Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,181

was shouting.

“What?”

“We don’t have to sink the barge!” she shouted. “It can’t move on its own! We just have to kill the boat that’s pulling it!”

“Right!” I said, and leaned the Harley into a turn that would take us arching back toward the barge—this time at its front, or prow, or bow or something, where a rig containing a tugboat a bit bigger than the Water Beetle had been built on.

It also brought us closer to the oncoming Outsiders, and I couldn’t tell which of us would get there first. As I sped up, Karrin dug into the compartments on the Harley, reaching around me, then said, “Hold it steady!”

Then she stood up, and I couldn’t see a damned thing—but I did see the way she pulled the pin out of a freaking hand grenade, and let the spoon spin off into the night. The Harley buzzed past the tugboat’s rig maybe ten feet ahead of the Outsiders, and Karrin gave the grenade a rather feeble little flick as we went by. I heard it smash into glass, like a stone thrown against a window, and then we were past the barge, and a huge sound thudded through the air, like an entire library of books all dropped flat at the same instant, and an incandescent white light flared from the tug.

I looked back over my shoulder and saw that the tugboat was on fire, pouring out thick black smoke and leaning sharply to one side. Murphy saw it, too, and let out an ululating war cry before she sat back down and pushed my hands off the handlebars, reassuming control of the Harley. “Two down!” she said. “One to go!”

I looked back behind me. The Outsiders had begun swarming at the barge, and one of them actually came out of the water at one of the rearmost riders of the Hunt—this horrible thing that was all pustules and multiple limbs with too many joints. As it leapt, the rider raised a shadowy bow and loosed a darkling arrow. It struck the Outsider and burst into red-amber flame the same color as the burning eyes of the Hunt. The Outsider let out an unearthly wail and plunged back beneath the surface.

“Come on,” I said to Karrin. “Head for the other boat.”

“Should we?” she asked. “That Erlking guy seems a little . . . do-it-yourselfy.”

She was right about that. Like any of the other seriously powerful beings of Faerie, the Erlking had a strong sense of pride—and you crossed that pride at your own risk. If I showed up and the Erlking thought I was making the statement that I judged him unfit to finish the task, it could come back to haunt me. On the other hand, I’d already insulted him once and there was a lot on the line. “If he didn’t want me making calls like this, he shouldn’t have let me shoot him and take over his Hunt,” I said. I turned to beckon the riders and hounds behind me and shouted, “Come on!” My voice came out as both my own and in the howling screech of the Hunt, the two interwoven, and the rest of my group joined in the shriek and formed up around the Harley as it raced across the water, toward the third barge.

Where the fight wasn’t going well.

There were several long, straight streaks of molten steel where the Erlking and his riders had struck the barge’s hull, the edges marked with flickering tongues of eerie green fire, but they had not torn a hole in it like we had the first barge, either, and the Outsiders had gotten to this barge faster than they had to mine. Even as we approached, I saw a racing hound of the Hunt vanish in a spray of water as things, plural, too twisted and too confusing to count, surged up from below and began to drag the hound down.

A shriek loud enough to cause spray to rise from the water shook the air, and the Erlking himself plunged down from overhead, leading a trio of hunters behind him. Blades and arrows struck at the Outsiders in plumes of ember fire. The Erlking seized the hound by the scruff of its neck and dragged it up out of the grasp of the creatures beneath the surface.

The Erlking and his riders had fallen into a formation, a great, tilted wheel. At the far end, the riders were maybe fifty feet above the waves, circling in the