Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  Bradley staggered up drunkenly and then turned to Rudolph, who was stirring feebly.

  “Get the girl out,” I said in a low, intense voice. “She’s more important. I’ll take care of Rudy.”

  Bradley hesitated. Of course. No good cop leaves his partner behind. But Bradley had seen some awful things that night, and he made the choice most fathers would.

  He picked up his little girl and ran to get her clear.

  I turned back to the Jotun and drew myself up to my full height, which meant I was eye to lower quadriceps with him.

  “I am Harry, son of Malcolm,” I shouted back. “I have battled dark sorcerers and black knights! I have fought men and beasts in numbers too great for counting, invaded the heart of Winter, confronted necromancers and the living dead, vampires and ghouls and demons in their hordes endless! I have matched wits with the six Queens of Faerie and prevailed, and thwarted the combined will of the White Council! When they came for my child, I smote the Red Court of Vampires, and laid them in ruin for all the world to see. I am Harry, son of Malcolm, and I have entered the vaults of Tartarus, and stolen its treasures beneath the gaze of Hades himself! And I’m about to add giant slaying to my résumé.”

  That seemed to please the Jotun immensely. His smile grew wider and wider, showing more and more teeth the size of dinner plates. “Impressive claims.”

  “Damned right,” I shouted back. “Who are you and what do you got?”

  The Jotun lifted his hand. There was a groan of concrete and steel breaking, and then that damned huge axe just flew back into his hand as if it had been drawn by a cartoon magnet.

  “I am Svangar, son of Svangi,” the Jotun roared back. He used one hand to gesture toward his scarred mouth, infusing it with contempt. “I have fought the Odinson and lived to tell the tale.”

  I swallowed.

  I didn’t know much about Thor beyond what stories, comics, and movies tell. But from what I understood he was pretty much the Jotnar’s boogeyman. If this particular Jotun had survived that boss fight, it was probably safe to assume he was no pushover.

  Worse, I had hoped to keep his attention longer, while he bawled his boasts in my face. Just my luck, I had probably found the one Jotun in the universe who had a humblebrag of that magnitude. You couldn’t not use that one to boast.

  My mouth was pretty dry. I didn’t reply. I just nodded.

  Svangar nodded back.

  Then he roared and came at me, axe whirling.

  The thing about creatures as big as the Jotun is that they come without power steering. There was simply too much mass building too much momentum for them to be quick to alter course—their whole life must be like walking on a sheet of slippery ice. Not only that, but nervous systems are nervous systems. Signals that have to travel a maximum of six feet are going to be faster than ones that have to cover twenty.

  I had to make that advantage count. If I could dance fast enough, maybe I could maneuver Svangar into tripping into a building or something, and run before he got loose.

  With the reach that axe gave him, there was no way to get around him without coming into range—and I did not want to do that. One hit from that thing, and I’d look like a Rorschach test image.

  So I ran right at him.

  Svangar bellowed a war cry as the axe came down toward me.

  I pointed my staff to one side, focused my will, and screamed, “Forzare!”

  Even magic can’t escape a lot of fundamental physics. Project force at something and it pushes back with an equal and opposite reaction. I used a lot of force, slamming against a brick building to my right. The building slammed me back, and the impact sent me flying to one side—and out from under the axe.

  The axe cleaved into the asphalt where I’d been a second before. I flew sideways and forward, dropping into a roll as I came down to the ground. The giant roared, his momentum taking him into his own axe. The handle jabbed him in the gut with a whoosh of expelled air that sound like a miniature gale.

  I made my feet again and darted up the street a dozen paces, to force the Jotun to face me and turn his back on the escapees.

  Svangar wasn’t a dummy, though. He knew he was slower.

  So he twisted his blazing axe, melted a bunch of the street’s asphalt into a blob of burning tar that could have filled a small hot tub, and flung it at me even before he’d begun to turn.

  I dodged that one easily enough—but Svangar had never intended to turn me into a living, screaming tar baby. As the Jotun turned, he simply seized a disabled car in one hand and flung it at me sidearm at the speed of a major-league fastball.

  I brought my shield up in time, angling it to my left as I darted right. The car hit the shield, which flared into nearly coherent green-gold light. Broken glass and fiberglass and metal flew out from the impact. The smashed car spun wildly away, but even so, Isaac Newton had his two bits. I was knocked to my right, staggered, and had to put a hand on the street to keep from falling.

  I recovered my balance, drew my blasting rod from my coat, slammed my will through it, and shouted, “Fuego!”

  The raw energy of the terrified city supercharged my spell. The beam of molten-gold energy that lashed out from its tip, as bright as any arc welder’s fire, forced me to close my eyes and turn away from its intensity in the smoldering ember light of the burning city, and left a blazon of blue-purple light across the insides of my eyelids.

  I blinked them open again frantically to find the Jotun eyeing me, with a large section of the mail over his heart glowing deep orange.

  “A little flame like that?” rumbled the Jotun. “Against a son of Muspelheim?”

  Dammit. Fire was my go-to exactly because it usually did the trick.

  The Jotun snorted contemptuously. Then he swung his axe broadside at a building, which put up about as much resistance as dandelions do to machetes, and sent a cloud of broken glass and concrete and steel at me.

  I lifted my arm to cover my face and brought up my shield. Broken glass rattled against the spell-armored sleeve of my duster. One piece got by and my ear suddenly went hot and tingly. The rest slammed into my shield and drove me back until I hit the hood of a parked car, taking my legs out from under me and sending me crashing to my back on the sidewalk.

  My heart slammed with terror.

  This wasn’t a fight; it was an earthquake—and I was running around in the middle of it like a damned fool.

  Svangar took a couple of huge strides and the axe came down.

  I braced the end of my staff against the hollow of my shoulder, the way I would have a rifle, and screamed, “Forzare!”

  The air was too thick with energy that night. I’d given the spell a lot more than I meant to. The staff kicked back against me like a mule. I heard my shoulder re-dislocate with an audible tearing sound and a burst of pain-static—but I held on and was flung violently away from the descending axe.

  I fetched up against another car, hard enough to drive the wind right out of me.

  The Jotun turned his axe sideways like a flyswatter, took a stride toward me, and raised it.

  And that was when I saw Bradley vanish into the haze, the last of the company of escapees—but Murphy hadn’t gone with them.

  She was standing next to her Harley, and the box labeled CAMPING SUPPLIES was wide open.

  I watched her draw out a round tube with a couple of grip points and a control pad, painted olive drab. She extended the tube, flipped up some kind of little doohickey on it, lifted it to her freaking shoulder, and settled her fingers lightly on the control pad.

  “You fight like a woman, seidrmadr,” Svangar snarled.

  “Hey, drittsekk!” Murphy shouted.

  Svangar turned his head toward her, his expression furious.

  One corner of her mouth crooked up in a smile and her blue eyes were cold. “Me, too.”

/>   And she fired the weapon.

  I don’t know a lot about military hardware. But if you’re going to fight a Jotun, it seems to me a bazooka is about the right caliber.

  I didn’t really see the rocket fly. That’s not how those things work. They move at about the speed of a handgun bullet. There was simply an explosion followed almost instantaneously by another explosion in the hollow of Svangar’s throat. CrackBOOM.

  Resisting fire was a nifty trick, but in the end, again, Sir Isaac will always weigh in on matters. Fire is an absolute, a collection point of energy, and it can always get hotter. Eventually, as with any defense, there’s a limit to what it can do, a point of catastrophic failure—and Murphy’s rocket found that limit.

  Ever see a watermelon get smashed with a sledgehammer?

  It was sort of like that.

  Flesh and blood exploded from the Jotun in a cloud of aerial chum. I could see Svangar’s cracked and blackened collarbone and his freaking spine through the hole in his neck. The Jotun staggered, his shoulder smashing into a building, raised his axe one last time—and fell as it dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers.

  The giant’s body crushed two cars and knocked over a streetlight as it came down. One outflung hand landed not three feet from my toes.

  And suddenly the street was silent and very still.

  I got up and walked toward her, taking slow steps, wide around the fallen Jotun. It was a little difficult to keep my balance. I might not have been able to feel it, but the pain was taking its physical toll on me. My entire body tingled unpleasantly.

  “Fight like a woman, my ass,” Murphy muttered darkly, glowering at the dead giant.

  She stood there with the rocket launcher on her shoulder and one hand on her hip and grinned at me as I came close.

  “Seriously?” I asked. “A bazooka?”

  “Had two. That other one was my practice launch,” she said.

  “You never told me about it.”

  Her grin widened. “No, you great gawking man-child. You’d have wanted to play with it.”

  I put a hand over my heart and gave her a wounded look. “Ow.”

  “Truth hurts, huh?”

  “Drittsekk?” I asked her.

  “Norwegian for, ah, scumbag,” she said. Then she glanced at my expression and said, “I’m a cop, Harry. There’s tradition to consider.”

  Before I could respond, Rudolph’s panicky voice screamed, “Both of you, don’t move! Don’t either of you scumbags move a fucking muscle!”

  I blinked and looked to one side. Rudolph had a shiner on his jawline that had already swollen into a proper mouse. He was standing on his feet, wobbling, his face pasty and his eyes wide and confused. His suit was torn and wrinkled and sprinkled with bits of blood from what appeared to be a broken nose. But he was in a Weaver stance, had recovered his gun from where Bradley had lost it, and had the weapon leveled at Murphy.

  “Terrorist!” he gabbled. “You’re a goddamned terrorist!”

  “Rudolph,” Murphy said, “you don’t know what’s going on.”

  The whites of his eyes got bigger. “You just killed someone with a rocket launcher!”

  Murphy eyed the fallen Jotun. “That was the idea, yeah.”

  “Hey, hey, Rudolph,” I said. “Easy. Easy. Look, we can’t be here for very long. There’s more of the enemy coming. We all need to go.”

  “Shut up, shut up!” Rudolph screamed, tracking the gun to me. “Shut the fuck up, you lowlife!”

  I began to lift a hand, to flick a wave of force at him, to take the gun out of his hand—but I didn’t.

  I looked at my arm. I told it to rise. It ignored me. I couldn’t tell what was going on behind the cloud of static flooding my nervous system. Christ, that was the shoulder I’d dislocated, again. Without being able to sense the pain of the injury, I hadn’t noticed.

  “Rudolph!” Murphy said, her voice cracking with authority. “We’re trying to help you. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, man, at least take your finger off the trigger.”

  Rudolph swung the weapon back to Murphy and began to shriek in a high-pitched voice, pushing the gun forward for emphasis. “I don’t need you to—”

  The gun went off.

  The emptied rocket launcher fell to the street with a metallic clatter, splattered with scarlet.

  Murphy dropped like a stone.

  Chapter

  Twenty-two

  Rudolph stood there, shocked at the sudden noise. He stared at the gun. Then at Murphy. “What? What?”

  “Medic!” I screamed, rushing forward. “Medic! Medic!”

  Murphy lay on the street behind her motorcycle. One knee had bent so that she was lying on her lower leg. The emptied rocket launcher was still rocking where it fell.

  I knelt over her. Her eyes were open wide as she stared up.

  The fire of the Eye flared again, briefly turned the world scarlet.

  I didn’t care.

  I ripped her jacket and shirt open.

  The bullet had gone into her neck, a quarter of an inch above her Kevlar vest. It hadn’t gone straight through. It had begun tumbling when it hit and had come out under and behind her left ear, leaving a trail of ravaged flesh in its wake. Blood came out as from a fountain.

  “Karrin,” I said. “Oh God.”

  I ripped the duster off, tore my shirt in my haste to get it off over my head, wrapped it into a pad, and put pressure on the gaping wound. As long as I didn’t try to move it at the shoulder, my injured arm functioned a little. I could use both hands. “Medic!”

  There was so much blood. It soaked my shirt through.

  I heard footsteps running toward us.

  “Karrin, I’m here,” I said. “Help is coming. Hang on.”

  She coughed blood.

  “Harry,” she said.

  Her lips went red with blood when she said my name.

  Her voice was ragged.

  “I’m here,” I said. It was hard to see her. The world had gone blurry. “I’m here.”

  The blood was making a pool around her golden hair.

  The running footsteps came to a sudden stop.

  Murphy made a couple of gurgling, choking sounds.

  I looked up to see Waldo Butters standing ten feet away, staring at Murphy.

  His face said everything.

  “No,” I said. “No, no, no, Karrin? Come on, Karrin.”

  She looked up at me for a second, and the corners of her eyes wrinkled as she smiled weakly. Her face had gone grey. Her lips were blue. “Not from you. I like Murph from you.”

  “Okay,” I said. I could barely choke the words. “Murph.”

  She reached across her chest and weakly touched my hand with hers.

  “Harry,” she said. “I lov—”

  Her eyes were on mine, and I couldn’t look away. I felt the soulgaze begin.

  And I saw the flame of a candle go out.

  Her eyes emptied. Just emptied, like the windows of an abandoned house. One moment, her body had been gasping for breath, straining, her face full of pain and confusion.

  Then . . .

  It was just an empty house.

  “No,” I said. “No, no, no.”

  I bent over her. Airway, breathing, circulation. I opened her mouth, tried to make sure it was clear. But it was pooled with blood.

  I couldn’t see her then. Was weeping. I bent over her anyway, breathed into her mouth.

  “Harry,” Butters said. His voice creaked.

  I breathed in five deep breaths, tasted blood. “Keep the pressure!”

  Butters knelt down, his body moving on autopilot, his face stunned. He put his hands over the pad, and I did compressions.

  On an empty house.

  I leaned down to breathe for Murphy again. Then more compr
essions.

  “Harry,” Butters said. “Harry.”

  Five breaths. Compressions. It was hard work. In a couple of minutes I felt dizzy as hell.

  “Harry, you can’t,” Butters said. “You can’t.”

  “Come on!” I screamed. “Murph, come on!”

  I breathed for her again.

  I broke her rib on the next compression.

  But it didn’t matter.

  It was nothing but an empty house.

  I felt Butters put his hands on my wrists. He drew them gently away. “Harry,” he said, his voice thick. “Harry, even if she’d been on a table when it happened . . .”

  I didn’t look away from her face. From her eyes.

  I’d been too afraid to soulgaze Murph. Everyone who had done that with me had seen something that didn’t please them. I’d been afraid to lose her, and I’d never allowed it.

  Now it was too late.

  The eyes are the windows of the soul.

  And Murphy’s eyes were just the windows of an empty house.

  There was nothing inside to gaze upon.

  I put my forehead against hers and wept. Helplessly. I screamed in rage and denial as I did. I knew the sound was ugly, was hardly human.

  I felt Butters’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Harry, we’ve got to go. We have to.”

  I shook him off with a violent twist of my shoulders.

  She was gone.

  Murphy was gone.

  And the Winter mantle did nothing, did less than nothing, for the pain.

  I put my hand on her hair. Her head was still warm. I could still smell her shampoo, beneath all the iron scent of her blood.

  I felt myself start to scream again. But I grabbed onto that scream and coldly choked it to death.

  I leaned down and kissed her forehead, closing my eyes. Felt the pain rising in me. And I embraced it. Welcomed it. I watched the futures I’d hoped we would have die before my eyes. I let the pain burn away everything nonessential.

  When I opened my eyes again and looked up, the world had gone grey scale.

  Except for Rudolph.

  Rudolph was bathed in light the color of Murphy’s blood.