Page 78 of Blood and Bells

“Oh no,” I breathe. “Why do they look like carolers who’ve forgotten the words and are hoping someone else remembers the next verse?”

Nick leans forward, gazed fixed. “He’s twisted it. The tree isn’t skimming off the gloom anymore—it’s taking everything. The good, the bad…even the bit that knows the difference between spruce and pine. He’s hollowing them out.”

“Why do this?” I ask. “Why go through all of this?”

“It’s obvious,” Crinkshaw says. “The elves got a bit too fired up on boozy eggnog. After they stole the tree, Santa took it to the Hollow of Mischief until he could figure out a way to get at the magic. Frank must have placed some wards on it and the transition would have altered the tree, reducing it to a snow globe. It’s Elementary Metaphysics, not Eldritch Geography.”

I join the others in staring at Crinkshaw, mouth open.

“We stole it before he could change it back,” he continues, “and now that he’s got it, he’s using the town’s energy to give him enough power to alter it. Simple, really.”

“That’s obvious to you?” Nick asks.

“That’s more complicated than calculus,” Ronan says.

A pang of guilt hits me. Hard.

“This is my fault. If I’d realized sooner⁠—”

“No,” Nick cuts in, sharply. “Santa’s had this in motion for a long time. We’ve been at it for—what—twenty minutes? And we’ve done it with a group chat, two thermoses, and Ronan’s flair for dramatics.”

From behind, Ronan yells, “It is not flair. It is commitment.”

“How do we stop him?” I ask.

Nick doesn’t hesitate. “We take back the tree. Then we make sure he never tries this again. Are you ready, Frost?”

I meet his gaze.

The doubt is still there, loud and persistent.

But so is everything else.

“Born ready, Draven,” I say. “Let’s go ruin Santa’s Christmas uncheer.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

We step away from the cars, ready for anything.

Santa doesn’t notice us.

The air shifts—not dramatically. Nothing so considerate. Just wrong enough that the back of my neck prickles. The red glow deepens, the light flickers, and something in the center of the square…unravels.

His veneer has gone. No more jolly, cherubic man in the red suit, but him as he really is. A wind sprite. He isn’t even solid.

He’s there, but not quite present. A smear across the air, like a painting rubbed while the paint was still wet. His face pushes through the middle of it, wrong and shifting, familiar only in the way a nightmare sometimes borrows a face you recognize. The beard remains, but it’s no longer hair—it fractures into crystals of frost that catch the light and splinter it. The red suit clings to the shape of him in pieces, darker now, like the color’s gone off.

He looks like a snowflake that’s turned on you. Not the charming kind you embroider on a tea towel. The other sort.

“Oh,” I say, because that’s apparently all I’ve got. “That’s…different.”

The townsfolk sway in loose, vacant unison around him, eyes glassy, expressions smoothed down to nothing. Whatever’s coming off him—whatever he’s pulling through that grotesque snow globe at the center—isn’t harmless. The air is thick with it, a cloudy, creeping miasma that curls through the square and sinks into everything it touches.

I’ve dealt with terrible things.

A basilisk in Bruges who knitted.

This is worse.