to take over the whole North Pole. They've got my manufacturing and shipping facility entirely under their control, but they're playing with some of the equipment and are probably breaking some of it down. One of the last of my elves coming out of here told me they're starting to unwrap some of the packages we've had ready to ship too. I'm pretty sure by this point they've noticed the sleigh, and with them playing with the center aerial doors it won't be long before they do something really ridiculous like try the sleigh out!"

"So, I want you come in there with me, guns blazing, and clear a path to the entrance on the village side. We're going to jam that door shut somehow and lock out any more of them from getting in here. Then next, we've got to make almost a half-mile rush to the controls for the central doors and force them closed too. We'll deal with these beasties in this complex first. Then we'll take care of the village."

"Wait, wait!" Hattie stammered. "Can't you tell us a little more than that? I mean...why are they trying to take over?"

"Girl, if we delay any further, Christmas deliveries are going to be ruined!" Santa replied.

"My name's Hattie!" she said a little more sheepishly.

Santa puffed his cheeks and blew out his lips a few times and then settled on a real conversation. "Blast, I know that Ms. Mejaki. Dash it all! Don't you know who I am?!"

Hattie was sincerely humbled by the question. "You _do_ know me, then?"

"Of course!" Santa stammered and flexed his hands, swinging his arms around haphazardly trying to calm himself down. "You very nearly made it on the naughty list last year. It's not like I'm going to forget that so easily, you know!"

Hattie blushed and backed down a bit.

Agent Bartholomew spoke, in a low and calm voice. "Mr. Belschnikel, we understand you're in a hurry. But we in the IPMA have had enough experience that we've learned we typically like to know what we're getting into before we rush into a gigantic room full of faerie folk. Let alone ones that are exhibiting violent tendencies."

"Oi!" Santa said, slouching back against the little door he had been trying to prep them to enter. "These little devils are not really violent. At least, they tend not to be. Listen..."

For a moment Santa paused as though he were pondering something before continuing. When he did he seemed a soul on his last breath of desperation.

"Kids... You've got to understand, I'm the reason they're here."

With no one else responding, Qanik stepped forward and took Santa's hand in hers. Josh thought he saw the electric flash in her eyes again and for just a moment he thought Santa had been mesmerized. "Please Mr. Belschnikel. Explain. So we can know how to help."

"Oh...alright," Santa replied, his eyes regaining focus. "You see, there's not too many elves left in the world, and there's more and more children every year that I would like to get to, somehow, you know?"

All five of the IPMA group nodded in acknowledgement whether they fully understood or not. Qanik released Santa's hand and allowed him to continue.

"Well, a few years back I started employing the Yetis, see? You know...just to fill in so to speak during the holidays in the packing and shipping departments."

"Mr. Belschnikel," Peter interrupted. "We happen to know you've been using robotic aides for delivery for some time now. Why not just develop some for packing and departure too?"

Santa waved a finger in front of him but his face remained more friendly than the first few minutes of their first meeting.

"No, won't work, see?" He was shaking his head as well. "You've got to have a touch of magic to make sure the packages are addressed to the right child...and um...you know, in the right colors, matching what the parents give, and what not."

"Mmmm," Agent Bartholomew replied thoughtfully, placing an index finger on his lip and glancing at Joshua.

Santa continued, "Anyway. I employed them here starting about October to help finalize things. But that was my mistake, wasn't it? I mean, they're fairly simple-minded fairy folk..."

"There's some question as to whether they really are faerie folk too," Peter said, but noticing a frown on Santa's face at the interruption he went back to holding his tongue.

"So anyway, they can't really help themselves. I showed them where the motherload of magic is and they want to get it for themselves now! Should've realized it actually...each year I hired them, twice as many as the year before would show up in the village looking for work....And they took their sweet time heading back south again too every January!"

"And this year?" Qanik prodded.

"Well, so a couple days ago, here comes this mass swarm of the little buggers, eh? I mean, they just swarmed the village. They were in my own home pushing me out, blooming themselves up to full Yeti height trying to scare me. And there we were, me and all my elves, sitting on the outside of the village borders before we could even raise any alarms or defenses. You know...we've really never planned for a full on ground assault before. All our defenses are meant to cloak us from the sky!"

"You keep saying 'elves'," Qanik questioned with one upturned eyebrow. "You know there isn't really such a thing as an elf, do you not?"

Santa waved his finger again and this time there was a little spark of the anger again. "Oh yes there is! There's not many, but there are real, for-goodness-sake Elves still left in the world."

Qanik was shaking her head while looking at Agent Bartholomew.

"But your right," Santa sighed again. "These in my employ are really just pixies. They like to dress up....and they're cute. So...I let them call themselves Santa's Elves."

Qanik looked at Josh and Hattie and though smiling, continued to shake her head, more in commiseration than denying what Santa was saying.

"Well, Mr. Belschnikel," Peter spoke up again. "We've got a few pieces of equipment and of course Qanik here. But how do you suppose we're going to fight our way through all those Yeti, exactly?"

"We rush 'em!" Santa pounded his right fist into his left palm to demonstrate. "They won't know what hit them. And they're really pretty much push-overs...if you catch them off guard instead of the other way around."

"Alright then, let's get at it," Agent Bartholomew said, drawing something from his inside coat pocket that looked a lot like the stone Peter had used much earlier on to cloak his IPMA sedan, but with five streaks of brilliant orange and red through the black.

Santa opened the door with a thunk on the latch and then a tired-sounding screech from the hinges as he pulled it slowly about a foot open. He pointed towards the side that was presumably closest to the village and a gigantic door could be seen. It was raised up somewhat from the position where the group was entering. They'd have to climb a set of nearby stairs and then run across the narrow section just inside the doorway to the opposite side to get to the controls. Santa whispered the majority of the information to Peter and Agent Bartholomew and gestured with his hands for the rest.

Through the small slit that Josh could see, there were not too many Yeti moving in and out of the doorway and around the entrance. He would guess that there were at least fifty or so though, and it would be a hard enough rush.

"You kids stay as close to me as you can, got it?" Peter said to Hattie and Josh in a whisper.

They both nodded in reply. Hattie looped her arm around Josh's and held him tight to her side as all six of the combatants got ready for battle. Joshua somehow felt a little dizzy then, and he could feel his arm warming and his cheeks blushing fiery red. He hoped Hattie was too occupied to notice and tried to play it cool.

"Ready," Santa rumbled quietly, "GO!"

They rushed out, Santa first, followed by Agent Bartholomew, then Peter as he tugged the two kids along with him, and then lastly Qanik. They went hunched over as if that would prevent any of the Yeti from seeing them, but it only served to make the look more ridiculous.

Making it to the stairwell and then clanging up its metal grate treads noisily seemed to not be as big an attractant to the Yeti as Josh might have thought. There were great noises of thuds, metal on metal racket and creatures yammering, growling, laughing and in all creating one resounding ruckus behind them, further into the structure. He risked turning his head and what he saw made his stomach turn. There were thousands of Yeti bouncing, climbing, swinging, throwing things and in all virtually covering every surface for the mile of building heading east of them.

There had to be more than thousands. _Tens of thousands!_ Josh thought to himself. The brief glimpse gave him the thought of an ant swarm covering a recent food cache discovery like a living carpet. And then, Peter crashed into Bartholomew, who had apparently bumped into Santa.

Just before Santa Claus on the stairway was one bemused Yeti, staring up at the group. It tilted its head and contemplated what the existence of the group before him meant as he was just headed down to find some more presents to unwrap. As it raised one arm and pointed at the group, shaking the finger excitedly and then beginning to jump up and down in place, Qanik jumped from behind the others onto the guard rail of the stairs, and used it to spring ahead of Santa, landing solidly on both of her feet.

Yeti number one had surprised Santa and the rest of the group and they did not know what to do with a singular Yeti staring them down. Fortunately, Qanik's quick action meant she was able to respond just as the creature was inhaling a big breath to begin screaming in alarm.

The sprite held her two hands before her and from them a blast of cold and white snow shot forth, enveloping the Yeti in a solid block of ice in a fraction of a second.

Mouth open, and with only its eyes able to roll around, looking surprised and frightened, Qanik gave it a quick kick and sent the Yeti-sicle into the corner of the upper metal grate planks at the top of the stairs. The creature was on its side and clearly wasn't happy as it watch the party of six interlopers hurry past towards the great exterior doors.

Quickly all six hustled along the metal-grate walkway until it butted against the cement floor of the production facility within a few feet of the gigantic front doorway. Peter, suddenly coming to a realization pulled out the stone he'd used to cloak his sedan back in Michigan, nearly dropping it into a hole in the last few feet of the grates as he fumbled it and then started waving it back and forth. All around Josh the six figures, including himself, faded into space.

"That's not going to work," Agent Bartholomew's voice came in a gruff rumble just ahead of Joshua.

Then Josh felt something heavy, though softly clothed in thick, padded material bar his path. Another object quickly plowed into him squishing him against what he guessed must have been Qanik and squealed with Hattie's voice into his ear as the three of them went clattering to the ground.

The milling and pleased-looking Yeti all about them seemed to stop and look around. Josh thought he heard Santa making a shush-ing sound. So he stopped moving, and so did Hattie and Qanik from what he could tell. Most of the Yeti looked about and fairly quickly gave up on seeing anything out of the ordinary. They one by one returned to their moving in and out of the facility. All but one.

A Yeti closest to their group started stepping very slowly in their direction in a zig-zag pattern holding out a set of stubby-fingered pink hands from his hairy white arms, and squinted it eyes. _It's looking for us!_ Josh thought.

As if in confirmation he heard Qanik's echo-y voice right beside his ear whisper, "Don't move. They're stronger than they look."

So he didn't. He could hear Hattie's nervous breathing and then she gulped and held her breath as the creature came ever closer. Apparently, the Yeti could hear something too for he growled with an odd murmur at the end and a few other Yeti around him stopped again and looked in his direction.

And then what Josh feared most happened. The miniature ball of fuzz exploded to ten times its own size, threw its arms up and in the air and released a gigantic roar. As he did, Hattie must have fallen backwards because Josh could hear her scrambling across the floor away from the invisible huddle of people and the Yeti above them.

Hearing the noise the Yeti reached out and grabbed at the space before him and apparently came up with something. It thrashed in his arms and he held it above his shoulders and then shook. With the violent scuffle the _shimmer_ that Peter had put upon Hattie dropped and she was suddenly in view. The great Yeti had her by her coat.

It turned her towards his face and brought her to within a few inches, then growled again. Hattie covered her ears, while at the same time screamed as loud as she could. Several of the other Yeti also bloomed into towering beasts and stepped to the attraction, forming a circle very near where Josh and Qanik were still lying motionless on the ground, invisible. Josh wondered desperately where Santa Clause or Peter, or maybe even where Bartholomew were right then, praying one of them would pull them, Hattie included, away from the horrific scene. All about them giant Yeti were roaring and swinging arms as though feeling for their prey.

The Yeti holding Hattie growled one more time and tossed her away about ten feet, where she was quickly surrounded by lumbering, furry white beasts. She curled into a ball and lay screaming. Suddenly, one of the Yeti surrounding Josh flew backwards tens of feet himself. In mid-air the beast shrunk back down to the size of the tiny fuzzballs. The little creature looked just as shocked and afraid as Hattie had moments before, but his flight through the air took three times as long.

"Joshua!" the boy heard Qanik say his name briskly. "They're using their _glimmer_ on you! They're very strong, but they're still very small. Kick low, at the base of their feet!"

Punt! Another Yeti went sailing, this time inwards towards the depths of the long production facility. As Josh watched the second flying Yeti arc into the building he got a good chance to look into the length of it. The entire facility was full of colorful, delightful things, each in a state of disassembly by a massing of fuzzy white furballs. He even thought he saw a P-38 twin-prop airplane, one of his favorites.

With a growl though, a Yeti had gotten ahold of Josh's ankle and his focus returned to the issue at hand. He turned and saw a lumbering giant Yeti dragging him towards the beast's feet.

"Kick low!" Qanik seemed to be yelling in his ear again.

He did, swinging his free foot in a wide, low arc skittering across the ground, until his boot connected with something solid with a thud. The giant beast seemed to go flailing off several feet away, again turning into the smaller fuzzball he had come to expect. When that one recovered quickly and started running back at Josh's general area it become engulfed in a flash in a frozen ball of ice. Qanik had bailed him out again.

Santa's voice rang out above all the ruckus and growled instructions to everyone to work their way through the Yeti to the other side of the door way into a control room on the far side of the plant. The only problem was that far side was probably two football fields away and they had all gotten entangled in the Yeti fight in the first fifty feet.

Looking to the outside, Josh noticed several small Yeti motioning to others closer to the village and hundreds more seemed to be pouring out of the buildings and the snowy hills around them heading straight for the doorway. If they didn't get the door shut quickly, they'd have probably twice as many Yeti to deal with momentarily. Then it happened in a flash of amber light. Every Yeti had shrunk back down to normal size and looked dazed. The only other being in view was Hattie whose _shimmer_ had dropped when the first Yeti grabbed ahold of her and tossed her. No one else was in sight still.

"Move NOW!" Josh heard Bartholomew yell, and he hopped up and started dodging and stepping over confused and re-miniature-ized Yeti.

It took nearly a minute to get to the other side, but as Josh was nearing the doorway to the control room a couple of Yeti seemed to be coming-to and they started growling as the giant entrance door to the facility started shutting. Looking behind Josh saw Hattie rushing in an uncomfortable-looking posture, as though she were being dragged by the arm. _Probably Qanik_ , he thought to himself. And then he was in the little control room.

As Hattie entered by her ghost chaperone someone else seemed to slam the door shut. It quickly locked and there stood Peter waving his _shimmer_ rock back and forth again. Each of the party of six wavered into view again, Santa at the control station, Peter and Agent Bartholomew standing near one another and watching the group as Peter worked, and Hattie being held up by Qanik tried to catch her breath. Santa slapped a couple buttons, including a big red one that quickly brought down shutters over the observation windows of the control room.

Heads turned and everyone had just enough time to see the giant facility door about halfway closed. _Oh why can't it close from the bottom up?_ thought Josh. _Then at least the Yeti wouldn't be able to keep getting in here._

It was true that several Yeti were still pouring in. But the mass migration wave from village to production facility hadn't gained access yet, and it looked like they were unlikely to make it.

Something tried the doorknob to the control room. Santa turned to the others and pressed his forefinger to his lips in an effort to urge everyone to remain still. All six held their breath. Then Santa reached slowly over his controls and tapped a button.

Outside, as though a ways off down the length of the facility they could hear an assembly tune being played, like a morning revelry but it was a jazzy, drum-heavy version of a Christmas song. The rattle of the knob stopped.

"I told you that wasn't going to work," Bartholomew groused at Peter, who was putting away his stone.

Peter just nodded, understanding completely what the problem with not being able to see one another might be.

"It's too bad we don't have a way to use _glimmer_ and have us all look like Yeti," Santa replied.

"Well..." Bartholomew started, bouncing the orange striped rock he had taken out before their attempt to cross the facility. "That wouldn't have stayed long either once I used this."

"What is it?" Qanik asked.

"This, my dear Sprite, is what brought those little hooligans' _glimmer_ down." With that the stone was palmed and then pocketed again.

"Oh!" Hattie replied. "That's perfect! It made it a lot easier to get around them all!"

Bartholomew and Peter both snickered just a little. Then Bartholomew added, "Yes. Not quite so scary as when they enlarge themselves, eh?"

Hattie just shook her head a little embarrassed at her panic earlier.

Josh thought about the discussion for a moment. "But, Qanik told me to kick low and that seemed to work too! Maybe we could deal with them while we're invisible, as long as we know how to handle them."

"That's true!" Peter said. "Good thinking Qanik! They're using their glimmer to confuse you and make you think they're really huge. But really, they're still quite small,...even if they are quite strong."

The agent looked at the girl again with that comment and seemed to be making sure there were no injuries.

"Are you alright, Hattie?" he asked.

She nodded again, sheepishly.

"Well then!" Santa said, slapping his knees and standing up again. "That's job one. We've cut them off from their reinforcements. Now has anyone got ideas on how to get the rest of them out of the building?"

Everyone stood dumbfounded, pondering. Santa looked from one to the other and then also placed his hand upon his chin to consider the situation. If he hadn't been locked inside a tiny room with a misfit collection of people he didn't think should even exist in the first place, Josh would have thought the picture of five people standing around stroking their chin hairs, whether they had any or not in the case of three of them, and muttering to themselves in whispers was quite comical. Then, Qanik spoke up.

"Mr. Belschnickel?" she asked.

Everyone turned, wide-eyed but hesitant.

"Do you happen to have a helicopter?"

"Well...Yes," he replied still hesitantly. "I do, actually."

"Is it more accessible than the CCV we left outside?"

~~~

Santa, Josh and Qanik had managed to sneak around the outside wall of the complex to nearly one third the distance of the entire building. They'd passed the first roof-mounted fly doors and were about half way between them and the second, middle set which the Yeti in that part of the building were still experimenting with opening and closing. Apparently, despite the clunks and thuds they'd heard as they slunk low against the wall emanating from the pad area of the giant red sleigh, none of the little fuzzballs managed to get Santa's chariot turned on.

Josh was just about to whisper to Qanik again his question about what it was he supposed to be able to help with, when Santa and then Qanik both stopped quickly before him. They were peering around a pile of supplies and crates and eyeing a pair of Yeti who seemed to be engaged in a tussle between themselves.

Sneaking a peak by crawling in tightly next to Qanik and Santa, Josh watched as one tiny-sized Yeti pointed at a wrapped present on the ground that appeared to have a slight tear in the wrapping. He mumbled and growled, apparently speaking in Yeti-ish to the other one, and then, POP! He blossomed to full size and waved its arms and howled at the second Yeti. Within a second or two it shrunk back down to miniature size and fussed over the package again, pointing and snarling some disapproval.

The second Yeti then took turns fussing. He flipped the edge of the torn paper and gestured back at the first Yeti and scowled. Then he too blossomed to full height, expressed some outrage and then shrunk back down.

This went back and forth about four or five times between them until they both grew large and appeared to lock arms on shoulders and head butted each other. They immediately shrunk down and as soon as their heads cleared started gesturing at the package again, grumbling and mumbling their way through their argument, apparently neither one quite ready to actually fight the other. Josh wasn't sure if the super-sized _glimmering_ was intentional or if it kept popping up as a natural defense or as perhaps a reflexive response.

"Freeze 'em, Sprite!" Santa said, in a much-too-excited tone for what Josh still expected of the Jovial spokesman of Christmas.

Qanik raised her palms without question and in half a second both of the Yeti were encapsulated in ice, blinking at one another, scowls locked on their faces for the next little while until the ice melted. One of them was mid-stomp and so was off balance. As the group rushed by along the outskirts of the building it tipped over and made a tinkling sound like crystal. It rolled it's eyes as far as it could watching the group go, obviously unhappy, and probably wondering who would be unfrozen first and get the prized present still lying between them.

As the small group moved, sometimes they had to stop and await a small pack or a straggler or two of Yeti moving past. In one of the quieter moments, Josh thought he'd take the opportunity to raise a question.

"Qanik," he started. "Couldn't you just freeze them all?"

The sprite, still wearing her Inuit clothing, shook her head. "No. I'm not really sure it's a good idea to be freezing them. And even with all this water and ice around me I'm still limited on how far I can extend myself. Our plan will require much less energy of me, actually."

They moved on a bit, creeping as they went.

"Why is it not a good idea to freeze them?"

Qanik leaned close to him to make sure no Yeti would catch their voices. Her breath was cool and crisp but not cold as he expected.

"Josh, most people don't appreciate being frozen. Imagine if I put a human through that cold. There's a good chance you might get frost bitten."

The boy pondered the thought for a moment. "That makes sense, but they're covered in fur. So...they're okay, right?"

Qanik nodded, "They're also faerie folk, so...I think it's safe enough."

Josh nodded in return and they moved on.

Once they came upon a much-too-small looking helicopter for Josh's liking Santa held them up and observed the surroundings. At that moment, Josh was wondering again why he had to come, but he did realize why Hattie did not. She would have been tossing her cookies even before the helicopter lifted. It did _not_ look like it could carry three people in his opinion.

"You know, there's some question as to whether or not the Yeti are even faerie folk," Santa pointed out again.

"Is that why you failed to inform the IPMA or any other duly appointed agency that you took them into your employ these past few years," Qanik asked. It was still her calm, echo-y tone but Josh thought he caught just the beginnings of a smirk upon her lips.

"I...well, uh..." Santa stammered. "It's really not any of their business. After all, no one has jurisdiction in the Arctic but me. That's the way it's been for hundreds of years and it's going to keep going on that way."

"Then why are agents Samuel and Bartholomew here?" she pressed.

Qanik looked to Josh and caught his eye just barely long enough to give him a wink and the smirk was exposed very briefly.

"I don't know why I've got to answer to you, Miss..." but Santa was cut off.

Qanik grabbed both Santa and Josh's coats and half dragged, half threw them at a run up into the Helicopter's open doors. With astonishment growing in its eyes there was one Yeti sitting upon the pilot's seat, wiggling the cyclic stick. As she hopped in immediately after the round man and the kid the Yeti was wrapped in ice, then picked up and tossed into a pile of blankets so the ice would not shatter, Qanik gruffed in an odd way with her echo-y sounding voice: "Because I'm the one that's going to get your Yeti out of here."

The blades started turning quickly as Santa punched a couple buttons. He apparently had to think through the process a little bit, and that made Josh even more uneasy about the flight.

Quickly Qanik frosted the front windows and put up a thin sheet of ice across the side openings of the copter. It was just in time as the Yeti within a couple hundred yards all turned to see which of them had gotten the helicopter to start and who was going to get a ride on it. A few clambered onto the skids just as the thing took flight, in hopes of "playing" with the Red Man's toys.

Once in the air, Santa turned in the direction of the central aerial doors and Qanik withdrew the ice hiding their presence.

"Got to time this close it looks like!" Claus murmured to himself.

Waiting for the doors to complete a closure, Josh sat hoping and praying the Yeti controlling the doors didn't suddenly think twice about opening them again, preventing them from exiting. Sure enough, after a couple seconds of being closed the doors started swinging upwards again.

Timing the width of the opening just right so he had plenty of time to get out before any Yeti would get the bright idea of closing the doors only half way through their process, the helicopter bolted straight up and out. The Yeti still brave enough to cling to the skids started dropping, like leaves from a tree, one at a time.

~~~

Hattie was beginning to wonder if she should have taken the helicopter ride after all. She and Bartholomew were tasked with getting to the farthest aerial doors' controls which, according to the map Santa had brought up in the front door control room, was nearly three-quarters of a mile into the facility. Peter was taking the first doors, much closer to the front door control. The idea was that two had a better chance of making it together greater distance, whereas Peter just had to stay hidden away.

Their route took them back across the face of the giant outside doorway again. Fortunately with it having been closed for a while and not too many of the Yeti being bright enough to even try the control room door, let alone try to force it or unlock it, there weren't many in their area. They swapped stones with Peter and cloaked themselves. Bartholomew had pointed where to meet up and said he'd uncloak within 5 minutes in that spot and she had better be there. It was a little against his opinion to use _shimmer_ again, but with only two to be cautious he figured they could probably make it without careening into each other again.

Having made it to the rendezvous in one piece and removing the _shimmer_ Bartholomew and Hattie moved on. They had observed some funny behaviors from the Yeti just as Qanik, Santa and Josh had. But they were obliged to keep to the shadows and behind stacks of both presents and supplies as well as wrapping papers. Out on the floor were many belts and machines that appeared to do the bulk of the wrapping for whomever worked there, be it Elf or Yeti. However, it was also clear what Santa meant about redirecting according to the needs of the child. Apparently some of the Yeti were so well trained they kept right on working, through all the mess and ruckus going on around them.

Once in a while, some of the invading Yeti would stumble across a belt and knock a present off, or take one to use in a sort of Yeti snow-ball fight with presents instead of snow. At that point one of the few "worker" Yeti would burst into their large form, growl at the interruptions and shoo them away. Once resolved the worker would inspect the packages and place them, tenderly, according to where they must have thought they needed to go next.

_Maybe Santa's right. They don't seem all_ that _bad,_ Hattie thought to herself. She began wondering if something more than just a hostile take-over to get at a source of magic was motivating the Yeti. In all her observations over the past few years they really didn't seem to want much else but to be left alone. In fact, that was the conclusion in her reports and Agent Jackson Davison had even reported to her that the IPMA historian himself had agreed with the assessment. It just made sense when you consider how little humans actually knew about Sasquatch and Yeti on the whole.

Finally, nearly twenty minutes later, as they heard the rotor of the helicopter begin spinning a ways behind them they had come across the control booth for the third aerial doors, furthest away from the opening at the village end. It was guarded by a number of Yeti. As the pair watched it became apparent the Yeti weren't so much guarding as just milling around looking for things to do. With the helicopter starting up, many of them slowly moved away from the area in the direction of the copter to get a better view of what was going on.

Bartholomew took the opportunity and grabbed Hattie's arm, dragging her into the control booth and then slamming the door.

There in one of the chairs was as single remaining Yeti. It looked about at them and sat stunned for a moment. Perhaps without others of his kind to egg him on he was not as keen to pick a fight. He cocked his head, and then raised his right palm and wiggled the fingers as though he were saying hello.

"Ohna!" the little Yeti chirped, then patted his hands on his legs.

"Maybe he's one of the ones Belschnickel hired," assessed Bartholomew. But then he moved quickly to pick up the Yeti by the scruff of its neck and motioned Hattie to open the door.

The little Yeti scrabbled a bit at that hand upon his back and grumbled about it, but really didn't do anything aggressive. As Hattie cracked the door open, Agent Bartholomew dropped the creature outside the door and then she shut it again quickly. For a couple seconds the thing seemed to be scratching at the door, like a dog might when it wants to be let back indoors. But it wasn't long before the noise stopped.

Hattie and Bartholomew supposed the thing had gotten caught up with the flight of the helicopter as the rest of his kin had. They went to work quickly trying to locate the aerial door controls. It looked like the helicopter was just about to get out through the central aerials and theirs had to be open shortly after.

~~~

Peter didn't have nearly the trip to make. He was glad to have at least Bartholomew's dis-enchantment stone, even if he did have to give up his _shimmer_ stone in exchange for it. He thought he could probably manage the few Yeti in a single control room just fine so long as he could keep his perspective and not be overwhelmed by several screaming full-sized Yeti.

As it was, he got off the easiest. He waited outside the first aerial doors' control room and in the shadows against the complex's outer walls. When the helicopter started rising he heard several childish sounding Yeti voices exclaim, "Eeewwweeee!" and they all exited the control booth to see what was going on.

Once inside, Peter locked the door and shut off all the lights. There were no blast shields or blinds on this control room, at least none that he could find, so he did his best not to attract attention to himself while he located the controls. Finding them just as the copter rose out of sight through the middle aerials he punched the control and his overhead doors began swinging open too.

Outside the booth some of the Yeti noticed the second set of doors opening too and oo'd and ah'd their lively action too. Peter ducked down but peered just over the edge of the lower window frame and caught site just a few seconds later of the third giant aerial doors beginning to move far down the length of the facility.

_Did it!_ Peter thought nearly out loud. They had all managed their part of the plan. Now it was just up to Qanik and Josh to create the diversion, like a modern Pied-Piper.

~~~

In the helicopter, Josh was still very uncomfortable. He'd found a seat belt of sorts but he couldn't get it to latch. So he just tied it in a bow on his lap as tight as he could instead.

Qanik was already leaning out the entrance opening on the side where Josh sat and beginning her plan. With a bit of light shimmering off her clothes and body like moonlight on the Arctic Ocean, she morphed into something even more beautiful.

The Sprite looked like a giant, dollop of water, only with arms. Her legs had sort of melted into a flowing-looking stream or waterfall. Josh supposed they still supported her but the form had molded into her torso such that she looked like some tower of water with a drop-shaped head and fluid, smooth arms and shoulders.

There were no words, no other action, but soon tiny mists of water started flowing from and around Qanik's body and she seemed to be directing them out in a wavy pattern over the production and shipping facility below them.

"Now I need you," Qanik said in a strong echo and with a truly friendly smile. "You must close your eyes. Imagine your favorite things. I will use your energy to ignite my water and it will look like a bright aurora to any magic creatures below."

Josh looked at her for a moment and nodded. He closed his eyes for a few seconds.

"Is it working?" the boy asked.

A moment's hesitation and then, Qanik replied, "No, Josh. It is not. I need you to really focus on something you love. Something that will make you very happy."

It wasn't working. He tried contemplating some of his toys, and that didn't seem strong enough. He tried imaging being home with Mother and Father again, but while that did make him very happy it wasn't quite getting the emotional effect Qanik needed to tap into.

"Josh!" Santa said and clapped his left hand on the boy's knee.

Joshua opened his eyes and looked at Santa Claus. The bearded face was grinning ear to ear. It reminded him of the grandpa he had never really known. _That's how Grandpa would've looked,_ Josh thought to himself, wishing he'd been born a few years earlier so he could have known his mother's father a little.

"Josh?" Santa said again. "I need you to imagine Christmas morning. Sitting around the tree with your parents. Your Mom is unwrapping the statue you made in art class this year. Can you do that?"

"Yeah!" Josh replied, smiling himself. "Yeah, I think I can."

A few seconds later, Qanik spoke up again. "It's starting to work. But you need to maintain it, Josh."

Josh never heard her. He was concentrating on Santa's vision he'd painted for him. And Santa explained some more.

"Now, lad," the now familiar voice said. "I want you to think about what Christmas really means. Can you do that?"

Josh was lost in his vision. He looked around the room. He saw the decorations his mother used year after year. He saw his dad sitting in the arm chair and drinking hot cocoa, the only time of year he was willing to do so, and smiling about it. And there, on the piano top was the Nativity scene, carved in wood, imported from Austria. It was a gift from his father's parents their first Christmas together Josh had been told.

He saw the display and seemed to feel a warmth emanating from the centerpiece of the scene.

"Jesus?" Josh asked. His eyes popped open for a moment and he caught Santa smiling his grandfatherly smile again.

Santa nodded vigorously and motioned with his free hand to close eyes again. Josh did so and was back in his scene looking at his mother and father again.

"It's about Jesus, isn't it?...And what he does for us, right?"

"Yes, Josh," Santa answered. "What does he do for us?"

"He..." Josh was still entranced with his vision. His mother was hugging him and father laughing about the great gift Josh had just given Mom. "He brings families together."

"That's it, Josh," Santa replied and then went back to the cyclic stick and started steering the Helicopter back and forth slowly up and down the length of the production facility while Qanik continued emanating the mist.

After a just a couple more minutes of flight, Santa asked again. "What else do you see, Joshua?"

Josh sat up in his vision and took in the scene. His mother's belly was bulging. She ruffled his head and patted her round tummy. "It's a boy, Joshy!" she said, and then started laughing and smiling at the same time. His eyes popped open and he took in Santa open-mouthed.

"My mom is having a baby?!" he yelled incredulously.

Santa turned his head briefly and with a knowing grin nodded again.

"Ah, ah, Josh!" Qanik said. "Stay in the moment!"

Josh quickly snapped his eyes shut. It took a second, but he regained the vision and kept it while Qanik worked, syphoning off some of his joy to power the vision in the mists she was creating.

Up and down the length of the facility Santa flew and thousands of Yeti stared up at him, seeing the brilliant aurora Qanik, with the help of Josh's emotions, was creating for them. They'd gotten the attention they had wanted. It was then time for the last step.

~~~

Agent Bartholomew was quite sure Hattie would be safe in the number three control room, while he completed his mission. After exiting the booth he checked for straggler Yeti, but they all of them seemed distracted with the onset of the very peculiar aurora borealis, even the ones that had seemingly been maintaining their employment with Belschnikel during the occupation of the facility. Even Bartholomew himself was struck with a sense of wonder at how brilliant the streams were, even having seen them a few times in his far northern US home. They seemed lace with images, movies almost, of various children and objects moving around and playing and such. It seemed so happy, even the gruff old agent got lost in the visage. But a brief few seconds later and he was on the move again.

This time little prevented him from making a flat out run to the far end of the production facility. He had several hundred feet to go but none of the Yeti, even those that happened to realize he was there, cared enough to prevent him.

At the back of the building, he then ran across the face of the closed rear door and took nearly another couple minutes to make it across the breadth of it. On the opposite side he ran into the door control room's own closed door...and it did not budge. He'd stubbed his toe and nearly flattened his nose on the surface of it when the knob refused to budge.

Bartholomew stepped back and rubbed his chin for a minute contemplating how energetic he was feeling. Should he try to bust the observation windows on the front of the control booth open? Or was he a little too tired for that? They were quite thick, after all. Fortunately the blast shields they'd found on the village side door control room had not been lowered, so it might be doable.

Then he remembered his _shimmer_ stone he received from Peter when he gave the younger agent his anti-enchantment stone. Perhaps he could trick the two Yeti he could see inside trying to peer out through the windows to come outside.

With several waves of his hand Bartholomew managed to turn the two creatures inside the booth invisible, and he waited. Within a few seconds the little twerps seemed to realize they could no longer see each other and had a bit of a panic attack. There were rumblings and growls and Yeti chattering. Apparently the effect was dis-settling and they had managed to get ahold of each other despite the invisibility to start a tussle about it. Perhaps they were arguing about which one caused it. But soon the door opened, and Agent B could hear first one set of tiny feet pattering away down the metal grate stairs into a lower working area of the facility, and a few seconds later a second set of feet padded away too.

Bartholomew entered the control room and punched the controls to open the facility rear door. This time, though it was still a painfully slow process, the giant doorway opening upwards was an advantage.

Santa flew the helicopter towards the far end of the facility and hovered around just far enough away from the doorway that Bartholomew could see the aurora. So did thousands of Yeti. Once they realized the source of the display had moved eastward out beyond the building they all started clambering towards the door Bartholomew opened and outwards onto the frozen icescape of the arctic.

It took several minutes, but by the time twelve had passed, Bartholomew felt it was safe to close the giant facility doorway. The production facility was oddly very quiet. It echoed his footsteps as he exited the control room. Then, off in the distance he saw Hattie waving her hands just outside her aerial door control booth and shouting that they had done it.

As he caught his breath and started making his way back to Hattie he heard occasional noises and metal clanking on metal. It appeared they may not have entirely vacated the Yeti from the building one-hundred percent. But it was certainly a huge improvement, and the building was under their control again. Such as it was.

Rubbish and torn wrappings were strewn everywhere. About a third of the collection of presents in various piles through the facility looked to have been opened up by the little faerie hoodlums. Belschnikel, it became clear, had a lot of work to do in only three days' time or less.

# Chapter 6

# December 22

# Central Aerial Door Control Room, Production Facility, World Headquarters of Belschnikel International

There wasn't enough room for everyone to fit inside a single control booth for the aerial doors. But half of the party, Peter, Bartholomew and Hattie sat inside the central control while they awaited Santa Claus' return. The helicopter had led the Yeti pack en masse about five miles away. Once Qanik stopped producing the aurora effect they flew in a wide circle south of the North Pole buildings and then into the central aerial doors to land on the helipad again.

Hattie punched the close button and as the giant doors closed that sealed the facility up for good. Both ends and all three aerials were sealed. Unless any straggling Yeti inside managed to open one of them in hopes of bringing back the others, they would be safe.

Once on the ground with rotors coming to a halt, Qanik had to escort Josh back to Earth. He was a little dazed and smiling pleasantly. Qanik had already changed her form back, such that Hattie and the two agents never witnessed what Josh had seen her as.

"Come Hattie. Help him get to a chair for a moment," the sprite said.

"Well," Bartholomew gruffed. "Mission accomplished, Mr. Belschnikel."

" _Santa_ , remember?" Claus fussed. "We're not done yet. I've radioed my elves and they should be coming in the same bypass entrance we used on the village end, but while they get working on this mess we've got to take back the village."

Qanik and Bartholomew nodded, somewhat begrudgingly. But Peter asked, "Is that a priority with deliveries starting in two days now? Why can't your home and offices wait until after Christmas morning?"

Santa shook a finger at him, "Because those buildings house the data center, and the primary workstation is in my home. The location data for the drones to deliver all these presents are run entirely by that equipment."

Peter tutted. "You don't have any system redundancy?"

"I beg your pardon?" Santa frowned. "I don't need redundancy. This place runs on magic, you know. That's why I'm up here."

"And it's why you're having a need for a little redundancy at this point since the Yeti now know about it too," Bartholomew interjected with his own finger-rattle and a wink to Peter.

Santa Claus grumped and stepped into the control booth with heavy clomping of his boots. Joshua wondered, not knowing Santa really well, how far the IPMA agents were able to push him before something bad happened. He imagined it was why Santa seemed a little sour about them showing up in the first place.

"Kids," Claus gave a forced smile to the two of them. "Why don't you stand outside for a moment while I show these folks what we're up against."

Hattie and Josh stepped outside while the other four crowded tightly around the controls and displays in the booth. They both managed to peer around elbows and such to get a view of the display Santa brought online. There was a great map of the buildings from an aerial perspective and sure enough it looked very much like the rough Yeti-built map Peter and Josh had discovered in the park on their trip northward. The spire seemed to be both Santa Claus' home as well as the main communications array.

"So basically, if we work our way through the alleys of the buildings along the outer edge of the village then we can enter my offices through my home," Santa concluded.

"You're saying we have to go through Mrs. Claus' back kitchen door?" Bartholomew said somewhat cynically.

Santa nodded. Peter snickered and asked, "Can I try one of her cookies?"

Before Claus could give any retort, Qanik asked, "She isn't here, is she, Mr. Belschnikel?"

Santa turned back and shook his head. "As much as she loves Christmas, she can't stand the perpetual night during the cold months of the year up here in the North Pole."

All the adult faces around the big round red man in the chair were empathetic. But Hattie gave Josh a quizzical look and Josh himself hung his jaw open a little perplexed. _Mrs. Claus doesn't like the North Pole?_ he thought.

"It's not the cold, heaven knows! She likes the cold," Santa seemed to be attesting a little too strongly. "She just likes a little sunlight every day. So...she actually goes on vacation to the South Pole from Fall through Spring."

There remained nothing but all sympathetic looks all around. It was almost as if they'd found Santa's skeletons he kept in his closet. "Mrs. Claus goes on vacation for six months?!?" This time it was Hattie's thoughts. Only, she was not as delicate as to keep them safely tucked in her head and spoke them, rather loudly, to the group.

Shaking his head, Santa added, "No. No. It's not like that. I go visit her every week. And she keeps tab of the progress ahead of Christmas and helps keep all the business side of the operations running, what with supplies and materials and such. We're equal partners, you know. She...just..."

"Doesn't like the North Pole that much. I get it Santa. It's okay," Peter said reassuringly.

"Alright then," Santa slapped his knees with his hands with finality. "Do we all know where we're going then, in case we get split up?"

"Yes," came the chorus of answers.

"Hattie, you're with Qanik, and Josh you stick with Agent Samuel, right?" Bartholomew said.

Again a small round of agreements were voiced, and then out they headed to meet a couple elves by the service entrance.

~~~

Joined by three very small beings with pointed ears and elongated noses, with limbs and digits tiny and frail looking, the party of Christmas rescuers hurried across the main pathway leading from village to production facility and towards the far north east side of the village to duck behind drifts and hills of snow and buildings painted in bright reds and greens. Few Yeti were on the roadway and those that noticed the party either quickly scuttled off in another direction or went about their business. It seemed as though most of the Yeti occupants of the village had followed the aurora and moved on with the large group from the metal facility. Josh started feeling hopeful the hardest work was already done.

Staying out of view of the windows in each building as the group moved was a little difficult because the near proximity to the village was for the most part flat. But the crew moved from one small drift to another and kept the mountain ring around the complex to their back. It hadn't really been necessary. Most of the Yeti inside the buildings were much too busy investigating prototype toys, wrappings, paperwork or the elves' living quarters to really care what was happening outside.

Finally, Santa led the group around the towering spire to the building attached to it and gathered them at a brightly painted red doorway.

"Hamish says there were barely any Yeti on the main floor. But if you try to get to the stairwell and head upstairs they're covering wall to wall," said one of the elves with a raspy echo much like Qanik's. Elf, as Josh had realized listening to Peter and Bartholomew, was a misnomer. He was really a pixie dressed in green clothing with a red overcoat and hat. Josh thought when he returned home he might do a little research and try to figure out what both sprites and pixies really were.

"Yes," said a second elf, which to Josh's surprise had a very feminine sounding voice. "He also said it looked like they were actually guarding."

Santa grimaced and nodded. "And where is Hamish now?"

"On his way back to Nova Scotia I think, sir," the last of the three elves spoke up. "He said he'd had enough of magic-obsessed creatures for a while."

"Well..." Claus started. "We _are_ going to get rid of the Yeti, of course."

"Mmmm..." the same elf skirmished for a minute with a scowl on his face. "I got the impression he didn't mean just the Yeti, sir."

"Oh." Santa didn't act offended but he didn't defend himself either. Josh had an inkling that there was probably more than just the joy of giving kids presents once a year that kept the round one at the North Pole year round.

The great jovial man placed a gloved right hand to the handle of the door and depressed the latch. It clicked, apparently much louder than Santa had expected because he flinched. After a couple seconds' pause, he slowly pushed the door open. Like a stereotypical door in a horror flick it creaked on its hinges. Everyone in the party then cringed. All but Qanik. She just watched, smirking slightly.

Once the door was fully open and everyone's eyes adjusted to the glow of an oil lamp still miraculously burning on the wall through all the commotion, a lone Yeti could be seen, relaxing in a winged-back chair and watching something on a television that was flickering color in random patterns about the room.

The little fuzzball rolled its eyes towards the motley crew standing in the doorway. Santa took three steps in, followed by the two agents, the elves and then by Qanik and the children. They fanned out and circled the half of the room with rear entrance they had all just poured through. As though he were determining a response, the little Yeti took each one in with a sleepy glance. Then he slowly stood up on the chair cushion, removed a toothpick from his lips that he'd been chewing on and took three, stop-motion steps to the edge of the chair.

Placing his hands at his side like a gunslinger the little Yeti twiddled his fingers, and then nodded slowly, eyeing Claus directly. Santa took up the same stance.

"What _are_ you doing, Belschnikel?" Peter whispered.

With that Santa flicked his right hand out and held the fingers in a pistol shape. The Yeti went for his two side arms too, but before he could make the pretend "pew pew" sound that Claus had, Qanik had frozen him solid.

The little white fuzz was fully encased, except for his eyes, which flicked in an irritated fashion from Santa to Qanik and back again.

"Oh dear!" Santa said, and rushed forward to pick up the block of ice. "I'm so sorry about that."

Santa put the iced Yeti near the fireplace on the far end of the room to thaw out.

Qanik placed her hands akimbo on her hips and asked, "What is going on here Mr. Belschnikel."

Agents Bartholomew and Samuel were just standing dumbfounded. The female elf in the party snapped her finger towards the Yeti and chuckled an evil sounding laugh. On the television, an old movie featuring Clint Eastwood was playing out, apparently where the little Yeti had gotten his inspiration.

"That will teach you sit in my spot, you little devil!" the first elf said.

"Aw," bemoaned Santa Claus. "He wasn't a bad one."

"What?! You know this guy?" Agent Bartholomew grumbled.

"Yes," the red man replied. "He was my first contact with the Yeti. He bartered their work contract several years ago actually...and he loves old westerns. It's just a little game we play sometimes."

As Santa motioned for everyone to follow him through a beautiful wooden archway into a hall beyond the apparent living room they'd entered, the last elf murmured to the Yeti, "Consider that your pink slip, Furball!"

Down the hall the group creaked on wooden floorboards. A dark wooden wainscoting was topped by a small shelf, and upon it appeared to be a collection of toys of some sorts. Josh tried to discern what made the collection special. Each one was very old, but were hand-crafted. None of them looked like the action figures, toy sets or portable video game systems that he was accustomed to.

One of the elves tugged at Josh's coat. It was the lady elf. "Those are from previous Santas. He likes to keep them in his private chambers so he can remember his forefathers, he says," she whispered.

Josh gave a nod, but he was still marveling over them, while trying to move quietly. The detail on each was exquisite and for some reason Josh instantly thought about how much such rare collectibles would go for on an online auction. But then he quickly thought better of it. Somehow the idea seemed very irreverent to him and made him uncomfortable. These toys seemed to be an expression of love to whomever they were given and Josh recognized it would never be right to sell them. As they traveled a unique look seemed to change from one batch to another, as though one person had made several, and then the next ones on the shelf made by another. It was in the details of the carvings, paint and even the strokes of how the color was applied. And that was some of what made them special.

Down they crept towards a great oak door hinged and latched with old English style wrought iron hardware. No matter how careful they were the group could not seem to stop the creaking in the homey-feeling house. Then finally they were at the door, Santa gripping the handle and latch as he'd done with the exterior entrance. He turned back and placed his forefinger in the white glove to his lip to indicate silence.

Josh found himself wondering if they'd find another colleague Yeti relaxing on a couch and wanting to play games, when the door was thrust open and Santa pulled inside with the handle.

As Claus stumbled into the room beyond, one of the largest big-form Yeti Josh had seen on the trip stood blocking the door and howling at the top of its voice. It was so bad that all members of the party except Qanik slapped their hands over their ears.

When the noise stopped the beast ripped the heavy oak door from its hinges and tossed it behind its back. Before anyone could react, the creature stooped and picked up Santa and then tossed him at the rest of the group standing in the hallway like a bowling ball. Indeed the man in red went rolling for several feet head over feet and knocked down the IPMA agents, Josh and Hattie and two of the elves. Qanik and the last elf managed to flatten themselves against the wainscot and shelf tightly enough that they missed impact from Santa.

Then Qanik sprung to action. She shot ice and started encapsulating the Yeti in it. And the last standing elf made a sliding dive with his right boot extended and kicked the creature low, knocking it into the wall.

Ice shattered, negating Qanik's effort but the impact was strong enough the Yeti went unconscious.

"Move!" Santa was already up and yelling as he hustled through the hall and into the room.

As they followed Santa he took just a few steps and then was rounding the last baluster of a circular set of stairs leading sharply upwards. It wasn't a room at all, but a very brightly lit stair well leading up into the spire they'd seen from outside and on the aerial maps and Yeti-built diorama.

_Clunk! Clunk! Clunk!_ went several pairs of heavy boots, IPMA Agent dress shoes and whatever it was Qanik was actually wearing. The elves' little pointed shoes didn't seem to make a sound, at least not that Josh could discern.

But by the time they were on the landing for the second floor, Yeti from the hallway and rooms beyond an archway were streaming towards them.

"Keep moving!" Bartholomew took a turn to yell this time.

Over his shoulder Josh could see tens or even hundreds of Yeti swarming into the stairwell, occasionally blossoming for a just a second or two into their large form disguise and then shrinking back again. When the stairs were too full, several started attempting to climb the sides of the spiraling rail to get at the group headed upstairs.

For the most part, the Yeti couldn't move as quickly up the staircase as well as the group with larger strides. It was an advantage Josh was thankful for, and he didn't spend time wondering how it was the elves were actually picking their way through legs and getting through the climb faster than anyone else with their short, near-Yeti length legs.

They'd passed a third floor landing, but fortunately it had a door on it. The Yeti in that area seemed a little slower to realize what was happening, but once they heard the clamor of their mates growling and chasing up the metal treads of the stairs they burst the doorway open and poured into the movement as well.

"I hope there's a really _big_ door at the top that we can lock, Belschnikel," groused Bartholomew ahead, almost out of breath.

"There is!" Santa shouted back, surprisingly still going strong. "And there's no more floors to the house either! Just keep climbing, we're almost out of it!"

White paint and rails and little port windows out the sides of the spire as they climbed made Josh feel as though he were climbing up inside a small lighthouse. But finally the group clanked onto a landing large enough to hold them all and stood before a very big door just as Santa had promised. Hattie was the first to look back down the stairs and what she saw spooked her. The Yeti were climbing fast, from every direction they could manage to get a hold. And they looked angry. These were not just simple-minded Yeti seeking a big magic influx as payoff for traveling to the North Pole. This group guarding the tower seemed intent on doing harm.

Quickly Santa opened the doorway with a great shove and in they went. They were standing in a nicely decorated room with the same wooden wainscot as down in the house hallways, some dark wooden shelves, a writing table and a flat screen monitor for a computer centered on the desk. Behind it sat a shocked looking person, blue, much like Qanik.

The man at the desk rose slowly. "Qanik?" he asked gently. Then more rudely he demanded, "How did you lot get up here with all these Yeti standing guard?"

Around each end of the table two angry-looking little Yeti strutted. One was pounding his fist into his other open palm in a pummeling gesture. Outside the tidalwave of white fuzzy bodies must have made it to the top because they pounded and howled at the door, the noise relatively well-muffled by the thickness of it. The pair escorting the blue man both blossomed into full height and roared at Santa's entourage and raised their arms.

"Tut, tut! Not yet boys," the man said, still flabbergasted by the party before him. "Qanik...what are you doing with these people?"

"You know this guy, ma'am?" Agent Bartholomew gruffed and pointed accusingly with his forefinger on his right hand upturned palm.

Qanik stepped forward one step and halted. "I used to. He's my..."

"Boyfriend!" the blue man raised his voice a bit.

"Not anymore," Qanik interjected quickly and stepped back again to stand behind Santa and the others.

The blue figure continued. "I can _not_ believe you put your lot in with this crew. You realize Belschnikel here has been hoarding all the magic along the geo-magnetic lines for the past several centuries?! And you're going to help him get it back!"

Santa turned around to the group and took them all in and then stared at Qanik incredulously. His face was cock-eyed confused as he spoke. "Qanik? Who is this twit?"

"Jack," she answered quietly.

"Jack?" Santa asked, turning back to the blue man. " _The_ Jack?"

"Of course I am," the smallish blue imp said. "Who else is going to be this far north fighting to take back what is rightfully the Northern Water Sprites' to possess! I am JACK! Jack Frost, if you don't mind. And this facility, and all the area around within four hundred square kilometers I claim as lands for our inheritance. The inheritance of the magic beings who have the only right to it!"

"Oh get off your high-horse, Jack," Qanik said rather casually. It was the first time Jack had heard Qanik's tone sound almost human. Perhaps she did have a sense of humor after all. "There is absolutely no reason Belschnikel can't use the magic up here to run his operations. You're really going to eliminate Christmas for everyone, just so you don't have to share?"

"How!" Jack bellowed, "can you _possibly_ be willing to help these... _humans_! When all they ever do is drive us faerie folk out of our sanctuaries and consume all the magic, then wonder later if it ever even existed. I WON'T TOLERATE IT ANYMORE!"

"Mr. Frost..." Peter started, but was immediately shot down.

"You! Quiet!" Jack jumped atop the desk and walked to its edge in an attempt to intimidate. He was short, like Qanik, with blue skin and dressed in silks of blue with gold trimmings. The attire looked princely to Josh, if the man wasn't so vile. " _Humans_ should not speak unless spoken to!"

The word 'humans' was hissed like a terrible cussword every time Jack uttered it.

And then there was a short exchange between Jack and Qanik in a language Josh had never heard before, even on television. It sounded elegant on both of their tongues, but Jack Frost seemed to make some of the words seem very vulgar the way he hissed and bellowed them. Qanik gestured repeatedly and looked like she was imploring Jack. He had tromped to the other side of the desk and was looking down upon her with disgust. At least twice, Josh heard the pair use the word Belschnikel and another word that sounded very similar to "Christmas". But otherwise their conversation was completely unintelligible.

"Eh..." Bartholomew started, wanting to inform the male Sprite that he was being rude not speaking in a common language to the group, but Peter put his hand on his arm and shook his head.

Somewhat reflexively, Hattie, Josh and the agents backed away from the confrontation as best as they could. Santa Claus shooed them further back with a wave of his hand behind his back and took one or two steps back too. The Yeti were very eagerly eyeing Qanik, awaiting orders and chomping at the bit to start smashing. Apparently the two had mastered the ability to maintain their _glimmer_ and remain at full height.

"Fine!" Jack finished finally. He strutted off the desk and landed back in the chair behind it. "Dispose of them."

With that the Yeti's howled and reared up, one aiming to snatch Qanik, and the other taking a step towards the rest of the group. And then they were frozen. Ice surrounded each with no mercy. It was so thick, Josh wasn't sure the Yeti could even roll their eyes around like all the others had before under Qanik's attack.

Instantly Jack jumped to the table again, fear spreading across his face. Qanik's legs disappeared and her coat melted into one continuous flowing form of water with a beautiful, smooth face, and clawed hands. She rushed upon the table and in the instant Jack began to make his change to water form as well.

But Qanik already had him. The force of her expanding volume took him up and slammed into and then through the window on the far side of the room. The rush of water out of the small window sounded like a great waterfall to Josh, but he could hear the male Sprite screaming above it in anger as well.

Santa and then the rest of the group rushed to the window and below could see a figure half-man, half wave of water fleeing away from the village, followed by what appeared to be a miniature tidal-wave. The pair disappeared over the crest of a hill of ice and the party turned back to the room to assess the damage. The door to the office was still banging and scratching and howls could be heard behind it.

"Uh..." Hattie asked, "how are we going to deal with all of those, now that Qanik is gone?"

Everyone stood quietly for a minute. Then Josh had an idea.

"Peter! You can make us all invisible!" the boy attempted a whisper but it was too loud and raspy to come off as one.

"Yes... I could..." Peter asked questioningly.

Agent Bartholomew took out the stone he had swapped with Peter and held it out. Josh plucked it up and put it into Peter's hands.

"Make us invisible, and we'll stand on either side of the door and then let them in!"

"What?!" Hattie screeched. "You can't let those things in here, there's probably a hundred of them now!"

Peter crooked his left eyebrow, and then checked Bartholomew's expression. Bartholomew looked at Josh and then back again and nodded.

"We let them in, then they see what happened here. It's perfect!" Josh said excited. "Once they see we chased off Jack Frost they will calm down and...well...maybe these last ones will just sort of wander off?"

"I like it!" Santa Claus said with a chuckle, and he took a step towards Josh to ruffle his hair. "Let's give it a try. If nothing else, they should at least move on to something other than us, and we can figure out our next step after they leave the room."

The female elf also agreed, having to swat the backside of her male elf companions to get them to agree with the big boss as well. It was settled.

Peter took the stone and began waving it back and forth before the group again as he'd done before, closing his eyes this time to concentrate. Then the group each stepped to the sides of the doorway, with a small amount of bumping into each other. Once, Hattie murmured something to Josh when he seemed to bump into her near the wall. She was irritated, but somehow he managed to recognize that she really did smell kind of pretty like girls do. He wondered absently if the magic being used on him distorts a young man's mind a little, or if his non-visual senses were just heightened.

Then, as agreed, Santa pull the latch back on the door, and Yeti came bursting in. The room continued to fill as the leaders made for the desk and the window. There were many little tantrums and frequent flashes of large-sized versions of the Yeti pack popping up in the crowd. A few books were thrown and one of them managed to jump up on the desk and look around as though he were trying to understand what had happened in the room. When it appeared to have dawned on him that both the intruders and with them his employer were gone, he started jumping up and down and throwing a temper tantrum with arms flailing and teeth gritted. Then he hopped down and ran back out of the room.

A large number of Yeti followed the angry one out and back down the stairwell so that there were only ten or fifteen milling about. They were all equally frustrated. But fortunately, none of them took their anger out on the computer on the desk. Santa was going to need that in two days if Josh understood him correctly.

With the last couple Yeti tromping off out of the room, Josh breathed loudly. He thought he heard Santa chuckling quietly too himself. But then they froze again. There was another soft padding of little pink Yeti feet on the floor in the doorway.

In walked a somber-looking Yeti holding a small chunk of ice and mumbling to itself. It looked around the room and then tutted to itself. Slowly it rounded the writing desk and sat at the table on the chair reaching up as best it could to the keyboard by stretching its arms. It tapped a few things on the keyboard and then rested its chin on the table, while continuing to move the mouse slightly and clicking the left button from time to time.

Joshua cautiously took a couple steps away from the group's position by the door, mostly to make sure he was providing enough maneuvering room to the adults. As he stepped away Hattie clearly snatched onto his arm and held on while she moved with him. He could also hear Santa's heavy boot squeaking slowly across the wooden flooring.

"What's it doing?" Josh heard Hattie whisper into his ear much closer than he would have expected. For some reason having a girl hanging on his arm and breathing on his neck as she talked was giving him shivers and he had a tough time controlling it.

"I think...it's playing a video game," Josh answered.

Soon they all heard Santa's voice quietly ask, "Chuck?"

The little Yeti lifted its head and looked about the room, wide eyes blinking looking for the source of Santa's voice.

"Awwwrrggg," grumbled one of the three elves in the group. Josh thought it was probably the one who had chewed out the Yeti in the family room downstairs for taking his seat.

Chuck, the Yeti, pushed back from the desk and just looked about the room mystified. Then it scrunched its nose up and cocked and eyebrow, turning its head as though preparing to hear the voices again. It grumbled something that sounded like a mix of a roar, the two Sprites' conversation and the tail end of "Belschnikel?"

By then Peter had taken out the _shimmer_ stone and was removing the invisibility enchantment on the part members. When Chuck saw Santa and the gang appearing before him he grinned a toothy grin and jumped up on the desk. Claus stepped near and put his hands on the back of the little twelve-inch tall fuzzball and pressed him into his belly to give him a hug. Chuck seemed to enjoy it and nuzzled the big red man.

Then the Yeti stepped back and looked about again. He leaned over trying to see around Santa and the two larger adults, agents Bartholomew and Samuel. He raised his two finger-pistols again and questioningly asked, "Pew Pew?" and then wrapped himself with his arms and pretended to shiver as though he were very cold.

Santa and Bartholomew both laughed out loud. Santa tossed the fuzz on the top of Chuck's head and said, "No. No, she's gone. She's after Jack Frost now. I think you're safe."

Chuck hopped off the table and strutted towards the door, with one hand griping the edge low, preparing to shut it and with the other upturned he gestured to Santa and grumbled something again.

"Yes, Chuck. Tell any of the stragglers that our contract is an end. We'll have to find someone else to help us out, I suppose."

Then Chuck pointed his free hand back to himself with his thumb and raised an eyebrow.

"No, Charles," Santa giggled. "You're welcome to stay. Just don't bring any more than a couple friends at a time, alright?"

With that the Yeti left the room and shut the door, leaving the remaining team of eight to discuss what to do about the presents.

Santa sat down at his desk and positioned the keyboard and mouse where he liked it. He snickered and mumbled, "Space Invaders. Of course."

The first male elf came around the desk and looked over the documentation Santa Claus was bringing on screen. The rest of the group slowly made the same approach.

"Looks like Frost was trying to pinpoint other magical points of interest, sir," the echo-y Elfish voice posited.

After a few moments of assessment and stroking his beard, Santa Claus proclaimed, "Yes, but otherwise I think we're good. I have all the flight plans and deliveries still programmed for the air drones. And, honestly, I think we can re-wrap and have just about all the presents we need. It shouldn't take us much in the way of magic to make up the last of it. I don't think the Yeti really tore into that many, do you?"

The female elf responded then in a pleading voice, her desperation beginning to show. "Sir, I think we've probably lost a good quarter, if not a fifth of what we were expecting to deliver. What do we do? Tell 20% of the kids that they ended up on the naughty list after all?"

"We _need_ some more help, sir," said the second male elf.

"You're right, Dingle." Apparently that was one of the elves' name, the first that Josh had heard.

Santa sat considering the situation. Agents Bartholomew and Samuel started motioning to the kids that they should probably be going, and Joshua wondered why they would be so quick to leave. "Can't we...?" he started.

"Josh," Peter said. "Even if all the IPMA agents were on duty, and even if we could harness the magic here at the north pole like Belschnikel does, we still wouldn't have enough to get the job done....We're not really that many. That's kind of...how we stay relatively secret."

Santa was grasping at straws. "Perhaps the Angiks?"

The three elves' faces went ashen white. "You must be joking, sir?" one of them said in a raspy voice.

"Why not?" Santa said, standing up. "I bet they'd help out. It'd be only natural for them!"

"No sir!" the lady elf said vehemently. "If you bring the Angiks here, I don't think you'll have a single elf willing to stick around."

"Alright then," Santa said, flapping his hands a bit. "Let's keep thinking."

Josh leaned over to Peter and asked in a whisper, "What are Angiks?"

Peter just shrugged and shook his head. But when Agent Bartholomew leaned in to whisper back, Hattie also put her head in conspiratorially.

"They're said to be _ghost_ faeries," Bartholomew spoke reverently. "Spirits of the First Nations who died young....I don't think it would be wise to bring in the undead for wrapping Christmas packages, do you?"

Hattie and Joshua shook their heads vigorously. Josh felt he was beginning to understand why this latest in the line of Belschnikels got himself into the situation with the Yeti that he did. He seemed perhaps a bit _too_ trusting of everyone's good will. Even if the ghosts wanted to help, Josh wasn't sure they could. Could they even touch anything? Let alone wrap it.

"I've got it, sir!" the second male elf said, with his finger pointing the air.

"Yes? Yes?!" Santa said, banging a fist on the desk, impatient for a resolution. "Go on!"

"Well...It's obvious!" the elf said again with a grin.

"What is it?!" three to four voices simultaneously chimed in with Santa's query.

"Well...she's right before our eyes. Why not have Qanik petition the Alven to help us. There's got to be hundreds, maybe even thousands around the northern edges of the continents this time of year, what with their moon-worshipping and all and it being dark all the time. And!..."

Santa sat back and was considering the thought while the elf concluded.

"And!..." he repeated. "They _do_ kind of owe us at this point, don't they? I mean, with their own Jack Frost having tried to take over, perhaps they'd be a little receptive to compensating us a bit?"

"Hmmm..." Santa said.

"Qanik is not an Alven. She's a pure water-sprite," Bartholomew said with a waggling of his fingers.

"Yes," the same elf pleaded, "but she knows them well, and she said herself that Jack was her boyfriend, didn't she? Well _he's_ an Alven. Or at least an Alven/Sprite mix!"

Peter shook his own head solemnly. "I'm afraid Princess Qanik isn't likely to return on time, though."

Hattie and Josh looked at each other. The girl quietly mouthed, "Princess?" All Josh could do was shrug his shoulders and look perplexed.

"No, we've got to make it work!" Santa said, with one more bang on his desk. "Call back all the elves, Cooper. We need to search her out and get on this. We don't have time to explore all possible solutions. I've got to have that sleigh and the drones loaded by tomorrow night!"

The Elf that had proposed the Alven plan bowed and smiled graciously. "You bet, sir! We're on it!"

With that the three elves ran out of the room and down the stairs, beginning preparations for Christmas Eve.

"You're a glutton for punishment, Mr. Belschnikel," Bartholomew groused. "I won't be back next year, just so you know."

Santa leaned back in his chair and grinned ear to ear. He put his fingers crossed together and placed his hands on the desk before him.

"Well, agents..."

Bartholomew and Samuel looked at one another.

"It seems you two have been _very_ good boys this year. Is there anything you'd like from Santa?"

Bartholomew chuckled and Peter just grinned.

"No sir," Agent B said pleasantly. "It's getting to December twenty-third already. I think I'd just like to go home and enjoy my wife's cooking now."

"And I've got a little last-minute shopping to do," Peter added. With the comment he caught a look at Hattie and Josh and they were instantly suspicious of what he was planning.

Then Santa stood again and came around the desk to sit on the corner of it.

"And what about you two kids? Have something special you might have thought you were too old to write me about this year?"

Hattie's jaw worked, but nothing came out. It was clear she wanted to defend her lack of faith in the red man, ask for a gift, respectfully decline, and express a desire to stay all at the same time. It caused both Santa and Josh to giggle a bit too.

"A pony!" Hattie blurted out.

Santa's eyebrow wasn't the only one cocked at an awkward angle at the comment. Peter and Bartholomew seemed a little impressed with her forwardness as well. Josh was simply flabbergasted that she would even ask.

Noticing the looks she was getting, Hattie humbled herself quickly and clasped her hands before her. "Well...I just mean. I've always wanted one on the farm. So...you know. If it wasn't too big of an issue."

Santa Claus stood, slapped her shoulder a couple times and said, "I'll see what I can do."

"And?...anything for you?" Santa asked Josh in a best-of-friends manner.

"Uh..." Josh began. He didn't quite know how to state what he was feeling about the visions, or dreams if that's what they were, that he and Qanik had showed him earlier. "No, thank you, sir. I think I've received plenty on this trip, already."

Santa brushed the hair away from Josh's forehead, while Peter and Agent Bartholomew chuckled at Josh's joke, having no idea what they were really overhearing. Claus leaned in close and whispered, "You're going to make about the best older brother I've ever known." Then gave the boy a wink as he stood up.

"Well then!" the large man in red said with finality. "I thank you so much for your assistance, yet again, my IPMA friends..."

Hattie looked at Josh with that same awkward look she'd used just a minute ago and mouthed a question for the second time, "Again?"

"...Time for you to get back to your families, I believe." And with that Santa sat back down at his computer and started typing away.

Peter put his arms around the kids and directed them out the door with him and the four of them began their slow climb back down the stairs.

# Chapter 7

# December 23

# Wattles Road (AKA: 17 Mile Road), Troy, Michigan

"Joshua?" Peter said after what seemed like hours of silence.

They had been traveling at reasonable speeds, uncloaked, through surface streets for the past half an hour or more. The trip back was indeed a very fast one. Peter had taken almost the exact same path they had followed north, but without doing any investigation, nor any other stops except to say goodbye to Hattie and then Agent Bartholomew once they'd gotten back to the park near Duluth.

Of course the farewells had been sad. And Hattie had actually given Joshua a hug and a kiss on the cheek for good measure. But they were short. Everyone was terrible tired, and considering it was late at night on the twenty-third it was just as well. Josh's parents, despite repeatedly being "magic'd" according to what Josh learned from _Home_ on the way, were beginning to worry that the following day was Christmas Eve and their son still hadn't returned home from the Essay-Writing conference. In fact, the pleasant female voice in the cockpit had reported by the time Peter and Josh were in the northern tip of southern Michigan that the agency had had to intercept calls to the school district offices, which were of course closed, twice.

The rouse had so far been successful, but even the agent online at _Home_ was beginning to sound impatient for Peter to get everyone home and wrap up the investigation.

Once Peter had pulled the machine off 17-mile road and onto Josh's street, he pulled over. There ahead of the CCV, with a light dusting of the flurries that had been going on around them since Minnesota, was the slick black sedan that Agent Samuel had first shown up in at the middle school. It was a welcoming site for Josh. He liked the CCV well enough of course. And he would never have wanted to give up his experience on the adventure with Peter, Hattie and the rest of the group. But it was time for a warm, familiar bed, and some nice hot cocoa on Christmas Eve in the morning.

An agent stepped out of the sedan as they parked. Josh thought the man must have been one of the most severely bearded man he'd ever met, oddly also wearing large sunglasses at night, until the person dressed in a black suit similar to Peter and Agent Bartholomew spoke in greeting to the pair. It turned out she was a woman, or at least a female of whatever she was.

"Thank you Agent Preti," Peter said, swapping keys. "See you after the break next week."

The woman hummed something in agreement and went to the CCV. Peter popped the sedan's trunk and throw in Josh's belongings including the bag and then motioned him to get in the passenger seat.

"Was that a Sasq...?" Josh started to ask.

"Tsst-tut!" Peter said. "They don't like you to call them that at all. And with everything we've just been through you should recognize that was not one."

"What was she then?"

Peter smiled kindly. "Nevermind for now. I'm sure you're going to find out some day."

They started the car and drove the half a mile down Wentworth Drive and pulled into the driveway of Josh's home. The snow had melted and iced again and was crunchy under the tires. When Josh and Peter shut their doors lights started coming on inside the house. His parents must not have been sleeping well waiting for Josh to return.

As they walked up the path to the front door, Mrs. Manders with her husband behind her were waiting.

"Oh, Josh! What has taken so long!" his mother asked.

"He made it to final rounds and won the contest, Mrs. Manders. I'm here to present you with his certificate and with the check for winning!" Peter said. "My name is Mr. Samuel. Peter Samuel. I'm with the regional council on education."

Josh's mother welcomed them in. Peter mentioned he couldn't stay long because it had unfortunately ran so late that it was very nearly Christmas Eve, as if Mr. and Mrs. Manders had to be told such a thing. Sitting at the kitchenette table, Peter wrote out a check on the school districts account apparently for $500. Joshua eyed him curiously, not sure whether it was a joke or what.

"Alright then, Josh. Time to get to bed," said his father.

His parents fussed for a moment over the certificate of achievement and the check that Peter had somehow magically produced. Josh wondered how Peter had accomplished it. Perhaps the lady that brought the car back had left it in the sedan for him to use?

Never the less, Peter took a moment to pull Joshua aside and gave him a business card. On the front was his name and some vague lettering that said IPMA, but definitely did not make it clear who or what that was. It included an email address and a couple phone numbers.

"To keep in touch," Peter said, smiling and turned towards the door. "I want you to report to me anything you see going on with the Yeti....Or anything else, too, really."

"Yeah?" Josh said with a grin. "You're really not going to wipe my mind?"

Peter laughed quietly while his mother was busy putting the check away in the kitchen. "No. It would be pretty hard to wipe all memory of this whole adventure."

"Yeah, probably," Josh agreed absent-mindedly, turning the card over.

"Besides...look at the back."

Josh did and as Peter stepped outside, he noticed that Hattie had written him a little note. It asked him to write her regularly so they can keep up on their research together. But her name had been signed with a little heart above the "i" as some girls did in his school on all their homework, and a farewell in French that read, "À la prochaine!"

"It means she'll see you later," Peter said.

"Oh," Josh replied. Not sure what else to say.

"You know... because you're twelve now," Peter grinned on the front porch step. "It's okay to kind of like girls now, see?"

"Oh, right," he agreed non-committal-like again. Then a moment of wisdom hit him. "And...it's okay to believe in Santa Claus when you're twelve too?"

Peter stepped off the porch and raised a hand in farewell gesture. "And to believe in Christmas Miracles too. Belief is a very powerful thing, Josh. It can lead to a little faith even. And you're going to need it if I'm ever going to train you as a partner."

Josh smiled and raised his hand too. He giggled a little, glad he had made a new friend. _Correction_ , he thought, _new friends_.

As the black sedan started and the projector headlights cast spotlights on the garage door, Mrs. Manders called to Josh. "Honey, can you come in please. I've got some very big news for you too!"

~ The End ~

# About the Author

P. Edward Auman is rumored to be older than his IPMA file would suggest. He is known in the latter half of the past century at least to have invented various faerie folk detection methods and devices as well as having confirmed, unofficially, that Mars does have water with a probe made with his own funds for only $42,712.83. The thrust engine to propel the probe launched in the Fall of 1973 is also rumored to contain magical artifacts to provide the power. Having made a number of advancements within the IPMA and the globe at large, Dr. Wilhelmina Rheinhart rewarded Edward with his choice of assignments in the IPMA at the turn of the century. He selected the role of IPMA Historian, with the obligation of detailing the events of the Institute for the Preservation of Magical Artifacts and their duly appointed agents. However, the activity for which Eddie is most famously known is his creation of 43 clones to assist him in all of his many ventures. 42 clones survive today, following a mishap with a gene-splice bio-fuel algae agent, to which Eddie responded, "42's probably good enough. It is the normally accepted answer to the Universe and everything in it anyway."

# Discover Other Titles by the Author at Smashwords.com

Seeing Devils: An IPMA Adventure for Halloween 2013 – released 10/31/2013

Speak Rain – released 1/27/2013

Troll Brother – Children's/YA Contemporary Fantasy – released 7/6/2013

Troll Brother 2 – TBR mid-2014

The Old Silk Hat, A Frosty The Snowman Prequel – An IPMA Short – 12/23/2012

More to come 2014 and beyond!

# Connect with Me Online:

www.TrollBrother.com

www.PEdwardAuman.com

www.IPMACreative.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/pedward.auman

http://facebook.com/trollbrotherbooks

Twitter: <http://twitter.com/@PEdwardAuman>

Smashwords: <https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/PaulAuman>

# Troll Brother 2: Little Brother Troll – Sample

# 

# Chapter 1

#

Why Nine-Year-Olds Are More Awesomer Than Twelve-Year-Olds

If you were to ask nine-and-a-half-year-old Richard Johansson, III ('Little Ricky' to his family and just about everyone else in the world but the Principle at Loafer Mountain Elementary) why it is that people are so afraid of the idea of trolls, goblins, sprites and faeries in general he would likely have no answer. So far, during the course of his travel up the face of Loafer Mountain, into the caverns of the local clan of Mountain Trolls and into the dining hall of King Karapace and Queen Isabel, he'd decided faerie folk were actually pretty much like his own family and friends, only...more awesomer!

Of course, Little Ricky was a bit more of a handful than even his mother, Sara, or his older brother, Robert, could have ever realized even after considering the adventures of Robert and their new troll friend, Kile, which also began in Maple Springs just at the base of the mountain below. For during the same time frame Little Ricky had an adventure of his own. And of course, the Mountain Troll queen, Isabel, recognized Ricky's propensity for being a handful immediately, having spent the last one-hundred-and-thirty-seven years with Kile himself around.

While she hosted Robert and Richard in their great hall and they ate, her plan to have Kile stay with the human boys was altered quickly to include the possibility of retaining Little Ricky for a stay. For, as most matriarchs of the Mountain Troll race can, she immediately sensed the culmination of many lucky pairings of humans over the centuries to produce one of the rarest of creatures on earth: an honest-to-granite, pure-blood human...with natural magic! She alone recognized the potential of a magic-wielding human who might also be allied with the Mountain Trolls, should conflict ever arise. And! As it turned out, he was a very energetic and a very comely young boy too...for a human. Both would suite the little human well if he were to learn magic from the Mountain Troll matriarchs as her hastily adopted change of plans required.

