Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

She turned toward me, slim and graceful, steady on the deck.

I faced her and tried not to pitch over the rail as the Water Beetle bumped along the waves. It had been a long night. And I didn’t have much left, physically or otherwise.

“Tell me your name,” I said, and slid some of my will into my voice.

“You know who I am,” Justine purred in answer.

Then she reached out with one hand and ripped a four-foot section of the ship’s steel handrail off its metal struts.

I blinked wearily and fancied I could hear grains of sand pattering to the deck from my eyes. Now I knew what Ethniu had felt like at the end. “Humor me,” I said, with more of my will. “Tell me your name.”

Justine, or whatever being was driving Justine’s body around, turned toward me and began slow, stalking paces forward. It made some abortive, choking noises in its throat, and then said, the words drawn from it reluctantly, “It will do you no good once I’ve caved in your skull. Nemesis am I called.”

There. Bingo.

For years, shadowy forces had been driving events in Chicago and in the wider world. For years, I’d been picking up threads and finding them connected to others. For years, I’d been flailing around trying to get an idea of the forces that had been arrayed against me.

And tonight, one of the players was in the open.

Right there. Behind Justine’s eyes.

And I was going to get answers.

I didn’t have much left in me but pure, stiff-necked, muleheaded contrariness.

But even after the night I’d had, I still had plenty of it.

“I don’t care what they call you,” I spat. The effort of maintaining my will made it impossible to move my feet as the slender girl stalked forward with her steel bar. “Thrice I say and done. Tell me your name.”

The slender figure froze in front of me, shuddering.

Then she exhaled in a slow, utterly sensual voice, “I am the doubt that wards away sleep. I am the flaw that corrupts, the infected wound, the false fork in the trail. I am the gnawer, the worm in the book, the maggot that burrows in the mind’s eye.”

She shuddered in bizarre ecstasy and panted, in a frantic whisper, “I am He Who Walks Beside.”

Hell’s bells.

A Walker.

And if I hadn’t twigged to its presence, I would have set it loose on Demonreach—the prison for the great nightmares of the world. Ethniu wasn’t the biggest thing in it—not by a long shot. And an Outsider with the power of a Walker, turned loose inside the island’s defenses, might well be able to destroy them and set loose every horror inside.

Hell. There’d have been an Ethniu for every city, if the place got emptied out.

The weight of my will, once finished forcing the information from the possessing being, flooded out of me and left me barely able to stand. I staggered back, away from the slender figure in front of me.

Justine, calmly, pursued.

“I hope it felt good to scratch that itch,” she purred. “This is the end of your story, starborn.”

“How long?” I asked. “How long have you been in Justine?”

Justine waved the steel bar in a vague gesture. “Mortal time is such a limited concept. A few years. Ever since she became close to Lara.”

I glowered at her. “You conceived my brother’s child intentionally.”

“Obviously,” Justine purred. “That ridiculous instinct, honestly. It is your kind’s greatest weakness. Once he understood that his mate and his offspring would die if he did not follow my instructions, well . . .” She shrugged.

“So you sent him at Etri. At the svartalves, someone almost everyone respects. Why? To shatter the Accords?”

“Apocalypse isn’t an event,” Nemesis murmured. “It is a frame of mind.”

I probably would have staggered anyway, but the phrase hit hard.

“This was less a plan than . . . an act of faith, I suppose you would say,” the Outsider continued through Justine’s lips.

“Faith?” I asked.

“In what is coming,” the Walker said. “The unraveling of all things into darkness and silence.”

“Empty Night,” I breathed.

“Empty Night,” the creature echoed, in the hushed tone of a holy phrase. “So we pressed the attacks at the Outer Gates. While I sowed havoc within the walls of reality. We loosed some of the primal forces of your own precious Creation against you. Undermined Mab, her people, the Accords, the delusion of order you force upon the universe with your useless presence.” She smiled, dropping lower, the motion feline, sensual, hypnotic. “You may have survived the day. But the deed is done. We are the tide. Infinite. Unrelenting. And one day, starborn, make no mistake, we will wipe away all that you know. All we need is a single opening.”

“Must suck,” I panted, “to get whipped by some stupid punk from Chicago. ’Cause it looks to me like I beat you.”

Something ugly went through her voice. “There was never a victory for you to gain,” Nemesis hissed. “The mortals have been given terror they have not known in centuries. There is nothing more that need be done. They are your death stroke. Now I need only wait.”

I finally reached the back of the boat and said, “Funny you should mention waiting.”

Justine tilted her head, too far, silent.

“You know how you don’t want to arrive on Demonreach, Walker?” The rear railing hit the backs of my thighs. “You don’t want to show up all on your lonesome. Alfred hates that. That would be like sprinting into a meat grinder.”

The gathering light showed me Justine’s face as her eyes widened and she whipped her head over her shoulder.

The black mass of Demonreach, backlit by the golden sky, loomed directly ahead of us, swiftly larger, as the boat chugged toward its shores.

Justine whirled back and lunged toward me. “No!”

I smirked at her, spread my arms, and fell over the back of the boat, into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan.

With the last shreds of my will, I called to Demonreach.

And the last thing I felt before things went black was green-gold light, and a huge stony hand clamping down on my shoulder, tearing me away from the Outsider’s desperate grasp.

Chapter

Thirty-six

Those next few days remain a montage in my head.

I woke up bumping along the surface of Lake Michigan in a rubber boat being run by Lara’s people. I vaguely remembered reaching shore and having Alfred store the Eye safely away. Demonreach had allowed Riley and two of his men to approach and pick me up off the shoreline, after throwing poor Freydis two hundred yards out into the lake. They’d found me unconscious with my legs still in the freezing water and were treating the Winter Knight for hypothermia. Which is a bit like fitting a polar bear for a fur coat—it doesn’t help the bear and it makes him sort of grumpy.