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.
Holy shit.
It was blurred at first, as if she were looking through the surveillance cameras back in San Diego. White and glowing, horses and riders.
Then forty yards away, the cantering parade snapped into sharp relief. Cut out in black by the brilliant lights, dozens of spiky goblins in medieval armor rode black chargers, capering and gibbering as they galloped, a thundering horde. There were at least a dozen of them sitting so high in their saddles that she figured the smallest to be at least six feet tall. Orange flames flared from the horses’ nostrils; sparks flew from their hooves. Hellhounds of ash and smoke bayed at their heels, disintegrating, re-forming—
Thirty yards.