Chicks Kick Butt

“Links! Verdammt, left! ” Lukas yelled at Meg, his voice crackling through her headset. “He’s there!”

Ebony trees and jet-black bracken jagged into silhouettes as Meg galloped wildly through the snowstorm. Her hair, braided and pulled back with an elastic band, hit her back like a fist. Deluged by sleet, still she sweated under her standard-issue German police riot helmet. Unlike the others, she’d painted no insignia on it, no coat of arms, no totem. Just her last name: ZECHERLE . The miner’s light attached to the front strobed icy blue on ferocious boughs of fir and pine. Wet splatted on her mask. She smelled the cold, and the mud, and her own stinking fear. Of smoky magick, there was no trace. And of their quarry, no sight.

To her left, the Black Forest raged and shook. To her right, boulders jutted toward treetops, and behind them, she knew, a waterfall cascaded. As if the icy flow had leaped the riverbanks, she was drowning in darkness and snow.

“Meg!” Lukas bellowed. “Reply!”

“Where?” she shouted into her headset. The mouthpiece was loose and she let go of the reins of her massive black stallion, Teufel, with one hand and held the mic to her mouth. “Shit, where ?”

“You must see him! Twelve o’clock!”

Doggedly, she squinted through the protective mask. No night-vision goggles, no GPS, nothing. If the Great Hunt got you and dragged you across the Pale, you were worse than dead.

If they didn’t get that baby back …

Snow. Darkness.

“Then my Sight’s not working,” she announced.

“Bitte?” Lukas cried. “Not working ?”

Through her earphones, she could hear the others responding in disbelief. It almost made her smile; they were so serious and smug. But she was clearly in deep trouble, so she spared no time for pettiness.

“I see trees and rocks,” she said. “Period, kaput. ”

“Meg, where are you?” That was Sofie, Lukas’s twin sister.

“Where the fuck are you ?” she shouted back.

Static crackled in her ears and snow rushed at her; tree branches smacked her chest, bolted into Kevlar body armor. Teufel grunted, then sailed over a fallen log long before she put her spurs to his flanks. She understood now why they didn’t use motorcycles or ATVs, which had been her first question when Lukas had explained about the magickal Haus of the Knights—Haus Ritter. He’d rolled her eyes and told her she was a typical arrogant American, and that the old ways were best because the old gods were alive and well in Germany. Well, yeah, heil Hitler to you, too.

“Meg, just focus,” another voice advised, in the polished, aristocratic British accent of Heath, who had deposited a hundred thousand pounds into a trust fund for her brother and paid off her parents’ refi, just like that, when Meg had protested that she couldn’t leave the States because her parents were too wiped out to deal with anything except their favorite TV shows. “Your Sight manifested. It can’t go away. It doesn’t work like that.”

“It did go away,” she yelled, furious. “I’m blind out here!”

Desperately, Meg scanned the flashing landscape dead ahead, then to her left, right. The German Black Forest glared back at her, far from still. Pines and firs shuddered and bowed. Snow poured from the sky. Aside from the voices of her team crackling in her ears—the four other Gifted Border riders on her patrol—the howling wind overpowered every sound, including the steady rhythm of her own horse’s hooves and the staccato pounding of her heart. In their world—of magick, and evil—she was blind, deaf, useless. It was only through sheer accident that she’d wound up on point, ahead of the others on the craggy slopes of the alpine mountain.

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.