“No,” she gritted, “crap.”
Losing consciousness, she slumped sideways. Into snow, she prayed; if she hit the rocks, or if she fell under Teufel …
Through the glowworm-like radiance, the image of the Great Hunt stretched and glimmered. She held out a gloved hand, as if she could scoop the riders up in her fist. Vibrations buffeted her ears; then banshee wails shot up around her. Death. Death was riding with the Hunt. The baby …
The wailing.
Just wolves, she thought, tears forming, grabbing the pommel and canting farther right. No, no, I was so close. So close again …
“Don’t go,” she ordered the Erl King. “Don’t, you bastard.”
The King of the Elves turned his head in her direction. Although Teufel was still racing forward, she froze from head to steel-toed boot. Behind his black mask, he looked at her. Saw her. She felt it as if he had laid a hand on her shoulder, or her cheek … icy cold, but gentle. Chills skittered up and down, ghost fingers on the xylophone of her spine.
She had never been more afraid, nor felt more alive, than in that moment.
“I know you,” she whispered.
He inclined his horned head slowly, in her direction. The chills got worse; but so did an incredible euphoria, as if she were the most powerful being who had ever lived.
He held her gaze, in his black mask and flaming antlers. Then he nestled the child beneath his chin.
And then she was gone.
*
In the hospital:
She’d heard her brother’s voice from behind the bandages, issuing from the hospital bed, after the lightning strike: “Meh meh meh.”
“He’s trying to say my name,” she’d told his neurologist.
“I’m so sorry, but it’s just a reflex. He doesn’t even know who you are,” the doctor had replied.
Their parents were drinking coffee in the waiting room. They couldn’t seem to make it down the hallway to see him. The nurses had all traded looks and the social worker had been called. Something about her parents’ denial. Something about he was their son, for God’s sake. They should at least see him.
In the desert:
When she had held that lifeless Mexican baby and tried to will it into living, she forgave her parents for being too afraid to face Matt. Maybe that was where the tears had sprung from, and the messy way she’d hit on Jack. He’d told her he’d been tempted until she started talking about her brother.
“You got issues, hon,” he’d told her.
We travel light, or we die.
*
When she awakened, she was lying on the floor of Haus Ritter’s dark blue van, and her armor was off. She was bare to the waist with a heavy blanket covering her, and she felt loopy, drugged, and supremely pissed off. Bathed in snowfall moonlight, Lukas knelt beside her, his hands resting one on top of the other, beneath the blanket, molded against her left side. His eyes were closed, his dark eyebrows furrowed as he whispered under his breath. Warmth spread from his skin to hers; he was performing a healing spell.
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.