Rachel Caine: Chicks Kick Butt

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.