Chapter Seven

A few minutes later, an announcer calls for all racers to mount their sleighs, and there’s a brief moment of chaos in the tent as a dozen or so people shuffle out into the cold.

Kris tosses the rest of an iced cookie into his mouth and straightens his hat. “See you at the finish line.”

“I’ll make sure they keep it up for you,” I say.

He grabs his stomach and pantomimes laughter. “This guy. So funny. Try not to fall off the sleigh laughing.”

He says it to Hex. Who has been standing with us as we picked at the buffet, those intense eyes taking in everything around us with silent, patient care.

At Kris’s words, Hex sets down his untouched plate of food. “Fall off the sleigh? Is that a true possibility?”

“Coal will not let you fall off,” says Iris, punctuating the words at me, and I throw up my hands.

“I make no such promises.”

“Is this race… safe?” It’s a simple enough question, but asked with reservation, it rings with concern that he must not have intended to let slip. He quickly clears his throat.

I don’t want to lie to him, but Iris says, “Yes” at the same time Kris goes, “Meh.”

She glares at him. “It’s safe. The whole track is well-lit, and even if you fall, it’s in snow.”

“Or a tree,” Kris mumbles.

Iris swats his arm.

Hex makes a low hum. “I see.”

“Racers, to your marks!” the announcer calls a final time.

I draw on every ounce of my seemingly limitless cocky confidence to face Hex and crook my arm for him. “Shall we?”

He studies Iris. The crowd in the tent. The reporters stationed around the stable yard.

“You don’t have to,” I add, arm dropping, voice coming in a tight gush. “I’m good at getting out of responsibilities. My services are at your disposal.”

But Hex shakes his head. “No. I won’t back down.”

That’s… loaded. I almost push him, but he waves for me to lead the way.

I trail Kris out of the tent, Hex behind me, and we part ways at the sleighs.

“Remember,” I call after my brother. “There’s no need to throw a tantrum when you lose. Everyone gets a participation trophy.”

Kris smiles sweetly at me in a way that’s more unnerving than if he’d snapped back with something cutting.

“The fuck?” I frown at him.

“Oh, I just don’t need to exert energy on any more trash-talking. My skills will speak for themselves.”

“Yeah—well—damn it. You took the fun out of it.”

He laughs and jumps up into his sleigh with a parting middle finger.

I take a second to pat the reindeer attached to mine. Being away at school so much means the actual care and training of our reindeer is left to staff, but when we are here, Kris and I both try to stay involved. And even though this guy didn’t lead me to victory last year—or the year before—when he paws at the ground and pushes his nose into my shoulder in recognition, I scratch behind his ears.

“Don’t try to butter me up,” I mutter, but he nudges me again, and I smirk.

“Which one is this?” Hex is next to me. A respectful distance between us.

“Which one what?”

“The song? Dasher, Dancer—”

I laugh. A fog of steam hits the cold air. “They’re not all named after that. We’d have like a dozen reindeer named Blitzen.”

“Ah.” The redness on Hex’s cheeks deepens. Is he… embarrassed?

Holy hell, that’s cute.

God, I’m in trouble.

I vault up into the sleigh and flip on the space heater that’ll make it bearable to be out in the arctic weather.

Hex stays below me for a beat. “They don’t… this is a race on the ground, yes?”

“Oh—god, you thought we were flying?” His reservations make more sense now. “No, I swear. We’re forbidden from using magic during the race—ask me how I know.”

My cheesy grin does nothing to soothe him, his neutral expression taking on an unamused twist.

I sober. “All four hooves stay on the ground. I promise.”

He considers. His lips tighten, the color draining slightly under the way he bites them into his mouth.

“What?” I ask, making a concerted effort to not let my gaze linger on his lips again.

“I’m trying to decide if a promise from you has merit.”

“You think I’d lie about the sleigh flying?”

“Yes.” No pause. “Are we or are we not contenders in an alliance with Easter?”

My chin jerks back. “And that means I have it out for you during a sleigh race?”

He gives a stiff shrug, and something tugs in my chest.

“You don’t think very highly of me, do you? Or is it my Holiday in general?” Please be my Holiday in general, not just me.

That would explain why he’s acting like being around me is morally offensive, though—he kissed me, realized I’m a disaster of a human being, and passionately regrets it. Awesome. But why did he admit to initiating the kiss at all, then? He didn’t have to say anything about it.

What is the point of having a Yale education if I can’t figure out shit like this?

Hex’s shoulders droop. His eyes cut around again, at the other racers mounted and ready, at the photographers off to the side.

“Your parents went back to—Mexico, was it?” I ask.

Hex nods.

“And they left you here?”

“I can handle Christmas. They’re needed back home.”

“Is everything okay?”

He looks up at me for another of those long, searching moments. There’s a pucker on his face, distaste maybe? But when I give no change in expression, he frowns.

It hits me in a lightning bolt. Of course everything isn’t okay—he was forced here into a possible arranged marriage. But… Halloween should be happy about this? God, I don’t know how Dad keeps all these lies straight and I go stiff with not being sure what to do with my body.

“It’s our yearly summit,” he says like he’s testing the water for my reaction. “They’re more useful there than posing for photos and participating in… death races.”

“It isn’t a death race. But—summit? Shouldn’t you be there for that?”

“Not necessarily. There will be dozens of people in attendance from Halloween, and all the autumn Holidays, like my mother’s—but the look on your face tells me you have no idea what I’m speaking of. Does Christmas never strategize with the other winter Holidays?”

“We have our noble houses. And Easter, I guess. But we’ve never really had any other Holidays we’d consider equals.”

Hex looks mildly annoyed. “And equality is only measured in joy and assets?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“But it’s what you meant. Christmas has never seen anyone else as an equal, because anyone close to being your equal is deemed a threat first.”

“No—that’s not—I mean, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? A partnership .” But as soon as I say it, my gut sinks. No, he’s not here because Christmas sees any kindred spirit in his Holiday—it’s exactly what Hex said. Dad views them as a threat, so we’re lying to them until we can outmaneuver them.

He sucks in a breath. “Well. The point is, I am here because I can handle this month on my own.”

I steady on the edge of the sleigh and bend down. Hex flinches at the sudden close proximity.

But he doesn’t move away.

I stretch out my hand. “You aren’t here alone. Or at least, you don’t have to be.”

“You’re offering me support?” His tone is flat with skepticism.

I shrug, hand still out towards him. “Why not?”

“We are set up in direct opposition. At the first sign of divided loyalties, you would immediately side with Christmas, and I with Halloween.”

I could be imagining things, but I’m starting to realize that he’s never actually said he wants to win over Iris. He phrases it purely from the angle of the competition itself, with an irritated tone, and I don’t know why that seems important, but I cling to it.

“Is that your way of saying, I’m not here to make friends ?” I ask, cranking up the sarcasm.

That eyebrow of his could cut through solid rock. “You joke, but this situation is complicated, and no, I did not come here to make friends. Thank you, Prince Nicholas, but we both well know where our allegiances stand.”

“Fair. You don’t trust me, and you don’t have to. I get that you’re here for shitty reasons and this whole situation is fucked up.” I try another smile. “I’m not asking for us to swear fealty to one another above king and country, Prince Hex.”

There’s a spark in his eyes, a burning ember of amusement he can’t fully smother under his annoyance.

My grin widens. “I’m saying we can take it one moment at a time.” One by one by one, I almost add, almost repeat what he said to me all those months ago, but I can’t, can’t let him know I think about that conversation as much as I do. “Start by letting me help you into the sleigh.”

Hex’s gaze goes to my gloved hand. “And then?”

I wait until he looks back up at me. The impact of his eyes is quickly becoming a necessity, a tangible, violent connection that feels predatory and consuming, sends a shiver walking dazedly down my spine. Does he look at everyone with this level of intensity? How does he not have trailing worshippers foaming at the mouth for him to glance at them?

There’s a moment where I think maybe he realizes the effect his attention has on me. The power he wields, unintentionally or not.

He watches me, a muscle jumping on his cheekbone.

“And then,” I echo, “we take off on a merry little death race.”

He rolls his eyes.

“I’m kidding. And then we take a lovely, brisk sleigh ride that might go fast at points. We don’t have to think too far beyond that. Just right now.”

My voice lowers, the pressure of his eyes pushing down on my volume until I’m trapped under that destructive intensity. Hex sways closer to hear me, so I hear when he swallows, a sharp click in his throat.

He sniffs. Straightens. “Fine.”

He takes my offering. He’s wearing black fingerless gloves, totally inappropriate for being in the snow, and I grip his hand and haul him up next to me. He lands in the sleigh and sways as it rocks and I don’t get a chance to move, worried he’ll topple back over the edge—so he’s close, as close as he was in the alley outside the bar.

His body presses the full length of mine, warm and solid in the chill air. He’s shorter than me, my chin at his temple, and it puts me at the perfect angle to see the palpitation of a vein that runs down the side of his neck.

I linger. Just enough to feel that I linger, and awareness rips through me in a serrated torrent.

My hand spasms around his fingers and I release him with a lurch backwards, putting space between us so abruptly Hex’s eyes burst wide in alarm. He doesn’t say anything, though, just jerks his hand to his side.

He’s made it clear; he doesn’t trust me. Doesn’t even like me.

I will not make his time here harder than it has to be. That includes but is not limited to drooling on him. Obviously.

The other sleighs are rolling towards the starting line and I grab the reins and snap to follow.

Hex comes up alongside me. There’s a bench seat, but he stands like I do, balancing against our sleigh’s curved front with a good foot of distance between us.

Fucking hell, I don’t think I’ve ever been more aware of the space between me and another person in my life. For something that is technically nothing, it sure is taking up a lot of room in my thoughts.

Hex breaks the silence first. “So what’s the reindeer’s name?”

“Oh. Yeah. Sven,” I say.

There’s a pause.

Then he laughs.

I’ve always been hypnotized by seeing joy on people, and I thought it was because of who I am, a Holiday prince and all, and so I don’t usually question it, and just revel in it. When Kris laughs. When Iris laughs. When I crack a joke and they roll their eyes but I know they’re grinning.

But the shattering crash of Hex’s laugh demands every ounce of my attention so urgently, so aggressively, that I have a full-on crisis. It’s as deep as his voice, husky and warm, but there’s an added layer of roughness to it like he doesn’t do it enough and his throat is unfamiliar with the motions.

Every single one of those instances when I thought I was hypnotized by seeing joy on other people, I’d been searching, searching specifically for his joy. Because now that I’ve experienced it, it renders all past joy obsolete.

Hex wipes a hand down his face and settles, but a smirk remains on his lips, a slight curl, just there.

“What’s so funny?” I ask, winded.

“Really? Sven?” He points across my body, at my brother in the sleigh next to us. “Kristoff?”

“Kristopher.”

“No. That’s what’s funny. Sven. Kristoff. Frozen ?”

I grin. “Really? That’s your sense of humor? Disney jokes?”

“You can’t deny the coincidence is amusing.”

“Yeah, I can, because I’m not eleven.”

Hex smiles at me, those full lips slightly crooked. “So the Christmas Prince has no opinion on whether he’d be Elsa or Anna?”

Is he bantering with me? My god, I think this guy is bantering with me.

“On your marks,” the announcer starts. “Ready—”

I rip off one of my gloves and let a pulse of magic flood my hand with snow. “Let it go, baby,” I say, and because I can, I wink, what the hell.

His smirk widens.

Then he sights something on my hand, and that smile freezes.

My nails. My black and orange nails, courtesy of Iris.

“Set—” the announcer bellows.

Reindeer stomp the ground up and down the row, the air misting with their anxious exhales. A few other racers whoop, but most are fixed in the concentration of the race.

I’m fixed on Hex.

On the way those eyes hit me when they rise back up.

“Not exactly Christmas colors,” he says. And he sounds winded now too, the same gust of missing air I’d felt when he’d laughed.

But I can’t read any emotion on him. Can’t discern any teasing or flirting or disdain. He’s in such delirious control of himself and it’s downright infuriating.

“GO!” A starter gun pops, and a dozen sleighs bolt into action.

“Shit.” I dust the snow off my palm and slam my glove back on to grab the reins and jolt Sven into action. He darts onto the track, second from last—Kris will never let me hear the end of this if I lose.

Hex grips the edge of the sleigh with both hands, but there’s tension in the air now. Again. Did it ever really leave? Were we flirting, or am I completely unable to read him?

But there’d been a moment.

A beat where he’d been smiling at me.

“Watch out!” Hex recoils as the sleigh in front of us veers towards an ice patch, and I narrowly avoid it by pulling Sven to the left.

“I got it!” I call back, the wind pelting us with icy cold.

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve been driving sleighs since I could walk.”

We lurch around a turn, taking it maybe a bit too fast.

“Since you could walk?” Hex clarifies.

“Don’t worry; I’ve only flipped a sleigh once—”

“ Once ?” Hex shrieks. His attention swings to me, back to the track, and he points frantically. “Branch! Branch !”

“I see it!”

“Do you? Turn —”

I obey, but I would have turned anyway, throwing us down the next arc of the track. We blow past two more sleighs, finally gaining ground, and I can see my brother up ahead.

I urge Sven faster, and he launches over the packed trail, the sleigh whooshing past evergreens that loom tall against the spotlights illuminating the track. This is racing; this is the reprieve, the true prize, this moment of pause, and I steal a glance at Hex.

He’s holding on to the edge, one elbow up to shield his face from the bite of the wind, but he—he’s smiling.

Oh, it’s on now.

I crack the reins. Sven ducks his head and pushes faster, leaving Kris in our snow-dust. My brother shouts something that gets lost in the speed, and I cackle as we pass him.

Up ahead, the track curves to the left, and I know there’s a bridge coming up—but I’ve taken that turn at faster speeds than this.

“Nicholas!” Hex shouts, and it’s the first time he’s said my name without any loaded title attached to it.

Something like that shouldn’t rattle me—but he grabs my arm. He grabs my arm, and he clamps down, and I forget where we are, what we’re doing, because he’s actively touching me. Through the layers of my sweater and coat, but it’s intentional, and my sight temporarily goes blank.

Sven turns, our sleigh careening on the track, and the whole thing dips too far left even for my liking. I yank the reins and at the last second, it rights itself, settling back onto the slick path.

The weight lifts from my arm.

Hex.

I twist to him—

But he’s gone.

He fell off the sleigh.

I yank the reins, hard. Sven rears up before slowing into a stilted canter but I leap off, the sleigh fishtailing. Horror drives my limbs faster than my brain can make a plan as I slide on the icy track, heart thrashing against my ribs like it’s trying to crack one of them.

“Hex!” I scramble back up the path. We have a few seconds, half a minute at most, until my brother catches up to us—if Hex landed on the track, there’s no way Kris will be able to stop in time without plowing over him.

Shit, shit, shit —

“HEX!” I’m running, eyes scrambling over the road, but there’s nothing, no prone body, no swath of black wool.

I spin, and—there. In a bank off the path that leads to one of the massive lights, a shadow has sunk down into the snow.

“ Hex !” I launch up the hill, tearing through snow like a madman, chest pinching tighter with each passing second of echoing, empty silence.

I drop to my knees in the snow and grasp into the sunken depression. An arm—that’s an arm. I pull, pull with everything in me.

And Hex bolts upright and slams a fistful of snow into my face.

My body goes stationary, stuck in the transition from being downright terrified to pummeled by a snowball.

I scrape the snow off and see Hex, red and wind-bitten and coated in snow, glaring at me, but it’s a light glare, a laughing glare.

“You lied,” he says simply, teeth clacking with cold.

“I—” My brain stutters. “I said it wouldn’t fly —”

“You threw me off the sleigh.”

“I did not! That’s the risk of sleigh racing!”

“You promised you wouldn’t do that.”

“I distinctly did not make that promise— Iris made that promise, and I agreed with Kris, that there’s a chance of it happening!” All the adrenaline crashes over me, breaks apart in a listing wave of relief. I can’t stop myself—I pat up his arm. “You’re all right?”

Hex heaves a sigh. “Pride, wounded. Freezing. But fine.” He bats snow off his sleeve. “If this is how you treat people to whom you offer support, remind me not to become your enemy.”

My hand gets to his shoulder. “But—you’re okay?”

Hex tips his head. His hair has broken out of its tie, falling around him in tangles of inky black. “I told you.”

“Say it.” I don’t mean to be demanding, I really don’t. I don’t mean to feel this way, this uncappable welling of protection, realizing how alone he is in the North Pole, how all the strain and stress in his life right now is totally out of my control to fix. All this magic, and I can’t stop what’s happening to him.

Hex leans forward, and the angle puts him so close that I can feel the heat of his exhale on my lips, a violent contrast to the cold air. It curls over my tongue, a diaphanous cloud, and even this subtle there-then-gone sizzle of his taste makes my eyelashes flutter.

“I’m all right,” he whispers. His gaze shifts through mine, rapid, rattled flickers of those black-lined depths, like he’s trying to read me but can’t, can’t make sense of something.

His eyes. Those eyes. They drop to my lips.

A lightning-fast bounce, then they’re up again, and I hadn’t known the limits of my own restraint until this moment.

A clatter of hooves breaks us apart. It breaks him apart—Hex shoves back and spins a flustered glance at the track.

I’m in a fog. My hand is on his shoulder. We’re in a snowbank but my body is all liquid fire. And it’s Kris approaching—just Kris, just my brother—but if it’d been anyone else, this position, the energy coming off us in waves, would have been hard to ignore.

Stumbling in the snow, I wobble to my feet and put a full yard between me and Hex.

Kris reins his sleigh up sharp, coasting down the turn before he looks back. “You all right?” he shouts.

I wave him off. “Yeah. Tumbled out. We’re good.”

Hex digs himself out of the snowbank. I should help him. I can’t bring myself to touch him. My hands clench and unclench uselessly at my sides, but Hex doesn’t make eye contact, and that drop of awareness feels like a reprimand.

I shouldn’t have let it go so far. I did that, touched him, hovered, breathing him in—

But he looked at my lips.

You weren’t the one who initiated it.

Hex and I claw our way down the snowbank as Kris smacks his reins and bolts off, dipping around our discarded sleigh. Two other riders fly past us before Hex and I are back in, kicking snow off our boots, but I feel the chill of it deep in my bones now.

Neither of us says anything the rest of the ride, and Iris is right; I do drive sedately.

Kris takes the win. I come in second to last. We all clap for Kris and I smile as he gets his photos, and then Dad gets into the pics too, and I can’t be the only one who notices that Kris’s whole demeanor changes.

Cameras flash.

Iris and Hex are next. A reporter calls for me too. “The two heirs! Photo, photo!”

My body moves, on autopilot since that moment in the snowdrift.

It’s all so fake. All of this, every second, it aches with how much of a mockery this is of anything real. But I find myself standing with my front against Hex’s back, him positioned towards Iris so I see him in profile, the harsh angle of his jaw, the dusting of snow still on the collar of his coat.

Everything around me reeks of fakeness. Except for him. And it’s crushing me, because he’s not real either, is he?

He deserves real. He deserves more than what we’re doing to him.