Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Mab approached and stood beside me for a moment, looking out at the night. You could see a squid being taken down every minute or so. It was a bit like watching for falling stars at the right time of year.

“Mortals ask a question,” she said after a moment. “Is it better to be feared or loved?”

“I can guess your answer,” I said.

“And I yours. Yet they do not love you, per se,” she mused.

“Not exactly, no,” I said. “But I found something they did love. Something that united them.”

Mab looked at me blankly.

“When a group comes together around something they love,” I said, “it changes things. It changes how they see one another. It becomes a community. Something greater than the sum of its parts.”

Mab did not seem enlightened.

I tried to explain another way. “The creation of the community encourages investment in that community,” I said. “Once they’ve invested, they’ll fight to protect it.”

Mab’s eyebrows went up in comprehension. “Ah. You found a weakness in their psychology and manipulated it. You provided them with a resource and incurred their debt.”

“I made them see themselves differently.”

“Neuromancy? You? I shudder to think of the results of that.”

I sighed. “Look. Maybe you’ll just have to trust me. It’s a mortal thing.”

“Ah,” Mab said dismissively. “Still. An impressive display. You frightened several very confident beings tonight. I found it entertaining.”

“Yeah, it just . . . sort of happened,” I said. I leaned tiredly on the battlements. I wished I had a sandwich.

I sneezed out of nowhere, so hard that I nearly slammed my head into the merlon I was leaning on. By this time, I was getting used to it. I felt the surge of wearying energy leave me, felt where the conjuration point drew matter from the Nevernever into the mortal world and shaped it. I managed to get my hands into the air above my head in time to deflect a falling club sandwich. It bounced off one of my forearms, splattered partly on one shoulder and partly on the ground—before promptly turning to gooey ectoplasm.

Mab stared at me as though I had just begun dissecting a fetal pig at the dinner table. She shook her head slowly, once, and said, “Just as you begin to impress me.”

“Oh bide be,” I muttered, and fished out a handkerchief to blow my nose.

Stupid conjuritis.

I was exhaling when the first explosion thudded through the night air.

Everyone froze.

To the east and a little south of us, a column of flames rose into the air, flaring out in the night. The shock wave of the explosion was tangible, even where we stood on the roof, something I felt push through my chest.

“Was that . . . ?” I breathed.

Mab drew herself upright, cold light gathering around her brow in a coronet of glittering motes that trailed a veil of tiny snowflakes behind it. Every eye on the roof turned to her, as the Queen of Air and Darkness lifted her face to the night sky and spoke in a voice that did not so much thunder through the air as glide into the earth itself and resonate in gentle music from every solid surface in sight.

“Accorded nations,” Mab said calmly. “Stand to arms. Mortal men of Chicago, remain in the homes that offer you your only safety. The enemy has come for the city.”

Chapter

Eight

My stomach did a little twisty flip.

Somewhere in my head, I’d been processing it all night, that events this large could not go by unnoticed. That destruction on this scale simply could not be brushed under the rug, that this many witnesses could not be silenced. Whatever happened in the battle, whoever prevailed, one fact was clear.

Things were going to change.

The mortal world couldn’t take something like this in stride.

I’d known that on an instinctual level for a while, I thought, but I hadn’t consciously processed it until I’d heard Mab addressing the mortal population of Chicago by means entirely and self-evidently magical.

She wasn’t even trying to keep things subtle.

God, that had the potential to be the greatest nightmare I could imagine—the mortal world, turned against the supernatural. The war that would be born from that conflict would redefine barbarism—and it could already be lurching into motion, right here in front of my eyes.

Of course, if Ethniu had her way, it was an absolute certainty. So we’d have to stop her here and now and as quickly as freaking possible.

But whatever happened, after tonight there would be walls coming down between the mortal world and the supernatural one that had stood solidly for centuries. Stars and stones, I didn’t think anyone knew what that might mean.

Focus, Harry.

Save the city.

Stop the Titan.

Don’t mess it up.

While I was busy trying to screw my courage to the sticking place, Mab was already moving. She spoke quietly to Listens-to-Wind and the two had a brief exchange before the old shaman inclined his head to her, murmured to Wild Bill, and then simply leaned and fell off the edge of the building and out of sight.

A heartbeat later, the gliding, silent form of a great owl swept up from below the battlements and soared in the direction of the explosion.

Out in the distance, I heard the sound of gunfire. Not the usual stuff, the kind of thing you might hear from time to time, that could maybe be a car backfiring. This sounded like a war movie, a crackling like deadly popcorn.

Mab listened to the gunfire for a moment. Then she stopped outside Martha Liberty’s circle, speaking quietly, and listened to what one of the poppets had to say. From there she stopped in with Lara Raith, holding a brief conversation that featured several nods from each of them.

Ebenezar stumped over to stand next to me. There was a long moment of strained silence. Then he cleared his throat and said, “How you doing, Hoss?”

“I feel like I should be moving,” I said. “Explosion, gunfire.” I nodded in the direction in which Listens-to-Wind had vanished. “I should be running toward that.”

The old man grunted. “Do you remember the hardest lesson of power?”

“Knowing when not to use it?”

“Aye,” he said, his voice rough. He leaned on a merlon and stared out at the night. Firelight from a circle of road flares several blocks away reflected in his spectacles. He watched the Little Folk take down another assassin squid. “Well. In this fight, you’ve got to be in the right place at the right time. That means hanging back until you know where to throw your weight.”