Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

“Dresden! These are Huntsmen! Kill them quickly!” River shouted. He bounded toward a figure as it came screaming out the front door of the house. One of his huge hands slapped the head of the Huntsman’s spear aside. The other seized the Huntsman’s furry neck and squeezed.

Imagine a toddler having fun with his banana. It was like that, but redder.

“I don’t know what that means!” I screamed. I barely had time to clear my shield bracelet and raise a shield before three of them opened up on me with the howling, flaming thunder of those black spears. Fire and force enveloped my shield and made the air hot and too full of smoke and choking gas to breathe. I had to stagger back out of it. The Huntsmen didn’t let being blinded by a cloud of smoke slow them down. Those spears howled and sent concussive force and fire splashing against my shield—or missing me completely, and hitting the houses across the street.

River came sailing through the air and landed behind my shield in a crouch to be able to keep his head at the same level as mine. He dropped something messy out of his right hand—the Huntsman’s grey corpse, minus its head. “Look,” he said.

I did. Right before my eyes, the corpse withered and shrank away, deflating as if it had been a skin filled with air. I could sense energy rushing out of it, something moving almost too quickly to be sensed at all.

And the other Huntsmen screamed again, in primal fury. Louder.

“Each that falls gives its strength to its packmates,” River Shoulders snarled. “Quickly!”

He turned to one side and leapt, fifty freaking feet in a single bound, both huge fists coming down on a Huntsman better than seven feet tall. He didn’t strike twice. When River Shoulders hit something, it went down and it stayed there. Without slowing, he bounded forward into the smoke, even as the pack howled again.

A Huntsman emerged from the smoke and leapt over my shield like it was on wires. I kept the shield held out toward its packmates back in the smoke, tracked it with the big Smith & Wesson, and started pulling the trigger as it landed and whirled with its spear.

The first round hit it center mass, and the big, slow bullet staggered it, even if it didn’t make it blink. It snarled and thrust the spear at me, but I’d gained enough time to shoot again, and before it could commit its weight to the thrust, the second round hit it lower and must have gotten its spine, because it dropped limp to the ground—

—and sank the fingers of one hand into the dirt and drove the spear at my face with the other, screaming.

I ducked and slapped the head of the spear with the barrel of the revolver, throwing up sparks. Then I recovered my aim and sent my last round through its forehead from five feet away. Its head snapped back and then flopped limply into the dust, its body already desiccating and draining away.

And the pack screamed. Louder. Deeper. Harder.

I holstered the gun and darted to one side, dropping the shield and trying not to gag and choke in the smoke. I tripped over a bundle of furs and loose skin, the remains of a Huntsman that River had apparently gotten. I recovered my balance in time to see a freaking icon of a Huntsman, nearly a foot taller than me and rippling with muscle, emerge from the smoke, whirling its heavy metal spear like it was a parade marshal’s baton and swinging it at my head.

There was no blocking that kind of force. It would have shattered my staff if I’d tried. I ducked and backpedaled and barely sensed the second Huntsman close in on my flank in time to fling myself out of the way. Its spear came down close enough to slice through the bottom hem of one of the legs of my jeans and to leave a cut in the side of the sole of my shoe.

Two more Huntsmen emerged from the smoke, enormous and terrifying. One hefted its black spear and hurled it at me. The other simply lunged, hands outstretched, filthy nails like talons spreading wide.

The spear hit me in the left shoulder. When its tip met the ensorcelled leather of my duster, there was a sudden shower of sparks as the energies in the weapon and the garment met and clashed. The impact was vicious, like getting slugged with a weighted bat, and it spun me to one side in an explosion of neutral white-noise sensation that the Winter mantle substituted for pain.

One of the Huntsmen flung itself at me in a human-spear attack and hit me in the right biceps. Right about the same time, the one with the bad nails came flying at me from not quite the opposite angle. Only it hit me in the shins.

I went down, hard.

There was an explosion of sensation that would have left me stunned and breathless without the Winter mantle’s influence. As it was, I kept enough awareness to twist on the way down and keep from getting any broken bones—and once I’d hit, kept my breath, drew in my will, and shouted, “Repellere!”

Naked, unseen force exploded out of me in a half sphere, a wave of thick, heavy energy that lifted the Huntsmen from their feet and flung them a dozen feet back through the air. They twisted and bent in graceful arcs as they went, and every damned one of them landed on all fours like some kind of big ugly cat.

I was on my feet by the time they were, but my shoulder wasn’t working so good. I was pretty sure it had been dislocated.

One of the Huntsmen made a sound like a wild boar, and the others moved, clearing to one side as it lowered its spear and readied another blast.

I cross-drew the coach gun from its scabbard, thumbed back the hammers as I raised it, and let him have it with both barrels of Dragon’s Breath.

Dragon’s Breath is a specialty shotgun ammunition. It normally consists mainly of hard pellets of magnesium.

But Molly’s people had added white phosphorus into these rounds.

Twin fireballs bellowed from the coach gun and splattered the top half of the lead Huntsman in a cloud of white-hot pellets of burning magnesium and white phosphorous.

The burning metal didn’t stop burning just because it had been buried deep in the thing’s flesh, and the Huntsman and a five-foot circle of grass around it burst into flames, sending up a squealing scream from the creature that felt like it could burst my eardrums. It thrashed horribly, staggering in a small circle before falling to its hands and knees.

I dropped the coach gun, turned toward the other three, and started to bring up my shield again—but one of them had rolled a higher initiative this round, and a little horn-handled knife tumbled past the hem of my duster and sank into my thigh.

Agony seared through me as if the knife had been white-hot. Pain had been a long-absent visitor in my daily experience, and its sudden arrival sucked the wind out of my lungs. Fire pierced my leg like a bar of red-hot metal. I could feel it searing me to the very marrow of my bones.

At the same time, my shoulder exploded in silver threads of nerve-rending torment as my rotator cuff screamed in protest at the damage.

Iron. The bane of the Fae and their magics.

The Winter mantle screamed.