Chicks Kick Butt - Rachel Caine, Kerrie Hughes (ed)

by Chicks Kick Butt (mobi)

  Holy shit.

  It was blurred at first, as if she were looking through the surveillance cameras back in San Diego. White and glowing, horses and riders.

  Then forty yards away, the cantering parade snapped into sharp relief. Cut out in black by the brilliant lights, dozens of spiky goblins in medieval armor rode black chargers, capering and gibbering as they galloped, a thundering horde. There were at least a dozen of them sitting so high in their saddles that she figured the smallest to be at least six feet tall. Orange flames flared from the horses’ nostrils; sparks flew from their hooves. Hellhounds of ash and smoke bayed at their heels, disintegrating, re-forming—

  Thirty yards.

  Twenty.

  At the lead rode the majestic Erl King himself, Master of the Great Hunt, exactly as Lukas had described him. Dressed in ebony chain mail and a solid black chest plate, the demon lord of the forest towered over the goblins. His black helmet was smooth, with no helm—no eyeholes—topped with curved antlers that flared with smoky flames; fastened at the shoulders, his cloak furled behind like the wake of an obsidian river. In his right chain-mail gauntlet, he held the reins of his enormous warhorse. His left clasped a squirming bundle against his chest—the baby.

  He must be freezing.

  The child had been snatched from his crib, where he slept bundled in pajamas. His name was Garriet, and he was nine weeks old. While they were suiting up and Lukas was detailing the mission, Meg had asked for a picture. Sofie had snorted.

  “He’ll be the baby in the Erl King’s arms,” Heath had deadpanned. “But if by chance there’s two, grab them both, Meggie.”

  The Erl King had stolen many thousands of children through the centuries. His goblins put changelings in their emptied cribs—often passing for human children, but evil creatures to the core. Adolf Hitler had been a changeling. Jack the Ripper. Charles Manson. There were other places where he could cross the Pale; it was the job of Haus Ritter to guard it here.

  What will he do to Garriet if we don’t get him back?

  No one could tell her. Their primary mission was to isolate the Erl King and kill or wound him, approach, and snatch back the child. It seemed an impossible task. Lukas and Sofie had done it once before, when they were nineteen. They were twenty-seven now, and this was the first verified theft since.

  “I see them,” Meg whispered into her microphone. “My Sight has returned.”

  “Bon, c’est bon, Meg,” Eddie said, his voice taut with excitement.

  Then light flared around the Great Hunt, saturating the surroundings with a hazy green glow. Lightning crackled. Sparks flew. Thunder roared down the mountain. The ground shook beneath her, and Teufel whinnied.

  A great wailing rose around her.

  “Scheiße. They’re across,” Lukas announced. “Abort.”

  A goblin rose in his stirrups, turned, and waved at her. His face was a mass of scars and hollows, as if someone had taken a Halloween mask and melted it.

  She’d been taunted before. You didn’t last in the Border Patrol if you gave in to your impulses. But adrenaline was pumping through her system so hard and fast she was quivering. There was no way this was over.

  “I can get them,” she insisted.

  “They’re beyond the Pale, love,” Heath reminded her.

  “It’s over,” Sofie chimed in. “Retreat, Meg.”

  Shaking her head, Meg pressed her thighs in a viselike grip against Teufel’s flanks, reached behind, and started to grab her Uzi. She rethought. On this side of the Pale, standard-issue ammo could kill her targets. But if shot from this side to the Pale, the chambered rounds were ineffective. The crossbow bolts, coated with magicks, would work. She didn’t know why. She didn’t care at the moment. Problem was, she had yet to master the crossbow. In target practice, she shot wide.

  She had to get closer if she was going to save that baby.

  “I’m going,” she said, urging Teufel forward. He tossed his head and broke into a run.

  Then she heard singing, in silvery tones, angelic and sweet:

  Oh, come and go with us …

  Where death never visits us …

  “Eddie!” Lukas shouted. “Stop her!”

  Oh, come and go with us …

  The song washed over her, drawing out her anger like poison from a snakebite. Buried anger over her helplessness—

  Where death never visits us …

  “Eddie!” Lukas bellowed.

  “Mwen regret sa,” Eddie said.

  Something slammed into her side like a huge, spiked fist; it tore through the layers of her protective armor and sliced into her skin. Fireball heat tore through her body; then she went cold, and began to slide from her horse.

  Oh, come—

  “No,” she gritted, “crap.”

  Losing consciousness, she slumped sideways. Into snow, she prayed; if she hit the rocks, or if she fell under Teufel …

  Through the glowworm-like radiance, the image of the Great Hunt stretched and glimmered. She held out a gloved hand, as if she could scoop the riders up in her fist. Vibrations buffeted her ears; then banshee wails shot up around her. Death. Death was riding with the Hunt. The baby …

  The wailing.

  Just wolves, she thought, tears forming, grabbing the pommel and canting farther right. No, no, I was so close. So close again …

  “Don’t go,” she ordered the Erl King. “Don’t, you bastard.”

  The King of the Elves turned his head in her direction. Although Teufel was still racing forward, she froze from head to steel-toed boot. Behind his black mask, he looked at her. Saw her. She felt it as if he had laid a hand on her shoulder, or her cheek … icy cold, but gentle. Chills skittered up and down, ghost fingers on the xylophone of her spine.

  She had never been more afraid, nor felt more alive, than in that moment.

  “I know you,” she whispered.

  He inclined his horned head slowly, in her direction. The chills got worse; but so did an incredible euphoria, as if she were the most powerful being who had ever lived.

  He held her gaze, in his black mask and flaming antlers. Then he nestled the child beneath his chin.

  And then she was gone.

  * * *

  In the hospital:

  She’d heard her brother’s voice from behind the bandages, issuing from the hospital bed, after the lightning strike: “Meh meh meh.”

  “He’s trying to say my name,” she’d told his neurologist.

  “I’m so sorry, but it’s just a reflex. He doesn’t even know who you are,” the doctor had replied.

  Their parents were drinking coffee in the waiting room. They couldn’t seem to make it down the hallway to see him. The nurses had all traded looks and the social worker had been called. Something about her parents’ denial. Something about he was their son, for God’s sake. They should at least see him.

  In the desert:

  When she had held that lifeless Mexican baby and tried to will it into living, she forgave her parents for being too afraid to face Matt. Maybe that was where the tears had sprung from, and the messy way she’d hit on Jack. He’d told her he’d been tempted until she started talking about her brother.

  “You got issues, hon,” he’d told her.

  We travel light, or we die.

  * * *

  When she awakened, she was lying on the floor of Haus Ritter’s dark blue van, and her armor was off. She was bare to the waist with a heavy blanket covering her, and she felt loopy, drugged, and supremely pissed off. Bathed in snowfall moonlight, Lukas knelt beside her, his hands resting one on top of the other, beneath the blanket, molded against her left side. His eyes were closed, his dark eyebrows furrowed as he whispered under his breath. Warmth spread from his skin to hers; he was performing a healing spell.

  She studied his face. Lying jerk. The first time she’d met him, in San Diego, she had allowed herself to be mesmerized by his movie-star looks. Craggy jaw, oceanic blue eyes fringed with heavy lashes,
deep hollows in his cheeks tinged with perpetual dark brown beard stubble.

  She and Jack had just spoken to a class of students at UC San Diego about the rights of undocumented workers. How “illegal immigration” boiled down to sneaking across the Mexican border to El Norte—the North, the U.S.—paradise, fairyland—to get raped, robbed, murdered, to die—and she had stared at all those idealistic, liberal kids who stared at her as if she were the Great Satan, hearing nothing of what she was saying—the agents, killed in the line of duty—and decided to tell them the story of the dead baby in the desert. Not to help them understand, but to punish them.

  “So how again do you define illegal immigration as a victimless crime?” she concluded in a flat voice brimming with venom.

  It was too much; she’d been too brutal. Jack had intervened by passing out a stack of the public affairs officer’s business cards. Then he’d driven straight to the Elephant Bar. To unwind, he said. Trouble was, his divorce would be final in nine days; and after a few Dos Equis and tequila shots, they both started crossing over into that fairyland of their own, which involved intimacies they shouldn’t take and confessions that were mostly lies, but kind lies, designed to comfort and tempt each other.

  But any love that was made there would definitely die. Meg had realized they were crossing the line sooner than Jack did. She’d excused herself to go to the bathroom and whipped out her cell phone, about to call herself a cab, when Lukas had appeared at the other end of the dimly lit hall, like a desperado calling her out at high noon.

  “You’re awake,” Lukas murmured now, lifting his hands from her chest and pulling the blanket up to her chin. Tenderly, gently.

  “Did we—?”

  “Nein.” Blue eyes in a face puffy with cold and despair. “No.”

  She clenched her fists to keep from exploding. “The whole thing was bullshit,” she said. “I couldn’t see. And you made Eddie shoot me.”

  “To stop you from killing yourself,” he replied. “Crossing the Pale is like stepping on a livewire. I told you that.”

  Oh, come and go—

  “How did I end up on point? I couldn’t see!”

  “Something affected your Sight,” he agreed.

  “Maybe the Erl King did it,” Eddie said, looking over his shoulder at them. Mid-twenties, he was very sculpted, with a hooked nose and deep hollows in his cheeks. Her distant relative, carrying magickal DNA or “auric vibrations,” as Lukas referred to them. So they’d been told.

  “How?” Meg asked.

  “Who can say?” Sofie said.

  Lukas glanced toward his sister, his expression hooded. “Well, it’s never happened before.”

  “And her parents didn’t manifest any Gifts,” Sofie added.

  “I was not adopted.” She scowled at the back of Sofie’s head as Lukas handed her a large gray sweater. She pulled it on over her head. They’d been over this. If magick could have saved Matty, someone in the family would have used it.

  “Sometimes it’s dormant,” Lukas reminded them both. “It’s not exactly genetic. Auric vibrations are like magick bloodlines.”

  “Then maybe magick forces we don’t yet understand have affected her Ritter vibrations,” Sofie interjected. “We need to find out if we can count on Meg’s Gift.”

  God, did she blind me? Meg wondered. Maybe Sophie liked being the queen bee of the patrol unit. There was definitely no love lost between the two of them, but would she actually sabotage someone on a life-and-death mission?

  “We’ll do a thorough investigation,” Lukas assured her.

  There was a lull. Everyone looked tired and glum. They’d been on a high before the mission. Eddie and Heath had known about their special powers, but they hadn’t realized there was a worldwide confederation of magickal groups—hundreds of thousands of people—who were “different.” Gifted, in their parlance.

  The van trundled over ancient cobblestones. Snow piled on skyscrapers of glass and steel, and on Victorian heaps whose roofs were skewered with chimneys and satellite dishes. It smacked at an angle against “perpendicular” whitewash-and-wood beams of Renaissance architecture, most of it decidedly “faux,” and all of it reminding Meg of Legoland back in California.

  Heath, who looked to be around thirty-five, sat facing her on the floor, wrapped in a dark blue blanket, looking cold, tired, and frustrated. His face was ruddy from the cold and his crazy blond Rasta braids were soaked with either sweat or snow or a combination. Sofie was driving, and Eddie was riding shotgun, tipping his head back against the seat.

  “How’s Teufel?” Meg asked.

  Lukas grimaced. “Feeling guilty. You need to have a chat with him and let him know he didn’t do anything wrong.”

  He probably means that literally, she thought. What would have happened to Teufel if she had crossed the Pale? In the heat of the moment, she hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. Her San Diego mount, Mesa, was a great quarter horse, and Meg felt affection for her, but she belonged to the Border Patrol and as such, was ridden by other agents. Meg had worked hard not to develop too close an attachment to her.

  Here, things were different. Each rider was assigned his or her own horse, and no one else rode it. It was expected that some sort of magickal bonding would take place. Meg had been riding Teufel since she arrived, and if that was happening, she didn’t have the Gift to know it.

  Moving stiffly, she elbowed herself to a sitting position, giving her head a quick shake when Lukas moved to help her. At the same time, Heath reached over to the left and showed Meg a thermos.

  “Tea?” he offered.

  When she didn’t move, Lukas took it and unscrewed the black matte plastic cap. He poured steaming brown tea into the cap and held it out to her. She wasn’t going to drink any of it, but she opened her mouth and the scalding, astringent liquid dribbled onto her tongue.

  “It wasn’t a good time for any of us,” Heath said to her. “But at least we know it’s real. The Hunt.” His voice reeked with awe.

  “Yeah, swell,” she retorted, to hide her freak-out. This was all a little too real for her comfort. “You didn’t get shot.”

  Eddie turned around, looked down at Meg, and grimaced.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was just a little…” He waggled his fingers. He had a special little Gift in addition to Second Sight—he could hurl blasts of debilitating energy from his hands. Sort of like hitting someone with just a little bit of lightning.

  “I’m okay,” she told him, remembering her euphoria, wondering if that was why she was crashing so hard now. Nothing else would have stopped her. She’d been seized by madness, designed to lure her across the Pale, so she would die.

  “We weren’t fast enough. We’ll get better,” Heath put in.

  I was fast enough, Meg thought.

  The van fell into another silence. Heath said, “We debriefed while you were out.” He smiled faintly. “Lukas told Eddie it was quite common to wet your pants the first few times.”

  “Guete ou. Lucky for you,” Eddie shot back, but Heath didn’t even acknowledge his salvo.

  It was very different back home, even after deaths and murders and some moron’s intestines exploding because they were filled with bags of heroin. Her compadres at the Border Patrol pulled crazy practical jokes on each other, drank together. That was why Jack had been so shaky when she had broken down crying over the baby.

  Six months’ leave of absence. That left all kinds of doors open. Jack would probably be in the middle of his first rebound.

  “We’re home,” Lukas announced, almost as if he could read her mind, and she needed reminding that Germany was home now.

  The crowning jewel of Ritterberg was the castle, Schloss Ritter, only half of which stood intact. Wars and time had pulled it down. Meg didn’t understand why they didn’t repair it—they could use magick, couldn’t they? It was like a distressed version of Disneyland, fairy-tale chic: circular turrets, crenellated walls; it was truly spectacular. The vast refurb
ished rooms, updated kitchens, and bathrooms were the official home to the 357 members of Haus Ritter, one of the hundreds of houses that composed the world of the Gifted—people who could use magick.

  What kind of magick? she’d demanded, throwing back more tequila and eating the nachos Lukas had ordered for her. Magick to read minds; to read memories off objects; to become invisible; to travel through time; to conjure and wound and kill. Magick to hurl fireballs and bursts of energy; magick to protect. Different Gifted possessed different Gifts. In Meg’s veins ran the blood of Haus Ritter—the German House of the Knights, sworn to guard the Bavarian section of Germany from all the supernatural elements that roamed within. She was a Border guard, maintaining a line watch of the Pale as it traced its route through the Black Forest, where the Erl King rode with the Great Hunt. There were four such units, and hers had been created a year ago, when Lukas and Sofie had found Eddie.

  It was a world Meg had never dreamed existed until Lukas came up to her in the hallway of the Elephant Bar. It probably helped his case that he was very handsome and that she was drunk, and he got her drunker. He confessed later that he’d also used a bit of charm on her, plopping herbs in her drink that would make her listen. Drugging her, in other words.

  It had taken her longer to believe him than he’d thought it would—nearly a month—during which he awakened her Second Sight and showed her the specters of their shared history: the ghosts of fallen knights whose last name was Zecherle, like hers; and Ritter, which was his.

  In the Middle Ages, Ritter simply meant “knight” in German—any nobleman with a coat of arms who protected his lands and his folk. But Haus Ritter was another matter—a secretive, dedicated family of Gifted warriors, who were unaware that the world over, there were other magick-using families dedicated to other causes—in some cases good but in many, many others, evil.

  That changed with World War II, and the Nazis’ fascination with the occult. Just as the Houses began to contact each other, fear of discovery by the Ungifted sent them underground. As Germans, Haus Ritter suffered terrible losses—conscripted into armies; shipped to the death camps; fleeing Europe. The Erl King was busy in those days, riding boldly across the Pale and stealing Bavarian children—Aryan, Jewish, Gypsy, Mediterranean, and African children—while the Nazis were blamed; and the weakened Ritters seemed powerless to stop him.