Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

I staggered and fell to a knee as I seized the bone handle of the little knife and wrenched it out of my leg—just in time to catch a stomping kick to the sternum that knocked me back in a short, brutal arc to the ground. Stars exploded in my vision and something in my head felt loose and hot. The breath was gone from my lungs. I tried to gather my will again, but they piled onto me, tearing with nails and biting, for crying out loud.

And then there was the sound of a dinosaur’s footsteps shaking the ground, and River Shoulders tackled all three of them, swept them into the circle of arms thicker than a horse’s neck, and squeezed. There was a quick series of wet, crunching sounds. River stood up with a contemptuous shake of his arms and dropped the Huntsmen.

What was left was . . . sort of smushed together. Ever seen The Thing? Think in that direction, only more slippery.

With the little knife gone from my flesh, the Winter mantle recovered itself pretty rapidly. I took a couple of breaths and then pushed myself to my feet, the pain once more vanishing into a vague haze. That was the great weakness of the fae, their bane. And mine, I supposed. Iron. Wow, that had hurt.

“How many?” River demanded. “How many did you kill?”

“Three,” I said. “You?”

“Nine,” he said.

Well.

Okay, then.

“Smoke,” River spat in the tone of a swear. “We missed one.”

“What?” I said.

“There are always thirteen.”

The burning corpse and the smushed ones abruptly deflated.

And there was a sudden crashing sound as a Huntsman half a head taller than River Shoulders just shrugged its way out through the front wall of the house, taking maybe half of the front of the house down. It raised its spear and let out a bestial roar that would have set off car alarms had any of them been working.

It leapt toward River Shoulders, its heavy iron spear held in one hand like an assegai, and thrust it at the Sasquatch. River took a pair of quick pivoting steps that I had seen Murphy do before, guiding the spear’s tip past him with one hand and getting in close to the Huntsman where he could seize the weapon’s haft and try to wrench it from his foe.

The Huntsman roared its defiance and fought.

The heavy iron bent and snapped like cheap plastic before the application of that much raw physical power. The Huntsman promptly rammed the snapped end of the spear in its hand into River Shoulders’ neck.

If River had been human, the blow would have killed him. But the Sasquatch had layers of muscle mounded up around his neck. His trapezius muscles went all the way to the bottom of his ears, and the shard of the weapon was ineffective at penetrating that much meat. Even so, the Huntsman got its other arm around River Shoulders’ waist and lifted the Sasquatch off the ground, charging forward to ram him into the old tree.

I lunged, seized the thirteenth Huntsman’s leg with both arms, summoned my will, and screamed, “Arctis!”

Cold, the pure supernatural cold of true Winter, flooded out of my hands and into the Huntsman. There was a horrible crackling sound as the temperature of the flesh I was touching sank to single digits on the Kelvin scale.

The Huntsman shrieked in pain and kicked its leg in an attempt to dislodge me.

I hung on.

There was a crackling sound, and I took the leg from the knee down with me.

The Huntsman screamed and fell in a shower of ice chips and a gout of blood.

Without hesitating an instant, River Shoulders seized the frame of the sedan in the driveway, picked it up with a tectonic knotting of massive muscles, swung it overhead like a man using a sledgehammer, and brought the engine block down on top of the thirteenth Huntsman in a massive swing.

Though it was crushed flat, there was still a horrible vitality in the Huntsman. It let out a burbling, hissing sound that somehow conveyed the same impotent fury as a shriek.

And then it spasmed and died. The car rocked and snapped and groaned in the Huntsman’s death throes.

I pushed the frozen leg away from me and got slowly to my feet. I’d lost my staff at some point. I recovered it. While I did that, River pulled the iron bar from his neck. He let it fall by the last Huntsman. The body began deflating just like the others, and as it went, the shard of the iron spear crumbled with it.

“What,” I breathed, “in the hell was that?”

River poked the spear. “Welsh creatures. The Huntsmen of the Land of the Dead. Whole pack makes their spears from their blended blood over years. Forges them together.” He shook his head. “Bad news. Very bad.”

“These things are the scouts?” I demanded. “That’s not fair.”

We heard bestial screams coming from the east and south. “Hell’s bells,” I muttered. I coughed, gagging on the smoke. There was enough of it. More houses were on fire now. People were running out. “Come on. We can’t leave them out here.”

I strode up to the door of the house, shield bracelet raised and ready. Someone had been shooting here, after all. I didn’t plan on getting cooked by some panicked normie.

“Hello, the house!” I said. “My name is Dresden! I used to live down the block in Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s old place.”

There was a pause. Then a male voice with a Hispanic accent asked, “With the dog?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The big grey dog.”

“Mouse,” the man said.

I couldn’t ever remember actually doing more than waving at this guy as I went past. I was pretty sure I hadn’t ever introduced my dog. How did he know Mouse’s name?

Damned pooch is more a of people person than I’ll ever be.

There was a clattering sound and then a slim, medium-height man in his late thirties emerged from a back room of the house. Behind him came a woman who matched him well, and a little girl holding a stuffed animal of some indeterminate but well-loved kind.

“It is you,” he said.

“Hey, man,” I said, lifting my chin. “Things are crazy, huh?”

He stared out at the night and the flames and the smoke, and at the remains on his front lawn. He nodded numbly.

“Okay,” I said. “Come on. I need your help. We’re gonna get all these people into the castle they built at the old place. There’re people sitting on their asses there with nothing better to do than protect you guys. Okay?”

The man looked numbly at the street, then at me. There was shock happening. He stared for a blank second and then nodded jerkily. “Castle. Get everyone in the castle.”

“And hurry,” I said. “Oh, and never mind the Sasquatch. He’s with me.”