Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

There was an enormous exhalation, and the Winter unicorn suddenly stood in front of me, stamping its spiked hooves impatiently.

Mab took the psychic phone back, her thoughts mildly reproachful. Have I ever asked you to accomplish an easy task, my Knight? Tonight seems an unlikely place to begin.

Well. She had me there.

Butters, evidently, was not privy to Mab’s conversation with me. He was staring at the unicorn. “Uh. Harry?”

“Dammit,” I muttered.

I swallowed and took a deep breath. Then I seized the unicorn by the mane, hoped to God it didn’t notice how much my hands were shaking, and leapt onto its back. I turned back to Butters and offered him my hand. “No time. Trust me.”

“Ah hell,” Butters said in a note of open complaint. But he’d already put his hand in mine before he began speaking, and I hauled him up onto the unicorn’s back with me.

If our weight was any burden to the unicorn, it wasn’t obvious from the way the creature moved. I could feel the thing quivering in its desire to spill blood. No sooner had Butters swung up behind me and gotten settled than the beast took off. If I hadn’t ridden a supernaturally powerful equine earlier that year, both of us would have fallen off on our asses—and even so, Butters had to cling to me hard to keep from taking a tumble. The unicorn forged through the little sea of blue- and purple-armored allies who glided from its path, and then we were on open ground and racing toward the enemy.

I’ve ridden horses more than most, and I feel qualified to say that riding a unicorn in battle is an experience I was unlikely to forget.

In the first place, there wasn’t really a sense of up-and-down to the way the creature ran. In that sense, it felt more like riding a motorcycle, though I had more experience with horses. The only times I’d been on a motorcycle had been with . . .

Murph.

The pain hit my heart.

Power flooded into me, more than I’d ever felt, all of it in the space of a couple of seconds. My heart rate skyrocketed, my hair stood on end, and my body temperature had begun to climb. My brain took note of those things while my heart kept aching and more and more power rushed in.

Magic and emotion are intertwined so strongly that it can be hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. Emotion makes the most immediate and ready fuel for magical power, though it can have some odd effects on what you’re trying to do. Fuel a love spell with rage and you’re likely to get some odd side effects, for example.

But for causing pain, there wasn’t better fuel than pain itself. So, though it hurt, viciously, I fought to take hold of that power and started shaping it with my thoughts as the unicorn rushed forward. But I’d never had that much energy rush into me that quickly before.

Hell’s bells, what had just happened to me?

Flickers of green-gold light began to gather along the unicorn’s central horn, and I suddenly understood.

I had various tools, like my staff, created to help me gather, focus, and direct power.

As did Mab.

It was everything I could do just to hold on, and the unicorn had more acceleration than a Maserati. We started closing the distance to the enemy with alarming rapidity.

I shoved my staff at Butters and shouted, “Hold this!”

He fumbled and managed to take it, and I leaned forward and laid my right palm on the unicorn’s neck.

The creature’s horn flared with pure power, became incandescent with gold-green light, and I felt the humming channels of power rushing through the body of the immortal creature, just like when I sent energy into my staff—only that was like comparing a drinking fountain to a firefighting company’s equipment. I might have been holding more energy than I ever had before, but this creature had been designed to focus and enhance Mab’s power. I couldn’t have overloaded it if I’d tried.

So when we were about fifty yards from the enemy, I sent that stored energy through my right hand into the Winter unicorn, focused my will and intent, modified the shape of the spell on the fly, and howled, “Forzare!”

By the time I’d done that, we were upon them.

A wave of pure kinetic energy, amplified by the unicorn’s horn, rushed out ahead of us like a fast-moving river and broke upon the enemy in a tsunami. Bodies flew from our path as if swatted away by God’s heaviest driver. I don’t mean they flew back, either. I threw them up, like thirty feet up, and before they could come down again we’d sprinted underneath them, so that the unicorn’s hooves were constantly coming down on open ground. From a distance, it must have looked like some enormous gardener had taken a hurricane-force leaf blower to the enemy.

“Holy moly!” shouted Butters.

The unicorn let out a bellowing sound that would have been more appropriate to maybe a bear or a tiger or a low-flying Concorde, and for several seconds the world became a confusing blur of bodies twirling into the air, screams, and flying thunderbolts of excess energy bleeding into the night.

The unicorn blew past the enemy lines and into the clear on the other side—and we started taking gunfire almost instantly. The unicorn didn’t slow down but started running serpentine, snaking left and right with what felt like enough g-force to give me whiplash. Targets moving like that are difficult to hit even in a practice scenario, much less in adrenaline-charged real life, but I was so busy holding on for my life that I couldn’t possibly have brought a counterattack to bear. I couldn’t even see where the fire was coming from.

I looked over my shoulder and caught a frenzied glimpse of King Corb bearing a staff of what looked like coral, pointing a finger at the ground ahead of us and shrieking.

And I realized that the problem with having all that power to work with was that the enemy got to work with it, too.

The ground ahead of us suddenly darkened. The unicorn tried to twist and evade it, but Corb had timed it perfectly and the creature was moving too fast.

I poured my will into my beleaguered shield bracelet, bringing it up in a tight sphere around Butters and me.

The unicorn hit the patch of darkened earth and plunged into it as if it were liquid. Salty brine had mixed with the earth, rendering it into the next best thing to quicksand, arresting the unicorn’s momentum abruptly, and Butters and I flew over its head, hit the ground on the other side, and started rolling.

We were heading straight for Columbus, bouncing like a cannonball. If we hit that concrete wall along the upper level of the park, we’d be splattered against the inside of my own shield, so I started layering its interior with kinetic force and letting the outer layers be ripped off by our impacts with the ground, slowing us and shedding our energy in the form of heat. We left a trail of bouncing ball prints in scorched earth and concrete, and by the time we hit the wall, we’d shed enough momentum that it didn’t feel much worse than a moderate traffic collision—which is to say it was loud and terrifying and painful, but we survived.