Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

The gunfire was closer and heavier now. I could make out individual shots. And hear screams. Screams on a battlefield aren’t like the ones you hear on TV. They’re high-pitched, falsetto shrieks and choked, gasping exhalations. Not all of them could have been human, but from where I was standing, they all sounded pretty much the same.

I stopped before we walked into the radius of the light around the defensive position and said, “River, maybe instead of walking up to all the nice frightened officers holding assault rifles, you should let me take the girl over there.”

“Huh,” the Sasquatch said. “Well. I did lose my glasses. Might be simpler.”

I took the girl from him, carrying her in both arms. The old hound paced along lightly at my side, moving with the spring of a much younger creature. I walked forward into the light, holding the girl, and said, “Hey! CPD! I need to get this girl some help!”

Rifles swung to cover me, and I prayed that the officers had decent trigger discipline. I’d have hated to get accidentally shot.

“Don’t move!” shouted several cops at the barricades. I didn’t.

“Keep moving west, sir!” shouted several others at the same time.

“Which is it, guys?” I called back to them. “I can’t not move and go west.”

There was a commotion at the barricade. One of the officers stepped back, and a dark, scowling face under a tight cut of silver hair peered out at me. “Dresden?” he called. “That you?”

“Rawlins!” I said.

The old detective had spent a lot of time in Special Investigations. We’d worked together before. He was a burly man with a particularly expressive face and his knuckles were lumpy with ancient scars. He carried a shotgun like it was an additional limb, and I trusted him.

“What the hell, man?” I called. “I thought you retired.”

He grimaced and nodded toward the sound of gunfire. “Two more weeks.”

I nodded toward the girl. “I need to drop her off with someone. I got stuff to do. Can I come in?”

“Depends, man. What was the name you knew me by the first time we met?”

“An Authority Figure,” I replied.

“Good enough for me,” he said. He nodded to the officers on the barricade. “Let him in.”

I carried the girl across the street and through a narrow gap in the cars that I had to turn sideways to navigate. Rawlins met me inside and led me back to the triage area.

It took me a second to realize that practically every cop there was staring at me. I overheard them speaking to one another. They must have fired enough rounds to make their ears ring, because their mutters were coming out at conversational volume.

“Is that him?” someone asked.

“The wizard, Dresden, yeah.”

“Is he for real?”

“Sure as hell hope so. Did you see those things?”

“Bullshit. He’s just a con man.”

“Eyes out!” Rawlins snapped, to all of them. “You think this is a goddamned circus?”

That did it, and they piped down and went back to watching the darkness.

Rawlins led me to an improvised bed made out of a folding table laid flat on the ground, with a layer of soft packing foam on top. I laid the girl down on it, and an EMT, his skin nearly as dark as Rawlins’s, bent over to examine her.

“Lamar,” I said. “Long time no see.”

“That’s because I don’t want nothing to do with you and your weird shit, Dresden,” Lamar said.

Lamar is one of the more sensible people I’ve ever met.

“Then what are you doing here?” I asked.

Lamar shrugged. “What I do.” He peeled back an eyelid on the girl, checked her pulse with a stethoscope, and rummaged in a medical kit beside him. “This your fault?”

“Not this time,” I said. “Honest.”

“Uh-huh,” he drawled, infusing both syllables with skepticism.

“It’s not always my fault,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. With even denser skepticism. He took out a small paper tube from the kit. He snapped it in half and waved the broken ends under the young woman’s nose. She shuddered and abruptly lurched, her eyes flying wide open. She started screaming.

“Back off, both of you,” Lamar said. “Let me work.”

I traded a glance with Rawlins and we backed off. He beckoned and walked over to an empty corner of the courtyard. I followed.

“The hell is happening?” Rawlins asked me intently under his breath once we were out of earshot. “Monsters on the walls with guns, guys with spears that shoot explosions, goddamned mercenaries with military-grade gear. What the hell is going on?”

I took a breath to try to think how best to condense it. “Bad guys from my side of the street have decided to destroy Chicago. And every monster and weirdo in Chicago has turned out to fight them.”

Rawlins stared at me for a moment before he said, “Shit.”

Rawlins was even better at condensing than me.

I glanced over at Lamar, who had gotten the girl to sit up. She was weeping and shuddering uncontrollably, and he was trying to get her to drink some water. “I gotta go, man,” I said. “Every minute I’m here is costing lives.”

“Where’s Karrie?”

Rawlins had been friends with Murphy’s dad, back in the day. He was the only person I knew who dared to call her by a diminutive nickname. “As safe as I could make her.”

He pursed his lips. “Oh. Bet she loved that.” He leaned over to ruffle the hound’s ears affectionately and glanced down at my hip as he did. “That coach gun legal?”

“No.”

He nodded. “Didn’t think so. You got enough ammo?”

“Tonight, there’s no such thing as enough ammo.”

Rawlins snorted. “Ain’t that the truth.” He leaned a little closer and said, very quietly, “Rudolph and his partner were in the middle of putting out an APB on you when the grid blew out. Once it’s up again, I figure they’re gonna have the entire CPD looking for you.”

“Oh,” I sighed. “Joy.” I eyed him. “Why tell me?”

“Karrie likes you. And Rudolph is a prick.”

“Tough to argue with that.”

His teeth flashed very white when he smiled. “Good hunting, Dresden.”