“You are kind of annoying,” Stúfur said. He chewed on a stick of cinnamon he’d unearthed from the larder.
Ket rolled his eyes. “He means they died. That’s what mortals do.”
“What? Die?”
“No. Well, yes. But they act like they don’t.”
It was actually better than sympathy. Dylan ignored the interruption and pressed on.
“They were on their way back,” he explained, with a brief, hard look at Stúfur. “But they hit something–probably a deer, from the damage to the car—and drove off the road. It was winter, and the car ended up in a snowbank. Even when people went out to look for them, it took a while to find them, and by then, they were dead. We didn’t have any family in the area so I stayed with our neighbor while they looked for someone to take custody. There was no one. They couldn’t find a single relative. Until one night, an old man came to the neighbor’s door. He told her he was my grandfather. I don’t know why she believed him.”
“Because he was Santa,” Ket said. “Who is going to call Santa a liar.”
Stúfur punched his brother in the arm. “I was going to say that.”
“But you didn’t,” Ket said as he rubbed his arm.
“So what happened then?” Somerset asked. “After your grandfather knocked on the door?”
This part had always stung. “He gave me the watch,” Dylan said. It was his first memory. The only one he had of his family. Except it wasn’treallya memory of his grandfather, was it? It was of the watch, cold in Dylan’s fat baby hands as he clutched it. “He told me it was mine now… or that it would be one day. I guess it was like an inheritance I had to take care of for him. Then he left. I ended up in care, then the army, then here.”
Stúfur sucked air in through his teeth. “Ghosted by Santa,” he said. “You must have been one unappealing toddler. I mean, if even Santa can’t love you—”
Somerset growled. “Shut up.”
“He’s not wrong,” Dylan said. It still hurt, but it was better when he was the one hurting himself. “There’s about a dozen foster families that would back him up.”
“That’s because you aren’t human. Our children always make humans uncomfortable,” Somerset said. When Dylan spluttered, he pointed out, “You just met your grandmother.”
Dylan’s mouth was already open to argue. The words stuck in his throat as he turned to stare at Somerset.
His grandmother…
That was a lot of feelings. Even before he factored in that she’d, maybe, thought about eating him. It felt like he was so full of emotion that he might puke. Dylan didn’t have the time to work out what any of those feelings were right now. So he balled them up and shoved them behind something else to think about.
“It was the only thing I had,” Dylan said. “The watch. That’s why I came back here the other night. I thought it had… I mean, it had fallen out of my pocket when I was punched. The bar was locked up, so I couldn’t get it, and then I found your brother. He gave me a watch that looked almost identical, just a bit older.”
Stúfur made an aggrieved noise and pinched his nose.
“It still doesn’t make any sense,” he grumbled. “Why would he do that? Where did the fake watchwehad come from? What was the—”
Ket cleared his throat. “We all assumed he was too old to come into his knack,” he said. “But if he had… his line descended from a toymaker Santa. And if he was married to a witch, he might have—heshould have—known more about the old magic than he seemed to.”
“And no one else ever thought of that?” Stúfur asked, one eyebrow cocked up. “In all the Court.”
“Why would they?” Somerset asked. “He was a placeholder. The factions couldn’t come to an agreement on who’d be the next Santa, and they weren’t going to before Christmas Eve. Two whole lines of Sainted had been wiped off the face of the earth. That’s why I stepped in… before we tore ourselves apart. But the Santa I brought to the Sleigh was an old man. Even with the Yule magic, he’d have fifty years at most. He had no ambitions. No favorites. None of the Court bothered to try to curry favor with him because he was only ever there until one of them thought they could force throughtheirchoice for the next Santa.”
Stúfur laced both hands behind his head, interlocked fingers wrapped around his skull. He stared at Dylan and then slowly grinned.
“The cunning old bastard,” he said. “He did an end run around them, and no one ever suspected because no other Santa would have done it. He gave the regalia to his heirbeforehe died.”
Dylan glanced around the table. This was exactly what he’d not wanted to hear.
“And I’ll do the same,” he said. “I’ll give it to someone else. Pick a Santa. Any Santa. I don’t care—.”
Stúfur shook his head. “That won’t work.”
“It just did,” Dylan protested.
