Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

I clasped his shoulder wordlessly for a second, then spun and headed back out of the courtyard to rejoin River and Ramirez.

“Two weeks,” Rawlins muttered as I left. “Gonna die of cliché poisoning.”

I walked back into the darkness and was promptly blinded to anything in it. I stumbled and faltered, but the hound stayed at my side, his shoulder against my leg, guiding me. I kept walking in the direction I knew they were, and tried not to gibber as I walked sightlessly forward.

“I’m just saying,” River Shoulders’ rumbling voice said, “you just draw two little lines from the corner of your mouth and then we have a public relations act. Humans love ventriloquists.”

Ramirez replied in an exhausted, bemused voice. “It might take more than that to establish relations between the Forest People and humanity at large.”

“Gotta start somewhere,” River Shoulders said.

“And the first place you went was a ventriloquist act?” Ramirez asked. “Maybe we should live through the night first. Then think it through for a while.”

“Mmmmm,” River Shoulders rumbled. “Probably smart.”

My eyes adjusted enough to make out dim shapes, and I said, “All right, folks. Let’s get a move on.”

The hound ran forward and leapt into the air, and a hawk soared away.

Man. I needed to learn how to do stuff like that one of these days.

“All right,” I said, “we—”

River Shoulders scooped me up in his other arm and bounded forward.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been scooped up by a Sasquatch or not, but it isn’t the sort of thing you forget. I’m a pretty big guy. River lifted me as if I were a toddler. And when he ran . . .

It wasn’t running, really, in any typical sense. It was more like a series of alternating single-leg broad jumps, covering thirty feet at a stride. River went from zero to maybe fifty miles an hour in three steps, and damned near gave me whiplash doing it.

The gunfire swelled rapidly as we reached Montrose and Clarendon.

On the left side of Montrose was a large art deco office building, shining glass and steel. The first two levels of the structure were an open-sided parking garage. The Einherjaren had taken it and gunfire roared out of the garage on both levels, flashes of light and bursts of thunder, all directed toward Clarendon Park. On the right side of the street was another office building, nearly the size of its opposite, and I could see teams on the roof firing big, big single rounds down toward the park with those huge sniper rifles Barrett makes.

Shadow and motion filled the park. Huntsmen and octokongs rushed forward in swift dashes—faster than any human could have done it. The city’s defenders concentrated their fire on the Huntsmen, and with good reason—there were several large holes blown in the low walls of the parking garage, and ugly scorched remains were visible. Assault rifles did an excellent job on the first several Huntsmen of any given pack—but by the time the last few of them had gone all Hulk, it was up to the Barretts.

The octokongs weren’t as much of a threat—until they got closer. The ape-squid things had the upper body of a gorilla mounted on the lower chassis of an octopus, hence octokong. Good thing they hadn’t used chimps, or I’d have had to call them octopongs. And that just sounds silly.

The octokongs could slither along the ground at great speed, and when they climbed, tentacles flailing, they didn’t really slow down. Each bore a large, crude-looking weapon that made me think of those old blunderbusses, but they were fed by a magazine of some kind. The octokongs weren’t exactly snipers. They didn’t really aim. They just pointed the weapons in a general direction and pulled the trigger, sending out sprays of what must have been buckshot, if the chewed concrete around the parking garage was any indicator.

“Dresden!” River said sharply. The Sasquatch set me roughly on my feet and pointed.

I looked. The building on the south side of the street, where the Einherjaren snipers were set up, was mostly shrouded in darkness, but I could see well enough to glimpse the shapes of dozens of octokongs that had somehow circled the brick building and were climbing toward the roof, from the rear side, their tentacles probably leaving giant sucker marks on all the windows.

“Think you can handle them?” I asked him.

River set Ramirez down more carefully, his dark eyes just a ferocious gleam beneath his heavy brows, and bounded off in that direction, vanishing behind a veil as he went. A minute later, something grabbed one of the lowest octokongs, whirled it in a circle, and smashed it like a water balloon against the ground. I could see the blur of a form as it leapt a good fifteen feet up the side of the building, and dust exploded from the bricks, presumably from River Shoulders digging his fingers into them to get a good grip. He started climbing the building, seizing octokongs from behind and either smashing their skulls against the bricks or simply throwing them off and letting them fall to an ugly death.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch.

“Hoss!” shouted Ebenezar’s voice.

I turned to see my grandfather on the second level of the parking garage, waving at me. He beckoned, and I held up a fist in acknowledgment.

“Can you move?” I asked Carlos.

The young Warden gave me a sour look and started limping along at his best pace, clutching his broken arm to his body to keep it from swinging. I went with him.

By the time we reached the second level of the garage, the old man was at the front of the garage, facing the park. Shot rattled around him, but the Blackstaff was the White Council’s dedicated killing machine. There were rumors among the Wardens that the old man’s shield had completely held off a round from a German battleship’s main guns in World War I. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but buckshot scattered off it in little fluttery sparkles that had no chance, at all, of getting through.

The old man stared down at the park thoughtfully, heedless of the incoming fire, then nodded once, held out a fist, spoke a word, and gathered a sphere of white-hot light into the palm of his right hand. He flicked his wrist, and the sphere of light streaked over to the park and set the nearest tree there violently ablaze.

Octokongs screamed and poured out of it—to where they were well-lit by the fire on open ground.

The Einherjaren let out whoops of excitement and approval as their weapons roared, absolutely withering every octokong on the ground.

“Do it again, seidrmadr!”

“Let them have it, wizard!”

The old man obliged them, and another tree went up with similar results.

I heard the cry of a hawk, and then a bolt of lightning descended, crashing into several parked cars along the road, providing cover for the enemy. The cars exploded into flame with a number of whumping sounds.