11. Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

T he world stopped. Dylan lay flat on the broad, warm span of hair and muscle under him and remembered how much he hated reindeer. It probably hadn’t been a good idea to remind himself two days before the big night.

He peeled one eye open to look at the sky. It was dark, but not as dark as it had been. They were on the other side of midnight, which meant there was one day left. One day until there were twelve of the hairy brutes surfing the wind while he flapped along behind them and the world spun in two different directions around them.

Maybe he should get some of those travel bands that were supposed to work through acupuncture.

Dylan forced his cold, stiff fingers open and slid-fell down the side of the reindeer. His legs felt raw where the half-frozen denim had chafed. He stiffened his knees and staggered backward a couple of steps.

The frozen vomit on the reindeer’s shoulder had started to melt. Chunks of it slid down the thick fur and splattered on the roof. The reindeer fastidiously stepped away from it.

“Stay here,” Dylan told it.

It gave him a blank, placid look that could have been obedience, confusion, or “fuck you, I do what I want.” Dylan thought better of trusting it and stepped forward to try and grab the reins to tie it up to…an aerial or something. The reindeer rolled a big dark eye as it watched him get closer and then bounced away with a flip of its tail.

Dylan stopped, took a deep, icy breath, and said, “Fine, but if you end up in the pound? I’m not going to come get you.”

The reindeer seemed unconcerned by the threat. Dylan left it to whatever it was going to do as he headed over to the door down into the building. Someone had been careless enough to leave the door wedged open, so Dylan was able to just push it, step over the bucket of old butts, and head down the stairs.

Irene’s apartment was three floors down.

Dylan tried the door—locked—and then knocked. There was no answer. He glanced over his shoulder at the seemingly empty corridor and then checked for a spare key. There was nothing under the mat. He stretched up on his tiptoes—this was one of those times it would have been handy to have Somerset here—to feel along the top of the door. His fingertips had just brushed against something metal and pointy when the door opened.

Dylan dropped back onto his heels and stepped back. A rangy woman, chestnut hair pinned back from her face and sports gear under her winter jacket, scowled at him.

“If you’re here to rob me,” she said, “all the Christmas presents are already at my boyfriend’s. So…”

The boyfriend had gotten her diamond earrings for Christmas, and she wasn’t going to like them. She’d wanted a key to his apartment.

Dylan hesitated as that certainty settled like a weight in his brain. OK, so that was either his imagination running wild or Christmas was close enough that Yule had decided to throw him some sort of bone.

He’d have rather had something he could use in a fight, but he’d take it.

The woman rolled her eyes in annoyance as she waited for him to respond. “ What ?”

“Umm…” Dylan shuffled his thoughts back together. “I was looking for Irene?”

“You and everyone else,” the woman said. “Look, whatever trouble she’s got herself into? I can’t help you. I told her not to get back together with that loser who’d left her at the altar, but she wouldn’t listen. So…whatever has happened, it’s her own fault. And… You know what?”

She stepped back into the apartment. Dylan started to follow her, but before he could she appeared again with a box full of stuff.

“Take it.” She shoved it into Dylan’s arms. He looked down into it, some clothes and photos, envelopes, mugs, and a dog-eared calendar.

“Sorry,” he said as he scrambled to get a grip on it. “What’s this?”

“She moved,” the woman said. The tartness in her voice was just a bit bitter. “Her and her boyfriend were leaving the city for a fresh start. Nice for some, but I’m not keeping her things forever.”

She stepped out into the hall, forcing Dylan back a step, and turned to lock the door behind her.

“Moved to where?”

“Don’t know,” the woman said. “Don’t care.”

She flipped her hair and started to stalk away. Her indignation got her halfway down the corridor and she stopped, shoulders sinking as she sighed. She turned around to look at Dylan.

“I don’t know, I didn’t approve,” she said. “And I didn’t know her that well. We only met last year after her wedding was called off and she needed a roommate. I’m sorry if she was your friend, I know she cut a lot of you off after that, but I can’t help you. And I couldn’t help her either, so now I have to focus on me. So if that’s all…?”

She trailed off and raised her eyebrows. When Dylan nodded, she turned and headed on toward the stairs. Once he was alone, Dylan braced the box on his hip to free up one hand to sort through it.

There was a photo of Irene and the wolf, back when he was just a man with bad choices, as they sat in front of a cafe and grinned at the camera. They looked happy. At the bottom of the box, tied together with a couple of brittle rubber bands, were letters.

Dylan pulled them out. The first, on top, was dated from the the first of December, and the return address on the envelope read “Demre and Hill.” He slid his thumb under the elastic band but before he could snap it off his phone rang.

It took a second for Dylan to work out how to juggle everything in his hands. He dropped the box onto the ground, stuck the letters into his pocket, and pulled out his phone. The number on the screen wasn’t familiar. He swiped to pick up the call and lifted it to his ear .

“What did I tell you, Mr. Hollie,” Lund said in a tight, angry voice. “There’s only so much I can do, especially when you keep things from me.”

Dylan wasn’t sure what she meant, but he had a feeling it wasn’t the Santa thing.

“What are you talking about?” he asked as he tucked the phone against his ear and bent down to pick the box back up. He let it dangle from one hand as he headed toward the stairs.

“Bury.”

“Who?”

“Where,” Lund corrected. “Bury, Montana. Sound familiar?”

“No. Should it?”

Dylan pushed the door to the stairwell open and braced it with his foot as he angled the box through the narrow gap. He heard the sound of typing on the other end of the call.

“It’s two hundred miles away,” Lund said. “An old lumber town, although the mill closed about a decade ago. The Jeep that caused the accident was stolen from a ranch out there earlier this year.”

Dylan’s feet scuffed off the stairs as he climbed. “Do you think they went back there?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t…” Dylan stopped. He balanced the box on the rail and frowned as he adjusted the phone against his ear. “You think this matters. I don’t see how.”

“No?” Lund said. “You don’t think it’s interesting that Bury is your hometown?”

Surprise nearly made Dylan drop the box into the stairwell. He steadied it as he considered that bit of information.

“I…”

“Mr. Hollie, please don’t try and pretend you didn’t know where you grew up.”

“I suppose I did,” Dylan said. It was probably written down in a bunch of places, but he’d never thought to look for it. Most of the time he tried not to think too much about his childhood. Even last year, when he’d racked his brain for any sliver of memory about his grandfather being Santa, he’d not thought about the place he’d been in. “It’s just been a long time.”

Lund made an annoyed sound through her teeth and then took a drink of something.

“It’s also your third strike,” she said. “I have too many reasons to bring you in and no excuse for not doing it. So if you want to help your friend, do it fast.”

She hung up .

Dylan stood there for a second and then loped the rest of the way up the stairs. He hooked the door open with his foot and ducked through back onto the roof. The reindeer lay snoozing there, a halo of melted snow around it, with its legs folded under it. It snorted softly with every breath, mist eddying around its nostrils.

There was a space near the door, under some pipes, and Dylan stashed the box there. Then he headed back over to the reindeer and slapped it on the broad, solid rump, startling it awake as it scrambled gracelessly to its feet. The broad rack of its antlers nearly clipped Dylan as it swung its head around.

“Time to go,” Dylan told it as he zipped his jacket up. The bulk of the letters nudged against his stomach under the fabric. “Back to the North Pole.”

The reindeer swung its head around to look at him. Then it walked away and turned its ass toward him.

“Don’t be a dick,” Dylan warned it. He glanced at the sky. It was still dark, but he could see the faint stain of dawn on the horizon. “You serve Yule, remember? Otherwise you’d be walking home.”

The reindeer broke into a frisky trot as it circled the roof. Its hooves clunked off the surface as it flicked up chunks of snow, and the bells strung on its reins rattled.

Dylan rubbed his hand over his eyes.

“Fine,” he said. “Extra…whatever you fancy. I’ll ask someone what that is.”

The reindeer snorted, made a tight turn around a metal strut, and pranced back over. Dylan fastidiously brushed off the last chunks of puke from its shoulder, grabbed the saddle pad, and dragged himself up clumsily.

“Let’s go home,” he said. “And if you can fly smoother, I’ll try not to puke.’

Somerset was waiting for Dylan outside the North Pole . He stood on the curb with his arms crossed, his leathers now scuffed and stained, and watched with a studiously impassive face as the reindeer walked down the road. It stopped in front of the club, and Dylan finally breathed out. He untangled his fingers from the reins—the imprint of leather and bells grooved into his palm—and swung his leg up and over so he could slide off .

“What part of ‘stay out of trouble’ is so hard to go along with?” Somerset asked as he hitched one eyebrow toward his hairline.

“Once I screw up the stay, the trouble sort of follows on its own,” Dylan said. “I found something weird.”

“It can wait.”

Somerset took two long strides forward, grabbed a handful of Dylan’s jacket, and pulled him into a hungry kiss. It caught Dylan off-guard, and he just dangled there for a moment, until his libido shoved his brain out of his way and dragged him into the kiss. He put his hands on Somerset’s lean hips and stretched up onto his tiptoes as he savored the coolness of Somerset’s tongue in his mouth.

Pleasure tweaked along his nerve endings and tightened his muscles, mixed through with a year-long itch of paranoia. After a breathless stretch, Dylan pulled back from Somerset and glanced past him at the North Pole.

“What if someone sees?” he said.

Somerset took Dylan’s chin between his finger and thumb and moved his head back. He bent down to bite the next kiss lightly across Dylan’s mouth.

“Turns out, that ship has sailed,” he said as he lifted his head. “They know.”

That was…good news. Or bad news. Dylan wasn’t sure which. It was definitely news, and he wasn’t sure how he should feel about it.

“So that means…”

“No more sneaking around,” Somerset said. He ran the pad of his thumb along Dylan’s lower lip, tracking the bruises of his teeth, in a gentle caress. “If that’s what you want.”

It was Dylan’s turn to grab Somerset’s jacket by the lapels. He dragged the bigger man down into a kiss, or tried to. It turned out Somerset was about as hard to shift as he looked.

“Come down here,” Dylan told him impatiently.

“Is that an order?” Somerset asked.

“Yeah.”

A soft smile flickered over Somerset’s mouth and then was gone, replaced with the usual stern set of his lips. He did as he was told, though, and leaned down into Dylan’s kiss. His mouth tasted of fresh whiskey and fresh-enough blood. Dylan didn’t care, and even if he had, he supposed his mouth didn’t taste great either.

He really hated flying.

Finally Somerset broke the kiss and leaned back. He grabbed Dylan’s wrists and pulled his hands away from his jacket.

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“Irene’s,” Dylan said.

Somerset looked blank, so Dylan filled in some details.

“The pregnant woman they took with Alice. I got her address, or…at least…where she used to live. Apparently she’d moved recently, but her roommate gave me some of her things, and there were a bunch of letters.”

“To Santa?”

“No,” Dylan said. “To her, from Demre and Hill.”

Somerset grimaced. “The rot in that place ran deep,” he said. “We’ve no idea how much damage they’ve already done.”

“I’ll leave that part to you,” Dylan said. “What we do know is that Demre and Hill had a connection with Irene before the Christmas Party, and that probably means the wolf did too. So why did he lie about it?”

Somerset still had hold of Dylan’s hands. He pulled one up and pressed a frosty kiss to his palm. Someone from inside the North Pole yelled ‘get a room,’ and Dylan had to squash the urge to jump back and pretend he’d just…had jam on him or something.

“It’s a good question,” Somerset said as he turned to head back inside, towing Dylan behind him. “But I’m not the one to ask.”

Dylan tried to hang back as he looked over his shoulder at the reindeer. “What about…”

“I’ll get someone to take her back to the stables.”

Lucas Carlisle had a black eye, a split lip, and an attitude.

The latter was impressive from a man cuffed to a bent stripper pole. He sat on the podium in a stained suit that probably cost more than Dylan’s rent and glared as Dylan and Somerset walked back into the room with Jars.

“You know you’re over, right?” he said. He shifted, and the cuff rattled against the pole. “The Winter Court will raze you, salt the ground, and take Santa for their own.”

Jars walked over and put the butt of his crutch under Lucas’s chin. He tipped the man’s head back.

“Over you?”

“My mother— ”

“Will disown you the minute we prove you attempted to subvert the succession of Yule,” Jars said. Then he paused and smiled thinly. “More specifically, that you failed to do it.”

He stepped back, weight still tilted to the left, and gestured for Dylan to come forward.

Dylan hesitated as he wondered exactly how Santa would act. In the end, since he’d no examples to draw from, it was going to have to be like him. He grabbed a chair and pulled it over to the podium, the legs scraping over the floor.

“I know you,” Lucas said. He narrowed his eyes. “You’re that paramedic. The one that came to the…end-of-year party.”

Dylan sat down.

“Christmas party,” he said. “You might as well admit it, the ship’s sailed on that one.”

Lucas gave a close-lipped smile and shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He glanced toward Jars and added pointedly, “Any of it. I manage Demre and Hill’s portfolio, that’s all–”

“But you knew Irene,” Dylan said. For the second time he had to provide context, as Lucas just shrugged at him. “The pregnant woman at the party?”

There was something nervous in the way Lucas’s eyes shifted away from Dylan. Or maybe it was how he leaned back.

“Her and her boyfriend gatecrashed,” he said. “I was being a Good Samaritan to call an ambulance instead of the cops. Or the Hunt.”

Dylan reached into his jacket and pulled out the letters. There hadn’t been time to go through them all, but even a cursory read had been enough.

“Demre and Hill brokered a deal with her to be a surrogate,” he said as he held the contract out to Lucas. “Except the deal was with the Winter’s wolf dressed as her boyfriend. Right?”

Lucas licked his lips and shrugged. “It’s nothing to do with me,” he said. “I just deal with money, Mr. Paramedic, not babies.”

Somerset grabbed a chair and turned it around to sit down. “You can call him Santa.”

A gray cast spread under Lucas’s face at that correction, but Dylan ignored it as he shuffled the papers.

“That’s right,” he said. “This is your name right here, isn’t it? On the breakdown of the payment schedule. Lucas Collins.”

This time Lucas just shut his mouth. He visibly chewed on his lower lip as Dylan waited a heartbeat before he pressed on.

“She changed her mind, and legally you couldn’t do anything about that.”

“Legally? You think the Winter Court cares about that?” Lucas scoffed. He glanced toward Jars and Somerset and then shifted forward so he could make eye contact with Dylan. “Look, I didn’t know who she was. I’d never met her. All I do is money, OK? If someone tells me to make money happen for them, that’s what I do. It’s not my job to try and decide if it’s a moral purchase or not. I work for the Winter fucking Court. Sometimes you buy a baby. Sometimes two. You know what you don’t do? Ask about it.”

He sagged back against the bent pole, his head tilted back to rest against it. It felt like the truth. Dylan could feel the balance on Lucas’s account shift from…naughty to nice. Not a lot, the man wouldn’t be getting a visit from Dylan anytime soon, but just a hair.

“You didn’t send the wolves to take her?” he asked. “Make sure your people got what you paid for?”

Lucas just shook his head. “No,” he gritted out. Then he lifted his head to look at them. “And what the fuck does that have to do with a plot against Yule anyhow? The old man, the last one, knew all about it.”