Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

My stomach twisted in fear and rage. Every instinct in my body urged me forward. The predator’s territoriality within the Winter Knight’s mantle was in complete accord, the need for violence, to defend my territory, to rend my foes, pulsing through my veins with every heartbeat.

“There,” I said, and pointed a shaking hand. “We have to help them.”

“That is not our role in this fight,” said Vadderung.

Another scream came down the street. This time there was no mistaking it.

It was a child’s voice, a single high-pitched note.

“Hoss,” said Ebenezar warningly.

I couldn’t see. My vision was narrowing to a tunnel. My chest heaved.

I looked to my left. In the tunnel of my vision, Mab was a slender, pale white light, her eyes bright, feline, narrowed. She watched me.

“We have to help them,” I said, louder and harder.

Mab’s teeth showed.

“We can’t,” Ebenezar said. “Hoss, there’s too many of them. We can’t commit until we know.”

I stared around the rooftop. Then I said, “To hell with all of you.”

And I did something I’d been working every day for months not to do.

I let the Winter mantle do its thing.

I went off the roof in a leap, windmilling my arms and legs. I hit the ground, let my body break my fall at its natural bending points, dropped into a forward roll, and came up running, moving as quick and sure as any creature of the wild.

There was a heavy thud, and a thousand pounds of River Shoulders landed next to me, an eager growl bubbling in his chest that sounded freaking tectonic. Ahead of me, another car exploded, part of the fireball catching one end of the rental house and enveloping it in flames. Indistinct inhuman figures leapt in through the front door.

And me and a genuine, honest-to-God Bigfoot let out simultaneous roars of rage, one way more impressive than the other, and launched ourselves at the invaders.

Chapter

Nine

I caught their scent at about sixty feet.

It was a wild, fierce smell, something that hit my hindbrain and set the hairs all along my spine up straight. Ever smelled a predator’s den? There’s the musk of the creature’s odor, mixed in with the scent of urine, a little bit of rotten meat, and the faint sweetness of marrow with the rasping dryness of cracked bone.

That same predator reek hit me as we closed in on the invaders—figures with massive, fur-outlined bodies and gnarled, muscular limbs. I got a good look at the first of them as we hit the sidewalk outside the embattled home.

It looked almost human. Skin the color of wet ashes. Six and a half feet tall, maybe, with the lean, ropy muscle of someone who can cover a lot of ground in a hurry. Its hair was a mane, ferocious and long, with feathers and claws bound in among it. The horns of a stag either grew from its skull or had been bound there somehow. A heavy mantle of furs over a long cloak of the same gave its lean torso some kind of protection, and it carried a long spear of some blackened metal in its hands.

Even as we closed, the creature had whirled toward us, bringing the tip of the spear up. There was a low howling sound, and a flicker of reddish light gathered around the creature’s hands. The light flashed up the shaft of the spear, hitting a number of pictographs etched into the metal along the way, each exploding in a sequential flash. I had about enough time to realize that a projectile was coming my way, and then the tip of the spear glared scarlet and I flung myself to the side.

There was a shrieking, howling sound, and a chunk of asphalt half the size of a garbage can flew up into a spray of scorched, blobby, flaming road material ten yards behind me.

I hit the ground at a roll, tried to come up running, and tripped on the damned Warden’s cape. I half strangled myself and fell.

River Shoulders had me covered. Even as the creature’s spear tracked toward me, the Sasquatch simply took a bounding stride, lowered a shoulder the size of an off-road tire, and ran into the thing.

If the creature had been standing in front of a train, it might have been better off. About half a ton of supernaturally powerful muscle hit the creature in a concentrated burst of precisely aimed energy as focused and directed as that of any martial artist. The creature’s body went rag doll, flying back from the impact in an explosive crackling of breaking bone—only to hit against a large old oak standing stolidly in the house’s front yard despite severe trimming to allow for power lines.

The shape that fell to the ground at the base of the tree was kind of . . . amorphous.

River Shoulders turned toward the front of the house and let out a roar that literally shattered the first-floor windows, a primal scream—and, the Winter mantle told me, a challenge that could not be ignored, not by foes as primally bound as these.

There was a faint sound to one side, and my eyes snapped forward to see a second of the creatures, this one larger and better-muscled than the first, ease around the corner of the house, outside of River Shoulders’ view, and raise its spear to aim at the Sasquatch’s back.

I drew without thinking, from a prostrated position, tightening my abs and aiming slightly to the right of my right foot. I had a great sight picture and lined up the dots of the big .50-caliber revolver and squeezed the trigger without once thinking a single thought. The bullet went through the creature’s right cheekbone, holy crap, and came out somewhere behind where its right ear would have been . . .

. . . and the thing whirled toward me, shrieking in fury, lips peeling back from a row of nightmare needle teeth, and leapt at me, its black spear lashing toward me.

Hell’s bells.

That should have been terrifying.

But the Winter mantle didn’t really do fear. Instead, I felt myself noting that the thing was damned stupid to leap in the air and go ballistic like that. Had it come toward me low to the ground, serpentine, I might have had a hard time shooting it, since it could have changed direction unpredictably. Up in the air like that, it was at the mercy of Newtonian physics, and it was a simple matter to predict where it would be at any given time.

I put the second round through its upper neck at ten feet, and rolled to the side. It crashed heavily to the grass where I’d been, and kind of flopped onto the sidewalk in front of the house, twitching in hideous spasms and making gurgling sounds as it died.

I came to my feet, regained my staff, and staggered as River Shoulders’ scream was answered by multiple throats from inside the house—brassy cries that could not possibly be entirely human ones.

Wooden window frames and the pieces of glass that still hung in them exploded outward from the house as somewhere between six and ten creatures came screaming out at us. We had, apparently, been fighting the skinny little ones so far, because these things must have massed twenty percent more than either of the first two and looked taller and stronger to boot.