by Jim Butcher
Meanwhile, Mai and Lara were beginning to bare their claws.
“Is that a threat, vampire?” Mai said in a flat tone.
“I would prefer that you regard it as a truth,” Lara replied, her own tone losing the charm and conviviality it had contained in some measure throughout the conversation.
The Wardens behind me started getting nervous. I could feel it, both for myself and through Demonreach. I heard leather creak as hands were put to the grips of holstered guns and upon hilts of swords.
Lara, in response, rested her fingertips lightly upon her own weapons. Her two sisters did the same.
“Wait!” I snapped. “Wait!”
Everyone turned to look at me. I must have looked like a raving mad-man, standing there with my eyes half focused, looking back and forth out of pure instinct and force of habit as the island’s intellectus informed me of the rapidly transpiring events. The White Court reinforcements had bypassed the tower hill and were headed for the beach to support Lara—which was something, at least. Lara’s helicopter hadn’t dropped them up there specifically to look for Morgan. It must have come up low, from the north, using the terrain of the hilltop to mask the sound of its arrival.
I forced my attention back to the scene around me. “Holy crap. I knew this would put the pressure on him. But this guy’s gone to war.”
“What?” Listens-to-Wind asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t start in on one another!” I snapped. “Lara, we need to work together or we’re all dead.”
She turned her head a little to one side, staring at me. “Why?”
“Because better than a hundred—one hundred ten, now—beings have just arrived at different points of the island and they aren’t here to cater the little mixer we’ve got going. There are only nine of us and fifteen of you. We’re outnumbered five to one. Six to one, now.”
Mai stared at me. “What?”
Howls slithered into the air, muffled by the falling rain, but were made all the more eerie by the lack of direction to them. I recognized them at once—Binder’s grey men. They were coming, moving with mindless purpose that cared nothing for the danger of a forest at night.
The second group was nearer. They’d stopped growing at a hundred and twenty-five, and were already on the move toward us. They weren’t as fast as the grey men, but they were moving steadily and spreading out into an enormous curved line meant to sweep the forest and then encircle their quarry when they found it. Red light began to pour through the trees in their direction, casting eerie black shadows and turning the rain to blood.
I forced myself to think, to ask Demonreach the right questions. A second’s consideration revealed that the two forces would converge on us at exactly the same time—they were working together.
The numbers disadvantage was too great. The Wardens might get some spells off, and the Senior Council members would probably leave mounds of corpses piled around them—but outnumbered six to one, on a dark night, when they would have trouble seeing their targets before they were within a few steps, they wouldn’t prevail. The large group would hit them from one side, and the smaller one would come from the other, boxing us in.
Unless . . .
Unless we could get to one of the two groups first and eliminate it before its partner reached us and hit us from behind.
Outnumbered as hideously as we were, the smartest thing would have been to run like hell—but I knew that no one would. The Council still had to recover Morgan. Lara still had to recover Thomas. Neither of them enjoyed the advantage I did. To them, the danger was only a vague threat, some howls in the dark, and it would remain so until it was too late to run.
Which left us only one option.
We had to attack.
The grey men howled again, from much closer.
I gave Ebenezar a desperate glance and then stepped forward, lifting my staff. “They’ve got us boxed in! Our only chance is to fight our way clear! Everyone, with me!”
Lara and her sisters stared at me in confusion. The Wardens did the same—but the fear in my voice and on my face was very real, and when one human being displays a fear response, those nearby it tend to find it psychologically contagious. The Wardens’ eyes immediately went to Ancient Mai.
I started jogging, beckoning as I went, and Ebenezar immediately fell in with me. “You heard the man!” Ebenezar roared. “Wardens, let’s move!”
At his bellow, the dam broke, and the Wardens surged forward to join us.
Lara stared at me for another half a second, and then cried, “Go, go!” to her sisters. They began running with us, effortlessly keeping pace, their motion so graceful and light that it hardly seemed possible that they would leave footprints.
I looked over my shoulder as I slowly increased the pace. Ancient Mai had turned toward the hateful red glare coming from the forest to the south, facing it calmly. “Wizard Listens-to-Wind, with me. Let us see if we can slow the progress of whatever is coming this way.”
Injun Joe went to her side, and the two of them stood there, gathering their will and muttering to each other.
I consulted Demonreach for the best route to follow toward the enemy, put my head down, and charged the demons that were coming to kill us, Wardens and vampires alike at my side.
Chapter Forty-two
Adrenaline does weird things to your head. You hear people talk about how everything slows down. That isn’t the case. Nothing is happening slowly. It’s just that you somehow seem to be able to fit a whole lot more thinking into the time and space that’s there. It might feel like things have slowed down, but it’s a transitory illusion.
For example, I had time to reflect upon the nature of adrenaline and time while sprinting through the woods at night. It didn’t make me run any faster, though. Although if I wasn’t actually moving my arms and legs faster than normal, then why was I twenty feet ahead of everyone else, the vampires included?
I heard someone curse in the dark behind me as they tripped over an exposed root. I didn’t trip. It wasn’t that I had become more graceful—I just knew where to put my feet. It was as if every step I took was over a path that I had walked so many times that it had become ingrained in my muscle memory. I knew when to duck out of the way of a low-hanging branch, when to bound forward at an angle to my last step in order to clear an old stump, exactly how much I needed to shorten a quick pair of steps so that I could leap a sinkhole by pushing off my stronger leg. Lara Raith herself was hard-pressed to keep pace with me, though she managed to close to within three or four yards, her pale skin all but glowing in the dark.
The whole time, I tried to keep track of the position of the enemy. It wasn’t a simple matter. I didn’t have a big map of the island in my head, with glowing dots marking their positions. I just knew where they were, as long as I concentrated on keeping track of them, but as the number of enemies continued to increase, it got harder to keep track.
The nearest of the hostile presences was about forty yards away when I lifted my fingers to my lips and let out a sharp whistle. “Out there, in front of me!” I shouted. “Now, Toot!”
It had been an enormous pain in the ass to wrap fireworks in plastic to waterproof them against the rain, and even more of a pain to make sure that a waterproof match was attached to each of the rockets, Roman candles, and miniature mortars. When I had Molly and Will scatter them around the woods in twenty separate positions, I’d gotten those “Is he crazy?” looks from both of them.
After all, it isn’t as if fireworks are heavy-duty weaponry, capable of inflicting grievous bodily harm and wholesale destruction. They’re just loud and bright and distracting.
Which, under the circumstances, was more or less all I needed.
Toot-toot and half a dozen members of the Guard came streaking out of nowhere, miniature comets flashing through the vertical shadows of the trees. They went zipping ahead, alighting on low branches, and then tiny lights flickered as waterproof matches were set to fuses. A
second later, a tiny shrill trumpet shrieked from somewhere ahead of us, and a dozen Roman candles began shooting balls of burning chemicals out into the darkness, illuminating the crouched running forms of at least ten of Binder’s grey men in their cheap suits, not fifty feet away. They froze at the sudden appearance of the flashing pyrotechnics, attempting to assess them as threats and determine where they were coming from.
Perfect.
I dropped to one knee, lifting my blasting rod, as the human-seeming demons shrieked at the sudden appearance of the bright lights. I trained it on the nearest hesitating grey man, slammed my will down through the wooden haft, and snarled, “Fuego!”
It was more difficult to do than it would have been if it hadn’t been raining, but it was more than up to the task. A javelin of red-gold flame hissed through the rain, leaving a trail of white steam behind it. It touched the nearest of the grey men on one flank, and his cheap suit went up as readily as if it was lined with tar instead of rayon.
The grey man yawled and began thrashing furiously. The fire engulfed him, throwing out light for a good thirty yards in every direction, and illuminating his companions.
I dropped flat, and an instant later the forest behind me belched forth power and death.
Guns roared on full automatic fire. That would be the Raiths. Lara and her sisters’ sidearms had been modified submachine guns, with an enlarged ammunition clip. Given the superhuman strength, perception, and coordination the vampires had at their disposal, they didn’t suffer the same difficulties a human shooter would have faced, running at full speed in the dark, firing a weapon meant to be braced by a shooter’s entire upper body in one hand—and their left hands at that. Bullets chewed into three different grey men, ten or eleven rounds each, all of them hitting between the neck and temple, blasting the demons back to ectoplasm.
Then it was the Wardens’ turn.
Fire was the weapon of choice when it came to combat magic. Though it was taxing upon the will and physical stamina of the wizard, it got a lot of energy concentrated into a relatively small space. It illuminated darkness, something that was nearly always to a wizard’s advantage—and it hurt. Every living thing had at least a healthy respect, if not an outright fear of fire. Even more to the point, fire was a purifying force in its non-physical aspect. Dark magic could be consumed and destroyed by fire when used with that intent.
The Wardens used the zipping little fireballs from the Roman candles and my own improvised funeral pyre to target their own spells, and then the real fireworks started.
Each individual wizard has his own particular quirks when it comes to how he uses his power. There is no industrial standard for how fire is evoked into use in battle. One of the Wardens coming up behind me sent forth a stream of tiny stars that slewed through the night like machine-gun fire, effortlessly burning holes through trees, rocks, and grey men with equal disdain. Another sent a stream of fire up in a high arc, and it crashed down among several grey men, splashing and clinging to any moving thing it struck like napalm. Lances of scarlet and blue and green fire burned through the air, reminding me for a mad moment of a scene from a Star Wars movie. Steam hissed and snarled everywhere, as a swath of woodland forty yards across and half as deep vanished into light and fury.
Hell’s bells. I mean, I’d seen Wardens at work before, but it had all been fairly precise, controlled work. This was pure destruction, wholesale, industrial-strength, and the heat of it was so intense that it sucked the air out of my lungs.
The grey men, though, weren’t impressed. Either they weren’t bright enough to attempt to preserve their own existence or they just didn’t care. They scattered as they advanced, spreading out. Some of them rushed forward, low to the ground and half hidden by the brush. Others bounded into the trees and came leaping and swinging forward, branch by branch. Still more of them darted to the sides, out of the harsh glare of the fires, spreading out around us.
“Toot!” I screamed over the roaring chaos. “Go after the flankers!”
A tiny trumpet added its own notes to the din, and the Pizza Patrol zipped out into the woods, two or three of the little faeries working together to carry fresh Roman candles. They gleefully kept on with the fireworks, sending the little sulfurous balls of flame chasing the grey men trying to slip around us through the shadows, marking their positions.
Lara let out a piercing call and came up to my side, gun in hand, snapping off snarling bursts every time a target presented itself. I pointed to either side and said, “They’re getting around us! We’ve got to stop them from taking Mai and Injun Joe from behind!”
Lara’s eyes snapped left and right, and she said something to her sisters in ancient Etruscan, the tongue of the White Court. One of them went in either direction, vanishing into the dark.
A grey man came crashing out of the flame twenty feet away from me, blazing like a grease fire. He showed absolutely no concern for the flame. He just sprinted forward and leapt at me, hands spread wide. I made it up to my knees and braced one end of my quarterstaff against the ground, aiming the other at the grey man’s center of mass. The staff struck it, but not squarely. It twisted to one side at the impact, bounced off the ground, took a fraction of a second to reorient itself on me—
And erupted into a cloud of ectoplasm as rounds from Lara’s gun took its head apart.
The next attacker was already on the way, out in the darkness beyond the firelight. I came to my feet and on pure instinct snapped off another blast of fire at the empty air twenty feet beyond Lara and about ten feet up. There was nothing there as I released the blast, and I knew it, but as the fire hissed through the falling rain, it illuminated the form of a grey man in the midst of a spectacular leap that would have ended at the small of Lara’s back. The blast struck him and hammered him to one side so that he came down like a burning jet, crashing across a dozen yards of ground before dissolving into flame-licked mounds of swiftly vanishing transparent jelly.
Lara didn’t see the attacker until he’d tumbled past. “Oh,” she said, her voice conversational. “That was gentlemanly of you, Dresden.”
“I’ve been known to pull out chairs and open doors, too,” I said.
“How very unfashionable,” Lara said, her pale eyes gleaming. “And endearing.”
Ebenezar stumped up to us, staff in hand, his eyes narrow and flickering all around us while Wardens continued to send blasts of power hammering into targets. Off in the woods behind us, submachine guns chattered. Apparently Lara’s sisters were still hunting the grey men who had gotten around us.
“We’ve got one Warden down,” Ebenezar said.
“How bad?”
“One of those things came out of a tree above her and tore her head off,” he said.
I tracked a slight motion in a nearby treetop and swiveled to point a finger. “Sir, up there!”
Ebenezar grunted a word, reached out a hand, and made a sharp, pulling motion. The grey man who had been clambering toward us was seized by an unseen force, ripped out of the tree, and sent sailing on an arc that would land it in Lake Michigan a quarter of a mile from the nearest shore.
“Where is the second group?” Ebenezar asked.
I thought about it. “They’re at the dock, at the edge of the trees. They’re closing on Mai and Injun Joe.” I glanced at Lara. “I think the vampires have been holding them off.”
Ebenezar spat a curse. “That summoner is still out there somewhere. His pets won’t last long in this rain, but we can’t afford to give him time to call up more. Can you find him?”
I checked. There was so much confusion and motion on the island that Demonreach had trouble distinguishing one being from another, but I had a solid if nonspecific idea of where Binder was. “Yeah.” I sensed more movement and pointed behind us, to where a trio of grey men had managed to close on a pair of Wardens who were standing on either side of a still, red-spattered form on the ground. “There!”
Ebenezar stopped talking to make another swift g
esture, spoke a word, and one of the approaching grey men was suddenly and literally pounded flat by an invisible anvil. Ectoplasmic ichor flew everywhere. The two Wardens, warned by the magical strike and now facing even odds, made short work of the remaining two.
Ebenezar turned back to me and said, “Shut down that summoner, Hoss. I’m taking the Wardens back to support Injun Joe and Mai. Let’s go, vampire.”
“No,” Lara said. “If Binder is nearby, then so is my sweet cousin Madeline. I’ll stay with Dresden.”
Ebenezar didn’t argue with her. He just snarled, made a fist, and lifted it up, and Lara let out a short, choking cry and rose up ten feet into the air, her arms and legs snapping down straight, locking her body into a rigid board.
I put a hand against his chest. “Wait!”
He glanced at me from beneath shaggy grey brows.
“Let her down. She can come along.” Ebenezar had no way of knowing that I wasn’t out there alone. Georgia and Will were lurking nearby, and could be at my side in a couple of seconds if necessary. Between the two of them, they had accounted for three grey men, too. I tried to put that knowledge behind a very slight emphasis in my tone and told him, “I’ll be fine.”
Ebenezar frowned at me, then shot a glance out at the woods and gave me a reluctant nod. He turned back to Lara and released her from the grip of his will. She didn’t quite manage to fall gracefully, and landed in a sprawl that gave me a great look at her long, intriguingly lovely legs. The old man eyed her and said, “You just remember what I told you, missy.”
She rose to her feet, her expression unreadable—but I knew her well enough to know that she was furious. My old mentor had just insulted her on multiple levels, not the least of which was pointing out to her exactly how easy it would be for him to make good on his previous threat. “I’ll remember,” she said, her tone frosty.
