Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Double Dragon boss fight beside Hell Knight Marcone now?

Yeah.

Sure.

Why not?

Chapter

Thirty-four

Ethniu didn’t arise from the waters of Lake Michigan so much as explode from them, her raw power and agility belying her mangled limbs. Stars and stones, she was functionally halfway to being a quadriplegic—biplegic, I guess—and she still moved like a damned gymnast.

Marcone began muttering in a language I didn’t recognize and pointed a finger at the ground twenty yards away and to his left. He indicated another position to his right with his other hand, at a point equidistant from the first, said something, and there was a crackling sound in the air, like . . . broken wind chimes, maybe.

Ethniu came out of the water with the Eye already bursting forth in a tidal roar of red energy, lashing out unstoppably at Marcone.

Marcone simply stepped to his left and vanished into a chorus of broken wind chimes—reappearing at the point he’d pointed to with his left hand, clear of the beam.

Ethniu shrieked in rage, slewing the gaze of the Eye around wantonly, though the motion was slower than it should have been and seemed to take physical effort from her straining neck muscles as she swept her gaze around, searching for Marcone. She spotted him with another scream, but he simply took a second step, vanishing from the first point of the triangle he’d indicated, and appeared in the second in another shower of clinking-crystal sounds.

Holy crap. Direct point-to-point translocation was something that the White Council kept in a section called “Highly Theoretical and Dangerous Magic” in the wizard’s library at the complex in Edinburgh. I knew, because years ago when I’d asked about it, I’d been put on the no-access list for the entire section.

Which . . . well, to be fair, probably wasn’t entirely unwise.

Ethniu spent the energy of the Eye’s blast while Marcone played freaking peekaboo with her, using magic I wouldn’t care to touch until I’d had another forty or fifty years to practice, at least.

And while Marcone kept her busy, I got to work.

I grounded the Spear next to me. Working with one hand was a pain, but my left hand wasn’t cooperating very well and couldn’t do much more than wave vaguely and grasp Marcone’s bloodied knife. I opened the bag I’d had tied closed, rested my palm on the skull inside for a second, and said, “Bob!”

The eyes of the skull kindled to light, even as I held him up so that he could see what was happening. “Did Radio Mab go off the air? Is it over? Are we . . . Oh my freaking God!”

Beyond us, Ethniu seized a boulder the size of a basketball and smashed at Marcone with it. The gangster stood there calmly while the rock shattered on a dim violet aura around him, the pieces flinging themselves violently back into Ethniu’s face.

“Oh hell no!” Bob declared.

I had to reach across to fumble in my opposite pocket with my good hand and withdraw the crystal I’d brought from Demonreach for the purpose. It flickered, deep down, with the faint green light of the crystals in the catacombs under the island.

“Bob,” I said. “We’re going to a bind a Titan.”

“Fuck that!” the skull sputtered. “I’m going to Utah! Stuff like this never happens in Utah!”

“Buddy,” I said, turning the skull to look at me. “I need you.”

Bob the Skull’s eyelights dwindled down to little points and he said, in a tiny voice, “Dammit.” He shuddered in my hand and then the lights brightened again. “Think of all the girls we’ll get when we lock her up!”

Such a long night.

“That’s the spirit,” I sighed.

“Oh! I see what you did there.”

“Dammit, Bob, focus!” I snapped grumpily. “You’re the circle. And if we survive this, you get a twenty-four-hour pass. Shore leave.”

“Whoop!” Bob whooped, and campfire sparks soared out of the skull’s eye sockets and into a swiftly moving cloud in the hellish air.

Ethniu recoiled from the rebounding stone, snarling in frustration, and started clubbing Marcone with one arm, the motion primal, brutal. His shields were comprehensive, if not really first-class in strength—but he just kept spinning new ones off his fingers, defenses akimbo. Ethniu’s furious blows would shatter the shield they struck, but by then Marcone would have spun up another one.

She switched tactics, kicking a cloud of stones at him with her broken foot—which already looked steadier than it had been. Marcone had to drop a new shield low to intercept the stones, which scattered off in random directions as the spell fractured, breaking the rhythm. He had to dive to one side before Ethniu compressed his spine into his tailbone, and she surged after him, snarling.

I took the bloodied knife and swept it over the smoldering light of the crystal, and it flared to life as the blood of the Titan touched it. It might have been really bright. I could barely tell. The world was turning into weird shadows and odd streaks of color. My good hand was shaking hard.

I drove the crystal down into some rubble so that it stood up from the ground. Then I smeared more of the Titan’s blood onto the tip of the Spear.

My heart suddenly skittered along even faster. Thrumthrumthrumthrumthrum.

Marcone did something that made greasy black smoke condense into a thick, choking cloud and sent it zipping toward the Titan’s face, where it clung in a wobbly bubble of impenetrable fog. The Titan swiped at it uselessly.

“Namshiel,” she snarled. “You greasy little snake!”

Marcone spoke in a different voice even as he ducked behind a chunk of fallen concrete the size of a tractor trailer. It sounded like him, mostly, only with a very formal British accent. “You haven’t changed much, either, darling.”

In answer, Ethniu screamed and surged directly forward and through the concrete and the rebar inside it alike. It exploded and came sloughing over Marcone in an avalanche. Marcone played a desperate move and threw a telekinetic strike at his own feet. Magic is awesome, but physics are still physics. Throw a bunch of force at the ground, and the ground throws just as much force back at you.

Marcone exploded out from under the avalanche of shattering concrete, flew up at maybe a twenty-degree angle, and landed a good fifty feet out into Lake Michigan.

And the Titan’s furious gaze immediately whipped toward me.

“Filthy little thief of Power,” Ethniu snarled. Spittle and foam were falling from the skullified side of her face, along with a steady patter of some kind of yellowish slime as she came skittering toward me over the stones. “I will feed you to the Eye.”