14. Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

A slap put Merula Demre on her ass in the town hall. The woman sprawled on the floor for a minute and then pulled herself up. Blood dripped from her split lip and splattered over her tattooed cleavage and unbuttoned white shirt.

“Stay down,” the short older woman who’d put her on the floor in the first place told her. “You forget yourself. Perhaps this will help remind you of your place.”

Demre wiped her mouth on the back of her arm.

“I’ve endured more for our people than this,” she said.

The older woman’s head swiveled so she could glare at Demre. She raised perfectly tweezed eyebrows and smiled thinly.

“Go on,” she said in a dangerously sweet voice. “Remind us what you’ve done for our people… lately .”

Demre got up onto her knees. “This wasn’t my fault!” she protested. “I didn’t bring them here. That fool Lucas caused this, him and his stupid party, and he wasn’ t mine.”

Somerset shifted position. It hurt. Someone had given the town forewarning that the Yule Lads were coming. When they’d ridden into town, the Kallikantzaroi had been waiting and had driven a dump truck into them. Somerset had been grabbed before he could extricate himself from the mangled mess of his bike.

Jars had covered for the others so they could scatter. So far they were the only two in chains, but it wouldn’t take long. The whole town was looking for them.

“So what happened?” Somerset asked. “I know Irene had backed out of your deal. She wanted to keep her baby…”

The old woman gave a sour look over her shoulder at the pickup-sized wolf curled up in the back of the hall. Its briar ribs were distended, dry leaves falling from wizened branches, and the two women were still huddled together in its gut.

“It was a contract ,” she corrected Somerset. “And what happened was that the wolf was supposed to…impress on her that it was for her own good to hold up her end of that contract. Except when he got there, he couldn’t tell the difference between an office Christmas party and a Yule raiding party and panicked.”

The wolf she was talking about—still mostly human, except for his dry leaf eyes—looked sour at the accusation.

“We want to go back to Winter,” he said. “Not fight your battles with Yule.”

Demre made a furious noise from the ground and yanked in frustration at her hair. “Yule wasn’t there!” she said. “You brought them down on us when you went after Santa!”

“He had the ticket home,” the wolf said. “We needed it.”

The pregnant woman, grubby and tired in torn leggings and matted hair, made a strangled sound at that dispassionate description. She buried her head in Alice’s shoulder, one arm locked around her stomach and the other clutching the other woman close to her. The paramedic looked gray and tired, the bruise on her forehead livid and raised, but she muttered something comforting as she patted the other woman’s shoulder. She pulled herself away and crawled to the front of their cage.

“He needs treatment.” She pointed at Somerset. “He could be bleeding internally—”

“I definitely am,” Somerset confirmed. It was not a feeling you’d mistake after the first time. His stomach felt like he’d eaten a whole pot of their mother’s stew, and his legs felt like overstuffed sausages. It wouldn't kill him, but that didn't make it pleasant.

“Good,” the old woman snapped. She jabbed a finger at Demre, the nail painted a neutral beige. “And your whining disgusts me. However it started, you should have stopped it. ”

Demre looked down, hidden behind the gray-brown fall of her hair. Her hand lifted to her face to poke at her lip.

“What are you going to do now?” Jars asked. He leaned back against one of the long benches, arms extended along the seat. “Even if you kill us, the Court will know you’re here, and they have no compunctions about killing you.”

Somerset snorted. “Neither do I,” he pointed out. “It’s only the oath that thinks they’re worth our time.”

Something squirmed under the woman’s face, oily hair pushed against her cheek from the inside. Bristles poked through her pores, and a beady black eye tried to bulge out of her eye socket. She reached up and pushed it back in with the heel of her hand.

“The Court won’t come looking for us,” she said. “ You didn’t. They’re looking for her, and they can take their pound of flesh from her.”

Demre’s head snapped up. “No!” She lurched to her feet, and her fingers crooked. Black nails split the skin at the end of her fingertips and poked out. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and kept peeling as her fangs showed. “You can’t do that. You said…you said once we were done I could come home.”

The woman spread her hands. “And you did,” she said. “Now put those away. I don’t want to fight with my daughter on Christmas Eve…but I will.”

Demre folded her lips back down over her muzzle, as much as she could. The woman waited until she was sure that Demre was cowed and then turned to go.

The wolf crossed the hall to cut her off. “And our deal?” he asked.

There was a pause as the Kallikantzaroi looked at him and then primped her lips in a smile.

“A deal is a deal,” she said. “Get your pet to give us the child and we’ll get you home. But not until after we have the others. So either help find them or get out of my way.”

The wolf stepped to the side and the woman left. He let her.

Jars turned his head to watch her go and then tilted his head back. He stared at the ceiling for a long while and then snorted softly to himself. It turned into a choked snickering laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Demre snarled as she pulled the hem of her shirt up to wipe her face.

Jars leaned forward and braced his hands against his thighs. He used his chin to gesture to the hall .

“What’s it been?” he asked. “Centuries of the Kallikantzaroi surviving paw to mouth, hiding in the gutters. Decades here, building yourselves back up with stolen babies—”

Demre barked out a humorless laugh. “And where do you think the Winter Court gets their changelings?” she asked. “At least we pay for them.”

Jars ignored that. “Infiltrating the Winter Court with…what are you?”

She glared at him. “Smarter than you,” she said. “Like that baby, something that the Courts will accept as their own. And all these years under your nose, but you Yule Lads were too far up your own asses to sniff us out.”

“All that,” Jars said. “And it all fell apart when the wolf got scared because someone pulled a cracker.”

He burst out laughing again, doubled over as he slapped his hand against his thigh. Somerset snorted his own contribution at the farce of it. The wolf snarled at them.

Demre lunged across the room and kicked Jars in the chest. The bench behind him broke on impact, snapped in half, and he landed on his back with a grunt. Demre pinned him to the ground with one foot as she leaned down.

“Laugh at us all you like.” She enunciated the words through snaggled fangs. Thick, stringy drool dripped from her jaws onto his face. “But we did all that and you saw nothing. You have no idea how close we came to having everything .”

Jars turned his face to the side and wiped it on his shoulder.

“So you failed all on your own?” he said.

Demre’s face contorted, and her jaw cracked open, almost all the way back to her ears.

“The Old Man wanted to keep you alive until we caught the others,” she said. “But the other one will do well enough as bait.”

Somerset tensed his arms to test the cuffs. The iron burned his skin, a hot itch that numbed his fingers and spread a slow, dull ache up toward his armpit.

“I hate to break it to you,” Somerset said. “But I’m not that well-liked.”

Jars snorted out another laugh at that. The sound of humor made Demre scream with fury, and she grabbed him by the throat. Her claws punched through his throat as she tightened her grip. Blood splattered from Jars’s lips as he choked and struggled for air.

The wolf at the back of the hall growled as it lurched to its feet. Inside its woven guts, the women cried out in alarm as they were thrown about. They grabbed the braided ribs for balance as the bars contracted around them. One of them yelped as their foot got caught, twisted awkwardly as the thorns dug into it .

“Enough,” the pack leader snapped at Demre as he stalked over to her. He grabbed her shoulder. “Challenge the old bitch if you want to lead…but do it once my pack and I are home.”

Demre didn’t loosen her grip on Jars’s throat as she backhanded the pack leader through a wall. Someone outside yelped in surprise as the wolf landed in the street. Second thoughts visibly dawned on Demre’s face as she dropped Jars and turned to the back of the hall.

“Don’t you—” she started the warning, but didn’t get to finish it.

The wolf threw its head back and howled. The sound rattled through the sticks of its throat in a keening moan that jabbed through Somerset’s ears in an attempt to find that atavistic fear of being hunted. It didn’t work, Yule Lads made for stringy meat, but it was a good try.

Demre flinched and raised one hand to press against her ear.

From somewhere in the town, the Winter’s wolves answered. Demre jerked her head up and toward the sound, her face worried.

“You said the others were gone,” she accused him.

The wolf snapped thorny teeth at her and then bulled through the part of the wall that had survived the pack leader. Broken planks of wood and plaster scraped along its hide. Demre cursed and threw Jars down as she ran over to peer out the hole.

Somerset forced himself to his feet. Resilient as his body was, it still protested that decision. Cracked bones ground together, and freshly healed tendons frayed as they stretched. Somerset ignored it as he wrapped the chain they’d tethered him with around one hand.

Frost bloomed on the metal in delicate, crisp lines. It clustered around Somerset’s fingers, thickening into a crust, and then raced down the length of the metal. Iron didn’t, in general, like magic, but all Somerset had done was dump cold on it. That was just physics. Probably.

Ice-cold metal burned Somerset’s palm. He gritted his teeth and braced his foot against the bolt in the floor. The first yank ripped a chunk of skin out of his palm and cracked one of the links. The second snapped the tether, chunks of frozen metal thrown over the floor.

He gathered the short length still attached to his wrist up into his fist and stalked toward Demre. Her back was turned to him as she watched the wolves outside. Somerset cocked his fist back to punch her, and the oath dug hot, disapproving pincers into his brain. He choked, the noise thick and strangled in his throat, and staggered as his knees seized up.

Demre turned to look at him. “Pathetic,” she said. “I don’t know why we were ever worried about you.”

Somerset tightened his fingers around the chain. He could push through the pain. An oath was nothing if you couldn’t break it, but the sour magic that clotted his brain was a precursor of what the price would be.

He dropped his arm, his weighted fist hanging loose at his side. Then he shoulder-barged her through the hole and into the dirt outside. She squalled in surprise as she thrashed in the frozen mud.

“We can’t kill you,” Somerset said through gritted teeth as he braced his arm against her throat. “But we can still hurt you.”

Demre thrashed as she gasped for air. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide and bulging. She managed to get her legs up between them, her feet twisted into bony clubbed hooves, and kicked him off her.

Before he could recover, she’d scrambled back to her feet and made a run for it. The element of surprise wasn’t going to last for long.

Somerset turned and stepped back through the hole into the building. He shook his bloody hand, the torn skin stinging, and walked over to check on Jars. His brother held up a hand for an assist back onto his feet. Somerset grabbed it and hauled him up.

“You know we aren’t going to make it out of here,” Jars said. “There are too many of them, and we can’t thin the herd. They can just throw bodies at us until they bury us.”

He was right. Somerset wiped his bloody hand on his leg and thought about that.

It had been hundreds of years since he’d thought to start counting them, and plenty before that. All the blood he’d shed and fun he’d had, and if he had to keep just one of those years it would be this one.

It could have been an even better year if he’d realized everyone knew he was fucking Santa, but he’d still take it. So what if it brought him here.

“How about we don’t die liars,” Somerset said. “We told Dylan we could save his friends, and we can still do that.”

“ You told him that,” Jars corrected him.

“Close enough.”

Jars snorted, and then, after thinking about it, nodded. “At least we can kill the wolves,” he said.

A storm followed the wolves through town. Snow piled high against cars and the sides of buildings, and ice cracked the windows with brittle gunshot retorts. It worked in the Yule Lads’ favor, since they’d grown up ankle deep in fresh fall. The Kallikantzaroi were less accustomed to it, and as they shed their mortal glamor for their true forms, their hooves didn’t have much purchase.

But there were still too many of them.

Somerset clenched his teeth against the nagging pain in his head as he put the stocky Kallikantzaroi in a butcher’s apron into a chokehold. The man kicked and swore, but eventually his body went limp.

Somerset let him drop into the snow and reached up to pull the butcher’s knife out of his shoulder. He wiped the knife on his jeans and looked at Jars.

“Could have helped.”

“Didn’t want to.”

Jars leaned on the cracked ax he’d taken away from another Kallikantzaroi as he leaned over to look for tracks. He brushed away the fresh fall of snow with the side of his foot to uncover the crushed pawprint.

“We’re close,” he said.

Somerset grabbed a handful of snow and shoved it under his jacket, the crust of ice packed against the shoulder wound.

“Not close enough.”

They started out of the alley and had to stop, frozen in place, as they heard the crunch of hooves on snow.

“This way!” a voice yelled, thin and nasal. “I saw them.”

“They went down Main Street!” someone countered.

The mob dithered for a moment as they tried to decide and then split. A handful of them went left, and the rest ran straight on.

Somerset and Jars looked at each other, shrugged, and fell in behind them.

It turned out that the “they” wasn’t the other Yule Lads. It was the wolves. The two of them were at bay in front of the town’s bank…but the wolves had no problem with killing the Kallikantzaroi. Bodies lay scattered on the ground, twisted from the transformation, their blood staining the snow like grease. The pack leader snapped the neck of the last of them and tossed him aside, the limp body taking out a snowman constructed on the bank lawn.

“I can smell you,” the pack leader noted as he wiped his hands on his shirt. “Peppermint and blood. Yule Lads.”

“You know,” Somerset said as he walked forward, “we don’t need to fight. The Kallikantzaroi aren’t your friends…you can see that now.”

The pack leader just shook his head. He looked worn down, weary in a way something born from storm winds and fear shouldn’t be capable of.

“Wolves don’t have friends,” he said. “We have the pack and the hunt and the kill. To be more ? It hurts.”

Somerset wrapped the loose links of the chain around his hand. “So will this.”

The wolf showed his teeth, thorns twisted through enamel, and lunged forward. Somerset caught him, and they tussled, their footing uneven in the snow that turned to slush and mud as they staggered back and forth. Both of them fell into a parked car and crushed the door. The alarm went off on impact, lights flashing as the horn blared.

The wolf picked Somerset up by the shirt and tossed him into the road. Somerset hit the snow-covered concrete and skidded on the ice. He rolled over and scrambled back to his feet. The wolf hit him before he could get his balance. They both hit the dirt again, rolling around and rabbit-punching each other like the sort of idiots Somerset had to throw out of the bar at the end of the night.

It was undignified, but it kept the wolf’s attention where Somerset wanted it.

At least it did until Jars’s shout rattled the street. Windows shattered, and the sudden cacophony of a dozen car alarms filled the air. The snow seemed to stop for a moment as it was blown back into the storm.

It sent Somerset and the wolf tumbling down the street like a couple of fallen leaves. Somerset grabbed a streetlight on the way past, while the wolf crashed through a plate glass window into a toy shop.

Somerset shook his head to clear the ringing and looked around to check on his brother. The wolf was on the ground, ribs twisted and splintered from the impact. The wizened body of the person it had been tied to originally lay half out of the wolf on the ground. Jars grabbed at the broken ribs and hacked at them, ripping the connective tissue of ivy apart to get at what was inside.

“No! ”

Somerset turned to see the pack leader leap back through the broken window. Chunks of glass were embedded in him, glittering in the net of roots and tendrils that stitched him back together. He shook himself, powdered bits of glass shed into the snow, and bolted across the street. Somerset intercepted him before he got there. They tore into each other in the middle of the road, brutal and desperate.

For a second, as Somerset twisted the wolf’s arm until he heard green wood tear, he thought he had the upper hand. Then he felt the wind tug at his hair and blow cold across the back of his neck to make him hackle. He looked as the last two wolves raced silently out of the snow.

“Fuck—”

A sudden crack interrupted Somerset’s disgusted profanity. One of the wolves’ front legs exploded in a shower of charred splinters and half-dead foliage. The wolf, Somerset’s seal still wrapped around its muzzle, pitched forward at the unexpected mess and tumbled tail over ears down the road.

The last wolf skidded to a stop, legs spraddled as it looked around. Unlike the others, it looked like it had thrived, draped with boughs of fir and mistletoe.

A second crack blew a hole the size of a child’s head through its shoulder.

From the top of a sedan, Stúfur whooped as he lowered his gun. He looked over at Somerset and gave him the finger.

“Just needed better bullets,” he yelled over the storm.

An elbow to the chin snapped Somerset’s attention back to the job at hand. He spat out a bit of his tongue and grabbed the back of the wolf’s head to grind it into the road.

All he needed was a…few…more…minutes.

Jars snapped the last ribs just as the wolf started to stir, the strings of briar pulled tight as the husk of its host was pulled back inside it. He reached in and unceremoniously yanked both women out by the scruff of their collars.

As the wolf scrambled back to its feet, still unsteady and clumsy, Ket and Gat came out of the storm to grab the woman. They threw them over their shoulders and took off at a run as the snow dropped behind them.

The wolf under Somerset screamed in raw, inchoate rage and hammered at the road with bark-thickened hands. He threw Somerset off and clawed himself along the road until he could stagger to his feet .

“Why?” he demanded as he turned on Somerset. “You’ve gained nothing . All you’ve done is make yourself weak. I’ll find them. I’ll give them to the Kallikantzaroi in return for a way home. What have you gotten from this?”

Somerset shrugged. “Pissed you off,” he said.

The wolf wrinkled his lips back and took a step forward. Then it stopped and looked up. Dark, wiry figures with rodent heads and cloven hooves appeared on rooftops along the streets. More horns joined the slowly going flat blare of car alarms, and the sound of a mob eddied through the snow.

“Let them have you,” the wolf said. “And when you die, know that I’ll find your brothers and kill them too.”

The pack leader ripped out of his human skin, briars and withies knit together into the bulk of a huge, heavy-boned wolf. The snow clotted on exposed, wet wood and hardened, frost thickened on its nails. He dropped onto all fours, showed one last fang to Somerset, and disappeared into the storm.

As he did so the other wolves pulled themselves back together and lurched after him, on half-formed legs and broken branches.

This time it was Stúfur who offered a hand up. Somerset regarded it dubiously but accepted the yank up onto his feet.

“Admit it,” Stúfur said. “The gun’s a good idea.”

“No,” Somerset said.

They backed up across the road until they met Jars at the steps of the bank. The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder as the Kallikantzaroi came running out of the storm toward them.

“If I have to die,” Somerset said, “I suppose I always assumed you’d be there.”

“Really?” Stúfur asked. “I’m touched.”

Somerset licked blood off his lip. “I mean, I assumed you’d be killing me,” he said.

“Fair,” Jars noted. “And same.”

The wave of Kallikantzaroi were nearly on them. Somerset braced himself. He hoped that at least one of them would trip over his corpse and break its neck.

The sound of bells broke through the storm. Somerset thought it was his imagination at first, but then he heard it again. A second later he saw a dark shadow look out of the misty veil of snow and Santa’s Sleigh broke back onto this side of reality right on top of the Kallikantzaroi. The reindeer swung their massive horned heads like hammers and sent the goat-rat bodies of the twisted Saint-blood flying. They were the lucky ones. The rest were trampled under dinnerplate-sized hooves and run over by the sharp metal runners of the Sleigh.

Dylan stood up in the Sleigh, legs braced and reins gripped tight in both hands.

“Get on!” he yelled as he snapped the reins. The Sleigh veered toward them. Somerset gawped at it for a second and then laughed in delight. He dodged to the side and jumped up onto the running board as it passed. Habit made him stick out a hand to grab Jars’s arm and drag him up behind him. Stúfur grabbed a harness strap and hauled himself up onto one of the reindeer’s broad, furry backs.

Nik was squeezed into the corner of one of the Sleigh’s seats, one hand white-knuckled around a leather strap. He gave Somerset a wild look.

“We can’t fight them!” he blurted out. “They’re Kallikantzaroi. All the babies they bought, they were all Christmas births. They—”

Jars dropped into the seat next to him and grabbed the back of his neck in one hand. He gave their little brother a friendly shake. “We got that,” he said.

Dylan snapped the reins again, and the reindeer threw themselves against their harnesses as they picked up their pace. Snow was flung up behind them, cool on Somerset’s face as it sprayed over them.

“Well I don’t plan to stop,” Dylan yelled over the wind. “The reindeer don’t seem bothered by your oaths.”

Somerset laughed again, sweet and heady as mead, as he grabbed Dylan and dragged him into a kiss. It was salty and rough, lips scraped, and their teeth jarred together. He didn’t care.

Nik apparently did.

“Eyes on the road!” he yelled. “Eyes on the road, for fuck’s sake!”

Somerset snorted, but dragged himself away from Dylan. True to his word, Dylan didn’t stop as they raced through the streets of Bury. Although he did slow the reindeer down to a trot long enough for Ket and Gat to throw the two women into the Sleigh before they scrambled up onto the backboard.

Santa had saved the day.

Dylan would be his tomorrow. For as many tomorrows as they could get.