Page 9 of Run, Run Rudolph
“I might still have some credit on my account at Your Fairy Godmother,” Char said, her voice rising like this was tantalizing information.
“Nope. Not risking it.”
“Why not?”
Why not? Was she kidding me? She’d wished like a crazy person and ended up owing Estelle more than she earned in a year. And to top it all off, she’d only had ninety days to pay it all off. Had she somehow forgotten about that mess, and how we’d all come together to help bail her out?
“Are you forgetting how awful it was? It was freaky and stressful.”
“You can use as many of my credits as you want. And, anyway, it all turned out okay.”
True. But I feared that if I decided to dabble in wishes, I might accidentally do it wrong and completely ruin Christmas.
Having Estelle contact Santa on my behalf felt safest. What was the point of having a fairy godmother if she couldn’t help you out in a pinch?
Char and I finished our call and, with a sigh, I turned back to the car. All eight reindeer were watching me, their giant antlers intimidating weapons in the illumination put off by my car’s flashing orange lights.
“Um. All decided?” I asked tentatively.
Comet said definitively, “Take Rudolph to your barn.”
“You’re coming, too, right?”
“Yes.”
“We trust you, but not that much,” one said. I think it was Dancer.
One of the more muscular reindeer stepped from the herd. His fur was glossy, and there were faded words painted on his rump that said Hitch me up. “Beat you there!”
“You don’t know where we’re going,” I grumbled, climbing into my car. Or maybe he did. Who knew how Santa’s visits really worked. Maybe his reindeer had internal GPSs as well as a mapped-out list of every human’s home address.
“Yeah, Dasher,” one of them chided, clearly delighted by the way I’d inadvertently put Dasher in his place.
“Are you flying behind me? How fast should I drive? Can you see without Rudolph guiding you?” I asked, aiming the car’s heater vents at my face, and feeling certain I was going to freeze to death driving between here and home with my convertible’s top down.
The reindeer began talking at once, with everyone having an answer, but Dasher’s was the loudest. They postured and pushed each other aside with their shoulders or antlers, trying to be heard, and to be the one in charge.
Men. It didn’t matter the species. They were all the same.
I put the car in gear and drove off without them.
Chapter 3
~ Estelle ~
“The girls need me! Char and Tamara!”
I’d withstood four long months of them claiming they didn’t need a fairy godmother in their life, and I was giddy to be back in the game.
“Report, Estelle,” the head fairy said with a sigh, as though I exhausted her.
“Yes! Right!” I was supposed to be filing my trainee report on what I’d done today here at Your Fairy Godmother. Not share my excitement that Char and her friends had made contact with me after several disappointing months of silence.
I cleared my throat and straightened my shoulders, trying to act more like the trainee who’d won the creativity award last summer. Winning an award in your first year was basically unheard of. Not to brag. Or rub it into the faces of anyone in particular, such as Trish, my primary rival who was also eager—make that overeager—to prove herself.
The head fairy was waiting, watching me with her lavender eyes.
“As you will recall, Char was our best client last year,” I stated unnecessarily.
