Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
I spit into a porcelain bowl Crinkshaw holds at my side.
The rogue elf slumps onto the couch, and Crinkshaw lurches forward with a glass of red wine as if this is the sort of thing that belongs on a checklist. Alcohol doesn’t make me drunk, but nothing washes the taste of tainted blood from my mouth like an Australian red.
He follows it with a peppermint-clove rinse, all with the solemn air of a ma?tre d’ at a tiny funeral.
“Someone’s really messed with that elf.” I wipe my mouth with a towel as Crinkshaw tilts the elf’s head with a quiet precision.
“He’ll be out for some time, Sire.” Crinkshaw drapes a tartan throw over the elf and sets a snowflake compress on its forehead. “How much did you take?”
“Only a mouthful, but it went everywhere, and it tasted foul. He’s been drugged. Santa’s been giving them something to make them more malleable.”
“Boozy eggnog?”
“Almost certainly.”
Elves are lunatics for boozy eggnog. They’ll do just about anything for it, which explains how Santa’s been getting them to play along. Honestly, this whole thing feels like a holiday-themed pyramid scheme, but with more sugar and less plausible deniability.
“Were you able to get anything else, Sire?”
I nod. Crinkshaw knows blood carries more than nutrients. Older vampires can sometimes pull something back if they’re good. Fragments. Impressions. Not much, and not often, but I’ve been at this longer than most.
I’m good at a lot of things, actually.
Things that might appeal to Holly. I’m handy with flatpack furniture and navigating tight spaces without making a sound.
I make a mean hot chocolate. Marshmallows included.
Then there’s my decorum. Charm. Finesse.
The sort that might make Holly’s eyes soften—for entirely professional reasons, of course.
Crinkshaw taps his bony fingers against the side table. A small shake of my head snaps whatever that was back into place. I force a cough, assuming he’ll think my state is due to the rogue elf blood. At least vampires can’t blush.
“A little. Mostly scattered images with a few flashes of chaotic rage. This elf doesn’t know what he’s doing, or why.
There was a factory, too. Could be anywhere.
Conveyor belts, red-and-white smokestacks like candy canes, and a sign in bad cursive: Naughty Intake.
Nothing definitive, but it smells like Santa’s logistics. ”
Ronan bursts into the room—his preferred method of using doors—looking more worried than usual.
His hair is unreasonably disheveled, and there’s a bright, battle-ready glint in his eyes.
He’s even donned his tartan kilt, which suggests I’ll soon be revisiting the topic of appropriate attire for the modern age.
“You’ve got to see this.” He thrusts a laptop at me, a video paused on screen. It’s grainy, indistinct—until it isn’t.
“Why are you showing me security footage of our house?”
“Watch.” He leans in to press play, and I find myself leaning forward with him.
The footage shows the exterior, zooming in on the giant bay window of this very sitting room. A flicker of movement in the corner draws my eye—someone creeping toward the glass with the subtlety of a penguin on roller skates.
Holly Frost.
With her cute little crinkled-up nose and a glare that’s like she’s personally offended by the weather, she looks like she marched straight out of a Christmas card—one that’s had its edges frayed from being thrown across the room too many times.
A slow unease settles in as she stumbles back from the window, her hand flying to her mouth. Even grainy and soundless, the hurt reaches right through the screen.
The video ends with her running.
I close the laptop.
She saw.
“Well,” I say, and hand the laptop back to Ronan. “That’s unfortunate.”
Neither Ronan nor Crinkshaw says anything as I walk to the window, my hands clasped loosely behind my back, watching snow drift past the glass.
“You should talk to her, Sire,” Crinkshaw says. There’s a hesitation in it, like he’d rather be doing anything else—including wrestling a yeti.
I don’t look at him. “I’m aware.”
“Sooner rather than later,” he adds.
“Yes, Crinkshaw. I gathered that.”
The pause is uncomfortable.
“You’re not very good at apologies,” Ronan offers, entirely unhelpfully.
“I’m not apologizing.”
Crinkshaw makes a small, diplomatic sound that suggests he absolutely disagrees.
I exhale. “I don’t even know what I’d be apologizing for.”
Before I can reconsider, my coat is being settled onto my shoulders and a scarf looped firmly into place.
“Sire—”
“I’m going,” I mutter.
“So I see.”
The door opens before I can argue further, and a moment later I’m outside, the night wrapped in that peculiar, muffled quiet that only comes with fresh snow and too many Christmas lights.
The scarf smells faintly of clove and starch. Somewhere down the street, a string of lights flickers in uneven rhythm, casting soft red and gold across the frost. By the time I reach Holly’s, I haven’t managed a single useful thought.
Her porch light glows like a star, which feels aggressively on-brand for Holly Frost. Of course she’d have a porch light that looks like it belongs on a Christmas card. Of course it would make this worse.
I knock, sharper than intended, and immediately regret it.
There’s no plan. No clever lines. No carefully constructed explanation. Just the increasingly unhelpful urge to fix something I may have already broken beyond repair.
The door flies open, and I realize how much trouble I’m in.
Color climbs Holly’s throat and settles high in her cheeks, and her mouth does that small, precise thing it does when she’s decided she won’t be persuaded by anything short of divine intervention.
This isn’t the Holly who laughs like sleigh bells or scowls like thunder.
This is the other Holly. The one who’s reached a conclusion and barred the gates behind it.
“Holly,” I say, but she cuts me off before I can get any further.
“What do you want, Nick?”
Her voice is sharp enough to cut glass. She stands square in her doorway, one hand on the edge of the door as though she’s already half considering the pleasure of slamming it in my face.
“I—”
Brilliant. For a man who has talked bishops into bad ideas, kings into worse ones, and entire rooms into agreement they never should have offered, this is an astonishing failure of basic speech. My words snag in my throat like tinsel caught on a branch, glittering there uselessly.
Holly lifts one eyebrow. “Either say it or get off my porch before I freeze you solid.”
“That seems excessive.”
“Then work quickly.”
There it is. That spark. The impossible, fire under her frost. Familiar enough that, for one ridiculous second, my chest forgets it is here to hurt.
I have lived through plagues, revolutions, and three deeply regrettable styles of cravat. In all my centuries, I’ve never met anyone remotely like her. Even Eleanor of Aquitaine wasn’t as interesting as Holly Frost.
“I need to talk to you,” I manage at last. “About what you saw.”
“Oh, I saw plenty,” she says. “I did wonder if there’d be a follow-up performance.”
“Holly—”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That thing where you say my name like it’s a substitute for an explanation.”
“It’s not like that. I was trying to help.”
She lets out a laugh that has no joy in it at all. “By feeding on a defenseless elf?”
“That’s not…” I stop, because apparently even my excuses need reorganizing. “Sometimes we pick things up when we feed. Memories. Impressions. I thought it might tell us something useful.”
“Oh, good,” she says. “So only a little violation of bodily autonomy, with festive mind theft on the side. Very seasonal.”
“It’s not stealing,” I say, hearing the edge in it too late. “It’s not deliberate.”
“It looked pretty deliberate from where I was standing.”
“That’s not fair.”
Her face changes at that. Not softer. This is far worse. She’s offended, yes, but beneath that she’s wounded in a way that makes me want to grab my sentences back out of the air and throttle them before they reach her.
“Not fair?” she repeats. “You want to talk to me about fair?”
“Holly, I didn’t hurt him.”
“I can’t believe I trusted you.” Her voice is low and clean, stripped of heat in a way that means that the heat has already done its damage. “You stood there and told me you wanted to help. That the vampires wanted to be part of Willow Creek. You told Frank you understood the rules.”
“I do.”
“Really?” she asks. “Because from where I was standing, what I saw was a man who heard the rules, nodded solemnly, and then decided they were for other people.”
“I didn’t break my word to Frank.”
The silence could draw blood or make a lesser man start confessing to unrelated crimes.
“No one in Willow Creek gets touched without consent,” I continue. “Not like that. The elf isn’t from Willow Creek.”
The look on her face is not encouraging.
She blinks at me once, very slowly. “Congratulations. You found a loophole.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“No?” She leans a little more on the door. “Then what is it, Nick? Go on. I’m fascinated.”
I hesitate. Which is new and unpleasant. I don’t hesitate. I advance, retreat, devastate, charm, and occasionally dance. I do not stand on winter porches like a boy in a bad ballad trying to remember how nouns work.
“It’s me trying to fix a problem. One that’s affecting you.”
“I didn’t ask you to fix it like this.”
“Is that what this is? You’re worried that you’re implicated?”
“No,” she says. “I’m worried about my integrity.”
Porch light and frost gather between us, along with the distinct sense that I am making an already poor evening more ambitious. And because I am apparently already committed to making this night memorable for all the wrong reasons, I decide to keep going.
“I was trying to help you.”
Her mouth tightens. “Right. Because that’s what this is about.”
“It is.”
“No,” she says. “It’s what you’re calling it. That’s not the same thing.”
I open my mouth and close it again.