Page 52 of Blood and Bells

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.”