Rachel Caine: Chicks Kick Butt

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.