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hadn’t helped at all.
    He turned his back on her and started up the snow blower. As he went forward, someone grabbed her arm. She eeped. She didn’t see anything. But she smelled peppermint and stale elf sweat.
    Delbert.
    “Hey,” he said. “What is all this? You’re not supposed to fraternize.”
    She could barely hear him over the snow blower, and she couldn’t see him at all. He had on his invisibility shield, the same kind of shield that Santa used when a kid stumbled on him in the middle of the night. Only S-Elves could use an invisibility shield, but she’d sure like to try, if nothing else than to get rid of Delbert.
    “Leave me alone,” she said in the direction of the hand gripping her arm. She could see a Delbert-sized opening snow drift created by the blower. He had apparently barreled through. He had probably even left tracks all the way back to the invisible sleigh. Delbert really was not the brightest elf in the workshop.
    “No,” he said, tugging on her arm. “We’re going to get in trouble.”
    And he couldn’t afford any more trouble.
    “If something goes wrong, I’ll tell the truth,” she said. “This is all my idea.”
    Behind her, the blower sounded louder. It was moving in a different direction. For some reason, that made her nervous. She started to turn—
    When an arc of cold snow coated her. Her and Delbert.

 
     
     
     
     
    8
     
     
    MARSHALL WAS MOVING too fast. He hadn’t been thinking. (Well, he had been thinking. Of Julka, not of anything else. Julka and coffee and the fact that she had found him, all on her own, and that she seemed nervous and she let him hold her hand and jeez, he felt like he was thirteen, only he hadn’t felt this way when he was thirteen because he hadn’t been able to get up enough nerve to talk to a girl, let alone touch her, or do anything until he was much, much older. College, really, and then only because he had met girls who were also interested in math and didn’t mind awkwardness—and there he was, not thinking again.)
    Anyway, he hadn’t been thinking about blowing snow or the powerful machine vibrating under his hands. He had been hurrying so he could get to that coffee, and hurrying never really did anyone any good. He kept going in this kinda fugue state until he heard the blower go crunch, and then make a growly noise that wasn’t normal.
    That caught his attention. He had probably hit some kind of decorative rock—which he really had to remove come spring. He backed the blower up, turned it sideways to get it out of the awkward position it was in, and then turned again—and walloped poor Julka with a mound of snow.
    His face flushed so hot he could have powered the entire block. He shut off the blower so he could apologize (even though she did look cute, standing there in her red not-elf costume, with snow frosting her hair, eyelashes, and cheekbones) and that was when he realized that there was something else beside her.
    Somehow the snow had formed a weird kinda snow man next to her. Only it looked vaguely like an unfinished Santa. Marshall had never seen the snow do anything like that, and he figured it was probably like the ways that clouds formed animal shapes—at least, he thought that until the Santa shape moved and cursed in definitively not Santa-like language.
    “Hey!” the Santa shape said in a burly male voice. “We’re standing here.”
    Its (his?) violent movement made half of the snow fall (off? Was there something to fall off of?), leaving a partial Santa shape that reminded Marshall of nothing more than a half-eaten unfrosted Santa sugar cookie.
    “Shh, Delbert,” Julka said, not moving her lips. But she wasn’t as quiet as she clearly thought she was, because Marshall heard her.
    “There really is someone there?” he asked.
    “No!” she and the male voice said in unison. Then Julka turned her head and glared at the half-Santa shape.
    Marshall looked at him (it?) too, and realized that just past it