Finally Somerset broke the kiss and leaned back. He grabbed Dylan’s wrists and pulled his hands away from his jacket.
“Where did you go?” heasked.
“Irene’s,” Dylan said.
Somerset looked blank, so Dylan filled in some details.
“The pregnant woman they took with Alice. I got her address, or…at least…where she used to live. Apparently she’d moved recently, but her roommate gave me some of her things, and there were a bunch of letters.”
“To Santa?”
“No,” Dylan said. “To her, from Demre and Hill.”
Somerset grimaced. “The rot in that place ran deep,” he said. “We’ve no idea how much damage they’ve already done.”
“I’ll leave that part to you,” Dylan said. “What we do know is that Demre and Hill had a connection with Irenebeforethe Christmas Party, and that probably means the wolf did too. So why did he lie about it?”
Somerset still had hold of Dylan’s hands. He pulled one up and pressed a frosty kiss to his palm. Someone from inside the North Pole yelled ‘get a room,’ and Dylan had to squash the urge to jump back and pretend he’d just…had jam on him or something.
“It’s a good question,” Somerset said as he turned to head back inside, towing Dylan behind him. “But I’m not the one to ask.”
Dylan tried to hang back as he looked over his shoulder at the reindeer. “What about…”
“I’ll get someone to take her back to the stables.”
Lucas Carlisle had a black eye, a split lip, and an attitude.
The latter was impressive from a man cuffed to a bent stripper pole. He sat on the podium in a stained suit that probably cost more than Dylan’s rent and glared as Dylan and Somerset walked back into the room with Jars.
“You know you’re over, right?” he said. He shifted, and the cuff rattled against the pole. “The Winter Court will raze you, salt the ground, and take Santa for their own.”
Jars walked over and put the butt of his crutch under Lucas’s chin. He tipped the man’s head back.
“Over you?”
“My mother—”
“Will disown you the minute we prove you attempted to subvert the succession of Yule,” Jars said. Then he paused and smiled thinly. “More specifically, that you failed to do it.”
He stepped back, weight still tilted to the left, and gestured for Dylan to come forward.
Dylan hesitated as he wondered exactly how Santa would act. In the end, since he’d no examples to draw from, it was going to have to be like him. He grabbed a chair and pulled it over to the podium, the legs scraping over the floor.
“I know you,” Lucas said. He narrowed his eyes. “You’re that paramedic. The one that came to the…end-of-year party.”
Dylan sat down.
“Christmas party,” he said. “You might as well admit it, the ship’s sailed on that one.”
Lucas gave a close-lipped smile and shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He glanced toward Jars and added pointedly, “Any of it. I manage Demre and Hill’s portfolio, that’s all–”
“But you knew Irene,” Dylan said. For the second time he had to provide context, as Lucas just shrugged at him. “The pregnant woman at the party?”
There was something nervous in the way Lucas’s eyes shifted away from Dylan. Or maybe it was how he leaned back.
“Her and her boyfriend gatecrashed,” he said. “I was being a Good Samaritan to call an ambulance instead of the cops. Or the Hunt.”
Dylan reached into his jacket and pulled out the letters. There hadn’t been time to go through them all, but even a cursory read had been enough.
