“I hate to break it to you,” Somerset said. “But I’m not that well-liked.”
Jars snorted out another laugh at that. The sound of humor made Demre scream with fury, and she grabbed him by the throat. Her claws punched through his throat as she tightened her grip. Blood splattered from Jars’s lips as he choked and struggled for air.
The wolf at the back of the hall growled as it lurched to its feet. Inside its woven guts, the women cried out in alarm as they were thrown about. They grabbed the braided ribs for balance as the bars contracted around them. One of them yelped as their foot got caught, twisted awkwardly as the thorns dug into it.
“Enough,” the pack leader snapped at Demre as he stalked over to her. He grabbed her shoulder. “Challenge the old bitch if you want to lead…but do it once my pack and I are home.”
Demre didn’t loosen her grip on Jars’s throat as she backhanded the pack leader through a wall. Someone outside yelped in surprise as the wolf landed in the street. Second thoughts visibly dawned on Demre’s face as she dropped Jars and turned to the back of the hall.
“Don’t you—” she started the warning, but didn’t get to finish it.
The wolf threw its head back and howled. The sound rattled through the sticks of its throat in a keening moan that jabbed through Somerset’s ears in an attempt to find that atavistic fear of beinghunted.It didn’t work, Yule Lads made for stringy meat, but it was a good try.
Demre flinched and raised one hand to press against her ear.
From somewhere in the town, the Winter’s wolves answered. Demre jerked her head up and toward the sound, her face worried.
“You said the others were gone,” she accused him.
The wolf snapped thorny teeth at her and then bulled through the part of the wall that had survived the pack leader. Broken planks of wood and plaster scraped along its hide. Demre cursed and threw Jars down as she ran over to peer out the hole.
Somerset forced himself to his feet. Resilient as his body was, it still protested that decision. Cracked bones ground together, and freshly healed tendons frayed as they stretched. Somerset ignored it as he wrapped the chain they’d tethered him with around one hand.
Frost bloomed on the metal in delicate, crisp lines. It clustered around Somerset’s fingers, thickening into a crust, and then raced down the length of the metal. Iron didn’t, in general, like magic, but all Somerset had done was dump cold on it. That was just physics. Probably.
Ice-cold metal burned Somerset’s palm. He gritted his teeth and braced his foot against the bolt in the floor. The first yank ripped a chunk of skin out of his palm and cracked one of the links. The second snapped the tether, chunks of frozen metal thrown over the floor.
He gathered the short length still attached to his wrist up into his fist and stalked toward Demre. Her back was turned to him as she watched the wolves outside. Somerset cocked his fist back to punch her, and the oath dug hot, disapproving pincers into hisbrain. He choked, the noise thick and strangled in his throat, and staggered as his knees seized up.
Demre turned to look at him. “Pathetic,” she said. “I don’t know why we were ever worried about you.”
Somerset tightened his fingers around the chain. Hecouldpush through the pain. An oath was nothing if you couldn’t break it, but the sour magic that clotted his brain was a precursor of what the price would be.
He dropped his arm, his weighted fist hanging loose at his side. Then he shoulder-barged her through the hole and into the dirt outside. She squalled in surprise as she thrashed in the frozen mud.
“We can’t kill you,” Somerset said through gritted teeth as he braced his arm against her throat. “But we can still hurt you.”
Demre thrashed as she gasped for air. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide and bulging. She managed to get her legs up between them, her feet twisted into bony clubbed hooves, and kicked him off her.
Before he could recover, she’d scrambled back to her feet and made a run for it. The element of surprise wasn’t going to last for long.
Somerset turned and stepped back through the hole into the building. He shook his bloody hand, the torn skin stinging, and walked over to check on Jars. His brother held up a hand for an assist back onto his feet. Somerset grabbed it and hauled him up.
“You know we aren’t going to make it out of here,” Jars said. “There are too many of them, and we can’t thin the herd. They can just throw bodies at us until they bury us.”
He was right. Somerset wiped his bloody hand on his leg and thought about that.
It had been hundreds of years since he’d thought to start counting them, and plenty before that. All the blood he’d shed and fun he’d had, and if he had to keep just one of those years it would be this one.
It could have been an even better year if he’d realized everyone knew he was fucking Santa, but he’d still take it. So what if it brought him here.
“How about we don’t die liars,” Somerset said. “We told Dylan we could save his friends, and we can still do that.”
“Youtold him that,” Jars corrected him.
“Close enough.”
Jars snorted, and then, after thinking about it, nodded. “At least we can kill the wolves,” he said.
