…
Good to know. Heshouldsmell of ambergris, cedar and sea salt according to the clerk who’d sold him the aftershave and the label. Instead he smelled like a granny’s handbag.
Probably nothisgranny. Dylan thought briefly of the woman he’d met last year, her sour humor and her unfortunately probably technically edible stew. Even after that brief meeting he could guess that any bag of hers would smell like animals, blood, and char.
She was the exception that proved the rule, though, and the point was that warm cookies wasn’t the signature scent he’d been going for.
Although he should have known better, a cool, blunt part of his brain he’d been trying to ignore for the best part of December noted,the hair dye didn’t stick either.
Dylan reached up absently to touch the gray streak that had taken root at his temple. That was nothing to do with Yule, he reminded himself; it had shown up back in September.
Same time as the Christmas decorations in Target, that dispassionate part of his brain pointed out,and gray is what we call white now?
That was…not something he wanted to deal with right now. He tossed a mental weighted blanket over the topic and got back to the situation at hand.
“So what is it?” he asked. “Do I know her?”
Alice puffed her cheeks out on a sigh. “Sort of?” she said. “Remember last Christmas, just before you and tall, blond, and chilly got together?”
Not the most flattering description of Dylan’s….of Somerset, but not inaccurate. There had been alotthat happened “just before” their first kiss, though. Quite a lot after it, too. It had been an eventful few days.
Most of it, though, Alice either didn’t know about, or if she had been part of it, she didn’t remember. Not accurately, at least. Not the parts of it with magic and wolves. Sometimes Dylan envied that.
Not all of the time, but…
He pulled his mind out of the what-ifs and tried to focus. What that meant for her was that the “before” was probably…
“The fight we got called out to?” he said. “At theJust-as-High?”
Alice nodded and waited expectantly for him to catch up. It was exactly fair, since she’d gotten a CliffsNotes version from their patient. There hadn’t been any women in the bachelor’s party, and the sexy Mrs. Claus had no reason to be angry with him.
So that only left…
“The bride?” he said. He stalled briefly as he racked his brain for the name. It had been old-fashioned, something that sounded a poor fit with her fiancé’s bar brawl. Something that started with…
“Irene,” Alice provided for him before he could put his finger on it. “Irene Daly. Her fiancé nearly killed her when he had that psychotic break at the hospital, remember?”
Blond hair straggled over the woman’s face as she slid to the ground. She touched her face with one hand. It came away bloody, and she held it out in a mute “look what you’ve done” to the man.
“I remember,” Dylan said. There was a thready edge to his voice, but Alice didn’t seem to notice. She put her hands in her pockets and bounced nervously on the balls of her feet.
“Anyhow, it turns out that was all your fault,” she said.
“How?” Dylan asked indignantly.
Alice shrugged her agreement with him. “I know,” she sympathized. “But to her, all her troubles started with you…a year ago. So the last face she wanted to see…”
She trailed off, and Dylan filled in the gap.
“Mine,” he said. It was understandable, he supposed. He took a second to think through the logistics and then shrugged. “I’ll call med control and see if we can get anyone to take over here. If not…would she be OK with me driving as long as I don’t touch her?”
Alice didn’t look confident about that, but nodded slowly.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “I don’t think we’re in any danger of delivering the baby just yet, but I want to get her in a bed and on a fetal monitor just to be safe. Preferably without her boyfriend in there with her so we can find out what happened.”
Dylan glanced over her shoulder to where the “boyfriend” hovered uncomfortably with a plastic cup of water. He paused with his hand halfway to the radio clipped to his chest.
“From what End-of-Year Nick over there told me,” he said, with a tilt of his head toward the man who’d turned out to be Demre and Hill’s COO. He had shed the red jacket now, at least, and was arguing with another member of staff about something. “That’s not her boyfriend. She arrived with someone else.”
