Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,198

glamour, simple enough that Maeve could have done it in her sleep, complex enough to slip by anyone not looking for it, even one of the Sidhe. I’d been talking, but it hadn’t been my words getting to Lily. Maeve had chosen my words for me.

I don’t know what she’d said, but she’d picked something exactly right to drive her Summer counterpart mad with rage. Lily’s gentler, more compassionate nature had been used against her. Maeve had employed her simple little glamour with exquisite timing, at the one instant when there was no way the relatively inexperienced Lily would have expected it—when she was full of concern for the fallen Fix. With a sinking feeling I realized that the passionate young Lady of Summer was no Titania. She had all the heat, but none of the restraint, the balance, and there was no way in hell that she was going to be able to think, to reason, to hold back her fury.

“Destroy him!” she screamed. Trees shook and rocks cracked as she spoke. The sound of it ripped at my ears, and I felt a sudden hot wetness in them. “Destroy Harry Dresden!”

She threw forth her hands and a wall of fire twenty feet high and as wide as a football field roared toward me.

Chapter

Forty-eight

For a fraction of a second, my brain squealed like the last little piggy running all the way home, a spinal-level fear reaction. I had an experience with fire once. It’s the kind of memory that sticks pretty hard.

Fire’s tough to defend against. That’s one of the reasons it’s always been my favorite form of attack. Even if you don’t actually set your target on fire, you can still roast it by heating up the air around it, unless it just throws away everything to get out of your way, in which case it isn’t thinking about doing anything back to you. As weapons go, fire is top-drawer.

But.

Fire’s tricky and fickle. Without focus, it’s just chaos, the random release of stored chemical energy. It isn’t enough to just have fire. You’ve got to know when and where and how to use it to best effect—and Lily didn’t.

I threw myself down over the unconscious Fix and focused, thrusting my hands out to either side, shouting, “Defendarius!”

As I formed a shield around us in a bubble, the firestorm roared down onto us, washing over us like an ocean tide. My shield held the fire back, but it couldn’t stop it entirely, and heat began to burn through. That was why I reached for Winter and filled the little bubble around us with the cold. That wave of fire was too massive for me to overcome—but I didn’t have to overcome it. It was spread out over such a huge area that all I had to do was beat a relatively tiny portion of it, to hold out against it like a large stone on a beach. I didn’t have the strength to beat it—but I did have the strength to hold it away, and to keep just the air within my shield from becoming an oven.

The fire washed over us, and I held on to the shield for a few seconds more, as long as I thought I could. Without my bracelet or my staff to help direct the energy, a few seconds were all I could do—but it was enough to survive. It left me on my hands and knees, gasping, on a small circle of frost-covered earth, but I made it, and so did Fix.

Go, me.

Maeve’s mocking laughter rang out over the hilltop.

Hot air touched the side of my face and grew gently, along with an approaching light. I looked up to see Lily walking toward me over the scorched earth, naked now but for the flames curling around her body, her own clothing burned away in the firestorm. Her eyes weren’t there. There were only a pair of searing fires burning where they had been, wisps of orange and scarlet flame rising up from them as she came closer. Her silken white hair rose into a wavering column like a flame itself, lifted by the hot air and colored golden green and orange by the light of her fiery nimbus.

Behind her, the other Summer Sidhe were shadows, with fire dancing in the reflection of silvery weapons, and with the echoes of it flickering in their hands and upon their brows, power and weapons alike spreading out around me to leave me no escape—but at the