Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Vadderung looked up at me sharply. A small, grim smile hit his face for an instant and was gone. “The frogs?”

“Fomor, whatever,” I said. “I mean, we can stop being diplomatic with these assholes now, right?”

The other men at the table huffed out low, nervous laughs.

“Frogs,” Ebenezar agreed.

“Frogs,” echoed the Erlking.

Vadderung’s eye gleamed. He shook his head but muttered something and touched the edge of the map, and blue circles blossomed around both indicated positions.

“Our main problem,” he noted, “is Ethniu. While she is not the only problem, so long as she stands, no victory is possible.”

“She wears Titanic bronze,” the Erlking said in a tone that suggested he had said it several times in the past couple of hours.

I held up a hand. “Question from the classroom floor. What is that, exactly?”

“A unique alloy of Olympian bronze and mordite,” Vadderung replied. “Kinetic weapons will be of very little use against her. Elemental energies will do little more. It will take a being of divine status to physically penetrate the armor.”

“Divine status,” I said. “Meaning what?”

“Your Knights, perhaps,” the Erlking mused. “Their power would seem to be of the proper origins.”

“Those angels you mentioned could do it,” Ebenezar said. “Mordite is condensed from the darkest, most evil stuff of the Outside. Once it’s alloyed, instead of devouring life it devours energy. Heat, force, lightning, what have you, all backed by the will of the being wearing it. Getting through that takes more than simple power.”

“It has to come from the proper source,” Vadderung agreed. “And be used for the proper reasons.”

Mab glided up to the table. “Sufficiently infernal power could manage the task as well,” she murmured. “I daresay Nicodemus Archleone might strike through Titanic bronze.”

“Assuming she just stands there and lets any of those beings attack her,” the Erlking pointed out. “In the first place, those assets are not under our command. In the second place, she won’t. She’ll do battle, and most likely kill them.”

Vadderung scowled up at the Erlking for a full five seconds before he said, “You’re gloomy.”

“Merely realistic,” the Erlking said.

“You’re saying that to get to her, we’d need a sponsor,” I said. “And that basically no one around here is strong enough or on the right frequency enough to sponsor that kind of thing.”

“Precisely,” Mab said.

Gulp.

“So we don’t have a tool that can break the armor,” I said.

“Probably not,” Ebenezar said. “This has to be done the hard way.”

Mab nodded. “We must find her if possible, or wait for her to reveal herself if not.”

“That means we have to react to her,” the Erlking objected.

“Yes,” Mab said. “We must be adaptable, above all. Then we must confront her and force her to expend power against us.”

“Uh,” I said. “That’s . . . going to hurt, isn’t it?”

“I expect many to die,” Mab said. “Once we have engaged her we must grind her down and, when we have weakened her as much as possible, drive her to the water.” Her huge, luminous green-grey eyes turned up toward me. “Where we must hope that the will of my Knight is sufficient to contend with hers.”

I swallowed. “Yeah. What happens if I miss?”

Mab regarded me steadily. “I should think that the Last Titan will laugh and do precisely what she said she would do. Destroy this city and anyone who stands in her way.”

Hoo boy.

“So it’s all resting on me,” I said.

“We’ll do the heavy lifting for you, Hoss,” Ebenezar promised. “You just finish the job.”

“Yes,” Mab said. “Do not fail.”

I looked down at the map.

In one of those little blue circles, there was a little girl who was probably asleep by now, watched over by Knights and angels.

And by me.

My chest hurt a little and I carefully packed the feeling away, bottling it, ready to be used later. My terror for my child would not make me better able to defend her. Storing it up and using it to power spells that would destroy the things trying to hurt her would.

Damn right, Harry.

Do. Not. Fail.

“First things first,” I said. “I’m going to need pizza.”

Chapter

Seven

Getting pizza wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. There was plenty of frozen stuff in the freezers in Castle Marcone’s kitchens to feed hungry Einherjaren, and the gas was still working fine. So, in a little less than half an hour, I had several pizzas delivered to the roof.

In that time, twenty more assassin squid streaked across the sky. With the razor-wire canopy, they couldn’t dive straight down, so their runs weren’t as fast—but they were determined. One of them went for Childs, and one of Marcone’s people dived in the way to intercept. He took a tentacle across the throat and went down screaming.

An Einherjar with a medical kit came sprinting, but there was nothing to be done. Marcone’s gunman thrashed and flailed so hard that I could hear the snap and crackle of breaking bone and tearing cartilage. He emitted a single-tone, high-pitched scream that went on and on, growing rougher and rougher—until the venom in the myriad tiny wounds just dissolved the flesh of his throat and it erupted into a small fountain of gore.

And that was the first death of the night.

The Redcap proved handiest for this work. He stood by with a suppressed nine-millimeter, cat-pupiled eyes half-closed, standing in a perfectly relaxed posture, and waited. Rather casually, he brought down fourteen of the twenty or so assassin-beasts. The last squidward before the pizza came up slammed into Cristos’s back and clubbed him to the roof, but his suit was at least as heavily enchanted with defenses as my own—and Yoshimo’s sword cut the squid in half before it had bounced off Cristos and fallen to the floor. He hadn’t taken any of the venom, so he would still be in the fight.

Once the pizza got there, I had them take it to the far side of the battlements from where the White Council had set up shop. Then I strode over to Molly and tapped her on the shoulder.

Molly hadn’t changed into mail and was still wearing the dive suit she’d had on at the kraken fight. She sat cross-legged, her back straight, her palms resting on her knees. Winter Fae, pixie-sized, but more savage and vicious-looking than my crew, hovered in a cloud around her, darting in and away with messages as she coordinated the movement of troops, I assumed.