Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

And we took off at a trot across the Great Lawn, our northern flank shielded by the defensive positions at the pavilion, with stealthy little monsters moving in a screen in front of us, serving as my eyes.

What I had not considered was that eight hundred people running together make a thunder of their own. As we ran, I heard the alien clicking sounds stop—and then resurge in a furious, faster tempo.

Hah. They hadn’t been expecting something like this. And now that I thought about it, I wouldn’t want to run into eight hundred angry people with shotguns on an average Chicago evening, either.

The retaining wall on this side of Columbus came into sight, and I poured it on, aiming for the pedestrian bridge. Sanya started screaming orders to his officers, hard to hear over the sound of that many people moving.

I didn’t see the enemy team holding our end of the bridge through the haze until they popped up from under cloaks like ghillie suits and opened fire. Angry wasps hissed through the air and someone hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat and drove the wind out of me.

For a second, I couldn’t tell what was happening. Some of my volunteers had raised their weapons and returned fire immediately, but most were confused. I knew the feeling. Getting shot at often confuses the hell out of me, and only training and experience allow you to respond with the kind of instant aggression necessary to counter that kind of surprise attack. I lifted my left arm, and only a lifetime of practice and dedication allowed me to bring up my shield through the pain.

Pain?

I looked down at my belly. There was no blood.

I felt a hit on my shoulder. Another on my cheekbone, even though nothing had touched my shield.

And then I got it.

My people were dying. I could feel it. Feel their pain. Their terror. Their confusion.

The air seethed with magical potential.

I drew my blasting rod, gathered my will, dropped the shield, and screamed, “FUEGO!”

Because nothing cuts through bullshit like a proper fireball.

The lance of energy that emerged from my blasting rod was an order of magnitude more potent than any I had thrown before, thanks to the cloud of terror over the city. The very air boiled and shrieked in protest, and when the blast hit the ground among the enemy fire team, the thermal bloom that erupted was a sphere of white-hot light. The concussion of that expanding heat slapped me in the chest so hard that it rocked me back a step.

The enemy fire stopped.

All that was left a few seconds later as the fire boiled away was a black circle on the ground maybe thirty feet across, in a mound, where the heat had sucked the very earth up in a low scorched dome, some unrecognizable lumps, and a small mushroom-shaped cloud of sullen red flame that vanished into black smoke.

There was a second of stunned silence, and then one of the volunteers, damned if it wasn’t Randy, shouted, “We’ve got a goddamned wizard! Fuck those guys!”

The rest of the volunteers roared their defiance. I ran forward, and they followed.

While we did, two of my people bled to death from their wounds. They . . . just went out. One moment, I could feel their terror and pain as if it was my own. The next . . . there was only silence.

Eleven hundred and eighty-five.

And I didn’t even have time enough to find where they’d fallen and look at them.

The footbridge isn’t just a simple, straightforward bridge over an underpass. It’s this enormous, gleaming, serpentine thing that winds like a river, made out of concrete and gleaming polished steel. It’s solid. Like, really solid. And the only place it could reasonably be taken down was over Columbus itself, where it thinned out to normal bridge proportions.

I drew up to a halt at the mouth of the bridge and turned to Sanya. “Deploy our people in two ranks. One along the side of the bridge and the other along the wall over Columbus.”

“And you?”

“Those trees are blocking our line of fire. I gotta take them out, then go out on the bridge to take it down,” I said. “Be right back.”

“Not alone,” Sanya said.

“He isn’t,” Butters said, firmly.

I eyed the little guy and didn’t have time to argue. So instead I grunted, jerked my chin to indicate the direction, and started off.

I couldn’t get over how easy it was to use magic in the boiling air. I’d already performed several spells that by all rights should have left me in need of a breather and a meal. Instead, the latent magic in the air made me feel exhilarated, eager to do more. Which isn’t different from any other kind of power, I suppose. And it held the same dangers. So I was careful about how much force I used on the trees. Just enough to rip through each trunk and send them crashing down toward the street below.

Once that was done, I raised my shield preemptively and hurried forward, following the curve of the bridge, even as some of the volunteers pounded out onto the bridge to take up firing positions overlooking the underpass.

The enemy clicks became louder and more erratic, and I saw them for the first time as I stepped out onto the bridge.

The Fomor army seemed to be organized in warbands. Each one had maybe three hundred creatures in it, in a distinct group, gathered around a central standard. No two groups looked the same. Some were simply a collection of turtleneck handlers, each holding a pair of large, hairless, vaguely canine animals. Some were packs of shapeless, deformed . . . things, naked, neither human nor animal, their faces and bodies twisted and ugly, the cruelest combinations of expressed genes imaginable. Some were orderly ranks of armored warriors, their arms a little too long for their bodies, their shoulders too wide. Some looked like troops of more modern militaries and were armed with rifles. And at the center of each warband was a knot of Fomor proper, frog-faced jerks in badly clashing clothing, seven feet tall.

There were a couple of thousand of them. And those were only the ones I could see. The haze must have been concealing the rest.

When I was spotted, things got a little crazy.

Shots rang out and my shield lit up like a disco ball. Butters yelped and jumped behind me. I pressed forward. I had to get far enough up the bridge to bring it down.

Someone shrieked something, and one of the groups of those tormented abominations came howling toward me, their locomotion ragged and swift.

Butters peeked out from behind me and said, “Wow, red carats everywhere.”

I blinked and poured more energy into the shield. With this much available, it wasn’t hard to hold it up. “What? What the hell do vegetables have to do with anything going on right now?”

“It’s kind of a Knight thing.”

I crouched low and got out of the worst of the fire. The walls on either side of the footbridge were about five feet high, and there was no way for them to get a clear line of sight to us. I felt clever as I hurried forward.