Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

“Did you do that, Harry?” she asked softly.

“Yeah,” I said.

She looked at a dead cop as we went slowly by. Then her face hardened. She spoke very quietly. “Good.”

“When we end this,” I said, “I’m . . . We’re going to need to get away. From all this. From everything. Someplace quiet. Just us. Get drunk for a month.”

“God,” she breathed, quiet longing in her voice. “I’m in.”

“I hate that you’re here with me,” I said.

“I know.”

“And I’m glad that you’re here with me.”

“I know.”

I held her against me for a moment and whispered, “I’m scared. What’s happening inside me. Stay close. Please.”

Her hand clenched my wrist, fiercely, for a beat. “I’m here.”

I shivered and leaned my chin against her hair and for a moment closed my eyes.

Then I straightened my spine and got my bearings. What was happening around me might be horrible, might be scraping away at whatever sanity I could legitimately lay claim to, but that didn’t mean I could afford to check out.

I closed my eyes and pictured the city at Millennium Park. There was a lot of flat, open space, good for an old-school battlefield. There weren’t a lot of places where you could have troops with rifles dig in, especially not in the vision-killing haze of dust and smoke. But Columbus Drive was a sunken road that divided Millennium Park from Daley Park, a natural obstacle that any troops coming in from the lake would have to overcome. Enough guns there would pile bodies in windrows.

I looked back at the men and women following me. If I put them there, they’d inflict the most damage on the enemy—for a while, anyway. Then they’d probably be overrun and slaughtered.

The question was whether or not that was still the right thing to do. The people marching behind me weren’t children. They knew death was in the air. And if the enemy overcame us, the city was doomed. All of it.

But, hell, I wasn’t even sure the people who were following me were actually doing it entirely of their own free will. The power of the Winter mantle and Mab’s preparations could well be influencing their emotions to the degree that it wouldn’t exactly be fair to call their willingness to fight a choice.

I knew how Mab would have called it. She had a battle to win.

Whereas I had people to protect.

“Sanya,” I said.

“Da?”

“When we get to the park, I want you to take charge of these folks. The enemy will be coming in from the east and northeast. I want you to find a position where you can . . . What’s the word where you get to shoot at them just fine, and they can’t shoot back at you too good?”

The Russian smiled thinly. “I think you are trying to say ‘defilade.’”

“Yeah. That. Defilade the crap out of them.”

“No. We want to be in defilade. What you want to happen to them is to put them in enfilade.”

“Whatever, you know what I’m after. Put them where they can do the most damage and take the least in reply.”

“Visibility this low, might not be possible.”

“Then guess,” I said, exasperated. “I’m kind of counting on the Big Guy making things work out so that you’re in the right place at the right time. Figure if I put these people with you, they’ll be there, too.” I looked back at the bleak, frightened, determined faces following me. “If God is going to be on anyone’s side today, I want Him to be on theirs.”

Sanya lifted both his eyebrows. “Faith? From you? Bozhe moi.”

“Less faith. More observation of operational patterns,” I countered.

Sanya abruptly grinned and said, “Da, all right. Maybe the horse will sing.”

“What?”

He waved a hand. “It is Russian thing.”

“No, it isn’t, Chekhov,” Butters said, in the kind of pedantic tone of protest you only get from a confident nerd. “What about me, Harry?”

“Same deal,” I said. “Only I want to be the one who’s with you at the right place at the right time. Stick close to me.”

The little Knight nodded. “Got it.”

“And me?” Murphy asked.

“Keep driving,” I said. “I need to stay mobile, and the park is open ground. The bike should be able to move around pretty quick.” I bumped my elbow on a black composite-material box that had been strapped to the back of the Harley. There was a printed label on it that read, CAMPING SUPPLIES.

“What’s in here?” I asked her.

“My dancing shoes.”

“Right.” I looked over at Will, who was watching me with serious wolf eyes. “And I need you guys to run interference for me. When the enemy figures out what I’m doing, I’ll”—I swallowed—“be target number one.”

The wolf stared steadily at me for a moment and then nodded once, sharply. Will knew exactly what I was asking them to do: take bullets for me, of one kind or another.

“Bob,” I said, “if anything useful comes over the airwaves, I want to know about it.”

“Got it, boss,” Bob said. “Um. But right now, there’s a repeating message from the castle’s command post, for any surviving forces to meet at Wrigley.” He was quiet for a second and then said, “I don’t think there’s anybody left over there.”

Somewhere in the distant haze ahead of us, a Jotun’s horn blared out, a long and mournful wail, a sound that somehow encapsulated bleakness and rage, despair, the end of all things.

And, somewhere in the distance behind us, another horn answered.

I could feel uneasiness ripple through my friends, and through the crowd behind me. Not even the monsters of Winter could hear those horns without feeling a sense of slow, inevitable dread.

I didn’t feel it, of course. I was a mighty wizard of the White Council, monarch of mental mastery, pharaoh of fickle fear.

I didn’t pucker up at all.

So. The enemy was playing head games, too.

“Bozhe moi,” Sanya murmured. “Are there enough of us?”

“Enough to do our country loss,” I said. “Steady.”

And we kept moving forward as the city once more turned the color of blood beneath the glare of the Eye.

Chapter