Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

* * *

Gunfire crackled out in the haze somewhere, and I staggered and nearly fell as I found myself back in my own body fully once more.

Grimalkin? I thought.

Not now, Knight, came the pained and furious reply.

Mab? I thought, experimentally.

I heard, my Knight, came Mab’s voice, throbbing in the vaults of my mind. It would be ideal were you in position behind Ethniu when the time comes.

I ground my teeth. You don’t ask for much, do you?

Whinging does not become the Winter Knight, Mab said.

Listen and his people will wipe my volunteers out if I leave them.

Mab’s mental hiss was painful. They will also die if Ethniu is not defeated, along with your city. There is no time for arguments. Choose.

Dammit.

Mab’s logic was cold and inhuman.

And it wasn’t wrong.

“Get me Sanya,” I snarled.

The Russian showed up a minute later.

“Professionals are coming,” I said. “Bad guys.”

Sanya couldn’t really blanch very well, but I saw him swallow. “Bozhe moi.”

“Good news is, they’re pretty conventional,” I said. “Bad news is that it’s Listen running them. He’s smart. Smart enough to have been running various operations for the Fomor in Chicago for freaking years, as a front for scouting the place out for tonight.”

Sanya lowered his voice. “I cannot hold this place with these people. Not for long.”

“Hopefully, you won’t have to,” I said. “You don’t need to fight so much as survive for a little wh—”

My head snapped back as a sledgehammer swung by someone on a speeding train hit me right in the middle of my forehead. I staggered.

One of my volunteers fell from his position. Pretty much all that was left of his head was his mouth and jaw.

“Down!” Sanya screamed. “Heads down!”

Then we heard a number of hollow booms. And, a second later, a chorus of whistling sounds.

“Mortars,” Sanya snarled. “Incoming! Everyone down!”

“Butters!” I shouted.

I took off at a sprint and felt Butters on my heels. The little guy could really move. The training he’d been doing with the Carpenters was serving him well tonight.

I whipped up as much of a veil as I could around us as we ran. It wasn’t going to keep anyone from seeing that something was moving, but as long as we kept moving, it should make it a lot harder to shoot us.

We dashed out of the pavilion as the mortar shells began to fall among the fortifications, and my people began to scream and die behind us.

Chapter

Twenty-seven

The svartalves had built the earthworks around the pavilion proper, the auditorium and concert hall. The Great Lawn had been stripped down to bare earth and Styrofoam packing in the process. Running across the broken earth was easy enough, except for all the bullets, and since the sidewalks around it had been made to be even with the lawn at its usual level, it meant that we had to hop up about three and a half feet onto the sidewalks to get back up to the park’s “ground level.”

We got lucky with the bullets, or at least we didn’t get unlucky. The shimmering field of the veil around us made us look like blurs in the air, maybe a little bit more obvious than a Predator. Between the veil and the pall of smoke and dust, trying to actually aim at any specific point on our bodies was hopeless, and the dimly seen enemy was mainly focused on dropping mortar shells on the earthworks. They couldn’t get enough guns pointed at us to simply fill the air with lead, not in the few seconds we were in the open and running, though the weight of enemy fire increased with every step.

I hit the ground with my staff and vaulted up to the ground level of the park, sliding on concrete for a few yards before springing up and continuing. Butters just jumped, hit the edge of the sidewalk at about belt level, and scrambled up with the agility of someone with a higher power-to-mass ratio than his build would suggest.

We sprinted forward, through the trees and onto the concrete in the square around the Bean.

“Friendlies!” I shouted into the haze, as the vague forms of the Winter cohort resolved themselves into the shapes of the ranks of armored Sidhe.

The entire formation snapped into battle posture, shields rising, knees bending, weapons lifted, when we appeared, and it did not relax from it as we approached. I dropped the veil as we did, and slowed my pace to a swift walk as I reached the ranks and plunged through, sword tips just barely moving out of my way.

“Stay close and keep mum,” I muttered to Butters over my shoulder. “Especially with Mab. Don’t get caught making anything that could sound like a promise. Don’t accept anything that could be construed as a gift.”

“That include advice?” Butters asked.

I glowered at him. He grinned at me—and then his face suddenly went slack as we emerged from the troops and he faced the Queen of Air and Darkness on her Winter unicorn.

“Well done, my Knight,” Mab said to me without preamble. “You wounded them enough to plant the seeds of doubt.”

Mortar shells continued to fall on the pavilion. Occasionally, small bits of dirt and debris would plunge down from overhead, pinging off Sidhe armor or clattering against the concrete. My skin felt as if someone had slapped it with a large grid of barbed wire and then dragged it several inches. The earthen fortress was down to six hundred and twenty-two defenders, with more than two hundred of them wounded, and I could feel each and every scratch. I buried the sensation behind a wall of pure mental discipline, hard-earned over my entire lifetime.

But I was feeling grouchy. I assure you.

“Oh good, doubt seeds,” I said. “If we water them and wait and eat all our vegetables, maybe they’ll grow into doubt saplings.”

“Do not be ridiculous,” Mab said. Her lips peeled slowly back from her teeth. “They grow into fear.”

“Which makes them angry,” I said. “Fear always becomes anger.”

“Precisely,” Mab said. “An angry foe is predictable. Easily manipulated.”

“Well, you’ve manipulated Corb and Ethniu into coming right at you,” I said.

A chorus of chirruping clicks erupted from the far side of the park and began to grow steadily louder.

Mab cast a gaze across the field that on most females would have been reserved for their lovers. “Yes. Corb will whip his people into a frenzy. They will charge us, howling for blood, blind to anything but our deaths.”