Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

We broke into air and I wheezed as much of the precious stuff as I could into my lungs. Lara’s hand was like a slender iron bar under my arm, firmly holding my head up out of the water. “Wizard, get back to the boat,” she snapped. The water had pressed her coal black hair to her head. It made her ears stand out noticeably and somehow made her look a decade younger. Her eyes were bright with anger. “I will not have my brother trapped out on that island because you are too stupid to avoid swimming with a kraken.”

“How is this my fault!?” I glugged, spitting out water.

There was a sudden cough and a hissing sound, and brilliant light flooded the surface of the water. Murphy had popped a flare on the bow of the Water Beetle, maybe twenty yards off, and stood holding it aloft in her hand, peering out at the water.

“Ms. Murphy!” Lara called sharply, and Murph swiveled to peer out toward us. The flare had blinded her to anything beyond the immediate reach of its light, but she’d ignited it to show us where to find the boat once she’d realized I’d gone into the drink.

The water suddenly thrashed with nearby motion.

“Go!” Lara called, and upended into the water as smoothly as an otter, vanishing with a kick of legs that were way too distracting, even in this mess. I spun in the water and started thrashing toward the boat. I was in good shape, but swimming was not my thing. I churned at the water and slowly drew closer to the ship’s side. Murphy hustled over with the flare and said, “Over here!”

A lean, dangerous-looking Valkyrie came vaulting over the locker at the back of the main deck, where we stored the ship’s lines, a coiled rope gripped in one hand. Freydis had short red hair, bright green eyes, freckles, and a boxer’s scars and was dressed in black tactical gear. Her hands blurred as she unknotted the line and flung it out toward me.

The coil hit the water a foot from my head, and I seized it. Freydis started hauling me in, hard enough that the counterpressure from the water made it difficult to hang on to the rope.

“Harry!” Murphy screamed, pointing behind me.

I whipped my head around in time to see a bow wave rushing toward me as something massive gathered speed in the water.

I started hauling myself up the rope, but the harder we pulled me, the harder the water pushed back.

“Harry!” Murphy shouted again—and flung the marine flare at me.

It tumbled through the air, dizzying in its brightness. At my size, I’m not an acrobat or anything, but my hand-eye coordination isn’t too shabby. I reached out, batted it into the air instead of catching it, then with a last desperate clutch managed to grab onto it—just as the tentacles chewed into me again and dragged me under, the magnesium flare blazing even brighter as it hit the water with me.

Magnesium flares burn at about twenty-nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. So when I shoved it against the tentacle around my waist, it peeled away as swiftly as a snapping rubber band—and the spider-silk suit reached the limits of its endurance, tearing off me like tissue paper, leaving pinched bruises all over my torso in its wake.

I looked down through the dark water and saw the kraken spreading out beneath me. It was . . . vast, its eyes gleaming with feral awareness, throwing back the light of the flare like eerie mirrors. For a second, I hovered there, meeting that gaze . . .

. . . feeling a dark, horrible awareness suddenly swelling unbearably inside my head.

What happened next would haunt me a while. The eyes are the windows to the soul. And wizards, if they meet your gaze for a moment, can sometimes get a peek in there. In the frozen dark of Lake Michigan, in the blazing, limited light of the flare, I soulgazed a kraken.

Soulgazes are serious business, because whatever you see there gets burned in. It never fades, never diminishes in horror or awe. If you see something bad enough, such as the n—

—something bad enough, it could do horrible things to your head.

I don’t even know what I saw that night. A blur of images, alien and strange and somehow nauseating. I felt my limbs, spread out and floating in the water. I sensed other creatures like me, writhing in obscene embraces on the floor of the ocean, amid broken columns and ancient statues of things that somehow seemed to bend themselves into more than three dimensions. Sensation flared through my thoughts, so absolutely alien to anything in the human experience that it might as well have been pure agony.

I heard myself screaming, felt the bubbles pouring up over my face.

But here’s the thing.

When a wizard looks into your soul, you look back into his. You see him the same way he sees you, clearly, a gaze that pierces veils and deceptions to see the world for what it truly is. The kraken stared back at me, and its warty hide began to ripple through fluttering bands of color, the skin distorting, becoming spiky, its tentacles coiling and curling in upon themselves.

I ripped my gaze away from the thing, my brain screaming in protest, but somewhere deep down, the instinctive part of me that almost enjoyed the benefits of the Winter mantle recognized something crucial.

Whatever it had seen when it looked back inside me had, for that moment, terrified it utterly. And something abruptly changed inside me, like a switch had been flipped.

The not-squid, the kraken, was afraid.

I was still stunned by the soulgaze, and so was the squid.

It never saw Lara coming.

She hit it from behind and beneath, knifing through the water as if she’d been wearing a jet pack. She slammed the point of my brother’s kukri into the warty flesh of its head, then used the viciously sharp blade on its curving inner edge to begin opening up the creature’s flesh.

Hell’s bells. She meant to cut out its brain.

The kraken abruptly thrashed and twisted, its skin rippling with colors and textures as it turned on her, tentacles questing. It seized her around the hips and whiplashed her back and forth in the water, ripping her hands free of the knife and aiming to break her neck with the force of it.

The knife was still sticking out of the back side of its head. Or body. I’m not sure which it was—the whole thing was just warts and tentacles and that vicious biting beak. So I began kicking down, ignoring the burning in my lungs. Lara hadn’t gotten to cut very far before the thing had seized her, maybe twelve or fifteen inches.

But that was an opening more than big enough for the magnesium flare.

I shoved it into the kraken’s flabby skull, all the way to my elbow.

It went mad.

I was battered by something, shoved back three or four feet, and if I’d had any breath left it would have been knocked out of me. I dimly saw Lara struggling, enwrapped in tentacles, until with her skin glowing like marble, she seized one of the tentacles in both hands and simply tore it in half.

Fluid stained the water in a cloud the size of a swimming pool.