Stúfur acknowledged the order. He tightened his grip on Dylan’s collar.
“Come on,” he said. “You don’t want to see this anyhow. You can’t even cope with a Sunday roast. This will turn your stomach.”
“We just talked about this,” Dylan protested as he tried to wriggle out of the coat. “You can’t just shove me somewhere and let me out once a year.”
He managed to get one arm out. Before he could get any further, Stúfur stooped slightly and hoisted him up over his shoulder. The strangled noise that came out of Dylan as his head dangled around Stúfur’s knees wasprobablya curse, but it was hard to tell.
“Don’t tempt us,” Stúfur said as he hooked his fingers into the back pocket of Dylan’ jeans. “Human rights are a really recent thing for us.”
He hefted Dylan up into a better position on his shoulder and ignored the attempt to punch him in the kidneys.
“Watch your hands,” Somerset growled at him sourly as he turned back to the fight. He only got a low, dirty laugh from Stúfurin response.
Asshole.
The closed-lip courtier raised his stained hands. The floor cracked open, the polished wooden planks splintering as they broke, and smoke belched up through the crevices. It was thick and greasy, sour with the smell of metal and stone, and it clotted into the shape of thick-shouldered goblins with blank faces and broad spade-like hands. Sparks dripped off them like sweat as they raced forward, barely visible in the smog their creator had raised.
One latched onto Somerset’s leg, and he swore. It was hot enough to scald through his jeans, and it dug at his stomach with blunt, hard fingers. Somewhere in the smoke he heard Jars spit out an old, ear-burning oath that had enough power behind it to make the smoke eddy.
Somerset gritted his teeth and grabbed the construct by the nape of the neck, scorching his fingers, and let his magic run down its arm into it. Frost cooled the burn on his palm and soaked into the thing through its skin. The sparks died as it cooled, and it slowed as its limbs hardened and went rigid.
Dead it was just slime and char. It crumbled to gritty dust in Somerset’s grip.
He wiped his hand on his hip. Habit made him reach for the wind, but it was too far away. It liked the Yule Lads well enough, but not enough to come inside. Damn. That just left the hard way.
Smoke caught in his lungs as he took a deep breath, sticky enough to cling. He spat the taste out of his mouth along with his brother’s name.
“Jars,” he yelled. “If I hold them off, can you clear the room?”
There was a grunt from the smoke, and the dense body of a construct flew past Somerset and cracked in half against a wall. Viscera made of liquid metal and coal dropped out to cool in a ghoulish pile on the floor.
“I wasn’t the one who had to retire,” Jars shouted back. “You just do your best.”
Somerset made a guttural, annoyed noise in the back of his throat as he stalked into the smoke. Until last year—when a missing Santa, the threat of a lost Christmas, and Dylan’s inability to keep his mortal ass out of trouble had dragged him back in—he’d thought his days of watching his brothers’ backs were done.
Even the ones he liked got on his nerves, and Jars…well, he was still pretty sure Jars was a traitor. So Somerset had to keep him alive, just to put a knife to his throat once he could prove it.
He stooped down, grabbed the back of a knocked-over chair, and swung it up to bat a lunging construct out of the air. It went flying. Another one took its place. Hot pincersgrabbed the back of Somerset’s thigh, the smell of burned denim and meat as it crisped sickly sweet as it rose up around him. The chair broke on its next swing. He was left holding a splintered rod as thick as his wrist, and threw it like a spear at the next sickly gray shape he saw.
The close-mouthed Winter courtier who’d called the smoke out made a choked noise of surprise as the roughly made projectile went into his throat. He clutched at it with both hands, the dark blood that oozed up scorching the wood as he staggered back.
Somerset paused for a breath to see if the summoner being injured dissuaded his creatures at all. It didn’t. He flicked his hold-out knife out of the wrist sheath and reached back to jab into the creature attached to his leg. The blade punched easily through the thing’s skull, but then got stuck in the sticky morass of cooling goo in there.
Somewhere in the smoke, Jars saidsomethingand cold struck like a nail through Somerset’s bones. It was the first bite of a winter storm, the bitterness before the blow.
He tossed the dead construct and knife away together. They went rattling over the floor.
Jars said the second word and the smoke started to sink toward the ground under the weight of what was to come. The cold had splinters in it. A static squawk came from the speakers, and a sped-up, throaty vocal cover of “Deck the Halls” blasted out.
Somerset braced himself.
It wasn’t a word that came next, just the smack of Jars’s crutch against the floor. The ground underfoot shook again as thick fingers of ice splintered out from Jars’s feet. Steam hissed from the crevices the courtier had opened as the ice packed them. The smoke froze and fell to the ground as smuts of soot.
The ice crawled on, thick frost-crusted vines of it that bunched and twisted as they formed a hedge around the Court’s delegation. Or maybe it was more of a cage.
“You couldn’t just yell?” Somerset asked, voice pitched to carry over the music. That had been Jars’s gift from their ma, a yell that could level a herd of sheep or rattle the rocks off a mountain. The ice was old magic, Yule magic, from books that only he’d ever bothered to crack open. “You had to break out the big guns?”
Jars, weight tilted to the side as he braced himself on one crutch, gave Somerset a sour look and spat out a mouthful of splintered ice and blood.
