Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

The wave loomed larger. Ethniu screamed again, but I put my shoulder up against my right ear, so that was fine.

There was a hideous smell in the air. I looked around and saw broken concrete beginning to melt into slurry while Marcone chanted in some harsh-sounding language.

The wave loomed up, millions of tons of water, coming at us fast.

And then the breadth of the wave condensed. Intensified. It built higher and higher in the last hundred yards to shore, focused, piling into a curl a city block wide and towering like a skyscraper.

For a second, the gold-green tower was poised at apogee, graceful, beautiful.

And then eyes opened at the top of the wave. Green, furious, hostile, and implacable eyes.

The wave came down.

And Demonreach came down with it, great stony hands the size of pickup trucks outstretched.

That vast wall of glowing green water crashed down over the Titan, who screamed once more.

And then that huge form, a magical servant of my will, surged through the binding of my will held around the Titan and enfolded her in its vast, implacable form. The Titan fought, but her strength was spent. It was like watching a seal get pulled down by something big and dark and unseen—a desperate struggle with a foregone conclusion. Not because the Titan was strong enough to fight something like Alfred—but because this was what Alfred did. This was the purpose of its creation. Ant lions aren’t all that much bigger or stronger than ants.

But ant lions kill ants. It is what they do.

This was what Alfred did.

I saw Demonreach drag the Titan, screaming and thrashing, into the pitiless waters of Lake Michigan. I felt it when my will prevailed.

THRUM. THRUM. THRUM. THRUM.

The Spear quivered in time with my heartbeat. Steady and rumbling, the tactile equivalent of a big rig’s engine.

The rest of the wave that had hammered the Titan back into the water hit us, icy cold despite the glowing light that infused it. Stinking greyness rose around us, and I was thrown into something hard, the sky and the city whirling overhead, and then there was darkness and cold water all around.

I started trying to find my way out. I was underwater. There were cold, hard walls. And a ceiling. I was in an enclosed space. I was exhausted. My battered body was so bruised and numb, I could barely tell when I actually touched something. I tried to summon up some of my will, at least enough to bring some light into my staff or amulet, and . . . just couldn’t. There was just nothing there. My tank was on absolute E.

I tried to find a way out, by feel, in the dark, with the water making me colder and slower, with my lungs slowly beginning to burn.

Then there were three points of violet light that resolved into the eyes and the rune of Thorned Namshiel.

I felt Marcone thump my shoulder. Then he fumbled at my hand. I took it, and the Baron of Chicago led me through the darkness, to an opening in the solid barrier surrounding us. I lost some skin but I scraped through, kicked weakly at the water, and eventually got my head above it again.

Marcone broke the surface at the same time. He started dragging me toward the shore.

I peered at what looked like an enormous concrete . . . teacup, I supposed, since it was about the same shape, upended, maybe twelve feet across.

“What?” I asked.

The waters were rough, waves surging back and forth—but the beach, such as it was, was empty, except for us.

And a massive form of green-gold light was vanishing, slow and steady, back into the depths of Lake Michigan.

Marcone slogged onto the shore and made sure I was able to get out of the water.

“What?” I asked, panting, “The hell. Is that thing?”

Marcone plopped down on a rock and said, “There’s no reason a concrete vessel couldn’t have handled that wave, structurally speaking. I must have made it too top-heavy, and it rolled on us.”

“Yeah, well,” I panted, gasping sweet, sweet air. “That’s because you suck. And you’re an amateur. Who sucks.”

“I didn’t see you doing anything about it.”

“Yeah, because I was holding the freaking Titan!” I shot back. “I was doing the grown-up stuff.”

“You just almost killed us both as an unintended side effect of that binding,” Marcone snapped. “And you call me an amateur.”

“I saved your life from a Titan,” I panted, exhausted. And I think I had picked up a couple of cracked ribs, despite the last-second shield of concrete that had risen to stop most of the force of the wave. “You almost drowned us. Fake wizard.”

“I just broke down the molecular structure of concrete and then chemically re-formed it inside a mold of pure will, saving both of our lives from that wave in the process.”

“Fake,” I said. “Sad.”

Marcone let out a low, weary chuckle.

My stomach twitched a lot while breaths went in and out of my exhausted body.

We did not laugh together.

And he was no less an asshole.

But we won.

Chapter

Thirty-five

We should move,” Marcone said eventually. “Without Ethniu’s will to counter those of the Ladies, Corb’s forces will break. They’ll run for the water, and we are in their path.”

He was right, but there was no sense letting him feel that way. And I was too tired to move. “How about you fight them all with your new buddy? Look real good in front of everyone.”

“You first.”

I started to say something childish, but there was a particularly loud ripple of water from the shoreline, and both of us came up ready to fight. Some of us more drunkenly than others.

An ivory sphere a little bigger than a softball, glowing with sullen fire, tumbled out of the waves and onto the beach.

The Eye.

Pulsing with power.

Throbbing with it, really.

Power that could lay gods and monsters low.

I glanced aside.

Marcone was staring at the Eye.

It lay approximately equidistant between us, down at the waterline.

It might have been six inches nearer to me.

He turned and looked at me thoughtfully.

He looked at the Spear.

He didn’t move or reach for weapons. No demented angelic eyes appeared on his forehead. He just looked at me.

I returned the look. I knew what Marcone was. I’d taken his measure, and he hadn’t changed. He was, above all things, a dangerous predator. It was simply his nature. And you don’t let predators know when you’re scared.