Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

So the scary horse was immortal, too. Check.

Mab vaulted to the unicorn’s back with about as much effort as I used to fall into bed, and said, “ ’Ware,” before snapping her fingers.

All of her blood that had been scattered around, and the unicorn’s, too, abruptly went up into heat and light like flash paper. It left my face and part of my neck seared as if by a sunburn. Butters very briefly managed a Human Torch impersonation and whirled on Mab in shock, the skin of his forehead and cheeks and hands as red as if he’d had them soaking in hot water. “What? Why?”

“I warned you,” Mab said calmly.

“She can’t leave her blood lying around,” I said. “Corb and his people use magic. If they get their hands on it, it’d be bad.”

Butters frowned. He knew a lot more about how magic worked than most people. He was something of a neophyte at sorcery himself, and could manage a few fundamentals, and I could see him running through the possibilities of someone getting a magical handle on Mab through her blood. “Even her?”

“It is foolish for most to attempt to chain a tigress,” Mab said. Her wide eyes swiveled to me. “Yet chains can be forged—and tigresses can be caged.”

“Kind of a solid rule, man,” I said. “Doesn’t matter how big something is. If it bleeds, you can bind it.”

Butters surreptitiously examined his own hands, presumably for any leaking cuts.

Mab showed her teeth and said, “Indeed.”

The chittering clicks in the haze ahead of us rose to a crescendo and then suddenly stopped.

So did the fire falling on the fortifications.

The night air changed.

It stilled.

Everything went completely silent and heavy. Sounds suddenly became immediate, close things, like on a winter night in falling snow.

The unicorn threw its head back and shook its mane. Mab laid a hand upon the creature’s neck and shivered, leaning forward, her eyes brighter than stars.

“Ahhhhh,” she said in a slow, sensual exhalation, barely more than a whisper. “Now we come to it.”

I swallowed and kept my voice low. “She’s here?”

Mab narrowed her eyes, as if peering through the haze. “The Titan and her”—she glanced aside at me—“frog prince.”

“How tough is Corb?” I asked.

“I have heard it said that it is not his destiny to perish before the deepest ocean meets the sun.”

“Fuck destiny,” I said. “Maybe I’ll free will his ass. How tough?”

Mab’s teeth showed. “He is your better in power, your better in experience, and your better in treachery.”

“But I bet he doesn’t have as many friends as me,” I said.

I held out my fist without looking.

Butters rapped his knuckles against mine without looking, either.

“Mortal wizards,” Mab sighed. “Forever meddling in things you do not comprehend.”

I dredged up a quote from someone I rarely agreed with about anything. “What’s the point of free will, if not to spit in the eye of destiny?”

“How to phrase this so you will understand,” Mab said calmly, facing the night. “Ah. Destiny is a . . . stone-cold bitch.”

Which, given the source, was really saying something.

“There are always consequences, wizard,” Mab continued. “Always a price to pay, to create a new branching of the universe, to bend the course of the great river.”

The haze of dust and smoke before us suddenly glared scarlet.

And then, like a curtain, it parted. Just unreeled away from the entirety of Millennium Park, leaving the air clear and clean, so that we could see plainly what was going on.

“Oh,” Butters breathed. “Oh crap.”

I swallowed and didn’t say anything.

I could see the fortifications clearly. One of the walls had slumped inward rather badly, so that I could see the actual amphitheater stage. I carefully allowed input from the banner, and it made my entire body ache with empathy at the sheer number of wounds my people had sustained. Only three hundred and ninety-eight of the volunteers were still alive. Of eleven hundred and eighty-seven, barely a third remained. Most of them were wounded. All of them were terrified.

Behind us, the forest of rebar was still blocking our retreat in a half circle maybe forty yards across. Beyond that seemed to be nothing more than an empty park. The Sidhe cohort had deserted the field, and I could sense the Winter creatures through the banner, staying out of sight, wary of showing themselves in the now-cleared air.

There were some wounded in sight, of both sides, struggling weakly on the field where they’d fallen.

But for all practical purposes, the only ones still standing were me, Butters, and Mab on her nightmare unicorn.

Four of us.

And across the field from us stood the enemy.

Even counting the casualties Mab and her cohort had inflicted, we were outnumbered maybe twelve hundred to one, and that was if you included the unicorn. And even as I watched, the enemy cheated again. Veils shimmered out of existence, revealing more warbands gathered around their banners, mostly of those heavily armored ape-looking things. We’d thought the enemy had come with about seven thousand bad guys. It looked like they’d managed to conceal another three or four thousand of their hardened troops from us.

I didn’t know the specific numbers in the moment. That came later. I just knew that they’d added a couple of hundred yards’ worth of ugly to the block of bad guys facing us.

“Wow,” Butters said quietly. His voice was flattened, numbed. “Sure are a lot of them.”

“It only looks like that because they’re all in the same place, standing close together,” I said.

Butters eyed me. “Yeah. That’s probably it.”

All that fighting hadn’t been enough.

It hadn’t been anything like enough.

In the center of the enemy line stood the Titan.

Even across a battlefield, Ethniu’s sheer presence drew the eye with a terrible fascination. The ruddy light from the haze that yet surrounded everything that wasn’t the park gleamed from her armored flesh. She had shed everything that was not made of Titanic bronze, and her form was perfection of beauty, but for the smoldering glare of the Eye. Her presence was a kind of weight on my mind, a gravity that strained space around it and could not be ignored. Somehow, even from a hundred yards away, I could see the loveliness of her features clearly, too magnetic to ignore. She was a creature of sorrow turned to such rage that her beauty had become a knife that stabbed at the eyes of any who looked upon it.