Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Rudolph, handsome as ever, even with his porn ’stache, wilted.

Bradley held his finger pointed a moment more, nodded, and then turned to me. “Excuse me, Mister Dresden. Lieutenant Stallings has asked you to come in on a consult.”

“No can do,” I said. “You need to seek cover in strong positions. Didn’t you guys get Murphy’s warning?”

“We got it,” Bradley said. “But she ain’t exactly in good odor right now, you know?”

“Because of you twits,” I snarled, about ninety-nine percent of it at Rudolph. “Well, tell Stallings my official consulting advice is that he’d goddamned well better listen to every word she said.”

“I knew it,” Rudolph said to Bradley. “It’s some kind of terrorist attack and he’s in on it.”

I stared at him, in my smudged, soaked, slashed suit that still smelled like dead fish and lake water, on my kind-of-stolen twelve-speed, and said, “Yeah, I’m Osama bin Laden over here. Hell’s bells, I don’t have time for this.”

“You should come with us, sir,” Bradley said.

The timbre of his voice had changed. He meant business. He hadn’t changed his stance yet, but he was the kind of guy who would let you know his intentions—and I was still standing there astride a bicycle.

“Bradley,” I said, “I know you’re doing your job right now. But you don’t know how much you could be screwing things up for, um, everyone. Just everyone.”

“Mister Dresden,” Bradley said, “you’ve done some good for us before. You know this drill by now. Just come in. You’ll be done in a couple of hours.”

“We don’t have a couple of hours,” I said. And because I can let people know my intentions, too, I met Bradley’s gaze and said, “Any of us.”

When I give people that look, they look away.

Bradley didn’t.

The eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul. They’re right. How long it takes to trigger the soulgaze varies, but it seems to work faster for people in heightened states of emotion—and we were standing in the middle of millions of people in heightened states of emotion. It was fertile ground for such a connection.

So I got to See Bradley, and where he stood was not only a man in a modest custom suit, but also the spreading trunk of some oak tree so enormous as to look squat, rising to branches that cast far more shade than its source occupied.

It didn’t take a genius to realize that I was looking at the man’s character—that he bore the burden of his duty with stolid responsibility. It didn’t mean that he was impervious to corruption or anything—but, like that solid tree, barring some injury or illness of character, it would hold up under the strain for a good long while. The image hit me with the same kind of impact you might experience in the ocean, as a wave lifts you off your feet. I had to take a stagger step to keep my balance, fighting to break the connection.

I don’t know what I look like in a soulgaze. The only mirrors for the human soul are the people around us. All the people who had been my mirrors hadn’t generally reacted with great positivity to what they’d seen.

Bradley let out a sharp, huffing cry and took a staggering step back. He stumbled and went down, catching himself awkwardly on his elbows and wrenching his neck. He lay there for a second, gasping.

“The fuck!” Rudolph screamed. He’d cleared his jacket from his gun and had his hand on the grip. “The fuck! The fuck did you do to him, Dresden!?”

I shook out my shield bracelet, just in case, and said, “Nothing! Just give him a minute!”

Rudolph drew the gun and aimed it at me, his voice panicked. “Goddammit, what did you do?!”

His finger was on the trigger.

Rudolph was one of those blessed idiots who thought that the world was a rational place. Though he’d been repeatedly exposed to the real score with the supernatural when he had worked at Special Investigations, he’d somehow remained impervious to reality, or at least gave every outward appearance of doing so. I guess it had made him really good at writing the reports Special Investigations had to turn in, where they reduced the paranormal into lowest common denominators until everything fit neatly inside all the categories.

Rudolph wasn’t stupid. You can’t be entirely dim and manage as a police detective and smarmy politico. His denial was less a function of intelligence than a complete lack of the moral courage necessary—a paralyzing inability to face truths that he found personally terrifying.

Rudolph was a coward.

“Trigger discipline, Detective,” I said in a quiet voice, not moving. “I’m not close enough to get to you, and I’ve got this damned bike between my legs. There’s no need to have your finger on the trigger yet.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he snarled, making a little gesture with his shoulders on the expletive. “Put your hands up! Slow!”

The Winter mantle didn’t appreciate the aggression in his voice—or maybe it appreciated it way too much. My first blind instinct was to lunge at the screaming twit, take my chances, and break his scrawny neck. But that would have been impolite.

I did what he said, slowly, seething with rising impatience and anger the entire time. Hell’s bells, of all the times to have to tangle with the normie bureaucracy, this was not it.

Unless . . . Maybe that wasn’t what was happening here.

Rudolph had been on someone’s payroll for a while, we’d been pretty sure. Suppose he’d been given orders to stop me and take me out of the picture for the evening?

Or for keeps.

And that accidental soulgaze with Bradley had just given him an excuse.

Rudolph might have been someone’s creep, but a creep he remained, and he was scared. If I brought up a shield or tried any of my usual tricks, he’d pull the trigger before he even thought about it, and he was too close to miss. My suit would probably stop the rounds when whole—fae tailors seemed to regard bulletproofing as a standard feature—but the kraken had slashed sections of it to ribbons, and there was always the chance he’d aim for the head or neck, or that the shot would go up the sleeve or something. He could get off three or four shots while I was calling up my shield.

I might chance that. But it wasn’t really Rudolph that was the problem.

The problem was what happened after I openly resisted a duly enabled officer of the Chicago Police Department. Once he started shooting at me, I’d have to disarm him at the least, and after that it might get really complicated, really fast. I preferred to be something other than a wanted fugitive.

Unless I just killed them both.

It was dark. There weren’t any street cameras, any instant backup. We were playing by old-school rules, the Winter mantle suggested. Rudolph had crossed a line. It would be too bad about Bradley, who seemed a decent sort, but there were about eight million reasons around me why the logic came down on the side of eliminating both of them and proceeding to the defense of the city. For all I knew, Rudolph was a Fomor agent trying to take out one of Chicago’s heavyweights. Well. Middleweights.