Name the ones you like, a stray voice in the back of his brain nudged him,go on, I’ll wait.
Somerset ignored that.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “Tell him to wait.”
Gull looked uncertain, but nodded and stepped back out of the room. He left the door open as he headed back into the bar. Somerset ran a finger around his neck to adjust the collar of his coat and looked at Enid.
“Where were we?” he asked.
“You were going to threaten me,” she said with a shard of bitter defiance in her voice.
He had been. Maybe he needed to reconsider his approach.
“Do I need to? You know I make a bad enemy,” he said. There was no reason to reinvent the wheel, after all. “But a fair enough friend. You might want to think about which is going to benefit you more.”
He reached down and opened the drawer with the whiskey in it. The bottle was over three-quarters empty. That was, Somerset judged as he lifted it out, about the right amount for a gesture. He unscrewed the cap and poured it into the cup, then pushed it over the desk.
“Someone in Yule has to have paid someone off,” he said. “Find it.”
Enid had the good sense to hesitate, but she’d been away from home a long time. The smell of blood and liquor wore her down, and she reached greedily for the cup.
“I can’t promise anything,” she said as she wrapped her hands around the glazed white sides. Her fingers left smudges of grease on it, and her nails were visibly dirtier. Grease bloomed in the creases of her knuckles. “But I’ll look…as soon as I can.”
“Before Christmas Eve,” Somerset told her.
Enid’s face fell, and she spluttered out the start of an objection. Somerset didn’t bother to wait to hear what it was. He could probably guess if he had to. Instead he left her to her whiskey and closed the door of the office behind him.
It turned out that when Gull had said “outside” he’d meant on the street.
Stúfur was parked at the curb. He straddled his matte-black bike—an almost identical replacement to the one destroyed last Christmas—with one booted foot braced on the road and his helmet between his thighs.
“We have a problem,” he said as Somerset joined him.
The chill wind pinched Somerset’s cheeks affectionately and tangled his coattails around his legs. He put his hands in his pockets and glanced around casually to see if there was any sign of their other brothers.
“Just one?” Somerset said dryly. “What are you doing here? I thought you were scheduled for duty tonight.”
Before he could get an answer, Gull came out of the bar and tossed a bottle of water to Stúfur, who caught it out of the air in a gloved hand. Somerset turned to give Gull a level look, which made the man swallow hard and disappear back inside. Irritating as his memory loss was in the search for who’d killed the previous Santa, an intact Gull would never be so accommodating. Stúfur ignored the interaction as he dug his nails into the plastic and pulled the top off the bottle, spilling water over his hands and knees. He took a swig and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“I am,” he said. “So by rights, I’m on Jars’s time. You rather I went to him?”
He cocked an eyebrow as he took another drink and waited for an answer. Somerset grabbed the end of the bottle and squeezed until the plastic crumpled in his hand. Stúfur choked and spluttered as the water shot into his mouth and sprayed out of his mouth. He slapped Somerset’s hand out of his face as he doubled over and coughed the liquid back up.
“If you’re on duty,” Somerset said, “where the fuck is Dylan?”
Stúfur pulled his T-shirt up to wipe his face, material balled up in his hand as he pulled it over his mouth. He sat back and gave Somerset a mocking look.
“See, that sounds like personal, not professional, concern,” he said. “I thought we’d agreed to putthaton the back burner.”
Somerset choked down his knee-jerk insult. They had. There was a good reason for it, as well. Yule was the Winter Court’s most powerful vassal, but that alliance wasn’t always free of friction. Santa was mortal. Yule wouldn’t accept less. That had always been a hard pill to swallow for the hidebound and highborn, especially when the mortal was a wild card like Dylan Hollie.
It would not help for them to find out that he shared Somerset’s bed. He’d gotten his hands dirty on their behalf far too often for them to want him whispering sweet nothings in Santa’s ear.
Somerset mentally grabbed his attention by the scruff of the neck to stop it from wandering off afterthatmental image. He acknowledged Stúfur’s point as much as he was going to with one smallcorrection.
“Where the fuck is Santa.”
Stúfur pulled his helmet from between his thighs and pulled it back on. From behind the polarized visor, his voice was grim.
