“Me.”
He hadn’t swallowed as much anger as he’d thought. The rough-voiced statement hung in the car between them. From the corner of his eye, he saw Dylan shift closer to the door, away from Somerset. It was something he usually appreciated—when your job was to be the scariest bastard in the room, people being afraid of you was like a commendation—but not from Dylan.
He swallowed again, harder this time, and tried to soften the roughness of what he’d said.
Of who he was.
“Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t. I told you, the watch is yours until you hand it to the next Santa. The Wolves won’t take it without you.” The town had started to fall away behind them as he headed into the outskirts of Belling. Snowmen peered beadily out of their yards, and lights strung up on fences glowed dully through a crust of ice. “Besides, you don’t want to. The regalia won’t let you want to.”
Dylan frowned. He reached down to his hip pocket and then pulled his hand away.
“What are you?” he asked.
It was the natural question to ask, Somerset supposed. Dylan couldn’t know it was a… not a raw spot, but at least a tender one. Still.
There had been a time when the answer would have been easy. He’d been a Yule Lad, second in command of Santa’s personal guard, and the fat man’s own favorite bodyguard.
That had been enough. Nobody had needed to ask anything else.
Until that Santa died along with his named heir, and the Second Succession crisis had nearly broken Yule in half. In the end, though, the only thing it broke was Somerset. It had left him…
“Nothing,” Somerset said. “Not anymore.”
“I don’t understand…” Dylan trailed off and turned away to scowl out the window. His shoulders were hunched and tight. “I don’t like any of this.”
Somerset reached out and cupped his hand around the back of Dylan’s neck. The contact made Dylan flinch again, and for a second Somerset thought…
He didn’t know what it was.
For a hot moment, it felt like he’d broken something important… and hadn’t enjoyed it. Not a feeling he was used to.
Then Dylan muttered, “Jesus, your hands are freezing.”
Somerset took his eyes off what he could see of the road long enough to look over. He supposed they were. His fingers were white-gray from the middle knuckle up, and his fingernails looked bruise blue. When he flexed them idly, the stiff pads pressing against the bands of muscle on either side of Dylan’s spine, it didn’t hurt. He could feel the crackle of ice in the joints and the little cracks from earlier.
He favored his father physically—or that’s what he’d always assumed, at least, since he’d been stew long before Somerset was born—but his mother’s blood always showed itself when he tapped into her power. As prices went, it was an unusually mild one.
Tonight, though, it made him squirm a little. He didn’t want Dylan to see him as… well, as what he was, he supposed.
“They’ll warm up,” he said as he took his hand back. “And trust me, you won’t remember any of this by next Christmas.”
Dylan gave Somerset a dubious look. “Because… magic?”
Not exactly. Magic was something leveraged to act on something else. The forgetting that smoothed over the torn edges when humans stumbled into the other world was more like the callus that formed on a broken bone to stitch it back together. It took a lot of exposure before anything stuck as more than a daydream or a creeping unease.
Detective Lund didn’t know how much she’d forgotten about the underbelly of Belling.
That was his mother’s influence as well, though. She was, alongside everything else, a pedant. For the sake of tonight…
“Yeah,” Somerset said. “Magic.”
The last time Somerset had come out here, the old rowan tree at the end of the drive had been a sapling. Now it was tall and scarred, the spread of its branches dipped under the weight of fresh fall. Somerset could feel its disapproval as he drove under it, a slow, green hate.
Lots of things hated him, though. Most had better reason.
Dylan shifted forward in his seat to squint at the sign, half obscured with a crust of ice.
“Claws Out Reindeer Farm,” he read out loud. “That’s a weird name.”
