Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

It left me and Butters lying on a sidewalk against a concrete wall, alone at the rear of the enemy lines.

And it also left us staring at Listen and a platoon of his turtlenecks, not fifty feet away, operating several infantry mortars and holding enough guns to invade Texas.

Listen and I moved at the same time.

His gun snapped up.

I thrust out my hand at the earth and snarled, “Forzare!”

My intention had been to use the spell to bulldoze a berm of earth into place between us. But I still wasn’t used to this turbocharged magic thing.

Oops.

The energy I’d sent out formed a berm all right—and then it kept on pushing and building it, like a rogue wave on Hawaii’s North Shore. Maybe eighteen or twenty tons of earth hit Listen and his people and swamped them.

And at the same time, someone punched me in the belly on my left side, right under the floating ribs, and drove the breath out of me. The whole left side of my abdomen suddenly felt wet.

Harry! screamed Molly’s psychic voice, full of alarm.

I felt the gaze of the Titan as her head swiveled toward me like a machine-gun turret, and her features, her presence, became suffused with pure rage.

I managed not to foul my underwear and fought to draw a breath as Ethniu kicked a panicked octokong out of her way and began striding toward me.

“Oh boy,” Butters breathed. He crouched over me and ripped my shirt open. His eyes widened as he stared down at me; then he shot a glance over his shoulder at the Titan, who was rapidly drawing nearer.

Butters drew my hands to the spot where I’d been punched and pressed them down. “Hold them here, Harry. Keep up the pressure. I’ll be right back.”

And then the little guy stood up, his limbs shaking, his face ashen, and put himself between me and a goddamned Titan.

I felt my teeth stretch into a wolf’s smile. Hell. If Butters could do that, I could do my part. It was hard. But I drew in enough breath and focused my will, infusing my voice with Power.

“Titania,” I wheezed. “I summon thee.”

Maybe half a dozen of the armored foot soldiers around Ethniu, confused and looking for direction, sensed her intent and went flying forward like hounds on a trail.

I labored for another breath, and to hold my hands where Butters had put them.

Butters lifted Fidelacchius and brought the blade to life in a buzz of angelic choral fury.

“Titania!” I rasped, louder. The Name echoed weirdly, or it seemed that way to me. “I summon thee!”

The first of the heavily armored ape-armed troopers reached Butters.

And the little guy went full Jedi on his ass.

Fidelacchius sliced the trooper’s weapon in half and took part of the arm with it. A second swing split the trooper’s heavy shield in half with the rest of him, and the pieces fell in separate directions. The other five hesitated—and Butters went up the middle like a human Cuisinart, striking down three more in less time than it would have taken to call his name.

Ethniu strode closer, shouting something in a tongue I did not understand, seized the corpse of one of my volunteers from the earlier engagement by the calf, and flung it overhand at Butters and his remaining opponents, smashing all three of them out of her way.

But the little guy had bought me time enough.

I drew in my third wheezing breath as the fire of the Eye began to kindle, poured my will into my voice, and screamed, “TITANIA! I SUMMON THEE!”

Chapter

Thirty

Titania doesn’t like me on the best of days.

It’s hard to blame her; I killed her child.

So when I completed the summoning, without anything like any kind of control over the being I was calling in, I wasn’t really expecting roses and chocolate.

Neither was I expecting to get struck by a bolt of lightning.

But here we are.

There was an enormous sound, a flash of light, a shock against my body like a spray of frozen fire. And the next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back, wheezing, with chunks of concrete and other debris pattering down around me. I tried to get up and I think my legs and shoulders twitched. But other than that, nothing much happened.

I lived static interference for a while, waiting for my brain to start tracking again. The next thing I knew, Butters was helping me sit up and saying something like, “. . . lucky that the bullet didn’t puncture the abdominal wall. The lightning actually cauterized it, or you’d still be bleeding.”

“Tough love,” I gasped. I got a look at my bare chest. I had a lot of blood and what looked like a horrible burn along the entire horizontal length of flesh beneath my ribs on the left side, shaped vaguely like the spreading branches of a tree, or maybe wave patterns in sand. At least that would be kind of a cool scar. Everything I could feel was encased in fuzzy white static, and I was grateful for the insulation the Winter mantle was giving me against the pain.

I couldn’t feel it, but I knew my body was taking a terrible beating. While I could keep driving it forward, this kind of thing was taking a toll. I still had limits, even if it didn’t feel like I did. If I didn’t respect that, I could tough-guy myself right into a grave.

I lay there quietly for a moment, staring up at the sky. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. Everywhere around us was smoke and dust, lit only by smoldering fires. But from where I now lay, it was like looking up from the bottom of a well, a long column of clear air that stretched up into the night sky, where clouds were boiling into existence out of nowhere, while thunder rumbled with low menace.

When the Queens of Summer and Winter took to the same field, there were always storms.

And then my awareness rushed back together again and I got my head back into the game, looking wildly around to determine what had happened.

Battle was raging in the park. The incoming charge of the Winter Lady and her troops had hit the wobbly lines of the Fomor like a wrecking ball, centered around a point of silver-white light and hulking trolls. I could hear the haunting shrieks of the Winter Lady, and the answering screams of her troops, as their offensive punched deep into the enemy formation and devolved into the pure chaos of frantic hand-to-hand combat.

Except that Molly’s troops were cheating: They’d brought pistols and submachine guns and plied them to devastating effect along with swords and axes. Though the enemy still outnumbered them, the Winter Lady’s charge had been potentially deadly, threatening to cleave the enemy lines entirely.

King Corb and his retinue of sorcerers and their bodyguards charged frantically toward that threat, to pit their sorcerous might against the Winter Lady—and to entrap her charge in their own superior numbers if she could be stopped from breaking through their lines.