Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Men and women who had followed me died.

I felt them dying. There were very few instant deaths. Even the people shot in the head had time to thrash and scream for a handful of seconds before the end. Some of them were so close I could hear them pleading for mercy. But Death plays no favorites and makes no exceptions.

Eleven hundred and fourteen.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, shoving away the phantom sensory input to the best of my ability. I’d lost seventy-three volunteers, while the enemy dead numbered in the hundreds.

We were winning.

Granted, we weren’t going to get any more effective surprise attacks. From here on out, we’d have to work for all of them. But we were doing it.

We were holding them off.

Until the Titan appeared.

Ethniu strode out of the haze, nine feet of terrible bronze beauty. She walked forward through the ranks, and while the enemy wilted and died all around her from my volunteers’ fire, she herself was unscathed, as if she’d been walking through a gentle rain instead of a storm of slugs and buckshot. She stood observing our positions for a moment or two, utterly ignoring everything the volunteers tried to do to her.

“Jesus,” I said, realizing her intent. “Butters, get them off the bridge!”

I took off, screaming for the volunteers to follow me. I ran back until the bridge met the park on our side of Columbus, then hopped up over the sidewall and slid down the shining steel slope on its other side to the ground. Then I ran toward Sanya.

He had seen what was happening, too. He was screaming for a retreat, but over the roar of gunfire no one could hear him.

Then Ethniu turned the Eye upon our side of the street.

The world went red and howling. She simply tracked the Eye up and down the retaining wall, blasting it into a slope of finely ground rubble.

Some of my people saw it coming in time, and ran.

Most didn’t.

They died. They died badly, consumed in a fire made from the raw, seething hatred of a Titan. Whatever pain they feared most, they felt as they died. Images of despair and doom flashed in that fire, and so much fear that many of my people went mad in the partial second of suffering they had left before their bodies were broiled and blasted to dust.

And I felt it with them.

Seven hundred and thirty-two.

It hurt so much that I couldn’t breathe.

In the space of a long breath, Ethniu had wiped out more than half of the offensive component of my little army.

Winning. What a joke.

Mortals could not stand against that.

The Titan lifted her hand, the gesture elegant, and pointed forward with one finger.

And with a roar, the Fomor army surged forward, down into the sunken road. The wall on our side of Columbus had been blasted into a slope, one the enemy would have no trouble climbing en masse. If we stayed, we’d be swallowed up in moments—and the enemy came at us eagerly, scenting victory, literally baying for our blood.

“Retreat!” I screamed. “Retreat!”

Most of the volunteers were way ahead of me.

But many, eighty-seven, in fact, had been injured and could not run.

They went down fighting.

Six hundred and forty-five.

The rest of us ran for our lives.

Chapter

Twenty-six

It isn’t a very long run from the bottom of the bridge to the pavilion. It’s maybe a couple of hundred yards.

That distance feels a hell of a lot longer when there’s an army chasing you. Without the pall of smoke and dust, their shooters would have gunned us down. It was bad enough for a while anyway: The enemy soldiers on the far side of Columbus fired furiously into the haze. They couldn’t see us once we were maybe ten feet back from our side of the street, but there wasn’t anything to stop the bullets from coming, either. I felt phantom wounds tear into me as more of my people were hurt by pure, merciless statistics.

I threw up my shield as wide as I could and turned to face the enemy while walking backwards. “Get behind me!” I shouted.

Some did, a little knot of defenders gathering around Butters and Sanya. The Alphas came hurtling out of the haze, muzzles bloodied, and also crouched down in the shelter of my shield. Both groups huddled behind me, and I kept my steps slow and steady so that they could match my pace. The volunteers reloaded their weapons in the safety my shield offered.

“How long can you hold it, Harry?” Butters asked.

“Won’t have to be long,” I shouted back. “They’ll stop shooting as soon as—”

The enemy fire abruptly stopped.

“—their vanguard gets to the other side of the street and obstructs their fire,” I shouted into sudden quiet. I dropped the shield. “Hell’s bells, move!”

We ran. Every single volunteer who had followed my banner was willing, but not all of them were terribly able. The folks who had gathered around Butters and Sanya were almost all older citizens who weren’t going to be winning any marathons anytime soon. I’ll give them credit, though—they still held their weapons as if they meant business.

“Weapon,” I snarled at one of the more weary-looking men, and he passed me his shotgun. “Keep going, head for the pavilion!”

I dropped back to the rear of the group and found Sanya, Butters, and the Alphas already there ahead of me. I passed the shotgun to Butters, who reduced the Sword of Faith to a wooden handle again, stowed it, and checked the firearm with, if not professionalism, at least confidence. Without a word, I traded looks with Sanya, and then the three of us spread out and turned to scuttle along backwards, Sanya and Butters with their weapons raised, me holding up the glowing tip of my blasting rod. The Alphas, meanwhile, darted out to our flanks, their furry forms vanishing swiftly into the haze.

The first shapes to emerge from the haze were those hairless canine things, of course, running across the ground at a low rush.

“Get some!” I shouted, and raised my blasting rod. “Fuego!”

Butters’s shotgun bellowed, and Sanya’s Kalashnikov hammered away at a metronome’s pace. Creatures snarled and screamed and fell. Fire bloomed among them, sending dozens running and screaming with their injuries. Our pursuers, though clearly still desperate to reach us, juked back and forth, both exposing their fellows to the fire and slowing the entire mass of them, until we could see the shapes of those broad-shouldered, long-armed, armored figures approaching behind them.

We had discouraged their advance, but we couldn’t stop it. We kept going backwards. And the enemy kept getting closer. I plied my blasting rod without slowing down, hurling one blast of green-gold fire after another, sending some of my foes screaming with dread and pain while others took their place and closed the distance between us.