Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Not everybody took a shotgun. Dozens had heavier weapons of their own. But by the time we were done, everyone had a firearm of some type, and everyone had pockets full of shells.

I called Toot-Toot in and sent him with a message for Etri. Within five minutes of sending the little guy off, a squad of svartalf combat engineers had arrived, and I’d given them their instructions. They immediately turned to the open earth inside the pavilion and began shaping it into defensible earthworks beneath the enormous, arching trellis that supported the pavilion’s sound system. People stared at that in awe. It’s not often you see several hundred thousand tons of earth moving itself around thanks to the hand gestures of a crew of little grey guys.

“Defiladey enough for you?” I asked Sanya.

“Da,” the Russian replied. “Did not know this park was built on Styrofoam at bottom.”

“Yeah, the whole place is technically kind of a rooftop garden,” I said. “Can you hold?”

“Maybe, but then they go around us,” Sanya said. “We leave one-third here. The rest, we go out and find them. Draw them back here if we have to fall back. They run across all this open space? Pow, pow, video-game easy.”

“If you have to fall back, huh,” I said.

The big man grinned. “Da, am Russian. We are a very positive people,” Sanya said.

“No, you aren’t!” came Butters’s protest from somewhere off in the haze.

Sanya beamed. “I really like little Jedi man,” he confided. “Here, look.” He leaned down to scrape at loose earth with the tip of his knife. “Mab here. Us here. Enemy coming from there, there, there.” He made marks to the north, east, and south. “See? Our people will hold against north threat from earthworks. Others go out, see if we can hit the east threat from flank once they engage Mab.” He nodded toward the mark in the south. “That one, up to the Archive and Etri’s people.”

I nodded. “You’ll just be wandering around blind out there.”

“Da, but so are they. So it is fair.”

“What kind of idiot wants to fight fair?” I complained.

“This is terrible fight,” Sanya said. “But is only one we have. ‘Fair’ is many steps up ladder from where we are now.”

“Good point,” I said with a grimace. I frowned and checked. My contingent of wicked fae, who were lurking around out of sight of the mortals, had approximately tripled in size, mainly with malks. I knew there was a big colony of them in town, and now I had a good threescore of the vicious little killers slinking around in the haze and waiting for a chance to spill more blood. None of them were near the mortals who had followed me, which was what I had mostly worried about.

Hey, I thought, as loud as I could, in the direction of Winter. The mortals of Chicago are off-limits. Cross me on this and I’ll kill every last one of you.

What came back to me from the creatures of Winter was a sensation of . . . Well, it wasn’t compliance. It was deeper than that. My will became their will. I felt the adjustment of their very beings, their rising fury at the suffering inflicted upon . . . The closest thing I can come up with, to explain it, was that they felt the same rage a farmer does when something is after his livestock.

Maybe that’s as close to being protective as Winter gets. But it was hard and cold and real.

The Winter Knight doesn’t so much lead Winter’s troops as command them as he would any other weapon in his grasp.

I sent the malks out in a circular screen around us. I wanted to know when the enemy got close, and the little killers were as silent and swift as any wraith.

Murphy was demonstrating to a group of volunteers how to load a shotgun. It’s not real complicated. When it comes to firearms, shotguns are about as basic as it gets. She finished showing a number of drawn, determined faces how to handle the weapon.

“For what we’re doing,” she said to the volunteers, “you’ve got about the best weapon you can reasonably get. It’ll shoot farther than you can see, and it will be hard to miss. Tuck it in tight to your shoulder and aim down the barrel. You have four rules. Never point your weapon at anything you don’t want dead. Know your target so you don’t shoot your neighbor. Know what’s behind your target so you don’t shoot your neighbor by accident. And for God’s sake, keep your finger off the damned trigger until you’ve followed rules one through three.” She held up her right forefinger. “You put this on the trigger, assume you are a deadly weapon and a threat to anything you’re facing, period. Clear?”

There was a round of murmured affirmatives.

I walked up behind her and said, “I need your advice.”

Murphy passed a shotgun to a nervous volunteer, a young man who said, “That’s all we get?”

“Plenty of soldiers have gotten less,” I said to him. “You want to run, head west. The enemy is coming in from all around us everywhere else.”

The kid swallowed, nodded, and carefully kept his finger off the trigger.

Murphy clapped him on the shoulder, and then we turned to walk a little distance away.

“What do I do?” I asked her quietly. “How do I arrange this so that I don’t get all these people killed?”

“Trust Sanya,” she said frankly. “He’s had some military experience. Neither of us does. That’s the best we’ve got.”

I looked over to where the Russian was talking to some guys in uniforms, laughing, his deep voice, the laughter itself, clear and somehow silvery. The air around him seemed less hazy than elsewhere, and I could read the faces of the people around him well enough to see that the Knight of the Sword’s presence was combating the supernatural fear and frenzy in the air around them. They . . . just looked more like people, when they stood near Sanya.

“Right,” I said.

I walked forward to stand next to Sanya, cleared my throat, and spoke out in what I hoped was a clear, firm voice. “All right, people. Gather in.”

They did. I was tall enough for everyone to see. Hadn’t ever really occurred to me why everyone thought military leaders should be tall. It simply offered a small practical advantage, for much of humanity’s history.

They could see my face, my eyes. They could see me.

“This city has gone to hell in a handbasket,” I declared. “And then a bunch of monsters showed up.”

There was a rumble of nervous laughter. Chicagoans love their city, but they also have few illusions about how screwed up it can be. They live here.

“I know you’re scared,” I said. “I know you’ve all . . . seen things that nobody should have to see.” I pushed the image of that damned crib out of my head. “I know you don’t know who I am, and this is all weird. So, let me introduce myself. My name is Harry Dresden. I’m a wizard of the White Council. And I mean to fight to the death to defend this town.”