The wolf just grinned. Behind him, one of the other wolves—one of the two who’d remodeled the host into something akin to the form they wore on the other side—stepped almost delicately through the smashed window of the Starbucks. It slapped a flimsy table with a cheap metal base out of the way with a gnarled paw. The table flew into the wall, the edge of it buried in the plaster like a discus, and someone screamed.
“Yule thinks too much of itself,” the wolf said, contempt in his voice. “It always has.”
“The Courts would disagree,” Somerset said.
Stúfur prowled out of the dark to stand next to Somerset, the semiautomatic he’d drawn held low and against his thigh in one hand. A step behind came Ket, who fell in at Somerset’s other side. He rested his hand on the hook at his hip but didn’t free it yet.
The wolf looked disinterested. “The Courts think too much of themselves,” he said.
There was no need for a signal. The wolves just attacked as one. Somerset was thrown as the pack leader slammed into him. He landed on his back and skidded over the slick road for a few feet, the wolf on top of him as it tore chunks of his arms and shoulders with thorn-tipped fingers. Tufts of cashmere caught in the ragged claws and felted together with blood.
He’d liked that coat, too.
Somerset bared his teeth in a snarl and managed to free one arm enough to close his fingers around the wolf’s throat. The outside of it gave like flesh, but he could feel the other, stiffer structures underneath.
“You should have run,” thewolf said.
Somerset still half-expected Yule to give him a cold shoulder when he reached for its power. After all, he’d not done any of the requisite groveling or asking to see his status at the Winter Court reinstated. Apparently it didn’t matter. He was a Yule Lad, like it or not, and as long as he upheld his oath, then Yule would give him what he asked for.
Heat filled him, painful enough to scald, and scalded its way up his arm. Surprise widened the wolf’s eyes a second before he burst into flames, filling the air with the crackle of dry wood as it caught light. Fire licked at Somerset’s hair and singed the collar of his coat.
The wolf snarled and threw himself off Somerset. He rolled in the bloody snow to put himself out, bare hands lightly charred as it slapped at stray embers and sparks.
Somerset scrambled to his feet. He reached into his coat and pulled out his knives, the weight of them heavy and familiar in his hand. The biggest of the wolves saw him and tossed Ket aside. One half of its face had been harvested at Ket’s hook, branches hacked apart and ivy yanked from its moorings, It didn’t slow it down as it dropped its mutilated head and charged at Somerset.
The storm surged ahead of it on a cloud of ice splinters and a cold so deep even Somerset felt the bite of it. He squinted against it, prickles of blood drawn on his hands and lips, and braced himself. Before the wolf could hit him, Stúfur spun away from the mostly-human wolf he tussled with in an elegant turn. He swung the gun up in one smooth movement and fired.
The splutter of a semiautomatic should have echoed off the nearby buildings, but it dropped into the muffled still between the seconds. The bullets stitched viciously along the wolf’s side, splinters of wood and shredded greenery torn out if it, and knocked it off its feet.
It nearly did the same to Somerset as a stray bullet punched through his thigh.
The jolt of pain shot up into his groin and made him stagger, his leg suddenly weak under him. Somerset caught his balance, weight shifted to the other leg as he waited for the wound to knit, and shot an irritated look toward his brother.
“You can’t shoot the broadside of a barn!” he yelled at Stúfur. “Use a fucking knife.”
Stúfur gave him the finger, flipped the gun around to grab it by the barrel, and turned to pistol-whip the wolf as it tried to lunge past him to get to Dylan.
The raw pain in Somerset’s leg had died down to a hot ache. When he tested his weight on it, it held. That was good, because the wolves were neither down nor out. The pack leader was back on his feet as he slapped out the last of the charred patches on his shirt.He grabbed the stunned wolf on the ground by the frosted scruff of its neck and hauled it back up onto all its paws.
Ket threw his hook in the air. The sickle blade caught the unsteady light from one of the few streetlights that Dylan hadn’t taken out. He caught as it came down, cocked his hand back over his shoulder, and threw it in one smooth motion. The pack leader caught it out of the air and turned it casually in his hand as he tested the weight. Before he could do anything with it, Ket pursed his lips to whistle. The hook yanked the pack leader off his feet and dragged him behind it as it headed back to its owner. It surprised the wolf enough that he didn’t let go for a second, and when he did, he went rolling over the road.
“Somerset!”
The voice was thin, a bit breathy as it cut through the noise. It still yanked Somerset’s focus out of the fight as he turned to find the speaker. Dylan was slumped against a crooked streetlight, one arm hugged to his chest with his free hand clutched over the wound.
“It wasn’t me,” Dylan yelled. He pointed clumsily with bloody fingers past the fight and toward the Starbucks. “They wanther.”
Somerset looked in the direction that Dylan had pointed. The big wolf had ripped the counter out of the Starbucks, water pissing over the floor around its feet. Two women were huddled behind the counter, one of them with her body wrapped protectively around the other to block the debris.
It was Dylan’s partner—the one that always put Somerset’s back up—and the…pregnant woman from Demre and Hill?
Somerset hesitated for a second as he tried to make sense of that. He’d been sure the woman was just a lure, an injured bird on the trail to catch a Santa soft-hearted even by the standards of the job. That made sense.
“Skellir!” Ket yelled, his voice sharp with warning.
Somerset turned just in time to drop his knife and grab the wolf’s jaws before they snapped shut on his head. Sharp, cold teeth sliced through leather and into his fingers as he held the wolf’s mouth open and braced himself against it. It snarled, and its breath smelled like fear and the sourness on an animal’s breath when it was run to death. The wolf reared onto its back legs and swung its head back and forth to try and dislodge him. Somerset hung on grimly as his feet scraped over the ground.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the wolf in the Starbucks unstitch itself. The connective strands of briar and holly pulled apart, and the hooked “bones” of its rib cagecreaked as they splayed out. The blonde one yelled and grabbed a broken length of metal to swing at it; the metal gouged a chunk out of the wolf and bent.
