“I wanted to make a point,” he said.
“What? That you could read?”
Jars’s crutch was frozen to the ground in front of him, the butt of it encased in a thick chunk of milky ice where it had first burst up through the ground. He grabbed the shaft just under the worn cuff and yanked. The ice held, the crutch buckled and broke. Jars twisted it free and swung the truncated length up onto his shoulder.
“That just because Christmas got cute, doesn’t mean we did,” he said.
“Oh, I think they know that,” Somerset said. He reached back to check the burn on his thigh. The scorched denim felt crispy, the skin underneath wet. “They’ve met you, after all.”
Jars ignored that as he limped across the ice-patched floor, weight listed heavily to the side onto his remaining crutch.
Behind the thicket of ice, Caolán shrugged off the last two retainers. He pulled himself up straight and glowered at the Yule Lads.
“What is this?” he demanded. “Has Yule forsworn itself?”
Somerset traded an annoyed look with Jars, momentarily in agreement despite their differences. Elves. This was why no one liked them.
“You started it,” Jars pointed out. “If it is to be war, it was Winter’s duke who violated guest-rightandall our treaties.”
The weight of that accusation was enough to make the last two members of Caolán’s entourage blanch. They traded worried looks and picked at Caolán’s sleeve for a word. He shrugged them off and crossed his arms.
“I don’t see your blood on my hands,” he said. “Can you say the same?”
Cocky little sod.
Before either Yule Lad could respond, the more persistent of the two retainers—a seal-eyed woman with freckles the size of dollar coins—tugged on Caolán’s arm hard enough to make him stagger. He flushed and turned on her in annoyance.
“What?” he snapped.
She blinked at him, unfazed, and then turned liquid black eyes toward the bent stripper pole.
“Where has Lady Demre gone?” she asked.
Everyone turned to look. The myrkálfar lay where he had fallen, in a puddle of dark blood, but the broken body of the woman was gone.
“Fuck,” the two Yule Lads and a Duke of the Winter Court said at the same time.
Chapter Nine
Blood had turned themakeshift bandage of napkins and what might have been a G-string into a thick paper-mâché scab. That wasn’t a Christmas craft that was going to catch on. Dylan soaked the edges of it with warm water until he could peel it away from the broken chair leg it had been packed around.
Habit shifted Dylan’s brain back into work mode as he categorized the injury in his mind as if he’d need to write it up later.
Maybe he would. When Jars had produced the first-aid kit that was all Dylan had to work with, he’d explained it with a shrug and a “health and safety.” So who knew.
The man—or what had Somerset called him…a mirk elf?—laid out on the righted table had an impalement injury to the throat. The makeshift weapon had punctured his throat on the left-hand side and continued at a downward angle until it hit his collarbone. From the deformation. it had broken it as well. Dylan pressed carefully at the injury with gloved fingers and felt the bones shift and grate.
Pain made the man…elf, whatever, Dylan had picked up his name was Hill, that would do…writhe on the table he was laid out on. Somerset put a hand on his chest and pinned him flat, like a bug on a board.
“Can you fix him?” he said.
“I’m a paramedic, not a doctor,” Dylan said. When he felt his way along the elf’s throat, he felt the bubble-wrap crackle of crepitus under the skin. “He…he needs a hospital. I mean, I guess. If he was mortal he would, but… Why isn’t he healing? I’ve seen you shrug off worse than this.”
The question made Somerset scowl. A petty part of Dylan that wasn’t over being hauled out of the room over Stúfur’s shoulder like a sack of old clothes was glad about that.
Not like you’d care if it had been Somerset with his hand on your ass, some ruthlessly fair-minded part of himself pointed out. Dylan didn’t appreciate it being right—notentirelyright, but close—so he ignored it.
“He should have,” Somerset said. “Some of our kind you can end with wood easier than steel, but not him. It could be a geas. They can be oddly prescient.”
