Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

There was no way to ride the Harley at proper speed, not with all the dead cars as obstacles. I was surprised the thing kept on rumbling at all. Murphy rolled us slowly and carefully through the parking garage and didn’t ease out of the building until one of the wolves appeared from the haze ahead of us, evidently signaling the all clear.

“Harry,” called Butters from behind me.

I turned my head and took the backpack he offered me. It was light.

He nodded at the pack, grinning.

I opened it.

Inside was a human skull, bleached and ancient and battered—and an old friend.

The skull’s empty eye sockets suddenly flooded with light the color of campfire embers, and the thing shook as though awakening from a sleep. Bob had been my assistant for most of my adult life. “Oh, hey there, Harry! Long time no see!”

“Bob!” I said. Despite everything that had happened, I grinned. “How the hell are you?”

“Terrified!” Bob piped up. “How’s about we all pick a direction and run?”

“No can do,” I said. “I’m working. What the hell is happening here?”

The world went red again. This time I saw the beam tear a building apart, farther south of us, bringing it crashing down like a sandcastle before the tide, and the light lingered in the air, tinging the haze an ugly shade of scarlet.

We all just stared at that for a second. No one made a sound.

“Big bad mojo,” Bob said. His tone was . . . worried. “I haven’t ever seen anything on this scale, boss. The amount of power flying around out there is more than it can handle.”

“More than what can handle?” I demanded.

“Reality,” Bob said. “That’s partly why the Tuatha fought the Fomor to begin with. Balor and his stupid Eye.”

“Whoa, wait,” I said. “Reality can break? That can happen?”

“Obviously it can happen,” Bob said, annoyed. “There’s . . . a structure to the universe, right? And like every structure it has limits. And a point of catastrophic failure.”

“So when Ferrovax the dragon is bragging about cracking the world . . .”

“He’s not kidding,” Bob said, nodding vigorously. “And it’s a process that feeds on itself. Like, you got about eight million terrified humans running around town right now, providing more and more energy for available use.”

Murphy rolled out onto the street and turned west. I felt weirdly like the subject of a presidential motorcade, what with the Knights and werewolves running escort. “So what can we expect?” I asked.

“Chaos,” Bob said.

“More specific?”

“Impossible! Widespread insanity for the mortals, maybe. Maybe transmissible insanity. Hallucinations, tulpas, and outright unintentional creation of things right out of people’s imaginations. Animals and people changing form or nature. The breakdown of Newtonian physics. Hell, even the quantum-level rules might change, with consequences that are literally unimaginable. Two plus two might equal five. Twilight Zone stuff. I don’t know. No one knows. You can’t predict chaos because it’s chaos, Harry.”

The clear night sky suddenly rumbled with what sounded like perfectly natural thunder.

“See?” Bob demanded. “That’s the boundary between the mortal world and the Nevernever. There’s so much energy flying around that it’s breaking down.”

I felt my eyes widen. The barrier between the mortal world and the world of spirit was all that separated humanity from demons and devils and nightmarish creatures of literally every description. “Is it thin enough for anything to get through?”

“If it’s not,” Bob said ominously, “it will be. Right now, Ferrovax is holding that door closed. It’s enormously inefficient to do it from the Nevernever side. He won’t be able to keep it up forever without coming to this side, in his true form, and that would basically rip reality’s nuts off.”

“How long?” I asked. “Can he hold them out until dawn?”

“No one’s seen a confrontation this big for thousands of years, Harry,” Bob said, and his tone was outright worried. “The laws of magic change over time. I don’t know the answer to your question. I don’t think anyone else knows, either.”

Murphy looked back at me over her shoulder, then down at the bag, before turning her eyes back to the road. After a moment, she said, “My leg and arm don’t hurt anymore.”

Bob grunted. “Yeah. That’s Mab.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Mab. Preparing the field. What, you think she and Titania called up Tir na Nog and practiced against each other all those times for funsies? Mab’s extending psychic power to those fighting on her side. And at the same time, she’s making it more oppressive for her enemies.” Bob jiggled his chin back toward the ground we had lost. “Everything coming in from that side knows, not in its head but deep down in its guts, that it is entering the lair of a predator and that it’s never going home. Knows the odds are against it. Knows that every step forward brings it closer to death.”

“How do you know that?” Murphy asked.

“Because I’m one of the beings Her Most Royal Frozen Naughtybits considers an enemy,” Bob said brightly—but his voice had a brittle, tense undertone. “She’s doing it to me as we speak.”

Murphy glanced back, frowning. “And she’s healing her allies?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bob said. “She’s just making it so you can’t feel the pain. She’ll blunt any non-useful terror you might feel, too. And she’ll encourage your aggressive tendencies. Like maybe enough so that someone who is too physically screwed up to be involved in fighting instead convinces her friends to help her and heads out into the war.”

Murphy snorted. “Yeah. There’s just no way I would have done that otherwise.”

I ran a quick mental inventory and found myself scowling. “How come she isn’t doing any of that for me, then?”

Bob gave me a disgusted look. “You’re the Winter freaking Knight. You get it all the time. Suck it up.”

Again the sky turned red. Again metal and concrete screamed and rumbled. There was too much dust in the sky now. I couldn’t see what had fallen—only the diffused glow of the power of the Eye and a slight thickening in the dusty cloud.

“Hell’s bells,” I complained. “How many shots does that thing have?”

“It’s being fueled by the city’s fear now, boss,” Bob said seriously. “It’ll run out when everyone’s dead. Which was the general idea, when it was created. That’s part of what Mab is trying to do, too. Dampen everyone’s fear. Rob the enemy of power.”