Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Which instantly began to boil.

I was close.

The Titan bared her teeth in a hideous grimace, enraged beyond making a sound, beyond even attempting communication, and came at him.

A rock rolled beneath my ankle.

Without an instant’s hesitation, Ethniu spun and flung a rock at me with her good hand.

I saw it coming and felt like a moron. Ethniu had had no reason to have a conversation with Marcone. She’d known I was there all along, but she hadn’t known exactly where. So she’d been using the slight sound of my own movements to get a fix on my location. The rock was enough to give me away.

But Marcone had struck her where it hurt—in the feelings. What he’d said had been defiant enough, disrespectful enough, to send her into a rage. She could have flicked that stone at me carefully, like a dart thrower, beaned me in the head, and that would have been that. But she didn’t. She threw it hard, sidearm, like a major-league pitcher, her rage giving the motion away so that I had an instant to counter her.

I turned my shoulder into the stone and it hit me like a sledgehammer.

My coat stopped the worst of it, which meant that all I got was a broken arm. Left one, middle of my forearm. The rock shattered against me, and if the coat kept me alive, it still felt like I’d been kicked by a particularly powerful and hostile horse.

I went down with a cry.

My body felt like a car that didn’t want to start, and my limbs filled with a bone-crushing weariness. The toll the night had put on me was becoming physically unsupportable. I slammed a hand to the ground to push myself up, or tried to. The actual movements my body performed seemed a lot feebler than I had intended. But I got back up, just as the Titan slithered across the rocks to Marcone.

Steel gleamed in the Baron’s hand. Maybe a four-inch blade, black composite handle, modern diver’s knife, very plain. Very much not epic or apocalyptic.

Marcone stabbed at her. A child would have done better against a professional wrestler.

Ethniu’s good arm blurred. She seized him by the throat, lifted him with no noticeable effort, gave her arm a little bob, a little twist, and broke his neck.

I watched Marcone jerk and go limp.

She rose to a knee, her good leg planted in the boiling water, and threw the corpse away like an empty beer can.

The Baron of Chicago landed on the rocks, boneless and broken.

A roar went up from the battlefield behind us.

The blue beam of light rising into the night like a vague, glowing moonbeam, above the embattled forces of the Winter Lady, flickered and dimmed.

Ethniu let out a bubbling, almost disbelieving laugh. Then she prowled like a beast down into the roiling water and slipped beneath it. I could see her reaching out a hand toward the light of the Eye.

I staggered over to Marcone’s body. Broken neck didn’t kill you right away.

Nobody ought to die alone.

And when I got there, he sat up.

I fell back with a manly high-pitched scream.

Marcone’s head was twisted way too far around to one side. He rolled his neck as if stretching out. There was series of hideous little pops in his neck and then he shook his head back and forth as if easing a cramp, and his neck just . . . unbroke.

Marcone gave me a bland look and held up his knife.

Its blade was covered in blood, too bright red to be real.

I blinked and stared at the knife. Then up at him.

“What the actual fuck?” I asked.

I felt my eyes widen.

Celestial power, they had said, to get through the Titanic bronze.

Or infernal.

Marcone’s eyes wrinkled at the corners in genuine amusement. “Honestly, Dresden. Did you think I’d stop with the title?”

And in the center of his forehead, his skin flushed and stirred and then began to glow in a lambent purple light in the shape of an angelic rune.

A pair of glowing violet eyes etched in light opened on his forehead, just above his own eyebrows.

And with a little ripple, black thorns that would have been at home on particularly wild roses began to emerge from his skin, in a pattern on his face and stirring beneath his shirt.

“I believe you needed this,” he said, offering me the handle of the knife. “And I believe time is short.”

I took the knife, staring.

Sir Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, Baron of Chicago, Knight of the Blackened Denarius, the bearer of the Master of Sorcery, Thorned Namshiel, calmly rose and divested himself of the pirate bandoliers. He reached up to undo his tie and tossed it to one side. Then he loosened his collar so that the thorns in his skin weren’t pressing on it, and unbuttoned the shirt, evidently to make himself more comfortable there, too.

The coin of Thorned Namshiel, one of a set of thirty, rested on an almost unbearably fine silver chain against Marcone’s chest.

“I believe Namshiel and I can play for a draw against her,” he said. “But not for long. You must complete the binding as quickly as you can.”

“I,” I said. “Buh.”

Marcone turned and slapped me.

“Hell’s bells,” I spat.

“Focus,” he snarled. “I know it hurts. I know what you’ve lost. I know you’re tired. But you and I are all that stands between that creature and this city.”

I clenched my jaw.

“If we fail now,” he continued, “everyone who has been lost has been lost for nothing. Your people. And mine.”

The water of Lake Michigan flared with red light.

Gulp. Ethniu had reclaimed the Eye.

“Dresden,” Marcone hissed, giving my chest a little push. “Are you going to sit there while that happens?”

I thought of Murphy’s body, silent, small, back in the Bean.

I thought of my little Maggie, in her pajamas, small and vulnerable.

I snarled at my sluggish brain, forced the gears to start grinding again. Then I met the eyes of tiger-souled John Marcone and said, “No.”

He bared his teeth. And the weird purple eyes . . . smiled.

Marcone rose, turned to face the water, and started spinning off defensive spells. Different ones. From each hand. Simultaneously. Evidently, a few years in private tuition with an angelic master of magic as a teacher really got some results.

Maybe if there was a later, I needed to get back to school myself. The very thought was exhausting.

Christ, it had really been a very long day.

A Titan was about to send the world into a new Dark Age while Knights of Winter and Hell tried to get in her way. Several Queens of Faerie had been beaten bloody, half a pantheon of supernatural terrors had smashed one another to pieces in Millennium Park, and they’d knocked buildings down like Legos while they did it.