Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

I dropped low and followed Toot into the darkness among the tombstones. I knew the place well enough to get around generally. Toot led me to a position a little uphill from Inez’s spot, and I stepped on one headstone to belly crawl up onto a mausoleum and peer ahead.

Spread in a circle near Inez’s grave were seven cloaked figures, speaking in whispering voices in a breathy chant. One of them held a large drum on a shoulder strap and steadily struck it with a thick-headed drumstick in one hand. From there, I could sense the power of the circle around them, but they were making an effort to work magical forces without any sloppy inefficiencies of energy transfer, which generally manifested themselves as visible light. This was a stealthy working.

There was a lump on the ground in the center of the circle. I couldn’t see who it was, but it was human-shaped, if you allowed for some ropes for immobility. A human sacrifice, doubtless, for the ceremony’s finale. It remained the single most effective way to turbocharge black magic.

Hell’s bells. Seven necromancers could wreck Chicago all by themselves. Four of them nearly had done it, once. Five, if you counted me, which I didn’t, even though my entry in that evening’s animation festival had taken best in show. I could feel the intensity of the working they had underway. I didn’t know who they were, but they were pros. If they were allowed to finish, they could wreck the town without the help of any army of improbably conceived monsters.

And if Toot and his people hadn’t warned me, we would never have seen it coming. I wonder what it says about me that pizza has been one of the better long-term investments in my career.

I slipped back down and away, unseen by the baddies. I returned to my allies and spoke in harsh, quick terms. “Seven. Six casters and a drummer. Cloaked, dark. I don’t know who or what they are. They’re with the Fomor, so they’re probably bad-guy leftovers from somewhere. They’re in a circle. They’ve got a prisoner.”

River Shoulders growled. It was a sound so low that I couldn’t hear it so much as feel it vibrating the bones of my skull. “Where you want me?”

“No time to get fancy,” I said. “Get behind them. You get two minutes. Then we’ll go right at them from this side, make plenty of noise, and draw their fire. Once we have their attention, you get in, get their sacrifice out. Then . . .” I brought my hands together in a silent clap.

“Simple is good,” River Shoulders said.

Then he gave himself a little shake, bounded maybe four feet into the air off one massive foot, shimmered, and turned into a goddamned owl with a wingspan as long as a freaking car. The massive owl glided out over the tombstones, arcing to one side, and vanished into the night.

“Jesus Remington Winchester Christ,” Wild Bill blurted in a strangled voice. “He’s a wizard?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Taught old Listens-to-Wind, the way I hear it.”

“Huh,” Bill said. “Now, that just ain’t fair.”

“Don’t complain. He’s on our side.”

“I’ll take two,” Wild Bill said.

I’d been counting in my head. When I got to a hundred, I said, “Okay, folks. Just like the old days. Chandler, you know the drill?”

“I may have been in the field once or twice,” Chandler said.

“Groovy.”

The team of young Wardens stacked up behind me, walking in close order, hands on shoulders in the dark to guide one another, and I headed out.

Warden fire teams work much like any soldiers. Any one of us can put out enough firepower to kill every one of us if we’re careless or stupid, and working together means developing trust and respect in one another’s skills. I’d go first and make the call about when the fight started. If necessary, my shield would cover the entire team—who could then fan out, Hydra-like, and take out the source of any threat.

Granted, if I stepped on a land mine or something on the way there, we were all dead together. But that wasn’t how most supernatural types tended to think.

I took long, striding steps in time with the drum, and as we approached the necromancers’ position, I felt Ramirez’s veil wrap us in a cloak of less-than-visibility. Yoshimo did something to the air that made us less-than-audible. They’d cover us until we got into place.

Wild Bill whispered something to the lever-action rifle he carried instead of a staff these days and plucked a rune-inscribed brass shell from his belt and slid it carefully into the rifle’s loading port before closing the action with a cautious, precise movement. My leather coat creaked, and I sweltered in the summer heat, within its smothering protection.

My shield was by far the noisiest and most obvious active spell we had among us, magically speaking, and would be the last to go up. I waited until we rounded the corner of the last mausoleum blocking our line of sight to shake out the bracelet and ready my defenses.

But first things first. We had two major problems to overcome.

One, the bad guys were standing inside a ritual circle. We could throw as much power as we wanted at them—it would splash uselessly on that thing until someone took the circle down. So we’d have to do that before we could really come to grips with them.

Second, if you want to control the dead, you’ve got to drop a beat on them. End that beat, end any possibility of summoning and controlling the undead. I drew my revolver, with its boring old regular, entirely mundane rounds, stepped around the corner, and raised the pistol, sighting on the drummer.

Swear to God, on a normal day, I barely shoot competently. But with the Winter mantle guiding my hand, I lifted my arm and made a one-handed shot in the dark at maybe twenty yards that drilled the drummer in the back with a thunderous report.

Two things happened immediately.

First, the round passing through the plane of the circle, sent there by my hand and will, disrupted the essential magical screen of the ritual circle. Stealthy the working might have been, but nothing works right when it’s falling to pieces, and it shattered away in flickers and shards of scarlet light.

Second, the round tore right through where the drummer’s liver should have been.

The hooded head whipped around, owl-like, nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, with such unnatural speed that the hood was flung back.

In the scarlet light of the disintegrating circle, I could see a ruined, desiccated face. The skin was drawn tight over the bones of the drummer’s face, withered and weathered like a corpse exposed to the sky. The eyes were milky white; the lips were leathery strips of jerky partly covering yellowed old teeth. Hair hung on to the scalp in clumps of soiled tangles, but much of it was bald and grey-white.

A vampire of the Black Court. And I knew her.

“Mavra of the Black Court!” I snarled. “You got a permit for raising zombies in my town?”