Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Two of the vampires who might have been twins, or similarly sized siblings, before all the decay had set in, blurred and became a pair of great, greasy-furred grey wolves the size of ponies. Both shot in opposite directions in great, bounding leaps.

“Flankers!” I shouted. “Yoshimo, Bill!”

Yoshimo bounded a step into the air and the wind itself seemed to gather beneath her feet and springboard her with silent grace to the top of the nearest mausoleum. She began to bound in twenty-foot steps, her toes barely coming down to touch the tops of grave markers, statues, and marble tombs, moving as if weightless to intercept one of the great wolves.

Bill immediately swung away from his target—a move that took no small amount of discipline—to begin tracking the second wolf with his rifle as it swung wide around us, a flicker among the smoke and shadows. Bill was an old-school shooter. He welded his cheek to the stock of the weapon, sighting carefully, and went almost entirely still as the barrel tracked the enemy and Wild Bill waited for his shot.

I was keeping my eyes on Drakul.

The pale figure watched the fight with keen interest, eyes like a pair of black holes, drawing in everything and giving nothing in return. He watched the opening exchange with the interest of a general observing children at chess, lips pursed thoughtfully. Then he took a step to the left and . . .

. . . and just freaking vanished. I don’t mean that he went behind a veil, or teleported, or opened a portal to the Nevernever. I can do those things, if I have to. This guy took a step and just up and up went away, as if stepping behind a telephone pole and never appearing on the other side. Gone. Just gone.

Except that in this case, “gone” turned out to be six inches behind me.

My ears suddenly twinged hard, like when the pressure shifts in an airplane, and the empty space behind me wasn’t empty anymore. I whirled, drawing my revolver, raising it—

—too late. Drakul caught the weapon’s barrel in the pale fingers of one hand and simply crushed it shut.

His other arm swept out and clubbed Ramirez into a tombstone and to the ground as if Drakul’s flesh had been made from cold, heavy marble. Drakul whirled toward Wild Bill, who flung himself into an evasive dive without ever looking back from his gun. It wouldn’t have been fast enough to save him, except that Chandler sent a quick trio of stones zipping into Drakul’s kidneys, wham, pow, crunch, with each stone exploding into gravel from the force of its impact.

Drakul turned to Chandler, muttered a word, and flicked an annoyed wrist.

The air behind the young Warden split with a howl of frozen wind, and a circle of pitch-black absence of light maybe four feet across appeared behind him. A stone seemed to turn beneath his foot. Chandler’s balance wavered and he stumbled a step back, into the circle.

The air somehow unscreamed, and the void black circle vanished.

Chandler went with it.

Drakul’s black-hole eyes swept back to me, and suddenly I was being crushed to the ground by the weight of the universe itself. The very thought that I could have done something against a power like that was laughable—but I’d felt this kind of raw, universe-bending will before, in Chichén Itzá. Drakul, whatever he was, had considerably more personal power than the Lords of Outer Night had ever managed to show me.

But I had hoisted those Red Court losers on their own petard, when everything was said and done. I would be damned if I rolled over for Dracula’s less famous dad.

I ground my teeth and fought back against the power crushing me, not with my muscles but with my mind. I pictured Drakul’s will as a great, dark hand pressing me down—and mine as my own hand, rising to force it away. I poured my will into the image, a couple of decades of discipline, experience, and focus, investing it with power, with reality, with life.

Gasping, one inch at a time, I lifted my hand until my right palm faced Drakul and steadied. I couldn’t stand—but I got an elbow underneath me and snarled silent defiance up at him, my right hand raised against his power.

An expression touched Drakul’s face for the first time—a small smile that showed cruelly curved, sharpened canine teeth.

“Ah,” he said, raising the knife he’d been planning to use for a blood sacrifice. “If only my own heir had been possessed of such determination.”

It took a lot of concentration to free up enough mental cycles to make word sounds with my mouth, but I wasn’t going to sit there and take it quietly. “Guess you’re Ethniu’s bitch now,” I gasped.

The smile again. “It cost little enough to support her. Minor squabbles like this are a good place to take stock of the field.”

“Field?”

“Oh, wizard,” Drakul chided me. “Their immaculate beardlinesses have you in the dark even now? As one starborn to another, I must say it seems unseemly in the extreme.”

I stared at him hard. “What does it mean?”

Drakul’s smile widened into something genuinely merry. Except for those empty eyes. Any expression that had those eyes in it could be nothing but a mask. “You’ll never value information that comes to you easily.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Something ugly flickered in that smile for a few beats. Then Drakul shook his head. “I would tell you to ask of your own White Council what they aren’t telling you, what they bred you for, and what they expect you to do.” He considered. “Well. Except that it seems unlikely you’ll have the chance on this side of the veil, I’m afraid.”

“Chump like you?” I gasped. “Tonight, you’re the warm-up act.”

Drakul regarded me for a second. Then he made an exasperated little sound and put one hand on his hip. “I’ll be open with you, starborn. At this point of conversations like this one, I often offer the dark gift of immortality to someone in your position. It’s occasionally a way to obtain a useful tool, but mostly I just want to see how they react. One sees people for who they truly are when they face death . . . but, honestly, five minutes of you in my life has been quite enough. You’ve no . . . gravitas. No decorum. No style at all.” He knelt over me and lifted the knife toward my throat. “But I suppose your blood will call to the dead as well as anyone’s.”

“Knock-knock,” I said.

Drakul frowned down at me and arched an eyebrow.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Here I am facing death and telling you a knock-knock joke. Why would I do such a thing?” I gave him the best grin I could while clenching my teeth. “Eternity is a long time to wonder about a punch line. Knock-knock.”

“Who,” said Drakul, in his mellifluous accent, his eyes narrowed, “is there?”

“Thousand-pound gorilla,” I rasped.