“So how again do you define illegal immigration as a victimless crime?” she concluded in a flat voice brimming with venom.
It was too much; she’d been too brutal. Jack had intervened by passing out a stack of the public affairs officer’s business cards. Then he’d driven straight to the Elephant Bar. To unwind, he said. Trouble was, his divorce would be final in nine days; and after a few Dos Equis and tequila shots, they both started crossing over into that fairyland of their own, which involved intimacies they shouldn’t take and confessions that were mostly lies, but kind lies, designed to comfort and tempt each other.
But any love that was made there would definitely die. Meg had realized they were crossing the line sooner than Jack did. She’d excused herself to go to the bathroom and whipped out her cell phone, about to call herself a cab, when Lukas had appeared at the other end of the dimly lit hall, like a desperado calling her out at high noon.
“You’re awake,” Lukas murmured now, lifting his hands from her chest and pulling the blanket up to her chin. Tenderly, gently.
“Did we—?”
“Nein.” Blue eyes in a face puffy with cold and despair. “No.”
She clenched her fists to keep from exploding. “The whole thing was bullshit,” she said. “I couldn’t see. And you made Eddie shoot me.”
“To stop you from killing yourself,” he replied. “Crossing the Pale is like stepping on a livewire. I told you that.”
Oh, come and go—
“How did I end up on point? I couldn’t see !”
“Something affected your Sight,” he agreed.
“Maybe the Erl King did it,” Eddie said, looking over his shoulder at them. Mid-twenties, he was very sculpted, with a hooked nose and deep hollows in his cheeks. Her distant relative, carrying magickal DNA or “auric vibrations,” as Lukas referred to them. So they’d been told.
“How?” Meg asked.
“Who can say?” Sofie said.
Lukas glanced toward his sister, his expression hooded. “Well, it’s never happened before.”
“And her parents didn’t manifest any Gifts,” Sofie added.
“I was not adopted.” She scowled at the back of Sofie’s head as Lukas handed her a large gray sweater. She pulled it on over her head. They’d been over this. If magick could have saved Matty, someone in the family would have used it.
“Sometimes it’s dormant,” Lukas reminded them both. “It’s not exactly genetic. Auric vibrations are like magick bloodlines.”
“Then maybe magick forces we don’t yet understand have affected her Ritter vibrations,” Sofie interjected. “We need to find out if we can count on Meg’s Gift.”
God, did she blind me? Meg wondered. Maybe Sophie liked being the queen bee of the patrol unit. There was definitely no love lost between the two of them, but would she actually sabotage someone on a life-and-death mission?
“We’ll do a thorough investigation,” Lukas assured her.
There was a lull. Everyone looked tired and glum. They’d been on a high before the mission. Eddie and Heath had known about their special powers, but they hadn’t realized there was a worldwide confederation of magickal groups—hundreds of thousands of people—who were “different.” Gifted, in their parlance.
The van trundled over ancient cobblestones. Snow piled on skyscrapers of glass and steel, and on Victorian heaps whose roofs were skewered with chimneys and satellite dishes. It smacked at an angle against “perpendicular” whitewash-and-wood beams of Renaissance architecture, most of it decidedly “faux,” and all of it reminding Meg of Legoland back in California.
Heath, who looked to be around thirty-five, sat facing her on the floor, wrapped in a dark blue blanket, looking cold, tired, and frustrated. His face was ruddy from the cold and his crazy blond Rasta braids were soaked with either sweat or snow or a combination. Sofie was driving, and Eddie was riding shotgun, tipping his head back against the seat.
“How’s Teufel?” Meg asked.