Chapter 49 — Concerning the Time a Yandere Snow Witch Attacked Santa’s Workshop
Like a chain reaction of dominoes falling, giant icicle knives sprouted from the floor and ceiling. Santa, Peter, Yuika, and a dozen other elves fled in terror as the jagged ice chased after them. In the warehouse forklifts slid helplessly across a frozen floor, and then so did Peter and Santa, as they tumbled down and slipped across the room on their backs. Above them a snowy phantom spiraled and cackled like a wicked witch, her white and blue dress an amorphous, gravity-defying tangle. All Peter could think of was that she wasn’t Jumeau.
As the workshop swiftly froze into a snowy cavern, Peter collided into a conveyer-belt and lifted himself up. Panicked elves were all about him, their legs encased in ice, unable to escape to safety. They called out to him for help. Peter went over to the nearest elf and stomped away at the ice until it shattered away from her legs, then he shouted to Santa, “I need a weapon!”
Santa skated off to the armory, as the toy making machinery frosted over and cracked with deadly cold. The catwalks above her head splintered apart and came crashing down behind her. Windows shattered and frigid winds cycloned about the workshop in a fury of blinding snow. Peter shut his eyes and gasped as ice clung to his face. An avalanche thundered down, and Peter hopped and skipped to stay above the layers of new fallen snow. He grasped a piece of the broken catwalk and pried it free— something to use as a bat or sword, when suddenly the witch above swooped down and tackled him. He felt feminine arms and legs wrapping around him, and they tumbled together, like two lovers in a bed fighting over who gets to be on top. The insane girl laughed, and as Peter looked at her face, he recognized her snow white skin and demonic eyes.
“Good morning, Peter,” the Snow Witch said.
“Good morning.”
“You haven’t replied to my text. I sent it over five minutes ago.”
“Kind of an overreaction, don’t you think?”
“Are you ignoring me?!”
Peter was going to say no, maybe even throw in a sweetie-pie, but the Snow Witch raised her icy claws up as though she were about to slash Peter’s face open. Gunshots blasted away at the Snow Witch’s face and arm, arresting her attack. Santa approached like an assassin, a Parabellum-Pistole drawn and aimed. With cold and deadly precision she emptied the magazine into the undead Snow Witch, reloaded, and emptied a second one.
The Snow Witch keeled over and lay upon the ice. The winds rested. But do not relax just yet. Like a Terminator made of liquid metal, the Snow Witch’s frosty body absorbed the lead bullets, the gaping wounds closed and sealed and healed to nothing— not even a scratch remained to show the entrance wound. Resurrected she opened her eyes, stood, and pounced onto Santa. The two girls beat and kicked at each other, even as Peter tried to pull them apart, their fists fluttered and jabbed helplessly in the air.
“Stop it!” Peter shouted. “Stop it! Both of you!”
“How dare you attack my workshop?” Santa said. “I should melt you into a puddle.”
“Don’t come between a Snow Witch and her boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?” Santa looked at Peter with surprise.
“Well…” Peter looked back at her with just as much surprise, not knowing how to explain that they were not dating without offending the Snow Witch.
“Do you know how infuriating it is when you don’t respond to my texts?” The Snow Witch lovingly raked her claws through Peter’s hair.
“Texts?” Santa repeated.
“Well, I was going to reply, but you don’t give me enough time,” Peter said.
“How much time do you need, my darling?”
“Darling?” Santa repeated.
“Could you excuse us for a second?” Peter asked.
“No.” Santa crossed her arms. “No, I won’t.”
“You never visit me. I’m all alone. All day, every day.”
“I’m busy! Busy stopping the apocalypse!”
“You don’t care about me at all!”
Peter was going to disagree, throw out a little lie to cheer up this crazy girl who was constricting him with one arm and tickling a razor sharp finger tip down his cheek, so that he could perhaps avoid losing an eyeball before this conversation was done, but Santa judged him with a silent glare, as if his answer would determine his fate. So he hesitated. How could he lie to the Snow Witch without upsetting Santa?
“Feel free to tell me I’m wrong!” the Snow Witch said.
So Peter laughed a strange, sing-song, nervous and obviously fake laugh, slow and forced. “Ha… ha-ha! Ha… ha… What? That’s… I mean… Hmm! You know that… I needed to talk to you! Because… I need you! To… the apocalypse! We need— I need you to assist us in the battle.” Peter bulged his eyes out at Santa and pursed his lips as if he really wanted her to listen carefully. “You are just so powerful. Remember that time you kidnapped me against my will… babe? I thought you were gonna kill me.”
The Snow Witch giggled and squeezed Peter like he had a squeeker toy buried inside him. He could feel ice crystals forming on his skin from her touch.
“Kill you? No, no, no. Only if I see you in the arms of another girl, my precious Peter.”
“Hmm…” Peter hummed through his clinched teeth as if he were an anxiously deflating balloon. “Murder suicide. Oh, that’s so romantic. I’m just… so lucky… to have you! Oh, you know what?” Peter held out his hand towards the frigid Napoleon in red. “This is Santa. Santa, this is… she doesn’t have a name.”
“Frosty,” Santa said.
The Snow Witch’s eyes widened, “I like that name!”
“Wow! You two make such great friends!” Peter said. “We should form an alliance and then… go away! Far, far, away from each other! So far. So very far.”
“I do not need an alliance with this Snow Witch,” Santa said.
“Yes. We do,” Peter said. “Because we don’t have anything but elves and guns right now.”
“I will form an alliance for my beloved Peter,” the Snow Witch cooed each word with a smug pride. “Under one condition…”
“What is it that you want?” Santa asked.
“I will fight for you only if I receive Peter’s virginity!”
A pained grunt escaped Peter, as if he had been punched in the stomach and tried to stifle any noise. “Wow, you just went right out and said it, didn’t you?”
“And what if he’s more valuable to me as a virgin?” Santa asked.
Peter looked at Santa with a cockeyed TikTok face, mostly out of confusion.
“Then I’ll just take it, without your permission.”
An uncomfortable laugh came from Peter, followed by a wry, “She’s not joking,”
Santa and the Snow Witch scowled at each other, unblinking, beaming pure hatred through their eyeballs like a magnifying glass focusing sunshine to a fiery point. The Snow Witch clinched her fists, grit her teeth and began trembling like a child who truly believed she had psychic powers that could make people’s heads explode. Peter wondered how long this pointless staring contest could escalate when Yuzuka burst into the room with a flamethrower puffing little hiccups of fire like a faulty torch.
“Get away from him, you snow bitch!”
The Snow Witch manhandled Peter and used him as a human shield. This however didn’t stop Yuzuka, as she continued to pull the trigger again and again, all while aiming the flamethrower right at his face, much to his horror. Luckily for him, it continued to misfire and only tooted out tiny fireballs that evaporated harmlessly into the air.
“Stop pulling the trigger!” Peter shouted. “Stop!”
Yuzuka rattled the flamethrower, slapped it a few times, checked the safety, looked down the barrel, tried firing it again, and gave up, lowering her aim with a heavy sigh.
“These things never work when you need them to.”
The Snow Witch, no longer in need of a human shield, spun Peter around and lovingly held him face to face. “I’ll kill so many people for you, honey. So so many. But don’t ever ignore my texts again, and remember: you belong to me... and me alone. I’ll be waiting for your most precious gift in my château. You still have the key, don’t you?”
“Yep. Still got it.”
“Adieu, my little pogchamp.”
The Snow Witch planted a kiss on Peter’s lips, quick enough to kiss a burning skillet without damaging one’s lips, and then she took off into the air, a swirly storm of snow and ice, looping in dramatic curlicues about the workshop, and then rocketing out through a shattered window. Peter lay on the floor, a smear of blue lipstick on his face. The workshop lights kicked on, and he looked up at Santa, looming over him.
“Well, Peter, it seems as though your girlfriend problem has been taken care of.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Really? Why didn’t you say that while she was here?”
“I almost did! But did you see her claws? She was going to decapitate me!”
“Almost carries no weight. Especially in matters of the heart.”
Peter stood up, and he would have rubbed the lipstick off his face if he knew it was there, but he did not, so this conversation continued with a big smooch print across his mouth.
“Look, if you want to be my girlfriend, then just come out and say it. And if you don’t, then quit getting offended whenever some magical slut tries to kidnap or molest me. Because we are not dating. In fact, I hardly ever see you, and when I do, you hardly talk to me.”
Santa’s face went from offended to cold, “You’re right, Peter. We’re not dating. So you don’t owe me any fidelity, do you?”
“Don’t use words I don’t understand!” Peter said.
“You are free to date any girl here in the North Pole, and if it isn’t with me… well, that’s your choice to make.”
As socially stunted as Peter was, even he could pick up on the subtext of what Santa was saying. And the way she choked on her words as she struggled to say them, and the bitter tears twerking on her lovely eyes, suddenly reversed the entire conversation. Peter had gone from the victim of this argument to the aggressor.
“Uh, hey wait, I didn’t say…”
But Santa would not let him finish! She dramatically turned away with a flourish of her cape, and hastily marched out of the room with a clip-clop of her boots.
“Santa!” Peter called out. “Wait!”
But she would not wait, and vanished from his sight. Peter looked about the room at Yuzuka with her flamethrower and the other elves, who had seen their bickering and stood in uncomfortable silence. Without a word, Peter dug through the piles of magicked snow and pulled out a buried elf, who gasped for air. Then he went to upright a toppled conveyor belt, and restored some sort of order to the ruined workshop. The other elves followed his example, climbing up to repair the windows and chiseling machinery out of its ice sarcophagi.