Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

“No, you haven’t, sir,” I said.

The old man scowled at me. “Are you sure? Maybe you just weren’t listening. Like on vampire day.”

“Seriously? Really?” I demanded of him and swiped an arm at the tentacular horrors closing in on us. “Right now?”

He thrust his jaw and the bucket at me. “Every time you get tangled up with them, you get burned,” he said. “Boy, when are you gonna use your head?”

I seized the bucket from him.

Suddenly, without a sound, without any kind of signal, all of the hounds crouched in an identical stance, and their tentacles began to vibrate all together.

“Go!” Ebenezar thundered. “Fast!”

Right. Time to get my head in the game. Maybe the cornerhounds couldn’t physically get to us, but if all thirteen of those things dropped the purely physical bass on us all at once, I was pretty sure we weren’t walking out of this garage.

In a perfect world, I could have broken the circle, rendered myself undetectable to the enemy, and just slipped aside and let the old man keep their attention while I laid down the circle and came at them.

But I’d have to make do with a birthday prank I’d been getting ready for Butters, instead.

First, step out of the circle.

As I did, the cornerhounds tensed, muscles and tendrils quivering.

At the same time, Ebenezar began to backpedal to put his back to the nearest column supporting the garage, even as he brought up another bulwark of invisible force to take shelter behind. “Come on, ye great ugly beasties!”

The cornerhounds’ tentacle heads flared out, tracking the old man, and rumbling, vibrating, subsonic thunderclaps filled the air and made me dizzy.

I rose, will gathered, and lifted my right hand, fingers spread to project energy, and snarled, “Consulere rex!”

The spell wasn’t a terribly complicated one. It basically duplicated an air horn. Just … a little bigger. And it played a tune.

Okay, look. You’re going to have to trust me on this one: Having a friggin’ Tyrannosaurus rex roaring out the tune of “Happy Birthday to You” at full volume is an entirely appropriate birthday present for Waldo Butters.

The sound that filled the parking garage wasn’t the volume of an air horn. Or a marching band. Or a train’s horn. It did, in fact, check in at around a hundred and sixty decibels. It wasn’t a hundred and sixty-five because when I’d tried that much, it broke all the glasses in the kitchen and set my hair on fire.

I’m not kidding.

For the record, that’s about the same amount of sound a passenger jet makes at takeoff. Now imagine being in a relatively small, enclosed, acoustically reflective area with that much noise.

No, don’t. If you haven’t done it, you can’t imagine.

The sound was less like noise than it was like being thrown into an enormous vat of petroleum jelly. Instantly, I felt like there was no way to get a good breath. There was pressure against all of my skin and pain in my ears, like when you dive to the bottom of a deep pool. I dropped my staff to the ground so that I could clap my hands over my ears, not that it did much good. This loud was a full-body, weapons-grade loud. It was a minor miracle I had the presence of mind to hang on to the bucket.

I had planned to run for the truck—but I hadn’t really counted on how damned loud this spell was going to be. So I staggered that way instead, barely able to keep my feet and walk in a straight line.

The cornerhounds had it worse than I did. Under the assault of my “Dino Serenade,” they crouched in pure agony, tendrils flailing, head tentacles flapping wildly, like some kind of flared-hood lizard receiving jolts of current. They weren’t howling now, or if they were, it was kind of redundant.

Sometimes the best defense is a T. rex.

I drunkenly fell only twice on the way to the truck. Then came the hard part.

I had to take my hands off my ears, and the, uh, music felt like it was going to burst my eardrums. I put the bucket down, crouched beside the truck, and called upon Winter.

Being the Winter Knight isn’t much fun. Having that mantle in my life on a daily basis meant that I had to fight and work, every day, to keep being more or less me. The damned thing made me think things I would rather not think, and want things I would rather not want. Being the Winter Knight doesn’t help you be a good dad, or make better pancakes. It doesn’t help you understand philosophy, create beauty, or garner knowledge.

What it does do is make you hell on wheels in a fight.

I seized the truck by its frame, used the hem of my spell-armored leather duster to protect my hands, tensed my back and my legs, and stood up.

It was hard. It hurt like hell as the edges of the frame and the mass behind them bit at my hands, even through the duster. My muscles screamed in protest—but the absolute cold of Winter ice filled my thoughts and my limbs, a counteragony that either dulled the physical pain or gave me so much additional pain that the mere physical torment seemed irrelevant by comparison.

The pickup truck quivered and creaked in my hands, and with a surge of my shoulders and legs I got my grip reversed and pushed the vehicle up onto its side.

Staggering under the assault of the ongoing “Dino Serenade,” I clenched my right hand into a fist and peered at the truck until I found the plastic of the gas tank. Then I drove my fist into it and right through the tank’s wall.

I ripped my fist out and brought the bucket up with the other hand at the same time. Gasoline flooded onto my shirt and then into the bucket. Five gallons fills up pretty damned quick from a fist-sized hole. Once it was sloshing over the brim, I turned and staggered back toward the circle.

And my “Dino Serenade” ended.

The silence hit me like a club. I staggered to a knee, barely able to hold on to the bucket, and gasped.

As I did, I became aware of the cornerhounds. Most of them were gathered around Ebenezar, who was protected by so many layers of energy that his actual bodily shape was distorted to my sight—but one of the hideous creatures wasn’t three feet to my left.

Another was less than six inches to my right.

There was a stunned, frozen instant where none of us moved and the world was one big after-tone from a chime the size of a skyscraper. And then my own sadly unremarkable singing voice added, into the silence at the spell’s finale, “And many moooooooooore!”

Tendrils flailed in excitement.

Tentacles flared in angry aggression.

I broke into a sprint, sloshing gasoline from my bucket.

“Sir!” I screamed.

A cornerhound leapt at me, a thousand pounds of tentacles and talons and muscle.

I ducked, reflexes as sharp and fast as the report of a gunshot on a clear winter evening.

Claws raked at my back.

My duster’s protective spells held, and all the night’s sweat and discomfort became worthwhile.

Ebenezar, meanwhile, had survived the blast of infrasound that the pack had begun to deliver just before my spell went off, and he hadn’t wasted his time since. With a single word, he pointed at the concrete floor of the parking garage, and a cloud of fine chips of rubble flew upward in a perfect circle as the old man’s will dug a trench two inches deep and four across in the obdurate flooring.

Three of the hounds hit him, one second motionless, the next moving like serpents guided by some singular, terrible will. The old man swatted one of them away with an upward blow of his staff and a detonation of kinetic energy that slammed the Outsider into the concrete ceiling and brought it back down in a shower of rubble from the impact. The second hit him square in the chest with outstretched talons, and there was a humming snap of expanding energy that sounded like a bug zapper the size of a Tesla coil. It recoiled from the old man, claws burned black. But the third cornerhound hit him in one leg, and while the old man’s shield protected him from the impact, the natural consequences of Newton’s First Law and having one leg slammed out abruptly from beneath him were harder on the old man. He went down with a gasp as another trio of cornerhounds blurred to within striking range at the base of the column.