Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

To look upon her was to look upon an older, more savage universe, a place where Titans strode the formless night and crushed mortal insects beneath their feet—to see a place so brutal and terrifying that even in our legends, humanity had chosen not to remember.

Her hatred seethed through the smoldering glare of the Eye, in the light of fires of destruction she had brought to my city, a power far older and deeper and more deadly than I had yet known. Beside that power, the massed ranks of the Fomor around her seemed as frail and as transient as fleeting shadows.

I tore my eyes away.

Butters was staring at Ethniu, too. He gripped the empty hilt of Fidelacchius in both hands, white-knuckled.

I nudged him and he jerked his chin toward me, his face pale.

“Army doesn’t seem nearly so scary now, does it?” I said.

He stared at me for a second. Then his lips lifted in an awful, sick-looking smile, and he exhaled several unsteady breaths that were laughter’s closest double in that moment. “Heh. Heh, heh, heh. Heh-heh.”

Moving at exactly the same time, Ethniu and Mab stepped forward.

“Stay behind me,” Mab murmured as the unicorn’s deadly presence brushed between Butters and me and took position between us and Ethniu. “Be ready.”

I knew precisely how scary Mab was.

I gotta say, it felt pretty awesome to watch that creepy unicorn plant its feet as if it intended to hold its ground before an onrushing train, bracing between that threat and us. Mab lifted her chin, faced Ethniu, and raised her slim pale hand.

Her voice snapped out over the ground, sharp and threatening, like sudden crackling sounds from the face of a glacier. “Hold, crone. You will come no farther.”

Ethniu faced that statement in silence and stillness for a moment.

Then she simply smiled and strode a step closer.

The two monsters faced each other for an endless beat, before Ethniu’s voice throbbed through the air, vibrating painfully through my bones, making my teeth buzz unpleasantly.

“You began a mewling mortal,” Ethniu replied. Her voice was as loud inside my head as outside, infused with sheer undeniable power. When that voice spoke, reality itself would bow to suit it. “You will end the same way. Powerful as you are, you come of a younger world. A weaker world.”

“A world that left you behind,” Mab said, mockery ringing in defiance of the power before her.

Ethniu took a further step forward, the Eye glaring brighter, now cowling her head in scarlet light. “Treacherous little witch. The one who would not bow to my father. You will bow to me or face the Eye.”

Mab pulled a play from my book.

She threw back her head and laughed.

It was a silvery sound, one that somehow shattered the stillness and closeness of the night. Scorn rang in that laughter, and genuine amusement—the cold, alien amusement of a spider. The laughter made the Fomor troops suddenly clutch at their heads. Their lines wavered as the heavily armored troops dropped their weapons and tried to wrap their long arms around their helmeted skulls.

“You do not know me very well,” Mab said, that ear-shredding laughter still lurking in her voice, “do you?”

Ethniu rolled another threatening pace forward. “Your pathetic alliance has abandoned you or waits for death. Your bodyguard is reduced to a pair of beasts. And the mortals will arrive only in time to mourn their dead.”

Butters gasped at the force in that voice and staggered a step to one side. Blood had begun to trickle from one of his nostrils. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him a little more into the shelter of Mab and the unicorn’s shadow.

“Harry,” he whispered raggedly. “What the hell are we doing standing here? We should not be here.”

I felt exactly the same way. These were powers older than the modern world of Chicago, beings that had seen years pass beyond the imagining of mere mortals, borne witness to events of myth and legend with their own eyes. To them, this night had simply been a skirmish, not a major metropolitan-scale apocalypse. Tens of thousands of people had died already this evening. Hundreds of thousands more might follow.

And my daughter was somewhere behind me.

The fear and rage I’d been keeping safely bottled all evening, all centered around that one little figure, probably sleeping in the safe room at Michael’s house, flickered with the most infinitesimal of sparks. That spark found ample fuel and began to burn like a tiny star inside me.

Maggie.

This bitch was not going to hurt my little girl.

And with that flicker of knowledge, the kindling of will inside me, the knife at my hip throbbed with a slow, steady, quiet pulse.

It had a heartbeat.

“Steady,” I growled. “We’re right where we’re supposed to be.”

Ethniu began striding forward, her giant form taking steps that would have made mine look like a toddler’s. “Yield!” she bellowed, and the force of it sent the skirt of Mab’s battle-mail dress flying backwards along with the unicorn’s unreasonably silken mane and tail, and Mab’s bloody starlit hair. “Bow!”

The force of will that condensed on Mab in that word was so dense that I thought it was going to break something. Like maybe the universe. It was a sphere of pure psychic pressure so intense that I knew that if it had been directed at me, it would have compressed my mind into something too dense and inert to function, like a tiny diamond formed from crushed coal.

I’m what you might call oppositionally defiant to authoritarian figures. Someone who doesn’t always do as he’s told. Maybe even a little bit of a troublemaker.

That will would have crushed mine, flat.

Period.

It wasn’t a question of weakness or strength. This was simply power orders of magnitude beyond my ability to contest. The force of that will wasn’t even directed at me, and it was everything I could do not to fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness in the face of that terrible rage.

Butters had an excellently ordered mind, but he hadn’t had the training I had in mental defenses. He let out a sob of utter despair and would have fallen if I hadn’t had his shoulder. I dropped to a knee with him, steadying him as he swayed, his entire body trembling violently.

Except for one hand. It stayed steady on the Sword.

I do not know what power she had won, what knowledge she had gained, what experience she had suffered, or what sacrifices she had made that enabled Mab to defy the absolute force of the Titan’s will.

But though her shoulders bowed as if under enormous weight, though the Winter unicorn staggered beneath her, Mab was Mab. She steadied the beast, and her expression locked into a cold, steady mask. She drew in a breath, barely visible as a blur in the air compressed by the Titan’s will, and said, simply, “No.”