Rachel Caine: Chicks Kick Butt

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.