Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

“Next time?”

He grinned at me, though he couldn’t move, in sheer mad defiance.

Supercool magical pokey stick or not, I didn’t have what it took to stand up to power on the order of magnitude of the Eye of Balor. My heaviest magical punch was nowhere close to what my grandfather could throw, and that hadn’t gotten through her armor, either. Even if I was a lot better, even if I threw it out as a death curse, the best spell I had wouldn’t surpass what the old man could do.

And I still hadn’t gotten to her blood.

If I was going to bind the Titan, I needed that. And I needed her closer to the water.

The Spear quivered with power, and I could feel the sheer metaphysical mass of the thing, its utter reality. It was, in many ways, just a spear. But it was a spear to everything. If I could stick it in the Titan, she would bleed.

But she was twenty rough feet away. And I’d have to get close enough to even have a shot at hitting her. And she’d have to be so slow that merely human reflexes could manage the task.

None of which was going to happen before she unleashed the Eye.

But I shoved myself to my feet, Spear in hand, brought forth my shield, and stepped forward, in front of the fallen Knight of Hope. No particular reason to do it. Not a lot of hope to be had.

The enemy had come at us, out of nowhere, far stronger than we had expected, and we’d done everything we could.

It hadn’t been enough.

I faced the Titan’s hate and fury and acknowledged that I couldn’t beat it. But I figured I could die as well as Hendricks had—on my feet, face to the foe, between her and my friend.

And, twenty yards away, the swirl of battle stirred, and I saw One-Eye’s shadowy form on the ground where he’d fallen.

He lifted his head.

He opened his eye.

It gleamed like a smoldering coal in the shadow.

And Odin, Father of the Aesir, spoke, his voice a deep resonance that shook the air with gentle power. “Gungnir.”

I knew the translation of the weapon’s name, a bit of useless trivia that had stuck in my head.

Swayer.

A rune burst into scarlet light upon the Spear’s blade.

And, like a snake, the weapon of the gods the Titan had stolen turned in her hand, whipping about with lightning speed. As it did, runes burst into light all along the length of the blade and haft alike, suddenly blazing with energy.

And the weapon plunged with vicious, absolute precision into the Eye of Balor.

A wall of light hit me. I don’t mean it was bright. I mean I got hit with a physical force the likes of which I had seldom experienced. If I hadn’t had the shield up and ready, it would have obliterated me.

Shield or not, I was flung to the ground, and I fought to keep myself between the torrent and the fallen Knights. The world was white. Sound was just a high-pitched, endless tone. Reality was pain.

When the world came back again, Ethniu was on one knee. Her right hand rested on the ground. Half of her skull was burned to the bone. Black. The Eye glowered within its socket, flames and semisolid plasma gathered around it. The arm that had been holding Gungnir was gone. Just gone, right around the elbow, the flesh burned to a withered stump. Blinding light seethed from what looked like cracks on the Eye’s surface.

And.

Stars and stones.

The damned creature lifted her maimed head. Half of her face was untouched. And she focused her gaze, equal parts mind-numbing beauty and screaming horror, and brought the Eye to bear on me.

Lara rose from behind that hideous head, leaping from a good fifty feet off. She sailed through the air with a grace that was more like that of an insect than a bird, spun as she came, and delivered a kick that could have inspired poetry to the back of the Titan’s skull. She put everything into it as she came, the full power of a White Court vampire unleashing her stored strength all at once. Lara could have driven that kick through a battleship’s hull.

She hit the Titan in the base of the skull.

The kick couldn’t hurt Ethniu.

But the Eye, the Eye flew out of its socket and landed on the muddy ground, a little bigger than a softball, glowing with sullen rising fire.

A fire that had the potential to consume anything that was.

Including Ethniu.

The Titan clutched at her maimed face and her expression suddenly became subsumed with terror.

She lurched for the Eye.

So did I.

So did Lara.

We hit in a tangled confusion of bodies. The Eye skittered away.

It bounced and rolled and came to a stop against the boots of Hendricks’s corpse.

And John Marcone popped out of the shadows near Hendricks’s body, seized it, gave me a ferocious glare, and sprinted toward Lake Michigan.

Ethniu thrust her good hand at me, but Lara was quick. She kicked at the Titan’s arm, deflecting some of the power of the blow, and it only sent me rolling across the muddy ground.

“Go!” Lara screamed, her eyes as bright as mirrors. She whipped her weapon—I think the Japanese called it a naginata—at the Titan, to no more effect than leaving sullen red lines of heat upon the Titanic bronze coating Ethniu’s form.

Ethniu batted Lara aside like a rag doll and rose—only to stumble, as Lara’s shroud-armor writhed off the vampire like a living thing, like some kind of bizarre invertebrate from the deep sea, and wrapped around the Titan’s knees, binding them together. Ethniu fell back down again and was forced to briefly struggle against the living cloth.

Lara, naked as a jaybird, her pale skin gleaming, almost glowing, scrambled to one side and thrust her weapon at the Titan’s fingers, trying to keep them from getting hold of the binding armor.

“She wants the Eye!” Lara screamed. “Go, Harry!”

The Spear felt heavy in my hands. It still had the power to hurt the Titan. But even with the backup of the Winter mantle, I was too battered and slow to get through to her.

And I needed to get her to the water anyway.

Marcone knew the plan. And he’d been thinking about it harder than me.

So I flung myself after him, plunging out of the clear air around the battlefield and into the choking, smoky haze over the city.

It was getting hard to tell where the park had been. The ground had been torn apart by the forces unleashed there. We got to where the footbridge had stood and found that Ethniu had used the Eye to facilitate the crossing of the avenue below for her army. She had blown the bridge and the retaining walls into slopes of rubble. And the area beyond was even worse. Streets, buildings, trees, light poles, everything that had not been able to flee had suffered destruction as if she had risen from the lake and pounded everything in her line of sight to rubble with the power of the Eye. The retaining wall beside the water was . . . just kind of a really, really rocky beach now.