Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,111

standing close together,” I said.

Butters eyed me. “Yeah. That’s probably it.”

All that fighting hadn’t been enough.

It hadn’t been anything like enough.

In the center of the enemy line stood the Titan.

Even across a battlefield, Ethniu’s sheer presence drew the eye with a terrible fascination. The ruddy light from the haze that yet surrounded everything that wasn’t the park gleamed from her armored flesh. She had shed everything that was not made of Titanic bronze, and her form was perfection of beauty, but for the smoldering glare of the Eye. Her presence was a kind of weight on my mind, a gravity that strained space around it and could not be ignored. Somehow, even from a hundred yards away, I could see the loveliness of her features clearly, too magnetic to ignore. She was a creature of sorrow turned to such rage that her beauty had become a knife that stabbed at the eyes of any who looked upon it.

To look upon her was to look upon an older, more savage universe, a place where Titans strode the formless night and crushed mortal insects beneath their feet—to see a place so brutal and terrifying that even in our legends, humanity had chosen not to remember.

Her hatred seethed through the smoldering glare of the Eye, in the light of fires of destruction she had brought to my city, a power far older and deeper and more deadly than I had yet known. Beside that power, the massed ranks of the Fomor around her seemed as frail and as transient as fleeting shadows.

I tore my eyes away.

Butters was staring at Ethniu, too. He gripped the empty hilt of Fidelacchius in both hands, white-knuckled.

I nudged him and he jerked his chin toward me, his face pale.

“Army doesn’t seem nearly so scary now, does it?” I said.

He stared at me for a second. Then his lips lifted in an awful, sick-looking smile, and he exhaled several unsteady breaths that were laughter’s closest double in that moment. “Heh. Heh, heh, heh. Heh-heh.”

Moving at exactly the same time, Ethniu and Mab stepped forward.

“Stay behind me,” Mab murmured as the unicorn’s deadly presence brushed between Butters and me and took position between us and Ethniu. “Be ready.”

I knew precisely how scary Mab was.

I gotta say, it felt pretty awesome to watch that creepy unicorn plant its feet as if it intended to hold its ground before an onrushing train, bracing between that threat and us. Mab lifted her chin, faced Ethniu, and raised her slim pale hand.

Her voice snapped out over the ground, sharp and threatening, like sudden crackling sounds from the face of a glacier. “Hold, crone. You will come no farther.”

Ethniu faced that statement in silence and stillness for a moment.

Then she simply smiled and strode a step closer.

The two monsters faced each other for an endless beat, before Ethniu’s voice throbbed through the air, vibrating painfully through my bones, making my teeth buzz unpleasantly.

“You began a mewling mortal,” Ethniu replied. Her voice was as loud inside my head as outside, infused with sheer undeniable power. When that voice spoke, reality itself would bow to suit it. “You will end the same way. Powerful as you are, you come of a younger world. A weaker world.”

“A world that left you behind,” Mab said, mockery ringing in defiance of the power before her.

Ethniu took a further step forward, the Eye glaring brighter, now cowling her head in scarlet light. “Treacherous little witch. The one who would not bow to my father. You will bow to me or face the Eye.”

Mab pulled a play from my book.

She threw back her head and laughed.

It was a silvery sound, one that somehow shattered the stillness and closeness of the night. Scorn rang in that laughter, and genuine amusement—the cold, alien amusement of a spider. The laughter made the Fomor troops suddenly clutch at their heads. Their lines wavered as the heavily armored troops dropped their weapons and tried to wrap their long arms around their helmeted skulls.

“You do not know me very well,” Mab said, that ear-shredding laughter still lurking in her voice, “do you?”

Ethniu rolled another threatening pace forward. “Your pathetic alliance has abandoned you or waits for death. Your bodyguard is reduced to a pair of beasts. And the mortals will arrive only in time to mourn their dead.”

Butters gasped at the force in that voice and staggered a step to one side. Blood had begun to trickle from one of his nostrils. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled