“It’s OK,” Alice told her as she crossed in front of the Wolves. “You’re going to be all right. I need you to stay calm.”
Lund took a shaky breath and looked at them with huge, shocked eyes. Her mouth twitched.
“It took me… thirty minutes… to get here,” she gritted out. “From the hospital.”
A Wolf stepped in front of Dylan when he went to follow Alice. Briars had grown from its ears, blood on the dry, woody stems, and worked themselves into a rough, matted crown. His eyes were the clean, orange-red of an oak leaf in fall.
“First. Where is it?”
Dylan’s face crumpled in frustrated despair. He shoved both hands through his hair. “I don’t know!” he said. “I told you! I don’t know what happened to Santa.”
“You told us,” the Wolf said. He showed thorn teeth in a cold smile and poked a sharp stick-finger against Dylan’s chest. “But you’re lying.”
Dylan shook his head. “What?” he protested. “I didn’t even know he was realuntil—”
The Wolf rolled those oak-leaf eyes in annoyance and interrupted. “You hold the regalia,” He walked around Dylan and poked at him from different angles, in his ribs and the back of his neck. “I can smell it on you—mistletoe, order, and obligation.”
Dylan reached for the hard lump of the watch in his jeans, but it was gone. He remembered the weight of Somerset’s coat over his shoulders and him slipping it into the pocket. His mouth was so dry that it hurt to swallow. He glanced at Lund, whose skin had gone sallow, almost ashy.
There was no time to try and figure out the rules the Wolves worked by. He would just have to treat it like a call gone bad. The same protocols. Talk down the aggressors, treat the injured, and try and keep everyone calm.
“I lost it,” he said. “The watch.”
The Wolf looked confused and maybe even slightly horrified. “That doesn’t happen,” he said. “The watch would make you keep it close. It woulditchat you to be away from it.”
“I am itching,” Dylan said. “Inside. It fell out of my pocket when Somerset sent me away from the fight. Let me help her, and I’ll tell you where to find it.”
The Wolf narrowed his eyes and then glanced at the other Wolf. The third Wolf, the one Dylan had broken, groaned and kicked at the shelves from one of the aisles. On the mend, then. That was one thing off Dylan’s conscience. After a moment, the Wolf who maybe should have been getting married today, leaned in to sniff Dylan’s throat.
“Why should we trust you?”
“I don’t care about the Court or Santa or what happened to him,” Dylan said. “I want to get us—me and them—out of this intact.”
The Wolves contemplated that too.
“Do it,” the head Wolf said. He poked a hook-thorned finger up Dylan’s nose and lifted, the sting of it enough to bring a tear to Dylan’s eye as he tilted his head back. “If you try and trick us, I’ll take you back to Winter with us. You’ll die… one day, and you’ll die cold.”
He stepped back, out of the way.
Dylan scrambled over to Lund’s side and crouched down next to Alice. She had both hands pressed to Lund’s stomach as she waited for him. Once he was there, she lifted her hands so he could see the wound punched through Lund’s stomach, just over her hip.
It could have been worse. It could have been better.
Dylan grabbed a handful of napkins and shoved them against the wound. “We’ll get out of this,” he told her as he reached around to pack the exit wound. ‘I promise. Do you believe me?”
Lund smiled thinly. Her lips were paler than the rest of her skin, and her eyes didn’t look focused.
“I’ll try.”
Dylan let Alice take over applying pressure to the wound while he went to scavenge what supplies he could under the Wolves' impatient disinterest. Gauze patches and bandages duct taped to her ribs and back like she was going to be shipped somewhere. There was a chance it would be enough.
“Are you satisfied?” the lead Wolf said. He bent over Dylan’s shoulder, the dry leaves on his briar crown scratchy where they brushed Dylan’s face, and sniffed Lund’s hair. “She’s stopped dying. We kept our deal. Where is the watch?”
Dylan shifted away from the Wolf, at least so it wasn’t touching him. He nudged Alice, who was monitoring the half-conscious Lund. Having something to do other than look at the Wolves seemed to have helped her.
“I need your phone,” he said. She looked dubious but then pointed her chin down toward her pocket. He fished the sensibly cased iPhone out and unlocked it after a few passes in front of her face.
“We’ll need to take the detective’s car,” he said as he stood up. The Wolves wrinkled their faces in disdain, and he defended his call. “You might have run here. I can’t.”
