Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,170

cheating! Go faster! Head for the Bush!”

Karrin turned her head enough to catch me in the edge of her vision. “Is there a plan?”

“It isn’t a very good plan!” I shouted. “But I need a big open area for it to work, away from people!”

“In Chicago?” she shouted. Then her eyes widened. “The mills?”

“Go!” I shouted. Karrin blitzed a red light, narrowly avoiding a left-turning car, and continued her furious rush down Lake Shore Drive.

Chicago is a city of terrific demands. Demand for a military presence helped establish the early Colonial-era forts, which in turn provided security for white settlers, traders, and missionaries. They built houses, churches, and businesses, which accreted over time into a town, then a city. Chicago’s position as the great crossroads of the emerging American nation meant that more and more people arrived, building more homes, businesses, and, eventually, heavy-duty industry.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Chicago was a booming industrial city—and its steel mills were nearly legendary. U.S. Steel, Youngstown Steel, Wisconsin Steel, Republic Steel, all thriving and growing on the shore of Lake Michigan, down by Calumet City. The lakefront in that entire area was sculpted to accommodate the steel works, and much of the steel that would fuel the Allied efforts in two world wars was produced in that relatively tiny portion of the city.

But all things wither away eventually. The American steel industry began to falter and fade, and by the end of the twentieth century, all that remained of an ironmongery epicenter was a long stretch of industrial-strength wasteland and crumbling buildings on Lake Michigan’s shore. A decade later, the city started trying to clean the place up, knocking down most of the buildings and structures—but here and there, stone and concrete ruins remained, like the bones of some vast beast that had been picked clean by scavengers. Nothing much grew there as the city around it thrived—just weeds and property values.

That portion of the waterfront was slated for renewal, but it hadn’t happened yet, and right now it was blasted heath, a flat, dark, empty, and desolate stretch of level land dotted with lonely reminders of former greatness. There was no shelter from rain or cold there, and on a miserable night like this, there shouldn’t be anyone hanging around.

All we had to do was make it that far.

We flew by the Museum of Science and Industry on our right, then flashed over the bridge above the Fifty-ninth Street Yacht Harbor, moving into a section of road that had a little distance between itself and the nearest buildings and a decided lack of foot traffic on a cold autumn evening.

As if they’d been waiting for an opening away from so many prying eyes, the Wild Hunt swept down on us like a falcon diving onto a rabbit.

But they were not attacking a rabbit. They were attacking a wabbit. A wascally wabbit. A wascally wabbit with a Winchester.

Something that looked like a great, gaunt hound made of smoke and cinders, with glowing coals for eyes, hit the ground just behind the Harley and began sprinting, keeping pace with us. It came rushing in, dark jaws spread to seize the back tire, the same motion it might have used had it been attempting to hamstring a fleeing deer. Mindless animal panic raged inside my head, but I kept it away from the core of my thoughts, forcing myself to focus, think, act.

I saw Karrin’s eyes snap over to her rearview mirror as it closed, and felt her body tensing against mine as she prepared to evade to the left. I gathered my will but waited to unleash it, and as the charhound closed to within inches of the tire, Karrin leaned and took the Harley left. The charhound’s jaws clashed closed on exhaust fumes, and I unleashed my will from the palm of my outstretched right hand with a snarl of “Forzare!”

Force hit the charhound low on its front legs, and the beast’s head went into the concrete at breakneck speed—literally. There was a terrible snapping sound, and the charhound’s limp body went tumbling end over end, bouncing up into the air for a dozen yards before landing, shedding wisps of darkness all the way.

What landed in a boneless sprawl on the road was not a dog, or a canine of any sort. It was a young man—a human, wearing a black T-shirt and torn old blue jeans. I barely had time to register that before the body tumbled off the