by P. N. Elrod
This is crazy, so crazy, she thought. She could remember having this same conversation with Lukas, back in California: Fifty years ago, people who saw your Border Patrol surveillance system would have thought it was magick. What’s to say that we aren’t simply using some other kind of technology?
All his rationalizations. All hers.
Maybe the Erl King was a man in a costume. The goblins, too. It’s an urban legend and these guys buy into it or perpetuate it, and I’m on a reality show. Or it’s some elaborate practical joke Jack cooked up. Speakers in the trees, special lighting.
Except … I speak German. And I was going to cross over. I couldn’t stop myself.
She rested her head on her knees.
Struck-by-lightning stories: August Hellman of Arkansas was struck twice and lived to tell the tale. No permanent injuries. No brain damage. Each time he was hit, he smelled ozone and felt “a terrible sense of foreboding” seconds before.
That monster took a baby. Why? What do they do to them?
No one could tell her. No one knew.
Someone was coming; she got to her feet and wiped her face, averting her head. Living in the castle was like living in a big office building, with people coming and going at all hours, busy, busy, busy. Guarding the Pale was only one of the duties of Haus Ritter. Apparently there were vampires called Blutsauger. And gnomes. A lot of guarding.
Hysterical laughter welled up inside her. She thought about calling Jack. Guess what. I’m living in an Underworld movie.
She didn’t recognize the man ambling toward her, apparently texting, head down, fingers flying. He wore jeans and a dark brown sweatshirt with the Ritter crest silk-screened in black.
“Abend,” he said casually. Evening.
“Guten abend,” she replied.
I should tell someone about all this. I shouldn’t wait until nine.
She continued on down the corridor of stone, knowing that Andreas’s office was on the fifth story of the castle and that she had to make two lefts before she reached the birdcage elevator, a Victorian contraption that scared her to death—
She heard a low, deep moan, and stopped walking. It was almost sub-audible, as if it were originating from underneath her. She looked around. There was nothing.
She walked on.
The moan came again.
Cocking her head, she turned down a passageway lined with oil paintings of Ritter knights, maybe Renaissance. At a T-intersection, she shrugged and forked right, turning around, wondering if she’d imagined it. It could be the water pressure in the pipes. A movie.
Except … she felt compelled to find it.
More woo woo, she thought.
Another moan.
Slowing, she spotted two wooden doors flush with the wall, very plain, with brass doorknobs. She tried the first one. It was locked. But the second swung open, into a dimly lit stairwell.
An ornate brass stair railing curved both up and down, and a faint light glowed from below.
Cocking her head again, she started down the stone stairs, worn and uneven but clean. She didn’t know why she didn’t summon someone to investigate. Why she didn’t sound the alarm. It seemed the right thing to do.
She reached the landing.
Another moan.
Another floor down.
She kept going.
And going.
Then the stairs stopped. On the wall was a faded sign that read EINTRITT VERBOTEN . No entry . It was so dark she had trouble reading it. But no trouble at all translating it, apparently.
Passing the sign, she looped around and started down the next flight of the staircase. About halfway down, a terrible stench wafted beneath the scent of her shampoo and body splash. She knew that smell—people crowded in too tightly; sick and neglected people.
She coughed into her fist. The sound echoed. There was a rustling as if in response, and a gasp. And another moan.
She descended one more flight. The smell grew worse, sickening her; making her remember the baby in the desert, and the baby on horseback.
At the bottom of the next landing, a strip of luminous tape had been attached to the stone floor. It gave off white light, like the Pale.
I should get the hell out of here, she thought. I’m not supposed to be here.
Then the moan became strange sounds, like wind chimes:
“****.”
Twinkling silvery.
“****.”
And she knew they meant “home.”
“Hello?” she whispered, staring at the tape. EINTRITT VERBOTEN .
“****.”
Home.
“Do you need assistance?” she asked in a louder voice.
Silence. And … weeping, and then a kind of gasping, like strangling. And another voice, higher-pitched:
“********.”
Help.
Meg sucked in her breath and made a semijump over the tape, bracing herself for a shock, or pain, but nothing happened. Her boots echoed. Rustling, scrabbling sounds came from the space in front of her, which was filled with vague, shadowy box shapes. As she walked forward, her eyes began to adjust.
She was standing at one end of a double row of cubes or boxes. They stretched far into the darkness, into some vast section of the castle she couldn’t picture; an open space this wide, with no supporting beams or columns for the weight of the building above it, shouldn’t be possible. Magick , she realized, and walked to the closest box, about three feet from the line of luminous tape.
The front was barred; she couldn’t tell if there was an additional barrier—Plexiglas, regular glass—but something sat inside, on the floor, with long shins perpendicular to the floor, and feet that appeared to be pulled from gray clay. Long, nubby fingers were wrapped around the shins, and a bald head rested on the knees. Meg stared at it, transfixed.
What the hell?
With a hiss, it whipped its head up and glared at her, its features deep and plain, very human, its eyes filled with hatred so deep that she took an involuntary step backward.
It was a holding cell. And the thing inside it was imprisoned.
It glared, and then it slowly shut its eyes. It remained that way, head raised, eyes closed, as Meg stared at it.
Jesus, she thought.
The moan sounded again. She moved past the box—the cage —and was about to pass another one when she froze. There was a naked child inside, a towhead, with big blue eyes and a quivering lower lip. It was a little girl, and when she saw Meg, she shrieked and threw herself backward, much as Meg had done at the first cage.
“Hey, it’s okay. I won’t hurt you,” Meg said.
The moan again:
“********.”
She raised a hand to the terrified toddler— I’ll be back— and hurried on, past more cages with more children in them. Most of them were fair-haired and blue-eyed, very German. An imprisoned mini Aryan nation. A few of the prisoners were like the first one, almost claylike, but most were like the little towhead.
Then she came to a cage inhabited by what appeared to be a child half carved from wood, but unfinished—arms that ended in stumps, one leg, the torso an approximation of a chest. No sex organs. No eyes.
“********.”
It was the thing that was moaning.
She looked around, pretending to be suspicious that this was all a joke, but the sick thudding of her heart belied her actions. She was believing this.
More moans joined the first. Home. Help.
Their eyes were huge and sorrowful. They were lonely, and homesick, and miserable.
She understood: they were the changeling children, from beyond the Pale. They were the babies who had been put in the beds of the human children taken by the Erl King. The fruits of the Ritter extraction teams.
She thought of the Mexican baby; and Matt; and the child who had been taken tonight. Garriet. What was going on? What was this about? Why was it that these … children could survive on this side of the Pale, but she couldn’t cross
it?
She wandered among the cages and cells, seeing more misery and despair, and deep hatred. Her cell phone alarm went off: eight thirty. Sliding it off, she hurried back up the stairs, fully intending to confront Andreas.
As she headed for the birdcage elevator, she saw him striding toward the castle entrance, bundled up in a black overcoat and a white fur hat. She hurried after him; he turned his head, took note of her, and said in English, “Emergency. We’ll have to postpone the meeting.”
“What’s going on?” she asked, not expecting him to tell her.
He frowned, shrugged. “It’s the damnedest thing. Garriet’s mother refused to give our extraction team the changeling. It’s a mess. She’s hysterical.”
“Let me come with you,” Meg said, striding along beside him.
He raised his brows. “You’re a Border guard. This is not anything to do with you.”
“I want to go.”
“You should rest. It was a hard night.”
“Bitte,” she said in German, and he smiled at her quizzically.
“You Americans are so pushy.”
“Assertive,” she corrected him.
He pursed his lips and made an eye sweep of her appearance. “There’s an extra coat in the car. Come on, then.”
* * *
It was nearly four, and still black out. The Erl King rode only at night. They rolled in a Mercedes through the snowy streets, followed by another navy blue van. Their driver was the texter Meg had passed in the hall.
A single pedestrian fighting against the snow took the time to wave. That there were goblins and ghosties had been accepted by the locals; and that the Ritters were the ones to go to for help was appreciated. Meg was boggled. Why had she never read about any of this? Wasn’t this groundbreaking, earthshaking?
Andreas was in cell phone communication with the leader of the extraction team. Since she could understand German now, she listened carefully. The house was isolated, deep in the forest. The woman was alone with the changeling. She had a gun.
“No, it’s not imperative that the Dämonkind survive,” he said. “But the woman … that would cause an incident. Ja …”
After a while, he flicked off the phone and sighed, looking out the window. She studied his profile.
“Are you going to put the baby in that dungeon downstairs?” she asked him.
He turned his head and looked at her.
“Where you keep all the others?” she added.
He frowned. “How do you know about that? That’s classified.”
Classified. Did Sofie and Lukas know about it?
“You know, where I come from, we just ship them back across the border,” she said.
He raised a brow. She could feel energy moving off him in waves; a thrill of fear centered in her back. Eddie had knocked her out with the flick of his hand. What could this guy do?
“Back where you come from, they aren’t evil.”
“No. They’re just desperate.” She shifted; the wound in her side was hurting a little. “What’s going on? Why does this happen?”
The snow fell as the Mercedes plowed through the storm. Unless the Erl King had gotten Garriet indoors, he’d probably frozen to death by now.
“In the earlier times, when a deformed child was born, the people would say it was a changeling,” Andreas began. “A slow mind, a missing limb … they would say this child was not a human child. Then they would take it into the forest, and leave it.”
“Charming.”
“Their hope was that the faeries would take it back.”
She pursed her lips. “So what are you saying, that the Erl King takes the deformed kids from us and leaves, what? Demons in their place?” She thought a moment.
“ Nein. We don’t know why he does it. But he never took the castoffs. And he leaves … what he leaves.”
She took a deep breath. “About what he leaves. They want to go ho—”
The Mercedes pulled to the right, and the engine went off. She looked past Andreas, to see a small white A-frame chalet sitting in the billows of snow, surrounded on three sides by fir trees. Smoke came out of a chimney set in the shingled roof, and empty flower boxes fronted a window beside the wood door, and another one above the door, where there must have been an extra little room.
The building was surrounded by what appeared to be a SWAT team in full body armor and helmets, crouched, holding crossbows. They all had Uzis slung across their chests. The soldier closest to the car looked over his shoulder at them, and made a fist.
Andreas murmured under his breath. She knew he was speaking Latin, and that he was conjuring a spell that would protect them. Energy washed over her in strong, surging waves, making her feel tall and light on her feet, and powerful —but it was a weak sensation compared to what she had felt at the Pale.
The soldier approached and brought Andreas up to speed: the woman was inside with the changeling; she was hysterical, armed, and defiant.
Andreas turned to Meg. She knew he was going to tell her to stay in the car.
“I’m going in with you,” she said in English, although she knew how to say it in German. And in Latin.
What am I doing? What am I, period?
The Wächter —the Guardian—parted his lips as if to deny her request; before he could speak, she pushed , somehow. Her intentions—her thoughts—carried power. She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but she did know she could make him say yes.
Then he blinked, and he told the soldier to form a bodyguard around the two of them. Andreas kept glancing at her, as if he knew something was up, but he didn’t know what. The disorienting, manic high she had first felt at the Pale thrummed through her as they were fitted with vests and Andreas was given a radio. Then he knocked on the door and spoke kindly to the woman, launching into hostage-crisis speak. He was good at it. He was charming her magickally; maybe she knew it and maybe she didn’t. The odor of the wood smoke from the chimney changed, and magick permeated the air.
Then they were in. The house was simply furnished, and a box of disposable diapers sat next to the door. The woman was around Meg’s age—twenty-eight, give or take—and she was holding the silent, unmoving baby against her body, as the Erl King had held little Garriet. Holy shit, she had a Glock in her hand, the weight of which must be wearing her down. It wouldn’t be long before she surrendered.
Her name was Brigitte, and her eyes were bloodshot. Her face was swollen with crying. She ticked her glance from Andreas to Meg and leaned her head against the baby’s head. The baby looked like any normal little baby, with a wisp of strawberry hair and those mirrorlike gray eyes of newborns. Younger than Garriet, then? She could smell the smoky magickal scent of him, like ozone before lightning.
“He doesn’t want to go with you,” the woman said to Andreas. In German, of course.
Andreas began to reply, but Meg spoke first.
“ Ich weiss.” I know.
Andreas looked at Meg sharply. She ignored him, focusing all her attention on the woman. Brigitte. Before Meg knew what was happening, her mind filled with the image of the baby in the desert, and of Matty … and of the Erl King, nodding at her.
Had it been so hideous in Mexico that the mother had had to cross? So terrifying in Matty’s hospital room that their mom couldn’t cross?
What lay beyond the Pale?
I crossed the tape in the dungeon, she thought. I don’t think I was supposed to be able to do that.
Meg heard Andreas’s thoughts, echoing in her head: This poor woman is crazy with grief. She’s trying to substitute the little monster for her little boy. Crazy, crazy.
And then Meg thought about the possible desperation of the Erl King. Was he a cunning monster, salting the world with genocidal dictators and serial killers? Or a coyote, finding places for the children of the desperate?
Or something else altogether?
In the house:
It all happened so fast.
Meg reached out her han
d to Brigitte. Andreas watched, hand on his radio. She knew dozens of weapons were cocked and ready.
Brigitte held her breath.
Meg nodded her head, once.
Brigitte exhaled and gave Meg the Glock.
“Gut,” Andreas said, grunting his approval as he held out his hand to Meg for the weapon. He said into the radio, “Achtung, hier spricht—”
Then Meg raised it and aimed it point-blank at his face. “Tell them to back away,” she ordered him. “Now.”
But he didn’t. First he tried to reason with her, and then he started to warn the SWAT team. So she knocked him out with the Glock, hard across his temple.
“Was?” Brigitte whispered, thunderstruck.
“Come with me. Now,” Meg ordered her.
Oh, come and go with us …
Silently, she and Brigitte went out the front door, holding the baby. Brigitte began sobbing. The snow was pouring down. The soldiers couldn’t really see what was happening. The first one to approach her asked her if Andreas was coming out.
“Ja,” she told him, sounding unnaturally calm. “He’s securing the interior. Get us to the Mercedes. The woman stays with us.”
The soldier complied. They were halfway to the car when Andreas’s voice crackled over the radio: “Stop them!”
Meg burst into action, clocking the soldier on her right with the Glock, grabbing his Uzi, aiming it at the solider on Brigitte’s left. He backed away, yelling. She swept a circle, shooting blam blam blam; the Uzi was her weapon. She covered Brigitte as the woman sprinted to the vehicle.
Meg heard Andreas’s thoughts: Gone mad when she hit the Pale; she’s under his control; what’s happening; will we have to kill her?
Now the soldiers were opening fire, but something surged around her, protecting the three of them as she charged to the driver’s side, yanked open the door, and dragged him out. Jerking him toward herself, she kneed him; as he crumpled, she aimed her elbow at his Adam’s apple. He fell backward far enough for her to leap in, slam the door, and peel out.
