Blood Rites (The Dresden Files #6) - Jim Butcher Page 0,113

a defense against kinetic energy, and while I had used it to handle everything from bullets to runaway elevator cars in my career as a wizard, it just wasn't all that good at stopping the transfer of intense heat. The napalm-jelly splattered against the invisible shield, gallons of it, and the fire clung to it in white-hot glee. Its mindless fury seeped through the shield and flowed onto me.

It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The fingers of my left hand were the first to feel it, and then my palm and wrist, all in the space of a second. If you've never been burned, you can't imagine the pain. And my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony.

I jerked my hand back, and felt my focus waver, the shield start to fade. I gritted my teeth, and somehow managed to dig up the strength to extend my hand again, hardening the shield and my will. I backed away in shuffling half steps, my mind almost drowning in pain, desperately keeping the shield up.

"Ten seconds!" Kincaid shouted.

I saw blisters rising on my left hand. I felt my fingers curling into a claw. They looked thinner, as if made of melting wax, and I could see the shadows of my bones beneath the flesh. The shield grew weaker yet. The pain got worse. I stood now at the bottom of the stairs, and as the shield faltered, the empty space between me and the doorway behind me might as well have been a mile.

I didn't have ten seconds.

I reached into myself, into the horrible red pain, and drew forth more power yet. I focused it on my staff, and the sigils and runes carved along its surface became suddenly suffused with eye-searing scarlet light. My nose filled with the smell of charring wood, and as the shield wavered out of existence, I screamed, "Ventas servitas!"

The power I'd gathered in my staff shot out of it, an invisible serpent of energy. The shield fell just as a shrieking gale of wind shot down the stairs. The column of air howled against me, throwing my duster forward around me like a flag, and caught the blazing napalm like a tub of Jell-O, hurling the fire back the way it had come and providing it with air enough to treble its size.

The fire went mad. It seared mortar from rough stone, and chewed cracks into the rock floor, the damp stone coughing and popping as water within expanded.

For an instant I could see the two Renfields, still spraying fire toward me. They started screaming, but they obeyed Mavra's raspy howls to stand fast, and it killed them. The napalm molded itself to them and the flame embraced them.

What hit the ground as they fell could not have been easily identified as human remains.

I kept my will on the wind, the carved runes on my staff blazing ember-orange, and it spread the flames into the far room in a deadly river of searing light and charred black ash. For agonized seconds I held the winds and spread the flames, and then my will faltered, the runes on the staff dimming. Pain overcame me for a second, and it hurt so much that I literally could not see.

"Wizard!" howled Mavra's voice, the words sounding like dusty scales and cold, reptilian fury. "Wizard! The wizard! Kill, kill, kill everything!"

"Get him!" Kincaid snarled. I felt Murphy get her arms under mine, and she started hauling me back with surprising power. I started seeing through the blinding agony in time to see a charred, inhuman-looking man wielding an ax leap at Kincaid. The mercenary rammed his spear full into the man's chest, stopping him in his tracks. A second man appeared from the smoke behind the first, this one holding a shotgun. There was a roaring sound, and fire tore through the impaled Renfield, then struck the second one full in the face with hideous, searing results. Kincaid jerked the spear clean of the corpse of the first Renfield, even as the second flailed around wildly, then pointed the shotgun in more or less the right direction.

Kincaid whirled the spear into a reverse grip, slammed it into the second Renfield's chest and the second incendiary round blasted out from the housing at the butt end of the spear, and drove the remaining life from the man. A burning corpse