“I told you,” Gull said from the other side of the door. He sounded uneasy. As if he’d be scared if he was just a little bit more sure of himself. “Mr. North isn’t in. If you want to leave a message, I’ll pass it on.”
Whoever was on the other side didn’t answer right away. Somerset felt the pressure as whoever it was shoved at the door again. This time it wasn’t physical. He dug his mental feet in, down somewhere rocky and cold where his mother had planted their magic, and weathered it.
There was something distinctly annoyed about the pause that followed. After a breath, whoever it was gave the door a petty kick. It was hard enough to crack the wood.
“Tell him to keep his nose out of other people’s business,” the visitor said in a soft, rough voice. “And off their sons.”
“I’d rather not,” Gull said. Apparently he didn’t need to remember who he was to know that wouldn’t go over well. “Maybe you could write that bit down instead?”
“Changeling,” the visitor spat with contempt. “At your age.”
The sound of a brief scuffle filtered through the door. Somerset swore under his breath and set Dylan aside at a safe distance. Like it or not—whether he was a traitor or not—right now Gull was his responsibility. Never mind the fact that it would look bad for some Winter Court lackey to get away with roughing up a Yule Lad.
Theywerethe Court’s muscle, after all.
He broke the seal on the door with a swipe of his thumb, the edge of the crack deep enough to draw blood. Before he could open the door, however, he heard someone spit a short, archaic curse and then a door slam.
Somerset cursed under his breath and yanked the door open.
There was an overturned table tipped against the wall and bloodstains on broken glass. Broken plaster lay in chunks on the polished wooden floor where it had come away from the wall. Gull wiped a bloody hand on his jeans and then looked at it as if he’d not seen it before.
“That was weird,” he said as he flexed his fingers slowly. There was blood on his mouth as well as his knuckles.
“You think?” Somerset grabbed Gull’s lip between finger and thumb and pulled it down to check out the damage. It wasn’t even split. Gull had just gouged the inside open when it grated against his teeth. “What happened?”
Gull batted Somerset’s hand away with a scowl. He stepped back and poked at his lip himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “The guy with him grabbed him, and the one who was talking threw a punch. So I threw the first guy into him and they hit the wall. Do I know how to fight? How do I know how to fight?”
It was a good question. Somerset wanted to know the answer too, but not right now.
“I’ve a better question,” he said as he toed a chunk of plaster with the toe of his boot. “You know how to replaster a wall?”
It turned out that Gull did not.
He did, however, know how to sweep up. So Somerset gave him a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a brush and left him to clean up. It was up to him what he started with.
Somerset headed back to his office. He scowled briefly at the hairline crack in the door before he let himself back in. Dylan was perched on the corner of his desk, one leg dangling and the other braced on the floor. He frowned at his phone as he read something.
Even if Somerset had been able to justify being stupid a while longer, the moment had passed.
“What is it?” he asked.
Dylan didn’t look up as he frowned and tapped his thumbs over the screen. “I’ve been suspended,” he said. “Pending an investigation into what happened the other night.”
“Good,” Somerset said as he headed over to the desk.
That terse comment made Dylan look up sharply. He narrowed his eyes as he glared at Somerset.
“What?”
It was the sort of “what” that wasn’t actually a question. It was an opportunity to recant whatever had been said before there was a fight. That was never going to work on a Yule Lad, even one who’d left the fold for a while. If they’d been born with consciences, they’d never have made it down off the mountain.
“Maybe now you’ll stay out of trouble.” Somerset brushed a lock of gray hair off Dylan’s forehead and ignored the scowl directed at him. “You’re Santa. You don’t need a side hustle.”
Dylan snorted. “Being Santa doesn’t come with a wage, or health insurance,” he said. “What am I going to pay my rent with? Candy canes?”
“I think that might be racist.”
“It’s not,” Dylan said. He started to say something else and then stopped himself. His knuckles poked, white and bony, through the skin as he wrung his hands around the phone. “And it doesn’t matter anyhow. I’m just trying to… Where’s Alice? What happened?”
