Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Screeches of rage and pain rose from the park, but the enemy pressed closer and closer. One of the Einherjaren set down his rifle, picked up one of those grenade launchers with a rotary magazine, and quickly sent half a dozen grenades into the park, each with a report and a phoont sound. He had used white phosphorous rounds. The carnage was impressive, but the octokongs kept pouring mindlessly forward—

—and a sudden sound split the air.

It sounded like a call from a horn—if the horn was the size of a Buick. It was a deep, brassy, throaty sound. And it was loud. Loud as a thunderstorm. Loud enough to shake the concrete beneath my feet.

And then I saw him.

Striding forward, toward Lake Shore, his black hair soaked with lake water and clinging to his skull.

A giant.

A genuine, honest-to-God giant. A Jotun.

His features were crude, rough, his beard and hair were woven in enormous braids, and he wore the armor and kit of a Viking warrior—just on a much larger scale. In his hands he bore a horn made from God knows what kind of animal, and as I watched he lifted it to his lips and blew again, shaking the city.

I thought of footprints on the beach and started cackling.

And then . . .

More giants.

They came forward, in a straight line from the lake, two by two, each armored and tattooed and bearing swords and axes of enormous, rough design. One of the giants got caught up in the branches of a tree, and with a snarl he turned, and his twelve-foot-long sword burst into flame and swept clean through the tree, as if it had just been a weed in need of whacking. That not being enough, he turned to a car parked near him, split it in half with another swing of his sword, and kicked the separate pieces forty yards.

The first giant blew the horn again.

The others answered with a roar and began a basso chant, a war song, in some language that sounded thick and sludgy.

The gunfire had stopped.

I looked around me to see the Einherjaren staring at the incoming behemoths, mouths open, eyes bright.

Then the big guy with the grenade launcher screamed, in freaking joy, “JOTNAR! JOTNAR OF MUSPELHEIM!”

And the goddamned madmen roared their excitement and began their own war song in answer. The Jotnar focused on the parking garage and bellowed pure rage at the sound of that song.

Then they started sprinting right at us.

Chapter

Fifteen

From the top deck of the parking garage, we were at eye level with the Jotnar. It didn’t make me feel any better. All it meant was that I could see the distinct expression of rage on each face as they either climbed and vaulted over the Lake Shore Drive bridge over Montrose, or else dropped under it, duckwalking under the bridge and rising as they emerged.

The scary part about it was that they were fast. Their walking speed would have been a fairly serious run for me. Running, they were moving at vehicle speeds.

I felt my hands shaking in pure, unadulterated fear. Doesn’t matter how good you are in a fight—mass matters, and I had more sheer tonnage of angry bad guy coming at me than maybe ever before.

“Hoo boy,” I said.

Ebenezar stumped forward to stand beside me, his eyes bright. Light from a flare shone off his bald, smooth-shaved pate. “Now, that, Hoss,” he said, “is something you don’t see every day.”

All around me, Einherjaren were ditching their rifles. Instead, they started pulling out axes and swords, laughing and singing as they did. A crew of several others came running in with crates made of heavy composite materials and opened them to reveal bricks of what I assumed to be explosive compounds of some sort. They started passing them out, along with small tubular detonators, which they clutched between their teeth as if they’d been passed a Cuban cigar.

“Okay,” I said. “What the hell are these guys thinking?”

“They’re thinking those giants are about to ram into this building and bring it down around us all,” Ebenezar said.

“What are we gonna do about it?” I asked.

There was a soft set of footsteps and then Senior Councilman Cristos stood beside me, staring hard at the oncoming Jotnar. He was breathing hard, and his face looked grey and exhausted. “It’s ready,” he said to Ebenezar.

“Right,” my grandfather said. He leaned forward, staring intently at the ground on the near side of the park. “Hoss, buy me a little time to work.”

“Me?” I squeaked.

“Mmm. Or we’ll die,” he said calmly. “Those are fire giants. We don’t stop these things here, they’ll run right through us and turn the city into a kiln while the Titan sits back and laughs.”

By this time, I could feel the shock when their feet, stumpier and wider than human feet would be, proportionately, struck the ground like an earthquake’s vanguard.

“Carlos, shield me,” I said. “I’m not going to have anything to spare.”

Without a word, Ramirez lifted his left hand and the air in front of me quivered with a pale greenish disk of light that rippled like water. It wasn’t more than a second before enemy fire struck it on one side, evidently with shot from the octokong weapons. The ball hit Ramirez’s shield and in the act of passing through, it was ripped into a fine spray of metallic grit.

The Jotnar closed to two hundred yards.

I lifted my right hand, staff gripped in it, and gathered my power, reaching out to the cold, vicious core of Winter that now resided within me.

One hundred and fifty yards.

From deep within, I touched upon the reservoir of Soulfire that I’d been gifted with many moons before. Soulfire was the purest force of Creation in the universe, left over from the birth of the universe itself. Angels wielded Soulfire, and one of them had given me enough to last a lifetime. Soulfire didn’t make magic more potent, precisely—but it made it more real. As the power of Creation itself, Soulfire was best used to create and protect, and what I had in mind was going to take a lot of it.

One hundred yards.

Cold blue light began to shine from me. That was enough to draw the fire of every octokong on the field, and Ramirez’s shield glowed brighter and brighter. I struggled not to flinch as an increasing spray of fine grains of lead washed against my chest and face.

“Harry,” Carlos gasped. “Hurry.”

Fifty yards.

Within my thoughts, I merged the power from the heart of Winter with Soulfire.

My head exploded with raw agony as the energies met—and fed upon each other, growing into a thunderstorm in my thoughts. Frost formed over my fingernails and spread out along a couple of feet of my quarterstaff on either side of my gripping hand. Steam boiled off me in small clouds as Winter frost met the sultry summer night.