Page 53 of Blood and Bells

“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.

She goes on before I can risk another sentence. “Do you know what the worst thing is? It’s that you’re standing here trying to explain why it doesn’t count.”

“It does count.”

“Then stop talking like it doesn’t.”

That lands.

“I didn’t hurt the damn elf,” I say, and now the words are coming from a lower, rougher place. “He was sedated. I took a thimbleful. He is alive, on my couch, with Crinkshaw tending to him as if he’s a visiting aunt with a chill. It was for information, not hunger.”

Holly’s gaze doesn’t move from mine. “I saw you.”

“Yes.”

“The poor thing was in agony.”

“He was drugged,” I say. “Santa’s been dosing them, making them pliable. I needed to know what he’s seen, where he’d been, what they’re doing with the tree.”