2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

T he coffee in a dive bar wasn’t any better than the whiskey.

Somerset downed it anyhow—it was his dive bar, he couldn’t really complain—and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He put the empty cup down on the desk and fixed his visitor with a hard look. The myrkálfar visibly shrunk down in the chair and squirmed uncomfortably.

“Nothing?” Somerset said.

“I can’t find what isn’t there,” Enid said, as she spread her hands in a helpless gesture.

She’d scrubbed them recently, from the raw knuckles and smell of Irish Spring soap, but her nails were already rimed with black. They were born to the forges, her kind, and even a decade spent among mortals couldn’t wash the stain of it away. To the Courts, it was a badge of honor. For the unCourted…either they got into manual labor or they spent a lot on soap.

Enid spent a lot on soap. She was a loan officer at the Belling National Bank, which was why Somerset thought she might be able to chase something up .

The Courts were hidebound by choice, but even they had to adapt to the mortal world’s economic discipline. Plumbers didn’t accept enchanted apples as payment. For that matter, neither did most of the fey. Fairy gold was all well and good, but there was always a chance it would turn into acorns in your pocket. A bank transfer didn’t have that problem. Not after the first time a highborn of the Courts had their assets frozen for wire fraud.

Wolves didn’t have pockets, of course, but a plot to overthrow the Winter Court’s most powerful vassal had to involve people who did. Someone out there had been bribed, bought, or bullied into their part in it. That meant money had changed hands, and that should leave a trail of some sort.

Yet here Enid was to tell him there was nothing.

Somerset leaned forward and braced his elbows on the table. He cocked his head to the side.

“My brothers still bank there?” he asked.

Enid ran her finger around the collar of her shirt. Her eyes darted around the room shiftily, as if something might jump off the walls to get her out of this.

“I…I could lose my job over this,” she muttered. “There are rules. A lot of rules.”

Somerset raised an eyebrow. “Tell me,” he said. “Any of those rules about using forged credentials to get a job?”

Hot color flushed Enid’s face for a moment and then, just as quickly, drained back out of it. She was left pallid and queasy-looking.

“That’s not…” She stopped and twisted her hands together in her lap. Her knuckles pushed, white and bony, against scrubbed raw skin. “I paid for those. Fair and square. You can’t hold them over me forever.”

“Paid for,” Somerset agreed, “but not paid off. But that’s beside the point, because you’re talking about a debt. I was threatening you. Do you see the difference?”

He waited, and Enid glared at him, her mouth pinched tight shut to keep the words in. The deadlock didn’t last long, and Enid was the one who folded. Her shoulders slumped, and she looked down at her hands.

“Your brothers are still some of the bank’s ‘special clients,’” she admitted in a low, sour voice as she picked at her dirty nails. “Nothing has changed there, but there was none of the activity you asked me to look for. No large transactions, no regular withdrawals, and no new payees on the accounts.”

Somerset scowled. It wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear .

“Nothing out of the ordinary?” he pushed.

Enid choked out a not-that-amused laugh. “Plenty by my standards,” she said. “All I deal with are business loans and people losing their house, not arms dealers and payoffs. But nothing your brothers hadn’t paid for before.”

The coffee hadn’t cut it. Somerset leaned back and reached for the drawer where he kept the whiskey. He pulled a bottle out, twisted the cap off, and poured a generous shot into his cup. The smell that seeped out of the bottle was of snow, hot milk, and frost-slow honey.

Enid licked her lips and swallowed. Her throat made a dry click as she did so.

Somerset didn’t offer her a drink.

“We all have hobbies,” he said as he put the bottle away. He pushed the drawer shut with his knee. “What about Jars? What transactions went through for him?”

He took a swig of the whiskey. Enid watched him with a thirst that went beyond the physical. The taste of home—stews brewed with fey meat, whiskey touched with blood magic and bee magic, fabrics stitched together with magic and silver—was an expensive indulgence in the mortal world. Somerset should know, since he was one of the people who set the price. Most of the unCourted couldn’t afford it. Enid certainly couldn’t.

“I am not supposed to even have access to these accounts,” she said after she cleared her throat. “I didn’t note down every penny handed out. Just, like you said, anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing.”

“There’s something,” Somerset said. “You’ve just not found it yet. Look deeper. Find out what the Pole spent its money on last year.”

Dismay weighed on Enid like chains. She shrunk down in the chair.

“If I’m caught, I’ll lose my job. If I’m caught, I’ll have your brothers after me,” she pointed out. “I’d be better off if I just let you ruin me now.”

Somerset smirked at her. “Trust me,” he said. “You’re wrong. I—”

Before he could finish what he was about to say, someone rapped their knuckles on the door. They didn’t wait for a response before they pushed it open and stuck their head in. Dark red hair stuck up in unruly tangles around a sharp, bony face.

“Boss?” Gull said.

He didn’t look like the words tasted like shit in his mouth. Like everything else since Gull had been discharged from Belling Memorial, it rang true. He didn’t remember his name, his brothers, or even what he was. By all accounts, both Courts were desperate to find out why, in case it wasn’t a geas or a curse but just some sort of…infectious mortality he’d picked up in the ward.

So far Jars had been a diplomatic barrier between Gull and the sharp-fingered scholars of the Courts. Whether he remembered it or not, he was a Yule Lad, and they were the only ones who got to kill their own. That was why Gull had a job at the Just-as-High , despite being a shit barman. If anyone refused to accept Jars’s soft refusal, they’d have to deal with Somerset’s more direct approach.

That and it let Somerset keep an eye on Gull, just in case his brother was more patient than anyone had given him credit for…or remembered something useful in time for Christmas.

“What?” Somerset snapped in annoyance.

Gull looked apologetic, but that didn’t unbreak the tension that Somerset had built up with Enid. He hesitated to either come or go, until Somerset growled under his breath in annoyance and gestured for Gull to come on in.

Gull pushed the door open, but stayed on the threshold. He stuck both hands in the pockets of his jeans and shifted his weight absently from one foot to the other.

“There’s someone outside for you,” he said finally, after a glance at Enid.

“Who?”

Gull shrugged. “Short guy, motorbike leathers,” he said. “Seems like a dick.”

It was a shorthand of a description, but it still worked.

Stúfur. Who else.

Somerset pushed back from the desk and stood up. He pulled his jacket off the back of the chair in one absent movement and shrugged it on.

“What does he want?” he asked.

Gull looked caught off guard by the question. He widened his eyes and then shook his head. “I don’t know. He just said to…um…get off your ass?”

Twelve. That was how many brothers Somerset had. Thirteen Yule Lads. And yet none of the ones he liked could be trusted not to have broken their oath to Yule and betrayed Santa.

Name the ones you like , a stray voice in the back of his brain nudged him, go on, I’ll wait.

Somerset ignored that.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “Tell him to wait. ”

Gull looked uncertain, but nodded and stepped back out of the room. He left the door open as he headed back into the bar. Somerset ran a finger around his neck to adjust the collar of his coat and looked at Enid.

“Where were we?” he asked.

“You were going to threaten me,” she said with a shard of bitter defiance in her voice.

He had been. Maybe he needed to reconsider his approach.

“Do I need to? You know I make a bad enemy,” he said. There was no reason to reinvent the wheel, after all. “But a fair enough friend. You might want to think about which is going to benefit you more.”

He reached down and opened the drawer with the whiskey in it. The bottle was over three-quarters empty. That was, Somerset judged as he lifted it out, about the right amount for a gesture. He unscrewed the cap and poured it into the cup, then pushed it over the desk.

“Someone in Yule has to have paid someone off,” he said. “Find it.”

Enid had the good sense to hesitate, but she’d been away from home a long time. The smell of blood and liquor wore her down, and she reached greedily for the cup.

“I can’t promise anything,” she said as she wrapped her hands around the glazed white sides. Her fingers left smudges of grease on it, and her nails were visibly dirtier. Grease bloomed in the creases of her knuckles. “But I’ll look…as soon as I can.”

“Before Christmas Eve,” Somerset told her.

Enid’s face fell, and she spluttered out the start of an objection. Somerset didn’t bother to wait to hear what it was. He could probably guess if he had to. Instead he left her to her whiskey and closed the door of the office behind him.

It turned out that when Gull had said “outside” he’d meant on the street.

Stúfur was parked at the curb. He straddled his matte-black bike—an almost identical replacement to the one destroyed last Christmas—with one booted foot braced on the road and his helmet between his thighs.

“We have a problem,” he said as Somerset joined him .

The chill wind pinched Somerset’s cheeks affectionately and tangled his coattails around his legs. He put his hands in his pockets and glanced around casually to see if there was any sign of their other brothers.

“Just one?” Somerset said dryly. “What are you doing here? I thought you were scheduled for duty tonight.”

Before he could get an answer, Gull came out of the bar and tossed a bottle of water to Stúfur, who caught it out of the air in a gloved hand. Somerset turned to give Gull a level look, which made the man swallow hard and disappear back inside. Irritating as his memory loss was in the search for who’d killed the previous Santa, an intact Gull would never be so accommodating. Stúfur ignored the interaction as he dug his nails into the plastic and pulled the top off the bottle, spilling water over his hands and knees. He took a swig and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“I am,” he said. “So by rights, I’m on Jars’s time. You rather I went to him?”

He cocked an eyebrow as he took another drink and waited for an answer. Somerset grabbed the end of the bottle and squeezed until the plastic crumpled in his hand. Stúfur choked and spluttered as the water shot into his mouth and sprayed out of his mouth. He slapped Somerset’s hand out of his face as he doubled over and coughed the liquid back up.

“If you’re on duty,” Somerset said, “where the fuck is Dylan?”

Stúfur pulled his T-shirt up to wipe his face, material balled up in his hand as he pulled it over his mouth. He sat back and gave Somerset a mocking look.

“See, that sounds like personal, not professional, concern,” he said. “I thought we’d agreed to put that on the back burner.”

Somerset choked down his knee-jerk insult. They had. There was a good reason for it, as well. Yule was the Winter Court’s most powerful vassal, but that alliance wasn’t always free of friction. Santa was mortal. Yule wouldn’t accept less. That had always been a hard pill to swallow for the hidebound and highborn, especially when the mortal was a wild card like Dylan Hollie.

It would not help for them to find out that he shared Somerset’s bed. He’d gotten his hands dirty on their behalf far too often for them to want him whispering sweet nothings in Santa’s ear.

Somerset mentally grabbed his attention by the scruff of the neck to stop it from wandering off after that mental image. He acknowledged Stúfur’s point as much as he was going to with one small correction.

“Where the fuck is Santa.”

Stúfur pulled his helmet from between his thighs and pulled it back on. From behind the polarized visor, his voice was grim.

“Demre and Hill,” he said, “the Winter Court’s bankers.”

“Shit,” Somerset gritted out between clenched teeth. “Why the hell did you let him—”

“You can’t even stop him riding your cock,” Stúfur said. “How am I supposed to stop him doing whatever he wants? Are you coming?”

Somerset gritted his teeth. They didn’t have time to fight. It would take too long for Stúfur’s legs to mend. He reached into his pocket and grabbed the keys to his pickup.

“Lead the way,” he said.

“It wasn’t a Christmas party,” Lucas Underhill, the COO of the firm and adopted son of the founder, said dismissively as he turned his back on Somerset. Lucas was human…enough, a changeling reared by the Courts to serve as a go-between with what they needed of the mortal world. Finance. Trade. Property. The Courts had always kept them. Lucas brushed a tangled ball of paper strips onto the floor and shut a drawer. “We just had an end of year celebration. Not that I should have to answer to the likes of you. You’re unCourted. You’re nothing.”

“That’s under review,” Somerset said. He looked around the offices. Not that he really needed to. Office Christmas parties were just another ritual—with drink and effigies and the sacrifice of the occasional marriage. He could smell the Yule magic in the air as it seeped from the hastily denuded fir tree in the middle of the office and curdled in the half-drained shot glasses of eggnog. The point was to see how hard Demre and Hill tried to sell the lie. He ran his gaze over the wrapping paper shoved into waste baskets around the room and the single crumpled paper crown left on a chair.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked with interest as he prowled along through the office after the man.

Dismissive or not, Lucas had enough sense to know that was a dangerous question. He stopped his half-hearted tidy and turned around to face Somerset.

“That’s…I…we are under the Winter Court’s protection.” He tried to visibly puff himself up with the change of subject, but Somerset didn’t know who the display was for. It didn’t fool him. Even Lucas looked like he could feel how thin his bluster was. “It’s a violation of our treaties for Yule to set foot on our territory without—”

Somerset leaned over and plucked the sprig of mistletoe from the lapel of the Santa coat. He twiddled it idly between his fingers as he said, “Invitation?”

Lucas pressed his mouth together, his lips pinched together in a thin, unhappy line.

Somerset flicked the sprig away.

“Where did he go?” he asked.

There was a pause, and then Lucas took a deep breath and visibly tried a different approach.

“The wolf is not our problem,” he said. “It wasn’t invited—who would?—and we might have broken the rules with—”

“Laws,” Somerset corrected mildly. It was a much bigger word than rules, and came from a less flexible time. The Winter Court might benefit from Yule, but it didn’t bend the knee to it or its trappings. That had been enshrined between them almost as long as the Yule Lads’ service to Santa had been.

“Laws,” Lucas conceded. His confidence slipped a little with the interruption. It took him a second to pull it back together. When he had he brushed a speck of something off his sleeve and shrugged. “But technically the party was for the mortal employees, not for those of us with other loyalties. It was all fine until the wolf got here. Once it saw the decorations, it kicked over the buffet table and started to threaten us. It had a pregnant woman with it and left her behind, so we had to deal with her as well. Why was the wolf even on this side? Who called it—”

“We can come back to the wolf,” Somerset interrupted him, and they would. “You called the paramedics?”

Lucas heaved an annoyed sigh and smoothed his hair back from his face. “Someone did, and then I had to deal with them.”

“Where are they?”

“I…what?” Lucas spluttered. He wrinkled his nose as he huffed, “I don’t know. I don’t care . They got the woman and left. That’s all I wanted. Are we done here? I feel Yule’s invitation is running thin.”

“Good thing I’m still unCourted then,” Somerset said and grabbed the collar of the man’s jacket.

He dragged him over to what was left of the buffet.

“We saw them come in,” he said. “We didn’t see them leave. ”

Lucas flailed around inelegantly inside his coat. He tried to grab at Somerset’s wrist and claw at his fingers.

“Get off me!” he said. “How dare you, what do you think—”

Somerset dunked him face first in a platter of seafood. He held him there as the man coughed and choked on the salt and spiced flesh. A shrimp fell off the edge of the plate, and Somerset grabbed it with his free hand and tossed it in his mouth.

He’d missed dinner.

As he chewed on the tender flesh he pulled the COO upright again.

“What way—”

“They took the other exit.”

It wasn’t Lucas, oysters jammed in his nostrils and eyes streaming from the sting of lemon, who answered. Somerset turned his head to look at the heavy-set man with the scarred knuckles who’d come out of the back office.

“There’s another exit?” he said.

The man nodded as he pulled a cap out of the pocket of his coat and pulled it on over his close-cropped hair. The red brim if it came down past his ears.

“I can show you.”

Somerset let Lucas go. The man staggered back, hit the table, and slid to the ground. He spat out some parsley and picked the meat from his nose.

“I’m going to kill them,” Somerset muttered under his breath. He looked at the redcap. “Lead the way.”

Lucas threw a chunk of raw fish across the floor. It skipped on the flat carpet tiles and rolled under someone’s chair. “Why do you care?” he demanded. “They’re just mortals . A dime a dozen, for fuck’s sake. Easily replaced if they’re your pets.”

Somerset held up a finger at the redcap to buy himself a moment. Then he bent over and grabbed the front of Lucas’ shirt to haul him back to his toes. They were nose to nose as Somerset leaned in.

“Piss me off more,” he warned, “and we’ll see how long it takes your patron to replace you.”

Lucas curled his mouth into a sneer. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said confidently. “My mother would never allow it.”

“Who’s going to tell her?” Somerset said. He let go of Lucas with a shove that sent the other man staggering into the buffet table. “People disappear into the cold all the time. They always have. ”

Lucas caught himself, his hand in a plate of eggs, and glared at Somerset.

“I have friends,” he said. “Important friends.”

Somerset smirked as he turned to go. “Liar,” he tossed over his shoulder as he followed the redcap toward the fire escape.

“The wolf came with the woman?” he asked as they headed down the narrow, bare concrete stairwell.

The redcap looked over his shoulder for a second and then nodded. “It didn’t want to leave without her either,” he said and frowned. “What would a wolf want with a pregnant woman? It’s not like they have a taste for mortal meat.”

Somerset grimaced.

“I don’t think they were here for her,” he said. “The paramedic who came for her—”

“He’s one of Yule’s,” the redcap interrupted. “You can smell it on him.”

“He is Yule,” Somerset corrected him grimly. “That was Santa, St. Nick himself.”

The redcap took a moment to absorb that.

“I should have told him what I wanted for Christmas,” he wisecracked eventually.

“Why?” Somerset asked skeptically. “You been good?”

“Doing pretty good tonight,” the redcap pointed out.