Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Rapidly and efficiently, metal base plates were screwed into the stone of the roof, poles erected, and razor wire strung overhead in a canopy maybe ten feet high. Ah. The svartalves had recognized the danger of Corb’s flying assassin creatures and were taking steps to limit their avenues of approach.

Sharp bunch, those svartalves. No wonder even Mab herself didn’t complain. Doesn’t matter where you go in the world—if you’re good at your job, people who are good enough at theirs to see it will respect you for it.

Though it would also seem to be an indicator of how much trouble we were in.

“How you doing, Hoss?” Ebenezar asked me in a gentler tone.

“Um,” I said, and licked my lips. “I’m not sure I’ve been involved in anything quite this . . . overblown, before.”

The old man grunted. “You figure Chichén Itzá was a quiet little tea party, I guess.”

“Hey, that was just the Council and the Red Court.” I had to take a step back to let a ghoul walk past me. The thing was half-shifted into its feral form and was struggling to fit into mail it must have acquired from Marcone’s people. I felt a familiar stab of hatred go through me at the sight of the thing. I set it carefully on the back burner. “This is everybody.”

Ebenezar snorted out a quick laugh. “Not everybody, boy. Not even close.” He looked around the rooftop and nodded. “But I’ll allow as it’s been a while since there was a dustup quite this big.”

I couldn’t just stand there talking shop with the old man. “Sir,” I blurted, “when this is over, you and I should probably talk about some things.”

Ebenezar glanced up at me. His eyes were like granite. “We got to the end of talking, boy. Remember?”

I glowered at him and we both kept walking along grumpily, our staves hitting the ground at the same time.

We reached the map table, and Vadderung and the Erlking both looked up at us. Vadderung was still wearing his business suit. The Erlking was dressed in hunting leathers from somewhere before the Renaissance, under a suit of dark mail. He wore a hunting sword at his hip, and his usual horned helmet had been set aside. The king of the goblins, one of Mab’s major vassals, he had an asymmetric, scarred face that somehow managed to be roguishly handsome. The past few times I’d seen him, he’d been really big and really scary. Now he was more like regular human size: He could have passed for a particularly large and graceful professional athlete.

“Ah, the young wolf,” the Erlking said in a resonant basso as I approached. “I had not realized he was your pupil, Blackstaff.”

The old man nodded to the Erlking. “Oh, he was mostly a hired hand for a little while. Just had to learn a few things before he went off on his own.”

The Erlking tilted his head, frowning. “He wears the amulet of Margaret LeFay.”

“My mother,” I said.

Ebenezar gave me a sharp glance. The old man didn’t believe in giving away information for nothing, at least not between the nations. Which was probably going to make that talk with him a little more difficult to arrange and frustrating to attempt. Super.

The current master of the Wild Hunt lifted his eyebrows. He looked back and forth between us before he said, “Margaret’s child? Much is explained.” He shook his head wryly. “You’ve no idea how many headaches your mother caused me in her day. Your . . . visit to my realm makes a great deal more sense now.”

Vadderung had never looked up from the map. He cleared his throat and said, diffidently, “Gentlemen, to business?”

I bellied up to the table and squinted down at the map. It was well illuminated by chemical light sticks holding down its edges. It had been done on heavy yellowed vellum in sepia inks, all of it in the style of the old Scandinavian mapmakers, complete with Norse runic letters.

And it was moving. Even as I watched, several tiny blue blocks marked with an X glided slowly down streets marked on the map. They stood out against the old-timey artistry as sharply as if they’d been some kind of video game.

“A tactical map,” I noted. “Of my town.”

Vadderung glanced up at me with his one eye and then back down. “What of it?”

“Takes a lot of effort to make a construct like this,” I said. “And a lot of being in the place you’re making the map of.”

“I’ve had more time than most to be more places than most,” he said.

Ebenezar thumped a thick finger down on the map. “What does this represent?”

“Light infantry,” Vadderung replied. “Mostly what we have available to us. Marcone’s people here. The White Court’s people are there. The local Fae forces are there.”

They were spread out in three defensive positions along Lake Shore Drive so that they’d be able to respond to the enemy wherever they came ashore. Two large blue circles marked the map inland of them—one here, atop the castle, and the second hovering over the svartalf embassy.

“Our reserve positions,” Vadderung noted. “Heavy response forces have been positioned at each of these points, and they both stand as defensive positions.”

“You need to mark a couple more defensive emplacements,” I said. I pointed them out on the map. “There. St. Mary of the Angels.”

“A church?” the Erlking asked skeptically.

“The church,” I said. “At least here in Chicago. There’s real faith there. Believe it. If we need to fall back to it, they’ll open the doors.”

“And the second?” Vadderung asked.

I put my finger on the map. “Michael Carpenter’s house. The Knights of Hope and Faith are there. Both of them.”

“Two doughty foes,” the Erlking noted. “And armed with fell blades. But only two.”

“There’s a dozen guardian angels on duty there at any given time,” I said. “Part of Sir Michael’s retirement package.”

“We will not plan to use them,” Vadderung said in a tone of absolute certainty. “Not the angels, and not the Knights. Not in any way. The being you call Mister Sunshine would be quite annoyed at the intrusion.”

I arched an eyebrow at Vadderung. I was pretty sure I hadn’t ever mentioned my nickname for Uriel to him.

Vadderung gave me a very bland look. “We have lunch once a year.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well. If some bad guys just happened to walk a little too close, I’m pretty sure they’re going to get incinerated. Course, Mister Sunshine thinks a lot of the Accorded folks are bad guys, too.” And I agreed with him. And might have been one of them. I glowered in the direction of the ghouls. “But if we need to move people in a direction, we can send them that way and be pretty sure that the frogs are going to be real slow to chase them.”