Broken glass on his lap.
Teeth in hisarm.
The memory of pain woke up the real thing as a dull, hot ache in Dylan’s other arm. He gingerly turned his head to look at it. His forearm was heavily bandaged and strapped down with crooked strips of skin-toned tape. The yelling, and the Christmas music, came from outside.
Dylan grimaced as he tried to lift his arm. It felt like it weighed three times what it should, and his elbow was made of Jell-O, but his grandfather’s watch was still strapped to his wrist. He exhaled in… Relief? Disappointment? It could be either and Dylan definitely had too many painkillers in his system to work it out right now.
He let his arm drop back down onto the bed…
That was a mistake. Dylan bit his lip as he rode out the wet gouge of pain that fired from his wrist to his armpit. When it subsided, he raised his gaze to…not Somerset.
In place of Dylan’s walking “it’s complicated” relationship status, otherwise known as Somerset, the cheap plastic chair next to the bed was occupied by Somerset’s oldest brother and the head of North Pole security.
That was such a weird string of words that Dylan had to take a second to consider the choices that had led him here. When he was done, he braced his elbows on the bed and squirmed up into a sitting position, with the paper-thin pillows balled up behind his back.
“What happened?” he asked. Because he might have most of the memory—except where pain or blood loss blurred the details—but he didn’t know the version they’d given Jars.
Jars bent down and picked up a Starbucks cup from the floor. He took a drink and then balanced it on the arm of the chair. Dylan watched the process with the same fascination he would a bear with a salmon at the zoo. It was just so mundane for someone that Dylan had never seen outside the North Pole.
“You were in a car accident,” Jars said. He glanced at Dylan’s bandaged arm, and his mouth twitched into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Apparently.”
Dylan nodded slowly and then said, “OK.” He waited to see what he was going to say next, but nothing came to him. His mind was so blank he could almost hear the echoes in there. After a long, tense moment of silence he managed to scrape together. “Wow.”
Irritation flashed over Jars’s face and then was gone. He took another drink of coffee and then leaned forward to set the cup on the overbed table.
“You don’t trust me,” he said
“You don’t like me.”
Jars paused for a moment and raised an eyebrow. For a second Dylan didn’t know why, and then he replayed the last few moments and… Yeah, that explained the look. Dylan hadn’t meant for that to be an out-loud thought.
He was surprised when Jars answered him.
“My oath is to protect Santa and to serve Yule,” he said. “Nobody said I had to like it, or you.”
It was probably strange that that made Dylanmore, not less, inclined to trust Jars. He resisted the urge. Somerset didn’t trust him, and he knew Jars better than anyone. Dylan had decided to follow Somerset’s lead in this twelve months ago, and he didn’t exactly have a fallback plan.
“No one saidIhad to trust you,” he pointed out.
“Yule did,” Jars said. He reached for his crutches, propped against the bottom of the bed, and levered himself up out of the chair. The muscles in his forearms, exposed by his pushed-back sleeves, stood out like cords as he put his weight on his hands. He looked down at Dylan. “But it doesn’t say I have to protect you from yourself. Whatever you did last year to get your seat on the Sleigh, I hope you enjoyed the ride. It doesn’t look like you’ll be back.”
He gave Dylan a stiff nod, turned with a squeak of his rubber crutch tips on the tiles, and headed out of the room. As the tall Yule Lad shouldered the door open, Dylan felt the air in the roomshift.He could taste snow on his tongue, crisp and faintly floral.
Then the door closed behind Jars and it was gone—all Dylan could taste was dry spit and his own teeth—and the machines he was hooked up to started to beep urgently. A second later the door opened back up and one of the hospital’s nurse-practitioners stuck her head in. He knew her. A bit anyhow. She didn’t work the ER often, and that was the department Dylan interacted with the most. She was…neurology? Gwen something.
Her eyes flicked to the machines and then back to Dylan.
“Dylan,” she said, in the sort of very gentle voice that meant bad news was on the way. “You woke up. We’ve been worried.”
That was the sort of thing people said to patients who’d missed out on months. Dylan frowned, reached up to tug on his hair. If it turned out hehadbeen in a coma, buthadn’tdaydreamed all of this, he’d be annoyed. His hair didn’t feel any longer, though, and if he’d missed Christmas, he was sure Jars would have thrown that information in his face.
“How long was I out for?” he asked.
“Just overnight,” Gwen said as she came into the room. She pulled a penlight out of her pocket and flicked it on. She played the beam across Dylan’s eyes as he tried not to squint. “Do you remember what happened?”
Dylan shook his head. “No,” he said. “Where’s Alice?”
The question made her hesitate for a moment. She recovered quickly and flicked the flashlight off so she could drop it back into her pocket. “That’s—”
