Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

I caught up to Marcone as he scrambled across the rough ground, running wherever possible. When I finally drew up beside him, he increased his pace, and I was hard-pressed to stay with him. Granted, he didn’t look like he’d been through as much physical discomfort as I had that night, but even so he moved damned well, and like he’d been to places like this before.

“Can we use the weapon?” he asked in a terse tone as we ran.

Behind us, Ethniu let out a scream of rage, and there was a sound like metal cables tearing.

Then she screamed again. And it was closer.

“Maybe I could,” I panted. “If I had a lifetime to study it. But probably not. Something like that isn’t meant for mortals.”

“Then we have no other option,” Marcone said. “What do you need for the binding?”

“Her blood,” I said.

And I started tearing at the bag I’d carried tied shut on my belt for most of the night.

Ethniu screamed again, closer. She wasn’t moving much faster than we were. She’d had one hell of a night, too. Hell’s bells, for all I knew she was using echolocation. She had every other damned advantage.

“I take it your weapon can accomplish that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. We’d reached the beach by then, and clambered down the slope of broken rock to the edge of the water. “But it was good enough for the Son of God. I figure it’s in the right league.”

Marcone’s eyes widened. One of his hands twitched. “And the adults let you have it?”

There was a clatter of rock on rock behind us.

“There’s not much justice in the world,” I said. “This thing might work. It might not. Takes some pretty serious power to hurt her. Like, angel-level power.”

“The Swords,” he said.

“Butters is new,” I said. “He did something without thinking. This is what we’ve got.”

In the haze, in which visibility had dropped to maybe thirty feet, I heard something breathing, the bubble of a slight snarl on every exhale.

Marcone crouched, tense.

“Do you at least have a gun?” I asked. “Maybe you can distract her.”

“I have a knife,” Marcone said.

“Jusht like a gangshter,” I said. “Bringsh a knife to an apocalypshe fight.”

Marcone gave me a level look and then said, in a much more conversational tone, “Honestly, Dresden. If you used your mind half as much as your mouth, you’d be running the place by now.” He held up the Eye and spoke patiently. “I have what she wants. I will distract her.” He clambered over several yards away from me and fell silent, watching the murky shadows.

I wanted to say something back, about how he was a running mouth, but instead I fell silent, gathered up some of my power, and shaped it into the mildest, softest veil I could around me. Too much power in it, and Ethniu might become aware of the energies in motion.

She was wounded now. Hunting. Hurting. Furious. Frightened.

Like one of us.

She’d be focused on retrieving the Eye, focused on securing its power, on wiping away her enemies, who were everyone, forever.

I wouldn’t matter unless I got between her and the Eye.

So I stood still and silent and let the haze of the battle and the more subtle effort of my will gather around me. And waited.

It wasn’t long.

Ethniu came down the slope on all fours, crawling with perfect grace and mangled limbs, like a wounded spider, holding herself up on the stump of her arm as easily as if she’d been born that way. Her burned face was . . . sort of seething, with some kind of thick mist or steam, as her body fought the injuries Odin had inflicted.

Her eye locked on Marcone and she let out a low, cackling exhalation.

“The mortal who thinks himself a lord,” the Titan purred.

“Fool,” Marcone replied by way of greeting, his tone polite and pitched to carry loudly.

“What?” Ethniu demanded.

“If you had a mind,” Marcone said, “you would have used restraint. You would have arisen from the water with no warning to anyone. You would have unleashed a wave of expendable troops on the city, blown down a building or two, and returned to the sea to watch the havoc unfold.” He shook his head. “I will simply never understand the need some people seem to feel to be proven correct in front of their enemies. It’s quite childish.”

I blinked.

Was Marcone . . . talking smack?

“Give me what is mine, mortal,” Ethniu snarled. “And I will kill you swiftly.”

“Your negotiating skills would seem to need work as well,” Marcone added.

Behind us, there was a series of roaring detonations, from back by the park. Sorcery, maybe.

I was an idiot. An exhausted, terrified idiot. Marcone didn’t do anything just to be doing it.

He was providing cover for me.

So I started moving whenever they spoke, as soft and quiet as I knew how. It wasn’t as quiet as usual. I’d just been too battered. Even now, I didn’t feel pain, exactly. Mostly my body just seemed very confused about what the hell was going on. One moment it would be too hot, the next freezing, and nothing felt like it was moving quite right, so my balance kept wobbling. The Winter mantle had been stretched to its limits. Or rather, it had stretched me to mine.

It felt like I was getting closer to Game Over than I had before.

“You aren’t anyone,” the Titan said. “You’re nothing. Just an animal. An animal near the top of its class on one little world.”

“And yet, I walk where I will,” Marcone said. “I sleep where and when I please. I eat when I hunger. I choose what to make of my life. I am free.”

I crept closer.

“Who are you?” Marcone asked back, his voice ringing defiance. “A daughter unloved by her monstrous father? Sold and traded like a horse? Hiding in a dark cave with her useless hangers-on for millennia? And now lashing out with her daddy’s gun.” He shook his head and bounced the Eye in his hand. “It appears that it is better to be a mortal than a Titan, these days.”

She crept closer, vibrating with tension. “Give me,” she seethed, “the Eye.”

Marcone stared at the Titan and appeared to choose his words the way a surgeon would his implements. “Be a good girl,” he said. “And go get it.”

With an expression of absolute nonchalant contempt, he tossed the smoldering Eye over his shoulder and into the waters of Lake Michigan.