“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!”