by P. N. Elrod
Or maybe it had been by design: Sofie had insisted that Meg wasn’t ready to ride, that she’d slow them down. Two minutes ago, the snotty German chick had been in the lead. Now Meg didn’t know where Sofie was, and her precious Sight had failed. Maybe Sofie had cast a spell of some kind to get rid of the deadweight. What had Sofie said? We travel light, or we die . Sofie’s thick German accent had made her sound like a mad scientist in a bad movie.
“Turn left!” Lukas shouted.
Setting her jaw, squinting, Meg pressed her heel against Teufel’s flank and the horse turned sharply—directly into the path of a low-lying pine bough. Meg flattened against her horse’s neck, holding on tight as Teufel soared over it, landing very hard. These animals weren’t bred for grace. Or long lives.
Like horse, like rider.
Icicles rattled down on her helmet and shoulders. Thank God for her body armor, uncomfortable though it was. And her kicker boots, which she’d insisted on wearing. She wasn’t losing her steel toes for anything. Though truth be told, her feet were freezing.
“Meg?” That was Heath, again, eagerly welcomed into their ranks six months ago by Lukas and Sofie. Meg was the newer newbie. Not a lot of eagerness on Sofie’s part when Lukas showed up with Meg, like a little boy with a stray puppy he wanted to keep. Heath was a European and he had a strong Gift. Plus he was incredibly hot, and Sofie was on her own Great Hunt to get him into bed. Meg supposed it made sense for Sofie to be a little bit German-centric, given her vocation as a Bavarian Border guard. But Meg would have thought she would be a little more human-centric, given what they were guarding the Pale from.
“Where are you?” Heath persisted.
“Unknown.” She was out of her element; this was crazy. “I can’t see anyone.”
“I’m coming for you,” Heath said.
“ Nein . Heath, keep going.” That was Sofie. “We’re almost at the Pale.”
How did Sofie know? What could she see?
White-hot lightning crashed, revealing a rider to Meg’s left—Edouard, the fifth member of their team. The Haitian held up his gloved hand in salute. She returned it as Teufel increased his speed, slaloming around trees like a skier.
“Eddie at nine o’clock,” she announced.
Sofie said something in rapid French, Eddie’s language, and Eddie answered. Everyone on the team spoke at least two languages; unfortunately, Meg’s second language was Spanish, and no one else spoke it. After a month in Bavaria, Meg still couldn’t understand 90 percent of what Sofie said—in any language. Her accent was very heavy.
“Going ahead of you, Meg. I’m too close to the Pale,” Eddie informed her, rising in his saddle jockey-style.
Like her, he was dressed in black body armor over a black cat suit, camouflage for their night ride. Their saddles were black leather, too, and each had an Uzi and a crossbow strapped behind it. She was a good shot with a submachine gun; she had that going for her. But what use was that if she could never see the target?
A curtain of snow swallowed Eddie up. To dodge another tree limb, Meg cantered left, in the direction from which Eddie had just retreated.
“Also, Meg, vorsicht!” Lukas yelled as Teufel lost his footing, and dizziness hit Meg like a fist. Vertigo fanned from the center of her forehead, smacking her temples and ripping in a zipper down the back of her neck. Jerking on the reins, she imagined the top of her head exploding and her brains shooting like a geyser toward the moon.
She knew she was skirting the Pale. The Great Hunt must have crossed over. If so, Team Ritter’s mission had just failed. Humans, Gifted or not, couldn’t cross the border between the realm of Faerie and humankind. Or so they’d told her. They seemed to be telling her a number of things that might not be true.
She thought of that little Mexican baby, six weeks old. Her stomach clenched as the old anger overtook her. She wasn’t turning back, not this time.
Screw it, she thought.
“Giddyap,” she ordered Teufel. Not the proper German command, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She put her spurs to him, and he obeyed. She grabbed her mouthpiece and held it still, wanting to make sure she was heard. “Proceeding for extraction.”
“Nein!” Lukas yelled.
“No, abort!” Heath’s voice cracked in her ear.
Dimly she heard the four of them shouting at her as she leaned forward and kept her head down. The pommel pressed into her stomach as she gathered up Teufel’s mane in her fists.
For one strange moment she saw herself back home three months ago, out in the desert with the temperature topping 110. Before she’d known there was a Great Hunt or a Pale. Before she’d met Lukas. Red hair in a bun, khaki fatigues, mirrored sunglasses, Beretta in her hand and another in Jack Dillger’s. Opening the door to the stolen U-Haul and seeing what the coyote had left—seven desperate Mexican nationals attempting to cross illegally: six dead, one alive; and that one nearly dead and begging for water, and begging more desperately not to be sent back across the border.
“Lo intentaré de nuevo.” I will try it again. He said it through cracked, bleeding lips, and then he burst into heaving sobs, crammed as he was among corpses.
Holding the baby in her arms, Meg had started to cry, too. She never broke down in front of anyone; she was a tough bitch, but that day her mirrored sunglasses could do only so much. That damn desert day of the dead she had cracked apart, right down the middle.
Shortly after that, Lukas had contacted her. And now she was here at a very different border.
The howling wind shimmered into silvery wind-chime voices:
Oh, come and go with us,
Death never visits us
Oh, come and go with us …
“Pull back. Don’t cross. You will die. Repeat: do not cross,” Lukas said.
Her tears:
The baby had worn a tiny gold chain and a religious medal around his chubby neck. He was curled in the limp arms of his dead teenage mother, and for one hopeful moment, Meg had thought he was still alive. She had gathered him up, feather light; his little head fell back and his last breath came out, a death rattle in a dried husk. Still she had hoped, prayed, whispered to him just please, por favor, hijo, to whimper, to take a breath. Part of her mind had registered that he was dead; another part spun fantasies, bargains that would pull him back to earth and make his lungs inflate. She was here; she would save him. It would be all right.
It would never be all right again.
Jack didn’t tell anyone that she’d cried and gotten sloppy drunk and yanked at the waistband of his jeans, Okay, what about just once; they had a strong partnership and they’d be fine afterward. Or that she’d wound up drinking even more, sitting on his couch and watching the remake of Night of the Living Dead and sobbing, “Why? Why?” And Jack, bless him, fully clothed, bless him, had said, “I know . I thought George Romero got it right the first time.”
She asked for a week of leave and spent it driving through the desert, looking for more stalled vehicles. She’d ridden Mesa, her dappled mare, along dusty trails bordered with deer weed, white sage, and manzanita that she couldn’t reach with a vehicle. Sweating in the heat, thinking of the baby, armed with a rifle.
Glad Jack hadn’t asked for a new partner. Yet. Watching the ghostly forms in night vision, in the surveillance center. Men, women, children, pushing through holes in the fences; wading the swell of a stream; white blurs like phantoms. Was she looking at the coyote who had left the baby to die?
In a phone call, her cousin Deb, who lived in Fargo, North Dakota, had told her that every winter, she and her friends routinely got in their cars and trolled for stranded drivers, whose car engines had frozen, whose hoods were buried in snow.
“So it’s in our blood,” Deb had concluded.
In her blood.
After the baby died, Meg doubled her visits to Matt in the care facility.
Matt, her big brother. Matt and Meg. Once a West Pointer, an athlete, a practical joker. Growing up, she�
�d hated it when he hit on her friends. Then at twenty, he’d been struck by lightning; his heart had stopped; his frontal lobe had been fried. She’d been eighteen. How could that happen? He’d been caught in a downpour at a party; he wasn’t alone. There were twenty-seven other people there.
She researched the histories of people who had been struck by lightning. A man named Roy Cleveland Sullivan had been struck seven times, and had some “deficits,” but he lived to tell the tale. Then he committed suicide at the age of seventy-one.
Matt couldn’t even ask for more applesauce.
Their parents checked out emotionally when they checked Matty into the facility. Meg slipped the orderlies extra money so he would never sit in dirty diapers. So they wouldn’t drug him. So if he ever did remember her, he would be able to tell her that they had treated him well.
Her parents protested only mildly when she dropped her plans to get a teaching credential and instead became a Border Patrol agent. None of her friends understood. So she dumped them. Of course, she didn’t understand it, either.
The Mexican baby, Matt, and the child in the glowing white snowstorm. Meg wasn’t losing this one, too.
“Giddyap, Teufel,” she told her horse, who responded as if he spoke her language.
Haus Ritter—the House of the Knights—had been after the Erl King for a thousand years. Their lineage was long and illustrious. They had snatched back hundreds—maybe thousands—of babies, right out of the arms of the Erl King’s goblin minions. There were stories, paintings, songs about Ritter heroes who had died in glorious service to the cause. But no one had ever crossed the border between Faerie and forest and returned to tell the tale.
“Meg!” Lukas bellowed at her. His voice echoed off the rocks. The snow-battered moon blazed. Too close; too close; someone fired off a warning round; maybe they figured she had lost her mind, which is what supposedly happened to humans when they crossed the Pale. Which was about to happen to the kidnapped child, if it wasn’t already dead.
“Meg, stop!” Eddie cried. “Look, look !”
“Zurück!” Lukas bellowed.
Then, through the din, something clicked in the bony ridges above and below her eyes, sounding like the cocking of a rifle. It was the same sound and sensation that Lukas had magickally caused in San Diego, to manifest her Second Sight. Now, as then, shimmers of luminous colors spiraled and pinwheeled all around her. The smoky odor of magick permeated her mask; and her heart skipped multiple beats. Her Second Sight was back, and the Great Hunt roared up in front of her, fifty yards away.
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.”
<
br /> 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.
