Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

I slammed the butt end of the Spear of Destiny on the ground, and green and gold fire leapt up in a ring around me.

The impact vibrated against my hand and I felt it go out into the ground through the soles of my sneakers. I could sense the substance of the Spear stirring, forming, almost awakening. It drew some of its energy from me. My heart rate started to climb.

“Hey! Regina George!” I called, and my voice echoed over the field as if on loudspeakers.

Thrum-thrum, went the power of the Spear. Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum.

Ethniu’s head whipped toward me, her eye focused on the Spear, wide and alarmed—while Butters and Sanya rushed to flank her.

“Yeah,” I said, and started wearily forward. “Enough foreplay. Time for the main event.”

Chapter

Thirty-three

Sanya and Waldo and I rushed the Last Titan, and Chicago hung in the balance.

Around us, armies clashed drunkenly. Marcone’s amateurs fought like hell beside mine. They didn’t fight well, but they fought hard—and when they went down, they did not go alone. Etri’s people were simply terrifying—blurs that moved across the battle, striking from almost complete invisibility, and could sink into the earth and emerge from it anywhere they wanted, at will.

If we’d had a legion of svartalves, we wouldn’t have needed anyone else. But they weren’t a numerous people—and they were directing their efforts to spearheading the attack of the relief force, to join up with the Winter Lady’s cohorts.

Lara’s people fought beside them.

Watching the two groups work together was like some kind of bizarre outtake from the Cirque du Soleil. Lara’s fighters sailed through the air with the greatest of ease, taking thirty-foot strides in great, leaping bounds, moving almost weightlessly, their shroud-armor fluttering and snapping. As I watched, the wavery figure of a svartalf emerged from the earth and dragged a minor Fomor’s ankles into the ground. Even as it did, a white figure flashed by, spinning a blade on the end of a pole in a smooth arc, and killed the enemy sorcerer as easily as a beast at slaughter, and I saw the unmistakable silvery eyes of Lara Raith as she went by. She snapped the weapon up in a salute to the svartalf warrior as she passed, then engaged a band of war-beasts and their handlers, only to have half a dozen more wavery figures emerge from the ground behind her foes as they surrounded her, a counterambush that annihilated the bunch.

Lara’s eyes and mine met for a dangerous second—and she immediately shifted her direction, bounding across the savage battlefield like a fluttering pale spirit, toward Ethniu’s back.

Sanya, as tough as Butters and more athletic, got to Ethniu first.

The Titan lashed out with the spear’s head, sending it whipping through an arc that would have severed Sanya’s neck if he hadn’t dropped into a slide. He came through with the old cavalry saber held in both hands and struck at the Titan’s other foot.

Ethniu knew the power of the Swords at this point, and she dodged out of the way—forcing her weight onto her wounded leg and sending her down to a knee.

Butters, going by the other side, whipped Fidelacchius through a circle—and Ethniu struck him right on the chin with the butt end of her stolen spear with a simple lightning-fast jab while he did it.

Which is why you shouldn’t learn fighting moves from the movies.

Butters went flying back into the mud and didn’t move.

Half the light on the field went out.

Sanya regained his feet, behind the Titan, and charged as she began to rise, the head of the spear orienting on the unmoving form of the Knight of Faith. Before she could finish him, Sanya slammed into her back and smashed her down into the mud.

Ethniu twisted on the way down and hammered an awkward blow at Sanya with one arm. The Knight of Hope caught the blow on the blade of Esperacchius.

And again, a Titan screamed.

Maybe two thousand individuals from both armies simply collapsed to the ground, howling in agony as a wave of psychic pain washed out of the Titan. It felt like my arm had been set on fire.

But it sure as hell wasn’t the first time.

This time, I’d been ready, bracing myself against the Titan’s suffering, and surged through it like a swimmer breaking through the first wave at the beach. I closed the last few yards, slammed my feet down hard to brace them, and thrust the Spear at the Titan’s face.

Ethniu swept her stolen spear from left to right like a windshield wiper, and she was fast, way faster than she’d looked when I hadn’t been within stab range. I tried to slip the parry but was just too slow, and she batted the Spear aside, seized Sanya by a handful of his mail shirt, and threw him at me with about as much energy as a runaway golf cart.

We both went down in a heap, hard enough to take breath and cause stars and comets to whirl in front of us.

Esperacchius spun out of Sanya’s hands.

There was blood on it.

The Titan’s blood.

Ethniu glanced at a smoldering pile of what was mostly corpses, their body fat blazing in flames where one of the bolts of lightning or flying shards of Power had struck incidental targets. With the head of the spear, she flicked the Sword of Hope, smeared with blood too red to be real, into the fire.

And then she thrust her wounded arm into it, her expression twisting with pain as the fire scorched and boiled the wound.

The light of the Sword died.

Hundreds screamed with the Titan’s pain.

And the world suddenly got a whole hell of a lot darker.

“Trinkets of the Redeemer,” she snarled, her voice absolutely bubbling with hatred. She rose, whipping her burned arm out of the fire. The wound hadn’t been a very big one, even struck with Esperacchius, and she had cauterized it closed, apparently. Though the surface of her bronze skin was untouched, the flesh inside the wound had been charred like meat on a grill. “Maggots crawling on our beautiful world. Infesting it. Humans.”

Hate seethed through her, vibrated off her like heat from a fire. The Titan twisted her face in a rictus of concentration.

And the Eye kindled to scarlet life and began to brighten.

“Damn,” Sanya muttered, as the Titan turned toward us. The scarlet warlight of the Eye let me at least see Sanya. The big man was lying on his back. Something in the area of his collarbone was . . . just wrong, under the skin. It wasn’t shaped like humans were supposed to be shaped. His voice was thready, and he panted as though each inhalation was of pure fire. “Was pretty sure that would work.”

“Get her,” I said. “Not much of a plan.”

“No. For next time, need better plan.”

I blinked and looked at the Russian as the red glare brightened.