“I don’t want any record of this,” Joe said. “I could lose my job. Get a pen.”
Dylan tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder as he turned to hunt for something to write with. It didn’t take him as long as he’d expected. Someone had left the world’s tackiest Christmas pen, with a Mrs. Claus whose clothes slid off if you turned the barrel upside down, lying next to a dented bucket on a table.
It would do.
Dylan picked it up, clicked the top of it a couple of times, and tested the ink against his hand. It took a couple of dry starts but eventually scrawled an overlapping circle on the heel of his palm.
“OK,” he said, once he was sure it still worked. “Tell me Irene’s address.”
Joe cleared his throat and hemmed and hawed for a second. The dithery act ran long enough that Dylan was worried the ink was going to dry up again. Then Joe recited the address in a quick, low voice.
23 Adelaide and North. Apt. 14 C.
The C bled into the creases around Dylan’s knuckles, but it was still legible enough. He clicked the pen closed and set it back down where he’d got it, propped up against the barrel to give Mrs. Claus her dignity back.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Wait,” Joe blurted, and Dylan hesitated before lowering the phone from his ear. “If you find Alice, tell her I’m sorry. Fuck. Only good thing I ever gave her was the kid.”
Dylan didn’t want to feel any sympathy for Joe…a thief, a peeping tom, and a bad husband. Somehow he still did. Maybe it was the shared guilt.
“Alice will be home for Christmas,” Dylan said. “Tell them not to worry.”
Joe sniffed and then blew his nose on something. “You shouldn’t lie to a kid about this sort of thing,” he said. “They don’t need false hope.”
“I know. Tell them Santa promised.”
Dylan hung up mid-‘Wah?’ and turned to look at the reindeer. Not one of his team or not, it was still a reindeer at the North Pole.
“Any chance you can fly?” he asked.
Chapter Ten
The resistance at Demreand Hill folded quickly under the Yule Lads’ assault.
To be fair to the security detail who’d taken the brunt of it, they had come to work expecting to deal with a disgruntled banker or pushy cop. Not thirteen—Ket had caught up with them halfway there—heavily armed assholes who didn’t get a chance to cut loose like this often these days.
Somerset blocked a knuckleduster-weighted roundhouse aimed at his head, the impact of metal and bone against his forearm a dull, spreading ache, and grabbed the redcap by the throat. The brutal fey’s deep-set eyes bulged, and his face reddened to nearly the color of his cap as Somerset lifted him off the ground.
“We don’t have an appointment,” Somerset said mildly. He tightened his grip on the redcap’s throat until he felt the structures underneath creak. “But I hope your COO can still fit us in.”
The redcap squeezed a wet croak out of his crushed throat as he thrashed. His steel-toed boots cracked painfully against Somerset’s shins and knees. Thin lips peeled back fromuneven teeth as the redcap sucked in a breath through his flattened nose—although the Yule Lads couldn’t claim credit for that one.
“You—”
The world went dark before the redcap could either give Lucas up or tell Somerset to fuck off again. It was a solid, featureless black, so heavy it felt like it hadweightas it dropped over them. It sucked out even the splutter of color from the backs of your eyes. The sort of disorienting absence that people only experienced in deep, deep caves or nightmares.
A night so total there was no way to tell what monsters hid in it.
It was a good trick. Most of the time.
There was just one problem.
Somerset was the monster in the dark.
Really? That sounded like something an elf would come out with. Maybe Jars had a point about Somerset being gone too long.
The redcap used Somerset’s moment of self-reflection to grab a handful of his hair. He yanked on it viciously, and Somerset snarled silently as he heard the sickly crackle of his scalp being pulled away from his skull for a second before the hair ripped free. The hot scrape of pain jabbed down into his jaw and the back of his neck. He left the redcap to clutch his trophy and snapped his head forward in a short, vicious headbutt.
