Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,117

the unicorn’s horn, rushed out ahead of us like a fast-moving river and broke upon the enemy in a tsunami. Bodies flew from our path as if swatted away by God’s heaviest driver. I don’t mean they flew back, either. I threw them up, like thirty feet up, and before they could come down again we’d sprinted underneath them, so that the unicorn’s hooves were constantly coming down on open ground. From a distance, it must have looked like some enormous gardener had taken a hurricane-force leaf blower to the enemy.

“Holy moly!” shouted Butters.

The unicorn let out a bellowing sound that would have been more appropriate to maybe a bear or a tiger or a low-flying Concorde, and for several seconds the world became a confusing blur of bodies twirling into the air, screams, and flying thunderbolts of excess energy bleeding into the night.

The unicorn blew past the enemy lines and into the clear on the other side—and we started taking gunfire almost instantly. The unicorn didn’t slow down but started running serpentine, snaking left and right with what felt like enough g-force to give me whiplash. Targets moving like that are difficult to hit even in a practice scenario, much less in adrenaline-charged real life, but I was so busy holding on for my life that I couldn’t possibly have brought a counterattack to bear. I couldn’t even see where the fire was coming from.

I looked over my shoulder and caught a frenzied glimpse of King Corb bearing a staff of what looked like coral, pointing a finger at the ground ahead of us and shrieking.

And I realized that the problem with having all that power to work with was that the enemy got to work with it, too.

The ground ahead of us suddenly darkened. The unicorn tried to twist and evade it, but Corb had timed it perfectly and the creature was moving too fast.

I poured my will into my beleaguered shield bracelet, bringing it up in a tight sphere around Butters and me.

The unicorn hit the patch of darkened earth and plunged into it as if it were liquid. Salty brine had mixed with the earth, rendering it into the next best thing to quicksand, arresting the unicorn’s momentum abruptly, and Butters and I flew over its head, hit the ground on the other side, and started rolling.

We were heading straight for Columbus, bouncing like a cannonball. If we hit that concrete wall along the upper level of the park, we’d be splattered against the inside of my own shield, so I started layering its interior with kinetic force and letting the outer layers be ripped off by our impacts with the ground, slowing us and shedding our energy in the form of heat. We left a trail of bouncing ball prints in scorched earth and concrete, and by the time we hit the wall, we’d shed enough momentum that it didn’t feel much worse than a moderate traffic collision—which is to say it was loud and terrifying and painful, but we survived.

It left me and Butters lying on a sidewalk against a concrete wall, alone at the rear of the enemy lines.

And it also left us staring at Listen and a platoon of his turtlenecks, not fifty feet away, operating several infantry mortars and holding enough guns to invade Texas.

Listen and I moved at the same time.

His gun snapped up.

I thrust out my hand at the earth and snarled, “Forzare!”

My intention had been to use the spell to bulldoze a berm of earth into place between us. But I still wasn’t used to this turbocharged magic thing.

Oops.

The energy I’d sent out formed a berm all right—and then it kept on pushing and building it, like a rogue wave on Hawaii’s North Shore. Maybe eighteen or twenty tons of earth hit Listen and his people and swamped them.

And at the same time, someone punched me in the belly on my left side, right under the floating ribs, and drove the breath out of me. The whole left side of my abdomen suddenly felt wet.

Harry! screamed Molly’s psychic voice, full of alarm.

I felt the gaze of the Titan as her head swiveled toward me like a machine-gun turret, and her features, her presence, became suffused with pure rage.

I managed not to foul my underwear and fought to draw a breath as Ethniu kicked a panicked octokong out of her way and began striding toward me.

“Oh boy,” Butters breathed. He crouched over me and ripped my shirt open. His