Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  But Marcone had struck her where it hurt—in the feelings. What he’d said had been defiant enough, disrespectful enough, to send her into a rage. She could have flicked that stone at me carefully, like a dart thrower, beaned me in the head, and that would have been that. But she didn’t. She threw it hard, sidearm, like a major-league pitcher, her rage giving the motion away so that I had an instant to counter her.

  I turned my shoulder into the stone and it hit me like a sledgehammer.

  My coat stopped the worst of it, which meant that all I got was a broken arm. Left one, middle of my forearm. The rock shattered against me, and if the coat kept me alive, it still felt like I’d been kicked by a particularly powerful and hostile horse.

  I went down with a cry.

  My body felt like a car that didn’t want to start, and my limbs filled with a bone-crushing weariness. The toll the night had put on me was becoming physically unsupportable. I slammed a hand to the ground to push myself up, or tried to. The actual movements my body performed seemed a lot feebler than I had intended. But I got back up, just as the Titan slithered across the rocks to Marcone.

  Steel gleamed in the Baron’s hand. Maybe a four-inch blade, black composite handle, modern diver’s knife, very plain. Very much not epic or apocalyptic.

  Marcone stabbed at her. A child would have done better against a professional wrestler.

  Ethniu’s good arm blurred. She seized him by the throat, lifted him with no noticeable effort, gave her arm a little bob, a little twist, and broke his neck.

  I watched Marcone jerk and go limp.

  She rose to a knee, her good leg planted in the boiling water, and threw the corpse away like an empty beer can.

  The Baron of Chicago landed on the rocks, boneless and broken.

  A roar went up from the battlefield behind us.

  The blue beam of light rising into the night like a vague, glowing moonbeam, above the embattled forces of the Winter Lady, flickered and dimmed.

  Ethniu let out a bubbling, almost disbelieving laugh. Then she prowled like a beast down into the roiling water and slipped beneath it. I could see her reaching out a hand toward the light of the Eye.

  I staggered over to Marcone’s body. Broken neck didn’t kill you right away.

  Nobody ought to die alone.

  And when I got there, he sat up.

  I fell back with a manly high-pitched scream.

  Marcone’s head was twisted way too far around to one side. He rolled his neck as if stretching out. There was series of hideous little pops in his neck and then he shook his head back and forth as if easing a cramp, and his neck just . . . unbroke.

  Marcone gave me a bland look and held up his knife.

  Its blade was covered in blood, too bright red to be real.

  I blinked and stared at the knife. Then up at him.

  “What the actual fuck?” I asked.

  I felt my eyes widen.

  Celestial power, they had said, to get through the Titanic bronze.

  Or infernal.

  Marcone’s eyes wrinkled at the corners in genuine amusement. “Honestly, Dresden. Did you think I’d stop with the title?”

  And in the center of his forehead, his skin flushed and stirred and then began to glow in a lambent purple light in the shape of an angelic rune.

  A pair of glowing violet eyes etched in light opened on his forehead, just above his own eyebrows.

  And with a little ripple, black thorns that would have been at home on particularly wild roses began to emerge from his skin, in a pattern on his face and stirring beneath his shirt.

  “I believe you needed this,” he said, offering me the handle of the knife. “And I believe time is short.”

  I took the knife, staring.

  Sir Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, Baron of Chicago, Knight of the Blackened Denarius, the bearer of the Master of Sorcery, Thorned Namshiel, calmly rose and divested himself of the pirate bandoliers. He reached up to undo his tie and tossed it to one side. Then he loosened his collar so that the thorns in his skin weren’t pressing on it, and unbuttoned the shirt, evidently to make himself more comfortable there, too.

  The coin of Thorned Namshiel, one of a set of thirty, rested on an almost unbearably fine silver chain against Marcone’s chest.

  “I believe Namshiel and I can play for a draw against her,” he said. “But not for long. You must complete the binding as quickly as you can.”

  “I,” I said. “Buh.”

  Marcone turned and slapped me.

  “Hell’s bells,” I spat.

  “Focus,” he snarled. “I know it hurts. I know what you’ve lost. I know you’re tired. But you and I are all that stands between that creature and this city.”

  I clenched my jaw.

  “If we fail now,” he continued, “everyone who has been lost has been lost for nothing. Your people. And mine.”

  The water of Lake Michigan flared with red light.

  Gulp. Ethniu had reclaimed the Eye.

  “Dresden,” Marcone hissed, giving my chest a little push. “Are you going to sit there while that happens?”

  I thought of Murphy’s body, silent, small, back in the Bean.

  I thought of my little Maggie, in her pajamas, small and vulnerable.

  I snarled at my sluggish brain, forced the gears to start grinding again. Then I met the eyes of tiger-souled John Marcone and said, “No.”

  He bared his teeth. And the weird purple eyes . . . smiled.

  Marcone rose, turned to face the water, and started spinning off defensive spells. Different ones. From each hand. Simultaneously. Evidently, a few years in private tuition with an angelic master of magic as a teacher really got some results.

  Maybe if there was a later, I needed to get back to school myself. The very thought was exhausting.

  Christ, it had really been a very long day.

  A Titan was about to send the world into a new Dark Age while Knights of Winter and Hell tried to get in her way. Several Queens of Faerie had been beaten bloody, half a pantheon of supernatural terrors had smashed one another to pieces in Millennium Park, and they’d knocked buildings down like Legos while they did it.

  Double Dragon boss fight beside Hell Knight Marcone now?

  Yeah.

  Sure.

  Why not?

  Chapter

  Thirty-four

  Ethniu didn’t arise from the waters of Lake Michigan so much as explode from them, her raw power and agility belying her mangled limbs. Stars and stones, she was functionally halfway to being a quadriplegic—biplegic, I guess—and she still moved like a damned gymnast.

  Marcone began muttering in a language I didn’t recognize and pointed a finger at the ground twenty yards away and to his left. He indicated another position to his right with his other hand, at a point equidistant from the first, said something, and there was a crackling sound in the air, like . . . broken wind chimes, maybe.

  Ethniu came out of the water with the Eye already bursting forth in a tidal roar of red energy, lashing out unstoppably at Marcone.

  Marcone simply stepped to his left and vanished into a chorus of broken wind chimes—reappearing at the point he’d pointed to with his left hand, clear of the beam.

  Ethniu shrieked in rage, slewing the gaze of the Eye around wantonly, though the motion was slower than it should have been and seemed to take physical effort from her straining neck muscles as she swept her gaze around, searching for Marcone. She spotted him with another scream, but he simply took a second step, vanishing from the first point of the triangle he’d indicated, and appeared in the second in another shower of clinking-crystal sounds.

  Holy crap. Direct point-to-point translocation was something that the White Council kept in a section called “Highly Theoretical and Dangerous Magic” in the wizard’s library at the
complex in Edinburgh. I knew, because years ago when I’d asked about it, I’d been put on the no-access list for the entire section.

  Which . . . well, to be fair, probably wasn’t entirely unwise.

  Ethniu spent the energy of the Eye’s blast while Marcone played freaking peekaboo with her, using magic I wouldn’t care to touch until I’d had another forty or fifty years to practice, at least.

  And while Marcone kept her busy, I got to work.

  I grounded the Spear next to me. Working with one hand was a pain, but my left hand wasn’t cooperating very well and couldn’t do much more than wave vaguely and grasp Marcone’s bloodied knife. I opened the bag I’d had tied closed, rested my palm on the skull inside for a second, and said, “Bob!”

  The eyes of the skull kindled to light, even as I held him up so that he could see what was happening. “Did Radio Mab go off the air? Is it over? Are we . . . Oh my freaking God!”

  Beyond us, Ethniu seized a boulder the size of a basketball and smashed at Marcone with it. The gangster stood there calmly while the rock shattered on a dim violet aura around him, the pieces flinging themselves violently back into Ethniu’s face.

  “Oh hell no!” Bob declared.

  I had to reach across to fumble in my opposite pocket with my good hand and withdraw the crystal I’d brought from Demonreach for the purpose. It flickered, deep down, with the faint green light of the crystals in the catacombs under the island.

  “Bob,” I said. “We’re going to a bind a Titan.”

  “Fuck that!” the skull sputtered. “I’m going to Utah! Stuff like this never happens in Utah!”

  “Buddy,” I said, turning the skull to look at me. “I need you.”

  Bob the Skull’s eyelights dwindled down to little points and he said, in a tiny voice, “Dammit.” He shuddered in my hand and then the lights brightened again. “Think of all the girls we’ll get when we lock her up!”

  Such a long night.

  “That’s the spirit,” I sighed.

  “Oh! I see what you did there.”

  “Dammit, Bob, focus!” I snapped grumpily. “You’re the circle. And if we survive this, you get a twenty-four-hour pass. Shore leave.”

  “Whoop!” Bob whooped, and campfire sparks soared out of the skull’s eye sockets and into a swiftly moving cloud in the hellish air.

  Ethniu recoiled from the rebounding stone, snarling in frustration, and started clubbing Marcone with one arm, the motion primal, brutal. His shields were comprehensive, if not really first-class in strength—but he just kept spinning new ones off his fingers, defenses akimbo. Ethniu’s furious blows would shatter the shield they struck, but by then Marcone would have spun up another one.

  She switched tactics, kicking a cloud of stones at him with her broken foot—which already looked steadier than it had been. Marcone had to drop a new shield low to intercept the stones, which scattered off in random directions as the spell fractured, breaking the rhythm. He had to dive to one side before Ethniu compressed his spine into his tailbone, and she surged after him, snarling.

  I took the bloodied knife and swept it over the smoldering light of the crystal, and it flared to life as the blood of the Titan touched it. It might have been really bright. I could barely tell. The world was turning into weird shadows and odd streaks of color. My good hand was shaking hard.

  I drove the crystal down into some rubble so that it stood up from the ground. Then I smeared more of the Titan’s blood onto the tip of the Spear.

  My heart suddenly skittered along even faster. Thrumthrumthrumthrumthrum.

  Marcone did something that made greasy black smoke condense into a thick, choking cloud and sent it zipping toward the Titan’s face, where it clung in a wobbly bubble of impenetrable fog. The Titan swiped at it uselessly.

  “Namshiel,” she snarled. “You greasy little snake!”

  Marcone spoke in a different voice even as he ducked behind a chunk of fallen concrete the size of a tractor trailer. It sounded like him, mostly, only with a very formal British accent. “You haven’t changed much, either, darling.”

  In answer, Ethniu screamed and surged directly forward and through the concrete and the rebar inside it alike. It exploded and came sloughing over Marcone in an avalanche. Marcone played a desperate move and threw a telekinetic strike at his own feet. Magic is awesome, but physics are still physics. Throw a bunch of force at the ground, and the ground throws just as much force back at you.

  Marcone exploded out from under the avalanche of shattering concrete, flew up at maybe a twenty-degree angle, and landed a good fifty feet out into Lake Michigan.

  And the Titan’s furious gaze immediately whipped toward me.

  “Filthy little thief of Power,” Ethniu snarled. Spittle and foam were falling from the skullified side of her face, along with a steady patter of some kind of yellowish slime as she came skittering toward me over the stones. “I will feed you to the Eye.”

  “Bob!” I screamed, and seized the Spear, holding its point up above me.

  The cloud of campfire sparks swirled in a helix up around the Spear, touched the blood at the tip like a hound picking up a scent. I whirled the Spear in a circle, gathering up the substance of the spirit around it along with my will, and murmured, “Ventris cyclis!”

  Wind and spirit flew toward the Titan, too swiftly to be seen as more than a single blur of light that whipped thrice counterclockwise about the Titan and then settled into place, a whirling cyclone of motes of light, a solid bar of my will that encircled her.

  Thrumthrumthrumthrumthrumthrum.

  I sent my will into the Spear, my own power flooding out along with Bob, infusing his essence, just as my will could have infused a circle of chalk or silver.

  Ethniu staggered as the lights surrounded her, shielding her eyes—and then she let out a choking sound and screamed in denial as the circle closed around her.

  Wizards are the gatekeepers, the defenders of this world. Or at least we are when we’re at our best. And if some immortal thing rolls in here from Somewhere Else, we can say something about it. We can pit our will against them. We might not win, but with a proper channel and a circle of power, we can make them stop to fight us.

  The circle closed on Ethniu, and suddenly I found myself pitted against the mutilated will of a Titan.

  There was a horrible pressure, a whole-body crushing agony, as if I had suddenly blinked to the floor of the sea. And that was what it was like, with the force of that mind pressing against mine—like trying to hold off the weight of the tide.

  But the sea had tried to wash my mind away before now, and I knew the secret of facing the will of supernatural beings. I might be nothing but a grain of sand on the shore of that ocean—but pound as it might, the ocean couldn’t destroy that grain of sand. Not if it was stubborn enough to hold together. Though the ocean might wash the sand here and there, might batter and rage at it, when the ocean’s rage is gone, and the waters once more serene, the sand will remain.

  So I took the pressure. Though my head felt like someone was trying to squeeze my brains out through my nose, I kept my will on the Spear, on the circle.

  The snarling rage of the furious, terrified Titan filled my head. Literally. Her voice was echoing off the surface of my skull, deafening and inescapable and really, really uncomfortable.

  “Mortal,” she snarled. “Do you think you can pit your will against mine?”

  “Obviously,” I muttered. “That’s why you’re in a circle, genius.” I took a slow breath and in that deep, echoing voice called, “Ethniu, daughter of Balor! I bind thee!”

  The Titan wailed and shook her head violently, spittle and slime and worse spraying everywhere. She thrashed and suddenly there was a hideous power raking at the circle.

  Bob screamed in agony. The sparks began to fly apart.

  “No!” I said, and sen
t my will rushing into the Spear, out along the stream of sparks still connected to it like some kind of bizarre whirling lasso. I fed power and will to the familiar spirit, fighting the pressure from the Titan, binding together his immaterial substance and preventing her from tearing it apart.

  “Insect!” Ethniu hissed, flinging herself from the edge of the circle and pacing back and forth in it like a frantic big cat. “The advantage of immortality is that one can take the time to be thorough. Do you think we did not plan for this?”

  “Yeah, kinda,” I said, “or you wouldn’t be stuck in my circle. Ethniu, daughter of Balor, I bind thee!”

  Ethniu didn’t scream this time.

  She smiled.

  And then she . . . thought at me.

  The lake and everything else went away.

  And I found myself standing on a quiet lawn in a darkened neighborhood I knew well.

  I was in Michael Carpenter’s front yard.

  The lights were out. And the sky was beginning to fill with dust and smoke and the red glare of the Eye. But I could still see the moon a little. This was earlier in the evening.

  She was showing me a memory.

  And I watched, as Listen and maybe thirty or forty of his turtlenecks advanced into the yard in full tactical gear. They came in, in multiple stacks, heading for Michael’s front door, the kitchen door, the garage, and the door to the backyard.

  I watched as, in a handful of seconds, the men set breaching charges on the door, blew it, and went in.

  Michael Carpenter, stolid in his blue plaid work shirt, was waiting for them, shotgun in hand.

  He wasn’t really a gunfighter. He was retired now.

  It was over quickly.

  They left his body in the entry hall and walked over it. Enemies, mortal enemies, twisted people but still people, flooded into his house to the chattering thumps of suppressed weapons. I knew there were angels on guard at Michael’s house. I knew they would have burned any supernatural attacker with the fires that ravaged Sodom and Gomorrah.