“Are you going to put the baby in that dungeon downstairs?” she asked him.
He turned his head and looked at her.
“Where you keep all the others?” she added.
He frowned. “How do you know about that? That’s classified.”
Classified. Did Sofie and Lukas know about it?
“You know, where I come from, we just ship them back across the border,” she said.
He raised a brow. She could feel energy moving off him in waves; a thrill of fear centered in her back. Eddie had knocked her out with the flick of his hand. What could this guy do?
“Back where you come from, they aren’t evil.”
“No. They’re just desperate.” She shifted; the wound in her side was hurting a little. “What’s going on? Why does this happen?”
The snow fell as the Mercedes plowed through the storm. Unless the Erl King had gotten Garriet indoors, he’d probably frozen to death by now.
“In the earlier times, when a deformed child was born, the people would say it was a changeling,” Andreas began. “A slow mind, a missing limb … they would say this child was not a human child. Then they would take it into the forest, and leave it.”
“Charming.”
“Their hope was that the faeries would take it back.”
She pursed her lips. “So what are you saying, that the Erl King takes the deformed kids from us and leaves, what? Demons in their place?” She thought a moment.
“ Nein. We don’t know why he does it. But he never took the castoffs. And he leaves … what he leaves.”
She took a deep breath. “About what he leaves. They want to go ho—”
The Mercedes pulled to the right, and the engine went off. She looked past Andreas, to see a small white A-frame chalet sitting in the billows of snow, surrounded on three sides by fir trees. Smoke came out of a chimney set in the shingled roof, and empty flower boxes fronted a window beside the wood door, and another one above the door, where there must have been an extra little room.
The building was surrounded by what appeared to be a SWAT team in full body armor and helmets, crouched, holding crossbows. They all had Uzis slung across their chests. The soldier closest to the car looked over his shoulder at them, and made a fist.
Andreas murmured under his breath. She knew he was speaking Latin, and that he was conjuring a spell that would protect them. Energy washed over her in strong, surging waves, making her feel tall and light on her feet, and powerful —but it was a weak sensation compared to what she had felt at the Pale.
The soldier approached and brought Andreas up to speed: the woman was inside with the changeling; she was hysterical, armed, and defiant.
Andreas turned to Meg. She knew he was going to tell her to stay in the car.
“I’m going in with you,” she said in English, although she knew how to say it in German. And in Latin.
What am I doing? What am I, period?
The W?chter —the Guardian—parted his lips as if to deny her request; before he could speak, she pushed , somehow. Her intentions—her thoughts—carried power. She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but she did know she could make him say yes.