Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

“They’re lightly armed. They need heavier weapons.”

Mab’s tone gained an icy edge. “They are not following my banner, O Knight.”

I lowered my voice to a bare growl. “Then I’ll send them home,” I said. “If you want me to fight for you, quit making it more difficult to fight for you. You and Marcone have been thick as thieves lately. I know you both. There are more weapons around here somewhere. I need them.”

Slowly, slowly . . . the unicorn noticed me. Its head swiveled as smoothly as a gun turret, bringing that horn to point at me, and the power in the air around me made me feel like my hair should have been standing straight up. There were bits of bone still stuck in its serrated blade. Its breath smelled like rotten meat.

My scrotum attempted to travel back in time.

Mab suddenly threw back her head and let out a . . . sound. Imagine a witch’s cackle, rolling up from her belly. Now imagine that at almost the exact instant said witch began it, she snapped a moldy scarf tight around her own throat. Then imagine the choked exhalation of what air remained above the point of strangulation.

Whatever the hell that sound was, it was not a laugh.

And it made the damned unicorn take a nervous sidestep.

“Yes,” Mab said, a wild fey light around her eyes, her head swaying as her mount shifted its weight nervously. “Oh yes. You’ll do, child. Tell me, who takes out contracts in terms of a thousand years, these days?”

“Oh God,” I said. I stared at her. Then at the Bean. “You’re kidding.”

Because that was the contract the artist of the Bean had with the city of Chicago. That the thing would stand for one thousand years. And when it had been finished, it had been encased in polished steel and enclosed, more or less permanently.

It was for all practical purposes a time capsule, out in plain sight, in front of God and everybody.

I stalked over to the Cloud Gate. I poked at polished panels of steel with my staff until one of them rang a little hollower than the others. I gave that one a series of solid thumps, and it popped off and clattered to the concrete. The red glare of the night was too dim to show me anything until I drew out my mother’s pentacle amulet, sent a whisper of will into it, and set it aglow with azure wizard light.

The inside of the Bean isn’t made of metal. It’s all a wooden framework and looks more like the hold of an old pirate ship. The interior of the Bean was piled high with mil-spec weapons cases and boxes and boxes of ammunition, secure on a sturdy internal framework. Just right in the middle of Millennium Park.

“You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve, Mab,” I murmured.

And her voice whispered in my ear, as if she’d been standing flush against me, “Thank you, my Knight. It is a fine compliment.”

I jumped and hit my head on the low opening and backed up enough to glower at her.

Mab turned her eyes away from me and said, “Do battle as you will, my Knight. Take command of your mortals and what few servants of Winter were near enough to join us.” Her gaze returned to the northeast, where the red pulse of the Eye flashed again. “Make the Fomor bleed. You will know the time to come to me.”

It was a clear dismissal, and Mab’s tone made it obvious that she was done with my shenanigans.

But I’m not so much the kind who gets easily dismissed.

Not even by the Queen of Air and Darkness.

I went to her side, where I noticed that even the unicorn’s hooves were set up like cruel, spiked maces, and said, “This . . . banner.”

“Few Knights have had the strength to manifest it.”

“You never spoke to me about it.”

“Would you have listened?”

Well. Touché, I guess.

“I can feel them,” I said. “The people following me.”

Mab closed her eyes for a moment. Then she said, “Yes. Such is the rule of Winter.”

“And when they die. I’ll feel that, too.”

“Obviously,” Mab said, in a near whisper. “For all power there is a price.”

I shuddered. My soul had already taken a beating in the past few days. I don’t know that I needed to add on the psychic experience of living through hundreds of deaths to my list of mental scars.

I gritted my teeth. I could take a little more if I had to. And I had to. A lot more people were going to die if we didn’t stop the enemy here.

I glanced aside at Mab and frowned.

Did she feel it, too? Her command of her subjects? Of . . . me?

Did she feel it when they died? Did she carry their pain, their rage, their terror, upon the back of her own soul, or whatever it was that passed for one now? Did she even have a soul anymore?

I was mortal once. . . .

I’d been waiting for Mab to lay into me with the magically enhanced temptation, the usual trappings and blandishments of corruption. I’d been expecting her, every time we met, to start putting me through Sith boot camp. The Kurgan’s Guide to Conflict Resolution. Evil 101.

The whole time, I’d been wondering, What happens when she does?

The far more terrifying question had never once occurred to me: What happens when she doesn’t?

Maybe the process of becoming something horrible wasn’t about temptation to sin, forbidden delights, and bad impulse control.

Maybe it was about choosing to throw your soul into a meat grinder, over and over again. Until what remained couldn’t even be seen as a soul any longer. Maybe the real monsters, the big bad monsters, aren’t created.

They’re forged. Hammered. One blow at a time.

I was mortal once. . . .

Mab opened her eyes again at last. The look she gave me was, for a second, very human: one weary, determined soldier staring at another. I had, in her eyes, passed some kind of test, some rite, that had changed my status.

And it terrified me.

The real battle for your own soul isn’t about falling from a great height; it’s about descending, or not, one choice at a time.

And sometimes, it’s about choosing to pay a price so someone else doesn’t have to. I had rarely hesitated to hazard my body in the defense of those who needed it.

I looked back at the city behind us.

If more is required of me, so be it.

I offered my hand to Mab, plain soldier.

She took it.

Chapter

Nineteen

I put Sanya and Murphy on getting the arms out to our volunteers. Marcone had planned as if he’d intended a city block party’s worth of amateurs to be kitted out with the one weapon that could do the most damage in their hands: shotguns. A hell of a lot of shotguns. And, given the haze over the city, it wasn’t like anyone could see clearly more than thirty or forty yards anyway.