1. Chapter One

Chapter One

“ J ust to be clear, it’s not a Christmas party,” the dark-haired man said as he ushered the two paramedics off the lift and onto the floor belonging to Demre and Hill Finances. “It’s an end-of-year celebration.”

Nobody had asked.

Dylan hefted his jump bag up onto his shoulder and cocked his head to one side as he looked the man up and down.

“Huh,” he said.

Normally he would be all for a non-denominational December. Not everything had to be about Christmas. In fact, right now, the less he heard about it the better. That said, it seemed a little disingenuous to make that claim on the twenty-first of December while wearing a Santa suit.

The man was self-aware enough to look awkward as he adjusted the fur-lined collar of his suit. He flushed and pulled the fake beard down under his chin. The elastic dug into his ears.

“This was…for the children,” he said.

Dylan glanced at his watch. The second hand ticked along inexorably as the date on the face quivered a minute away from clicking over to the twenty-second.

“Really?” he asked.

Alice stepped past him

“You’ve made his day,” she said cheerfully. “He hates Christmas.”

The man preened just a little under her attention. Alice tended to have that effect on people. Sometimes Dylan wondered what the fact they’d been made partners said about him.

“I don’t hate Christmas,” Dylan responded on autopilot. “It just shouldn’t start in—”

“August. I know,” Alice said. She gave the not-Santa a megawatt smile and rolled her eyes in mock-exasperation. “That’s how long he’s been complaining about the Dollar Store having reindeer dog toys in stock. So what’s the problem? Your call said someone had an accident?”

The man started to answer, stopped himself, and pulled a dubious face.

“I guess?” he said. “You kind of have to see for yourself.”

He gestured for them to follow him and headed across the lobby toward the smoked glass doors that led the way into the Demre and Hill’s offices. Dylan leaned over to mutter to Alice as they started after him.

“You don’t see Easter eggs in October.”

She jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow. “Give it a rest.”

Fine. Dylan gestured his surrender and stretched his legs to catch up with Not-Santa as the man held the doors open for them. The speaker-distorted sound of the latest poppy Christmas hit spilled out through the gap, saccharine sweet and quick paced.

“It’s Spotify,” Not-Santa said defensively before Dylan could even hitch an eyebrow.

It might be. That wasn’t enough to help his case, though. Maybe he could pass the colored paper chains off as a craft project, but the six-foot decorated spruce in the middle of the office would be hard to pass off as anything but Christmas.

If Not-Santa wanted to live in denial, though…far be it from Dylan to burst his bubble.

“Can you give us any idea what happened?” he prodded instead.

As they headed through the office, the deflated-looking partygoers shuffled awkwardly out of their way. One of them caught a glare from Not-Santa and quickly pulled the paper crown off his head to stuff in his pocket .

Paper-chain garlands had been torn down and trampled into the thin office carpet, along with the crushed ice and salty meats from a flight of shellfish. Empty champagne bottles had been kicked under tables, and the smell of booze fought with that of seafood.

There was another tree, an artificial one with the slightly lacklustre air of corporate addition to the season. Someone had knocked it into the wall. and it listed crookedly against the millennial gray paint. There were no decorations, but it had been strung with fairy lights. They must have shorted out during the scuffle, with smoke stains bubbled into the paint.

“It’s really nothing to do with us,” Not-Santa said huffily. “They were party crashers. I don’t see why we should be responsible for anything that’s happened.”

Dylan sighed to himself. It was going to be a weird call, wasn’t it. He could feel it.

“That’s not really our remit,” he said. “We just patch people up.”

“Yes, well,” Not-Santa muttered. “I’m just saying. This is nothing to do with us, and you can tell the Pole that from me.”

Dylan stumbled. He caught himself and gave Not-Santa a quick, searching look as he tried to work out if he’d misheard or not. Maybe he had. Not-Santa didn’t look as if he knew he’d said anything out of the ordinary. In fact, he didn’t even look at Dylan as he stopped at the door to an office and rapped his knuckles pointedly on it.

“The paramedics are here,” he said. “Can we come in?”

There was a loud groan that sounded like a sheet of linen being ripped and a muffled answer. It must have sounded like “Yes” to Not-Santa, because he pushed the door open and gestured dramatically at the room on the other side.

Dylan stepped forward and cocked his head to look in.

A stocky man in a torn shirt stood awkwardly in the middle of the room next to the heavily pregnant woman slumped in what looked like a designer chair someone had dragged in from another room. She clutched one of his hands in hers, his fingers cramped and white-looking, while she held her belly with the other. Her head was hung forward, brown hair swung in a curtain to hide her face, as she panted raggedly.

”About time,” the stocky man grumbled as he looked up. “We could have had the babe named already—“

“No!” the woman blurted out. She tightened her grip on the man’s hand, her nails dug into his skin. “She’s not coming. I’m not ready. We were supposed to have another week.”

“Christmas baby,” Alice said as she started into the room. “That’s so cool.”

“Everyone thinks that,” Dylan said. “Trust me, it’s not always.”

Alice gave him a startled look. Before she could say anything, the woman took a ragged breath as the spasm passed. She loosened her grip on the man’s fingers and looked up. Festive silver makeup was smudged around her eyes, and there was a bruise on her cheek, that precise shade of livid blue that would darken to purple in the next few hours.

“You!” the woman blurted out. Her face twisted with anger as she let go of the man’s hand and tried to push herself up out of the chair. It was a thickly cushioned, slanted cube that didn’t lend itself to easy exit. so she struggled. “What are you doing here?”

Dylan stretched his legs to get her to sit back down. As he reached her she freed one hand from the arm of the chair and slapped him across the face. Her palm hit his cheek hard enough to jerk Dylan’s head to the side and grate the inside of his cheek against his teeth. He tasted blood—hot and salt-fresh—before he felt the sharp itch of pain.

“This is your fault!” the woman said furiously. Her body shook with a mixture of adrenaline and temper as she jabbed a finger at him. “This is all your fault.”

The man in the torn shirt got over his surprise at the outburst and stepped in front of the woman. He glared at Dylan and raised his hand to ward him off.

“Back off,” he ordered, his brow furrowed in a scowl.

Dylan fell back a step and let Alice jump in instead. Whatever was going on, it wouldn’t help to escalate the tension. As Alice helped the woman back down into the chair and distracted the protective friend with a request for water, Dylan turned to Not-Santa, who gave him a judgmental look over his beard.

Yeah, Dylan supposed he could guess why. The “your fault” statement was suggestive, and some people didn’t have gaydar. Understandable or not, though, he didn’t appreciate the attitude from a hypocrite in a Santa suit.

“So, you said that this woman crashed your Christmas party?” he asked in a deliberately mild voice.

Not-Santa flushed and yanked his beard off.

Alice gave the woman’s knee a reassuring pat and then pushed herself to her feet. She jerked her head for Dylan to follow her out of the room .

“She really doesn’t want you there,” she said apologetically as she pulled her gloves off with a snap. The blue nitrile dangled from one hand as she used the other to smooth her hair back from her face, strands of blond stuck to her sweaty forehead. “It’s nothing to do with you, not really, but she’s adamant.”

Dylan took the gloves from her. He absently tied them into a ball and stuck them into his pocket to dispose of when they got outside.

“She doesn’t like men?” he guessed.

He wouldn’t have said it was common. Emergency medicine wasn’t like obstetrics, where the patient usually had the opportunity to vet their doctor. By the time EMS turned up at a scene, the patients usually only cared about getting whatever was happening to them to stop happening to them. It did happen sometimes, but it wasn’t personal.

Alice wrinkled her nose in a worried expression and then shook her head.

“No,” she said and tapped her finger against his chest. “She just…doesn’t like you .”

“Oh,” Dylan said, taken aback. He rubbed the back of his neck as he took that in. “I mean, OK. I suppose it doesn’t change anything, but…why? Do I smell weird to her or something?”

”No,” Alice said quickly. “The cookie cologne is a bit weird, but it’s nice.”

…

Good to know. He should smell of ambergris, cedar and sea salt according to the clerk who’d sold him the aftershave and the label. Instead he smelled like a granny’s handbag.

Probably not his granny. Dylan thought briefly of the woman he’d met last year, her sour humor and her unfortunately probably technically edible stew. Even after that brief meeting he could guess that any bag of hers would smell like animals, blood, and char.

She was the exception that proved the rule, though, and the point was that warm cookies wasn’t the signature scent he’d been going for.

Although he should have known better , a cool, blunt part of his brain he’d been trying to ignore for the best part of December noted, the hair dye didn’t stick either.

Dylan reached up absently to touch the gray streak that had taken root at his temple. That was nothing to do with Yule, he reminded himself; it had shown up back in September.

Same time as the Christmas decorations in Target , that dispassionate part of his brain pointed out, and gray is what we call white now?

That was…not something he wanted to deal with right now. He tossed a mental weighted blanket over the topic and got back to the situation at hand .

“So what is it?” he asked. “Do I know her?”

Alice puffed her cheeks out on a sigh. “Sort of?” she said. “Remember last Christmas, just before you and tall, blond, and chilly got together?”

Not the most flattering description of Dylan’s….of Somerset, but not inaccurate. There had been a lot that happened “just before” their first kiss, though. Quite a lot after it, too. It had been an eventful few days.

Most of it, though, Alice either didn’t know about, or if she had been part of it, she didn’t remember. Not accurately, at least. Not the parts of it with magic and wolves. Sometimes Dylan envied that.

Not all of the time, but…

He pulled his mind out of the what-ifs and tried to focus. What that meant for her was that the “before” was probably…

“The fight we got called out to?” he said. “At the Just-as-High ?”

Alice nodded and waited expectantly for him to catch up. It was exactly fair, since she’d gotten a CliffsNotes version from their patient. There hadn’t been any women in the bachelor’s party, and the sexy Mrs. Claus had no reason to be angry with him.

So that only left…

“The bride?” he said. He stalled briefly as he racked his brain for the name. It had been old-fashioned, something that sounded a poor fit with her fiancé’s bar brawl. Something that started with…

“Irene,” Alice provided for him before he could put his finger on it. “Irene Daly. Her fiancé nearly killed her when he had that psychotic break at the hospital, remember?”

Blond hair straggled over the woman’s face as she slid to the ground. She touched her face with one hand. It came away bloody, and she held it out in a mute “look what you’ve done” to the man.

“I remember,” Dylan said. There was a thready edge to his voice, but Alice didn’t seem to notice. She put her hands in her pockets and bounced nervously on the balls of her feet.

“Anyhow, it turns out that was all your fault,” she said.

“How?” Dylan asked indignantly.

Alice shrugged her agreement with him. “I know,” she sympathized. “But to her, all her troubles started with you…a year ago. So the last face she wanted to see…”

She trailed off, and Dylan filled in the gap.

“Mine,” he said. It was understandable, he supposed. He took a second to think through the logistics and then shrugged. “I’ll call med control and see if we can get anyone to take over here. If not…would she be OK with me driving as long as I don’t touch her?”

Alice didn’t look confident about that, but nodded slowly.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “I don’t think we’re in any danger of delivering the baby just yet, but I want to get her in a bed and on a fetal monitor just to be safe. Preferably without her boyfriend in there with her so we can find out what happened.”

Dylan glanced over her shoulder to where the “boyfriend” hovered uncomfortably with a plastic cup of water. He paused with his hand halfway to the radio clipped to his chest.

“From what End-of-Year Nick over there told me,” he said, with a tilt of his head toward the man who’d turned out to be Demre and Hill’s COO. He had shed the red jacket now, at least, and was arguing with another member of staff about something. “That’s not her boyfriend. She arrived with someone else.”

Between the eggnog and covering his ass, Nick hadn’t been too clear on the details of who. It had sounded like he’d know who they were, even if they hadn’t gotten an invite.

Alice looked surprised. “Was her face like that when she got here?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” Dylan said. “Probably not, though. Nick said she didn’t want to be here at first…”

“She’s definitely not dressed for a party,” Alice said.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t,” she muttered under her breath.

Dylan ignored that.

“Things got worse when they were asked to leave, Irene refused to go with him—the man who brought her—and that’s when he got rough with her. And when her new admirer stepped in.”

Alice grimaced, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Now I feel bad for having an attitude with him,” she said. “And for Irene. Even if she’s not being fair to you, she’s had the worst Christmas two years in a row.”

There might be some who could argue with that. Not Dylan. He might not be too happy about being roped into the family business, and he was definitely in over his head, but there were…some perks.

Dylan’s lips tingled at the memory of frost-chilled kisses and hunger. He had to cough to clear his suddenly dry throat before he could get back to the problem in hand.

“Go check on Irene,” he said. “See if she’ll get in the ambulance if I’m driving. I’ll get on Med Control.”

Alice nodded and turned to go. She stopped after a few steps and spun back around.

“Oh, and happy birthday,” she said with a grin. “In advance, since I probably won’t see you on the day.”

“No one ever does,” Dylan said. It was meant to be a joke, but the problem with inside jokes was that…sometimes…they just sounded unnecessarily dark. Especially when you’d grown up in foster care and the only one “inside” the joke was you. Alice looked as if Dylan’s throwaway line had knocked the wind out of her. Dylan racked his brain quickly for a takeback. He chuckled awkwardly and went with, “Now you know why I hate Christmas.”

That did not work. Alice just creased her face up like she’d seen a sick puppy.

“I never thought of that,” she said.

Oh, this was going to follow him. Dylan held up his hand to stem the wave of sympathy headed his way.

“It was a joke,” he said. “It’s fine. Go.”

Alice hesitated, but finally did as she was told. As she walked away, Dylan sighed to himself and rubbed the back of his neck.

He couldn’t even pull off “jolly.” One year in and the whole Santa gig still didn’t come naturally to him, bloodline or not.

It was one of those sour-grape thoughts that came and went. This time, though, the bad taste lingered as it occurred to Dylan that Irene might have a point. Just because he’d not done anything to her, didn’t mean her problems hadn’t started because of him.

He could try and pass the buck to the person who’d murdered Dylan’s estranged grandfather, the incumbent Santa Claus. It was usually easy to pin things on someone who’d commit violence against the most beloved of seasonal avatars. The time, though, it didn’t work. The killer might have set the ball rolling when he…did whatever he did…but it was Dylan who’d brought it into Irene’s life.

Not on purpose, but if he’d not been at the Just-as-High that night then maybe she’d have been happily married.

Or , Dylan thought dryly as he remembered the unprepossessing drunk whose head he’d stitched up, married, at least.

One way or another.

It was a mean enough thought that Dylan felt awkwardly exposed .

“Dispatch, this is medic eighteen,” he said. “We’ve had a soft refusal here based on previous contact. Can you free up any other team to transport an expectant woman to Belling General?”

They could not, as it turned out.

Between brawls, car accidents, and alcohol poisoning, the Belling paramedics were all occupied. Either Irene got in the bus with Dylan or she signed a waiver that she was refusing the ride against medical advice.

It had been a close-run thing, but Alice’s concern over the baby had swayed Irene to agree. On condition that Dylan didn’t go anywhere near her. She’d clutched Alice’s hand the whole ride down in the elevator, as if whatever bad luck she thought Dylan brought with him would jump out to bite her.

She needn’t have worried.

The North Pole might not be thrilled with their new Santa, but they weren’t going to try and get rid of him. Not with only three days until Christmas Eve, at least. They had cut it close enough last year to know they didn’t want to risk what happens to Yule with no Santa at the reins of the Sleigh.

Dylan turned onto Wild Avenue, past the strings of fairy lights strung from the holly bedecked lampposts. In the plate glass window of Wick’s Furniture Store, an animatronic Santa raised a plastic cookie halfway to his mouth and dropped it again on repeat.

“Dylan?” Alice said as she leaned in from the back. She put her hand on his shoulder. “The baby has started to show signs of distress. We need to get to the hospital.”

Shit.

“On it,” Dylan said.

He flicked the sirens on and put his foot down. Alice patted his shoulder and disappeared into the back of the ambulance to check on the patient. The traffic lights on the intersection ahead flickered to red. Dylan put off radioing in the upgraded code to the hospital long enough to hit the pre-empt switch on the dash.

Ahead of him the light turned green. Dylan glanced down briefly as he reached for the radio .

His fingers had just touched the dial when the glare of lights through the side window made him look up. He didn’t have time to brake. He had just long enough to wish he’d fucked Somerset more and listened to him less. The last year would have been a lot more fun. Then the Jeep slammed into the side of the ambulance.