The soft pulse of warmth fluttered against his touch. Something in Somerset’s chest that had been strung so tight it was about to snap loosened, and he let out his breath.
“He’s alive,” he said.
“Doesn’t look it,” Stúfur noted as he leaned over Somerset’s shoulder. “It’s never good when they go that color.”
“Will he make it to the Pole?” Ket asked.
Somerset didn’t know. Alive or not was about as far as his knowledge of the mortal condition stretched. He took his coat off and draped it over Dylan. It covered the smaller man like a blanket, and maybe it was Somerset’s imagination but Dylan’s face seemed to relax.
Even if he made it to the Pole…what healer could he trust? Even if they weren’talreadymurderers, they could still be ambitious.
“We take him to the hospital,” he decided abruptly as he reached over Dylan’s body to grab his arm. The ripped sleeve of the paramedic’s jacket squelched under his fingers and blood oozed out. “They can patch him up.”
There was a pause Somerset could feel as his brother’s exchanged looks over the top of his head.
You say it.
Fuck off. You.
“They didn’t do such a good job with Gull,” Stúfur said. “And what if it’s not…you know…up and running for Christmas Eve? We’re right back to where we started last year.”
Somerset’s fingers brushed over the face of the watch sealed around Dylan’s wrist. It never kept good time, always stopped at a minute to midnight on Christmas Eve, but Santa’s power ticked along behind the glass.
If it stopped…
To hell with all of them, Somerset thought bleakly. He closed his hand over Dylan’s arm and pulled his own power up out of his bones. Frost crackled in the blood on Dylan’s sleeve as the ice sank down into his arm to slow the blood.I’ll smash the watch myself this time, make sure it’s done right.
Somerset half-expectedsomesort of otherworldly reaction to that, but there was nothing. He got his arms under Dylan and stood up. Dylan groaned softly at being moved, and his eyelids fluttered, but other than that he didn’t stir as his head lolled on Somerset’s shoulder.
“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” he said. “Go back to the Pole and tell Jars…”
He paused as he tried to weigh how little they could get away with telling their older brother. It was stupid that it mattered, with how they’d all lived since then, but someone it always did. Even now when they thought he might well be a traitor.
“We have to tell him something happened,” Ket noted. “Our shift ends in a few hours. Nik’s lined up to relieve us and…he might not be the brightest, but even he’s going to notice something is wrong.”
“Not only that,” Stúfur said. “He’s going totell.”
“Tell Jars it was an accident on the road,” he said after a glance at the ambulance. “Nothing else.”
He held Dylan tight to his chest as he headed over the road to where he’d left the pickup. Ket and Stúfur followed along behind him. Their feet were silent on the ice.
“What if he doesn’t believe us?” Ket asked.
Somerset hitched up Dylan’s weight in one arm as he reached for the handle of the door with the other. He got the door open with the help of his knee and gently lowered Dylan, still wrapped in stained wool, into the passenger seat.
“Tell him to come and find me,” he said and slammed the door.
Chapter Five
The sound of Christmasmusic and someone yelling woke Dylan up from a dream about a cold house and the sound of a car slowly coming closer. He could taste peppermint on his tongue as he woke up and, out of decades of muscle memory, tried to slap the clock radio he’d had on his bedside table as a little kid.
It wasn’t there.
Instead he hit his forearm off a metal pole, and he felt the jag of something sharp yank at his arm. He peeled his sticky eyes open and rolled his head to the side to blink at the IV drip plugged into a vein. For a moment he’d no idea what had happened, and then his brain reluctantly drip-fed him the context.
Blood on Alice’s face.
Wolves.
