Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

She eyed me. “What do you know about it?”

I shook my head. “Mostly mortal folklore, which is sort of like trying to understand history through a game of telephone. But the Eye . . . it’s a weapon that is beyond what the world has seen in millennia. Anyplace we gather to fight the Fomor’s troops, we’re just bunching ourselves up for the Eye to wipe us out by the boatload. And from what I heard, we’ve got very few ways to actually hurt Ethniu. But if we stand by and do nothing, she’ll literally level the city with the damned thing.”

“So how do we win?” Murphy said.

“Hell if I know,” I said. “The Senior Council will have been gathering information this whole time. It’s possible they’ll have come up with options.”

“That’s why you went out to the island,” Murphy said. “You think you can lock her up out there.”

“I think if I tried to walk up and bind her, she’d rip my brain apart from the inside out,” I said. I had to force myself not to rest my hand on the knife I was now wearing at my hip. In fact, it would be best if I didn’t think about it at all. Too many things in this world are way too good at catching glimpses of your thoughts. “Maybe she can be worn down. I might have a chance then.”

“Maybe,” Murphy noted. “Might. I’m hearing a lot of waffle words.”

“Yeah, that’s because I’m speaking optimistically,” I said, glowering.

“Let’s call that one Plan B, then.”

“Plan Z,” I said. “This isn’t like our usual mess. I’m still a heavy hitter in those. In the league these people are operating in, I’m a middleweight at best. I . . .” I shook my head. “I’m hoping someone has a better idea of what to do than me.” I felt myself growing instinctively tenser and cut the throttle by half. “Okay. I think we’re getting close. If there’s going to be trouble, it will be between us and shore. Better let them know.”

She bumped her head against my arm, leaned for a moment, and then pushed away. “I’ll tell them.”

She limped out carefully to go belowdecks again, and I began to cut the throttle a bit more, peering out into the night. There wasn’t much to see. There was some city light against the belly of the cloud cover, south from way down past Aurora, and from the far side of the lake, but Chicagoland was wrapped in utter blackness.

Except . . . it wasn’t.

I just hadn’t been able to see the firelight from quite so far away.

The tall, dark, silent cliffs of the city’s skyline appeared against the not-quite-black overcast. There were candles in windows, hundreds of them in sight, but they were lonely little points of light in all that darkness. Fires had to have been burning on the streets, because they cast ruddy cones of light dimly over the lower levels of some of the buildings.

I cut the throttle even more. I had a pretty good idea of where I was on the lake, thanks to my mental connection to the island behind us, but I was only sure of my position to within maybe a hundred yards, and the dark made things tricky. I didn’t want to miss the channel into the harbor and gut the boat on the rocks.

The electric bow lights I would normally have used to help pilot my way in had been blown out when the Last Titan had unleashed the Eye of Balor on the roof of the nigh-indestructible castle of the Brighter Future Society. The Eye had blown a hole clean through it and simultaneously sent out a pulse of magical energy that had blown out the city’s grid completely, including the electronics on cars and airplanes and the electrical systems on the boat. The old diesel engine was still chugging away, but that was about the only thing on the boat that had survived the super-hex the Eye had thrown out. Chemical lights hung at the bow and stern, but that was just to keep someone else from running into us, as if anyone else was out on Lake Michigan that night.

I peered through the dirty glass of the wheelhouse, searching for the white painted markers of the channel, which should have been all but glowing in the gloom. The harbor’s lights were out, of course, and eighteenth-century lighting was not highly conducive to proper boat-handling safety.

Abruptly there was a crunching sound, squeals of protest from the Water Beetle’s hull and superstructure, and the boat went from moving slowly to not moving at all in the space of several seconds. I staggered and had to grab at the ship’s console to keep my balance, and the wheel spun suddenly in my hands, the grips smacking my fingers hard enough to leave bruises before I could whip them away.

I lurched out of the wheelhouse as the boat began to pitch sharply to the left and front, timbers groaning.

Murphy appeared from belowdecks, a chemical light hanging from her harness, her little rifle at her shoulder. She staggered into the bulkhead with her bad shoulder and hissed in discomfort, then made it out onto the deck and braced her feet, holding on to the rail with one hand. “Harry?” she called.

“I don’t know!” I called back. I reached into my shirt and pulled out my mother’s old silver pentacle necklace with the red stone in the center of the five-pointed star. I held it up, murmured a word, and let out a whisper of will, and the silver of the amulet and the chain began to glow with soft blue wizard light. I made my way quickly forward as the ship rocked back the other way, groaning and squealing, holding up the light so that I could see a little ahead of me. “We must have run aground!”

But when I stepped over a thick clump of lines and got to the ship’s bow, I could see only dark water in front of me. In fact, the light from my amulet picked out strips of reflective tape and plastic reflectors on the docks, ahead of me and slightly to the left. Which was to port, on a ship, I think.

We were still in deep, clear water.

What the hell?

The ship moaned and rocked the other way, and that was when the smell hit me.

It was an overwhelming odor of dead fish.

Oh crap.

I turned and held my amulet out over the clump of “lines” I had stepped over.

It was a thick, rubbery, pulsing, living limb, a tentacle, deep red-purple in color, covered in leathery, wart-shaped nodules and lined with toothed suckers—and it was maybe half again as thick as a telephone pole.

I wasn’t telling my body to move in nightmare slow motion, but it felt like that was happening anyway, as I followed the tentacle to the side of the ship, where it had slithered up the hull and seized the superstructure, attaching itself to it with dozens and dozens of limpet suckers—and went down to a vast, bulky shape in the water, something almost as massive as the boat itself.

That tentacle flexed, distorting in shape, and the ship screamed again, rocking the other way.

And a great, faintly luminous eye glimmered up at me through the waters of Lake Michigan.

A colossal squid. A kraken.