Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,56
arms and waited.
“Uhh...”
“Well?”
“Uhh...”
Someone knocked on the door.
“No guesses who that is.” Hardwick strode over and unlocked the door. “Vance, right?”
“Future brother-in-law, right?” Vance nodded at Delphine as he sauntered in. “Hey, sis.”
“Are either of you going to explain any of what you’re doing?” Delphine demanded, exasperated. “Santa? You two do remember you’re almost eighteen now, right?”
“You remember last year, right? The mystery of the Christmas cards?”
“It wasn’t a mystery—”
“We left Christmas cards in a box in the woods, and on Christmas morning, someone had slipped them under the window! Ooh, mystery!”
“Hardly.” Delphine explained to Hardwick: “One of the tourist businesses around here runs Christmas-themed sled dog trails where you can ride out to post a Christmas card in the woods. On Christmas Eve, the employees deliver the local cards around town. And the employees include an owl shifter and a pegasus, so I don’t think you two need to literally stake out the hotel windows to figure out how they manage that without leaving tire tracks.”
“Or it could be one of the dragons. Or the hellhounds! They work there too, don’t they? Anyway, uh, that’s not all we were doing.” Anders nudged Vance. She saw a hint of sparkly cardboard hidden in his hand.
“You’re stealing other people’s Christmas post?” she gasped.
“No! Only ours! Uh, yours.”
“Someone sent me a Christmas card?” She remembered doing this with the twins and her Mum the Christmas before. It had been a cute day out, with the twins pretending that racing dogsleds wasn’t anywhere near as fun as flying. Who would have sent her a card this year? She couldn’t imagine the twins going back—even if they had enjoyed themselves, it was more a thing for kids than for teenaged boys.
“Yeah, we sent it, sis.”
Delphine shook her head slowly. “And now you’re… stealing it back?”
Vance and Anders exchanged a nervous look. Anders pulled the card out of his sleeve where he’d hidden it. A cloud of glitter followed it. “We were going to leave it for you to read by yourself,” he said, “Or, uh, not by yourself, I guess, but…”
Vance took up his trailing sentence. “We had second thoughts about how you would take it and thought it might, you know, help, if we were both here to explain.”
Delphine’s head buzzed, and she could only imagine the furious telepathic discussion her brothers were having. She crossed, thought again, and held out one hand.
“Go on, then. I have to read it before you can explain it, don’t I?”
Reluctantly, Anders gave her the card.
More glitter fell off it as Delphine turned it over in her hands. It was exactly the sort of thing she remembered from last Christmas: a picture of Pine Valley, with a flying dogsled team howling ‘Merry Christmas!’ in glitter. She half-expected a tinny recording to start playing when she opened it.
Instead, her heart almost stopped.
It was Anders’ handwriting. He’d written ‘Happy Christmas sis!’ at the top and something else smaller down the bottom, but it was the text in all-caps in the middle that made the blood turn to ice in her veins.
Happy Christmas sis! the card read, and then: WE KNOW YOUR SECRET!
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hardwick
Delphine went white. She sat down with a thump on the bed and Hardwick was standing between her and her brothers before he knew he’d started moving.
He shot the boys a warning look and knelt in front of her. Her knuckles were bone-white, clutched around the Christmas card so hard she was bending it out of shape.
“No,” she whispered, her gaze so distant he knew she wasn’t talking to him. “No, this can’t be—”
Before Hardwick could say anything, the twins started talking over one another.
“I knew this was a bad idea!”
“You’re the one who wrote it so it sounds more like a blackmail note than a Christmas card!”
“I thought it would be funny!”
Delphine dropped the card, her fingers suddenly unclenching like a piece of machinery. Hardwick picked it up. His face went stormy as he read it.
“This is meant to not be a blackmail note?” He doesn’t bother to keep the growl from his voice.
“It says ‘love from’ us at the bottom!” Anders said plaintively. “And there’s a winky face!”
“We should have started with that!” Vance hissed. “Dear sis, we love you, happy Christmas, we know your secret and we still love you—”
“That sounds even worse! It sounds like we shouldn’t love her!”
“That’s what you said the other day! And we ended up writing that!”
This could go on for hours, Hardwick thought. And someone would hear the shouting.
He