13. Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

D ylan stood under the shower in what Jars had informed him were his quarters. The water was turned up as hot as strong as it would go, but it still couldn’t wash the lingering chill of Somerset’s fingerprints off Dylan’s hips or cock. He leaned one arm against the slick tile and tilted his head forward, the stream of water beating against the back of his neck.

The frost-kissed traces didn’t have anything to do with why he was here and Skellir was there. In Bury, where the Wolves came from and where, hopefully, they’d gone to close the deal with Irene’s baby. Dylan still felt guilty, though.

At least he’d had time for a shower.

He flicked the tap, cutting the water off, and stepped out of the cubicle. The bandage had peeled off his arm, sodden and dripping. He stripped it off the rest of the way, half-planning how to redress it, and then realized he didn’t have to. Black stitches stood out in loose squiggles, and the injury had knit itself together. It wasn’t pretty, the scar tissue was lumpy and tender, but it was healed .

Maybe Yule didn’t hate him that much…or it just didn’t want to deal with a subpar Santa before the big night.

A robe hung on the back of the door, white and almost ludicrously fluffy. Dylan left it there. It was probably, like his clothes, freshly made for him, but until he knew for sure he’d rather not. He might have inherited a watch and a job from his grandfather, but he drew the line at the old man’s robe.

It had been the only option. A year’s worth of arguments about not needing to be kept out on a shelf aside, it was Christmas Eve. The Yule Lads would never agree to let him leave town, never mind go to a fight.

Either he stayed behind or there was no rescue. As it was, they’d still had to negotiate over who went to Bury and who stayed to guard Dylan.

It had made sense to agree, but that didn’t make Dylan feel less useless.

Someone had laid out clothes on the bed. The ripped shirt he’d slung over the back of a chair was gone. That was…something to get used to.

“Thanks,” he said, slightly dubious, to the room at large. Nothing changed. He eyed the walls suspiciously, in search of an eyeball or a camera, but he supposed if there was something watching they’d already gotten an eyeful.

He got dressed quickly. The clothes fit his mood, black and severe. Before he got on the Sleigh tonight—if he got on the Sleigh—he’d don the rest of the regalia. Being Santa, Dylan thought wryly as he tucked his shirt into his jeans and laced the belt through the loops, was getting to be a habit.

Someone knocked on the door. That was progress. It would have been more progress if the Lad had waited for an answer before he opened the door. Nik leaned into the room. The youngest of the Yule Lads scowled at Dylan. He wasn’t impressed with either Jars and Somerset’s currently detente or being left out of the fight.

“Your food’s here,” he said. “It smells like shit.”

Considering what the Yule Lads considered a home-cooked meal, that boded well.

It had been over a day since Dylan had last eaten anything, other than a handful of trail mix or a couple of peppermints. He was three slices of pizza in and it hadn’t even touched the sides yet. Cheese scalded the roof of his mouth as he took a bite, and he soothed it with a swig of lemonade from a wet paper cup.

“Someone here could have made you pizza,” Nik pointed out.

“You’d put pineapple on it,” Dylan accused, one hand over his mouth as he chewed. “Or use ketchup for sauce.”

Nik rolled his eyes. “As long as it’s a tomato, what’s the difference?”

Before Dylan could argue with that point, the door to the hall opened and the nervous accountant Somerset had left with the incriminating laptop stumbled into the room. She froze when she saw Nik and Dylan, her hands tightening on the folder she clutched. Her chest rose and fell quickly as she stared at them.

“I was looking for you,” she said and thrust the folder toward them. “You have to see this.”

Dylan wasn’t sure of the first part of that statement—he had the strong impression that if they’d not been there Enid would have made a break for the door—but the second part seemed compelling. He dropped the half-eaten slice of pizza into the box and grabbed a napkin to wipe the grease off his hands as he slid out of the booth.

“Stay there,” Nik told him sternly as he stepped in front of Dylan. He took the folder from Enid, flicked through the pages, and then escorted her over to the table. “Sit.”

She did. Her hands were folded in her lap, fingers tucked into her palms and out of view.

“What is it?” Dylan asked as he took the folder. There were soot stains on the manilla cardboard that smudged over his fingers as he touched them. When he opened the cover, he found copies of a dozen–more, he realized as he flipped through, contracts. “The babies?”

Enid took a deep breath and nodded. “I noticed something, when I was going through them,” she said. “They all have the same dates. Look.”

She reached out and pressed a finger to the top of the page, underlining a passage with a smear of grease. Then she flicked a few pages down and repeated the process, her fingers stained and shaky.

“OK,” Dylan said. “What does it mean?”

Enid glanced at the pizza, then almost visibly shook off the distraction. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s not consistent with a changeling brokerage. They’d want a steady stream, not a glut.”

So, nothing good .

Dylan pushed the pizza absently toward Enid as he flicked through the papers. All the dates were noted down within a few days of each other. The only difference was the year.

“That’s a lot of Christmas babies,” he noted absently.

“What?” Nik said.

Dylan looked up and waved the papers. “Based on the dates, they’d all be due around Christmas,” he said. “Irene’s baby was.”

Nik’s face creased into a scowl as he snatched a handful of pages from the folder. He checked the dates and started to count it out on his fingers. Dylan would have judged him, but he’d only made the connection because of his conversation with Irene.

“Christmas babies,” Nik said.

“Yeah,” Dylan said. “It sounds more fun than it is. What is it?”

Nik grimaced and tossed the pages down. The corner of one went into the pot of garlic mayo open on the table.

“We need to talk to Hill,” he said and then leveled a finger at Dylan. “That means you need to wake him up.”

It turned out that it wasn’t hard to get Hill to turn on his partner.

There was no honor among thieves or, as it turned out, those who bartered babies.

Getting him to talk , however, was another matter.

Behind Hill’s lush, placid lips were teeth burned to cinders and a tongue charred to jerky. The inside of his cheeks and the back of his throat cracked and flaked as he breathed, the flesh underneath cherry red and poisoned.

He gave them a good view of the ruin and then closed his mouth, his lips set in that serene smile.

“Did my blood do that to you?” Dylan asked, taken aback.

Hill blinked in clear contempt and shook his head. He picked up the pen they had set on the table in front of him and scrawled in a spiky, hard to read hand.

To Assure.

It took two passes at that thought before Dylan was convinced he had it right. “You agreed to let them do that?” he asked. “As insurance?”

The pen scratched over the paper again. A little price .

Dylan couldn’t agree with that. He ran his tongue over the back of his teeth to feel the smooth enamel and ridges of them, intact and solid.

“But you can write the answers?”

Hill started to write something, but as a letter that was either a K or an F left the pen his fingers started to smoke. His nails split, and before he could finish he dropped the pen and shook his hand like he’d just nipped it in a drawer.

Nik reached over the table and ripped the page out of the notebook. He screwed it up in his hand until it was in a tight, compressed ball.

“All I need you to do is nod,” he said. “Kallikantzaroi.”

Hill drew back slightly at the name, his neck creased around the bandage that covered his collarbone. Then he dipped his chin in a nod. The two of them glared at each other while Dylan looked from one to the other.

“What does that mean?” he asked. “Who are the Kallik—”

“Monsters,” Nik said flatly. He dragged himself away from Hill and frowned at Dylan as if he’d just noticed him. “And not your problem.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here,” Dylan said. “It kind of sounds like they are. Who are they? Why do they want Irene’s baby?”

He waited.

“Don’t make me play twenty questions,” Dylan said.

Nik pulled his hand down his face, stretching the skin out as he debated whether to answer. He probably would have refused to, except Dylan turned toward Hill.

“They’re traitors,” Nik said shortly. “Once they were part of Yule, but they turned on us and tried to destroy us. One of their misdeeds was to steal infants to replenish their ranks, but only those born on Christmas. It’s bad luck to speak of them, and no reason to since they’re all dead. Or that’s what we believed.”

“Don’t tell me,” Dylan said. “You were wrong?”

Nik waved his hand in a broad, jerky gesture at Hill. “I didn’t say it, he did.”

“Technically he nodded it,” Dylan pointed out. The joke flopped as both of the fey stared at him with disdain. Dylan supposed it hadn’t been that funny. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “So…what? I’m not a fan of the baby trafficking, but they don’t sound any worse than Winter’s wolves.”

“They were,” Nik said. Then he grimly corrected himself. “Are. We can fight the wolves, but the Kallikantzaroi…our oath won’t let us end the Line of Nick, no matter how corrupted. Once my brothers realize who has been buying babies out there, they’ll either be forsworn or dead. And there’s nothing I can do about it for the same reason. To keep my oath I have to stay here and babysit you.”

He shook his head in frustration and stalked out of the room. The door slammed behind him. As babysitting gigs went, Dylan thought nonsensically, leaving your charge alone with a dangerous stranger probably wasn’t best practice.

It did give him a chance to ask…

“Lucas said that my…predecessor…” Dylan caught himself before the “grandfather” slipped out. “That he knew about the babies.”

Hill just stared. There was something disturbingly intense in his expression. It hadn’t, Dylan supposed, been a question.

“Did he know who was buying them?”

This time he got a nod.

“He knew it was the Kalli… Calli—”

In a surprising bit of generosity, Hill didn’t make Dylan finish the sentence. He just nodded and waited.

“How long has it been going on for?” Dylan asked. “How many babies have they bought?”

Instead of answering, Hill just smiled, the charred ruin of his tongue rattling around his mouth like a pebble as he laughed. Not exactly precise, but answer enough.

Dylan bolted up out of the chair and out of the room. The troll left on guard duty yelled something after him, but Dylan ignored it. He fished his phone out of his pocket and flicked through it as he walked. Demre and Hill might belong to the Winter Court, but to function as a financial entity it needed to be part of the mortal world.

It might not have a website, but…no, it had a website.

He caught up with Nik in the hall. The Yule Lad had slumped to the ground outside Jars’s office, his head buried in his hands. He didn’t look up as Dylan reached him.

“I can’t even tell anyone, can’t send help,” Nik said. He clenched his hand in his hair, tufts of it sticking up through his knuckles, and sniffed wetly. “The Kallikantzaroi are supposed to be gone, pruned branch and root.”

“Get up,” Dylan said.

Nik spat on Dylan’s boot instead. “Fuck you,” he said. “Your weakness, your fondness, did this. A Santa that cares more about some fucking mortal than Yule. I hope they—”

It wasn’t a good idea for Nik to finish that thought. Dylan crouched down and grabbed Nik’s jacket, leather thick and clumsy between his fingers .

“You can get up,” he said, “or you can stay here, but I’m going.”

He shoved Nik back against the wall and stalked off down the corridor. After a second he heard boots scuff the ground behind him. Nik grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back.

“You can’t,” he said, his voice cracked through with resentment. “I can’t. It’s Christmas Eve. You have to be here to take the Whip and drive the Sleigh. We’ll just have to hope that my brothers are smart enough to find a way out without violence.”

Dylan pulled away from him. “That’s not really their strong suit,” he pointed out. Then he held his phone up in front of Nik’s face. The glare made Nik blink and lean back as he squinted at the screen. “Nineteen fifty-one. That’s when Demre and Hill were founded. Nearly a hundred years, Nik. How many babies do you think that adds up to? The Kallikantzaroi aren’t in Bury, they are Bury.”

Something that Santa had known all about before he was killed, but the repercussions of that bit of knowledge would have to wait. Nik’s face had blanched as the information sank in.

“Six of us gone,” he said raggedly. “ Six. The Winter Court will eat us alive.”

Dylan turned on his heel and struck out again. “No one is going to die today.”

Never make any promises. That was one of the first things that Dylan had learned as a paramedic. No “You’ll be OK” or “We can save the leg,” and absolutely never promise that someone is going to make it. Right now, Dylan didn’t care.

“What are you going to do?” Nik protested. He sounded bitter, but he was still at Dylan’s shoulder. “I can’t let you leave the North Pole. It’ll be bad for Yule to lose my brothers, but worse if the Sleigh stands empty on Christmas Eve.”

That was it. Up until now the closest to a plan Dylan had was that he wasn’t going to let anyone die for him, but that worked.

“I am Yule,” Dylan said, the memory of Somerset’s words almost making him believe it. “And don’t worry about the Sleigh, we’re taking it with us.”

The arguments against taking the Sleigh—argued grimly by the remaining Yule Lads or indignantly by the Saint-blood as they clustered around the Sleigh—mostly boiled down to “No one has ever done it before ” and “If you die, we won’t have the Sleigh for the new Santa.”

Dylan had only been able to come up with one argument for , which was that he wasn’t asking. So far that was carrying the day. It had gotten his regalia fetched, the Sleigh dragged out, and the reindeer harnessed.

He pulled on the heavy fur-lined jacket and black leather gloves and braced one foot against the Sleigh’s running board as he went to boost himself up. The bells on the harnesses chimed as the reindeer snorted and tossed their impressively-horned heads. The sound made Dylan’s skin prickle with the memory of cold hands and rough kisses. His throat tightened at the thought that might have been the last time, but he squashed that fear down with the blunt weapon of his promise.

No one is going to die.

Although, Dylan thought bleakly as he hesitated, that didn’t mean that Somerset would want anything to do with him after this was over. As far as Santas went, Dylan’s appointment hadn’t been plain sailing.

One of the Saint-blood—Kris, Dylan thought, from his beard and gray-blond hair—shoved his way to the front of the crowd. He grabbed Dylan’s arm and dug his fingers into the down-padded sleeve.

“Bring them home,” he said. “Yule can survive anything else.”

The support caught Dylan by surprise. Not just that one person had said it, but that he saw a few other Saint-born in the crowd nod in agreement. It wasn’t even close to half, but more than he’d expected.

“I will,” he said.

Kris nodded as if it was an agreement, let go, and stepped back. He grabbed one of the other Saint-born and pulled them back.

“We serve him,” he reminded them gruffly. “Not the other way around.”

The Saint-blood curled his lip. “Maybe it’s time we asked more questions about who we serve,” he said, his voice pitched to carry. “What does anyone even know about him? What line is he from? He’s not one of us.”

Someone threw a punch. Dylan wasn’t sure if it was one of his unexpected supporters or not. It didn’t really matter, as the gathering quickly turned into a brawl.

Nik grabbed hold of the edge of the Sleigh, one foot braced on the polished runner. The other Yule Lads followed suit. As they grabbed on, Nik looked at Dylan .

“What are you waiting for?” he said as he reached back with his free hand to absently check his axe. “If you are going to do it, do it now.”

He was right.

Dylan took a deep breath and grabbed the handle of the Whip. He lifted it out of the holder and shook it to let the braided lash untangle. The metal tip on it tapped against the ground. Dylan cocked it back over his shoulder and cracked it.

He’d practiced since last year—in secret, feeling like an idiot—but he still wasn’t that good with it. It didn’t matter. The snap of the Whip still made Dylan’s teeth rattle and the reindeer surged forward against their harnesses as one. One of the Saint-blood grabbed one of the reindeer by the bridle. It threw its head up and dragged him off his feet. He hung on grimly.

Dylan hoped he had a good grip. He cracked the Whip a second time. The glittering metal tip of the lash slipped through the seconds and fractured time. It blew out in a slow-motion explosion of moments, a thousand years of today split into wafer-thin slivers.

As the road opened, the reindeer surged forward. Furry split-toed hooves found purchase on the minutes as they labored upward and through the world until they were out the other side. The Sleigh lurched and bounced behind them. The Saint-blood hung on for a second and then let go at the last minute, he rolled back into the mundane world.

“Is this…normal?” Nik asked through gritted teeth as he tightened his grip. “I always imagined it…smoother.”

Dylan dropped the Whip between his feet and untangled the reins into both hands. The Saint-blood who’d come along for the ride hooked his arm through the reindeer’s harness and buried his face against its throat.

“You and me both,” Dylan said through gritted teeth.

“Do you even know where Belling is?” Nik asked. The words were stripped from his lips and thinned out, sped up or slowed down depending on what eddies caught them.

“Bit late to worry about that,” Dylan said. “But don’t worry. They do. They know where everything is.”

And just for fucking once he hoped they’d take him straight there instead of jerking him around, crisscrossing the globe to end up one street over from where he’d started.