Holly North by Emma Savant

Author:Emma Savant [Savant, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-12-21T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

My heart pounded like a hummingbird’s and my stomach felt like it had leapt up into my throat.

That had been Jack Frost.

He was everything I’d imagined from Joy’s comments and much more besides, and just thinking of him standing there made my skin crawl.

Or maybe that was just the cold. The lights had come back on, but the chill in the air didn’t budge.

I grabbed all the harnesses, stringing them on my arms until the weight was almost enough to knock me over, and bolted out of the storage room.

This corridor was still empty, which did nothing to ease the unsettled feeling in my gut. I walked as quickly as I could down the hall and threw myself into the central workshop.

The usual busy industry of the room had shifted. They were still working, but everyone seemed tense, and elves kept glancing up at the ceiling like they were going to be plunged back into darkness at any moment.

It was a real concern. The ceiling of the workshop was one enormous skylight, but the sky outside was black and foreboding, and I didn’t want to look at it for more than a few seconds.

“Holly!”

Felix rushed toward me from the other side of the balcony. He held out his hands and took half the harnesses from me. The worry on his face was, I realized, more for them than for me.

“They’re fine,” I assured him. “I dropped Vixen and Comet’s but they’re both okay. I need to talk to you.”

“You dropped them?” Felix said in consternation. He lifted his arms and started looking for the injured harnesses. I rolled my eyes and held up Comet’s, which was in one piece and didn’t have a scratch on it.

Felix’s utterly misplaced anxiety calmed me a little. This was ordinary, and I needed a dose of ordinary after what had just happened.

And to think I thought that any of this was ordinary. I looked out across the sea of uniformed elves carving the kinds of rustic wooden toys new hipster parents probably lost their minds over. My life hadn’t just been turned upside-down. It had been shaken, then stirred, then thrown into a blender and turned into a smoothie of weirdness.

“Felix,” I said sharply. “I need to talk to you. Actually, no, scratch that. I need to talk to Santa.”

“He’s busy.”

“He’s not too busy for me.”

I marched toward the stables to drop off the harnesses, which were getting heavier by the minute. He rushed after me.

I hung my harnesses up in the stable’s tack room and then turned to face Felix, whose arms were still weighed down.

“What’s the pole?” I said. “Not the North Pole, the pole.”

Felix blanched.

“Where did you hear about that?”

“It’s in danger,” I said. I took a harness from him, while he frowned at me. The frown looked absurd on his jovial face, like he was a toddler who was trying a little too hard to convey what a bad mood the idea of naps elicited.

“I know it’s probably supposed to be a secret from me,” I said in a quick undertone.

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