Humans were bad with magic. Just awful, really. They had ridiculous assumptions and ridiculouser inclinations, and when they came face-to-face with the arcane arts, it was almost always a disaster. And there in front of Kol stood a disaster waiting to happen in a sweater two sizes too big.
He’d seen her while peeking through the windows, trying to decipher how he would rescue the defiled alcyon spruce from the clutches of an entire gaggle of humans. She hurried around the immense house too quickly to track, one of the sixteen humans he’d counted—and hehadcounted, meticulously, twice. She posed a unique problem with her speed and size, too stealthy and small to be properly tracked, but he didn’t expect her to end up standing right in front of him out in the freezing forest. In the house? Sure! But out here? This was supposed to behisdomain.
Sort of.
“Moose,” she repeated, mouth falling open.
Kol glanced at the fehszar behind him. With antlers sprawling to either side of her sleek head, long tapered legs that led to the snow, and coarse fur that matched the whiteness on the ground, she was more like an elk than anything but so large she looked prehistoric. “Not exactly.”
“Albino moose?” The young woman tightened her grip on the dog, its hind end dangling, but otherwise, she barely moved, her feet still firmly planted only about three feet away which was way too close. “And you’re…talking to it?”
Kol groaned in the back of his throat. Fehszar were brilliant enough to understand most speech, though it took an elf to parse out the other half of a conversation with one, but plenty of humans talked to animals, so that could be explained away. His hat was still pulled down over his ears, which meant that maybe things were still salvageable until her eyes darted away from the huge creature and to his outstretched arm.
Kol released the branch and stuffed his hand away, but the glow refused to die off quickly enough, lighting up the darkness of his pocket. “You didn’t see that,” he said, turning to her fully and squaring his shoulders.
Behind him, the fehszar huffed again but lacked all the intimidation a creature her size should have had.
“I didn’t?” The woman’s voice was hollow, eyes rimmed with purple circles but held wide open.
“No,” he said with a firmness.
Her face went ashen. “I slipped off the deck and hit my head, didn’t I?”
Kol arched a brow. He had no powers of suggestion like a vampire or siren, yet this was an angle he hadn’t considered. Maybe there had been some phruwebore in the wood, and he’d unknowingly set off spores into the air, but her pupils didn’t have a delirious sheen to them, just that tired sunkenness.
“And now I’m going to die of hypothermia out in the snow because no one’s going to check on me, and the dog’s going to eat my face.” She continued to not blink, looking past him and the fehszar into the forest. “I had a feeling it was going to end like this. Better than the alternative, I guess.”
Kol let the frown that creased his lips tick upward. She was amusing, at least, even when she was slowly slipping into shock, and he may as well use that to his advantage. “That’s right,” he said as he took a step closer, boots crunching in the snow. The lights of the cabin shone behind her in the deepening darkness beyond the trees. “You’re hallucinating the fehszar, and you’re hallucinating the elf.”
“Hallucinating?” There was longing in that word like she wished it really were true.
Kol closed the gap, only the squirming dog between them. He was at least a foot taller but held her gaze, and when he nodded, she inadvertently mimicked him. Was she really going to make this so easy? “Yes, you’re hallucinating.”
The woman’s mouth went completely slack. Drowning in boots that came up to her knees and a shapeless sweater covered in a garish pattern of snowmen and candy canes, she was the very definition of mousy right up to her messy knot of dull brown hair. As far as humans went, she was just plain enough for this to work.
Elves were purported to have a certain charm that came with being fae, and though Kol was only half imbued with whatever the truth of that ability was, he knew humans were three times more gullible than the average creature. And this human? She was practically begging to be charmed. “Now, what you’re going to do is turn yourself around, go back into that house like nothing happened out here, and then when everyone’s asleep, you’re going to drag that tree you hacked within an inch of its life back out to me.”
“I’m gonna…” She swallowed, and then she blinked. “Did you sayelf?”
The word came crashing down on Kol like a heap of snow shaken off a branch overhead. Maybe he had pushed his commands a little too hard, but no one else ever complained. Snapped out of his attempted trance by the accusation in her voice, his own cracked. “Uh, well, only half actually.”
“Half?” Eyes that were no longer pliable set on him. Still wide, their dull brown sheen went sharp. She tipped her head with a slowness, gaze traveling down to his boots. “Shouldn’t you be shorter then?”
Kolwasshort, for an elf. “By human standards, I’m significantly above average.”
“So, is he, like, a giant?” She pursed her lips, and while Kol tried to parse out what in the nether she meant, she gasped. “Oh, andthisis a reindeer?”
The fehszar snorted, and Kol translated. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You know, lives at the North Pole, makes a list, checks it twice,” she said, clicking her tongue. “You’d think my elf hallucination would know Santa Claus.”
Kol scoffed at how ridiculous things were suddenly going, though it shouldn’t have been a surprise, not when a human was involved. “None of that’sreal, especially the idea that someone could live at the North Pole—it’s full of frost dragons.”
“But you said you’re a Christmas elf.” She readjusted the dog in her arms, tucking a hand under its hind end. “Though you’re the weirdest looking—”
“I’m an elucidai elf.” He pulled off his hat and pointed at his ears. “A being descended from the fae of the Transcendental Plane, a millennia-old species from a dimension beyond your comprehension. There’s no such thing as Christmas elves, and frankly, I find the concept more than a little degrading.”
Her face filled up with awe again all at once, and her mouth clamped shut.
